You're assuming all the people involved were rational and calm, the driver follow instructions, and information was accurately relayed. There have been several similar incidents and in all of them, despite lots of people blaming mechanical problems, it was driver error. When I hear hoofprints, I think horses. I'll believe it's a zebra when the real evidence comes in.

There's a great audio of one such incident with a woman whose brake pedal jammed on the Long Island Expressway. In more than 20 minutes of conversation, it was impossible to get her to shift the car into neutral. When they finally got her to, she said, "the engine is racing!" and put it back into drive. This was while police were trying to make physical contact with her car to slow her down from in front and there was a significant risk of death. Nobody could stop her from worrying that she shouldn't race the engine. You have too much faith in humanity. It is not justified.

So what? Driving at 125 miles per hour could have killed him -- worrying about the engine or the brakes is idiotic. And the brakes won't catch fire decelerating you from 125 to 0 just once after the transmission is in neutral. He should have shifted into neutral as soon as he realized he couldn't keep the engine from accelerating the car beyond where he wanted it to be.

They don't meet the definition of a security, see the Securities Act of 1933 et seq. They are more like a commodity. They are more like ounces of orange juice than shares in a company that makes orange juice.

Because generally at law, specific performance is not a remedy. You sue for the value of what you have lost, not the actual thing you have lost.

If I give you a meal worth $50 to clean my garage and you don't paint my house, I sue you for $50. I don't sue for the meal. I don't sue to force you to clean the garage.

Bitcoin does not rely on servers to be secure. If you choose to store the key that secures your Bitcoins on a server, then the key is only as secure as that server. But you don't have to do this unless you wish to.

Right, but they said they wouldn't because EU law required them to -- a law that would be unconstitutional (violating the first Amendment) if it was a US law. So why is the US enforcing such a law?

As a somewhat absurd hypothetical, consider if Iran passed a law that a company can't do business with Iran if they hire any Jews. Some company really wants to do business with Iran, so as Iranian law requires, they say they won't hire any Jews. Then the United States government gets a tip that this company has hired a few Jews, investigates, and fines the company. Does that seem like something the US should be doing?

It's a bit bogus to compare something that breaks US law to something that doesn't break US law.

He doesn't sue the hosting company because the hosting company is just following the law. The DMCA makes it the site owner's responsibility to respond to these complaints, not the hosting company. The hosting company is specifically allowed to honor them if the site owner doesn't counter-notice.

Some people think the host is required to honor the takedown notices. They are not. They just run the risk of being sued themselves if they don't honor the takedown notice. So it is fair to blame the hosting company for not refusing to honor the notices at their own legal risk. But he can't sue them -- they are permitted to honor the takedowns.

> No. The rights are unconditional, they can not be denied to people who aren't rich enough to "buy" them.

I agree. And they aren't.

> "Opportunity" and "possibility" are not rights. If society really protected the right to public speech, it would have to provide a way to exercise it that would be accessible to every member of society.

That's incoherent nonsense. If a person has no vocal chords, they still have the right to speak. The ability to exercise a right is not the same thing as possessing the right.

> What is, of course, impossible in the current American society centered around for-profit entertainment and advertisement.

As it's impossible in any society, since it makes no sense. The reason freedom of speech works is because it places no obligations on anyone else to help you speak or to listen to you. There is no "freedom to enslave". There is no "freedom to make people listen".

What's funny is that Wu states this argument, and the re-states it as arguing that the computers inherit the programmer's rights. No, it's arguing that the question of whether the computers have rights or not is irrelevant because the computers are not speaking any more than the books or radio stations are speaking when *people* use them to communicate.

A person who can't pay to distribute his speech to the public still has the right to do so and that right is still fully protected. He simply doesn't have the ability to do it. A person born with no vocal chords still has the right to speak even though he lacks the ability to do it.

Now, if the government had fined him for speech they didn't like, thus leaving him without the funds to speak, that would be different. Similarly, if the State removed your vocal chords, thus depriving you of the ability to speak, that would deprive you of the right to speak.

Except that's not how the net worth is calculated for tax purposes. Otherwise, nothing would be taxable. Even ordinary employees labor for dollars of equal value.

When you trade A for B (whether A is labor, or B is labor, or A is dollars, or B is Bitcoins, or B is beer, or whatever) your change in net worth is calculated by what you got minus what you gave. But the value of what you gave is not the fair market value. It's the *lower* of the fair market value or what it cost you to get it. (Called your "basis".)

This means if you buy some stock, or Bitcoins, or wine for $50 and its value goes up to $500, that's not taxable. But if you sell it for $500, your profit is $500 minus the lower of $500 or $50, hence $500 - $50, and thus $450.

So if you barter, say, a paint job for a trailer, your profit for tax purposes is the fair market value of the trailer less what it cost you to provide the paint job. Sadly, if you bought a car for $35,000 and then traded it something after its value dropped to $8,000, $35,000 is not your basis. (Too bad, because that would be a great tax evasion strategy) $8,000 is, because that's lower.

It's not distributed proportionally to CPU resources. It's distributed as a payment for a service it requires in order to operate. In order for the Bitcoin system to operate, transactions have to be secured with computing power. It's the nature of the way the system operates -- it takes computing power to secure the transactions. New currency is paid out proportionally to those who provide the computing power needed to make the system work. When the block rewards stop, computing power will still be needed. At that time, people who provide the computing power needed to make the system work will be paid out of fees for each transaction they securely add to the block chain.

The early adopters didn't get anywhere near half the total wealth to ever be available. As of mid-November last year, the total value held by early adopters was around $12 million. The current value of all Bitcoins is already around $50 million. (Actually, this is measuring the value using the market cap method, which is not actually realistic. In truth, both values are much less, but the proportions are roughly the same.)