They could sell the Chinese XP rights to a company in cahoots with the government (and once you get above a minimum size in China, you're with the government or out of business).

The government company would have the incentive and the government backing to get everyone in China on "legit" XP.

MS gets money now. They get to transfer blame for XP support to someone else. They could encourage the Chinese to essentially fork XP, so the supported Chinese version wouldn't compete with recent Windows.

Sounds win-win to me.

seems to be the most generic statement of it. From Wikipedia.

It is theft, but the damages involved are inconsequential. A formal warning by the officer to not do it again would have been a better solution.

It's about an 8.3A draw. It's not going to burn down the building, even if another such draw is happening. I'd be surprised if the breakers are rated for anything less than 25A, and wouldn't be surprised to see 40A breakers.

I'm sure the "disruption, not damage" thing is going to be very reassuring to the guy with a pacemaker.

More generally, it's going to be very hard to calibrate field strength for this kind of thing to shut down car electronics without damaging any electronics: it works by turning wires into antennas and inducing enough voltage to confuse the device on one end of that wire. Due to the range of normal operating voltages in different devices -- or even different circuits within one device -- one voltage level might be too low to confuse some devices but high enough to damage others.

You can make a pretty good estimate by dividing the cost of uncompensated care by total costs, and if I recall correctly, it would be well under two percent. At that level, you're probably paying much more for regulatory reporting and other forms of overhead, so it seems silly to only list uncompensated care as a "line item". (It wouldn't really be a line item, because that cost would already be included, and perhaps spread unevenly, across the other charges on the bill -- and if you have insurance that negotiates a reduced payment rate for some goods and services, that discount could make it more uneven.)

Nice reading fail: I said your particular dollars, and appropriations bills neither fully specify spending nor match actual spending. Nice try, moron.

To make it all fair, government should also provide a detailed breakdown of where your particular tax dollars -- not just income and payroll tax, but duties, excise taxes, sales taxes, and all the rest -- went each year. Sound good?

I think the more interesting part is the fact that we have some decent mathematicians (in this case Adi Shamir among others) are setting about pulling the entire bitcoin transaction graph and doing some serious data-mining on it. The reported result sounds like a mildly interesting result that happened to pop up in the first pass.

Given the advanced tools available these days for graph mining (largely developed for social network analysis among other things) I suspect some rather more interesting results may start coming out soon. What may seem hard to track on an individual basis may fall somewhat more easily to powerful analysis tools that get to make use of the big picture. I bet there's some interesting info on cliques and exchanges that could be teased out by serious researchers with some decent compute power at their disposal. Pseudonymity may be even weaker than you might think.

Well, you won't anymore because the Zimbabwe dollars were discontinued and the country now uses US dollars as its currency because price volatility made continued use of Zimbabwe dollars as a currency effectively impossible.

Now Zimbabwe had inflation not deflation, but the issue of volatility is the same: it makes things ultimately unworkable if it gets too high (even if it moves in a predictable way). When prices change significantly* by the minute and transactions take several minutes to complete then trouble may set in.

* significantly here means, say, double digit percentage change in price every minute. Bit coin is a long way from that currently, but is headed in that direction.

US phone plans typically have no roaming charges over the 48 states - it's easy to spend six hours in the air with no cost increase for cell phone use, and thus no deterrent to yacking.

In Europe, it's hard to take a flight over an hour without crossing an international border.

Casual web search just turns up articles about the new stations in the US.

If we don't already have equivalent stations in Russia, we could offer them a trade. They get theirs when we get ours.

Google patented a method to help cover the costs of free wireless access balloons. This of course makes a bunch of idiots very upset that Google would not just pay for the balloons out of their magic profit printing press, because Google forbid that people who use a service help pay for it.

Being primarily a mathematician and not a computer scientist or engineer I've used Maple, Mathematica, Matlab, Magma and R. I've also programmed in Python, Perl, C, and Java and dabbled in things like Lisp and Haskell.

All the "math" programs on that list are terrible programming languages; they work great as interactive environments for doing (potentially symbolic) computation, but writing code in them? Ugh. If I actually have to write scientific computing code it's going to be in Python using numpy and sympy, or C if I need performance.

All the different math programs all have their strengths and weaknesses: Matlab kicks the crap out of the other for anything numerical or linear algebra related, both for ease of expression and performance; R has far more capabilities statistically than any of the others -- data frames as a fundamental data type make that clear; Magma is incomparable for the breadth and power of its algebra, none of the other come remotely close; Mathematica and Maple are ... well, sort of a poor jack of all trades that do most things but none of it very well.

If Dylan isn't good enough for you, your problem isn't non-S-expression syntax.