WELL if we want to get in the business of apologetic measurements, I believe Mars One is based in the Netherlands. So assuming that back of an envelope calculation was being applied to the location of operations, we could assume they are referring to the inverted shores that are the endpoints of Afsluitdijk Dike which happen to connect North Holland province with Friesland province and measures 32 kilometers in length.

So basically you're proposing a move from just give me a little cash upfront to let me leech off your electricity bill in a ridiculously circuitous way to gamble for BTC (keeping in mind that the more people that adopt your model of "BitCoin-Ware" the more people will be vying for BTC the less your expected value will return)?

An interesting idea and definitely one for the mathematicians but simply unsustainable and risky and ... I guess deceptive if you don't point out the small cost to their electrical bill ...

Ars Technica ran an inditing article on your sanity in which you made statements on the virtues of MDPV (bath salts), having three informants in the Zeta Cartel and also informants in Nicaragua that had made contact with Hezbollah's camp. To put my question succinctly: what the hell, man? Where have your James "Psychonaut" Bond travels taken you to recently?

I don't get it. Jung is a convicted drug smuggler. You have had no such charges ever filed against you (to my knowledge) by the United States so, if nothing more than a publicity stunt, why did you pick him to write your biography? If you feel you are wrongly accused, I can understand why you would pick someone wrongly accused to write your biography -- they can relate. But George Jung was certainly a key part of Pablo Escobar's deadly and pervasive criminal organization. You are (again, to my knowledge) far from that so why bait the readers with that author as a link? I have had very little associations with you and illegal drug activity but now I think you view yourself as a modern George Jung, am I wrong in making this assumption?

Almost exactly one year ago your dog was killed (my sympathies), your passport was confiscated and your house searched by a Gang Suppression Unit (GSU) while you lived in Belize. Why not publicly name names and provide as much detailed evidence as possible to reveal this horrible corruption and abuse of something that is supposed to stop crime? Who was it that tried to extort political money from you? Is there anyway to verify?

While you were moving around, Vice.com got to spend time with you. If memory serves me, it was later revealed that the image they uploaded with you had GPS data that you then claimed to be spoofed. Coincidentally the news styled documentary they were going to do with you never seemed to surface ... now that things have died down can you give more context to that whole situation?

Please, I don't deserve all the credit, thank H. Leighton Steward and coal baron Corbin Robertson. And from the looks of it, the Koch brothers somewhere up that chain ... did you know it's a 501(c)(3) and has a sibling (but separate!) ad-buying 501(c)(4) named CO2 is Green?

You know what, you're right! And I don't know why those folks in Fukushima got all upset about their nuclear reactor getting water washed all over it! I mean, the darn thing needs water to work anyway, right? Plus plants and people drink water, why were they upset that they got extra from the ocean? It's just water!

Right because the possibilities of water wars, refugees, failing economies, destruction of the food chain, droughts and general destabilization of the planet will have no effect on you whatsoever.

No. No I am not. For reference see:

Ask Slashdot: Am I Too Old To Learn New Programming Languages?
Ask Slashdot: Am I Too Old To Retrain?

They should have a lot of the bland "buck up" responses alongside the "outta my way I know everything" youngsters.

Also, to more quickly expedite this process, I prefer your story submissions in the form of "Ask Slashdot: Am I Too Old To <X>?"

What? You mean like the TSA? (probably NSFW)

To clarify his point (yours is valid but you're not addressing his claims fully):

Emphasis mine. I totally agree with you but the argument here is that they could prevent attacks. I find that argument specious and foolhardy in that a bomb could be disguised as anything and a suicide bomber (as these individuals clearly had no intention of surviving a police encounter) would simply continue to wear the explosive into the crowd. I think they need to reevaluate what little benefit it would provide against the massive issues and rights violations it could cause system-wide.

There's a stark difference between a store knowing I am in their store and a centralized location storing all of my visits. And then there's an even further jump when it's a government doing that. I'm fine that I go into Gamestop and Gamestop gets tapes of me looking at games. I'm fine that I go to Chipotle and there's a camera on the cash register. I'm fine that I then walk by the entrance to an electronics store and I'm on their cameras passing by. That's cool, if they want to put together the odd footage they have of me going there, I'm not really concerned about that. And that's the stuff that ended up helping catch the Boston suspects.

I'm not okay when one centralized location stores that data and my complete movements can be tracked. If a Gamestop employee got my address from a purchase and wanted to search my house, he'd have only the time I'm on camera to do it. If my whole trip is detailed, it could be done covertly quite easily.

Decentralizing the stores of this video information has its own merits and disadvantages but I think there is a very small group of people that are uneasy with being videotaped at a grocery store by the grocery store yet a large group of people (once they think about what their tax dollars are being spent on) that would be uneasy about a government system centralizing this and putting individuals in charge of it.

What worked here is that businesses realized they each had a piece of the puzzle to solve a heinous crime. This commissioner's claim that technology exists that would have prevented these attacks had it been a government controlled and centralized effort is largely horseshit and what benefits that pretends to provide are insignificant compared to the possible evils it could unleash.

By the way, if this topic interests you then you should be watching Germany closely.

This actual study itself has at least one very good point that may not be obvious to people: our leadership's drive to promote the idea of a STEM shortage is primarily to justify guestworkers and allow them to add provisions like OPT-STEM extensions. Don't get me wrong, there is a sort of shadow brain drain war going on here that for a long time the West had easily been winning. UK, Germany, USA, etc had been sucking up the talent from India, China, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, you name it we took the brightest from it. And it was really really easy. And now Western leaders are kind of getting uncomfortable because, well, it's not really working in our favor anymore. I care that our politicians are being deceiving about this concept but I don't care about the "taking our jobs." In fact, I'm one of those meritocratic boogeymen that thinks our borders should be open with nothing more than a background check into your criminal record before you're granted entrance to the United States. Sure, some other stuff would need to change but that's an entirely different argument I'm not going to get into.

The main point of this study, however, is what the Post picked up on and is being reiterated: there is no shortage of STEM workers here in the US. And while that's likely true, the study (though comprehensive) doesn't really seem to ever step up to the plate and look at STEM versus non-STEM in the cases of employability and what those industries do for our GDP. Our leaders like Obama are operating on the assumption that a surplus in STEM workers is better than a perfectly equalized workforce with zero unemployment. They're not going to say that but my guess is that they're getting uneasy that China is mandating how many STEM workers it will produce and limiting the number of liberal arts degrees. The West is now uneasy that they might start losing the STEM war and they're trying to figure out how to scare their populations into letting them selectively brain drain other countries. A fake "massive shortage of STEM workers" is pretty much their only card so far.

Shouldn't this be up in the summary? Why did I have to read down so far to get to this information that immediately tips me off that Quirky is like one of those terrible schemes where you start "your own" store selling shitty products to your friends who, if they start their own store, earn money for you further up the chain? I don't want to be that guy that thinks he's a genius for selling his friends vitamins to make them healthy while I get a negligible profit from a company that's making even more profit. And I don't want to be the guy that shows up at your house and asks you how my invention that you bought from Quirky is doing and I expect it to be prominently in use.

I'm a smart guy but those companies that prey on people like that ... they just ... *shudder* ... are like some sort of vampire that hurts my brain when I contemplate what they do. And that's the feature on Slashdot today? At least let me know what's going on before I invest in reading this stuff. Clearly that should be your thesis.