Perhaps .22 LR isn't readily available in the UK?

No ammunition is readily available in the UK. Because almost nobody owns guns.

That would make sense if bitcoins were only supposed to replace actual physical money, but my understanding is that the ultimate goal is far grander.

Unicorns and fairy dust are much cheaper, they don't require CPU intensive mining.

the appearance of a TV that will produce a better picture. That's something, right?

Yes. It's called marketing.

What the fuck is the server up to now? :

Slow Down Cowboy!

Slashdot requires you to wait between each successful posting of a comment to allow everyone a fair chance at posting a comment.

It's been 3 minutes since you last successfully posted a comment

Am I meant to be on Slashdot, AND a mouth-breather, and unable to type, and have to stop chewing gum and halt peristalsis while posting. Oh, I know, I'll bitch about the retard-o-matic code!

But not until my $1,200 3d printer can print me a girlfriend.

Idid go Googling for a "3d shape file artificial vagina" for your printer, and I'd be flat-out astonished if it had never been done before. But I got as far as this and decided to stop.

I'm no doctor, but I've read a lot on this subject (mainly in order to debate loony antivaxers) and from what I understand, it's safer for a couple of unvaccinated kids to go to school with a bunch more vaccinated kids, because of herd immunity

This works if the success rate of vaccination is 100% ; it's not, it's typically in the high 90s of %. So the unvaccinated kids are protected form getting the bug by herd immunity, but they present a hazard to the people protecting them, who are only (say) 95% protected if the unvaccinated kids import the disease from their filthy family circumstances.

Bad deal all round, for the vaccinated kids. If the parents don't want to vaccinate their kids, that's fine. But they've violated the social contract with the rest of society, and don't get to use the Health Service (I'm talking about the civilised world here, not America), their phone calls to the police are hung up at the station, their cars are fenced onto their own homes because they're not allowed to use publicly-funded roads, and if their house burns down, the fire brigade will bring marshmallows and a sound system.

Oh, and they get the option of home-schooling, or paying for a private school. I'll allow them to buy train tickets (would they be allowed to use banks owned by the government? Debatable.) after they've walked to the station.

Bitcoins should be priced in CO2

Seems Amazon and Google see the writing on the 'internet wall'.
  Their core products/services are not going to bring them anymore revenue than what they get now, and can shrink further when nimble competitors or new ideas happen. So the only way is to branch out.
  Google thinks it will be driver-less cars, automation, internet balloons, thermostat etc., while Amazon thinks it will be AWS, cloud and so on.
  Surprisingly both these behemoths are not branching into life sciences. May be no has made good impressive power points yet.
  The one company terribly lost is Apple. They are buying into an arthritic rapper!!!

What makes you think Google is seeing the writing on the wall? As far as anyone's concerned, Google's investment in home automation and such are to plaster more ads in non-traditional places.

Think about it - driverless cars means you can plaster the inside and outside with ads, AND get location information of those vehicles and their users. Internet balloons - there's nothing wrong with giving more internet to more people, especially if it means more eyeballs to see ads. Home automation/thermostats - well, now there's a treasure trove of information there - and eyeball space. Knowing the house habits of people inside, being able to show ads on the thermostat, etc.

Amazon's just expanding its reach. I mean, once they get people hooked on AWS and everything, they can start to leverage them to "get a better deal" (see Hachette).

I mean, once they've got your data, you're their bitch.

Apple? They rely neither on ads nor services for revenue. They don't sell ads (well, iAds, but that pathetic thing should be put out to pasture, or taken to the back and shot. The only reasonable explanation for why it's still around is Google is paying Apple to keep up the illusion of competition). They don't really care about content, though they do note iTunes music revenue is falling as people are switching from buying to renting/streaming.

Apple knows where they're headed. It's in selling stuff to consumers, hopefully with an interface that's well thought out.

(yes... when I was in college, I was asked to help someone who had some private things stored on his laptop... and when the thieves stole it, they demanded $3000 or else they would post all the nudie pictures of his GF that the victim took to the Internet.)

What on earth did your friend (for which I expect that you mean "yourself") expect from you? The hardware with the data on it has gone ; the thieves have it, they know what they have, and they know enough to be able to contact the person they stole it from, so it's pretty likely that they know how to contact the girlfriend in question.

• Were you expected to somehow reach out through the airwaves and wipe the drive remotely, as well as all the drive and memory sticks to which they'd already copied the extortion-worthy pictures? OK - I'm told there are tools like that for Macs, in which case your "friend" either had them installed and hadn't used them for some reason, or they weren't installed, or hadn't worked (e.g., the pictures were now on another floppy somewhere other than the stolen computer).
• Or, were you meant to be some sort of private detective, track down the thieves and beat them with a $5 wrench until they promise to not post their backups of the pictures to the net after you let them go.
• Or were you just part of the find - murder - corpse disposal squad? That's a smart move, boasting about it in a public forum.
• Or were you the one who had to explain to the girlfriend what happened. Actually, that's about the only credible scenario I can come up with - explaining that some bad shit had happened that your "friend" would have had a hard time predicting, and that the consequences were going to happen whatever your "friend" and/ or the girlfriend did. What - you expected the blackmailers to stay brought?

The story simply is not credible.

I smell something more sinister. The thieves knew the people they stole from, perhaps (so they knew that $3000 was a credible first bleed ; and they knew the images would cause embarrassment). Or the pictures had been taken without the girlfriend's consent. Or it was the girlfriend that the "official" girlfriend didn't know about.

I'm wondering who the fuck trusts MS enough to use Bitlocker. I don't.

The corporate IT people who provide this laptop [types - this one] for their corporate purposes using my skills trust MS enough to mandate Bitlocker on all their laptops. The user doesn't get an option - if the machine connects to their network, it must have Bitlocker installed and running, otherwise the machine won't be allowed any network traffic.

Their machine ; their choice.

Even if I had a Windows machine at home, that's not going to persuade me to use it. Or Windows.

Then, having a bathroom (as opposed to a toilet) was pretty unusual. Most people (e.g. the 3 or 4 servants who lived in the attic rooms) would have had a chamber pot to piss and shit into during the night, and an ewer of water and a wash basin for the morning. And after the servants got up and cleaned themselves, their first task would have been to light the fires in the kitchen to warm up the stove and start to make warm water for their masters to wash with.

Different world - I remember finding the pull-wires for the servants call-bells when we were re-wiring the house after we moved in. We found the original electrical wiring from circa 1890 ; one of the early owners was a real technophile, in that day. But two parallel single-strand copper wires with rubber (yes, rubber!) insulation, designed for 12V DC and now (then, 1970s) carrying 240V AC ... With the rubber perished to the point of falling to dust. Lovely. I like antiques, but I had no compunction about helping Dad to rip that stuff out and pull new twin+earth with the antiques. For the fiddly bits we trained the cat to run through the floorboards towing string to pull the next cable. Herring beats ripping up acres of floorboards!

Well, I am glad I didn't have to, and that the moderation shows that sanity still prevails.

Yes, apparently anything goes for clicks these days.

"These people will gleefully sail us into the abyss, blaming everyone else all the way down."

Well said :-)