lol

the comments on this are outrageously hilarious.

yours almost makes me feel like i'm in irc right now

i now wish i hadn't joined in with what little i have to say based on what little i know or care about silk road or any of this

otherwise these mod points would be modding parent up

can it be coincidence that both "characters" have advanced chemistry backgrounds specializing in the formation of crystals

can it be coincidence that the bust comes right on the heels of the federal government almost seemingly without sanity declaring bitcoin "real currency"

can it be coincidence that all of this comes just as the show "breaking bad" is coming to an end?

there's coincidence, then there's synchronicity.

(this)

hilarious, lmao in fact

where did my ass go! whoops!

Dem Darn Feds! *rioutous laughter*

will the judge, at sentencing, have to have a computer monitor displaying the current value of bitcoin, and gavel it in and speak the value aloud, JUST at that moment?

or will they press charges on his 3.6 million dollars of bitcoin even after it's worth a wooden nickle?

It seems to me that three counts of conspiracy can be thrown out of court or at worse will not represent a very firm sentencing.

I don't think this guy should get a hard sentence any way. He's just a merchant.

This is more like an experiment for the FBI to see if it's possible to seize this new form of asset, and to see how valuable it is once they've seized it.

Recall, that bitcoin was recently upgraded to the designation "actual money". VERY recently.

It's all basically in tandem. Hard to have pressed charges on him or his friends if they're just wildly playing russian roulette with a bunch of digital thingamabobber whatsits.

Entirely different if it fetched the grand master 3.2 million dollars of actually now-recognized "real currency".

i bet these hornets are more of a worry in canada than in the united states.

no matter where they hide in the united states, unless it's death valley, people are going to run into them and report the fact that bugs the size of their head have been spotted.

if these go into canada and can survive there, they can easily find plenty of space to reproduce for many generations unnoticed and undisturbed. by the time they're encountered they'll be numerous.

i imagine they will move into the giant beaver dam that's up there. and eat all the beavers.

It's total bullshit to blame a handful of relatively anonymous California grade school teachers for the failure of an Apple security feature. You might as well go all the way and blame them for several "immutable laws" of information and security.

Including the costs of a keyboard, a stand, a tiny piece of (potentially unreliable solid state) flash to make up for the "32GB" model really coming with 16GB of remaning capacity, the price point compares to a fairly decent, new, fully featured laptop.

That doesn't include the cost of realistically including a large, cheap flatscreen monitor to view without having to slouch.

I can't understand somebody like yourself who embraces new technological gimmicks without thought. The tablet isn't "the new PC", yet. It has seen barely a year of proving ground and so far hasn't been exactly the major success the uber-geek insists it is. There are, meanwhile, still people who purchase towers. My room mate is steadily convincing a friend to buy a laptop instead of a tower, but the friend still lives in the 90's and doesn't understand that the laptop is about as customizable as, realistically speaking, his beloved tower.

I had mentally excluded microSD from the criteria of "removable media" because when I showed her what a microSD looks like, she said "forget it". So, sorry chum but sometimes size does matter. And I, for one, have to agree with her. I don't think anybody should be reliant on something so important being so small, let alone the profit-minded producers of tablets. There are numerous practical reasons why not to consider microSD for anything but cameras, ipods, and other tiny devices that you don't really intend to remove it from. And a customer's size preferences aside, I would never try to sell somebody a computer meant for serious, daily use where the sole removable media was some sort of chip. As you well know, when you purchase new software in a store, you don't receive it on SD cards.

And you could suggest that software be obtained from online, but not everybody is in "the cloud" at this point in time, especially not certain customers. Especially not people who ask questions about their right to the software. When I told this particular customer (my room mate) that the Office 365 she was so interested in was a 2-year subscription, she abruptly lost interest. Telling her that she could conveniently download it online over her slow, overpriced internet did nothing to bring her back to M$'s weird new idea.

Well, perhaps you're one of those stodgy types who shakes their fist and insists that the latest, fastest, and smallest devices not only have to be adopted, but will be adopted. But I look around and I still see CDs and DVDs are the de-facto main media in use everywhere and that they obviously will be so for probably another decade.

Meanwhile, the computer she chooses has to be able to burn CDs for the purpose of business presentations at her workplace. Despite anything else, that is a requirement.

God, you look like such an ass, now, telling somebody else not to be so presumptuous when that's exactly what you're doing.

As it turned out, the roomie's bad experience with purchasing her first ever brand-new computer online left a sour taste in her mouth about the whole idea of buying a computer online. It's hard to reason with superstition. And, since I'm not somebody she knows very well, I wasn't able to convince her to try any other online avenue. She was firmly set on the brick and mortar route, and was too impatient for me to call around to the almost a dozen local computer stores looking for a deal. So off we went to Best Buy. I was at least put in charge of selecting the computer based on the price window, and for roughly $60 more than the notebook she sent back I managed to nearly triple the purchased processor speed, I believe double the hard drive capacity, increase the screen width by roughly 1.50 times, and add certain amenities like HDMI, USB 3.0, chip reader, the latest multi optical writer standard, etc. She was surprised was you can get by not trying to save the most money in an attempt to obtain something that looks similar to what you already have and assuming that newer means faster. She was quite surprised that there's an entire world of hitherto meaningless statistics and other data to take into consideration. Ah, the bane of computer illiteracy faced with the need to spend money wisely.

Meanwhile, she espied the large tablets, the newborn technology I was warning her about. She is dead set on purchasing basically a large flatscreen to port around with her. I asked her if she intended to affix it to a large CNC, blueprint copy, elevator directory, or other machine that would benefit from having such a console as opposed to physical push-buttons. She didn't get it.

I don't see any purpose in the attempt to market touchscreen tablets, essentially overgrown iPods, to everyone in lieur of productivity. It's just profit-seeking behaviour, much like how you can easily get a thorough response on a forum like Slashdot by mentioning that you have money to spend.

Isn't this what the physicists hoping to "test" whether or not the universe is just a huge simulation, were saying would "prove" that theorem?

You mean the dirty membrane keyboard peasants that could only afford the Sinclair ZX-81? Those Atari people were minor barons at the very least.

But you don't have to actually use Metro to get things done. The normal desktop is still there, and if you start typing in Metro, then what you are looking for quickly pops up in a search result.

I don't understand peoples' dismissal of Metro, considering it's not even the star of the OS. It's just a weird-looking box house that you can, for all intents and purposes, totally ignore and go on without really using. I only acknowledge its existence because I see it every time I go to start searching for something, like group policies.

And there's another thing: typing for what you want. A lot of people don't do that. There are tons of Windows users who still click through the control panel and then click through admin tools and then yada, yada. Well if you hit the windows key and start typing, what you want shows up pretty quickly.

Metro isn't any different. And I personally hated the Start Menu, it was slow to render and was a cluttered mess. Metro's a cluttered mess but at least it's immediately there when I ask for it.

The roomie I just moved in with was appalled when I discovered for her that her newly purchased notebook was actually a slower and worse-off computer than the laptop she was hoping to "upgrade" from. So we sent it back and now she has the credit and wants me to shop for her.

She kept mentioning the RT and liking it, but I warned her away and told her that tablets are still a developing technology, that it's in its awkward stages and next year she'll have something worth picking up. She said "okay, maybe next year it would be a good idea" but still seemed lost.

I'd like to say she has some good news when she gets home today, but the tablet isn't much better than the notebook. There's no removable media, not even a full-size SD slot?

I see these things as glorified palmtops. They're just slightly larger, but they fit the same niche -- something to pull out of your backpack or Euro-wallet at the airport or cafe and use within serious constraints on time and space. It's a useful gadget to complement a fully functioning PC at home, but IMHO it doesn't really qualify as a principal or "base" PC.

But oh, look: it's priced like a PC.

Scratching my head / not catching on.

You'd think the guy would call it Piece of Shit Jackoff Suicidal Squirrel or Suicidal Squirrels in Your Sorry Excuse For a Programmer's Mother's Anus or something similar.