"When somebody sounds like a total fucking crackpot, they almost always are."

Aristarchus of Samos sounded like a total fucking crackpot, and if you had called him out your prediction would have been right - for a couple millennia.

What if instead of taking your attitude, the Greeks had devoted their energy to developing better sensors to test Aristarchus's claims about the parallax motion of the stars? Instead of sitting around calling him a crackpot, we could have had an accepted heliocentric model of the solar system some 1800 years before Copernicus.

Why the fetishistic obsession with balance? Isn't anti-symmetry the reason we exist at all?

Laws of conservation are derived from Thermodynamics which makes very limiting assumptions.

Violations of conservation laws are empirically measured: Dark Energy, for example.

I just saw this article on today's front page:

http://science.slashdot.org/st...

The EM drive is controversial in that it appears to violate conventional physics and the law of conservation of momentum; the engine, invented by British scientist Roger Sawyer, converts electric power to thrust without the need for any propellant by bouncing microwaves within a closed container. So, with no expulsion of propellant, thereâ(TM)s nothing to balance the change in the spacecraftâ(TM)s momentum during acceleration.

Hey, it was Purge day.

Even with the identity verification, the encryption is not a guarantee against the MITM.

Because the man (the one in the middle) could have hijacked the certificate.

The oft quoted example here is the China injecting the JS into the unencrypted traffic. They probably do not even need to hack anything to hijack the certificate - they likely already have the laws which force the CA to hand over the certificates legally. And once that happens, back you are at the drawing board.

Decoupling at least allows the two technologies (A) to be developed independently and (B) to be easier replaced.

Only users??

Most serious hosters still charge by traffic. The web-site owners too would appreciate the increased traffic and higher bill.

Just decouple the traffic encryption and the identity verification already.

- there is absolutely 0 wrong with providing a company with a promise to buy scheduled services on the clock without interruptions and to pay for the service whether or not you can use 100% of its capacity that day.

If I want to start a shipping business I can talk to an import/export broker and work out a schedule, where regardless of my circumstances I will ship 1 container every 2 days with him on a clock and because of that certainty of payment he will give me a much better price than he could anybody else.

As to Rockefeller's 'secret deal to prevent shipping for others' - baloney. The so called 'secret deal' was no such thing, it was a discount that Rockefeller was getting that nobody else could get because they would not ship a supply of that much oil on the clock, whether they have it or not that time and pay for a prearranged amount of delivery as promised.

Rockefeller was absolutely right and the reason that oil never went below 7 cents was exactly because government destroyed his company and did not allow him to find new ways to increase demand by lowering prices even further. Nobody was finding any better way of doing business in that time, otherwise they would have won against Rockefeller and that is all there is to it.

Microsoft had a temporary monopoly for a very good reason: they provided the computing platform that nobody else could provide at the price and just because you can't accept that doesn't change that fact. Microsoft and others also pushed hard enough in the market that competitors actually had to innovate to become competitive in that market, which is how free and open source software came to existence.

As to me being 'religious' about free market - I cannot stand hypocrisy of the modern society that will vilify the individual and promote the collective and use the force of the collective to oppress the individual. If I am 'religious' about anything that would be the belief that individual freedom tramps every so called 'societal good' that you can come up with that is based on lies, oppression, destruction of the individual, theft from the individual, slavery of the individual by the collective.

Yes, I am saying precisely that, because free market is market free from government oppression, which means government cannot give a monopoly to a company and as long as a monopoly status is not given and not protected by a government the so called 'monopoly' is a temporary state of affairs that clients assign to a company if the company does exactly what the clients want.

A monopoly in a free market is not a problem at all because it doesn't become a monopoly by using force and oppression of government, so it may be a temporary monopoly (temporary as long as the company provides the best product at the best price) but no company stays a monopoly for too long. As an example I consider the break up of Standard Oil in 1911 to be a complete and utter travesty and destruction of individual freedoms. That company was started with one goal, to make money the best way Rockefeller knew how: by building a company that over time reduced prices and improved quality of service, both of which that company did.

The prices for oil product (kerosene at the time) went down from 60 or so cents in 1860s to just around 7 cents a gallon by late 1890s. All of this improved standard of living for people buying the product, the government wanted to steal the proceeds and let inefficient friends to enter the market where in the free market they could not compete on those prices at all.

Yes, a monopoly in a free market shows that the company is doing everything right.

Bacteria? Don't they keep finding it on Mars craft and such?

They should have shipped the Kansas state government up there to monitor the whole thing, make sure the computers weren't lazing around in the sunshine.

Don't they have a lot of solar energy to work with, to move away from the Sun?

- wrong. 2 things are necessary for free markets to exist:

1. equal application of all laws to all individual regardless of their individual circumstances.

2. protection of ownership and operation of private property against the government intrusion, against the mob and the collective.

A feudal system does not treat all people the same under the law. Neither does any of of the current socialist / fascist systems. As an example the so called 'progressive' income tax increases tax rates on a smaller and smaller percentage of the population relative to their greater income. This is unequal application of the law, as it creates a gigantic divide between people who run businesses, own assets and the rest, who want to steal from those who run businesses and own assets.

- actually this is one of the worst forms of government, since it creates oppression that cannot be eliminated by taking down any one particular individual. A dictator can be shot, even a single party system (like what we had in the USSR) can be stopped, but a hydra that is 'democracy' cannot be simply shot or stopped because it pretends that it exists on the voluntary participation of the electorate, which is nonsense and it does not give power to any one particular governer, instead it provides power by proxy to the most connected individuals (companies) and it keeps a puppet in the spot light.

You can go ahead and shoot that puppet but not the puppeteer, and the puppeteer is intelligent enough to give you the impression that you are in control of the government.

Democracy is a horrendous system, where few in power (the puppeteers) use the mob to keep the power structure going by setting up the useful puppets that promise to keep the mob happy by stealing from the minority (employers, 1% or whatever) and handing the stolen goods to the majority (electorate).

Of-course the reality is that the mob gets crumbs, the money is stolen from everybody and the puppeteers have direct access to the actual reigns of power and to the fake money printing presses.

- wrong. Every time humanity actually did get to experience freedom (free economy means economy not centrally planned, economy built by people without government meddling with it) the people built the biggest economies, which later were crashed by the mob, which set up government to steal from the fruits of labour of people who built the economy.

As for 1000 years of feudalism - the feudalist system is a system of government that destroys freedom. Free market requires that people are free from regulations and from government, you can't be born into slavery and call that a free market.

- wrong, freedom is the exact opposite of coercion, which is what communism entails, given that no free person would stay in a communist system on his or her own volition unless they were ruling it somehow.