So you trust dollars implicitly and are leery of bitcoins, thats a perfectly understandable and reasonable position.

If you feel like taking part in the trendy thing, you can still sign your store up to accept bitcoins but instantly convert into dollars, and set your prices in dollars as well, so that your payment processor takes on any currency exchange risk for you.

If it gets to the point where you are leery of dollars and can buy **** anything **** with btc, then you can always
change it up and start accepting btc directly.

True, and insightful, however there is one difference: due to the nature of transactions,
coins are effectively melted down and recast each time they are moved. Even with
only a tiny percentage of coins having been directly stolen or used for nefarious purposes,
they would very quickly spread a taint through the whole body of moving coins.

> if the wallet file is lost or destroyed, the coins within it are effectively gone, correct?

If all copies everywhere are lost, and the wallet is a pure random one, yes.
Many types of wallets can be recovered with just a passphrase.

>If so, then at some point there's an expected loss over time
Absolutely correct.
At some point, 8 decimal places wont be enough, and the currency will need to be divided down into smaller fractions.

The interesting part, in my opinion, will be determining a fair way to prune ancient unspents, so the blockchain ETXO doesnt
grow endlessly.

er, that's why they are getting ISPs to block the routes to the sites, rather than taking the sites down.

They already forced ISPs to do it for child porn, then the courts enforced blocks on "pirate" sites because the child porn filters proved that it was technically possible, next step (previously announced, due to come in soon) they are forcing every UK ISP to implement porn (_legal_ porn) filters.

And now it's "block stuff that isn't porn/child-porn/illegal-under-copyright-law, but we don't like it anyway". No surprise.

Whenever a controversial law is proposed, and its supporters, when confronted with an egregious abuse it would permit, use a phrase along the lines of 'Perhaps in theory, but the law would never be applied in that way' - they're lying. They intend to use the law that way as early and as often as possible.

http://yro.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=169254&cid=14107454

And the punchline is we're still surprised every time the ratchet turns tighter. Every. Fucking. Time.

True to form, slashdot is sceptical as ever.

We had the same baseless naysaying when it spiked to $200, and the same smug "told ya so's" when it crashed back down to $100

There is something bitcoin has that diamond and tulip bulbs don't, and even if crypto isnt your bag, I' expected more insight from such and otherwise smart crowd.

States rights is not about allowing oppression, but allowing the people of a state to organize a government fitting their culture. Our current system does not allow this. Rather, it forces each state to adhere to what the federal judiciary and Congress believe should be a one-size-fits-all vision of America. Anyone who has looked at a "red/blue map" of America knows that we are dividied country, now more than ever in our history, and we need to devolve decision making down to the community level as much as possible. Most of our bad federal policies these days come from forcing all important decision making as high up the government food chain as possible rather than letting communities decide. So now you have a culture war between Chicago and the rural South and Midwest over gun rights because the federal government is inextricably involved that the two views cannot coexist within their communities.

As America becomes more diverse, poorer and the federal government more strained we will face a choice. Either we can devolve decision making to communities to take pressure off of the central government or face the inevitable acrimony as large minorities decide to break away because they are tired of having their visions consistently crushed by a small majority.

The further down decision making is pushed, the easier it is for political rights to be upheld. It's easier for a minority (political, racial or otherwise) to rebel or relocate when most decisions are made at the local level than the federal level. The further down you go, the smaller the political authority you are challenging. It's easier to challenge a mayor and sheriff than a governor; it's easier to rise up against a governor than the President with the backing of the US Army. It's much harder to justify federal involvement in an armed conflict between a revolting minority in one city when the federal government is not being challenged.

If you are budgeted 40 hours a week for six months, you can only work 40 hours/week for six months as a government contractor, salaried or not. Those are literally the only hours you can legally bill to the customer. That means that if you do 80 hours a week with only 40 paid, the business has literally taken away your ability to make a salary for those remaining 3 months unless they have new coverage. It is worse than normal salaried over time.

CGI was selected in part because they were one of only a handful of companies that got on the task order from DHHS that covered this and many other big CMS contracts. This system is designed to make it extremely difficult to just start a business and put out a bid. The justifications for it are very flimsy and center around things like making sure that some fly-by-night company doesn't get the contract/screening out junk bids. Poblem is, they don't actually work. In many cases, they just let the "primes" that win the slots act as funnels for the actual work done by subcontracts which just adds to the cost of the contract.

Another thing, if the reddit thread on this was correct, CMS needs to do what the DoD increasingly does with overtime which is to scrutinize or reject invoices with more than 80 hours per two weeks per employee unless the overtime was either authorized or can be explained in reasonable terms. Overworked government contractors don't get rich; their employers do at the expense of the employee and government. One thing often left unappreciated by the general public is that unpaid overtime is literally stealing employment from the employee because a salaried employee is only authorized to bill so many hours to a contract during a period of performance.

The third annual Kong Off will run this Friday through Monday.

Lots of places to play even if you're not competing.

Denver, CO: The 1-Up (official Kong-off location)
New Hampshire: Funspot
Portland, OR: Ground Kontrol
Vegas: Pinball Hall of Fame (might not have Donkey Kong, but it sure is fun.)
SF Bay Area: Pacific Pinball and High Scores, and many more smaller spots.

Who's missing from this list? Where's your town's reboot of the vintage arcade?

>People think that adding encryption to something makes it more secure. No, it does not. Encryption is worthless without
> secure key exchange,

This is false; encrypting everything by default significantly increases the barrier to casual eavesdropping.
Letters are usually sent in sealed enveloped. Yes, someone could go to the trouble to steam them open, but
generally they dont bother. When they must bother, its expensive.

How to establish trust is a completely separate problem. Its even separable: (you could have the authentication
and tamper-resistance with no encryption at all.).

If you have been paying attention to recent events, mass-eavesdropping has been a big thing in the news lately.

>MITM detection needs to be implemented within the protocol. This is tricky, but possibl

um, no, thats not true at all...

I remember that. For whatever reason 3d0g would get me out of it. I was just a kid and had no idea what to do with the gibberish that the assembler would spit out at me. I just knew how to get out and back to my prompt.

CALL -151: Think "65536-151" - jump to $FF69, which was the monitor ROM entry point.

3D0G: 0x3D0, "Go": Run the code that DOS put at location $03D0. I believe it was a 4C BF 9D, as in, JMP $9DBF, which was the DOS 3.3 entry point/warm start routine.

Damn, I'm old. After a long and convoluted ride through the IT world, I got to retire early because I spent my early teenage years messing around with that sort of thing. It was pure luck that I got my hands on the right machine at the right time, developed a love of computing at a time when home computers were regarded as nothing more than means to store recipes (mom), do taxes (dad), or play games (kids).

Anyways. Thanks, Apple guyz, for putting a disassembler into ROM. It's only been in the past few years that I realized just how much of an impact that comparatively minor technical decision had on my life.

Put the territory under some sort of corporate or government control and let the employees in charge of the territory use deadly force to stop the poachers. Works quite well in Africa where their game reserve rangers can put a .308 through you quite legally if they catch you hunting endangered species.

Or Kucinich. Only a radical like Paul or Kucinich would have the ideology and the stones to order the FBI to dismantle the DEA's special operations division and treat every employee of the same as a probable criminal conspirator who conspired to systematically perjure themselves to win cases in federal court. You won't get this from a "mainstream guy" because moderates are moderates almost invariably because they either stand for nothing or have the intestinal fortitude of a freshly butchered lamb. One of the best articles I've ever read on moderates and why moderates have such a pernicious history in American politics is "The Paranoid Center" by Reason.

If the threat was as real as they say it is, the CIA's clandestine service would be the largest it's ever been since the agency was founded and Bush/Obama would have told them to take the kid gloves off in dealing with Al Qaeda. By that I mean the CIA (or MI6 here) would have been given carte blanche to go abroad and use the full playbook of nasty espionage tactics. You'd think a "Mossad times ten" had suddenly hit the major terrorist networks.