See, this is one of the reasons why we in Europe have public health care: your fate and health depends less on people that actually have an interest in not helping you when need it; ie, insurance companies.
I don't know about Larry Page - to me he is just another suit that got lucky. I have worked in software engineering for over 20 years, and I have never worked out why people like him are admired; they are always shallow, sometimes embarrasingly ignorant about things and a bit deficient, morally and otherwise. Which is why the got rich, really.
Would most people be better off undiagnosed? When it comes to mental "illness", often the only (or at least the best) treatments are behavioral therapy, in which the "illness" is trained away.
Perhaps not. I think the point they are trying to make is that the traditional diagnoses do not reflect any deep insight into the nature of the disorders - they merely describe a set of symptoms, and trying, like the American manual, to pin it out in ever more specific categories does little to help in that respect.
There is some research to suggest that the actual underlying disorder in the brain may be essentially the same for at least several of the common diagnoses (like schizophrenia and depression), while some disorders that are considered variants of the same may be caused by different, underlying problems. Current treatments are only directed at the symptomatic diagnosis, really, and it would be a lot better to understand the disorders well enough to treat the underlying conditions.
In China it is quite common to have something similar: the lights in communal areas, like on staircases in apartment buildings, switch on when you make a noise, like clapping your hands or stomping your feet. Or, as I can attest, if you fart loudly enough.
I get the cause, but what they utter misses point and just shows that they don't understand technology.
Of course they don't understand - they are politicians. Show some charity.
Another question is whether it is feasible. It may be; but a lot of the point in banning something is simply to set up a set of rules so eg. the police or a regulator can go out and punish those who don't follow the rules. The police can't do anything about things that aren't explicitly against the law, even if those things are obviously wrong; so this is about empowering the police and the regulators, not directly about stopping porn from being accessible over public WiFi.
I'm not sure they are against pornography; this is the sort of thing that comes out of listening to your voters. The thing is, many people are concerned about internet porn, perhaps especially conservative voters, and perhaps especially parents who don't want their children to find that sort of things too easily.
Personally, I'd say 'Screw the children' - except, that sounds a bit wrong, doesn't it? What I mean is, porn is one of the things I just can't be bothered with, and the less chance I have of stumbling over it the better, as far as I am concerned; porn is too much like that idiotic advert for "Cillit Bang": some screeching idiot in a cheap suit trying to sell an indefferent cleaning product.
- trying to reduce pollution is a scam - being liberal (ie. having an open mind) is to hate America - preparing for the consequences of climate change is fear mongering - China is our enemy
As Robin williams once said: "Never have I seen a man in such dire need of a blowjob". Or perhaps a heavy dose of prune juice would do the trick.
Immeasurable impact on issues surrounding technology over recent years
I suppose you could say that - I certainly haven't been able to measure the impact mr Assange has had on technology. He was in the news, but so were the "megastars" from Big Brothel. And like them, he has now faded away into obscurity.
For a political party to be taken seriously, it must address the whole range of issues that a government is faced with, especially in the US, I think, where government is formed almost exclusively from one political block. You might get away with being a single-issue party in a Scandinavian country, where there are many parties in parliament, but only just.
This means that you have to have a well thought through economical policy - ie. more than just 'cut taxes', or 'reduce spending'; it will have to tell exactly how and you will have to present some plausible calculations that show what the consequences will be.
There will also have to be policies for everything else that goes on in society: military, criminal justice, social services, etc etc. Good government is not at all about exciting ideals, it is pragmatic and desperately boring, I'm afraid, unless you happen to like to be an executive manager of a whole bunch of things you don't understand and don't actually want to know about.
Microsoft may have many clever people, and it may be cheap to say "fire Ballmer", but at the end of day, the success of a company depends on the leadership being able to make the right decisions.The brilliant employees are important, of course, but if the leaders make the wrong the wrong decisions, all that means is that you go to hell brilliantly instead of incompetently.
As I understand it, it is because those in charge at Apple feel that gay sex is a real pain in the backside. Personally, I wouldn't know; it's not something I have experience with.
OK, maybe it isn't called "specific legislation", but that was the best I could come up with. The problem is, when you make a law that bans a specific practice or action, it very often doesn't address the real issue: here, not keeping your attention on your driving. It would have been better to be more general - like banning anything that is likely to distract your attention from driving.
So others get the blame for the public being shortsighted and greedy and selling their shares?
That is the most disingenious nonsense I've seen for quite some time, even here on/.
You know perfectly well that most of the public only have just enough to make things go round. I've been there myself - every month you can only just pay your bills, and because you are honest, that is what you do. And you are surrounded by advertising designed to remind you just how crappy it is to live a life with absolutely no luxuries; so, what do people do when they suddenly have a few thousands - which is more than they've ever had their hands on? Making good investments that will benefit you and you family in the long term requires that you have the insight in economy and a well established discipline, and when do you have the chance to learn these things when you have to struggle with the dismal reality of your daily existence?
Of course most people went and burned off what extra money they had; that was after all the intention, when the government sold off those assets. They would have been most upset if everybody had turned out to be clever with the money and put it in the bank - or even better, under the mattres in a box. To sum it up: you are either unbelieveably ingnorant or a hypocrite.
And that sums up the problem with "Capitalism": it is built on lies and false assumptions. The problem doesn't lie with private ownership or free trade - if we really had those things, we would be in less of a mess, I suspect, but the real problem is that the wealth in society is not flowing freely. It all ends up in that big sink-hole that makes up the top 1%; in the end, people will stop buying things and then the whole thing collapses. This started happening a few decades ago, when everybody suddenly started being able to get credit cards and loans more and more easily. Consumers had run out of available money, so businesses were unable to sell their goods; this is not unlike the way it was under feudalism, when poor peasants had to borrow more and more every year to survive, until they were owned, body and soul. And like then, it will have to break.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could set up a system where wealth did not accumulate like that? Communism is perhaps not the answer, but then let's come up with a better solution this time.
And on a final note: I put Capitalism in quote before, because what we have is not really capitalism - we have a religion that calls itself "Capitalism", but it is as close to good, working capitalism as most "Christian" sectariansim is to the ideals and kindness expressed by Jesus.
This is what I would do - crude, but it should work: Install Linux on your system, then some VM - I prefer VirtualBox, personally. Then install Windows in a VM, with all the things you want there. Shut it down, and make a clone/backup or whatever; this is for when you want to clean out your guest Windows. Now, you can let your guests play with Windows, and when they muck it up, you restore it from backup to a know, clean state.
The future of education looks bleak when this is the kind of crap that goes on, but I think it is only yet another symptom of what is going wrong with our education system, and it has been a problem for a very long time.
This narrow focus on exam results means that it is rather hit or miss, whether the student actually learns anything of use. However, it only reflects the wider problem, that most teaching seems to focus on results only. Take mathematics: the typical study material goes "definition, theorem, proof, theorem, proof,..."; so the focus is on the grand results - the theorems. When I left university, with quite good grades, I found my knowledge amazingly useless; it took me years to realise that I had learned the wrong things - that the useful things are not primarily in theorems, but in the methods used to prove the theorems. A good teaching staff will help you understand this point; I don't think an exam robot can.
All this hype about freedom is beginning to wear thin, I feel. I mean, I am as keen on people enjoying personal freedom as any, but like all other good things, it has been snatched up by those least worthy and turned into a prostitute concept, that means "whatever lines my pocket". In short, I find it helpful - nay mandatory - to maintain a healthy amount of skepticism when people envelop their message in "freedom".
Remember, one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist; and there is no such thing as perfect freedom. More freedom for one generally means less for somebody else.
So, is it a good thing that 'oppressed people' are better able to protect themselves? Well it depends on who your oppressed people are, doesn't it? Anybody who is subject to the unfavourable attention of the authorities would say that he/she is 'oppressed'; I have certainly never come across a criminal who wouldn't consider himself a basically decent guy who is being unreasonably targeted.
I think we need a good explanation why this or that particular group is 'good' or 'bad'; or rather, why they are less bad than their opponents. I don't think the picture is clear at all - certainly not as black and white as this article so smugly assumes. Yes, the Syrian regime is definitely bad, but are the rebels really any better? Do they represent all of the Syrian people? As the revolutions in other Arab nations have shown, the picture is a lot more complicated than that.
What is needed, I think, is fact-based, pragmatic thinking and a will to find practical, workable solutions; not lofty idealism.
One can, however, ask for proof for particular claims about a God who defies the apparent "natural" order.
And that is perfectly reasonable too. If God is real and a person, then it should be simple and straightforward to determine that it is so. I mean, it is not as if he is supposed to be on the run or hiding.
Christians and other theists are trying to hide the lack of reality in their beliefs behind the "faith" label; but faith doesn't mean believing in something despite the lack of evidence. It is something that involves trust - that you are willing to base your actions on your faith.
Let me tell how that worked out for me: Many years ago, I desperately wanted God to be real, so I tried to believe in Christianity. I tried the mainline churches, but they were too woolly-mouthed and vague; I tried the charismatics, but I realised that they were simply going "Lalalala I can't hear you" with their fingers in the ears. In the end I did what I should have done from the beginning: I decided that since God was supposed to be Truth, I would follow the truth no matter where that took me. That, I think, was real faith: truth is not always easy or simple, but we have tools that anybody can use to determine whether something is true or not: logic, common sense etc.
I have never, since that time, come across anything that would stand up as evidence that God is real or that miracles are real. I am still very open to the possibility that I may be wrong, but: evidence, please, give me some evidence. And have faith.
I have spent quite some time last year, working on a disaster recovery plan for my company, and one thing I realised was, that of all the important things you have to do to be able to recover after a total wipe-out, back ups are actually the smallest. This is my list of priorities:
1. People: we develop software, and it takes something like a whole year before a new developer is fully on top of their game. The sudden loss of even one of them would seriously hurt our ability to perform. How many could we survive losing in one go?
2. Hardware: it can take anything from a few weeks to several months to replace a server, depending on the specs. Intel x64 based systems are easy to replace, but Itanium, SPARC and POWER less so. No HW = no production; how long could we survive that?
3. Data: restoring data from an off-site backup takes a few days if it isn't urgent, so there isn't all that much of a loss involved, really, as long as you adhere rigidly to a sensible backup scheme.
All of these problems can be addressed, of course, but the point is that one has to be prepared. And backups are likely to be the least part.
Very true - the way I use the word 'society' is to mean or include 'system'. My point here was not to state that laws and regulations spring from noble and selfless ideals, but that the laws are there to provide long-term stability, mostly. Lofty ideals are inherently unstable, because even at best, they can only be valid in a rather narrowly defined range of circumstances; long-term stability requires a combination of willingness to change and a frankly rather grubby pragmatism.
And pragmatically speaking, you have to take the interests of ordinary people into account if you want long-term stability. Even if you are extremely cynical and regard people as nothing more than cattle, you will still realise that your livestock needs feeding and conditions in which they can breed, work productively etc. It's common sense, really.
The bankers won in 1913, and are obviously running us all into the ground in spite of the losses to the rest of us, so they can keep extracting resources from us.
I think the era of that sort of banking is coming to an end; as is the era of that sort of capitalism in general. Accumulating wealth beyond a certain point, whichever way that is defined, is damaging to stability; there is only a limited amount of it to go round, despite what the economists tell us, so if it accumulates in one place, there will be less in other places, and at some point it will collapse: basic Marxist theory (you should pay a little bit of attention to it - some very prominent, capitalist economists are taking this seriously). The point of this observation is not that we should make a revolution and introduce a Soviet style Communism, but that wealth is only meaningful if it is circulating. It is like energy: potential energy doesn't do anything - it is only valuable when it is transformed into work, in a sense.
The big question here is: how do we ensure that wealth keeps circulating? I don't know, but we will have to solve that problem in order to keep things stable in the long run. The good news is that when wealth does circulate, it benefits us all - ie. even us normal people.
Bitcoin is already regulated by somebody, so it is only a question of who gets to write the rules. It's a bit like PayPal - they do all the things a bank does, but they escape bank regulations by not calling themselves a bank - I don't think I need to reiterate all the complaints against PayPal, so I won't, but they are getting away with these things because they don't follow the normal banking rules.
The reason we have laws and standards regulating the handling and production of money is to protect society, ie mostly ordinary people. And the reason the rules have to be written by the legislature is that self-regulation never works in favour of people, it only works for the said industry. At least the government has to consider all the industries, and who knows, maybe even the people sometimes.
As far as I can see, somewhere behind Bitcoin there's a group of people who are making a profit from it, and whose profit would be diminished by having to follow rules meant to protect the ordinary user. I haven't been able to find out who they are; IMO, you should never trust a business who doesn't want to look you in the eye. There is nothing wrong with wanting to make money out of something, so why hide behind anonymity? It is certainly not because they are saintly idealists who only want the best for you. Remember the old saying: "If it's too good to be true..."
What is actually the problem here? I think the real problem is that one's data can be found, not that it exists somewhere. And the way to solve THAT problem is to implement a "search to kill" mechanism: a way to delete any data marked for killing when it is found. And if the holder of the data doesn't conform, the name and other data will be reported to the person whose data it is. I don't think that sounds difficult.
Don't go looking for trouble. If you couldn't handle Ubuntu, Arch will drive you insane.
I switched from Ubuntu to Debian because it too often got painted into a corner, somehow. Yeah, it looks cool and all that, but I realised that I just wanted to get some work done. And, actually, Debian is cool enough, after all.
Also, it kept bugging me that Ubuntu keeps use names that sound like they are desperate to be seen as cool; I found it hard to take them entirely serious. Yeah, I use the command line a lot, I'm that old;-)
Slashdot Mirror
See, this is one of the reasons why we in Europe have public health care: your fate and health depends less on people that actually have an interest in not helping you when need it; ie, insurance companies.
I don't know about Larry Page - to me he is just another suit that got lucky. I have worked in software engineering for over 20 years, and I have never worked out why people like him are admired; they are always shallow, sometimes embarrasingly ignorant about things and a bit deficient, morally and otherwise. Which is why the got rich, really.
Would most people be better off undiagnosed? When it comes to mental "illness", often the only (or at least the best) treatments are behavioral therapy, in which the "illness" is trained away.
Perhaps not. I think the point they are trying to make is that the traditional diagnoses do not reflect any deep insight into the nature of the disorders - they merely describe a set of symptoms, and trying, like the American manual, to pin it out in ever more specific categories does little to help in that respect.
There is some research to suggest that the actual underlying disorder in the brain may be essentially the same for at least several of the common diagnoses (like schizophrenia and depression), while some disorders that are considered variants of the same may be caused by different, underlying problems. Current treatments are only directed at the symptomatic diagnosis, really, and it would be a lot better to understand the disorders well enough to treat the underlying conditions.
A remote control, so you could get it to make obscene gestures.
In China it is quite common to have something similar: the lights in communal areas, like on staircases in apartment buildings, switch on when you make a noise, like clapping your hands or stomping your feet. Or, as I can attest, if you fart loudly enough.
The NRA thinks more guns are the answer
A small correction: it should have been "... more guns bought from members of the NRA's manufacturers..."
- accompanied by the words "Give your fucking wallet..."
I get the cause, but what they utter misses point and just shows that they don't understand technology.
Of course they don't understand - they are politicians. Show some charity.
Another question is whether it is feasible. It may be; but a lot of the point in banning something is simply to set up a set of rules so eg. the police or a regulator can go out and punish those who don't follow the rules. The police can't do anything about things that aren't explicitly against the law, even if those things are obviously wrong; so this is about empowering the police and the regulators, not directly about stopping porn from being accessible over public WiFi.
I'm not sure they are against pornography; this is the sort of thing that comes out of listening to your voters. The thing is, many people are concerned about internet porn, perhaps especially conservative voters, and perhaps especially parents who don't want their children to find that sort of things too easily.
Personally, I'd say 'Screw the children' - except, that sounds a bit wrong, doesn't it? What I mean is, porn is one of the things I just can't be bothered with, and the less chance I have of stumbling over it the better, as far as I am concerned; porn is too much like that idiotic advert for "Cillit Bang": some screeching idiot in a cheap suit trying to sell an indefferent cleaning product.
My, my, aren't you just a fountain of wisdom.
So, according to you:
- trying to reduce pollution is a scam
- being liberal (ie. having an open mind) is to hate America
- preparing for the consequences of climate change is fear mongering
- China is our enemy
As Robin williams once said: "Never have I seen a man in such dire need of a blowjob". Or perhaps a heavy dose of prune juice would do the trick.
Immeasurable impact on issues surrounding technology over recent years
I suppose you could say that - I certainly haven't been able to measure the impact mr Assange has had on technology. He was in the news, but so were the "megastars" from Big Brothel. And like them, he has now faded away into obscurity.
For a political party to be taken seriously, it must address the whole range of issues that a government is faced with, especially in the US, I think, where government is formed almost exclusively from one political block. You might get away with being a single-issue party in a Scandinavian country, where there are many parties in parliament, but only just.
This means that you have to have a well thought through economical policy - ie. more than just 'cut taxes', or 'reduce spending'; it will have to tell exactly how and you will have to present some plausible calculations that show what the consequences will be.
There will also have to be policies for everything else that goes on in society: military, criminal justice, social services, etc etc. Good government is not at all about exciting ideals, it is pragmatic and desperately boring, I'm afraid, unless you happen to like to be an executive manager of a whole bunch of things you don't understand and don't actually want to know about.
Microsoft may have many clever people, and it may be cheap to say "fire Ballmer", but at the end of day, the success of a company depends on the leadership being able to make the right decisions.The brilliant employees are important, of course, but if the leaders make the wrong the wrong decisions, all that means is that you go to hell brilliantly instead of incompetently.
As I understand it, it is because those in charge at Apple feel that gay sex is a real pain in the backside. Personally, I wouldn't know; it's not something I have experience with.
OK, maybe it isn't called "specific legislation", but that was the best I could come up with. The problem is, when you make a law that bans a specific practice or action, it very often doesn't address the real issue: here, not keeping your attention on your driving. It would have been better to be more general - like banning anything that is likely to distract your attention from driving.
So others get the blame for the public being shortsighted and greedy and selling their shares?
That is the most disingenious nonsense I've seen for quite some time, even here on /.
You know perfectly well that most of the public only have just enough to make things go round. I've been there myself - every month you can only just pay your bills, and because you are honest, that is what you do. And you are surrounded by advertising designed to remind you just how crappy it is to live a life with absolutely no luxuries; so, what do people do when they suddenly have a few thousands - which is more than they've ever had their hands on? Making good investments that will benefit you and you family in the long term requires that you have the insight in economy and a well established discipline, and when do you have the chance to learn these things when you have to struggle with the dismal reality of your daily existence?
Of course most people went and burned off what extra money they had; that was after all the intention, when the government sold off those assets. They would have been most upset if everybody had turned out to be clever with the money and put it in the bank - or even better, under the mattres in a box. To sum it up: you are either unbelieveably ingnorant or a hypocrite.
And that sums up the problem with "Capitalism": it is built on lies and false assumptions. The problem doesn't lie with private ownership or free trade - if we really had those things, we would be in less of a mess, I suspect, but the real problem is that the wealth in society is not flowing freely. It all ends up in that big sink-hole that makes up the top 1%; in the end, people will stop buying things and then the whole thing collapses. This started happening a few decades ago, when everybody suddenly started being able to get credit cards and loans more and more easily. Consumers had run out of available money, so businesses were unable to sell their goods; this is not unlike the way it was under feudalism, when poor peasants had to borrow more and more every year to survive, until they were owned, body and soul. And like then, it will have to break.
Wouldn't it be nice if we could set up a system where wealth did not accumulate like that? Communism is perhaps not the answer, but then let's come up with a better solution this time.
And on a final note: I put Capitalism in quote before, because what we have is not really capitalism - we have a religion that calls itself "Capitalism", but it is as close to good, working capitalism as most "Christian" sectariansim is to the ideals and kindness expressed by Jesus.
This is what I would do - crude, but it should work: Install Linux on your system, then some VM - I prefer VirtualBox, personally. Then install Windows in a VM, with all the things you want there. Shut it down, and make a clone/backup or whatever; this is for when you want to clean out your guest Windows. Now, you can let your guests play with Windows, and when they muck it up, you restore it from backup to a know, clean state.
The future of education looks bleak when this is the kind of crap that goes on, but I think it is only yet another symptom of what is going wrong with our education system, and it has been a problem for a very long time.
This narrow focus on exam results means that it is rather hit or miss, whether the student actually learns anything of use. However, it only reflects the wider problem, that most teaching seems to focus on results only. Take mathematics: the typical study material goes "definition, theorem, proof, theorem, proof, ..."; so the focus is on the grand results - the theorems. When I left university, with quite good grades, I found my knowledge amazingly useless; it took me years to realise that I had learned the wrong things - that the useful things are not primarily in theorems, but in the methods used to prove the theorems. A good teaching staff will help you understand this point; I don't think an exam robot can.
All this hype about freedom is beginning to wear thin, I feel. I mean, I am as keen on people enjoying personal freedom as any, but like all other good things, it has been snatched up by those least worthy and turned into a prostitute concept, that means "whatever lines my pocket". In short, I find it helpful - nay mandatory - to maintain a healthy amount of skepticism when people envelop their message in "freedom".
Remember, one man's freedom fighter is another man's terrorist; and there is no such thing as perfect freedom. More freedom for one generally means less for somebody else.
So, is it a good thing that 'oppressed people' are better able to protect themselves? Well it depends on who your oppressed people are, doesn't it? Anybody who is subject to the unfavourable attention of the authorities would say that he/she is 'oppressed'; I have certainly never come across a criminal who wouldn't consider himself a basically decent guy who is being unreasonably targeted.
I think we need a good explanation why this or that particular group is 'good' or 'bad'; or rather, why they are less bad than their opponents. I don't think the picture is clear at all - certainly not as black and white as this article so smugly assumes. Yes, the Syrian regime is definitely bad, but are the rebels really any better? Do they represent all of the Syrian people? As the revolutions in other Arab nations have shown, the picture is a lot more complicated than that.
What is needed, I think, is fact-based, pragmatic thinking and a will to find practical, workable solutions; not lofty idealism.
One can, however, ask for proof for particular claims about a God who defies the apparent "natural" order.
And that is perfectly reasonable too. If God is real and a person, then it should be simple and straightforward to determine that it is so. I mean, it is not as if he is supposed to be on the run or hiding.
Christians and other theists are trying to hide the lack of reality in their beliefs behind the "faith" label; but faith doesn't mean believing in something despite the lack of evidence. It is something that involves trust - that you are willing to base your actions on your faith.
Let me tell how that worked out for me: Many years ago, I desperately wanted God to be real, so I tried to believe in Christianity. I tried the mainline churches, but they were too woolly-mouthed and vague; I tried the charismatics, but I realised that they were simply going "Lalalala I can't hear you" with their fingers in the ears. In the end I did what I should have done from the beginning: I decided that since God was supposed to be Truth, I would follow the truth no matter where that took me. That, I think, was real faith: truth is not always easy or simple, but we have tools that anybody can use to determine whether something is true or not: logic, common sense etc.
I have never, since that time, come across anything that would stand up as evidence that God is real or that miracles are real. I am still very open to the possibility that I may be wrong, but: evidence, please, give me some evidence. And have faith.
I have spent quite some time last year, working on a disaster recovery plan for my company, and one thing I realised was, that of all the important things you have to do to be able to recover after a total wipe-out, back ups are actually the smallest. This is my list of priorities:
1. People: we develop software, and it takes something like a whole year before a new developer is fully on top of their game. The sudden loss of even one of them would seriously hurt our ability to perform. How many could we survive losing in one go?
2. Hardware: it can take anything from a few weeks to several months to replace a server, depending on the specs. Intel x64 based systems are easy to replace, but Itanium, SPARC and POWER less so. No HW = no production; how long could we survive that?
3. Data: restoring data from an off-site backup takes a few days if it isn't urgent, so there isn't all that much of a loss involved, really, as long as you adhere rigidly to a sensible backup scheme.
All of these problems can be addressed, of course, but the point is that one has to be prepared. And backups are likely to be the least part.
The system is protecting itself, not us.
Very true - the way I use the word 'society' is to mean or include 'system'. My point here was not to state that laws and regulations spring from noble and selfless ideals, but that the laws are there to provide long-term stability, mostly. Lofty ideals are inherently unstable, because even at best, they can only be valid in a rather narrowly defined range of circumstances; long-term stability requires a combination of willingness to change and a frankly rather grubby pragmatism.
And pragmatically speaking, you have to take the interests of ordinary people into account if you want long-term stability. Even if you are extremely cynical and regard people as nothing more than cattle, you will still realise that your livestock needs feeding and conditions in which they can breed, work productively etc. It's common sense, really.
The bankers won in 1913, and are obviously running us all into the ground in spite of the losses to the rest of us, so they can keep extracting resources from us.
I think the era of that sort of banking is coming to an end; as is the era of that sort of capitalism in general. Accumulating wealth beyond a certain point, whichever way that is defined, is damaging to stability; there is only a limited amount of it to go round, despite what the economists tell us, so if it accumulates in one place, there will be less in other places, and at some point it will collapse: basic Marxist theory (you should pay a little bit of attention to it - some very prominent, capitalist economists are taking this seriously). The point of this observation is not that we should make a revolution and introduce a Soviet style Communism, but that wealth is only meaningful if it is circulating. It is like energy: potential energy doesn't do anything - it is only valuable when it is transformed into work, in a sense.
The big question here is: how do we ensure that wealth keeps circulating? I don't know, but we will have to solve that problem in order to keep things stable in the long run. The good news is that when wealth does circulate, it benefits us all - ie. even us normal people.
Bitcoin is already regulated by somebody, so it is only a question of who gets to write the rules. It's a bit like PayPal - they do all the things a bank does, but they escape bank regulations by not calling themselves a bank - I don't think I need to reiterate all the complaints against PayPal, so I won't, but they are getting away with these things because they don't follow the normal banking rules.
The reason we have laws and standards regulating the handling and production of money is to protect society, ie mostly ordinary people. And the reason the rules have to be written by the legislature is that self-regulation never works in favour of people, it only works for the said industry. At least the government has to consider all the industries, and who knows, maybe even the people sometimes.
As far as I can see, somewhere behind Bitcoin there's a group of people who are making a profit from it, and whose profit would be diminished by having to follow rules meant to protect the ordinary user. I haven't been able to find out who they are; IMO, you should never trust a business who doesn't want to look you in the eye. There is nothing wrong with wanting to make money out of something, so why hide behind anonymity? It is certainly not because they are saintly idealists who only want the best for you. Remember the old saying: "If it's too good to be true ..."
What is actually the problem here? I think the real problem is that one's data can be found, not that it exists somewhere. And the way to solve THAT problem is to implement a "search to kill" mechanism: a way to delete any data marked for killing when it is found. And if the holder of the data doesn't conform, the name and other data will be reported to the person whose data it is. I don't think that sounds difficult.
It's a brand, mostly shoes. Here's a link:
http://www.atheistberlin.com/
Don't go looking for trouble. If you couldn't handle Ubuntu, Arch will drive you insane.
I switched from Ubuntu to Debian because it too often got painted into a corner, somehow. Yeah, it looks cool and all that, but I realised that I just wanted to get some work done. And, actually, Debian is cool enough, after all.
Also, it kept bugging me that Ubuntu keeps use names that sound like they are desperate to be seen as cool; I found it hard to take them entirely serious. Yeah, I use the command line a lot, I'm that old ;-)