Where are the XRP fountains?
I'm willing to sell you small amounts of XRP at market rates for BTC if you need some to start (up to about 200, which is about 0.01 BTC currently), other than that you can buy them at Kraken, Bitstamp and some slightly more shady places. Also there are some people just giving them away if you promise to buy a few more and give these away to other newbies in return (I don't know how successful this stuff really is in the end, that's why I usually just sell them).
Sure are. I was just going to suggest that since Ripple is open source, we should create a Ripple with BTC (or NMC) as the native currency (instead of XRP), and thus resolve the issue that the initial creators controlled 100% of the XRP.
So you admit it's actually a very good system?
Huh? "Admit" that it's actually a very good system?
I don't know if it's a very good system or not. It seems to have some good ideas in it. But I'd consider the fact that the creators gave 80% of the XRP to some for-profit company (and presumably kept the other 20% to themselves?) to be a fatal flaw even if the rest of the system is sound.
I don't like the currency much either, unlike bitcoins though XRP are just a small part of the system and can be mostly ignored if you don't explicitly want to use them to make markets.