You had it right the first time, snark should never be done half ass. Quality snark is to be admired and held up as a thing to be beholden. You have to take pride in your work, how can you take pride in half ass snark?

Fox news was established to cater to a market that wasn't being met by a person willing to meet it. The cable news at the time came in two flavors, CNN and CNN headline news both of which were owned by Ted Turner. Ted Turner is a billionaire corporate mongrel by the way, but he is a very liberal corporate mongrel (he was married to Jane Fonda for years). The result was that CNN reflected his political views and had a great number of disenfranchised viewers.

Murdoch had already built up a media empire in other parts of the world and saw the bias in the reporting and gladly exploited it by catering to a conservative viewpoint. You'll want to do some research on your basics, because conservative is not the same thing as pro-corporate or republican. Many very large corporations (e.g. Apple) publicly espouse views that are very much not in line with conservative dogma.

Not a conservative or republican or a Fox news fan, but this revisionist history stuff is as bad as the stuff that Fox is accused of at times.

Nonsense, it all boils down to human nature and people seeking out the 'truth' that matches their political views. People seek out the news that reinforces their views just as they always have. When a story comes along that reinforces your political views it's likely to get you read it because it confirms that you are "right".

The problem is that nowadays with the Internet we can make the problem with self referential reinforcement all the worse. Facebook, google and other sources are constantly trying to customize your news to make a tailored experience for you that will ensure you have higher click-through rates. They find the stories that you tend to click on and give you more of the same, after a while the result is that you only tend to see like minded stories. Log into a fresh computer and the news while look very different than the one you already use.

For example the gay waitress claiming to be insulted on a receipt - lots of people bought the story because they wanted to believe these things happen. Almost nobody bothered to check with the couple accused of the insult, and when they did they showed a credit card statement proving they left a good tip. People want to believe the things that confirm their political beliefs and they will seek out the news that does that and avoid the news that proves them wrong. It's human nature.

I worked at a University for a few years where we had thousands of staff tablets. I can assure you that the tablets never got used for anything other than consuming content, status symbols and brief emails or notes. Even when they were actually used to produce content it's always easy to tell when an email was written on a tablet due to the short and abbreviated way it was composed.

If your in school you should be there to produce content (homework, research etc) and for that a tablet is the worst choice possible, and it's no different for industry or government. It's the one thing Microsoft got right about the Surface, give it an integrated keyboard to make it feasible to actually produce content. Without the keyboard your left with a consumption device or a status symbol.

That being said, if Apple makes a 12.9" tablet, there are a lot of people that would buy it for a content consumption device just like they do with any other apple tablet. Apple should make it just for all the people that would appreciate a larger tablet for lounging around the house with and it would do quite well there, especially if it gets the upgraded screen that was talked about. But don't fool yourself into thinking that a larger tablet would have a damn thing to do with either education or producing content.

If he had been executed as he should have been we wouldn't have this problem. Death for spam, surely this sentence is the law in some country somewhere...

Your missing the point of doing this. This doesn't have anything to do with putting Android on the desktop, it has everything to do with sending a message to Microsoft. PC makers have suffered their largest decline in sales - ever. The decline has jack to do with tablets (which were for sale before windows 8) and everything to do with Metro. The manufacturers which have collectively lost billions of dollars on the disaster called Metro are at their wits end and desperate for Microsoft to change this.

Unfortunately for the industry Microsoft has only grudgingly provided half ass measures with boot to desktop (off by default) and the Start button that simply returns you to Metro instead of the Start Menu. It's a way for Microsoft to claim their listening without actually making the changes that are needed as it is still necessary to interface with Metro. The industry just went through a decade plus slump with XP and sees the writing on the wall that the enterpise will not touch windows 8. Home users are avoiding it because the reputation is worse than Vista, in fact it's uptake rate is even worse than Vista's.

It's a pissing contest and Microsoft has deeper pockets to wait things out longer than the manufacturers do. The manufacturers have begged, pleaded and screamed at Microsoft to revert back from forcing Metro on users by default. Everyone knows that Microsoft could easily restore the Start Menu and set the desktop to be the default, but they refuse to do it because they are trying to force people to become familiar with their tablet and phone interfaces and to use their marketplace.

The result is that the manufacturers are now sending a message to Microsoft that they can start putting Android on the desktop instead of Windows. It's a common Linux interface that the public knows and accepts, it's free and the app market is well established. By standardizing on Android for the desktop they could easily push enough development resources to make Android the desktop default. If Microsoft doesn't fix the issues with the Start Menu and boot to desktop by default 2015 could be the year of Linux on the desktop - by Android.

The problem isn't the capabilities of Unix, it's never been about that. The problem has always been about the usability of Unix from the average Joe's perspective. The fact that new users are typically told to RTFM and met with hostility certainly hurts the cause. It wasn't any different with DOS, it was a command line OS that was so counter-intuitive to learn that it spawned the entire 'For Dummies" series of books. By the time Windows 95 came out and put a useful GUI on DOS it was such a big deal that people lined up outside the stores at midnight just to buy it.

Steve Jobs understood this and worked ruthlessly to make Mac OS easy to use regardless of the back end. Nowadays you have the argument that Android and Mac OS/iOS are out there an extremely popular, but again they are simply GUI shells to the back-end that hide everything. Cisco routers and switches also have GUI's that will happily hide everything that was previously done by a command line. Really, the bottom line is that unless your in certain fields in IT or a programmer you don't have anything to gain by playing with command line. I grew up on the command line, I have spent decades with it, but I can't justify it to anyone just because I went through it.

Time's change, I remember supporting Novell Netware 2.x and 3.x and Token Ring, but I'm not about to suggest anyone spend time learning Netware or Token Ring either. I've had these conversations with people new to the field, they don't see the point, they just see a GUI to learn and buttons to click. The OS itself doesn't make a damn bit of difference, they don't want anything to do with a command line.

Early beer wasn't intended for getting drunk and wasn't as strong as the beer of today is. It was intended as a day in, day out workaday drink for the masses.

You've also got to remember that people back then didn't understand basic hygiene (Queen Elizabeth likely only bathed a couple times in her life) or why things like boiling water would be beneficial. Principals that today are widely understood simply weren't known back then. Even things as simple as washing your hands before surgery are very recent developments (more soldiers died from infections from wounds in the Civil war than were killed on the field).

What people did know was that people that drank beer didn't get sick like the people that drank water. They also knew that it tasted better than water and they were raised up on it as generations prior had been. It was likely cheaper to buy beer than the firewood to boil your own water if you lived in a city, it was also certainly less hassle when you consider that many households didn't have kitchens. In short there was simply no reason to go through the effort of boiling water.

Don't knock this as Homer Simpson level work, beer has shaped history for thousands of years. From the Pilgrims landing at Plymouth Rock to the establishment of trade routes beer has always had it's place.

The idea of beer as somehow being sinful is a bit like the diamond ring, it's essentially a modern invention. Monks in Europe brewed beer for centuries as a bonafide way to make money for the monastery to live on. Any number of religions have brewed and used beer for their religious purposes all over the world, it is literally a mark of civilization. When water was historically often filthy and unfit to drink, it's use as a stock drink for the masses wasn't anything to mess about with. When the colonies were established beer was one of the first priorities for the colonists.

The Recording and movie industries have spent decades trying to make an erasable Internet. In their fruitless endeavor they have been joined by countless embarrassed companies, politicians and countries. There is no such thing as an erasable Internet, and there never will be. The Internet isn't a single entity, it is an ecosystem made up of billions of parts with vastly different political, religious and personal views. None of which takes into account the crazy people, the Internet is full of crazy people, and you can't reason with them.

The article might as well be titled, Could we get rid of the tides if we didn't have a moon?

The root of the issue goes back to he had income that he did not report. It was the lifestyle and assets he had which proved that he had income beyond his means. Without any conceivable legal means to use to show as proof to justify the lifestyle and assets he had he was nailed for the tax evasion charges. The point very much stands as I made it.

If he mined them the block chain would provide that information in a heartbeat as it records it's entire history. If he has a pristine block chain than he could argue that they were mined and not from the proceeds of the crime.

I think the odds of that are very low though for two reasons. The first is that he used a program to tumble all the bitcoins together to make tracking for law enforcement more difficult. The problem is that by doing this he knowingly put his bitcoins into a money laundering operation and for that alone he would lose them. It's like knowingly investing otherwise good money in a drug deal before the feds bust it up, your money is gone even if you had nothing to do with the deal itself.

The second reason is that if they were indeed pristine from mining he would have immediately raised that to make a claim so that he could get access to them to help pay for his legal defense. He's facing decades in prison at best, if he could cut years off of that by using them to hire better legal counsel and experts he would in a heartbeat.

They are extremely volatile price wise, on this we agree.

Hypothetically speaking if they were pristine and purely an investment that went up, would that count as income before they were sold? I do know enough to know that such a claim could easily be proven by looking at the block chain to see if they were pristine bitcoins that had never been traded. It would be interesting to hear from a tax expert on that question as a number of slashdotters will have mined them back in the day and have sat on them.

If he got them in trade and didn't report the income than he has significant legal problems that would be no different than getting income from a foreign currency and not reporting it. With that bitcoin wallet being recently reported as being worth around $100 million dollars were talking significant money laundering charges and tax evasion charges if those coins weren't pristine.

Your an idiot without any idea of how the law works. So let me point you in the right direction with some links that didn't come from wikipedia.

http://www.law.cornell.edu/wex/forfeiture
http://www.mackinac.org/1274
http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/law-enforcement-bulletin/april-2012/money-laundering-and-asset-forfeiture
http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/investigate/white_collar/asset-forfeiture
http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=19&cad=rja&ved=0CHcQFjAIOAo&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.drugpolicy.org%2FdocUploads%2FAsset_Forfeiture_Briefing.pdf&ei=y6e5UofjNeGqyAGxxoHABQ&usg=AFQjCNH69cfy5T2Ayp8TL9L38XZJ4VPCcw&sig2=g3-gNZLWLpcJMyhtBipLCg

But hey, it's not like there isn't precedent going back centuries for doing this.

http://online.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424053111903480904576512253265073870

Even if he somehow could get out of the drug dealer and murder for hire charges he would still have the problem of proving how he legitimately got the money and why he didn't pay taxes on it. Penalties for failing to report tens of millions of dollars in income could easily put him in prison for a decades and would still result in the loss of the bitcoins because he can't prove any legitimate means why which he got them.

He admitted an entirely new set of felonies around taxes just to try to claim the bitcoins back. Again, he is one of the biggest idiots that the Internet has ever known.

That's the rub, in claiming them he has admitted a massive tax fraud that could put him behind bars in prison for just as many years. Since the bitcoins are a product of tax fraud they could be seized on that basis alone. They won't give the bitcoins back though, because he could turn them over to third parties and use them to do things like put out hits on witnesses - the thing that they shut down his operation for in the first place.

Remember it was taxes that did Al Capone in, everything else he had a handle on, he just couldn't prove how he got his money through any means that was honest.