Dey took er JERBS!

I would say AMD generally prices their parts competatively. If you are talking about >$300 Intel parts, you are correct that AMD has nothing to offer (I don't count 220W parts as viable, as I'm not in the market for a desk-side-vacuum-cleaner). But at $180 an FX-8350 looks pretty competative vs a $200 i5-4570:
http://www.tomshardware.com/ch...
If you are using efficiently multi-process applications (e.g. video compression), AMD is the clear winner. If you are using mostly-single-process applications (Blizzard games?), Intel is the clear winner.

In my usage, single-process applications tend not to be CPU-bound, or they tend not to be computationally taxing. But YMMV. And some games are obviously highly 1-2 core CPU bound (Blizzard), which is worth considering.

Finally points:
Over clocking: If you are planning on overclocking, the least expensive intel part is $240 (33% over FX-8350). Overclocking won't close the FX-8350 single-threaded performance gap, but it helps.
Heat: The FX-8350 is rated at a TDP of 125W... The i5-4570 is rated at 84w. So AMD is hotter and louder.

Disclaimer: My next system is going to be Intel, primarily because I want the machine to be near-silent, and 125W is hard to work around.
Note: All prices based on Newegg at the time of writing.

gome24ever.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/E...
They use additives to prevent formation of ice crystals, but the temperatures are certainly what you would call freezing, and the preserved objects (embryos, here) are solidified.

Right. The value of gold is based on supply and intrensic industrial value. 95%+ of the value of gold is purely speculative. Just because it is shiny and limited does not make it safe. Anything used as a currency is going to have an artificial value far in excess of its tangible value. Hope you didn't buy in 1980, or you are still missing half of your money. http://commons.wikimedia.org/w...

"Stop trying to tell God what to do." -Bohr

What your post glosses over is the following:
Microsoft will essentially be publishing security flaws for XP every time they patch Vista/7/8. It is not a matter of "discovering" a few new bugs. It is a continuous process of bugs being pointed to by M$ with no patching.

If you own an XP machine, and you keep it connected to the internet, good luck. You will be a zombie if nothing else within a year or two (and you should definitely not do online banking/shopping with it...).

If you have an offline XP machine, or a well guarded (no flash, javascript, IE, MS Office) XP virtual machine which boots a clean image, you'll probably be okay.

The problem is, the people jumping on the bandwagon don't even know what arbitrage is, let alone what to look for in a currency. It's one more example of tech assuming it can do $X better than the industry built up around $X, without understanding how $X even works.

Actually I did :) Flu, sorry!

According to the link below, approximately 5% of people in state prisons in 2012 were incarcerated for possession with no other crime. http://www.drugwarfacts.org/cm... I think it is highly dependent on where you live and the color of your skin. There is a huge racial disparity in police letting offenders off with a warning.

Are you claiming that online banking does not exist? Do you think banks are shipping paper back and forth when transactions occur? And paypal stores value in (wait for it) Dollars. Gold is a commodity, and has value (although we could argue about whether the current value is inherent or speculative). Likewise land and housing represent resources/goods and have value. But like all goods prices fluctuate, and (other than resources like gold and land) depreciation is a killer. If you are "storing" your worth in a house, land, etc., viewing it as superior to more diverse assets, you are a goof. Even if you buy that the housing market in general is fairly stable (can we lay this theory to rest?), individual markets surely are not.

No because deflationary currency is unstable, and Bitcoin is a hype bubble.

My mother regularly says she'd want to die were she in the throws of dementia. It's a sad state of affairs that we give dogs a more humane death than humans...

Confinement is certainly a good thing for some, but jails/prisons seem like the wrong setting for non-violent addiction-related issues. The focus of prisons (from my limited observation) is rarely to rehabilitate.

Do you store your wealth in Beanie Babies, or use them as a means of payment? You talk about "store of value" and "payment network", but that's exactly what a currency is, and a failed currency is a terrible option for either, because it has very unpredictable value.
The algorithm behind Bitcoin is interesting. It's just not a functional currency. The lack of built-in scaling means it would be deflationary purely due to population growth, if nothing else.
I'm not saying Bitcoin has not given us an interesting case study, or possibly laid groundwork for some more functional accounting algorithm, but I have not seen any economically sound argument for its stability.