Making your weapon smaller and more accurate DOES make it less scary.

Violence is scary. Random, indiscriminate violence is more scary.

I would counter your argument with the suggestion that a ridiculously large, but clumsily inaccurate weapon is far more scary than a weapon that only hits its intended targets.

If all I have are precision weapons, then all you need to do to be safe is make sure not to piss me off. If I have extremely powerful weapons with "unreliable" targeting, then it might be in your best interest to also put pressure on your neighbor to not piss me off.

Your thinking is shallow.

At the end of the day, there is no such thing as a weapon of war. There are just weapons. There is no such thing as a tool of peace. There are just tools.

They are all just objects. Like pebbles or fallen branches. The don't *do* anything. They just exist. That's all. They don't endorse causes or have a political agenda. They just sit there and exist, perfectly content to do absolutely nothing and be perfectly harmless for the rest of eternity.

What matters is *who* has possession of them. The living, thinking creature that can make them do something.

Personally, I would prefer that the most powerful weapons be under the control of somebody who is, to at least some degree, on my side.

Even more often, the "failure" was a hesitation to meet the unreasonable demands of an aggressor who wants you to relinquish possession of something valuable.

Violence is a two party game, you can't simply "choose" to never be involved in it.

What you can choose is whether or not you want to be the loser every time you are forced to participate.

If my destruction is already determined, and there is no other way out, then having a way to convince the aggressor that he'll be going down with me is a perfectly valid tactic. Really, it's the only valid tactic on some situations.

That may be a valid point, but it is an argument for *upgrading* weapons, not eliminating them.

You misunderstand the true value of weapons.

If you have to use a weapon, that means you didn't have a big enough one.

Much better to have a weapon that is big enough, and scary enough that you don't ever have to actually use it.

We could give up our strategic advantage, but it would be exceedingly stupid.

Weapons should be thought of as a form of insurance. In a perfect world, you'd never have to use it, but in the world we live in, it's foolish not to have it.

No, I'm sure Amazon can afford much, much smarter marketing people than that.

When did bitcoin get big enough to have "name recognition"? Outside of geek circles the only people who have even heard of it have gotten their info from news articles about silkroad, and thus equate it to drug smuggling, gun running, human trafficking, etc....

I'm not a marketing guy, but if I was, and was looking for a good brand to leach off of, it sure as fuck wouldn't be "bitcoin".

The quote you included doesn't really back up your point very well, but you do make a good point anyway.

The entire concept of money is 100% dependent on general trust and perception. If you want my boat, and I agree to sell it to you for $10,000, I'm not agreeing to it because those dollars have any particular value to me. I agree to it because I have confidence that I can trade them for something that does have value to me.

In other words, "money" has value because, and only because, we all agree it does. It's simply a proxy. We only accept it because we believe that someone else down the road will accept it as well.

If that system of confidence ever breaks down (and someday it will), we're probably all screwed.

If you truly believe that, then you really haven't thought this through.

A couple of hours ago I stopped at a convenience store and purchased a 12-pack of beer and a pack of smokes. I paid with one of my credit cards. I take it for granted that multiple entities can see that I made a purchase. I also take it for granted that most of them can take the total, subtract the sales tax, and then fairly easily determine which combination of items would have added up to that amount. Hell, that's pretty simple stuff, and I assume that "they" can do hard stuff, too.

Now, if I had thrown a $20 bill down on the counter instead of the credit card? "They" wouldn't get any info at all.

So why do I use credit cards? Honestly, I don't give a shit if "they" know I bought a 12-pack of shitty beer and a pack of smokes tonight.

But if I was making a purchase that I did want to keep to myself? Hell yeah, cash would be the only way to go.

At present, paper money is the one and only way to make a purchase and be assured of anonymity. To think that there isn't anything special about paper money is simply delusional.

Forget beta. Slashdot loses its credibility simply for the fact that "https://slashdot.org" doesn't work, and brings me back to the regular http site.

Yes, yes, I know... SSL is broken by design and offers no security against the NSA and their foreign counterparts. Still kinda handy for skirting corporate monitoring crap, though.....

FTFY

Not true. There are plenty of cars out there with factory installed HIDs that completely blind me when I meet them on the highway.

It's not a problem that would probably be noticed by people who spend most of their time in the city, since there is enough light pollution there that your eyes don't dark adapt to the same degree. They've never caused me a problem in a city, but when you've been traveling down a rural highway and not met another car for 20 minutes, coming up on a fucking BMW or Mercedes with those damn things can and has blinded me to the point where I had to pull over for a few minutes to let my eyes recover.

Well, given that HID headlamps are still legal, the answer seems to be "Yes".

Yeah, windows that don't allow light to pass through them.

I believe that's called a wall.