Ted

This. Perhaps as the health service is so crucial to this country, why not put it to the public to decide, with a referendum. Do we want a full 7 day service for which we are prepared to pay x% more of our income tax for, or are we happy with the status quo? If the public votes yes, we hire more doctors and ramp up service at the weekend.

If you have an iphone, breadwallet is a fantastic application for using Bitcoin. It uses simplified payment verification meaning you don't need to download the whole blockchain to verify your current balance. It also gives you a backup phrase which you can write down and keep in a safe place. Should you ever lose your phone, you can recover your wallet by reinstalling breadwallet on a new phone and entering the phrase. Other wallets can be found here If you're running windows, Electrum is also a deterministic wallet meaning you can recover the wallet using a backup phrase.

I pay DD monthly, it recently came up for renewal. They sent me an email confirming the renewal and asked to double check the bank details so it would be processed correctly. Seems better than how it used to be, no need to do anything.

In our time is worth the license fee alone. The best back catalogue bar none.

I'm sure this has been posted, but I had been reading this thread and checking the news sites and could not see where this change was coming from. You can read about the changes here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/restricting-finance-cost-relief-for-individual-landlords/restricting-finance-cost-relief-for-individual-landlords

I don't understand this part about forced sales. Can someone please explain? They will force councils to sell high value property which people are living in, in order to allow others to buy the houses they are renting. People will be evicted ? Apologies if I have got this wrong.

Various news sources. 3%-15% recoverable. Might help to pay of a lot of the national debt. Interesting to see if this has any impact on the election.

I was thinking the exact same thing when I read the OP I stumbled across Solyaris after watching the Soderbergh 2002 version. Both are great films imho. The 2002 version is very chilled out in some parts. I recently watched bitter lake and was really surprised to see Solyaris mentioned, its not really a film you hear about very much. The book is also worth checking out, written in 1961! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solaris_%28novel%29 Bitter lake is definitely worth watching.

Thanks for this! More d3 examples can be found here https://github.com/mbostock/d3/wiki/Gallery for the javascript programmers amongst us Very good tool. The only thing which can't be factored in though is having to move due to the landlord selling up. This is an inconvenience in itself, plus you have the additional agent costs. If you are free and single, this isn't really so much of an issue. With a family though it is a big headache.... I'm speaking as long term renter who has had to move on twice for this reason.

Yes, on the one hand you could view it as the contributors to the pools are just processing power, being centrally managed and directed. However, if an attempt was made to subvert and manipulate the blockchain, it would be quickly detected and steps would immediately be taken to eliminate this threat. A great example of this is what happened in March 2013 where we had a hard fork of the blockchain. On that occasion a block was found which was accepted by clients running version 0.8, whilst being rejected by older clients running 0.7. The chain forked due to older clients rejecting the block and continuing to mine, building on this chain. On that occasion the community quickly came together and two of the biggest pools at that time downgraded their clients back to version 0.7. You can read about what happened here: https://github.com/bitcoin/bips/blob/master/bip-0050.mediawiki Obviously this is slightly different to an attack, however it does demonstrate how a future attack could be thwarted.

To be fair though, that headline is very misleading: GHash is not a single entity but a mining pool. https://ghash.io/ Thousands of miners have their equipment using this pool as it provides a consistent payout of btc. If there was anything untoward going on, these miners could quickly switch to an alternative pool. Alternatives to these centrally controlled pools are already spreading, such as peer to peer mining: https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/P2Pool However why would GHash attack the same protocol that is generating them profit? As soon as they tried anything, they might be able to double spend a few transactions, but this would quickly be noticed and people would immediately switch away, killing their business. I agree it is something that the community needs to be aware of, but it's not overly concerning.

+1 It really is this simple. I just don't understand why it's not discussed more in the media. We'd all be better off with a lower cost of living, and the easiest way to reduce this is to lower the cost of housing. We'd then have more disposable income to spend in the economy.

I agree with this. Morrisons is my preferred supermarket by far. Perhaps it shows people are giving the discount supermarkets a try, but Morrisons has some good deals if you stick to what is on offer for that week. They should have moved into the online arena much earlier though.

If one btc was worth $1million, it would have to become one of the major currencies of the world. If that was the case, costs of $3.6 billion per day or $1314 billion per year (or say £817 billion) to secure the public ledger don't seem so out landish to me(edit : it is actually 1.9% of world GDP :-) so a fair bit of cash!). Small beer really compared to the amount of money sloshing around. However, still a significant amount. Mining is completely self adjusting however, on average, 1 block will be found every 10 mins, if this increases, the difficulty adjusts to counteract this. On the other hand, if miners stop mining as profitability drops, the difficulty reduces, to ensure the magic number of 1 block is found every 10 mins. Once all bitcoins are produced, money is made from the small transaction fee you can elect to include when sending coins to increase the chance the transaction will quickly be included in a block and confirmed. The protocol self adjusts. As mentioned before, whatever happens to bitcoin, the original developer was a genius.

As already mentioned, it's obviously very difficult to break the cryptography underpinning Bitcoin. Every Bitcoin address(or wallet) has a public and private key. You could try a brute force approach to find the private key of a wallet you would like to steel the coins from, but this would take a very very long time with the current computational power we have available. For example, here we can see bitcoin uses keys which are 256 bit long Private Keys. Wikipedia says the following: Wikipedia And remember, this is the time it would take just to crack one wallet. Even if we develop a way to crack these codes in a reasonable length of time, the bitcoin protocol can be modified providing more than 50% of the mining computational power agree to this change. Which would go something like: Developers: "Hey we have this new version of the protocol, which will make it more secure, should we all run it?" Miners: "Hell yeah!" Thus the protocol can be improved upon, providing the majority agree.