For everything else, there is VISA?

This is in line with Nobel Laureate Paul Krugman's view of bitcoin as gold currency as expressed in his article Adam Smith Hates Bitcoin"

To highlight a paragraph from the op-ed piece, in which he quotes Smith:

"The gold and silver money which circulates in any country, and by means of which, the produce of its land and labour is annually circulated and distributed to the proper consumers, is, in the same manner as the ready money of the dealer, all dead stock. It is a very valuable part of the capital of the country, which produces nothing to the country."

Nice try.

However, it's not the same without a third character (as in: an Irish, an English and a French walked into a bar...).

Here, let me demonstrate (off-topic):

An Indian, a Malay and a Chinese waited outside the prime minister's office.

The prime minister summoned the Indian into his office and asked, "How much will it cost to send you to the moon?".
The Indian replied, "One million dollars because it is a risky job".
Taken aback, the prime minister next consulted with the Malay.
The Malay replied, "Two million dollars because I have two wives to feed should anything happen to me".
Disappointed with the answer, the prime minister called upon his last candidate, the Chinese.
The Chinese curtly replied, "Three million dollars".
Outraged, the prime minister demanded an explanation, to which the Chinese replied,
"You keep one million, I keep one million and we send the Indian to the moon for one million".

If you like this joke, you can thank my dad. Otherwise, sorry, no refund.

I based my comment on the following observations:

(1) One can buy originsl PS3 games from the Sony store, so it is conceivable that the store should also carry original Blu-ray/DVD.

(2) It would be a real stretch to say that at this day and age, one cannot find an original copy of DVD in Malaysia. Here is a link to get you started (it's a forum on blu-ray). Good luck.

"Alcohol is not cheap, that isn’t an issue for me but may add hundreds of dollars a month to expenses for some people." - John Hunter.

There. That should scatter half the slashdot crowd.

I agree that life can be rather comfortable with $1300/mth in Malaysia. Here are a few more to consider:.

- if you wish to buy Western products, say a Haagan Dasz ice-cream or a PS3, expect to pay the US equivalent of the cost. Also, PS3 games do not come down in price, even for old titles.
- unless if you get your movies through the internet, all original copies of DVD undergo some censorship if you buy them locally.
- Keep in mind that the bandwidth in Malaysia is not great (and probably has some data cap).
- not every place in Malaysia is disabled-access friendly.

This reminds me of Warren Buffett's speech that he gave to a group of MBA graduates.

His thought experiment* ran eerily similiar to Upstart's goal: if you have to invest 10% of your money in your classmates, what attributes do you look for? Warren placed integrity above all else. In fact, he joked and I quote: "if they don't have integrity, you want them dumb and lazy".

* - about 1:40 into the video.

The convenient, running argument seems to be :

I like the product but I disagree with the price of admission. Therefore, I am justified to obtain the product through other means.

Does the option to just walk away ever cross anyone's mind?

If management is that bad as many here suggest, good and able employees must have left the company by now.

Many smart people would rather move than work under bad management. They can find companies that offer the same perks easily.

Thus, we can safely assume that the smart ones that are still at Yahoo are there for reasons other than perks.

So Mayer's ban will most likely help than hurt Yahoo.

"No matter how good you are or how good your deck is, it's realistically very possible to be completely screwed out of a game by the random nature of your deck. "

I do not play Magic very often but isn't this problem part of the deck building exercise? You place too many creature/spell cards in your deck and you run the risk of not drawing any land cards for a while.

Good. I hope everyone benefits from this feature. MOOC has been a boon for me, and I suspect, for others as well.

One remarkable thing that recently came out of Coursera is Rice University's CodeSkulptor . With CodeSkulptor, I can write interactive games in Python (with additional help from CodeSkulptor's library functions).

You can do all that if you take the course "An Introduction to Interaction Programming in Python" . It's a lot of fun.

If you choose to DIY, it may interest you to take a look at Steve Huffman's (Reddit) at Udacity : CS253 How to Build a Blog. Sure, a blog is not a forum but they share some key elements. Steve uses Google App Engine as the server and codes in Python and Jinja2.

What the hell ?! Would it kill the OP to slap a spoiler alert to this article?

I have tried hard to avoid any information about this movie. I guess I have to try harder next time.

If others have commented about this, my apologies. I dare not skim this thread for fear that more shall be revealed.

Just thought that I would add something I found when I took Sebastian Thrun's AI course.

The Google self-driving car will not work in snowy condition. This is because the localization algorithm computes the car position using lane lines. So, if there is snow on the ground, lane acquisition will fail.

The other tidbit I will throw in also is that the Google car favours a right turn over a left turn because it is deemed less risky (i.e., change lane as least times as possible).

Oh, and one other thing. The Google car does not honk. The Google self-driving car team cannot figure out how to communication effectively with other drivers in this fashion. I

Aha.

I couple more of these "Apple's Story is Like [TV Series]" and we can finally debunk this Slashdot poll "How much TV do you watch in a week"