Wait a bit. See: http://olimex.wordpress.com/tag/a20/ - when these become available, they'll be about 4x the speed of a pi for about twice the money. Plus the olimex boards have a lot more GPIOs and useful stuff like that. :)

Of course, just measuring GHz isn't everything. As that's an AMD chip, you could probably get similar single-threaded performance by overclocking a recent Intel chip to about 6.6GHz (consensus seems to be that in computationally-intentensive tasks, sandy bridge is about 25% faster than bulldozer).

Right, and why is a second payment then accepted in another way?

When they say it does not involve a security breach, what they mean is "it doesn't breach *our* security." Why do you think they give a shit about *your* security, exactly?

For the merchants accepting the payments, because they'll have to bear the cost of chargebacks on transactions that were otherwise perfectly valid but cannot be proven to have been authorised by the cardholder.

Yep; in the end, they're just checking AVS which just checks the numbers in your postal code. Same should work for at least UK-issued cards, and probably all major European issuers as well.

So it turns out that like RFID tags, the assurances of limited range are absolute bullshit. A more powerful transmitter coupled with a more sensitive antenna than used in the reference design allow them to work from farther away. Who'd have thought it?

Mary Robinette Kowal has a book on the shortlist and I haven't read it yet. Must grab a copy... (quick note to self)

Some people believe the values of precious metals are being manipulated by either governments (who typically have large holdings of them) or mining cartels (who have obvious means to benefit). Others suggest increased industrial use coupled with a higher median income in the developed world versus cost of day-to-day living have driven demands higher and that production has lagged behind this. Whatever the reason, there is little doubt that the cost of both silver and gold has increased faster than that of most other goods.

No, by "reasonably stable" I mean "there are indications of the kind of market support that would mean I could be reasonably confident of buying at this value and being able to sell at a similar or higher value at later time periods in the order of several months (although I may have to wait for appropriate market timing to do so)."

This is different from "stable" by which I would mean "there are strong indications that the market would support the value at or above the current level in the long term, i.e. over a period of years, and I would be unlikely to have to wait for market timing in order to avoid significant losses".

Note that I would not currently consider many currencies to be stable. USD is perhaps the only candidate.

A couple of months back I posted that the value of BTC looked reasonably stable to me in the vicinity of $100. It's still in that vicinity. There may have been a bubble in the interim that has now burst, but anyone with sense should have seen that coming and avoided purchasing while it was overvalued.

Or maybe it's just that they've realised that what's happened is actually that the real-terms value of silver has increased substantially over the last 50 years and that you're therefore talking bullshit.

Erm. That is not even approximately what's happening here. There is no old or new currency, no exchanging happening, and no inability to deal with "netsplits" as you put it -- there is a built-in algorithm that is used to resolve cases of chain forks. It is unfortunate that some of the older mining software out there won't recognised the existence of the fork and will therefore happily carry on working on the broken incorrect chain, which may therefore cause some buggy older clients to report transaction success or failure inaccurately, but the chance of this actually affecting anyone's actual money is actually tiny. Other than the miners who haven't updated, who will lose their mining fees. But as they're the equivalent of bankers in this system, nobody actually cares about them...

Fortunately, it's only mining software that needs to be updated. Anyone just handling ordinary transactions doesn't really need to worry.

As a technical community, there is little we can do about events that occurred in the past short of inventing a time machine (and I think there would be worse atrocities to prevent than those if we did). But ongoing problems caused by short-sighted technical ideas are right up our street. They're things that are in our line of professional thought (for a large proportion of the community here) and that a few here might have direct influence over (don't try telling me none of facebook's dev team reads /., because I just won't believe you).

Yes, there are different levels of problems and some people always have it worse. But we shouldn't let that stop us addressing the smaller scale problems, because those are often the things that we can actually fix.