Well, there's your problem.

In my experience, Brother HL-series black lasers get questionable after about 150,000 duplexed pages due to roller wear, but other than that that they're solid. I don't much care for their MFCs though; besides the build becoming awkward due to integrating a scanner, the fax capability is usually about as useful as a USB pet rock, and the driver software they come with is frankly crap -- doubly so if you use the network-based interfaces.

As for personal use, my venerable HP LaserJet 4L continues to serve, and its no-corona-discharge-wire design is a nice touch. Old enough that it could probably use some new rollers to reduce misfeeds, but it still works.

Precisely. The only way vendors of artificially limited products will get the message is when people stop buying their crap.

This doesn't necessarily mean you have to either infringe or do without, though: many PC games have licenses given away as promotional goodies. For example, the only reason I even hold a license to play Diablo III is because it was a promotional gift-with-purchase thrown in when I bought a new motherboard.

I see an enumeration of ingredients listed in descending order of quantity but not specifically quantified, and including opaque composite ingredients such as "natural and artificial flavors"; then again, it isn't an open source soft drink either.

A great many things can be combined into the single item "natural and artificial flavors"; the actual composition of the flavor formula need not be disclosed. Quantities can be further obfuscated by providing inline breakdowns of some composite ingredients while leaving others opaque.

I have my own law now? News to me. But I was talking about the articles linked from the story, not the comments.

This is rather notable in that it's the first article I've seen in a while that talks about both GPU-compute and mining without being about Bitcoin.

Wait, what? The 5970 is the GPU miner's proverbial holy grail. With a 5970 you should be getting 700 MHash/sec easily, 750 if you overclock. Are you sure you don't have a 5770?

There are two parts to the block reward: a subsidy (which, as pointed out, dwindles over time approaching zero) and transaction fees gathered from transactions confirmed in the block. (Some transactions carry a minimum fee based on how many bytes the transaction occupies or to discourage pointlessly small "coin-dust" micropayments; some may include a larger fee in hopes of priority confirmation; small, low-priority transactions carry none.) Stats for the past 24 hours are available from the Blockchain.info stats page; as of this post, transaction fees seem to be in the vicinity of 0.3 BTC per block mined.

The general idea, though, is that the more bitcoins are transacted, the more transaction fees are made available to miners, and these fees are expected to keep the network ticking once the subsidy dries up.

There's already a documented way to coalesce arbitrarily many bitcoin micropayments to a single party into exactly two blockchain transactions without involving a trusted third party. It bears a striking similarity to the two-transaction authorize-capture flow used by VISA and friends, but with the added bonus that the payee isn't trusted to capture for the correct amount.

This (like all smart contracts) is a fairly advanced use-case that basic wallet software isn't capable of, but can readily be built as an add-on that operates as a client of bitcoind.

Fiendishly, breathtakingly complex world-simulation engine from Bay 12 Games. Comes equipped with "Fortress mode" city simulator, "Adventure mode" Roguelike play, and "Arena mode" battle sandbox. The wiki is pretty much required reading.

Well, they are links to adjacent tropes, and together are intended to clarify how subtlety or lack thereof can be applied to cussing... and besides, if you're here you have time begging to be eaten up.

Pages on various wiki sites often contain valuable insight, even if it does tend to result in too much time sunk in a random wiki walk.

Knowing how to drop a precision F-strike at the appropriate time is one thing. Indiscriminately carpeting the place with cluster F-bombs is a waste of perfectly good shock ammunition.