Let's not shout about this or they'll start arresting random people to get the figures up and support the funding party

If you, for example, had some Bitcoin in your wallet on the site and you were hoping to buy a gold coin anonymously then you have broken no law.
But now the DoJ has taken your money...
how do you get your coins back? Who do you call?

Not everybody on the site was a criminal.

  The way this will play out depends on economics.
If the USA and dollar finally lose reserve status as some have predicted then I can see it going the way of Argentina. There, there are a lot of things that go on that are illegal. Especially in sharing and things like the black market dollar market. At first the police and government did all they did to enforce rules but in the end attrition set in. So many people were breaking the law just to survive. The police had to be corrupt to survive too. In the end the police relaxed and just stopped acting on petty rules for things like resturant licensing for the government as they finally came to relise that having an empty street is pointless. The governments authority was eventually greatly reduced. Unfortunatly it took many years for this to happen.

My main point in this is that the laws are still there. Nothing changed. It was just a case of people, police etc just ignoring those laws.

So these petty laws in the end just undermine the authority of the government. It's a waste of their power. Try to take away from this that this is a good thing as most governments are filled with good people trapped by things like the military-industrial complex, central banks and popularism.

In the end economics will be the decider.
But until then check out all the options. It's good to see society rerouting around it's restrictions. Sharing is amoungst a number of groundswell trends. I can't see companies being able to do much about this in the long term other than being better companies. It's good to see avocacy speeding up the process.

Here's another example. In Spain they've banned 3month home lettings under pressure from hotels. This took away income from the more efficient decentralised small businessness and individuals making cash on the side. In turn this will effect the economy there - it's funny how the exact opposite of what is needed causing a self feedback cycle of regulation. As a result people have been doing it anyway as they are so desperate for cash in some cases they have nothing to lose. The gov have been sending round stooges testing letting agents to see if they will let and then throwing them in jail, or fining people heavily. Yet still it goes on as people have little choice. Then there's AirBNB and subcontracting for hotels - a way round the problem. AirBNB recently showed how it has boosted the economy in San Francisco. No wonder - it's increased competition and that always leads to efficiencies. It's also greater choice.

So sharing is not only a social trend but it can also be more efficient than money and regulation.

Viva la resistence.

While Apple tech is good it's not /that/ good. It's not worth the premium. It's not nessessarily /the best/. I see plenty of people talking around with smashed screens.

However the premium is image. It's jewellery. It's about showing you have enough money to join the social club. "A lifestyle choice". A mate worthy of mating with.

Is Apple as chic as it was? Surely not.

By reducing the price they have severely threatened their position as /the most expensive phone/.

Now there's phones like the Galaxy X to the power of n with an even bigger, even more vugar display of peacocking neanderthalism showoffmanship. Not only is it bigger... but most importantly, it's the most expensive and therefore... is beginning to be seen as the most exclusive. It doesn't have the cool. But if it ever does then it then becomes top dog.

Perhaps Apple knows that it has both cool and price premium exclusive and decided secure enough to forgo one in order to work into cheaper markets - where the lower price option is still relatively exclusive.

Well said. It should be about quality of life.

2 mechanics see an old car. The first mechanic throws his hands up in the air: "It's impossible, just throw it away and get a new one". The 2nd mechanic already has a spare car he's kept working, oiling the parts, sealing out rust, maintaining it. While it's a lot of work this car is easier to work on, from a time when things were built to last. He does what's needed to get it right.

You can fix these things but yes it's work. And that's why it's awkward and the truth is very hard. It's easier to have babies and start again with death than to fix it all.

That said...
how very, very lazy!
The technology to me to fix the many of humanities problems doesn't seem like a big ask in the very big picture of looking at things. If we had the tech for our bodies as we have for computing we'd be there right now.

Taking a perspective here by looking back in history. Chinese tradition views the average life expectancy as ~120 years. That's from 2,000-4,000 years ago. It then has the viewpoint that anything shorter than this is due to stress on the body, not that dying early is something to worry about (actually) and that if you live a healthy lifestyle you will get to 120 years. I don't expect to live that long. I don't mind a whole bunch at the moment... But I would like to have the quality of life that such a long life can provide. I know in any event I'll probably do better than the ~40 years for the stereotypical savanna African plains we had for most of human history.

All of my parents, my grandparents have gone to a doctor recently and the doctor has dismissed their (very pressing) problems with age. This is disgusting. Is it worth changing a hip on a grandma only to have it last a year before she dies? Is it worth doing dental surgery if you only have a few years left?
My grandpa has been ignoring his tooth problems, ignoring his leg problem, digestion problem etc etc because he doesn't want to put a burden on anyone. So he goes round limping everywhere. And then these 70 year old people go on to live another 30-40 years - longer than I've been around!
  Meanwhile, I fixed my digestion problems, I see a private dentist. I am planning for the long haul. I look after myself. The thing is, I will continue to do so long while I get into old age. Only when I'm older will I know if my maintenance schedule will ave paid dividends or not.

It's time people stopped looking at their bodies as something holy to a simple engineering subject of high stakes.

Conspiracy theories are becoming to be a bigger thing than I for one ever imagined.
I don' t think North Americans realize how much this talk goes across the world. What was once quiet internet chatter has been taken mainstream by RT et al.

In Argentina I noticed how Britain is mixed in with the USA which is also mixed in with general view-of-infidels Islamic paranoia and any other conspiracy theory going. Some of it is true but also people aren't checking facts at all and it all joins up. So when I get in a taxi in Argentina and I work in oil and gas I'm not simply a tourist, I'm 'one of them'. Now, the same thing is going on all over the world. Russian feel very much the same. The evil USA empire, HAARP, chemtrails, the lot. Same in the middle east and all of the Islamic world. Similar in nearly all of South America and so on. Pretty much this is all of the world.

Conspiracy theories are a point upon which people rally around. The confirmations such as the NSA spying are remembered but it takes some guts to admit when you're wrong and you've been an idiot.

I still think there's a lot of truth in conspiracy theories in general and many seem to just keep getting proved true all the time.

The OP article shows what thoughts should be happening in relation to HARRP "it doesn’t have nearly enough energy to do anything over the Lower 48" but this is the kind of minimal thought/research people need to be doing when you read an article. As a matter of national security the USA should be educating people around the world on how to assess a story and sources. But it's not. Why? Because it was all true after all! ;-)

For contrails wouldn't it be good to actually go up in a light aircraft with a convert and actually make some contrails?

This all seems like a modern phenomenon but isn't this just a continuation of what people have always done? Only before such things were blamed on the devil. In fact, let's join it all up and say the devil is behind all these things, farming humanity as the good shepherd, steering genetics of the breed according to the required spec.

Looking at the number of people with iphones and no clue instead of Android and cranking up permissions controls I think the most realistic course of action is to allow the majority of people to suffer the consequences while taking action ourselves to take advantage of (hopefully) lower prices we can achieve by gaming the system in various ways.

The only problem with this might be if maintaining privacy or gaming the system starts costing more than it's worth.

This the better line of argument because the pictures continue the damage.

But... deleting the pictures isn't deleting what happened. It isn't deleting it from the minds of who's seen it. So... is it really worth it?

It means the removal of the internet as we know it in order to achieve it. I don't think you can have one without the other. By the internet what I mean is, that place where people were able to feel a lot more free about what they can do and this brought about a lot of social revolutions.

  Some of the crappy social changes have been porn, shock media, paedophiles. Thing is, you say goodbye to paedos you say goodbye to everything from Jackass to progress in gay rights and everything in between.

  I guess this internet thing always was a bit of a dream. Unsustainable madness. It makes sense to implode. I remember thinking this when my friend was loading up a porno floppy disc in an Acorn Archimedes at school 25 years ago.
  We're going to end up with an internet as exciting as a middle class Facebook where nobody says anything riske or funny because it's broadcast to the whole world and therefore someone gets insulted. That, and the ability to pay for bills, shop online and book tickets to things... admin.

I like that we can have this conversation. In the future we may not want to. I already find myself wanting to not type to defend the other side of the argument.

It does seem to be a pattern that as new things are invented they are then slowly subverted into some kind of monster be it tech or even art like music. Perhaps the only response is not to fight it but to keep innovating. Innovation seems to have been given the OK

Bloomberg, as a financial and inparticular, media firm should be interested in privacy and security.
There isn't a phone out there that has integrity to trade... closest we got was Replicant on a Samsung but the modem had carte blanche to everything so it was imperfect.

So Bloomberg would be a good customer. Any Bloomberg employee who has sensitive info has the possibility of communicating privately.

Amen, the photos had me in stitches that's for sure :D

AND tie wraps - that's the trinity

In order to unblock porn filtering on GiffGaff you have to use a credit card and link your identity to the sim. In order to unblock you have to make yourself that bit less anonymous

There's not a whole load of interesting comments in this thread. You can easily say "Stupid people" but you don't learn much from that. Have a look at the details too.

Bitcoin has been a really interesting study in trust. Pirate managed to get away with what he did because people put a lot more trust in him than other people would. Pirate had a very good safe reputation before this and people had an idea of who he was.
The other thing that is interesting is that it could have been a pass-through to somebody else.
The next thing is that people were given info on how the profits were supposed to happen... I don't much about the scam but I think the cover story was supposed to be arbitrage on the dollar? In reality some think that his plan was to scare the market with some dumps... but it didn't pan out.

So, lessons to be learnt:
- you shouldn't judge trust by WHO but HOW. The distance of money between the trustee and you is key. Bitcoin of course made it seem very distant and therefore more tempting
- things happen gradually. You have a bank... then you realise you can get away with lending out a bit... then it's a bit more... and so on
- just because there's a real and plausible plan doesn't mean you won't be scammed
- just because someone has a good reputation isn't a great guide
- the value of the reputation:scam profit ratio is a better guide

If you're thinking of doing this DIY with a router USD port or Raspberry Pi bear in mind that some USB IDE/Sata adapters don't support spindown (hdparm -y or -Y). As a result you have a 2.5" disk running constantly leading to failure and also a risk of overheating.

Unfrtunately I can't tell you which adapters support the poweroff or standby signals.

I really don't like the tying of software features to specific phones. Phone manufacturers really try to push it as they know it stratified the market whereas if all the software is the same standard Android platform you can compare phones easily. This is why Android is better value than iphone - it puts phone makers into competition and they don't like it.
I take this even further by wanting Cyanogenmod on every phone I buy so it's familiar.

As great as this software is I'm not going to buy into something that makes phones massively more expensive by dividing the market and also giving me less choice.

It's also probably a battery drain so I think have to anticipate automating turning it off when bluetooth pairs with a vehicle handsfree kit.