You don't have to be "cynical" to expect the government to act in the government's own best interest. The idea that one piece of government will keep another piece in check rather than colluding together to expand power is an unrealistic pipe dream. Honestly we've had over two hundred years of real world experimental evidence demonstrating that checks and balances DON'T WORK. They never did, and never will. The only realistic check on government power is secession.

My sense is that the MEAN Stack (Mongo, Express, AngularJS, Node) is sort of winning. There's some packaging of it over at mean.io.

Personally, I'm really getting interested in Meteor (www.meteor.com). Watch the videos, and realize I saw a smart non-coder go from zero to *ridiculously* interactive site design in three months.

They never want me. They find out I won't enforce the law as written if I find it to be immoral, and that's that.

Hopefully eventually they will be unable to find enough jurors who don't feel like me in the jury pool! But I guess I'm feeling over-optimistic today.

True. And I used to buy that. :( I hardly ever fly, and I used to actually think I should have a say in what other people do in life.

Sounds like a job for a jury! :)

Mod up to 6!

What does that have to do with it? Even if it were a mere convenience or luxury, the point of government is to secure the right to liberty. That includes the liberty to enjoy some things that some people might regard as a luxury (a subjective judgment if I ever heard one), so long as I am not doing so at the expense of somebody else's right to life, liberty, or property.

No, it isn't. Everything they have was acquired through theft and coercion.

I'm 36 and my opinion on this has been stable for 8 years. Hopefully you will engage in less name calling when you grow up.

Actually it leads to more efficient use of space through price rationing.

Who cares what the city government wants to avoid? They have no more right to enforce their will than any of the rest of us.

On the other hand, it's okay when we do it!

Remember when we had a Debian system on the biosciences mission? They scrubbed the whole mission after they were already in space due to a fuel-cell issue that I think turned out to be a faulty sensor, and flew the entire mission a second time.

As a "real" tandem person (see here), I must say this thing looks like a toy to me. Of course, it is also far less expensive than the bikes made by serious tandem bike companies, who often make bikes with derailer and brake systems that alone cost as much as this monstrosity.

We've had our tandem going 60-70mph (down mountain roads). There's no way I would trust this thing for such riding. Maybe it is OK for some gentle cruises, but that's it. And furthermore, there's a far better design for front-stoker visibility.

/snob mode off

There are a whole host of reasons why what you are saying is impossible. First off, no matter how much CPU power you accumulated, you wouldn't be able to rival the hashes per second being put out by the custom hardware. If you rooted and botnetted every CPU on earth you would still only be a fraction of the hashes per second of the Bitcoin network. CPUs for Bitcoin mining were obsoleted by GPUs long ago, and both CPUs and GPUs are now way-obsoleted by ASIC.

Also, even if you were able to control a majority of the hash power on the Bitcoin network, you would still not be able to spend somebody else's Bitcoin. To do that you would have to crack the private key for the account containing the Bitcoin. Doing that is a totally different math problem from what Bitcoin mining hardware is doing, and there are a lot of visuals out there illustrating that it would likely take longer than the projected life of the universe to crack these keys using currently available methods. If you had a majority of hashpower on the network, you could alter the blockchain, which is the ledger showing in what order transactions occurred. This would allow you to double-spend your own Bitcoin and cheat somebody, but would not allow you to spend somebody else's.

Bitcoin stories shouldn't mention MtGox any more than dollar stories should mention Enron.