The fundamental problem with Kickstarter is that there's no accountability for handling the money.

Only if you completely, and entirely, miss what it's used for. If someone wants to set up a kickstarter equivalent where projects must be independently audited, project plans validated, and investors have some legally watertight form of ownership as well as power to intervene then they are welcome to set it up.

Here's one of the projects highlighted on Kickstarter's frontpage: Help send The Kinsey Sicks to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival! They want ~$24,500 to go to and perform at a Festival. They aren't trying to sell a product, they are asking fans to help them. Some of the higher pledges include getting a CD or some such. Why on earth does a project like this need drowning in bureaucracy (the lack of which is what you claim is Kickstarter's weakness) because some other people naively think Kickstarter is a zero risk pre-order store?

The rewards offered on kickstarter are pitiful given the risk to the capital, and complete lack of upside if the product is successful.

If someone is Kickstarting something that you think want to be made, but isn't going to be made otherwise, then the reward can be perfectly sufficient. Kickstarting isn't about becoming an investor in businesses (there are other platforms for that), nor is it a pre-order marketplace. It does what is says it does, and 90%+ of the bitching I hear about it is people who think it is something it clearly isn't.

Isreal will do whatever it feels like doing to expand it's borders and, secondarily, defend itself. Helping Muslims will not factor into it.

I disagree vehemently with a huge amount of what Israel does but they clearly aren't completely stupid. Jordan may not be the ideal neighbour but it is on the other side of around half their land border and infinitely better as a neighbour than Lebanon. Israel isn't going to just sit by and let Jordan get overrun by people who actively want to annihilate them, must easier to provide support to Jordan and fight in their territory.

No. Appeasement in the context of WWII was the other European powers lack of response to German militarisation and its actions in Czechoslovakia. It should be highlighted that the American president at the time openly praised Chamberlain for appeasing Germany. People who think appeasement was a mistake see Poland as the consequence of this (Germany got away with earlier actions and thought it could get away with this), but the response to Hitler's invasion of Poland was to go to war.

If you're going to use historical examples then at least stick to the established facts.

Well we thought we'd copy America's lead but you dive headfist into dumb-fuck un-winnable wars so fast we never got the chance. Also, before you get too smug about the mistake European leaders made with appeasement 60 years ago, look at how your own country was reacting to the exact same threat at the same time.

I still find it hard to comprehend why more isn't done to protect people from scammers and pursue those who run these scams. A government can easily put eye-bleedingly large fines on any company who provides a phone number that is used for scamming. This would make the companies who provide the UK/US/etc numbers on the end of overseas scams far more cautious about who they provide them to.

Then you're only left with foreign calls which a) cost scammers vastly more, b) already look very suspect, and c) can be dealt with by penalising countries that provide a safe-harbour to scammers.

Grandparents have no legal duty to bail out grandchildren

You seem to be labouring under the delusion that this has anything to do with legal duty. Think of it as the risk people take for not being a selfish and uncaring douchebag.

I think it is safe to assume that from that moment on the name Ross Ulbricht led the suspect list and all effort was put in to linking DPR to Ross Ulbricht.

I also think it is likely that they caught him exactly as they said he did. That doesn't mean that they shouldn't be expected to keep records to show that is what in fact happened, and have their records audited to ensure they tell the truth. We're seeing far too many cases of things like the FBI protecting the police from having to reveal information about certain methods of surveillance to trust their word.

There are enough examples of very serious crimes, that don't get solved for decades and when they are that the quantity and obviousness of evidence is overwhelming; yet somehow it was missed at the time.

It's called straight-faced sarcasm and/or well done, traditional, trolling ;)

Sure, I suppose the NSA could have used magical spying technology to know everything about Dread Pirate Roberts, but whether they did or not, they didn't need to. He had left enough clues about DPR's identity scattered around in public to put him on a small list of suspects.

I don't intend to suggest something underhand happened, but I want to highlight what I feel is a flaw to this logic. Once you know someone has committed a crime it will be comparatively simple to find masses of evidence. Yes he might of left information around that could help narrow down suspects, or even incriminate himself, but that doesn't mean that it would have been found, noticed, and acted on.

Those documents belong to us, they should be redacted when filed so that we can see them.

Pretty stupid logic. You're suggesting that the government spend $1.4 million redacting these documents, and hundreds of millions annually redacting all documents that could possibly be requested, in case they are requested, rather than spending the money when someone actually asks for it. You could make a case for arguing the government should be expected to pay the cost of redacting documents that the public are entitled to request, but that's a different issue.

Since when do we use unknown/uncommon words in headlines ?

You not knowing it isn't the definition of 'uncommon'. It's a pretty widely used term in general; on a tech news site like /. it's constantly in use.

The consensus view on Slashdot seems to be that vaccines are good and that taxes are bad. But, to me, at least, such views seem inconsistent.

Then that's your shortcoming, and you should think things through a few steps further. I shouldn't really be shocked though, the correlation between half-arsed incorrect arguments and opposition to vaccination is staggeringly high.

The cost of treating a serious outbreak, disruption to the economy etc are considerable. The costs of supporting those left disabled by disease are considerable. The cost of treating people in hospital with severe cases is considerable. The money spent developing vaccines by government is negligible compared to the costs to government of their being no vaccination.

Hyperlinks, learn not to be a dickhead.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to see that something very strange happening with allergies. I've just hit 30 and when I was a kid nut allergies were virtually unheard of, nothing was done by society to control the risks, nut free food plants didn't exist (or were at best vanishingly rare). Now ~20 years later nut warning information is everywhere, nut free plants are common, schools and other institutes have policies and processes in place, airlines have nut allergy policies etc.

Either nut allergies are a lot more common, or its become a lot more common to think you have an allergy.