I'm not sure you understand how gerrymandered house districts are. Republicans will not lose the seat unless there's a massive upheaval in the political landscape or, more likely, the Dems eke out a majority at some point in the future and redraw the lines in their favor.

Google and Amazon (despite what the summary incorrectly states) have had online payment systems for years. Those are just the 500 lb gorillas, there's literally dozens of other providers, none of which have managed to gain much traction.

Personally I avoid paypal like the plague, too many horror stories. But then, I've never had reason to argue with Google Wallet or Amazon Payments, so maybe resolving conflicts would be just as much hassle with than as with paypal, I couldn't even say.

Dang $500 collectors edition Millenium Falcon... if only I hadn't been a poor college student at the time...

There is nothing at all saying a corporation can't call out the common good in it's bylaws, mission statement, and investment perspectis.

The risks of government abuse if such a system is available are practically unlimited and, if history is anything to go by, almost guaranteed to come to pass. Ignoring them from your risk/reward calculations isn't just dumb, it's incredibly, mind numbingly dumb.

How about "Adds that look like a download link on file hosting websites". Trying to download files without adblock is like a puzzle game... only one button does what you want and there's little if anything to distinguish between it and the numerous (and probably malware filled) fakes.

Yeah, but how much of it is meaningful. It's not as though every atom in your body needs to be precisely position, not even every cell. Heck, it's entirely possible that most of the tissues outside the nervous system wouldn't need to be placed all that accurately.

Long term goals for the launch recovery include recovery of the second stage, essentially the entire rocket would be recovered and reused. If that can be accomplished (a non-trivial "if" certainly), launch costs could drop to the hundreds of thousands range rather than the tens of millions. You could have 100 launches for the cost of a single one today (already one of the cheapest launch platforms in history). Most of the cost of major missions is getting stuff to orbit; cut that one item by 99% and a lot of budget math changes.

Looking at their upcoming launch manifest I see: NASA, Orbcomm, Asiasat, Space Systems, Loral, Thales Alenia Space, US Air Force, CONAE, NSPO, Spacecom, Bigelow Aerospace, SKY Perfect JSAT Corporation, SES, Iridium, and SATMEX.

The US government isn't even the customer for a majority of the launches through 2015. If you're specifically talking about manned missions you might have a better argument. But even then the Bigelow Aerospace launch is tantalizing hints of the future... even if it's only the future for the fabulously, ridiculously wealthy.

It still wouldn't explain the lack of communication from the team. They're one of the most prominent and well known open source security tools and the entire website and signing keys get hacked, you don't think they would be talking to the community right now if?

If you're gonna post compromised binaries of TrueCrypt, you generally wouldn't stick them on a page with "WARNING: Using TrueCrypt is not secure" in large, bright red text. You'd also expect some kind of statement from the good folks that have been running TrueCrypt for the past decade.

I'll join the chorus of people speculating about them getting a court order they couldn't bring themselves to follow. I would stay far, far away from that latest binary, if I had to guess it contains whatever loophole they were ordered to put in place, hence all the big and bright warnings.

Maybe, but as long as that limit is several times more thinking power than the human brain you still have, effectively, the singularity that Vinge described: i.e. you have technological advancement faster than can be predicted at the present time. Unless you think the human brain is the absolute theoretical maximum thinking power it's possible to accumulate in one system...

But Verner Vinge isn't one of them. In his original paper, he used them to illustrate how difficult to comprehend concepts might, conceivable play out. For example, he mentions that a singularity may play out over the course of decades or over the course of hours. Imagining how such massive changes could occur on a global scale in just a few hours is difficult, so he points the reader to a book whose author has already put time and effort into imagining how such a thing could play out and what some of the implications might be. It is using the book precisely as a thought experiment to examine an especially extreme part of what he is describing.

You're begging an important question with your argument, let me quote from the article to illustrate it.

If you asked someone today what the first computer capable of designing an improved version of itself would look like, you'd say it would be a true AI. This is not necessarily true. You are assuming that designing a new, more powerful computer requires true intelligence. Maybe in reality it'll be a few million node neural network optimized with a genetic algorithm such that the only output is a new transistor design or a new neural network layout or a new brain-computer interface.