Banning adding sugar in any form to anything would essentially wipe out a huge number of foods, including a whole mess of relatively healthy traditional foods. Basically any desert is off the table, a whole variety of Asian foods, heck if you take "in any form" to its extreme you've just banned anything containing fruit or milk, as well as potatoes, any kind of grain, essentially you'd be left with meat and a few, though not many, vegetables.
To be honest, I don't think any amount of regulation is going to help. We're simply wired to love fat and sugar, some of us more than others. Millions of dollars are spent trying to fight our instincts and for the most part its an epic failure. We're simply not going to be moving back to a substantially more active or time balanced lifestyle any time soon and we'll find crap to eat so long as crap is available, which unless we start regulating the caloric intake of every individual, it always will be.
At this point I think our best hope is something scientific or medical that can either help us to better process our high fat high sugar diets or to control our cravings. In the last few years we're finally beginning to understand that it isn't just a matter of fat people being lazy or thin people being hard working, and that in a lot of cases, all the willpower in the world won't help you. I know it sounds like a cop out, but I honestly can't see any level of regulation which could possibly exist in our current legislative framework which could help. We're all time poor, and a lot of people are money poor too, we're not going to go back to living the kind of Mediterranean lifestyle which kept this sort of thing at bay in Southern Europe because we're not going back to a society where mothers don't work and have all day to cook that food, even if people still knew how. Fresh food is still expensive, even in areas where it's plentiful and local, preparing it is still reasonably difficult, and we still crave fat, sugar, and salt.
They do that as well, but that's a particular type of advertising, not advertising as a whole.
My point is that if you eliminated all advertising in the kind of idiotically naive way implied by the phrase "ads are toxic" you'd have no idea where to go to find someone who could provide you with a good or service, whether anyone else would provide you with a good or service, or any information about said good or service. Every piece of information you receive about a product that you didn't explicitly go and ask the vendor about is advertising and for that matter, a good deal of the information they provide you with when you explicitly ask is also advertising. Eliminating it not only idiotically naive it would actually make life worse as you'd pretty much only know about the local vendor of crap whose shop you happened to stumble upon.
What I meant to say was that with the exception of political advertising, which for first amendment reasons isn't regulated for truth, advertising regulation is fairly effective at keeping blatant falsehood in check. If a commercial advertiser blatantly lies you can complain and they almost certainly will be fined.
Indeed, because Slashdot has always been such a bastion of informed journalism. If anything things are slightly better because only about 20% of the articles are rampant Microsoft/RIAA/MPAA hating click bait. Heck I think I've actually gone a full month without seeing anyone type Micro$oft. Slashdot has changed, mostly because those of us who have been reading this place for more than a decade are older now, and it's also not changed which can be frustrating because we all have. It's never been anything other than what it is though, though fire hose has made it a little less horribly biased.
Because everyone else is doing so much better on the obesity front? India, Mexico, and China are all facing much larger obesity epidemics than anywhere in the west, including the US, and the rest of the West is actually no better than the US. Even places like Italy and Greece are facing problems as the demands of a modern lifestyle mean that families don't have time to cook traditional foods and the same convenience foods are doing the same thing there as everywhere else.
For all that America is the home of the most famous of fast food giants, they didn't invent fast food, or fried food, or sugary sweets. They didn't wire human beings to crave fat and sugar and they didn't create the environment where everyone works so much they have no time to cook properly. Walk your own streets, the chances are you have as many overweight and obese people as any US city you care to name.
Advertising is a way to let people who may be interested in purchasing your product or using your service that you exist, nothing more, nothing less. On a fundamental level, there's nothing wrong with it.
There are certainly issues with some ads, in terms of the products they sell, the stereotypes they reinforce, and in some cases the veracity of the claims that they make(though outside political advertising regulation keeps that sort of thing largely in check. There can also be issues with the tools advertisers use to reach us and in some ways the degree to which they manipulate us, but that's not the same as saying "Ads are toxic".
That kind of attitude is so pointlessly naive it's ridiculous. Are signs on shops toxic? Yellow pages advertisements? Websites for products or services? Review Sites? Slashdot Articles? All are a form of advertising.
It sort of depends on the value of your secrets. People are reasonably certain that if you wipe random data over a disk 32 times that it can never be recovered, reasonably certain, with current technology anyway, well with the current technology we know about anyway. Now you have to ensure of course that it's been done properly and some dimwit hasn't just cleared a partition instead of the whole volume, and of course when you start dealing with SSD's or more expensive drives with smarter controllers your ability to actually do a write to every sector to achieve this goal is somewhat questionable, and of course doing a 32 times rewrite on a large drive is going to take a few days to actually finish, days you're paying someone you trust with that data to sit and watch it, well presumably anyway.
On the other hand, physically destroying the disc is much faster and much more effective, depending on what the company charges, it might actually even be cheaper since you could actually do it to a whole bunch of hard drives at once.
Is it probably excessive if you're the radio shack at the mall? Sure, if you're the government though?
Vista had some serious issues, and Win 7 is much, much better, but it was never quite as bad as people made it out to be. They also tend to forget that Windows XP was as bad or worse on most existing hardware when it was released. Particularly in terms of RAM XP required a something like 4 times what would run 98 comfortably.
You'd probably actually find that Win 8 ran fine on that rig, it ran faster than 7 on mine.
The stupid thing is that by SP2 Vista was actually not bad. Hell Vista at release was actually pretty good, it suffered from Microsoft's battle with vendors over a halfway decent security model, but was otherwise fine, still better than XP. For that matter once you get by the whole moronic touch crap, 8 is actually even better than 7.
The fundamental problem is that people are hanging onto Windows XP like it's their god damned life. The fact that it's actually a horribly shitty 13 year old OS and that every single subsequent Microsoft OS is dramatically better (yes that includes both Vista and Win 8), seems to mean nothing to anyone. Sure there are people who can't upgrade, but there's a lot of people who just refuse to, including people on places like Slashdot who should know better (god how horrible was Linux in 2001).
Microsoft has back ported IE 11 to Win 7(and presumably Vista, who knows), but they can't port it back to XP, you probably couldn't run the latest Chrome in a version of X11 from then either.
Microsoft's "IE strategy" if there was one, was to do absolutely nothing with their browser for the better part of a decade, nothing more, nothing less. In 2001 when they released IE6, pretty much no one was actually standards compliant, certainly not Netscape, Opera came close, but had a tiny market share. Every release they've made since then has been moving further towards standards compliance, not away from it.
I know it's popular to bash Microsoft, and they have many sins to answer for in the web arena, but doing two tenths of fuck all for ten years isn't exactly a vile conspiracy.
It isn't so much that big companies are wasteful, but that when you've reached a certain level of market saturation in your core business area the only way to expand revenue in any significant way is to expand into new business areas. You can almost think of these as new business ventures as opposed to simply purchases by a company, and most new business ventures, even those by established players, fail.
That said, the Motorola purchase seems particularly insane, the only logical reason for Google to make that purchase was to build their own phone which is something they didn't even try. I'm not really surprised they didn't try given that it would have caused a backlash against both Android and ChromeOS in their entire supply chain for little to no gain, but they should have known that before they bought the company in the first place.
Except selective enforcement, even if that's what this was, can only be tyrannical if the law is already tyrannical. In a system like ours where the executive doesn't actually get to create law this means that through selective enforcement, even if that's what they were doing, is actually reducing the tyranny of the legislative branch.
On top of that, allowing the executive(that is to say the police) the ability to take into account circumstance and context is the only way in which any kind of justice can exist. The law is black and white, but real life quite often isn't, every single time that we try to reduce the ability of the executive and judicial branches to selectively enforce the will of congress, for example through minimum sentences, we make our country a worse place to live and less free. Yes selective enforcement allows for the opportunity for the wealthy to bribe their way out of power or for the poor to be made an example of, but it also allows for people to be offered second chances or for their circumstances to be taken into account.
The enforcers of the law can only truly be tyrants if they enforce laws which do not exist or if the laws that they enforce are tyrannical. We have the courts to protect us from the former, and selective enforcement is part of how the executive protects us from the latter.
That wasn't even close to my point.
The police in Hicksville are doing what the residents if Hicksville want them to do which is crack down on undesirables. They wouldn't for one second get away with treating the town majority like that. It's not lck of oversight or the fact that control measures don't work. Not for the NSA, and not for the Hicksville PD, it's that we don't really want criminals to have civil rights because civil rights get in the way of arresting them.
Then FOSS offers a solution, code it yourself or pay someone else to code it for you. It'll probably cost you 5- 10 years of full time development or close to a million bucks to accomplish, but you have that option.
For whatever reason there simply aren't enough developers who have a professional music editing itch to scratch or perhaps there aren't enough with the same itch to scratch for anything much to get off the ground. Realistically it's not all that surprising that people who make their money out of content creation and copyright might not be the biggest proponents of FOSS and so not necessarily the most willing to sink huge amounts of time into it.
It's not about not being able to drink plain water, it's about how insane you'd go if you ate nothing but plain water for the rest of your life.
On top of that, once you've taken all this crap, processed it and dried it into a powder, shipped it across the country and then left it in your cupboard for a while, does it still have all those nutrients? Are they delivered in a more effective manner than vitamin pills(which are largely useless)? How do you ensure you're not getting too much of something? The guy in question even seems to have health problems associated with it, ones which seem to match the ones associated with tube feeding in general.
TL;DR; Even if it works, a longer life at what cost? There's evidence that castration will vastly increase your lifespan too, but I'm not lining up.
Of course people crossing a border pass that test. US Customs was created and empowered to search people crossing the borders by the people who actually created the constitution. Searching people and objects entering your country is something that law enforcement is empowered to do in every single country on earth and has always been empowered to do in every single country on earth.
They can't stop the officers of Hickville PD mostly because the community doesn't really have a problem with the abuses of Hickville PD.
You see, the citizens of Hickville don't much like African Americans or other minorities very much, they wouldn't say that to your face, but it the cops are hassling people, well they're probably criminals. Because they're in Hickville, the residents of Hickville are the only people who regularly see what they're doing and since those same residents actually approve of what they're doing nothing happens.
Bitcoin will eventually be deflationary because of the limited supply cap. The fact that we have things like fractional reserve banking increases the amount of time it could theoretically remain non deflationary, but there comes a point where if you made any more imaginary money the whole system will collapse and you need to make some more real money which bitcoin doesn't do.
The major problem with bitcoin however is that a fairly small number of people already have the vast majority of coins that can ever be mined. If you stuck the entire world onto bitcoins the few thousand people who currently own bitcoins would become richer than anyone who currently exists on earth while everyone else would be third world poor. Except of course that most of the people who had all those bitcoins would be incredibly asset poor and a lot of the people who didn't would be incredibly asset rich. You'd have extremely poor people who owned multi billion dollar companies and extremely rich people who didn't even own their own home. That's insane and won't work.
Our big challenge isn't to get the 1st and 4th amendments applied to the internet. The problem we have to resolve is how to expand our 1st and 4th amendment protections to cover all the information that can now be collected without making it illegal to walk down the street.
What the NSA is doing for the most part is collecting all the information that sits outside of what is actually protected by law, most of it has always been legal because it wasn't possible to use that mass of information to actually determine anything, now it is.
It's always been perfectly legal for the police to follow you everywhere you go on public property and write it down, it just wasn't cost effective to do it and the cops stuck out like a sore thumb, today we've all quite happily placed GPS tracking devices in our pockets so the police can get all that information without having to actually do any work and with modern computers they can actually process it.
Well it's incredibly unlikely that anyone will bother to ban bitcoins, nor have they actually done so in this case. The main reason why it's incredibly unlikely is that for any number of reasons it's appallingly unlikely that anyone sane will ever use bitcoins as any kind of real replacement currency. Not least of which being that everyone and everything has to have enough local currency on hand to pay their taxes and accepting more than one currency is inconvenient for most people. The fact that a valueless deflationary currency would actually destroy not help the economy is another.
What governments will do, as they have done in this case, is actually treat bitcoins exactly like a real honest to goodness currency and not play money. They'll then require that places that act like banks follow all the legislation which applies to banks and that you pay taxes on any money you earn in bitcoins. They might even let you start paying government fees in bitcoins because then they can work out which bitcoin wallet belongs to which person and then they'll have a whole bunch of dollars with their entire transaction history built in that they actually legally own so can legally read. Then the government will have a gigantic party because you've voluntarily given up something they had no idea how to get rid of and given them their surveillance wet dream.
I dunno, personally I think that a currency that is much easier to steal, much easier to lose, requires a functioning internet connection to use for anything at all, is by nature highly deflationary and which, just as an added bonus, contains its entire transaction history so that whoever has that coin can see exactly where it's come from is actually clear worse than anything we have now.
Just because you mine it doesn't mean that it's actually got any inherent value, it's even more worthless than gold and unlike the dollar it's not backed by the full faith and credit of the US government(for whatever that's worth these days). In terms of transactions you can send real money for pretty close to free as well, just stick cash in an envelope. Sure it won't necessarily get there on the other end, but that's what you actually pay for. A lot of people like the fact that you can reverse transactions to get back money someone stole from you to actually be a feature to.
There's certainly some validity to the arguments in favor of an electronic currency of some sort, but the idea that there's a single damned thing about bitcoin which is actually better than even some of the idiotic alternatives like gold backed dollars, is just insane.
The government didn't say no, they said "OK, here's all the paperwork you have to fill in to process currency exchange complete it or go to jail". This guy is going to spend several decades in a dark cell specifically because they are treating Bitcoin like an actual currency.
Slashdot Mirror
Banning adding sugar in any form to anything would essentially wipe out a huge number of foods, including a whole mess of relatively healthy traditional foods. Basically any desert is off the table, a whole variety of Asian foods, heck if you take "in any form" to its extreme you've just banned anything containing fruit or milk, as well as potatoes, any kind of grain, essentially you'd be left with meat and a few, though not many, vegetables.
To be honest, I don't think any amount of regulation is going to help. We're simply wired to love fat and sugar, some of us more than others. Millions of dollars are spent trying to fight our instincts and for the most part its an epic failure. We're simply not going to be moving back to a substantially more active or time balanced lifestyle any time soon and we'll find crap to eat so long as crap is available, which unless we start regulating the caloric intake of every individual, it always will be.
At this point I think our best hope is something scientific or medical that can either help us to better process our high fat high sugar diets or to control our cravings. In the last few years we're finally beginning to understand that it isn't just a matter of fat people being lazy or thin people being hard working, and that in a lot of cases, all the willpower in the world won't help you. I know it sounds like a cop out, but I honestly can't see any level of regulation which could possibly exist in our current legislative framework which could help. We're all time poor, and a lot of people are money poor too, we're not going to go back to living the kind of Mediterranean lifestyle which kept this sort of thing at bay in Southern Europe because we're not going back to a society where mothers don't work and have all day to cook that food, even if people still knew how. Fresh food is still expensive, even in areas where it's plentiful and local, preparing it is still reasonably difficult, and we still crave fat, sugar, and salt.
They do that as well, but that's a particular type of advertising, not advertising as a whole.
My point is that if you eliminated all advertising in the kind of idiotically naive way implied by the phrase "ads are toxic" you'd have no idea where to go to find someone who could provide you with a good or service, whether anyone else would provide you with a good or service, or any information about said good or service. Every piece of information you receive about a product that you didn't explicitly go and ask the vendor about is advertising and for that matter, a good deal of the information they provide you with when you explicitly ask is also advertising. Eliminating it not only idiotically naive it would actually make life worse as you'd pretty much only know about the local vendor of crap whose shop you happened to stumble upon.
Maybe my phrasing wasn't right.
What I meant to say was that with the exception of political advertising, which for first amendment reasons isn't regulated for truth, advertising regulation is fairly effective at keeping blatant falsehood in check. If a commercial advertiser blatantly lies you can complain and they almost certainly will be fined.
Indeed, because Slashdot has always been such a bastion of informed journalism. If anything things are slightly better because only about 20% of the articles are rampant Microsoft/RIAA/MPAA hating click bait. Heck I think I've actually gone a full month without seeing anyone type Micro$oft. Slashdot has changed, mostly because those of us who have been reading this place for more than a decade are older now, and it's also not changed which can be frustrating because we all have. It's never been anything other than what it is though, though fire hose has made it a little less horribly biased.
Because everyone else is doing so much better on the obesity front? India, Mexico, and China are all facing much larger obesity epidemics than anywhere in the west, including the US, and the rest of the West is actually no better than the US. Even places like Italy and Greece are facing problems as the demands of a modern lifestyle mean that families don't have time to cook traditional foods and the same convenience foods are doing the same thing there as everywhere else.
For all that America is the home of the most famous of fast food giants, they didn't invent fast food, or fried food, or sugary sweets. They didn't wire human beings to crave fat and sugar and they didn't create the environment where everyone works so much they have no time to cook properly. Walk your own streets, the chances are you have as many overweight and obese people as any US city you care to name.
Advertising is a way to let people who may be interested in purchasing your product or using your service that you exist, nothing more, nothing less. On a fundamental level, there's nothing wrong with it.
There are certainly issues with some ads, in terms of the products they sell, the stereotypes they reinforce, and in some cases the veracity of the claims that they make(though outside political advertising regulation keeps that sort of thing largely in check. There can also be issues with the tools advertisers use to reach us and in some ways the degree to which they manipulate us, but that's not the same as saying "Ads are toxic".
That kind of attitude is so pointlessly naive it's ridiculous. Are signs on shops toxic? Yellow pages advertisements? Websites for products or services? Review Sites? Slashdot Articles? All are a form of advertising.
It sort of depends on the value of your secrets. People are reasonably certain that if you wipe random data over a disk 32 times that it can never be recovered, reasonably certain, with current technology anyway, well with the current technology we know about anyway. Now you have to ensure of course that it's been done properly and some dimwit hasn't just cleared a partition instead of the whole volume, and of course when you start dealing with SSD's or more expensive drives with smarter controllers your ability to actually do a write to every sector to achieve this goal is somewhat questionable, and of course doing a 32 times rewrite on a large drive is going to take a few days to actually finish, days you're paying someone you trust with that data to sit and watch it, well presumably anyway.
On the other hand, physically destroying the disc is much faster and much more effective, depending on what the company charges, it might actually even be cheaper since you could actually do it to a whole bunch of hard drives at once.
Is it probably excessive if you're the radio shack at the mall? Sure, if you're the government though?
Vista had some serious issues, and Win 7 is much, much better, but it was never quite as bad as people made it out to be. They also tend to forget that Windows XP was as bad or worse on most existing hardware when it was released. Particularly in terms of RAM XP required a something like 4 times what would run 98 comfortably.
You'd probably actually find that Win 8 ran fine on that rig, it ran faster than 7 on mine.
The stupid thing is that by SP2 Vista was actually not bad. Hell Vista at release was actually pretty good, it suffered from Microsoft's battle with vendors over a halfway decent security model, but was otherwise fine, still better than XP.
For that matter once you get by the whole moronic touch crap, 8 is actually even better than 7.
I don't think it was a choice, windows xp is just seriously old, and full of really bad design decisions.
The fundamental problem is that people are hanging onto Windows XP like it's their god damned life. The fact that it's actually a horribly shitty 13 year old OS and that every single subsequent Microsoft OS is dramatically better (yes that includes both Vista and Win 8), seems to mean nothing to anyone. Sure there are people who can't upgrade, but there's a lot of people who just refuse to, including people on places like Slashdot who should know better (god how horrible was Linux in 2001).
Microsoft has back ported IE 11 to Win 7(and presumably Vista, who knows), but they can't port it back to XP, you probably couldn't run the latest Chrome in a version of X11 from then either.
Microsoft's "IE strategy" if there was one, was to do absolutely nothing with their browser for the better part of a decade, nothing more, nothing less. In 2001 when they released IE6, pretty much no one was actually standards compliant, certainly not Netscape, Opera came close, but had a tiny market share. Every release they've made since then has been moving further towards standards compliance, not away from it.
I know it's popular to bash Microsoft, and they have many sins to answer for in the web arena, but doing two tenths of fuck all for ten years isn't exactly a vile conspiracy.
Only if they get to keep them.
It isn't so much that big companies are wasteful, but that when you've reached a certain level of market saturation in your core business area the only way to expand revenue in any significant way is to expand into new business areas. You can almost think of these as new business ventures as opposed to simply purchases by a company, and most new business ventures, even those by established players, fail.
That said, the Motorola purchase seems particularly insane, the only logical reason for Google to make that purchase was to build their own phone which is something they didn't even try. I'm not really surprised they didn't try given that it would have caused a backlash against both Android and ChromeOS in their entire supply chain for little to no gain, but they should have known that before they bought the company in the first place.
Except selective enforcement, even if that's what this was, can only be tyrannical if the law is already tyrannical. In a system like ours where the executive doesn't actually get to create law this means that through selective enforcement, even if that's what they were doing, is actually reducing the tyranny of the legislative branch.
On top of that, allowing the executive(that is to say the police) the ability to take into account circumstance and context is the only way in which any kind of justice can exist. The law is black and white, but real life quite often isn't, every single time that we try to reduce the ability of the executive and judicial branches to selectively enforce the will of congress, for example through minimum sentences, we make our country a worse place to live and less free. Yes selective enforcement allows for the opportunity for the wealthy to bribe their way out of power or for the poor to be made an example of, but it also allows for people to be offered second chances or for their circumstances to be taken into account.
The enforcers of the law can only truly be tyrants if they enforce laws which do not exist or if the laws that they enforce are tyrannical. We have the courts to protect us from the former, and selective enforcement is part of how the executive protects us from the latter.
That wasn't even close to my point. The police in Hicksville are doing what the residents if Hicksville want them to do which is crack down on undesirables. They wouldn't for one second get away with treating the town majority like that. It's not lck of oversight or the fact that control measures don't work. Not for the NSA, and not for the Hicksville PD, it's that we don't really want criminals to have civil rights because civil rights get in the way of arresting them.
Then FOSS offers a solution, code it yourself or pay someone else to code it for you. It'll probably cost you 5- 10 years of full time development or close to a million bucks to accomplish, but you have that option.
For whatever reason there simply aren't enough developers who have a professional music editing itch to scratch or perhaps there aren't enough with the same itch to scratch for anything much to get off the ground. Realistically it's not all that surprising that people who make their money out of content creation and copyright might not be the biggest proponents of FOSS and so not necessarily the most willing to sink huge amounts of time into it.
It's not about not being able to drink plain water, it's about how insane you'd go if you ate nothing but plain water for the rest of your life.
On top of that, once you've taken all this crap, processed it and dried it into a powder, shipped it across the country and then left it in your cupboard for a while, does it still have all those nutrients? Are they delivered in a more effective manner than vitamin pills(which are largely useless)? How do you ensure you're not getting too much of something? The guy in question even seems to have health problems associated with it, ones which seem to match the ones associated with tube feeding in general.
TL;DR; Even if it works, a longer life at what cost? There's evidence that castration will vastly increase your lifespan too, but I'm not lining up.
Of course people crossing a border pass that test. US Customs was created and empowered to search people crossing the borders by the people who actually created the constitution. Searching people and objects entering your country is something that law enforcement is empowered to do in every single country on earth and has always been empowered to do in every single country on earth.
They can't stop the officers of Hickville PD mostly because the community doesn't really have a problem with the abuses of Hickville PD.
You see, the citizens of Hickville don't much like African Americans or other minorities very much, they wouldn't say that to your face, but it the cops are hassling people, well they're probably criminals. Because they're in Hickville, the residents of Hickville are the only people who regularly see what they're doing and since those same residents actually approve of what they're doing nothing happens.
Bitcoin will eventually be deflationary because of the limited supply cap. The fact that we have things like fractional reserve banking increases the amount of time it could theoretically remain non deflationary, but there comes a point where if you made any more imaginary money the whole system will collapse and you need to make some more real money which bitcoin doesn't do.
The major problem with bitcoin however is that a fairly small number of people already have the vast majority of coins that can ever be mined. If you stuck the entire world onto bitcoins the few thousand people who currently own bitcoins would become richer than anyone who currently exists on earth while everyone else would be third world poor. Except of course that most of the people who had all those bitcoins would be incredibly asset poor and a lot of the people who didn't would be incredibly asset rich. You'd have extremely poor people who owned multi billion dollar companies and extremely rich people who didn't even own their own home. That's insane and won't work.
Our big challenge isn't to get the 1st and 4th amendments applied to the internet. The problem we have to resolve is how to expand our 1st and 4th amendment protections to cover all the information that can now be collected without making it illegal to walk down the street.
What the NSA is doing for the most part is collecting all the information that sits outside of what is actually protected by law, most of it has always been legal because it wasn't possible to use that mass of information to actually determine anything, now it is.
It's always been perfectly legal for the police to follow you everywhere you go on public property and write it down, it just wasn't cost effective to do it and the cops stuck out like a sore thumb, today we've all quite happily placed GPS tracking devices in our pockets so the police can get all that information without having to actually do any work and with modern computers they can actually process it.
Well it's incredibly unlikely that anyone will bother to ban bitcoins, nor have they actually done so in this case. The main reason why it's incredibly unlikely is that for any number of reasons it's appallingly unlikely that anyone sane will ever use bitcoins as any kind of real replacement currency. Not least of which being that everyone and everything has to have enough local currency on hand to pay their taxes and accepting more than one currency is inconvenient for most people. The fact that a valueless deflationary currency would actually destroy not help the economy is another.
What governments will do, as they have done in this case, is actually treat bitcoins exactly like a real honest to goodness currency and not play money. They'll then require that places that act like banks follow all the legislation which applies to banks and that you pay taxes on any money you earn in bitcoins. They might even let you start paying government fees in bitcoins because then they can work out which bitcoin wallet belongs to which person and then they'll have a whole bunch of dollars with their entire transaction history built in that they actually legally own so can legally read. Then the government will have a gigantic party because you've voluntarily given up something they had no idea how to get rid of and given them their surveillance wet dream.
I dunno, personally I think that a currency that is much easier to steal, much easier to lose, requires a functioning internet connection to use for anything at all, is by nature highly deflationary and which, just as an added bonus, contains its entire transaction history so that whoever has that coin can see exactly where it's come from is actually clear worse than anything we have now.
Just because you mine it doesn't mean that it's actually got any inherent value, it's even more worthless than gold and unlike the dollar it's not backed by the full faith and credit of the US government(for whatever that's worth these days). In terms of transactions you can send real money for pretty close to free as well, just stick cash in an envelope. Sure it won't necessarily get there on the other end, but that's what you actually pay for. A lot of people like the fact that you can reverse transactions to get back money someone stole from you to actually be a feature to.
There's certainly some validity to the arguments in favor of an electronic currency of some sort, but the idea that there's a single damned thing about bitcoin which is actually better than even some of the idiotic alternatives like gold backed dollars, is just insane.
The government didn't say no, they said "OK, here's all the paperwork you have to fill in to process currency exchange complete it or go to jail". This guy is going to spend several decades in a dark cell specifically because they are treating Bitcoin like an actual currency.