As for your second note, yes, in the last decade Apple have done well.
I never made this point, my argument doesn't require it; I think what I said can prevail wether Apple is the largest tech company on Earth or bankrupt.
I'm not sure your argument about the "fast pace" of the "tech-world" are very airtight, considering the decade of missteps on the part of major players like Microsoft, and I'm not sure your rather brief (and typically moralizing) scenario for Apple losing dominance because of "failing to include others" is sustainable in the face of companies like Oracle and Nintendo, companies that share nothing, partner with companies in highly restrictive ways, only market end-to-end solutions and are still highly profitable and successful, with millions of happy customers.
Finally, PC != Microsoft. I was discussing more the openness of the x86 architecture and the wide and varied hardware support it enjoyed than MS dominance.
Eh... saying that "the PC" isn't the same as Microsoft is a hard line to draw, DOS and Windows were indispensable components of PCs, nobody ever successfully marketed an x86 PC with anything else back when this sort of thing was important, and today there's really only one company that mass markets x86 PCs that run something other than Windows: Apple. And while x86 was "open," the Wintel platform was decidedly not, and I don't think there's a useful distinction between x86 and Wintel, because nobody ever marketed x86 PCs with anything else, and the fact that the x86 ISA was open and documented didn't make a bit of difference to application developers, because applications require an OS, and today the application devs basically can choose between Windows and OS X, neither of which are particularly open.
The openness of x86 doesn't "rub off" on other parts of the stack, just as the openness of the Android hardware and OS doesn't rub off on the Google platform apps or internet services, which must rank among the most closed of all commercial closed sources today. Google won't even tell you what kind of computers they run search or docs on, let alone exactly what they're retaining and how they use it.
Finally, while we can all concede that Wintel was a far more open platform than Apple's, and this led to all kinds of positive feedbacks and network effects that allowed Wintel dominance in PCs of the 90s, my point is that this was not a good thing for end users. Microsoft became a lazy, anti-entrepreneurial company that lived off of monopoly rents and basically arrested all innovation in home computing for a decade. When the OS vendor stops caring about the end user and cares more about protecting their partner's business model, mediocrity is the result.
Microsoft's dominance was a direct, though probably not intended, consequence of IBM opening the x86 hardware platform; the openness didn't extend and wasn't useful to the end user, just to people with computer factories and their partners, the people writing OSs. And today, we find a nominally "open" Android that is basically nothing more than a dumb terminal for closed Google services and user metric aggregation -- the openness isn't to the benefit of the user, just to companies like Google, Samsung and Verizon.
Google played this one brilliantly, Android is here and the irony is delicious. Apple lost the original Mac vs PC war at the onset due to control-freak behavior. They guarded their technical details jealously, IBM did not, it became easier to write for IBM hardware, clones began to appear, etc, etc, etc.
This did not turn out very well for IBM, if we talk about them specifically. They owned the market in 1980 and by 1985 it had completely walked away from them to silicon valley. One could hope that someone could market a Android than Google, and turn that into an alternate platform to draw people to alternate services, true open services not the Big Black Box that is Google, but considering the way the OHA has organized the market this doesn't seem likely. It's basically a cartel to make sure an AOSP Android never finds major support or market traction in the developed world.
The alternate characterization also applies, namely, that Apple failed to reap Microsoft-level profits because it insisted on being an integrator and marketing to end consumers, instead of leveraging an open product to monetize closed products, and converting the PC userbase into a locked-in pool of service demand that could be funneled, at MS's whim, to software developers, advertisers, and service providers. And that these devs, advertisers and service providers became Microsoft and IBMs real customers, and the end user would get screwed ten ways from Sunday as long as the real customers were kept happy.
The parallels with the Android business strategy should always be kept in mind.
Thomas Edison worked part time as a clerk to fund his research.
Edison was a charlatan and marketer who "invented" almost nothing he claimed to. He was the first Steve Jobs. He used the government patent system to suppress independent sound recording and filmmaking for decades.
Henry Ford worked his way up from machinist to create Ford.
He was also a taylorite who dictated his employees' social lives, had racist hiring practices and his company would have gone bankrupt in the 40s if not for government war contracts.
Any account of American entrepreneurship in the laissez-faire "golden age" ends up being a story of someone finding a nice cozy rentier perch and then using it to oppress mankind, with the state's help.
Be skeptical. America is about the state helping someone or other, it's just a question of whom; it'd be nice if it were different, but in a democracy it's not clear if you can change this.
Whoever intercepts the phone calls, and decides which calls to put on wikileaks and which to hide.
If you want to make their phone calls readable, you have to have a mechanism where they're ALL published in the open, and not merely readable by whoever can hack an Autonomous System carrying their call.
skype was properly protected from prying government eyes.
[Citation--- you know the rest.]
Surely there's some Open Source tool they could use? Of course SIP and strong encryption are easy to put together, the real benefit of Skype is the phonebook service mapping names to their Internet locations. All other OSS video solutions I'm aware of require knowing an IP addy/domain name/URL for your destination.
"Prudent and Simple Procedures Render Hacker Tool Useless" doesn't make much of a headline.
iPhones can have alphanumeric passwords of eight or more characters; I'm certain Android phones can as well. You do that, and the only demonstrated way of cracking an iPhone is by getting access to the system you run iTunes on, but if someone steals that and you don't encrypt ~/ you're going to be pretty hosed no matter what phone you own.
Hiding behind "you're doing it wrong; the software is right, change your habits" may work sometimes; just because everyone else got away with it doesn't mean you're in the same boat.
Users, particularly professional users over the age of 40, ask for stupid things and complain mightily about everything. When the Montage editing system came out, it used a computer and a dozen videotape machines to edit film, and the editors would complain about the slowness of work, and they'd demand a system that supported TWO dozen videotape decks. So, when the first Media 100 and Lightworks machines came out, editing was MUCH faster, but the editors complained and managed to force the original software vendors to make the computer systems act like videotape editors -- the original Avid software woudn't even allow you to insert a clip inbetween two others in one step, because this was impossible with a three-point videtape editor.
Picture editors are clever people but they have impenetrable smugness when it comes to the gear and what they feel they need to learn in order to use it; they also hate software that is "easy," because it devalues their technical chops and makes it easier for the director or producer to push the buttons without them, they also tend to hate anything that makes them buy new gear, though they'll generally find some other way to rationalize this.
FD. I'm a sound editor and am exactly the same way about Pro Tools; OTOH I wish Pro Tools had something magnetic timeline and coalesced clips, but Avid is stupidly conservative where Apple is stupidly tweak-happy.
The 30-year old Avid timeline interface and the new FCPX magnetic storyline (coupled with some of the missing features) are probably different enough that, no, you can't just read in a previous project. Without a half-zillion available tracks, you won't get an exact one-to-one conversion. FCPX is a clean break with the past.
My concern is that this experience is going to give the dynamic timeline a bad name, even though I'd been wanting one for years. Having to manually manage a one-to-one relationship between media and a statically-allocated player object, which is what tracks on an Avid are, is very old-fashioned compared to what the hardware can do now -- I really shouldn't have to worry about wether or not a sound is playing on A1 or A2, I just wanna hear them both, please let the computer figure it out for me. But now people are racing to call it consumerish, when they're really pissed off about AAFs and RED support.
it's made to be maintainable with Bronze Age tech and its purpose and workings are to be as clear as possible to allow even a primitive civilization to take a look at it and figure out what goes where, and what does what.
We have CT machines and we still can't figure out exactly what the Antikythera device did. On the plus side the LNC will be quite a bit bigger and will (perhaps) not be flooded with ocean water.
It isn't like Google is keeping people from using other search engines.
Wether other search engines are available isn't completely at issue -- what matters is what people actually do. It doesn't really matter if people are free to use other search engines if they never do, because that's a free ad market in princple but not in reality or effect.
Could it be because they have systematically shut off every reasonable legal way of obtaining it?
There are legal ways to obtain it. They want you to pay for cable and buy the DVD. You can't force people to sell their property at whatever terms the buyer dictates, even if it's in the seller's interest. They've been trying to give away content thru Hulu for several years now and it just doesn't make money. This was the experiment and for the purpose of a profitmaking enterprise, it failed.
There are plenty of practical reasons why people to pirate these programs, but there's no normative, moral or ethical one. These aren't 50 year old works the studios are sitting on throug eternal copyright-- these are last month's episodes of Kitchen Nightmares, and they're entitled to whatever means they have to recoup their costs, including clearance and run schedules, and planned scarcity.
What's interesting is in the 1950s, the Supreme Court ruled that a movie theater company had to give access to all studios, and that they had to charge competitve rates and that studios/producers coudn't own movie theaters. So in the 80s, when cable tech got cheap enough, they just moved the "theater" to your living room, and now studios can own an entire integrated chain, from studios, to distribution, to ads, to cable company.
Lloyd Bentsen was a Texan. It's sort of complicated, but in the late 80s/early 90s the Republican leadership in the House prevailed on conservative Democrats in Texas and the rest of the south -- people who were very conservative but were Democrats for historical reasons -- to switch to the Republican party and/or to withhold their votes for the Democratic Speaker when organizing the House. This effort gave the House to the Republicans in 1994, and the decades-long Democratic control of the House has been intermittent ever since. The realignment has made House vote much more ideological.
Republicanism and Coservativism isn't inherently pro-oil, but the Republican party is where all the southern, oil producing state representation is, and the party ideology is whatever the powerful voting blocks in the party say it is.
You're right but it's an interesting distinction. If you leave flyers with your clients email addresses hanging throughout town, and someone reads them...
I would say a GET request is fundamentally different in quality than the front door of a home and the same standard wouldn't apply, but the real question is, which car analogy is appropriate here...
Be careful what GET requests you make, because apparently if they're "unauthorized," despite not being protected by any authentication or session and bring happily returned by the server, you may still be a criminal.
If you run all, or a commanding majority, of all the advertising ad space available, in the US, under many circumstances, it may be true that you may not advertise your other companies, or charge your subsidiaries lower rates than outside ad buyers, or use the price structure to diminsh competitive access to ad space.
What I know is that developers can decide whatever they want, but they can't force people to accept those decisions.
If you have wealth in Bitcoins and the rules of Bitcoins change, regardless of who promulgated the change, your wealth is dragged along for the ride; same thing if one dev gets disgruntled and starts mouthing off on a forum and claims BTC is a "Ponzi scheme." Your wealth was were forced, with just as real a force as if your dollars were depreciated by inflation.
The Bitcoin developers are a monetary authority wether they want that or not. They can't just wish away the responsibility by taking no action and making no plans; BTC market failures, insecurity, bad information and unclear rules will hurt the credibility of BTC regardless of who in particular may be to blame and how they try to rationalize it with libertarian handwaving. Having no policies is still a policy.
Well, the devs can change the code, but it only affects anything if most people running the Bitcoin program actually accept the changes. Any bitcoins created with a different algorithm won't be accepted by existing nodes, so they can't simply make a 'personal branch' that creates 10x more bitcoins for them.
Making more Bitcoins for themselves isn't the fear. There are many problems if the developers have short positions in BTCs, by holding options, or by playing silent partner in exchanges and bucketing BTCs on deposit, and then releasing negative news or taking action that puts the soundness of the protocol in question. It's not clear what sort of interest the developers, of which there is no complete list or real names, have in the various exchanges.
Also, are you conceding the point here that the developers are at liberty to promulgate changes to the protocol? How do they decide that? And if they decide never to change it, how did they decide that? What if 90% of the BTC market, by balance or body, want to extend the inflation calculation another 5 years, or want to stop it now, how is that decided? Are they just supposed to fork their currency through a (you admit basically unreliable) exchange process?
Bitcoin is basically whatever a majority of nodes says it is? Doesn't that make anybody who runs a block calculator a vote on a sort of Bitcoin FOMC?
you don't have to use them to receive or send Bitcoins
What a relief! Walled gardens aren't just for cellphones anymore!
But the technology in principle would allow public repudiation of a transaction, though not actual rollback.
It's possible to declare in public that you made a transaction and everyone else can witness it -- it's not like transfers are a he said/she said -- and it's possible to follow money through the system as it passes from endpoint to endpoint, and to see if any of the money in a particular incoming transaction was ever in the defamed endpoint. That would allow voluntary policing by people who agree to not accept transactions from "dirty" endpoints.
Other servers with a port open. The trick is getting javascript running on your destination system's web browser to launch a server that can listen on a port.
Don't get me wrong, I think BTCs are crank goods, mainly due to governance issues and institutional opacity -- just because you can see the source code doesn't mean the maintainers aren't going to change it tomorrow if it would make them a buck in the process, and all the major BTC trading firms are completely unaccountable and un-audited.
But the technology in principle would allow public repudiation of a transaction, though not actual rollback.
You can't stop a transaction in BitCoin, if the sending party sends his authorization the transfer is commited. Any refusal to accept from a certain endpoint, in order to preserve the decentralized system, would have to be a voluntary act.
When that guy got a huge number of BTC jacked from his wallet, all he revealed was the receiving endpoint, but from there everyone could see how much he'd lost and everyone knew that anyone using that endpoint to send money was (putatively) a thief. The thief could transfer from endpoint to endpoint to try to "launder" the money, but the chain of posession would always have that ill endpoint in it, in the publicly-visible tree, for anyone to inspect. The public tree is visible everywhere and for most purposes tamperproof.
What's interesting with Bitcoin is that all coins are essentially "marked," you can trace the posession of a sum through all of the endpoints it passes through, and if someone alleges that they had BTCs stolen from them, they can tell you what endpoint they went to, the transaction is in the public tree, and software that would recognize funds that came from that endpoint (or any subsequent endpoints) is possible, without having to invent any exotic new technology.
If someone is defrauded, it should be possible to put some sort of temporary or disputable "fraud alert" out on the funds, that wouldn't positively stop that money being transferred, but would alert people that they shouldn't accept that money and would help people identfiy bad actors.
But this is Bitcoin, and like all things laissez-faire, possible is far from routine.
Slashdot Mirror
As for your second note, yes, in the last decade Apple have done well.
I never made this point, my argument doesn't require it; I think what I said can prevail wether Apple is the largest tech company on Earth or bankrupt.
I'm not sure your argument about the "fast pace" of the "tech-world" are very airtight, considering the decade of missteps on the part of major players like Microsoft, and I'm not sure your rather brief (and typically moralizing) scenario for Apple losing dominance because of "failing to include others" is sustainable in the face of companies like Oracle and Nintendo, companies that share nothing, partner with companies in highly restrictive ways, only market end-to-end solutions and are still highly profitable and successful, with millions of happy customers.
Finally, PC != Microsoft. I was discussing more the openness of the x86 architecture and the wide and varied hardware support it enjoyed than MS dominance.
Eh... saying that "the PC" isn't the same as Microsoft is a hard line to draw, DOS and Windows were indispensable components of PCs, nobody ever successfully marketed an x86 PC with anything else back when this sort of thing was important, and today there's really only one company that mass markets x86 PCs that run something other than Windows: Apple. And while x86 was "open," the Wintel platform was decidedly not, and I don't think there's a useful distinction between x86 and Wintel, because nobody ever marketed x86 PCs with anything else, and the fact that the x86 ISA was open and documented didn't make a bit of difference to application developers, because applications require an OS, and today the application devs basically can choose between Windows and OS X, neither of which are particularly open.
The openness of x86 doesn't "rub off" on other parts of the stack, just as the openness of the Android hardware and OS doesn't rub off on the Google platform apps or internet services, which must rank among the most closed of all commercial closed sources today. Google won't even tell you what kind of computers they run search or docs on, let alone exactly what they're retaining and how they use it.
Finally, while we can all concede that Wintel was a far more open platform than Apple's, and this led to all kinds of positive feedbacks and network effects that allowed Wintel dominance in PCs of the 90s, my point is that this was not a good thing for end users. Microsoft became a lazy, anti-entrepreneurial company that lived off of monopoly rents and basically arrested all innovation in home computing for a decade. When the OS vendor stops caring about the end user and cares more about protecting their partner's business model, mediocrity is the result.
Microsoft's dominance was a direct, though probably not intended, consequence of IBM opening the x86 hardware platform; the openness didn't extend and wasn't useful to the end user, just to people with computer factories and their partners, the people writing OSs. And today, we find a nominally "open" Android that is basically nothing more than a dumb terminal for closed Google services and user metric aggregation -- the openness isn't to the benefit of the user, just to companies like Google, Samsung and Verizon.
I you read this entire post you can officially claim to be a subscriber to greentshirt's newsletter.
Google played this one brilliantly, Android is here and the irony is delicious. Apple lost the original Mac vs PC war at the onset due to control-freak behavior. They guarded their technical details jealously, IBM did not, it became easier to write for IBM hardware, clones began to appear, etc, etc, etc.
This did not turn out very well for IBM, if we talk about them specifically. They owned the market in 1980 and by 1985 it had completely walked away from them to silicon valley. One could hope that someone could market a Android than Google, and turn that into an alternate platform to draw people to alternate services, true open services not the Big Black Box that is Google, but considering the way the OHA has organized the market this doesn't seem likely. It's basically a cartel to make sure an AOSP Android never finds major support or market traction in the developed world.
The alternate characterization also applies, namely, that Apple failed to reap Microsoft-level profits because it insisted on being an integrator and marketing to end consumers, instead of leveraging an open product to monetize closed products, and converting the PC userbase into a locked-in pool of service demand that could be funneled, at MS's whim, to software developers, advertisers, and service providers. And that these devs, advertisers and service providers became Microsoft and IBMs real customers, and the end user would get screwed ten ways from Sunday as long as the real customers were kept happy.
The parallels with the Android business strategy should always be kept in mind.
The MAFIAA are simply Promoters, Publicists, and Producers. They do not Create.
Er. What is it you think producers do exactly? How many producers have you actually met, let alone seen work?
Let us also not set aside the fact that all artist royalties are collected by and pass through RIAA and MPAA members...
Thomas Edison worked part time as a clerk to fund his research.
Edison was a charlatan and marketer who "invented" almost nothing he claimed to. He was the first Steve Jobs. He used the government patent system to suppress independent sound recording and filmmaking for decades.
Henry Ford worked his way up from machinist to create Ford.
He was also a taylorite who dictated his employees' social lives, had racist hiring practices and his company would have gone bankrupt in the 40s if not for government war contracts.
Any account of American entrepreneurship in the laissez-faire "golden age" ends up being a story of someone finding a nice cozy rentier perch and then using it to oppress mankind, with the state's help.
Be skeptical. America is about the state helping someone or other, it's just a question of whom; it'd be nice if it were different, but in a democracy it's not clear if you can change this.
Whoever intercepts the phone calls, and decides which calls to put on wikileaks and which to hide.
If you want to make their phone calls readable, you have to have a mechanism where they're ALL published in the open, and not merely readable by whoever can hack an Autonomous System carrying their call.
Transparent to whom? The people or blackmailers?
skype was properly protected from prying government eyes.
[Citation--- you know the rest.]
Surely there's some Open Source tool they could use? Of course SIP and strong encryption are easy to put together, the real benefit of Skype is the phonebook service mapping names to their Internet locations. All other OSS video solutions I'm aware of require knowing an IP addy/domain name/URL for your destination.
"Prudent and Simple Procedures Render Hacker Tool Useless" doesn't make much of a headline.
iPhones can have alphanumeric passwords of eight or more characters; I'm certain Android phones can as well. You do that, and the only demonstrated way of cracking an iPhone is by getting access to the system you run iTunes on, but if someone steals that and you don't encrypt ~/ you're going to be pretty hosed no matter what phone you own.
Hiding behind "you're doing it wrong; the software is right, change your habits" may work sometimes; just because everyone else got away with it doesn't mean you're in the same boat.
Users, particularly professional users over the age of 40, ask for stupid things and complain mightily about everything. When the Montage editing system came out, it used a computer and a dozen videotape machines to edit film, and the editors would complain about the slowness of work, and they'd demand a system that supported TWO dozen videotape decks. So, when the first Media 100 and Lightworks machines came out, editing was MUCH faster, but the editors complained and managed to force the original software vendors to make the computer systems act like videotape editors -- the original Avid software woudn't even allow you to insert a clip inbetween two others in one step, because this was impossible with a three-point videtape editor.
Picture editors are clever people but they have impenetrable smugness when it comes to the gear and what they feel they need to learn in order to use it; they also hate software that is "easy," because it devalues their technical chops and makes it easier for the director or producer to push the buttons without them, they also tend to hate anything that makes them buy new gear, though they'll generally find some other way to rationalize this.
FD. I'm a sound editor and am exactly the same way about Pro Tools; OTOH I wish Pro Tools had something magnetic timeline and coalesced clips, but Avid is stupidly conservative where Apple is stupidly tweak-happy.
The 30-year old Avid timeline interface and the new FCPX magnetic storyline (coupled with some of the missing features) are probably different enough that, no, you can't just read in a previous project. Without a half-zillion available tracks, you won't get an exact one-to-one conversion. FCPX is a clean break with the past.
My concern is that this experience is going to give the dynamic timeline a bad name, even though I'd been wanting one for years. Having to manually manage a one-to-one relationship between media and a statically-allocated player object, which is what tracks on an Avid are, is very old-fashioned compared to what the hardware can do now -- I really shouldn't have to worry about wether or not a sound is playing on A1 or A2, I just wanna hear them both, please let the computer figure it out for me. But now people are racing to call it consumerish, when they're really pissed off about AAFs and RED support.
We have CT machines and we still can't figure out exactly what the Antikythera device did. On the plus side the LNC will be quite a bit bigger and will (perhaps) not be flooded with ocean water.
That's true, you're right, unless you count airplay from an iPad etc.
It isn't like Google is keeping people from using other search engines.
Wether other search engines are available isn't completely at issue -- what matters is what people actually do. It doesn't really matter if people are free to use other search engines if they never do, because that's a free ad market in princple but not in reality or effect.
Could it be because they have systematically shut off every reasonable legal way of obtaining it?
There are legal ways to obtain it. They want you to pay for cable and buy the DVD. You can't force people to sell their property at whatever terms the buyer dictates, even if it's in the seller's interest. They've been trying to give away content thru Hulu for several years now and it just doesn't make money. This was the experiment and for the purpose of a profitmaking enterprise, it failed.
There are plenty of practical reasons why people to pirate these programs, but there's no normative, moral or ethical one. These aren't 50 year old works the studios are sitting on throug eternal copyright-- these are last month's episodes of Kitchen Nightmares, and they're entitled to whatever means they have to recoup their costs, including clearance and run schedules, and planned scarcity.
What's interesting is in the 1950s, the Supreme Court ruled that a movie theater company had to give access to all studios, and that they had to charge competitve rates and that studios/producers coudn't own movie theaters. So in the 80s, when cable tech got cheap enough, they just moved the "theater" to your living room, and now studios can own an entire integrated chain, from studios, to distribution, to ads, to cable company.
I don't think Flash runs on my Roku, and it certainly doesn't run on an AppleTV.
Lloyd Bentsen was a Texan. It's sort of complicated, but in the late 80s/early 90s the Republican leadership in the House prevailed on conservative Democrats in Texas and the rest of the south -- people who were very conservative but were Democrats for historical reasons -- to switch to the Republican party and/or to withhold their votes for the Democratic Speaker when organizing the House. This effort gave the House to the Republicans in 1994, and the decades-long Democratic control of the House has been intermittent ever since. The realignment has made House vote much more ideological.
Republicanism and Coservativism isn't inherently pro-oil, but the Republican party is where all the southern, oil producing state representation is, and the party ideology is whatever the powerful voting blocks in the party say it is.
You're right but it's an interesting distinction. If you leave flyers with your clients email addresses hanging throughout town, and someone reads them...
I would say a GET request is fundamentally different in quality than the front door of a home and the same standard wouldn't apply, but the real question is, which car analogy is appropriate here...
Be careful what GET requests you make, because apparently if they're "unauthorized," despite not being protected by any authentication or session and bring happily returned by the server, you may still be a criminal.
If you run all, or a commanding majority, of all the advertising ad space available, in the US, under many circumstances, it may be true that you may not advertise your other companies, or charge your subsidiaries lower rates than outside ad buyers, or use the price structure to diminsh competitive access to ad space.
If you have wealth in Bitcoins and the rules of Bitcoins change, regardless of who promulgated the change, your wealth is dragged along for the ride; same thing if one dev gets disgruntled and starts mouthing off on a forum and claims BTC is a "Ponzi scheme." Your wealth was were forced, with just as real a force as if your dollars were depreciated by inflation.
The Bitcoin developers are a monetary authority wether they want that or not. They can't just wish away the responsibility by taking no action and making no plans; BTC market failures, insecurity, bad information and unclear rules will hurt the credibility of BTC regardless of who in particular may be to blame and how they try to rationalize it with libertarian handwaving. Having no policies is still a policy.
Making more Bitcoins for themselves isn't the fear. There are many problems if the developers have short positions in BTCs, by holding options, or by playing silent partner in exchanges and bucketing BTCs on deposit, and then releasing negative news or taking action that puts the soundness of the protocol in question. It's not clear what sort of interest the developers, of which there is no complete list or real names, have in the various exchanges.
Also, are you conceding the point here that the developers are at liberty to promulgate changes to the protocol? How do they decide that? And if they decide never to change it, how did they decide that? What if 90% of the BTC market, by balance or body, want to extend the inflation calculation another 5 years, or want to stop it now, how is that decided? Are they just supposed to fork their currency through a (you admit basically unreliable) exchange process?
Bitcoin is basically whatever a majority of nodes says it is? Doesn't that make anybody who runs a block calculator a vote on a sort of Bitcoin FOMC?
What a relief! Walled gardens aren't just for cellphones anymore!
It's possible to declare in public that you made a transaction and everyone else can witness it -- it's not like transfers are a he said/she said -- and it's possible to follow money through the system as it passes from endpoint to endpoint, and to see if any of the money in a particular incoming transaction was ever in the defamed endpoint. That would allow voluntary policing by people who agree to not accept transactions from "dirty" endpoints.
Other servers with a port open. The trick is getting javascript running on your destination system's web browser to launch a server that can listen on a port.
That's definitely the problem.
Don't get me wrong, I think BTCs are crank goods, mainly due to governance issues and institutional opacity -- just because you can see the source code doesn't mean the maintainers aren't going to change it tomorrow if it would make them a buck in the process, and all the major BTC trading firms are completely unaccountable and un-audited.
But the technology in principle would allow public repudiation of a transaction, though not actual rollback.
You can't stop a transaction in BitCoin, if the sending party sends his authorization the transfer is commited. Any refusal to accept from a certain endpoint, in order to preserve the decentralized system, would have to be a voluntary act.
When that guy got a huge number of BTC jacked from his wallet, all he revealed was the receiving endpoint, but from there everyone could see how much he'd lost and everyone knew that anyone using that endpoint to send money was (putatively) a thief. The thief could transfer from endpoint to endpoint to try to "launder" the money, but the chain of posession would always have that ill endpoint in it, in the publicly-visible tree, for anyone to inspect. The public tree is visible everywhere and for most purposes tamperproof.
What's interesting with Bitcoin is that all coins are essentially "marked," you can trace the posession of a sum through all of the endpoints it passes through, and if someone alleges that they had BTCs stolen from them, they can tell you what endpoint they went to, the transaction is in the public tree, and software that would recognize funds that came from that endpoint (or any subsequent endpoints) is possible, without having to invent any exotic new technology.
If someone is defrauded, it should be possible to put some sort of temporary or disputable "fraud alert" out on the funds, that wouldn't positively stop that money being transferred, but would alert people that they shouldn't accept that money and would help people identfiy bad actors.
But this is Bitcoin, and like all things laissez-faire, possible is far from routine.