Now only if it could have a 33% rate success in convincing other humans it was an exiled Nigerian dictator who needed some help moving his money out of the country.

Actually we do have a very small number of life tenure positions outside Academia. The most noticeable examples would be Supreme Court Judges and Members of the UK House of Lords.

The purpose of tenure is actually the holder the freedom to explore unpopular ideas and the freedom to make unpopular choices without having to worry about political consequences from the bureaucracy. Tenure in the judiciary and politics, along with separation of powers, was a practical solution to the previous abused of power under monarchy.

In academia, tenure would give the holder the same intellectual freedom as the landed gentry who where independently wealthy and not in need of an income. The Nobel Prize ($1.2 million USD) and other major academic prizes serve a similar function as tenure, but without attaching the individual to an organization.

A hundred years ago, only a small percentage of the population went to university. Academia while not exclusive to the rich, did have a much higher share of gentlemen scholars who where not in need of an income, or at least had friends in high places willing to serve as patron. The subjects themselves where also much newer, thus a PHD was not always forced to investigate an ultra specialized niche.

Then a correlation was discovered, those with university degrees tended to be set for life. A degree itself soon became almost a basic requirement for any mid-level job, so the lower classes started flooding the universities and the expectation that everybody will earn a degree. So qualification inflation started to happen, a degree is no longer enough, you need a masters or a PHD now to secure your place in the job market.

The government sets a budget for science research, and we still have a number of rich patrons and alumni donating into the system, but the ratio of research funding to university students has gone down considerably (because the student population has rapidly increased) and the ratio of PHD students to available professorships has gone up.

There are too many people chasing too few places, but it takes a generation for the lesson to be learnt, and the promise of our parents generation was that degrees where rare and near gaurentee of a successful job. The truth has always been that success often requires standing outside of the crowd, and its impossible to create a standardized formula to achieve this.

The unwritten understanding of the intelligence community is that everybody is spying on everybody else, yet nobody will actually admit to doing it.

The revelations about Angela Merkel's phone resulted in a bit of diplomatic banter and point scoring, plus a few blushed faces, but the Germans too would have been naive to believe the US wasn't trying to spy on them. Though the Germans may have been a little surprised at how good the US was at spying. However this hasn't changed the underlying alliance and trade relations between the US and the EU. A major PR flap, but no harm done.

Even if we consider enemies such as Osama Bin Laden, before the Snowdon revelations. Al-Qaeda seemed to have an understanding that the US had secret backdoor access to much of the modern digital infrastructure, even if they didn't understand the technical details. Their counter strategy was to organize themselves using pre-digitial methods, using secret face-to-face meetings and hand couriered letters.

The law is nothing more than a threat that the government will use all its available power against you should you violate its written law. The call by John Kerry to "man up" and face trial is nothing more than an admission of defeat by the CIA that they are unable or unwilling to secretly kill, capture or rendition him back to the USA without creating a martyr out of him. The US has already invoked it full power, he is being actively monitored, they have revoked his passport and have pulled alot of diplomatic strings to prevent him traveling outside Russia. Snowdon has effectively beat them at their own game.

A Snowdon trial would not reveal any truth that is not already known. The only thing to be achieved by a "trial" would be to place Snowdon in the custody of the US government and allow them to keep incommunicado and prevent him access to the media. His revelations have all been about putting the US government itself on trial, by exposing the evidence to the court of public opinion.

The irony is that the US is a nation that can easily kill an armed "suspected terrorist" from half way round the world, with just a touch of a button from a drone, yet still has trouble killing a man strapped to a chair.

If it becomes technically possible to build a fully functioning humanoid robot, regardless of the price, then one will be built. Once this happens, Moore's law will start to kick in, as will the cost benefits of mass production. In fact all you need to do is to build a self-replicating robot, and call it skynet.

  "While theoretically and technically television may be feasible, commercially and financially it is an impossibility." -- Lee DeForest, inventor.

The NSA was never here, we just happened to be passing a sniffer patrol unit infront of your house, the dog barked so we got a warrant, didn't find any drugs after we broke down the door, but we did find one hell of a sign.

The bitcoin protocol itself works by having every transaction public, this is all stored in the blockchain. I send you a coin, and publicly announce this with a message signed with my private key. If I try to spend the same coin twice, then this is where the transaction confirmation chain kicks in (and why you need to wait for X number of confirmations). When you announce sending a coin to somebody else, I see the message, and additionally sign your transaction message with my private key and add it to the blockchain. The next person to see the transaction, will again sign on top of all the previous confirmations.

If I try to double spend a coin, then there will be two different sets of transaction history. The bitcoin client is configured to accept the transaction confirmation chain with the most number of signatures as valid, the other one is ignored. Additionally, clients in the network will only additionally sign the chain they believe is valid. Once you get more than a few signatures, its almost computationally impossible to fake a confirmation chain faster than the network, assuming you don't have 51%+ CPU dominance (which is the worry about cex.io going rogue).

The MtGox issue is that they wrote their own custom bitcoin software to deal with the running of a high transaction volume exchange. They where not waiting for transaction confirmations from the network to check their own internal transactions. Their software was buggy and suffered from an exploit using Transaction Malleability. See https://freedom-to-tinker.com/...

The best real world bank analogy, is if you where to go to a cashpoint ATM outside a bank, withdraw money from the system, then enter a special code into the ATM which makes it display an error message. You then go into the bank and show them the error message, and ask them to refund the ATM withdrawal from your account claiming the ATM never gave you any cash (but in truth you did get the cash). This process didn't create new cash out of thin air, in practice you just got the bank to give you free money.

Eventually the bank becomes bankrupt, and you discover that what you actually own is not cash but rather an IOU from the bank for cash, which the bank can't pay.

Its a rather average ruling

Obligatory XKCD
https://xkcd.com/865/

Ah but we want a "civilized" execution. The last meal is the buy the prisoners cooperation with the process.

The prisoner may or may not have accepted his fate, but you don't want that "oh shit, its finally happening" moment and for him to suddenly fight and struggle, it would ruin the show for the "civilized audience". The prisoner may know logically, knows he is going to die at some point in the near future, but survival instincts can be very powerful.

The unfortunate side effect of this is now we will have to invent a better system for killing people

But an eye for an eye was indeed pacifism compared to ten-fold retribution