I'll bet you feel stupid for filling all those party balloons last week.

The philosophies, politics, religion and entertainment of today has hardly changed since the dawn of recorded history.

Technology has changed, certainly; instead of watching Greek drama in a theater, we now watch Greek drama in a theater with CGI effects. But history has time and again proven that new toys do not qualitatively change mankind.

(p.s. - ironically, our imminent ascendance to godhood is another of those ideas that has been around forever...)

Yeah, I was hoping this would be some sort of mesh backup, where files are encrypted and spread redundantly throughout the network.

Still, it could be a useful collaboration tool, but not a replacement for Dropbox or Crashplan.

Subluxation: the partial dislocation of a joint.

It's a very real (and measurable) thing.

Unfortunately, medical subluxation : chiropractic 'subluxation' :: computer virus : 'I think it's got a virus'

Nothing new; we've been anti-castor since 1960.

Except they try to maintain the rate of payouts by scaling the difficulty. The more people mine, the more difficult mining becomes.

In other words, it's an arms race. If you have better miners than your peers, you can grab a bigger slice of the pie. But once everyone has the same equipment, you're back where you started (and out a lot of money on gear).

On the other hand, anyone not able to afford specialized hardware will be pushed out of the mining game. The rumor mill is already pointing suggesting Litecoin as a possible Bitcoin replacement, as it has a crypto algorithm designed to resist hardware acceleration and thus keep small miners competitive with big iron. Then again, it's best not to underestimate human ingenuity when piles of money are involved.

It's silly to complain about such an early version. Don't worry—Java 10 should catch up with the Windows 95 GUI.

You mean, companies that have no business plan except leech off investors until a profit model magically appears? Those are the kind of companies that fail when tech bubbles pop.

But there are tons of smartphones, and tons of people who want apps for their smartphones. As long as you work on something that has a real market and makes real money you don't have to worry about 'bubbles'.

Oh no! Five-year-old* long-discontinued phones running old OSes lack security! The horror!

* okay, the Droid is only 4 years old, and the Optimus a mere 3. (And both shipped with Android 2.0 or earlier.)

I was pretty let down by Slashdot last year—I mean, no April Fools jokes at all? It couldn't get any worse.

But this year I was impressed, because they proved it could.

The late Ed Wood says "hi".

And also "braaains", but in a stilted and really rather pathetic tone.

http://www.smbc-comics.com/?id=2867

And the obligatory comic.

Sigh.

If you sell individual videos more than 12 minutes long, you play MPEG-LA a royalty of of 2% or $0.02 per sale, whichever is less.
If you run a paid subscription service, and you have more than 100,000 subscribers, you pay MPEG-LA a royalty between $0.10 and $0.25 per subscriber per year.
If you broadcast your shows on TV, you pay either a one time fee of $2500 for each encoder, or between $0.005 and $0.01 per viewer per year.

If you make your videos available for free (even if they are ad supported) you pay no royalty.
If you sell videos less than 12 minutes long you pay no royalty.
If you run a subscription service with less than 100,000 subscribers you pay no royalty.

If that "prevents you from becoming a producer", you might want to rethink your business model.

(Source: the AVC/H.264 terms.)

Assuming you have an unlimited amount of time, yes.

But in reality, making mountains out of molehills is a clever form of filibuster. It gives you a "tough" image even while you distract debate from the real mountains.