I have personally known software developers with multiple patents to their name who thought patents only rarely made sense. Their employer foot the bill, obviously. In fact, they argued the patents were so worthless and confusing that they had trouble understanding half the patents that were based on their own work.

Thank you, for the confirmation. So, in principle, if one were running an exchange that might be having problems, a diligent and honest operator could shut down for a week or so, and validate all their currency using public keys by inspecting the blockchain. Since public keys are public, having an up to date inventory at your fingertipcs should be a basic accounting practice (otherwise how could I ever do any transaction at all). That MtGox could not accomplish this or chose not to accomplish this (or did so and kept the facts close to its chest) makes me now lean towards Inside Job as the likely story.

Also,if I understand it all correctly, in principle, it is possible to watch the block chain and observe your own coin has been "stolen", because the public keys used to validate are public. Whether that is practical I do not have any idea.

Yours is a very plausible theory.

The slightly more innocent (but still probably criminal) interpretation is that MtGox employees were scrambling to make transfers that kept themselves financially whole, while the company burned down with everyone else's assets. That is usually fraud when viewed under the bright lights of a courtroom, because of the implied or explicit promises made to customers, even when the company somehow escapes the usual fiduciary duty to its account holders.

A week ago there was a rumor going around that 200,000 bitcoin seemed to have been transferred to a place the CEO had provably had involvement with in the past. It could be that the CEO finally recognized that his own efforts to cover his tracks were inadequate, and if he did not "discover" this "accounting error", he would be put in jail.

It is possible for things to get temporarily or permanently lost by transferring around your own wallets. But an actual thief would be 100% likely to do a real transfer of that money, making the old keys obsolete, for the very reason that it is not actually stolen until you make the transaction impossible or very hard to reverse.

The answer is probably "no". The problem is that unless you are a professional, you are an easy target for some other fan to claim you stole their idea, thus muddling up the rights. Someone in the business can be trusted to not cross the lines, because real professionals have more good ideas of their own than they could finish in ten lifetimes. Professionals actually read very little fanfic. Many (most?) fans who write fanfic read a lot of fanfic, or, at least, that is what a jury will be easily convinced of. So the possibility of honest errors skirting too close to the legal line is vastly greater with fanfic authors. Fanfic is a headache best avoided.

I am a bit of a bitcoin skeptic, but I see a very plausible niche as a competitor to credit cards. There are hidden costs and risks to small vendors using bitcoins, but when competing with 3% off the top, there is room for insurance (or self-insurance) to cover the glitches.

Mind you "drive" might be too strong a word. All G'Kwon has to accomplish is to make the Narn homeworld a not useful base of operations. Sneaking near a base and crashing a pair of Shadow vessels into each other would probably get the point across, without any real battles being necessary. The threat would be sufficient to get the Shadows to find another planet.

No, a very few telepaths survived, G'Kwon being the most famous. Presumably those that survived were extremely potent. They have no remaining telepaths because many necessary genes were scrubbed from the rest of the populace, diluting the probabilities to their disfavor. One might speculate G'Kwon's valuable genetics could have been preserved with space age science, but the Narn were incapable of such one thousand years ago.

Touche!

Maybe it is me, but that seems gobsmackingly wrong. If Target cannot tolerate a server being unavailable for a few minutes, there must be something wrong with the entire technical infrastructure. There must be single points of failure all over the place. (Not trying to be snarky. Please tell me I am wrong!)

They are following the will of the elected officials of NYC and the senior police leadership. That may not make 4th Amendment advocates very happy, but the police are not trying to "get away" with anything that they are not proud enough to do in broad daylight in front of numerous witnesses every day.

Also most incidents of bad behavior start off with police officers who walk in ambiguous situations with the initial intention to behave professionally (e.g. the officers who beat up Rodney King were not intending to lose control of their emotions and the situation when the encounter started). Those police officers will not turn off their cameras.

I generally agree.

I would also suspect that the police officers recognize that if the recording shows the first words out of their mouth sound professional and reasonably polite, then they are home free in the eyes of the jury if the suspect suddenly seems hostile. Sounding professional and polite is also likely to illicit less hostile responses.

For most police officers, this is no change in behavior. But there are surely some marginal individual officers who will build better habits when they see how it serves their personal interests.

You are employing a double standard in an attempt to create a false equivalence. For the dollar, the general stockmarket, the US GDP, dropping more than 10%-20% is an unusual event. It is not perfectly safe, but it is very safe if you are willing to accept a modest amount of downside risk. In contrast, we see extreme hyperinflaction and hyperdeflation all the time, and the bounds of risk are clear as mud.