Forced abortions? Forced vasectomy for all men? (Maybe forced castration, that would probably also reduce the number of wars, and definitely reduce the number of rapes.)Or maybe just don't provide government support to anyone with a child, enabling only the rich to reproduce, and producing more property "crime" as the poor have to steal to support their families.

Consider all the other option, Voluntary measures.

Personally, I think simply raising the living standard of everyone will be far better. Demonstrated fact that countries with higher living standards have lower birthrates.

If only I hadn't stopped to grab a quote, and comment a little, I would have beaten you to posting that link!
http://tech.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=2058378&cid=35650204

The UK government has already said they don't like the plan. From the BBC UK rejects EU call for city centre ban on petrol cars:

But UK Transport Minister Norman Baker said it should not be "involved" in individual cities' transport choices.

"We will not be banning cars from city centres anymore than we will be having rectangular bananas," he said.

It's certainly an interesting idea. And it seems, using the example of London's congestion charge, that it wouldn't be a bad thing. I certainly encourage more people to use public transport, and ride bikes.

And for the Yanks who will complain they live in the suburbs, maybe lobby your local government for better public transport? And stop complaining, this is an article from Europe.

The fact is, that I wouldn't be giving my credit card to an self-signed cert site. But, I would def. feel safer giving them my password. There are varying levels, and I would say that I would rather have encryption when sending passwords over the wire, than not.

Reporting live from Tokyo (well, just on the outskirts, but def. part of the greater Tokyo area):
People here have bought up massive amounts of bottled water, though apparently the level of radioactive iodine has fallen below the maximum legal limit for infants (which is one third for that of adults). Milk is also in short supply. Two days ago, two supermarkets near me had no milk, or plain bottled water. (Haven't looked since then.)

On the subject of meltdowns, there is no "official" meaning to the term. But, I would say that at least a couple of the reactors have "melted down" (I haven't really been paying attention to the news, so I don't know if any of the others have or not). Anyway, fun facts, the "precautionary" safe limit of 80 KM set by the US government (and then the Australian government), for folks, was apparently worth setting. At least one village outside the 30 KM radius has had really high levels of radioactive iodine get into the water.

Me, I'm staying in Tokyo until things get really bad. But, I imagine, at least a couple of million of the other residents would also want to leave at that time too. So...

Your post advocates a

(x) technical (x) legislative ( ) market-based ( ) vigilante

approach to fighting spam. Your idea will not work. Here is why it won't work. (One or more of the following may apply to your particular idea, and it may have other flaws which used to vary from state to state before a bad federal law was passed.)

( ) Spammers can easily use it to harvest email addresses
(x) Mailing lists and other legitimate email uses would be affected
(x) No one will be able to find the guy or collect the money
( ) It is defenseless against brute force attacks
( ) It will stop spam for two weeks and then we'll be stuck with it
(x) Users of email will not put up with it
( ) Microsoft will not put up with it
( ) The police will not put up with it
(x) Requires too much cooperation from spammers
(x) Requires immediate total cooperation from everybody at once
( ) Many email users cannot afford to lose business or alienate potential employers
( ) Spammers don't care about invalid addresses in their lists
( ) Anyone could anonymously destroy anyone else's career or business

Specifically, your plan fails to account for

( ) Laws expressly prohibiting it
(x) Lack of centrally controlling authority for email
(x) Open relays in foreign countries
( ) Ease of searching tiny alphanumeric address space of all email addresses
( ) Asshats
(x) Jurisdictional problems
( ) Unpopularity of weird new taxes
(x) Public reluctance to accept weird new forms of money
(x) Huge existing software investment in SMTP
( ) Susceptibility of protocols other than SMTP to attack
( ) Willingness of users to install OS patches received by email
(x) Armies of worm riddled broadband-connected Windows boxes
( ) Eternal arms race involved in all filtering approaches
(x) Extreme profitability of spam
( ) Joe jobs and/or identity theft
( ) Technically illiterate politicians
( ) Extreme stupidity on the part of people who do business with spammers
( ) Dishonesty on the part of spammers themselves
( ) Bandwidth costs that are unaffected by client filtering
( ) Outlook

and the following philosophical objections may also apply:

(x) Ideas similar to yours are easy to come up with, yet none have ever
been shown practical
( ) Any scheme based on opt-out is unacceptable
( ) SMTP headers should not be the subject of legislation
( ) Blacklists suck
( ) Whitelists suck
( ) We should be able to talk about Viagra without being censored
( ) Countermeasures should not involve wire fraud or credit card fraud
( ) Countermeasures should not involve sabotage of public networks
( ) Countermeasures must work if phased in gradually
(x) Sending email should be free
( ) Why should we have to trust you and your servers?
( ) Incompatiblity with open source or open source licenses
( ) Feel-good measures do nothing to solve the problem
( ) Temporary/one-time email addresses are cumbersome
( ) I don't want the government reading my email
( ) Killing them that way is not slow and painful enough

Furthermore, this is what I think about you:

(x) Sorry dude, but I don't think it would work.
( ) This is a stupid idea, and you're a stupid person for suggesting it.
( ) Nice try, assh0le! I'm going to find out where you live and burn your
house down!

(From http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt.)
----

Furthermore, I don't think you truly understand what Bitcoin is all about.

The thing with bitcoin is that there is no central authority to control it. New bitcoins come about by "mining", not by some central authority minting new coins, or printing new notes. Gold too has collapsed in value before.

What makes a currency worth something, is that people are willing to accept it in exchange for goods. Gold is only worth as much as it is now, because people are all like "ooh, shiny". It's intrinsic value (what it can be used for), is not anything like how much people are willing to pay for it.

Bitcoin is more like gold than traditional government issued currency. There is a fixed amount (there will never be more than 21 million bitcoins, though as that amount is divisible to eight decimal places, that's not a problem). It's value is not centrally decided.

E-gold collapsed because it was controlled by one company. Bitcoin isn't controlled by anyone. Anyone can download the "official" client, or one various mining software, and mine their own bitcoin. You could arrest everyone who has ever touched the bitcoin client source, and the blockchain would still exist.

Bitcoin, it's peer-to-peer, that's the advantage of it.

I really like BitCoin, But the biggest problem is the "goldrush" is over. While new bitcoins can still be mined, it's expensive, and takes time. Oh, the other big problem is that not enough people accept them. But, meh.

More implementations of the software are always good. But, they don't actually matter. It's the blockchain that matters. So long as the various implementations use the same blockchain (which is the cryptographic chain that indicates which address has how many bitcoins), things will stay together.

The biggest potential problem is Google, or another big organisation, starting a new blockchain, and splintering the bitcoin community. Google actually probably has enough processing power to mine quite a lot of bitcoins from the current blockchain anyway.

What the fuck? "To see the contents of this list you should enable Javascript." Well fuck no! I don't trust you evil Google, and so I don't enable JS for you!

A simple table, or list, and it requires JavaScript? That's fucked up. Progressive enhancement, or graceful degradation (whichever one of these you prefer) is essential to providing an accessible, usable, and useful web. Two different design philosophies, that amount, in this case, to the same thing. If the browser is not JavaScript aware, capable, or has it turned off, the browser should still be able to access the information!

Anyway, from the first link, I can see that AbiWord, a great, fast, and cross-platform word processor, is on the list. I use it all the time, 'cause it opens up so much faster than OOo.

(On the list, some kind soul pasted it too: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=tmw4JCFU. Though it's in CSV format.)

I can see from the list, that DokuWiki, DragonFly BSD, Freenet, LibreOffice, MoinMoin (another wiki system...) and QEMU also got listed. There are a lot of other good projects there too. I don't use most of the projects, but knowing they are there, is good.

Lol, when the yanks invade the country I'm currently in (again), maybe they'll capture me and harass me over threatening their poor defenseless president on Slashdot. Or, maybe, they've got better things to do with their time. You've just been trolled sucker.

In Internet slang, a troll is someone who posts inflammatory, extraneous, or off-topic messages in an online community, such as an online discussion forum, chat room, or blog, with the primary intent of provoking other users into a desired emotional response

And, if the individual concerned is in Sweden, they hardly got burned did they? Sure they might not be able to visit the States (neither can I, oh noes), but that's hardly a problem for most of the world. Basically, the lawyers win, and the company who has to pay them loses. Everyone else is about the same.

First, I would like to say that this is a clear case of the cloud being the wrong place to store your data. Especially if the cloud-based service is located in the USA. From the (2nd) article:

“Discovery (evidence gathering) allows for the acquisition of literally anything relevant to the suit as long as it is not protected by some kind of privilege,” we were told. “It is often a wake-up call to people when they learn that they likely do not have a reasonable expectation of privacy in e-mails or information stored on a third-party server.”

Secondly, to the people who think this guy is an idiot for sending such an email, well aren't you just a bundle of fun. At most it's trolling (assuming the article is all true), and you don't expect the lawyers to start asking for personal data because of trolling. (I'm going to shoot that president, and the vice-president of the United States with my ak47.)
Third, the lawyers are going to get paid regardless. So what do they care if this person is in Sweden or some other place?

I will pay someone $1000 if they kill the President of the United States of America, and another $1000 if they kill all the Congress as well, plus an additional $10 for each Governor of a state they knock off.

Please do the act and then post your name after one of my posts with contact details.

But tortilla aren't actually that flat.

As for this wonderful new device, wow 80GB. No matter how fast it is, it isn't big enough. Considering my non-media (i.e. not moving pictures, still pictures and music) totals over 20 GB on it's own (with my photos (not porn thank you very much, that's in another folder) taking up at least another 20 GB minimum, and my moving pictures (films, TV shows) is nearly 100GB on it's own, and my music is over 50GB) and the fact that I only have a laptop (and travel a lot)...

So, just to clarify for all you people who haven't realized yet, there are two different groups working on HTML at the moment.

• The W3C HTML Working Group, which is putting together the final HTML 5 spec. (Which will consist of various things that have at least two independent implementations.)
• The Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group is working on various new HTML stuff, and is getting new stuff into browsers as soon as possible. Experimenting with new tags and so on.

For all you professional corporate/big org types, I strongly suggest continuing to work with HTML 4.01 Strict (and/or XHTML 1.1 as appropriate). OK, you could go with HTML 5 if you really want to, but the difference is, that it isn't stable yet. And is it really sensible/professional to create corporate/big org pages that might not get touched for five years if the "standard" you are basing the pages on, isn't even standard?

For your personal website, use whatever you want. But if you aren't using features of the new HTML5, I suggest you don't use it. (Personally, I think the new form stuff is awesome, but haven't noticed much else that I would use as yet.)