I can't find the renewal pricing for cheap-domainregistration.com. I'm guessing that there is a good reason for that, and the reason is that I wouldn't be happy with what I found!

Even if we assume that government could solve this problem (which is a big "if"! How much money do, say, 419 fraud victims normally get returned to them? Or eBay escrow fraud victims? Good luck!), it would still be cheaper to the victims to operate in the black market.

By way of example, let's say a vendor does $1000/day in Evolution market sales and let's say that money is typically held in escrow for 14 days (I'm pulling these numbers out of my ass, but they seem pretty reasonable). Let's also assume that these transactions are subject to a 5% sales tax (which is almost certainly very low, considering how heavily intoxicating substances are taxed in the real world!). That would mean that the vendor would expect to have $14,000 held in escrow at any given time, and that they would be collecting $18,250 in sales tax annually. Money that would otherwise go to the vendor. As we can see, government pulls more money out of the market than it is able to provide in protection, assuming that it provided any protection at all, which I doubt it would.

The risks of trading on the Darknets are well-understood and are accepted. Trading in illegal goods carries risk. Film at 11.

I would pose the same question back to you? How many times has the "affluenza" defense worked? I only know of one. And how many crooked judges are there?

Wealthy people have more resources to defend themselves with, no doubt. But they can't just throw money at any given problem to make it go away.

Or they could go to jail. That's right. For speeding.

I know some people think that, but it's just not the case. Just ask pro baseball player Jayson Werth. I realize that doing jail time for speeding isn't going to hurt the guy in the long run, but "zero consequences"? Not so.

And when the rich get too many tickets, they lose their license, just like you or I would. I get that the fine is pretty meaningless to them (my last ticket was for $150, and it was a bummer, but it didn't cause me to miss my rent payment or anything), but losing your license just sucks, I don't care who you are.

It's easier to calculate income than it is to calculate net worth and assets are easier to hide.

Where did that yacht go? Oh, it sank. I didn't just reflag it in Vanuatu, honest.

Of course that's the case now. I'm talking about the folks who go through the prison coding bootcamp. Part of the program will need to be incentives for hiring the ex-cons. Otherwise, you're right, they'll never get hired, and they'll just be ex-cons who now know how to write C#.

I hate to break this to you, but I bet a lot of your coworkers have broken one law or another. They just never got caught. Are you only a criminal if you have a record?

Presumably, there would be incentives for employers who hire the ex-cons. Obviously they wouldn't be appropriate to work in all roles, but I'm sure there's something that they could do.

Eh. I've been around the block a lot of times at this point. I'm not concerned that throngs of ex-cons might be interested to do what I do for less money. Most people, criminal record or not, would not be able to imitate what I do at any price.

And presumably they will expect a higher compensation at that time, which is commiserate with their improved skill level.

I worked for peanuts before I knew what the hell I was doing. That was then, this is now.

The "banksters" have armies of lawyers to ensure that what they are doing is legal, or at least pretty close to legal.

Also, the types of crimes that poor people commit are easier to detect than the type of crimes that rich people commit. A poor person smoking marijuana and a rich person committing securities fraud could be sitting right next to each other at a coffee shop, but guess who's going to jail? The one who smells like marijuana, because how's the cop supposed to know the rich guy is committing securities fraud?

It's not really "selective" in that the cop would rather bust the weed smoker. Hell, the securities fraud is probably a felony, so I'm sure the cop would rather bust the rich guy if he could. But to the cop, it's just a dude in a suit working on his laptop. Nothing illegal about that, right?

How many open source efforts do you know of where there is only one version of the software? Forks are common and even encouraged! I name mysql because that's what's coming to mind right now, but there are several forks of it: drizzle, mariadb, Percona. I realize that the project has a semi-commercial license, but anyway, you get the idea. Projects fork all the time. Hell, there's a "fork" button right on github to make the process easier!

In the commercial software world, you don't get to just hit the "fork" button.

FYI, this article wasn't about removing the means to commit suicide from people like yourself. Since you suffer from long-term medical depression, should you make the long-run decision to take your own life, you would have sufficient time to plan your suicide. Hopefully you would not make such a decision and I genuinely wish you the best of luck in your treatment/coping--I'm just saying that this isn't aimed at people in your condition.

Instead, this method of removing easy access to suicide means is directed at people who ordinarily are not depressed or suicidal, but are temporarily so due to having suffered a trauma (or several traumas). The suicidal impulse may last only a few hours, and the person is unlikely to be thinking clearly at that time. So the idea is that if you can keep them alive until the suicidal impulse has passed, you will have saved that person's life.

So I think that this is really cool research, even if it doesn't pertain to people in a similar position as yourself. And I again wish you the best of luck.

The idea is to block the exits temporarily to thwart unplanned suicide attempts. The idea is to thwart the suicide attempt until the suicidal thoughts pass. Maybe just for a few hours until the mental breakdown subsides.

The article topic does not cover preventing planned suicide attempts.

Which I think* is the point of the article.

Let's say that a person is not suicidal, but suffers some trauma that sends him into a mental breakdown and he becomes suicidal during the breakdown. Once the breakdown passes, that person probably will no longer be suicidal. So the idea is to prevent easy access to effective suicide methods, and a handgun is certainly one of those methods.

If our temporarily-suicidal example person has easy access to a handgun during his suicidal episode, he could quickly and efficiently end his life, even though the suicidal episode might have passed after a few hours or days. So if we can prevent him from eating a bullet for just a few more hours, we can probably stop him from ending his life.

This method obviously wouldn't prevent planned suicide.

* I think, because I didn't actually read the article. This is still slashdot, after all!