Since the primary purpose of owning a gun is to commit suicide (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/05/24/suicides-account-for-most-gun-deaths/) that scenario will feature prominently in any rational discussion of smart guns.... It follows that any discussion of smart guns that does not focus on their primary use--killing their owner--is not a rational discussion, but rather an emotion-laden hysteria-fest.
That may be the primary cause of "gun deaths", but it isn't the primary purpose of owning a gun. You're ignoring all the guns that aren't ever involved in a "gun death". People rarely buy a gun with the specific intent of using it on a person (for suicide or otherwise). They buy one to have it on hand in case of an emergency, and/or for hunting or target shooting.
If someone does go out and buy a gun specifically for the purpose of committing suicide, I would hope that it does the job it was purchased for with a minimum of trouble. I have zero interest in cruelly prolonging someone else's life against their expressed will.
However we are heading towards an IPv6 world where ip-reputation is too hard (too many addresses).
I don't believe that for a moment. "Too many addresses" is only an issue if you're trying to store reputation for every individual/128. To begin with, you can ignore everything below/64. A/64 is the minimum ISPs are supposed to allocate to individual customers, much like a/32 address in IPv4. The remaining 64 bits still leave a lot of space to map out, to be sure, but there aren't significantly more end-users than there were before—they just get larger ranges each. If you store reputation by network, with variable prefix lengths, you should be able to compress the results quite nicely.
If anything, IPv6 should lead to more (mostly-)static address assignments and thus less headaches when it comes to tracking reputations, compared to dynamic IPv4 addresses which are frequently repurposed.
And how in practical terms does that differ from regulating the price of gold?
In the first scenario you're trying to dictate the relative values of two different free-floating goods. Your dictates can't overrule the law of supply and demand, and the attempt to deny reality leads to chaos. In the second case you have gold, and claims for gold (a.k.a. dollars), and the prices of both—relative to each other and to everything else—are determined by the market.
Whatever the standard US currency is should be backed by tangible assets...
In other words, you believe in price regulation for some commodities. Logically, basing your currency on some tangible thing is exactly equivalent to regulating the price of that commodity.
You have it backward. A gold standard doesn't "regulate the price" of anything. Instead, it defines each unit of the currency a claim to a specific amount of gold. That's what it means for a currency to be "backed" by something. The issuer incurs a fixed liability for every note it issues. The price of the currency then floats depending the relative value (purchasing power) of a claim to gold vs. the actual gold. If the issuer later refuses to redeem its notes for the amount of gold they were issued for, as the U.S. did when it first redefined the exchange rate and later went off the gold standard entirely, it is repudiating its debts.
If you don't take steps to regulate the *market* price of gold at $1300, your claim to have based your currency on gold reserves is empty.
Obviously, to have a currency backed by gold, you have to actually have the gold. The exchange rate wouldn't be $1300/oz., however; it would be based on how much gold is actually available to back the currency in circulation. Given approximately 250 million troy ounces of official U.S. government gold reserves and a $3 trillion monetary base, the exchange rate would be more like $12,000/oz. Maintaining that rate once on the gold standard would simply be a matter of refraining from issuing more currency unless the gold reserves are increased by the same amount.
The term "arms" at the time the amendment was written was a bit narrower than the modern term "armaments", referring to the sorts of weapons which would traditionally be carried and used by an individual soldier. I don't know of any army that would issue WMDs or artillery to individuals. However, that would certainly include rocket launchers, RPGs, and C4.
(For that matter, C4 isn't necessarily a weapon. It has industrial uses in mining, demolition, etc.)
The 2nd Amendment of the US Constitution guarantees that each citizen has the right to keep and bear arms for self-defense.
The 2nd amendment qualifies that right with words about a "well regulated militia".
First, to the GP: "for self-defense" does not appear anywhere in the 2nd Amendment. It's the right to keep and bear arms, period. There's no need to justify why you want to keep and/or bear arms; for hunting, sport shooting, whatever.
Second, while there is language about a "well regulated militia", it's not qualifying the right—it's providing the justification for it (one of many). It is the right of the people to keep and bear arms, not the right of the militia. At the time these were essentially the same thing, but the right was never limited to the militia. How could it be? Rights are universal, not restricted to certain groups.
If you read the amendment from a neutral point of view and not as someone who wants to find a justification for banning firearms, it's really pretty obvious. More so if you read contemporary commentaries on the subject. The only "debate" on this issue is due to a number of people, including some judges, who want to simply ban firearms but (fortunately) lack the support to repeal the amendment outright. Since they can't change the text they try to sow confusion and twist its meaning instead.
I need a license, registration, and insurance to drive a car.
Only on a public road. You don't need a license or insurance simply to own a car, transport it, or drive it on private roads, and the registration just shows that you've payed your taxes. There is no point in licensing the use of guns as the use of cars on public roads is licensed; they're something you carry only for emergencies, in the hope you won't need to use them. You shouldn't need anyone's permission just to manufacture, buy, sell, or own one, carry it around, or practice with it on a private firing range. If the time comes that you do need to defend yourself with it, that should be treated no differently than defending yourself with any other tool which happened to be at hand.
You CAN take it to Sprint or AT&T, but you'll pay the same monthly charge as someone who didn't bring their own device...
With AT&T at least that is no longer true; you get a $15/mo. discount ($25/mo. for the 10-50 GB plans) for bringing your own device or buying it in installments via their AT&T Next program, compared to the price with a 2-year contract. Source
Dollars have value because the government, charged with the creation and enforcement of laws, says they do. If the consensus changes, it doesn't matter, they're still worth what the government says they are worth.
That will be really helpful when you go to the market and find that a gallon of milk costs $100. "What the government says they're worth" is meaningful only as long as the government has the goods you want to buy. Even if they tried to impose a price ceiling, the long-term result would simply be that no one would be willing to sell the goods at the mandated price. You can't legislate away the law of supply and demand.
You don't have to look far to see examples of government currencies which were devalued "down to zero", with said governments powerless to prevent it: Examples of Hyperinflation. In general these devaluations are due to massive increases in the money supply, which won't be an issue with Bitcoin.
Who cares? The question was whether you could spend bitcoins for goods and/or services, not whether the prices are fixed in stone. Stores change their prices all the time, even prices given in USD. What matters is the price at the time you place your order.
And why would you need to do this when any other currency you might add has capital gains and losses, but you do not need to recognize them on the tax form?
Why indeed? The problem is with that last assumption. Gains from foreign currency exchange are taxable if they exceed $200:
Any currency gains in excess of $200 per transaction (per trip or per purchase) are treated as a capital gain.... The primary source of information on the tax treatment of currency gains or losses is IRC Section 988. -- U.S. Taxation of Foreign Currency Gains or Losses
The question is what can you GET for them... Right now? Not much.
You really need to update your anti-Bitcoin propaganda. Between Bitcoinstore, Overstock.com, TigerDirect, Fancy, eGifter, and Gyft you can get quite a bit for a bitcoin these days, and that's not counting all these other merchants:
If the voters were that irate about the politicians, they'd vote them out. Even if the new ones were just as bad, the voters would express their ire by voting them out, too.
That would be a good start, but one would hope that after a while they'd learn to stop voting them in. Just leave the office empty and let people get on with their lives in peace.
Then it doesn't matter whether most people would find the effective hourly rate "insulting"; all that matters is that anybody who does find an exploit will turn it in to the company rather than selling it on the black market or exploiting it themselves.
You're assuming they can only choose one. What is there to prevent someone from exploiting the bug themselves for a while, selling it on the black market (to a discrete buyer), and still eventually turning it in to collect the bounty?
How is it not so good for buyers? It seems buyers would be paying taxes based on a current assessment with or without prop 13? In other words prop 13 seems irrelevant to that initial assessment and tax rate, that it only affects increases not the initial rate.
It's bad if you consider that the tax burden is distributed unevenly. New buyers pay a larger fraction of the tax, yet receive the same share of city services as long-time owners of similar properties. The rate has to be set higher to make up for the shortfall from the undervalued properties. Let's say the city needs 5% of the current market value of all the properties to meet its budget. If half those properties are undervalued by 50% for tax purposes, the tax rate has to be set at 6.7% instead of 5%, which means new buyers are paying a third more than they would if all the property taxes were based on current market value.
Recording a conversation without the consent of the other party even for the purpose of providing evidence requires a warrant, under the first amendment and the laws governing free speech. While I understand the intentions and agree that attempting to resolve it by providing clear evidence is reasonable, the simple truth is that under US law recording conversations is prohibited without the oversight of a judge who can determine whether or not it is an appropriate exception to the right of free speech.
You're making it sound like all-party consent laws exist throughout the entire US. Only twelve states require all-party consent: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Washington. In the other 38 it's perfectly legal to record the conversation as long as you are a party to it. This isn't anywhere close to a first amendment or free speech issue. Your right to speak freely does not imply a right to make others forget what you said or prevent them from testifying about it—and the only relevant difference between a recording made in person and one's own memory is that the recording is a more reliable form of evidence, which is all to the good.
It's the all-party consent states, like this one, which are being unreasonable here. So long as the person speaking is aware that you can hear them, they have no reasonable expectation of privacy from you and you ought to be perfectly free to record what they say.
You lose that ability the moment you incorporate. You want protections of incorporation, then you also get regulated.
You shouldn't have to forfeit your rights and submit to arbitrary restrictions imposed by a third-party just to exercise your natural freedom of association and act as a group.
The protections of incorporation are really fairly limited. It's not an absolute defense; if you cause harm which can't be made whole out of corporate funds, incorporation won't help—you can still be made personally liable for the damage. The benefits of incorporation mostly come down to simplified tax accounting and clarifying the scope of each party's responsibilities when entering into contracts. The first part is a solution to a problem created by government in the first place, and the second doesn't need government at all, just a mutually-agreeable arbiter to settle disputes.
Sure. But that assumes that you can prosecute. For a crime like breaking & entering, that may work often enough to serve as a deterrent. Online, not so much. You'll probably never find out who orchestrated the attack, and even if you do, they're like to be in a different jurisdiction (or even have state backing). As a result, your security measures have to be strong enough to prevent the attack from succeeding in the first place.
That's not to say that you always need absolute security. There's still a cost/benefit analysis involved. You just can't count on making up your losses by prosecuting the offender when the security fails, which increases the net benefit of having proper security in place.
very unconvincing... wouldnt it be easier to grow your hair a few mm longer?
What's to say that didn't happen? We just don't call the ones with longer hair instead of stripes "zebras".
Evolution doesn't involve a species voting on how it would prefer to evolve. If there are multiple possible adaptations then it's entirely possible that different subgroups will evolve in different directions in response to the same environmental factors. This is one path to speciation, if the change are significant enough.
git does support hierarchical branches. You can have a branch named maria/new-crypto, and even pattern-match on the branch path in refspecs. The problem, as you alluded to, is that SVN doesn't have native branches at all, just copies. How is git-svn supposed to know that/branches/maria/new-crypto refers to a branch of/trunk and not to a directory within the "maria" branch? They look the same. For that matter, you could get that path by creating a branch named "maria" (copied from some version of/trunk) and then coping/trunk into it as a subdirectory—a branch within a branch.
You can work around odd SVN layouts somewhat by manually configuring custom branch paths in.git/config:
You then stash apply. You get the conflicts, say "I give up for now". Now all you have to do is figure out what the SHA1 of the copy that was in the stash is. Might have to do some reflog digging, but it is not only possible but actually pretty easy if you know about the reflog.
You don't even need to bother finding the SHA1 or searching the reflog. stash apply doesn't get rid of the stash, so it's still right there as stash@{0}. You can also find it with stash list. stash pop would normally get rid of the stash after applying it, but even there the original stash is preserved if there were any merge conflicts.
I was pointing out that this is a 'free market', with the government being another variable that companies must take into account...
This should go without saying, but if you have to take third-party interference with the peaceful exercise of your property rights into account, then it isn't a free market. (The absence of such interference is exactly what the "free" part refers to.)
Bitcoin takes an average of 10-30 minutes before the transfer is effectively irreversible by the customer. With a credit card, due to chargebacks, it takes months to reach that point. Checks are faster than credit cards, but easier to fake, and still much slower to finalize than Bitcoin.
Even before you get your 1-3 confirmations, unless the customer controls a large fraction of the mining network or is colluding with someone who does they have very little change of implementing a double-spend once the transaction has been broadcast through the network, a process which takes only a few seconds. In the meantime you probably have them on camera, and they can't get very far before the transaction is confirmed or invalidated. If you're concerned about a particularly large transaction you can always ask for a photo ID in case you need to track them down later.
Slashdot Mirror
Since the primary purpose of owning a gun is to commit suicide (http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/05/24/suicides-account-for-most-gun-deaths/) that scenario will feature prominently in any rational discussion of smart guns. ... It follows that any discussion of smart guns that does not focus on their primary use--killing their owner--is not a rational discussion, but rather an emotion-laden hysteria-fest.
That may be the primary cause of "gun deaths", but it isn't the primary purpose of owning a gun. You're ignoring all the guns that aren't ever involved in a "gun death". People rarely buy a gun with the specific intent of using it on a person (for suicide or otherwise). They buy one to have it on hand in case of an emergency, and/or for hunting or target shooting.
If someone does go out and buy a gun specifically for the purpose of committing suicide, I would hope that it does the job it was purchased for with a minimum of trouble. I have zero interest in cruelly prolonging someone else's life against their expressed will.
However we are heading towards an IPv6 world where ip-reputation is too hard (too many addresses).
I don't believe that for a moment. "Too many addresses" is only an issue if you're trying to store reputation for every individual /128. To begin with, you can ignore everything below /64. A /64 is the minimum ISPs are supposed to allocate to individual customers, much like a /32 address in IPv4. The remaining 64 bits still leave a lot of space to map out, to be sure, but there aren't significantly more end-users than there were before—they just get larger ranges each. If you store reputation by network, with variable prefix lengths, you should be able to compress the results quite nicely.
If anything, IPv6 should lead to more (mostly-)static address assignments and thus less headaches when it comes to tracking reputations, compared to dynamic IPv4 addresses which are frequently repurposed.
And how in practical terms does that differ from regulating the price of gold?
In the first scenario you're trying to dictate the relative values of two different free-floating goods. Your dictates can't overrule the law of supply and demand, and the attempt to deny reality leads to chaos. In the second case you have gold, and claims for gold (a.k.a. dollars), and the prices of both—relative to each other and to everything else—are determined by the market.
Whatever the standard US currency is should be backed by tangible assets...
In other words, you believe in price regulation for some commodities. Logically, basing your currency on some tangible thing is exactly equivalent to regulating the price of that commodity.
You have it backward. A gold standard doesn't "regulate the price" of anything. Instead, it defines each unit of the currency a claim to a specific amount of gold. That's what it means for a currency to be "backed" by something. The issuer incurs a fixed liability for every note it issues. The price of the currency then floats depending the relative value (purchasing power) of a claim to gold vs. the actual gold. If the issuer later refuses to redeem its notes for the amount of gold they were issued for, as the U.S. did when it first redefined the exchange rate and later went off the gold standard entirely, it is repudiating its debts.
If you don't take steps to regulate the *market* price of gold at $1300, your claim to have based your currency on gold reserves is empty.
Obviously, to have a currency backed by gold, you have to actually have the gold. The exchange rate wouldn't be $1300/oz., however; it would be based on how much gold is actually available to back the currency in circulation. Given approximately 250 million troy ounces of official U.S. government gold reserves and a $3 trillion monetary base, the exchange rate would be more like $12,000/oz. Maintaining that rate once on the gold standard would simply be a matter of refraining from issuing more currency unless the gold reserves are increased by the same amount.
The term "arms" at the time the amendment was written was a bit narrower than the modern term "armaments", referring to the sorts of weapons which would traditionally be carried and used by an individual soldier. I don't know of any army that would issue WMDs or artillery to individuals. However, that would certainly include rocket launchers, RPGs, and C4.
(For that matter, C4 isn't necessarily a weapon. It has industrial uses in mining, demolition, etc.)
You're not quite correct on a couple of points.
The 2nd Amendment of the US Constitution guarantees that each citizen has the right to keep and bear arms for self-defense.
The 2nd amendment qualifies that right with words about a "well regulated militia".
First, to the GP: "for self-defense" does not appear anywhere in the 2nd Amendment. It's the right to keep and bear arms, period. There's no need to justify why you want to keep and/or bear arms; for hunting, sport shooting, whatever.
Second, while there is language about a "well regulated militia", it's not qualifying the right—it's providing the justification for it (one of many). It is the right of the people to keep and bear arms, not the right of the militia. At the time these were essentially the same thing, but the right was never limited to the militia. How could it be? Rights are universal, not restricted to certain groups.
If you read the amendment from a neutral point of view and not as someone who wants to find a justification for banning firearms, it's really pretty obvious. More so if you read contemporary commentaries on the subject. The only "debate" on this issue is due to a number of people, including some judges, who want to simply ban firearms but (fortunately) lack the support to repeal the amendment outright. Since they can't change the text they try to sow confusion and twist its meaning instead.
I need a license, registration, and insurance to drive a car.
Only on a public road. You don't need a license or insurance simply to own a car, transport it, or drive it on private roads, and the registration just shows that you've payed your taxes. There is no point in licensing the use of guns as the use of cars on public roads is licensed; they're something you carry only for emergencies, in the hope you won't need to use them. You shouldn't need anyone's permission just to manufacture, buy, sell, or own one, carry it around, or practice with it on a private firing range. If the time comes that you do need to defend yourself with it, that should be treated no differently than defending yourself with any other tool which happened to be at hand.
You CAN take it to Sprint or AT&T, but you'll pay the same monthly charge as someone who didn't bring their own device ...
With AT&T at least that is no longer true; you get a $15/mo. discount ($25/mo. for the 10-50 GB plans) for bringing your own device or buying it in installments via their AT&T Next program, compared to the price with a 2-year contract. Source
Dollars have value because the government, charged with the creation and enforcement of laws, says they do. If the consensus changes, it doesn't matter, they're still worth what the government says they are worth.
That will be really helpful when you go to the market and find that a gallon of milk costs $100. "What the government says they're worth" is meaningful only as long as the government has the goods you want to buy. Even if they tried to impose a price ceiling, the long-term result would simply be that no one would be willing to sell the goods at the mandated price. You can't legislate away the law of supply and demand.
You don't have to look far to see examples of government currencies which were devalued "down to zero", with said governments powerless to prevent it: Examples of Hyperinflation. In general these devaluations are due to massive increases in the money supply, which won't be an issue with Bitcoin.
Who cares? The question was whether you could spend bitcoins for goods and/or services, not whether the prices are fixed in stone. Stores change their prices all the time, even prices given in USD. What matters is the price at the time you place your order.
And why would you need to do this when any other currency you might add has capital gains and losses, but you do not need to recognize them on the tax form?
Why indeed? The problem is with that last assumption. Gains from foreign currency exchange are taxable if they exceed $200:
Any currency gains in excess of $200 per transaction (per trip or per purchase) are treated as a capital gain. ... The primary source of information on the tax treatment of currency gains or losses is IRC Section 988.
-- U.S. Taxation of Foreign Currency Gains or Losses
IRC Section 988
Bitcoin doesn't get the exception for gains under $200, but otherwise the treatment is very similar.
The question is what can you GET for them... Right now? Not much.
You really need to update your anti-Bitcoin propaganda. Between Bitcoinstore, Overstock.com, TigerDirect, Fancy, eGifter, and Gyft you can get quite a bit for a bitcoin these days, and that's not counting all these other merchants:
Trade page at the Bitcoin Wiki
If the voters were that irate about the politicians, they'd vote them out. Even if the new ones were just as bad, the voters would express their ire by voting them out, too.
That would be a good start, but one would hope that after a while they'd learn to stop voting them in. Just leave the office empty and let people get on with their lives in peace.
Then it doesn't matter whether most people would find the effective hourly rate "insulting"; all that matters is that anybody who does find an exploit will turn it in to the company rather than selling it on the black market or exploiting it themselves.
You're assuming they can only choose one. What is there to prevent someone from exploiting the bug themselves for a while, selling it on the black market (to a discrete buyer), and still eventually turning it in to collect the bounty?
How is it not so good for buyers? It seems buyers would be paying taxes based on a current assessment with or without prop 13? In other words prop 13 seems irrelevant to that initial assessment and tax rate, that it only affects increases not the initial rate.
It's bad if you consider that the tax burden is distributed unevenly. New buyers pay a larger fraction of the tax, yet receive the same share of city services as long-time owners of similar properties. The rate has to be set higher to make up for the shortfall from the undervalued properties. Let's say the city needs 5% of the current market value of all the properties to meet its budget. If half those properties are undervalued by 50% for tax purposes, the tax rate has to be set at 6.7% instead of 5%, which means new buyers are paying a third more than they would if all the property taxes were based on current market value.
Recording a conversation without the consent of the other party even for the purpose of providing evidence requires a warrant, under the first amendment and the laws governing free speech. While I understand the intentions and agree that attempting to resolve it by providing clear evidence is reasonable, the simple truth is that under US law recording conversations is prohibited without the oversight of a judge who can determine whether or not it is an appropriate exception to the right of free speech.
You're making it sound like all-party consent laws exist throughout the entire US. Only twelve states require all-party consent: California, Connecticut, Delaware, Florida, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Vermont, and Washington. In the other 38 it's perfectly legal to record the conversation as long as you are a party to it. This isn't anywhere close to a first amendment or free speech issue. Your right to speak freely does not imply a right to make others forget what you said or prevent them from testifying about it—and the only relevant difference between a recording made in person and one's own memory is that the recording is a more reliable form of evidence, which is all to the good.
It's the all-party consent states, like this one, which are being unreasonable here. So long as the person speaking is aware that you can hear them, they have no reasonable expectation of privacy from you and you ought to be perfectly free to record what they say.
You lose that ability the moment you incorporate. You want protections of incorporation, then you also get regulated.
You shouldn't have to forfeit your rights and submit to arbitrary restrictions imposed by a third-party just to exercise your natural freedom of association and act as a group.
The protections of incorporation are really fairly limited. It's not an absolute defense; if you cause harm which can't be made whole out of corporate funds, incorporation won't help—you can still be made personally liable for the damage. The benefits of incorporation mostly come down to simplified tax accounting and clarifying the scope of each party's responsibilities when entering into contracts. The first part is a solution to a problem created by government in the first place, and the second doesn't need government at all, just a mutually-agreeable arbiter to settle disputes.
If you're renting it from your landlord, it's not "private property".
It's still private property. It's just not your private property—it belongs to the landlord. You've just contracted to use it for a time.
Most security in this world is about prosecution.
Sure. But that assumes that you can prosecute. For a crime like breaking & entering, that may work often enough to serve as a deterrent. Online, not so much. You'll probably never find out who orchestrated the attack, and even if you do, they're like to be in a different jurisdiction (or even have state backing). As a result, your security measures have to be strong enough to prevent the attack from succeeding in the first place.
That's not to say that you always need absolute security. There's still a cost/benefit analysis involved. You just can't count on making up your losses by prosecuting the offender when the security fails, which increases the net benefit of having proper security in place.
very unconvincing... wouldnt it be easier to grow your hair a few mm longer?
What's to say that didn't happen? We just don't call the ones with longer hair instead of stripes "zebras".
Evolution doesn't involve a species voting on how it would prefer to evolve. If there are multiple possible adaptations then it's entirely possible that different subgroups will evolve in different directions in response to the same environmental factors. This is one path to speciation, if the change are significant enough.
git does support hierarchical branches. You can have a branch named maria/new-crypto, and even pattern-match on the branch path in refspecs. The problem, as you alluded to, is that SVN doesn't have native branches at all, just copies. How is git-svn supposed to know that /branches/maria/new-crypto refers to a branch of /trunk and not to a directory within the "maria" branch? They look the same. For that matter, you could get that path by creating a branch named "maria" (copied from some version of /trunk) and then coping /trunk into it as a subdirectory—a branch within a branch.
You can work around odd SVN layouts somewhat by manually configuring custom branch paths in .git/config:
You then stash apply. You get the conflicts, say "I give up for now". Now all you have to do is figure out what the SHA1 of the copy that was in the stash is. Might have to do some reflog digging, but it is not only possible but actually pretty easy if you know about the reflog.
You don't even need to bother finding the SHA1 or searching the reflog. stash apply doesn't get rid of the stash, so it's still right there as stash@{0}. You can also find it with stash list. stash pop would normally get rid of the stash after applying it, but even there the original stash is preserved if there were any merge conflicts.
I was pointing out that this is a 'free market', with the government being another variable that companies must take into account...
This should go without saying, but if you have to take third-party interference with the peaceful exercise of your property rights into account, then it isn't a free market. (The absence of such interference is exactly what the "free" part refers to.)
Sabriel wasn't talking about mobile phones. He was alluding to the organic recording device located inside your skull.
Bitcoin takes an average of 10-30 minutes before the transfer is effectively irreversible by the customer. With a credit card, due to chargebacks, it takes months to reach that point. Checks are faster than credit cards, but easier to fake, and still much slower to finalize than Bitcoin.
Even before you get your 1-3 confirmations, unless the customer controls a large fraction of the mining network or is colluding with someone who does they have very little change of implementing a double-spend once the transaction has been broadcast through the network, a process which takes only a few seconds. In the meantime you probably have them on camera, and they can't get very far before the transaction is confirmed or invalidated. If you're concerned about a particularly large transaction you can always ask for a photo ID in case you need to track them down later.