Seeing as how the BBC article clearly mentions that the "Passengers" (aka Researchers) on the ship have been rescued, but that the crew members of the ship are staying on board and could be stuck for several weeks, I hope the attention span of the people keeping an eye on the ship is a bit better than that of the /. editors, who had apparently forgotten that the crew exists before they reached the bottom of the article...

The two scenarios where I see this being a benefit for the surveillance and intelligence-gathering community is that:
(a) Other alphabet soup agencies in the US and abroad will get an even better idea of what the NSA are gathering, and they will then push even harder for similar capabilities within their domestic spheres to give them more trading options with NSA and others, "because if the NSA needs this information, then so do we" and
(b) The scrambling by pro-surveillance lobbyists and lawmakers to say that this is legal, followed by the judicial branch issuing judgements on this "grey area" of the law in conflicting and contradictory rulings, to the point where the lawmakers again need to step in with a new law that "clarifies" the current situation.

Although the fact that I can even call this a "grey area" is frankly laughable. While I am sure the collective efforts of the judiciary ruling on cases which impinge on Constitutional issues of the last 100 years have not been a co-ordinated campaign to weaken and obviate the Consitution, the end result is that the Constitution is no longer a shield for the people protecting them from Federal Government and limiting the reach of those in power. It now has so many holes in it that it is barely a safety net" between the two groups - it stops most of the baseballs thrown at it, but bullets will easily find the holes.
Note: The previous comment is not intended to be a suggestion that the people of the United States of America should round up the politicians, lobbyists, lawyers and judges and shoot them.

Having said that, as bad as the USofA has become, it is still possible to criticize the US Government in this way without being dragged away to re-education classes or prison camps. Mostly... so far.

No, no... the NSA is always on the lookout for intelligence. One of their analysts at one point had some intelligent material in their possession. But given the choice of spit or swallow, it was swallowed, flushed and lost.

...that kind of scale could work.
For a bounty of $150,000 to be "less than two-tenths of 1% of those companies' annual revenue" (I am assuming that is each company's annual revenue calculation, not a global pool), that suggests the model is aimed at companies with >$75M annual revenue.
Newsflash for the paper authors... there are not many software development companies in that ballpark. Granted, the smaller the company, (probably) the smaller the market for their software so the smaller the need for such a bug bounty.
But if companies are going to be "compelled" to buy bug reports, that is going to require federal legislation which is not good at such fine-tuned work, especially after 150 groups of lobbyists have crafted their specific amendments to it, at which point companies will shift development efforts offshore, causing the federal legislation to be retargeted at company head-office location or companies whose software is used within the country, and a legal dance to get around the legislation begins, assuming software dev houses do not simply say their software cannot legally be used within USA.

Very true, but "the taxpayer" did not choose to invest in GM in the first place, the US Government did. Equally, "the taxpayer" did not choose to sell their shares in GM, at a lower price than those shares were bought for (thus generating the losses), the US Government did.
The US Government had a very compelling reason for buying those shares and shoring up the GM corporate entity and its supply chain. However, there was no contractual obligation for them to sell the shares when they did - as far as I can tell, that decision to sell was made for purely political/PR decisions. Admittedly, those reasons are also compelling - if the US Government introduces and legislation that will have some kind of positive impact for car manufacturers, then there is a conflict-of-interest issue to be addressed, so it is in the Government's interest to avoid holding the shares for an extended period.
However, the Government decided to sell when it did, and the Government is (or should be) responsible for the losses incurred through that decision. After all, if the transaction had yielded a massive profit, the Government would not have been willing to hand that profit over, either back to GM for further investment or to some other organisation that could use it. That profit would go to the treasury to be used.
The company whose shares are being bought and sold has no control over that process, as the shares are freely tradeable on the open market. So without any leverage of control, the company cannot assume the liability for losses. Want to complain about it? Welcome to capitalism. Complaints can be addressed to our Complaints Manager, Helen Waite. Her office is in the basement. Form a queue outside the door, and when someone asks what you are doing, tell them that you were told to go to Helen Waite.

The biggest security hole in any operating system is the same in every operating system - the source of ID-10-T and PEBKAC errors (Idiot, and Problem Exists Between Keyboard and Chair) - the OS can be totally secure and hardened, but if it allows users to do stupid stuff then it is still going to be vulnerable.
Unless, of course, the system is totally locked down so that it resembles the IT version of a strait jacket, in which case users will spend as much time cursing the fact that the computer stops them working, and trying to get around your restrictions to see their lolcat pictures as they do actually working.

If the physical object itself was a legal form of currency, then I could get behind what the Government are doing... but as the Government has only just started to recognise Bitcoin as a commodity with value, I fail to see the rationale behind this unless either the Government people behind the idea are crazy for power or they actually think that the physical "coin" this guy makes is what carries the value.

As it stands, I would say that the physical object here is closer to being an ornament, perhaps a small piggy bank - for example, he charges $50 for these items, and people send him $100, so he returns an item with a $50 note inside it. He has sold them a container, not a representation of money. Because in the case of the Bitcoins, the representation of money is the cryptographic key which is inside the item he has made, and the value of the item he has made is that of the materials used in its construction plus his time and effort.

Having a huge religion is probably not enough to get you a part in a porn movie, though.

Bah, I hate it when /. blocks characters it knows nothing about... Pnyn should come out to be something like Pinyin, but with a bar over the i's :(
Hopefully the community do not slaughter me for that mistake *prays*...

The iDot... Apple's new (patent and copyright pending) way to end sentences and provide a break between the integer and fractional parts of a number. According to Apple, it looks better than the old "decimal point" that it replaces, it has more caché, has been designed with usability in mind, and it runs the latest version of iOS.
It is also fully compatible with your web browser and email system, and all such systems will be automatically upgraded to work with the new symbol.
A small licensing fee will be levied by Apple for the use of this incredible and ground-breaking new technology, and their lawyers will be in contact with each and every one of you in due course, to arrange your payment of this licensing fee, along with the pre-defined hourly rate for the lawyers' time spent on the case.
Failure to pay the licence fee and other associated fees will cause a general reduction in your attractiveness to the opposite sex, and infestation of Locusts to descend on your house, you will be afflicted with Cooties, and you will henceforth be referred to by anyone who hears about the failure to pay the license fee for such a useful and necessary implement as "that iDot".

Oh and if you believe the Urban Dictionary, ying-yang is the erroneous spelling of the phrase "yin-yang", which is the simplified form of "ynyáng", the Pnyn (phonetic method of representing Chinese characters in western script) spelling of the Chinese characters which define Yin and Yang. So, it looks like the OP is not the "iDot" in this case...

Anonymity (for a Government that fears either its own people or someone else's) is, in my opinion, a direct threat to that government, because they seek leverage/power over those individuals or institutions that they fear, as a means of control. But that is my very Orwellian 1984-type negative opinion of people who seek power through political office speaking... I am sure that nobody in the US political machine is actually like that...

As for dark pools, they work on a double-blind system, for fungible assets (a fungible asset is one that is directly and equally swapable for any other identical asset - a $10 bill can be swapped for any other $10 bill in the system without gaining or losing any value, with the only real difference being that one is slightly dirtier, more crumpled and more bacteria-ridden than the other - a bank will still give you $10 for it if you take it in).
In simple terms, a dark pool allows me to say that I want to sell 100 of a particular item at a particular price, usually shares in a company, but fundamentally it could be anything fungible. You might post that you want to buy 150 of that particular item, again at a particular price. Neither of us sees that the other has posted something relevant to our request, but the dark pool system will see both requests and pair them up if the prices we are both looking for match. Once the trade has been completed and ownership is transferred, then the trade can be examined to see who the two parties in the transaction were (if you want truly anonymous trading, then most of the major trading exchanges for fungible assets - NASDAQ, LSE, NYSE, and so on - have anonymous exchange trading platforms which keep the identities of the parties involved in the transactions secret even after the trade has completed, although this information can be obtained by law enforcement agencies with a court order, or probably by the NSA without one...).

For many people/sheeple, they derive comfort from the idea that they are (a) Right, and (b) in the majority (with "right" being determined at the time with incomplete information by who is either in the majority or who shouts loudest).
Things like the medieval opinion that the world is flat, that women or specific ethnic/indigenous groups are unimportant/inferior, or the Standard Model of particle physics, and even with religion, show that there is great comfort in being in the majority.
Choosing to go against the majority can be a brave decision to stick up for your principles, or it can simply be a sign of bloody-mindedness with no better reason than a desire to not conform (guess who usually plays the Devil's Advocate in one-sided discussions?)
In many instances, humans exhibit a profound "herd animal" instinct, where the outsider/outlier is attacked, from children in the playground picking on the smallest or the one who is different because one powerful individual does so, to the people in a meeting rounding on a dissenting voice because their manager does the same. For those people, conforming to another person's idea is an easy thing to do because then it is not necessary to think about the situation and come up with your own opinion, especially if that opinion might align with the one being attacked so that you either have to support that individual and yourself face attack or willingly go against your opinion... better to not think at all and "go with the flow".

The critical thinker who is appreciated in their own lifetime is typically the one who comes with a blindingly obvious idea which improves things all round, whose idea does not cause the loud shouters to lose prestige or influence because they did not themselves see that idea. Given that most critical thinkers' ideas piss off at least a few people and show them as being wrong, it takes time until those loud people lose their influence (or those people find a way to adopt the new idea without losing face) before the critical thinker's contribution has a real chance of being acknowledged and properly valued.

Yes and no... as a bona fide cynic, I will believe that the sun is made of twinkie foam before believing anything that any CEO says about increased costs justifying higher prices or smaller price reductions. But at the same time, a 350mm wafer means more chips per wafer, not smaller chips. That does help them increase yield (number of viable chips per wafer), so that each wafer is worth more (but also costs more, because it is larger... the increased value is greater than the increased cost, however, for Silicon wafers and slightly better but not as good as Silicon for the more exotic wafer types - Gallium Arsenide, Cadmium Telluride, etc. because of the extra manufacturing complexity inherent in larger wafer production for compound wafers).
So the cost per chip with larger wafers comes down, but as you refine the process node and make your devices smaller, those devices become more sensitive to tiny imperfections in the wafer, whether it is a break in the crystal lattice caused by the wafer cutting or a foreign body lying across the surface of the wafer, so those process node enhancements typically drive yield down.
It comes out a bit like Intel's tick-tock processor release model - improve the process nodes to drive down the die size and make smaller devices but which result in lower per-wafer yields as the "tick" phase, then larger wafers with the same process node to drive per-wafer yields back up as the tock phase.
Given that the investment in each process node improvement costs many many billions of dollars, probably every 3 years, that is a huge capital cost that needs to be recouped or written off, and not many companies are going to be able to write off that kind of expense regularly (which is why we have so few companies at the cutting edge of semiconductor fabrication)...

Almost certainly they are using a Commodity Futures Contract model that is used for precious metals, oil/petroleum, wheat and so on, on places like the Chicago Board of Trade or the London Metals Exchange. With those, there is a finite new supply of "product" and for the vast majority of people dealing with them, there is no physical product - the contracts being traded are for future delivery of a specific quantity of a specific product on a specific date. The product will be delivered to a specified place, and it is the responsibility of the person receiving the product (the contract owner as of the contract maturity date/product delivery date) to move it from that delivery point to a storage location of their choice.
As such, the traders who buy and sell these contracts do not want to hold them until maturity, because they have no storage space, so they buy the contracts (for example) 12 months before the delivery date for a specified price, and sell them before maturity, hopefully for a profit.

With bitcoins, there are no physical deliverables, but in every other important sense they resemble these Commodities Futures contracts.
If they became widely accepted and centrally traded, with a central body guaranteeing transaction integrity (basic ESCROW systems would probably be the starting point for that), they would almost certainly be traded as a "standard" currency on FX markets (exchanging Bitcoins for US Dollars, Euros, Japanese Yen, etc.), but without that central body guaranteeing the transactions, they would probably be traded as Commodities Futures.

The "problem" with both of those routes is that there is heavy auditing on every stage of every transaction, so the anonymity aspect of Bitcoin goes right out of the window. The parties involved in any given transaction would be known and recorded, and even if those are brokers acting on behalf of the real Bitcoin owners, the brokers would still need to have records showing who the real owner is.

In the world of athletics, the athlete is responsible for verifying beforehand that any substances entering their body are free from performance-enhancing drugs and a range of other substances. In this case, that same rule seems to have been applied to software - the admins are responsible for code entering the body of the application.
Aside form anything else, my opinion is that someone on the project should have oversight of new code submissions before they are committed to the main codebase. If that is not happening here, then this is a lesson in stupidity for the admins. If it is happening, then the admins really are facilitating, because they have explicitly allowed that functionality into the application. Flipping the coin again, if the admins explicitly allowed the content without realizing what it does, then they have commited code without understanding the purpose or impact of the code, and we are back to the lesson in stupidity again...