The only reason people were into this was to either trade in illegal goods and services or be cutting edge with something that only really served to facilitate illegal activity.

Fuck you very much, sir.

I, and the vast majority of Bitcoin users, engage in entirely legitimate commerce with BTC as the medium of exchange. Heck, I even declared my BTC gains on my taxes last year, fer chrissakes.

Now, when I want to score a quarter of weed - You ever actually try to buy anything with BTC, or just mindlessly parroting the FUD about Silk Road? My dealer takes USD only, thanks.

If you hold your own Bitcoins in a local wallet, then yes, a handful of confirmations adequately proves you really do have those coins.

As soon as you entrust them to someone else to store in a pooled account, bam, confirmability lost.

A key philosophy behind the BTC protocol assumes direct person-to-person transactions. If you adhere to that, you don't get screwed by a failed exchange; for that matter, you don't even care about the existence of an exchange... Except insofar as they help define the "worth" of a Bitcoin as a medium of trade. Though, with the likes of Overstock accepting BTC now, the marketplace itself might soon serve that function without needing an external point of reference.

All these 'with-it' trendy people got to brag about about being ahead of everyone else and 'cool' because they were so smartly investing in this scam.

So do I still get to brag, since the handful of BTC I still have currently trade at USD$650, while my initial investment comes out to less than $50 in electricity?

Boo hoo, people who trusted an unregulated exchange got burned - Color me shocked.

In the first sentence, Karpeles is reported to have said he "suspected hundreds of thousands of bitcoins were missing". In the second sentence, the submitter, and by extension Timothy the editor, turn this suspicion of into "knowing that its bitcoin stash was wiped out". Let me demonstrate the problem with this:

So, you have named two kids in one class and have jumped to the conclusion it must be common core and not the teacher and not the students.

My stats are the most current I could find on such short notice and there was no information on India. But, what I notice is you offered NOT ONE SINGLE REFERENCE FOR YOUR CLAIMS AT ALL, and that makes your entire post "irrelevant".

Are you aware that we rely on other species to survive? We evolved with those other species around - removing them from our environment might indeed change the balance of wildlife to the point where things we directly rely on start being affected by our changes to other species.

Don't worry, we're adaptable. We can just find some other way to metabolize glucose into ATP after we kill all the oxygen-producing creatures on the planet. Just one little atom, anyway - And heck, other critters use sulfur instead of oxygen, why can't we? ;)

You seem to have shot yourself in the foot. From a 2004 paper in World Psychology on teen suicide:

To be quite blunt, your entire argument seems to be that high standards and expectations are a bad thing. That, of course, flies in the face of the recently validated idea that high expectations lead to high performance

When I was in third grade, we didn't write out the times tables, we wrote out every single number between one and a thousand in numbers and in letters by ones, one and ten thousand by fives, tens, and fifties, and one and one million by hundreds as homework. It took about a week. That is a form of rote memorization and it works.

You talk about Common Core producing "confused, bitter adults.. or the worker drones they really want", yet the current curriculum is based more on memorization and parroting back the "correct" answers and gives partial credit for utilizing the correct method even if the answer is wrong (that, by the way, boils down to "it doesn't matter what you get as long as you do things my way") rather than critical thinking which many say is a hallmark of Common Core

It really sounds like your "bright" kid liked science and school when it was easier and as he has gotten older he has, like so many kids, started to dislike school and you are blaming Common Core instead of actually finding out why your kid doesn't like it. Maybe you should start spending more time with your kid and helping him with his studies, something called "being a parent", instead of making excuses.

Android

They are banned in some areas of the country. But i agree, 'outed' shows a bias against gun owners by the people writing the story.

Resulting in a need for a larger generation surface due to both non-optimal angle of incidence and the fact that the panels will get less light.

The Antartic has so little precipitation that is qualifies as a desert.

Oh, sure, there goes the environmental benefits of not burning coal.

"You didn't build that"

Accusations are as old and devilish as Satan himself. The left/right dichotomy is a comparatively recent bugaboo, dating to the French Revolution. While Saul Alinsky gets credited for being Mr. Finger Pointer, Rules for Radicals really broke no new ground, did it?

See http://www.breitbart.com/Big-Government/2013/03/11/The-Seven-Foot-Tall-Stack-of-New-Regulations-That-is-Obamacare