Let met guess. You're a "cracker" who run "gnu/linux" from a small dock on a lonely island, from which the ship has sailed.

The internet is certainly better off without the 50% which is complete bullshit.

50%? You're way under-estimating, especially if you go on a straight SNR ratio. One stupid auto-playing video that should have been a brief essay (happens on Yahoo all the time) is enough to make a page almost 100% pure bullshit.

Well, whatever. She has as good a chance at banning jargon as she does banning creole. It's human nature for distinct groups to communicate in distinct ways. As a man who has run afoul of jargon (I really embarrassed myself with "side effects" at some point) I didn't get bent out of shape about it. I learned and moved on. If you want to empower women, teach them how not to lose confidence when they look stupid. If looking stupid discourages you, software is no place to be. Anybody who has been programming for a while should have quite a few stories about how some bug made them feel stupid. Indeed, "all bugs are shallow" is a cliche, and yet they continue to bug us.

Why not issue commemorative $5 notes? Commemorative coins are issued in the US, although actors aren't usually on them. There is, AFAIK, no commemorative US or Canadian note like that. Stamps are more liberal in that regard. I'm sure a lot of conservatives would hate it, say it's "undignified", blah, blah... It's Canada so they might even have to get permission from the Queen; but if they don't, then why not innovate? Come on Canada. You're so cool in many other ways. Make it happen.

In Search Of... consolation...

Worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, as bright as a quarter moon for a while, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry, worry.

There would be considerably more worrying were it not for Slashdot filters.

Based on a study that shows the average Briton doesn't take nearly enough placebo.

I would say "sold" but with BTC in the $250 range that works out to roughly $0.000025 so it isn't worth the hassle of setting up an account, and it's too small to withdraw. Besides, agents of His Majesty Felipe VI are the ones who really need to do the collecting.

I hereby declare the number 90185349087539845793845389573985739485739487593857893 in the name of the King of Spain. What will you give me for that?

I'm curious to know who this collective "we" is that you're talking about. There is a lot that the United States does that is cause for concern, but there's also plenty the US does to help. You give me the impression that either you're either ignorant about everything that happens around the world or you're very selective about where you get your news.

As for the US military, for a whole host of reasons the US is endlessly doing Europe's dirty work. They sure are averse to getting involved, even when something's happening in their own backyard or their own meddling was the source of those problems. And in the end, while Europe enjoys the luxury of keeping its hands clean they have no shame in getting on their high horse about American involvement around the world.

Of course, the US could always take the Chinese approach of superficially not getting involved in anything, but supporting oppressive regimes so that they can strip nations of their resources. Take a look at what they're doing in Africa.

Do continue.

Ditto. Any significant C I've written had "cleanup:" at the end of many functions, and "goto cleanup" wherever you had to bail out of the middle of such functions. Once I got over the "never use goto" mentality that was drilled into my head, I realized it was the most maintainable way of dealing with things that had to be released such as file handles, graphics contexts, memory, etc. Anybody who analyzed my code should have quickly picked up on the fact that this was an idiom for something like destructors in a language that doesn't have them.

Isn't the point of prison to separate criminals from the general population?

This; but with some very important caveats. First, the separation must be as humane as practical. Why? Well there's the obvious "don't be a sicko and mistreat anybody, even a prisoner because it's immoral" argument. There's also the "hey, they might be innocent" argument. Everybody, even the most hardened "tough on crime" person should understand this. Every single one of us is potentially a victim of mistaken imprisonment. What, not me? Yes. You. If you disagree, please refer back to the definition of "mistaken imprisonment". Thus, we all have a personal stake in safe, humane treatment of prisoners.

Second, we should carry out this humane separation only when necessary, and in a way that isn't too costly.

The policy as described in the article summary seems neither humane, nor necessary. In the long run it will be costly too. Extended solitary can lead to severe mental conditions. Severe mental conditions are costly to society, either because of new crimes when released, or the need to turn the prisoner over to an expensive psychiatric facility for the rest of their lives.

If they're concerned about people running gangs from prison, they could monitor their networks. Collect all the information and trade it with your friends... then collect their friends and put them in the same cell. Of course there'd be less of this if we weren't waging a war on drugs; but that's a separate rant.

Perhaps the difference is that much of the ship on Titan would be operating at temperatures close to the phase transition, whereas on Earth only a tiny part of the ship is operating at such temperatures.

Now I really want to know how many C-64s, Apple ][s, Osbourne's, or other contemporary machines available to students we would have needed to have a 95% chance of mining a coin before the semester was out. That's assuming that crypto currency existed in 1987, which it didn't. I suspect we would have overloaded the breaker panel and not have had much of a chance. These machines struggled to render one crappy low-res image of the Mandlebrot set.

A more plausible technique back then would have been to steal cycles from an academic computer. I don't know what they had in the 80s, but when I returned to school after dropping out there was an RS6000 and a Sun cluster to which we had access, and possibly more that we could have found and compromised. Not sure how much computing power could have come from pooled student accounts. It might have been more plausible; but the ability to run unattended jobs was often restricted. Computing privileges at a university generally aren't worth risking for such nonsense...