But will it be cheaper or more expensive than using a credit card?

Accepting Bitcoins is surprisingly expensive. There's a volatility risk, and for a currency that can change by 10% in minutes, that's a real problem. Coinbase (which is a dealer, rather than an exchange) has a posted buying price, good for one minute, and some shopping cart systems use that. But that price is usually lower than the prices on the major exchanges; there's a conversion cost. So, as with retail money-changers, you pay a conversion fee. Also, like most money-changers, Coinbase will briefly stop buying during periods of high volatility or if they have trouble unloading their Bitcoins.

Then, of course, there's prying the money out of the Bitcoin broker or exchange. Overstock is probably in a strong enough position to demand a daily sweep into a real bank account, with serious penalties for failure to deliver.

If you look at the few Bitcoin-accepting businesses that sell real products with typical mail order retail markups, the Bitcoin price is usually significantly higher than the US$ price. Most of the stores that currently accept Bitcoin are selling T-shirts, posters, remaindered goods, and similar crap. Of course, that's what Overstock does, so it may be a good fit.

If you've never written software using mod, then you've never implemented a lockless data structure, or likely written any low-level code. In fact, I'd find it pretty hard to think of what category of software you are writing where you never need to do it. It's not something I use every day, but I'd expect to see it at least once every thousand lines of code. I've no idea what you do, but if you think you've managed to become a competent programmer without ever having to use mod then you're such a statistical outlier that it's not likely to be a problem to accidentally not hire you. If you don't know the basic arithmetic and logical operators in your favourite language, then you are probably not worth hiring.

I actually RTFA, one fellow said he wished that was what they would find but it's incredibly unlikely because "bertha would cut through it like it was made out of paper." The most likely theory is that it's a big rock the glaciers brought down that spins with the blade.

I'm really interested to know how you've got IE7 running on Win7 when it ships with IE8 and Win7 doesn't support IE7, according to the 2nd post (from an MS employee) on that page.

I have no idea, I'm not the one who imaged them. I just do databases these days.

You may be right about it being an attention getting stunt. I'd never heard of Duck Dynasty before the uproar.

See above. But here's the link again: GSM Association Official Document 12FAST.13 - Embedded SIM Remote Provisioning Architecture.

This is an earth-pressure-balance type TBM built for soft sand and dirt, below water level. Compressed air is used to keep water out at the working face. That's what's needed for a tunnel under the Seattle waterfront. It can cope with rocks and boulders, but not a solid rock face. It's not a hard-rock TBM. Those have very different cutters, but can't handle waterlogged soil.

Tunneling is like that. Stuff like this happens. It will be handled.

You don't use 3rd party (e.g. not in your distro's repo) software or upgrade to new releases often, do you?

Nope, haven't yet had the need to with either kubuntu or Mandriva. I only upgrade when I read that there is a performance boost or a new feature that looks interesting. Of course, I'd have to if I had a task that nothing in the repo could supply.

Which distro can I go to and grab a release from 2000 that still has a year of support left?

No need, modern distros run just fine on ancient hardware. Some kind soul pointed me to a fix for an issue that was keeping one old machine of mine running XP (Audacity has a feature I thought it lacked) so I'll be slapping kubuntu on it next April. No way that ancient clunker would run W8 (which I wouldn't use unless I was well paid to but W7 is OK).

Hell, I collect old computers, fix any hardware problems, slap Linux on them and give them to poor people, it's a hobby. Some of those old machines are running W95 yet run fine with Linux.

You've given so many EOL requirements that it's no wonder MS can't meet your demands.

Microsoft can't meet many of my demands at all, that's only one.

I was really hoping you'd comment on why you're okay with running software that has not received updates in years

? I'm not. But the reality is people do, usually out of ignorance. A third of the world's computers are running XP and Microsoft is the only one who can fix that problem.

Maybe I'm just biased against it because I know when it dies I don't have to support IE8 anymore.

That's a very good reason. However, we got W7 computers at work last year and they're running IE7 so you may still have that headache for a while.

It looks like that may work, thanks. I wonder if Aramok can handle higher rates? I'll have to do a little testing.

While China and India are sending spacecraft there, our government can't even build a working website

"Truthiness" much? Do you have any idea how fucking many perfectly functional web sites the US Government has? Starting with NASA's? Ever register a copyright? copyright.gov. Want to see how many people live in your town? Census.gov. And guess what? Even the Obamacare site is working now.

How the hell did that completely inaccurate comment get modded up? Twice! I'm glad they were overruled by smarter moderators.

our finest minds are squandered on ways to get people to click links

Jeff Bezos is our finest mind? I think you'll find that the "finest minds" aren't greedsters, but scientists working at universities and yes, at NASA.

This week's This Modern World explains it well. Unfortunately I can't find it on the internet, the most recent cartoon is from March and the Illinois Times only runs it in its print edition, not the web rag. You might find it in one of your own left-leaning weeklies.

You pompous British git, Legos are Danish, not British. The plural of Lego is legoklodser. Now, Legos are a recent thing, what rule of the English language do you think says that the plural of lego is lego? What's he plural of tomato? Potato? Tornado? Frito? Cheeto?

Sheesh...

That price is arbitrary. It's that high because these guns are actually working, limited edition art pieces. They made guns to show how much stress the final product can withstand. I'd bet actual manufacturing costs (except the printing equipment) were far less than a gun bought from a gunsmith would cost.

I wish you'd have written TFA, because I thought TFA sucked. Buffy the Vampire Slayer? That is NOT science fiction, nor Batman, nor Ghostbusters. The "lesson" from the STNG episode? "Think outside the box."

Lame article, I'll bet the comments here are a lot better (just started reading them)

It's a bit complex to squeeze into a slashdot summary. Here's what has to say about it. This article, written by Theoretical Physicist Matt Strassler, does a better job of explaining it in layman's terms, I found it to be an excellent article. I'd had only the vaguest idea what it was about before reading it.

Now I have a much less vague idea, but reading an article by a physicist doesn't magically turn you into one.