To come up with something as sophisticated as bitcoin would take more than the usual type of bedroom coder who knocks up some social network site. So I'm afraid I don't believe he's some lone genius who's managed to stay under the radar and then suddenly amazes the world with his invention. He's almost certainly a known polymath expert.

Though unless there's a cryptography + programming + economics expert who's known by almost no one - which is pretty damn unlikely - then there's only a limited number of people it could be anyway and from what I've read he's the #1 suspect.

It's not because they are non-white racial groups, but that poverty and other social problems are so over-represented in those groups. This seems to have two effects, low parental participation (engagement in-school and engagement in homework, reading, and other similar learning reinforcement) as well kids who bring their at-home social problems with them to school.

This leaves teachers and schools struggling with a whole bunch of social welfare problems schools are ill-equipped and funded to handle as well forcing teachers to devote a lot of time on remedial learning, which hurts the educational opportunities for the kids who are more or less in the median.

And I think it drives well-meaning school officials into a hopeless struggle to close the "achievement gap" which is in actuality trying to solve the much larger social welfare problems. They end up dysfunctional from fighting problems of scale which greatly exceed their resources.

It looks to me like CarPlay exploits the iPhone (and iPad, AFAIK) ability to use an HDMI display as a second monitor rather than an in-dash computing device on its own. When plugged into the CarPlay interface, the home screen gets output to the in-dash display and switches to a dumbed-down, big-icon interface that only displays apps with CarPlay approved display/interfaces.

CarPlay hardware is probably just a custom Lightning HDMI dongle (more or less) that handles video and touch input, meaning that it probably will have an Android analog that somehow works with Android HDMI output. I'm not enough of an Android user to know if Android HDMI output works similarly as a "second" display the way iOS does or not or if Android has an external touch capability the way CarPlay apparently does.

I could be totally wrong about all this, but I can't see carmakers buying into iOS and Apple's control enough to actually let them own the infotainment system down to hardware & software or it being at all practical to actually have iOS run in the dash.

I download about 30 hours a week, but I don't actually watch any of it. I just archive it in case I'm ever bored so I have something to watch should I ever actually want to numb my brain.

And most of what I actually do watch isn't new material, but stuff that's been off the air for a few years -- like Red Dwarf.

Here's the problem: most open source software isn't owned by US authors. So the software is developed and maintained with absolutely no concern about anal-retentive American military "requirements." You can hardly take a global project and demand that people from certain nations stop contributing so that you can ship the software to a US market without getting into trouble for "conspiring" with those nations.

Quite frankly, the law is asinine anyhow. There are no shortage of places around the globe to download and access the full code and binaries of "restricted" software from those nations, because there are other nations who participate in open source projects that don't kiss American ass.

So as far as I'm concerned, RedHat is doing what is necessary to continue using open source software.

To truly meet the American legal requirements, they'd have to rewrite and lock down an insane amount of software -- including replacing the Linux kernel.

A Massachusetts court applying laws as written, rather than making up some bogus progressive interpretation to satisfy their liberal bias? That IS news!

Examples of this?

We don't "make up bogus progressive interpretations." We take great pride in the commonwealth's constitution, which aside from being the first in the nation, predating the federal constitution, and in fact serving at its model, is also one of the most protective of individual rights.

Remember the whole gay-marriage thing, and how MA was one of the first? There's a reason. Our own constitution said we had to treat everybody equally. The courts said "yup, since the state holds the keys to marriage, we gotta treat everybody equally." Case closed. Done.

Also: stop abusing the term "liberal" in this context. Liberal, in a constitutional and individual freedom/liberty sense, usually more accurately describes the "conservative" side of the political spectrum. It's "conservatives" who keep trying to strip people of their voting rights, for example. It's "conservatives" who most often try to impose religion on others, violating separation of church and state (indeed, "god" was inserted into the pledge of allegiance by a republican, for example, in the mid-1900's.) It is "conservatives" who keep trying to advocate for an unequal tax base that vastly favors the rich. It's "conservatives" who keep trying to violate women's basic human rights (ie control of their bodies.) It's "conservatives" who keep trying to censor. It's "conservatives" who have presented the notion that some people are not deserving of the right of marriage. It's also usually "conservatives" who do most of the warmongering and have pushed a very aggressive foreign policy, especially around preemption.

All that is, constitutionally, quite "liberal"/radical.

Further, the court specifically said they felt it SHOULD be illegal to take an 'upskirt' photo.

The hooplah over this is patently ridiculous and demonstrates the lack of ethics in modern journalism - or the desperation for pagehits, something we used to only see among bloggers.

My main concern is that in the rush to "fix" this, someone screws up the law and ends up making it unconstitutional or otherwise overly broad.

I said that mentioning a note (or the reason for the suicide) is the worst thing the media could do, not that it is commonly done.

Mentioning the reasons is an invasion of privacy, and validates suicide as a solution to problems others may be having. Very similar to why notes are not mentioned.

WaPo stops short of outright *saying* she committed suicide, but that's certainly the conclusion they're leading their readers to.

There's a reason the press shies away from it. Mental health organizations have guidelines and recommendations on how to report responsibly on suicides.

The absolute worst is reporting on the contents of, or even mentioning, a note, because then people who are on the edge / suicidal think "Ah, I can get my letter published too!"

This sounds absurd, but it's well demonstrated that suicides are "infectious", and reports in the media about a suicide can cause others who are close to do it themselves. It's one of the reasons, after a suicide in a school/workplace/community, you see an immediate effort made to make resources available to everyone else.

Perhaps you'd like to check out how long it took to drill down a few miles to Lake Vostok in Antartica using a team of people on site and a huge drilling rig?

Once you've done that I would suggest you stuff your sarcasm back in its box and buy a ticket on the next clue train going past.

Err, amino acids are scattered throughout the universe and can be made rather easily by simple chemical processes if you have the right precursors. Finding them on the surface of a moon proves nothing other than the precursors are available.

Did she know something we don't (yet)?

I think there are those moments in normal life where you gain an understanding of something and you are struck by the profound nature of whatever truth it is you discover, sort of a breakthrough moment. These moments are fleeting and not usually common occurrences.

I think part of what LSD does is to stimulate the brain in a way that makes more ideas seem like they provide a profound understanding or meaning.

I think a lot of terminally ill people probably suffer from a lot of confusion and fear because they know they are dying and it is tied to a lot of emotions like fear and anger and confusion. When they talk about these things with a therapist on LSD they probably are able to have the experience of a profound understanding and meaning about their illness and dying.

A lot of the early experimentation with LSD often involved someone who served as a "guide" -- quite often someone with a background in psychology, and I think those people often prompted a lot of discussion that enhanced this.

I know in college we used to wander around campus and really be taken in by the details of architecture on campus buildings. I can remember being in a small, man-made concrete "amphitheater" and if you stood at the focal point of its shape you would hear a kind of perfect echo. Suddenly mathematics and architecture became unified in some kind of perfect synergy that was quite profound at the time. Later, of course, it was just a kind of ugly, modernist college campus landscape feature that nobody ever used for its theater-like purpose.