See people got it in their head that the 1st amendment is about 'freedom of speech', which is really a very loose summation of what the 1st amendment really is. The first amendment is to guarantee that you cannot be politically silenced. It is to guarantee that you can peaceably assemble, and discuss whatever the fuck you feel like (ostensibly for the purpose of enacting political change). It guarantees that if you choose to espouse something which may not be popular, as long as your speech is not inciting dangerous behavior, the government will not attempt to silence you. If you are attempting to start a riot via hateful demonstrations, it is not protected. If your speech is damaging to another party (such as a political rival), and you do not have sufficient evidence of it's validity, it is not protected.

The problem is that the amendment has been taken too broadly to mean that any form of expression should be protected against censorship. And while I am anti-censorship in all of it's forms, the 1st amendment was not meant to guarantee your right to show pictures of titties on the internet for the purpose of titillation or any other non-political purposes.

You're a human being with a reasonably competent understanding of basic technological concepts. There is a LARGE portion of the population who does not meet this criteria. [/understatement]

There are people who cannot grasp the concept of putting 3 color coded wires from one box into the back of another box. There are people who cannot understand the difference between their tv remote and their cable remote, and are probably the same people who need someone to clearly show them how to use their remote even though the purpose of each button is clearly labeled. Switching inputs on a TV between a cable box and a DVD player is a challenge to these sorts of people. And these are some examples of a technology (the tv) practically everyone is familiar with, the examples I've given are not new technological developments for TVs, these sorts of capabilities have existed on TVs since the 90s, giving roughly 2 decades for people to become familiar with them. But it still confuses the heck out of a good 20% of the population.

These are people who have trouble working their microwave and you expect them to suddenly work a touch screen order taker, and not screw it up? Not likely. And guess who these people are going to blame for their failure to operate? I mean it obviously wasn't their fault that your machine didn't understand that when I said only ketchup, I meant I didn't want mustard, I still wanted the pickles and onions.

It's even more exaggerated than that. So-called patent trolls are not generally interested in shutting down infringers (unless they have an exclusive license with someone else, which I don't think Personal Audio does). They want infringers to stay in business so they can get paid licensing fees. Since they want to maximize their revenue, they don't even want the license to be so burdensome that infringers simply close up shop rather than pay. What's more, the normal standard for patent damages is a reasonable royalty, so in most cases the patentee can't even ask for (much less receive) enough damages to shut down infringers.

The law already recognizes this. First, damages for patent infringement can only go back six years. Second, the standard for issuing an injunction takes into consideration how long a patentee sat on its rights and the extent to which the public has become dependent upon the wide availability of the invention. Third, there is an equitable doctrine called laches that can prevent a claim from being made after a long time, sort of like a flexible, implicit statute of limitations.

They tried the home automation thing about 5-6 years ago, it was never popular so they ended up discontinuing the line. Maybe if they'd waited until the days of the iphone, and android it would have been different, but z-wave was not the way to go.

Even a 'day or so' is frankly outrageous considering our current technological capabilities. There is no real reason that an international transfer of funds should even take that long. I'll be fair and state that the 2-3 weeks is an outlier situation, but it's not at all unreasonable for someone transferring funds to a 2nd or 3rd world nation.

If you want to get technical transactions on the bitcoin network are using the bitcoin protocol, which happens to be cyphered with SHA256. Also should the community of developers determine that SHA256 was no longer a viable cypher, it would be relatively simple to create a cutoff point in the blockchain where new transactions need to be processed in whatever the next generation cypher is. My point was that if the above protocols are compromised because the underlying cryptography is vulnerable, there are much greater dangers in terms of potential fraud or data security, considering every modern agency in the world relies on the premise that those protocols are secure.

To be fair I don't think that foreign investment accounts are covered under the Federal Deposit Insurance Company either. Or for that matter, there are plenty of charter banks that aren't FDIC insured domestically. Even if MtGox wasn't based in Japan, there's no requirement (except as provided by state law) for a bank to be FDIC insured. In short, if you're worried about your money you probably should have some caveats about putting it into an organization that has no official policy for how it's going to compensate you if they screw up, monetary policy or no.

The basic crypto behind bitcoin is sha256 it's the same crypto used behind TLS and SSL, PGP, SSH, S/MIME, and IPsec. If sha256 is compromised the fact that your bitcoins are now double spendable is the least of the world's problems.

The 'official' wallet software is open source, and is not subject to the sort of transaction malleability that affected MtGox. In short the official software is sound, however, the official wallet software is not designed to handle the volume of transactions that an enterprise environment like an exchange needs to be able to process. It simply isn't fast enough to keep up with hundreds to thousands of transactions per second. To this end MtGox like most exchanges used the official source code as a reference point and created their own custom wallet software to interact with their exchange. Unfortunately they made shortcuts in their coding to do this, which allowed this particular vulnerability to be exploited.

And that's different from the over all distribution of USD how? Most of the people with large bitcoin fortunes are early adopters, and frankly why shouldn't early adopters be rewarded for taking a risk on something that ultimately may not pan out. You don't have to go far to find plenty of people who think Bitcoin is a scam, scheme, or otherwise 'no good'. You yourself imply as much. Like anything early adopters take a big risk, if BTC never got to be worth more than chump change they're out time and possibly money if they invested anything heavily into it. As another analogy, 25-35 years ago there were plenty of people who insisted personal computers would never be popular and there was no market for them. You don't begrudge people like Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates who took a risk on fledgeling technology and came out on top do you? Maybe in 10-20 years BitCoin will have gone the way of the betamax and vhs, but then maybe it won't.

I trust that bitcoin will continue to be a currency with value and use until something else comes along that replaces it (and given BitCoins incumbent status as king of the cryptocurency world is I believe, unlikely in the near future. There are a number of 'altcoins' which each seek to improve upon BitCoin's core functionality in some way or another, but none of them have successfully come close to dethroning BTC).

Bitcoin has a lot of functional benefits as a system for transferring value, even if it is eventually determined that its volatility ultimately makes it unsuitable as a currency for conducting day to day business with. This is especially true when it comes to international transactions. Currently the fees for transmitting USD across international wires, not to mention conversion to local currency (if needed) are significant, and time consuming (I've oft seen quotes of international wires taking 2-3 weeks to complete, depending on where it's going and what not). On the other hand, a bitcoin transaction is instantaneous, and after roughly 60 minutes is pretty much irrevocably entered into the block chain so that there is no possibility of the funds being lost or otherwise delayed in transmit.

Now does this mean that I trust bitcoin to go up, or down, or sideways, or do anything else? Well, I'd like to say I'm hopeful for a strong future for the currency, and I trust that in the long run bitcoin will eventually stabilize as it matures more, but in the short term, we're still in the wild west so to speak.

That's not the standard for declaratory judgment jurisdiction in patent cases and hasn't been since the 2007 MedImmune case, in which the Supreme Court rejected the Federal Circuit's "reasonable apprehension of suit" test. The MedImmune standard is "whether the facts alleged, under all the circumstances, show that there is a substantial controversy, between parties having adverse legal interests, of sufficient immediacy and reality to warrant the issuance of a declaratory judgment." MedImmune v. Genentech, 549 U.S. 118, 127 (2007) (quoting Maryland Casualty Co. v. Pacific Coal & Oil Co., 312 U.S. 270, 273 (1941)).

Have I actually tried what? Actually linking a wallet to a person. No I haven't, but then I don't have the resources available to me that most government agencies do. Sure the chain can be 'long' and it may be difficult, if not impractical to track down the owners of wallets that are mixed with a mixing service, but all of the transactions are public, and therefore CAN be traced, even if it is impractical to do so. Furthermore most mixing services could themselves be classified as performing or aiding in money laundering or structuring depending on local laws about the subject. So while a user of a mixing service might avoid getting tracked down for their drug charges, they could face money laundering charges instead. In my opinion there's little incentive to most users to use a mixing service unless they have dirty coins, the privacy gained just doesn't seem particularly worth it to me, considering the chain is already pseudonymous.

Bitcoin is pretty much the opposite of untraceable. For a bitcoin transaction to be valid it has to be reported in a giant public ledger where everyone agrees on it. If you send bitcoins to someone there is a permanent record of you doing so. Sure the ledger might not associate a wallet address with a particular person, it doesn't for example record 'John Q. sent Bill W.' 100 BTC, but it does record that wallet '1785' sent 100 btc to wallet '1863'. There are a variety of ways to link a particular wallet address to a physical person, especially if that person is attempting to cash out to any Fiat currency (either the transaction has to be done 'in person' or virtually every exchange that allows deposit or withdrawal of fiat currency requires some sort of identity verification, not to mention it's likely being withdrawn to a bank account, which also likely has a name associated with it). The long and short of it is, that if you want to transact business without a paper trail, cold hard, unmarked cash is still the best way to do it.

Blame Canada!

Sorry... Couldn't resist.