Given the average cost of land in Greece is around €7k/acre as far as I can tell, or €4.5m/sq mile. Greece is only 51k square miles. Greece's GDP is only €220m.

Now that they're bordering on default, I'd be okay with them paying in dirt. Maybe 10x the value of the land, or 1/10th their area. Or at least putting that on the table to light their fires and maybe scare them into doing something financially responsible for once.

I mean, don't get me wrong, I am sure the problem isn't entirely their fault, but I would have more sympathy of they spent more effort working than whining, and instead of protesting austerity actually started acting austere with their milk and honey pension/retirement system and culture of sleeping on the job/corruption.

I wasn't alive during WWII but both of my parents were. My mother was fortunate enough to be evacuated to Canada with her brother and my grandmother while my grandfather stayed behind. Neither of those two then-children saw the war up-front. My grandfather never, ever spoke of the war.

My father, however, did experience it first-hand and did tell me about it. As a precocious young boy, he risked imprisonment and worse by illegally building and repairing radios during the Nazi occupation. I hope you understand the full implications of it being illegal to own radios (think if it being illegal to own a smart phone, a tablet, or any kind of computer). There was no such thing as free speech. The Axis occupation of Greece was horrific, with the Germans being responsible for the worst of the atrocities. 13% of the occupation of Greece was killed or starved to death. Nearly all of the infrastructure was destroyed. The hyperinflation was the 5th worst in history. There is very good reason that many Greeks still do not like Germans, and want war reparations, and it isn't too much of a stretch to view the recent bail out programs as exactly that.

Sure, but having the bitcoin sitting in the bitcoin wallet doing nothing makes it kinda worthless, yah? The whole idea is to use it for commerce, at which point you are vulnerable to all sorts of scams and theft that you would normally be protected from.

Then there's liquidity. Most transactions are off-block-chain (as in one block-chain transaction per every ~400 or so off-block-chain transactions). They have to be, because putting a transaction on the block-chain takes too long. This means that you must inherently hold a balance, in bitcoin, with a third party, if you actually want to be able to use your bitcoin for general commerce. There are currently no protections whatsoever against that balance.

And then of course there's the volatility of the buying power of bitcoin itself. It's one of the most unstable and volatile currencies in existence.

That said it is better than nothing and certainly better vs certain emerging market currencies undergoing hyper-inflation.

But it isn't better than the dollar or any western currency and never will be.

-Matt

This isn't correct. Banks can only lend out what they have. They can't manufacture leverage out of thin air. Leverage is a function of being lent money, not of lending out money.

The correct example is that the bank receives $1,000 in deposits from Alice and is allowed to lend out $900 of that. However, this means that the bank only has $100 cash on-hand so it cannot return Alice's $1,000, at least not immediately.

This does not mean that banks do not employ leverage, banks do borrow money, typically in the form of a preferred stock issuance. Just that they basically aren't allowed to in the example you gave. This is all laid out in bank financials. for example, for 2014 Wells Fargo had assets of $1.7 trillion and loans of $863 billion. The Deposit base is around $1.1 trillion.

So, $863 billion in loans on a deposit base of $1.1 trillion.

The mortgage crisis created a situation where loan losses exceeded the regulatory pad for many banks, and in several cases made them effectively insolvent. The Fed provided liquidity temporarily to give the banks time to become profitable again in order to be able to get back into compliance. Which most did. Most of those that did not, such as Washington Mutual, were either forced to be sold (at the beginning) or became desirable assets sold to other banks who were able to take over the deposit base without incurring losses to depositors. Most of the FDIC's losses (since recovered) occurred with smaller banks who had gone so deep into the red that they could not recover even with the extra few years the Fed gave them to become profitable again.

That's the reality. You don't have to like it, but people who deeply believe in bad information tend to wind up unhappy their entire lives when it turns out not to be true, over and over again. There's been a lot of that, too.

-Matt

People will crack streamed DRM if there is content that's either only available there, or is available there first... If you look at most torrent sites these days you will see all kinds of content that has been ripped from streaming media sites, all of which used DRM and yet still got cracked and made available in a more convenient form via torrents.

When people started doing that it was the current generation console, and it's not a lot of effort to install an xk3y (which costs about the price of a single game) and then copy downloaded iso files to a usb hdd... In fact, being able to hook up a large portable hdd containing hundreds of games is far more convenient than sorting through a pile of dvd media.

The claim that Sweden would hand him over to the US. Were I to worry about anyone in the EU doing that, it would be the UK. The US and UK have a relationship literally called the "special relationship." They back each other on diplomatic and intelligence matters in a way rarely seen among other nations. So they would be the one I would peg to hand him over all quiet like, if anyone.

The UK courts heard the matter, all the way to the top, and decided that it was a valid request. Your opinion on that doesn't particularly matter, only the opinion of their courts. That is how it works in any case of a nation which has an extradition treaty with another nation: The courts of the nation being asked to extradite decide if said request is allowable per the treaty. What that requires varies treaty by treaty.

In the EU, the extradition treaties are pretty strong. Countries don't have a lot of choice to say no. If a fellow EU member asks and the paperwork is all in order, you more or less have to comply. That is precisely what the British courts found in this case. They reviewed it, found it valid, he appealed, they found it valid and so on.

Doesn't matter if you don't like it, that is how the justice process works there. This was not a case that was handled in some shady back channel matter, it went through the court system properly and the rulings fell against him. That's all there is to it.

The UK now has a case against him, and a very strong one. He fled bail, and that is a crime. That crime is still ongoing since he's still fleeing said bail. So they can arrest and charge him for that. Doesn't matter if the original matter is log dropped, he is still on the hook for this.

That's the thing with court dates, bail, and all that jazz: Even if the case against you was going to be dismissed, if you skip bail you are now guilty of another crime. You have agreed to appear in court and a failure to do so is against the law.

The UK had no beef in this originally, they were just acting on an EU arrest warrant. Sweden said "We want this guy," the UK looked at the warrant and said "looks valid per the treaty" and thus arrested him. They had no interest or ability to decide on the validity of the charges, only if the request required them to act per treaty. It did so he was arrested, and then released on bail.

He challenged the extradition all the way up to the high UK court, but the courts found it was a valid request that the UK had to honour. Nothing to do with his guilt, just that the request was a valid one and they were bound by treaty to hand him over. Had he gone to Sweden then, that would have been the end of the UK's involvement. His bail would be returned and the UK would have no further interest in what happened.

However he fled rather than handing himself over. So at that point, he became a fugitive in the UK. They now have a case against him. It is totally separate from the original case, it is simply a case of skipping bail.

Likely they'll want to act on it too, since he's been flaunting it in their face for years.

Yeah, I've gotta say I'm within a hair of dumping Firefox. I'm not a Chrome fan, and IE is just not on. I've tried some other open source browsers and they have the usability of a jello hammer.

At this point I'd be willing to pay money for a browser that just didn't flatline my CPU every time I loaded a page, that didn't stall for tens of seconds at random intervals (this is after I turned off hardware acceleration, which make things tens times worse on Windows in 38) and is simply, utterly and completely unusable on Amazon.

Why these basic usability metrics aren't the first priority for Firefox developers is beyond me. The changelog seems full of completely irrelevant stuff that's just going to bloat things more.

Dunno... maybe it's time to hold my nose and move to Chrome, but Firefox has so many features I like and know well that I'm loathe to do so. It feels churlish complaining about software I don't pay for, but I'm not sure why Firefox is being shipped any more. It certainly isn't to satisfy user needs, because it doesn't.

Or you can use pdftk to remove the arbitrary pdf restrictions and get a plain normal pdf file out of it...

If the password can be retrieved in an automated fashion then even if its encrypted, everything necessary (i.e. the key) is present, so if the host is compromised the passwords effectively are plaintext as the attacker can simply run the same process to decrypt the password.

And even if you use SSL to check your mail, that doesn't change how the email has been transmitted from one mail server to another, which is often done without using SSL, and most mail servers will fall back to plain text even if they do support SSL because so many out there don't support SSL at all.

Not necessarily in these days of social media... A lot of people have Facebook accounts and will have added relatives or people they went to school with...
For your example, you already know the school, so you find out a list of their teachers (often published online) and try them all, and if the attacker knows your age they can narrow it down further... Either way there's a relatively small number of possible answers.

All the routers i've seen implement statefull filtering on ipv6 and allow all outbound and no inbound (except traffic related to an outbound connection) by default, which is functionally identical to their ipv4 nat implementation.

Good luck trying to scan an ipv6 range...
The smallest subnet is a /64, even scanning every host there for a single port would take a LONG time.

IPv6 works fine with VPN software, even ipsec was originally a part of ipv6 and cruftily backported to ipv4... Infact, you can use ipsec properly (ie end to end without kludges like l2tp) with ipv6. The problems published recently were due to short sighted vpn providers who completely ignore the existence of ipv6. If they provided dual stack connectivity over their vpn then there wouldn't have been a problem.

Bugs could still be found in ipv4 stacks too (and are still being found), on the other hand ipv6 is much newer and addresses some of the weaknesses of ipv4.