Essentially, they're just converting currencies. If they had seized a large pile of Yen, they could just convert it to US$, since there are highly liquid markets to do that. With Bitcoin, there isn't the liquidity to run a transaction of this size through any of the exchanges, so they're auctioning them off. Investors do similar things with stocks every day - if you're a mutual fund, and you want to sell 10k shares of AAPL (which trades about 50 million shares a day), you just sell it through an exchange. If you want to sell 10 MILLION shares, you probably negotiate a price with a major bank, since trying to dump that much stock on the open market will crush the price.

They're auctioning them off because Ulbricht has explicitly denied that they're his. He's in a tough position - if he claims them as his own, he's acknowledging that he was running Silk Road.

So, based on this algorithm, the #1 priority author would be Sherrilyn Kenyon (who writes paranormal romance), followed by Al Sarrantonio (who writes horror, and puts together a bunch of anthologies), and Muammar Gaddafi (yes, that Muammar Gaddafi). Number six is Gardner Dozois, who's also (like Sarrantonio) an anthologist.

If this is designed to be popularity-based (e.g. designed to determine what people most want to see get scanned/uploaded/entered/produced by something like Gutenberg, rather than an assessment of the aesthetic/historical value of the works), an algorithm that puts these folks at the top, and puts massively popular authors like Stephen King (867) and Tom Clancy (1883) far down the list, is more that a bit suspect

The case was brought by a number of parties, who have separate claims against Iran, North Korea, and Syria. All have gotten judgments, now they are trying to collect on them. For the North Korea judgment, the claim results from a 1972 terrorist attack in Israel. The attackers were actually Japanese, part of a Japanese terrorist group called the Japanese Red Army, loosely linked (if I remember correctly) to the German Red Army Faction, and backed by a Palestinian terrorist group (offshoot of the PFLP), the same folks who hijacked the plane to Uganda, resulting in the "Raid on Entebbe." The court ruled that the terrorists' training had been funded at least in part by North Korea.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Have had to in Italy, Germany, the UK, Netherlands, Austria, probably several more.

As to the ID and credit card thing in the US, that's the hotel's doing - they want to make sure they get paid, and that the person using John Smith's credit card actually is John Smith, and not some guy who's going to raid the minibar and walk out with the towels and the TV.

The group clearly has a bee in their bonnet about Google. Pretty much every month, they put out a big press release attacking something the company does.

http://insidegoogle.com/

So, we should never have any international treaties about anything that's not an existential threat? Got it. Let's dump that pesky Geneva Convention, the human race will survive whether or not prisoners are tortured. Let's also drop those treaties around the use of space - if we end up with satellites in the same orbital slot, interfering with each other's signals, it won't result in the end of the human race.

Ever consider that something that's not absolutely perfect in every possible way could still be an improvement over the status quo? A car doesn't get you from point A to point B instantly, does that mean we should just walk everywhere? Of course not.

China's producing 7.2 tons per person. The US is producing 16.5 tons per person.
http://www.bbc.com/news/scienc...

The US is committing to cutting its emissions to 14.1 tons per person (down 27% from 19.3 in 2005). That's still 2x China's current level. Why on earth would China agree to forever have half the emissions per capita of the US?

Because, if GNOME prevails, there wouldn't be damages, just the rejection of Groupon's trademark applications.

It's not like you can live the rest of your life on €51,000, but that doesn't mean that the people who can afford to spend that on Patek Philippe watches aren't rich.

$200k is more than the net worth of 70% of US households, even if they sold everything they owned, including their houses.

Also, Antarctic cruises are more like $20k/head - $30k gets you very top end. Again, while there are millions of people who can afford this, that doesn't mean they're not rich, unless you want to define rich as "no possible way you could ever spend it all in your lifetime."

Again, for any reasonable definition of rich, people who can afford to spend $200k for this jaunt are rich.

$200k is FOUR TIMES the median annual family income in the United States, and that's before taxes. Yeah, if you have $200k to spend on a discretionary jaunt like this, you're rich, by any reasonable measure. Doesn't mean there aren't millions of people who could afford it (it's a big country, and a big world), but they're without a doubt rich.

Agreed. I'd bet real money that the delta between the mean and median salary at Amazon is a lot bigger than at Facebook or Google.

Comparing Amazon to Google or Facebook, is really apples-to-oranges, given that they're in very different businesses.

Don't you think that distributors actually have thought this through, and have done a lot of research on price elasticity in games? Why would you assume that people for whom the pricing of games is a multi-million or multi-billion dollar question are totally wrong about optimal pricing, and instead that your own personal price elasticity curve holds true for the population as a whole?

You say that, for every "sucker" who pays $60, there are "100s willing to pay a sensible price." Modern Warfare 3 sold 6.5 million copies on its first day, in the US and UK, at $60/copy. You really believe that, at $10, it would have sold 650 million copies? That's more than the combined population of those two countries put together.

Good point, and I'd add that very smart, very well-meaning people have substantial disagreements about "what is necessary." I'm not talking about people (and there are a lot) who define "what is necessary" as "what will benefit me personally, or the people who pay me," but rather the fact that there's a lot of honest disagreement in the economics community about what exactly would "fix the economy and create jobs."