Russia and China oppose so much that they would be willing to send in their armies to counter anything America decides to field.
Yeah, that sounds like a whole lot of fun to me in terms of a "hot war" between nuclear powers. And of course that can never get out of control, can it?
um, you do know the USA and USSR just moved the violence and destruction to other countries right? Perhaps the world would have been better off for the last 70 years if they just took it out on each other and not played their stupidity out on the world stage.
Are you really sure of that? The option of "taking it out on each other" would have involved the rest of the world as well, as it would have been a genuine world war that has been calculated at various time to be killing off about 90% of mankind and causing such extreme harm to the environment from such an action that the remaining 10% would be wishing they were among that 90%. Screw worries about global warming and petty idiots like Assad being a jerk, even survivalists in Montana would be out of luck.
There is a damn good reason why that expected war didn't really happen with tanks running by each other in the Fulda region of Germany. Had it occurred, you would not be writing such an idiotic post like this. I seriously doubt that if you really thought through what you were writing, that you would think it was a good idea.
With due respect, I think the reason why there hasn't been a carpet bombed city is mainly because the advanced industrial nations have avoided direct confrontations between each other, and that the weapon of choice in such a situation is currently a thermonuclear bomb. Guided bombs are useful if you want to keep the wars "limited" and going after weak nations that thumb their nose at the larger countries.
If a major wars erupts between major military powers, I would say all bets are off. The interesting thing about Syria in particular (since this is the topic at hand) is with regards to whatever Russia may end up doing to support their ally. If American ships were involuntarily resting on the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, I think you might see some interesting changes in attitude towards these kind of weapons change.
The point of carpet bombing is to demoralize the population of a country so they would be encouraged to "give up" and possibly surrender to the attacking military force. As for how effective that can be is debatable. The bombing of London was pretty much irrelevant so far as giving reasons for the British people to give up, and the same could be pretty much said of Berlin in the 1940's as well. On the other hand, the nuclear bombs used in Japan were effective in terms of getting the Japanese Emperor involved in terms of stopping the war in the Pacific.
"the free inhabitants of each of these States, paupers, vagabonds, and fugitives from justice excepted, shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several States; and the people of each State shall have free ingress and regress to and from any other State, and shall enjoy therein all the privileges of trade and commerce"
-- Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, Article IV, Paragraph 1
This document is still technically a part of the United States Code, although I haven't seen it cited as rationale in a legal argument for preventing the "no fly list". This is also one of the few individual freedoms explicitly mentioned in founding documents that is not a part of the Constitution of 1787. As to if this document still holds legal weight could also be questioned, I suppose, but technically all the Constitution of 1787 did was update this document. It certainly puts such notions of "it is a privilege not a right" legal theories into serious question.
In other words, the right to travel is an explicitly granted constitutional right and not something that can be extrapolated more loosely from things like the 9th Amendment (which I think this quote amply shows something previously thought of as an individual right not to be eliminated by its absence in other legal documents).
You might be able to argue that the internal combustion engine itself is regulated and requires an operator's permit, although that is a real stretch. States simply can't prohibit either entry or exit of other otherwise legal citizens of other states and it can be assumed that includes travel internal to that state too.
The TSA wants to set up airport levels of security at train stations as well. It is just a matter of time. Heck, they tried to do that kind of security at bus terminals as well, but the bus companies really threw a fit and bitched to the proper congress critters and got that rule proposal killed and buried.
I'm just waiting for screening checkpoints along interstate highways every 20-50 miles or so. That ought to make life real fun.
The idea of a satellite was hardly a new idea in the 1950's. You can't even call that trail blazing other than showing it could be done at all.
I also disagree with your notion that the "data" that 'governments amassed" was necessary for commercial launch operators from being developed. Much of that data was started by efforts of several amateur rocketry clubs that had been created at the beginning of the 20th century based upon the work of Hermann Oberth and Robert Goddard, both of whom in turn leaned upon the efforts of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and his rocket equation.
I think you are placing far too much emphasis upon the role that governments played here in getting this working. No doubt government efforts accelerated development of spaceflight, but was it necessary for governments to get the ball rolling to make rockets work in the first place? I suppose we won't know because governments were involved heavily once actual hardware capable of going into space was developed, but I am suggesting otherwise.
Sputnik was a stripped down nuclear warhead missing the fissionable material itself and instead it had a very simple radio transmitter.
Also note that Telstar was launched just five years after Sputnik. Do you really think there was much of a technology transfer from the USSR to an American telecom company in the 1950's and 1960's?
And yes, I believe that without the massive race to build nuclear bombs and the Cold War that it is likely commercial spaceflight would have happened anyway. It may have been slower to get going and certainly done on a much smaller scale, but it likely would have happened. The rocket equation wasn't exactly a new concept in 1960, especially since the people you really need to give thanks to are the Germans of World War II that helped to build the V2.
With this statement you are presupposing that Telstar would never have been able to go into space had Sputnik never launched. I am suggesting that the two were not directly related incidents and indeed were contemporary of each other.
That is true, I'll grant you - but if the Government could be persuaded to fund it - why not the banks? (I'm guessing that the banks would have wanted too much in return)
If it is raining money, you haul out the buckets and fill them up first before borrowing money from your Aunt Erma.
The problem here is that competitors to SpaceX had their lobbyists in motion well before SpaceX got into the game and had these government loan programs in place to help out their buddies. That SpaceX happened to be in the right place at the right time to qualify for the same programs (they were competitors to SpaceX after all), SpaceX took the money and ran with it.
The banks charged a higher rate of interest and in some cases wouldn't loan the money no matter the interest rate because they (legitimately I might add) considered such business ventures to be extremely risky and not likely to succeed.
I'll also note that Elon Musk did get quite a bit of private capital that he raised from some of his friends and people that he knew from his earlier entrepreneurial activities including his experiences with PayPal. Indeed many of his PayPal co-founders and other related people are investors in both Tesla and SpaceX.
And who said that SpaceX doesn't have a line of credit with ordinary banks too? I'm pretty certain that they have those loans as well.
New stuff is usually government because profit-motivated people are risk averse. You are incorrectly assuming risk aversion in the current private space pioneers.
Profit motivated people are willing to take risks. The problem is that those risks need to be weighed against potential profit, and if the profit is high enough you will find people willing to finance you on something that is very risky.
That is the one way a government can really screw up things like risk taking, as having the government step in and take any profit or transfer that profit to a competitor upon your success is likely to simply get those investors to walk away and not bother. Even the threat of government involvement is usually sufficient, or an uncertainty in terms of knowing what the government will do if you are successful. That by far and away has been a huge problem with regards to private commercial spaceflight efforts in particular, as those private efforts have usually been thwarted by sometimes well meaning government interference or at least indifference.
The U.S. federal government had an aviation program under Samuel Langley. It cost $70k (in 1898 dollars) to fund his effort to launch an airplane into the Potomac River that ultimately ended up killing two pilots who tried and ended up as mostly a failure. A couple of bicycle mechanics from Ohio, using their own funds, ended up developing a much more successful airplane.
Commercial satellites are being launched by private companies because the government paved the way for them in the 1960s and 1970s.
Nope, you are wrong here.
Commercial satellites were first developed not by the good graces of the U.S. government, or even the Soviet Union for that matter. Instead the first practical communications satellite (and commercial satellite I would note too) was launched by AT&T as a part of the Telstar program Keep in mind that AT&T paid for the satellite development, paid for the rocket to launch it into space, and even paid for the launch pad services at a premium rate. Unfortunately the rocket and the launch pad were government owned and required special legislation to be passed by the U.S. Congress just for AT&T to be granted permission for the privilege of being able to go into space.
The other stupid thing about this whole venture by AT&T is that once they proved that commercial satellites could be successful, and furthermore that a real business opportunity existed so entrepreneurs could actually make money by sending satellites into space, special legislation was enacted that actually prohibited anybody else other than a competitor to AT&T could launch satellites into space. It was a forced government monopoly that essentially treated satellites as a regulated utility company.
Far from the government being a trailblazer of going forth and proving that satellites could work and earn money, the government actually screwed things up and prevented commercial spaceflight from happening for more than 40 years after commercial spaceflight efforts had been proven successful. I think that has damaged the U.S. economy and only in the past decade has commercial spaceflight efforts even been permitted to happen in meaningful ways that in earlier decades simply were illegal.
This lack of freedom to even try has been by far and away the worst part about government space policy in the 20th Century. I'm not even convinced that the government was the only option for developing rockets either, but the one thing that made building rockets so important to the government in the 1950's and 1960's (not so much in the 1970's) was that it provided a good platform to place nuclear bombs for ICBMs and shorter ranged missiles. The whole business of sending stuff into space was mainly a side-show of technology that could be reused for other things at the same time.
I'll also note that one of the reasons why the USSR achieved so many "firsts" early on with rockets is that the nuclear bombs they had to fly were so much larger than the bombs built by America that they simply needed the larger rockets. The same ICBM used to deliver the huge nuke to America could also be used to launch a capsule big enough to carry a cosmonaut into space.
Note also that by about 1970, the needs of missiles and the needs of vehicles going into space diverged enough that they became different vehicles. The design requirements for an ICBM is not the same as what you want to use for sending "fragile cargo" up into space including communications satellites or crewed vehicles. This is also why funding for spaceflight in both the USA and the USSR was cut substantially, even though the public relations benefits from continuing the spaceflight programs still had some benefit. This is also why Neil deGrasse Tyson's notion of government funded space is never going to happen either, as there is no purpose other than minor public relations benefits to the governments involved to see that it occurs.
The first NASA astronauts going to Mars will be greeted by a crew from CNN covering the landing live on the ground under the lander... and a party will be held honoring their arrival when the rest of the people in that part of Mars gather together for the celebration. NASA astronauts or for that matter government employees will not be the first to go there.
The problem with an entrepreneur making a profit in space is getting cooperation from government to get that to happen. Note that I'm not saying that the government must necessarily subsidize the venture, but it is possible to set up a "business climate" that encourages or discourages entrepreneurial activity in space.
Two big examples for how the U.S. government basically killed entrepreneurial spaceflight activity:
Space Services, Inc. designed and built the Conestoga rocket. They got to the working hardware stage of development which actual flights of the hardware (most rocket launching companies don't even get that far). While there were admittedly problems with quality control and other problems, the primary issue that this company faced was competition from the Space Shuttle program, where NASA claimed commercial customers could buy launching services for about $1000 per pound to low-Earth orbit. This basically threw out the business case for Space Services to continue developing this rocket, thus they bailed out. The funny thing is that NASA never delivered on that promise of commercial launches and the Space Shuttle never could have been able to fly payloads at that price even if commercial payloads were actually flowing freely like was originally promised.
The OTRAG rocket wasn't even manufactured by an American company, but instead was mostly composed of European investors and engineers. Again they got to the working hardware stage of development and even started to build some launch sites for their rockets.... except those launch sites were located in "sensitive countries" like Libya and Zaire (now called Congo again). Intense diplomatic pressure (perhaps justified) was employed by the U.S. government to kill the development of this rocket, not to mention that Arianespace had formed as a competitor (government funded as well... something OTRAG didn't have) so all further permits were cancelled.
The interesting thing is that more recently there was sort of the opposite sort of anti-entrepreneurial activity that took place, especially following the success of the Ansari X-Prize when Burt Rutan's Spaceship One finally made a successful series of sub-orbital flights. Noting that Scaled Composites was hardly the only company, the Office of Commercial Spaceflight was established to at the very least permit entrepreneurs to try and see if they can make a commercial effort in space. It also doesn't hurt that existing government launcher efforts like the Constellation program and the SLS have proven to be so horribly uneconomical in their operations and development that the case for commercial launcher operations is basically a slam dunk business case at the moment.
What I'm trying to say is that the government can either encourage private entrepreneurial efforts in this regard, or they can completely screw them up so they would never be successful no matter how hard these entrepreneurs try. Also, spaceflight really is a very capital intensive business. Not nearly so much as petroleum exploration and refining (which definitely has much more capital tied up in those business), but unfortunately space transportation services is also a razor thin profit margin as well. In the words of Elon Musk, commercial spaceflight launchers is an excellent way to turn billionaires into millionaires.
But for pure tracking purposes, BitCoin is a dream - all the data is owned by everyone all the time as a nature of the protocol, so you can build social graphs and run correlation functions as much as you want.
The "trick" to Bitcoin tracking is trying to correlate the various addresses of the protocol to specific people. Once that is done, yes it gets much easier to do things that at least get to the level of marketing analytics which can identify somebody who drinks coffee, drives a Tesla automobile, and buys organic food sold in Oregon (or something like that). It certainly could be at least a marketer's dream in terms of following both number of transactions and quantities of money spent that follows from one kind of business to another. Even if you can't identify individual customers, you certainly can see that individual Bitcoin pools have been spent on various merchants and can even make temporal relations (aka they buy coffee on Monday, and it appears that their paycheck comes in on Thursday where they do several purchases at once on that day). Admittedly that can also be used to identify individual consumers by name from other data sources, which is where your identity is compromised.
How do you do any of the above without tying any personally identifying information (such as IP address) to that wallet address?
The IP address of transactions is not recorded in the block chain logs, and the only "person" that would "know" what IP address is associated with a particular wallet or transaction would be any node on the network (these are peer-to-peer nodes, not a central server) which receives the transaction information. Those transactions then get passed around from node to node gradually being accumulated to produce blocks made by the miners.
Basically, the wallet information itself isn't the weak part of the concept. What gets the identity compromised is if you coordinate a particular wallet ID (usually the "bitcoin address") with an IP number or URL external to the Bitcoin protocol itself, such as posting the Bitcoin address on a website or in a Twitter Tweet.
So perhaps you would have preferred if, for example, the US had stayed out of WWII and the extermination camps had continued ? Perhaps the Axis would have won and there would be no jews at all left in the world. This would have been acceptable to you?
You're assuming that leaving is a realistic possibility when, for many, it is not.
On top of that, being a refugee with no money, no belongings, no rights leads to such things as having to sell your daughter's body to be able to survive. Would you do that, rather than ask for foreign intervention to stop the use of chemical weapons where you live?
But why should you care about such things? After all, it isn't happening on your side of the street.
Two things that are extremely important to note about World War II:
First of all, actual acts of war happened upon America where military personnel serving in a combat situation died.... several thousand of them in fact. I will dare say that the existence of America was directly at stake. Certainly there were plans drawn up to conquer America, and actions which indicated that it would happen.
Furthermore, from an authority no less than the memoirs and writings of Franklin D. Roosevelt, there was very little change in war plans and in particular no consideration for even entering World War II due to "human rights abuses" by the Nazi government.
Frankly, even bringing this up in this context is totally out of line and unwarranted in terms of trying to justify a rationale for going to war in a minor country which poses no direct threat beyond the borders of Syria. I'll also note that the "international law" here is real murky... as noted by Parliament as well. That admittedly political body chose not to intervene for pretty much the same reasons I gave above.
Again, you seem to be mistaking the idea that international law is something like legislation passed by a parliamentary body. At best international law is more akin to a contract signed voluntarily between nations like a contract to buy or sell a house or car is between people. How you can assert that a country which didn't even sign most of these treaties you are claiming they are held under can be invaded militarily according to a provision that doesn't even exist in these treaties is beyond me.
I don't buy the notion that all "weapons of mass destruction" are equal.... if you are really talking about red herrings.
America has had a general policy that any "weapons of mass destruction" used against America would result in retaliation via "weapons of mass destruction". One tiny problem with that: The only WMDs that America openly admits to be using right now are thermonuclear weapons.
The Assad government of Syria may or may not have used some sort of chemical weapons against about a hundred unprepared and unarmed civilians. That is the crux to the whole thing, and a few hundred people died. Is it legitimate to in turn use a nuke on a random city in Syria because that happened? That is essentially the only valid response here, and for myself it really doesn't make sense to go down that path either. Talk about a disproportionate response.
Please excise that stupid term "WMD" and get rid of it and trample it to death as well. It is a part of a Cold War mentality that was deliberately chosen as a trigger for starting a nuclear war, thus a reason why you wouldn't want to be caught using those kind of weapons. I'm not suggesting that the use of chemical weapons should be endorsed either, but get a grip upon what actually happened here. I don't know why chemical weapons are even in that part of the world in the first place, but I'd also suggest that you follow the money trail and note it likely leads to countries like the UK and USA... including the source of such weapons.
And for goodness sake.... do you really want to see a global thermonuclear war happen right now? That seems to be precisely what you are advocating here, and I am strongly saying that in this particular situation perhaps it is better to ignore a couple hundred dead Syrians than to see the resulting deaths of literally billions of people and possibly the destruction of this entire planet all for the sake of avenging those couple hundred people. Get your priorities straight and note you are likely going to be included in those billions of people who are going to die.... and I am presuming I will likely be among that number too. That certainly is the real danger that the world is facing if "a clear message" is sent that can be remotely effective to ensure Syria won't use chemical weapons again.
In this case, the "n" is the number of customers and people using the exchange although explicitly it is the number of transactions between Bitcoin customers and the exchange in a given period of time between when you put your money into the exchange and when it gets pulled out. That certainly can approach numbers on a similar scale of complexity approaching modern cryptography (assuming >O(n^2) is correct).... or at least the software used to untangle those transactions would need to be of similar complexity as cracking some modern encryption methods including what is being used for Bitcoin storage itself.
I really doubt this is a O(n) type of problem, sort of what you are implying here. A thousand transactions a day or more and trying to match specific incoming transactions with outgoing transactions would be a real guessing game... and that is a very small exchange. As far as how Bitcoin is going to survive under transaction loads approaching that of major stock exchanges like the NYSE or NASDAQ, that has been a subject of substantial speculation over the years as well. On the positive side, the transaction fees for such transaction volume will be positively huge and will far overwhelm anything miners get from the raw Bitcoin creation so those involved in running the network will be smiling all of the way to the bank if that happens.
Regardless, the question of who owns the moon is a serious question (there are even treaties related to it.
Yes, there are treaties about land use on the Moon. Essentially, it creates such a murky legal morass about actual ownership that very likely anybody who goes there (or other places in the Solar System) will completely ignore those treaties and just do their own damn thing and work out a completely separate legal framework. Those treaties were strongly biased in favor of a Communist ideal of land ownership... essentially that "the state" owned everything thus individuals could own nothing. In the context of those treaties, the USSR (not even Russia) wanted to ensure America nor any other country could claim those parts of the Moon before they got there first.
Really, they are unworkable solutions and if anybody wants to really do something on the Moon, a completely new from scratch legal framework needs to be established. Right now the realistic framework is that the law will be provided by Smith & Wesson with a bit of "stay off my front porch". That sounds real promising. It also includes "I got the bigger gun, so get out of my way and I want your stuff too".
Regardless of why US supported Iraq back then, that support involved knowing and approving of the use of poison gas by Iraqis, to the point of designating targets for them (thankfully, only military - the Kurdish villages that Saddam gassed were his own pickings).
Are you suggesting that the Bush I administration deliberately planned and approved the deliberate use of poison gas by Iraq upon its own citizens, in particular the Kurds?
No doubt Iraq and Saddam Hussein planned and used those weapons. That is also the reason why a decade later it was presumed that Iraq still had those weapons, since they had previously been used. Perhaps that was some grand conspiracy on the part of the "globalists" who wanted to set up Saddam Hussein as the fall guy for using weapons and then being accused of using them as rationale for going to war to remove him from power.
That sounds like one hell of an elaborate plan to me. Care to tell me other conspiracy theories?
You suppose wrong. The UN is not about moral authority. The UN's purpose is to maintain peace and stability. Peace, as it turns out, just means "no (major, costly) war", and stability usually only means "for the (top) member nations", so it might mean letting dictatorships persist because the tyrant is good at containing war to their own little pocket hell hole, or intervening with local civil wars (with the most moral noble goals) because that hell hole might spread.
The purpose of the United Nations was to defeat Adolph Hitler and to eradicate Fascism from the Earth. That was its founding purpose, and the only actual accomplishment that can be said really mattered. The other stuff added was fluff and a decision that the alliance to defeat Hitler could be made permanent so everybody could continue to work together for common purposes that might from time to time come up over the years afterward. Because Hitler lost, the only political and military forces that were left was the United Nations, thus "they" ended up ruling the Earth. That is hardly a smart way to establish a new "government" and is fraught with all kinds of problems.
Maintaining peace and stability is really not an objective of the UN. It may be a sort of side effect of many actions taken by the major nations involved, but otherwise the UN mostly becomes an interesting international debate society as there is no real authority for anything done at the UN to really become effective... especially as a matter of law. Some convention has occurred where some countries try to go to the UN first for "approval" as a means to justify their actions, but the real teeth behind any of those actions is basically the original military alliance that started the whole thing in the first place.
This is where the "moral authority" comes from, as a country who has received "approval" from the other UN members (especially in the security council), it is considered a "legitimate and valid war". The only real authority that the UN exercises is within the physical boundaries of the UN building in New York and the other related buildings found elsewhere around the world.
This whole exercise reminds me of an experience of trying to do telephone support for a guy setting up the control system for one of the signs on Times Square in NYC. I spent about 3 hours troubleshooting over the phone, and the system finally came up about 5 seconds before the "big boss" who paid for the sign showed up to take a look at what all his money purchased.
I've also taken calls from freeways and sports arenas during the middle of a game (when cell phone coverage drops to nothing due to everybody at the event having a cell phone and overloading the local towers).
Yeah, I can relate as I've done all that and more.
The only anonymous in Bitcoin transaction is one where you hand someone the "wallet". Transferring your secrets, especially by hand, is as anonymous as handing cash to someone, but that's not really the intended model, or a particularly useful one.
That is how the physical bitcoins themselves work. The authentication keys are printed on the note or physical coin which can be converted back to electronic currency at any time by the recipient. They can also be verified during each transaction for the paranoid, even though there is an element of trust involved.
There is also the "sneaker net" version of bitcoin transactions which also could work as well, for at least exchanging bitcoins from one person to another if you want to perform "off-grid" transactions. With that version of transaction (assuming the network itself is down) is that you build up the transaction history that gets posted globally once you get back to a computer which is connected to the internet. As long as you have a Raspberry Pi computer (or equivalent) and some sort of power source, including a solar panel, you could certainly conduct Bitcoin transactions with comparable security. There is a slim potential of double spending in such a situation, but even that could be verified or at least caught. Double spending would definitely be caught by the global network and such transactions would be invalidated.
If they can prove that your bitcoin came from the money laundering bank, they got you for money laundering. No link to the original crime necessary for that, since money laundering is a crime itself. They'll probably also find hints about the true origin when they study your confiscated computers.
Which is why you would use a legitimate exchange or some other website that "holds" your bitcoins temporarily for some sort of speculation. Mt. Gox used to be a perfect site for something like that as it was commonly used for things far beyond just laundering the coins.
I would envision that eventually there will be some legal requirements for anybody running such websites that will require some formal authentication even to just "day trade" on the exchange. Some of the exchanges formerly allowed you to join in the speculation without authentication as long as you didn't request the actual monetary units (Euros, Dollars, Rubles, and other currencies were used with some exchanges I have interacted with). In that way you could speculate with Bitcoins, buy up the government-backed currencies, then sell them back at hopefully a profit. This was even seen as a positive feature of the exchange at the time.
Because there are legitimate uses for such transactions, it would be incredibly difficult to prove that the purpose of the exchange was just laundering. If you are dumping money into exchanges that openly brag they are being used just for laundering, yeah that could be much more problematic.
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Russia and China oppose so much that they would be willing to send in their armies to counter anything America decides to field.
Yeah, that sounds like a whole lot of fun to me in terms of a "hot war" between nuclear powers. And of course that can never get out of control, can it?
um, you do know the USA and USSR just moved the violence and destruction to other countries right? Perhaps the world would have been better off for the last 70 years if they just took it out on each other and not played their stupidity out on the world stage.
Are you really sure of that? The option of "taking it out on each other" would have involved the rest of the world as well, as it would have been a genuine world war that has been calculated at various time to be killing off about 90% of mankind and causing such extreme harm to the environment from such an action that the remaining 10% would be wishing they were among that 90%. Screw worries about global warming and petty idiots like Assad being a jerk, even survivalists in Montana would be out of luck.
There is a damn good reason why that expected war didn't really happen with tanks running by each other in the Fulda region of Germany. Had it occurred, you would not be writing such an idiotic post like this. I seriously doubt that if you really thought through what you were writing, that you would think it was a good idea.
um, if you stay out of the fight then you lose to Russia. Do you really think that's going to happen?
If you stay out of the fight, then you don't lose to Russia. Yeah, I think that is a pretty reasonable outcome.
Why do you want to pick on Russia? Is it a death wish, or just hoping you might be stronger than they are?
With due respect, I think the reason why there hasn't been a carpet bombed city is mainly because the advanced industrial nations have avoided direct confrontations between each other, and that the weapon of choice in such a situation is currently a thermonuclear bomb. Guided bombs are useful if you want to keep the wars "limited" and going after weak nations that thumb their nose at the larger countries.
If a major wars erupts between major military powers, I would say all bets are off. The interesting thing about Syria in particular (since this is the topic at hand) is with regards to whatever Russia may end up doing to support their ally. If American ships were involuntarily resting on the bottom of the Mediterranean Sea, I think you might see some interesting changes in attitude towards these kind of weapons change.
The point of carpet bombing is to demoralize the population of a country so they would be encouraged to "give up" and possibly surrender to the attacking military force. As for how effective that can be is debatable. The bombing of London was pretty much irrelevant so far as giving reasons for the British people to give up, and the same could be pretty much said of Berlin in the 1940's as well. On the other hand, the nuclear bombs used in Japan were effective in terms of getting the Japanese Emperor involved in terms of stopping the war in the Pacific.
And of course the 9th Amendment doesn't really apply to ordinary citizens. I got that.
So you are telling me that we don't have a constitutional right to freely travel?
There is no Right to Drive in the US, where driving is a rather a privilege.
In the Articles of Confederation, the following right is explicitly granted:
"the free inhabitants of each of these States, paupers, vagabonds, and fugitives from justice excepted, shall be entitled to all privileges and immunities of free citizens in the several States; and the people of each State shall have free ingress and regress to and from any other State, and shall enjoy therein all the privileges of trade and commerce"
-- Articles of Confederation and Perpetual Union, Article IV, Paragraph 1
This document is still technically a part of the United States Code, although I haven't seen it cited as rationale in a legal argument for preventing the "no fly list". This is also one of the few individual freedoms explicitly mentioned in founding documents that is not a part of the Constitution of 1787. As to if this document still holds legal weight could also be questioned, I suppose, but technically all the Constitution of 1787 did was update this document. It certainly puts such notions of "it is a privilege not a right" legal theories into serious question.
In other words, the right to travel is an explicitly granted constitutional right and not something that can be extrapolated more loosely from things like the 9th Amendment (which I think this quote amply shows something previously thought of as an individual right not to be eliminated by its absence in other legal documents).
You might be able to argue that the internal combustion engine itself is regulated and requires an operator's permit, although that is a real stretch. States simply can't prohibit either entry or exit of other otherwise legal citizens of other states and it can be assumed that includes travel internal to that state too.
at least for distances like from SF to LA.
The TSA wants to set up airport levels of security at train stations as well. It is just a matter of time. Heck, they tried to do that kind of security at bus terminals as well, but the bus companies really threw a fit and bitched to the proper congress critters and got that rule proposal killed and buried.
I'm just waiting for screening checkpoints along interstate highways every 20-50 miles or so. That ought to make life real fun.
The idea of a satellite was hardly a new idea in the 1950's. You can't even call that trail blazing other than showing it could be done at all.
I also disagree with your notion that the "data" that 'governments amassed" was necessary for commercial launch operators from being developed. Much of that data was started by efforts of several amateur rocketry clubs that had been created at the beginning of the 20th century based upon the work of Hermann Oberth and Robert Goddard, both of whom in turn leaned upon the efforts of Konstantin Tsiolkovsky and his rocket equation.
I think you are placing far too much emphasis upon the role that governments played here in getting this working. No doubt government efforts accelerated development of spaceflight, but was it necessary for governments to get the ball rolling to make rockets work in the first place? I suppose we won't know because governments were involved heavily once actual hardware capable of going into space was developed, but I am suggesting otherwise.
Sputnik was a stripped down nuclear warhead missing the fissionable material itself and instead it had a very simple radio transmitter.
Also note that Telstar was launched just five years after Sputnik. Do you really think there was much of a technology transfer from the USSR to an American telecom company in the 1950's and 1960's?
And yes, I believe that without the massive race to build nuclear bombs and the Cold War that it is likely commercial spaceflight would have happened anyway. It may have been slower to get going and certainly done on a much smaller scale, but it likely would have happened. The rocket equation wasn't exactly a new concept in 1960, especially since the people you really need to give thanks to are the Germans of World War II that helped to build the V2.
With this statement you are presupposing that Telstar would never have been able to go into space had Sputnik never launched. I am suggesting that the two were not directly related incidents and indeed were contemporary of each other.
That is true, I'll grant you - but if the Government could be persuaded to fund it - why not the banks? (I'm guessing that the banks would have wanted too much in return)
If it is raining money, you haul out the buckets and fill them up first before borrowing money from your Aunt Erma.
The problem here is that competitors to SpaceX had their lobbyists in motion well before SpaceX got into the game and had these government loan programs in place to help out their buddies. That SpaceX happened to be in the right place at the right time to qualify for the same programs (they were competitors to SpaceX after all), SpaceX took the money and ran with it.
The banks charged a higher rate of interest and in some cases wouldn't loan the money no matter the interest rate because they (legitimately I might add) considered such business ventures to be extremely risky and not likely to succeed.
I'll also note that Elon Musk did get quite a bit of private capital that he raised from some of his friends and people that he knew from his earlier entrepreneurial activities including his experiences with PayPal. Indeed many of his PayPal co-founders and other related people are investors in both Tesla and SpaceX.
And who said that SpaceX doesn't have a line of credit with ordinary banks too? I'm pretty certain that they have those loans as well.
New stuff is usually government because profit-motivated people are risk averse. You are incorrectly assuming risk aversion in the current private space pioneers.
Profit motivated people are willing to take risks. The problem is that those risks need to be weighed against potential profit, and if the profit is high enough you will find people willing to finance you on something that is very risky.
That is the one way a government can really screw up things like risk taking, as having the government step in and take any profit or transfer that profit to a competitor upon your success is likely to simply get those investors to walk away and not bother. Even the threat of government involvement is usually sufficient, or an uncertainty in terms of knowing what the government will do if you are successful. That by far and away has been a huge problem with regards to private commercial spaceflight efforts in particular, as those private efforts have usually been thwarted by sometimes well meaning government interference or at least indifference.
The U.S. federal government had an aviation program under Samuel Langley. It cost $70k (in 1898 dollars) to fund his effort to launch an airplane into the Potomac River that ultimately ended up killing two pilots who tried and ended up as mostly a failure. A couple of bicycle mechanics from Ohio, using their own funds, ended up developing a much more successful airplane.
Commercial satellites are being launched by private companies because the government paved the way for them in the 1960s and 1970s.
Nope, you are wrong here.
Commercial satellites were first developed not by the good graces of the U.S. government, or even the Soviet Union for that matter. Instead the first practical communications satellite (and commercial satellite I would note too) was launched by AT&T as a part of the Telstar program Keep in mind that AT&T paid for the satellite development, paid for the rocket to launch it into space, and even paid for the launch pad services at a premium rate. Unfortunately the rocket and the launch pad were government owned and required special legislation to be passed by the U.S. Congress just for AT&T to be granted permission for the privilege of being able to go into space.
The other stupid thing about this whole venture by AT&T is that once they proved that commercial satellites could be successful, and furthermore that a real business opportunity existed so entrepreneurs could actually make money by sending satellites into space, special legislation was enacted that actually prohibited anybody else other than a competitor to AT&T could launch satellites into space. It was a forced government monopoly that essentially treated satellites as a regulated utility company.
Far from the government being a trailblazer of going forth and proving that satellites could work and earn money, the government actually screwed things up and prevented commercial spaceflight from happening for more than 40 years after commercial spaceflight efforts had been proven successful. I think that has damaged the U.S. economy and only in the past decade has commercial spaceflight efforts even been permitted to happen in meaningful ways that in earlier decades simply were illegal.
This lack of freedom to even try has been by far and away the worst part about government space policy in the 20th Century. I'm not even convinced that the government was the only option for developing rockets either, but the one thing that made building rockets so important to the government in the 1950's and 1960's (not so much in the 1970's) was that it provided a good platform to place nuclear bombs for ICBMs and shorter ranged missiles. The whole business of sending stuff into space was mainly a side-show of technology that could be reused for other things at the same time.
I'll also note that one of the reasons why the USSR achieved so many "firsts" early on with rockets is that the nuclear bombs they had to fly were so much larger than the bombs built by America that they simply needed the larger rockets. The same ICBM used to deliver the huge nuke to America could also be used to launch a capsule big enough to carry a cosmonaut into space.
Note also that by about 1970, the needs of missiles and the needs of vehicles going into space diverged enough that they became different vehicles. The design requirements for an ICBM is not the same as what you want to use for sending "fragile cargo" up into space including communications satellites or crewed vehicles. This is also why funding for spaceflight in both the USA and the USSR was cut substantially, even though the public relations benefits from continuing the spaceflight programs still had some benefit. This is also why Neil deGrasse Tyson's notion of government funded space is never going to happen either, as there is no purpose other than minor public relations benefits to the governments involved to see that it occurs.
The first NASA astronauts going to Mars will be greeted by a crew from CNN covering the landing live on the ground under the lander... and a party will be held honoring their arrival when the rest of the people in that part of Mars gather together for the celebration. NASA astronauts or for that matter government employees will not be the first to go there.
The problem with an entrepreneur making a profit in space is getting cooperation from government to get that to happen. Note that I'm not saying that the government must necessarily subsidize the venture, but it is possible to set up a "business climate" that encourages or discourages entrepreneurial activity in space.
Two big examples for how the U.S. government basically killed entrepreneurial spaceflight activity:
Space Services, Inc. designed and built the Conestoga rocket. They got to the working hardware stage of development which actual flights of the hardware (most rocket launching companies don't even get that far). While there were admittedly problems with quality control and other problems, the primary issue that this company faced was competition from the Space Shuttle program, where NASA claimed commercial customers could buy launching services for about $1000 per pound to low-Earth orbit. This basically threw out the business case for Space Services to continue developing this rocket, thus they bailed out. The funny thing is that NASA never delivered on that promise of commercial launches and the Space Shuttle never could have been able to fly payloads at that price even if commercial payloads were actually flowing freely like was originally promised.
The OTRAG rocket wasn't even manufactured by an American company, but instead was mostly composed of European investors and engineers. Again they got to the working hardware stage of development and even started to build some launch sites for their rockets.... except those launch sites were located in "sensitive countries" like Libya and Zaire (now called Congo again). Intense diplomatic pressure (perhaps justified) was employed by the U.S. government to kill the development of this rocket, not to mention that Arianespace had formed as a competitor (government funded as well... something OTRAG didn't have) so all further permits were cancelled.
The interesting thing is that more recently there was sort of the opposite sort of anti-entrepreneurial activity that took place, especially following the success of the Ansari X-Prize when Burt Rutan's Spaceship One finally made a successful series of sub-orbital flights. Noting that Scaled Composites was hardly the only company, the Office of Commercial Spaceflight was established to at the very least permit entrepreneurs to try and see if they can make a commercial effort in space. It also doesn't hurt that existing government launcher efforts like the Constellation program and the SLS have proven to be so horribly uneconomical in their operations and development that the case for commercial launcher operations is basically a slam dunk business case at the moment.
What I'm trying to say is that the government can either encourage private entrepreneurial efforts in this regard, or they can completely screw them up so they would never be successful no matter how hard these entrepreneurs try. Also, spaceflight really is a very capital intensive business. Not nearly so much as petroleum exploration and refining (which definitely has much more capital tied up in those business), but unfortunately space transportation services is also a razor thin profit margin as well. In the words of Elon Musk, commercial spaceflight launchers is an excellent way to turn billionaires into millionaires.
But for pure tracking purposes, BitCoin is a dream - all the data is owned by everyone all the time as a nature of the protocol, so you can build social graphs and run correlation functions as much as you want.
The "trick" to Bitcoin tracking is trying to correlate the various addresses of the protocol to specific people. Once that is done, yes it gets much easier to do things that at least get to the level of marketing analytics which can identify somebody who drinks coffee, drives a Tesla automobile, and buys organic food sold in Oregon (or something like that). It certainly could be at least a marketer's dream in terms of following both number of transactions and quantities of money spent that follows from one kind of business to another. Even if you can't identify individual customers, you certainly can see that individual Bitcoin pools have been spent on various merchants and can even make temporal relations (aka they buy coffee on Monday, and it appears that their paycheck comes in on Thursday where they do several purchases at once on that day). Admittedly that can also be used to identify individual consumers by name from other data sources, which is where your identity is compromised.
How do you do any of the above without tying any personally identifying information (such as IP address) to that wallet address?
The IP address of transactions is not recorded in the block chain logs, and the only "person" that would "know" what IP address is associated with a particular wallet or transaction would be any node on the network (these are peer-to-peer nodes, not a central server) which receives the transaction information. Those transactions then get passed around from node to node gradually being accumulated to produce blocks made by the miners.
Basically, the wallet information itself isn't the weak part of the concept. What gets the identity compromised is if you coordinate a particular wallet ID (usually the "bitcoin address") with an IP number or URL external to the Bitcoin protocol itself, such as posting the Bitcoin address on a website or in a Twitter Tweet.
So perhaps you would have preferred if, for example, the US had stayed out of WWII and the extermination camps had continued ? Perhaps the Axis would have won and there would be no jews at all left in the world. This would have been acceptable to you?
You're assuming that leaving is a realistic possibility when, for many, it is not.
On top of that, being a refugee with no money, no belongings, no rights leads to such things as having to sell your daughter's body to be able to survive. Would you do that, rather than ask for foreign intervention to stop the use of chemical weapons where you live?
But why should you care about such things? After all, it isn't happening on your side of the street.
Two things that are extremely important to note about World War II:
First of all, actual acts of war happened upon America where military personnel serving in a combat situation died.... several thousand of them in fact. I will dare say that the existence of America was directly at stake. Certainly there were plans drawn up to conquer America, and actions which indicated that it would happen.
Furthermore, from an authority no less than the memoirs and writings of Franklin D. Roosevelt, there was very little change in war plans and in particular no consideration for even entering World War II due to "human rights abuses" by the Nazi government.
Frankly, even bringing this up in this context is totally out of line and unwarranted in terms of trying to justify a rationale for going to war in a minor country which poses no direct threat beyond the borders of Syria. I'll also note that the "international law" here is real murky... as noted by Parliament as well. That admittedly political body chose not to intervene for pretty much the same reasons I gave above.
Again, you seem to be mistaking the idea that international law is something like legislation passed by a parliamentary body. At best international law is more akin to a contract signed voluntarily between nations like a contract to buy or sell a house or car is between people. How you can assert that a country which didn't even sign most of these treaties you are claiming they are held under can be invaded militarily according to a provision that doesn't even exist in these treaties is beyond me.
I don't buy the notion that all "weapons of mass destruction" are equal.... if you are really talking about red herrings.
America has had a general policy that any "weapons of mass destruction" used against America would result in retaliation via "weapons of mass destruction". One tiny problem with that: The only WMDs that America openly admits to be using right now are thermonuclear weapons.
The Assad government of Syria may or may not have used some sort of chemical weapons against about a hundred unprepared and unarmed civilians. That is the crux to the whole thing, and a few hundred people died. Is it legitimate to in turn use a nuke on a random city in Syria because that happened? That is essentially the only valid response here, and for myself it really doesn't make sense to go down that path either. Talk about a disproportionate response.
Please excise that stupid term "WMD" and get rid of it and trample it to death as well. It is a part of a Cold War mentality that was deliberately chosen as a trigger for starting a nuclear war, thus a reason why you wouldn't want to be caught using those kind of weapons. I'm not suggesting that the use of chemical weapons should be endorsed either, but get a grip upon what actually happened here. I don't know why chemical weapons are even in that part of the world in the first place, but I'd also suggest that you follow the money trail and note it likely leads to countries like the UK and USA... including the source of such weapons.
And for goodness sake.... do you really want to see a global thermonuclear war happen right now? That seems to be precisely what you are advocating here, and I am strongly saying that in this particular situation perhaps it is better to ignore a couple hundred dead Syrians than to see the resulting deaths of literally billions of people and possibly the destruction of this entire planet all for the sake of avenging those couple hundred people. Get your priorities straight and note you are likely going to be included in those billions of people who are going to die.... and I am presuming I will likely be among that number too. That certainly is the real danger that the world is facing if "a clear message" is sent that can be remotely effective to ensure Syria won't use chemical weapons again.
In this case, the "n" is the number of customers and people using the exchange although explicitly it is the number of transactions between Bitcoin customers and the exchange in a given period of time between when you put your money into the exchange and when it gets pulled out. That certainly can approach numbers on a similar scale of complexity approaching modern cryptography (assuming >O(n^2) is correct).... or at least the software used to untangle those transactions would need to be of similar complexity as cracking some modern encryption methods including what is being used for Bitcoin storage itself.
I really doubt this is a O(n) type of problem, sort of what you are implying here. A thousand transactions a day or more and trying to match specific incoming transactions with outgoing transactions would be a real guessing game... and that is a very small exchange. As far as how Bitcoin is going to survive under transaction loads approaching that of major stock exchanges like the NYSE or NASDAQ, that has been a subject of substantial speculation over the years as well. On the positive side, the transaction fees for such transaction volume will be positively huge and will far overwhelm anything miners get from the raw Bitcoin creation so those involved in running the network will be smiling all of the way to the bank if that happens.
Regardless, the question of who owns the moon is a serious question (there are even treaties related to it.
Yes, there are treaties about land use on the Moon. Essentially, it creates such a murky legal morass about actual ownership that very likely anybody who goes there (or other places in the Solar System) will completely ignore those treaties and just do their own damn thing and work out a completely separate legal framework. Those treaties were strongly biased in favor of a Communist ideal of land ownership... essentially that "the state" owned everything thus individuals could own nothing. In the context of those treaties, the USSR (not even Russia) wanted to ensure America nor any other country could claim those parts of the Moon before they got there first.
Really, they are unworkable solutions and if anybody wants to really do something on the Moon, a completely new from scratch legal framework needs to be established. Right now the realistic framework is that the law will be provided by Smith & Wesson with a bit of "stay off my front porch". That sounds real promising. It also includes "I got the bigger gun, so get out of my way and I want your stuff too".
Regardless of why US supported Iraq back then, that support involved knowing and approving of the use of poison gas by Iraqis, to the point of designating targets for them (thankfully, only military - the Kurdish villages that Saddam gassed were his own pickings).
Are you suggesting that the Bush I administration deliberately planned and approved the deliberate use of poison gas by Iraq upon its own citizens, in particular the Kurds?
No doubt Iraq and Saddam Hussein planned and used those weapons. That is also the reason why a decade later it was presumed that Iraq still had those weapons, since they had previously been used. Perhaps that was some grand conspiracy on the part of the "globalists" who wanted to set up Saddam Hussein as the fall guy for using weapons and then being accused of using them as rationale for going to war to remove him from power.
That sounds like one hell of an elaborate plan to me. Care to tell me other conspiracy theories?
You suppose wrong. The UN is not about moral authority. The UN's purpose is to maintain peace and stability. Peace, as it turns out, just means "no (major, costly) war", and stability usually only means "for the (top) member nations", so it might mean letting dictatorships persist because the tyrant is good at containing war to their own little pocket hell hole, or intervening with local civil wars (with the most moral noble goals) because that hell hole might spread.
The purpose of the United Nations was to defeat Adolph Hitler and to eradicate Fascism from the Earth. That was its founding purpose, and the only actual accomplishment that can be said really mattered. The other stuff added was fluff and a decision that the alliance to defeat Hitler could be made permanent so everybody could continue to work together for common purposes that might from time to time come up over the years afterward. Because Hitler lost, the only political and military forces that were left was the United Nations, thus "they" ended up ruling the Earth. That is hardly a smart way to establish a new "government" and is fraught with all kinds of problems.
Maintaining peace and stability is really not an objective of the UN. It may be a sort of side effect of many actions taken by the major nations involved, but otherwise the UN mostly becomes an interesting international debate society as there is no real authority for anything done at the UN to really become effective... especially as a matter of law. Some convention has occurred where some countries try to go to the UN first for "approval" as a means to justify their actions, but the real teeth behind any of those actions is basically the original military alliance that started the whole thing in the first place.
This is where the "moral authority" comes from, as a country who has received "approval" from the other UN members (especially in the security council), it is considered a "legitimate and valid war". The only real authority that the UN exercises is within the physical boundaries of the UN building in New York and the other related buildings found elsewhere around the world.
This whole exercise reminds me of an experience of trying to do telephone support for a guy setting up the control system for one of the signs on Times Square in NYC. I spent about 3 hours troubleshooting over the phone, and the system finally came up about 5 seconds before the "big boss" who paid for the sign showed up to take a look at what all his money purchased.
I've also taken calls from freeways and sports arenas during the middle of a game (when cell phone coverage drops to nothing due to everybody at the event having a cell phone and overloading the local towers).
Yeah, I can relate as I've done all that and more.
The only anonymous in Bitcoin transaction is one where you hand someone the "wallet". Transferring your secrets, especially by hand, is as anonymous as handing cash to someone, but that's not really the intended model, or a particularly useful one.
That is how the physical bitcoins themselves work. The authentication keys are printed on the note or physical coin which can be converted back to electronic currency at any time by the recipient. They can also be verified during each transaction for the paranoid, even though there is an element of trust involved.
There is also the "sneaker net" version of bitcoin transactions which also could work as well, for at least exchanging bitcoins from one person to another if you want to perform "off-grid" transactions. With that version of transaction (assuming the network itself is down) is that you build up the transaction history that gets posted globally once you get back to a computer which is connected to the internet. As long as you have a Raspberry Pi computer (or equivalent) and some sort of power source, including a solar panel, you could certainly conduct Bitcoin transactions with comparable security. There is a slim potential of double spending in such a situation, but even that could be verified or at least caught. Double spending would definitely be caught by the global network and such transactions would be invalidated.
If they can prove that your bitcoin came from the money laundering bank, they got you for money laundering. No link to the original crime necessary for that, since money laundering is a crime itself. They'll probably also find hints about the true origin when they study your confiscated computers.
Which is why you would use a legitimate exchange or some other website that "holds" your bitcoins temporarily for some sort of speculation. Mt. Gox used to be a perfect site for something like that as it was commonly used for things far beyond just laundering the coins.
I would envision that eventually there will be some legal requirements for anybody running such websites that will require some formal authentication even to just "day trade" on the exchange. Some of the exchanges formerly allowed you to join in the speculation without authentication as long as you didn't request the actual monetary units (Euros, Dollars, Rubles, and other currencies were used with some exchanges I have interacted with). In that way you could speculate with Bitcoins, buy up the government-backed currencies, then sell them back at hopefully a profit. This was even seen as a positive feature of the exchange at the time.
Because there are legitimate uses for such transactions, it would be incredibly difficult to prove that the purpose of the exchange was just laundering. If you are dumping money into exchanges that openly brag they are being used just for laundering, yeah that could be much more problematic.