Call the feds, someone who legitimately owned the domain had a sense of humor! How dare they! Don't they know that every time we laugh, the terrorists win???
Seriously, I rarely complain about stories on Slashdot, but... WTF, Slashdot? New owner of domain uses it differently than former owner. Film at 11.
Did..did you read it? He tried it, it made him, ill then didn't do it again.
Right. And if it hadn't made him sick? If it had worked like modern synthetic steroids? Barry "*" Bonds would have nothing on Ruth or Aaron with another good decade in their careers to whallop another 2-300 homers. Intent matters more than outcomes, though - If they could have, they would have.
Yes, lets take poor kids, train them for a sport they might get into, and then let them poison themselves in order to make the next dollar, all so you can enjoy your game
Okay, sounds good to me. We pay them far, far more than the best-of-the-best who actually contribute to the good of humanity. I have no problem with our modern gladiators destroying their bodies in the process, to at least earn that fat wad o' cash.
From which of those do you suggest fat was removed in the 70 and "replaced with huge amounts of sugar"?
Cat chow, for one. Cat count as obligate carnivores. They have zero need for sugar in their diet - They can't taste it), they can't even properly metabolize it. Bad for them. They do, however, have a high need for fat and protein.
And it pisses me off every time I go shopping for cat chow that I have to pay literally twice as much to get cat food that doesn't have 15-25% added carbs in it. Cat food should not have any carbs, except what comes incidental to whatever kind of horse they use as the basic ingredient. And you think you can't go wrong buying tinned more-or-less fresh meat for fluffy? Nope. Many brands even add sugar to that.
That said, I have to agree with you that wild marmosets probably don't eat a lot of doughnuts.;)
That is all predicated on the faulty assumption that anyone wants to use Windows 8 in the first place.
Why did that get modded "funny"? +5 insightful, all the way.
For $479, I can get an iPad 4 that actually has a slick OS and doesn't need a keyboard. For half that, I can get an Android without the "walled garden" lock-in, which also doesn't need a keyboard.
Symbolizing what, though, will be the topic of many a journal article.
Well, in fairness, we haven't had a good ol' official (not counting the religious whackjobs putting money in JK's pockets just to brag that they warmed their hands over Order of the Phoenix) book-burning in quite a while. And really, doesn't smashing hard drives count as the modern equivalent?
Dear governments - Don't play this game. We all know you have the ability to kill an awfully lot of us in the process, but you will lose. How about you just do the job we pay you to do, lose the paranoia, and we can all go home and enjoy life?
but if they do, by other means (probably if you try to cash out, possibly by surveillance of improperly anonymized use), they get a full transaction history automatically.
Careful by what you mean by "get a full transaction history", because in the most useful sense, that doesn't hold true.
The Bitcoin client, by default, creates a new address for every single transaction you make. Identifying yourself in one of them has no impact on any other transactions in which you may have participated.
Each identifiable transaction gives exactly two and a half points of useful metadata:
1) As much PII as the sender revealed,
2) The recipient's Bitcoin address, and
2.5) The transaction history FOR THE BTC SPENT (not for the sender or recipient).
The "full transaction history" that you refer to consists of that last point - Which I only count as half of a useful point, because in virtually all cases, it has no meaning - If you pay cash for your lunch today, and the vendor uses "your" $20 bill to buy crack later tonight, you have nothing to do with the subsequent crime.
So, in the sense that you can trace every single BTC back to its originating block, yes, you get a complete transaction history. In the sense of revealing information about any of your other transactions, then no, outing yourself for one transaction doesn't have any effect on the others.
Unless you are programming utterly structure starved glue-code, input is not the limiting factor, thinking about what you want to input is.
You beat me to it.
I can type in code pretty damned fast - Fast enough that people frequently ask me how often I go through keyboards - Fast enough that I've actually had people in the room with me ask if I had just typed something meaningful or merely mashed keys for the hell of it - And, while coding, I tend to spend far, far more time thinking than coding. Someone watching me program for an hour would see 3-5 minutes at a time of complete inactivity, followed by assaulting the keyboard for a 30 second burst, rinse wash repeat.
And because you like win-r plus typing you feel that it's appropriate to forbid the use of the start menu?
Hmm? No, I loathe Windows 8 and in no way meant my post as a defense of the abomination called "Metro".
I more meant my post as pointing out the absurdity - Microsoft managed to effectively kill the CLI world with their nice shiny GUI. Now, they have reverted Windows to a state where, by dumbing-down the GUI to a Fischer-Price level of functionality, those of us still proficient in using a command line have more of an edge in using it than ever.
Snowden at least stands accused of treason. Assange faces rape-after-the-fact charges in one of the most misandrous countries on the planet. Where the fuck does a drone strike against the latter even become a topic open for discussion?
Make your case for Snowden, dude. I happen to consider him nothing short of a hero, but I can certainly appreciate the opposing POV. Assange ranks right up there with the Kardashians for his overall level of ego-vs-the-good-he-could-do.
Then again - Perhaps I have this backward. Yes, nuke Assange (and Rodman, and the Kardashians, etc) from orbit, so they stop trying to steal the spotlight from real discussions we need to have about security vs privacy vs basic human rights.
The metro screen is the start menu so many people seem to think disappeared.
Don't miss the forest hidden behind all those trees - The start button simply serves as a convenient proxy for a hard-to-articulate sense of generalized annoyance.
Yes, Win8's interface has some serious shortcomings, particularly for power users. Yes, it still works more-or-less okay as a GUI, and if forced to use it for a few weeks, most of us would just get used to it. But the entire Metro interface slaps us with Microsoft's sheer arrogance in randomly deciding to make change for its own sake rather than because people asked for it.
As another example that makes the point in a less "wow so much I don't know where to start" way, the "ribbons" in MS office. I liked menus and toolbars, and aesthetically dislike ribbons. But I will admit that they don't take any longer (or shorter!) to use once you get used to them - Once you get used to them. But why the hell should anyone need to get used to them? Okay, they do offer a few enhancements (in-place font and chart previews as obvious examples) over toolbars...Not out of any inherent quality of ribbons themselves, however, but simple because MS added new features that they didn't backport to toolbars. Change for change's sake.
If you know the names of your seldom-used programs, sure... (Also, really, so searching by typing is the new big thing instead of menus? Like the UNIX command line in the 90's...)
Heh, I never considered it like that - The people who most hate Windows 8 actually end up the least impacted by it.
Hell, I already run most of my "2nd tier" programs (anything not right on my desktop) by hitting win-R and typing the program name. It takes noticeably less time than click-move-click-scanthelist-move-click, possibly with a few more layers of those last three steps. Remote Desktop makes a great example of that - I always used to forget if it lived under applications or accessories or admin tools or whatever (and on a Win7 machine right now, I can't even find it without using the search bar on the start menu). But good ol' win-R mstsc has it open faster than I could even get to the start->all_programs with the mouse.
There is no bridge to burn, and people that are leaving already have new positions elsewhere when they resign. What is the possible incentive to give more than one or two day's notice?
I take it you haven't worked in IT long - Or have only worked for one, fairly stable company? Because you seriously ask what possible incentive exists in that situation???
Your current employer has outsourced their entire engineering staff to somewhere 10k miles away that speaks a different language and has an entirely different work culture. Put bluntly, can you say "ca-CHING" when the contracting hours start rolling in? Not a "maybe", they will realize they need some of you back on an all-but-permanent basis.
Believe me when I tell you this counts as quite possibly one of the greatest career-advancing opportunities you might have in your entire working life. Don't fuck it up because it feels good to tell your boss off.
and there's only one question in the entirety of what you posted
Then I suppose you have, accidentally, shown my proposal as too complex - Because the "one question" counts as a red herring and gives you the wrong answer (thus my final statement of auto-banning anything that answers 50.858).
FWIW, the real "question" appeared as "He noted the blood, ignored the rest".
Why run a WWW server at home, when you can use a hosting service for as little as $4 per month?
Why run Excel at home, when you can use Office365 for as little as $8.33 per month?
Some people lease their cars and have a new one every 2 years. Some buy them new and always take them to the dealer for service. And... Some buy a wreck, restore it to drivable condition, and do all their own maintenance on it to keep it running for literally decades.
The economic ecosystem extends far beyond that website on which you run ad-blocker and steal their content by breaking the social contract of using their bandwidth and consuming their content in exchange for seeing their ads.
Pssst - If your business model depends on annoying people - You don't get to claim the moral high-ground when people get annoyed. You simply vanish when they find a way to avoid you.
"Stop shooting me with that nerf gun!"
"But I get paid to do it - And you wouldn't want the toy stores, and the trucking companies, and Nerf itself, and and the plastic manufacturer, and the oil companies to go out of business would you???"
still, your chances of surviving a car accident are overall pretty good. Your chances of surviving a crash at 800mph are 0.00000000%
The odds of surviving a crash don't much matter here - The odds of a crash do, for two reasons.
First, because the accident rate matters. You have made an argument appealing to the fatality rate, while ignoring whether or not tubes would have more or less total (fatal) accidents. If fewer than 350 100-passenger tube-pods crash per year, you have a net improvement vs cars. Comparing that to flying, if we had an average of one packed airplane going down in flames every day - We'd see commercial aviation end almost overnight. More to the point, people die in car accidents largely because people fail, not because their cars fail.
And second, bad things happen in car accidents beyond "death". Things (IMO) worse than death happen. And don't forget all the high-cost but not-worse-than-death injuries (broken limbs, major surgeries needed, etc). Yes, an 800MPH accident pretty much means trying to ID the bodies by searching for teeth with a sieve; that doesn't mean you get to just ignore all the "not quite dead" car accidents, which far outnumber the actual fatal ones.
/ And hey, if I really end up dying in an accident some day - I'll gladly take "you need to look for teeth with a sieve" over "watching myself and my family slowly bleed to death as paramedics try to cut us out".
There is a glaring hole in that sort of reasoning. You could say the same thing about murder or theft: it will always exist, so we might as well legitimize it in order to reduce the amount of harm.
You've compared an adult - not talking about slaves or children or anything like that here - choosing to have sex with another adult, for pay... With murder?
I can't help but think you may need your sense of proportion recalibrated.
Well, except for that whole thing about USPS photographing and storing images of every envelope it processes.
Funny thing about that, I haven't used a return address on physical mail in years. I always just write the recipient's address in both places, so on the off chance it gets returned instead of delivered - It still gets delivered.
Of course, that wouldn't work well if sending something of actual value to a potentially bad address - But I don't think I've ever sent anything of actual value in the mail - Information I can reproduce, checks I can cancel, letters to Grandma, meh, no big deal if one gets lost every few years.
They've resorted to actually opening and reading them in the past; I don't think, given the current state of affairs, that they're beyond that now.
I actually didn't seriously mean to suggest that we should use snail mail as an alternative to email... More of a throwaway joke.:)
You have this completely twisted. It's not just consensual outlets, it's illegal ones.
Consensual does not equal legal. Illegal does not equal non-consensual. And perhaps most importantly, casual Craigslist hookups don't all count as prostitution - In fact, most of them don't, merely ones more way for horny adults to find each other and "get it on".
If their laws are somehow objectively wrong, why aren't we doing something about that while we're there?
Because if we actually demanded the savages quit killing people for witchcraft, mutilating little girls' genitalia, and throwing acid on each other in semi-legitimized "honor" attacks - We'd have no allies left anywhere in the entire Middle East or Africa. Simple as that.
So instead, we take it one step at a time. "Hey, guys, guys, calm down here - Let's try this, what if he just gives you a goat instead of you sodomizing his sister to death? Surely that goat will bring you far more milk, cheese, and meat in the long run, right? Okay then, two goats - Sound good to everyone?"
Does anyone have replacement recommendations for people who used these services?
I would say "something hosted outside the US", but as the international banking community has shown, Uncle Sam's jack-booted foot extends well outside our own borders.
So that really leaves "GPG" as you sole realistic option. End to end encryption, with no one but you and the recipient knowing what you wrote. Of course, "they" can compromise either end, but it deprives them of the ability to funnel everything on the wire into their data centers for 4th-amendment violating goodness.
Or, we could all go back to writing letters. Oddly enough, that still has more legal protections behind it than any other form of communication.
Is this a joke about campaign contributions? Because it's not really a joke...
No, actually, not a joke.
As long as humans have existed, and as long as they continue to exist, we will have some form of "sex workers". As the single best thing we can do to increase their quality of life (particularly post-career, which as my not-quite-a-joke pointed out, fades with their youth), we can legitimize them. Give them a medical, a 401k or pension, profit sharing, the works.
Now, as for TFA - Sorry, but whether you accept them as "needs" or not, any military consists of a huge number of guys at the peak of their... "virility"... All sent far away from their wives/girlfriends/other for six months to a year at a time. And these asshole MPs want to bust them for finding consensual outlets? Wow. Just... Wow. Really makes you need to ask if "the good guys" deliberately use rape as a weapon of war.
Sure, they make more than most of us do in their prime, but 25... 30... 35?... 40??? years old, and please pick up your complimentary shopping cart from the nearest grocery store.
Slashdot Mirror
Call the feds, someone who legitimately owned the domain had a sense of humor! How dare they! Don't they know that every time we laugh, the terrorists win???
Seriously, I rarely complain about stories on Slashdot, but... WTF, Slashdot? New owner of domain uses it differently than former owner. Film at 11.
Did..did you read it? He tried it, it made him, ill then didn't do it again.
Right. And if it hadn't made him sick? If it had worked like modern synthetic steroids? Barry "*" Bonds would have nothing on Ruth or Aaron with another good decade in their careers to whallop another 2-300 homers. Intent matters more than outcomes, though - If they could have, they would have.
Yes, lets take poor kids, train them for a sport they might get into, and then let them poison themselves in order to make the next dollar, all so you can enjoy your game
Okay, sounds good to me. We pay them far, far more than the best-of-the-best who actually contribute to the good of humanity. I have no problem with our modern gladiators destroying their bodies in the process, to at least earn that fat wad o' cash.
Yes, it's terrible to think that professional sports players should actually be rewarded for training and talent rather than drugs.
You mean, like the old timers? Good ol' Babe Ruth, he didn't need any steroids! Oh, wait, yes he did (ctrl-F "sheep's testicles").
Let 'em use whatever the hell they want, and get the FDA the hell out of moralizing our biological mediocrity.
From which of those do you suggest fat was removed in the 70 and "replaced with huge amounts of sugar"?
;)
Cat chow, for one. Cat count as obligate carnivores. They have zero need for sugar in their diet - They can't taste it), they can't even properly metabolize it. Bad for them. They do, however, have a high need for fat and protein.
And it pisses me off every time I go shopping for cat chow that I have to pay literally twice as much to get cat food that doesn't have 15-25% added carbs in it. Cat food should not have any carbs, except what comes incidental to whatever kind of horse they use as the basic ingredient. And you think you can't go wrong buying tinned more-or-less fresh meat for fluffy? Nope. Many brands even add sugar to that.
That said, I have to agree with you that wild marmosets probably don't eat a lot of doughnuts.
That is all predicated on the faulty assumption that anyone wants to use Windows 8 in the first place.
Why did that get modded "funny"? +5 insightful, all the way.
For $479, I can get an iPad 4 that actually has a slick OS and doesn't need a keyboard. For half that, I can get an Android without the "walled garden" lock-in, which also doesn't need a keyboard.
Symbolizing what, though, will be the topic of many a journal article.
Well, in fairness, we haven't had a good ol' official (not counting the religious whackjobs putting money in JK's pockets just to brag that they warmed their hands over Order of the Phoenix) book-burning in quite a while. And really, doesn't smashing hard drives count as the modern equivalent?
Dear governments - Don't play this game. We all know you have the ability to kill an awfully lot of us in the process, but you will lose. How about you just do the job we pay you to do, lose the paranoia, and we can all go home and enjoy life?
but if they do, by other means (probably if you try to cash out, possibly by surveillance of improperly anonymized use), they get a full transaction history automatically.
Careful by what you mean by "get a full transaction history", because in the most useful sense, that doesn't hold true.
The Bitcoin client, by default, creates a new address for every single transaction you make. Identifying yourself in one of them has no impact on any other transactions in which you may have participated.
Each identifiable transaction gives exactly two and a half points of useful metadata:
1) As much PII as the sender revealed,
2) The recipient's Bitcoin address, and
2.5) The transaction history FOR THE BTC SPENT (not for the sender or recipient).
The "full transaction history" that you refer to consists of that last point - Which I only count as half of a useful point, because in virtually all cases, it has no meaning - If you pay cash for your lunch today, and the vendor uses "your" $20 bill to buy crack later tonight, you have nothing to do with the subsequent crime.
So, in the sense that you can trace every single BTC back to its originating block, yes, you get a complete transaction history. In the sense of revealing information about any of your other transactions, then no, outing yourself for one transaction doesn't have any effect on the others.
Unless you are programming utterly structure starved glue-code, input is not the limiting factor, thinking about what you want to input is.
You beat me to it.
I can type in code pretty damned fast - Fast enough that people frequently ask me how often I go through keyboards - Fast enough that I've actually had people in the room with me ask if I had just typed something meaningful or merely mashed keys for the hell of it - And, while coding, I tend to spend far, far more time thinking than coding. Someone watching me program for an hour would see 3-5 minutes at a time of complete inactivity, followed by assaulting the keyboard for a 30 second burst, rinse wash repeat.
And because you like win-r plus typing you feel that it's appropriate to forbid the use of the start menu?
Hmm? No, I loathe Windows 8 and in no way meant my post as a defense of the abomination called "Metro".
I more meant my post as pointing out the absurdity - Microsoft managed to effectively kill the CLI world with their nice shiny GUI. Now, they have reverted Windows to a state where, by dumbing-down the GUI to a Fischer-Price level of functionality, those of us still proficient in using a command line have more of an edge in using it than ever.
Note: Swedish man tax was overthrown in 2004.
And you can say that - in argument against an accusation of misandry - with a straight face how???
The US eliminated the poll tax in 1964. Has it enjoyed 40+ years of perfect racial harmony since then?
Wait, what?
Snowden at least stands accused of treason. Assange faces rape-after-the-fact charges in one of the most misandrous countries on the planet. Where the fuck does a drone strike against the latter even become a topic open for discussion?
Make your case for Snowden, dude. I happen to consider him nothing short of a hero, but I can certainly appreciate the opposing POV. Assange ranks right up there with the Kardashians for his overall level of ego-vs-the-good-he-could-do.
Then again - Perhaps I have this backward. Yes, nuke Assange (and Rodman, and the Kardashians, etc) from orbit, so they stop trying to steal the spotlight from real discussions we need to have about security vs privacy vs basic human rights.
The metro screen is the start menu so many people seem to think disappeared.
Don't miss the forest hidden behind all those trees - The start button simply serves as a convenient proxy for a hard-to-articulate sense of generalized annoyance.
Yes, Win8's interface has some serious shortcomings, particularly for power users. Yes, it still works more-or-less okay as a GUI, and if forced to use it for a few weeks, most of us would just get used to it. But the entire Metro interface slaps us with Microsoft's sheer arrogance in randomly deciding to make change for its own sake rather than because people asked for it.
As another example that makes the point in a less "wow so much I don't know where to start" way, the "ribbons" in MS office. I liked menus and toolbars, and aesthetically dislike ribbons. But I will admit that they don't take any longer (or shorter!) to use once you get used to them - Once you get used to them. But why the hell should anyone need to get used to them? Okay, they do offer a few enhancements (in-place font and chart previews as obvious examples) over toolbars...Not out of any inherent quality of ribbons themselves, however, but simple because MS added new features that they didn't backport to toolbars. Change for change's sake.
If you know the names of your seldom-used programs, sure... (Also, really, so searching by typing is the new big thing instead of menus? Like the UNIX command line in the 90's...)
Heh, I never considered it like that - The people who most hate Windows 8 actually end up the least impacted by it.
Hell, I already run most of my "2nd tier" programs (anything not right on my desktop) by hitting win-R and typing the program name. It takes noticeably less time than click-move-click-scanthelist-move-click, possibly with a few more layers of those last three steps. Remote Desktop makes a great example of that - I always used to forget if it lived under applications or accessories or admin tools or whatever (and on a Win7 machine right now, I can't even find it without using the search bar on the start menu). But good ol' win-R mstsc has it open faster than I could even get to the start->all_programs with the mouse.
There is no bridge to burn, and people that are leaving already have new positions elsewhere when they resign. What is the possible incentive to give more than one or two day's notice?
I take it you haven't worked in IT long - Or have only worked for one, fairly stable company? Because you seriously ask what possible incentive exists in that situation???
Your current employer has outsourced their entire engineering staff to somewhere 10k miles away that speaks a different language and has an entirely different work culture. Put bluntly, can you say "ca-CHING" when the contracting hours start rolling in? Not a "maybe", they will realize they need some of you back on an all-but-permanent basis.
Believe me when I tell you this counts as quite possibly one of the greatest career-advancing opportunities you might have in your entire working life. Don't fuck it up because it feels good to tell your boss off.
and there's only one question in the entirety of what you posted
Then I suppose you have, accidentally, shown my proposal as too complex - Because the "one question" counts as a red herring and gives you the wrong answer (thus my final statement of auto-banning anything that answers 50.858).
FWIW, the real "question" appeared as "He noted the blood, ignored the rest".
Why run a WWW server at home, when you can use a hosting service for as little as $4 per month?
Why run Excel at home, when you can use Office365 for as little as $8.33 per month?
Some people lease their cars and have a new one every 2 years. Some buy them new and always take them to the dealer for service. And... Some buy a wreck, restore it to drivable condition, and do all their own maintenance on it to keep it running for literally decades.
The economic ecosystem extends far beyond that website on which you run ad-blocker and steal their content by breaking the social contract of using their bandwidth and consuming their content in exchange for seeing their ads.
Pssst - If your business model depends on annoying people - You don't get to claim the moral high-ground when people get annoyed. You simply vanish when they find a way to avoid you.
"Stop shooting me with that nerf gun!"
"But I get paid to do it - And you wouldn't want the toy stores, and the trucking companies, and Nerf itself, and and the plastic manufacturer, and the oil companies to go out of business would you???"
still, your chances of surviving a car accident are overall pretty good. Your chances of surviving a crash at 800mph are 0.00000000%
The odds of surviving a crash don't much matter here - The odds of a crash do, for two reasons.
First, because the accident rate matters. You have made an argument appealing to the fatality rate, while ignoring whether or not tubes would have more or less total (fatal) accidents. If fewer than 350 100-passenger tube-pods crash per year, you have a net improvement vs cars. Comparing that to flying, if we had an average of one packed airplane going down in flames every day - We'd see commercial aviation end almost overnight. More to the point, people die in car accidents largely because people fail, not because their cars fail.
And second, bad things happen in car accidents beyond "death". Things (IMO) worse than death happen. And don't forget all the high-cost but not-worse-than-death injuries (broken limbs, major surgeries needed, etc). Yes, an 800MPH accident pretty much means trying to ID the bodies by searching for teeth with a sieve; that doesn't mean you get to just ignore all the "not quite dead" car accidents, which far outnumber the actual fatal ones.
/ And hey, if I really end up dying in an accident some day - I'll gladly take "you need to look for teeth with a sieve" over "watching myself and my family slowly bleed to death as paramedics try to cut us out".
Go fuck yourself.
Love,
America.
There is a glaring hole in that sort of reasoning. You could say the same thing about murder or theft: it will always exist, so we might as well legitimize it in order to reduce the amount of harm.
You've compared an adult - not talking about slaves or children or anything like that here - choosing to have sex with another adult, for pay... With murder?
I can't help but think you may need your sense of proportion recalibrated.
Well, except for that whole thing about USPS photographing and storing images of every envelope it processes.
:)
Funny thing about that, I haven't used a return address on physical mail in years. I always just write the recipient's address in both places, so on the off chance it gets returned instead of delivered - It still gets delivered.
Of course, that wouldn't work well if sending something of actual value to a potentially bad address - But I don't think I've ever sent anything of actual value in the mail - Information I can reproduce, checks I can cancel, letters to Grandma, meh, no big deal if one gets lost every few years.
They've resorted to actually opening and reading them in the past; I don't think, given the current state of affairs, that they're beyond that now.
I actually didn't seriously mean to suggest that we should use snail mail as an alternative to email... More of a throwaway joke.
You have this completely twisted. It's not just consensual outlets, it's illegal ones.
Consensual does not equal legal. Illegal does not equal non-consensual. And perhaps most importantly, casual Craigslist hookups don't all count as prostitution - In fact, most of them don't, merely ones more way for horny adults to find each other and "get it on".
If their laws are somehow objectively wrong, why aren't we doing something about that while we're there?
Because if we actually demanded the savages quit killing people for witchcraft, mutilating little girls' genitalia, and throwing acid on each other in semi-legitimized "honor" attacks - We'd have no allies left anywhere in the entire Middle East or Africa. Simple as that.
So instead, we take it one step at a time. "Hey, guys, guys, calm down here - Let's try this, what if he just gives you a goat instead of you sodomizing his sister to death? Surely that goat will bring you far more milk, cheese, and meat in the long run, right? Okay then, two goats - Sound good to everyone?"
Does anyone have replacement recommendations for people who used these services?
I would say "something hosted outside the US", but as the international banking community has shown, Uncle Sam's jack-booted foot extends well outside our own borders.
So that really leaves "GPG" as you sole realistic option. End to end encryption, with no one but you and the recipient knowing what you wrote. Of course, "they" can compromise either end, but it deprives them of the ability to funnel everything on the wire into their data centers for 4th-amendment violating goodness.
Or, we could all go back to writing letters. Oddly enough, that still has more legal protections behind it than any other form of communication.
Is this a joke about campaign contributions? Because it's not really a joke...
No, actually, not a joke.
As long as humans have existed, and as long as they continue to exist, we will have some form of "sex workers". As the single best thing we can do to increase their quality of life (particularly post-career, which as my not-quite-a-joke pointed out, fades with their youth), we can legitimize them. Give them a medical, a 401k or pension, profit sharing, the works.
Now, as for TFA - Sorry, but whether you accept them as "needs" or not, any military consists of a huge number of guys at the peak of their... "virility"... All sent far away from their wives/girlfriends/other for six months to a year at a time. And these asshole MPs want to bust them for finding consensual outlets? Wow. Just... Wow. Really makes you need to ask if "the good guys" deliberately use rape as a weapon of war.
Except the government paid prostitutes.
Do you know how many whores get pensions?
Sure, they make more than most of us do in their prime, but 25... 30... 35?... 40??? years old, and please pick up your complimentary shopping cart from the nearest grocery store.