Has no one noticed that the coins disappeared at almost the same time the FBI seized Silk Road's Assets?

We're past groundhog day..

So it's acceptable, then, because they've always done it. Gotcha.

er,.. Linux was aping Multix and other *nix. It came out pretty original.

While I do wish the kids would go outside and play, it's not minecraft that's the problem, it's just the way kids are in the time of "playdates". Minecraft however is such a great game for them. It basically replaces the hours I spent with lego. I find hardcore first person shooters psychically disturbing so I'm greatly relieved when they find shooting sheep with enchanted diamond bows or building cat fountains amusing. Its similar to the way I used to build lego things that I could smash. Even better with things like raspberry pi, you can write in your own python code to build stuff or launch other people in the air when they come into your house.

The very best feature of minecraft is that there is no objective at all. Again like lego. it's up to you and your imagination. It just gives you an organized platform for creating.

What will MS do? I was afraid they might shutdown the python API on raspberry pi but they just released Windows for free on the new raspberry pi, so it looks like they might embrace it even more. I think Microsoft is finally re-learning how they became successful by being the low cost alternative to apple and IBM. they want the love again. Market share uber alles.

I suspect they might pervert it the way lego has been perverted by selling specialized kits that just build one thing. So they might sell pre-built minecraft worlds with various happy-meal like themes. Or hook it into microsoft live where you gotta pay the man a subscription to live in the microsoft amusement park. I would really resent that because kids come and go from their toy interests and so a subscription for something they are not using would hurt.

The problem is that everybody seems to defend the politicians on their side, no matter how immoral or corrupt they've proven themselves to be. Confirmation bias, I suppose.... it's always worse when the other person does it.

That!

I've had a number of arguments against certain candidates because they quite obviously lied... and partisan apologists for that candidate would say "yeah, but all politicians lie!" This has happened, of course, for politicians from every party... but it shows that far too many of us not only accept it, but condone it. "It's OK because it's the one I support... but if your candidate lies I'll never stop mentioning it!"

I remember when Bill lied to a grand jury, and there were far too many people who said "yeah, but who wouldn't in that situation?" I wouldn't... I wouldn't have been in that situation, either. Which leads us to the fact that it's not just politicians, it's a large (and growing) segment of our society that believes that lying and deceitful behavior, immorality and selfishness are OK.

There is no sense or morality or common decency anymore. Sure, most kids lie about their bad behavior, but it used to be that parents would punish them even worse for lying about it. Nowadays so many people don't want to punish their kids - they want to be "friends," that kids get away with anything by lying about it... and those kids grow up, and breed more kids just the same; they grow up to be politicians, businessmen, police officers, and all manner of people that we are supposed to be able to trust. I even had an argument with someone boasting about screwing up someone else... their defense was "there's no law against it." I had to ask "since when to common decency and common sense need to be written into law?"

I'm interested in learning more about this. Would you mind elaborating, or sharing a link to an article discussing it?

Speaking of style over function, I take it the new phone is not using LiquidMetal for it's metal. They teased a liquid metal ad last week. But it looks like just polished metal to me. Or is it? Apple's exclusive rights purchase for liquid Metal technology I beleive ran out a week ago, making it possible this could be a liquid metal phone case.

Pretty interesting concept and if it works as well in the real world as the video portrays, it could be very cool to use. I was all ready to sign up for early access and talk about it with my team on Monday, until I saw your comment below that it only works on Apple devices.

In the tech and development world (especially in the trenches) Android rules, and our office is no exception. What a downer.

Considering the cause of death was end-stage chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, I'd guess smoking played a major part. Says Wikipedia:

But it's a sad day regardless.

As someone who was quite vocal against Beta in the original announcement article, I've got to say that this about-face is a pleasant surprise. I don't love everything about it, but it's a far sight better than what we saw on the beta site. Glad to see the powers that be came to their senses, and were not persuaded by UX blowhards.

One bug/design issue is with the comment margins. Here's what I'm seeing in Firefox: http://i.imgur.com/YPhBVI0.png

Playing with the CSS, I think this is easier on the eyes and feels a lot less squished: http://i.imgur.com/npol1Kq.png

Which I got with this:

    #commentwrap, #commentlisting {
        padding-left: 1em;
    }

    #commentlisting {
        padding-right: 1em;
    }

Now how about some proper Unicode support? :)

I can think of a zillion loopholes by which this will be evaded.

Is there a definition of what is THE internet? surely comcast can create a parallel construction and sell however they wish like a private toll road. It could have discrete points where it could tap into the "real" internet. Thus amazon or netflix or whomever could connect into this autobahn on the goes-into side and pop out into "the" internet at some Comcast hub in the customers town.

Picture it like FED Ex, transporting a package 90% of the way, then mailing it. the postoffice might not charge differently for different customers and Fed Ex might not either (or they could) but only customers with valuable deliveries would be willing to pay the cost of the combined service, which would be dominated by the Fed Ex high speed service.

That's effectively what companies like Akamai sell already and those are not part of the discussion of Net Neutrality.

It might be easy to regulate comcast if comcast is the parent company of both halves of this real and shadow internet. But if these services are split into two companies then what? Even if the shadow company is privately held by comcast this is going to be hard to regulate.

Eventually the shadow compaines won't even bother with their own hardware. They will lease a certain number of dedicated switches from Comcast for their own uses. these will be cut out of the real internet.

An alternative way around this is by selectively enforcing the tragedy of the commons. In principle Netflix could prioritize its packets on a neutral interenet by emitting 100 times as many packets where each packet is sent 100 times. the receiver ignores all but the first one of the redundant packets. This of course would be retaliated by others now squeezed out doing the same thing resulting in 100x the traffic for the same data and no gain for anyone. COmcast would come down hard on these miscreants but would it be selective?

I think this is what people don't get.... it may be true that that links to certain services were weak points, but what Comcast wanted to do was charge the content providers for those links, despite the fact it was already their own customers that wanted (and WERE PAYING FOR) the bandwidth. The larger problem is that I am a Comcast customer, and also a Netflix customer. I pay Comcast a lot of money every month for service - nearly $100 when you include everything (yes, including modem rental), and what I want to use that service for is (sometimes) to stream Netflix. Comcast should want me to be a happy customer with how much I'm paying. They obviously don't give a crap... but since there's no reasonable competition in my area, I (you know, the actual Comcast customer) am screwed. Netflix is not "pushing" their content, I, the customer, am pulling it over the bandwidth I've already paid for.

Every industry with competition is driven towards serving the customer. Period. The problem here is not throttling, it's ultimately a lack of competition and collusion between ISPs. I'm not a big fan of regulations - if you actually have a free, competitive market, you don't need regulations, but companies take advantage and participate in anti-competitive behavior otherwise. The regulations shouldn't restrict the services of the company, they should be to keep the free market free, even if that means that, in the short term, people get their netflix throttled.... long term goals are much more important.

Since no on knows who owns VitnetX, it would be surprising if you did. The Technology appears to have been developed by SAIC under govt contract and has been licesenced to Microsoft and others. Now that jury award has been nullified on appeal. So either by liscening or not, there doesn't seem to be anything stopping people from using the technology. So if that's the NSA objective here it seems to have not succeeded or perhaps there nver was an NSA agenda and it was simply about making money off invented technology?