My opinion that the less than Dread Pirate Roberts is a massive idiot has now been reinforced in a way I never would have imagined. The demand is tantamount to the drug lord demanding the feds return the hundred million dollars that could only have come from selling 100 kilos of cocaine many times over.

He hasn't got any possible legal pretense to justifying having the money and all it's going to do is prove his guilt. This idiot ought to look at the cartels and organized crime worldwide where they pointedly have this process called laundering money so that they can have at least have a pretense of legitimacy for their claims. No jury in the world is going to buy that this guy made tens of millions of dollars day trading bitcoin without a paper trail.

I haven't seen a single thing about the silk road operation that did anything other than prove the man was an idiot from inception through the present day. Why the hell are people defending this guy, just because he ran a trading site for drugs? The people who were deluded into thinking they were safe on silk road are being arrested, the intelligence gained was an incredible coup and likely the only reason it lasted as long as it did until the guy started trying to trade bitcoins for murder.

If you want to defend legalizing drugs, than make your argument for that, but don't defend one of the biggest idiots the Internet has ever seen.

One of the problems with that is that the rural poor in places like California and Illinois aren't being taken care of now. Resources tend to be spent almost exclusively on urban areas as it is. The entire purpose of having states was to have an area with people where the state represented the people of that given region.

In a place like Illinois the government effectively represents only 10% of the area of the state at best. The population in the other 90% of the state have different political needs than Chicago and it's closer suburbs. Those people simply aren't being represented, and therefore their state needs to be split to give them the representation that they deserve.

Whereas travel was once very much an issue, today it isn't the political issue that it used to be. States are intended to represent all of their constituents and not simply those in the big city. Cities absolutely depend on the country side that surrounds them, something that the forefathers knew was the case. They wanted to make sure that the people of the country were not excluded from the political process by a few big cities as that effectively created two classes of citizens, those with representation and those without. Considering that this affected everything from the law of the land to taxes it was considered a pretty big consideration.

This is hardly an idea without precedent would better serve the needs of the constituents while be very much in the spirit of the Constitution. Virginia, New York and Massachusetts split and gave us a handful of other states. When states become two politically oriented in one direction for only a given geographical ares while ignoring the wishes and values of the other states they can and should split.

The Constitution was designed to balance the power of the people so that you didn't have any one area with too large of an influence over the others. It was then designed to ensure all areas would have equal representation in the Senate. It was one of the most careful balances of power ever crafted and has served as a model for countless other governments ever since.

When people feel the need to systematically disregard the political views of a given portion of their constituency they no longer deserve to have that constituency as they no longer represent their needs. California, Texas, New York, Illinois and a couple of other states have long areas on both the left and the right that have systematically ignored large portions of their population for many years.

Before science gets hot and bothered about the loss of data scientists need to do something about the quality of the data they produce to begin with. Frankly given the complete lack of quality controls that a lot of scientists use the loss of their data is probably for the best. Depending on the field as much as 60% of all scientific research cannot even be reproduced. Work that cannot be reproduced by another team is far from isolated to one field either:

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424052970203764804577059841672541590
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-05/half-cancer-scientists-have-been-unable-reproduce-studies-survey-finds
http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2012/08/reproducing_scientific_studies_a_good_housekeeping_seal_of_approval_.html
https://www.xsede.org/gateways-for-open-science
http://www.eusci.org.uk/articles/data-doesnt-lie-scientists-do

Depending on the study that means that either the data has been fabricated by unethical scientists, or the data has been misrepresnted for political purposes. Studies are often improperly interpreted by failing to take into account sound statistical modeling and noise is reported as science. In some fields politics have effectively taken over (e.g. social sciences) and standards are used that would never be tolerated in other scientific fields.

The very culture of science that demands quantity over quality needs to change as the rat race that inspires junk science to begin with. I can't think of any other field where those kinds of failure rates about the reproducibility of your work would do anything other than get you fired for fraud and destroy your career. I like science, I have since I was a young child, but the junk were getting labeled as science doesn't deserve the label.

Seriously, do you know anything about Obama that wasn't put out by MoveOn or the Democrats?

Obama selected a vice president who was the most **AA friendly Senator that the US has ever had in it's history. He picked former **AA lobbyists and put them in key leadership positions at the Justice Department.

Both SOPA and TPP were conceived and attempted entirely under his watch. Obama did far more with the **AA's than he ever did with things like cranking up Bush's NSA initiatives. I'm no fan of Bush, but he never tried pulling anything on the scale of SOPA. He was also very in your face about what he did and sure as hell didn't go around doing things like negotiating treaties that take away rights in secret when he knew they would be so unpalatable to the public. I'm an Independent, not a Democrat and I can't stand white washing history.

DRM is probably the single greatest driver of privacy that their is. It has never particurlarly been very good at stopping people from accessing content. What is has been good at is creating artificial barriers that allow for greater market segmentation. It does things like allow for different regions for DVD's and Blu Ray's or making photoshop so expensive in Australia it used to cheaper to fly to America, buy a copy and fly back. DRM just has to be enough to make something clearly illegal and frustrate most users.

It gives an excuse to force people to provide marketing information to be able to use a product that they paid cash for. It creates a market in file trading from unusable media is used to justify the greatest land grab of civil rights in history (Trans Pacific Partnership AKA SOPA 2). DRM is an excuse to change the very concept of "I own that' to "I lease that".

You pair that with laws that will put people who break it into prison and now you have a society that is firmly in the grip of IP based companies. Throw in the patent wall that makes an upstart like Compaq all but impossible nowadays and you have an oligarchy that can effectively never be challenged due to insurmountable legal costs. You can't go around them with DRM or you go to prison, you can't fight it in court because it's a treaty and you can't beat them as a competitor. As long as they don't become a monopoly they are untouchable for decades at best.

Just remember that Obama was the president that drove the greatest takeaway of civil rights in history...

This is exactly the kind of issue that should be talked about. I use more than one streaming service and now know not to even bother trying Spotify. This is the market in action, make sure you tell as many people as you can.

Panspermia is the concept of taking one in a trillion odds of a shot hitting the target and firing that shot a trillion times. I'm not particularly advocating for it, but it has at least some basis in plausibility.

We know that rocks from others planets can and do get shot out by meteor impacts on a routine basis as some have landed on Earth. We know that these impacts shoot out large quantities of rocks at a time into space at random directions. We also know that gravitational currents can help objects naturally move between planets.

We also know that bacteria can survive being left in outer space for years at a time. We know that the interior of a meteorite does not particularly heat up upon re-entry into the Earth's atmosphere. We know that bacteria are found inside of rocks inside the Earth when we look for them.

Now I'm not going to get into life (bacteria etc) evolving and everything that goes with it. I'm certainly not saying that Panspermia has any evidence of having ever occurred. I'm simply saying that the idea of Panspermia has at least some plausibility as a delivery mechanism for bacteria like life that had already evolved on it's own.

If we ever meet any life that evolved from back then we shall microbes to them as microbes are to us. A curiosity to be studied, and shelved, dissected and put on display.

Your wrong about WMD, the development of the nuclear bomb led the the greatest age of relative calm between wars that man has ever known. The atomic bomb was so effective that it ended WWII without the loss of millions of soldiers from both sides and millions of Japanese civilians. MAD was also the one thing that kept the cold war from going hot. It stopped the Soviets from continuing their takeover of nation states after WWII. It kept the Americans from invading Cuba and sparking WWIII.

Conventional weapons killed tens of millions of people at a world wide scale. Nuclear weapons stopped that and help wars to much small regional conflicts. The death tolls reflect the success of the nuclear weapon as the greatest peace making device the world has ever seen.

It should be well made, Microsoft has been in the hardware business for about 30 years by now. Once upon a time they sold memory and logic boards for computers (they actually started as a Unix shop), things like mice have been getting sold for over 20 years and I've had good luck using their keyboards for over a decade. Their latest mice haven't does as well for me as I would like, but I they actually have a fairly good track record with making hardware (except for the xbox 360).

Every once in a while a post comes along that needs attached to the story instead of the comment section. Editors, this is just such a post.

Out do nothing congress is finally doing something useful. These are the kinds of questions we should be asking before problems start to occur and while there are chances to try to introduce standards. It's like the Toyota sudden acceleration thing, everyone assumed it was careless people until someone did a proper audit and discovered a complete lack of industry best practices that everyone assumed had been in place.

Document the issues so that it is clear you are aware and tried to do something about them. Bring them up verbally to your boss - without being obnoxious about it. Once you've done those than you need to the hardest thing of all which is to let it go. If you make too big of a deal about it you will be seen as a troublemaker. If you do nothing you will be seen as complicit or incompetent if there is a violation.

Now in certain industries you may have requirements (possibly enforced by law) that require you do to more. Most of the time that isn't the case and you have to let it go and move on with other things. Often times disasters are the only way that people higher up the food chain can and will learn.

I recall when Nimda was making it's rounds in 2000. I was aware of the worm, had the patches downloaded, instructions printed and had requested permission to patch servers. Permission was denied. I asked again, it was denied again. I had awareness of the issue, my statement of the severity and denial all in writing.

I watched a fortune 25 company go down for 2 days and lose $100 million dollars and countless workers get sent home when their facilities were rendered useless. As a result an inflexible policy was changed and any number of people were fired or disciplined. Because I had documented everything I was just about the one person nobody faulted.

I'm no fan of Neo Nazi's, but this strikes me as crossing over to the realm of thought crimes and criminalizing unpleasant people. Look at what they are trying to do, identify music as being wrong and identify a group of people as being wrong. Now take this same technology and remember that it can be used on other groups. What about using this technology to identify gangbangers that like gangsta rape or hackers since we know that they like techno?

The stereotypes are bunk of course and many people listen to music of multiple genres. From heavy metal bands that are classically trained and influenced (Metallica S&M etc) and so on. The whole thing stinks of trying to outlaw certain types of people simply based on who they self identify as. Society should stick with outlawing behaviors and stop being so judgmental of others. Slipper slope over here...