Prior art has to be published. Until recently, the courts were very particular about what constitutes publishing, to the extent that "properly publishing" patents was (is?) an industry.

> RC4 is math. It's either broken or not-broken. You can't go half way.

Security isn't binary. Cryptography, being targeted for practical application, is different than theoretical mathematical statements, which we all know can be discovered to be either correct or incorre... hang on, Godel is calling me from the afterlife...

(heard from distance) What? Really! Mind-blowing, man. Yes, I know your name has those two funky dots, but Dice thinks "pretty" is more important than "functional", so it might be a while before Slashdot can actually display them...

Well, we can't be completely sure. Possibly, before the Big Bang, the Central Bang Bank messed up the Bang interest rate stabilization calculations, and our universe ended up getting a lot less Bang for our buck...

If humanity is ever going to colonize other solar systems with slower-than-light travel, it's a no-brainer that we're going to have to learn how to recycle our waste. In a closed ecosystem, it makes sense to find ways to use urine, or plants/bacteria/yeasts grown using urine, as raw material to produce essential materials for repairs.

You're still not arguing against the points raised by DanielRavenNest and ultranova. Neither of them claimed that the bitcoin protocol was the "best-designed" protocol from an energy efficiency point of view.

If you're really interested in solving the problem which seems to irk you so, just go out and make Peercoin (or whatever other alternative cryptocurrency you invent which doesn't require proof-of-work in the long term for maintaining the block chain) more popular than Bitcoin. You could start by talking about Peercoin's advantages every time Bitcoin comes up...

> OK, I think you see the point,

What? I merely see that you don't know how to argue logically well.

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...