Yea, remotely possible, but there are just too many eyes on the Tor project to make it realistically likely.

If we can't trust even the most thoroughly reviewed projects, then we really can't trust anything except burning brands and pitchforks as tools of political change.

Who's to say that Silk Road, Bit Coin, TOR etc aren't all just honeypot projects for the NSA?

Because the people involved in some of them are all well known non-Government types, especially Tor. Besides, even if it were an NSA honeypot, the code is thoroughly understood and vetted, the protocol openly implemented and the actual servers are controlled by a very large number of disparate people and orgs.

Even if it DID start out as an NSA honeypot, they can't be getting too much from it as it does deliver well on its promise.

So put it in a VM with a firewall blocking anything except what is precisely expected.

Plus, they have more to lose (their entire market) by exploiting their members than they have to gain (a functioning black market of their own design).

Actually, that is sometimes the case.

Coal is about the only reliable and cheap source of power that we have enough raw materials for for several hundred years into the future

If we continue burning coal at the current rate, civilization as we know it will not exist several hundred years in the future.

This is a very real problem

No, it's not really. The world has survived plenty of instances of entire technological paradigms becoming obsolete. Fossil fuels will become obsolete sooner or later, and the world will be better off for it. It's just a question of how long the elite (like the Koch brothers) can hold the welfare of the entire world hostage to their pointless shell game.

What you describe is a "law above laws", that serves as a guide to legislative actions and that reflects the underlying values of the society that we don't want legislated away by the whims of the parliament of the day.

This is the role of the constitution. And yes, the modern world does need a right to private communications or something similar to be included, because the current protections included in it just don't cover the manners in which modern abuses of power can manifest.

Tell me, what motivating factors could grandma have for wanting to update the firmware in her router?

In many European countries, citizens' rights are upheld, they are not treated like cattle for the crime of wanting to travel through an airport, they are not taxed to breaking point to fun pointless wars that enrich a tiny, politically connected clique, they have access to free education and healthcare and they have faster access to the internet.

You can argue about definitions of "aristocracy" and who is or is not in de facto control until you're blue in the face. However, the outcomes speak for themselves.

Haha, I was typing "make excuses to procrastinate" and didn't delete enough words when revising the post.

When I want to go somewhere and it's too much trouble, I make procrastinate until it's too late to make it to whatever appointment I was going for, and that way I don't even have the bother of traveling anywhere at all.

Wrong again.
You can't make any predictions about a single lottery draw. You can make reasonable predictions about 100 lottery draws, better ones about 1,000 lottery draws. You can make extremely accurate predictions, within a fraction of a percent, about 1,000,000,000 lottery draws.

Oh yea, and also... They would not need foreknowledge of the desired value as the ratios they use are sound. They would only need confidence in the random distribution of holes in the target.

I don't think they'd need to game it that much. They'd need a random dispersion of a large number of holes on that square to achieve the result, and I don't think that getting close to that ideal would be difficult given a large number of discharges at the target using fine shot shells. The law of large numbers would be in their favour.

Do you have a citation to that medical paper and a robust dissection of it? It'd be great to know from where all this nonsense started.