that depends entirely on your geography. If, for instance, you try that in, say, Los Angeles... you're going to die horribly. Try it in a rural country road in England, and you'll be just fine.

not that there's much use for them now, to be sure - but as a kid, this was one of those games I spent hours and hours and hours on trying to beat... I had always thought it was me not being able to figure it out (I had no way of knowing otherwise, really) and only now am I aware, because of articles like these, that it was practically unbeatable due to its shoddy planning. As for the quality, it was what it was, and it wasn't really any worse than the other games available for the 2600 at the time, so I didn't really know the difference. I liked it because it made me think about strategy in ways I hadn't otherwise yet learned at 8 years old, it taught me planning because I mapped out on paper some of the puzzle piece locations so I could try and find a pattern (sorta like D&D, even though I was never allowed to play that), and most of all because it certainly taught me patience beyond my years. I look back fondly at the E.T. game - not for the gameplay, but for what I learned as a young gamer because of what I now know are its flaws.

But yes, now that they're there in the ground, no real reason to dig them up - they're not going to be worth anything and all it really does is waste time and money to verify an "urban legend". Big whoop.

wouldn't that be the 8th closest star to Earth?

well said :D

The real question is, "what does she bring to the table" as a member of the Board? Does her tenure as a faculty member in the Stanford School of Business matter? What about her time as the director of the Stanford Global Center for Business and the Economy?

you are aware that the groups are not mutually exclusive, right?

I'm not sure you understand what a Ponzi scheme actually is. Bitcoin isn't one. MtGox, however, appears to have been simply a case of embezzlement.

As for the rest of your rant, yes, you can buy groceries with Bitcoin. http://online.wsj.com/news/art...

^ winner.

this is exactly how diesel locomotives work, and they are quite efficient. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D...

so you're saying someone could take the vacuum of service this opportunity generates to make a free dynamic DNS service, and once it hits a certain subscriber number, sell it to Dyn.com, then rinse, repeat?

Sounds like a plan.

wait, what? there are dividends on Bitcoins?

you just described the case against allowing people to use cash. (you know, "folding money" as my grandparents called it)

Cash is anonymous, and is regulated only when it comes to transferring into or out of a bank (or if you try to import/export it overseas). By its very nature of being decentralized, cash cannot be regulated in any practical or meaningful way between two private parties, which is, in practice, effectively no different from the current crop of cryptocurrencies. The key difference is that ALL transactions in the Bitcoin protocol are public, and therefore Bitcoin is actually much less private than cash transactions.

If the senator truly wanted what he said he wanted, he would push to regulate or abolish the use of cash and demand electronic payments in all circumstances. It's more of a "problem" than bitcoin is. How often do you see huge stacks of millions or tens of millions of dollars in cash when there's some big cartel bust? None of that would be possible if cash was regulated and traceable. But no, it's Bitcoin that's the problem, according to this guy.

same way people salivate to submit the "Beta sucks" posts.

so you've read the white paper, then, I presume.

You know, the one that described the use case for the design and the foresight and theories of application.

you're assuming he *has* to convert to dollars. It should be obvious that he could simply keep the bitcoin. Takes 2 minutes or less to start up an online wallet, which would be perfectly acceptable for a 1 bitcoin balance.