I don't care if it's a lunar colony, Mars, an asteroid, or even a city-sized space station at a Lagrange point, as long as it can sustain itself indefinitely.
Start on Earth first. Any technology to build a wholly self-sustaining community is so much easier when there is gravity, pressure, and radiation shielding. Once we solve the issues of sustainability on the ground, we can worry about the additional challenges (or work on them in parallel with non-sustainable space stations).
And, along the way, we may obviate the need for going off-planet to survive most of the disasters you list, which will help a LOT more people live through them.
So there is a clear path to actually producing energy with nuclear fusion? It has been theoretically possible for many decades, but the devil is usually in the details. I'm glad to hear that I will have my flying car soon!
Stop being supercilious. It's like you've never worked on a major project before.
This isn't just pie-in-the-sky ballparking. This is a major engineering project with goals and timelines. It's inevitable that something will slip due to an unforeseen complication, and IFMIF may not come up with a usable plasma facing material in time for DEMO, but there is a roadmap and concrete steps being taken in that direction. Fusion research deserves a little more respect than "flying car" slurs.
Yes, the road has been long (30+ years long), but the facility has been under construction for 5 years now, first plasma is planned for 2020, and first fusion reactions in 2027. If you want a better idea of what they've been doing/will be doing in the 2008-2020 timeframe, see this slide. See also pp. 10 & 36 of this presentation.
Letting the neutrons bombard a stainless steel shell, which gets hot, heats water, turns a turbine, is the standard way to do things, but the steel shell becomes brittle and radioactive pretty quickly. I hope this actually solves something rather than simply being another method to use more exotic fuel, and reactor equipment, to produce radioactive results along with power.
No, but engineering ones can be estimated pretty well. The basic principles are well understood. All that's left is building and fine-tuning. It's not like this is the first tokamak reactor we've built (see, e.g., JET & Tore Supra), and we're already planning DEMO to follow ITER as a sustained, continuous reactor. ITER is just a testbed for technologies needed to make a real reactor, like materials to resist damage from neutron emissions (in conjunction with work at IFMIF), plasma heating & vessel cooling, and a variety of other supporting technologies. ITER won't even have a way to generate power from the steam it produces. That's DEMO's job.
Of course, this all assumes that fusion will be cheap someday. That's even further off than "commercially viable" or even "sustainable as a 24/7 power source even with heavy subsidies" is.
For all we know, fusion may always be expensive but still have utility in avoiding some of the hidden costs of "cheaper" fossil fuels.
Shouldn't be too hard to write steganography software that hid its messages in the pseudo-random changes to the text for filter evasion. You'd just need a good library of spam message templates of varying length to use as the chaff. For better results, run the same process with random messages that are sent out as part of the same bulk mailing blast to a large list of spam recipients to make it impossible to tell which message is important and which is not. Two terrorists can converse by broadcasting garbage to the world.
Now that I think of it, I wonder if that's the reason I get spam messages with no attachments or links to tell me where to get the product should I have a temporarily absence from reason and want to actually purchase them...
The only thing that everyone should remember was Obama's no new taxes rallying cry that got him elected.
Now Obama has broken a lot of campaign promises, but I'm pretty sure that's not one of them. In fact, if I recall correctly, one of his promises was specifically to roll back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and to deliver cuts for the lower & middle class. He's delivered the latter, but it's the former one that the Republicans have repeatedly stymied him on.
It's actually the promise to raise taxes that he broke by caving to the Republicans in 2010 and passing an extension of the tax cuts in full as well as changing the AMT to make sure it didn't affect as many people as it was going to (i.e. lowering taxes further). In 2012, all he managed to get was a minor rollback for households with $400k ($450k joint)* and to let a few of the 2001 cuts expire (leaving all the 2003 cuts in place) because the Republicans were still working up their bravery to pull the trigger on the US economy they were holding hostage over the fiscal cliff.
(* You know, because ~9X the median salary in this country is still "middle class.")
Yes, we just need to get those heart surgeons salary limited to $100k per year. I mean, that is enough for anyone, right?
What are we getting for the average $446K we spend on heart surgeons? The US does have some of the best rates of survival post heart attack or stroke, so we're getting something, but there's a lot we pay for that's unnecessary: angioplasty, for example. Most vessels opened by it are closed back off within a few months, and the procedure costs upwards of $64K. In European countries, they mostly just do what we *also* do in addition to the procedure -- proscribe nitroglycerin and various blood thinners.
Is there a reason you don't go elsewhere for your health care?
Hassle. Proximity to family. Time available off from work. The fact that my insurance doesn't cover foreign doctors, that I can't afford healthcare without it, and that I've in effect already paid for it at an exorbitant rate via my premiums.
What do you do for a living, and shouldn't we have the govt "help" your industry out?
Previously, I would have said, "Hell yeah!" since that would mean good benefits and a reliable job, but Congress has done it's best to sabotage that feather in the cap.
For me, it was AT&T cell phone plan. I read it in detail because the service rep at the store where I purchased my replacement iPhone just clicked through it without my permission. When he couldn't go back a screen to look at it, I ended up with a print copy to review.
What came out was a shrink-wrapped 2"-thick mini-novel on (IIRC) roughly 6" x 4" paper. Boggled at the size of it, I sat down and started skimming the whole thing to see just what kinds of terms would take up such a stack -- and it wasn't because the thing was in multiple languages! It was largely endless repetition of mostly the same terms for different services & products as well as on behalf of various third parties. Totally wasted verbage as far as I could tell, but who knows what little poison needles they hid in that haystack that I just missed.
It was simply ridiculous. I ended up holding up the kiosk where I was being checked out for 45 minutes or more. It's unconscionable to expect a customer to actually have read that thing and for courts to act like it's reasonable to expect that they should.
(And no, it wouldn't have been a clever out to just say, "I didn't agree," as result of him clicking it. Continued use of the phone & plan as well as paying my bill would be more than enough to constitute acceptance.)
I would like to (delicately) point out what might have happened if you didn't have health insurance....
I would like to (delicately) ask, "Who do you think you are to question the way another family dealt with the painful loss of a loved one and to imply (delicately) that they went about it all wrong by insensitively prolonging her pain?"
The condescension dripping off this post is just galling, as is the implication that people might be better off without healthcare for taking away the option of fighting to live as long as possible. That isn't your decision to make for anyone but yourself.
Political correctness has no place in science, and neither does 'dumbing down'.
Neither does rampant misogyny.
It's interesting that you point all the fault of the paper at one "brainless female," when the paper had 11 authors, 7 of which were male, including her post-doctoral adviser, Dr. Ronald Oremland, who is a noted expert on the metabolization of toxic elements. Dr. Wolfe-Simon was the lead author on the paper, but it could not (or at least should not) have gone forward with those 10 other names without each of them approving. And if any of them were so much smarter and better than someone "only employed for reasons of political correctness, then why did all of them sign onto the "rebuttal" paper in response to criticisms of the original paper? Why does only she get the blame for this and none of them, and where do you get the notion that all of these people worked under her (much less were forced to do so for political reasons)?
One would also suspect, given her list of published papers on biochemistry, that she knows a wee bit more about chemistry than some AC blowhard on Slashdot, despite having been very wrong about GFAJ-1. The ability of arsenic to substitute imperfectly for phosphorus is in fact the very reason it's toxic. It's not impossible that there would be some biological use for arsenic, though it seems highly unlikely given the relative abundance of the two elements and the havoc that arsenic causes because of its similarity. The follow-up research in the wake of this is proving fascinating. At the very least, she's kicked off a whole new interest in arsenic biochemistry.
So, while you pat yourself on the back on your true "scientific understanding," it's clear that you haven't done ANY real research on this subject matter and are just relying on snap judgments -- not surprising considering the sheer hatred you seem to be able to call up for an entire gender. Speaking of which...
It turns out that the liquid state of carbon is mostly an unknown due to the temperatures and pressures required, but there's been a recent consensus that it acts very differently at "low" and high pressures. Computer simulations and experiments have suggested that under high pressures, carbon orders itself into an irregular but still recognizably diamond-like structure with four neighbors for each atom. In fact, high pressures make the formation of solid diamond when the liquid cools more likely as a result. At low pressures, it's more like graphene or strings of carbon, with bonding to neighbors in 2's & 3's instead of 4's. At even higher pressures it develops into a metallic structure. So the term "liquid diamond" actually has significant meaning and isn't just media buzzwords.
That would be a small attache case full of $100 dollar bills. Good luck stopping that.... Not really. These people can live in caves. Or as the guest of Pakistan. Good luck drying up a bunch of very small cash flows.
I think you have a very... media-cultivated view of how terrorists work. Just because they can survive off the land doesn't mean that they can be effective terrorists while doing so. According to the CIA, al Qaeda had operating expenses in the range of $30 million per year before 9/11. That's not a "small attache case full of $100 dollar bills" enterprise -- that's a major, international criminal enterprise / political movement. We have confiscated hundreds of millions of dollars from them and their major financial backers.
Keep in mind also that militant Islamic groups aren't just a bunch of skulking, "easy pickings" criminals, though that's what the West has mostly encountered at home. They're actively involved in several large, open, armed conflicts like in Syria and Somalia, just to name two recently in the news. They're fighting a war, and supply chain logistics is a major issue for them.
And the results? Well, while we may have fostered the growth of many, smaller groups by cutting the head off the hydra, each of those groups is small with a fraction of the global reach al Qaeda had before.
I recommend reading the CRS 2013 report on terrorist tactics -- in particular their financial links to other criminal organizations as well as fundraising methods listen in the appendix.
Sometimes I wonder why science is a religion for these people since they obviously have some kind of emotional need to destroy what it produces?
Same reason that many religious people do the same -- to prove they're "better" at it and satisfy their own ego, regardless of what their own faith supposedly teaches them.
But there is no conceivable enforcement action that the Treasury/IRS can take in a terrorism case.
The Treasury Department is the one that requests that foreign-held (and domestically-held) assets of suspected terrorists and other criminals be frozen. That probably won't stop an attack in progress as part of an emergency counter-response, but it severely hampers the ability to plan future attacks and to evade justice for past ones.
Capitalism requires that increased productivity should cause increased wages. When the 10 Luddites are replaced by a machine (that costs the same as paying 4 Luddites) and 1 Luddite, does the remaining Luddite's pay increase 10 fold, 4 fold, or 2 fold? Where does the money go? This is the riddle of the robot menace, and why Capitalism can't solve the problem by itself.
The remaining worker's pay remains the same, and the difference is split between the owners of the capital (the machines), the makers of the capital, and lowered costs to the consumers of the end product. The only reason the worker's pay would increase would be if the supply of workers was constrained (e.g. by an increased skills requirement).
I'm not sure where you learned economics, but basic supply and demand applies to the labor market too.
It's more that you *have* to choose disease risks. This isn't engineering a baby's genome from scratch -- it's just a matching system between potential gametes.
For example, if you're a woman looking to have a child via artificial insemination, then this system will let you profile the risks and rewards of using different donor sperm with your own eggs. All of these genomes (and your own) carry defective genes. So, do you want the donor with a high IQ and arthritis or the one with good looks and a high risk of heart disease? It'll depend in part on what genes you have that make the risks worse in addition to what benefits you most value.
No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.
Of course, the slimy lawyers in Congress saw the loophole in this populist amendment right away: just pass a law making raises automatic, and once it's in effect they get raises forever.
You do realize that all this means is that any automatic raise had to wait until the next election after it was passed. It can be removed as easily, but that would just have to wait until the next election to take effect.
It doesn't mean that every time they get a raise, the counter resets on when it could be repealed.
Wait, the cops told Ulbricht he should have the admin murdered? Attorneys will have a field day with that.
Entrapment requires that the police induce a suspect to commit a crime which they would otherwise be unlikely to commit. You have to show that the cop induced the victim to do something he wouldn't normally do himself without the cop's specific involvement. (e.g. If you go to a line up of hookers and just pick the one that happens to be a cop, that's not entrapment.)
In the Maryland indictment, an uncover cop posed as a supplier and arranged a deal with DPR to move cocaine in bulk since shipments to small time users wasn't profitable for him. A couple of weeks after they finished that deal, DPR contacted the same undercover cop about one of the site's admins who had been caught by the police and who had stolen money from other Silk Road users. He asked if he could arrange for the man to be roughed up and forced to return the money before later asking to have him killed. The indictment implies that DPR was the one to tell the cop about the guy being caught, though it's hard to tell how it went from there. He paid $40k up front and after and gave the go ahead after being told assassins were waiting to get him alone away from his wife and kid. This took place over two months with multiple chances to pull out.
This first also comes up later in a second hit request against someone trying to blackmail him.
The federal indictment describes an incident in which someone by the nickname "FriendlyChemist" claimed to have hacked into another Silk Road vendor's machine and downloaded the real names of vendors and customers. He attempted to blackmail DPR to the tune of half a million that he said he needed to pay off his suppliers. DPR then asked for his supplier so that they could work things out. Behind FriendlyChemist's back, he asked for the supplier to have him killed as a liability and to sell his wares directly instead. The supplier quoted a price of $150k-$300k, which DPR haggled down to the lower end of the range saying that he'd paid for $80k in the past for a hit. He was later mailed a picture of the guy dead and thanked him for his swift action.
Why would a millionaire drug dealer - a type of criminal that is highly unwelcome in the US, continue to reside there?
Probably because (a) he thought he wouldn't get caught for it, and (b) there aren't really any other places where one can enjoy the same standard of living that won't harshly punish or turn over a trafficker in illicit goods and services. I mean, where exactly should someone who runs a black market website live?
Mostly in snagging your password if you, like most users, reuse passwords. Also, if you wish to use a pseudonym that you don't want tracked back to you, it's impossible without SSL covering what pages you view and what you post.
Of course, even if some of these creatures are in the US, the chances of encountering one - much less being killed by one - will be less than that of being hit by lightning while clutching a winning lottery ticket...
For now. But people could have said that same thing about fire ants, crazy ants, Africanized bees, and most definitely the Asian tiger mosquito which is pretty much everywhere now. There's no reason to believe if there's a breeding pair that they won't flourish as well here.
The US govt seized my bitcoins which silk road kept for me. I am not a US citizen. I have not committed a crime involving us soil or citizens. Will I be able to reclaim my bitcoins? I was actually keeping them there as a safe haven.
You will probably not be able to get your coins back. They have been seized via civil forfeiture. To get your coins back, you will need to establish proof that you are the owner of the coins and that you qualify for an "innocent owner" defense under 18 USC 983(d). Specifically, you will need to show that you "(i) did not know of the conduct giving rise to forfeiture; or (ii) upon learning of the conduct giving rise to the forfeiture, did all that reasonably could be expected under the circumstances to terminate such use of the property."
So, can you show that you did not know that drugs and other illicit materials were being traded on Silk Road? If not, can you show that you tried to get your coins out as soon as you learned this was the case? If not, then goodbye money. You shouldn't have knowingly comingled funds with criminals.
Beyond the unlikelihood of successful recovery, I would point out that attempting to claim your coins may put you at risk of criminal charges for your own actions. I note that you specifically mention that you "have not committed a crime involving us soil or citizens" (emphasis added). If you have used your coins to participate in a crime elsewhere or have participated in activity that is legal elsewhere but criminal in the US (e.g. trade in controlled substances), you may run afoul of money laundering charges (18 USC 1956-1957) and RICO (18 USC 1961-1968).
I highly recommend you consult a real attorney first. (I am not one!) Be honest with them; you have attorney-client privilege in the US and in many other countries, and they cannot give good legal advice without all the facts. Don't be reckless, though. Since you're a foreign national, any calls to the US will most likely be monitored according to recent news, and the DEA is accused of using information they can't legally obtain to fake up a "clean" evidence trail that can't be constitutionally impeached. If possible, you may wish to seek an attorney local to your country who works with US law internationally.
Final note: I am not a lawyer. This should not be construed as legal advice, and I may be quite wrong on several aspects of the above. If you are in serious trouble, consult a real attorney and not Slashdot.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't care if it's a lunar colony, Mars, an asteroid, or even a city-sized space station at a Lagrange point, as long as it can sustain itself indefinitely.
Start on Earth first. Any technology to build a wholly self-sustaining community is so much easier when there is gravity, pressure, and radiation shielding. Once we solve the issues of sustainability on the ground, we can worry about the additional challenges (or work on them in parallel with non-sustainable space stations).
And, along the way, we may obviate the need for going off-planet to survive most of the disasters you list, which will help a LOT more people live through them.
So there is a clear path to actually producing energy with nuclear fusion? It has been theoretically possible for many decades, but the devil is usually in the details. I'm glad to hear that I will have my flying car soon!
Stop being supercilious. It's like you've never worked on a major project before.
This isn't just pie-in-the-sky ballparking. This is a major engineering project with goals and timelines. It's inevitable that something will slip due to an unforeseen complication, and IFMIF may not come up with a usable plasma facing material in time for DEMO, but there is a roadmap and concrete steps being taken in that direction. Fusion research deserves a little more respect than "flying car" slurs.
Yes, the road has been long (30+ years long), but the facility has been under construction for 5 years now, first plasma is planned for 2020, and first fusion reactions in 2027. If you want a better idea of what they've been doing/will be doing in the 2008-2020 timeframe, see this slide. See also pp. 10 & 36 of this presentation.
Letting the neutrons bombard a stainless steel shell, which gets hot, heats water, turns a turbine, is the standard way to do things, but the steel shell becomes brittle and radioactive pretty quickly. I hope this actually solves something rather than simply being another method to use more exotic fuel, and reactor equipment, to produce radioactive results along with power.
Figuring that out a minor goal of ITER and the primary purpose of IFMIF, the International Fusion Materials Irradiation Facility.
Can scientific breakthroughs really be scheduled?
No, but engineering ones can be estimated pretty well. The basic principles are well understood. All that's left is building and fine-tuning. It's not like this is the first tokamak reactor we've built (see, e.g., JET & Tore Supra), and we're already planning DEMO to follow ITER as a sustained, continuous reactor. ITER is just a testbed for technologies needed to make a real reactor, like materials to resist damage from neutron emissions (in conjunction with work at IFMIF), plasma heating & vessel cooling, and a variety of other supporting technologies. ITER won't even have a way to generate power from the steam it produces. That's DEMO's job.
Of course, this all assumes that fusion will be cheap someday. That's even further off than "commercially viable" or even "sustainable as a 24/7 power source even with heavy subsidies" is.
For all we know, fusion may always be expensive but still have utility in avoiding some of the hidden costs of "cheaper" fossil fuels.
Shouldn't be too hard to write steganography software that hid its messages in the pseudo-random changes to the text for filter evasion. You'd just need a good library of spam message templates of varying length to use as the chaff. For better results, run the same process with random messages that are sent out as part of the same bulk mailing blast to a large list of spam recipients to make it impossible to tell which message is important and which is not. Two terrorists can converse by broadcasting garbage to the world.
Now that I think of it, I wonder if that's the reason I get spam messages with no attachments or links to tell me where to get the product should I have a temporarily absence from reason and want to actually purchase them...
The only thing that everyone should remember was Obama's no new taxes rallying cry that got him elected.
Now Obama has broken a lot of campaign promises, but I'm pretty sure that's not one of them. In fact, if I recall correctly, one of his promises was specifically to roll back the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy and to deliver cuts for the lower & middle class. He's delivered the latter, but it's the former one that the Republicans have repeatedly stymied him on.
It's actually the promise to raise taxes that he broke by caving to the Republicans in 2010 and passing an extension of the tax cuts in full as well as changing the AMT to make sure it didn't affect as many people as it was going to (i.e. lowering taxes further). In 2012, all he managed to get was a minor rollback for households with $400k ($450k joint)* and to let a few of the 2001 cuts expire (leaving all the 2003 cuts in place) because the Republicans were still working up their bravery to pull the trigger on the US economy they were holding hostage over the fiscal cliff.
(* You know, because ~9X the median salary in this country is still "middle class.")
"No new taxes," was George H.W. Bush, not Obama.
Yes, we just need to get those heart surgeons salary limited to $100k per year.
I mean, that is enough for anyone, right?
What are we getting for the average $446K we spend on heart surgeons? The US does have some of the best rates of survival post heart attack or stroke, so we're getting something, but there's a lot we pay for that's unnecessary: angioplasty, for example. Most vessels opened by it are closed back off within a few months, and the procedure costs upwards of $64K. In European countries, they mostly just do what we *also* do in addition to the procedure -- proscribe nitroglycerin and various blood thinners.
Is there a reason you don't go elsewhere for your health care?
Hassle. Proximity to family. Time available off from work. The fact that my insurance doesn't cover foreign doctors, that I can't afford healthcare without it, and that I've in effect already paid for it at an exorbitant rate via my premiums.
What do you do for a living, and shouldn't we have the govt "help" your industry out?
Previously, I would have said, "Hell yeah!" since that would mean good benefits and a reliable job, but Congress has done it's best to sabotage that feather in the cap.
For me, it was AT&T cell phone plan. I read it in detail because the service rep at the store where I purchased my replacement iPhone just clicked through it without my permission. When he couldn't go back a screen to look at it, I ended up with a print copy to review.
What came out was a shrink-wrapped 2"-thick mini-novel on (IIRC) roughly 6" x 4" paper. Boggled at the size of it, I sat down and started skimming the whole thing to see just what kinds of terms would take up such a stack -- and it wasn't because the thing was in multiple languages! It was largely endless repetition of mostly the same terms for different services & products as well as on behalf of various third parties. Totally wasted verbage as far as I could tell, but who knows what little poison needles they hid in that haystack that I just missed.
It was simply ridiculous. I ended up holding up the kiosk where I was being checked out for 45 minutes or more. It's unconscionable to expect a customer to actually have read that thing and for courts to act like it's reasonable to expect that they should.
(And no, it wouldn't have been a clever out to just say, "I didn't agree," as result of him clicking it. Continued use of the phone & plan as well as paying my bill would be more than enough to constitute acceptance.)
I would like to (delicately) point out what might have happened if you didn't have health insurance. ...
I would like to (delicately) ask, "Who do you think you are to question the way another family dealt with the painful loss of a loved one and to imply (delicately) that they went about it all wrong by insensitively prolonging her pain?"
The condescension dripping off this post is just galling, as is the implication that people might be better off without healthcare for taking away the option of fighting to live as long as possible. That isn't your decision to make for anyone but yourself.
Political correctness has no place in science, and neither does 'dumbing down'.
Neither does rampant misogyny.
It's interesting that you point all the fault of the paper at one "brainless female," when the paper had 11 authors, 7 of which were male, including her post-doctoral adviser, Dr. Ronald Oremland, who is a noted expert on the metabolization of toxic elements. Dr. Wolfe-Simon was the lead author on the paper, but it could not (or at least should not) have gone forward with those 10 other names without each of them approving. And if any of them were so much smarter and better than someone "only employed for reasons of political correctness, then why did all of them sign onto the "rebuttal" paper in response to criticisms of the original paper? Why does only she get the blame for this and none of them, and where do you get the notion that all of these people worked under her (much less were forced to do so for political reasons)?
One would also suspect, given her list of published papers on biochemistry, that she knows a wee bit more about chemistry than some AC blowhard on Slashdot, despite having been very wrong about GFAJ-1. The ability of arsenic to substitute imperfectly for phosphorus is in fact the very reason it's toxic. It's not impossible that there would be some biological use for arsenic, though it seems highly unlikely given the relative abundance of the two elements and the havoc that arsenic causes because of its similarity. The follow-up research in the wake of this is proving fascinating. At the very least, she's kicked off a whole new interest in arsenic biochemistry.
So, while you pat yourself on the back on your true "scientific understanding," it's clear that you haven't done ANY real research on this subject matter and are just relying on snap judgments -- not surprising considering the sheer hatred you seem to be able to call up for an entire gender. Speaking of which...
It turns out that the liquid state of carbon is mostly an unknown due to the temperatures and pressures required, but there's been a recent consensus that it acts very differently at "low" and high pressures. Computer simulations and experiments have suggested that under high pressures, carbon orders itself into an irregular but still recognizably diamond-like structure with four neighbors for each atom. In fact, high pressures make the formation of solid diamond when the liquid cools more likely as a result. At low pressures, it's more like graphene or strings of carbon, with bonding to neighbors in 2's & 3's instead of 4's. At even higher pressures it develops into a metallic structure. So the term "liquid diamond" actually has significant meaning and isn't just media buzzwords.
That would be a small attache case full of $100 dollar bills. Good luck stopping that. ...
Not really. These people can live in caves. Or as the guest of Pakistan. Good luck drying up a bunch of very small cash flows.
I think you have a very... media-cultivated view of how terrorists work. Just because they can survive off the land doesn't mean that they can be effective terrorists while doing so. According to the CIA, al Qaeda had operating expenses in the range of $30 million per year before 9/11. That's not a "small attache case full of $100 dollar bills" enterprise -- that's a major, international criminal enterprise / political movement. We have confiscated hundreds of millions of dollars from them and their major financial backers.
Keep in mind also that militant Islamic groups aren't just a bunch of skulking, "easy pickings" criminals, though that's what the West has mostly encountered at home. They're actively involved in several large, open, armed conflicts like in Syria and Somalia, just to name two recently in the news. They're fighting a war, and supply chain logistics is a major issue for them.
And the results? Well, while we may have fostered the growth of many, smaller groups by cutting the head off the hydra, each of those groups is small with a fraction of the global reach al Qaeda had before.
I recommend reading the CRS 2013 report on terrorist tactics -- in particular their financial links to other criminal organizations as well as fundraising methods listen in the appendix.
Sometimes I wonder why science is a religion for these people since they obviously have some kind of emotional need to destroy what it produces?
Same reason that many religious people do the same -- to prove they're "better" at it and satisfy their own ego, regardless of what their own faith supposedly teaches them.
But there is no conceivable enforcement action that the Treasury/IRS can take in a terrorism case.
The Treasury Department is the one that requests that foreign-held (and domestically-held) assets of suspected terrorists and other criminals be frozen. That probably won't stop an attack in progress as part of an emergency counter-response, but it severely hampers the ability to plan future attacks and to evade justice for past ones.
Pack it in you eugenics morons! We are on to your game!
I sense irritation and a vague sense of intellectual superiority...
Woah... James Randi, here I come!
Capitalism requires that increased productivity should cause increased wages. When the 10 Luddites are replaced by a machine (that costs the same as paying 4 Luddites) and 1 Luddite, does the remaining Luddite's pay increase 10 fold, 4 fold, or 2 fold? Where does the money go? This is the riddle of the robot menace, and why Capitalism can't solve the problem by itself.
The remaining worker's pay remains the same, and the difference is split between the owners of the capital (the machines), the makers of the capital, and lowered costs to the consumers of the end product. The only reason the worker's pay would increase would be if the supply of workers was constrained (e.g. by an increased skills requirement).
I'm not sure where you learned economics, but basic supply and demand applies to the labor market too.
It's more that you *have* to choose disease risks. This isn't engineering a baby's genome from scratch -- it's just a matching system between potential gametes.
For example, if you're a woman looking to have a child via artificial insemination, then this system will let you profile the risks and rewards of using different donor sperm with your own eggs. All of these genomes (and your own) carry defective genes. So, do you want the donor with a high IQ and arthritis or the one with good looks and a high risk of heart disease? It'll depend in part on what genes you have that make the risks worse in addition to what benefits you most value.
No law, varying the compensation for the services of the Senators and Representatives, shall take effect, until an election of Representatives shall have intervened.
Of course, the slimy lawyers in Congress saw the loophole in this populist amendment right away: just pass a law making raises automatic, and once it's in effect they get raises forever.
You do realize that all this means is that any automatic raise had to wait until the next election after it was passed. It can be removed as easily, but that would just have to wait until the next election to take effect.
It doesn't mean that every time they get a raise, the counter resets on when it could be repealed.
Wait, the cops told Ulbricht he should have the admin murdered? Attorneys will have a field day with that.
Entrapment requires that the police induce a suspect to commit a crime which they would otherwise be unlikely to commit. You have to show that the cop induced the victim to do something he wouldn't normally do himself without the cop's specific involvement. (e.g. If you go to a line up of hookers and just pick the one that happens to be a cop, that's not entrapment.)
In the Maryland indictment, an uncover cop posed as a supplier and arranged a deal with DPR to move cocaine in bulk since shipments to small time users wasn't profitable for him. A couple of weeks after they finished that deal, DPR contacted the same undercover cop about one of the site's admins who had been caught by the police and who had stolen money from other Silk Road users. He asked if he could arrange for the man to be roughed up and forced to return the money before later asking to have him killed. The indictment implies that DPR was the one to tell the cop about the guy being caught, though it's hard to tell how it went from there. He paid $40k up front and after and gave the go ahead after being told assassins were waiting to get him alone away from his wife and kid. This took place over two months with multiple chances to pull out.
This first also comes up later in a second hit request against someone trying to blackmail him.
The federal indictment describes an incident in which someone by the nickname "FriendlyChemist" claimed to have hacked into another Silk Road vendor's machine and downloaded the real names of vendors and customers. He attempted to blackmail DPR to the tune of half a million that he said he needed to pay off his suppliers. DPR then asked for his supplier so that they could work things out. Behind FriendlyChemist's back, he asked for the supplier to have him killed as a liability and to sell his wares directly instead. The supplier quoted a price of $150k-$300k, which DPR haggled down to the lower end of the range saying that he'd paid for $80k in the past for a hit. He was later mailed a picture of the guy dead and thanked him for his swift action.
Why would a millionaire drug dealer - a type of criminal that is highly unwelcome in the US, continue to reside there?
Probably because (a) he thought he wouldn't get caught for it, and (b) there aren't really any other places where one can enjoy the same standard of living that won't harshly punish or turn over a trafficker in illicit goods and services. I mean, where exactly should someone who runs a black market website live?
What is the impact of a MITM attack for a /. user?
Mostly in snagging your password if you, like most users, reuse passwords. Also, if you wish to use a pseudonym that you don't want tracked back to you, it's impossible without SSL covering what pages you view and what you post.
Of course, even if some of these creatures are in the US, the chances of encountering one - much less being killed by one - will be less than that of being hit by lightning while clutching a winning lottery ticket...
For now. But people could have said that same thing about fire ants, crazy ants, Africanized bees, and most definitely the Asian tiger mosquito which is pretty much everywhere now. There's no reason to believe if there's a breeding pair that they won't flourish as well here.
Oh, I know you know, and I know you know I know, but do everyone else out there know we know or even just know, you know?
The US govt seized my bitcoins which silk road kept for me. I am not a US citizen. I have not committed a crime involving us soil or citizens. Will I be able to reclaim my bitcoins? I was actually keeping them there as a safe haven.
You will probably not be able to get your coins back. They have been seized via civil forfeiture. To get your coins back, you will need to establish proof that you are the owner of the coins and that you qualify for an "innocent owner" defense under 18 USC 983(d). Specifically, you will need to show that you "(i) did not know of the conduct giving rise to forfeiture; or (ii) upon learning of the conduct giving rise to the forfeiture, did all that reasonably could be expected under the circumstances to terminate such use of the property."
So, can you show that you did not know that drugs and other illicit materials were being traded on Silk Road? If not, can you show that you tried to get your coins out as soon as you learned this was the case? If not, then goodbye money. You shouldn't have knowingly comingled funds with criminals.
Beyond the unlikelihood of successful recovery, I would point out that attempting to claim your coins may put you at risk of criminal charges for your own actions. I note that you specifically mention that you "have not committed a crime involving us soil or citizens" (emphasis added). If you have used your coins to participate in a crime elsewhere or have participated in activity that is legal elsewhere but criminal in the US (e.g. trade in controlled substances), you may run afoul of money laundering charges (18 USC 1956-1957) and RICO (18 USC 1961-1968).
I highly recommend you consult a real attorney first. (I am not one!) Be honest with them; you have attorney-client privilege in the US and in many other countries, and they cannot give good legal advice without all the facts. Don't be reckless, though. Since you're a foreign national, any calls to the US will most likely be monitored according to recent news, and the DEA is accused of using information they can't legally obtain to fake up a "clean" evidence trail that can't be constitutionally impeached. If possible, you may wish to seek an attorney local to your country who works with US law internationally.
Final note: I am not a lawyer. This should not be construed as legal advice, and I may be quite wrong on several aspects of the above. If you are in serious trouble, consult a real attorney and not Slashdot.
It's "intents and purposes!"
I don't even want to know what an intensive purpose is, but I bet you'd probably want to keep that kind of thing on Tor and out of public sight.