Silk Road was only down for a month or two, following the arrest of one individual.

http://www.forbes.com/fdc/welcome_mjx.shtml

"On Wednesday morning, Silk Road 2.0 came online, promising a new and slightly improved version..."

Dynedain's "Contribute How?" post hit the mark, and I have no idea what it is you're really asking. However, having worked in university IT for about a decade I can offer some advice that can be applied broadly: you have an amazing resource at your disposal - smart people - and you should exploit that by developing software to suit your needs.

A lot of universities spend millions on proprietary software like PeopleSoft when they could get much better value and results by hiring competent programmers, work-studies, grad students, postdocs, etc, in-house to create software that does exactly what your institution needs it to do. Your custom software will do whatever needs to be done, it will be infinitely flexible because you have complete control over what it does and how it does it, you will not be at the mercy of any external vendor for support, and the ongoing licensing costs will be $0.

This is silly; mobile devices and "full size" gaming systems have to be considered different markets.

I can write documents on my iPhone, but that doesn't mean I won't be buying word processing software for computers any more.

Knowing what the odds are seems rather problematic. Once beyond-human AI is developed, then it might have a better idea...

Actually, it's still pretty cool. :)

All good points; it's a big project. Mapping is an important, but not the final step.

The sensory deprivation aspect raises an interesting ethical problem -- if the simulated brain is in fact 100% accurate, then wouldn't running it without normal sensory input be the same as torturing a sentient person?

I suspect that part of creating a functional full-brain simulation will have to involve it's being embedded in a robot (or biological body) which can supply the expected sensory environment.

Actually, it would need to be severely dumbed-down in order to pass the Turing Test. Electronic circuitry operates millions of times faster than the electro-chemical circuitry of the brain, plus it could have instant access to vast databases of information, and no human has that much and that accurate memory.