Nice reference.

it always surprises me that people actively trying to avoid detection by law enforcement do so many dumb things.

This is a start!
It's this kind of thinking that will bring us closer to Vorlon tech, LEXX, or even Moya! =)
(did I miss any?)

Seriously, as others have pointed out, the most expensive valuable parts are not the airframe, but the motors/camera/radio/battery so stop the hippy-dippy crap and don't worry about making it out of biodegradable material.

But seriously, keep working/thinking in this direction.

I'm not sure if you are intentionally be obtuse or not seeing the forest for the trees.

Bitcoin allows the seller to directly receive payment from the purchaser. Whenever a seller depends on a 3rd party intermediary to pass money through then that seller becomes dependant on the whims of that third party.

In some cases that 3rd party has enough clout to enforce change that is beneficial to society. But that power can be abused easily.

Lets take an imaginary scenario:
Payment processor "Money Buddy" discovers that website "slave-labour-goods.com" is forcing children to work 23hrs a day for a nickle. "Money Buddy" tells them to stop being assholes or they will stop processing their payments.

Nobody can really argue that this forced-change is a bad thing. Now lets change the scenario to something more ambigious.

"Money Buddy" discovers that "imported-cheap-stuff.com" forces that any female employees wear a hijab. The "Money Buddy" CEO is a feminist and thinks that this is an oppressive rule. But "imported-cheap-stuff.com" is located in a country that enforces that law, and the president of the company proudly wears her Hijab during the press conference proclaiming that "Money-Buddy" is actively trying to oppress her religion and national law.

Bitcoin bypasses that middleman. If you want to support child-labour and buy your sneakers for $2 less then the competitor offers then you can. If you want to make sure your money goes directly to the people you want you can. Why allow these fat-cats to continue getting their cut when they offer no added value for their services?

Bitcoin can be an incredibly powerful tool for change in society.

This is one of the many problems that Bitcoin solves.

Easy answer, build N+1 of them and use the 'average' value of time that they generate.

One of my favourite quotes applies here:

"When you have a clock you always know what time it is. When you have two you are never quite sure." - Mark Twain.

You have obviously R'd TFS, TFA, and TFM.
What are you doing on /.?
You are too perfect an imposter. No spelling or grammar errors either. Probably some AI.

Should I refer to you as Wintermute?

I've heard a rumour that he can also smell things behind him too!

(yes I just started that rumour)

If you have a system that you can test against (i.e. a server at your work with a fatter-pipe then you have at home, or a hosted server/VPS/etc.)

iperf

run "iperf -s" on the server and "iperf -c server.ip.address" on the client.
Read the man pages for more options.

If you don't have a 'known better then you' to test against try this to test your maximum download bandwidth.
Simple test: download a large file from Microsoft (i.e. a 'network install' service pack, or similar) or other big-host

More complicated:
run several (4-20) 'wget' concurrently. If you use Linux .iso's as your target download, make sure you grab the files from *.edu sites. Schools should have a lot more bandwidth then the average .com that is hosting files.

Your ISP might have several things in place from preventing DDOS attacks from there customer machines. So each 'download' might be throttled by your ISP. If you open several download threads to different locations, downloading different things you can maximize your usage.

Also, don't download the same thing twice from the same source. Caching can/will interfere with accurate measurements.

It appears that TFS has been edited to answer my question.

Thanks.

There was a Batman TV show in the 90's?

I thought the only Batman TV show was the campy 70's version. Or are they referring to a cartoon?

SSH into your host.
from the bash prompt just paste the above string.

i.e.
user@host $env x='() { :;}; echo vulnerable' bash -c "echo this is a test"

--------------------
If you see:
vulnerable
this is a test
Then you are vulnerable and need to update your system.

If all you see is:
this is a test

Then you are ok.

=)
I too was suspicious of that fork-bomb potential. So the first time I ran it was on a test-vm.

I'm glad I am not the only paranoid one.

Doesn't this sound like using an elephant gun to try to kill a fruit fly?

Very similar results with me too, although for me that effect waited until I was 35'ish.

Plural of anecdote = data?