Funny and all, but change of address only works for First Class mail. And you'd be amazed at how little junk mail is 1st class.

Since the US post office is looking for ways to save/make money I offer this:
I would be interested in paying the US Post office to only deliver First Class mail and to automatically destroy all the other stuff.

Or how about this: They could hold auctions. If the junk mailer can outbid me they get to deliver the junk. If I outbid them, I don't see it. Either way the post office wins.

For all I know this is valid scientific research. But I can't even be bothered to find out because potheads have stigmatized hemp. "Dude, do you know hemp is 85% more efficient biomass than bacon?" "You know that hemp fibers can be turned into inferior yet expensive paper, right?" "Hemp-o-lene, it's either hemp biofuel or something you jump on." Which all are quite obviously thin excuses to grow more "medicinal"* hemp.

And hemp is a pretty great material, but every time I see an article that talks about a new industrial use I can't help thinking it comes from the same people who giggle when they hear "420" and snerk when they mention how they're into 'hydroponics'.

Seriously folks, if you want me to take you (hemp or pot smokers) seriously you need to clean up your game. Don't smoke a bowl on April 20th, instead bring to my attention how we really don't know the medical properties of cannabis because of government overregulation (or whatever, anything that has real promise to someone who has no interest in smoking pot.)

*Medicine is sold at drug stores, not in shadowy places with a bouncer at the door and punny names like "Grass Roots Clinic" or "Foggy Daze Dispensary".

There's a solution to this, it's called deprecation. A proper way to do this would be to still support Wacky Version Numbers with System.getProperty("java.version") but note that it is deprecated and list a date after it will no longer be supported.

Then you add something new like System.getProperty("java.realVersion") which is just a number from 1 to infinity. (Or something more common like Major and Minor version.) Doesn't break anything, provides a way forward. Languages that aren't thinking 10 years/revisions ahead are doomed in the present.

Contests only gather a weird, smallish subset of programmers who are good enough to win a contest, but who have the spare time[1] and will[2] to enter a contest. [1] This means they have little internal motivation because they're not otherwise working on something that inspires them. Good employees have internal motivation, bad ones need Management to whip them, which is what you'll get here. Instead find those who contribue to open source projects or who spend free time giving stellar information to the programming community. (Blog posts, Stack Exchange, etc.) [2] Again, motivation. What are they really trying to get by competing in the contest? Can you, as an employer, provide that same motivation on a regular basis? Probably not. So once again you'll get a pretty great programmer who underperforms.

Trolling question is trolling.

My ping time is 162ms with a maximum of 1431.

But I'm in rural America. I'm lucky I can even ping anything, despite paying $70 a month for 0.5Mbps. (Yes, the decimal point and units are correct. We pay for 0.5, but get 0.35. Almost fast enough to stream music!)

It won't. Bitcoin is a commodity, not a currency. Commodities are inherently unstable because their method of creation is fixed. This leads to hoarding and dumping, and market speculation much beyond currency trading.

Modern currency is managed ("backed") by whoever issues it can can take steps to stabilize the currency when problems arise. This is simply not possible with Bitcoin.

Yeah, but who's going to settle on a planet in orbit around Joe Smith's Giant Cock And Balls, or Spectacular Illumination By GoDaddy.com?

And when we finally meet the aliens from Tostitos III, how do we explain that to them?

Is there any way to get any useful data from this poll? (I mean, as much as can be gained fron any internet poll.) Is it really just asking how strongly I feel about a subject? Because that's about as dull as you can get. Here's the discussion it will create:
A: "I feel strongly!"
B: "I feel less strongly!"
A: "Oh."

GMO and food labeling are interesting subjects, but this poll doesn't let us discuss them at all. (Which is kind of the point of these things.)

So, in lieu of a poll that actually asks for an opinion: I'm against labeling GMO foods. It's essentially meaningless, and impossible to (dis)prove, due to expensive testing and the way most foods are processed. (Also, we've been modifying the genetics of food since we first built the first farm.)

It will also likely raise prices on GMO-free foods as companies try to capitalize on the fad, much like the similarly meaningless "Organic" labels do. Anything that raises the prices of the food supply without increasing quality or availability is bad policy.

If you have a botnet and can't think of anything better to do with it, you can lease it out or sell it.

Except dealing with any third-parties increases your risk. Which one of them has loose lips, poor security, is a snitch or an undercover officer? Even criminals don't want to hang out with other criminals more than they have to.

Keep in mind that as a zombie computer becomes more "obvious"- computer is slower, fan runs at 100% all the time, etc, the more likely that the malware will be noticed and removed.

I don't think you're around the typical computer user much, or their computers. You describe at least 60% of the non-technical people's computers that I know. They shrug it off. Computers suck and they'll never understand why. Eventually it will straight up die and they'll have another frustrating and expensive experience with Geek Squad. Rinse, repeat.

Amazon's got far less stake in regular data processing, they just want to know about shopping habits.

Yeah. Right. Just like Google only cares about search results.

Are you a parent trying to keep your kids from porn? Are you a business trying to keep your workers on task? Are you a government trying to control the eyeballs of your citizens? Are you just trying to keep ads away from your personal eyeballs, malware from your personal devices?

If it's for your own personal use there are two approaches:
1) Do it on the device. This has the advantage of being easy to pause if it causes a web site or service to stop working. It has the down side of not being centrally managed. You'll have to set it up on all of your devices/browsers. It may not be available for certain mobile platforms.

2) Do it centralized through a proxy. You only have one place to set it up and you run all of your devices through the proxy. More of a pain to self tune, and you have the added overhead of running a proxy.

If you're one of the other use cases and you want to use keep your users from accessing certain kinds of content, there's really only one answer: Do it as far upstream from your users as you can get. Because the users are not going to be happy with it and some will do everything they can to circumvent it. Ideally you're on a network where you can filter all of their (non-wireless) traffic through a single controlled point where you need physical access (lock and key) and a passcode to make changes. If you can remote admin it, or if people can access the 'net at large without going through that point, you've lost the battle.

If it really is GPS then it's simply the local time, broadcast in the clear. How is that classified?

You might take a look at GitTip. It's also a microtransaction platform, but different from Flattr. Patrons pledge from $0.25 to $25 a week to another person.

I like the weekly pledge and the tiny amounts. The weekly pledge encourages people to keep up the good work while the small amounts... I can pledge $0.25 weekly to a lot of people before I miss that money from my bank account.

Good analysis. I suspect that the project was founded by ... I don't know what. Guys without any experience with embedded systems is my bet. The cost difference, in bulk, of a small 16 mhz 8-bit CPU with 0.5k RAM and a 100mhz 32-bit CPU with 128K RAM is about a dollar.

If they had spent the extra dollar per unit they could have had a device that could take care of all of the I/O formatting, etc, etc and been a stand-alone device.

(Even without spending the dollar, you can get a lot of performance out of an old 8-bit CPU if you know what you're doing.)