I'm grabbing my barf bag now. Linux isn't magical, it is an operating system.

I'm sure glad I'm not the only one who reacted that way. In the end, operating systems are tools. I use OSX on this notebook that I use for e-mail, Lightroom and Logic. My work desktop runs Windows. My development system at work is Linux. You choose the tool with the right trade-offs for the task at hand.

So why did you even mention Denver if you don't know about it? :-) There are a lot of tech jobs all up and down the Colorado Front Range from Colorado Springs to Fort Collins in many different types of industries and national research labs. It is just one factor contributing to the more than doubling of population in this region during my life time.

Don't get too complacent, though. Even in the worst cases, the chem labs always send you home to mommy in a finite real number of small boxes. That...isn't always true... after certain classes of mathematics accident.

> Sharia Law is over there . . . .

I'm pretty sure Sharia law predate cameras by a good eleven or twelve centuries.

Also, note this salient part from the ticket comment:

"Export rules are very hard and very complicated (and they change from time to time)."

Red Hat has a very solid legal department. When serious legal issues crop up in relation to Fedora, Fedora goes and asks RH legal (which talks to SFLC, FSF, and other major bodies' legal teams when appropriate, of course). The advice we get back, we stick to.

In other words: we take legal advice from professional lawyers, not from Slashdot comments, folks. ;)

This isn't really a policy.

The specific case arose, FESCo asked Fedora Legal for it, Fedora Legal asked for expert opinion from Red Hat's lawyers, and the guidance that came back was posted to the FESCo ticket and meeting log. That's it. It's a case where a general project committee asked for expert legal guidance.

You can read basically the entire thing happening at https://fedorahosted.org/fesco... .

These are 'journalists', in the dreadful contemporary sense. If they thought that 'quiet, eccentric, mathematician brutally murdered in suspected cyber-revenge' would have an ROI greater than the legal exposure, they'd probably kill him themselves just to be first to the body...

It's pretty spartan, hey got caught up in the trains themselves. Each set of cars is arranged in a very specific sequence that he really gets worked up about, and I've noticed that it takes him longer and longer every time to decide on and add a new car to the end of the train....

Write and maintain bitcoin-protocol compatible clients, care for and feed mining hardware, provide the bandwidth for continued distribution of the block chain, and (maybe) actually use bitcoins for something so that they aren't just a pile of uninteresting solutions to difficult-but-totally-banal math problems?

There is no specific Bitcoin Commissar; but (not unlike most OSS projects, wholly aside from your view of the... exciting financial infrastructure that exists between bitcoin and the broader world) only software projects that are either 100% dead, or so perfect that no coder since the Heroic Age has felt worthy enough to soil them with his changes, work without some sort of team, often fairly heavily skewed toward a few core people with a (sometimes more helpful, sometimes mostly passive) cloud of peripheral users and smalltime contributors. Whatever else it may be, it is a software project, a peer to peer network, and a distributed computation setup, all of which don't exactly keep themselves running. He, presumably, is no longer interested in dealing with any of that.

"Taking The System Down From The Inside?" or "The Man's Ultimate Long Con?"

We ask vague, hyperbolic, questions; you fight it out in the comments section!

Given the sorts of weirdos who end up stalking ordinary celebrities, I'd flee this gravity well at relativistic speed if I were The Celebrity among some of the more... peculiar... elements of bitcoin fandom.

How dare that consumer act as though Apple's intellectual property was something she could just 'bequeath' because she's all dead or some sentimental rubbish? She should be grateful that they deigned to permit her a limited license!

It's more about science getting approval. LSD is one of those compounds that is next to impossible for researchers to get access to and test in humans. For reasons I don't care enough about keeping kids off drugs or something to fully understand, some drugs are so wicked and dangerous and illegal that it is necessary to prevent any research (even about how dangerous they are; but definitely nothing suggesting that they aren't as dangerous as previously believed), even under hardass conditions, on terminal patients, and so forth. As quoth noted toxicologist and psycho-pharmacologist Jacqui Smith: "You cannot compare the harms of an illegal activity with a legal one." Why? Because one is illegal, of course!

I wouldn't really call this 'ancient knowledge' (if the first synthesis was in 1938, it probably isn't shamanic lore); but it was certainly an active area of scientific interest pre-ban. That somebody would want another crack at it isn't even remotely news. That they managed to fill out the paperwork, on the other hand...

That's total nonsense. The only monopoly a government has on money is the requirement to pay taxes in a particular currency. Bitcoin doesn't make a dent in that.

There is absolutely nothing stopping you from converting your money to any manner of scrip (aka stocks), commodity-tracking scrip, or a commodity itself and still have it be liquid enough to be usable as a currency. Many of these instruments have great long-term records of inflation protection to boot.

Bitcoiners seem to believe that there is some magic 'currency' instrument which is immune to inflation and all manner of government manipulation which maintains or increases its value magically over time with no effort. No such beast exists anywhere in the world. There is not a single instrument anywhere which can make that guarantee. Certainly not bitcoins. Not gold. Nothing.

People who believe that crap deserve to lose every cent they own.

-Matt

I found an awesome one that is accepted all over the world with a nifty piece of plastic that you just swipe in a little machine. Takes 5 seconds and you don't even have to sign for small transactions. Ultra convenient and I can only lose $50 in the event of fraud. All my transactions are listed conveniently on a monthly statement. And, best of all, they loan me the money for 30 whole days and it costs me absolutely nothing as long as I pay my balance off each month.

It's called a credit card.

-Matt