Congratulations on only entering destinations that have existed for at least a year! Those of us living in "newer" portions of cities enjoy the constant joy of having our street "not exist" on Google Maps/Mapquest/wherever people are going now besides those.

Yes. THIS.

The single biggest thing that renders useless an otherwise-great STEM education is the lack of ability to write well.

Legion are the devs who string together many words, but forget to have a verb or period at the end. Innumerable are the IT wonks who can't scrape together a coherent and concise summary of 1000-page compliance reports. I swear, the collective plural noun for some of the security analysts at work is "a shimmer of tin foil hats" or "a fuckery of subjectivism" ...and they don't even understand the nature of the criticism.

Can I *PLEASE* have a critical thinker and good writer in the house???? Anyone??

Science does no good if you cannot express a coherent hypothesis, imagine a threshold, or string together a sequence of actual actions for testing. In medicine this costs lives.
Technology is an interchange, it does no good if you cannot listen to a problem, and express understanding back. At this moment in software, we're awash in UX implementations that aren't traceable to a functional problem.
Engineering compounds the problem later without functional expression and holistic and temporal views. Ask a Boeing maintenance tech about the plethora of could-have-been-shared 1-off components in 20-40 year old jets.
Math does no good if you cannot draw a picture. Ask the Morton Thiokol guys about their reports on the o-rings on the space shuttle.

Among other "humanities" like history and writing/composition, Tufte ought to be mandatory for high-school seniors in a STEM program.

That would be Mint Linux.

No soapbox, no high-minded reasons here, just pure practicality: One of the places I've volunteered for a long time is a shelter for abuse victims. This county-funded program receives and triages women (mostly) and children into appropriate programs and mid-term housing, and provides courses ranging from home-ec and job training to computer literacy and online privacy before sending them back on their own. For several years those who completed the computer literacy program were given a good-spec laptop with Ubuntu + many apps, configured for security and privacy in the same way we'd done the training. We saw them all: hopeless tweaker prostitutes who went back and gave everything to their pimps, to beaten trophy wives hell-bent on recovering their independence after disconnecting the GPS tracker on the mercedes. After the first few months, the success rate surprised even us: Of those who were given a modern-spec PC with Ubuntu, more than 2/3 were still in active use a year later (still with Ubuntu, and usually with separate accounts for the kids). We probably had 250 Ubuntu PCs in the field at any given time.

Then Shuttleworth jammed Unity forward. Ubuntu's shift to a Metro-esque gui was a disaster with this novice audience. We had people decline a free computer because they couldn't make sense of Unity. Others installed XP over it and called us when it broke or they discovered you had to pay for Office. Others called over and over for basic navigation support. In general, the answer was "no thanks" to Ubuntu.

Switching over to Mint (first with Mate, then Cinnamon) rescued our program, and was a huge hit with the end users. Several years of .deb and ubuntu-based config & tuning was re-usable on Mint, and the interface didn't scare off the novices. Similar enough to the older W95/XP/7/OSX interfaces that they knew were to start, but modern enough for good security and functionality. Just to be clear *I* like playing with the latest and weirdest geekery, my s.o. does malware reversing to calm her nerves (so hot!!), and my home has kids who think nothing of reflashing cyanogenmod on their phones and argue over whether to use Win8+visual studio or Mint+Eclipse for their homework. But that's not the world most people inhabit, and it's really important to recognize that /. readers are not the norm or a good baseline for what is useful and usable to the general populace.

Clem's just a regular guy solving regular problems.
Shuttleworth is a philosopher of the future, with some distinctly reality-adjacent ideas of what ought to be, and enough monetary thrust to make his pigs fly just fine.
I'd rather live and help people in the present. So yeah.... "Ubuntu for Computers" is Linux Mint.

North Dakota and Texas, primarily, due to the shale oil and oil-to-gasoline-refinery booms, respectively, a lot of jobs that don't seem like they'd pay $150k are paying tons of money due to the laws of supply and demand in order to entice people to move there.

I actually know a guy that sells fairly expensive cars down in Texas and he says it would blow my mind how often people come in, missing teeth, looking really fucked up and generally like they can't afford a $100,000+ automobile and plop down cash on the barrelhead for their new M5. Where do they work? Oil refinery. Oil field. Oil drilling. Oil services...

"That word... I don't think it means what you think it means..."

Carriers have been "ready" for years--nothing whatsoever is stopping Comcast, AT&T and everybody else from flipping 100% of their users to IPv6 tomorrow, in fact. ...But there's no content to access via IPv6... So what's the rush?

The odds of us ever actually "transitioning" to IPv6 are somewhere between slim and none for the foreseeable future. The most likely way it will work out is mobile applications (where it doesn't matter what you're using because it's a mobile phone that mates only to the provider's network) will be mostly IPv6 before too long, if they aren't already. Some consumer ISPs may move customers to IPv6, but that will be somewhat delayed by the incredibly slow pace that content providers are switching to IPv6--that is to say, as Akamai has illustrated for us here by getting themselves a /10 (FUCK ME, that's a shitload of IPs for a company that already controls multiple other swaths of space this big) the content providers just aren't bothering to move to IPv6.

And yeah, the ISPs can choose maintain a bridge between the universes, but the more traffic you pour through that bridge the more resources it requires to operate... Eventually, if the ISP can't force the issue it stops making sense to transition any more users to IPv6 until more content providers get on-board.

I fully anticipate retiring in another 25 years or so and still having IPv4 be the vast majority of IP networks in operation because in the end, even if your ISP switches, what's the point of changing your internal network over? Any company of decent size will have a security team that says "No fucking way will outsiders directly connect to your IPv6 address" and block it with some kind of firewall/NAT arrangement which almost instantly negates the biggest "advantage" of IPv6. And once that "advantage" is off the table there is zero business reason to incur the expense involved in such a change-over.

DON'T BE A DICK ON THE HIGHWAY! Drive conservatively, dress conservatively, and be completely (able to pass a blood test) sober.

Most importantly: Don't draw attention to yourself.

Apples to zebras, my friend: VISA and MasterCard process transactions in hundreds of currencies. Even if one of those currencies (or even ten) were to simply become worthless it wouldn't really do any damage to them: They'd just figure out how to process Visa card transactions in the currency that replaced whatever disappeared.

Bitcoin processors are basically fucked. Maybe they can repurpose some of their uber-expensive GPU rigs to mine other currencies, too.... But maybe not.

I think it would be hysterical if, in three years, eBay had 10,000 auctions running for these overpriced "GPU in a box" rigs that were selling like hotcakes last year before the late-adopters figured out BitCoin wasn't really a workable currency.

Its value will plunge precipitously. There simply isn't enough money "processing transactions" for other people for a reasonable "business" to be run doing so, and that is all that would be left for "miners" once all the bitcoins are found. So "processors" will start disappearing almost immediately. This will in turn drastically reduce the ability to spend your bitcoins which will in turn demolish their "value."

All of that is to say "Dump them now, avoid the rush, maybe get some of your money back."

Perhaps, but most of these devices have a separate category for that (so you can run a report and quantify just how much "more secure" you are than if you'd stayed with your old product.)

No.

All common loans (mortgage, credit card, signature loan, auto loan, etc) in the US are fixed principal. E.g. Say you borrow $200,000 for a house, and you get fees tacked on, plus the cost of financing ata fixed rate... you could pay ~3x the original loan but only as a result of compounding. The loan terms never change even if the value of the dollar completely tanks or shoots up. It is a common option to have a variable interest rate, making it possible to have the interest rate tied to the prime rate and have that skyrocket.. which could get me into trouble over the long term of I cannot afford adjusted monthly payments. But otherwise it's the same story: the principal amount is *never* adjusted for the value of the dollar. I'm quite sure that would be illegal (but IANAfinance lawyer), and if it's not, any creditor exercising that kind of option would find their buildings burned down by morning, Venezuela style.

If the value of my work stays steady, a strong dollar actually makes it harder for me to pay my mortgage, but a weak dollar lets me pay off my loans faster. Imho this sort of relationship has a stabilizing effect on the US economy and dollar.