legalbeagle

This course of action (taking a small risk of losing everything in exchange for a high probability small reward) is what Nassim Taleb calls "picking up coins in front of a steamroller."

This is not about going to jail. No one is going to go to jail. If Apple loses, they will have to comply (assuming it is technically possible to do so). They are going to appeal what is (at this point) an order from a magistrate judge. They have at least three higher forums (district judge, court of appeals, supreme court). If and when they get a final, adverse order they can't appeal, they are going to comply.

Compelling production of Apple's private keys would (for better or worse) be a far easier legal question than what this subpoena seeks to compel. Remember the Lavasoft case? The private keys were ordered produced there. The difference here is that what is sought to be compelled here doesn't exist now; it will have to be created through expert engineering and software design work.

Compelling expert testimony happens all the time. (You might have to pay for it, but the witness has no choice.) The Apple subpoena is different. It is an attempt to compel engineering and coding work.

Yes, you can compel expert witness testimony, but this is different. Testimony is answering questions. Here, they are seeking to compel engineering/coding work. I've never seen that compelled by a subpoena.

The most interesting alleged fact is that these agents used the credentials of C.G. (a DPR employee) to steal 20,000 BTC from Silk Road. That caused DPR to suspect C.G. of the theft, and DPR then paid one of the agents even more BTC for a contract hit on C.G. (which the agents were trying to fake).

Better than The Wire!

The complaint does accuse the two agents of stealing directly from Silk Road during the "proffer" of DPR's employee, C.G. There is no accusation of stealing from Mt.Gox. They reportedly used Mt.Gox to convert stolen bitcoin to dollars and then wired out the dollars to other accounts).

Interestingly, these guys weren't caught because they stole bitcoin. They were caught because they converted the bitcoin into US dollars and then ultimately transferred that cash into accounts subject to investigative jurisdiction in the U.S. Had they simply kept (and maybe even spent) the bitcoin directly, it would have been far harder to identify them.

Two errors in this. First, the 22 oz is before cooking weight. After cooking will be less - maybe 16 oz raw (after you deduct bone and fat) and 12 oz after cooking. The remaining lean meat isn't pure protein. There's other tissues. nutritiondata.self.com lists only about 76.7 calories per oz, or about 920 calories for the whole thing.

There is no information in the article about where the information on calorie counts came from. Personally, they seem wrong to me, at least on some of the items. I don't think the Cowboy Ribeye from Ruth's Cris, for example, really contains 1650 calories.

This guy, Ben Edelman, focuses a lot of his work on online advertising issues. The question here is that his campaign against the Chinese restaurant, although technically correct (they did charge higher prices than advertised online) is wildly disproportionate.

It seems to me that what OpenBazaar is trying to do is to use software and the network to create a truly voluntary marketplace that offers many or most of the structural benefits that we get from centralized marketplaces but without the regulations and risks imposed by those who control such marketplaces. It is very much like what bitcoin does for currency, but applied to a different subject.

DPR and the SR2.0 guy profited from illegal transactions. That wouldn't be the case here. No different in my view from the developers of bittorrent or tor itself.