On the Internet nobody knows that you're unemployed.

Lennier ended up on a small farm located on an earth-like planet way on the outskirts of Grid Epsilon and lived a happy, if uneventful, life with his trusty space-collie as his most trusted friend.

You don't have to be a Michael Straczynski to know that B5 had a "beginning of the story" and an "end of the story". One of the best decisions that Mr. Straczynski ever made was to allow the story to end (and end grandly I also have to say).

Too many cheap crap-hounds (*cough*couch*abrams*cough*) try to extend a story as long as they are able to squeeze money out of it and are eventually revealed to have no idea what they were doing or where they were going with it. Straczynski told a really great story that ended i a really great way. Live and art have to move on.

A 4 TB slowish seagate hard disk can be had for about $160ish if you look around. Five of them are $750. An inexpensive bod tower such as a TowerRAID 4 Bay eSATA RAID runs about $150. Get two of them.

Total cost is around $1100 and the solution is expandable .

>. All the transactions of all the people are public and is verified by multiple entities

Oh really? So you know *all* the principle entities of Mt. Gox? You know just where they were storing/investing that HALF A BILLION DOLLARS ? You know the names of the independent accounting agency that oversaw that HALF A BILLION DOLLARS ?

You know none of that and very little else.

Why who ever would have thought that when you give have a f!@kig BILLION dollars to a more than less anonymous source(s) by anonymous means and with no oversight - why who every would have thought that maybe - just maybe - someone would be tempted to just walk the hell away with Half a BILLION??

You know who didn't think that way? Some chump wanna-be geeks with too much disposable income and too little common sense.

>What gives you the right to say 'Bitcoin was designed as a vehicle to steal' ?

I'm guessing that it has something to do with the fact that you are giving your hard-earned money to an unknown source to be looked over by unknown people by unknown means???

Hey but that's just me - please feel free to send me any extra money that you have and I'll be sure to protect it for you and even give you a return on your investment when the price goes up! Hey - whata deal

A studio enforcing their copyright against personal-use downloads might be a somewhat crappy and ill-advised practice, but it's not "trolling". To me if you were going to call something "copyright trolling" it would be more like using copyright letters to silence people, aka SLAPP, not using copyright the way it was intended, to prevent people other than the owner from making copies of the entire media as a substitute to buying it from the media holder.

I'm seeing far more liberals (on the internet, generally pretty wealthy) that are pro-guns, so not that hard for me to picture. But I will grant you the average conservative probably wouldn't get it.

Ignoring the general stupidity of many TSA practices, and that this is an artificial market created by government inefficiency, what's so fundamentally wrong with paying more to get through faster?

If your money is worth more than your time, you'll wait, if your time is worth more than your money, you'll pay. That's a fundamental decision every time you say something like "I'll pay someone to change my oil because I don't want to spend 20 minutes and get dirty doing it myself", or "I'll eat out so I don't have to cook". Time/money/value decisions are something you make dozens of every day.

I was once at an airport, I think it was LAS... people were all piled up in a clusterfuck right after of the entrance to TSA where they check IDs, even though there was about a mile of Disneyland spiral queue that was not being used. A helpful TSA agent started to open up the spiral queue, and was actually rebuked by a superior because "that's not the way they do things", and everyone that went in the queue had to rejoin the mosh pit of people.

And then they closed two of the four open screening lanes because "it wasn't busy enough to justify having that many open". We had to literally jog across the airport to catch our flight after being stuck in that mess for 50+ minutes.

I'm not sure it would take new technology to fix the TSA, just some people running the show that don't have their head up their ass.

Someone who knows PHP and Javascript really well is not a common thing. If you do go the web route, focus on the JS more than the server side, since that's where things are actually happening these days. Learn how to write JS that doesn't leak DOM nodes or memory (for god's sake, please). Half the JS libraries out there leak like a sieve.

Learning to write good PHP code would be a huge benefit, since it seems to be a rare skill, and as you point out, the language gives you plenty of rope to hang yourself with.

I take issue with the idea that a CS degree at most schools would give you the foundation to be a good programmer.

There's far too much emphasis on math, and far too little emphasis on what really matters in software. I will never ask one of my employees to solve a partial differential equation. But I will ask them to write maintainable code (even simple shit like don't copy and paste big blocks of code seems to not be taught at all) and to consider usability and UI at every step.

If Slashdot were created today, I wonder if it would be some kind of homogenized youtube channel or twitter account.

The barriers of entry have come down, but inevitably, so has the quality of content. The white noise isn't a conspiracy, it's a consequence of commoditization of publishing. It just turns out that most people don't have anything worthwhile to say.