They never have. Long before some anarchist fringe elements in the crypto world dreamed of Bitcoin, people were using this technology:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paper_money

Bitcoin will always be a fringe currency. What Google is doing is encouraging a return to peer-to-peer filesharing, which I have no problem with.

Sorry, that should be read as a half tank being between 6 and 7 gallons of fuel; the entire tank is somewhere between 12 and 13 gallons.

Talk about blanket statements. I suspect that there is quite a bit of 1980s IT equipment in your life that you are not even aware of.

The problem is not what decade the equipment comes from, it is whether or not the equipment meets its requirements. If equipment from the 1980s is continuing to meet the requirements that governments face today, then there is no reason to spend enormous amounts of tax money to replace that equipment unless doing so will pay for itself before the next upgrade. Unfortunately, there are few cases where such upgrades actually do pay for themselves, so in terms of what is best to do with tax dollars, upgrading old equipment that continues to function as needed is questionable.

Now, if the equipment is not working, then it is time to replace it. The real problem is that government contracts are not typically given to companies deemed best for the job, and so these situations arise. Contracts are awarded to companies that bid low and to companies that are well-connected, even when better companies are available.

"270 mile range sounds fantastic (my car only gets 210 miles to a tank)." You should get a better car. I drive a VW TDI, and on a half tank (somewhere between 12 and 13 gallons) I can do at least 200 miles -- and I do not exactly drive in a way that maximizes fuel efficiency. Diesel cars sound a bit different and smell a bit odd after short trips, but even with higher-priced fuel you are going to see a cost advantage to diesel (maintenance is a bit pricier too, but even factoring that in you'll have a cost advantage).

What I really want, though, is to take that diesel engine and plug it into an electric motor, like a railroad locomotive. Charge the battery when I can, get 400+ miles on a tank of diesel otherwise (probably even more, though, since the diesel engine could maintain its optimal RPM while generating electric power). I'd sacrifice my trunk space for it if I had to.

Example?

Example?

...and the law can never be unjust. It's the law, right?

Oh Lord no! He was planning to distribute academic papers to people! The potential damage is unthinkable! PEOPLE MIGHT LEARN!

"the New York Times. They don't lie" I think there is a bit of misplaced faith here. I would be wary of trusting *any* American news source, even one as famous as the New York Times.

Aside from potential dishonesty, the NYT employs reporters who routinely fail to have experts check their statements. Just read through the "Technology" section if you want examples (the most extreme examples can be found there). Like most American media, the NYT is desperate to get their story out there before their competitors; double checking facts and ensuring accurate statements are secondary objectives in the best case.

Name those costs. Universities already archive scientific journals as a service, peer review is generally done by unpaid volunteers, editing is generally done by unpaid volunteers, and we know how to use peer to peer networks to distribute large amounts of data without paying a lot for bandwidth (imagine the major universities acting as seeds for bittorrent archives of each years' collection of published journal articles). So what cost do you think remains to be paid here?

In other words, we still have some of the problems that open access should solve. While we no longer have the issue of individuals being unable to access knowledge, we are still saying that research can only be done by those with university affiliations or who are wealthy.

Volunteers, which is basically what we do now. Anyone can submit a paper to the journals my group publishes in, and if the paper meets the requirements, it will be reviewed by volunteers, and if it is accepted it will be edited by volunteers too.

Charging authors to publish is not much better than charging people to read the articles. What we truly need is a system that is paid for by universities, cooperatively, that allows anyone to submit a paper and allows anyone to download as many or as few papers as they would like.

It's not the protest itself that is secret, but the planning. The point of spying on activists before they stage a protest is to crack down on the protest, to spread propaganda just before the protest, to move important meetings away from the protest site, etc.

It's not as simple as that. I saw a talk by a researcher a few months ago who discovered that Twitter posts could be used to predict spikes in crime. Basically, the example he demonstrated went something like this: when a lot of people are posting messages about being stuck in traffic, the probability of hit-and-run accidents increases. The researcher conjectured that the reason for this phenomenon was that drivers were taking detours, and that the combination of running late and being on an unfamiliar route increased the likelihood of a collision (and by extension, of a hit-and-run). He then went on to show a similar analysis for predicting drug crimes, and then one that predicted terrorist attacks in Iraq.

So it is not just that people who engage in protests will leak data. Someone working at a deli where activists like to meet might post a comment to the effect of, "A bunch of weirdo hippies just walked in the door and they are not buying anything!" If you had a lot of people making Twitter posts that indicated that activist groups were holding meetings of increasing size and frequency, you could probably conclude that a major protest is being planned.

Allow me to rid you of your annoyance:

https://www.redhat.com/products/enterprise-linux/desktop/

Read a little more closely. Fedora releases stop being supported after 12 months, and new releases come out every 6 months. RHEL releases lose support after 7 years, with new releases every 3 years or so.

This is exactly the point: the support cycle is long enough that I will generally have to reinstall at some point before the 7 years are up, and I can do so at my discretion, when I have time available. I do not buy a new machine every 6-12 months; were I to stick with Fedora, I would be reinstalling (or praying that the upgrade option will work) on the same hardware year after year, and then having to take a few days away from work to rewrite configuration files, find workarounds for deleted features (or worse yet, added "features"), get my machine to connect to the network, etc.

I'm glad to here Ubuntu LTS works for you and lets you get your work done. I'll be over in here RHEL land getting my work done, and I'll be ignoring Google and their efforts to get me to do something else.

I guess I just do not see that problem on my own systems. I have a few EPEL and RPMFusion packages, and otherwise everything I need is already in the repositories.