That would be a guess. All LE, or anyone without inside access to Silk Road, could see is the funds going to the Silk Road wallet. Beyond that, there's no way to tell AFAIK. If the sender buys something, they could do it immediately, or not. They could wait months, with the coins there on their SR account. They might not even buy anything, they might just be using SR as a mixer service and withdraw to a different address to break the connection between themselves and their bitcoins.

All the researcher discovered was that the writer had sent funds to Silk Road. The article specifically points out they couldn't tell what, if anything, the bitcoins were used to buy. The headline is sensationalist, to say the least.

"Additionally, the government would not authorize us to separate NSLs from other government data requests or to express the NSLs that we have received, if any, as a range from 0 to 1,000" Did Yahoo just circumspectly say they have received between 0 and 1,000 National Security Letters?

Even if you don't think the devs have put a backdoor in yet, can you be sure they won't comply with a secret order to insert one into their system?

So... Another made-in-china Android device that you're supposed to trust with your personal data? Where's a privacy-oriented smartphone maker when you need one? Why didn't Ubuntu's marketing for their phone focus on that?

What's wrong with asking for voluntary donations?

Preventing economic growth seems like a solid environmental move.

I'm pretty sure most USians will turn into card-carrying communists any time if that's what it takes to keep fuel prices down.

I don't know where you get your information from. Shavers took deposits in bitcoins, promising to pay out again in bitcoins, with 7% or so weekly interest. The payouts went out for quite some time, presumably funded by new deposits, and then Shavers simply did a runner with the bitcoins he had accumulated. So it was very much a classic Ponzi scam.

2,000 g is 2 kilograms, surely? 2 milligrams would be 0.002 g. Perhaps you meant "mg" instead of "g"?

Is it?

That's what happens in an outbreak - a transmissible disease gains sufficient foothold in a community to spread wider than it usually does. It doesn't happen all the time, otherwise it wouldn't be unusual. Herd immunity provides protection when circumstances otherwise would conspire to allow for a disease to suddenly spread across a population.

I fully agree. However, there's a difference between saying your backups will be lost to you if you forget your password and saying the data will be properly encrypted with a key known to you alone...

And you would trust the encryption implementation to protect your data?

"Stopped thinking at birth", you mean.