This doesn't mean what you seem you think it means. The man harmed his wife by making what a reasonable person (including his wife) saw as credible threats. If he had no intent whatsoever to assault her in any way, but had the intent to make her afraid by sending credible threats, then he did in fact intent to cause her harm.

They have to prove that he intended to make threats, not that he intended to follow up on his threats. I don't actually see this as much of a problem. I am sure he would have been convicted with the right jury instruction, but the right jury instruction was not given.

Not at all.

Courts sometimes get things wrong, and then SCOTUS steps in and tells them that they got it wrong. The courts then have to look at the matter again. They are supposed to do it right the next time. SCOTUS is not supposed to tell them how to do it right. They are not little children that need hand holding. They are assumed to get it right on their own most of the time.

Well, he is not getting away with it (not yet). It was decided that the judge gave wrong instructions to the jury. The wrong instruction was that the jury had to decide whether a reasonable person would think of his posts as threats. The correct instruction would have to be that the man himself knew that what he posted would be taken as threats.

So it's going back to court. I personally believe and hope that he will be found guilty with the correct jury instruction as well.

They can already map the serial numbers of the currency to the account holder and the person in possession of PIN and card. And there already are cameras, except that currently they don't protect you from misuse of your card by a thief, but can only tell that it was a thief after the fact.

That's always the same on Slashdot. They come up with weird fantasies of kidnapping and so on.

Stealing or duplicating a credit card is relatively easy and no big risk. If you get caught, the punishment isn't too bad even if you stole a thousand cards. Kidnapping on the other hand doesn't give you any more reward, even a single attempt is dangerous for you, unlike normal kidnapping where you hide the victim you must bring the victim to a public place which hugely increases the risk, and if you are caught they never let you out again.

Not at all. If someone puts Joe Smith's card into the reader, and types in Joe Smith's card PIN, then they only need to compare the face of the person with a picture of Joe Smith, and nobody else. A crook can only get your money if by a huge coincidence that crooks looks the same as you. And that crook cannot get anybody else's money. There are no false positives, there is no reason to compare the face with the photo of anybody else.

In European countries the order is typically tax, social security, employees, then everyone else. Tax includes income tax for the employees, so as long as that is paid, the employee will get some cash in their tax return. (Say you were supposed to make $100,000, they paid $40,000 tax on your behalf and the money is gone, then you effectively made $40,000 that year and all the overpaid tax gets returned to you).

Depending on the level of your coding skills, you are either harmless, dangerous, or useful.

You need to learn quite a bit to skip over "dangerous" into the "useful" territory.

Police officer says: "He told me that he had hired a hitman" - hearsay.
Police officer says: "He asked me to kill the guy" - not hearsay.

Actually, a bit more complicated. If someone is accused of intimidating witnesses. and the police officer says "I heard him telling Mr. X that he had hired hitmen to kill people giving evidence against him before". That's hearsay as far as hiring hitmen and killing people is concerned, but it is perfectly acceptable evidence for witness intimidation.

I don't think so. The jury has to decide based on evidence whether he is guilty of crimes beyond reasonable doubt. However, the same doesn't apply to sentencing. Sentencing can take your good behaviour into account, and it can take your bad but not criminal behaviour into account. If you have a history of harrassing your neighbour in a non-criminal way, and then you beat him up, your sentence for the beating may very well be higher because of that history.

For many years, Samsung has spent more money on advertising than Apple. Recently with their revenue drop, and with their massive drop in profits, it seems they had to scale their spending back.

Profits are quite simple: They are the difference between what people are willing to pay for a product, that is how much it is worth to them, and what it costs to manufacture and sell the product. So Apple seems to be just very good at making products that are worth a lot of money to people.

Not really. The fight is between PC makers and Mac makers (that's Apple). There would be an obvious way to increase the MacOS X market share, which would be to make it available and market it to PCs. And obviously Apple doesn't do that because they would lose more in Mac sales than they would gain in OS sales. (If you think compatibility would be a problem, I think that Dell, HP etc. would be delighted to sell computers that have been thoroughly tested and work fine with MacOS X).

For an operating system, being called boring is a compliment. I wouldn't want an exciting operating system.

The problem that PC manufacturers have: I have no way to find out what is a quality product and what isn't. If PC X costs more than PC Y, then I don't know if it is because X is better or because the seller tries to rip me off. So I buy the cheaper one. The manufacturers building better and more expensive hardware lose out, so they use cheaper and lower quality hardware. And so on and so on.

With a Mac I go to the Apple Store and whatever I buy, it is quality. If I have a problem, I take the Mac to the store and they fix it. Every other store tries to get rid of customers with problems.

Volume 2 of "The Art Of Computer Programming" contains an excellent description of RSA.

Actually, a decent mathematician should figure out RSA if you just remind them that every prime number has a primitive root, and that primitive roots of about half of all primes can be used to solve x^3 = a (modulo p) for primes p, and to solve x^3 = a (modulo pq) for a product of two primes pq if p and q are known, but not if only the product pq is known.

For large primes (like 1024 or 2048 bit) the number of calculations needed are a bit lengthy, but even a naive implementation on a modern computer is fast enough to implement it. Maybe not fast enough for hard disk encryption, but fast enough to encrypt a few megabytes of documents.