Why? As long as we're talking about encrypted wallet backups as opposed to physical bitcoins, there is no "weakest" link, because it doesn't matter in the slightest if only one "link" is broken. All copies of your wallet (both the backups and the original) need to be lost at the same time for you to lose your bitcoins. You don't need insurance, because you already have insurance by backing up in multiple locations.

Money is not a matter of "whoever has the most wins". If you have twice as much money as I do, that doesn't mean you control the power and I control nothing. It just means you have twice as much power as I do. Everyone has power in proportion to their wealth. The poor have less power than the rich, but they are not completely powerless. Contrast this with a typical democratic government, in which whoever has the most votes controls all the power and everyone else has nothing.

In any case, the only way to exercise the power that money provides is to spend it, after which you don't have as much money as you did, and somebody else has more. If somebody has a lot of money but they don't actually do anything with it, that money might as well not exist as far as the rest of the economy is concerned.

You might possibly be able to insure physical bitcoins for their bitcoin value, but you definitely won't be able to do the same for a wallet backup, because if the backup is lost, stolen, or destroyed, that does not mean you've lost the bitcoins. After all, you do have backups in several locations, right? Right?

Run Bitcoin with the -testnet parameter. eg. at the command line, run "bitcoin-qt -testnet" (without the quotes) or add "testnet=1" (again, without the quotes) to your bitcoin.conf file. Bitcoin will then generate a testnet wallet if you don't already have one and start downloading the testnet blockchain. Note that unless you're testing Bitcoin software or services, there is literally no reason to ever use this.

No, Ponzi schemes can't be sustained (that's why they're illegal). Suppose Alice sends you BTC1 and then Bob sends you another BTC1. You now have BTC2, and so you can pay back Alice BTC1.1. You now have BTC0.9, but you owe Bob BTC1.1. You not only can't pay him the 10%, but you can't even pay him back the BTC1 he originally gave you unless you get someone else involved in the scheme. The last person in the chain is completely screwed because there is literally no way you will ever have enough to pay back their original investment.

You don't seriously expect us to believe you never thought of this, do you?

He didn't "find" the faucet, he just doesn't understand the difference between "found" and "founded". Or "there" and "their", for that matter. Or "that" and "who". Or the plural form of "payout".

Although I personally prefer:

The US already did, over twenty years before the Chinese, using a purpose-built anti-satellite missile. They then did it again, this time using a standard anti-ballistic missile. India is also developing such weapons, though they haven't (yet) tested any.

To solve the problem, we should make this Bitcoin satellite a manned space station. After all, it's against international law to fire upon civilians, and in any case it would cause way too much of a public outcry. So, does anyone want to volunteer to be the satellite's human shield?

This is a stupid idea. For starters it isn't how people are normally used to dealing with foreign currency (which is ideally what they should be treating Bitcoin as). When I buy something online for €10, I know that it's going to show up on my bank statement as about $12, depending on what the current exchange happens to be at the time I make my purchase. I do not expect the store to say "That'll be $12.05 exactly." only to find, on closer inspection of my bank statement, that it actually cost $12.50. Good accounting requires that exact prices be quoted in whatever currency the merchant is actually using, with exchange rates calculated by the agent performing the actual currency exchange. People expect exchange rates to fluctuate, and will be horribly confused if merchants start giving exact exchange rates when they're not actually exchanging currency at all.

Sudo does not require your password if you have already entered it recently (within the last 15 minutes, by default). This makes it a lot less annoying if you need to do several things which require root privileges.

All plants (other than legumes) require nitrogen fertiliser. Without it, they just die. But that's okay, because "organic" fertilisers contain nitrates too, the only difference is that these nitrates are naturally produced, as opposed to "artificial" nitrates, which differ in that they are artificial and therefore "bad". Yes, nitrates are technically inorganic, but so is water - does adding water to plants also somehow destroy their organic goodness?

It's not supposed to look "right", it's supposd to look usable. Having the check boxes on the right puts way too much space between the label and the check box itself, and since all check boxes look the same, the distance from the labels makes it harder to tell which check box is which. Look at how the Firefox preferences dialog does it: the buttons are on the right, the check boxes are on the left, and yet it still manages to look "right".

Yeah, I think all the other check boxes are correct.

It's a private key, not a passphrase. It's a tad too long to be used as a passphrase unless you have a very good memory. But yes, you could sit at home and keep entering private keys until you get one that someone's already using (note that the use of private keys is fundamental to how Bitcoin works, and is not limited to Armory or any other specific software). What you're missing is that it would require more time and energy than the universe contains to do so.

Organic (in the context of food)
Unless you eat rocks, all food is organic.

Natural
Again, with the strange exception of "artificial chemicals" made by mixing natural chemicals with other natural chemicals, all food is natural, even if you do eat rocks. Just don't eat rocks containing lead, asbestos, or uranium. Despite being 100% natural, these rocks are not healthy snacks.

It's not silly at all. Far from it. As has been pointed out, his mining efforts efforts are providing additional security for the Bitcoin network, and by destroying the coins he is both declining to accept the reward normally offered to those who provide this important service and increasing the value of everyone else's coins. I normally wouldn't reply to a thread such as this, but I just feel obliged to thank Coins are Gone for his selfless generosity. Well, I guess it's not selfless since he's stealing from the company to do it, but that doesn't mean he's not a hero. Like Robin Hood in a way.

A couple of minor problems:

* "Transaction fees as small as five tenthousandths of a bitcoin" is completely meaningless to someone who doesn't know what a bitcoin is or how much it's worth.
* The official bitcoin client won't run on any Macintosh that was produced while Apple still had its stupid rainbow logo.

Some random feedback on 0.81-beta:

* In left-to-right languages such as English, check boxes (such as those in the Preference dialog) are supposed to be to the left of the label, not the right, and vice-versa for right-to-left languages.
* The default date format (%Y-%b-%d %I:%M%p) isn't my system default date format (ISO 8601), and isn't even a standard date format used anywhere in the world. Where'd this weird date format come from? Also, for the example date, it's generally recommended for the time to be after 12:59 PM, to make it easier to differentiate between 12- and 24-hour time.
* It looks like I didn't fully test the light-on-dark colour scheme handling earlier: unconfirmed transactions in the ledger are displayed in black on a dark background. I understand reducing the contrast for unconfirmed transactions, but I think you overdid it slightly.

Not if the sender used an e-wallet service and thus the receiver has no idea what address to send the refund to.

Let's see now...

Low quality stock photography of random women - Check
No HTTPS - Check
No Contact Info - Check
TOS saying "we are not liable for anything" - Check
Affiliate site has all of the above problems plus fake TRUSTe and BBB seals - Check

Yeah, I think we're done here.

Not hard at all. In fact, I think a few (possibly even most) keyloggers take a screenshot on every mouseclick for exactly this reason. The reason not to implement a randomly-changing on-screen keyboard is that it's damn annoying and doesn't really provide much (if any) improved security, and in fact will probably reduce security substantially as it encourages users to use short passwords, due to how damn annoying it is to click a huge number of buttons when the buttons keep shifting positions randomly every time you click one.

Seriously, security features that are annoying are as bad as no security at all because users will actively try to avoid using them properly: people would rather be insecure than annoyed. They may not admit it, but it's the truth. All security features must be designed with non-annoyingness in mind.