I totally get that there are benefits to a truly untraceable, anonymous currency. But to those who oppose regulation for the simple fact that it's the government getting involved, I would advise taking a look at what happened to the banking industry back in the 1920s and early 1930s before making claims that it's all bad.

Yep. Rules and regulations are usually a byproduct of previous experience. Wildcat banks often issued their own scrip, supposedly based on currency on-deposit, but often that currency was either other wildcat banks' scrip, or was so incredibly over-leveraged that they had really almost nothing on deposit to support their outstanding currency.

These banks could either go under due to bank runs or could just close up shop overnight, leaving the local employees stuck holding the bag while the owners ran off with what real money actually was on deposit. If other banks had this bank's scrip, that scrip was now valueless and that other bank was likely to have its own problems.

One could even integrate this kind of thing into the mesh network concept, where aircraft and ground stations simply routinely exchange their data as a sort of near-field-communication thing for the skies.

It could work along the same lines as the early shared-bandwidth ethernet model:

• Plane, on takeoff and once away from range of the airport (which could be a predetermined value and could even be unique to any given airport) starts listening, and starts a random count to transmit (like the CSMA/CD negotiation for Ethernet). The aircraft is listening for basic data such as grandparent post outlined.
• If aircraft detects a transmission from another, it simply notes the sender ID and checks if it has previous data on that sender. If it does it simply appends to the log on the sender, otherwise it starts a new log with that sender's ID.
• If there's no one transmitting, the aircraft transmits.
• If the aircraft detects a special node, like a ground-based node, and if no one is transmitting, the aircraft transmits its flight history information, and then transmits the collected information on other aircraft. This could be on a different frequency so to avoid interrupting the real-time data from aircraft.
• When the aircraft lands, it uploads all of the history on itself and on other aircraft to the airport. Depending on the airline or nation, it may then delete the logs of other aircraft or it may hold on to them, but it holds on to its own logs until maintenance clears them. Once it takes off, the process repeats itself.

To me this isn't all that difficult of a concept, though it would require mandatory participation among commercial jets to be most effective. It would also require that the system couldn't readily be turned off either, so that a hijacker can't disable it.

How is this a Slashdot topic?

Last time I checked, dietary considerations and irrigation policy weren't high on the agenda of a site that usually talks about electronics, rockets, and Star Trak...

I just wish they'd pick one time -- Daylight Saving or Standard, I don't care which -- and keep that year round. There is no reason that will convince me that switching time twice a year is worthwhile.

Where I live they did! I had no idea what this Daylight Savings thing was until my age was measured with two digits... My parents moved to here before I was born, and where they came from there was no Daylight Savings Time either.

And yes, I do live in the United States of America.

Ah. My apologies, I assumed that the Scandinavian label applied to the Finnish.

If I remember what I read somewhere, the Russian/Soviet side lost something like 2500 tanks in the Winter War, mainly due to the Finns figuring out how to interfere with the treads to immobilize the tanks before setting them on fire...

A tank without a crew would go a long way in explaining how that happened, as there wouldn't be personnel to see the attack on the tank or to repel it while clearing whatever was used to jam the treads.

As a side note, that war explains why Biathlon is so culturally significant to the Scandinavian countries...

The block chain does not have names associated with it. Governments may well know that transactions have occurred, but they do not necessarily know who made the transactions, nor is there a method by which to automagically pay any required taxes during the transaction itself.

It costs nothing to create a new wallet? What kind of argument is that? It's the contents that matter, not the wallet itself. If one loses access to all of one's accumulated wealth then one is done for.

At least the banks, the FDIC, and the NCUA guarantee the money of depositors in the event of a banking system problem. If they didn't then no one would keep their money in banks

I don't actually want a specie-based economy, as either the value of the specie has to fluctuate with the value of the currency, or else as you state, the amount of money in circulation is limited.

I prefer the other option I discussed for this very reason.

It also doesn't help that Bitcoin, in of itself, has no intrinsic value, and it can be argued that as far as real-world value goes it's actually a detriment as it takes fairly significant resources to run the computers to competitively generate bitcoins and it's possible and even quite likely that people will lose their private keys and thus will lose access to bitcoins.

Money relying on specie that is also itself a valuable material for manufacturing will at least maintain the value of exchange for that manufacturing. Gold is a good example of that given its use in the electronics industry and the jewelery industry, among others. Same could be said for platinum or palladium, and this is the strongest argument in favor of a specie-backed currency.

Money whose value is market-based and is sponsored by government is inexpensive to produce, which is its strong suit. Printing bills is inexpensive- printing the $100 costs the government just about the same as printing the $1. Generating money electronically in the form of credit at the prime rate is also inexpensive, and while computers are involved they're not working as hard in parallel competition to generate the money.

...that all scrip currencies are going to find themselves subject to attack from all sides? Wasn't it obvious that governments are going to have a problem with it due to a lack of ability to regulate/tax, banking systems are going to have a problem with it due to their not having a role in something that could be lucrative, and criminals are going to be interested in exploiting the lack of government oversight in order to either profit through its use or through outright theft?

A coworker previously had sang the praises of Bitcoin, but it sounded like he was approaching it from a stock market speculation angle, as in the more it grows the more he was interested. This wasn't long before it started making the news big-time, and like all bubbles, once everyone is involved it usually means that it's time to get out. And also like other bubbles, it has started experiencing the bursting that kills value.

Bitcoin is interesting, but for something so libertarian requires way too much third-party interaction in order to practically use it, and those third-party gatekeepers are the perfect targets.

They can't do all of Doctor Who, the BBC literally doesn't have all of it anymore due to a series of purges of their collection of old content in the seventies.

If you're into British TV and are willing to try sitcom-type dramas, look at As Time Goes By. Judi Dench is at the top of her game and it's very amusing, and not nearly so implausible as storylines go as many other sitcoms. I also recommend the Granada Television version of Sherlock Holmes with Jeremy Brett, the vast majority of the episodes are quite good. We've also found a liking for New Tricks, Inspector Morse, and Inspector Lewis.

You can have my Laserdiscs when you pry them from my cold, dead hands!

Seriously, we collect media and have for a very, very long time. We have about 800 titles on VHS, close to 550 on Laserdisc, several hundred DVD, and probably 80 Blu-Ray. We also have a smattering of S-VHS stuff that I recorded from broadcast that we occasionally watch. We're somewhere over 1500 titles once redundancies across formats are eliminated from consideration.

As much as I wish that I could simply subscribe to a service to get all of the content that I want, there are too many conditional things going on, like a content provider having content seasonally blocked (recent issues with Grinch come to mind) and having titles withdrawn after awhile. Sorry, I want to be able to watch what I want to watch, when I want to watch it, with no revocation or special conditions upon my watching. Similar reasons are why I'm hesitant to hostile to medialess books and music. I don't want my music collection to go away simply on account of a hard disk drive failure (a'la iTunes) or for my books to go away because the reader croaked, and I don't want a company being able to censor me (like the irony in the withdrawal of 1984 from readers) because of some company-to-company dispute.

You compare certificates as-recorded by your computer with certificates retrieved by third-party sites. If they don't match then there's probably this kind of thing going on.

How about Dance, Monkey Boy!