The good news is, initiatives like this give us a chance to find out whether it's the "girls don't code because computers require testosterone to operate", or whether it's "girls don't code because boy coders are, on average, idiots who can't deal with girls."

The difference, again, is in how much effort is expended to move from one to the other. Gold panning is difficult and unpredictable. Bitcoin mining is very predictable (if you take into account current valuations), very easy to turn off, requires nothing you aren't already running, and its only downside is the impact of a drop in bitcoin valuation, which changes for how long you can run you mining rig before you want to ship it out.

People might start out thinking "I'm gonna sell shovels to the miners!", and then they quickly discover that they have created an automated shovel, and that the gold mine is in the electric outlet.

And some libertarians still think that gold has any intrinsic value. Ask me how much your gold is worth when I put a gun to your head.

What do you call it when someone doubles (or triples, or quadruples) an existing transaction? What do you call it when someone invalidates a transaction? And what do you call it when 51% of the network generates a parallel blockchain that it calls the one true blockchain? Yes, you can fork it and have two official block chains, but at that point, bitcoin WILL be dead to everyone. It'd be like there suddenly were two US of A governments, each distributing their own, slightly different dollars, but with hugely different printing rules.

Yeah, this 51% business is as bad as people make it out to be.

If John Deere could make a profit by rigging up its tractors in its factories to some pre-built servers, it would. If all it would take the farmers to make corn chips is to plug their corn silos into some pre-built servers, they would.

All your comparisons fail due to the huge difference in how easy it is to move from producing bit-coin machines to producing bitcoins. Especially if the bitcoin machines have to be tested with their final functionality, which is 100% indistinguishable from its end user utilization.

Why would they not? All they would have to do is to not unplug their bitcoin rigs from their testing harness. In short, it takes them more effort to stop being miners than it does to be miners. Why in god's name does anyone still think that there is some economic reason they don't mine bitcoins themselves? The only reason they even pretend they don't is because this way, they get up-front free capital for creating their own rigs. When the cost of a loan drops below the cost of servicing the miner purchases, that's when these operations will stop selling to end-users.

A fairly significant nit-pick: the free market, as described by Adam Smith and associated with the invisible hand of the free market, is predicated on two things:
1) Zero cost of entry into a market
2) Perfect information about each entrant into the market is available to all consumers at all time.

The closest thing to a market with zero cost of entry we have is lemonade stands and websites, and perfect information does not, will not, and cannot exist. Comcast is working very hard to significantly raise the cost of entry for websites (pay up, or no one wants to use your website), and actively lying to make sure #2 doesn't take place.

You're absolutely right in your conclusion, but it is important to understand the foundation of why Adam Smith thought the free market was so great. It explains a lot about the current failures of the market, and also explain why Smith himself understood the need for regulation.

You are free to move to any of the great countries around the world that have a very small central government and whose reach barely extends past the capital. Wait, you're still here? It couldn't be because of the entirely predictable problems that those countries face, wouldn't it? No, I'm sure it's just because John Galt is still slaving away in some factory, held down by the man. It's just a matter of time - Galt's Gulch is just around the corner, I'm sure of it. And then you'll show us all poor sheeple just how awesome government-less life is, and how screwed we all are without you.

Go ahead, I'll wait. Just like I'm still waiting for the Communists to really do their thing.

Actually, they are. A murderer does not create a new murderer with his victim. Someone who shoots someone else in a spree might create PTSD, but generally does not fundamentally alter the person they harm. Pedophiles, when they act on their desires to rape children, do it generally more than once, and leave behind a train wreck of a person that will take decades to get over the trauma, if they ever do.

With murderers, the crime ends with the act. With child abuse, the crime frequently self-perpetuates in the victim.

That's undeniably the worst aspect of current sex offender lists.

Personally, I was hoping that Google ushers in a whole new sense of what people are like: we're all sinners, we have all broken rules, and the only thing that matters is whether we persist in those crimes, and what those crimes EXACTLY where. Instead, people persist in hiding issues, going to great lengths to not face their own past or stop judging others.

Thanks - I didn't think it was actually malware since I didn't get any ads or anything similar, but turns out that I did install PureLeads. Looks like either Foxit, Handbrake or CDex had it bundled. Gah, and I thought I was pretty good at reading malware install prompts.

It won't even let me post if I don't whitelist it. Then again, I do have slashdot whitelisted, soooo.... I might have to look into a custom set of script enablements for Slashdot now, because this is just ridiculous.

On the upside, the people put a government in place that curbs air and water pollution, and makes it difficult to fire someone because they're gay.

The legal climate is that of every area that has lots of money floating around: you can hire a cheap lawyer, an expensive lawyer, or anything in between. For what it's worth, I haven't seen anyone be sued for volunteering to work through lunch. Forcing someine to work through lunch without overtime compensation though will quickly get you a letter from a lawyer.

The environmentalism can be kooky - but then again, every area has its bunch of crazies. We just have all of them - crystal power people, anti-vaxxers, celeb-chasers, gun nuts, republicans, white supremacists, black panther, democrats, socialists, libertarians, slow-food people, fast-food people, techies, farmers, billionaires, hill-billies, etc. The upside: whatever your brand of crazy is, we have it.

It's a nice place to live, if you decide to actually live there. And find a place to live. Everything else is pretty copacetic there.

Not opensource, but Salesforce does offer up a good chunk of their online storage/access for free to charities. And since at the core, Salesforce is just an Oracle DB wrapped with some fancy business logic, you can use it as an easy store of information, with access that can be handled even by total neophytes. Drawback: it requires Internet access and depends entirely on what Salesforce decides to do with its offering for charities.

For an open-source and stand-alone application, LibreOffice Base is the way to go. Just make sure they have some form of backup (hard copies!) and that someone who knows at least a smidgeon of computer stuff takes over after you leave. Otherwise, I'll echo what someone else said: if it's too complicated, they'll abandon it the instance you walk out the door.

And why do I need to whitelist it to load full comments, reply to large comments, and to moderate? The only thing I can find is this shit: http://pureleads.com/, and it seems to me that beta still hasn't fully died.

Dice and Dice Holdings: go fuck yourself.

Unfortunately, Seaworld's version of an orca enclosure is the equivalent of the zoos and circuses of the PT Barnum era. For comparison, the Monterey Bay aquarium has a bigger tank for its shark/turtle/tuna and other large fish exhibit.

Yes, you get to see the animal. Yes, you get to see it do stupid tricks. But that's the only value it has for you, and the only value it has for the animal is that it isn't immediately killed off.

Not much of an endorsement.

And the vast majority of "ISPs" in this country are not relevant to the vast majority of Americans, as they service tiny and highly localized markets. Most markets are served by some form of the telephone/cable company duopoly, both of which offer TV, DVRs and soon streaming services.

If it would be a money-losing proposition, ISPs would get out of the business of offering TV. Somehow, neither Comcast nor ATT are doing that.

Of course. It's an awesome way of making sure that you maximize your revenue while minimizing your investment. Bandwidth caps are awesome for ISPs. They suck for customers. The reason they are coming everywhere should tell you something about the competitiveness of the market.

You mean, there's actual competition in the market? I haven't seen actual competition in one of the heaviest populated areas in the US since.... well, ever. The only options were Comcast (sometimes), ATT (always), and maybe an ATT DSL reseller, whose main line during issues was "Sorry, we know this, but ATT won't fix their lines."

If that would be true, Netflix wouldn't see the growth it does. Plus, there's a huge opportunity for remote doctor's visits that isn't taking off because most plans offer a measly 1Mb up.

You missed the part where there's only two food places in town, both are colluding in making smaller doors, and both are offering slightly larger doors at rapidly increasing prices.