"Don't forget Poland!" - George Bush

What was exciting about Halo? No clue here, never heard of it before MS.

Meant to have a "large amounts" in there. I thought it was part of the rules to track money laundering, just as any transfer over $10k (or is it $5k?) must be reported. Banks definitely scan large deposits, but I can't find a link to a legal requirement for the serial numbers (they scan for counterfeits as a matter of course). Bill serial number scanners are a real product, but they seem to be marketed to police evidence rooms, not to banks, so I could just be confused on this one.

Actually, this one's a case of the moderators needing to get off my lawn. The "pave the world" movement was known to any real geek during the days when usenet ruled. Slashdot died a little today, when no one got the joke that everyone would have once recognized. Pit slaves, the lot of you!

They belong under my wheels. Keep your toys off my infrastructure. You will join the other pit slaves on Paving Day, doomed to a life of cleaning public toilets while I cruise the paved world in my hypersonic atomic car, under the light of the chromed moon.

A government could of course shut off BitCoin, torrent, email, or anything else on servers connected to the internet. The problem with BitCoin (unlike email) is it doesn't realty work on ad-hoc networks. Maybe there's no central authority, but a central network is required, so that transactions from anywhere can be processed by every processor (miner).

BitCoin is quite vulnerable to a powerful government agreement deciding to purge it from the internet. That seems unlikely though, as I think the big players will be content to track it.

Banks are already required to scan and report the serial numbers of all banknotes for deposits/withdrawals. Heck, the last time I got cash directly from a teller, it came not from the teller's drawer but from a dispenser that probably had a scanner built in.

But if I get cash from Alice and give it to Bob, no banks involved, it's anonymous. Unlike Bitcoin.

I was going to post that RabbitMQ was written in Haskell, but fortunately I checked first: nope, Erlang. Haskell? I got nothing.

Languages don't really matter much. Pick a problem domain that's in demand, and not much in supply. The language is just a tool. (But avoid COBOL if at all possible.)

Some things are true across all the big players (I don't know about the government-audited services; I can only imaging there's even more tracking).

If you're running the service, you don't have access to the datacenters, and likely don't even have access to the location of the data centers (the big players all keep exact datacenter locations somewhat secret - they have addresses, but the addresses don't mean much). If you work at the data center, you don't know what any given server is doing. So you don't really have physical access to the hardware in a useful way.

Further, everything is logged and audited like crazy - not so much for stuff like PCI compliance, but for troubleshooting. If a server falls in the woods, a whole team will hear. I'm sure everyone has tools to let you remote into any given hypervisor, but I'd be quite surprised if you could do so without a heck of an auditing trail.

It's not quite there for banking, but for most normal business, chances are there's more safety against a bad employee of MS Google, or Amazon than there is protecting you from your own IT staff locally.

I routinely have problems playing low-res YouTube vids on my 50 Mb/s connection, but didn't have those problems with my previous 3 Mb/s connection. Something's just screwy with YouTube. Either they have internal service issues, or the slap-fighting between them and ISPs continues.

Well, to the engineers' defense, the wheels were designed to handle the terrain that was found by the previous 2 rovers. Going beyond that probably gets into internal NASA politics, but your claim wouldn't surprise me at all - sexy features seem to trump infrastructure in every field.

As with anything on Slashdot that starts with armchair experts asking "didn't they think of X?", well, of course they thought of X. Weight of the probe is the primary cost of the mission - nothing's heavier than in must be.

These wheels were tested extensively, and work just fine in normal rocky soil - they're more robust than car tires. But glue a spike to the ground pointing up and it goes right through the wheel. There was no reason to expect Martian Caltrops, but that's what was found: sharp spikes of rock that aren't merely stuck in the soil, but seemingly extruded from the bedrock (like you can get with a'a lava).

For those who don't follow this stuff: the rover has tin-foil wheels, and they're getting chewed up fast (many holes and tears in them already). The problem is sharp rocks that are embedded firmly in the ground, or perhaps part of the bedrock like a'a lava - a geological feature that wasn't expected or designed for. The rover can handle sharp rocks in soil just fine, but now they're going really slowly trying to find a better path.

So you're actually playing the victim card now? Ohhhh, I'm just like a handicapped person or the elderly because I'm tall, get women easier, and make more money. Pity me!

You can guess my delight at that idea.