Could seizure by authorities unable to crack encryption have some even slight deflationary effects on Bitcoins?

There is likely not enough trade in bitcoins or economic activity, for much deflation to occur. It was only some small portion of the total bitcoins available that are taken out of circulation by the seizure.

It is not as if the guy was offering all those BTCs on the open market previously; coins that are being hoarded, don't really cause deflation when they vanish.

You're not allowed to use gains the government claims are ill-gotten, in order to fund your defense.

Once they claim certain dollars are proceeds of illegal activity, they freeze the assets, and they will be held in trust, or held by police, until the charges are settled.

That means those bitcoins will be unavailable to use for his defense, even if they are his, and he does decrypt them.

It doesn't discriminate on the basis of yellow skin or slanty eyes. Any oriental can come, as long as they're not from China.

That fact doesn't matter. The law will block more people who happen to be Oriental than people who happen to be White. Therefore; the law has a disparate impact: Few/no White people are restricted by the rule, but many Oriental people are affected by the rule.

Forbidding NASA from allowing Chinese nationals on the premises clearly has a disparate impact against people of Chinese ethnicity; therefore, this is discrimination based on race.

Under the latest interpretations of the Civil rights act; any disparate impact is discrimination.

The courts should be having a field day with this....

His brain is not being compared against one other (as in your analogy). Thus your analogy is false.

No. The analogy is correct. HIS Is the one brain being compared against a more representative sample of the population. You have reverse the relationship, that doesn't invalidate the analogy "The other people's brains" are being compared against HIM; he is the sample of 1, and he was not chosen randomly, either, therefore: he is not even a representative sample, which essentially means, that however you proceed from that comparison, it will have no scientific or statistical validity; you can only use it as a rough way to try to guess at a hypothesis --- not to test a hypothesis.

A valid correlation requires multiple representative samples from the population to achieve. Not a member of the population (Einstein), and a sample.

An example of a correlation is, you want to check for a relationship between height and weight -- you take 4 representative sample groups of people randomly selected from the population (simple random sample); 10 people in each group.

Within each group; you measure the height and weight of each person. You calculate an Average height, an Average weight, a Standard deviation of height, and a Standard deviation of weight for each group.

For each person in each group you calculate (Height - Average_Height)*(Weight - Average_Weight) You sum these for each group; the answer is the covariance

To achieve the ratio of correlation, you normalize the covariance by dividing by the product of the standard deviations of Height and Weight for the members of the group.

For each sample group, you obtain a fraction of correlation. You have established a reliable correlation, only if the groups are large enough, that the standard deviation of means for both variables across sample groups is small enough (small enough standard error). And if the coefficient is in agreement across the sample groups containing representative samples.

So what stops nVidia selling a not dissimilar card without this feature and with a penguin logo instead?

You're asking the wrong question. What benefit do they get by selling a not-dissimilar piece of silicon with a penguin logo instead? (And is that benefit greater than the cost?)

The cost of marketing and selling another product can be significant; especially, if they have to make sure the driver for the penguin logo product won't work on the Windows logo product.

I imagine most OEMs such as Dell, and System integrators require the Windows logo version, because they're building PCs, and Microsoft requires that they use only Windows Logo video cards, for their final PC product to be able to carry the Windows Logo, and OEM Windows under system builder terms, requiring the outcome to be logo certified.

Therefore.... limited market for the Penguin-badged product.... will the demand for a more expensive penguin-badged product justify the resources required to make it happen? Probably not at this point.

It is thus drawing a rather thin correlation to a correlation. But the sample size is not 1

A correlation is a comparison of a measurement between two samples.

For example: People who have thick members and those that have thin members.

You cannot take a representative sample of people who have a small penis and a girlfriend-finding success rate of 3 girlfriend/year, and compare it against a sample of one person who has a large penis who happened to have a success rate of 14 girlfriends/year, to find a correlation of penis size to number of successfully found girlfriends.

By the same token, you cannot use a sample size of 1 person to establish a correlation of brain CC thickness to intelligence.

'dangerously naïve about the reality of exercising that power [of technology], to the extent that he destroyed himself'

They are trying to set their conscience at ease by Blaming the victim.

Schwartz did not destroy himself. They destroyed him.

MIT was complicit in everything that happened to him.

Schwartz did nothing wrong.

no. The sample size which his brain is being compared to is much larger. He is the not the sample size, he is being compared to the known correlation of intelligence and corpus collosum thickness. Check it on google to find more research results.

Yes. He is being compared; HOWEVER, if you were to argue that this means thick corpus collosum makes you perceived as intelligent, that would be to commit a prosecutor's fallacy.

The study does not show if corpus collosum thickness is useful information or not.

It only shows he had this difference; not that it was a factor in the public's perception that he is deemed intelligent.

The thick corpus collosum could be a coincidence, unrelated; it could have a tertiary or hidden cause, that might (or might) not also be related to our perception of his intelligence.

For all we know, thick corpus collosum hindered him, and he would be perceived as even more intelligent if it wasn't so unusually thick.

Dang citation needed. Please see Slash:TISNWP or Slash:This_is_Slashdot_not_Wikipedia_sorry_for_the_confusion.

Specific citations cannot be made of documents that a vendor has restricted and not been made available for public perusal.

I think WHQL certification is mostly MS' way of pressuring component vendors to implement new features they want. For example; UEFI secure boot / OS signing, and preventing OSes such as Linux for booting, or providing TCPA / TCPM (Trusted Computing Platform Modules).

But that's not all. there are plenty of features. Whatever MS requires or forbids will be extremely influential, as computer manufacturers Want to be able to advertise their product using the Windows Logo; and they are required to use only Windows logo certified components in their systems, so a hardware vendor not getting the stamp of approval on their product can be harmful to their business.

MS will use their leverage to do what they think will improve the number of people buying their product --- that includes improving their user experience, or diminishing the user experience of old operating systems, or competing vendors' OS.

For example: making new hardware no longer compatible with XP or Windows 7 would be a win for them, because it encourages more sales of Windows 8.

The WHQL requirements are full of lists of features that must be supported and features that must not be supported by hardware.

In the former category; they list supposed business justifications, and it's all about user experience.

For the latter category; these are limitations of Windows, and the hardware is not allowed to have support for features outside of Windows' limitations.

In the middle category; there are features hardware vendors must ask for permission to implement; that is probably the safest category for MS to use to pressure vendors --- just withhold permission, until they agree to 'off the record' conditions.

This is not a quote. It is an implication; that behind closed doors, between vendors, there is an "arrangement" MS requires, and if they refuse to comply --- MS has the stick of refusing logo certification to their product ---- if nVidia doesn't get the Windows Logo; then neither do any of the hardware builders or OEMs using nVidia components; therefore, they are likely to ship someone else's hardware instead, so they can get the logo.

Some of the Logo certification requirements

As for multiple monitors with SLI Mosaic.... remember what that is?

Multiple real GPUs responsible for all the various monitors, presented to the operating system as one Logical GPU; so, the OS interacts with one GPU, but the responsibility for the display changes between GPUs.....

What do the WHQL requirements say? Well, nVidia needs an exception. How likely is MS to grant the exception to their requirements to their business partner, if/when they learn nVidia has provided better Linux support than Windows support, when the feature is used?

Target Feature: System.Fundamentals.Graphics
Title: If a Windows 8 system has Multiple GPU's, the graphics and system test must pass in every "Operating Mode"

3. Not-allowed Features. These are features that create unavoidable scenarios that do not meet Windows experience expectations,
do not meet certification requirements, and prevent the system from getting certification.

Switchable Graphics Not Allowed Not Allowed

Switchable Graphics: Two or more GPUs from either the same vendor or different vendors where the responsibility for display output to any monitor changes from one processor to the other, typically through a MUX. Starting with Windows 8 systems, this feature is not allowed.

to this day my right eye seems to see in a warm tint and the left eye in a cold one)

This sounds like a multi-million$ lawsuit.

What deal? The only deal would be between Nvidea and Microsoft, who I'm sure paid a princely sum to hide one of Windows' various deficiencies.

Why do that, when you control the Windows logo rules?

Windows must have a preferred status; features available to Windows users must surpass the list of features available to users of competing platforms; that is, as a condition of applying Windows logo certification to a qualifying hardware product, Hardware must have an experience or supported featureset on Windows that exceeds the user experience on any competing operating system.

In two weeks when we have defaulted on the national debt you will forget these trivialities. We will have bigger stuff to worry about, like how to feed your family when dollars are not worth the paper they are printed on.

This is why i'm planning to borrow millions of $$ from the bank, and stock up on things like Guns and Ammo, that won't be devalued by the US default on the national debt.

By the way; in the event of inflation, Real Estate, and commodities such as silver, copper and steel, can be expected to increase in face value, to match the amount of inflation. These commodities, and things like Bitcoins can then be used as a medium of trade.

Gold is probably not the best thing to acquire at this time, because it's already inflated.

I heard somewhere; that if you are one of the few that has guns and ammo: you should be able to find food in any economy. There will still be plenty of resources to survive; in a survival situation, you just need to be a good competitor.

It's also worthwhile to build a massive stockpile of long-shelflife foods and cooking materials: coconut oil, baking soda, lots of hard liquors of course, cornstarch, salt, maple syrup, pure honey, dried wild/white/jasmine/basmati rice, sugar, dried fruits, dry beans (pintos, kidney beans, blackeye beans), canned beans; freeze-dried stuff, pure vanilla extracts, distilled vinegar, buckwheat, dry corn, kamut, millet, barley, rye, oat groats, flour

But you can't stock up on these at home --- you need to make sure you have a secure, confidential, defensible location for resource storage.