You shouldn't have to forfeit your rights and submit to arbitrary restrictions imposed by a third-party just to exercise your natural freedom of association and act as a group.

The protections of incorporation are really fairly limited. It's not an absolute defense; if you cause harm which can't be made whole out of corporate funds, incorporation won't help—you can still be made personally liable for the damage. The benefits of incorporation mostly come down to simplified tax accounting and clarifying the scope of each party's responsibilities when entering into contracts. The first part is a solution to a problem created by government in the first place, and the second doesn't need government at all, just a mutually-agreeable arbiter to settle disputes.

It's still private property. It's just not your private property—it belongs to the landlord. You've just contracted to use it for a time.

Sure. But that assumes that you can prosecute. For a crime like breaking & entering, that may work often enough to serve as a deterrent. Online, not so much. You'll probably never find out who orchestrated the attack, and even if you do, they're like to be in a different jurisdiction (or even have state backing). As a result, your security measures have to be strong enough to prevent the attack from succeeding in the first place.

That's not to say that you always need absolute security. There's still a cost/benefit analysis involved. You just can't count on making up your losses by prosecuting the offender when the security fails, which increases the net benefit of having proper security in place.

What's to say that didn't happen? We just don't call the ones with longer hair instead of stripes "zebras".

Evolution doesn't involve a species voting on how it would prefer to evolve. If there are multiple possible adaptations then it's entirely possible that different subgroups will evolve in different directions in response to the same environmental factors. This is one path to speciation, if the change are significant enough.

git does support hierarchical branches. You can have a branch named maria/new-crypto, and even pattern-match on the branch path in refspecs. The problem, as you alluded to, is that SVN doesn't have native branches at all, just copies. How is git-svn supposed to know that /branches/maria/new-crypto refers to a branch of /trunk and not to a directory within the "maria" branch? They look the same. For that matter, you could get that path by creating a branch named "maria" (copied from some version of /trunk) and then coping /trunk into it as a subdirectory—a branch within a branch.

You can work around odd SVN layouts somewhat by manually configuring custom branch paths in .git/config:

[svn-remote "origin"]
url = http://server.org/svn
fetch = trunk:refs/remotes/origin/trunk
branches = branches/maria/*:refs/remotes/origin/maria/*
branches = branches/fred/*:refs/remotes/origin/fred/*
tags = tags/*:refs/remotes/origin/tags/*

You don't even need to bother finding the SHA1 or searching the reflog. stash apply doesn't get rid of the stash, so it's still right there as stash@{0}. You can also find it with stash list. stash pop would normally get rid of the stash after applying it, but even there the original stash is preserved if there were any merge conflicts.

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.