It's called the Apt Tax and could replace many of our existing taxes and severely reduce the IRS:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A...
http://www.apttax.com/

The guy who quoted 2% is much too expensive though. It should be less than 1%.

I suspect a kill switch may hurt or help handset makers another way. The loads of people who thought they lost/had their phone stolen but find it shortly after again.

Will they demand free replacements and the manufacturers bow to their demands or will they just go out and buy a new one?

A little more than 1/100. The weight of water in such a pool is 2,500 tons. The weight of the peanut butter is 25 tons. Water density is 1 g/cc. Unsalted peanut butter is 1.09 g/cc.

Every time I see new construction around here, they put dig some ridiculous pond/hole-in-the-ground for water to go. Except it's way out of proportion to what they're are builing (like 1/5 the constuction size in my area). So lots of still standing ponds and swampy areas. And people wonder why the area has a mosquito problem and then spray poisons to reduce them. Which probably lead to something else.

I don't even know the point of the ponds, don't see them in Europe at all. Probably something civil engineers instructed townships to do to justify their existence, and it's spreading as township tend to just copy each other.

We welcome him with a lot of calls. Remember to be nice to the prescreeners.

These virtual currencies only have value due to consensus

That's the value of everything. Say a nuclear holocaust happens, 90% of people die. What do you think happens to the value of gold or coca cola stock?

You can move to dogecoin or whereever, but bitcoin has the same value as ebay. Firstmover status. Do you know any online auctions? Because I do. Places like epier or ioffer. None of them are inherently less valuable than ebay in its early days, but people just don't use them. So their entire value (or lack of) comes from a network effect that isn't easily duplicated once an equitable service is in effect.

Still could be recording conversation though.

Considering the poor quality of most photographs, I don't think most people's face are that identifiable. Especially once you run into the millions and billions.

I actually have a less-than symbol in there somewhere but slashdot deleted that. I forgot the nuances of this specific site.

2008.... what like the 1st year the app store was even out, Iphone barely a year old....have something a bit more recent?

Less rubberstamping committees, more restritictions on the government.

Carter started extraconstitutional spying on suspected foreign agents (tapping phones) and had FISA courts oversee the implementation, and those courts I think went ahead with all but 4 out of 17,000+ requests in one of the past years.

Oversight is always than complete government restriction.

The US consumes 1/5 the energy in the world:
http://www.eia.gov/tools/faqs/...

Oil specifically, the US consumers 18.8 million bbl a day with 313 M population. The EU comes in a distant second with 12.8 million bbl a day with a population of 507 M.

For the US, that means an expenditure of 2.5 gallons oil per person per day. For the EU, that means an expenditure of 1.1 gallons oil per person per day.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...

Oh wow, that's cool. Never knew that existed. The sucessor to that today seems to be a 1500 watt electric scooter, such as this:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...

Similiar weight (~90lb), similiar top speed (30-35+mph).

As to the briefcase scooter, just too expensive.

Because no black market is a bad thing, of course. If the market has demand for hired killers, for example, obviously they should exist.

(The is/should fallacy of free marketism is legitimately scary to me)

The black market often brings goods in demand to people where the government blocks them. During many war times, they were the only way people got around rations to get food and luxuries in a decent supply.

Drugs are often a black market. Yet, by and large marijuana is harmless, legal alcohol is not.

Markets have existed before governments rose. Markets are not scary, they are what make us inherently human. The exchange.

Your fearmongering is rather sad. Yes, criminal acts are possible. That doesn't come from the nature of the exchange, it comes from human nature.

Do I have to point out that a lot of military spending, including the labor force (soldiers and the like), isn't bringing the US Taxpayer all that great ROI?

There is spending for defense, and then there is our level of spending.