There is nothing wrong with expecting all TV and movie entertainment to be free. This is the future and companies that do not understand this are destine to meet newspaper companies, book stores and video rental shops in the afterlife.

Paying for entertainment is a thing of the past. Especially paying for simple delivery. There is no need to pay for distribution since all citizens now pay directly for that bandwidth through their ISP.

Any system of delivery that delivers their content with 30% advertising mixed in and cannot figure out how to do this for free is destined to DIE.

Currently, there is a limitation on quality video and music due to channel limits that are funnelled through the paid distribution network. This allows the distribution companies to milk the consumer for far more then it is worth. This system is supported by a huge waste of marketing and advertising used to brainwash young minds into accepting the concept of a "blockbuster" or "superstar", that is sanctioned by the distributors.

Once the public finally wakes up and lets go of paid distribution entertainment, the flow of quality media will be far greater. Only then can we begin to discuss what is fair for consumers to pay back to producers for their work.

In the meantime... dont accuse consumers of stealing. The only ones stealing today are the commercial distributors.

For perspective, the average US driver travels 16,500 miles per year. So if you jump from a plane 10 times a year, you are just as likely to die in your car then by falling from the sky. And if you only jump a couple of times in your life, then the risk is far less then the average traveller in a vehicle.

So anyone who claims the reason they do not skydive because of the danger, needs to admit to themselves that it is actually because they are scared.

I dont know why anyone claims that bitcoin is anonymous. Bitcoin is the most public payment system ever devised. Every single transfer of funds from one account to another is public knowledge. Imagine, if every stick of gum you paid in cash was in a publicly accessible ledger somewhere online. This is exactly what bitcoin does. So the "anonymous" features of bitcoin are the minimum required in order to allow for this public ledger. ie: the identity of the payer and receiver is hidden from the public online ledger. And thank god.

So stop repeating the fluff about bitcoin being anonymous. The anonymous portions of bitcoin are far less then any other payment method used so far.

Bitcoin is not the payment system for anonymous nuts. Its the payment system for people who simply dont want every payment they ever made to be known by everyone and forever.

Yes, you can. Bitcoin transfers are as fast as your internet connection. The reason most transactions take about 60 mins is because they dont trust the sender. The transaction is posted onto the blockchain in no time at all. Complete trust of a payment transaction from a total strange can be almost 100% guaranteed in 6 confirmation blocks (about 1 hour). But you dont need 6 confirmations from your co-worker. Because if the transaction doesnt go through because he attempted to double spend the money, then you just approach him in 1 hour and say "hey buddy, your bitcoin payment bounced". Which will happen nearly 0% of the time from people you know and trust.

Try that with any other payment mechanism. With a cheque, you may not know it is NSF for weeks. With Credit card you may get a chargeback months later. With cash, you never know whether it is counterfeit or not.. and also, the government will not ensure you against counterfeit money that you may accept and have no way of verifying 100%.

Bitcoin is the fastest and safest payment mechanism ever (so far). People who complain about waiting 1 hour to be 100% sure of payment from complete strangers simply do not understand the current state of fraud and slow verification built into all other payment methods.

Credit cards are insecure. They have weak fraud prevention built into them. This is by design, because the credit card company never pays for the cost of fraud.

Here is the order in which fraud is paid for: 1) the customer doesnt notice and pays for fraudulent charges on their card. 2) the customer complains, but the card company accuses them of not following their agreement to secure the card and the customer pays for it. 3) the merchant is accused of accepting a card without properly verifying the integrity of the purchase and the merchant pays.

Notice that in all cases the card company pays nothing for fraud. This is the reason that credit card are insecure. The card companies always make money from fraud.

The final reason that card companies like fraud is because they use fraud as a marketing tool. First they make an insecure system that allows fraud to take place, and then they tell the customer that they will secure them against it by refunding them. But as you can see above, they never pay for it, the merchant does, and subsequently the customer does by paying for higher margins built in by the merchant to cover the percentage of fraud orders.

You see, the card companies want you to believe that online purchasing is insecure by nature. This is not the case. Instead, it is designed into the credit card payment system, because there are no competing options for customers to pay for goods online AND the card companies make more money when fraud occurs. IMO: this is a huge mistake, and the card companies are setting themselves up for a secure payment system to take away their total online business (like: bitcoin)

Licensing fees is a tiny cost compared to the ongoing expense of maintaining MS servers.

Current laws and corporate objectives are aligned against your privacy. You have the right to protect yourself, whether or not the law protects those rights. You need to make sure that your email, telephone, web browsing and Internet chat is encrypted and anonymous. All the tools are available to protect, all you have to do is install them. And as a responsible citizen who does not like crime, you should do so. Because you need to protect yourself and your family from those who wish to do you harm. Leaving yourself open to easy monitoring by your government agencies also leaves you open to monitoring of criminal elements. In other words, not protect yourself makes this country weak. After all... you are not a terrorist or a criminal. So there is no reason for you to have all your privacy be an open book for your government to verify that you are not.

You need to do this yourself. The government will not do it for you, because the free information that collect on you makes their job easier: namely, to get re-elected. And corporations will not do it for you since there is a profit motivation for collecting personal information from you to sell to others.

Come on America. Dont let our country remain in danger simply because your government and business are not protecting you. As a minimum step, install PGP email encryption. Do it now!

My signup to slashdot was only 3D, the first 2 dimension was username and password, and my email address was in the 3rd dimension. Some forms have much higher dimensions and involve string theory.

I would just like to know why google blocks so many of my search requests while using TOR? Often it will not even let me type into a captcha in order to prove I am human to continue. Is Google worried about the fake top level SSL certs that were handed out improperly and that I may be using an old browser without an updated blacklist and redirected to false search results by a deviant TOR exit node??

because if google wants to be the monopoly search portal, which I think it should want to, then they should support users who do not wish to broadcast to the world which search terms that are entering into Google's search forms.

When I search for GOSSIP using https, google directs me to a results page that has GET data in the url. One of the entries in the get request is: "q=GOSSIP". Im not sure, but I dont think that GET data embeded in the URL is encrypted, just the content of POST requests and the response data from the server. Maybe I am wrong, but I think this shows that it is non-trivial to see exactly what you type directly to search in the https://google.com/ homepage.

You buy bitcoins on the street for cash using a site like localcoins. Then you pay for the VPN using the bitcoins. There is no trace.

If you are supper paranoid, you use TOR to access the Internet through wifi hotspots while using a different MAC address on your wireless card and signup for the VPN service using a tormail account.

Despite the ledger of bitcoin transfers being apparent, there is no reference to those transactions to you individually. So it is private.

Are you saying that burning wood does not release carbon into the atmosphere? You believe that carbon inside of wood is the same thing as what is released when you burn it? You should rent a cabin with a fireplace, close the flue and light some wood. See if your opinions change about the environment inside the cabin.

That is a problem we know how to fix. We cannot synthetically create gasoline and we cannot use it without polluting. Even if some areas are forced to increase coal burning to meet demand, we know how to upgrade this over time.

Your mindset does not account for "free energy". The pollution cost of a hydro, solar or wind installation is essentially zero. So any loss of electricity during the production, delivery or usage does not count the way it would for a combustion engine. When you run a combustion engine, it will pollute all of the burnt fuel regardless of how efficient the engine is. I mean that one litre of gas used in an economy car is likely as polluting as 1 litre of gas used in a large SUV regardless of how far each vehicle travels. Even if the delivery of electricity was found to be less efficient then a combustion engine (which I doubt)... the enviromental impact of such loss is not comparable when electricity is produced in a "green" way.

Even if you get your electricity from the grid I think electric is more environmentally friendly. The electric grid is supplied by central stations that produce electricity on mass and divide it between customers. In a car, every individual produces electricity with their own tiny engine. Even if the electric companies produced electricity using gasoline, I think it would be more efficient due to the size of the engine they can create. They wouldnt be generating electricity from a bunch of small car engines as we are.

Furthermore, there are many existing ways to produce electricity in completely environmentally friendly ways. In my neighbourhood, we have water flow and hydro to do the job. Creating a demand on electricity now will give reason for other areas to invest in solar, wind or hydro to meet demand. Even if the transition is equilevent in environmental damage... we are far better moving to electricity now as it has a path to a green future. There is no known mechanism for putting solar panels on the roof of your gasoline car or using the output from a personal wind turbine in order to fuel up a gas car.

Finally... its way cheaper to run your car on electricity then gasoline. The only cost right now is sticker price and eventually battery replacement costs. These costs do not have anything to do with environmental cost of fueling the motion of the vehicle. So on a purely cost basis, you know that electricity is better on the environment then gasoline is. The cost of running my electric vehicle is 1/10th the cost of running it on gasoline. Do you believe that my electric vehicle is 10 times more polluting then my gasoline vehicle? So think for a minute where that cost savings is coming from. It is coming from the fact that it takes less energy to supply locomotion to my electric vehicle. If you doubt this, then you do not believe the free market system is working. And this is not even counting all the subsidise that governments tend to apply to the oil industry.