Exactly what I was going to say. Just because it's 1 atom thick doesn't mean it's 2 dimensional.

This is what it looks like. It doesn't always show up on the front page, but it's in the right sidebar when it does.

Because there was just a violent overthrow of a legitimate government that was headed by a Russian loyalist. As soon as Kiev fell and the interim government was instituted Russia had to assume that their supply lines could be endangered, as was access to their fleet's only Mediterranean port at Sevastapol. Most of eastern Ukraine DOES share ethnic roots with Russia. I'm not saying that Russia isn't meddling (they certainly are), but I think that what we're seeing is less intentional land-grabs, and more efforts from Moscow to ensure that supply lines aren't compromised in Ukraine if the pro-west/pro-NATO side wins. Putin is brilliant, he's smart enough to know that Russian troops are largely green right now, and the country doesn''t currently have the resources to maintain a sustained conflict in one of the largest countries in Europe. That said, Putin is brilliant, so if this is a game of chess and he plans to make more moves, he'll move slowly and deliberately, and make sure that he has plausible deniability and casus belli for every move he makes.

Not so fast. We have aided Mexico militarily by sending special forces for training, and also bringing Mexican troops to the US for training. Russia itself has not invaded Ukraine. Russian loyalists however have occupied several government buildings/regions because they're not a fan of the Pro-NATO, Pro-West stance taken by the Kieven government. I'm not going to say Russia is entirely innocent here, after all there were supposedly photos of Russian special forces training Eastern Ukrainians, but that behavior is nearly the same as what the US has done with Mexico in the drug war. We picked the side we liked and benefitted us the most, we gave them equipment and training, and told the other side that if they spill over our borders we will christen them with hellfire missiles.

Fair enough. Other than privacy implications i largely never bother with blocking ads (I don't mind vendors/content creators getting revenue from my using their services) unless I have a good reason. When i don't want to be tracked, tor+foxyproxy+adblock. I guess it all comes down to your tolerance of advertising :)

Russia is seeing a country that is essentially on the brink of civil war right next to its borders. On top of that, that country happens to control many of the major resource pipelines into and out of Russia. They have a vested interest in keeping Ukraine stable. Do you expect that the US would do any differently if Juarez or Tijuana truly became a Narco-stronghold? Don't rush so quickly to judge. The media on both sides of the pond spins the story to make their respective side look good.

Why do you need an ad-blocker on slashdot? If you have great karma from being a good member of the community they give you the option to disable all advertising. Just post constructively and no adblocker is necessary.

It would be fantastic if breweries used the grain to start raising their own cattle then. The other option is to do what every other great society through history and into prehistory has done - open bakeries. It's still saccharomyces cerevisiae, and spent grains are amazing for baking.

I've been using freecad, personally. I just did a series of adapters that allow me to attach RC servos to LEGO bricks for some inverse kinematics robots. It worked reasonably well. I've had it crash and do unexpected things, but what I've found is that if I work in the part design toolbar, build sketches that are fully constrained, and then use extrude/pocket operations to build my final parts, it seems pretty robust. Then I can switch to mesh and turn those into exportable meshes individually, and get parts that interact the way I want to. Half the stuff I'm doing I 3d print and the other half I mill on my cnc mill, and when I'm processing stl's I find again that having started from fully constrained sketches means the stl's are more robust and less likely to crash the cam programs I use.

You think normal currencies are stable? Google "forex." They're absolutely not stable.

Tinfoil hat much?

Yup, just like all of those people had protections from being screwed over by banks in 2008. Real dollars are so much better, you've convinced me.

All currency, whether it's bank notes, hunks of gold, bitcoins, goats, glass beads, or anything else, is a commodity. The only thing that determines price of that commodity is demand and supply. If people think it has utility, it has value. If people stop thinking any of these items have value, then they become worthless. All of these are speculated on as well; that's what foreign exchange markets are, that's what commodities markets are. None of them have intrinsic value until we decide to put a price tag on them in order to exchange them for other things.

Right now I can name about 4 local vendors who accept bitcoin because they prefer it to the 3% transaction fee charged for credit cards. And they're pulling in still more vendors. They're not involved as speculators, they're involved as people who want to accept it because it makes their cost of doing business lower.

Pyramid schemes aren't ponzi schemes. They're different things, with a few similarities.