An easy way to get bitcoins is to sell your second-hand stuff for bitcoins at http://bitmit.net/

When will Wikipedia accept Bitcoin donations?

When I was in my teens, I was watching a circus. Between every act, a cleaner with a broom and a garbage bag would clear any detritus from the ring.

After a few acts, I clapped this guy, just for a laugh. To my surprise, everyone else joined in. From that point on, until the end of the show, the cleaner got rapturous applause every time!

This product is significant because it will be the first online appliance that most non-geeks will discover.

After people get used to the Good Night Lamp, they won't bat an eyelid when their car tweets that it has just received a parking ticket (and by the way, the front left tire is half-flat). They'll take it in good stride when their refrigerator emails to say that it is shutting down unless the six-month-old lump of rotting blue cheese is removed by midnight.

People will expect their toothpaste tube to order the next tube to be delivered just in time, and won't be surprised if the park bench posts a YouTube video of their fat ass sitting on it.

Fixed it for you!

But even in exception-based languages there is still a lot of code that tests returned values to determine whether to carry on or go down some error-handling path

The key to taming exceptions is to use them differently. Any exception that escapes a method means that the method has failed to meet its specification, and therefore you will need to clean up and abort at some level in the call chain. But you don't need to catch at every level (unless your language forces you to), nor should you need to do anything that relies on the "meaning" of the exception. Instead, you take a local action: close a file, roll back the database, prompt the user to save or abandon, etc, and either re-throw or not according to whether you have restored normality. There will only be a few places in your app where this type of cleanup is needed.

If you're not doing it this way, you're using exceptions as a control structure, and that's never going to be clean.

Another reason to prefer OpenStreetMap. There's no pressure for contributors to add fake map features in the name of copyright enforcement.

My guess is that they have found levels of Carbon 14 higher than we can currently explain without living organisms.

That's not quite the same as finding life, but it would be pretty exciting to a scientist.

I love how the list of attendees includes Jon Plowman, Head of Comedy.

To beat the summer heat, turn off your Bitcoin mining rigs. If you turn on the air conditioning to compensate, it's going to cost you more electricity than the value of the Bitcoins that you generate.

Heh, it would be quite a coup for a less-than-friendly space-faring nation to bring back to earth the Apollo 11 lunar lander (descent stage) as a "trophy"!

If the government really wanted tax-funded information to be free, they would just declare that it was public domain. Society would find a way to disseminate that information at zero cost to the taxpayer.

Instead, this looks like a bureaucratic project designed to take years and absorb lots of taxpayer's money, while giving the illusion of making information nominally "free" but retaining control, and giving Jimmy a high-profile ego-stroke in the hope that he may moderate his objection to internet censorship.

That's right. People tend to do stuff that they know. Those who learn history seem to be doomed to repeat it.

Those who learn underlying principles, rather than study individual historic instances, end up having the tools they need to do things better the next time round.

The public blockchain shows that the majority of coins generated in Bitcoin's first year have not moved.

Don't forget Google as predicted in 1964 in a children's book.