I'm curious what the narrative about the cradle of civilization is if the Romans hadn't gotten their shit together. Marius, despite his wealth, is discredited by the Senate and never implements the Marian reforms, the Cimbri and Teutones defeat a sapped Rome, sack Rome and the Romans never manage to become more than a regional power in the Italian peninsula and the widespread influence of Greek-influenced Roman culture never takes hold in Western Europe.

FWIW, I might proffer the Battle of Breitenfeld as being nearly as valuable to Western civilization as Tours and Vienna. It marked the end of Catholic religious domination, broke the political monopoly of the Catholic Church through the establishment of the modern nation-state with the signing of Peace of Westphalia.

Right, they can refuse the sale ahead of time. There is no debt before the sale.

But once the debt exists, they cannot refuse to accept legal tender for its payment.

The QuNexus also has control voltage outputs for directly triggering analog/modular gear.

That is great news. I've got a room full of old modular synths, like a Serge suitcase model and an early Arp.2600. Not to mention a Steiner-Parker that looks like it should have a 1930's phone operator sitting at it.

I've built some home-brew triggering controllers, but none of them are anywhere near as good as what McMillan makes.

I liked, "A Walk Among the Tombstones".

As far as I know, this is only true prior to creating the debt. You can decide you'll only sell your widget for credit cards, in trade for tribbles or whatever payment method you decide on. But you can only do so BEFORE the sale.

After the sale (once the debt is created), you MUST accept legal tender to settle the debt when it is offered. If I sit down in a restaurant and eat a meal without any notice that I can't pay my bill in cash and then I want to pay in cash, they must take my cash.

If the Cartel finds a likely candidate on its own head-hunt, what's to keep the guy from narcing them out?

Oh, I don't know, maybe something about how THEY TAKE CHAINSAWS TO PEOPLE WHO ARE ALIVE.

But think of all the possible benefits, like all the coke and heroin you can handle.

Maybe, it is all about single-parenthood â" all human cultures were highly suspicious of bastard children (the very term is a derogatory one). And not because the mother "sinned" â" if that were the case, her subsequent marriage would not have absolved the child â" but because it is much harder for a single parent to raise a child into a decent human being.

I'm not so sure it's bastard children but the decline of the multigeneration household. I think in centuries past, despite the social penalties, there were probably a lot of single-parent families but the loss (or lack) of a parent was less burdensome because of the presence of other adults in the home.

I also think bastard children were disliked less for the moral implications and more because they represented a disruption to succession of leadership. If Grog was the head of his clan and he had a sons with his wife and his mistress, there's always the chance that the son of his mistress might challenge the son of his wife for clan leadership. I seem to recall from a history class that the Catholic hierarchy in Europe grew quite a bit as bastard children of royalty were put into the Church to give them something to do and get them out of the way.

Hollywood doesn't do interesting and thoughtful.

You're ignoring Liam Neeson's thoughtful and nuanced performance in "Taken 3".

Check this stunning version from avant garde guitarist Bill Frisell, jazz pianist Fred Hersch and Renee Fleming (yes, the opera singer).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

If the intermediaries matter, you're doing it wrong.

Because they can find a handful of things in a sea of evidence and then construct a narrative of guilt around it.

The NSA used to get by with being clever because it used to be that mathematically secure communications didn't exist, or if they did, they were extremely difficult to implement without a mathematician and only useful for small messages.

Now we have trivial access to computing power and well-understood encryption technologies that turns this on its head and communications can be trivially secured in ways that can only be broken by compromising them so they are internally flawed or by statutory means of denying access to the technology.

Granted, nothing is perfect. But I'd like to see any demonstration of hacking a system like this.

Or, rather, I'd like to see them try.

Real network security is defined by the quality of its endpoints. And to have secure endpoints we need a personal computing culture that values openness as the first step to better security.