mod parent up. i guess, as an earlier poster mentioned, we need steganographic vpns. openVPN feature request? Thought these were interesting:

STEGAN0GRAPHY APPLIED 0N NETW0RK SESSi0NS AND NEiGHB0URH00D
http://www.s0ftpj.org/bfi/dev/en/BFi12-dev-10-en

Except banks should be able to transfer all your assets, if not in cash, at least in some form (given a reasonable amount of notice in any reasonably likely situation) by calling in investments. They are constrained by regulations and audit scrutiny, etc., It's going to be hard for privately-held, internationally cloaked Full Tilt to get customers' money back out of their exec's pockets.

The Greater Internet Jerkwad Theory:
Normal Person + Anonymity + Audience = Total Jerkwad

As TheGratefulNet suggests, anonymity is very important. At least in the sense that we value intellectual freedom. Sometimes the quality/range/expressive power of the discussion improves too, so I guess we need it as a comunication tool. I don't know that we NEED tons of anonymity to survive as a species, but it does seem like one of the more enlightened human rights and a good thing to try to preserve.

For now, we have plenty of technologies and forums supporting some degree of anonymity, and I don't see them going away just because Google+ landed on the individuation side. Bad news (for + users): Google+ will lose some userbase and some amount of the good things that anonymous communication can foster. Good news (for lovers of aliases-based communication): some other, less-omniscient service will get a market opportunity they wouldn't have had if Google+ allowed aliases.

FWIW, I have a + alias-as-name and will probably drop 'em like Friendster if they make me change it. I already have a RealIdentity-style social network. (On Facebook. For now. Can't wait to try the Great Opensource Distributed Social Network that I know one of y'all is going to invent.)

Comparing vector to raster is like apples and oranges, but that's an interesting observation... the choke point for graphics has shifted way up. it's because vectors are like blueprints (and the cpu cycles are like fantastic builders) whereas raster is a less-dimensional structure that can be easily displayed and copied, but not easily manipulated.

I don't think your black-and-white line test is a good one. The eye treats parallel lines specially.

For me, I can't distinguish lines from gray starting at about 30 inches from my 72-dpi laptop monitor.

http://djradon.com/bw_test/

By your test, I wouldn't fail to distinguish until 80" away. Or is my math off?

good for you.

now if only we had super-smooth AI agents to adopt your technique for us!

I disagree. The question is "number of USB cable types"

http://www.usbfirewire.com/uextendminib.html

proprietary connectors make it a non-usb cable in my book.

the different possibilities for ends should be limited to:

A = type A (std) male
a = type A (std)female
B = type B (D) male
b = type B (D) female
mA = mini A male
ma = mini A female
mB = mini B male
mb = mini B female
uA = micro A male
ua = micro A female
uB = micro B male
ub = micro B female

my collection includes:

A - A
A - a
A - B
A - mA
A - mB
A - uA

i am very suspicious of voters with more than 15 types.

You could have a democracy of largely informed and conscientious citizens.