The article itself mentions that five of the attempts to hire a hitman were actually scams targeted at Ulbricht - it seems more like it was "hitmen" soliciting or trying to solicit him rather than him soliciting them. Given that, even the single supposed attempt by Ulbricht to hire a hitman sounds off - you would think that the prosecution would have charged him with something if they felt they could make it stick, which makes me wonder about entrapment in that case.

I think Ulbricht has a pretty good case for an appeal here. Take the part in the article where the federal prosecutor mentioned that people had died from overdoses of drugs they had purchased on Silk Road. The way the prosecutor says this, they make it sound like Ulbricht had something to do with their deaths by overdose, when in all likelihood they would have purchased drugs and overdosed from somewhere other than Silk Road had the site not existed. The same thing goes for the failed attempt at hiring a hitman - they didn't charge him in that case, and yet it was still being brought up as "character evidence".

I really fail to see what makes Ross Ulbricht any different from a regular drug dealer on the street (few of whom get life sentences) other than the massive amount of media attention that Silk Road got and that he was dealing drugs over the internet.

The newsworthy part isn't that they constructed noise-reducing landscape around an airport, but that they did it in a way that is palatable to the general public and reduced noise levels significantly. If you read the article, the point is that the same principle could be applied in the United States to reduce airport noise, as an alternative to having fewer flights, which would impact things like airline ticket prices and flight availability.

The real newsworthy part is that you can get the NIMBY crowd to stop complaining if you dress up things like berms as a public park and "land art" rather than "We're going to build some six-foot-high mounds of dirt to reduce the noise coming from the airport".

Oh, okay. Thanks for clearing that up for me, makes a lot more sense now.

The logic the majority used in ruling on this case seems pretty simple (unless I'm totally off): the patent troll had a patent that was still legally valid because there had been no court challenge to declare it invalid. Because the patent was still legally valid, the infringement of the patent is still a valid cause of action in a lawsuit.

Scalia's logic is that you can bypass a legal challenge over a patent that might be ruled invalid in court because it was never valid in the first place. The question is, though, how would you know whether the patent is valid without the court saying so?

I've seen plenty of college courses where the professor makes a powerpoint and teaches to the powerpoint, to the point where the person in front of the room could be any person off the street with zero knowledge in the subject they're teaching. The worst example of this I've seen was a physics class in which the professor was not only teaching to the powerpoint, he was teaching to a powerpoint made by the publisher of the textbook. That particular class got so bad that a bunch of the students dropped it because they realized they could just download the powerpoint themselves and get the same "education" for free.

I think the fear is more that kids will see this stuff while doing research for school (especially in earlier grades where they don't necessarily know better) and take it for granted. I had a professor in college who showed me a site that popped up when searching for information about the civil rights movement and Martin Luther King, Jr. that was actually run by a racist group, which contained blatantly false information. As I recall, it appeared near the top of Google results at the time, but this was five or six years ago.

I think this kind of stuff should remain up, though. There's the free speech issue, but I think it's a really good way to teach kids how to find proper sources of information.

What I'm wondering is what would have happened had this iPad crash occurred during the flight post-takeoff. Why do they not carry the paper manuals as a backup in case this sort of thing happens?

I think this case should absolutely be used as precedent when and if they sentence Edward Snowden. I think a two year suspended sentence, followed by a Congressional Medal of Freedom would be an appropriate sentence.

I don't know how viable these devices are for mass production or what it takes to keep them running, but you could potentially use them in places (building roofs, taller light fixtures in parking lots) where there isn't enough space or it isn't viable to plant trees.

I do recall, however, someone pointing out to me that industrial hemp is more efficient at removing co2 than even some trees.

I can remember reading several articles which stated that cryonics doesn't work because the freezing process is not perfect - it does not stop decomposition, which older frozen specimens were starting to show. Why do people still spend money on this?

I wouldn't be surprised if it's because they thought the iPad is the "best tablet" due to its branding. I used to carry a Nexus 7 to work and half the people there thought it was a phone.

According to the article, the person who died was a British multimillionaire who was the head of the company that purchased Segway.

I think the real story here is that a Georgian man's cellphone became sentient and was using him as a proxy to enter chess tournaments. The phone is the real grandmaster here.

The sheriff in this case sounds like he read a Judge Dredd comic and assumed it was supposed to be a manual for how the justice system should work.