Moor's law is about capability and not price. If it was about price since I bought a computer for $3000 in 1985 I should be able to buy one for $23.
Well, you can buy a Raspberry Pi Model A for less than $23, with more CPU performance and memory than anything you were likely to see in 1985, not to mention far lower power consumption. You still have to supply your own keyboard and monitor, though.
When you join an army you represent the group with their knowledge and consent. If a group attacks us than that group has claimed that our life is not worth theirs and we have the right and moral obligation to defend ourselves in war agains that group.
If someone is foolish enough to seek out and attack the army, given that the army has a right to be there and didn't initiate the fight, I have no problem with the army, as a group, mounting a response in kind against those specific individuals who participated in the attack (with supporting evidence, the same as if this were a court of law). Anyone actively shielding them can be considered complicit in their crime. Beyond that, use of lethal force in retaliation against other members of their "group" who were not complicit in the attack is murder. They have no obligation to leave the group, so long as they stay out of the fight. If you attack them without just cause they retain the right to defend themselves.
Execution is a deterrence in that the same person won't be murdering anyone else.
That said, while I do believe it is the victim's right to respond in kind against their murderer—through a representative, obviously—I don't think that's necessarily the best choice, particularly in cases where recurrence is unlikely. Life-long restitution is generally a better option, the specific form to be determined by the victim's representative. The offender would naturally be free to opt for the capital punishment they deserve should the idea of restitution prove unappealing.
No, war is mass killing. Killing and murder are not necessarily the same...
You're right, they're not the same. Murder is killing someone who hasn't tried to kill you, or someone you can personally claim to represent (with their knowledge and consent). In other words, most of the killing that happens in war is still murder on a mass scale, with perhaps a few rare cases of self-defense sprinkled in. That's particularly true when you travel half way around the world to kill someone who didn't pose any threat to you until you sought them out.
Life is a right, however even rights can be taken away in specific situations. Your rights to life end when you take another life unjustifiably.
It's not so much that the right is taken away, as that by taking the life of another (who did not first try to kill you) you have effectively argued, through your actions, that the right does not exist. Actions speak louder than words; if you don't believe the right exists, who are we to disagree? If you want to claim the protection of a right, you must show others the same consideration. (See also the legal principle of "estoppel".)
It's important that the conditions under which a right does not apply are carefully delineated. Rights cannot be nullified based on some nebulous theory of overriding "social good"; that would render them meaningless. Your claim to a right is forfeit only when you violate the same right yourself.
If i pay for bandwidth, it has to really cost something. No i don't lease the equipment, i already pay an isp for connectivity. Why should i pay extra for bits that mysteriously use a system, which even if i wasn't connected would still be draining tremendous resources?
If you're only paying for connectivity, why should the ISP bother provisioning for any upstream bandwidth? As long as you're "connected", that's all you need, right? Wrong. Connectivity is a prerequisite, but it's not the end goal. ISPs only have that expensive equipment in order to transfer data for their customers. The more their customers want to transfer—not instantaneously, but over the long term—the more equipment and peering agreements they need. The peak capacity of a given set of equipment may be fixed, but the equipment itself is variable. That is why it is fair to divide the costs among the ISP's users according to how much they use.
To put this in concrete terms: If your ISP pays $45,000/mo. for an OC-3 (155Mbps ~= 45.5 TB/mo.) which is used near full capacity, and you use 10 GB/mo., it makes sense that you would pay $10/mo. while someone else who uses 50 GB/mo. would pay $50/mo. If the uplink is not used at full capacity then the cost per GB will be higher, which means (barring regional monopolies) the ISP will need to either encourage more use or downgrade its equipment to remain competitive. If the uplink is maxed out, on the other hand, then the ISP needs to increase its capacity in order to bring in more revenue.
The current flat-rate / per-Mbps "unlimited" model decouples the amount of service provided to a given customer from that customer's share of the costs. This leads to overuse by some and overpayment by others, and undermines the ISP's profit motive to upgrade its capacity. For optimum results, pricing should be based on (a) the fixed cost to provide connectivity to the ISP; (b) a variable cost based on the amount of data transferred; and (c) an additional variable cost based the degree of contention—peak/off-peak, 95% percentile, QoS, whatever works for the target market.
What if you were an investor in that stock who had set a stop-loss at $10? Knight's wild selling would have triggered the stop-loss, and you'd lose money because of Knight's actions.
No, you'd lose money because you sold at the wrong time based on an automated trading rule rather than your own informed judgement. That is the risk you take when you enter a stop-loss order: if the drop in price is temporary, you're going to lose money. It makes no difference why the price moved. Knight's inadvertent trades are not to blame here. No one who payed attention to the fundamentals lost anything. Only those who panicked took a loss, and deservedly so.
Everyone uses the road system and it's only fair that everyone pays for it.
Not everyone uses the road system equally, so it's not fair that everyone pay for it equally. Any fair system must consider mileage in addition to vehicle weight—ideally inclusive of cargo.
The solution seems obvious: automated toll roads. Couple some automated license-plate scanners and/or a device like EZ-Pass with weight sensors embedded in the roads. Charge drivers based on current vehicle weight and distance traveled, with all funds going to support road maintenance and traffic enforcement for that particular section of road.
If you're designing the mac that will ship in 2015 right now, explain to me why you need an NFC radio.... You already have a radio that does this in there. It's called bluetooth 4.
NFC is Near Field Communication. It's used for things you wouldn't want to be accessible from a distance, like smartcards, and for establishing authentication through close proximity. Ironically, Bluetooth has far too much range to be considered a reasonable replacement for NFC. It also requires both devices to have an active power supply, whereas NFC only requires power for the reader, which induces enough power in passive devices (like smartcards and tags) to activate their NFC functions.
As for whether anyone actually needs NFC... do we actually need any of this? Probably not. They're conveniences. But BT4 and NFC serve completely different functions. Neither one can serve as a replacement for the other.
Your PINs are protected by "security through obscurity," by the way.
Your PINs are supposed to be secret, not obscure. In other words, it's supposed to be impossible to find out what they are, short of asking you or guessing randomly. "Obscure" would mean other people could discover your PINs given sufficient analysis of the other information available to them.
Of course, insecure PINs are common, birth years being a common choice, for example; this would be an example of "security by obscurity"—the security of the system in such cases relies (in part) on others not knowing your birth year, which is a matter of public record. They're also not very well protected. However, PINs are only a small part of the overall system, and the requirement for your physical card, video recording of ATM users, active fraud monitoring, and reversible transactions all help to offset the insecurity of the PINs—which are only a few digits long to begin with.
Even with these other factors the overall system is frequently breached, leading to higher costs for everyone, meaning that it's hardly a shining example in favor of "security by obscurity". It's more like an example of how even insecure systems can be made workable if you're willing to throw enough resources at them.
What value was created by this errant trading algorithm?
The shares were redistributed to those who valued them more. If I have something I value at no more than $3, meaning I would be willing it consume it to gain $3, and I sell it to someone else for $5, meaning they would not consume it for a return of less than $5, then at least $2 of additional value has been created. It's the same good, but it was only worth $3 while it was mine, and now it's worth $5 in someone else's hands.
In this case the good was undervalued by an algorithm, without any human consideration, but the effect is the same. The shares are in better hands following their sale by an irresponsible trader.
...Hence why they're talking about adding DRM to HTML5.
No, they're talking about adding a DRM API to HTML5, which will still require (non-standard, non-portable, proprietary) DRM plugins to function. As despised as it is, that's hardly an improvement over the Flash plugin, which at least has the status of a de facto standard with support for multiple platforms, not to mention uses other than DRM.
And any of them who are socially conservative or who believe corporations have rights are not actually libertarian, much like Christians for War are not actually Christians.
You can be socially conservative without believing that force is an appropriate means to prevent social change. Moreover, while corporations as such may not have rights, the individual shareholders who make up the corporation do, which amounts to much the same thing. Neither view is incompatible with being an "actual" libertarian.
The better way of putting that would be that instead of sitting on cash, the SS Trust Fund bought US government bonds which will be paid back to them just like all of the other bonds....
The problem with this—and what makes it different from investing in any other organization's bonds—is the disconnect between who the money is being spent on and who will be forced to pay back those loans to keep the SS trust fund solvent. The Baby Boomers paid into the fund, supposedly setting funds aside for their retirement. That money was lent to the rest of the government to cover current expenses (i.e. for the Baby Boomers' benefit). Now, when it comes time for those Baby Boomers to retire, the rest of the government must take resources away from those still working to pay back the trust fund so that the Baby Boomers can receive their SS payments. The Baby Boomers get all the benefits, while the next generation is stuck with all the costs.
Of course, the same applies to any retirement fund which holds U.S. government bonds, not just Social Security. The problem is really about intergenerational debts rather than the SS trust fund's choice of investments, beyond the fact that the fund is acting as an enabler by buying U.S. government bonds, with repayment from future taxes, instead of investing in something which is actually productive.
My understanding is the difficulty increases as the limited block range pool gets exhausted, kind of like a quadratic, it just so happens over time that the number of folks mining and the mining performance has also increased.
No, the GP is correct. The difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks based on the difference between the actual time and expected time (two weeks), targeting an average of 10 minutes per block. More miners mean this checkpoint is reached sooner, causing the difficulty to increase, and vice-versa for fewer miners. The quadratic decay, and the limit on the total number of bitcoins, come from the block reward dividing in half every 210,000 blocks (about four years).
There is no situation that all fees for the infinite lifetime of the block get paid to the original finder.
All the fees "for the infinite lifetime of the block" are determined from the transactions in the block when it's solved; all these fees immediately go to the original finder. Any fees for later transactions which build on the transactions in a block (including the coinbase transaction with the reward for solving the block) will go to the finder of the later block which includes those transactions, not the finder of the original block.
I can then spend a few thousand on mining rigs and provide the lowest fee (or for free) for verification, thus making it financially unfeasible for the existing miners to continue.
That's probably closer to "a few million", plus ongoing costs, if you want to have enough mining capacity for your fee schedule to make any difference. Keep in mind that if you only control 1% of the network, you will only solve 1% of the blocks and your users would have to be willing to wait 100x as long, on average, for verification. The transactions don't automatically go to the miners with the lowest fees. To ensure inclusion in the next block or two, users would still need to attach a fee acceptable to >=50% of the mining network.
In a few months of running at a loss I *should* be controlling more than 51% of the network because all the other miners have quit.
At that point the entire btc concept breaks down. I can seize coins (by never verifying them), transfer coins to myself, reverse verified transactions and possibly even "magically" create new bitcoins that I then proceed to verify.
A 51% attack doesn't let you do most of those things. You can choose not to include specific transactions in the blocks you mine, but others can still include them and you would have to spend extra resources to replace those blocks with your own. Reversing verified transactions, while possible, still requires resources which increase exponentially with the depth of the transaction in the block chain. You can't transfer anyone else's coins to yourself without their private keys, regardless of how much of the mining network you control, and if you fail to adhere to the coin-creation schedule specified in the protocol then no one else will recognize your blocks, rendering them worthless.
I'm waiting for a big-name, trusted bank, insurance company, or sovereign state to print "Bitcoin Certificates" that are designed to be used as spending money (i.e. not just as a stuff-in-the-mattress currency) backed by BC, similar to the Gold and Silver certificates of days gone by.
Why bother, when the actual bitcoins are both easier to transfer and easier to secure than any paper certificate? What would the selling point be?
This has been attempted before, several times, with Bitbills, Casascius coins, and even print-your-own paper wallets. While the goal is generally to enable offline person-to-person transfers, my impression is that these are used more for "cold storage" than as cash-analogues. For actually transferring funds around, even face-to-face, a smartphone app is far more convenient.
Some people consider nationalisation of private property to be a pretty drastic measure.
Sure, and that would be relevant if we were talking about private property, as opposed to patents.
On the other hand, far too many people don't seem to have a problem with nationalization of actual private property in the form of, say, taxable income, so perhaps the underlying premise is incorrect. If they can nationalize part of your income, which is your by natural right, they can certainly nationalize a few patents which only exist by their say-so in the first place.
A free market only functions when both parties have approximately equal negotiating power, are fully informed and not under threat.
A free market only functions ideally under those conditions, which are obviously never attained in the real world. However, it functions at least as well as any other system you could name under conditions of unequal negotiating positions and/or incomplete information. Having a third-party step in and take the decision from you can only place you in a worse negotiating position, as power is transferred from you to the interloper, and ensure that the decision is made on the basis of even less complete information—as the interloper does not have your incentive to acquire the best available information, or access to the more relevant information of all, your own preferences.
That's not how war works, and terrorism is a form of warfare.
Wrong. Terrorism is a form of crime. Wars exist between peers, not nation-states vs. a handful of malcontents. Treating terrorist groups as if they were peers gives them far more credit (and credibility) than they deserve, not to mention ushering in a dystopian, totalitarian, police state—an inevitable consequence of sending soldiers to do the job of cops.
Foreign terrorists don't have, and shouldn't have, the same rights as an accused car thief.
I think you mean accused terrorists. Innocent until proven guilty, remember? And even the guilty have rights. Prioritizing the enforcer's convenience over people's rights is the essence of a police state.
... anyone else blocking content from being sold or read is also censoring that content, whether it's because of the government or not.
While true, that isn't what's happening here. No one is blocking anything from being sold or read. Some retailers are simply choosing not to sell certain content themselves. If you can't find it anywhere else, feel free to blame copyright—which, after all, originated as a scheme to enforce censorship by restricting publishing to those licensed by the state. Modern copyright has less direct influence by the state, but remains the means by which distribution of content is kept under a tight leash.
No, that's not the same thing. The film wasn't created to satisfy anyone's desire to see someone murdered, which is the defining characteristic of a snuff film. The Syrian army was going to execute the priest anyway, and chose to film it for propaganda reasons. They didn't kill the priest just so that they'd be able to film the murder.
But you're not saying we need a warrant to wiretap a known foreign terrorist in another country, right?
Why not? People in other countries have rights too, you know. If they're really a "known" terrorist you shouldn't have any problems getting that warrant. If you can't justify a warrant then perhaps your case isn't as clear-cut as you thought.
there is no reason that one couldn't at least be required within 24 hours of the start of interception (it could even be retroactive)
Saying that warrants can be retroactive amounts to mandating that warrants always be issued, whether or not the Constitutional requirements are met. What do you do when the interception—illegal without a warrant—is carried out and then the application for a warrant is later rejected? You can't take back the interception, or (legally) make an exception for the first 24 hours while the application is being processed. For every interception there must be a warrant—and it's not the interception which is required by the Constitution.
However, there is no reason why issuing a warrant must be a lengthy process. The probable cause, supporting evidence, and scope of the warrant could all be communicated to a judge with a simple five-minute phone call, with an audio recording for the archive. There is no excuse for starting the interception without prior approval.
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Moor's law is about capability and not price. If it was about price since I bought a computer for $3000 in 1985 I should be able to buy one for $23.
Well, you can buy a Raspberry Pi Model A for less than $23, with more CPU performance and memory than anything you were likely to see in 1985, not to mention far lower power consumption. You still have to supply your own keyboard and monitor, though.
When you join an army you represent the group with their knowledge and consent. If a group attacks us than that group has claimed that our life is not worth theirs and we have the right and moral obligation to defend ourselves in war agains that group.
If someone is foolish enough to seek out and attack the army, given that the army has a right to be there and didn't initiate the fight, I have no problem with the army, as a group, mounting a response in kind against those specific individuals who participated in the attack (with supporting evidence, the same as if this were a court of law). Anyone actively shielding them can be considered complicit in their crime. Beyond that, use of lethal force in retaliation against other members of their "group" who were not complicit in the attack is murder. They have no obligation to leave the group, so long as they stay out of the fight. If you attack them without just cause they retain the right to defend themselves.
Execution is a deterrence in that the same person won't be murdering anyone else.
That said, while I do believe it is the victim's right to respond in kind against their murderer—through a representative, obviously—I don't think that's necessarily the best choice, particularly in cases where recurrence is unlikely. Life-long restitution is generally a better option, the specific form to be determined by the victim's representative. The offender would naturally be free to opt for the capital punishment they deserve should the idea of restitution prove unappealing.
No, war is mass killing. Killing and murder are not necessarily the same...
You're right, they're not the same. Murder is killing someone who hasn't tried to kill you, or someone you can personally claim to represent (with their knowledge and consent). In other words, most of the killing that happens in war is still murder on a mass scale, with perhaps a few rare cases of self-defense sprinkled in. That's particularly true when you travel half way around the world to kill someone who didn't pose any threat to you until you sought them out.
Life is a right, however even rights can be taken away in specific situations. Your rights to life end when you take another life unjustifiably.
It's not so much that the right is taken away, as that by taking the life of another (who did not first try to kill you) you have effectively argued, through your actions, that the right does not exist. Actions speak louder than words; if you don't believe the right exists, who are we to disagree? If you want to claim the protection of a right, you must show others the same consideration. (See also the legal principle of "estoppel".)
It's important that the conditions under which a right does not apply are carefully delineated. Rights cannot be nullified based on some nebulous theory of overriding "social good"; that would render them meaningless. Your claim to a right is forfeit only when you violate the same right yourself.
If i pay for bandwidth, it has to really cost something. No i don't lease the equipment, i already pay an isp for connectivity. Why should i pay extra for bits that mysteriously use a system, which even if i wasn't connected would still be draining tremendous resources?
If you're only paying for connectivity, why should the ISP bother provisioning for any upstream bandwidth? As long as you're "connected", that's all you need, right? Wrong. Connectivity is a prerequisite, but it's not the end goal. ISPs only have that expensive equipment in order to transfer data for their customers. The more their customers want to transfer—not instantaneously, but over the long term—the more equipment and peering agreements they need. The peak capacity of a given set of equipment may be fixed, but the equipment itself is variable. That is why it is fair to divide the costs among the ISP's users according to how much they use.
To put this in concrete terms: If your ISP pays $45,000/mo. for an OC-3 (155Mbps ~= 45.5 TB/mo.) which is used near full capacity, and you use 10 GB/mo., it makes sense that you would pay $10/mo. while someone else who uses 50 GB/mo. would pay $50/mo. If the uplink is not used at full capacity then the cost per GB will be higher, which means (barring regional monopolies) the ISP will need to either encourage more use or downgrade its equipment to remain competitive. If the uplink is maxed out, on the other hand, then the ISP needs to increase its capacity in order to bring in more revenue.
The current flat-rate / per-Mbps "unlimited" model decouples the amount of service provided to a given customer from that customer's share of the costs. This leads to overuse by some and overpayment by others, and undermines the ISP's profit motive to upgrade its capacity. For optimum results, pricing should be based on (a) the fixed cost to provide connectivity to the ISP; (b) a variable cost based on the amount of data transferred; and (c) an additional variable cost based the degree of contention—peak/off-peak, 95% percentile, QoS, whatever works for the target market.
What if you were an investor in that stock who had set a stop-loss at $10? Knight's wild selling would have triggered the stop-loss, and you'd lose money because of Knight's actions.
No, you'd lose money because you sold at the wrong time based on an automated trading rule rather than your own informed judgement. That is the risk you take when you enter a stop-loss order: if the drop in price is temporary, you're going to lose money. It makes no difference why the price moved. Knight's inadvertent trades are not to blame here. No one who payed attention to the fundamentals lost anything. Only those who panicked took a loss, and deservedly so.
Everyone uses the road system and it's only fair that everyone pays for it.
Not everyone uses the road system equally, so it's not fair that everyone pay for it equally. Any fair system must consider mileage in addition to vehicle weight—ideally inclusive of cargo.
The solution seems obvious: automated toll roads. Couple some automated license-plate scanners and/or a device like EZ-Pass with weight sensors embedded in the roads. Charge drivers based on current vehicle weight and distance traveled, with all funds going to support road maintenance and traffic enforcement for that particular section of road.
If you're designing the mac that will ship in 2015 right now, explain to me why you need an NFC radio. ... You already have a radio that does this in there. It's called bluetooth 4.
NFC is Near Field Communication. It's used for things you wouldn't want to be accessible from a distance, like smartcards, and for establishing authentication through close proximity. Ironically, Bluetooth has far too much range to be considered a reasonable replacement for NFC. It also requires both devices to have an active power supply, whereas NFC only requires power for the reader, which induces enough power in passive devices (like smartcards and tags) to activate their NFC functions.
As for whether anyone actually needs NFC... do we actually need any of this? Probably not. They're conveniences. But BT4 and NFC serve completely different functions. Neither one can serve as a replacement for the other.
The idea is to use NFC for Bluetooth pairing in place of entering a PIN, not to actually play music over NFC. Eight inches should be plenty.
Your PINs are protected by "security through obscurity," by the way.
Your PINs are supposed to be secret, not obscure. In other words, it's supposed to be impossible to find out what they are, short of asking you or guessing randomly. "Obscure" would mean other people could discover your PINs given sufficient analysis of the other information available to them.
Of course, insecure PINs are common, birth years being a common choice, for example; this would be an example of "security by obscurity"—the security of the system in such cases relies (in part) on others not knowing your birth year, which is a matter of public record. They're also not very well protected. However, PINs are only a small part of the overall system, and the requirement for your physical card, video recording of ATM users, active fraud monitoring, and reversible transactions all help to offset the insecurity of the PINs—which are only a few digits long to begin with.
Even with these other factors the overall system is frequently breached, leading to higher costs for everyone, meaning that it's hardly a shining example in favor of "security by obscurity". It's more like an example of how even insecure systems can be made workable if you're willing to throw enough resources at them.
What value was created by this errant trading algorithm?
The shares were redistributed to those who valued them more. If I have something I value at no more than $3, meaning I would be willing it consume it to gain $3, and I sell it to someone else for $5, meaning they would not consume it for a return of less than $5, then at least $2 of additional value has been created. It's the same good, but it was only worth $3 while it was mine, and now it's worth $5 in someone else's hands.
In this case the good was undervalued by an algorithm, without any human consideration, but the effect is the same. The shares are in better hands following their sale by an irresponsible trader.
...Hence why they're talking about adding DRM to HTML5.
No, they're talking about adding a DRM API to HTML5, which will still require (non-standard, non-portable, proprietary) DRM plugins to function. As despised as it is, that's hardly an improvement over the Flash plugin, which at least has the status of a de facto standard with support for multiple platforms, not to mention uses other than DRM.
And any of them who are socially conservative or who believe corporations have rights are not actually libertarian, much like Christians for War are not actually Christians.
You can be socially conservative without believing that force is an appropriate means to prevent social change. Moreover, while corporations as such may not have rights, the individual shareholders who make up the corporation do, which amounts to much the same thing. Neither view is incompatible with being an "actual" libertarian.
The better way of putting that would be that instead of sitting on cash, the SS Trust Fund bought US government bonds which will be paid back to them just like all of the other bonds....
The problem with this—and what makes it different from investing in any other organization's bonds—is the disconnect between who the money is being spent on and who will be forced to pay back those loans to keep the SS trust fund solvent. The Baby Boomers paid into the fund, supposedly setting funds aside for their retirement. That money was lent to the rest of the government to cover current expenses (i.e. for the Baby Boomers' benefit). Now, when it comes time for those Baby Boomers to retire, the rest of the government must take resources away from those still working to pay back the trust fund so that the Baby Boomers can receive their SS payments. The Baby Boomers get all the benefits, while the next generation is stuck with all the costs.
Of course, the same applies to any retirement fund which holds U.S. government bonds, not just Social Security. The problem is really about intergenerational debts rather than the SS trust fund's choice of investments, beyond the fact that the fund is acting as an enabler by buying U.S. government bonds, with repayment from future taxes, instead of investing in something which is actually productive.
My understanding is the difficulty increases as the limited block range pool gets exhausted, kind of like a quadratic, it just so happens over time that the number of folks mining and the mining performance has also increased.
No, the GP is correct. The difficulty is adjusted every 2016 blocks based on the difference between the actual time and expected time (two weeks), targeting an average of 10 minutes per block. More miners mean this checkpoint is reached sooner, causing the difficulty to increase, and vice-versa for fewer miners. The quadratic decay, and the limit on the total number of bitcoins, come from the block reward dividing in half every 210,000 blocks (about four years).
There is no situation that all fees for the infinite lifetime of the block get paid to the original finder.
All the fees "for the infinite lifetime of the block" are determined from the transactions in the block when it's solved; all these fees immediately go to the original finder. Any fees for later transactions which build on the transactions in a block (including the coinbase transaction with the reward for solving the block) will go to the finder of the later block which includes those transactions, not the finder of the original block.
I can then spend a few thousand on mining rigs and provide the lowest fee (or for free) for verification, thus making it financially unfeasible for the existing miners to continue.
That's probably closer to "a few million", plus ongoing costs, if you want to have enough mining capacity for your fee schedule to make any difference. Keep in mind that if you only control 1% of the network, you will only solve 1% of the blocks and your users would have to be willing to wait 100x as long, on average, for verification. The transactions don't automatically go to the miners with the lowest fees. To ensure inclusion in the next block or two, users would still need to attach a fee acceptable to >=50% of the mining network.
In a few months of running at a loss I *should* be controlling more than 51% of the network because all the other miners have quit.
At that point the entire btc concept breaks down. I can seize coins (by never verifying them), transfer coins to myself, reverse verified transactions and possibly even "magically" create new bitcoins that I then proceed to verify.
A 51% attack doesn't let you do most of those things. You can choose not to include specific transactions in the blocks you mine, but others can still include them and you would have to spend extra resources to replace those blocks with your own. Reversing verified transactions, while possible, still requires resources which increase exponentially with the depth of the transaction in the block chain. You can't transfer anyone else's coins to yourself without their private keys, regardless of how much of the mining network you control, and if you fail to adhere to the coin-creation schedule specified in the protocol then no one else will recognize your blocks, rendering them worthless.
I'm waiting for a big-name, trusted bank, insurance company, or sovereign state to print "Bitcoin Certificates" that are designed to be used as spending money (i.e. not just as a stuff-in-the-mattress currency) backed by BC, similar to the Gold and Silver certificates of days gone by.
Why bother, when the actual bitcoins are both easier to transfer and easier to secure than any paper certificate? What would the selling point be?
This has been attempted before, several times, with Bitbills, Casascius coins, and even print-your-own paper wallets. While the goal is generally to enable offline person-to-person transfers, my impression is that these are used more for "cold storage" than as cash-analogues. For actually transferring funds around, even face-to-face, a smartphone app is far more convenient.
Some people consider nationalisation of private property to be a pretty drastic measure.
Sure, and that would be relevant if we were talking about private property, as opposed to patents.
On the other hand, far too many people don't seem to have a problem with nationalization of actual private property in the form of, say, taxable income, so perhaps the underlying premise is incorrect. If they can nationalize part of your income, which is your by natural right, they can certainly nationalize a few patents which only exist by their say-so in the first place.
A free market only functions when both parties have approximately equal negotiating power, are fully informed and not under threat.
A free market only functions ideally under those conditions, which are obviously never attained in the real world. However, it functions at least as well as any other system you could name under conditions of unequal negotiating positions and/or incomplete information. Having a third-party step in and take the decision from you can only place you in a worse negotiating position, as power is transferred from you to the interloper, and ensure that the decision is made on the basis of even less complete information—as the interloper does not have your incentive to acquire the best available information, or access to the more relevant information of all, your own preferences.
That's not how war works, and terrorism is a form of warfare.
Wrong. Terrorism is a form of crime. Wars exist between peers, not nation-states vs. a handful of malcontents. Treating terrorist groups as if they were peers gives them far more credit (and credibility) than they deserve, not to mention ushering in a dystopian, totalitarian, police state—an inevitable consequence of sending soldiers to do the job of cops.
Foreign terrorists don't have, and shouldn't have, the same rights as an accused car thief.
I think you mean accused terrorists. Innocent until proven guilty, remember? And even the guilty have rights. Prioritizing the enforcer's convenience over people's rights is the essence of a police state.
... anyone else blocking content from being sold or read is also censoring that content, whether it's because of the government or not.
While true, that isn't what's happening here. No one is blocking anything from being sold or read. Some retailers are simply choosing not to sell certain content themselves. If you can't find it anywhere else, feel free to blame copyright—which, after all, originated as a scheme to enforce censorship by restricting publishing to those licensed by the state. Modern copyright has less direct influence by the state, but remains the means by which distribution of content is kept under a tight leash.
No, that's not the same thing. The film wasn't created to satisfy anyone's desire to see someone murdered, which is the defining characteristic of a snuff film. The Syrian army was going to execute the priest anyway, and chose to film it for propaganda reasons. They didn't kill the priest just so that they'd be able to film the murder.
But you're not saying we need a warrant to wiretap a known foreign terrorist in another country, right?
Why not? People in other countries have rights too, you know. If they're really a "known" terrorist you shouldn't have any problems getting that warrant. If you can't justify a warrant then perhaps your case isn't as clear-cut as you thought.
there is no reason that one couldn't at least be required within 24 hours of the start of interception (it could even be retroactive)
Saying that warrants can be retroactive amounts to mandating that warrants always be issued, whether or not the Constitutional requirements are met. What do you do when the interception—illegal without a warrant—is carried out and then the application for a warrant is later rejected? You can't take back the interception, or (legally) make an exception for the first 24 hours while the application is being processed. For every interception there must be a warrant—and it's not the interception which is required by the Constitution.
However, there is no reason why issuing a warrant must be a lengthy process. The probable cause, supporting evidence, and scope of the warrant could all be communicated to a judge with a simple five-minute phone call, with an audio recording for the archive. There is no excuse for starting the interception without prior approval.