Other than bitcoins, are other virtual coins worthless?

Mining many scrypt altcoins and immediately trading them for Bitcoin can net 40-50x or more what the same hardware would deliver mining for Bitcoin directly. CoinChoose will show you what's most profitable. You can set up CryptoSwitcher (disclaimer: I'm a contributor) to manage pool switching and exchange operations, or you can mine someplace like WeMineAll that manages all of that for you.

I wonder if anyone is really stupid enough to base their retirement plans on bitcoin investment.

It could hardly be much worse than basing your retirement plans on Social Security. :-P

TigerDirect, Overstock.com, and Gyft.

Another one I've run across lately is Zinc. I'm testing it out with a hard drive I needed to replace a bad drive in my media server. In addition to allowing you to pay with Bitcoin (or Dwolla, if that's your bag), it'll shop your purchase around among other vendors for a better deal. I put the order together on Amazon (which which I could've used Gyft, and have done so in the past), but they ended up placing the order with Newegg instead (for which there isn't otherwise a way to pay with Bitcoin) to knock a few dollars off. It's supposed to arrive tomorrow...we'll see.

With a trade-off of about 3-5 times the processing power required to decode. I learned that the hard way when trying to play movies on my old netbook with an Atom N270.

That's why you offload video decoding to the GPU. A weedy Atom 230 (or even the ARM-compatible core in a Raspberry Pi) is more than up to the task of shoveling 1080p H.264 into the GPU, which handles decoding, scaling, etc. Even the lowest-end nVidia or AMD GPUs are more than up to the task. I have OpenELEC running on an Acer Aspire Revo and a Raspberry Pi, and neither have any issues with anything I've thrown at them. (A third box runs on a Core 2 Duo E8400, which would be sufficient for software decoding of just about anything, but a GeForce 210 uses less power (fanless heatsink!) and adds HDMI output.)

What's that? Your netbook doesn't have a proper GPU? Well, isn't that special? :-P

RAID-5 uses up 1 disk worth for striping, so net space in an 8-drive array is 7-drives worth (about 27TB using 4TB drives). The problem with RAID-5 is that you are 2 disks away from failure and rebuilds often kill the disks.

RAID-6 uses 2 disks worth for striping, so net space in an 8-drive array is 6-drives worth (about 23TB using 4TB drives). Is able to survive a double-disk failure before data loss. Still has some of the same issues as RAID-5.

I use Greyhole for media and document storage. It handles disks of unequal size (currently running one 3TB and two 1.5TB drives), and you can choose the level of redundancy you need. In my case, movies, TV shows, etc. get a single copy (one file exists on one drive), while documents and photos get two copies (one file exists on two drives). If a drive goes bad, you only lose the files on that drive...and only for the files for which you selected no redundancy. With redundancy, extra file copies are recreated on the remaining drives from the surviving copies; this process is most likely less stressful on the disk set than a RAID rebuild.

My movies, TV shows, and music are backed up to BD-R, stored in a binder at work. They hold ~20GB each, as I'm using dvdisaster to guard against media errors. When a 2TB drive failed, I brought the backup (currently about 190 discs) home and restored the files that had gone missing. Backup and restore are managed by scripts, with information about what files are on what discs held in a MySQL database that gets periodically backed up off-site as well. The initial backup took several months (on and off) to finish, and the last time I needed to restore, it took about a week, but now I just burn a disc when I have about enough new data to fill one. Burning and verifying takes a few hours, but it's something you can start and walk away.

Personally, I'm a little disappointed with Apple's system. First, it's not wireless

I don't see the wired connection as a problem. You need to plug something into your phone anyway to keep it charged on a long trip (especially if you're streaming your music collection), so you might as well route whatever data this thing needs over that connection.

And this is why I bought a double edge razor handle.

Right around the time I was considering making the switch, Woot was offering Mach3-compatible cartridges at somewhere near a dollar each for a dozen. Considering that the "genuine" cartridges usually sell for 3-4x more, that was a good-enough savings for now, and so far they've mostly gotten the job done. (The springs in one crapped out after only one or two uses.)

$995 will buy a lot of cab rides.

It won't buy that many. Last time I took a cab home from the airport, it was about $50. That would only be about 20 trips.

When you pay at least $18,000 for a car, spending less than $150 for an OBDII reader that can be used on any car is, well, something you should have no problems doing.

You don't even have to spend that much. A Bluetooth OBD-II dongle will set you back maybe $20, and you can use any computer, Android device, or jailbroken iOS device to talk to it.

A structured, socialized statist society is always a rich society.

Like Venezuela? How's socialism working out for them, idiot?

I've never come across a hard drive with a stepper motor actuated arm. Care to cite a model number for me?

I'm pretty sure the Seagate ST225 I once had in an IBM PC/XT used a stepper motor to move the heads. Voice-coil actuators only came on the scene sometime in the late '80s or so.

I'm running Greyhole on my home server. It aggregates storage across multiple (possibly dissimilar) drives in one or more pools. You can set varying levels of redundancy for each pool; you can have two (or more) copies of documents so that they're safe in case of drive failure, while disabling it for your video library (which is OK if you have it backed up). You can pull a drive out of a Greyhole box and access the files written to it.

I've had a disk fail recently, and another was on its way out (smartctl reported it had no more replacements for bad blocks). In the latter case, migrating data off the old drive onto a new one was easy. The other drive failed outright. My documents and photos were all safe. Some video and music files needed to be restored from backup...a minor pain. Overall, I think it's worked "as advertised" and would recommend it to others.

Disney and Warner Brothers ("Maverick") jump-started the infant ABC television network. Disney's move to NBC and color production rocketed sales of color TV sets.

ABC was spun out of NBC because the government believed NBC (owned at the time by RCA) was getting too big.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NBC#Red_and_Blue_Networks

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) had, since its creation in 1934, investigated the monopolistic effects of network broadcasting. The FCC found that NBC's two networks and its owned-and-operated stations dominated audiences, affiliates and advertising in American radio. In 1939, the FCC ordered RCA to divest itself of one of the two networks. RCA fought the divestiture order, but in 1940 divided NBC into two companies in case an appeal was lost. The Blue Network became NBC Blue Network, Inc. and NBC Red became NBC Red Network, Inc. Both networks formally divorced operations on January 8, 1942, and the Blue Network was referred to on the air as either Blue or Blue Network, with official corporate name Blue Network Company, Inc. NBC Red, on the air, became known simply as NBC.

After losing its final appeal before the U.S. Supreme Court in May 1943, RCA sold Blue Network Company, Inc., for $8 million to Life Savers magnate Edward J. Noble, completing the sale on October 12, 1943. Noble got the network name, leases on land-lines and the New York studios; two-and-a half stations (WJZ in Newark/New York; KGO in San Francisco, and WENR in Chicago, which shared a frequency with Prairie Farmer station WLS); and about 60 affiliates. Noble wanted a better name for the network and in 1944 acquired the rights to the name "American Broadcasting Company" from George Storer. The Blue Network became ABC officially on June 15, 1945, after the sale was completed.

Di$ney acquired ABC sometime in the '90s IIRC, decades later.

You don't have to deploy ASP.NET projects to Windows boxes. You can use Apache/Nginx/whatever, Mono, and MySQL (or probably PostgreSQL, though I've not tried this) to replace IIS, .NET Framework, and SQL Server. There are a few differences here and there and it's not likely going to be as easy as deploying to Microsoft's webserver stack, but the savings on a farm of Linux servers vs. a farm of Windows servers (or even of a Linux VPS vs. a Windows VPS) should make it worthwhile if you're already up to speed on C# (or your language of choice), ASP.NET, etc.

There are airlines that charge you for each carry-on that you have. I know Spirit Airlines does this

Frontier does this for some passengers, though I think there are still ways to avoid the fee that don't involve paying more for your seat.

On a recent flight, I overheard that Spirit had bought Frontier. Tried googling it just now...turns out that Frontier was purchased by a private-equity firm headed up by a former chairman at Spirit. Given that my first (and last) experience with Spirit was total suckage in nearly every possible way (they canceled the return flight and had everyone fend for themselves until the next morning...my wife and I would've been stuck at LAX overnight if her brother-in-law hadn't gotten us out of there and back), this doesn't bode well for Frontier.