Wrong. It has not centrally defined value, but it has value. If you give me X for this painting on my wall, then X is its value, regardless of what X is. It could be US$ or pieces of cake or a service.

Yes, I said that poorly, but you chose to ignore my point. The whole reason we use token currencies comes from the convenience of not pricing things in terms of goods or services. We don't need to value a shovel in terms of chickens, or a cow in terms of a number of hours spent weeding your garden. We can agree that X units of currency will pay for a shovel, Y units for a cow, and Z units per hour for weeding the garden.

As for the "value" of DocuCoin, I would repeat (or perhaps clarify) that the coins themselves have no value, in the same way that me scribbling a crappy picture of a cat on an old napkin has no value. Now, if Jim Davis draws a cat on a napkin, you might have something you can sell on ebay for a buck or two - But that has nothing to do with the underlying "coin" of doodling-on-a-napkin. The drawing, and more importantly, who made it, has value; but that puts us back to "how many Garfield sketches does a cow cost?"

FTA: "The value of each coin will be completely subjective, depending on who creates the coin and why."

I don't think this has a problem with double-spending, because it has no actual value.

This has almost no resemblance to "currency" in any meaningful sense, and calling it such amounts to nothing short of deceptive. This looks more like a formalized system of LinkedIn endorsements, except still with the same underlying flaw that your technophobe mother can "endorse" your 133t Perl scripting skills. Or perhaps in the best case, it amounts to a built-in certificate of authenticity for things like celebrity signatures on books or baseball cards.

Bitcoin doesn't need to worry about the competition.

The order of society is far more important than a single insignificant persons life.

You might want to re-think that stance - Not because I particularly value human life, but because it negates your own point.

A rolling-right-on-red doesn't threaten to undermine the order of society. Punishing people who haven't committed any crime, however, does. When people stop believing in at least the theory that our system of crime-and-punishment more-or-less works, the motivation to at least give lip-service to pointless laws completely vanishes.

1,000 out of 4,000,000 tickets makes a 0.025% error rate. That's a perfectly acceptable margin of error.

You need to discriminate between positive and negative error rates in situations like this.

If it failed to ticket 0.025% of red-light runners, we would consider it an amazing success.

If, however, it tickets even one law-abiding driver, then it very much needs an angry mob ripping these damned things down from the poles, throwing them on the front lawn of City Hall, and demanding an end to the outsourcing of "justice" to for-profit companies.

So log the workorder, then repair the system, then close the workorder. Just like in the municipal code manuals.

You, uh, didn't even make it through the summary, did you? :)

But hey, you got 1st p, so, I guess that counts for something.

More to the point, it's the Right Thing to do, because the *privilege* of occupying a chunk of Internet resource comes with the *responsibility* of being contactable if bad things are emanating from it.

Bullshit, straight-up.

The right of all humans to communicate freely with one another - and to avoid communicating with those they don't want to - trumps archaic administrative nonsense about the accuracy of a DNS record as enforced solely through US hegemony over the internet.

Once upon a time, if you had a problem coming from a domain, you would contact the admin as a peer, explain the situation, and he'd put the smack-down on whichever of his users had screwed up. Today? Even at the likes of Sony they admit they don't monitor it, so why bother having it there at all? If you have a problem coming from a domain today, you either report it to the FBI (if a credible attack), or you blacklist them at the router (if a mere nuissance). The days of getting things done on the internet through the mutual respect of admins ended a looong time ago.

here's the law. you want me to do any of your other homework for you?

Not the GP, but yeah, I do - Can you explain what an anti-domainsquatting law that specifically deals with trademarks and identity theft, and absolutely nothing to do with simply giving fake info to a registrar, has to do with your original claim that giving ACCURATE contact info counts as US law?

Now, ICANN can enforce its policies on the registrars themselves, simply by virtue of the fact that a registrar requires ICANN's continued blessing to operate. But the only recourse they have about (non-identity-stealing) fake registration info comes down to taking the domain away from you. For someone like Sony, that might look like an end-of-the-world scenario. For someone who just wants a named place to stick stuff online for my own personal use? Meh, worst case, I've lost $10-$15 and I have to wait three days for a new domain to propagate (and not always even out the money - Much to my surprise, I actually had GoDaddy refund me when I flatly refused to send them a photocopy of my license, three months into a registration).

If the address was unread now, it must have been monitored originally.

Not necessarily - I have a domain. It has a "real" administrative contact email (a throwaway GMail account). I haven't checked it since I had to confirm it as valid (the registration just autorenews - Pssst, SCEA, you live off subscription models, ever thought of using the same damned idea to keep your domains/certs/etc active?).

Administrative contacts for a domain amount to nothing more than a pre-confirmed spam address. Why the hell would anyone use an address where they actually have to suffer through reading the crap that comes in?

Yes you can. If Microsoft stole an antique and shipped it to China, and then was ordered to produce it they couldn't say "well its in China so we don't have produce it".

If, however, they sold it to someone in China, that Chinese person has zero obligation to give a fuck about what the US courts want.

/ Just don't ever visit the US
// Including simply flying through
/// Including flying through one of our "lapdog" partner-states.

You are legally obligated to take positive action to comply with a subpoena. So setting up that kind of system is still obstruction of justice.

You miss the point - Let's say I work for WidgetCoUSA, a wholly-owned subsidiary of WidgetCoUK. Normally, I would have access to WidgetCo's global Exchange servers.

Warrant comes in. WidgetCoUK revokes every shred of my access to their servers.

WidgetCoUK has zero obligation to comply with US law. Their IT people who (rightly) removed my access acted legally and in the company's best interests. That unfortunately leaves me holding the pig in a poke, which a US court may or may not respect. But I have zero control of the outcome no matter my level of motivation.

That describes the real scenario we have here. Does Microsoft-USA have to comply with a US warrant? Absolutely. Does Microsoft-Ireland have the same requirement? Absolutely not. And unless MS.us can physically force MS.ie to play ball, it really doesn't matter what Judge Joe "Contempt" Sixpack has to say about the situation. Because name aside, these do not count as the same company, or the same people in charge. They may normally play well together, but don't need to when it doesn't suit their interests.

True - I honestly don't have the background to evaluate whether or not TFA has that part correct, but have to give him the benefit of the doubt. :)

Just shut the fuck up and take it

Spoken like a true AC.

Naw man, that multiverse, it go so deep, the polyverse be cryin' for mercy!

No. Time is a part of this universe. There is no "meta" time, other universes do not necessarily have time. There is no t Minus infinity. We know exactly when time started (ok, to within a few trillionths of a second).

FTA: "The most amazing thing about it, though, is that this is exactly what the Universe was doing before the Big Bang, only with a much greater energy and at a much faster rate! This was the period known as Cosmic Inflation."

Words like "before" presuppose the existence of time. If, as you postulate, time exists only as a function if this universe, then you have just established the de facto existence of "meta time" (at least if you believe TFA).

"Universe" = everything. "universe" = everything observable.

Fan of Bucky, eh? :)