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And I didn't even have to disable Javascript!

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And I didn't even have to disable Javascript!

Oh yeah ? "...difficult to communicate with..."
You think you communicate very well ? Many people with English as their native first language can't read/speak/write proper English. And, of course, as if there are no accents here in the US - see "Traveling with an accent" NYTimes June 8 2003. http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/08/travel/traveling-with-an-accent.html?pagewanted=print&src=pm
Likewise, get off your high-horse...

BZZZZZZT! Wrong, their is nothing wrong with Medicare/Medicaid. What's wrong is health care costs which are increasing at rate twice that of inflation and is 17% of GDP. Which is not just affecting entitlement programs, but the country as a whole.

"I would think RIAA would demand 3D scanner be illegal to own or operate as it is a device designed to circumvent "copy protection" known as "obsolescence.""

Not to mention circumventing Edison's original media lock technology:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/11/business/yourmoney/11edison.html?pagewanted=2

"An adapter permitted Victor records to be played on an Edison Disc Phonograph, but Edison forbade the sale of an attachment that permitted his records to be played on competitorsâ(TM) machines."

Of course if you wanted to rip his competitor's discs, you'd probably be violating their EULA - the language doesn't seem to have changed much in a century:

http://www.natch.net/stuff/78_license/

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/17/international/americas/17pavel.html

The small inventor finally won, but the point is there are examples which contradict that this is a straw man argument.
So kindly, stfu and get off your horse. On your way out you can turn in your caps lock key.

And yet corporate profits are up, corporations have record amounts of cash on hand, economic demand is down, and capcity is idle, inflation is nonexistent, and with interest rates near zero, credit is cheap.

If there wasn't enough money in the economy, then the corporations wouldn't have cash, there would be no excess production capacity, and inflation would be high. None of these are true. Taxes ain't the problem kid. They haven't been for 40(!) years. What is moving production overseas? Labor arbitrage -- the race to the bottom. And no, we don't have to accept this as a nation, and no unions, nor regulations are the cause. Case in point: The world's second largest exporter: Germany.

(B) the WTO and other international trade organizations would ensure retaliation by imposing massive duties on exports.

Actually, the WTO seems to have said otherwise. This is a terribly important and generally overlooked point. A strong international emissions reduction agreement appears very doubtful, so the only way to get started on serious reductions in emissions is for countries to be able to impose domestic controls on greenhouse gas emissions without the fear of destroying domestic industry. The simplest way of doing so is to impose a carbon tax on domestic consumption, so that imports from countries without controls on carbon emissions will have taxes imposed, and exports to those countries will be subsidized to compensate for the domestic carbon tax.

This might be the straw that's very likely going to break the camel's back, but it's been a long running story now. Back in 2005 they were rumbled for hacking into voicemail of aides to the royal family, a good article from a US source, the NYT, here. The tl;dr version of that article is a minor uproar ensues but Newscorp contains it and is more or less successful claiming it as a one-off, rouge scenario, offering up the resignation of Andy Coulson, the editor, though he claims not to have known anything about it of course.

Now Andy Coulson makes the mistake of getting a job - head of communications, think Toby Ziegler in the West Wing - in the Conservatives, who get into government. This, combined with statements made by the private investigator who's decided he's not going down alone, adds enough fuel to get the fire burning again. The Guardian and Channel 4 get digging and out comes a documentary. A handful of celebrities are sniffing around it now, lo and behold Hugh Grant throws gas on the fire by bugging the bugger. All is forgiven Hugh, well played.

Accusations just keep mounting up and the picture is forming pretty solidly of a newsroom where such things were par for the course. An oft-repeated point directed at Coulson I'll paraphrase as "either he knew and he broke the law, or he didn't and he's grossly negligent" (not sure who started that, I think Ian Hislop). Coulson is given the boot.

The shit is flying pretty thick now and it just keeps coming. But it's all the royals, celebs and politicians. There is a sense that whilst it's overstepping the mark considerably, these are all public people and fair game. Milly Dowler, on the other hand, was a child and a tragedy. This is a recent turn in events and very quickly major advertisers have started to step away. I'll applaud Ford for being the first of the big advertisers to drop them, though I'm quite surprised it took so long. I suspect more shuffled away quietly.

News is now coming in that the police investigating the phone hacking have contacted the parents of Holly Wells and Jessica Chapman, the girls killed by the Soham Murderer. This was one of the biggest stories and national tragedies I can remember.

The News of the World really must not be allowed to survive this, it is a stunning failure of ethics, governance and plain decency on a huge scale with substantial evidence. If they can't be brought down for this, they clearly cannot be taken down for anything. Yet it's even proving difficult to remove the editor.

No, they would not. The examples of substitute infrastructure getting built (in the absence of laws prohibiting it or increasing barrier for its entry) are plentiful.

Show me your examples of redundant competitive water infrastructure, line power, or "plentiful" competitive, redundant line comms.

The idea of "tacit collusion" is absurd.

Why do you find it so? Overt collusion occurs when it can, and would occur pretty aggressively without government intervention. Is it "inefficient" to prohibit monopolies, price fixing, and anti-competitive behaviors, such as business behaviors expressly targeted at putting competitors completely out of business?

Strong players in narrow and unthriving market are quite happy to manipulate that market into an "efficiency" which benefits themselves pretty heavily, at the expense of everyone else. To wit: they aren't very "efficient" if you put the dotted line around the entire market. These parties don't care about the market, though, just themselves. The Invisible Hand is an amazing thing, but let's not commit ideological idolatry, okay?

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/13/technology/13panel.html
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/news/2010/05/chipmaker-cartel-fined-331-million-for-dram-price-fixing.ars

Anything which interferes with it (the free free market) introduces inefficiencies.

A free market is not always able to produce an economically effective result. What do you think of the concept of a "market failure"?

You do know that FIOS competes with cable, do you not?

Yes. Well, sorta. FiOS doesn't go everywhere, but be that as it may:

A duopoly (cable vs. AT&T) is hardly a thriving market. You need more than a few players in a market for it to thrive. Two is most assuredly not enough.

You wanna explain how cell phone service keep dropping in price and increasing in quality even though there is only 4 national providers?

Are you confident such a thing would keep happening if there were only 1 national provider? And why are price drops your only measurement of how well the market is doing? Do you think cell service is fungible, like pork, your throughput, quality, or services not to matter?

In any case, it would appear that you regard a market with a vertical monopolist operating in one silo and a very narrow market of nearby substitutes as a "free" one (e.g., municipal water vs bottled water). I do not agree. Conditions need to be changed such that this is not so. My observation is rather generic in nature, as in to say "what we have now sucks, and it shouldn't be merely left there." Additional regulation would be a silly answer; however pretending that privatization will fix everything flies in the face of observed facts. To wit: there are municipalities that have tried privatizing municipal water. As it turns out, the "inefficiency" of government-operating things isn't as bad as the inefficiency of corporately-managed things plus the need to extract private equity return on investment.

It's almost like giving up on your childhood by rejecting its beliefs.

When you assess your own self, how is it that you can be sure that your own mind is that of an adult? Have you ever really evaluated your inner self and asked, or have you never considered the matter?

For example, given the character of your the last paragraph in your message to me, do you find my response here surprising? Is it one you wished me to make? Would have you predicted I would? Was it a desired outcome, or did you lack the foresight to know one was forthcoming? Do you feel wounded by my questions, or introspective, or otherwise? If you feel my response is pointless, why did you bother to generate it? When you wrote an "abrasive" response, did you desire one in return? If not, what would an adult mind have reasonably expected?

C//

Cops are stupid by design. http://www.nytimes.com/1999/09/09/nyregion/metro-news-briefs-connecticut-judge-rules-that-police-can-bar-high-iq-scores.html

OMG! How on earth did the human race survive for millenia before patents? You're so right, without patents nobody would ever invent anything

This is really disingenuous. The issue of what we call now intelectual property is not new, and has existed long before patents and copyrights were introduced. Because there was no good mechanism for establishing and enforcing ownership of new inventions and discoveries, many creators refused to make them public, to the disadvantage of everybody else. Many skills and processes were passed only within a family, or a guild, or from master to apprentice, and their secret was jealously guarded. Look at the Venetian Republic, which ensured the monopoly of Murano glass for centuries, by forbidding glassmakers to leave the city; look at many scientists, like Galileo: in order to claim priority for his discoveries, he used to send encrypted descriptions to other scientists (see here for details), and only make the discoveries public later. It's possible he had even discovered Neptune, back in 1613 (see here for details) but he did not disclose it, fearing somebody else may claim it. As a result, the existence of Neptune remained unknown until 1846, that is more than two hundred years later.

Or check the thoughts of actual writers living in a period of weak or inexistent copyrights; look at Dickens here or Twain here.

Oh, but you can't just "buy" judges in America. You have to make a donation to SOB's favorite charity: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/23/education/23newark.html

>I can assure you that banks, foreign exchange brokers and payment processors such as Visa and MasterCard are regulated by government agencies

Hahahah!

Government Regulator leaves FinCEN for Bank of America

Bank of America Acknowledges Illicit Funds Moved Through a Manhattan Branch

Banks Financing Mexico Gangs Admitted in Wells Fargo Deal

I'll be right there by your side telling them to fuck right off and do it in their own homes or outside.

Which I'll appreciate. Will you be by my side telling them to fuck off when they start lighting up in parks, beaches, apartments, hotels, and college campuses?

Are they in bed with the companies bidding on the contract and getting lots of hookers and blow?

Does this answer your question?

The city official who was the project's point person, Joel Bondy, resigned in December and had close ties to the suspected mastermind of the scheme.

Gerard Denault, a former executive with Science Applications International Corporation, the company overseeing CityTime, was charged with receiving over $5 million in kickbacks for his work as the project's senior manager.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/28/nyregion/criticism-for-citytime-project-grows-as-a-manager-is-arrested.html?_r=1

I see lots of comments exasperated about the cost overruns and folks pointing out that these types of systems are more complicated than it seems. But I couldn't find any comments to moderate up that point out the criminal aspects of this project - so here you go. :)

More than any other profession, those who practice law have the ability and influence to assure their lack of competition from computer aplications.

I agree with your post for the most part, but I'd argue that computer programmers have more ability to assure their lack of competition from computer applications than lawyers. Creating software to mine data and analyze it is one thing. Creating software to create software to mine data and analyze it is another.

I don't imagine software will replace lawyers in the courtroom any time soon, if ever. But, the grunt work like document review is already being done by software instead of high-hourly-rate lawyers. I thought this was covered here, but can't find it. The NY Times covered it with the headline Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software

While you do make a few good points here, I would add one point to this:

C) Drug use. For example, just in tenth graders, 41% of American students have tried pot, compared to 17% in Europe. Also included in this same study* is the fact that 23% of American students have used illicit drugs other than cannabis (not counting alcohol), while only 6% in Europe have.

I hate to be the one to bring up drugs, but from what I see on a daily basis, it does play a major role. I'm not saying every drug user is going to become a criminal, but it seems from recent data collected by SAMHSA, the balance of drug abuse is changing in the US. Marijuana and alcohol are decreasing, while other more serious, dangerous drugs are increasing in use. This varies from Europe, where Alcohol and Marijuana, in that order, are the most abused, with much, much lower percentages of the population using more dangerous, serious drugs.

I attribute this change in the US being due to the availability. Alcohol, as a teenager is actually much harder to come by than say marijuana, or surprisingly prescription pain killers, for example. Teens these days have broad access to marijuana, and seem to always have a friend who can get pain killers or tranquilizers (I do not have a source for this statement, it is based on personal observation.) This leads to them just avoiding the trouble of acquiring alcohol and instead, smoking marijuana, while not really a problem in my eyes, or taking prescription pain killers, which is a much bigger issue. Marijuana isn't truly a gateway drug, many users can go their whole life without moving to something "harder", but things like prescription pain killers, tranquilizers, etc are more likely to create the need to get higher and higher, and are rising in use at an alarming rate.

I've not known many marijuana users, or alcoholics for that matter who will harm someone to get money to acquire their drugs. Crack, Cocain, Meth, Pain Killers, Tranquilizer, etc users on the other hand, will go to great lengths to get their next high. I've seen many, many friends go down this path, and it's truly sad to see.

Study Cited: http://www.nytimes.com/2001/02/21/us/study-finds-teenage-drug-use-higher-in-us-than-in-europe.html
Older, but still accurate information with the same testing methodology used in both regions.

Wow, that should buy them about one-fifth of a reactor!

Slow news day huh?

This is the major reason why the military has been investing heavily in green tech. A gallon of diesel fuel at the front lines in Afghanistan costs the military something like $400 because it first needs to be shipped in-country, then trucked through hostile territory on roads, and sometimes lashed to a mule and packed in. Plus, supply convoys are ripe targets - casualties due to roadside bombs these days are comparable, if not higher, than actual combat. The military realized this a couple of years ago, looking at the single-walled canvas tents they are cooling with A/C run from diesel generators in a 110 F desert. Being one of the biggest users of, well, everything in this world, their economies of scale and opportunities for savings at home and in theater are huge. They have been working on it, but it's a huge infrastructure and logistical change to undertake. If anything, it should give us all pause to realize how big a job the rest of the world will have to change our own infrastructure and habits to become more efficient.

Which of those integrity checkers do you recommend for a shop that mostly uses the Windows OS? An extensive comparison says Samhain is the best.

The FAQsays Samhain works under Windows XP with Cygwin.

In Windows 7 there is a hidden, non-standard partition. I'm guessing that Samhain would not be able to check that partition. Does the design of Windows 7 prevent thorough integrity checking? Microsoft makes more money if Windows is vulnerable to malware. See the New York Times article Corrupted PC's Find New Home in the Dumpster.

The researchers tried to downplay that aspect of the study. It wasn't an intentional "let's see if they're pay for sex" study. It was the byproduct of the introduction of currency and economy and trade that occurred naturally and definitely disturbed those involved.

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/06/05/magazine/05FREAK.html?pagewanted=1

He is probably referring to this recent event, which does indicate that some terrorists take no pride in their work anymore.

Ignoring your paranoid flamebait, someone should point out that there's plenty of other products like that, so I guess I will. Apple's iOS has a kill switch and Amazon removed 1984 and Animal Farm from all Kindles following a licensing dispute with the rights holders. And let's not forget the PS3 Other OS fiasco. Also, any DRM system that has to contact the master server to determine if a game is properly licensed (Steam, Spore's DRM, Games for Windows Live...) can have the same effect.

If it bothers you so much, jailbreak and pirate everything. No regulatory body has ever succeeded in stamping out a black market for which there was sufficient financial incentive; in this era of information, notoriety and ego will suffice instead, and have sufficed for the past thirty years, since the invention of the first copy prevention mechanism. Yar-har, fiddle dee-tee.

Eventually, the people who commission these systems will get the clue that a free culture is the best solution. Until then, just work around their silly unenlightened nonsense. But remember to pay them. They need to survive too.

Seems like the flood preparations at the operating plant Cooper have made it very difficult to access emergency equipment. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/27/science/earth/27nuke.html

Did you read David Pogue's questions to the FCPX product manager? It sounds like video monitoring is a matter of driver support, with AJA cards having beta drivers. Possibly that will come in conjunction with Lion...

EDL support will be coming soon it seems like once Apple releases the API docs for FCPX... they seem to want to promote better interchange formats than EDL though.

Apple essentially merged FCP and FCE. While leaving the extremely advanced users behind with EOL software. Some numbers say that Apple sold about 2 million copies of the last version of Final Cut Pro, if we assume that Final Cut Express sold less, at perhaps one million copies (this is a bit low, part of me thinks there are actually more FCE users). This is the market for the new Final Cut [any version] that Apple is targeting. However, was their mistake in alienating the top 50 000 - 100 000 or so users in the initial release enough to kill their whole market? No, most users are not affected by the high end limitations in the initial release.

Most importantly though is that almost all of the complaints have already been acknowledged by Apple and the product manager has promised that they will return to the suite in coming updates.

"keeping people from entering the country" != "throwing people out of the country"

e.g., the Jose Vargas story: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/magazine/my-life-as-an-undocumented-immigrant.html?_r=2&hp

It took me five seconds to remember the New York Times Editorial that cites exactly what you're looking for
NY Times Op Ed

I found the following particularly interesting: "According to Google’s figures, if donations to all religious organizations are excluded, liberals give slightly more to charity than conservatives do. But Mr. Brooks says that if measuring by the percentage of income given, conservatives are more generous than liberals even to secular causes."

Interesting if true. Perhaps smokers cause less burden on the health care system as they tend to die, instead of living on forever and soaking up expensive medical treatment. here.

Many drugs can cause immediate addiction

[citation needed]

cocaine, yeah, the upper middle class white mans drug. There some mighty racism right there.

You forget that cocaine was made illegal nearly a century ago. Times have changed. Here is what the New York Times was saying about cocaine circa 1914:

http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F60B14F7345F13738DDDA10894DA405B848DF1D3

The reason that Obama reneged on his promises w/r/t the drug war, is that the drug war is an enormous pork-barrel scheme.

Or that there is no real political will to legalize it, and substantial opposition to it. Passing healthcare reform may end up costing him the election, it seems to have cost the house. I would have been annoyed at Obama for wasting political capitol on it. If marijuana users want it to be legal, they need to fight for it, pester their law makers. Expecting someone else to do it for them, or just waiting until absolutely no one who votes is actually opposed to marijuana is going to take an extremely long time, and is just plain lazy.

Besides that, the drug war amounts to universal criminalization: cops can get away with breaking into anyone's home and killing them if they pretend to have done so on the basis of an anonymous tip that there were drugs in the house in question.

They'd still be able to do that with any of the other drugs that are never going to be legalized. Law enforcement is also not 100% in favor of continued pot prohibition.

I don't think there's a conspiracy here, I think it's just pot smokers aren't doing anything to win their rights back.

"We've had the technology to do video calling for quite a while - people just aren't that into it."

Wrong: we want video phones but we don't want to pay a lot for it, especially since it requires both parties to spend $$$. People do want to see each other, webcams seem to have done quite well since they're less than $100 but few wanted to spend the several hundreds of dollars that video calling had cost until just recently.

In response to the synopsis: "we can use Skype to call one another over the Internet and video call with mobile `phones, but the video quality is nowhere near the quality shown in the film 2001 or the aforementioned Transatlantic Tunnel film."

Huh? You act like progress on video calling has just ended. You realize 20 years ago a video phone cost $750 and looked and sounded like crap over 56k, right?

It wasn't until 2004 when a real video phone was released by D-Link. Using broadband eliminated the framerate problems but the price was a bit high at $400 each.

Video phones really wouldn't be possible until we had a wireless network that could handle it but 3G cellphones weren't even available in the US until 2004, and 3G was still so new by 2007 that the first iPhone didn't even offer 3G.

Fast-forward just 6 years after 3G first reached the US and Skype now allows video calls through 3G on iPhones for free. That's amazing progress! To go from the network just being setup to transmitting video calls over it for free. And that was all of 6 months ago, give it some time, another 6 years from now using your cellphone as a video phone will look better than it did in 2001 and Transatlantic Tunnel and it will be free.

in 2004 the average car in the us is 4000 pounds or 2 tons http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/05/business/05weight.html

cars have already been able to achieve 100+ miles per gallon and be completely road worthy. in fact the folks over at insightcentral.com have a forum thread on it. http://www.insightcentral.net/forums/mpg-issues/9562-first-time-over-100mpg.html
these cars are already 100% street / road legal.

WikiLeaks will show them the stupidity of this.

In the meantime, time to fire up Tor and change ISPs.

Better move to another country...

However in terms of a carbon tax with a price that is being negotiated in the 10s of cents per tonne...

If by "10s of cents per ton" you meant $23-26 per ton, then you would be correct.

A quick calculation shows that turning off the lights (20 kW total) at my workplace on nights and weekends would save 88 hours of electricity per week, which at .0005883 tons/kWh comes to 54 tons of CO2 per year. With the carbon tax, this amounts to $1200-1400 per year.

And that's just the lights. Turning off other appliances could save much more. Factories, bakeries, and so on have much more potential to save money through the carbon tax than ordinary office buildings. Incentives matter!

White men earn substantially more for the same work as either women or non-white men.

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/03/nyregion/03women.html

Not anymore, not everywhere.

It's also important to note in that article that the income disparity favoring young women decreased as they get older because they leave the work place to start families, not because they fail to be promoted.

My personal experience bears this out. Almost all of the women I know make more then the men I know, even though they come from mostly the same background (white, middle class, liberal arts degree). The women get a head start as they have equivalent skills, but are also physically attractive (the much older boss tends to be male). However unlike the men, many if not most of the women's primary ambition is to find a man wealthy enough that they can quit and raise children, so they tend to gravitate toward older men, particularly bankers.

see their "socialist health care plans"? I ask because I have and I quite liked it.

I guess you haven't had anything serious yet, or you might have ended up in the news as yet another socialist health care horror story as you can't get drugs due to rationing or just die while you wait months for treatment. Heck, even the NHS director herself could not get treatment and died in her own hospital. In the US you won't get treated if you can't afford it, but when you can afford it, you will get treated. I'll take that over your lousy universal health care any day.

Oh, and once you let the government "take care of you", it immediately decides it has the right to tell you how to live, and if you have some unhealthy habit you will become a criminal. You can keep your socialist health care and I'll keep my freedom to do whatever the heck I want with my body and die when I choose, not you.

Yep, they can have a pat on the back for this one... though I still haven't forgiven them for the 1997 bailout of Apple.

That's bullshit and easily checked with a search. US consumed 138.5 billion gallons of gas in 2010. While Exxon Mobile made profits of $30.46 billion on $383 billion in revenue. Why are so many people compelled to be apologists for big business. I bet you believe that rapist really loved you too. I suppose it's possible that they made on $0.02 per gallon and made up the rest on t-shirt sales to corporate fan boys.

Yes. Everyone. Except the the intelligence agencies that didn't. Like the CIA and UNSCOM. So really if you discount those two primary sources then he didn't lie. And if you discount the fact that Bush himself doubted he would find any WMDs when talking to Blair before the war. So if you discount those three things... Ah fuck it. Obama's bad; maybe even as bad as Bush, but Bush was bad.

There are great ways to fund investigative journalism. Here are a few:

http://homedelivery.nytimes.com/
https://services.chicagotribune.com/
http://www.latimes.com/about/mediagroup/shop-and-subscribe/
http://service.usatoday.com/

More investigative journalism comes out of daily newspapers than anywhere else. Subscribe to your local newspaper.

Judges Plead Guilty in Scheme to Jail Youths for Profit:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/02/13/us/13judge.html

---

And, there you go: Money's there to be made & to requote MY attorney?

"There is no law, no justice: ONLY MONEY! If you lack the 1st commodity, you get NONE of the 2nd"

APK

P.S.=> No, not all law enforcement folks take "kickbacks" etc. like that (& imo @ least from speaking to folks internationally I have know back in 1994 from Russian in a former collegiate academic classmate of mine who's a pal to this day of mine? It's a LOT more legal & honest here, than it is in mother Russia where he told me if you get pulled over for a traffic ticket?? You just pay the cop to avoid the legal system!)... but, my point is there, with a real example, not just "anecdotal b.s."!

... apk

Instead the truth is we've got about 100 million more people (and many more businesses) in the US than we did in 1980, and with more people you can lower the burden on all.

That claim is false: the overwhelming majority of US government spending is proportional to the number of people - and in particular, a significant chunk of it is proportional to the number of old US citizens.

Think of the US government as an insurance company for the old, which has an army. That single sentence describes roughly 50% of all US government spending.

Much of the rest pays for equal-chance education (teachers), unemployment insurance (which cost goes up during crises and goes down during booms), poor families/children, roads and other infrastructure - none of those have fixed maintenance costs but go up linearly with the number of people.

So an income proportional tax rate which gets progressively larger for the luckier (richer) people is a very natural model if you think about it rationally: those should pay for civilization who benefit from it financially.

Yeah, talk about your buried lead! The kid has fusion going for him, egads! TFA says he did the fusion thing 3 years ago, but is otherwise mute on the details. I'm no nuclear physicist, so I had to google to make certain my own understanding of nuclear fusion was in the ballpark.

http://partners.nytimes.com/library/national/science/032399sci-cold-fusion.html

Wait until Nature reads about this development at Gizomodo.com; they're gonna be pissed!

No, it is 60 days. Nice try at confusing the facts though. Obama has even ignored the legal advice of some of the nations top lawyers on the subject.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/18/world/africa/18powers.html

"WASHINGTON — President Obama rejected the views of top lawyers at the Pentagon and the Justice Department when he decided that he had the legal authority to continue American military participation in the air war in Libya without Congressional authorization, according to officials familiar with internal administration deliberations."

"A White House spokesman, Eric Schultz, said there had been “a full airing of views within the administration and a robust process” that led Mr. Obama to his view that the Libya campaign was not covered by a provision of the War Powers Resolution that requires presidents to halt unauthorized hostilities after 60 days."

After years of fighting Mr. Ballard at the federal Patent Office, in court and across a negotiating table, the banks went to see one of their best friends in Congress, Senator Charles E. Schumer of New York, who inserted into a patent overhaul bill a provision that appears largely aimed at helping banks rid themselves of the Ballard problem. The Senate passed the bill easily in March.

Banks do not like “business method” patents.

Collectables are only desired by others with the same desire. Bitcoins are desired by anybody that desires something that can be purchased with Bitcoins. Your analogy is anemic.

A Picasso does not serve the same role, it is unique and there is only one. It's transfer is highly public and to keep it private there are extreme measures that must be taken. Also a Picasso would fall under the definition of barter, one item for another, rather than a medium of exchange. Again an anemic analogy.

As for nothing new other than peering algorithms, you have chosen to blind yourself to what Bitcoin is. Rather than taking a rational approach you have attempted to use poor analogies in an attempt to rationalize denial. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/15/arts/people-argue-just-to-win-scholars-assert.html

Its funny that you mention Greece, as it's the austerity measures imposed by the EU and IMF that are now causing instability, riots and poor economic conditions. Meanwhile, it's our "Big Government" that builds maintains infrastructure. If the government needs to shrink, the only sensible way to do it without wrecking the economy is attrition. The largest problem with cutting "entitlements" is that a lot of people feel entitled to them. Everyone who pays payroll income tax pays for Social Security and Medicare. We see line items for those, separate from Federal Income Tax, on our pay stubs. Social Security is the reverse of a progressive tax, the more you make, the less you pay into them. There are loopholes, entitlement taxes are payroll taxes. It's only in 2013 that medicare tax will start being applied investment income.

The George W. Bush 15% capital gains tax were implemented in 2003, and how has the economy and stock market been since then? Aren't stock values being propped up by the 401k's and IRA's? The markets crashed, they lost a lot of perceived value, and where did that perceived value go? The 15% capital gains tax encourages short term thinking, people can take profit straight from the market and pay the same tax rate as low income earners. Doesn't it make sense that the 28% capital gains rate from the Clinton years encouraged people to put their investments in "tax shelters"? IRA's and 401k's are much longer term planning, and if you don't pay capital gains tax on them when you hit retirement, then they work exactly how they were designed. It's the 15% capital gains tax that encourages short term thinking, short term profit taking, and it's what is enabling the wealthy in this country to completely fleece the middle class. We put our money in 401k's, planning for retirement, and it's those who work on Wall Street and play the market that are taking profits and paying little to do so. It's not that I see capital gains tax as a revenue source, its that I see it as a deterrent to reaming out our private market retirement investment plans.

I recall reading a NYTimes article (China's Cyberposse)about how people who did bad things were tracked down (and sometimes harassed) by Chinese citizens starting investigations on online forums. A quote:
"Human-flesh search engines — renrou sousuo yinqing — have become a Chinese phenomenon: they are a form of online vigilante justice in which Internet users hunt down and punish people who have attracted their wrath. The goal is to get the targets of a search fired from their jobs, shamed in front of their neighbors, run out of town. It’s crowd-sourced detective work, pursued online — with offline results."