The gender exclusivity comes from the product of Federal law when combined with some interpretations of the Constitution, not from interpretations of the Constitution by themselves.

I just find it amusing that, because of the codified definition of the U.S. militia, a person who supports interpreting the 2nd Amendment as "only the militia is allowed to own firearms" ends up also taking the position "only men (and women in the National Guard) are allowed to own firearms". And that position was affirmed by Congress as recently as 5 months ago.

All of this is academic, though, as SCOTUS appears to believe that the 2nd Amendment does give an individual right to firearms.

That's... pretty interesting, actually. I wish I still had mod points to up this with. That makes it sound like interpretation of the 2nd Amendment is almost irrelevant, with such a broad definition of a militia codified into federal law. Though I notice it's also unequal - exempting women (outside of the National Guard) from classification as part of the militia also means they could potentially be excluded from gun rights under some interpretations of the 2nd Amendment.

The really attention-grabbing thing about the IRS guidance is Question 8 under the FAQ, which reads:
Q-8: Does a taxpayer who “mines” virtual currency (for example, uses computer
resources to validate Bitcoin transactions and maintain the public Bitcoin
transaction ledger) realize gross income upon receipt of the virtual currency
resulting from those activities?

A-8: Yes, when a taxpayer successfully “mines” virtual currency, the fair market value
of the virtual currency as of the date of receipt is includible in gross income. See
Publication 525, Taxable and Nontaxable Income, for more information on taxable
income.

(emphasis in the original)
This sounds like an enormous amount of record keeping for individual miners to keep track of.

If it means only having to pass a scan from a geiger counter instead of a full-body pat down at the airport, I'm all for replacing terrorist fearmongering with thermonuclear fearmongering.

...can I pay them in Dogecoins?

From my own research, difficulty appears to vary by card manufacturer, linux distro, and specific task. If you pick the right distro, support is decent. If you pick the wrong distro, you spend many hours wandering the internet safari. I can sympathize with Google's position.

In the briefest terms, AMD/ATI = Hard Mode, or so it appears.

Most recently, it took me a significant part of a weekend to setup a GPU-based Dogecoin miner on Debian, using ATI cards. The first and most painful lesson was learning that Debian Squeeze was a non-starter, which wasn't immediately obvious as several seemingly outdated guides exist, referring to experimental apt packages that no longer exist. Upgrading to Wheezy, I only managed to get a single card working, though a second identical card was plugged into the motherboard and known to be good. Lamenting my half-solved problem, a coworker directed me to a hardware hack (resistors stuck into a DVI/VGA converter) so that the second GPU would be fooled into thinking a monitor was present, so it would be recognized by the mining software. Apparently, this is a hardware hack needed to run Apple desktops in headless mode.

Supposedly, these things are "easier" on NVidia-based setups, or at least have a larger community to assist, but there are still some gotchas. I wouldn't blame Google for feeling that things need to be improved before offering official support. With any luck at all, Steambox will push card manufacturers to create better drivers for at least one distro, even if it's only Steambox. The Count tells me that One is greater than Zero, Ah, Ah, Ah.

Not to mention, this sounds like the kind of plan that could easily result in the loss of two crews, instead of one.

When I drive more than an hour or two, I'm making a journey that crosses state lines. If I felt I had that kind of money to waste driving a rental across state lines, I wouldn't be worried about putting miles on the car I have.

That's a far more interesting phenomenon than the one I thought was being described.

It's not "unpossible". Protons (like most things at the sub-atomic scale) are not like the physical objects you're accustomed to, with seemingly concrete boundaries. It's not like a very small kind of baseball.

Protons are more like the broadcast range of a wifi hotspot (assuming, like any good physicist, that the hotspot signal is exactly spherical, to make the math easier). You might look at signal-to-noise ratio, which will produce one definition of "size", or you might look at wattage, which produces a different measurement of "size", or you might look at some other factor entirely, producing yet another definition of "size". These will not give you the game size, but are all "correct" within their contexts.

And, of course, since protons are actually composed of 2 up quarks and 1 down quark, that complicates the question of "size" further, since you could define proton size based on measurements and modeling of the quarks, which would be analogous to considering the shape and location of the antennae in the aforementioned wifi hotspot.

What? It's not like they'd drive someone to suicide.

Slow news day on Slashdot, apparently.

"Dammit, why did my car just shut off again?!"

I think anyone here will recognize how easily "smart gun technologies" will be circumvented on the streets, either by hardware hacks or software ones, meaning the technology will be useless at preventing illegal firearms transfers after a few days of being introduced. The only kind of crime that would be prevented by biometric or RFID identification would be stealing someone's gun to use on them in the heat of the confrontation. This seems somewhat desirable for peace officers and security personnel, but only if the technology can be made robust enough to prevent false negatives. No officer would ever want to place their lives in the hands of a gun that might refuse to fire at the most important moment.

For the majority case, sport and range shooting, the "feature" is nothing more than a potential nuisance, something else that can break in an already complex, dangerous system.