With a life expectancy over 70, we're already living longer than the kings of just a few centuries ago.

Is it really necessary to push that to 100 with a sleepy, vegetarian, teetotaling lifestyle ?

European here. Businesses are required by law to round any sale to the nearest multiple of 5 eurocents. Similar as to what's being done in Canada, so what's happening in the US is old news. I'm very to glad that the useless copper 1- and 2-eurocents are not legal tender anymore, and I wish the last remaining copper (the 5-eurocent piece) would also be abolished.

However I'm surprised by your stance about 1- and 2-dollar coins. I love the 1- and 2-euro pieces, they don't strike me as particularly large or heavy (remarkably, the 50-eurocent coin is a tad larger than the 1-euro coin). Perhaps Canada went the American way, and introduced a very large 1-dollar coin. I've got my hands on a "Sacawega" US dollar and indeed it's huge.

Anyway the debate is moot by now. I'm considered a dinosaur for still carrying cash around, so the trend towards e-payment is relentless, even here in Europe with all the statism. My grown-up kids don't bother with cash anymore. They used to have an emergency bank note in their phone casing. Last weekend, somebody told me that it's fashionable among youth these days to carry such a bill visibly in their phone shell, for esthetical reasons, as a "forgotten relic" ...

... is the title of a 2022 documentary by Tom Costello. I saw it on TV, now it seems to have been taken offline everywhere. There's just a small excerpt remaining on YouTube.

I'm all for using this wonderful, cheap, unbreakable material that we call plastic ; but the documentary opened my eyes to what happens after use.
1. There seems to always be a "downgrade penalty" when plastic is actually recycled. You can't make a shiny new PET bottle from melting down used PET bottles. At best, you obtain a lower-quality material used to pave roads, make park benches, or act as bricks in buildings.
2. Many classes of plastic are just not reusable. The recycling logo on all kinds of wrappers and foils is just a lie to make consumers feel better. The most sane way to treat plastic waste is to burn it under controlled conditions (it is a petroleum derivative, after all, so it burns well) and reuse the energy. Voter sentiment doesn't always allow this, but then what actually happens to the greenwashed masses, is that all their carefully sorted plastic waste is exported to the most corrupt country in view. It says a lot, when even Turkey cracks down on illegal landfills - relocating the problem to Bulgaria.

Hell yeah , Fight the Power (surge) ! 110V DC *NOW* !!

Hey I remember the steam locomotive silicon art ! My coworkers at Alcatel around 1996 put it in a telecom ASIC for network switches. So you're saying that this drawing was copied from some place else ?!

Sure, you can have my trusty old C ... if you pry it out of my cold, dead hands.
Because : C doesn't cause buffer overflows, *I* am the one who's coding buffer overflows, dammit !

It was right here on Slashdot that I learned the intriguing story of Manu Sporny, who published his 23andMe data on Github. That repo is still out there, I see it's dated 2011.
I thought 'hey cool, I wanna do the same thing' - so I did. This hasn't affected my life in any noticeable way.

2. There's no reason for sex segregation in chess in the first place.

Just a few days ago, Slashdot reported that allegations of sexual misconduct exist even in the world of chess.
So if the ladies feel more comfortable playing chess in a league of their own, then anybody who was born as a male doesn't belong in there.

Fredric Brown, Pi in the Sky (1945)
Short story

Every news outlet should be mandated by law to print the natural deaths next to whichever Covid number they're reporting.
"360 covid deaths per day !!" OK fine, but next to it the mandatory legal disclosure : "7600 average daily deaths in the US before there was any Covid"

The US has gone over 325 million inhabitants since 2017, and adds way more than 1 million extra, every year.
Every single one of those lives will end in death, and for once, this is totally not the government's fault.
It should not surprise anyone that there has been a steady stream of 2.8 million deaths per year in the US, in the years before Covid.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

So let's add the mandatory fine print to this article : over the same period of 27 months, 6.3 million Americans died of other causes.

I was always amazed by the brief 'replay' that was displayed in Civ1, after losing yet another game.
This view of all civilisations that were in power _at the same time_, each on their own continent,
was something that I never received in history class at school.
Long after Civ1, this same idea was implemented with painstaking effort into https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
If only the history teachers would devote 20 minutes of class time to THAT video !

We have a daughter with a rare genetic disease, which causes her muscle tissue to dissolve. It turns out that both parents were carriers of a recessive gene defect, without ever noticing anything, so we had 1/4 chance of a disabled child. This has absolutely devastated our lives. For me, the obvious decision "if we had known" would have been to terminate that pregnancy.
She is now 18 years old and an absolute sweetheart, always cheerful and charming - bumbling through her freshman year at college right now. To me, the love for my daughter is perfectly reconcilable with the decision that she would not have lived, had we gotten a prenatal diagnosis. I discussed this once with my wife, who is much more zealous than me, in her devotion to our children (there's another daughter, in perfect health). Especially after the unique experience of gestating this child in her belly, I expected her opinion to be different. To my great surprise, she replied instantly that she would also have opted for abortion.
I could tell you of all the times throughout my daughter's life when she hurt herself in yet another nasty fall, or when she cried because she couldn't join a social experience, simply because of her disability. There's enough pain and suffering in the world, even when everyone at least gets to start out with a healthy body.

Whenever there's a news report about a leap forward in genetic technology, there's always an outcry from the ethics gang, warning against any and all intervention. From first-hand experience, I would love to see a "Gattaca" future happen. Whenever acquaintances announce the joyful news that "they're expecting", I now cringe and silently hope that at least their child will be born healthy. I'm convinced that in some future century, it will be considered an obvious standard of medical care, to guarantee this.

I inhaled helium from a balloon as a college student, and the Donald Duck effect did not disappoint.
A surprising side effect was the instant dizziness - as if my brain suffered oxygen deprivation right from that single toke of gas.
The exposure was limited so the effect was ever so brief ; for instance, I was standing upright and never felt like I would stumble.
Still, I'm not sure that's the way I'd like to depart, if the experience with helium is at all comparable to nitrogen.
I've experimented with other substances, and the helium doesn't qualify for euphoria at all.
The closest resemblance that I can think of, is with that fleeting feeling when general anesthesia kicks in.

My livelihood since a few years, has been to modify firmware running on an ARM.
The intellectual property might soon leave the UK forever, and the actual hardware is being manufactured by US company Atmel (now Microchip), but I'm still grateful for this nice British CPU design.

I've stayed far away from the whole Ponzi scheme that is cryptocurrency, so I hear you. However, I wanted to make an illicit purchase last week, and the seller insisted on bitcoin.
So after all these years, I had to figure out how to deal with the practicalities of obtaining, owning, and spending bitcoins after all - preferably with some degree of anonymity.

Getting myself a 'wallet' was the easy part. But buying bitcoins anonymously proved very hard. My impression is that the authorities have been clamping down on all trading platforms. I tried registering with several online platforms, to be confronted with a hard requirement to submit a scan of an official ID - and I found out that these are actually being validated by *humans* (only during the next business day, and mine got refused). I assume that bitcoin exchanges wouldn't implement these costly checks, unless various governments had them pinned with their backs against the wall.

I started Googling for solutions how to buy bitcoin anonymously. To my amazement, the recommended option was to get onto some chat forum and find some bitcoin owner nearby, to conduct a trade in real life. So I was supposed to meet a fellow criminal in some dark alley to buy his bitcoins ?? No thanks.
The 2nd option was even more ridiculous : "Got something of value lying around the house? Why not quickly throw a webshop together, and sell that item for bitcoin !" Yeah, right. The 3rd option down the line was actually the most reasonable : look for a bitcoin ATM.

I was in luck, because according to the Coin ATM Radar website (mentioned in TFA) there was an ATM near where I live. It was even in the same street as my favorite gold bar fence - I believe the guy got indicted for money laundering after I last went there, but I digress. Some guy had posted a Google review for that particular ATM being out-of-order a month ago, with a pic of the stuck BIOS screen and all, but I figured I might as well go scope it out. It was back online alright - but for some reason they had the thing running within a double iron cage, locked, with no instructions about how to get inside.

The outfit running the ATM had dubbed themselves Shitcoin, as in your aptly named subject line. I wonder what commercial insight has driven them to take that official name, but I still wholly concur. They turn out to have yet another ATM running, a mile away. This took me to a seedier part of town, and I had to leave my daytime job as a programmer in time to make it before closing hours of the shady telecom store where the ATM was located. From there on, it was an amazingly smooth experience. I inserted the bank notes that I obviously had gotten out of a regular ATM in another part of town first ; I had to wave the QR code of my 'wallet' in front of the machine ; but at no point did I need to identify myself in any way. The only moment of hesitation was when the GUI presented me with a slider for "blockchain fee". Apparently, the party which initiates the transaction gets to pick how many bitcoins will be spent to make the sale official along all the nodes of the ledger, or whatever. The most expensive option amounted to only 3c, so I put the slider all the way to the right. Only the cameras of the store could yield a clue as to my person, but thank god for face mask mandates round here.

By the time I got home, the bitcoins were already in my 'wallet', so I conducted my deal. The seller acknowledged receipt of my bitcoin the next day, and I received his shipment a week later. I had bought twice the amount of bitcoin I needed, you know, just in case of repeat business. I went to check on my wallet a couple of times since then, and I watched the exchange rate bounce all over the place. It's preposterous.