You're buying insurance for both yourself and your wife, so your case isn't relevant to the discussion. Obviously any policy covering both a male and a female will include coverage for male-specific procedures for the male and female-specific procedures for the female. That doesn't imply that anyone should be forced to buy insurance for a procedure he or she is guaranteed to never need. Gender should be taken into account when calculating risk factors and premiums.
This is how insurance works. We pool everyone. You're not buying specific health procedures. You're buying decreased risk.
No, that's not how insurance works. That's how charity works (or wealth transfer, a.k.a. theft, when it's forced). True, you're not paying for specific procedures. However, you should be paying according to the probability and cost of the procedures you're covered for. A procedure you'll never need has zero probability, and thus shouldn't affect your premiums.
You're not buying decreased risk. Risk is the product of probability and cost; if anything, insurance increases your risk by adding the insurance company's overhead and profit margin. It certainly can't decrease risk for everyone no matter how you structure it; there must always be at least as much payed in as the insurance company pays out, on average, or the company goes bankrupt. The purpose of insurance is to reduce the cost of an insured event to something manageable, in the event it does occur, at the expense of increasing the probability of paying that cost (you have to pay the premiums whether the event happens or not).
The idea behind insurance pools is to group together statistically independent policies of about the same level of risk. They don't necessarily have to cover the same things, you just want to avoid holding a bunch of cash in reserve, or else bankrupting the company in the event several large claims have to be paid out at the same time.
Wasted electricity has no demand.
Bitcoin is linked to the supply and demand of WHAT exactly?
That electricity isn't "wasted"; it goes to validate blocks of transactions. Achieving world-wide consensus on who has how many bitcoins is a service which provides value, which is the reason for the transaction fees. (The exponentially decreasing block reward is primarily a decentralized way to distribute bitcoins as fairly as possible.)
Of course, it's not the supply and demand of bitcoin mining which is important here, but rather the supply and demand of bitcoins. The supply follows a known formula over time, with an ultimate limit at 21 million bitcoins. The demand, as for any currency, is determined by a combination of direct use, marketability and speculation, with an emphasis on marketability. Relative to the dollar, gold has more demand for direct use and bitcoin has more demand for speculation, but in all three cases the main source of demand is the fact that you can trade them for other goods and services later.
As for Wayland, the only thing I've seen there is experimental support for running the full blown Wayland server and compositor on the server and it will use RDP if you want to view it remotely.
Well, you will need a Wayland compositor on the server, since Wayland is a local/shared-memory IPC protocol. The compositor will take the place of the xpra server, and communicate with a proxy (Wayland client) on the user's machine. It doesn't have to merge the windows into a single desktop, however. The current RDP backend in Weston is limited to the desktop mode, but if you can forward a complete desktop then there's nothing technically difficult about forwarding an individual window; it's just a matter of proxying the non-video parts of the protocol. I get the impression that they have more urgent tasks on their to-do list, like getting XWayland working so that you can use it with legacy applications.
For example, if a person is in prison for drug possession and is rehabilitated, while should punishment matter.
Why should rehabilitation matter? That person shouldn't be in prison in the first place. They didn't do anything to justify locking them up as a proportional punishment, and they don't pose the imminent threat of irreparable harm necessary to justify a preemptive act of defense. They didn't even cause anyone harm for which they would need to pay restitution.
The thing about punishment is that it isn't so much that the person should be punished as it is that they shouldn't be able to appeal to the State for protection against the victim doing to them exactly what they did to the victim. They did it, therefore they claim that it's all right to do it. No take-backs. (More formally: estoppel.) Whether they actually are punished should be up to the victim, though, and there is something to be said for leniency so long as it doesn't place others at risk.
In that case what you want is xpra. Each window is rendered off-screen and forwarded individually, as a compressed video stream (x264 if it's available). You can detach from the xpra server and reattach later, from the same client or a different one, with all your applications intact. A lot like how Wayland remoting will work, really, except that in Wayland it will be better integrated due to not needing to support all the legacy parts of X11.
Then Apple, Google, Netflix etc come along with digital downloads, which are essentially just a stream of 0's and 1's, which are definitely not a tangible thing, and a whole hodge-podge of legal issues comes along. Can you pass 0's and 1's to your next-of-kin? Can to transfer these 0's and 1's to a different device? Can you resell these 0's and 1's to someone else?
You make this sound like something new. The problem is inherent in copyright itself. Whenever you attempt to censor the communication or storage of information you're going to end up with a lot of arbitrary (and often contradictory) rules.
The wallet does not contain discreet coins. A wallet is basically a private key with a value assigned to it. When someone pays you, the global leger says "the value went up by X".
That's not quite right. While you're correct that there is no such thing as a discrete coin, the blockchain doesn't record totals; it records transactions. Ergo, you can meaningfully refer to and selectively spend the coins you received as part of a particular transaction. You have to spend all of them, however—a given transaction output can only be spent once. Normally this selection process is left up to the client software, which hides the details and only shows the total for each address. Any leftover balance is sent back to either the address it came from or a new (typically hidden) address.
Bitcoins from different transaction outputs aren't even necessarily interchangeable. The "colored coin" model, for example, assigns meaning to a particular output and tracks its movement through the block chain. Such coins can represent claims on physical property, shares in a company, bonds, etc; possession of the private key becomes proof of ownership for the property as well as the bitcoins. You can transfer ownership with a normal transaction, though splitting the output or mixing it with other coins destroys the association, forfeiting whatever claim it represented.
In your scenario, originally you had $100, and the other person had a stock share that he could trade for $100. Therefore there was $200 in total value.
Only if you're including the estimated market value of the share, which is illusory unless you actually sell it at that price. What actually exists is $100 and one share of stock. If you could have sold that share for $100 but didn't, and now you can only sell it for $10, nothing has been destroyed. The share still exists, and the other $90 still exists; it just isn't being offered in exchange for your share.
From your own point of view, of course, that was a major missed opportunity (in hindsight). You bet that the share was worth more than $100 and lost, badly. For the market as a whole, however, it's pretty much a wash. Resources could perhaps have been allocated a bit more efficiently if it were known in advance that the share would only be worth $10, but that's due more to whatever caused the price to drop rather than the devaluation itself (perhaps the company suffered a major setback resulting in wasted effort or materials).
The attacker can't:
* Reverse other people's transactions
I'm not sure that's true. The attacker can control whether or not a transaction is included in a block, and can replace recent blocks on the chain with other blocks including different sets of transactions. Put together, that should imply that they can allow anyone's transaction(s) to confirm, and then produce a longer chain without those confirmed transactions. The transactions would go into the block chain the moment the attack let up, assuming they're still valid, but in the meantime the coins have reverted to their original addresses and can be re-spent if the attacker allows it.
If somewhere down the line someone eventually gets to processing the original transaction, then Joe might get double-charged, because I don't know if there's a way to void the previous transaction, but it may expire on its own after a certain period of time, so that might not be an issue.
The inputs to a transaction are specific unspent outputs from previous transactions, so once either of the transactions is included in the block chain the other one becomes invalid. That applies even if some or all of the bitcoins are sent to address they came from; even though the address hasn't changed, the coins still moved to a new transaction with different outputs. So you can't get double-charged, and there's no need to explicitly void the unwanted transaction; at most one will go through. Most likely the one with the higher fee.
The same argument applies there. Insurance isn't for paying for things you know you need, it's for hedging your bets so that if something unexpected happens it doesn't render you destitute. You can't make the first kind of "insurance" work in a free society; people have to be forced to sign up, or the system goes bankrupt.
The only real problem regarding "pre-existing conditions" is that under the current system you have to maintain your insurance continuously after being diagnosed in order to receive funding for your ongoing care, which naturally leaves people paranoid about being unemployed or unable to pay their insurance bill, even for a short time, and then not be accepted by any other insurer due to their known condition. The way it should work is that the current insurer is on the hook for the lifetime cost of care for whatever you were insured against at the time you were diagnosed, even if you later drop your insurance policy.
Yes, I am saying that people have a right to be free from ubiquitous government surveillance.
For the sake of argument, let's say that's true. Rights are inherently subjective; the only constraint is consistency. If you have the right, so does everyone else. On that basis, let's say someone did put you under surveillance, and you found out about it. What would be a proportional response? Your only "damage", if you can call it that, is the subjective emotional impact of being aware that you're under surveillance. Imprisonment and/or loss of property would clearly be out of proportion. Reciprocation would be fine, of course, but would also be unlikely to have much effect on someone who truly believes in ubiquitous surveillance.
Legal rights work because there are some rights that it simply doesn't pay to disagree with. The right to life, for example—if you disavowed that then anyone could try to kill you without any legal consequence. Or property rights—if you claim that property is a right then others can deprive you of the products of your labor at any time, leaving you with no more than the barest minimum you need to survive. The proposed "right to be free from ubiquitous government surveillance" doesn't work that way, because the people wanting to do the surveillance don't mind having it applied to them.
... isn't it a given fact that we need another party to create or transfer those bitcoins?
If you don't wish to mine bitcoins yourself then yes, you'll need someone else to do that for you. At that point you can buy them directly from the miner (e.g. via localbitcoins.com) or you can trade for them on an exchange. In the latter case, you can immediately withdraw the bitcoins to your own private wallet. Either way, there is no need to leave yourself vulnerable to any third-party after the transaction is complete.
When another party creates those bitcoins for me, how can I be sure that they won't keep a copy for later use?
You can't copy bitcoins, only private keys. (There's nothing to copy; the bitcoin is an abstract unit of account, not data.) If you have the other party send the bitcoins to an address for which only you know the private key, then only you can spend those bitcoins.
The kit, that requires extra parts, is $100. The assembles Peachy is $400.
These "extra parts" consist of some containers and a length of pipe. Not exactly hard to come by. You're mainly paying to avoid doing the assembly yourself (est. one hour, probably more for the inexperienced).
Another problem with the technology, and a reason for the small parts, is that it uses a steered mirror system. The laser will be coming from one spot and as the piece gets bigger horizontally the laser will hit the resin at more of an angle.
Agreed, though you could mitigate that somewhat, at the expense of resolution, by moving the laser assembly further away from the resin. But to each his own.
I think you're just being cynical. They're a small group whose specialties clearly do not include marketing, and they're perhaps overly fond of trendy video effects, like the blurring you mentioned. There are some clear close-ups of the objects from the video in the December Kickstarter update, however, and an earlier update from November included photos of some additional prints.
None of this is to say that the Peachy is intended to compete with multi-thousand-dollar printers, because it isn't. It may or may not have the resolution for the object in the article; either way, you'd run into issues due to the size. The sample prints for the Peachy are tiny. The quality is quite a bit better than one would think from the image you posted, however, which is all I intended to say. It's pretty remarkable, really, for a device they plan to sell for only $100.
That's one of the earliest prints, with pre-alpha hardware and software and practically no calibration. Now that the project is getting close to completion there are more recent videos demonstrating higher print quality.
It is unconstitutional for law enforcement to target you without probable cause. The fact that new technology allows them to target everyone, all the time, does not make it any less unconstitutional.
The Constitution doesn't say anything about "targeting" someone. What is unconstitutional is performing a search—that is, forcing you to grant the police access to your property as part of an investigation—or seizing your property without a warrant for that specific search or seizure, supported by documented probable cause to expect that the search or seizure will turn up evidence that the owner was involved in the particular crime being investigated.
On the other hand, no special police powers are required to simply record anything and everything visible to the public, even if the recording is ubiquitous and systematic. Doing so may be rude and uncivilized, but it doesn't violate anyone's rights.
And the idea that "source pays" seems kind of stupid.
It's always seemed kind of stupid to me that you pay your ISP to let some third party send you data, with the ISP paying some upstream transit provider to be on the receiving end, when the postal service and package delivery have always worked the other way around. When you order goods online you pay the retailer for the cost of shipping, and they in turn pay someone to deliver the goods to you. A fixed rate for maintaining a connection to your ISP would be reasonable, much like paying for your own local roads, but paying for what others send you (whether you requested it or not) makes no sense. Better to pay sources to send you content, with the payment covering the cost of delivery along with all the other hosting costs.
Bitcoins aren't numbers. If they were then you couldn't transfer fractions of a bitcoin, since each fraction would need its own unique number. They're fungible abstract units, much like dollars or euros, or even points in a game. The GP's understanding was closer to the mark. The hard-to-compute part comes in when you work toward confirming transactions by solving a block; as a reward, you're allowed to include a "coinbase" transaction in the block which credits a certain amount of freshly-minted bitcoins, plus any fees from transactions in the block, to an address of your choice. The coinbase transaction, like other transactions, is just a notation in a ledger associating a certain number of bitcoins with certain address(es).
To answer the GP's question, all Bitcoin transactions are public, but only in terms of the addresses, not real-world identities. If Mt. Gox were to publish the public part of the address the coins were in before they were "misplaced" then anyone could look that address up in the block chain and see which address(es) they were transferred to. Of course, that could just be another address belonging to Mt. Gox. There's no way to prove that they don't have the private key.
The GP already alluded to that. But that gives you control over the funds in a new wallet, not control over the original wallet. If someone sends new funds to the old address you won't have exclusive control over them until you've transferred them elsewhere.
Think of wallets as free, unbreakable safes with fixed combinations. If someone else learns the combination, you can move the contents to a different safe that only you know the combination to (as long as you get to it first), but the other party will always be able to get into the original safe.
so long as the underlying content is semantically structured to allow alternate renderings to be carried out
And how often is that the case? If you want a table layout, you have to structure the underlying HTML as a table (even if you prefer to use divs instead of a table element) because CSS can't affect the presence or order of the tags. Given that you have to write the HTML with the layout in mind anyway, why not simply have a <gridlayout> tag (and <hbox> and <vbox> while we're at it) to distinguish table layouts from semantic <table>s, rather than relying on generic <div>s organized as tables—as opposed a way which would make sense semantically—but still ultimately dependent on a mass of boilerplate CSS to actually be presented as intended?
Of course, if they were actually serious about separating presentation and sematics, the top level of the page would probably look more like XUL or QML, with the main content (either embedded or pulled from separate files) written in a subset of HTML with no support for scripting, styling, or layout, just pure semantics.
That is true, but adding the RDP backend to Weston does not appear to have required very much in the way of actual code. Most of the work is left to the FreeRDP library. I expect that most Wayland compositors will prefer to share a common library of backends once we have more than one in actual use on the desktop, much as the Wayland protocol handling is delegated to libwayland. Until then, the E19 compositor should be able to simply copy from Weston to get the same capability.
As for stacking compositors, that might be possible. Weston supports Wayland as a backend; E19 may do the same. If so, you could forward the entire E19 compositor over RDP as a client of Weston.
Banking laws. Deposit protection. Rules about how they can't just decide that your money is now their money. Legal oversight.
You're talking about online wallets, not Bitcoin. Bitcoin isn't banking, and doesn't have deposits, just a note in a shared database that says a certain number of bitcoins were sent to your address, and can be sent on to someone else if you supply a transaction signed with a certain key (or set of keys). It's all just communication and consensus, which puts any attempt to regulate Bitcoin itself on fairly shaky ground with regard to the First Amendment in the U.S., or freedom of speech in general internationally. Online wallets and exchanges are a different matter, of course—particularly if they deal in national currencies alongside Bitcoin—but you don't have to use them.
Slashdot Mirror
You can already buy Walmart gift cards with Bitcoin via Gyft:
Gyft Adds Retail Giant Walmart to its Bitcoin Gift Card Network
You're buying insurance for both yourself and your wife, so your case isn't relevant to the discussion. Obviously any policy covering both a male and a female will include coverage for male-specific procedures for the male and female-specific procedures for the female. That doesn't imply that anyone should be forced to buy insurance for a procedure he or she is guaranteed to never need. Gender should be taken into account when calculating risk factors and premiums.
This is how insurance works. We pool everyone. You're not buying specific health procedures. You're buying decreased risk.
No, that's not how insurance works. That's how charity works (or wealth transfer, a.k.a. theft, when it's forced). True, you're not paying for specific procedures. However, you should be paying according to the probability and cost of the procedures you're covered for. A procedure you'll never need has zero probability, and thus shouldn't affect your premiums.
You're not buying decreased risk. Risk is the product of probability and cost; if anything, insurance increases your risk by adding the insurance company's overhead and profit margin. It certainly can't decrease risk for everyone no matter how you structure it; there must always be at least as much payed in as the insurance company pays out, on average, or the company goes bankrupt. The purpose of insurance is to reduce the cost of an insured event to something manageable, in the event it does occur, at the expense of increasing the probability of paying that cost (you have to pay the premiums whether the event happens or not).
The idea behind insurance pools is to group together statistically independent policies of about the same level of risk. They don't necessarily have to cover the same things, you just want to avoid holding a bunch of cash in reserve, or else bankrupting the company in the event several large claims have to be paid out at the same time.
Wasted electricity has no demand.
Bitcoin is linked to the supply and demand of WHAT exactly?
That electricity isn't "wasted"; it goes to validate blocks of transactions. Achieving world-wide consensus on who has how many bitcoins is a service which provides value, which is the reason for the transaction fees. (The exponentially decreasing block reward is primarily a decentralized way to distribute bitcoins as fairly as possible.)
Of course, it's not the supply and demand of bitcoin mining which is important here, but rather the supply and demand of bitcoins. The supply follows a known formula over time, with an ultimate limit at 21 million bitcoins. The demand, as for any currency, is determined by a combination of direct use, marketability and speculation, with an emphasis on marketability. Relative to the dollar, gold has more demand for direct use and bitcoin has more demand for speculation, but in all three cases the main source of demand is the fact that you can trade them for other goods and services later.
As for Wayland, the only thing I've seen there is experimental support for running the full blown Wayland server and compositor on the server and it will use RDP if you want to view it remotely.
Well, you will need a Wayland compositor on the server, since Wayland is a local/shared-memory IPC protocol. The compositor will take the place of the xpra server, and communicate with a proxy (Wayland client) on the user's machine. It doesn't have to merge the windows into a single desktop, however. The current RDP backend in Weston is limited to the desktop mode, but if you can forward a complete desktop then there's nothing technically difficult about forwarding an individual window; it's just a matter of proxying the non-video parts of the protocol. I get the impression that they have more urgent tasks on their to-do list, like getting XWayland working so that you can use it with legacy applications.
For example, if a person is in prison for drug possession and is rehabilitated, while should punishment matter.
Why should rehabilitation matter? That person shouldn't be in prison in the first place. They didn't do anything to justify locking them up as a proportional punishment, and they don't pose the imminent threat of irreparable harm necessary to justify a preemptive act of defense. They didn't even cause anyone harm for which they would need to pay restitution.
The thing about punishment is that it isn't so much that the person should be punished as it is that they shouldn't be able to appeal to the State for protection against the victim doing to them exactly what they did to the victim. They did it, therefore they claim that it's all right to do it. No take-backs. (More formally: estoppel.) Whether they actually are punished should be up to the victim, though, and there is something to be said for leniency so long as it doesn't place others at risk.
In that case what you want is xpra. Each window is rendered off-screen and forwarded individually, as a compressed video stream (x264 if it's available). You can detach from the xpra server and reattach later, from the same client or a different one, with all your applications intact. A lot like how Wayland remoting will work, really, except that in Wayland it will be better integrated due to not needing to support all the legacy parts of X11.
Then Apple, Google, Netflix etc come along with digital downloads, which are essentially just a stream of 0's and 1's, which are definitely not a tangible thing, and a whole hodge-podge of legal issues comes along. Can you pass 0's and 1's to your next-of-kin? Can to transfer these 0's and 1's to a different device? Can you resell these 0's and 1's to someone else?
You make this sound like something new. The problem is inherent in copyright itself. Whenever you attempt to censor the communication or storage of information you're going to end up with a lot of arbitrary (and often contradictory) rules.
The wallet does not contain discreet coins. A wallet is basically a private key with a value assigned to it. When someone pays you, the global leger says "the value went up by X".
That's not quite right. While you're correct that there is no such thing as a discrete coin, the blockchain doesn't record totals; it records transactions. Ergo, you can meaningfully refer to and selectively spend the coins you received as part of a particular transaction. You have to spend all of them, however—a given transaction output can only be spent once. Normally this selection process is left up to the client software, which hides the details and only shows the total for each address. Any leftover balance is sent back to either the address it came from or a new (typically hidden) address.
Bitcoins from different transaction outputs aren't even necessarily interchangeable. The "colored coin" model, for example, assigns meaning to a particular output and tracks its movement through the block chain. Such coins can represent claims on physical property, shares in a company, bonds, etc; possession of the private key becomes proof of ownership for the property as well as the bitcoins. You can transfer ownership with a normal transaction, though splitting the output or mixing it with other coins destroys the association, forfeiting whatever claim it represented.
In your scenario, originally you had $100, and the other person had a stock share that he could trade for $100. Therefore there was $200 in total value.
Only if you're including the estimated market value of the share, which is illusory unless you actually sell it at that price. What actually exists is $100 and one share of stock. If you could have sold that share for $100 but didn't, and now you can only sell it for $10, nothing has been destroyed. The share still exists, and the other $90 still exists; it just isn't being offered in exchange for your share.
From your own point of view, of course, that was a major missed opportunity (in hindsight). You bet that the share was worth more than $100 and lost, badly. For the market as a whole, however, it's pretty much a wash. Resources could perhaps have been allocated a bit more efficiently if it were known in advance that the share would only be worth $10, but that's due more to whatever caused the price to drop rather than the devaluation itself (perhaps the company suffered a major setback resulting in wasted effort or materials).
The attacker can't:
* Reverse other people's transactions
I'm not sure that's true. The attacker can control whether or not a transaction is included in a block, and can replace recent blocks on the chain with other blocks including different sets of transactions. Put together, that should imply that they can allow anyone's transaction(s) to confirm, and then produce a longer chain without those confirmed transactions. The transactions would go into the block chain the moment the attack let up, assuming they're still valid, but in the meantime the coins have reverted to their original addresses and can be re-spent if the attacker allows it.
If somewhere down the line someone eventually gets to processing the original transaction, then Joe might get double-charged, because I don't know if there's a way to void the previous transaction, but it may expire on its own after a certain period of time, so that might not be an issue.
The inputs to a transaction are specific unspent outputs from previous transactions, so once either of the transactions is included in the block chain the other one becomes invalid. That applies even if some or all of the bitcoins are sent to address they came from; even though the address hasn't changed, the coins still moved to a new transaction with different outputs. So you can't get double-charged, and there's no need to explicitly void the unwanted transaction; at most one will go through. Most likely the one with the higher fee.
s/glasses/glucose meters/
Oh wait...
The same argument applies there. Insurance isn't for paying for things you know you need, it's for hedging your bets so that if something unexpected happens it doesn't render you destitute. You can't make the first kind of "insurance" work in a free society; people have to be forced to sign up, or the system goes bankrupt.
The only real problem regarding "pre-existing conditions" is that under the current system you have to maintain your insurance continuously after being diagnosed in order to receive funding for your ongoing care, which naturally leaves people paranoid about being unemployed or unable to pay their insurance bill, even for a short time, and then not be accepted by any other insurer due to their known condition. The way it should work is that the current insurer is on the hook for the lifetime cost of care for whatever you were insured against at the time you were diagnosed, even if you later drop your insurance policy.
Yes, I am saying that people have a right to be free from ubiquitous government surveillance.
For the sake of argument, let's say that's true. Rights are inherently subjective; the only constraint is consistency. If you have the right, so does everyone else. On that basis, let's say someone did put you under surveillance, and you found out about it. What would be a proportional response? Your only "damage", if you can call it that, is the subjective emotional impact of being aware that you're under surveillance. Imprisonment and/or loss of property would clearly be out of proportion. Reciprocation would be fine, of course, but would also be unlikely to have much effect on someone who truly believes in ubiquitous surveillance.
Legal rights work because there are some rights that it simply doesn't pay to disagree with. The right to life, for example—if you disavowed that then anyone could try to kill you without any legal consequence. Or property rights—if you claim that property is a right then others can deprive you of the products of your labor at any time, leaving you with no more than the barest minimum you need to survive. The proposed "right to be free from ubiquitous government surveillance" doesn't work that way, because the people wanting to do the surveillance don't mind having it applied to them.
... isn't it a given fact that we need another party to create or transfer those bitcoins?
If you don't wish to mine bitcoins yourself then yes, you'll need someone else to do that for you. At that point you can buy them directly from the miner (e.g. via localbitcoins.com) or you can trade for them on an exchange. In the latter case, you can immediately withdraw the bitcoins to your own private wallet. Either way, there is no need to leave yourself vulnerable to any third-party after the transaction is complete.
When another party creates those bitcoins for me, how can I be sure that they won't keep a copy for later use?
You can't copy bitcoins, only private keys. (There's nothing to copy; the bitcoin is an abstract unit of account, not data.) If you have the other party send the bitcoins to an address for which only you know the private key, then only you can spend those bitcoins.
The kit, that requires extra parts, is $100. The assembles Peachy is $400.
These "extra parts" consist of some containers and a length of pipe. Not exactly hard to come by. You're mainly paying to avoid doing the assembly yourself (est. one hour, probably more for the inexperienced).
Another problem with the technology, and a reason for the small parts, is that it uses a steered mirror system. The laser will be coming from one spot and as the piece gets bigger horizontally the laser will hit the resin at more of an angle.
Agreed, though you could mitigate that somewhat, at the expense of resolution, by moving the laser assembly further away from the resin. But to each his own.
I think you're just being cynical. They're a small group whose specialties clearly do not include marketing, and they're perhaps overly fond of trendy video effects, like the blurring you mentioned. There are some clear close-ups of the objects from the video in the December Kickstarter update, however, and an earlier update from November included photos of some additional prints.
None of this is to say that the Peachy is intended to compete with multi-thousand-dollar printers, because it isn't. It may or may not have the resolution for the object in the article; either way, you'd run into issues due to the size. The sample prints for the Peachy are tiny. The quality is quite a bit better than one would think from the image you posted, however, which is all I intended to say. It's pretty remarkable, really, for a device they plan to sell for only $100.
That's one of the earliest prints, with pre-alpha hardware and software and practically no calibration. Now that the project is getting close to completion there are more recent videos demonstrating higher print quality.
It is unconstitutional for law enforcement to target you without probable cause. The fact that new technology allows them to target everyone, all the time, does not make it any less unconstitutional.
The Constitution doesn't say anything about "targeting" someone. What is unconstitutional is performing a search—that is, forcing you to grant the police access to your property as part of an investigation—or seizing your property without a warrant for that specific search or seizure, supported by documented probable cause to expect that the search or seizure will turn up evidence that the owner was involved in the particular crime being investigated.
On the other hand, no special police powers are required to simply record anything and everything visible to the public, even if the recording is ubiquitous and systematic. Doing so may be rude and uncivilized, but it doesn't violate anyone's rights.
And the idea that "source pays" seems kind of stupid.
It's always seemed kind of stupid to me that you pay your ISP to let some third party send you data, with the ISP paying some upstream transit provider to be on the receiving end, when the postal service and package delivery have always worked the other way around. When you order goods online you pay the retailer for the cost of shipping, and they in turn pay someone to deliver the goods to you. A fixed rate for maintaining a connection to your ISP would be reasonable, much like paying for your own local roads, but paying for what others send you (whether you requested it or not) makes no sense. Better to pay sources to send you content, with the payment covering the cost of delivery along with all the other hosting costs.
A bitcoin is a hard-to-compute number.
Bitcoins aren't numbers. If they were then you couldn't transfer fractions of a bitcoin, since each fraction would need its own unique number. They're fungible abstract units, much like dollars or euros, or even points in a game. The GP's understanding was closer to the mark. The hard-to-compute part comes in when you work toward confirming transactions by solving a block; as a reward, you're allowed to include a "coinbase" transaction in the block which credits a certain amount of freshly-minted bitcoins, plus any fees from transactions in the block, to an address of your choice. The coinbase transaction, like other transactions, is just a notation in a ledger associating a certain number of bitcoins with certain address(es).
To answer the GP's question, all Bitcoin transactions are public, but only in terms of the addresses, not real-world identities. If Mt. Gox were to publish the public part of the address the coins were in before they were "misplaced" then anyone could look that address up in the block chain and see which address(es) they were transferred to. Of course, that could just be another address belonging to Mt. Gox. There's no way to prove that they don't have the private key.
The GP already alluded to that. But that gives you control over the funds in a new wallet, not control over the original wallet. If someone sends new funds to the old address you won't have exclusive control over them until you've transferred them elsewhere.
Think of wallets as free, unbreakable safes with fixed combinations. If someone else learns the combination, you can move the contents to a different safe that only you know the combination to (as long as you get to it first), but the other party will always be able to get into the original safe.
so long as the underlying content is semantically structured to allow alternate renderings to be carried out
And how often is that the case? If you want a table layout, you have to structure the underlying HTML as a table (even if you prefer to use divs instead of a table element) because CSS can't affect the presence or order of the tags. Given that you have to write the HTML with the layout in mind anyway, why not simply have a <gridlayout> tag (and <hbox> and <vbox> while we're at it) to distinguish table layouts from semantic <table>s, rather than relying on generic <div>s organized as tables—as opposed a way which would make sense semantically—but still ultimately dependent on a mass of boilerplate CSS to actually be presented as intended?
Of course, if they were actually serious about separating presentation and sematics, the top level of the page would probably look more like XUL or QML, with the main content (either embedded or pulled from separate files) written in a subset of HTML with no support for scripting, styling, or layout, just pure semantics.
That is true, but adding the RDP backend to Weston does not appear to have required very much in the way of actual code. Most of the work is left to the FreeRDP library. I expect that most Wayland compositors will prefer to share a common library of backends once we have more than one in actual use on the desktop, much as the Wayland protocol handling is delegated to libwayland. Until then, the E19 compositor should be able to simply copy from Weston to get the same capability.
As for stacking compositors, that might be possible. Weston supports Wayland as a backend; E19 may do the same. If so, you could forward the entire E19 compositor over RDP as a client of Weston.
Banking laws. Deposit protection. Rules about how they can't just decide that your money is now their money. Legal oversight.
You're talking about online wallets, not Bitcoin. Bitcoin isn't banking, and doesn't have deposits, just a note in a shared database that says a certain number of bitcoins were sent to your address, and can be sent on to someone else if you supply a transaction signed with a certain key (or set of keys). It's all just communication and consensus, which puts any attempt to regulate Bitcoin itself on fairly shaky ground with regard to the First Amendment in the U.S., or freedom of speech in general internationally. Online wallets and exchanges are a different matter, of course—particularly if they deal in national currencies alongside Bitcoin—but you don't have to use them.