I question how much it's still "oil". Oil, outside of reservoirs, evolves. The volatiles slowly separate out; their ultimate fate is evaporation and photodegradation. The shortest chains are lost rapidly, but the longer they get, the longer they take to disappear. As volatiles are lost, the oil thickens. It eventually becomes tar, and then basically asphalt.

No, this is what Slashdot has always been. I started regularly reading Slashdot around 2000, and back then there were posts just like yours decrying the state of Slashdot today, pining for some golden age. And yet, looking at the archives, not much had changed.

And neither mentions the CPU architecture, but if you go to the product brochure then you learn that they're Intel Xeon E5s (which doesn't narrow it down much). Interesting that they're using E5s and not E7s, but perhaps most of the compute is supposed to be done on the (unnamed, vaguely referenced) accelerators.

There are also costs associated with taking cash. Having to store large amounts of cash, having to audit tills more often, having to transport it to the bank, increased security needed as a result of being a much more attractive burglary target, and so on. For large stores, these tend to be more than the cost of accepting cards (next time you're in a supermarket, imagine if every transaction was cash. Think about how much they'd have on the premises by the end of the working day.

The difference is that the costs of accepting cash don't scale linearly, whereas credit card fees do. For a small shop with a low turnover, cash is often a better deal, but for a large shop it isn't. I came across a paper a few years ago that compared the two and was quite surprised by how much handling cash costs even small businesses.

They don't hate you, but you're probably not their favourite customer. The most profitable people are the ones that have high income and poor impulse control, who will buy an expensive thing periodically and then take a few months (at 10+% interest) to pay it off.

The people who put through a lot of purchases and pay promptly are the next best - they're charging the merchant 1-3% of the total purchase price to lend you the money for a month, which is a pretty good interest rate for the lender. I put a load of work expenses on my card and so last time I had an issue with a fee that I disputed, my card company immediately and without quibble cancelled the fee and added a good-will payment to my card, because the fee was about 5% of the profit that they make on me in a year.

For some card companies, the people who massively overspend are a good long-term investment. They get a (relatively cheap) court judgement against these people, which requires them to pay back a small amount each month for a very long term. It generally works out to 5-10% annual interest, but pretty much guaranteed over a 10-25 year period. The risk is very low and they're a steady stream of income for an up-front capital investment. This is why you get a lot of card companies advertising to students and other low-income groups.

While technically true, there are some corner cases. In the UK, Jeremy Clarkson discovered this when he tried to prove a point by posting his account number and sort code online. He then discovered that it's possible to set up a direct debit with just this and a signature. Anyone that accepts direct debit payments is bound by the code of conduct that requires them to return anything taken by that mechanism if it's disputed and they're easy to cancel, but he did end up being signed up to donate money to a few charities. You'll get the money back in the end, but there's a lot of inconvenience possible until you do.

I know it's hard to remember the first statement in a post by the time you get to the end, but I'd recommend trying before you write a snide reply.

I remember having a Quake directory that was 500MB, when the original game was about 50MB. 90% of it was user-generated content. This included a load of maps and a load of mods. I don't remember the names of all of the maps, but I do remember that almost all of the time we played was on third-party maps, not on ones that came with the game.

If your system uptime relies on individual nodes having high uptime, then you're doing it wrong.

I don't know why you've been modded troll. The problem isn't binary files, it's complex files. All of your log files are binary, the difference is that you have a load of small tools that can work with the ASCII / UTF-8 text ones easily. As long as there's a small program that can be statically linked and run from a recovery medium to turn the log files into something that other tools can handle (or, ideally, can search them faster) then there's no issue. The problem is systems where you need the entire GUI and a big chunk of the userland applications stack working to be able to read logs.

Oh, and for the record, lava and snow are IMHO a beautiful reaction. :) Fire and ice, baby!

I just typed it. But Slashdot simply "disappears" thorn characters, which is annoying.

Bárðarbunga is full of eye candy. I can point to abundant examples including no shortage of videos on Youtube / Vimeo.

As for pronunciation: Á is said "ow". BOWR-dthar-BOON-ka. The R is an alveolar tap or trill. If that's too hard for you, you can also call it Holuhraun (HOLE-ih-HROYN), Nornahraun (NORDN-uh-HROYN), THorbjargarhraun (THOR-Byardg-ar-HROYN), or a bunch of other names (the TH should really be a thorn, but again, Slashdot silently eats thorns). Among the many proposals for names was Holuhraunshraunshraunshraun, which was suggested because it would be fun watching foreigners try to pronounce it ;) It was never actually a serious contender, but I wrote an article poking fun at the concept on Uncyclopedia at one point ;)

Meh.

If you want a flaming hellscape, Kilauea is a little candle compared to Bárðarbunga in Iceland. Kilauea erupts a couple cubic meters per second. Bárðarbunga erupts a couple hundred. Kilauea's gas emissions barely show up on satellite images. Bárðarbunga's just last night caused levels so high in a town a hundred kilometers away that it went off the top of the safety scale (which they got from Hawaii ;) ). Bárðarbunga has already erupted more lava than of Mauna Loa's multi-year eruptions in modern history, in under two months, and is up to about 1/6th the volume emitted by Kilauea in the entire 31 years of its eruption, with no signs of stopping. And it's doing all of this through a dike dozens of kilometers long. The magma chamber itself may still actually go off, mind you. An area the size of Manhattan is currently dropping by about a foot per day into the caldera, and has been doing so for months, causing one in every five powerful earthquakes on Earth. The caldera has released the largest lava eruptions on Earth since the last Ice Age, as well as floods several times larger than all of Earth's major rivers combined.

But nobody cares about Icelandic volcanoes unless they take out European air travel ;)

What percent of the US's population do you think is in the risk of a major natural disaster of some kind - volcano, flood, hurricane, tornado, earthquake, landslide, avalanche, etc? This time the dice got rolled and it was their homes that came up snake eyes. It should be noted that the town was built before Pu'u 'O'o became a "thing". There were no signs back then that Pu'u 'O'o was even likely to become an active vent, let alone one that would erupt for over three decades.

Now who's laughing?