How would you replace that? How does anarchy work exactly?

There are entire sections of libraries about how this has worked in the past, works now (every unregulated transaction), and what kinds of improvements could be made in the future, but you can YouTube Bob Murphy for some gentle introductions. Just be careful of the "but who would pick the cotton?" arguments.

Hell, if people could actually trust each other, we wouldn't *need* nation states in the first place.

Nation states killed 350 million people in the last century alone.

The onus is on nation states' defenders to show that neighborly spats and other small disputes would do worse than that. It's not like private conflict-resolution services don't already exist (and are always preferred in business contracts). Every lack-of-imagination excuse people have for "needing" nation states must be justified vis-a-vis the demonstrated body count (and that's only taking the utilitarian stance, not even the moral one).

If somebody showed up today promising peace in exchange for executing a tenth of the world's population, they'd be locked up in the psychopath ward and the religious people would call him an antichrist.

ob. Joker:

"Spy on entire nations and nobody bats an eye - spy on a few government officials, and suddenly everybody loses their shit."

When the law says X, you break it at your own risk.

When a stupid law says X, you follow it at your own risk.

quadrotor-cowboys that are more interested in whether they CAN obtain footage using their newfangled toys than stopping to think about whether they SHOULD

No doubt when film cameras were first invented people went apeshit about them too. Most aerobot operators are totally responsible, but there are always a few exceptions in every population.

Society will just accept these risks and move on, like in every other situation with new technology. Our problem is we have a caste that calls themselves "lawmakers" and so all they want to do is make new laws.

As the meme goes, "WTF - stop banning shit."

Adam has been asking for more money every day for months...every episode of every show on the Carolla Digital network

Ah, there's the problem. Many of his biggest supporters in this effort have no interest in his shows at all.

Disliking homosexuals is completely different from not liking capitalists, conservatives, liberals, etc. Disliking homosexuals is disliking people for something that they didn't choose and cannot change.

You mean like how the USSR succeeded because it worked with innate human values instead of against them?

the finite number of minigames they set up with their finite number of items in them, rendering the whole thing pretty useless.

There might not be a benefit to that outcome, but a "good" CAPTCHA system does have a good outcome when it's broken.

I was talking to the guy who started reCAPTCHA many years ago, and his idea was that the OCR work they were farming out was too tough for algorithms to beat. As long as bots could not do better than humans, reCAPTCHA would be offering a valuable service. As soon as the bots were as good as the humans, accurate OCR had been solved, and reCAPTCHA had made that happen, so it was also a win, and he'd have to come up with another CAPTCHA.

I tend to shy away from helping Google StreetSpy on people, and use the audio CAPCHA when available now, but more people are doing the street number thing, which could still be used for good (if we trust Google). And if the bots solve that, maybe their algorithms could be applied to ambulance services, or whatever.

I'm not sure that the TFA's proposals "solve two problems" the way that great engineering solutions universally do. But there are certainly worthy ones out there.

Does "promoting" mean passing out some posters or getting rid of the requirement to purchase a fishing license from the State to keep the northern snakehead? There are plenty of folks out of work who could help here in a win-win situation. We already have systems in place to police the fish that people keep and removing all restrictions on invasive species taking would go a long way towards reducing their populations.

The state of engineering in PC recovery is awful, shame on software devs

What? You just power off your vm, roll back the storage to the appropriate snapshot, and turn it on again.

Wait - you let Windows touch your hardware? Oh, my.

Sometimes I think what America needs is mother nature hitting the proverbial reset button on us.

It'll be amazing if "America" is still around in 2080, much less 2880.

The entire population of the 13 Colonies was less than the current population of Iowa and they stood up a country just fine. China doesn't keep itself together by playing nice, and we really need to avoid going the Mao Zedong route.
 

The problem is their algorithm has to be close to perfect or it makes things worse. Once people begin to trust the label, they'll fall harder for the stories that the algorithm misses.

I don't think Literally Unbelievable has anything to worry about.

If someone develops a digital currency that addresses those issues and makes them more practical for every day use I support it.

Exactly. The Bitcoin high priests have already chased off the Zerocoin folks, so their future is far from guaranteed. secp256k1 also looks like it wasn't the best choice.

The blockchain idea is a good one, and will probably outlast bitcoin itself. But middlemen are also needed for any of these systems to handle transactions and arbitrage efficiently.

The OP isn't wrong, though - the trendy altcoins are all doomed too.

Literally, a guy named Lovins writes papers about applied hope.

It's just a made up fairy-tale name anyway.

We need some leadership to push the concept.

Leadership is exactly the opposite of what we need. Remember, the Integral Fast Reactor was successfully run for more than a year and was ready for commercialization by about '92. Within the first few weeks of Clinton's Presidency, he defunded the post-research effort and Gore, Kerry and O'Leary lead the Senate fight to kill the project completely.

Without that "leadership" we'd all be sipping power by now generated by cleaning up the waste from the light water reactors that is such a disastrous 300,000-year problem. Branson even has been trying to get an appointment with Obama for years to talk about _him_ footing the bill to get such a system rolling in the US (Virgin Electric?) but "leadership" continues to suppress clean[up] power.

"Leadership" wants to make an enemy out of carbon-based energy sources - not replace them. An external threat is always the way to more power (but not the kind we need).

We could stand to have quite a bit less leadership and instead let coordinating partners actually fix the problem.