Honestly, if the machines were that profitable then the companies making them would just keep them and mine on their own, as it would be more profitable than just selling the hardware.

This actually isn't totally true, since cryptocurrencies rely on several kinds of trust, and one of them requires that no single entity controls the mining. So it can sometimes be in the interest of a mining equipment manufacturer to even sell mining equipment at a loss, if the manufacturer also mines.

> Uh huh. Me and 97% of climate scientists

I'm so glad that you know what 97% of climate scientists think about bitcoin. Nice way to not actually argue on points, though, like showing that the CO2 generated by mining over the life of the bitcoin protocol will exceed the CO2 which might be saved?

Wikipedia:

The FreeOTFE website is unreachable as of June 2013 and the domain name is now registered by a new owner. The program can be downloaded from a mirror at Sourceforge.

Given what we know about Big Brother nowadays, I'd say that it would be nice if we could maintain several diverse solutions to this problem. Unfortunately, it seems that there's not enough developers around to do that...

What do you think about MayOne, aka MaydayPAC, Lawrence Lessig's attempt to reform US democracy (on the Federal level)? Were you surprised how quickly it reached the initial funding goal? Do you think it has a chance of actually making a significant change?

>> So yes, I think their safeguards and failsafes extend beyond Windows Update and Norton.
>> Open sourcing their code reduces the black-box vulnerabilities well beyond that level to
>> begin with.

is the same as

> FOSS proponents extremely frequently in the past claimed that OSS was security issue free

eh?

I could analogously argue that your logical ability (which seems small), is zero. But I won't.

Small != zero, and conflating them can be a strawman argument, since it also means conflating their reciprocals.

> FOSS proponents extremely frequently in the past claimed that OSS was security issue free

Nice strawman, there.

Personally, I'd say that the only frequently claimed advantage claimed for FOSS in the past was that it was, then, so niche that no one would find it worthwhile to try to exploit. Times have changed, now. For example: Firefox, Chromium, and, I'd say, even desktop Linux isn't safe anymore according to that criterion (server Linux never was safe, since servers are such juicy targets).

> Actually, I am a security professional, working for one of the largest security companies in the industry.

Hm, let me guess. You work for Microsoft, in the team developing Microsoft Security Essentials?

Although some AC has decided to derail my attempt to get you to argue logically, I'll try again, although you don't seem to be that amenable.

1. Why isn't it a false dichotomy?

2. If electricity is 100% reliable, I assume you mean that it is 100% reliable because the laws of physics are 100% reliable. How exactly does this argument extend to make taxi drivers who have passed "The Knowledge" test 100% reliable?

Even though your rebuttal is correct, it's

1. Impolite to impersonate someone else (i.e., me)

2. Childish to react the way you did with the language you did

> If you can't rely on public transport, there is no point in having it.

Oh, it's great that you took the trouble to make the good old "False Dichotomy" fallacy actually explicit, so we could all figure out where you've gone wrong.

How exactly did you post your comment without using electricity? It's not 100% reliable, you know...

> Please leave us some numbers to talk about. Or leave your strawman somewhere else.

Yes, I think this whole discussion could benefit from that. I don't see that either side is actually giving us any real data.

> Military drones migrating to Linux

I smell a rat. And what are all those drones going to do when they get there? Mate? Hibernate for the winter? Migration, my foot! It's all a plot by Microsoft, I say!

GP> If you go to an "online dating service" where you meet a person and
GP> then pay them for a service rendered, that's pretty much changing the
GP> dynamic as much as you can (and would also be highly illegal in most places).

GP didn't specify what service was rendered, so I think we can safely say that the vast majority of services which could be rendered (which in and of themselves are not illegal) would be legal to render in this situation. Prostitution could be an exception. Helping someone copy their legally owned content which is protected by technological countermeasures is such an exception, in jurisdictions with DMCA-like laws.

Copyright maximalists might jump on this to compare pirates with whores, but personally, the only connection I think about between the DMCA and prostitution has something to do with, er, politicians...

> From what I understand, his intention was to release the articles to the public, but he never got that far.

As far as I know, there is no evidence for this, except circumstantial (feel free to reply with supporting evidence). You could very well be correct, or he could have had a more nuanced plan, like only releasing the public domain stuff first, or threatening to do so, and somehow hoping to leverage that to achieve other goals (like, for example, the subsequent JSTOR relaxed access policy which enables private individuals to access 3 papers for free every two weeks), but now we will never know.

> if it's abundantly clear that the person is a net deficit on the human balance sheet...

Said the person who AC thought was a net deficit on the human balance sheet.