This should go without saying, but if you have to take third-party interference with the peaceful exercise of your property rights into account, then it isn't a free market. (The absence of such interference is exactly what the "free" part refers to.)

Sabriel wasn't talking about mobile phones. He was alluding to the organic recording device located inside your skull.

Bitcoin takes an average of 10-30 minutes before the transfer is effectively irreversible by the customer. With a credit card, due to chargebacks, it takes months to reach that point. Checks are faster than credit cards, but easier to fake, and still much slower to finalize than Bitcoin.

Even before you get your 1-3 confirmations, unless the customer controls a large fraction of the mining network or is colluding with someone who does they have very little change of implementing a double-spend once the transaction has been broadcast through the network, a process which takes only a few seconds. In the meantime you probably have them on camera, and they can't get very far before the transaction is confirmed or invalidated. If you're concerned about a particularly large transaction you can always ask for a photo ID in case you need to track them down later.

You can already buy Walmart gift cards with Bitcoin via Gyft:

Gyft Adds Retail Giant Walmart to its Bitcoin Gift Card Network

You're buying insurance for both yourself and your wife, so your case isn't relevant to the discussion. Obviously any policy covering both a male and a female will include coverage for male-specific procedures for the male and female-specific procedures for the female. That doesn't imply that anyone should be forced to buy insurance for a procedure he or she is guaranteed to never need. Gender should be taken into account when calculating risk factors and premiums.

No, that's not how insurance works. That's how charity works (or wealth transfer, a.k.a. theft, when it's forced). True, you're not paying for specific procedures. However, you should be paying according to the probability and cost of the procedures you're covered for. A procedure you'll never need has zero probability, and thus shouldn't affect your premiums.

You're not buying decreased risk. Risk is the product of probability and cost; if anything, insurance increases your risk by adding the insurance company's overhead and profit margin. It certainly can't decrease risk for everyone no matter how you structure it; there must always be at least as much payed in as the insurance company pays out, on average, or the company goes bankrupt. The purpose of insurance is to reduce the cost of an insured event to something manageable, in the event it does occur, at the expense of increasing the probability of paying that cost (you have to pay the premiums whether the event happens or not).

The idea behind insurance pools is to group together statistically independent policies of about the same level of risk. They don't necessarily have to cover the same things, you just want to avoid holding a bunch of cash in reserve, or else bankrupting the company in the event several large claims have to be paid out at the same time.

That electricity isn't "wasted"; it goes to validate blocks of transactions. Achieving world-wide consensus on who has how many bitcoins is a service which provides value, which is the reason for the transaction fees. (The exponentially decreasing block reward is primarily a decentralized way to distribute bitcoins as fairly as possible.)

Of course, it's not the supply and demand of bitcoin mining which is important here, but rather the supply and demand of bitcoins. The supply follows a known formula over time, with an ultimate limit at 21 million bitcoins. The demand, as for any currency, is determined by a combination of direct use, marketability and speculation, with an emphasis on marketability. Relative to the dollar, gold has more demand for direct use and bitcoin has more demand for speculation, but in all three cases the main source of demand is the fact that you can trade them for other goods and services later.

Well, you will need a Wayland compositor on the server, since Wayland is a local/shared-memory IPC protocol. The compositor will take the place of the xpra server, and communicate with a proxy (Wayland client) on the user's machine. It doesn't have to merge the windows into a single desktop, however. The current RDP backend in Weston is limited to the desktop mode, but if you can forward a complete desktop then there's nothing technically difficult about forwarding an individual window; it's just a matter of proxying the non-video parts of the protocol. I get the impression that they have more urgent tasks on their to-do list, like getting XWayland working so that you can use it with legacy applications.

Why should rehabilitation matter? That person shouldn't be in prison in the first place. They didn't do anything to justify locking them up as a proportional punishment, and they don't pose the imminent threat of irreparable harm necessary to justify a preemptive act of defense. They didn't even cause anyone harm for which they would need to pay restitution.

The thing about punishment is that it isn't so much that the person should be punished as it is that they shouldn't be able to appeal to the State for protection against the victim doing to them exactly what they did to the victim. They did it, therefore they claim that it's all right to do it. No take-backs. (More formally: estoppel.) Whether they actually are punished should be up to the victim, though, and there is something to be said for leniency so long as it doesn't place others at risk.

In that case what you want is xpra. Each window is rendered off-screen and forwarded individually, as a compressed video stream (x264 if it's available). You can detach from the xpra server and reattach later, from the same client or a different one, with all your applications intact. A lot like how Wayland remoting will work, really, except that in Wayland it will be better integrated due to not needing to support all the legacy parts of X11.

You make this sound like something new. The problem is inherent in copyright itself. Whenever you attempt to censor the communication or storage of information you're going to end up with a lot of arbitrary (and often contradictory) rules.

That's not quite right. While you're correct that there is no such thing as a discrete coin, the blockchain doesn't record totals; it records transactions. Ergo, you can meaningfully refer to and selectively spend the coins you received as part of a particular transaction. You have to spend all of them, however—a given transaction output can only be spent once. Normally this selection process is left up to the client software, which hides the details and only shows the total for each address. Any leftover balance is sent back to either the address it came from or a new (typically hidden) address.

Bitcoins from different transaction outputs aren't even necessarily interchangeable. The "colored coin" model, for example, assigns meaning to a particular output and tracks its movement through the block chain. Such coins can represent claims on physical property, shares in a company, bonds, etc; possession of the private key becomes proof of ownership for the property as well as the bitcoins. You can transfer ownership with a normal transaction, though splitting the output or mixing it with other coins destroys the association, forfeiting whatever claim it represented.

Only if you're including the estimated market value of the share, which is illusory unless you actually sell it at that price. What actually exists is $100 and one share of stock. If you could have sold that share for $100 but didn't, and now you can only sell it for $10, nothing has been destroyed. The share still exists, and the other $90 still exists; it just isn't being offered in exchange for your share.

From your own point of view, of course, that was a major missed opportunity (in hindsight). You bet that the share was worth more than $100 and lost, badly. For the market as a whole, however, it's pretty much a wash. Resources could perhaps have been allocated a bit more efficiently if it were known in advance that the share would only be worth $10, but that's due more to whatever caused the price to drop rather than the devaluation itself (perhaps the company suffered a major setback resulting in wasted effort or materials).

I'm not sure that's true. The attacker can control whether or not a transaction is included in a block, and can replace recent blocks on the chain with other blocks including different sets of transactions. Put together, that should imply that they can allow anyone's transaction(s) to confirm, and then produce a longer chain without those confirmed transactions. The transactions would go into the block chain the moment the attack let up, assuming they're still valid, but in the meantime the coins have reverted to their original addresses and can be re-spent if the attacker allows it.

The inputs to a transaction are specific unspent outputs from previous transactions, so once either of the transactions is included in the block chain the other one becomes invalid. That applies even if some or all of the bitcoins are sent to address they came from; even though the address hasn't changed, the coins still moved to a new transaction with different outputs. So you can't get double-charged, and there's no need to explicitly void the unwanted transaction; at most one will go through. Most likely the one with the higher fee.