One of his main points is how capital is extremely dynamic and adaptive, he discusses a number of points where apparently insurmountable technical problems or new government regulations or social unrest actually ended up leading to greater efficiency and technological innovation. Command economies like the USSR have generally failed to capture these qualities even though they were extremely successful in initially industrializing (and it tends works the same way in businesses, free exchange of ideas and less hierarchy leads to more innovation rather than stagnation)

He actually did discuss the advantages of capitalism over previous economic systems, extensively, in Capital

The US has been openly giving weapons to the Taliban since the 80s, if they can't work with that I don't think a few spies are going to help.

Aesthetics are totally subjective. People respond completely differently to the same sets of images, and that has to be taken into account. Wikipedia for the most part operates by working towards a consensus rather than explicit rules, and should strive to be inclusive without compromising the information contained within its articles. If you flippantly ignore the fact that a large number of readers are offended or revolted by certain images prominently displayed in Wikipedia articles (whether you agree with them or not), you're excluding a lot of people on very questionable grounds. Wikipedia already has a problem with the fact that almost all of its editors are middle-upper class white nerdy males in their 20's and these attitudes are part of the problem.

I don't want to see hi-res photos of Wikipedia editors' genitalia or nasty skin diseases at the top of an article (when an illustration would suffice) for the same reason I don't want to Wikipedia to change over to magenta text on a lime-green background. There's an issue of aesthetics and readability here.

Tell that to L.A. or Seattle! Unless you're expecting some sort of Maoist uprising, I don't think anyone's going to bother trying to "roll into" your small towns.

Though with the current exchanges, it's impossible to withdraw more than $10,000 of bitcoins a month, so you'd never get most of that "value" out anyway. You'd be better off using that computational power to rent out a real botnet if you actually managed to infect 500,000 machines (Not to mention moving that much money through banks would draw a lot of suspicion even if you could get it all out, hopefully you have an account in a country where the banks are as poorly regulated as bitcoins...)

State censors arrested a dissident British performance artist for attempting to incite pro-democracy protests using a "Blackberry," a social networking device popular in his native country. The arrest comes just days after a wave of intense pro-democracy demonstrations among British peasants in the capital city of London and the subsequent crackdown by state security. David Cameron, the British Prime Minister, has been quoted as saying the protests "brought great shame to the ancestors of all involved" and would be "severely punished in accordance with the Glorious United Kingdom's policies as prescribed by The Great March Towards Austerity"

Trains. Fire Trains. Trainbulances. If you don't think a Fire Train Truck Train would be totally badass, I don't know what to say

The author got a lot right in this article. The thing about using real identities is the effects are asymmetrical, it's not some egalitarian system that always improves discourse. The people in positions of power, authority, privilege, etc. are the ones who determine what is and isn't acceptable to begin with, so obviously they have nothing to lose by being identified. When we say "civility" we mean don't really mean "civility" according to everyone, just according to whoever defines the status quo. There's a reason Facebook is now mostly parents posting baby pictures and employers doing corporate promotions, that's all its useful for when everyone can see it and everyone can identify everyone else who uses it.

Rather than developing expensive DRM solutions, publishers can cut piracy rates tremendously by ensuring their games get low review scores. Everyone knows that game sales are based mostly on hype, and ever pirated copy is a Lost Sale, so it follows that a game with a high hype to review score ratio will actually outsell a hyped game that also has high review scores.

This entire debt crisis is a blatant attack on the working class. Our legislators knew what was coming back when they were busy cutting taxes for the rich and funneling billions into banks. Things will only get worse from here!

More to the point, the boundary layer shear is what enables this concept to work at all

If you read the PDF article, it says it works like an air-hockey puck or hard-drive platter, there's an extremely thin layer of air between the spinning surface which is under high shear which is conducive to heat conductivity. The PDF goes on to explain that this dramatically reduces the size of the boundary layer, not eliminate it as the summary says (since this isn't even logical what I remember of my fluids class). I didn't read the whole thing but I think it's the fact that the heat sink blades themselves are spinning at very high speeds, rather than having dirty air blown on them, that prevents dust build-up.

I logged into facebook recently and it took me like 10 minutes to find my list of friends. At some point they literally hid the friends list