The really attention-grabbing thing about the IRS guidance is Question 8 under the FAQ, which reads:
Q-8: Does a taxpayer who “mines” virtual currency (for example, uses computer
resources to validate Bitcoin transactions and maintain the public Bitcoin
transaction ledger) realize gross income upon receipt of the virtual currency
resulting from those activities?

A-8: Yes, when a taxpayer successfully “mines” virtual currency, the fair market value
of the virtual currency as of the date of receipt is includible in gross income. See
Publication 525, Taxable and Nontaxable Income, for more information on taxable
income.

(emphasis in the original)
This sounds like an enormous amount of record keeping for individual miners to keep track of.

If it means only having to pass a scan from a geiger counter instead of a full-body pat down at the airport, I'm all for replacing terrorist fearmongering with thermonuclear fearmongering.

...can I pay them in Dogecoins?

From my own research, difficulty appears to vary by card manufacturer, linux distro, and specific task. If you pick the right distro, support is decent. If you pick the wrong distro, you spend many hours wandering the internet safari. I can sympathize with Google's position.

In the briefest terms, AMD/ATI = Hard Mode, or so it appears.

Most recently, it took me a significant part of a weekend to setup a GPU-based Dogecoin miner on Debian, using ATI cards. The first and most painful lesson was learning that Debian Squeeze was a non-starter, which wasn't immediately obvious as several seemingly outdated guides exist, referring to experimental apt packages that no longer exist. Upgrading to Wheezy, I only managed to get a single card working, though a second identical card was plugged into the motherboard and known to be good. Lamenting my half-solved problem, a coworker directed me to a hardware hack (resistors stuck into a DVI/VGA converter) so that the second GPU would be fooled into thinking a monitor was present, so it would be recognized by the mining software. Apparently, this is a hardware hack needed to run Apple desktops in headless mode.

Supposedly, these things are "easier" on NVidia-based setups, or at least have a larger community to assist, but there are still some gotchas. I wouldn't blame Google for feeling that things need to be improved before offering official support. With any luck at all, Steambox will push card manufacturers to create better drivers for at least one distro, even if it's only Steambox. The Count tells me that One is greater than Zero, Ah, Ah, Ah.

Not to mention, this sounds like the kind of plan that could easily result in the loss of two crews, instead of one.

When I drive more than an hour or two, I'm making a journey that crosses state lines. If I felt I had that kind of money to waste driving a rental across state lines, I wouldn't be worried about putting miles on the car I have.

That's a far more interesting phenomenon than the one I thought was being described.

It's not "unpossible". Protons (like most things at the sub-atomic scale) are not like the physical objects you're accustomed to, with seemingly concrete boundaries. It's not like a very small kind of baseball.

Protons are more like the broadcast range of a wifi hotspot (assuming, like any good physicist, that the hotspot signal is exactly spherical, to make the math easier). You might look at signal-to-noise ratio, which will produce one definition of "size", or you might look at wattage, which produces a different measurement of "size", or you might look at some other factor entirely, producing yet another definition of "size". These will not give you the game size, but are all "correct" within their contexts.

And, of course, since protons are actually composed of 2 up quarks and 1 down quark, that complicates the question of "size" further, since you could define proton size based on measurements and modeling of the quarks, which would be analogous to considering the shape and location of the antennae in the aforementioned wifi hotspot.

What? It's not like they'd drive someone to suicide.

Slow news day on Slashdot, apparently.