Well, now we know what John Titor was really looking for with his leet IBM 5100 mining rig.

Thanks, that is good factual information to have.

Still, would losing 100 or 200 coins make headlines these days when thousands got lost and stolen in what makes the news (Silkroad, Mt. Gox, etc.) ?

.... not even a kernel panic?

It also brings up the question of why they didn't try an inhaled version rather than an oral version. Marijuana is known to have antiemetic benefits, for example, and delivering it via the lungs is both faster and avoids the problem of vomiting up the drug before it's absorbed. Pills are not the best way to deliver antiemetics; the leading anti-nausea drug (Ondansetron) is frequently delivered rectally or via IV. Delivery by inhalation has substantial advantages.

I really don't know why there aren't inhaled versions. I don't know if it's because research indicated that it wouldn't work, or if it's because it's so difficult to experiment on THC-derived compounds that nobody wanted to put forth the effort.

It is *not* the miracle drug that its proponents like to pretend it is, but it seems to be better than placebo for various indications and has the advantage of being cheap. And it would be readily available, were it not for laws preventing that. Since it appears to be no more dangerous than other commonly-available drugs, I don't see why it remains a Schedule I drug.

Not a single someone, he's probably mention it. But how about 100,000 individual someones, each of whom mined (on average) 10 or so coins? That's a few thousand bucks these days, not something that would make headlines beyond your Facebook page.

Exactly.

I hate paying taxes as much as everyone, but I'm not super-rich, so I don't have options to avoid it. Once you go above a certain income class, your tax burden drops, in both relative and absolute values, because you can make use of loopholes that normal people can't.

Corporations are the worst of it all. As they can split up, merge and do other trickery that physical humans can't, they can exploit the system to the maximum effect. And since everyone else does it, they almost have a duty to do so, because otherwise their shareholders will grill them about it.

The problem is that the tax systems allow this, which is caused by countries competing against each other to attract corporations. Which, if you are able to see it for a moment from outside the pot in which you're slowly being boiled, is quite insane and perverted.

As long as the countries of the world readily sell out to corporations and super-rich, nothing will change. Only when they realize that (at least yet) they have the tanks and the guns and the corporations don't and maybe the power-relationship should be the other way around, and then work together to fight the parasites, this will stop. All it needs would be a world-wide agreement to, say, leverage a fixed % of revenue from every corporation, no exceptions, no loopholes, no special deals.

A few years letters? :P

I was waiting for someone mention the (funded and being built) JUICE mission: it's astonishing to me that the "if it ain't NASA, it ain't worth jack" attitude generally persists, and that hardly anyone in the media (let alone on /.) bothers to do the slightest modicum of research.

JUICE is under development by the European Space Agency for launch in 2022 (not 2020 anymore) and arrival at Jupiter in 2030. It will tour the Jupiter system, including multiple fly-bys of the giant icy moons Europa, Callisto, and Ganymede. It will end up in orbit around Ganymede, where it will conduct a more detailed survey.

All three moons are thought to harbour giant water oceans under (probably) very thick icy crusts (~100km), although there are debates about which may be the most likely to provide potentially habitable environments deep in these oceans: it may depend on central heat flux from the moon's contraction, flexure due to Jupiter's gravity, heat from radioactive decay, and whether there's a water:rock interface which could provide minerals.

Why Ganymede as the final moon to be orbited? Because Europa is closer to Jupiter and suffers a much higher radiation dose due to high energy particles trapped in Jupiter's magnetic field. Not necessarily an issue for life(?) buried deep in the oceans, but certainly an issue for the survivability of a spacecraft. Through the US's, umm, extensive military experience, NASA has access to higher-grade rad-hard electronics components than ESA, and so JUICE will only fly-by Europa a few times instead of bathing itself in that radiation.

But NASA is involved in JUICE too: several of the (many) instruments on JUICE have US Principal Investigators, funded by NASA. So, NASA is already going to Europa in a very real sense.

I agree in principle, though not in degree. Let's be honest here: All advertisement is psychological warfare, and it is very, very imbalanced. It's millions of dollars in research and design vs. the usually untrained mind.

However, in the game there is also immersion, which is intentionally abused, and a situation that was artificially constructed. It's more like the soda stand in the theme park which is intentionally placed at exactly the distance from the intentionally way-too-salty french fries stand at which you realize that you're quite thirsty.

This is what we all hear all the time when it comes to advertisement, and I'm quite certain the advertisement experts are giggling so much they can hardly catch a breath. This false belief is one of the core reasons advertisement is still legal and not very heavily regulated. It's the Emperor's New Clothes situation - as long as that meme is out there, most people won't admit that they are, in fact, influenced by advertisement.

But you are. More than you believe. And claiming you aren't only proves denial, not freedom.

You do realize that math covers everything in our universe and BEYOND. Accordingly, I would be careful about what constraints you put on it. . . as it is statistically more likely that your mind is just creating artificial constraints.

Ah, the irony.

Math is a creation of the human mind, and by its nature can never go beyond the limits of human ability to understand. The universe, on the other hand, is not bound by the limitations of the nervous systems of a group of balding apes, and I have to agree with J. B. S. Haldane's suspicion that "the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose."

People do crazy things when money and power is involved.

Neither of which will be involved once the Bitcoin fad ends.

I realize that Apple has an actual presence in Ireland, with employees who do things, and get paid. But this story is about something else - using a secret deal in Singapore to book sales in Australia as profits in Ireland. It is those transactions, specifically, that I was referring to.

Exactly, Ireland did not "get" 9 billion as the headline claims. The number of extra jobs created by this in Ireland is a handful at most.

The only prize in the race to the bottom is just a smidgen of grease and crumbs, like when the peanut butter is empty.

Why the fuck should Apple be exempt?

Because they are Apple. No other reason needed.

Uh, no we aren't.

Windows XP was released in October 2001. That's half a year after the initial release of OS X (March 2001). In fact, by the time XP came out, OS X was already on 10.1 (released in September 2001).
MacOS 9 is a full two years older, it was released in October 1999.