I agree. Even before 1960, retreads of "Frankenstein's monster runs amok" and "here in our dying galactic empire..." were run of the mill. In fact, Asimov's great accomplishment is to figure out how to start discussing ideas about how robots might affect human society that did not involve any machines running amok.

It may not be a dystopic story, but it takes place in an extremely dystopic setting that seems sophisticated to teenagers because it employs slightly subtle royalist and "ends justifies the means" arguments. The idea that there could be non-feudal or non-authoritarian forms of gov't that could sway the human future are simply handwaved away with the suggestion that such societies can never effectively compete.

As for the story itself, is not clear that Paul makes the world a better place in any clearly positive nameable way. It is implied he prevents complete evil (the Harkonnens) from making a grab for the imperial throne. But the fact the Harkonnens could even attempt that is really a side effect of the nominally religious Bene Gesserit having abandoned pretenses of morality for a chance to seize more power.

"a nuclear program for decades" does not really mean anything. It is a deliberately wishy washy description that could include a single guy with a Physics bachelors who downloads stuff off the web and reads standard textbooks. We built our first bombs in less than three years, after proof that chain reactions were possible at the the Chicago pile, back seven decades ago. With so much useful information about nuclear fission out in the public record today, that a program that last decades without building a weapon is actually evidence of a lack of enthusiasm in going nuclear at all.

The secret of the nuclear bomb is that it is practical to build a nuclear bomb. Any nation who really makes it a priority is likely to succeed within 5 or 6 years. Several nations have demonstrated exactly that.

If Iran were actually ruled by leaders who thought that the 12th Iman would return and kiss their own crispy foreheads as well as the crispy heads of their grandchildren, they could have simply rained down conventional missiles on Israel and gotten that response. Why not go to heaven sooner, rather than later?

You do not get the full benefits of membership in the nuclear club by acting crazy. The crazy talk is not actually helping North Korea, it is only causing China to see the day to whip North Korea into better behavior is coming sooner than they expected.

Held onto as a last resort, nuclear weapons are a positive asset. Employed recklessly, nuclear weapons are a liability -- because once you have been proven to be completely reckless, the entire nuclear club with see the reasonableness of scraping your sorry nation off the face of the earth with nuclear fire. Where is the fun in that?

Furthermore, letting nuclear weapons out of your fortified safe places is dangerous. Crazy terrorist groups do crazy things. In the case of Iran, the ME is filled with enemies. Can you be sure it will not be captured and used on YOU? Absolutely sure? Is this a risk that is so worthwhile? Mossad is likely to figure out where the bomb came from -- there are only a few possible sources. So your plausible deniability game does not guarantee anything.

You should read up on what Lincoln thought about "splitters". He strongly disagreed with exactly what you suggest, based on his political experiences. One party splitting tends to severely punish the point of view of all those in the split group -- not always, but usually. The problem is that the non-split party has a cakewalk to victory.

BTW, I do sympathize with your point of view, and I often vote for third parties, as well as the major parties.

You have a lack of imagination, my friend. Dear old Mitt as much as admitted that he knew squat about foreign policy. His solution? Call Bibi. Bibi is a man who will stalwartly defend Israel from Iran down to the last drop of American blood.

"I really don't see how he could be." just does not make any sense. Maybe you doubt Mitt would be worse. I can respect that. But not imagining how he could be worse is really not thinking through how much fun we had in Iraq.

However bad you might think Obama has been, we could very easily do much much worst. Enough of the voters saw Obama as a known quantity, and Romney failed to make the case he knew any better.

It is quite common to find a good hire, and then be very interested in who they would recommend. Or the people left behind ask about this new opportunity the hire left for, become interested, and ask to have their resumes forwards. I have seen a number of hires that come in such clusters of 3 or 4 in Valley, and I am not a well connect or a highly knowledgeable person on this topic. Even the "cluster" is spread out over a few months, it can feel like "unfair" poaching if a certain key group is denuded.

Someone named rossulbricht@gmail.com revealed himself as one of the first people who knew about Silk Road. Item #4 in TFA. (Could be lying/misinformation, but it is a plausible explanation.)

Yup. The real secret to not being caught by Columbo is not, as would be geniuses tend to think, by having a "full proof" scheme by which Columbo will never be able to prove you did it. It is by never showing up on Columbo's suspect list in the first place. Ulbricht's post that reveals his email was probably his doom, putting him on a select list of mere hundreds of people who knew about Silk Road early in the game. Then it becomes a numbers game, and the list shortens and shortens until the Dread Pirate has made one too many small errors.

Without bank-like entities with a hoard of bitcoins, there cannot be effective cross currency exchanges. Without exchanges there is very limited liquidity. Without liquidity, bitcoin will always vacillate wildly. A currency that vacillates wildly is a toy currency for the very wealthy to use for a bit of "pin money", something the 99% should avoid like the plague.

The reason is it easy to pay a small fee for this escrow handling for things like houses is because we have reliable banks for the USD currency. Such a service would be a natural business for an bitcoin bank/exchange to be involved in. Unfortunately bitcoin exchanges seem to vaporize due to inside jobs. I am 99.99999999% certain that a title company that happens to be handling the escrow account working with the loan agent from my personal bank is not going to walk away with my money or will be able to stand behind statements about funds being on hand, because there are layers of law and protections. How assured to the customers of MtGox feel about this kind of thing?

I think that is rubycodez's point -- ex-military might have hands on experience with many kinds of fairly "advanced" stuff (at least from a pedestrian civilian's POV).

Of course, not even the most brain dead conservatives believe that nonsense. If it were true, then successful businesses would soon enough succeed to roughly the same level, regardless of whether the profits were taxed 10% or 20% or 40% or 60%.

Mortars are not going to disappear because they are useful, but there are many known practical countermeasures to mortars, including mortar counter fire.

Drones offer a special new kind of threat because it is easy to imagine them having the intelligence to home in from many locales miles away and create an overwhelming & lethal swarm in a particular area. The ability to mass firepower is a basic combat strategy. Drones offer new ways to mass firepower quicker than ever from disparate military units spread over 100 square miles or 1000 square miles or 10000 square miles.

I do not think anybody particularly cares about cash found next to the evidence of an overtly prosecutable crime. The problem is when the cash itself seems to be the target, in the absence of any apparent crime. The examples the made the news were things like driving 64 mph in a 55 mph zone with $5000 cash on hand -- here is your speeding ticket and the police keep the $5000 cash.