I would respectfully argue that pictures distributed after the fact are still harmful to the original victims. Nothing makes it harder to move past some unpleasant event in the past than the constant reminder that it happened. Imagine for a moment that you were victimized in some way (not even necessarily sexually), now imagine that the event was recorded on camera. Now imagine that 10 years after the fact people are still leering at the pictures of your victimization. How would that make you feel? The damage of child pornography doesn't necessarily end when the abuse stops.

But is this something that we can convert into a practical design for transporting goods or people cross country or is it just a gimmicky air craft that while nifty will likely never see any wide scale use beyond hobbyists, a la ultralights.

I think it's unlikely that BTC will ever be used in a brick and mortar environment, but see my arguments about transaction fees below. OTOH for web based transactions if someone is ordering physical goods it's a non-issue to wait for some confirmations to hit the network (I mean by the time you have their product boxed up and ready for shipping the transaction would have already been confirmed), and if they're ordering some web based service, you can probably grant the user instant access without confirmation and just revoke it if there seems to be a double spend attempt or some other fishiness going on.

As far as security goes, that's no different than dealing with security in any other financial environment, banks deal with it, credit card companies deal with it, wall street deals with it; if it doesn't want to have it's reputation dragged through the mud and very likely go out of business, any company dealing with BTC (or any sort of money) should be putting at least as much effort into security.

Transaction fees are largely irrelevant when dealing with BTC, right now they're entirely voluntary, but even if I choose to pay say .001 BTC as a transaction fee (again completely optional) with a BTC transaction, that translates to less than $0.10 USD by current exchange rates. More importantly the purpose of transaction fees is to make sure your transaction as a consumer is rapidly accepted by the network. On the other hand, most credit card companies charge 1-3% on their processing fees, which is paid by the merchant for the privilege of allowing their customers to use their services. Even if we weren't talking about apples and oranges here, the break even mark would be a purchase of about $10 USD or apx. .1 BTC if we presume a minimum 1% processing fee for the credit card companies. On larger purchases the transaction fee for BTC remains the same (and still voluntary), while the credit card processing fees grow larger and larger.

Now for a brick-and-mortar store the instantaneous processing of a credit card has some benefits such as instant confirmation, which may very well make it 'worth it' for a store/customer to pay that sort of processing fee, vs waiting for confirmations to hit the BTC network, and I think that's a perfectly valid trade off. It would however be possible to set up a sort of BTC payment processor in that you pre-pay some BTC into an account and transactions are validated by that processor for transactions requiring 'instant' approval. In my mind this is mostly reinventing the wheel (credit card companies already exist) and invalidates the reason to use BTC in the first place (low to no transaction fees, the processing company has to make money somehow), but this COULD happen as an option to allow brick and mortar's to offer instant confirmation.

I didn't even notice it was gone, but that tagline used to define why I liked slashdot so much.

Eh, I think the 5th amendment says otherwise, I know there is some legal precedent about encryption keys but I'm not particularly familiar with the cases, and a quick google search reveals an article that seems to support my argument. Of course if you can provide some counter examples I'd be happy to look at them.

Use Tor if you really want to add a layer of anonymity to the transactions. As soon as someone trying to track down a transaction based on IP addresses realize they've hit a Tor endpoint, trying to track any further would be an exercise in futility. You just have to be particularly vigilant that ALL your transactions flow through tor and all of your coins get 'mixed' before you try to use them.

Presumably someone as paranoid about anonymity as this would have their wallet file encrypted. Of course even if they didn't, I don't know how it works in whatever country you're from, but in the US you need to be pretty specific when it comes to search warrants, the 4th amendment prevents cops from taking a 'shotgun' approach and just randomly searching people's stuff to look for potential crimes. Incidentally in the above case the cops would need to already know who you are and have a reasonable suspicion that they're going to find evidence of a specific alleged crime before they could get any sane judge to sign off on it.

Cash is only worth what people are willing to trade for it, I fail to see how Bitcoin is inherently any different.

Amen to that, I've yet to see a torrent site with the same level of Niche stuff that Demonoid used to have. If ever I found another site with that same quality of content I'd join in an instant.

True, but a corporation can only be this evil because there's no specific accountability to the people who own the corporation. Corporations act as a shield for individual liability, that's their only real purpose. If the people who own a corporation were exposed to the same legal and financial risks, they probably wouldn't do half the shit they do.

Well, there's certainly worse things that a zombie network can do. Hell, I'm downright in favor of some greyhat hacker putting Tor exit nodes into a botnet. I mean ideally we'd shut down every bot net out there, but since that's not realistically going to happen this would at least be a nice consolation prize while they go about their business DDoSing bitcoin or whatever else happens to be in vogue for a botnet to do these days.

terminal server for thin clients?

Fair enough, you are correct that it's the block rate that's fixed, not the rate of coin generation, just that the 'block reward' happens to be what most people care about when it comes to a new block.

Or decreases if the computational power of the network drops (granted advances in technology make that unlikely in the long term, and only minimally impactful in the short term). The difficulty self adjusts SO that the rate of coin generation remains largely fixed.

They're not independent variables, the more power you have the faster you can compute an equation to match the current difficulty, and earn more coins, it just also happens that the difficulty is self adjusting so that the rate which coins are found stays apx. = to 1 per 10 minutes. If the computational power of the network is strong enough that it's taking less than 10 minutes for someone to find a block, the difficulty rises until that is no longer true, and if the computational power of the network drops enough that it's taking more than 10 minutes for someone to find a block the difficulty drops.