Doesn't your investment claim make some false assumptions like difficulty remaining constant?

If you can beat the general network for 120 days (and increasing, and also the difficulty is generally increasing as well, making 120 days even more of a lower bound), then I don't see how that is meaningfully different from being able to do so indefinitely. A third of a year is a pretty long time.

You are not talking about the 51% attack as generally understood. You can't, because then you are talking about requiring far more than 51% of power for a few blocks: you need 51% of the network indefinitely to build a longer blockchain *and* you also need to defeat the checkpoints used by most clients & miners *and* defeat whatever community-based mechanisms happen.

No, you can't 'rewrite history'. What the 51% attack lets you do is block any additional transactions by refusing to produce blocks with those transactions in them, which lets you do double-spends. However, you cannot spend someone else's coins because you cannot create valid signatures without their private keys.

I've made a full transcript of the declassified PDF: http://www.gwern.net/docs/1955-nash

Excess capacity summons its own uses.

You assume that your movies and videos cost only their storage space. But what if you switch to a finegrained snapshotting filesystem? That could use up a great deal of space depending on how much you download, modify, and delete.(With space no longer an issue, longevity becomes an issue. I'd rather lose half the space on an oversized hard disk if that means that 20 years from now I will still have my files.)

You assume you'll only store what sort of things you currently do. But what if you scan all your books to save space? High resolution book scans can easily consume hundreds of megabytes a piece. I was thinking of scanning an art book at best resolution, and calculated that its ~500 pages would use up around 20 gigabytes in TIFFs.

And what of new electronic stuff? Lifelogging (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lifelogging) is currently the stuff of experiments and early tentative ventures by the likes of Gordon Bell. But just yesterday the NY Times covered a small camcorder which uses 2GB for 72 minutes of video and costs ~$200; not useful, no, but useful in a few more years/cranks of Moore's law. Lifelogging is easily a gigabyte a day. That's peanuts, of course, and ever cheaper - but the point is that it will soon burst the seams of your 500GB drive.

And so on. Right now you think your needs are met. But there's always something more one could store, and needs change. Maybe, just maybe, you *are* right and 500GB is all you'll ever need; but for the rest of us, that's as sensible as Gates's mythical '540k is enough for anyone'.

Isn't it outrageous? I mean, one could also buy a few books, scan them at leisure and return them!

> Though my idea would be to have the justices only review secrets that specifically pertain to legal cases.

And what is to stop regulatory capture*? Your court is akin to the FISC authorizing wiretaps, and it is famous for rarely ever rejecting requests:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillance_Court#FISA_warrant

* http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Regulatory_capture

"Movable Type is a dead end. In the long run, the utility of all non-Free software approaches zero. All non-Free software is a dead end."

http://diveintomark.org/archives/2004/05/14/freedom-0

> Evolution requires that there be variation in individuals, and that there be selection.

That's odd. My vague memories of reading people like Dawkins keep whispering things like 'evolution is changes in allele frequency in a gene pool', which is obviously nonsense because that says nothing about 'individuals'.

Oh ye of little research ability: http://groups.google.com/group/brain-training/browse_thread/thread/458a2f4c212e86fb/954ef9456f6e7aca%5C

There are many cases where unilateral movement to a desired equilibrium is worse than useless; it's stupid to suggest that *obviously* copyright is not one of them. It's like saying 'if South Korea really wants peace, why isn't it disbanding its military and kicking out the US?' Because that only helps the other guy, does nothing to bring about the desired outcome, and will screw you the heck up.

> I've occasionally heard people say that if there was no copyright, there'd be no need for the GPL, but I don't buy that -- if you really believe that, why not use BSD or MIT? erm... because I believe that copyright exists? '~C -> ~G' does not imply '~G'.

Healthy old folks may be useful for humans. That would be a great explanation - if humans were the only things to sleep. Why do all sorts of animals which don't even have social groups, much less the ability to learn from each other (or anything to learn), sleep? Further, what sort of incredibly massive advantage are 'we' deriving from old people that in exchange we are willing to piss away at least a third of our life and render ourselves incredibly vulnerable?

The author of the OP article, bos, most certainly does understand the Darcs model, having used it often as he has long been part of the Haskell community (as his bio reveals); his point is that other people may not. (Personally, I think in comparison to Git's model, Darcs is a miracle of clarity. But reasonable hackers may differ.)