Before assuming proof of stake is a panacea, read the article(s) by Paul Storc, https://www.truthcoin.info/blo... Basically, due to the law that marginal cost equals marginal revenue, if you use Proof of Stake, you're still using Proof of Work, it's just obscured (people will generate new PoS chains that pay them the reward and only publish the one that does) and you can't see that it's using the same amount of energy. In PoW you can determine how much energy is being used by looking at the rate of blocks and how many proof of work bits are zero in the block hash. This is why people point at the proof of work as wasteful, because they can easily calculate a number. We need proof of work to solve the Byzantine Generals' problem, to allow trading with untrusted parties. If you don't want to waste energy, the best way is to increase trust, by building relationships and then you can trade on credit instead of BTC, pay less BTC fees and thus incentivize less mining. If everyone trusted one another no one would need BTC.

It's a reference to bitmunchies.com, which used to sell beef jerky for bitcoins. Site closed now.

I disagree with the Wordpress author's analysis at http://markjaquith.wordpress.com/2010/07/17/why-wordpress-themes-are-derivative-of-wordpress/ and their downplaying of the fact the code lives in a separate file. Even though the theme calls wordpress code and loads into the same address space, it's not linked until it's loaded. A core dump of the process after it's loaded would be a derivative work, but the theme's source on the disk would not be. I don't see the PHP developers demanding any app written in PHP be licensed under the PHP license just because the script runs in PHP's address space.

In a hypothetical situation, someone could rewrite Wordpress under a non-GPL license, and make it support all themes. Irrespective of what Wordpress authors would say about the Wordpress clone itself, any themes used with such a Wordpress clone wouldn't be required to be GPL.

The Wordpress author's dangerously attempting to take away users' freedom to load code from different licenses and run it. Copyright and the GPL only limit distribution of the derived work, not the creation and personal use of the derived work. You're allowed to do anything you want with GPLed code as long as you don't distribute it, since keeping code for yourself isn't covered by copyright law.

It doesn't appear on the main page. I guess this one is a YRO special article, not for the masses. I often browse /. using Search with a blank search, because more articles appear. I don't know if it's a bug or a feature.