These swings are fairly meaningless since Bitcoin hasn't achieved its goal of becoming a currency yet.

The markets have turned it into a volatile foreign exchange game, and people are just trying to make a quick buck playing the market. There currently isn't any 'currency' aspect to it, since there's damn near nothing you can buy with bitcoins.

Since they failed to achieve any intrinsic value of their own, they are currently just bad, unreliable representations of legal tender. As long as that is true, nobody will ever accept them as payment for real goods or services.

I received a similar notification from US Bank today with regards to my linuxfund.org credit card. They called out Epsilon as the source of the leak, and claim no financial data was compromised.

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As a valued U.S. Bank customer, we want to make you aware of a situation that has occurred related to your email address.

We have been informed by Epsilon Interactive, a vendor based in Dallas, Texas, that files containing your email address were accessed by unauthorized entry into their computer system. Epsilon helps us send you emails about products and services that may be of interest to you.

We want to assure you that U.S. Bank has never provided Epsilon with financial information about you. For your security, however, we wanted to call this matter to your attention. We ask that you remain alert to any unusual or suspicious emails.
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Yeah, it's safe to ignore both time and money estimates from government contractors until it has blown both its time and budget constraints a few times. The first bid is always impossible and full of half-truths and omissions to win the contract. The politics are stupid, but at least sometimes it results in good research.

The price of Graflex synchronizers has gone through the roof because of Star Wars nerds who want their own authentic-looking light sabers. This is a real nightmare for those of us who love flash bulb photography, since new Graflexes aren't being made anymore (except replicas without the electronics, specifically for building light sabers). Please, if you want to make a light saber, buy a Graflex replica instead of an original. They're cheaper, in better condition, and don't deprive anyone of a now-rare useful tool.

Considering how many entry forms still don't allow '+' in an e-mail address (or, worse, allow it in the sign-up box but not in the unsubscribe box), and considering how many banks still restrict you to an 8-character password, does it come as any surprise that they have difficulty with something that isn't defined in an RFC?

$20 billion? It's like in that movie 'Contact', it costs that much for everyone else to build, but Japan secretly already built one for a few million.

Couldn't the restaurant... buy regular duck eggs and ferment them?

A century egg can apparently be made quickly by soaking the egg in salt and sodium hydroxide for a week or two. Or you could actually bury it in alkaline soil... believe it or not, you don't actually have to be in China to accomplish this.

I propose we round up any dirty chinamen buying drain cleaner at the grocery store on the grounds that they must be no good commie spies!