Now the meddling do-gooders want to do to the environment what they've done to the economy. Enough with the grand schemes to control complex systems you don't understand, assholes.

That was very well done.

They may share some common libraries, etc., but programming for one isn't like the other.

It's not "some common libraries", it's a common kernel, base system, and the exact same core libraries. Far beyond POSIX - iOS is built on NextSTEP APIs just like OS X, because iOS is based on OS X. For nearly everything except the user interface, the APIs are not just similar, they are identical (though sometimes the iOS version has some functionality removed).

Even the OS-level filesystem layout is the same. /Library, /System/Library, ~/Library/Application Support, and so on, are all there and all serve the same purposes as in OS X. Unix stuff is hidden under /private. Devices under /dev use the same naming conventions. Apps are bundles, with an Info.plist and all else that you'd expect, that live in /Applications.

These are not coincidences, and Apple didn't go out of their way to make them appear similar, because all of this is hidden from your average user anyway. It's similar because it's a different version of the same OS.

If you were correct, that means I can run the full OSX environment on my PC. But I can't.

No, that has nothing to do with what I said. Android is based on Linux, but that doesn't mean it's a full desktop Linux system, or that you can run Android on a PC.

Here you go.

Just no. The two are not the same. IPhone, IPod, and IPad are the same. Development is not the same for the Mac. They are totally different.

No they're not. They use the same development tools, language, and base APIs. The UI toolkits are different, out of necessity, and iOS is missing many of OS X's frameworks, but the two platforms are very similar.

Please. OS X Snow Leopard has absolutely nothing to do with iOS. They are two totally different entities.

Wrong again. iOS is essentially a stripped down OS X with a new UI:

iPhone4:~ mobile$ uname -a
Darwin Take-2 10.3.1 Darwin Kernel Version 10.3.1: Wed May 26 22:28:33 PDT 2010; root:xnu-1504.50.73~2/RELEASE_ARM_S5L8930X iPhone3,1 arm N90AP Darwin

Is this not the basis for all trade?

What is? Government-mandated scarcity? No. Copyrights and patents (but not trademarks) are fundamentally anti-market constructs.

Find Dr. Sp0ng, arrest him, and lock him up.

Good thing I'm only College-Dropout Sp0ng. They'll never find me.

Yep. Tor, like everything else in this world, isn't perfect. If you have a high-level view of the network, you can trace anything.

As for adjacent nodes knowing your IP, though, the whole point of Tor is that they don't know if the data is coming from your or somebody 10 hops back. All they know is that you're using Tor.

Yeah, that's useful, but I don't trust it as a full solution. I would make sure to firewall it off externally too. All it would take would be a web browser hole and somebody could run a script resetting your filters. Tor users are uniquely vulnerable to such things from rogue exit nodes.

There's really only one way to do it - run it on a freshly-installed (probably virtual) machine (so there's no personal data on the system) with a non-public IP address, and then firewall it off so it cannot make any non-Tor network connections. Then apps can leak all the data they want, but they have no useful info to leak.

our civilization's advancement has been tied to our declining levels of agression throughout history, especially in the last 200 years

By what measure? Seems to me that the 20th century was the bloodiest in all of recorded history, and in the 21st we seem determined to replay the same script.

Otherwise, should we demand that all news-media report opinions they don't agree with? Should Christian news-papers be forced to publish pornographic material? Should Fox News be forced to report in a fair and balanced way?

No. But such a defense of private property rights is unexpected from somebody who self-identifies the way you do.

I've long suspected that much of environmentalism is nothing more than crypto-Luddism or -primitivism, and this only adds to that suspicion.

It's not even so hidden - a lot of that crowd talks explicitly about returning to a pre-industrial lifestyle.

Few if any energy production technologies fully pay for their pollution at the moment

Yeah, yeah. So what? Lots of things have external economic costs that aren't properly accounted for. Why are we singling out energy, which is uniquely important to our economic well-being, for this? Especially in light of the politicized, manipulated "research" that global warming alarmism is based on?

And even ignoring that, what makes you think that this will "level the playing field"? Who is going to get paid to "offset" these costs? The government, at our expense - who, by the way, is the world's largest polluter in the first place.

there are very few activities that directly generate CO2

"Directly" has nothing to do with it; everything uses energy in its production, and the vast majority of energy produces CO2 - including humans attached to rickshaws. I'd be interested in hearing of a single counterexample to this - what's a product whose production did not involve comparatively large amounts of energy?

Though you are correct about nuclear energy being an exception - nuclear is the only "clean" energy that makes sense (or would, were it not so hamstrung by over-regulation). If energy gets more expensive, fewer products will be produced and more (human) effort will go into the production of each. "Renewable" energy like solar, wind, etc are extremely expensive compared to traditional sources of energy - we're not talking a *little* bit more expensive, we're talking *game-changingly* more expensive. Government subsidy doesn't change this fact, but rather is the worst form of corporate welfare - making an unprofitable industry profitable by throwing tax dollars at it. In the big picture, it's still costing us either way, and if we make that our economic modus operandi we will bankrupt ourselves.

In fact, I think it would go the other way: if it takes more effort to generate energy by non-CO2 generating means, then more economic activity will be devoted to doing that.

Paul Krugman, is that you? Why don't we just bury bottles of money and pay people to dig them up?

Economic activity just for the sake of "activity" is not a useful thing to society. If it takes more economic resources to produce a given quantity of end product, that's economically WASTEFUL. Yes, more economic activity will be devoted to energy production, and less wealth will be created in the end. The economy is not about "jobs" - they are a means, not an end. The whole point is to increase our wealth and standard of living. Wasting economic resources and energy by REDUCING productivity has the exact opposite result. More jobs needed to accomplish the same thing means more human effort must be expended with no net gain - this is not a good thing.

Reducing pollution may have other non-tangible benefits, as you said - increased health and so on. But "pollution" in that sense and CO2 are two different things. But claiming that more expensive energy will result in INCREASED productivity shows a total lack of economic understanding - energy is a direct replacement for human effort, and as such cheaper energy means higher productivity and standard of living, all else equal.