Notice that the guy who said it is an advertising guy. That's his whole worldview. That's the way he thinks it is and the way he thinks it should be. Meanwhile for the rest of us, we have lots of alternatives. Paid sites, community-supported sites, ad-blocked sites, sites run by people who love what they are running a site about.

Basically this is a little advertiser wanting us to support clubbing a big advertiser, Google. He'd like us to get mad at his competition. What he wouldn't like is for us to start noticing just how much what he is advocating is in his self-interest.

I recommend we all switch to ad-block and screw them all. If some sites die or have to switch funding models, works great for me.

You don't have to be "cynical" to expect the government to act in the government's own best interest. The idea that one piece of government will keep another piece in check rather than colluding together to expand power is an unrealistic pipe dream. Honestly we've had over two hundred years of real world experimental evidence demonstrating that checks and balances DON'T WORK. They never did, and never will. The only realistic check on government power is secession.

They never want me. They find out I won't enforce the law as written if I find it to be immoral, and that's that.

Hopefully eventually they will be unable to find enough jurors who don't feel like me in the jury pool! But I guess I'm feeling over-optimistic today.

True. And I used to buy that. :( I hardly ever fly, and I used to actually think I should have a say in what other people do in life.

Sounds like a job for a jury! :)

Mod up to 6!

What does that have to do with it? Even if it were a mere convenience or luxury, the point of government is to secure the right to liberty. That includes the liberty to enjoy some things that some people might regard as a luxury (a subjective judgment if I ever heard one), so long as I am not doing so at the expense of somebody else's right to life, liberty, or property.

No, it isn't. Everything they have was acquired through theft and coercion.

I'm 36 and my opinion on this has been stable for 8 years. Hopefully you will engage in less name calling when you grow up.

Actually it leads to more efficient use of space through price rationing.

Who cares what the city government wants to avoid? They have no more right to enforce their will than any of the rest of us.

On the other hand, it's okay when we do it!

There are a whole host of reasons why what you are saying is impossible. First off, no matter how much CPU power you accumulated, you wouldn't be able to rival the hashes per second being put out by the custom hardware. If you rooted and botnetted every CPU on earth you would still only be a fraction of the hashes per second of the Bitcoin network. CPUs for Bitcoin mining were obsoleted by GPUs long ago, and both CPUs and GPUs are now way-obsoleted by ASIC.

Also, even if you were able to control a majority of the hash power on the Bitcoin network, you would still not be able to spend somebody else's Bitcoin. To do that you would have to crack the private key for the account containing the Bitcoin. Doing that is a totally different math problem from what Bitcoin mining hardware is doing, and there are a lot of visuals out there illustrating that it would likely take longer than the projected life of the universe to crack these keys using currently available methods. If you had a majority of hashpower on the network, you could alter the blockchain, which is the ledger showing in what order transactions occurred. This would allow you to double-spend your own Bitcoin and cheat somebody, but would not allow you to spend somebody else's.

Bitcoin stories shouldn't mention MtGox any more than dollar stories should mention Enron.

Not to anyone who actually follows Bitcoin. MtGox was old news in 2013, a year before it actually failed. Bit coin's success was never based on MtGox - it was the other way around. And the failure of a fraudulent company in the Bitcoin space made Bitcoin stronger, not weaker.

Tired of hearing this illogical assertion repeated.

That would be the definition of best-ever Congress, then.

I suspect that in the last year since the Snowden revelations a lot more eyes have suddenly gotten focused on these packages. People are going to be looking for real security and wanting to make sure there are no secret backdoors, intentional or otherwise, in the code they depend on.