They never want me. They find out I won't enforce the law as written if I find it to be immoral, and that's that.

Hopefully eventually they will be unable to find enough jurors who don't feel like me in the jury pool! But I guess I'm feeling over-optimistic today.

True. And I used to buy that. :( I hardly ever fly, and I used to actually think I should have a say in what other people do in life.

Sounds like a job for a jury! :)

Mod up to 6!

What does that have to do with it? Even if it were a mere convenience or luxury, the point of government is to secure the right to liberty. That includes the liberty to enjoy some things that some people might regard as a luxury (a subjective judgment if I ever heard one), so long as I am not doing so at the expense of somebody else's right to life, liberty, or property.

No, it isn't. Everything they have was acquired through theft and coercion.

I'm 36 and my opinion on this has been stable for 8 years. Hopefully you will engage in less name calling when you grow up.

Actually it leads to more efficient use of space through price rationing.

Who cares what the city government wants to avoid? They have no more right to enforce their will than any of the rest of us.

On the other hand, it's okay when we do it!

There are a whole host of reasons why what you are saying is impossible. First off, no matter how much CPU power you accumulated, you wouldn't be able to rival the hashes per second being put out by the custom hardware. If you rooted and botnetted every CPU on earth you would still only be a fraction of the hashes per second of the Bitcoin network. CPUs for Bitcoin mining were obsoleted by GPUs long ago, and both CPUs and GPUs are now way-obsoleted by ASIC.

Also, even if you were able to control a majority of the hash power on the Bitcoin network, you would still not be able to spend somebody else's Bitcoin. To do that you would have to crack the private key for the account containing the Bitcoin. Doing that is a totally different math problem from what Bitcoin mining hardware is doing, and there are a lot of visuals out there illustrating that it would likely take longer than the projected life of the universe to crack these keys using currently available methods. If you had a majority of hashpower on the network, you could alter the blockchain, which is the ledger showing in what order transactions occurred. This would allow you to double-spend your own Bitcoin and cheat somebody, but would not allow you to spend somebody else's.

Bitcoin stories shouldn't mention MtGox any more than dollar stories should mention Enron.

Not to anyone who actually follows Bitcoin. MtGox was old news in 2013, a year before it actually failed. Bit coin's success was never based on MtGox - it was the other way around. And the failure of a fraudulent company in the Bitcoin space made Bitcoin stronger, not weaker.

Tired of hearing this illogical assertion repeated.

That would be the definition of best-ever Congress, then.

I suspect that in the last year since the Snowden revelations a lot more eyes have suddenly gotten focused on these packages. People are going to be looking for real security and wanting to make sure there are no secret backdoors, intentional or otherwise, in the code they depend on.

I bought my first Windows 8 machine in January, not by choice. The new app system confused me to death, and still does. I had no idea what the name for it was until your post. I will be forever grateful to you for providing the name "metro app" so that I can google what in the world this is and learn what I can do about it.

I tolerate Windows 8 about as well as its two predecessors. The first thing I do on a new Windows machine is install Firefox and Cygwin, and since I spend most of my time in those two environments I usually don't care very much what OS I am on. With Windows 8 the one exception has been the new metro-ized Windows Media Player, which I had to promptly replace with VLC player.

The printed documentation that came with my Windows 8 box was useless about all this new stuff. It seemed to think the first thing I would want to know was how to find something called "Windows charms." Frankly that sounded awfully girly to me so I wasn't much interested, but they seemed so proud of it I went to check it out. I wasn't much impressed, and I'm not sure why they thought that should be question #1 on the cards they printed and stuffed in the box.

Many thanks for just those two words!

Yet this study doesn't seem to support that. It would be interesting to see a similar study done that draws a distinction based on the exact reason for rejecting the theory of evolution.