You wouldn't be surprised if you knew why that is the case. You don't get a good deal for paying cash, you just get a regular deal, and everyone who pays electronically gets a bad deal. The ticket price typically includes the cost of processing electronic payment, because consumers (who think credit cards are magical devices that have no costs whatsoever) think they're getting ripped off if the have to pay a surchage for electronic payment. Hence the "discount" for paying cash.

I already heard it. It is, I think, the third stupidest riddle I've ever heard. The second stupidest is the one about the midget who can only push elevator buttons with his umbrella, but refuses to carry his umbrella when it is sunny, despite it being useful for more than just keeping out of the rain. I can just picture him thinking "Oh, shit, I forgot my umbrella again. I thought I wouldn't need it because it was sunny, but I totally forgot I also need it to push the elevator buttons. I also forgot to sue the building manager for not making these elevators handicapped-accessible. I mean, is it really that hard to put in a stool or something?"

The most stupid riddle I've ever heard is the one about the dead guy found alone in a field with a pack on his back. The pack is what killed him, and is either a pack of wolves or an unopened parachute, depending on who's asking the riddle. Riddles are supposed to have one correct answer, dammit!

It has nothing to do with Jell-O and everything to do with gelatin, aka powdered bone slime. Gelatin is a protein consisting of a triple-helix of amino acid chains. The amino acid chains separate when the gelatin is dissolved in hot water, and when the mixture is cooled, the chains link together again to form a semi-solid substance, in much the same way that epoxy resin hardens when the epoxide monomers link together to form polyepoxide plastic. That's not really a riddle, though.

A crucial piece of information has been left out, and the correct answer doesn't even remotely make sense without that information. A better answer (but not the "correct" one) is that her sister is actually her half-sister, and the man is the sister's father (that's why he was at the mother's funeral). But the girl didn't know that, and when the man told her this, she got so angry at her sister (who never told her she was really her half-sister) that she killed her.

No, silly, it's just the answer to a stupid riddle. It's not even the "correct" answer, but the correct answer doesn't make any sense: "It was a plane cabin. He died when the plane crashed into the side of the hill." I mean, seriously, what kind of riddle is that? It's not like someone's going to come across a plane wreck with a dead man inside and say "Gee, I wonder how he died? It's quite a mystery." As bizarre as my answer may seem, the scenario it describes is actually more likely to provoke the original question in the first place, so I consider it to be a more correct answer on that basis.

It was a plane cabin. He bought the plane on SR but he didn't have a pilot licence, so he couldn't fly it. Instead, he pushed it up a hill and got in and rode it down again. But as he was going down the hill, a goat jumped out in front of the plane. He jammed on the brake and stopped just in time (which is how the plane came to rest on the side of the hill), but he was so shocked by the incident that he had a heart attack and died (the man in the plane, not the goat; the goat was fine).

Not very. Fast confirmation times do not improve security at all (assuming equal difficulty, one 10-minute block is as secure as thirty 20-second blocks), and in fact security is reduced significantly by wasting hashpower on more orphaned blocks since network lag is a much bigger factor. The result is that it is possible to do a 51% attack with significantly less than 51% of the hashpower, if the attacker can maintain a low-latency connection to many nodes.

I think you don't have the faintest idea how money works. Money is a medium of exchange. It allows people to trade things they have for things the want. With me so far? Now what happens when two people who want to trade are each using different things as money? Neither of them has or wants the other's money, so they can't trade, right? Wrong, as long as both forms of money can be easily exchanged for one another. Then they can use a form of money they don't want, but it's okay because they can exchange it at a fair price for the one they do want. The ability to easily exchange one form of money for another is absolutely necessary for it to actually be used.

Actually, that is the etymology of the word "disrupt": the prefix "dis-" can also be an intensifier, as in "disgruntle" (from gruntle to complain) or "distend" (from tendere to stretch).

I'm still waiting to see what the Alliance has to say about the new rules. If I don't get a response soon, I'm going to have to start thinking for myself again.

A stapler.

Don't you mean 20,999,999?

What do you mean "like"? The manufacturers do deliberately design these machines to be as loud as possible. They once tried putting mufflers on them, but nobody would buy them because they thought the quieter motors were less powerful. They honestly think the loud ones are better. So that's what the manufacturers make. Which proves that capitalism only works when the consumers aren't complete morons.

No, it didn't delete itself. How else would they appreciate the genius of it? Also, that would have been quite difficult to pull off with a CD-R...

The school did weekly backups of everything, so I figured it would just be a minor inconvenience. That's the only reason I wasn't suspended. In retrospect, it was slightly less funny than I thought it would be. But only slightly.

Heh. I did almost exactly the same thing in high school, only it wasn't BASIC, it was autorun.inf (this was back when Windows would silently run anything autorun.inf told it to, no questions asked). I nearly got suspended for that.

Wrong. If a block is orphaned, the reward (including transaction fees) is invalid (or more accurately, it no longer exists in the main chain) and the unlucky miner loses the coins. For this reason, newly mined coins cannot be spent until 120 confirmations.

The fees are not lost, however. Since the transactions that were in the orphaned block are no longer in the main chain, they are now unconfirmed and back up for grabs by another miner. The next miner who includes those transactions in a block gets the fees.

Maybe he is, but I'm not:
Guess you guys never had the balls to actually try it.

(Use rm --help|grep root to determine if your version of rm has this feature - if you're a wimp.)

This is not a valid DOCTYPE. PUBLIC must be followed by both a public and system identifier (eg, <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD HTML 4.01//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/html4/strict.dtd">). Without a valid DOCTYPE, your browser may take it upon itself to "correct" any irregularities in your markup (even if your markup is syntactically valid).

For example, in Firefox, your body's 0 px margin is not always inherited by other elements. Whereas, if you had used a valid DOCTYPE, your body's margin will be inherited, resulting in all elements which don't specify their own margin to have a 0 px margin instead of the default margin, which is what's screwing up your spacing (in reality, it's not screwed up at all: it's exactly what you asked for, even though it's not what you meant). At least, that's what's happening in Firefox. Other browsers may correct your markup in different ways, resulting in your page appearing different in different in different browsers.

TL;DR: If you use <!DOCTYPE HTML> (or any other valid DOCTYPE), your browser will display exactly what your markup specifies. If this differs from what you wanted or expected, there is a bug in your markup.
If you use <!DOCTYPE HTML PUBLIC> (or any other invalid DOCTYPE), your browser will attempt to fix such bugs, resulting in your page looking correct even if it is not. However, this is not valid and your page is likely to look different (and may even look worse than if the bug was not fixed at all) in different browsers.

Confirmed. Neither logging in nor logging out has any effect on other sessions.

The transaction ID is a hash of the transaction. It is random, but it is possible to generate many variations of the same transaction (without actually sending them) until you get a transaction with a transaction ID that matches some criteria, and then only send that one. You should not use a transaction ID alone as a source of random data.

The correct way to do what you're trying to do is to generate a secret, then publish a hash of that secret. Add the secret to the transaction ID, then hash that, and use that hash to select the winner. When you announce the winner, reveal the secret at the same time. To verify that the winner was fairly chosen, anyone can hash the secret, verify that the hash matches the hash you published earlier (to prevent you from cheating by changing the secret), and then hash the secret+transaction ID to verify that you selected the winner correctly.