Seven feet!?

Yes, Ubuntu is a massive usability fail. I don't get it. The Ubuntu people are constantly saying "we need to make Linux more user-friendly" and then they go and create something like Unity. That's why I recommend MEPIS for newbies. It "just works" even with oddball hardware, and uses KDE instead of GNOME as its window manager, which is much easier to use (especially if you're coming from a Windows environment).

No, but it is possible to become licensed in at least one country. For example, the country your business is based in. That would be a good start, don't you think?

Of course they work. A bullet is just a roughly cylindrical object the same diameter as the gun barrel, that gets propelled towards the target by the force of the gunpowder exploding; it's kinda hard to screw that up. Literally anything that'll fit down the gun barrel will work (to some degree) as a bullet. Of course, bullets are completely useless without gunpowder. Why are you getting so excited about this?

This is not possible. Nobody, under any circumstances, can transfer coins from an address if they don't own the private key. What an attacker can do, is mine a block containing a transaction sending coins from his own address to another one of his own addresses, but not release the block or the transaction right away, and continues mining a few blocks on top of it. He simultaneously sends a transaction to, say, purchase something, and after that transaction is confirmed, he releases the blocks he mined, rendering the "confirmed" transaction suddenly invalid, and he gets his goods for free. This is known as a double-spend attack. Normally waiting for transactions to be confirmed is sufficient to defend against double-spends, but a 51% attack means even confirmed transactions can no longer be trusted. That is what makes this attack so disruptive.

An alert will almost certainly be issued, warning users not to trust even confirmed transactions until it is clear the attack is over.

Only invalid blocks will be rejected. Blocks mined as part of a 51% attack are perfectly valid, and do not contain invalid transactions. There is no way to determine whether a given block was mined as part of a 51% or not (though the attack can be detected in other ways, for example, honest miners will find their blocks are constantly being orphaned).

In order to pull off this attack, the attacker needs to ensure that only his blocks are accepted, and nobody else's. To do this, the attacker's chain must be longer than that of the honest miners. The only way to guarantee this is to have more hashing power than everybody else (51%), thereby allowing the attacker to mine more blocks and produce the longest chain.

I'm going to assume they're referring to this sort of guillotine, because I know how it is with bureaucracies: always too much paperwork, not enough paper cutters. Looks like the government's finally doing something about it. I guess the bullets are part of a new police training program, in which police have to actually be able to hit a target in order to pass training. Though it's probably a tad optimistic to think they can do this with only 600 million rounds...

Nothing suspicious going on, everybody put away your tinfoil hats and go back to whatever it is you were doing...

I have winter, but I don't want it anymore. I'm freezing my fucking tail off down here. You can have it back any time you want. Now if I could just figure out how to ship it...

Because people are idiots who think if they enter a random username and click "Forgot your password?" they'll automatically get access to the account with absolutely no kind of verification whatsoever?

Forget that, look at his bowling average! He obviously spends way too much time playing with his balls.

It's unlikely because it's usually completely unnecessary. Despite what you've seen in films, state police are in fact allowed to follow you across state lines and arrest you (assuming they were actively pursuing you from the start; if you're already in another state before the police are on to you, they can't do anything except get an extradition warrant).

Is it legal to give bitcoins as a gift? Yes.
Is it legal to falsely claim a transaction is a gift in order to avoid regulation and/or taxes (irrespective of whether bitcoins are involved)? No.

I hope that clears things up.

I recommend Bitcoin a lot. Most if not all of the others are just clones of Bitcoin that don't actually improve upon it in any way, and are much less secure due to their low hashrate, much more volatile due to their low liquidity, and are almost certainly just pump-and-dump schemes designed to make their creators rich at the expense of anyone foolish enough to actually buy them.

Ha ha. I don't activitate nearly as much as you, yet I get a higher activity score than you. I'm awesome.

Still, I feel somewhat cheated. Having thousands of posts used to mean something. It meant you were a highly valued and respected member of the community. Or, more commonly, it meant you were a complete asshat. Either way, whenever you saw someone with thousands of posts, you knew they were someone special. Now, I feel we've lost that.

You mean, on your own hardware? If you can't trust your own hardware, you can't trust anything. Game over. You lose.

You're talking about red/black separation. Ideally, your red box (the one you're accessing sensitive data on and which stores your keys) won't have any kind of network connection at all, instead using sneakernet to transfer encrypted data to and from your black box (which has a network connection, but never touches unencrypted data). It's the only way to be sure.

The title of that article is somewhat misleading: it is referring to electromagnetic radiation being emitted by particles trapped in a particular region of the magnetosphere. The radiation itself is not trapped, only the source of the radiation is.

True. I never said it wasn't, though.

Cosmic rays and the solar wind are both composed entirely of the aforementioned charged particles, mostly high energy protons.

I saw your previous post. It displays your remarkable ability to read something without understanding it. Go read that article again, especially the part about microwave radiation from space being detectable by ground based observatories. I do think microwaves go through the atmosphere. Radar astronomers also think microwaves go through the atmosphere. Radar wouldn't even work at all if they didn't. As for the sun's microwaves in particular, most of the radiation (what did you think the word "primarily" means, in that context?) is indeed absorbed by the atmosphere without reaching the Earth's surface, but some is not. And the microwave radiation that does reach the Earth, both from the sun and other sources, is completely harmless.

The atmosphere is more or less transparent to most wavelengths of electromagnetic radiation. This is evidenced by the fact that you can, you know, see through it. Radar astronomers, using microwaves, also have no difficulty seeing through it. Although the atmosphere absorbs most of the sun's microwaves, some manages to get through. And it's not just harmless stuff like light and microwaves that the atmosphere is transparent to: although the ozone layer provides partial protection against ultraviolet radiation, a significant portion still reaches Earth - this why you should wear sunscreen to avoid skin cancer. Why would you think the atmosphere stops "everything"?

Despite what you may have seen in the (completely retarded) movie The Core, the Earth's magnetic field only affects charged particles; it has absolutely no effect whatsoever on any kind of electromagnetic radiation.

More bullshit. Non-ionising radiation is not "a violent, destructive process" that "rips apart" molecules. Heat can cause chemical reactions and in some cases produce toxic or carcinogenic chemicals, but the source of the heat makes no difference.

What? The sun has been microwaving everything on Earth for billions of years. No harm seems to have come of it, especially compared to the ultraviolet radiation the sun is constantly spraying out, which is far more dangerous.

All forms of heating destroy nutrients in food, not just microwaves. In most cases, microwaves actually do less damage than other methods of cooking, due to the lower temperatures and shorter cooking times (the only exception is boiling certain vegetables, which some studies suggest causes slightly less damage than microwaving).

The paper in that link is complete bullshit. For starters, the formation of radiolytic compounds in a microwave oven is flat-out impossible, as microwave radiation is non-ionising. Microwave radiation is also not "AC" or "DC"; these are varieties of electric current, not radiation. Radiation can be neither of these things.

There is also no way for microwaves to increase the cholesterol content of foods. More likely, the types of food which are typically microwaved (ie, junk food) contain higher levels of cholesterol to start with. Eating that shit ain't healthy, microwaved or not.

As for increased white blood cell counts, it is less widely-known than it should be that because microwaves cook at lower temperatures, there is a much higher risk of bacterial contamination from undercooked food. Lack of awareness of this fact is a very common cause of food poisoning.