It's official. Ross Ulbricht is trolling the government.

I spoke with someone who was involved in the process to determine jurors in highly technical cases, and the response was not promising. Essentially the first step of selecting jurors is to eliminate all candidates that have any technical or expert background because they can influence the other jurors.

The problem with that again is that it pressures me into using the Apple ecosystem. Apple is free to encourage me to use their other products and services, and many of them are quite useful, but if it is found that Apple has been deliberately gimping their hardware to pressure me into using their services then that is a legitimate anti trust issue. Personally I don't use any of Apple's other services, and I don't feel I should have to in order to do something as simple as update my OS.

Proving that Apple has been deliberately downgrading hardware to promote their services is probably impossible unless they find another video with Jobs being a dumb ass, but the limitations that I feel in their design still stand. And lets be honest. Packing a few more GBs into their $500 phones probably won't increase the cost in any meaningful way.

You are definitely right that they have taken steps to reduce the OS footprint, but I have a few issues with how their storage works:

1. The amount of space that they advertise doesn't include the OS and other apps meaning that if you purchase a device expecting 16GB to put music on, but learn that you have 12GB of usable space then that may cause me some annoyance in how I load my music and apps.

2. I believe another Slashdot article covered this but the total storage of apple devices in the first place tends to be rather low, and it was speculated that this is deliberate so that Apple can force people on to other services like iCloud to store their media which locks customers into their products.

3. On an 8 GB iPhone I had to delete every piece of media and almost every app just to be able to download the ios updates.

Even the example you give is still zero sum because the cap is what I am willing to pay not what I actually pay. If I am willing to pay 100$ a month on books, but I only spend 10$ on this service then your cap is still 100$ you just need to figure out how to get me to spend the rest.

The current model makes it easier to get me to my cap: ie make me buy more books, but that isn't to say that I can't b convinced to spend the other 90$ on other things like special edition hard copies, merchandise, etc etc. In either circumstance the limit of my expenditure is hard. I cannot/will not spend more than my cap, and that is were the article errs. The market is capped by willingness to pay and ability to pay like all markets, but it makes the assumption that what people are currently paying is the market cap, not what they are willing to pay.

It is very easy to increase the amount that people are spending but that doesn't increase the market cap only the amount of money in the industry. People will always want to spend less and that is the tug O' war of capitalism: figuring out how to get people to spend what they are willing to pay not what they are currently paying, and that is up to the publishers.

You are comparing the market to the buying habits of an individual here. Publishing has always been a zero sum game just like every industry ever because every market has a market cap. Regardless if one person spends more on books than another the size of the market still grows with the number of people and the amount they are willing to spend which is finite.

What this pricing model does is make the whales who buy tons of books worth less but it makes the people who normally spend less than 10$ a month on books worth a lot more, and there are far more people worth less than 10$ month now than there are people who are worth more than 10$. This will cause the value of each customer to become more similar because each customer is worth as much as their time not their wallet.

It is a new business model that could end up being very disruptive, but at the end of the day it is unlikely that it will seriously affect the market cap because that is what customers are willing to pay not just what are currently paying. In your example of getting a reader to read more it is easily doable under this model as well. encouraging people to spend more is what marketing is all about and that won't dry up because they discovered a cheaper service. All it will mean is that you will have to work harder to convince them to spend their money.

An apples to oranges comparison. Girls, like all children are forced to go to class, thus they naturally adapt (in this case they do so better than males), but choosing to join a club is an entirely different matter and takes into consideration far more than just the subject matter, namely personal enjoyment.

When you decide to engage in extra curricular activities ( what my original statement was referring to not the AP course ) you take into account all factors that affect your enjoyment including the prospect of being awkwardly hit on for being one of the only girls in the group. There is quite a bit of psychology around group dynamics involving a gender imbalance, and it rarely turns out well. Such pressures can be the tipping point that forces anyone out of an extracurricular program, not just women.

Imagine if you will, a scenario where you are given an opportunity to learn about a subject you truly love from one of the best experts in the field, but you would have to take the class with 10 of the most far right nut wingers imaginable. A classroom filled with Rush Limbaughs. Some would have the mental will power to ignore it and get some good out of the class and others will say hell no.

Granted that is an extreme example, but for a middle school or high school child who are not the most stable people to begin with they may choose to join their friend's clubs regardless of what they may truly enjoy and in the process find something different from STEM.

I can imagine the kinds of comments that are coming, but I have to say that I approve of these women targeted programs because I believe they do create an environment that encourages more participation. Most people feel comfortable around similar people especially at younger ages, and telling a girl that she will be in a class with other girls as apposed to a class filled with men could be the difference in her decision making.

Put another way, if a nerd was told they would be working with other nerds they would feel more comfortable trying to work in that environment because common background and common interests fuel conversation. Hopefully these women targeted programs will help some talented women on the fence to take the plunge.

I think you may be misunderstanding. The summary says that it is the engineered mice that could resist the sunlight while the normal mice became prunes. In this case the cream (more likely a shot) would be what allows you to stay out in the sun without using sunscreen at all.

In diabetes there is a new medication that I underwent clinical trials for that takes advantage of a certain trait of the body to dispose of sugars before the levels become too high. You see when the body becomes saturated with glucose the body takes it on itself to urinate out the excess sugars. Typically this threshold is at the 190+ level (where 140 is a normal maximum). Long story short the medication was a pill that lowered the threshold to the healthy 140 level so that even if you body took in all of that sugar it would dispose of the excess before reaching unhealthy levels.

In regards to the amount of food that we intake we don't convert all of that food into energy. Plenty of energy is lost in the inefficiency of the process of digestion. I see no reason why a pill couldn't be made to inhibit the intake, or facilitate the evacuation of, an unhealthy level of fats and carbs in the same way we can with sugars. Controlling factors like dosage and other things would be a challenge, but it is certainly plausible.

I agree with you that if you want to be truly healthy you will probably never be able to take a magic six-pack pill and exercise will always be a part of a healthy lifestyle, but for those who just want to take their weight down a level a pill like that would be a great option.

P.S. I do realize that the medicine in question is taking a different approach. I just wanted to point out that some precedent exists for this kind of thing, and it isn't all just snake oil.

It is very difficult to forge a Bitcoin, and the only only known way (controlling a 50%+ share of the entire pool) can easily be discovered. If it is discovered that Bitcoins are being forged then the value tanks and the people who were forging them lose big money so I think its fairly safe on that front. Certainly less likely that the banking industry crashing the economy again.

As for treating it like a commodity there is a very good reason for that as well because just like gold Bitcoin has no inherent value other than what we give it. Just like gold has uses in industry Bitcoin has fringe uses in driving anonymous transactions but the majority of all use is hoarding. I'm not saying that you use it like gold to shore up your investment portfolio with safe bets, but to look at it like an investment option which derives its value from belief that it has value (similar to currency which I feel is where the confusion on how to classify it comes from).

Invest in BTC like you would in any other volatile stock.

I'm like you in that I don't like the idea of a self regulated currency, but I don't find Bitcoin to be a problem because I have always looked at it as an investment similar to a stock or a bond. When you buy a Bitcoin you are buying the chance that they will become more valuable in the future. Funny enough the people who have made the most money from Bitcoin are the exchange traders and early adopters.

I think as long as you look at Bitcoin as a commodity and transactions like a barter or trade system then there isn't much of a problem when both parties understand that they are trading in goods not currency. As far as an actual currency it is far too volatile. You can't have a currency that changes value significantly in the time it takes to get to the grocery store.

Another great implementation for this will be images stored on smartphones. I know plenty of people who don't want to use iCloud (for good reason) that often have their phones filled quickly with music and photos. If you could halve the size of an image, you could greatly expand the usage of small hard drives on phones. Add to that the benefit of being able to send smaller images over your cell data plan and it feels like a natural fit.

It is an apples to oranges comparison. Constitution is the law that governs the land, and you are right; it has been wrong before, but the declaration of independance gives us the spirit of the law. The ideal which we were meant to aspire to.

During WWII we see the same kind of propaganda regarding the Japanese. We termed them as violent monkeys, and vicious barbarians for the manner in which they treated prisoners of war, and there executions which were also beheadings. Despite this, at the end of WWII when the Japanese surrendered we didn't exact vengeance by slaughtering all those who committed such crimes. Instead we cooperated with them to rebuild their homes an economies that had been decimated by war. Today we can see the results of that effort. Japan is one of the most peaceful nations in the world minus the bad blood between them and the Asian mainland, and we certainly aren't locked into a decades long struggle of occupation like we are in the middle east.

Contrast these results against Germany from WWI and we have clear definitive evidence that retribution fails where forgiveness succeeds. This isn't bleeding heart liberalism it's pure fact. If we just murder all of these men in cold blood, consequences be damned, then it is with 100% certainty that I can say it will only be a few more years until their sons pick up the guns and back we are to a cycle of perpetual war. If we want a happy ending to this then it will start by engaging that part of the world as less "enemies" and more "people."

So when the US firebombed civilian populations in Japan killing hundreds of thousands of people was that an act of war or terrorism? How about the more recent example of the US's use of drones to terrorize the local populations by flying overhead for days on end before firing missiles that more often than not kill 10x more civilians than actual militants? The debate has been going on long before that as to whether or not the civilian population, which drives the industry for the war machine, is as much a target in a war as any soldier. Does the man who builds warships become a military asset when he makes the weapons used to fight? How about the drone pilots? Do they stop being fair game when they leave the office and drive home?

The world trade center was targeted for the same reason as the pentagon. Not as a military asset but as a symbol. The pentagon represented the dirty dealings of the US through the CIA that built and ultimately abandoned Al Qaeda. While the trade center was the symbol of western capitalism which runs against the ideology of hard line Islam and Sharia.