Your first post-college professional job typically cares about your GPA. Too low a GPA and you might not even get the interview.

What you say only makes sense if I'm depositing the proceeds of the loan with the same bank.

If I'm buying a car and the dealership banks elsewhere, there's no real economic difference between me taking out a $20,000 cash withdrawal, handing it to the car dealer, and having him deposit it in his bank vs. me having the $20K wired directly to the car dealer's bank account. Because there is no real economic difference, it would be irrational to have different reserve requirements for these two transactions.

I'm not saying you are wrong, I'm just saying that if you are right, then there is something very irrational going on here.

I doubt the Physics community will trust the US Government to be a critical partner any project that big until the institutional memory of the SSC budget axe goes away. We are just over 20 years into what I expect to be a 40-60 year wait for that to happen.

Oh, I get it, 25% of all /. viewers are infected with malware that DNS-poisons *.slashdot.org so they land on this fake "Beta" site. Wait until Dice's technical team locates the malicious crackers and sics the legal team on them. There will be hell to pay, I tell you, hell to pay.

... when they can just locate it and make it connect to a fake tower instead?

A "kill switch" will just brick devices the first time they connect to the network in California or a network that transmits "kill switch" orders outside of California. I wouldn't expect it to work if the thief dropped the phone in a metal-lined bag until it was safely outside of the country.

Blacklisting the ESN is just as effective and doesn't require special phones.

Besides, if the phones are being bagged and stripped for parts in a shielded room, neither blacklisting nor a kill switch will do much good.

Obviously you've never had the natural gas lines go out in a cold snap. Standing next to your rack of bitcoin-mining machines prevents frostbite.

What? You mean we just got lucky and creating heat wasn't part of the design of bitcoin?? Wow, who was so blind that they missed that key feature???

That's a stretch. Most banks can only loan out x% of their deposits, limiting the amount of money the can create "at will."

I don't know about Russia, but in America, private people can still loan each other money at interest and they can demand collateral, subject to certain regulations and limitations. As a simple example, if I want to loan my neighbor $1000 at interest of 0.1%/week (i.e. far below "illegal usury" rates) so she can pay for unexpected car repairs, my government isn't going to stop either of us from making that transaction.

When my Internet gets "choppy" and starts dropping more than 1-2% of packets, most "non-simple" web sites including /. slow down horribly. Simple ones slow down tolerably.

This is one reason (accessibility for the blind is another) why all web sites must have a "simple" version for those who need it.

Logged in users should be able to use any "version" of the Slashdot look-and-feel that hasn't already been permanently retired, subject to things like "new features may not be added to deprecated "versions" and "deprecated versions may not work well or look good on devices/screen sizes they weren't designed for."

In short, don't take away any "version" that already exists until long after it's officially "deprecated," and don't take it away until the number of users in the last few months has dropped below a very small percentage of logged-in users.

And always, always, maintain a "simple version" that can work with a plain-old mid-1990s-standards web browser which provides at least the basic capabilities like logging in, reading, posting, and submitting stories. This isn't just for universal compatibility, but it's also to make sure that blind people or those who are on very slow or erratic internet connections can still participate. After all, when I'm connecting to Slashdot from outer space or Antarctica, my connection probably won't be the best and I'll be looking for simplicity over functionality.

Non-logged in versions should always have the ability to click on a link called "simple" or "basic" or type in a specific URL modifier like ...?version=simple to get the simple interface. Hehe, better yet, call it ?version=HTML2.0 :).

... cigarettes?

Nuclear is far from clean, it's just a different kind of dirty.

Solar/wind/hydro/etc. are "relatively" clean and may be "literally" non-polluting once the plant is built, but they rarely have anything close to zero ecological impact.

One nearly-inherent aspect of renewables is that they won't "run out" like fossil fuels and uranium. Some carbon-based fuels, such as burning fast-growing plants, are "renewable" in this sense but are far from pollution-free.

I won't pay for "general news" because by definition other news outlets could pick it up if they wanted to. If no major news outlet picks it up then it's either not important or not of general interest.

I would consider paying for specialized-interest news like hyper-local news, very-niche-interest news ("Lintball Newsletter," etc. - and yes I just made that up), and good analysis/opinion.

Bottom line: If you are a general-interest online newspaper, unless you've got some local opinion/analysis that I find very attractive or you've got local content that other online sources simply aren't interested in carrying because it's not local to them, I'm not going to give you money. As for local content, it will have to be of specific interest to me. If you are my hometown-as-a-kid paper, the paper of a town or a loved one lives in now, or a town I'm considering moving to, we'll talk. Otherwise, if you want me to see your ads, don't charge me for content.

If you are my current hometown paper, I can get local content for free on the radio or TV, so you better have good opinion/analysis for me to want to give you money. However, I've got a deal for you: I'll pay $3/month if you give me $3 in coupons to buy a print paper. I'll also be more likely to buy a print paper if it comes with a 48-hour pass to access to a PDF of that day's paper and copy-and-paste-able text and images of every article in that day's paper. That will save me the trouble of scanning the paper when I want to send a copy to my Aunt in Boise (yes, I made that up too - I don't have an Aunt in Boise).

Oh wait, I just read the freaking article, and that's exactly what they are using.

The only question I have is "Why is the industry just now getting around to this? With respect to broadcast-FM non-satellite radio, wasn't this technology available in 1997 when the Emergency Alert System replaced the Emergency Broadcast System?"