One-click is actually a great counterexample of your point - despite private bounties being placed on prior art, an EFF campaign seeking prior art, and four years of reexamination that confirmed patentability, people still bring it up as if it were a "mockery of the entire patent system".
The fact that the "one-click" patent may actually be a legally valid patent is exactly what makes it a "mockery of the entire patent system". A reasonable patent system (were such a thing not a logical impossibility) would exclude such patents. If ours does not, that just reaffirms how unreasonable the system is.
This isn't maths: If you vote 3rd party the 3rd party probably still won't get in, but that's not the point. If 5% or 10% of people were to vote 3rd party then it would send a message to the other two and start to affect the debate.
The 3rd party won't get in either way. That isn't the issue. The problem is that with the voting system we have (another issue), if your allegiance is e.g. to the Libertarians, but you prefer the Republicans over the Democrats, voting Libertarian rather than Republican can directly lead to the Democrats winning the election. You're sending a completely hypothetical message at the expense of losing some very real representation. Maybe you don't agree with the Republicans on every issue, but they're more likely to vote the way you'd prefer than the Democrats. This sort of strategic voting is like a informal version of the Instant Runoff election process; based on the polls, voters recognize that the 3rd parties aren't going to win and eliminate them from consideration.
The solution isn't telling people to vote for 3rd parties. Under the current system that can only make minority opinions even less relevant to the political process. Fixing this problem requires a change to the voting system itself. Range voting, for example, is easy to understand and works best when voters answer honestly.
In my model of ownership, the stock itself has no actual value (because you can't sell it).
In your model of ownership, buying into a company, even a successful one, would be significant risk—you wouldn't be able to break even for decades, much less make a profit. Moreover, you would have to buy in when the company is formed, at which point the ownership is set in stone. We would be reduced to companies privately owned by a small number of partners; changing the set of partners or the division of ownership would require dissolving the company and starting anew. To raise money the partners would have to take out loans rather than selling shares. I really don't see any of that as an improvement over the current system.
It's more of a really high level view of how I wished it worked, that is, the money going directly to someone who is going to be doing something with it, rather than just bouncing around between other investors.
That's what happens when you buy shares at an IPO or (dilutive) follow-on offering. The money goes directly to the company, and you get a small measure of ownership in exchange. That only works if the shares are worth something after they're sold, though. No one would hand over money to the company without expecting to get something of value in return, which pretty much depends on being able to sell the shares eventually (even if all the actual profits come from dividends).
... you still need to devise a system by which an eligible voter can obtain (without some absurd hassle) one and only one anonymous key, without it being covertly linked back to them, or them being able to sign up for ten,...
It doesn't solve all the problems, but blinded signatures can take care of this part. The essence of it is that a server can sign a "blinded" token such that, given the unblinded version at a later time, it can tell that it generated the signature but can't trace it back to the blinded version which was signed.
In this scenario, the voter would present their credentials and be issued a single blinded token. The server would then add them to a list so that they can't come back and ask for additional tokens later. To vote, they present the unblinded token along with their choices. The server knows that they're authorized to vote, but not who they are. The token is added to another list to make sure it can't be reused.
Obviously you'd need to take precautions (like using Tor) to avoid leaking any personally identifiable information to the server along with the ballot and unblinded token.
What does "with enough users to thwart traffic analysis" mean to the NSA?
Showing that the money you spent came from a particular drug deal is a hard problem if the mixing service is implemented correctly. Obviously if one person puts in 10 BTC and only one person withdraws 10 BTC within a reasonable time, it's easy to connect the dots. However, if there are 1000 deposits of 10 BTC each from 1000 unique addresses, and 1000 withdrawals of 10 BTC each to another 1000 different addresses, then there are no obvious connections between any particular deposits and withdrawals. All the deposits go into a common pool, with withdrawals being fulfilled from randomly-selected deposit transactions.
I don't know about money laundering laws, but regardless I'd guess that they only need to track that you put Btc in and got Btc out to establish the money trail well enough for a court.
Like I said, for money laundering all they probably need to show is that you used a mixing service, which is relatively easy. For that they only need to show that you put BTC in or got BTC out. You can try to cover your tracks a bit, but if you withdraw money from the mixing service to buy real-world goods delivered to your address, or USD delivered to your bank account, then (with the other party's assistance) they can show a connection to the mixing service, which is all they'd need for evidence of money laundering. The same applies if they know that you sent funds from your own address to a mixing service. However, they wouldn't be able to connect the two unless they already had evidence that you controlled both addresses, which is the point of the mixing service.
There's no reasonable way to launder bitcoins as all transactions are public - it only takes sufficient record keeping and computing power to unwind any mixing of btc.
That is incorrect. The transactions may all be public, but the connection between putting money into such a service and taking money out is not, at least not if it's implemented reasonably using a limited set of deposit and withdrawal denominations, with enough users to thwart traffic analysis. With an implementation based on blinded signatures the service itself doesn't even need to know who made the deposit when a withdrawal request is presented.
Of course, the fact that you sent funds to such a service, or that your funds came from one, is essentially public knowledge. In the U.S. that's probably enough by itself to net you a money laundering charge.
While the physical amount of gold in existence can't readily be changed..., the supply of gold - reserves available for sale - and the overall demand for gold are very much vulnerable to both general volatility and deliberate manipulation.
No argument there, but the supply of FRNs is far more vulnerable. Deliberate manipulation of the gold supply is limited by the amount of reserves available, and in order to use those reserves for manipulation they have to be dumped on the market well below their current price, which both reduces the scope for future manipulation and costs the entity doing the manipulation dearly.
This has been illustrated quite graphically over the last few years. Fifteen years ago, gold was trading below $300 US per ounce.... A year ago, it was nudging $1800. Now it has slid back down to $1300, and shows no sign of slowing its decline. There was a similar spike around 1980.... the 'intrinsic' value of gold generally accounts for only a relatively small portion of its market price, and the majority of its 'value' is just as imaginary as that of any fiat currency.
This is typical "bubble" behavior, driven by demand for gold as a hedge against the dollar and an excess of cheap money resulting from the same Fed policies which lead people to seek a hedge in the first place. This sort of thing can happen to any commodity—even the dollar, were anyone inclined to consider the dollar a "safe" investment. Other memorable targets of bubbles in recent history include tech companies and housing. Notice I never said a word about "intrinsic value"; the price of gold is driven by supply and demand like everything else.
The price of gold under the various iterations of the gold standard was stable not because of gold's intrinsic value, but because the currency (or currencies) pegged to it had a perceived stable value. In a very real and practical sense, the strength of the U.S. dollar was backing the price of gold for much of the 20th century, and not the other way around.
Causality doesn't really apply here, because under the gold standard—before they started messing with the exchange rates and restricting redemption, and eventually banned private ownership of gold, forcing the switch to unredeemable paper currency—the price of gold and the price of the dollar were one and the same thing. A dollar was a certain amount of gold, and vice-versa. Now, the price (purchasing power) of gold may have hinged mainly on its role in the U.S. economy, but you could say something similar about any currency. The single most important criteria for any currency is marketability.
"Backed" is the wrong word, but the factor that has made gold a trustworthy currency for millenia, one people are eager to receive and reluctant to part with, is scarcity.
In terms of "backing", Federal Reserve notes and gold are on the same footing. Neither is backed by anything else. The difference is that there is no practical limit to the number of FRNs in circulation, which means that if the Federal Reserve so chooses your currency could have half the purchasing power tomorrow that it has today. Admittedly that is very unlikely, but no one has that kind of influence over the price of gold, because it can't simply be created on demand.
A currency which is backed by something represents a liability against the issuer to provide a fixed amount of that something on demand in exchange for each unit of the currency. The United States used to have this form of paper currency; in going off the gold standard the U.S. government repudiated its very real debts as the currency's issuer.
Three crowd-funded sites, each raising $25,000, would be able to hire a whopping total of **ONE** security guard, and a poorly-paid one at that.
It's not $25,000 per year. This is for a four-month trial, so the $25,000 is only for 1/3 of a year's pay for each patrol. Multiplying that out, $75,000 per year would be slightly above the 90% percentile salary of $74,000 for a police patrol officer in Los Angeles, California. No doubt the agency will take a significant cut off the top, but that still leaves plenty to pay the guard on patrol an above-average wage.
No, "government" is the name for when you're forced to pay for things your neighbors want whether you agree or not. Crowdfunding is when you and your neighbors cooperate voluntarily to fund things you both want. Similar results, completely different methods. One approach is ethical; the other, not so much.
And yes, it is libel even if it is true - the defense against libel is that the allegations have to both be true as well as in the public interest.
The truth is always in the public interest. Certainly more so than ignorance, censorship, or disinformation.
It is worth noting that the level of insanity in libel and slander laws varies between jurisdictions. Your falls somewhere between truth as an absolute defense (as in the US) and legally-enforced propaganda. Even the US system falls well short of actual freedom of speech, or even just the fundamental principle of proportional response. Fortunately, attempts to suppress speech through the courts tend to backfire spectacularly, even if you manage to win.
... why not make Ulbricht pay for his prosecution, assuming it's successful. After all, criminal prosecution is a burden on us all. We should be able to extract monetary damages from the guilty.
Criminal prosecution is the choice of the prosecutor, not damage caused by the criminal; as such, it is the prosecutor's responsibility to pay for it. When you harm someone, deliberately or otherwise, and force them to go to court rather than voluntarily making amends, you cause even more damage which must be made whole. The same does not apply to retaliatory punishments, however justified.
If you're upset that punishment is occurring at the taxpayer's expense, I suggest you stop treating it as a function of the state and leave it up to the victim whether to pursue some form of retaliation—within the realm of a proportional response, naturally—at their own expense. After all, the victim is the only one with the right to retaliation in the first place. The choice of whether to exercise that right is up to the victim, not the state.
While that is theoretically possible, by their own admission the NSA has had no luck tracking down specific users on demand.
With manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users, however, no success de-anonymizing a user in response to a TOPI request/on demand.
The PowerPot is a bit heavier than the FlameStower (12 oz) and almost twice as expensive ($150), but otherwise it appears to have the same or better advantages over the BioLite as the FlameStower and is already commercially available. It's only 30% the weight of the BioLite and can supply a standard full-rate smartphone charge (5W, vs. FlameStower's 2W) over USB from any external heat source. You can even boil water or cook with it while it's generating electricity, which addresses concerns about using up cooking space on your campfire or camp stove.
Assuming the images were uploaded anonymously, and that both parties had access, there is the further question of exactly which party is seeking revenge. It isn't beyond belief that someone might upload their own photos in an attempt to frame the person who just broke up with them.
How do you propose that someone could "take responsibility" for killing someone?
It happens all the time. Speeding isn't the only way to accidentally kill someone; that's why manslaughter charges exist. In any case, the existing legal consequences for speeding (fines, loss of license) could easily be implemented by a private road operator. It's up to the owners (and their customers) to determine what level of risk they're willing to accept on their own property. Every action we take has the potential for irreversible consequences for others; if we insisted on eliminating all risk, to ourselves or to others, we would never actually live. Only actualized consequences, not risks, are properly the subject of the law.
every sane person acknowledges that the line is not at no infringement
Casting your opponents as "insane" does not help your argument. This is a blatant ad hominem.
That analogy isn't quite right. They aren't rewriting history; they're passing conflicting laws. They authorize deficit spending, but they don't authorize borrowing any more money. The problem is that by the time they reach the point where they need to borrow money to pay their bills, they've already gone into debt by promising later payment in exchange for goods and services received. The actual borrowing is just trading one type of debt for another. Even though they were covered by the appropriations, the Executive branch shouldn't have risked default by entered into those contracts before the debt was authorized by Congress.
The analogy aside, I mostly agree with you. The debt ceiling should be repealed—and replaced with a balanced-budget amendment. That wouldn't necessarily prevent deficit spending; Congress would just have to approve the debt before the extra appropriations, ensuring they have the money in hand before they spend it.
I thought Tor uses 3 relays between source and destination
Perhaps they do. You need a minimum of two to implement onion routing, but more relays offers better security; more nodes have to be compromised to link the endpoints.
And yes, someone controlling enough nodes to put together the pieces, or monitoring enough of the network to achieve the same end through traffic analysis, are the major threat models against onion routing. This is why it's best to have a wide variety of relays, to make it more difficult for one organization to take over the network.
Accepting that something exists doesn't mean we make it legal.
Sure. But the argument for it being made legal isn't that it exists, it's that there is no legitimate justification for making it illegal. It's an entirely victimless crime.
Speed limits fall into a large grey area which results from mixing the role of the owner of the road, who has every right to ban people from using it when they break the rules, with the role of the government, which has no business punishing anyone for merely going too fast or otherwise taking risks. If you actually hurt someone then that's your responsibility, otherwise we're well into the domain of pre-crime, punishing people for harm they haven't caused yet and may never cause. This confusion of roles is one of many moral hazards which could be avoided by making the roads (and other things) privately owned and operated.
You can encrypt what you're saying, but someone has to know who you're talking to.
Actually, no. Someone has to know who you are, and someone has to know who's being talked to, but they needn't be the same person. The way Tor works is that there are at least two "interior", routing-only nodes. Let's call the sender A and the receiver D; the interior nodes are B and C. A opens an encrypted connection to B, and tells it to connect to C. A then opens an encrypted channel to C using B as a relay, and yet another encrypted channel to D relaying through both B and C. B knows about A and C; C knows about B and D; and D knows about C. Unless the nodes are sharing information, none of B, C, or D know that A is communicating with D.
Note that this bust didn't result from compromising Tor; the SR operator was discovered through old-fashioned customs inspections.
But the reason Obama can't negotiate on this one is because if he caves, the Republicans will think they have carte blanche to demand whatever they want when the debt ceiling debate hapens.
Obama and the Democrats wouldn't be in this situation in the first place if they had merely refrained from spending money which they hadn't even legally been approved to borrow yet. If the debt ceiling has to be raised to meet appropriations, that should happen before the appropriations are passed, not after they've already committed to spending the money. You don't max out your credit card, and then contract for some expensive service which you plan to put on your card before you've even called the bank to see about raising your credit limit.
Taxes which are levied against corporations are indirectly levied against their customers. They simply raise the prices of their goods and services to offset the difference...
That isn't accurate. They don't have the option of simply raising their prices. The prices were already set at the point which optimizes revenues; raising prices would reduce revenues. An increase in cost corresponds directly to a decrease in profits.
The rise in prices is a longer-term side effect. Basically, some of the suppliers don't have enough of a profit margin to adapt to the increased costs. These suppliers become unprofitable and go out of business, which decreases the supply. With a lower supply comes higher prices, though the price increase is not necessarily equal to the added cost. In the end the extra cost is divided between lower profit margins for the remaining suppliers and higher prices for their customers. Just how much each party is affected depends on a number of different factors, but in any case it isn't as simple as "all extra costs are passed on to customers".
Are you also able to opt out of emergency medical care? Because you should be required to do so if you choose not to get health insurance. Otherwise you're shifting the costs to others.
Insurance is not the only way to pay for medical care. Other options include having sufficient reserves to cover the cost directly, taking out a loan, or receiving (voluntary) charity from others. However, yes, if you can't come up with the necessary payment then you can and should "opt out" of even emergency medical care rather than force someone else to provide it to you at their expense.
Let's be honest... Civilized people are fine with Conservatives being able to benefit from our society, but the Conservatives want it all for themselves. They go crazy at the thought of a poor person getting healthcare.
Let's really be honest and acknowledge that Conservatives have no problem with a poor person getting healthcare. They have a problem with your particular method of getting poor people health care, because it depends on force. If you and other like-minded individuals want to provide health care for poor people, the Conservatives won't stop you. They may even join in; historically, Conservatives as a group are more likely to support charitable causes than non-Conservatives. It has to be voluntary, however. The opposition is not to providing health care, but rather to the use of force.
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One-click is actually a great counterexample of your point - despite private bounties being placed on prior art, an EFF campaign seeking prior art, and four years of reexamination that confirmed patentability, people still bring it up as if it were a "mockery of the entire patent system".
The fact that the "one-click" patent may actually be a legally valid patent is exactly what makes it a "mockery of the entire patent system". A reasonable patent system (were such a thing not a logical impossibility) would exclude such patents. If ours does not, that just reaffirms how unreasonable the system is.
This isn't maths: If you vote 3rd party the 3rd party probably still won't get in, but that's not the point. If 5% or 10% of people were to vote 3rd party then it would send a message to the other two and start to affect the debate.
The 3rd party won't get in either way. That isn't the issue. The problem is that with the voting system we have (another issue), if your allegiance is e.g. to the Libertarians, but you prefer the Republicans over the Democrats, voting Libertarian rather than Republican can directly lead to the Democrats winning the election. You're sending a completely hypothetical message at the expense of losing some very real representation. Maybe you don't agree with the Republicans on every issue, but they're more likely to vote the way you'd prefer than the Democrats. This sort of strategic voting is like a informal version of the Instant Runoff election process; based on the polls, voters recognize that the 3rd parties aren't going to win and eliminate them from consideration.
The solution isn't telling people to vote for 3rd parties. Under the current system that can only make minority opinions even less relevant to the political process. Fixing this problem requires a change to the voting system itself. Range voting, for example, is easy to understand and works best when voters answer honestly.
In my model of ownership, the stock itself has no actual value (because you can't sell it).
In your model of ownership, buying into a company, even a successful one, would be significant risk—you wouldn't be able to break even for decades, much less make a profit. Moreover, you would have to buy in when the company is formed, at which point the ownership is set in stone. We would be reduced to companies privately owned by a small number of partners; changing the set of partners or the division of ownership would require dissolving the company and starting anew. To raise money the partners would have to take out loans rather than selling shares. I really don't see any of that as an improvement over the current system.
It's more of a really high level view of how I wished it worked, that is, the money going directly to someone who is going to be doing something with it, rather than just bouncing around between other investors.
That's what happens when you buy shares at an IPO or (dilutive) follow-on offering. The money goes directly to the company, and you get a small measure of ownership in exchange. That only works if the shares are worth something after they're sold, though. No one would hand over money to the company without expecting to get something of value in return, which pretty much depends on being able to sell the shares eventually (even if all the actual profits come from dividends).
... you still need to devise a system by which an eligible voter can obtain (without some absurd hassle) one and only one anonymous key, without it being covertly linked back to them, or them being able to sign up for ten, ...
It doesn't solve all the problems, but blinded signatures can take care of this part. The essence of it is that a server can sign a "blinded" token such that, given the unblinded version at a later time, it can tell that it generated the signature but can't trace it back to the blinded version which was signed.
In this scenario, the voter would present their credentials and be issued a single blinded token. The server would then add them to a list so that they can't come back and ask for additional tokens later. To vote, they present the unblinded token along with their choices. The server knows that they're authorized to vote, but not who they are. The token is added to another list to make sure it can't be reused.
Obviously you'd need to take precautions (like using Tor) to avoid leaking any personally identifiable information to the server along with the ballot and unblinded token.
What does "with enough users to thwart traffic analysis" mean to the NSA?
Showing that the money you spent came from a particular drug deal is a hard problem if the mixing service is implemented correctly. Obviously if one person puts in 10 BTC and only one person withdraws 10 BTC within a reasonable time, it's easy to connect the dots. However, if there are 1000 deposits of 10 BTC each from 1000 unique addresses, and 1000 withdrawals of 10 BTC each to another 1000 different addresses, then there are no obvious connections between any particular deposits and withdrawals. All the deposits go into a common pool, with withdrawals being fulfilled from randomly-selected deposit transactions.
I don't know about money laundering laws, but regardless I'd guess that they only need to track that you put Btc in and got Btc out to establish the money trail well enough for a court.
Like I said, for money laundering all they probably need to show is that you used a mixing service, which is relatively easy. For that they only need to show that you put BTC in or got BTC out. You can try to cover your tracks a bit, but if you withdraw money from the mixing service to buy real-world goods delivered to your address, or USD delivered to your bank account, then (with the other party's assistance) they can show a connection to the mixing service, which is all they'd need for evidence of money laundering. The same applies if they know that you sent funds from your own address to a mixing service. However, they wouldn't be able to connect the two unless they already had evidence that you controlled both addresses, which is the point of the mixing service.
There's no reasonable way to launder bitcoins as all transactions are public - it only takes sufficient record keeping and computing power to unwind any mixing of btc.
That is incorrect. The transactions may all be public, but the connection between putting money into such a service and taking money out is not, at least not if it's implemented reasonably using a limited set of deposit and withdrawal denominations, with enough users to thwart traffic analysis. With an implementation based on blinded signatures the service itself doesn't even need to know who made the deposit when a withdrawal request is presented.
Of course, the fact that you sent funds to such a service, or that your funds came from one, is essentially public knowledge. In the U.S. that's probably enough by itself to net you a money laundering charge.
While the physical amount of gold in existence can't readily be changed..., the supply of gold - reserves available for sale - and the overall demand for gold are very much vulnerable to both general volatility and deliberate manipulation.
No argument there, but the supply of FRNs is far more vulnerable. Deliberate manipulation of the gold supply is limited by the amount of reserves available, and in order to use those reserves for manipulation they have to be dumped on the market well below their current price, which both reduces the scope for future manipulation and costs the entity doing the manipulation dearly.
This has been illustrated quite graphically over the last few years. Fifteen years ago, gold was trading below $300 US per ounce. ... A year ago, it was nudging $1800. Now it has slid back down to $1300, and shows no sign of slowing its decline. There was a similar spike around 1980. ... the 'intrinsic' value of gold generally accounts for only a relatively small portion of its market price, and the majority of its 'value' is just as imaginary as that of any fiat currency.
This is typical "bubble" behavior, driven by demand for gold as a hedge against the dollar and an excess of cheap money resulting from the same Fed policies which lead people to seek a hedge in the first place. This sort of thing can happen to any commodity—even the dollar, were anyone inclined to consider the dollar a "safe" investment. Other memorable targets of bubbles in recent history include tech companies and housing. Notice I never said a word about "intrinsic value"; the price of gold is driven by supply and demand like everything else.
The price of gold under the various iterations of the gold standard was stable not because of gold's intrinsic value, but because the currency (or currencies) pegged to it had a perceived stable value. In a very real and practical sense, the strength of the U.S. dollar was backing the price of gold for much of the 20th century, and not the other way around.
Causality doesn't really apply here, because under the gold standard—before they started messing with the exchange rates and restricting redemption, and eventually banned private ownership of gold, forcing the switch to unredeemable paper currency—the price of gold and the price of the dollar were one and the same thing. A dollar was a certain amount of gold, and vice-versa. Now, the price (purchasing power) of gold may have hinged mainly on its role in the U.S. economy, but you could say something similar about any currency. The single most important criteria for any currency is marketability.
And the gold was backed by...?
"Backed" is the wrong word, but the factor that has made gold a trustworthy currency for millenia, one people are eager to receive and reluctant to part with, is scarcity.
In terms of "backing", Federal Reserve notes and gold are on the same footing. Neither is backed by anything else. The difference is that there is no practical limit to the number of FRNs in circulation, which means that if the Federal Reserve so chooses your currency could have half the purchasing power tomorrow that it has today. Admittedly that is very unlikely, but no one has that kind of influence over the price of gold, because it can't simply be created on demand.
A currency which is backed by something represents a liability against the issuer to provide a fixed amount of that something on demand in exchange for each unit of the currency. The United States used to have this form of paper currency; in going off the gold standard the U.S. government repudiated its very real debts as the currency's issuer.
Three crowd-funded sites, each raising $25,000, would be able to hire a whopping total of **ONE** security guard, and a poorly-paid one at that.
It's not $25,000 per year. This is for a four-month trial, so the $25,000 is only for 1/3 of a year's pay for each patrol. Multiplying that out, $75,000 per year would be slightly above the 90% percentile salary of $74,000 for a police patrol officer in Los Angeles, California. No doubt the agency will take a significant cut off the top, but that still leaves plenty to pay the guard on patrol an above-average wage.
The name for such crowdfunding: "Government"
No, "government" is the name for when you're forced to pay for things your neighbors want whether you agree or not. Crowdfunding is when you and your neighbors cooperate voluntarily to fund things you both want. Similar results, completely different methods. One approach is ethical; the other, not so much.
What is this world coming to when people resort to a website called "Crowdtilt" as a replacement for government?
Civilization.
And yes, it is libel even if it is true - the defense against libel is that the allegations have to both be true as well as in the public interest.
The truth is always in the public interest. Certainly more so than ignorance, censorship, or disinformation.
It is worth noting that the level of insanity in libel and slander laws varies between jurisdictions. Your falls somewhere between truth as an absolute defense (as in the US) and legally-enforced propaganda. Even the US system falls well short of actual freedom of speech, or even just the fundamental principle of proportional response. Fortunately, attempts to suppress speech through the courts tend to backfire spectacularly, even if you manage to win.
... why not make Ulbricht pay for his prosecution, assuming it's successful. After all, criminal prosecution is a burden on us all. We should be able to extract monetary damages from the guilty.
Criminal prosecution is the choice of the prosecutor, not damage caused by the criminal; as such, it is the prosecutor's responsibility to pay for it. When you harm someone, deliberately or otherwise, and force them to go to court rather than voluntarily making amends, you cause even more damage which must be made whole. The same does not apply to retaliatory punishments, however justified.
If you're upset that punishment is occurring at the taxpayer's expense, I suggest you stop treating it as a function of the state and leave it up to the victim whether to pursue some form of retaliation—within the realm of a proportional response, naturally—at their own expense. After all, the victim is the only one with the right to retaliation in the first place. The choice of whether to exercise that right is up to the victim, not the state.
While that is theoretically possible, by their own admission the NSA has had no luck tracking down specific users on demand.
With manual analysis we can de-anonymize a very small fraction of Tor users, however, no success de-anonymizing a user in response to a TOPI request/on demand.
The PowerPot is a bit heavier than the FlameStower (12 oz) and almost twice as expensive ($150), but otherwise it appears to have the same or better advantages over the BioLite as the FlameStower and is already commercially available. It's only 30% the weight of the BioLite and can supply a standard full-rate smartphone charge (5W, vs. FlameStower's 2W) over USB from any external heat source. You can even boil water or cook with it while it's generating electricity, which addresses concerns about using up cooking space on your campfire or camp stove.
Assuming the images were uploaded anonymously, and that both parties had access, there is the further question of exactly which party is seeking revenge. It isn't beyond belief that someone might upload their own photos in an attempt to frame the person who just broke up with them.
How do you propose that someone could "take responsibility" for killing someone?
It happens all the time. Speeding isn't the only way to accidentally kill someone; that's why manslaughter charges exist. In any case, the existing legal consequences for speeding (fines, loss of license) could easily be implemented by a private road operator. It's up to the owners (and their customers) to determine what level of risk they're willing to accept on their own property. Every action we take has the potential for irreversible consequences for others; if we insisted on eliminating all risk, to ourselves or to others, we would never actually live. Only actualized consequences, not risks, are properly the subject of the law.
every sane person acknowledges that the line is not at no infringement
Casting your opponents as "insane" does not help your argument. This is a blatant ad hominem.
That analogy isn't quite right. They aren't rewriting history; they're passing conflicting laws. They authorize deficit spending, but they don't authorize borrowing any more money. The problem is that by the time they reach the point where they need to borrow money to pay their bills, they've already gone into debt by promising later payment in exchange for goods and services received. The actual borrowing is just trading one type of debt for another. Even though they were covered by the appropriations, the Executive branch shouldn't have risked default by entered into those contracts before the debt was authorized by Congress.
The analogy aside, I mostly agree with you. The debt ceiling should be repealed—and replaced with a balanced-budget amendment. That wouldn't necessarily prevent deficit spending; Congress would just have to approve the debt before the extra appropriations, ensuring they have the money in hand before they spend it.
I thought Tor uses 3 relays between source and destination
Perhaps they do. You need a minimum of two to implement onion routing, but more relays offers better security; more nodes have to be compromised to link the endpoints.
And yes, someone controlling enough nodes to put together the pieces, or monitoring enough of the network to achieve the same end through traffic analysis, are the major threat models against onion routing. This is why it's best to have a wide variety of relays, to make it more difficult for one organization to take over the network.
Accepting that something exists doesn't mean we make it legal.
Sure. But the argument for it being made legal isn't that it exists, it's that there is no legitimate justification for making it illegal. It's an entirely victimless crime.
Speed limits fall into a large grey area which results from mixing the role of the owner of the road, who has every right to ban people from using it when they break the rules, with the role of the government, which has no business punishing anyone for merely going too fast or otherwise taking risks. If you actually hurt someone then that's your responsibility, otherwise we're well into the domain of pre-crime, punishing people for harm they haven't caused yet and may never cause. This confusion of roles is one of many moral hazards which could be avoided by making the roads (and other things) privately owned and operated.
You can encrypt what you're saying, but someone has to know who you're talking to.
Actually, no. Someone has to know who you are, and someone has to know who's being talked to, but they needn't be the same person. The way Tor works is that there are at least two "interior", routing-only nodes. Let's call the sender A and the receiver D; the interior nodes are B and C. A opens an encrypted connection to B, and tells it to connect to C. A then opens an encrypted channel to C using B as a relay, and yet another encrypted channel to D relaying through both B and C. B knows about A and C; C knows about B and D; and D knows about C. Unless the nodes are sharing information, none of B, C, or D know that A is communicating with D.
Note that this bust didn't result from compromising Tor; the SR operator was discovered through old-fashioned customs inspections.
But the reason Obama can't negotiate on this one is because if he caves, the Republicans will think they have carte blanche to demand whatever they want when the debt ceiling debate hapens.
Obama and the Democrats wouldn't be in this situation in the first place if they had merely refrained from spending money which they hadn't even legally been approved to borrow yet. If the debt ceiling has to be raised to meet appropriations, that should happen before the appropriations are passed, not after they've already committed to spending the money. You don't max out your credit card, and then contract for some expensive service which you plan to put on your card before you've even called the bank to see about raising your credit limit.
Taxes which are levied against corporations are indirectly levied against their customers. They simply raise the prices of their goods and services to offset the difference...
That isn't accurate. They don't have the option of simply raising their prices. The prices were already set at the point which optimizes revenues; raising prices would reduce revenues. An increase in cost corresponds directly to a decrease in profits.
The rise in prices is a longer-term side effect. Basically, some of the suppliers don't have enough of a profit margin to adapt to the increased costs. These suppliers become unprofitable and go out of business, which decreases the supply. With a lower supply comes higher prices, though the price increase is not necessarily equal to the added cost. In the end the extra cost is divided between lower profit margins for the remaining suppliers and higher prices for their customers. Just how much each party is affected depends on a number of different factors, but in any case it isn't as simple as "all extra costs are passed on to customers".
Are you also able to opt out of emergency medical care? Because you should be required to do so if you choose not to get health insurance. Otherwise you're shifting the costs to others.
Insurance is not the only way to pay for medical care. Other options include having sufficient reserves to cover the cost directly, taking out a loan, or receiving (voluntary) charity from others. However, yes, if you can't come up with the necessary payment then you can and should "opt out" of even emergency medical care rather than force someone else to provide it to you at their expense.
Let's be honest ... Civilized people are fine with Conservatives being able to benefit from our society, but the Conservatives want it all for themselves. They go crazy at the thought of a poor person getting healthcare.
Let's really be honest and acknowledge that Conservatives have no problem with a poor person getting healthcare. They have a problem with your particular method of getting poor people health care, because it depends on force. If you and other like-minded individuals want to provide health care for poor people, the Conservatives won't stop you. They may even join in; historically, Conservatives as a group are more likely to support charitable causes than non-Conservatives. It has to be voluntary, however. The opposition is not to providing health care, but rather to the use of force.