Intel knows where they can make money from GNU/Linux: servers. That is not the target of this restricted boot system, and even if these restrictions come to servers, nobody will complain -- professional IT workers can put a $99 signing key purchase on their budget and continue to deploy whatever they want. Desktop GNU/Linux is not going to make Intel all that much money, and they know it -- Windows and Mac OS X are where all the desktop money is.
Intel and everyone else knows that restricted boot environments for personal computers (desktops and laptops) will be hugely profitable. Entertainment companies love it -- they can deploy a new kind of DRM that won't be defeated for years (see: PS3). Software companies love it, because they can stop people from applying cracks to evade DRM. ISPs love it because they can better lock-down their networks if they can control the computers that can be connected to those networks. The potential for money-making deals is HUGE, and Intel knows that when their chips are the center of these profitable systems, they make lots of money.
At the end of the day, Intel could not care less about hackers or computing freedom; they exist to make money, and there is no money to be made in allowing desktop and laptop users to have freedom.
If your company is issuing you a computer, and they don't realize that some engineers want to run Linux, they may not let you install new keys or disable the secure boot
Sounds like a big selling point: "Make sure your employees only run approved software!" Corporate bosses are not going to complain about losing control, and if the engineers are unable to make a business case for approving another OS (see how things switch up there), they had better just deal with what was approved.
I think Red Hat's strategy is to be the Linux distribution that will work without having to mess with any secure boot issues,
Which is a fine strategy for making money on a GNU/Linux distro, but some of us would prefer not to have to get Microsoft's permission to run the software we want to run. If you look at what Fedora will be doing, it makes it pretty hard to run a custom kernel, it does not help in running other distros, and it basically turns Fedora into a fancy TiVO. That's fine for Red Hat's desktop strategy, but the rest of us are going to need a better approach.
Canonical is making the right choice for their users.
Funny how when I was growing up, free/libre software meant that the users did not have to rely on companies like Canonical to make their choices for them.
So it's come to the point of having to attack our own computers just to run the software we want? The fact that we have to resort to these measure is a sign of just how bad things have gotten.
provide an easy way for users to reflash theirs from Windows or whatever OS is preinstalled
So to run free software, I have to first agree to yet another license for proprietary software? That is a step backwards if I have ever seen one.
No doubt this will prevent windows being reinstalled but unless you want a dual boot machine I doubt this matters much
There are lots of people who want or need dual boot. I would guess that a substantial fraction, maybe even a majority, of GNU/Linux users have dual boot. People should be free to use their computers the way they want, which includes the freedom to dual boot.
Is this just because criminals are now using Internet services, and the service operators are just cooperating with law enforcement and providing a loophole in the wiretap process?
Well, let's put it this way: when someone is looking for a job, if the companies that make an offer know that the person has a greater-than-normal need for money, the company can reduce the salary they offer -- desperate people often take whatever they can get. It may not even be the case that you are in a vulnerable position; if there is one job opening, and two candidates, it would not be unreasonable for a corporation to choose the candidate who needs the job more -- the candidate who cannot afford to quit, who cannot afford to stand up to his boss, who is more likely to accept a lower salary, etc.
This is not exactly news in terms of strategy. Sun Tzu said, "If you know your enemy and you know yourself, you will not be endangered in 100 battles." Authoritarian governments often compile information about their citizens (even before the computer age) as a way of protecting their own power. Whenever you have an adversarial situation, information can be a deciding factor; unfortunately, we live in a very adversarial society (by design).
The problem here is that we, as individuals, have less power over our own lives as a result of this sort of tracking. We cannot decide what image of ourselves we want to present, because we cannot hide details of our past or present lives -- your fetishes, your political views, your medical problems, your family life, etc. The people who are using the information that is collected about us can, of course, present whatever image they want -- the effort required for you to see through their facade is generally greater than what any single person is capable of.
Sure, society will learn to cope -- I already know people who get angry when their picture is taken at a party, because they are afraid of that picture being posted to Facebook and hurting their chances of landing a job. People brag about lying to Facebook and Google, painting an image of themselves that excludes the details they would prefer to keep private. That is not society learning to cope with the end of privacy, it is society learning to cope with companies who are trying to bring about the end of privacy.
I don't recall Google ever imprisoning or shooting someone for violations of their TOS...
Sure, I doubt that any of these data mining companies are doing such things, but that brings up an interesting question: what are those companies doing? How are they using the information they collect? Who are they selling it to, and how is it being sold?
How do you know that some email you sent a few years ago will not become a deciding factor in a job application, a loan application, being allowed to board an airplane, or any number of other situations where one of these companies might be asked to supply information about you?
Why do people keep pushing these ridiculous false dichotomies? Nobody is saying that we should all be isolated, secretive hermits who keep everything we do secret from everyone else. The problem is that we have these companies amassing vast amounts of information on people, with horribly inadequate limitations on how that information can be used, how long it can stored, or what should be done if a person objects to the storage of that information. It is clear that these companies do not really respect the wishes of their users to not be tracked, because they are using these sorts of tricks to evade browser settings.
If you think there is no difference between people in my town knowing who I am dating and a company like Google keeping track of everything I read, watch, purchase, and say, then you are not paying attention. We are not talking about gossip here, we are talking about companies amassing power over everyone (by collecting information) without any check on that power.
PMs are only deflationary up to a point where it makes sense to mine some more
Mines are not infinitely deep. Eventually, all those metals will be mined, and then what?
Inflation is much more destructive than deflation
Both are bad for the economy, but the difference between inflationary and deflationary trends is that inflationary trends do not self-perpetuate the way deflationary trends do. Deflation encourages hoarding, which in turn increases the rate of deflation.
For example, if it costs $50 to get one ounce of silver from scrap electronics, it will only be profitable to do that when silver is over $50 an ounce
Except when you get to the point where all the silver that can be mined as been mined, where there is none left in scrap electronics, and even worse, where there is none left for productive industries. Would you rather see metals pressed into bars and left in a vault somewhere, or used to create useful goods?
If deflation happens, the pool of available methods to get the PMs increases.
No, it decreases, because people are encouraged to hold their metals; the value of metals keeps increasing, and so selling tomorrow is better than selling today. It is not until the end of a deflationary trend that people have an incentive to sell their metals.
Inflation acts as a silent tax, a theft of wealth
No, inflation is just a trend that discourages the use of a currency as a store of value. Wealth is not simply about the number of dollars some person or organization has saved. Inflation encourages people to store their wealth in things that are useful -- land, buildings, factories, etc. That is a good thing for society, because it places wealth where it belongs and where it is needed (we might argue about how that wealth should be distributed i.e. if the factory workers should own the factory, but that is an entirely separate issue). People should not become wealthier by simply sitting down and doing nothing; that is how societies wind up failing.
Instead of Usenet or the Internet returning to the days of being networks for hackers and intellectuals, we are entering an even darker age. Now, when we are online, we need to make sure that we are encrypting everything, that our certificates are valid, that we are using an anonymity system, that our firewall is configured to block ranges of IP addresses known to be used by certain organizations, and that we stay up to date on the latest methods of attacking all these systems. The Internet is a depressingly hostile network these days, and this only worsens that situation.
Knowing which books you buy is not equivalent to knowing which books you read. You can be buying a gift, you can be making a donation to a library, you could receive a book from someone else, etc. The difference here is that the software is designed to spy on you.
The problem is proprietary software. This is a feature that could theoretically be included in free software, but which the users would just remove and distribute a fork.
Yet everyone said we were crazy when we warned about proprietary ebooks and reader software...
How much will this pointless crack down impact my legal and legitimate use of this service?
You will receive a letter, and then you will call your ISP, demand that they reduce your strike count because you were just downloading those Debian disks. The ISP will insist that their system is perfect, until you speak to a manager who will reduce your strike count, but only in one of many databases that only synchronize increases in the count. Eventually you'll be in court, suing your ISP, only to be told that your service agreement says that you have no legal recourse.
That is terrible -- the Internet is supposed to be for us, that is, for the computer users of the world. We are supposed to have a network where we can communicate freely, where there are no borders or region codes or deals to negotiate. If the copyright industry is allowed to hijack our system, the answer should be to make a new Internet.
By the time the Internet looks like cable TV, living life without an Internet connection will be very difficult. Banking, shopping, communications (voice, video, text) will all basically involve the Internet. Most people want the superbowl and will not boycott the Internet if it becomes the only way to get their entertainment, even if they are losing the freedoms the Internet was supposed to provide (which most people have not really had to chance to enjoy, due to the generally poor understanding of computers).
Let's put it this way: how many people will give up on Facebook in the Internet-as-cable-TV scenario?
The copyright lobbyists live in a world of services, a world where people are either consumers receiving service, or service providers who provide service. They love this world, because copyright fits very naturally into it -- the copyright holder can negotiate with the service providers, whose business interests compel them to enter into profitable deals. That is why they love the cable TV system -- the consumers are just leaf nodes, whose money can simply be siphoned upward to the businesses running the show.
Compare this to the Internet, where peer to peer networking thrives (and which is a peer to peer network itself). Sure, there are service providers online, but the truth is that unlike the cable TV system, the Internet does not require service providers to distribute entertainment -- anyone with an Internet connection can be a participant in entertainment distribution. Suddenly, the consumers are not just passive receivers whose wallets can be raided; they are participants in the distribution of entertainment, and they are not all party to an explicit deal with the copyright industry. They might receive their entertainment without having to pay for it, they might distribute the entertainment before or after the industry would have preferred, they might make entertainment available that embarrasses the industry.
The industry does not know how to rake in billions of dollars in profits in such a scenario. Thus they have simply resorted to attacking peer to peer itself. As long as people are only able to receive their entertainment from a distribution service, the industry is happy. They'll play that game, they'll sue and bargain with file sharing websites, because they understand the model and the websites have more to lose than some college kid. The endgame is for the Internet to become a fancy cable TV system, where there are channels, distribution regions, disputes between networks and copyright holders that leave consumers without entertainment, and most importantly, consumer systems will just be passive receivers.
Six strikes? Just a way to scare people away from peer to peer models, until there are enough TPMs and DRM systems to ensure that peer to peer networking is no longer possible.
They would rather deal with online services than P2P. That's what this has been about this the beginning of this ridiculous situation. The old media barons do not want to see a world in which people can be both consumers and distributors of entertainment or software, because that turns their whole business upside down. Peer to peer networks, and yes, that includes the Internet itself, are the targets; they want this to look more like cable TV systems, where consumers have consumption devices and where distributors have to negotiate deals and fight things out in courts.
The RIAA and MPAA love playing whack-a-mole; they have decades of experience doing it, they have laws on their side, they have public sympathy on their side. Suing an service provider off the face of the Earth doesn't really get the public angry, and it can result in that service provider making a deal that rakes in cash. Suing some college kid, some working class parent, some old computer-illiterate grandmother -- those things get the public angry (which is only tolerable up to the point where they start voting for less industry friendly politicians), they have no chance of producing a profitable deal, and they involve a party that has little money to give.
Hm...that's an interesting assertion...perhaps you meant "hard to monitor" or "I cannot see how this will be monitored," but unless you would like to point to a proof of hardness i.e. that either in an information theoretic sense or under some common cryptographic assumption it is hard to track Freenode transfers, I would not stake much on Freenode. It would not be beyond the RIAA or MPAA to hire some cryptanalysts to develop methods of attacking the security of Freenet, nor would it be beyond them to set up malicious Freenet nodes for that purpose.
It would not inappropriate, however, to refer to the charge as a "sex crime" -- that is to say, to use quotation marks, which make it clear that the definition of the crime in Ethiopia is different from the commonly understood definition. That is the point of using quotation marks around the word "rape" in the Assange case -- he is accused of doing something that does not meet the commonly understood definition of rape. Failing to include any indication that the use of the word is unusual and based on an overly expansive and uncommon definition is nothing more than an attack on Assange's character (someone being accused of or charged with a serious crime damages their reputation, regardless of their guilt or innocence).
Why go through a complicated, convoluted, non-private, expensive "cashless" system to avoid having to keep some money in your wallet? That seems pretty silly.
When did we start talking about "non private" systems? I am thinking of Chaum-style systems, where the bank can only really track how much money is in your bank account, and not where or when the money is being spent. I should be able to withdraw money from my bank account while sitting at my desk, add it to a smartcard, and spend it without the bank tracking my spending habits or demanding fees from the businesses I frequent. This is not about going "off-grid," it is about adding convenience without undermining the privacy of our existing system.
Keep in mind that large cash transactions are automatically reported (by law) to the IRS; it is pretty hard to make large cash transactions without at least going through one tax-paying business (e.g. a bank), and even if you split the transaction up, there is a point beyond which you will not be able to hide what you are doing. This is actually one of the biggest difficulties that fugitives face: it is very hard to receive income off the books, pay rent off the books, buy food off the books, etc. It is also the case that most people try to pay their taxes correctly; the cheaters are in the minority (we can debate whether or not that is a result of enforcement or the fact that we give our consent to be governed).
Additionally, the government has incentives to support secure payment systems, and even incentives to support anonymous payment systems. Several classes of fraud, including (importantly) fraud against banks (the government definitely cares about their interests, even if they do not care about commoners'), are difficult to the point of impossibility. Secret operations and programs need to be paid for, and just burying the paper trail in a mountain of shell corporations is usually not enough.
Now, some of our friends on the right wing of American politics do indeed loath the idea of individuals being able to engage in transactions that cannot be recorded and analyzed without the knowledge of one or both parties. Unfortunately, we currently have a right wing majority in our government (don't be fooled -- the majority of Democrats are right-of-center at best, and only push for left wing charges on the thinnest, outer-most layer of things that matter; health care reform was the closest thing to a deviation from that behavior that we have seen in a long time, and even that fell short), and so anything that appears to hinder law enforcement will almost certainly to pass through our legislative or executive branch.
This is not a problem with "government," it is a problem with "ring wing government."
I cannot withdraw physical cash from my bank account while I am sitting at my desk. It is not a huge problem, but it adds inefficiency -- there is a reason so many people just use credit and debit cards to pay for things, and it is not just that they get rewards or cash back.
Why should I have to choose between convenience and privacy, when we already have the technology to achieve both goals?
So on the one hand, you agree that government backed currency is the only useful currency, since the demand is made clear (taxes, legally enforced debts, court verdicts, etc. -- just so nobody is confused as to why a government backing a currency creates value). On the other hand, you say that precious metals are better than fiat currencies.
What's the difference, in terms of backing? None. The real difference is that those metals are both hard to find and industrially useful. The first means that the currency will ultimately become deflationary, unless the population stops growing; the second means that the currency will become deflationary unless industries stop using the currency to make things.
Somehow, I am not seeing the point at which the currency does not trend towards deflation, which ultimately dooms any currency (due to hoarding).
I wish it was feasible to move all my money to bitcoin, honestly.
What are you going to do when some idiot crashes his car into your living room? You are going to go to court and have a judge resolve things, because in all likelihood, the idiot is not going to fix the damage on his own. You know what the court ruling will be in terms of? Your nation's currency, because that is how courts work.
Governments do actually provide useful services, like courts. Those services must be paid for, like anything else, and governments collect taxes to pay for those services. When a government says that it is collecting taxes in some currency, the government is backing that currency.
So unless a government starts backing Bitcoin, Bitcoin is stuck trying to make up for a massive gap in demand. Taxes are mandatory and cannot be paid in Bitcoin; so far, all Bitcoin offers is a hard-to-achieve form of anonymous payments, which must be online. It does not take a genius to see the difference between compulsory payments and a semi-useful currency feature.
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Intel knows where they can make money from GNU/Linux: servers. That is not the target of this restricted boot system, and even if these restrictions come to servers, nobody will complain -- professional IT workers can put a $99 signing key purchase on their budget and continue to deploy whatever they want. Desktop GNU/Linux is not going to make Intel all that much money, and they know it -- Windows and Mac OS X are where all the desktop money is.
Intel and everyone else knows that restricted boot environments for personal computers (desktops and laptops) will be hugely profitable. Entertainment companies love it -- they can deploy a new kind of DRM that won't be defeated for years (see: PS3). Software companies love it, because they can stop people from applying cracks to evade DRM. ISPs love it because they can better lock-down their networks if they can control the computers that can be connected to those networks. The potential for money-making deals is HUGE, and Intel knows that when their chips are the center of these profitable systems, they make lots of money.
At the end of the day, Intel could not care less about hackers or computing freedom; they exist to make money, and there is no money to be made in allowing desktop and laptop users to have freedom.
If your company is issuing you a computer, and they don't realize that some engineers want to run Linux, they may not let you install new keys or disable the secure boot
Sounds like a big selling point: "Make sure your employees only run approved software!" Corporate bosses are not going to complain about losing control, and if the engineers are unable to make a business case for approving another OS (see how things switch up there), they had better just deal with what was approved.
I think Red Hat's strategy is to be the Linux distribution that will work without having to mess with any secure boot issues,
Which is a fine strategy for making money on a GNU/Linux distro, but some of us would prefer not to have to get Microsoft's permission to run the software we want to run. If you look at what Fedora will be doing, it makes it pretty hard to run a custom kernel, it does not help in running other distros, and it basically turns Fedora into a fancy TiVO. That's fine for Red Hat's desktop strategy, but the rest of us are going to need a better approach.
Canonical is making the right choice for their users.
Funny how when I was growing up, free/libre software meant that the users did not have to rely on companies like Canonical to make their choices for them.
for someone to hack the secure boot BIOS
So it's come to the point of having to attack our own computers just to run the software we want? The fact that we have to resort to these measure is a sign of just how bad things have gotten.
provide an easy way for users to reflash theirs from Windows or whatever OS is preinstalled
So to run free software, I have to first agree to yet another license for proprietary software? That is a step backwards if I have ever seen one.
No doubt this will prevent windows being reinstalled but unless you want a dual boot machine I doubt this matters much
There are lots of people who want or need dual boot. I would guess that a substantial fraction, maybe even a majority, of GNU/Linux users have dual boot. People should be free to use their computers the way they want, which includes the freedom to dual boot.
Is this just because criminals are now using Internet services, and the service operators are just cooperating with law enforcement and providing a loophole in the wiretap process?
Well, let's put it this way: when someone is looking for a job, if the companies that make an offer know that the person has a greater-than-normal need for money, the company can reduce the salary they offer -- desperate people often take whatever they can get. It may not even be the case that you are in a vulnerable position; if there is one job opening, and two candidates, it would not be unreasonable for a corporation to choose the candidate who needs the job more -- the candidate who cannot afford to quit, who cannot afford to stand up to his boss, who is more likely to accept a lower salary, etc.
This is not exactly news in terms of strategy. Sun Tzu said, "If you know your enemy and you know yourself, you will not be endangered in 100 battles." Authoritarian governments often compile information about their citizens (even before the computer age) as a way of protecting their own power. Whenever you have an adversarial situation, information can be a deciding factor; unfortunately, we live in a very adversarial society (by design).
The problem here is that we, as individuals, have less power over our own lives as a result of this sort of tracking. We cannot decide what image of ourselves we want to present, because we cannot hide details of our past or present lives -- your fetishes, your political views, your medical problems, your family life, etc. The people who are using the information that is collected about us can, of course, present whatever image they want -- the effort required for you to see through their facade is generally greater than what any single person is capable of.
Sure, society will learn to cope -- I already know people who get angry when their picture is taken at a party, because they are afraid of that picture being posted to Facebook and hurting their chances of landing a job. People brag about lying to Facebook and Google, painting an image of themselves that excludes the details they would prefer to keep private. That is not society learning to cope with the end of privacy, it is society learning to cope with companies who are trying to bring about the end of privacy.
I don't recall Google ever imprisoning or shooting someone for violations of their TOS...
Sure, I doubt that any of these data mining companies are doing such things, but that brings up an interesting question: what are those companies doing? How are they using the information they collect? Who are they selling it to, and how is it being sold?
How do you know that some email you sent a few years ago will not become a deciding factor in a job application, a loan application, being allowed to board an airplane, or any number of other situations where one of these companies might be asked to supply information about you?
Why do people keep pushing these ridiculous false dichotomies? Nobody is saying that we should all be isolated, secretive hermits who keep everything we do secret from everyone else. The problem is that we have these companies amassing vast amounts of information on people, with horribly inadequate limitations on how that information can be used, how long it can stored, or what should be done if a person objects to the storage of that information. It is clear that these companies do not really respect the wishes of their users to not be tracked, because they are using these sorts of tricks to evade browser settings.
If you think there is no difference between people in my town knowing who I am dating and a company like Google keeping track of everything I read, watch, purchase, and say, then you are not paying attention. We are not talking about gossip here, we are talking about companies amassing power over everyone (by collecting information) without any check on that power.
Really? I can withdraw money from an ATM at no cost. Why should I not be able to do the same with a digital cash system?
PMs are only deflationary up to a point where it makes sense to mine some more
Mines are not infinitely deep. Eventually, all those metals will be mined, and then what?
Inflation is much more destructive than deflation
Both are bad for the economy, but the difference between inflationary and deflationary trends is that inflationary trends do not self-perpetuate the way deflationary trends do. Deflation encourages hoarding, which in turn increases the rate of deflation.
For example, if it costs $50 to get one ounce of silver from scrap electronics, it will only be profitable to do that when silver is over $50 an ounce
Except when you get to the point where all the silver that can be mined as been mined, where there is none left in scrap electronics, and even worse, where there is none left for productive industries. Would you rather see metals pressed into bars and left in a vault somewhere, or used to create useful goods?
If deflation happens, the pool of available methods to get the PMs increases.
No, it decreases, because people are encouraged to hold their metals; the value of metals keeps increasing, and so selling tomorrow is better than selling today. It is not until the end of a deflationary trend that people have an incentive to sell their metals.
Inflation acts as a silent tax, a theft of wealth
No, inflation is just a trend that discourages the use of a currency as a store of value. Wealth is not simply about the number of dollars some person or organization has saved. Inflation encourages people to store their wealth in things that are useful -- land, buildings, factories, etc. That is a good thing for society, because it places wealth where it belongs and where it is needed (we might argue about how that wealth should be distributed i.e. if the factory workers should own the factory, but that is an entirely separate issue). People should not become wealthier by simply sitting down and doing nothing; that is how societies wind up failing.
Instead of Usenet or the Internet returning to the days of being networks for hackers and intellectuals, we are entering an even darker age. Now, when we are online, we need to make sure that we are encrypting everything, that our certificates are valid, that we are using an anonymity system, that our firewall is configured to block ranges of IP addresses known to be used by certain organizations, and that we stay up to date on the latest methods of attacking all these systems. The Internet is a depressingly hostile network these days, and this only worsens that situation.
Knowing which books you buy is not equivalent to knowing which books you read. You can be buying a gift, you can be making a donation to a library, you could receive a book from someone else, etc. The difference here is that the software is designed to spy on you.
The problem is proprietary software. This is a feature that could theoretically be included in free software, but which the users would just remove and distribute a fork.
Yet everyone said we were crazy when we warned about proprietary ebooks and reader software...
How much will this pointless crack down impact my legal and legitimate use of this service?
You will receive a letter, and then you will call your ISP, demand that they reduce your strike count because you were just downloading those Debian disks. The ISP will insist that their system is perfect, until you speak to a manager who will reduce your strike count, but only in one of many databases that only synchronize increases in the count. Eventually you'll be in court, suing your ISP, only to be told that your service agreement says that you have no legal recourse.
Let's put it this way: how many people will give up on Facebook in the Internet-as-cable-TV scenario?
The copyright lobbyists live in a world of services, a world where people are either consumers receiving service, or service providers who provide service. They love this world, because copyright fits very naturally into it -- the copyright holder can negotiate with the service providers, whose business interests compel them to enter into profitable deals. That is why they love the cable TV system -- the consumers are just leaf nodes, whose money can simply be siphoned upward to the businesses running the show.
Compare this to the Internet, where peer to peer networking thrives (and which is a peer to peer network itself). Sure, there are service providers online, but the truth is that unlike the cable TV system, the Internet does not require service providers to distribute entertainment -- anyone with an Internet connection can be a participant in entertainment distribution. Suddenly, the consumers are not just passive receivers whose wallets can be raided; they are participants in the distribution of entertainment, and they are not all party to an explicit deal with the copyright industry. They might receive their entertainment without having to pay for it, they might distribute the entertainment before or after the industry would have preferred, they might make entertainment available that embarrasses the industry.
The industry does not know how to rake in billions of dollars in profits in such a scenario. Thus they have simply resorted to attacking peer to peer itself. As long as people are only able to receive their entertainment from a distribution service, the industry is happy. They'll play that game, they'll sue and bargain with file sharing websites, because they understand the model and the websites have more to lose than some college kid. The endgame is for the Internet to become a fancy cable TV system, where there are channels, distribution regions, disputes between networks and copyright holders that leave consumers without entertainment, and most importantly, consumer systems will just be passive receivers.
Six strikes? Just a way to scare people away from peer to peer models, until there are enough TPMs and DRM systems to ensure that peer to peer networking is no longer possible.
They would rather deal with online services than P2P. That's what this has been about this the beginning of this ridiculous situation. The old media barons do not want to see a world in which people can be both consumers and distributors of entertainment or software, because that turns their whole business upside down. Peer to peer networks, and yes, that includes the Internet itself, are the targets; they want this to look more like cable TV systems, where consumers have consumption devices and where distributors have to negotiate deals and fight things out in courts.
The RIAA and MPAA love playing whack-a-mole; they have decades of experience doing it, they have laws on their side, they have public sympathy on their side. Suing an service provider off the face of the Earth doesn't really get the public angry, and it can result in that service provider making a deal that rakes in cash. Suing some college kid, some working class parent, some old computer-illiterate grandmother -- those things get the public angry (which is only tolerable up to the point where they start voting for less industry friendly politicians), they have no chance of producing a profitable deal, and they involve a party that has little money to give.
Is there some reason to think that they will not continue to bankrupt college students?
without the possibility of monitoring
Hm...that's an interesting assertion...perhaps you meant "hard to monitor" or "I cannot see how this will be monitored," but unless you would like to point to a proof of hardness i.e. that either in an information theoretic sense or under some common cryptographic assumption it is hard to track Freenode transfers, I would not stake much on Freenode. It would not be beyond the RIAA or MPAA to hire some cryptanalysts to develop methods of attacking the security of Freenet, nor would it be beyond them to set up malicious Freenet nodes for that purpose.
It would not inappropriate, however, to refer to the charge as a "sex crime" -- that is to say, to use quotation marks, which make it clear that the definition of the crime in Ethiopia is different from the commonly understood definition. That is the point of using quotation marks around the word "rape" in the Assange case -- he is accused of doing something that does not meet the commonly understood definition of rape. Failing to include any indication that the use of the word is unusual and based on an overly expansive and uncommon definition is nothing more than an attack on Assange's character (someone being accused of or charged with a serious crime damages their reputation, regardless of their guilt or innocence).
Why go through a complicated, convoluted, non-private, expensive "cashless" system to avoid having to keep some money in your wallet? That seems pretty silly.
When did we start talking about "non private" systems? I am thinking of Chaum-style systems, where the bank can only really track how much money is in your bank account, and not where or when the money is being spent. I should be able to withdraw money from my bank account while sitting at my desk, add it to a smartcard, and spend it without the bank tracking my spending habits or demanding fees from the businesses I frequent. This is not about going "off-grid," it is about adding convenience without undermining the privacy of our existing system.
Keep in mind that large cash transactions are automatically reported (by law) to the IRS; it is pretty hard to make large cash transactions without at least going through one tax-paying business (e.g. a bank), and even if you split the transaction up, there is a point beyond which you will not be able to hide what you are doing. This is actually one of the biggest difficulties that fugitives face: it is very hard to receive income off the books, pay rent off the books, buy food off the books, etc. It is also the case that most people try to pay their taxes correctly; the cheaters are in the minority (we can debate whether or not that is a result of enforcement or the fact that we give our consent to be governed).
Additionally, the government has incentives to support secure payment systems, and even incentives to support anonymous payment systems. Several classes of fraud, including (importantly) fraud against banks (the government definitely cares about their interests, even if they do not care about commoners'), are difficult to the point of impossibility. Secret operations and programs need to be paid for, and just burying the paper trail in a mountain of shell corporations is usually not enough.
Now, some of our friends on the right wing of American politics do indeed loath the idea of individuals being able to engage in transactions that cannot be recorded and analyzed without the knowledge of one or both parties. Unfortunately, we currently have a right wing majority in our government (don't be fooled -- the majority of Democrats are right-of-center at best, and only push for left wing charges on the thinnest, outer-most layer of things that matter; health care reform was the closest thing to a deviation from that behavior that we have seen in a long time, and even that fell short), and so anything that appears to hinder law enforcement will almost certainly to pass through our legislative or executive branch.
This is not a problem with "government," it is a problem with "ring wing government."
I cannot withdraw physical cash from my bank account while I am sitting at my desk. It is not a huge problem, but it adds inefficiency -- there is a reason so many people just use credit and debit cards to pay for things, and it is not just that they get rewards or cash back.
Why should I have to choose between convenience and privacy, when we already have the technology to achieve both goals?
So on the one hand, you agree that government backed currency is the only useful currency, since the demand is made clear (taxes, legally enforced debts, court verdicts, etc. -- just so nobody is confused as to why a government backing a currency creates value). On the other hand, you say that precious metals are better than fiat currencies.
What's the difference, in terms of backing? None. The real difference is that those metals are both hard to find and industrially useful. The first means that the currency will ultimately become deflationary, unless the population stops growing; the second means that the currency will become deflationary unless industries stop using the currency to make things.
Somehow, I am not seeing the point at which the currency does not trend towards deflation, which ultimately dooms any currency (due to hoarding).
I wish it was feasible to move all my money to bitcoin, honestly.
What are you going to do when some idiot crashes his car into your living room? You are going to go to court and have a judge resolve things, because in all likelihood, the idiot is not going to fix the damage on his own. You know what the court ruling will be in terms of? Your nation's currency, because that is how courts work.
Governments do actually provide useful services, like courts. Those services must be paid for, like anything else, and governments collect taxes to pay for those services. When a government says that it is collecting taxes in some currency, the government is backing that currency.
So unless a government starts backing Bitcoin, Bitcoin is stuck trying to make up for a massive gap in demand. Taxes are mandatory and cannot be paid in Bitcoin; so far, all Bitcoin offers is a hard-to-achieve form of anonymous payments, which must be online. It does not take a genius to see the difference between compulsory payments and a semi-useful currency feature.