I don't know if you're serious as someone else rated you funny, but as the lack of terrorist attacks since 9/11 is cited often enough as reason to justify all of our countermeasures, I'll assume you're serious.

While 9/11 was a tragedy, let's also not forget that it was a singular event. Would a huge expansion in the intelligence community have stopped it? Who knows. Personally, I think the thing that would have had the greatest chance of stopping it would have been a commander in chief who would have taken memos from his intel guys that said things like "al Qaeda training to use planes in the us", "bin laden determined to strike at the us" and "all the alarm lights are flashing red" seriously might have done the trick. Instead, he sleeps on the job and our massively expanded intelligence apparatus is turned against us instead.

Whenever I go to my hometown, I'm struck by the dearth of kids hanging out like we used to. They just are nowhere to be found. But the, there sure are a lot of no loitering signs, no skateboarding signs. I assumed that they're staying home on their own accord, playing tony hawk instead of trying to actually skate on their own. But then, when friends drop their kids off places, they leave but expect them to answer their phone at a moments notice. Worse, I think, is using gps to track them. And then, even when they're home, parents now have an array of trully scary monitoring software. Kids today really do lack the freedoms that kids of yesteryear had. I just assumed that they liked it, for the most part, rather than herding into all the chat apps simply because they can't see their friends face to face anymore.

It's not like he did a sham transfer to a strawman. He transferred them to his foundation, irrevocably. Just because the foundation has his name doesn't mean he gets anything from it. Aside from getting to vote the shares the way he and the rest of the board agree, the shares are gone to him - any appreciation, all dividends, they all are for the bill and Melinda gates foundations benefit, and that organization publicly discloses their tax return so you can verify that.

Creating and funding that foundation did nothing with regards to microsofts antitrust case, except make bill a lot less rich (but still in the top 3)

Yes, ASIC's can hash SHA256. But suppose a flaw is found in SHA256 - not a crushing flaw that renders it useless, but something theoretical enough that researchers are worried. My bet is that Bitcoin would stay put on SHA256 because of the huge investment in custom hardware to do the work.

I've been following Bitcoin for a long time now (comparatively to many, at least). And i think the move to ASIC is the worst thing that could have ever happened to it. Each day that goes by, bitcoin becomes even less "peer to peer" than it was before. As a fan of the peer to peer currency idea, I think that's a net negative.

Youre right, it is a 1.0 attempt at a peer to peer currency. But it'll be next to inpossible to go back to the drawing board on it. Too much vested interest. Think all those people who have spent tens of millions (most likely) on mining equipment will endorse even a slight change to the algorithm that renders their equipment useless? Not likely. And that's just at the simest level. Then there's more fundamental things like block generation rate ( which is the time for a transaction to get into the block chain), even if 90% of people thought it should be changed, it's not a democratic process - so long as the important people thought otherwise, nothing would happen.

Point out enough of this on the bitcoin boards and you're told "if you don't like it make your own" but then if you make your own, at best it's called a cheap knockoff with a couple parameters changed, at worst it get attacked by bitcoin miners in the name of "defending bitcoin"

Luddites are on slashdot?!?

What really impresses me is that it downloads the entire Wikipedia, with "no internet connection required!" That's an engineering feat if I've ever heard of one!

Public servants are the only ones that have legally been able to trade on inside information. Why would they stop now?

25 bitcoins every 7 or 8 minutes. That's the max. And that's supposing they deployed so much hashing power that the rest of the network (ie -- all the miners currently deployed, in production, or contemplated to be in construction) only accounted for the slimmest percentage of the resulting network.

Having the us government involved might be beneficial, only in the sense that when block rewards diminish, if the fees aren't enough to reward miners to continue, then having a "miner of last resort" available would probably lend itself to stability. Who knows though.

Because it's backed by the general revenues as taxing authority if the United States. Big difference when your a government and can arbitrarily adjust all the externalities to suit your needs.

Because, well, windows sucks. It's redeeming quality is the huge amount of software that's available for it. Take that away, and there's nothing left.

Kind of like every version of windows was an unstable POS until they dropped all of the dos underpinnings from it? Or should companies who have realized their products have outlived their utility be forced to continue to support them with their current products even decades later?

why is that so bad? What happens if they drop all human variables from the models and discover that the change would not be nearly as severe as is now claimed? Wouldn't that bolster the theory that they're so adamant on protecting that they won't even do research that doesn't involve it?

Like, what if a politician said "i don't believe in dark matter. do a study and demonstrate what the universe would be like if there wasn't any dark matter in it". Would scientists simply refuse to even broach the subject? Of course, dark matter is not at all politicized, so they wouldn't be afraid of their names appearing on a study that disputes that, even if the result of it is that dark matter must exist of the universe to behave as it does...

So, scientists refuse to conduct research that might call into question their own previous findings and presumptions? What if "scientists" refused to conduct any studies or research into weather systems because the research could be used to overturn their own beliefs that the weather is controlled by the gods?

I'm sorry, I just don't agree; it's a complex issue and every angle needs to be explored, if nothing else than to quantify the effect of natural vs. unnatural causes. To refuse to do research because it concentrates only on the natural side of climate change seems, well, unscientific. This shows just how bad it is for society as a whole that science is as politicized as it is; scientists are now refusing to conduct research that goes against the community consensus.

Yes, if you 51% the network. But you'd undo every payment that occurred since then, and you'd undo every miners block reward as well. Therefore, no one will possibly go along with that idea.