There are over a hundred different altcoins by now. What makes this one so different that it's Slashdot-front-page worthy?

It has hit Slashdot front-page, therefore it has got exposure to some high profile geeks (or it would, if there were any high profile geeks left reading Slashdot).

I actually wonder why anyone pays for the Office Suite now

One word: styling. In a corporate environment that needs to 1) allow mostly untrained office workers to share, cut and remix content and 2) stage it with corporate branding of tolerable quality, MS Office is still the easiest software stack to set up.

There are other platforms for technical writing that are more flexible and provide better, more professional results, but they're a nightmare to mount from scratch, and require a good deal of training. MS Office only requires to follow an install wizard to have it up and running.

The huge investments MS makes on making it obvious to use for simple use cases ensure a gentle ramp up where users can start using it at their own pace and being productive in a short time. Learning its numerous and frustrating quirks to achieve more complex results can happen later, as knowledge disseminates within the organization, which then gets locked-in in this software platform.

If your phone has Project Tango hardware and a good amoled screen with high resolution, and if the manufacturer implements a high refresh rate, you will have a lot of what the Occulus Rift has in terms of image quality

...and if the hardware has high latency, half of their users will report headaches and severe dizziness that last for days after using it.

Occulus limitations are there to provide an extremely low latency, which is needed to reduce the above effects. Full immersion in a VR environment has disorientation effects much more intense than those of 3D cinema. There are some users immune to them, but major publishers are not interested in this technology unless they can sell it to 99% of common people.

Cardboard is a cheap way to test what it's like to have a virtual environment with head position tracking, but it doesn't compare to the quality of an Oculus device. Heck, even Oculus is having problems with creating lasting nausea for many, and it's being created by an all-star team of world-class developers.

For this to have any effect someone would need to force 100s (small-town election)

Which is easy to do when the small town is dominated by the local chieftain.

to millions (presidential election) ppl to vote the way they need.

Which is certainly doable by a well-coordinated syndicate of local chieftains with a shared interest in a pro-local-chieftain candidate.

With just a few percent of the victims testifying anyone trying to pull this off should find themselves in serious trouble.

This is why vote anonymity is essential. If a ruler is powerful enough to impose the votes on a whole community, no one would be silly enough to risk their neck by openly testifying against them. This may look hypothetical today, but if you open the possibility for coercion in elections, its only a matter of time that it gets abused on a wide scale.

Mathematics is a language, but not a natural one. The parts of those sciences dedicated to make programming less mind-bending are not a subset of maths, yet they're still CS. There are parts of computer science which are math, not all of it.

You have that a little wrong. God *can* (in principle) be proven. If the sky breaks open, choirs of angels break forth, a 10km-long arm reaches down from the skies and an 8km golden-haired, bearded face looks down upon humanity and utters words of unshakable truth...then God is proven.

That ostentatious display of fireworks wouldn't prove that the entity responsible for them would be omniscient, all-powerful, omnipresent and all-benevolent, though.

These are characteristics that those in the know consider essential properties of what they call "God", and those wouldn't be proven by your hypothetical display of evidence; that would only show that someone has a tremendous FX budget.

By their very definition, those "omni" properties cannot be proven by empirical evidence, so by definition they are outside the reach of scientific enquiry, and belong to the realm of the purely philosophical. All theology and most classic philosophy depend on those universal, unlimited powers of God for their reasoning, so most of what you've heard about such entity would still remain unproven. That's why all this talk about "science can prove the existence of God" or "science can prove that God doesn't exist" is quite silly; they would anyway work only for some trivial values of God, not its core definition.

Can you name which client in fdroid is the reliable one you're talking about?

You miss the parts that are very close to Linguistics and Information science: Ontologies, Information retrieval, Semiotics, and the all-important Human-Computer Interaction - how to build a computation environment that's efficient for humans to interact with. Maybe this is not a well-defined problem in a mathematical sense, but it's at the core of all programming activity beyond the level of micro-instructions.

This is not merely cross-disciplinary work; those are also essential parts of the science of computation, little related to mathematics yet highly relevant to all projects in the computing field, either in research or business - although many are unaware of their relevance.

Who says there would be no constraints? Merely because there's no threat of hunger and cold, doesn't mean that creating art would have no challenges of its own. Many artists in history could create their craft because they were wealthy enough not to need other work.

Even if there is not a pressing need, artists can use self-imposed limits to explore the possibilities of their medium of choice.

Do you have a suggestion on how to modify our behavior to keep the sun from exploding?

If I check out the windows and there were rioters and police shooting at them, I'd be wary of going out that day, yes.

Have you ever heard of the Pascal wager?

The (un)likelyhood of an unwelcome outcome should be weighted by the severity of harm if it happens, to make a rational informed decision.

I said "Not if you choose to be one of the people who doesn't work and lives from the basic rent"... or also if you can't choose and are forced into it. Life is long and you never know what tomorrow brings.

With a basic income, you have a choice that you didn't have before. This is what those extra taxes are buying you (in addition to reducing competence because other people will choose not to apply to the remaining jobs). Being universal, you also benefit from them.

What if the product is not created by a person but by a robot? That option didn't ever exist in the past.

Because I have to pay taxes to support them?

Not if you choose to be one of the people who doesn't work and lives from the basic rent.

...making us less competitive internationally. Which causes more jobs to be outsourced...

Do you realize that those arguments wouldn't apply if the rent was truly universal? I.e. if *all* people could apply for them, not just people from a single country, all workers in the world would face the same increases in costs, thus not making any difference in their competitiveness.

...or just vanish due to being economically unproductive.

Again you're assuming 1) that such thing would happen and 2) that it's a bad thing. Why?