Seriously. Adapt to the local social norms, moron, you're making me embarrassed to be an American.

(Well, okay, that's far from the most shameful thing we Americans have done overseas, but still.)

"Lead" pronounced "leed", meaning something used to guide (electric current, in this case).

Sparkfun is a hobby electronics company. Surface-mount LEDs are a pain to solder by hand, and impossible to prototype.

Right now Charles Stross is steepling his fingers like and saying "Excellent...."

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

By definition, BitCoin is money. Troll more elsewhere. "any article or substance used as a medium of exchange, measure of wealth, or means of payment, as checks on demand deposit or cowrie."

Sure, it's money. It's just not very good money.

You can be sure that there are at least as many bitcoin proponents who would like a government to simply stay out of the whole affair and let them engage in vigilantism as there are those who would like a government to provide a remedy.

To be sure. The value of this social experiment is not so much in pointing out the hypocrisy of the anarcho-libertarians, or convincing them they're wrong, but in showing everyone else what an anarchist "utopia" actually looks like in practice.

It's that cops always want to cover their asses. But sometimes the suspect *does* shoot first. In this case, there are dozens of eyewitnesses who should be able to straighten out the truth.

Nope. Probably because we don't discriminate against them.

HA HA HAHAHAHAHAA!

http://www.gmu.edu/programs/ic...
http://www.theguardian.com/com...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M...

Sorry, you were saying something? Europe is absolutely racist, it's just a bit less visible because the minority population is smaller, less visible, and doesn't try to hold power. Also, the historical repercussions of your past racism are less visible because you guys mostly kept your slaves in your colonies rather than in your backyard: it's a lot easier to pretend that Nigeria isn't your problem any more than to abandon Birmingham.

Great analysis. Another statistic I'd like to see is a comparison of number of shootings due to police error: cop misses and hits bystander, cop mistakes fake gun for a real one, cop shoots self in foot.

One could argue that cops shooting bad guys and getting shot in turn is part of the ugly job of law enforcement: the bigger tragedy is when innocents get killed.

"Sir, I don't have a gun. Would you please don't shoot at me until my associates arrive?"

Yes, that's pretty much how it works. As others have noted, it works because guns are the exception rather than the rule. But another advantage: when a gun is in the picture, the beat cops back off and call the professional shooting-people cops, who're actually trained in the art of shooting people, as opposed to the American beat cops who will shoot kids with water pistols, black men reaching for their wallets, miss and shoot bystanders, shoot themselves in the foot, etc.

Russia's manned space program basically consists of announcing plans to do amazing things, which come to nothing as they keeping on doing the same stuff they were doing in the 1980s. As opposed to the U.S. manned space program, which consists of making plans to get back to the stuff they were doing in the 1980s, which come to nothing.

(Unmanned is another story.)

The headline misquotes Bloomberg. He didn't say you *can't* teach a coal miner to code, he said you won't. And he's right. While it's certainly *possible* for some older adults to radically change their career paths into tech jobs, the majority of us lack the motivation and mental flexibility, and society doesn't want to spend the money to help us make the switch. It's just not going to happen. Bloomberg's overall point is dead on: we need to come up with ways to allow people to gently move into new careers that make the most of their talents, rather than just firing them, throwing a Javascript for Dummies book at them, and expecting them to become the next Zuckerberg.

That said, Bloomberg's got a pretty 19th century view of what coal mining is. Since it's all done with heavy machinery and robots these days, it's a pretty technically demanding job.

Ask not, "why are the lion's share of visa quotas going to offshore companies?" Ask, "why are there visa quotas?"

America's rise to become a great nation was driven by unlimited immigration. Let everybody in. Everybody.

"Oh look," I said to myself, "an article on sexist and homophobic game culture. On Slashdot. I bet 90% of the comments are going to be 'we like our disgusting frat house the way it is' by sociopathic morons, and the other 10% will be self-professed 'nice guys' explaining to women how they're doing feminism wrong."

But I was wrong. It's 100% sociopathic morons.

Agree. The ratio of people talking about Bitcoin to people who know *anything* about how it works is astounding.

More informed slashdotters explained that those "expired" blocks have been purged from most miners.

When I first read the details of the Bitcoin system, this is the point at which I got a gigantic sinking feeling in my chest.
The documentation said, "Look, we keep a distributed record of all bitcoin transactions!", and I said,
"Well that does make it vulnerable to law enforcement, but that means it can't be stolen which is awesome." And then it said,
"And then after a while we throw those records out."
"...so all I've got to do is conceal my theft until the records get purged?"
"Pretty much!"
"..."