170 marathon runners / spectators were wounded and children were killed in this attack intended to kill/maim as many innocent people as possible.

What does this have to do with neighborhood gun crime, or car crime, or whatever? If those gunmen had indiscriminately opened fire on a crowd of people, just because they wanted to maximize the damage, and 170 people were maimed and children were killed, I am sure you would get a similar response. (And presumably there would be people saying "that's nothing: in the neighborhood I live in people have got stabbed and mugged before and there was no lockdown then! this is becoming some kind of fascist state!"

It is so embarrassing seeing people in this discussion saying how few people were killed, what a terrible thing it is that Boston was locked down for a day, and how could the police do that.. I just cringe at the thought of someone who's life was affected reading some of the comments in this discussion.

Right; more people are killed by car accidents every day than by 20 snipers taking out people at random across the country. I say in that situation the police should ignore the snipers and go look for drunk drivers and speeding!

Frankly until terrorists are killing more people within the US than cancer and heart disease put together, I don't see much point going after it.

Awwww.. did that 30 minute emergency drill ruin your day?

And I thought the people whos limbs were blown off and children were killed had it bad.. We need to realign our priorities!

As a non-American I find this weird:

• A couple of people execute a plan to blow hundreds of innocent athlete/spectators' limbs off,
• The police use technology to work with the public to catch/kill them in a matter of days with no additional casualties,
• Some Americans then go wallow in self-hatred over either
  • How scared they are of the police intruding on their freedom,
  • Or how easily scared they are.

I can't believe people are saying to the effect of "only three people died, less than the deaths caused by normal crime." Surely there is a difference between those looking to maim hundreds of innocent people and the sum of everyday crime?
How can people be so wishy-washy about this? A couple of complete assholes have just ruined hundreds of peoples' lives, and people feel conflicted about the manhunt that ended in their death and arrest?

Don't give a damn, and indifferent about it...

And I'm sure if Forbes wrote "Bitcoin is a fantastic idea, I fully support it" you would be saying "oh he is just taking the contrary position because he knows reverse psychology blah blah blah" ?

Maybe (just.. maybe) he says he doesn't think Bitcoin is money because he doesn't think Bitcoin is money?

Gee elucido; after seeing you post how bitcoins will increase 10x by 2014 in three posts now I can see that you selflessly want us all to partake in this great opportunity. I think I'll go and get some now!

Hard-hitting analysis there.. Any cryptographers want to walk us through the technical issues raised here, maybe allay our fears?

I take it you're as leveraged as you can get to take advantage of such amazing returns?

If they hadn't locked it out everyone would be complaining "Why is it taking so long to patch *it's being exploited in the wild*!"

There is just no good way to deliver news of a security hole.

"you people"? The thing is you can't respond to people like the GP and say "well.. not really. come on, here's an anecdote about our CIO planning ahead."

Maybe P8 can maintain the integration between the P1-7 providers, P9 can handle all the different contracts, and P10 can figure out why it takes so long to load data through 5 layers of providers?

The IRS stole from you? You should take them to court.

• The company I work for with ~2000 employees paid $80,000 AUD for our Christmas party at a convention center.
• We spent $xx,000 on a marketing firm to develop a screensaver which promoted our corporate values, but which flickered in a way that gave some people headaches, and had to be taken down.
• Our department went Go-karting twice last year, and I was given 5 days of training for something I haven't used before or since.
• Two years ago someone in our department was paid by another department ~$40,000 in billable hours to write some software which for whatever reason wasn't suitable.
• There are spikes in the number of broken company iPhone 4s after iPhone 5s come out.
• We spend tens of thousands on color ink because engineers don't like electronically marking up documents.
• My sister works for a charity which spent $30,000 for a web-dev company to build a template-based website (which the web-dev company owns).

Large businesses waste money, you're in no position to say it had no value, and the amount of money is trivial. If you consider this excessive don't get mad when you run into a front-line IRS worker who hates their job and behaves as such.