Good luck trying to get a chargeback on your card if you use it for a donation. When the word "donation" is heard by the rep, they'll end the conversation right there. Donations with credit cards are like Western Union money transfers. Once you pay, the money is gone.

Note that a kickstarter contribution is not a donation, it's a payment for service, and you can certainly ask your credit card company for a chargeback if your backed project doesn't deliver.

And what's so different between gpg in javascript vs. gpg in machine code?

Why would you care? It's trivial to get it fixed with your credit card company.

Donations are not a service and are not subject to chargeback. End of story.

Paypal does not really work internationally. I've tried. You can't use a credit card in an account that's not in the same country as the card's issuing bank. If you have got credit cards in banks in ten countries, you need 10 different paypal accounts. It's insane.

Even worse: eBay somehow, by default, blocks foreign PayPal accounts from paying for purchases even if the seller ships internationally. I've tried to buy an iPad 2 for my sister living in Europe, using her credit card on her paypal account. 30 different eBay sellers would refuse to accept the payment.

Pray tell how could a donation be subject to a chargeback? I've donated once and wanted to withdraw my donation upon learning of some new policies of the nonprofit I donated to. It was impossible.

But BitCoin isn't an institution. It's an algorithm and a software implementation for it.

Like, um, to know well enough not to drive? Yeah, sure. Go right ahead :/

I'd like to point out the conspicuous absence of the element Li in the NiMH battery chemistry. You're interestingly off-topic :)

New factories are in the process of being built. Always. Almost independently of what industry you choose. Even if it's horse/buggy repair shops.

On the contrary, and Samantha Wright please correct me if I'm wrong, but I'd think a whole big hunking lot of single-cellular life can in fact survive being frozen. I mean, come on, human fucking sperm even does. Never mind that frozen life is well, frozen. While the DNA repair mechanisms are dormant, so are the copying mechanisms. Bacteria can live quite deep within porous rocks. I'm not exactly sure if it's really necessary for ejecta to be always heated up to sterilization. Now I'm not saying that this little life-from-Mars theory has got any legs to stand on just yet, but your arguments don't really do much to discount it, I don't think.

Must have never heard of prosecutorial discretion, then. Nobody, neither personally nor at any level of government, has any obligation to uniformly enforce all laws. I'd have hoped that people who think otherwise are just happy drug users - to my bewilderment, it turns out not to be the case :(

Most people would go crazy without having a job or otherwise being occupied somehow.

The major gain from Watson-like solutions is that you can have a multi-specialist system. It's nigh impossible for a family doctor to have specialist (as opposed to general) knowledge in other areas of medicine. Such specialist knowledge could be useful, though, so a Watson-style solution may turn out to be a vastly better doctor in the end. The human touch still matters, of course, but that means you can have a Watson-backed nurse relegating classical doctors into the dustbin of history.

What?! What buildings? In the U.S., a typical 30-year-old house is ready for a major renovation, including serious energy-related overhaul. A lot of buildings older than say 50 years may need to be torn down and replaced as it'll be cheaper than fixing them up. Never mind that the population grows, so no, we still need new buildings all the time. Of course the population growth might stop or even reverse into a decline, but you'll still need new buildings. I think the real issue is that the middle class has been virtually relocated to China.