If you haven't read his site with his position on all the issues and his suggestions on how to address them, I suggest giving it a thorough read. While Paul's ideas sound pretty nuts when you take them piecemeal, as a system, they actually sound pretty effective to me. For instance, the end of the student loans would seem plenty terrifying, but he puts a lot of money into parents' pockets for doing homeschooling. This can make for stronger families and better upbringing, IMO and now that we have Khan Academy and Google, it's getting hard to justify fixed, slow, institutional education these days designed to educate the lowest common denominator in giant classes. You should be able to learn at your own pace, hopefully with mentors to help you over the humps and to guide/pace you. These days, I think University educations should be for those who want to get into research, not for people trying to get a career.

I see the problem with Paul's plan is that you need Congress to enact most of these things in order for them to work, and the odds of them enacting the whole Paul package approach zero without a violent coup or Paul becoming Chairman of the Board of the 147 companies controlling our global economy (and thus our Congressmen).

What's cooking? Something tells me you're up to something big.

Also, would you mind terribly running for President?

There are a lot of reasons people still follow him closely.

He's really smart, hard-working, and open with his opinions. If something blows, he doesn't sugar coat it out of fear for his relationship with the company whose product he's bagging on.

He's also fiercely empirical. Moreso than a lot of his competitors, he doesn't buy into his own bullshit. If he has an idea, he makes an experiment to test it, and if it doesn't cut the mustard, he adjusts his view on the subject. He reverses his opinions over time and points out when he's been wrong. You'd think that trait would be common amoungst coders, what being lovers of science and engineering in general, and you'd be wrong.

He's also open with his source code, and a lot of coders have actually learned how to write games by reading his source for Doom & Quake. In addition to being a fast coder, he writes very clean code with a very crisp style, and that code has been a really positive influence on the next generation of game programmers.

But if you're looking for Jesus, you need look no further. I was one of the first coders John hired, and if you recall, Jesus is the *son* of God, and like Jesus, I was cast out from Heaven to muck about with mortals and spread the good word. Also, unlike John but more like Jesus, I believe my own bullshit without the need to test it. Crucially, if you look up "gamer" under Google images, I'm on the first page, and you'll see conclusively that I can rock the long Jesus hair. I am also skinny, emaciated, and have been repeatedly crucified. If you choose to become a disciple, I will welcome you with open arms. I just won't respect you.

I open a terminal window on my Mac. Do it every day for one reason or another.

It's particularly fun to go fullscreen with it and run nethack, and people actually think you're doing something very brainy and technical.

I find it hard to believe how much vitriol geeks are showing for a major step forward in currency technology.

You'd really prefer to stick with central bank currencies where the banks can instantiate money out of thin air whenever they please? You honesty think that's a better solution? Have you not noticed the trouble it has gotten us into?

I am a game producer, and one of the things you learn early on is that you need to reward early adopters, because there is a default stigma against all things new. In essence, you need the promise of an aristocracy class. Part of what motivates us as geeks to work for start-ups is stock and stock options. That makes us the aristocracy class if the company sees a liquidity event, because we got on early and took a chance, even if there are lots of other employees later who only get paid a fixed cash salary and end up doing a lot more work, because they didn't get in early and didn't take that chance. There's no difference, and it's hypocrisy to pretend that's a different situation than it is with a new currency.

And who do you think is going to become that aristocracy class of the bitcoin market? You think it will be bankers or geeks? Which is better?

Disclaimer: I bought a whopping $40 worth of bitcoins in January, because I believe in the concept, and I believe it's going to be an important, global currency that helps all kinds of people and corporations have a liquid hedge against vagaries of central bank currencies. I feel foolish for not having bought more, and I think with a limit of 21M bitcoins over the lifetime, it's going to easily break USD$100 per BTC.

My questions for Amir are:

"What markets do you think will be the first to most aggressively adopt bitcoins as their currency?"
"What insights can you offer as to why the US government is having a hostile reaction to bitcoins?"
"What kinds of competing P2P currencies are in development, and how will their deployment affect the valuation of bitcoins?'

It's too late. Technology has corrupted him. Darth Lucas is more machine than man.

It was no Shawshank, but the original Tron wasn't the tripe that is Star Wars Episodes 1-3 or Tron Legacy either. The original Tron also had a production budget of $17M. The new Tron Legacy had a production budget of closer to $170M. Those things need to be taken into consideration.

The first Tron had the novelty of being the first, which buys it cool points, and yes, it was better written and acted, much better than Tron Legacy, where every female character's job was to literally bat their big eyes at attractive angles, where Jeff Bridges' immense acting talent gets completely disposed of so that he can spend over half the screen time trying to look Zen, and instead, we're distracted by a character named Zeus, because what the Tron universe needs is a comical club owner / double agent who likes to play with a Charlie Chaplin cane. Just reading that makes my eyes bleed. What made Tron Legacy particularly inappropriate was that it required you to be familiar with Tron and heavily referenced it, so the juxtaposition becomes vivid in your mind as you're watching it.

George is copping out.

I'd still watch new episodes of the original 60's Star Trek, as long as the writing/acting was a good as some of the better ones they made then, and the special effects were all but missing in action then.

By contrast, I just saw Tron Legacy again, and it is nearly unwatchable for me. It was distractingly inappropriate as a sequel to the original. Great special effects married with poor writing and poor actor direction.

Perhaps once it's more than a tiny percentage of the size of WWII? Total estimated dead for WWII was 50M-70M. Total dead for all West-vs-Other conflicts in play right now is probably under 2M? We just have wider and more instantaneous coverage now.

Darfur has little to do with Western intervention, and they are mopping up on the casualty count at 350k-ish.

Tapping geothermal energy cools the earth's center faster, which slows magma rotation, which reduces the strength of the magnetic field protecting us from cosmic radiation, does it not? I'm sure this wouldn't bite us for many years, but this seems like a bad direction, just as using fossil fuels was.

Seems like it would be easier to draft a treaty that prevents governments from taking down or censoring the net.

Why don't they just issue laser safety glasses to pilots, and they can put them on when the ass-hats arrive?

http://www.thorlabs.us/newgrouppage9.cfm?objectGroup_ID=762

Much as I disapprove of Palin, I have to admit, if you only fine and don't imprison, then during the next election, you're going to get people hacking into accounts because it's just smart campaign warfare, and there's a simple, measurable cost to it instead of incarceration.

We need hiding places for victims from their stalkers because we don't know where the stalkers are, and we have to hide witnesses from mafia, because we don't know where the mafia's hit man is. If you have global openness, then you don't have these problems with exposure to begin with. Being open is by all measures the better path, but Assange has the very hardest of jobs, weening us off of secrecy one giant batch of secrets at a time. It's going to sting a bit until our ethics have ratcheted up a notch or twelve.

And keep in mind, for all the saber rattling from the US gov't, his leaks haven't led to one death yet. That may change, but I'll put the secrets behind the Iraq war and the hundreds of thousands of people it killed up against the numbers of dead Julian can do.

Julian Assange is the most important man alive today IMO.

I disagree about the constant surveillance environment comment by Fred Ritchin. It's a great environment. One of my most frustrating issues is my students goofing off in facebook while I teach.

I also think it's great training for this new world where privacy has become illusory. Things have gone transparent, and if someone wants a creative new view of the world, I feel that's his prerogative. We should be allowed to do whatever we want with any photons bouncing off us.