You might try slaving your hard drive to a second computer and using some file recovery software to try to recover the wallet.dat.  Of course, I would advise immediately ceasing use of the computer (just powering it off with the power button would be better than shutting down, lest the wallet file be overwritten by some files that are written during shutdown).  A decent piece of software might cost $50.

If that doesn't work, there are professional labs that will read the actual data on the disk, if it hasn't already been overwritten.  A decent lab would cost $1000 or so.  Don't cheap out on this if you try it.  I did, and I regret it, a lot.

And beyond that, if you use a mechanical hard drive, forensics labs can actually tell what bits were written to a given sector BEFORE the current bits, because the previous bits leave some sort of magnetic bias behind.  That's why military erasing standards dictate that a drive must be overwritten 7 times with random bits before the data that was on it is considered securely erased.  I have no idea what it might cost to get a forensics expert to look at your drive though.

Another huge loss of 7208 BTC:  http://forum.bitcoin.org/index.php?topic=11104.0

11,606.31
+7,208.00
----------
18,814.31

Wow, that sucks. 

It's the inevitable downside to an unregulated and untraceable currency.  Without fundamentally changing Bitcoin (and challenging the ideals of it), we have no choice but to accept the consequences.

EDIT:  But on the upside, maybe this will help parents become real parents again, instead of relying on the government to protect their children from anything the government deems "unsafe".

Do articles have to be biased towards the good side of Bitcoins, or would I be allowed to write honestly?

I'm interested in tackling some of the more technical/analytical write-ups.  Subjects might include "How a Deflationary Currency Would Affect You", "Mine Or Buy: What Is the Best Method for Investing In Bitcoins", "Bitcoin Predictions: Price", and "Bitcoin Predictions: Governments".  Do these sound interesting to you?

The only thing I'm unsure of is the payment.  1-3BTC isn't a whole lot.  I understand this is a startup magazine, and you only have so much coinage to spread around, but I'm just not sure if it is worth spending hours on a write-up that might pay less that minimum wage.  Is the payment negotiable at all?

I like you. 

Still, what right do you have to tell other people when they can and cannot sell?  If there's no limit to panic that can be caused by speculative capital, then people investing in bitcoins should keep that in mind to minimize their own risk.

LOL.  So we should limit who is able to buy/sell coins on MtGox and when they are able to do it?  Sounds like a FANTASTIC idea!  

If someone wants to sell all their coins for $8.75, who am I to say that my coins are worth more than that?  That sounds like the most unequal treatment of bitcoins possible, not the other way around!

EDIT:  By the way, I just sold 10 coins for $9.15.  ZOMG, I'm an evil capitalist pig!

Sorry for the mystery.

Ultimately, I want to create my own vanity bitcoin addresses (i.e., addresses that contain particular letter/number combos).  Gavin has already created a patch for the standard client that can do this, but I'd like to have the code to do it in PHP, and I'd like to know more about how addresses are generated.  I'd also like to know if I can generate such vanity addresses for multiple wallets easily.

I suppose this presents a couple of questions.  Would a server REQUIRE bitcoind to be running in order to find an address for a wallet?  Or is there a way to generate addresses without having the wallet or bitcoind running?

The reason I want to do this in PHP rather than another language is because I am most familiar with PHP.  That way, I can optimize the code and more easily manipulate it to what I want to do beyond these vanity address generations.

I bought minecraft when only about 2000 other people had.  Do I get a cookie?

Then why couldn't I generate a private key, generate a public key based on the private key, and generate an address from the public key?  Or are you saying that it's not possible to generate a private key, then import it into a wallet file?

Sorry for all the questions. 

Can I manually generate a public/private key that corresponds to a given address, then import that information into a wallet.dat to make that particular public/private key combo accepted into that particular wallet?  If that is possible, what keeps me from importing the same public/private keys into multiple wallets and causing havoc?

Interesting... thank you much!  I will indeed read more in that wiki article.

Thanks for the answers theymos and BitterTea!

Guess I wasn't asking quite the right questions then... I assumed that each wallet only had one public key!

What I am getting at is, how could I generate a list of addresses that I was sure would go to the same wallet?  Looks like theymos's PHP code is most of the way there too...  

Also, bittertea, in your equation, is checksum multiplied by the result of "version+ripemd-160(sha-256(public_key))"?

First - How can I get the public key of someone else's wallet?  Or better yet, can a public key be derived from an address?

Second - How can I generate an address based on that public key?  What mathematical calculations, hashes, encryption is being done behind the scenes?

Third - Would an address still "work" even if it was not generated by the wallet owner's client?  In other words, if I had the public key of someone's wallet, and generated an address for them without them knowing, could I send them bitcoins to that newly generated address and they would receive them?

Thanks much!

You need to have a monitor or dummy plug plugged in to the 5770.

Looks like you're the one trying to steal people's info, not slush...

What address?  Who are you talking about?

Thanks for calculating and writing out what I was too lazy to do bcpokey. 

This is a good point as well, and something I have considered to a great extent.  It's another reason I like the larger pools.  Less variance means you can more easily compare daily BTC rates.