Every other slashdot poster is truncated at 20 or 30 lines with a "read the rest of this comment" link.
Why aren't this troll's posts truncated?

It's not a matter of whether you have ever heard of it. That's would be an insane standard. The test for jury duty is whether the court believes you can put aside what you may have heard and objectively consider only the evidence presented at trial.

Americans hold the people of every other country to be responsible for their politicians. Why shouldn't America be held to the same standard?

This is Freeman Dyson. Look up the original Orion rocket. The nuclear power plant is not bolted on top of a firecracker.

Is that a blue bag on the ground behind him?

Logging. Logging could go very wrong.

The chance of dying in a car accident are much higher than that.
in the US : approx 350M people / over 30K deaths/year = on the order of 1 in 10,000.

Fair dinkum? Strewth, I bet he's madder 'n a mallee bull.

I think it is more like driving becoming irrelevent as driverless cars bocome more common.
The main cause of accidents is people and eventually there will be sufficient pressure to actually ban manual driving.
Then you can only go where the car will let you, and you will be tracked all the way.

Well yeah. When cats get to plague proporions, rats and mice get scarce. Maybe there's a connection.

The problem is that technology has advanced to the point where creating those jobs is too expensive, and they employ highly skilled people who have no trouble finding a job anyway.
You no longer need 500 ditch diggers for your canal, it's a few engineers and skilled equipment operators.

A similar thing is happening to labor as happened to capital, it is all concentrating on the top few percent because of the force multipliers of technology and automation.
There are a some possibilities, but they are all politically unpalatable:
- Universal Basic Income (start low and increase until enough people drop out and live on it to make unemployment hit your desired %)
- Legally mandated (and enforced) maximum working hours (Start at 40 and drop until unemployment hits your desired %)
- Massive Bullshit Makework projects

You know, it's not a nice thing, but I sort of hope that at least some of the judges are close to women who have had breast cancer.

In theory mining should be almost value neutral. The amortised hardware cost and electrical power consumed should be equal to value of the bitcoins that mining produces (with a fudge factor for the expected deflation of bitcoins).
There are reports of ASICs being sold for many multiples of their retail price. In the short term, this should reduce the amount spent on electricity.
If the hardware plateaus, then long term the hardware cost should become marginal, and the coins mined and transactions fees should be equal to the cost of the power.
As long as the hardware capability keeps improving, buying it will suck money out of the power bill.

There's a banner on Neocube's website now that says :
THESE PRODUCTS ARE NOT FOR CHILDREN UNDER 14!! Please Read All Warnings
NOT FOR SALE INSIDE THE U.S.

The step from prokaryotic to eukaryotic took much longer - 3 billion years. It looks like that may actually be the difficult step.
Self replication is practically a given in the primordial soup environment. It doesn't need to be A directly creates copies of A.
It could be molecule A promotes B, B promotes C, C promotes D, .... all the way to ZZ9pluralZAlpha promotes A.
Any such loop, no matter how many steps, will optimise as it progresses. That's what evolution means.

ps. Even that is a vast simplfication. It is more like "the presence of A increases the chance of B forming C instead of D".
Millions of such "rules" acting together in the soup will produce self-promoting systems that eventually evolve into fully self replicating entities. ie Life.