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I would say that SETI has produced one of the most useful pieces of software available today for the use of the general public.

Folding@Home

SETI@Home

These guys can ALWAYS use more cycles.

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu...

After all these years of running SETI@Home, we still haven't found any extraterrestial TV signals carrying alien porn. :/

It was on the tee-vee, friend. :)

After all these years of running SETI@Home, we still haven't found any extraterrestial TV signals carrying alien porn. :/

> Primarily because the school boards aren't in the business of
> writing textbooks or funding the creation of the same.

Classical English literature
===================
you can get Shakespeare's works *FREE* from project Gutenberg http://www.gutenberg.org/ebook...

Astronomy
========
http://nineplanets.org/ (yeah, the website name is an anachronism) *FREE* and since it's a website, you don't need to order and pay for a new edition each time new discoveries are made

Evolution
=======
Tree of Life Project http://tolweb.org/tree/

Dinosaur Specific http://www.ucmp.berkeley.edu/d... *FREE* and since it's a website, you don't need to order and pay for a new edition each time new discoveries are made

For those fundamentalist schools who don't believe in evolution Project Gutenberg has the King James Bible and the Douay-Rheims version

A school district should be able to get a good chunk of its needs free off the web. Most of these sites will easily give permission to download and duplicate. Instead of handing out 16 KG of books to each student, hand out 16-gigabyte USB keys to each student with the necessary e-books and/or mirrored websites.

In most of Europe, the "economically conservative but socially liberal" parties have economic policies to he left of the Democrats,

Not in terms of tax progressivity. American has managed to export Reaganomics to the world. "Socialist" France, to take but one example, has a much lower top marginal tax and higher income concentration than America had in our golden era -- 1950s and 1960s. Details here.

Compilers can also "optimize" away Kahan summation algorithm. See page 6 of How Futile are Mindless Assessments of Roundoff in Floating-Point Computation

no, the study did not test anything related to what he said. the study was quite simply a factor analysis. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/F...

as you put it, it inferred the empirical statistical correlation of correct / incorrect answers.

the study showed only that the question about evolution was a relatively independent component. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I...

the rest of the article was the author's unfounded -- and as almost everyone in this forum has demonstrated, wrong -- inferences.

the study did not establish - at all - what is or is not part of scientific literacy.

what is or is not part of scientific literacy is established by the _philosohpy of science_.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/P...

http://undsci.berkeley.edu/art...

ML has already been proposed to improve the performance and resource efficiency of large-scale datacenters. Detailed information on two of the most well-known examples from Stanford and Berkeley can be found below: http://engineering.stanford.ed... http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/P...

a lot of the changes are random

And here's me thinking that all random mutations are random. Give these guys a Nobel Prize.

Hence the line about "light gathering chemicals like it". There's a few different chemicals that can be used by organisms in photosynthesis. Chlorophyll is simply the most popular on the surface of the Earth. Other pigments are optimum for regions that receive different light spectra than the surface. On worlds whose stars had different spectral maxima than Sol these pigments would likely be more abundant in photosynthetic life.

You are correct of course. Thanks for pointing that out. I should have written "proof". Likely Tart puts it better. To agree with you, from:
http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/A...
"There are a few caveats to take into account to refine what a lack of supporting evidence says about a hypothesis. Absence of evidence is not necessarily strong evidence that outright disproves the hypothesis in the way that an observation that contradicts the hypothesis would be. ... As such, absence of evidence acting against a hypothesis is only a probabilistic approach and works best in a full Bayesian-style framework, which also takes into account other probabilities and other evidence."

== Some rambles on weighing the meaning of absence of evidence in US society

First, Tart claims evidence os paranormal activity from research studies. People may dispute that including by questioning the studies, so let's just assume there still is no evidence for the sake of discussion.

An important factor in weighing the meaning of the absence of evidence is the intense competition for research funds which is increasingly corrupting science. See: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~dg...
"Peer review is usually quite a good way to identify valid science. Of course, a referee will occasionally fail to appreciate a truly visionary or revolutionary idea, but by and large, peer review works pretty well so long as scientific validity is the only issue at stake. However, it is not at all suited to arbitrate an intense competition for research funds or for editorial space in prestigious journals."

For example, when Pons and Fleischmann submitted their "cold fusion" results to a peer review process for grant funding, it turned out one of the reviewers was working in the same area and was about to publish on it. This conflict (whoever is most at fault) ultimately lead to the press conference announcement (against the scientist's preferences) at the university wanted to claim priority on the discovery (via creating artificial scarcity through patents). A handful of hot-fusion scientists (especially at MIT) after fairly brief and limited attempts then claimed the results could not be duplicated an that failure to replicate was essentially proof that Pons and Fleischmann were wrong and "cold fusion" could not exists given popular conceptions of nuclear physics at the time. Pons and Fleishmann may have been wrong in several ways, including in calling it "fusion" of any sort and also in their neutron measurements. But these were expert chemists well experienced in heat measurements and that part of what they did was likely valid, and likely they did detect excess heat. But for *decades* any mention of doing cold fusion research became academic suicide based on the handful of failures to replicate by people whose short-term interests were served by not finding results. Only a few (mostly older, tenured) people continued to work on that. Related:
http://newenergytimes.com/v2/r...
http://www.e-catworld.com/2014...
http://undsci.berkeley.edu/art...

"Cold Fusion" (now LENR) Research has been picking up in the last few years though, such as with this LENR conference ironically at MIT:
http://world.std.com/~mica/201...

Another example is when Halton Arp was denied telescope time to pursue his "electric universe" ideas. Ignaz Semmelweis is another example from centuries ago, where his evidence of how to prevent disease by hand-washing was dismissed as in conflict with conceptions of health and disease at the time.

Is her state refusing to expand medicaid?
A can't find any income level to low for subsidies, that don't get medicare.
I did my search based on a single person, 21 years old.

If she lives in a state that throwing a political fit at the cost of the poor, well.. I feel for her, but it isn't becasue of ACA.
http://laborcenter.berkeley.ed...

I did 1000, 5000, 1000, 15000 and 20000. 5,10,15 medicare, 20 was subsidized.

If you do that, it performs slightly better. But - there is still an astonishing amount of certificate changes of big sites, where the signing CA changes too.

See this paper for a few examples.

I like this flowchart. Particularly relevant to the question of whether science is "settled" is the fact that there is no "end" cell in the flow chart. When attempting to disprove some scientific knowledge you should know what has failed in the past (and reputably confirmed) so you don't waste resources. There are always questions that haven't been answered yet! That doesn't mean you can't make good use of science (or rely on partial results) even when some people disagree. I'm glad we didn't have to wait for conservapedia to agree before we began taking advantage of Einstein's work.

Nuclear power can be done as was shown with the US navy, but it requires
spending lots of money, and the problem with it as a utility is the bean
counters start bypassing safety.

But in the case of Fukushima stuxnet also got involved...

http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/no...

I don't know about "Internet.org" specifically but as for using anything tied to Facebook, Instagram, and similar services: Try watching any of his recent talks, from the most recent talks to the talks dating back about a year or three. He tells you right at the top of the talk what he thinks of Facebook, Instagram, and the like—he dares to call them by their proper name: surveillance engines—and he asks users to not participate by not uploading copies of his talks and photos with him to these services. You can also read his personal website on Facebook detailing many reasons to avoid Facebook. I imagine any other service that works similarly ("Google+", for example) will receive a comparable critique.

It seems unlikely to me that any program started by these organizations will be anything other than come-ons to lose one's privacy to these data collection companies.

There are free software web browser add-ons you can install on your free software web browser: Priv3, NoScript, and various cookie editors/filters which will help you deal with the monitoring various services use when you get an offer to be tracked with a "like" button or similar thing. There's more work to be done on this ground, to be sure, but this is a good start.

I guess they figure that the radioactive material coming from Fukushima would
equalize it all given enough time and decided not to bother....

What most ppl don't realize is that the US taxpayer paid for this happen TWICE....

The 1st time for what this article is talking about, and the 2nd time when stuxnet
either caused or made worse the disaster in Fukushima.

http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/no...

When stuxnet or its next variant runs amok it won't contribute to another Fukushima disaster event ?

http://www.nuc.berkeley.edu/no...

And yes that is the nuclear engineering dept at Berleley.edu....

If the NSF Report actually stated "that roughly 40% of Americans believe astrology to be scientific," this would be an interesting use of five bucks. But that's not what the report says.

Here's what the NSF report acually writes—and it's actually interesting:

Fewer Americans rejected astrology in 2012 than in recent years.
* In 2012, slightly more than half of Americans said that astrology was “not at all scientific,” whereas nearly two-thirds gave this response in 2010. The comparable percentage has not been this low since 1983.

Page 7-6 of the report gives actual details about the survey—speciically, the Science and Technology portion of the General Social Survey". You can search the GSS survey for the word 'astrology' to see the actual question:

ASTROSCI : ASTROLOGY IS SCIENTIFIC - 1037. Would you say that astrology is very scientific, sort of scientific, or not at all scientific?
0 NAP
1 Very scientific
2 Sort of scientific
3 Not at all scientific
8 DONT KNOW
9 NO ANSWER

The whole point is that they're asking Americans if they know what the word 'astrology' means.

If there was a mass epidemic of amnesia between 2010 and 2012, I don't remember it. So what caused the reversal in a steady trend that lasted from 1983 to 2010? Why did the number of Americans who know the definition of the word 'astrology' make a sudden and very large negative drop from 2010 to 2012?

This is an interesting result, and to their credit the authors of the NSF report do a good job of accurately reporting their finding without resorting to hyperbole or finger-pointing.

SNAP! is a visual editor that can put together some simple-to-moderately-complex programs. I'm surprised no one has cited it as an example of the convenience / drawbacks of a visual editor. It can be hooked up to all kinds of things, including mindstorms, wiimotes, and Arduino. I've only seen it used standalone for intro-level CS instruction, but it does seem to have some interesting uses. I don't think this is a real problem though -- the text of actual code isn't a barrier to actual coders...

As for the rest of your rant^H^H^H^H post, it doesn't really make sense. You believe that a self-signed certificate will somehow "protect" you from the NSA? Who is somehow incapable of a MITM? Well, this, this and this may prove... enlightening. And while we're on the topic of "additional reading", may I also recommend "Alice in Warningland" - a study showing 70+% clickthrough rates for SSL warnings.

There are some other issues, like you mentioning wireless traffic. With WPA2 being the default, and with many modern wireless NICs no longer supporting promiscuous mode, it is often more difficult to sniff wireless traffic than to mount a MITM on a wired network (especially when the target is the victim's router - again, see the links above).

Security means encryption + integrity + authentication. Period. Anything less is no longer secure.

did you realize that HP didnt start selling PC's until 1995... over 10 years after the macintosh was released?

I guess the folks who did that timeline didn't consider the HP Vectra, released in 1995, very important, perhaps because it wasn't aimed at "the home computing market", which is what the timeline says HP entered in 1995. (I also guess they didn't consider usability very important, either, unless it works better than it did on Safari.)

And, as long as we're beating up marketoons making misleading claims, HP didn't "create RISC architecture" all by themselves in 1986; the first Berkeley RISC processor and the first Stanford MIPS processors were developed in the early 1980's, and IBM were working on the 801 in the late 1970's. Perhaps the first PA-RISC-based HP 3000 was the first commercial RISC-based machine, but that's a different matter.

Well, thanks for replying to me. I notice you make a pretty bold claim "There has been precious little change in the actual distribution of income over the last 20 years," citing the census data. Note that a change of two points in the Gini is pretty significant, and that Mexico, notorious for not having any middle class, has a Gini of 48, while most other fully developed countries, such as Germany (28.3) have lower Gini indices than the US.

I got my data from the paper "Income Inequality in the United States, 1913-2002" by Thomas Piketty and Emmanuel Sanz: http://elsa.berkeley.edu/~saez/piketty-saezOUP04US.pdf

Just wanted to mention Alfred Wegener, the man who proposed continental drift, only to be dismissed for nearly 50 years before being accepted.

Or, you can read about Barry Marshal who discovered that the bacterium H. pylori caused peptic ulcer disease, leading him to win a Nobel Prize in 2005. he published it in the 80's and if wasn't widely accepted until some 10 years later.

So regardless of the AGW debate, your assertion that it must be true because there is no widely accepted theory disproving it, is complete horseshit.

When you google "peer review problems" the first hits are:
http://blogs.berkeley.edu/2013/10/04/open-access-is-not-the-problem/
and this
http://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/blog/2013/oct/04/science-hoax-peer-review-open-access
and this
http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21588069-scientific-research-has-changed-world-now-it-needs-change-itself-how-science-goes-wrong
and
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1420798/

So, should all the journals discussed there be closed down? Peer reviewing ending up favoring somebodies paper whom the anonymous reviewers happen to know or like, or whose conclusions they agree with is a well known problem. As is peer reviewers delaying papers that disagree with their own research, despite impeccable research.

The problem is not that the peer review process used here was acceptable and should in fact have continued. The problem is double standards.

But I still ask, how come commercial space didn't happen in 1980s. Was technology too exotic? There was the Soviet threat but no ITAR.

You might want to dig a bit into the history of OTRAG to see some of the difficulties that people faced in the early development of commercial spaceflight. The largest problem was mainly a "giggle factor" where regulators and people involved with even permitting this kind of activity happening. It took Ronald Reagan to pass the Commercial Space Launch Act which in turn created the Office of Commercial Spaceflight and encouraged government agencies to hire private companies to perform services that previously were done by government personnel.

In other words, it was largely a political issue rather than necessarily a technological one. When AT&T sent up their Testar satellites, they needed specific legislation passed by Congress just to be permitted to launch vehicles into space. For a long time it is this whole permitting process that has had the government getting in the face of anybody trying to seriously consider going into space, and even now the regulations on building spacecraft still are a major hassle and consume full time employees just to meet those regulations even in a very small start-up company with just a dozen employees. Don't even think about starting a company with space-based assets or things going into space without one or more lawyers on staff.

The other aspect is that the internet also created a whole bunch of tech savvy geeks with money. Many of them wanted to do stuff in space, having grown up watching the Apollo Moon missions and hoping that things would be moving along faster in space than it actually has. There were dreams that by the year 2000 we would already have colonies on Mars, yet that didn't happen. Arguably the reason why that didn't happen is because it was too expensive to go there, and Congress seriously gutted the space program following the completion of the Apollo missions. These geeks decided that since government programs aren't getting the job done, they would be willing to try to do it themselves.

The X-Prize is something that has been a catalyst for getting the current generation of commercial spaceflight happening, where conferences before the X-Prize were mostly concentrating on how to expand NASA funding and building constituencies, and conferences after the X-Prize (particularly after Burt Rutan won that X-Prize) started talking about venture capital funding, business plans, and how to avoid getting bogged down in government regulations to get your project going. There really has been a radical change in thinking in recent years, and that explains part of what is happening in commercial spaceflight at the moment.

Bullshit. Evolutionary theory explains why species evolve, and "god did it" is not one of the mechanisms. Do you see divine intervention in this list? http://evolution.berkeley.edu/evosite/evo101/IIIMechanisms.shtml

And in a parallel universe, the SETI project would be more open to the idea.

http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/forum_thread.php?id=71623

But they're not -and depending on one's point of view, they have good reasons for it.

The other difficulty is making a fold or SETI search accomplishment a proof-of-work without it being wide open to abuse (and, therefore, hugely detrimental to those projects).

A less stringent method would be to set a transaction bit and message to an online solution, and allow clients to check the bit (and the solution) and accept that as the transaction fee - thus allowing anybody who doesn't want to pay a transaction fee to have the option of helping cancer research of the search for little green men instead. Unfortunately, this then runs into a large portion of the Bitcoin community not being open to that idea, since any such framework could easily be abused (see also: Coin Validation).

Why not heat with a bitcoin miner? You'd help to cover the cost of the electricity. Or, do service for boinc. http://boinc.berkeley.edu/

In the domain of language in which Ruby plays, I'd say Python has by far the brightest future.

Some graphs from google trends: ruby programming, python programming and php programming. Which one of these things is not like the others? (Hint: Python).

TIOBE data, questionable as it is.

Search for jobs at LinkedIn:

Ruby: 112 results
Python: 5,151 results
PHP: 3,046 results

And the "programmer perception" survey Berkeley did a while back (that I think was covered at Slashdot). Check out the results for the question "This language is likely to be around for a very long time".

DB: Queries with Bounded Errors and Bounded Response Times on Very Large Data

No, BASIC is also a pile shit in pedagogical terms: complex, fiddly, inconsistent, crude. Edsger Dijkstra described potential programmers exposed to BASIC as "mentally mutilated beyond hope of regeneration", but I increasingly think this description could be generalized to cover all students raised in the Algol school of programming - and since Algol begat C and Pascal, which in turn begat C++, Java, ObjC, Python, Ruby, PHP, and JavaScript, I think it sums up nearly all mainstream programmers today.

Seymour Papert once had the right idea: you don't teach "programming", you teach structured thinking and analytical problem solving. That students learn how to program along the way is just a nice side-effect of the platform used, which in Papert's case was LOGO. Algolites frequently perceive LOGO as a toy language for little kids because it looks ludicrously simple compared to Algol-family languages, those vast baroque monuments to their own extreme cleverness. But any idiot can do complicated: it's doing it simple that's hard. Syntactically and semantically, LOGO only has two primitive structures - words and lists - yet it can express everything that a "proper" language like Pascal can. Heck, you can even learn Computer Science Logo Style, which makes me think that CS departments should actually be teaching LOGO as their first language.

As Guy Steele once put it (back before he went to the Dark Side): "The most important concept in all of computer science is abstraction." And LOGO - bless its crystal clear sense of priorities - gets right to the heart of this, introducing itself like so:

1. This is a word.
2. This is how you run a word.
3. This is how you add your own words.

Simple, beautiful, and incredibly powerful and empowering. No bullshit, no fuss. Just the total essence of computer programming, expressed in terms that even a child can understand and use.

Basically, the Algol-family languages teach students to "bang the rocks together" - the procedural ones neatly wash the rocks first, while the object-oriented ones paint them all shiny silver to show what hot shit they are. The apex of achievement is measured by how hard and rhythmically they can bring the rocks together, and how many rocks they can get through before their arms fall off. Whereas the Lisp school, of which LOGO is part, could not be less impressed by all this sturm und drang clatter of rocks. Their only interest is in learning how to use those original stones to manufacture flint knives, which can be used to fabricate clothing and axes, which can be used to construct buildings and forges, which can be used to smelt iron... and so on. Honestly, if civilization had been built by C and JavaScript programmers, we'd all still be living in caves today.

The genius to LOGO's pedagogical approach is that what it teaches is not merely tool use, but tool creation. Start with a primitive core vocabulary, then build it out and enrich it until it can effectively and efficiently express your own specific wants and needs. And the reason it can get on and teach this right away is because it doesn't spend 99% of its time drowning its students in vast swamps of micromanaging make-work nonsense. The myriad 'special forms' that all those macho Real Languages so proudly present as if they're the most important and special fundamental concepts in all of programming - statements and expressions and operators and conditionals and loops and types and values and variables and punctuation and so on - turns out to be entirely unimportant and not special at all; it's just garbage, with no real value beyond obfuscating and distracting and keeping honest onlookers from developing the sneaking suspicion that most of today's programmers don't really know what they're doing nearly as much as they pretend to.

It's just a tragedy that Khan and Zuckerberg and others have now progressed to the stage where they're now enthusiastically evangelizing their own Algol-crippled mentalities upon millions more. I'm sure they mean well enough it, but the world could really do without such Dunning-Kruger idiocy going recursive.

This issue was described far better than I can in William Kahan's essay, How Java's floating point hurts everyone everywhere

While that's true in many cases, there are some situations in which we need . Read Shewchuk's excellent paper on the subject.

When disaster strikes and a real RAM-correct algorithm implemented in floating-point arithmetic fails to produce a meaningful result, it is often because the algorithm has performed tests whose results are mutually contradictory.

The easiest way to think about it is with a made-up problem about sorting. Let's say that you have a list of mathematical expressions like sin(pi*e^2), sqrt(14*pi*ln(8)), tan(10/13), etc and you want to sort them, but some numbers in the list are so close to each other that they might compare differently on different computers that round differently, (e.g. one computer says that sin(-10) is greater than ln(100)-ln(58) and the other says it's less).

Imagine now that this list has billions of elements and you're trying to sort the items using some sort of distributed algorithm. For the sorting to work properly, you *need* to be sure that a < b implies that b > a. There are situations (often in computational geometry) where it's OK if you get the wrong answer for borderline cases (e.g. it doesn't matter whether you can tell whether sin(-10) is bigger than ln(100)-ln(58) because they're close enough for graphics purposes) as long as you get the wrong answer consistently, so the next algorithm out (sorting in my example, or triangulation in Shewchuk's) doesn't get stuck in infinite loops.

The Internet Archive says that it subscribes to the The Oakland Archive Policy which for |requests by governments" says:

Archivists will exercise best-efforts compliance with applicable court orders Beyond that, as noted in the Library Bill of Rights, 'Libraries should challenge censorship in the fulfillment of their responsibility to provide information and enlightenment.'

Seems like this may just have slipped past them. Let's make sure they know they need to sort it out... Surely they only removed it from the Wayback Machine, not from the archive itself.

That's actually a really good point. I wonder if there's any justification in the Policy for retroactively removing content based on current robots.txt

Archivists will exercise best-efforts compliance with applicable court orders Beyond that, as noted in the Library Bill of Rights, 'Libraries should challenge censorship in the fulfillment of their responsibility to provide information and enlightenment.'

Seems like this may just have slipped past them. Let's make sure they know they need to sort it out... Surely they only removed it from the Wayback Machine, not from the archive itself.

Do you realize that doubling the minimum wage will also result in a net loss of jobs?

For someone who complained about lack of citations and statistics the sentence before, you sure make bold claims with nothing to back them up.

Loss of jobs has been the #1 agenda item for those against... uh, actually pretty much anything that might help the low-income people, be it minimum wage, unions, employee protection laws or really anything else.

Rarely is there any evidence for it. Two recent papers show that there is no significant impact:
http://www.nber.org/papers/w4509
http://www.irle.berkeley.edu/workingpapers/157-07.pdf

Now pony up your evidence or accept you've fallen for cheap rhetorics.

"innovative methods"??? I do not know of a single serious scientist who hasn't been lectured on the ills of weak testing (and told not to use 0.05 as some sort of magical threshold below which everything magically works).

Back when I was a wee researchling, this is literally one of the first paper I was told to read and internalise (published 20 years ago, and not even particularly breakthrough at the time).

There is absolutely no need for new evidence or further discussion of the limitations of statistical testing thresholds: anybody who cares is keenly aware of them. People who don't (particularly in some areas of social science), are just looking for a way to get their next paper out the door by any means possible.

The rich of today pale in comparison to the wealthy of the last century. Rockefellers, Carnegies had 10 times as much wealth as Bill Gates, the 'wealth gap' was much wider, yet the standard of living for the poor was rising, not falling the way it is today.

Wow! 10 times more!? Got a source for this interesting claim? You wouldn't just be makin' stuff up would you?

From what I can find the incomes of the top 1%, and the top 0.01%, etc., is at or above the GDP share of the beginning of the 20th century.

True enough, they even built their own domain specific C extension for the purpose of evaluating very large datasets (it's called 'Hancock' if you want to go googling yourself).

However, if I've learned anything about the world from software, it's that the fact that the work has already been done is absolutely no obstacle to charging each customer for doing the work...

When I see actual things with the ability to talk to each other, the universal option always seems to be CANbus (or a variant, like NMEA 2000). Chung-Wei Lin and Alberto Sangiovanni-Vincentelli of UC Berkeley have this proposal for implementing CANbus with security. If I'm going to automate something in my home, I'd rather use CANbus so I can just buy the stuff that does the tasks.

Opps link didn't make it.

Here it is:

http://ced.berkeley.edu/bpj/2012/09/gerrymandering-politics-out-of-the-redistricting-process-toward-a-planning-revolution-in-redrawing-local-legislative-boundaries/

The paper from Candes is here:
http://www-stat.stanford.edu/~candes/papers/ExactRecovery.pdf

He was not actually looking at MRI images, but on a test image.
The application to MRI was done a bit later:

http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/~mlustig/CS/SparseMRI.pdf
http://www-mrsrl.stanford.edu/studygroup/2/Files/Block_2007_Undersampled.pdf

Hi Shavano,

In this post you wrote:
> Let's be clear about this. Silk Road operators had a guy killed.

And in another post you wrote:
> These guys are also murderers.

While I think your main point is correct, that Ross Ulbricht is (allegedly) a thug, I also think we should be clear that (probably) nobody actually died. Ulbricht is accused of paying bitcoins to have two people killed, but neither "hit" was carried out. See
http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/UlbrichtCriminalComplaint.pdf
bottom of page 23, for a summary of one "hit", and
https://ia601904.us.archive.org/1/items/gov.uscourts.mdd.238311/gov.uscourts.mdd.238311.4.0.pdf
starting on page 6, for a step-by-step account of the other.

Your main argument is how talking to the police benefits the society as a whole rather than the individual. Let's take a look at two recent high profile examples which contradict your point.

On the one hand we have Ross Ulbricht who was caught running Silk Road. The evidence that lead to his arrest is pretty solid as you can read in the criminal complaint. If he had cooperated with the investigation, he gets a reduced sentence. How is that fair to the society as a whole?

Well when I say that the defendant cooperating the police benefits society, I mean that the standalone act of his cooperating, benefits us (saves us some effort gathering evidence against him). Now, because that standalone act benefits us, we might offer him something in return, and after the quid pro quo is done, the entire net transaction might no longer be beneficial to us, if the quid pro quo was too generous. But that has no bearing on the original point, which is that the act of his confessing to the police would help us.

On the other hand we have Aaron Swartz. He clearly understood not talking to the police, but his girlfriend Quinn didn't, as a result subjected herself and Aaron to unnecessary harassment by the prosecutor. It costed their relationship, and eventually, Aaron caved under the pressure and took his own life. In Aaron's case, it wasn't clear what is the maximum extent he could be charged for what he did, but cooperating definitely made it worse. It's like the prosecution ripped him off by charging him 10x for his crime, and then generously offered a 10% discount as leniency.

If you believe what Aaron did was good for the society, you would have advised Aaron and Quinn not to talk to the investigators.

In the case of Aaron Swartz, I think the law he was being charged with was an unjust law (at least under the prosecutor's interpretation of the law and the penalties that they were seeking).

So of course that makes the prosecution's tactics look horrible, but the trouble with that line of reasoning is that every law enforcement method looks horrible, when the law that they're enforcing is clearly unjust. So you can't use that as the standard for judging a law enforcement tactic.

What if some guy Bob found himself in the same situation, except that Bob had robbed a liquor store, and the cops came to talk to him, and Bob lawyered up but his girlfriend Jane spilled the beans and ultimately got Bob arrested. Would it still look so unfair for the police to have used that tactic?

Your main argument is how talking to the police benefits the society as a whole rather than the individual. Let's take a look at two recent high profile examples which contradict your point.

On the one hand we have Ross Ulbricht who was caught running Silk Road. The evidence that lead to his arrest is pretty solid as you can read in the criminal complaint. If he had cooperated with the investigation, he gets a reduced sentence. How is that fair to the society as a whole?

On the other hand we have Aaron Swartz. He clearly understood not talking to the police, but his girlfriend Quinn didn't, as a result subjected herself and Aaron to unnecessary harassment by the prosecutor. It costed their relationship, and eventually, Aaron caved under the pressure and took his own life. In Aaron's case, it wasn't clear what is the maximum extent he could be charged for what he did, but cooperating definitely made it worse. It's like the prosecution ripped him off by charging him 10x for his crime, and then generously offered a 10% discount as leniency.

If you believe what Aaron did was good for the society, you would have advised Aaron and Quinn not to talk to the investigators.

On or about March 29, 2013, ROSS WILLIAM ULBRICHT, a/k/a "Dread Pirate Roberts," a/k/a "DPR," a/k/a "Silk Road," the defendant, in connection with operating the Silk Road website, solicited a Silk Road user to execute a murder-for-hire of another Silk Road user, who was threatening to release the identities of thousands of users of the site.

It's interesting that they're not charging him for the murder-for-hire scheme; the criminal complaint describes it in lurid detail. http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/UlbrichtCriminalComplaint.pdf (The detail starts at point #31/page 21.) Ulbricht allegedly tried to pay ~$150k to have a supposed blackmailer assassinated. He claims to have had an earlier "clean hit" done for around $80k.

Contrast the murder-for-hire move with the following (allegedly) hypocritical drivel from his LinkedIn profile:

I want to use economic theory as a means to abolish the use of coercion and agression amongst mankind. Just as slavery has been abolished most everywhere, I believe violence, coercion and all forms of force by one person over another can come to an end. The most widespread and systemic use of force is amongst institutions and governments, so this is my current point of effort. The best way to change a government is to change the minds of the governed, however. To that end, I am creating an economic simulation to give people a first-hand experience of what it would be like to live in a world without the systemic use of force.

Actually, it sounds like he was just sloppy in keeping his identities and email addresses separate. Seriously amateur.
http://www1.icsi.berkeley.edu/~nweaver/UlbrichtCriminalComplaint.pdf