That NPR article is pretty outrageous. He writes that everyone tried to get their gold at the same time and there wasn't enough to go around, therefore the British government decided to stop giving out gold altogether!

What I see here is criminal fraud, perpetuated by the government. The paper bills were supposed to have been claim slips for gold, with a government *promise* that if they ever wanted to claim the gold, it would be there. The government of Britain clearly broke its promise, as there wasn't enough gold to cover all the claim slips that had been issued. Rather than own up to this mistake and make reforms to avoid this in the future, they abandoned the gold standard to make it easier to perpetuate such fraud in the future.

Well said! Here's a neat graph that hammered this point home for me: http://whyisupportronpaul.us/

They talk specifically about the rising cost of gasoline, and how that is 100% due to inflation, whereas the actual cost of gas hasn't gone up at all over the last 40 years!

No, but crime lord types probably will be smart enough.

When I wrote the original post, I was picturing a TrueCrypt volume in a file rather than full disk encryption. You create the file volume, say 2 GB in size, and fill half of it with grandma's recipes. Then you create a shadow volume within the 1GB blank space of that file, and put the incriminating data in there. They'll find the TrueCrypt volume/file on your computer and order you to provide the passphrase, so you decrypt the recipes. File access/modification dates won't be an issue -- it's been a few months since you last baked grandma's chocolate chip cookies, that's all!

Disk encryption software already supports hidden volumes. Even if this kind of decision becomes dominant case law, that won't accomplish anything. People will just start deploying volumes with two passphrases, and when ordered to give up the passphrase, giving up the one that decrypts grandma's recipe collection.

Since there's no way to prove that a second volume exists within the blank space of the first one, encryption will win the day.

Damn straight! I wish I had mod points right now..

Unfortunately, paper checks don't travel well outside the country. This is because they generally clear through the nation's central bank. International wire transfers are expensive and troublesome, so much so that 99% of potential donors will change their minds about donating.

When Visa, MC, and PayPal block you, moving money internationally becomes reeeealy hard.

Fascinating! Which plan/provider and phone did you get to do this so cheap?

I do online backups through Mozy.com, and I found that to be ideal. They keep everything for 60 days (including versions for files that change) so if my hard drive fails, I won't lose anything. This means I can just keep my photo library in a folder on my PC and know for sure that it'll be safe.

You could do the same thing with a Dropbox account.

The dropbox home page has a huge, prominent video right in the middle of the page. Did you try watching that? It explains pretty well what it does.

I'm not sure what the hell you want.. do you want them to give away products that cost millions in R&D to produce, just because some of the games will bear titles similar to ones you already own?

I mean, this isn't EA cranking out pretty much the same Madden game every year. It's a truly innovative 3D gaming system, something we've never seen before and that probably cost Nintendo a buttload of cash to develop. In my opinion, it's well worth paying for.

Those programmers gotta eat, too, and I'd rather support innovations like this one, rather than what Sony and Microsoft are doing.