They want to have the authority to regulate apps that after release have been linked to "safety related issues" that have an intended purpose of being used primarily while driving on a road. They're not asking to regulate all cell phones, or twitter, or Facebook use while in a car (yet), what they are asking for is the ability to bitch-slap developers after the fact who create apps that are designed for use while driving yet lead to distractions, ergo creating safety issues for those likely using said app while driving, presumably on a highway. To that end, is someone more likely to be using Navigon, Garmin, TomTom, or the multitude of other apps while going for a walk, or when driving somewhere?

And if they incorporated a "Thank you for using MotionX GPS Lite, before giving your your directions, please watch this YouTube video and answer this quick survey!", should NHTSB or anyone else for that matter have the authority to tell them that that is morally wrong, and potentially unsafe behavior, let alone compel them to take corrective action?

Their request for oversight over this area doesn't seem like a "major" stretch at this point, but it does set a quite unusual precedent that can be used to expand their powers in the future. And as we all have seen in the past, if Government has the potential to grow, it will do so.

You mean like paying an undercover cop $80,000 equivalency from the same Bitcoin wallet that was seized to arrange to kill someone?

I completely agree with you that it is improper to conduct the auction before the trial because it sets a dangerous precedent that all it takes is a cop to lie for prosecutors to liquidate the assets of anyone they don't like.

The question is whether someone who claims to be innocent should have access to someone else's assets to mount their defense.

Should Ulbricht maintain that he is not DPR, his 5th Amendment rights are not being violated because he asserts that the property "wasn't his". Regardless, his 6th Amendment rights are not being violated because he has not been denied the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.

The only noteworthy thing here is that should he admit perjury that he is in fact DPR, or another party come forward and either party later be found innocent of any wrongdoing, the government would be required to provide whatever funds they generate through the auction back to the innocent party; something that incentivizes them to sell at below market value.

Except, the distinction here is that Ulbricht is claiming that he is completely innocent, and has no part in the situation.
As such, the seized assets in this case are 'believed to be associated to Ulbricht, however are at present only known to belong to the previous "DPR", the former operator of Silk Road'. And no one else has stepped up to claim them, so the government is putting them up for auction, because why not.

Really, it is an interesting case... 100M equivalency of a cryptocurrency that the claim of ownership comes along with it the implication that you are ran an international drug ring and attempted to orchestrated the murders of several parties.

Acknowledge the property as yours, it remains seized and is instead held in your name until after trial for those acts, or walk away from it and claim that it is all someone else.

Devils Advocate to your argument, let's assume that Ulbricht is telling the truth and that he truly is not DPR; should he be entitled to use the seized SR assets that the government is asserting are his to mount his defense?

When there is money to be made in perpetuating the problem?

Really, most of our broadcasts are now directed back towards earth via satellites, and any signals sent to space are of such a low intensity and so absurdly directional that the odds of it being detected are minuscule at best even with extremely sophisticated equipment sitting on the moon.

That isn't to say that we can't *also* talk into space, but we have gone to highly directional, low powered communications systems as our primary means of communications as a species. Even AM, FM, VHF, UHF, and various Cellular transmissions are now directional and positioned in a longitudinal configuration to reduce power waste by broadcasting where people won't be (strait up).

During the 50's and 60's, sure... we were broadcasting some very powerful signals into space simply because we as a civilization were trying to be as loud as possible to hit every inch of our planet. During that point in time, there is a chance that another culture, if they were of sufficient technological advancement (about where we are today or ahead of it) that they *could* have seen us if they were specifically surveying our star and it's planets.

The bottom line is that like everything, intensity of any signal falls off at the square of the distance, and we are taking some major distances here. While those signals would be severely disrupted by the Oort Cloud, one would still see a deviation from the Cosmic Microwave Background Radiation as well as that of our star.

And we didn't give a species like us much time to find us.
And as long as we are talking like that, is it reasonable to also make a logical jump that a species that would have developed technologies necessary to detect us would have also implemented similar efficient means of communications for their species, as a result making them "less detectable" in a similarly short window?

Do you realize that Valve does do two factor auth, and all it takes is a checkbox to turn on?
Afterwards, attempts to even log in from a new location will require that you be texted or emailed a code which you type in, and can then revoke access at any time.

Sounds like maybe you should make use of some of their security mechanisms, the least of which being simply changing your password.

People willingly use $200 computers that only browse the Internet when all they want from a computer is to browse the internet.

This chair is Windows 7. It's comfortable. It's familiar. You've been sitting in it for years.
Now we'll install Windows 8 on the chair. We can still tell it's a chair. It's not the chair we know but it's still a chair.
It just --- unghh... takes some getting-- *WHIMPER* used to. You just need to-- huh... break it in a little bit, ungh. Eventually it will become comfortable and familiar--- gah!
Ahhh. The blood is body temperature, so it's almost like a heated seat. Mmmm... comfy.

CAD - The Upgrade

It doesn't matter the amount of evidence available, there will always be deniers. Hell, there is photographic and some video evidence of the holocaust and yet there are still swarms of people saying that it never happened. 9/11, swarms of people saying 'the jets weren't even commercial airliners but were military cargo planes' and yet hundreds of millions of people if not billions watched it live with plenty of recordings available today. Some people just like to take confrontational standpoints because they find them fun.

Buying the game was super easy as those servers were all up and working. The game auth servers were not though, so once it was downloaded, it could not be activated to be played "offline". So Ubisoft has no problems taking your money, just with letting you use your purchase. Then on the other side, those who pirate it get to play immediately without all of these problems, but apparently some releases include a bitcoin miner. In thinking about it, amazed that game developers wouldn't incorporate that model into games themselves where "download for free, and we lower the quality of your experience by siphoning of compute cycles to earn us money, or pay to download and not have your computer mine for bitcoin while trying to enjoy our title!"

Well, there are those who have written Android App Compatibility layers for Tizen that would allow one to run all their existing apps. Not that different from how you can now run Android apps on a Blackberry. Since one can imagine that most have purchased from Play instead of Amazon, they would be highly unlikely to do so without a repurchase though. I still think of it as a solution in search of a problem, but should a major vendor (like Samsung) put all of their backing behind it, maybe it beats Windows Phone, maybe it doesn't. All comes down to whether the general purchasing public notices or cares about the change versus thinking that it is just them rebranding Android for differentiation from their competitors. Android already looks wildly different from HTC to LG to Samsung to Oppo to ...

Definitely no midnight lines on either Surface or Windows Phone either just that people are taking a risk on them. Windows Phone is beating Blackberry at this point. Although in thinking about it, before long you may start counting Blackberries sold on one hand. It would be very interesting to see if Microsoft can hold the #3 spot should Tizen ever ship on something, let alone a Samsung flagship.

Except, Microsoft is no longer making that much money from Windows. Their bread and butter is Office followed by their various server and software development products. Office gives them 16.2 billion in profit, Windows gives them 9 billion. So, office is *close* to double Windows in terms of supporting Microsoft's vision well into the future. Windows ubiquity is great for Microsoft as it makes things far easier for them, hence why Windows is now free for 8" and less devices as a way of trying to grab a portion of the Android marketshare. Xbox is cool, but then it only provides them with 800M. It does however create truckloads of good will towards them as it is a product that people really *WANT* to own. Try as they might, I doubt that they will ever get anyone lining up at their local BestBuy for a midnight Office 2015 launch. That want creates a halo for them where people are more willing to take a risk on one of Microsoft's other emerging offerings like Windows Phone or Surface.

Not that it really matters, but the majority of the deal is in stock...
Also known as "we now own you, and in exchange your stockholders now hold a smaller portion of our stock instead!

Only 30% of the deal is in cash, making it 14.5 Billion changing hands. Still a big number, but not as bad as it sounds.

As such, it actually comes out a touch cheaper than the cost that DirecTV spent on their satellites in the first place, and AT&T gets to exploit the 16% profit margin on DirecTV's lines of service.

Last I checked, when we as a civilization are launching satellites into orbit some costing in excess of hundreds of millions of dollars, the payouts to a family for "my Timmy died in a fiery explosion" would probably be one of those "phew! Thank god it wasn't last weeks rocket that blew up!" moments for their insurance company. The cost of human life just isn't that high to a typical actuary.