Both are also general case statements. There are many, many programs which can be proven to halt or to loop indefinitely quite easily. The trick is that you can't create a program which, when given ANY program as input determines whether it will halt. Your program may well work for billions of programs, but there is at least one program for which it must fail. (Actually, there are infinitely many programs for which it must fail, but they're sparse in the space of all possible programs...)

There's also the security aspect to software. Unless you're designing army bunkers you probably aren't trying to make the walls bulletproof. But if you're designing software that interacts with networks, well, you have to consider security.

Also, quite a lot of software is under active attack. Civil engineers don't design their bridges to resist being dynamited, because to do so would require ridiculous amounts of extra work. Software engineers DO need to design their applications to be secure, and when they don't they have to go back and try to fix things. Either way it takes much more work. The environment is much more hostile.

"Mining" IS processing transactions. You can't mine without doing so. And a sufficiently large mining pool has quite a number of attacks possible, the entire system is vulnerable to collusion. Bitcoin has many, many problems, but "no one will mine once all possible coins are mined" isn't one of them.

The "free" bitcoins gained by miners are one way for miners to earn coins, but not the only way. They can also set a transaction fee. That's why mining is likely to continue.
That said, as transaction fees increase the value of the currency decreases, since it becomes less favorable to use it over other currencies with lower fees.

Exactly, Slashdot is all about the discussions. Ars has the articles, but the discussion system is worse. Slashdot has an excellent discussion system (ignoring things like the whitelisted unicode and such.) I don't come here for the news, I come to see what people with experience in the fields relevant to the news think. That can be people like NYCL or Bruce Perens or Daniel Dvorkin or Spun or whoever. I've been here for quite a while, since back when I was working on the (pre-beta) Dark Magic Unreal Tournament mod in ~ 2002. I've moved on since then, and don't use this username anywhere else, so leaving leaving will be the end of a rather long era for me.

What would I do to improve Slashdot Beta? I'd take it out back and shoot it.

You seem to think that workers are free to change jobs, as though each employer has an infinite supply.
Jobs are limited. The one business would have a massive advantage in hiring, but wouldn't need to (or be able to) hire everyone else. Jobs aren't like commodity goods, where you can simply change to a different supplier if you're not satisfied with the current one. Also, there's significant risk and expense in switching jobs.

KDE Active is a version of KDE that is designed to work on tablets. It's pretty nice, for tablets. It sucks for desktops, which is why it's not installed by default for desktops. You CAN install it on a desktop easily enough, for development or masochism. Unlike Gnome 3/Shell/Windows 8 where they integrated the tablet and desktop OSes KDE kept them separate, though using the same base code.

Hawking made a proposition. It's not a theory, it's a proposition. His note (two page paper) shouldn't be taken to imply that it is anything more than a proposition. Once it has been fleshed out with equations it will be a hypothesis, if the math works out it will be a theory, and if it agrees with observations better than any other theory it will be accepted.

Maintaining privacy with e-mail isn't that hard, you just have to make sure the server never has access to the plaintext or the keys. Just like every other end-to-end encryption system ever. The problem comes when people want the server to hold their keys/plaintext for them, and when server providers pretend they can do that safely.