My power usage actually went up a little more than that since I tend go near the 80-90% max of my PSUs.  I got about 3.87% more with 7.8% more power used.  Mix of 6950, 7950, 7970/280X and a 290.  I'm going back to v5.0 since it's hot as hell out in the west US.

Well tax laws will definitely change if this goes through.  The only way the agricultural belt could make money without hurting it's own people would be to tax produce.  A CA sales tax on fresh produce would be a 10% across the board increase on food commodities - yeah that's not going to be a kick in the pants 

What you are describing is called crony capitalism.  It's made to look like capitalism, but the inner workings are all that of the corrupt oligarchs that have ruled mankind since day 1.  True capitalism does not have the state protect bad business models - those fail under their own accord.  In this case the entertainment industry is able to bypass free markets and gain the political favor of governments by contributing greatly to their general election funds.

I'm not sure how the US expected to bring the concept of democracy (1 person = 1 vote) to a land where women apparently are not considered humans but more like livestock.

Oh I'm sorry, did my 10 year old dog daughter interfere with your life, I'll it put down immediately.

It's one thing to be culturally sensitive and not push "western" ideals onto another culture, it's another thing to look away while an innocent 10 year old child had to endure rape and them may feel even more pain thinking minutes before she dies that she shamed her family.

Maybe it's a father in me talking, but personally I would have taken the mullah to the back of my house, beaten him silly and let my dogs have dinner.  Guess I'm a westerner.

Inigo: Let Me Explain.  No, there is too much. Let me sum up. Buttercup is marry Humperdinck in little less than half an hour. So all we have to do is get in, break up the wedding, steal the princess, make our escape... after I kill Count Rugen.

-SR seized 30K coins went up for auction and were bought by VC Tim Draper (same guy who wants to 6 way split CA)
-GHash.IO has hit 51% again and said initially they were doing all they could to stop it  and are now saying they will cut off users at 40%
-Hashfast went belly up. BFL still lives and still hasn't shipped it's Monarch (no surprises there)
-China has banned Bitcoin for some of its citizens for the 118th time.
-Dish, Newegg, Expedia and most recently Dell now allow buying items with Bitcoin middleman like Bitpay.
-Proposed NY law would essentially make pool mining in the US illegal (via ridiculously cumbersome red tape) http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2014/07/new-york-state-proposes-sweeping-bitcoin-regulations-and-theyre-strict/
-Conversely CA reversed its position on digital currency and states that Bitcoin is legal to use.
-Litecoin has been declared dead for the 8th time and of course recovers while all the other alts take a hit it he pants sans one
-Bitcoin on its way to being documented by Guinness as the world's most powerful network to date.

Why not use both?

They serve different functions due to different characteristics.  Armory has the potential to have the most setup possible with true cold offline storage.  Electrum is light and easy to use.

If you have 137 BTC, I would put 125BTC in an Armory offline wallet and have it secured and sleep soundly at night.  The other 12 BTC can be used in Electrum for day to day type transactions.

If you use a deterministic wallet you don't need to store the keys anywhere as long as you can reseed the wallet.  In the case of Armory, for example, you can make an M of N wallet where you would need M of N pieces to restore the wallet.  You can make it so you need 3 out of 8 pieces and scatter the 8 pieces around the world - most people can't break into 3 locations to get your coins.  You can even put one of the 8 pieces on the cloud - it would be meaningless for anybody unless they were hellbent on targeting just you.  So cloud/online can be safe as long as it's not able to recreate a wallet in its entirety.

I can't see a justifiable reason for spreading out your coins into multiple wallets unless you're so well off you don't want people to know you have 10K coins, and in that case you can have your Butler do it 

Well very few ASICs have actually made profit for the end user.  You should not figure fiat exchange ratio into the price since you could have acquired the Bitcoin on an exchange for 10 minutes of work (instead of months of mining).

Consider this:

If you buy Bitcoin right now with $40k USD you get 64.9BTC instantly which you can sell at any time (what you if need the $ for a cancer diagnosis).

If you spend $40K on pretty much any ASIC besides an Antminer S3 you will mine less than 64.9BTC in the next year.  This includes KNC Jupiter, Spoondoolies S30, BFL Monarch, BTCGarden or Rockminer equipment.  Even the S3 is questionable - people with free electricity will probably make a decent profit.  People with expensive power will end up with less the 64.9BTC they could have bought.

The ASIC manufacturers will have made somewhere between 10 and 25BTC off of your ASIC purchase (which they will either keep as profit or use to make their own farm to compete with the equipment they sold you making your equipment worth even less).

If the goal is to make a profit then the majority of ASIC purchases would result in a loss.  If you want to learn about mining or enjoy it as a hobby then nothing can replace having a miner and buying a few isn't going to bankrupt most people (except maybe BFL gear).

The only reasons end users have AT THIS MOMENT to mine are to support decentralization, and if they have MASSIVE power to create anonymous transactionless coins.

I would expect to see both these guys in the fetal position if an artillery shell landed and blew up the 4x4 in the background.  Of course I would be cowering right there next to them 

I would say Guild Wars 2.  I got tired of the game and the grind but I have to admit the music is probably the most professional piece of artwork I have ever "seen" in any game.

Surprised we haven't seen people post fleets of S3s in racks.  I'm seeing S1 being modded or retired but didn't Antminer get most of the S3s from Batch 1 pushed out yet?

I'm going to repeat what I said in the other thread because these threads are basically asking the same question - how do I choose the best loser:

If you buy Bitcoin right now with $40k USD you get 64.9BTC instantly which you can sell at any time (what you if need the $ for a cancer diagnosis).

If you spend $40K on cloud mining you will mine less than 64.9BTC in the next year.  Even if you had a 5 year contract you would probably not mine more than 45BTC if even that.

The mining company will have made somewhere between 10 and 25BTC off of you with a 5 year contract if they keep their promise (which they will either keep as profit or use to make their own farm to compete with the hashes they sold you making your hashes worth even less).  If they go bankrupt like bASIC, Hashfast, or many of the other Bitcoin scams then you'll lose something closer to the original 64.9BTC.

Feel like buying cloud mining now?

If you buy Bitcoin right now with $40k USD you get 64.9BTC instantly which you can sell at any time (what you if need the $ for a cancer diagnosis).

If you spend $40K on cloud mining you will mine less than 64.9BTC in the next year.  Even if you had a 5 year contract you would probably not mine more than 45BTC if even that.

The mining company will have made somewhere between 10 and 25BTC off of you with a 5 year contract if they keep their promise (which they will either keep as profit or use to make their own farm to compete with the hashes they sold you making your hashes worth even less).  If they go bankrupt like bASIC, Hashfast, or many of the other Bitcoin scams then you'll lose something closer to the original 64.9BTC.

Feel like buying cloud mining now?

I think I saw in another thread he's in the English army, so things are different than in say the US Marine corps.

If you're living off base yeah maybe you could get away with mining.  Even if they say you have free electricity, there are explicit fine print things which 99% of Americans (and now passing the assumption onto Brits) don't read since it's usually not pertinent.  Mining would be considered beyond typical use and may not be covered.

You could always use the load balancing features of CGMiner and submit to multiple pools and reduce you variance risk that way.  Either way the option to spread out mining depends on how much the future difficulty increases will be - seems to be about 10% this round, effectively almost a 10% drop earnings with neutral luck.

People love to talk without understanding the basics of mining.

It's a 7% drop, expected earnings on any pool should be roughly 99% since 1% will be lost due to lost orphan races.  BTC Guild actually lost none last week, while Ghash.io lost 1.5%.

Their 3 month rating is pretty bad - and it is known that they had a large hasher who was supposedly doing an unintentional block withholding attack.  Those stats won't clear out until August.

Looking at the past 24 hours I see their luck is at 200%.  Last week was horrible, this week has been excellent.  If only we had a name for this variable luck.....hmmmmm 

Before going all gun-ho I would check with your CO about mining as it may be against regulations.

Mining LTC right now is not a good idea since ASICs are really driving up the difficulty.

For BTC mining everybody seems to think the S3 is the best option.

You include the fee for the very same reason Visa and Mastercard charge a 3% to their merchant customers for using their services.  It supports the Bitcoin network.  Currently most of the support is from the block subsidy of 25BTC, but that amount will keep decreasing until all 21 million BTC are mined.  Fees will become more and more significant in payment to miners.

I suggest you don't mine because you will end up loosing money.  Why are there so many people mining then.... well basically everybody thought they could make money so they followed the herd and picked up axes (mining equipment) only to enrich the people who sell such equipment.  Those sellers are either becoming rich from those sales or they use the sales to fund their own massive multi-million dollar farms.  This is not speculation - this is known and documented - case in point are BFL, Avalon, KNC - all ASIC vendors.

Unless you have over $1 million dollars to throw at mining you won't be able to compete with the big boys and you will lose money.  You can buy a small and cheap miner like an outdated USB stick or even a soon to be obsolete Antminer S1 and learn how mining works and do the calculations to see how bad it is.

Best financial advice is to buy the coin directly. Spend a little bit on a miner if you absolutely need to mine for enjoyment.

While I have some experience with Linux, the sheer majority of Bitcoin users (I'm not talking about miners where 1/2 know Linux) will only know Windows.  Asking somebody to learn a foreign OS just to obtain security is asking too much.

There are Windows based alternatives that are well polished and more secure and versatile than the default Windows-QT.  Windows-QT is still needed for people to run the nodes.

New users should spend a couple hours in here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?board=37.0