In a sport, you can say, "If I do X I will get Y number of points." In a judged competition, you can't do that.
That's exactly what happens in a judged competition. The moves are all known, indexed by difficulty, and assigned a point value. The judges are trained to spot the various errors that are typical of each move, and to deduct certain amounts for certain errors, or to simply not award any points for moves executed incorrectly.
The athletes' task is simple: accumulate the maximum number of points within the time limit. The judges' task is simple: add up (or subtract up) what they actually did. A machine can't do that (not yet anyway), so it has to be a human. And two judges may have different opinions on whether that waving hand was the athlete trying to catch their balance, or just an ungraceful flourish, so that's where the subjectivity comes in. But that level of subjectivity is not a whole lot different from a referee trying to decide if a soccer player was tripped or was diving.
Athletes don't just just do the maximum number of high-scoring moves, because that is beyond human athletic capacity (by design), and they will end up committing a large number of serious errors.
However, none of this applies to sports that include an "artistic impressio" component to the judges' score. Nor to sports that require sequins.
In many ways plain TeX is much easier. Unlike LaTeX, it will accept a plaintext document with no markup as input (and actually produce decent output). The math markup is the same as LaTeX, so you don't lose anything there.
On the downside, when it comes to more advanced typesetting, TeX gets more complicated quickly. (LaTeX was originally Layman's TeX, after all.) Tables are more complex, and if you have to conform to a specific template or styleguide, then LaTeX makes it easier to just load it up. But I have personally found LaTeX to be harder for simple jobs because I have to define various unnecessary (to me) document types, sections, etc. before I can actually write, which means I have to have a model of my document structure in hand first, and understand the templates I am using.
It's like programming in a framework; you have to know the framework first. You can save a huge amount of time if the framework actually matches what you are doing (eg. producing a publication-ready paper for a particular journal). If not, the framework is just a nuisance.
Motorbikes suffer from the same problem as SUVs. They are designed to be gonad amplifiers rather than practical vehicles. 0.0001% of buyers are actually going race Daytona or run the Paris-Dakar, but that's what sells. Well, that or a vaguely criminal image riding huge Harleys built out of pig iron and with the meintenance cycle of a Model A Ford. These bikes are impractical, expensive, and overpowered. But as phallic substitutes go, nothing beats 'em.
The most practical bike I ever owned was a 250cc Yamaha that got 80mpg, cost $100/yr for insurance, could be parked anywhere, was indestructible, and got me out of more scrapes than it got me into, because of its agility. But as a testicular enhancer it kind of sucked. It was marketed as a "girls bike" because of its size, and as a result even the girls didn't want to buy it.
With power literally between your legs, the phallic (for boys) or equine (for girls) associations are just too strong to resist. Practical bikes exist(ed), but do not sell as well as something ridiculously sexy. As such, practical motorcycles were killed off by scooters about 20 years ago. RIP. I miss my bike.
It's used more broadly than it should be because it's a propaganda term, intended to evoke an emotional rather than rational response. Attacking civilians with no warning just makes you a criminal, perhaps even a murderer, regardless of your motives. When our leaders just want the problem to go away they will treat the perpetrators as the criminals or murderers they are. Catch 'em, lock 'em up, maybe execute 'em, depending on your state. But when our leaders want the problem itself, because it's an enabler of radical policy, then they will call them "terrorists", and there will be hardly any mention of criminal investigations or justice in the ensuing "debate".
That's why Osama Bin Laden is a terrorist, and the Unabomber is just a plain-old murderer.
government agents intentionally creating instability to justify crackdowns or other policies
rogue agents acting in extra-legal or "black" ops outside normal chains of command
civil servants enacting standard government policies designed to quell dissent
bandits, pirates, and other heavily-armed thieves
angry people who have lost everything, desperately seeking to restore their honour
revolutionaries fighting oppressive regimes
oppressive regimes fighting revolutionaries
journalists and citizens who happen to sympathize with any of the above
Once you stop calling them "terrorists" and call them what they really are, it usually helps to suggest a more rational and workable approach to dealing with them. Bundling all of the above into a single category of "people who may endanger innocent bystanders" in the hopes that this will make the problem more manageable, will in fact do the opposite.
Linux and GNU did not invent OSS. They were, in fact, a counter-revolution (OSS v2), in response to the revolution of proprietary software that overthrew OSS v1 in the early 1980s. Proprietary licensing took off with the rise of personal workstations and PCs and the subsequent rise in the portability of software. The GNU philosophy is that the old way of doing things was better, and cleverly co-opted the software licensing model to try and turn the ship around. Unix arose in the OSS v1 world, but right around the time that proprietary software was getting a foothold. As a consequence, it got caught up in the heart of the OSS/proprietary schism, and became embroiled in intellectual property lawsuits, which is why a Linux became necessary. But Linux didn't invent this approach to Unix; it simply capitalized on the fact that BSD was locked down in court battles for years. TCP/IP arose much earlier, before proprietary licensing was a significant force at all, so it is very much a creature of the OSS v1 world. If it wasn't, we either would not be using it today, or we'd be paying a hell of a lot more for it.
I run various Linux distros professionally, so I'm well aware of what is possible with Ubuntu. But it's still several years behind (on the desktop), because like all modern Linuxes, it is targeting Microsoft, not Apple, and Microsoft is typically 5-10 years behind the state of the art so it's a slow-moving target. (Linux was a better OS when it was targeting the major Unixes, but that's just my perspective as a Unix guy.) And none of Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, or various other major software houses make their major apps available for Ubuntu. The fact that a skilled nerd can make some of these apps work under Ubuntu is no more interesting than the fact that a skilled nerd can run OSX on his Dell.
I am an old-school Unix sysadmin and developer, who went Mac back at 10.1 because it is the exact *opposite* of what you claim. All the hard-core Unix nerds were early adopters back then, because we didn't give a fuck about backwards compatibility issues with OS9, and all the Unixy goodness seemed to be fully supported, with a few Apple quirks that for the most part seemed like really good ideas once you got used to them. The standard unix development suite was included, preconfigured for you by Apple. Most Gnu apps seemed to work with little more than a recompile. X-windows was included out of the box. Apache is preconfigured and running in the basic system. Same with CUPS. As delivered by Apple, your laptop was a running LAMP server (AAMP? MAMP?). (These days the dev tools are a separate free download, but that wasn't the case in earlier versions.) Industry-standard file formats were all built in, and often (eg. with PDF) to a degree that puts all other OSes to shame. It even ran those annoying Microsoft apps for those situations when people insist on sending you proprietary files. The Apple apps, proprietary or not, are a mere footnote to all of the above. You can treat them as a nice little bonus, or you can drag them to the trash. Your call.
The only reason you're stuck with Apple, is that nobody else does all this in one box.
For a *nix environment, even if malware got in through the user's browser, it still needs an escalation of privleges to do real bad harm. Without it, the damage is largely contained to the data in the user's directory.
Not true any more. The vast majority of *nix systems out there today are single-user workstations using standard system images that are cheap or free. In other words, the user's home directory is the *only* place you can cause real damage. Privilege escalation is only really needed when attacking servers.
The atheist argument is that the Universe has always existed and will always exist and therefore does not need a creator and does not raise the question of what came before.
Therefore this is just a trivial semantic argument about what word we use to refer the ultimate entity.
Plus, of course, whether it will give us any goodies if we're nice to it.
Round-trip tickets are only useful for tourists, and the real reason to go to Mars is to colonize it, not to take some snapshots and then go home again. We are doing that already with robots, so there's really no point in doing it with people.
The interesting idea here is not the one-way thing, but the one-man, one-way thing. The author is right, it's initially kind of a shocking proposal, but when you stop to think about it, we're just a bunch of wusses. Our ancestors did this kind of risky one-way shit as a matter of course. (Think of how the Polynesians colonized the entire Pacific in simple canoes.) There shouldn't be anything shocking about it at all. We're just not worthy. Some other culture will do this, and we'll talk about how barbaric they are for trading so callously in the lives of their astronauts. But I guarantee the astronauts will go willingly, and while we tut-tut their backward ways and high mortality rate, they'll be conquering Mars.
And say you're a company maintaining existing cross-platform software. Why pay the costs of maintaining Windows and Unix versions; just drop support for the Windows version, and let UNG pick up the slack. But once a few companies start doing that, the negative marketing consequences (not a real technical issue, just the *appearance* of loss of Windows support) will probably cause Microsoft to scuttle the whole idea and screw over everyone who had banked on it.
A better strategic approach would be the inverse - a Windows-compatible subsystem that runs on *nix. Then companies could drop support for their *nix versions, and let this subsystem pick up the cross-platform slack. This gives superior marketing optics - the major packages only appear to run on Windows. In reality, of course, it would mean that everything runs on *nix, but marketing trumps reality, so it would be a pyrrhic victory for the *nixers.
It should be pointed out that 99.99% of art is created without any profit, or even revenue. Professional artists are exceptionally rare. I do not include designers in this category, because making art to someone else's specifications is not art, it's a trade--an important and valuable one, but it's still design, not art. I also guarantee that many of those designers are also making real art in their spare time, and not getting paid for most of it.
Art will get made as long as creative people have time on their hands. A few will be paid for it, and a smaller few will make a living by it. This state of affairs has not changed much in thousands of years.
You're not allowed to go to Cuba, but many do regardless. You're also not allowed to spend money while there, iirc.
Those are the laws in the USA. In Cuba, however, the laws are quite friendly to Americans. US dollars are the official currency of trade, and there are plenty of US dollars flying around where ever you find tourists and business people. And when you enter the country, Americans get special treatment - no stamps in your passport, because it might get you in trouble back home. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
Was one of those $2 notebooks made out of paper. They are lightweight, easy to use, and replaceable just about anywhere. They accept a variety of input devices, can survive being dropped from a large distance, and work reasonably well even after getting dunked in a river, although the fit and finish may suffer. They can exchange data with just about anything, by the simple expedient of tearing out pages. They have amazing translation and cross-cultural communication capabilities - just hand the notebook and your pen to the guy you are trying to get directions from, and he'll whip up a great little vector drawing in the local language to show you which turns to take. It has a crude but useful backup system, which consists of ripping out important pages and mailing them home. There is a very cool built-in security feature, which is that nobody wants your goddam notebook, so it will still be there in that café tomorrow when you remember where you left it. You can attach nearly anything to your files, even actual physical objects, if you bring some scotch tape with you.
And when you get home, take some of the thousands of dollars you saved, and hire a typist to transcribe it all for you. Or save even more money and take a week to do it yourself.
If one screws up one's life even with hard drugs (which, I'm sorry, you do not have a right to tell me I can't take them), one loses his/her money and can't buy the drugs anymore. Kinda puts a stop to the abuse, you know? If drugs were legal, there would be no recourse to selling the drugs to keep oneself addicted, and people who are down on their luck would therefore have to get a job. Have you even thought about this issue?
You were sounding pretty intelligent until this post. When you lose your money and can't buy the drugs anymore, this is what actually happens:
you bum your drugs from friends
you borrow money from friends
you borrow money from friends and never pay it back
after your friends cut you off, you borrow money from family and never pay it back
you pawn all your shit
you move back in to your parent's basement
you steal money from your family
when your parents throw you out, you steal their property and pawn it
you engage in petty theft
you sleep under a bridge, but get beat up and/or raped by the other addicts whose place you took
you figure out where you can sleep, and occasionally have to beat the shit out of other addicts who try to take your stuff
you contract all kinds of diseases, and regularly require the attention of healthcare professionals for other things like overdoses, and beatings from your dealer because of how much you owe him
you engage in prostitution, incidentally infecting stupid johns with a preference for discount hookers
you engage in serious theft and robbery
you go to jail, dry out, and learn how to behave like a real criminal from your fellow inmates
you get out, can't get a job, go back on the pipe or needle to cope, and start over again.
Sorry, no profit anywhere in this list, except for the organized crime syndicates who provide the stuff that makes your world go 'round.
Now, I'm in favor of legalizing drugs, but it's not because addictive drugs are not harmful to society. It's because the harm to society is 10 times worse when you criminalize the behaviour, instead of treating it as a health problem akin to mental illness, except much more treatable.
Privacy legislation in Canada is largely a provincial jurisdiction, and British Columbia is thought to have some of the strongest privacy legislation of all of the provinces. But privacy legislation is largely designed to restrict what organizations can do with data they collect on private individuals (eg. through subscriptions, application forms, etc.). It is not necessarily designed or intended to restrict what the government or law enforcement may do to dig up dirt on suspected illegal behaviours, which may or may not be what the poster was really asking abuot.
And as an aside, the OP asks who has the most "libertarian" laws on privacy. I would have thought that would be no laws at all. What they really want is the most draconian laws on privacy, just in favour of the private individual instead of the state or corporations.
Virtually all of the New World explorers were funded by business interests, even if it was a sovereign state doing the funding. All we need is a half-decent idea where the money is out there, and we'll be all over it, both nation-states and corporations.
Personally, I think the Moon and Mars are both dead-ends if fast-paced exploration is the goal. Once someone figures out how to prospect in the asteroid belt, Mars will have a million people on it within 50 years, servicing the mining industry out there.
(So why not just mine Mars if there's that many miners there? Because the cost of moving a million tons of nickel-iron asteroid to Earth is way cheaper than getting it off the surface of Mars. The only thing you want to be lifting off the surface of Mars with any regularity is Martians.)
My grandma, for example, has an all-in-one iMac... with an external modem, an external floppy disk drive, and a hub... I guess the hub must be for her dot-matrix printer.
Anybody who watches TV needs to get the fuck back ON Slashdot and lay off the old media already. A 13" TV is good enough for keeping up with the Olympic Games once every two years, and tuning in for 9/11-level news events once every 5 or 10, but anything much larger is a real pain in move in and out of storage, and tends to make you stupid, fat, and cranky if you don't.
Slashdot Mirror
and an improbable event verified three out of three times
Sorry, are you arguing against or for the conspiracy theories?
What's wrong with you? How would you "love" your phone if you can't use it for its primary purpose?
Personally, because I despise its primary purpose, but am obligated to carry a cell phone with me.
Unfortunately, my iPhone has so far been way more reliable than my old Sony-Erickson. Anyone know how to enable this poor reception feature?
In a sport, you can say, "If I do X I will get Y number of points." In a judged competition, you can't do that.
That's exactly what happens in a judged competition. The moves are all known, indexed by difficulty, and assigned a point value. The judges are trained to spot the various errors that are typical of each move, and to deduct certain amounts for certain errors, or to simply not award any points for moves executed incorrectly.
The athletes' task is simple: accumulate the maximum number of points within the time limit. The judges' task is simple: add up (or subtract up) what they actually did. A machine can't do that (not yet anyway), so it has to be a human. And two judges may have different opinions on whether that waving hand was the athlete trying to catch their balance, or just an ungraceful flourish, so that's where the subjectivity comes in. But that level of subjectivity is not a whole lot different from a referee trying to decide if a soccer player was tripped or was diving.
Athletes don't just just do the maximum number of high-scoring moves, because that is beyond human athletic capacity (by design), and they will end up committing a large number of serious errors.
However, none of this applies to sports that include an "artistic impressio" component to the judges' score. Nor to sports that require sequins.
In many ways plain TeX is much easier. Unlike LaTeX, it will accept a plaintext document with no markup as input (and actually produce decent output). The math markup is the same as LaTeX, so you don't lose anything there.
On the downside, when it comes to more advanced typesetting, TeX gets more complicated quickly. (LaTeX was originally Layman's TeX, after all.) Tables are more complex, and if you have to conform to a specific template or styleguide, then LaTeX makes it easier to just load it up. But I have personally found LaTeX to be harder for simple jobs because I have to define various unnecessary (to me) document types, sections, etc. before I can actually write, which means I have to have a model of my document structure in hand first, and understand the templates I am using.
It's like programming in a framework; you have to know the framework first. You can save a huge amount of time if the framework actually matches what you are doing (eg. producing a publication-ready paper for a particular journal). If not, the framework is just a nuisance.
Motorbikes suffer from the same problem as SUVs. They are designed to be gonad amplifiers rather than practical vehicles. 0.0001% of buyers are actually going race Daytona or run the Paris-Dakar, but that's what sells. Well, that or a vaguely criminal image riding huge Harleys built out of pig iron and with the meintenance cycle of a Model A Ford. These bikes are impractical, expensive, and overpowered. But as phallic substitutes go, nothing beats 'em.
The most practical bike I ever owned was a 250cc Yamaha that got 80mpg, cost $100/yr for insurance, could be parked anywhere, was indestructible, and got me out of more scrapes than it got me into, because of its agility. But as a testicular enhancer it kind of sucked. It was marketed as a "girls bike" because of its size, and as a result even the girls didn't want to buy it.
With power literally between your legs, the phallic (for boys) or equine (for girls) associations are just too strong to resist. Practical bikes exist(ed), but do not sell as well as something ridiculously sexy. As such, practical motorcycles were killed off by scooters about 20 years ago. RIP. I miss my bike.
It's used more broadly than it should be because it's a propaganda term, intended to evoke an emotional rather than rational response. Attacking civilians with no warning just makes you a criminal, perhaps even a murderer, regardless of your motives. When our leaders just want the problem to go away they will treat the perpetrators as the criminals or murderers they are. Catch 'em, lock 'em up, maybe execute 'em, depending on your state. But when our leaders want the problem itself, because it's an enabler of radical policy, then they will call them "terrorists", and there will be hardly any mention of criminal investigations or justice in the ensuing "debate".
That's why Osama Bin Laden is a terrorist, and the Unabomber is just a plain-old murderer.
Once you stop calling them "terrorists" and call them what they really are, it usually helps to suggest a more rational and workable approach to dealing with them. Bundling all of the above into a single category of "people who may endanger innocent bystanders" in the hopes that this will make the problem more manageable, will in fact do the opposite.
Linux and GNU did not invent OSS. They were, in fact, a counter-revolution (OSS v2), in response to the revolution of proprietary software that overthrew OSS v1 in the early 1980s. Proprietary licensing took off with the rise of personal workstations and PCs and the subsequent rise in the portability of software. The GNU philosophy is that the old way of doing things was better, and cleverly co-opted the software licensing model to try and turn the ship around. Unix arose in the OSS v1 world, but right around the time that proprietary software was getting a foothold. As a consequence, it got caught up in the heart of the OSS/proprietary schism, and became embroiled in intellectual property lawsuits, which is why a Linux became necessary. But Linux didn't invent this approach to Unix; it simply capitalized on the fact that BSD was locked down in court battles for years. TCP/IP arose much earlier, before proprietary licensing was a significant force at all, so it is very much a creature of the OSS v1 world. If it wasn't, we either would not be using it today, or we'd be paying a hell of a lot more for it.
s/sovereignty/national security/
The US blocks a hell of a lot more than you think.
In our defense, it gets pretty cold in the winter, and sometimes we don't shave.
I run various Linux distros professionally, so I'm well aware of what is possible with Ubuntu. But it's still several years behind (on the desktop), because like all modern Linuxes, it is targeting Microsoft, not Apple, and Microsoft is typically 5-10 years behind the state of the art so it's a slow-moving target. (Linux was a better OS when it was targeting the major Unixes, but that's just my perspective as a Unix guy.) And none of Microsoft, Apple, Adobe, or various other major software houses make their major apps available for Ubuntu. The fact that a skilled nerd can make some of these apps work under Ubuntu is no more interesting than the fact that a skilled nerd can run OSX on his Dell.
This meme is annoyingly false.
I am an old-school Unix sysadmin and developer, who went Mac back at 10.1 because it is the exact *opposite* of what you claim. All the hard-core Unix nerds were early adopters back then, because we didn't give a fuck about backwards compatibility issues with OS9, and all the Unixy goodness seemed to be fully supported, with a few Apple quirks that for the most part seemed like really good ideas once you got used to them. The standard unix development suite was included, preconfigured for you by Apple. Most Gnu apps seemed to work with little more than a recompile. X-windows was included out of the box. Apache is preconfigured and running in the basic system. Same with CUPS. As delivered by Apple, your laptop was a running LAMP server (AAMP? MAMP?). (These days the dev tools are a separate free download, but that wasn't the case in earlier versions.) Industry-standard file formats were all built in, and often (eg. with PDF) to a degree that puts all other OSes to shame. It even ran those annoying Microsoft apps for those situations when people insist on sending you proprietary files. The Apple apps, proprietary or not, are a mere footnote to all of the above. You can treat them as a nice little bonus, or you can drag them to the trash. Your call.
The only reason you're stuck with Apple, is that nobody else does all this in one box.
Not true any more. The vast majority of *nix systems out there today are single-user workstations using standard system images that are cheap or free. In other words, the user's home directory is the *only* place you can cause real damage. Privilege escalation is only really needed when attacking servers.
The atheist argument is that the Universe has always existed and will always exist and therefore does not need a creator and does not raise the question of what came before.
Therefore this is just a trivial semantic argument about what word we use to refer the ultimate entity.
Plus, of course, whether it will give us any goodies if we're nice to it.
Round-trip tickets are only useful for tourists, and the real reason to go to Mars is to colonize it, not to take some snapshots and then go home again. We are doing that already with robots, so there's really no point in doing it with people.
The interesting idea here is not the one-way thing, but the one-man, one-way thing. The author is right, it's initially kind of a shocking proposal, but when you stop to think about it, we're just a bunch of wusses. Our ancestors did this kind of risky one-way shit as a matter of course. (Think of how the Polynesians colonized the entire Pacific in simple canoes.) There shouldn't be anything shocking about it at all. We're just not worthy. Some other culture will do this, and we'll talk about how barbaric they are for trading so callously in the lives of their astronauts. But I guarantee the astronauts will go willingly, and while we tut-tut their backward ways and high mortality rate, they'll be conquering Mars.
And say you're a company maintaining existing cross-platform software. Why pay the costs of maintaining Windows and Unix versions; just drop support for the Windows version, and let UNG pick up the slack. But once a few companies start doing that, the negative marketing consequences (not a real technical issue, just the *appearance* of loss of Windows support) will probably cause Microsoft to scuttle the whole idea and screw over everyone who had banked on it.
A better strategic approach would be the inverse - a Windows-compatible subsystem that runs on *nix. Then companies could drop support for their *nix versions, and let this subsystem pick up the cross-platform slack. This gives superior marketing optics - the major packages only appear to run on Windows. In reality, of course, it would mean that everything runs on *nix, but marketing trumps reality, so it would be a pyrrhic victory for the *nixers.
It should be pointed out that 99.99% of art is created without any profit, or even revenue. Professional artists are exceptionally rare. I do not include designers in this category, because making art to someone else's specifications is not art, it's a trade--an important and valuable one, but it's still design, not art. I also guarantee that many of those designers are also making real art in their spare time, and not getting paid for most of it.
Art will get made as long as creative people have time on their hands. A few will be paid for it, and a smaller few will make a living by it. This state of affairs has not changed much in thousands of years.
For them, maybe. But its knock you back into the 11th Century, and the world is right back where it started.
Those are the laws in the USA. In Cuba, however, the laws are quite friendly to Americans. US dollars are the official currency of trade, and there are plenty of US dollars flying around where ever you find tourists and business people. And when you enter the country, Americans get special treatment - no stamps in your passport, because it might get you in trouble back home. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink.
Was one of those $2 notebooks made out of paper. They are lightweight, easy to use, and replaceable just about anywhere. They accept a variety of input devices, can survive being dropped from a large distance, and work reasonably well even after getting dunked in a river, although the fit and finish may suffer. They can exchange data with just about anything, by the simple expedient of tearing out pages. They have amazing translation and cross-cultural communication capabilities - just hand the notebook and your pen to the guy you are trying to get directions from, and he'll whip up a great little vector drawing in the local language to show you which turns to take. It has a crude but useful backup system, which consists of ripping out important pages and mailing them home. There is a very cool built-in security feature, which is that nobody wants your goddam notebook, so it will still be there in that café tomorrow when you remember where you left it. You can attach nearly anything to your files, even actual physical objects, if you bring some scotch tape with you.
And when you get home, take some of the thousands of dollars you saved, and hire a typist to transcribe it all for you. Or save even more money and take a week to do it yourself.
You were sounding pretty intelligent until this post. When you lose your money and can't buy the drugs anymore, this is what actually happens:
Sorry, no profit anywhere in this list, except for the organized crime syndicates who provide the stuff that makes your world go 'round.
Now, I'm in favor of legalizing drugs, but it's not because addictive drugs are not harmful to society. It's because the harm to society is 10 times worse when you criminalize the behaviour, instead of treating it as a health problem akin to mental illness, except much more treatable.
Privacy legislation in Canada is largely a provincial jurisdiction, and British Columbia is thought to have some of the strongest privacy legislation of all of the provinces. But privacy legislation is largely designed to restrict what organizations can do with data they collect on private individuals (eg. through subscriptions, application forms, etc.). It is not necessarily designed or intended to restrict what the government or law enforcement may do to dig up dirt on suspected illegal behaviours, which may or may not be what the poster was really asking abuot.
And as an aside, the OP asks who has the most "libertarian" laws on privacy. I would have thought that would be no laws at all. What they really want is the most draconian laws on privacy, just in favour of the private individual instead of the state or corporations.
Virtually all of the New World explorers were funded by business interests, even if it was a sovereign state doing the funding. All we need is a half-decent idea where the money is out there, and we'll be all over it, both nation-states and corporations.
Personally, I think the Moon and Mars are both dead-ends if fast-paced exploration is the goal. Once someone figures out how to prospect in the asteroid belt, Mars will have a million people on it within 50 years, servicing the mining industry out there.
(So why not just mine Mars if there's that many miners there? Because the cost of moving a million tons of nickel-iron asteroid to Earth is way cheaper than getting it off the surface of Mars. The only thing you want to be lifting off the surface of Mars with any regularity is Martians.)
Anybody who watches TV needs to get the fuck back ON Slashdot and lay off the old media already. A 13" TV is good enough for keeping up with the Olympic Games once every two years, and tuning in for 9/11-level news events once every 5 or 10, but anything much larger is a real pain in move in and out of storage, and tends to make you stupid, fat, and cranky if you don't.