I doubt it. Without moderation, people will start to routinely see unpleasant things like child porn or extreme violence. That will drive people away from those platforms to ones which do moderate. The end result of this, if it does stick (which seems unlikely), will be further restrictions on speech than now.

It's not as simple as using the server's time as the source and the local clock to advance. The problem with that approach is timezones. Doing it in JS you can't get the locale, only the current clock's UTC offset. If the user's time is set wrong, the timezone (and UTC offset) may be as well, Also, time differences may cause weird effects around the daylight savings switchover time as the local clock will change it's UTC offset earlier or later than expected. The problem with using an IP to do it is that the IP that the server sees may be in a completely different timezone to the user. Proxys, VPNs and NAT could all cause that issue.

The GP is right, it's pretty much impossible to get right. It's much better to let the only thing that knows how to work out the right time do it, the user.

There's also daylight savings. Any business that advertises opening hours would have to update their signs, website, leaflets, etc. twice a year.

Isn't there a chain recorded with the coins though? Couldn't you just look for the earliest address that all the coins have in common and that would be the person?

While I'm all for personal freedom, that kind of black and white thinking is not useful. Not being from the US, I really dislike the idea of nutters being able to get hold of guns easily. But to be honest, regardless of our differing views on guns, I'm not sure there is a good choice to be made here.

To take it to an extreme, what if you could print a nuke? Should anyone be able to do that? Bearing in mind, all it would take is one disturbed individual to kill a load of people and really mess up the lives of everyone else. But, on the other hand, you'd probably need a police state to prevent people accessing the tech which is obviously terrible. The ultimate question will be which is the lesser of these two evils. With molecular engineering and 3D printing, we could see this play out in our lifetime. Scary stuff.

The way our railways were privitised (which has been a total disaster btw), is that the government leases out monopolies on routes to companies for 10-15 years. This is about one of the routes coming up for renewal and the contract being taken away from the current operator (Virgin). After the announcement of the winner, Virgin said the other company had made an unrealistic bid and wouldn't be able to operate the route at the quoted rate. Now it turns out the government department overseeing the bidding process has messed up the calculations when assessing the feasibility of the bid.

The EU passes directives which states are bound to implement as law. A directive is a set of goals and the member states can implement whatever laws they wish to in order to meet the goals. I guess it's done that way to allow all the different legal systems and existing legislation of each member state to carry on functioning. But it's pretty much a law. They can also create regulations which require no state laws to enact because the powers they require are already granted to the state under existing laws.

I think you're missing D) use whatever changes they like but never distribute their proprietary code to anyone else.

You can use GPL code for anything you like, it's only when you distribute it to someone else that any obligations are imposed on you.

What a load on nonsense. That analogy doesn't account for inflation. Next year it will cost more in dollar terms to provide the same services, and that effect is compound. If inflation is about 3%, you're looking at about a 15% cut in spending in real terms over 5 years. And that's ignoring growth which will increase the burden on government services, requiring an increase the amount of resource required to provide everyone with the same services at the same levels. And then there's the aging population problem, someone has to pick up the slack on social security at some point.

Please never vote for that guy, he doesn't have a clue, or is just grandstanding.

I think that's why he's advocating using Bitcoins for exchanging existing currencies. If you look at the current rates and do a simultaneous buy and sell, you can exchange with less fees than other payment providers. Once enough people are doing that it will increase the liquidity and decrease the volitility and holding them for a longer time will be possible/sane.

I thought he signed off on them because the other guys were holding him to ransom.

That's not how it would work. Assuming he gets 50% of the original company, Facebook has taken lots of private investment since then and that share would be watered down. He would bacially get half of what Zuckerberg's shares are worth, assuming he's kept them all. It all seems pretty fishy at this stage to me though.

I really like the free version for browsing for new music but I don't see why anyone pays for the subscription service. I rarely find more than 2 or 3 new albums that are worth keeping per year and I can buy the MP3s for a couple of months worth of fees. Not to mention that when you stop paying it all goes poof.

Except the summary says it's only nine people.

They'd be much later into the Windows phone game than Android, they will still have to compete with other Windows phone manufacturers and nobody wants Windows phones anyway.