I really do need to pay enough attention to this comet, figure out if it's worth a trip to the middle of nowhere to watch.

Spent Thursday with friends. We had a US-style turkey dinner (well, veggies for me) at church at lunchtime, hung out for the afternoon, went to Korean BBQ for dinner, and on the way there we saw people waiting in line at Best Buy.

Ok, going to restaurants technically counts as "buying things", but we didn't actually do that Friday.

Stealing CPUs for mining probably isn't worthwhile. Using your own GPU isn't particularly worthwhile (unless it's winter and you have electric heat, and aren't buying new hardware.) ASIC miners are available surprisingly cheaply on eBay and IIRC DealExtreme, and if you're going to buy mining equipment, the best choice is probably them or maybe FPGA boards. But from what I hear, GPU mining with stolen electricity is probably still profitable, at least if you're infecting machines yourself; not sure if it's profitable if you're also renting botnet time.

Wednesday's /. article on Jolla Phone and Sailfish OS. Sure would have helped if the summary had mentioned what "Meaningless-Name" and "OtherMeaninglessNameOS" were :-)

I used to offer to help them get the FTC's $50,000 reward for stopping telemarketing abuse by turning in their boss. None of them took me up on it :-)

But that program's over, so I usually just ask them how their family feels about them scamming people for a living. Most of them just hang up, some of them get mad.

Unfortunately, the US government will probably try to find a way to do just that. If they can allege a link between Satoshi and DPR-or-Ulbrich, that gives them a better excuse to try to pry information out of anybody involved with Bitcoin, either through legal process in the US or through possibly-illegal wiretapping overseas.

Paypal's primary niche in the early days was being a popular way to pay sellers on eBay using credit cards. The seller could accept Paypal much more easily than opening merchant accounts with multiple credit card services, and the buyer didn't have to give the seller their credit card number, and the transaction fees were competitive. It was way better and faster than buyers having to mail sellers a check, waiting for the post office, sellers having to wait for the check to clear, buyers hoping the seller wasn't scamming them; it cuts a huge step out of the non-credit-card market.

That's going to be difficult.

If your car gets x mpg in the US, your cost of gasoline over the lifetime of the car is about $1M / x. ($5 per gallon * 200,000 miles / mpg) So a 20mpg SUV will cost you $50K in gas, or a 50mpg Prius will cost you $20K. (Pro-rate if you're just keeping the car a few years, of course.) If the price per mile for electric is equivalent to 100 mpg, then it's going to save you only $10K over a Prius, but $40K over an SUV.

I live in the San Francisco Bay Area. A lot of the driving I do is less than 10 miles each way, but there are a lot of 40-50 mile trips that I make frequently (one is to work, on the days I don't telecommute), also between Silicon Valley and SF or Berkeley. I'd need a car with at least 200-mile range that I can charge at home in 6 hours to feel really comfortable driving that. If I could afford to maintain three cars (I don't have parking for them, and would rather not pay for the insurance and registration), I'd be fine with the current electric cars, which would get used for most non-commute driving, but my wife and I would still have full-range cars if we needed them, though I'd rather wait a few years.

When Bitcoin was new, you could successfully mine bitcoins using your CPU. But the parameters on Bitcoin keep making the amount of computation higher, and these days the CPUs have been left in the dust, GPU-based miners are getting passé, and it takes ASICs to really keep up. Part of that's competitive speed, and part of it's the cost of electricity, which as a botnet herder you don't actually care about, but you've got to have a mining client that can run on the GPU without being noticed, so it can't run if the user is doing graphics-intensive GPU stuff. Harder to hide that without being detected.

Look, you're only calling her the "mystery woman" because you can't remember her name, and it was 50,000 years too early to get her phone number.

Identifying animals by species is usually convenient, but it's really an shorthand for clades of individuals. Are two individuals close enough to reproduce and have offspring that are capable of reproduction? That's a different question from whether Species X and Species Y are close enough, and the boundaries are a lot fuzzier than they taught us in high school. Lions and tigers aren't the same species, but they're close enough that ligers or tigons can be fertile, and there's at least one liliger out there. (It doesn't happen in nature, because lions and tigers don't live in the same areas, at least in modern times, but they're still close enough relatives.) And even mules are occasionally fertile.

"anti-capitalist"? Are you one of those Rand-worshippers who thinks that any decision a corporation or corporate executive makes is automatically correct? You've obviously never worked with real businesses before; they make dumb decisions all the time. (If that weren't true, you'd have gotten to this link by clicking with your Cue-Cat, or looking it up with Excite or AskJeeves.) One of the core things that makes capitalism work is that when dumb decisions get made, businesses (or parts of businesses) fail, die, and go away, and the people (and sometimes the resources they were using) can go do different things.

I'm boggled at hearing that Groupon still even exists, much less has that much market cap, because they were seriously tanking after they went public, and I haven't seen a Groupon or Groupon-like daily deal in ages.

They don't need any changes related to corrosion because they're made with those changes already included - it's mostly picking the right kinds of rubber for the seals and hoses. That doesn't mean an old motor boat engine will have been designed for that, and as the earlier poster said, there's also the problem that boat engines often sit unused for half a year, with the fuel evaporating away.

Yup. They don't have to catch criminals and terrorists significantly more often than chance, and even catching them less often than chance is just fine, as long as most people submit to the bullies and they can beat up the ones who don't. (Occasionally they fail, like the other week when some loser decided to shoot up the TSA because he had a problem with authority.)

I'm skeptical about the "scientific study", though, because TSA is almost never actually dealing with terrorists; they're much more likely to be dealing with people who are carrying politically incorrect plants and pharmaceuticals, or reading politically incorrect books, or worrying about the TSA thugs rooting through the underwear in their carryon bags.