Yeah, I have always thought it was weird that judges are supposed to take remorse into consideration when sentencing. It borders on violating the fifth amendment protection against self-incrimination, in my opinions. Because they are, judges have to form an entirely subjective opinion on that matter, and you end up with quotes like the above where she is basically countering the defenses narrative of how remorseful he was with her own narrative demonstrating why she doesn't but it.

I am undoing moderation to post this, because I have seen similar comments everywhere covering the story, all moderated up, and it simply isn't true.

Yes sentencing should be consistent which is why we have sentencing guidelines, and this judge followed them. He was convicted of running a continuing criminal enterprise which has a mandatory minimum sentence of 20 years. And it gets worse when you add up the offense levels in the guidelines for his crimes: It was demonstrated that people who took drugs purchased on Silk Road have died from that drug use, which give him a base offense level of 38. The continuing criminal enterprise offense adds 4 points, and since he played an Aggravated Role as the ring leader that adds another 4 points, bringing him to 46 points. The sentencing table for someone with no prior convictions and an offense level of 43 or more is a life sentence, period, and that is before talking about the other five charges he was convicted of! As a judge you would have to present a very strong argument as to why someone with that high of an offense level should get less than life.

The reason he got such a harsh sentence is because our drug laws are so harsh, not because the judge was harsh. Prosecutors have huge flexibility in what they charge people with, and in this case they threw the book at him.

The Orbital ATK merger is different because they had complementary capabilities and weren't really competitors. Orbital didn't have any experience building rocket motors; they have always refurbished ICBMs for military launches, or purchased motors for their private launches. Whereas Thiokol produced many of those original ICBM motors that Oribital was reusing, and was already contracting with them to produce new motors for Antares. There was/is some overlap in the non-launch services parts of the companies, but as far as launch goes it was a pretty natural fit for them to merge.

Here is a presentation given by John Carmack that explains it a bit better than my first link.

No, they are talking about a technique that is also used by Oculus to translate variable frame rate renderings to smooth fixed frame rate output without judder.

I don't know why this is moderated down, it is absolutely correct. Ubuntu provides and supports both upstart and systemd:

Mint is just following their lead, which makes sense given that Mint is based on Ubuntu. This is a non-story, fabricated because editors know systemd flamebait generates traffic.

And we've been doing it since at least the 1940s with everything from pharmaceuticals to fertilizer and hence it's extremely well developed and cheap technology.

That's how most of the '-contin' formulations work (eg oxycontin). You make tiny pellets of the analgesic, add a thin layer of wax to some, a thicker layer to some, a thicker yet layer to some, then make up a pill containing some pellets with no coating, and some with each of the increasingly thicker layers of wax. When you swallow the pill, the stuff with no layer goes into immediate effect (so you get fast acting relief). The acid in your stomach starts dissolving the wax around the rest, with the different thicknesses of wax acting to give a continuous release of the remaining analgesic. Different formulations have differing amounts of the initial uncoated analgesic.

The whole point of this is that they are planning to mandate that per-country licensing is illegal in the EU. The same way that the EU is a single market when it comes to physical goods, it will be a single market for copyright as well.

All roadworkers carry a device which signals to self driving vehicles that they can't pass through this area? The truck either re-routes, pulls over, or wakes the human substitute driver up.

That is the killer feature, IMHO. I was scrolling through expecting to just ignore this like I did the downloader, but that actually provides something of value above what you can do with the website.

In 17 years the number of complaints went up by 30%. However according to the Census Bureau, the number of "Mathematical and Computer Science" workers increased by 150% between 1997 and 2012 (from 1.3 Million to 3.3 Million). The number of job postings likely scaled similarly, so the complaints per posting actually went down.

Source:
http://www.census.gov/prod/3/9...
http://www.census.gov/compendi...

Except the whole part about inviting speakers who are actively trying to suppress free speech by banning the Quran.

Now, George was a good straight boy to begin with,
but there was bad blood in him someway
he got into the magic bullets and
that leads straight to Devil's work
just like marywanna leads to heroin
You think you can take them bullets and leave 'em, do you?
Just save a few for your bad days.
well...

Well, now we all have those bad days when we can't hit for shit.

The more of them magics you use,
the more bad days you have without them
So it comes down to finally
all your days being bad without the bullets
It's magics or nothing.
Time to stop chippying around and kidding yourself,
kid, you're hooked, heavy as lead

And that's where old George found himself.
Out there at the crossroads.
molding the Devil's bullets.
Now a man figures it's his bullets,
so it'll hit what he wants to hit.
But it don't always work out that way

You see, some bullets is special for a single aim.
A certain stag, or a certain person
And no matter where you aim, that's where the bullet will end up.
And in the moment of aiming, the gun turns into a dowser's wand,
and point where the bullet wants to go

I guess old George didn't rightly know what he was getting himself into,
the fit was on him and it carried him right to the crossroads.

- Tom Waits, The Black Rider