New news update from them today:

"Our launch date is approaching and will be announced within the week! We are working very hard on the following: 1) Migration of our beta servers to a new server infrastructure with heightened security. 2) New Terms of Use created by our legal team. 3) Compliance with Canadian anti-money laundering policies as well as GST and CRA policies. Operating a Bitcoin Exchange in Canada is a ground breaking endeavor that involves risk on our part. The delays with going live have all been due to our mission of providing a secure service for you as well mitigating our risk. Unlike other exchanges, we choose to operate in the country of residents we service. We will comply with regulatory bodies and are undertaking research and obtaining legal advice to make this exchange a reality! When choosing us for your Bitcoin exchange, you can be confident that you are dealing with a company that is performing due diligence and is located in Canada."

Does this mean (among other things) that they're going to be charging 5% sales tax on every purchase?  That seems like it will basically kill it as an exchange.

Doesn't look like it.  That's unfortunate and I hope they don't intend to keep going this way for long.  Even aside from the recent price volatility, the depth of the bid market is very shallow already.  There's not enough cash in there to make it flow as an exchange.

My 6950 (reference, unlocked) is still hard-locking the my Win7 system with 11.6 if I launch a video or a 3D game.  Running at -f60.

Not saying it's definitely a scam.  But it definitely could be a scam and there would be no way to know.  Even if it sometimes paid jackpots to real users, it could still be keeping others.

Based on the exponential growth in difficulty, one would have to assume that quite a lot of newbies are mining.

Probably a good time for everyone to check for malware, change their mtgox password, and probably transfer any large BTC balances to a secured wallet.

Hello, I am BlueThursday and I am currently posting in a generally-contentless newbie thread.

I've participated in lots of forums and I've never seen newbie restrictions this draconian before.  It's not like forum spam is unique to bitcoin.