Interesting article. While it is entirely possible to do this, professional traders will soon move in and arbitrage any price differences between exchanges.
As competition increases, amateur exchanges that manipulate the price will suffer the consequences, for example, overpaying on the buy side because they've artificially inflated the price. Or traders will just move to another exchange if the spread is too high between bid and ask.
The delay with getting your money into/out of bitcoin is too long to allow for that kind of arbitrage. The exchange owner could easily get away with the described practices.
You just need an account with some liquidity on every exchange. You could automate an HFT bot that executes a buy order on one exchange and a sell order on the other simultaneously.
I've been saying this from the start. Normal people just don't need tablets. What can you do on it?
Music - Have an ipod or other music device
Movie - Have a big tv
Movie in bedroom - Have a big tv in bedroom
Internet? - have smartphone/netbook/laptop
Games? - Xbox/PS3/smartphone.
At the end of the day, when the dust has settled, there's just no use case for tablets.
We often forget that, although it's obvious search engines filter results, the information we see on social sites is also filtered.
Consider users of Reddit. Now most of them would consider themselves very open minded and enlightened, yet their is active discouragement for radical ideas without due consideration as to their merits. It's just easier to downvote and look at Mario cake.
Overall, I think in a way we NEED filters to remove the faff, but be careful to keep a social circle which encourages radical ideas to be bought out into the light of logic and due consideration,
It's more than that. Yes, doubt has increased, but with it has come increased scrutiny of the Bitcoin ecosystem. And with that we are now starting to really dig into the weaknesses of the system.
As it says in the article, anonymity has it's benefits sure, but comes with certain drawbacks that we're now starting to look into. In particular, who do you trust and why?. The future of Bitcoin will be an interesting case study for whatever system inevitably follows.
Forgot to mention the GPS too...