Heh, "financial server institutions." My fingers insist that root just always has to end in "-er."

But what else is there? ;-)

It was people smelling the underlying complexity (and security vulnerabilities) of grain sacks, gold bars, paper-dollars, bank-dollars, credit cards, Paypal, etc that led to the succession of those things, with Bitcoin being the latest solution-to-it-all.

Every one of Bitcoin's ancestors had failures, and due to grass-is-always-greener psychology, the most recent ones (dollars and financial server institutions) are naturally viewed as the "worst" (because their failures, unlike grain bags' failures, are part of people's real experiences and memories) so Bitcoin has gone full circle (not exactly, but it's kind of commodity-like) and tends to have security models similar to commodity-money's models. Thus it's having similar failures ("I lost my wallet" == "I forgot where I buried the gold" ; "someone 'hacked' my wallet and transfered my funds out" == "I dug up my gold, and the chest was empty" ; "The online wallet service closed and they, rather than me, is who actually had the key" == "The guy, whom I asked to hold my gold, disappeared").

Maybe some day, governments will use force or sneakiness or "social weight" to make a new chain policy more popular than today's policy, and there will be a Bitcoin fork, which presents a model more like 20th century banking. Then the security complaints will be "my account got frozen" or "I'm leaking wealth due to government-created inflation" or even "the price of everything in BTC changed because of immensely complicated market and government forces that I can't begin to understand, where my currency on the surface appears to be as strong as it was in 2106, but somehow here in 2109 I'm poorer." And then we'll repeat the cycle again.

We'll repeat it again, because money wasn't actually the problem. Real life was the problem, and life is complicated. Life is full of intelligent adversaries (sometimes posing as friends, sometimes not), bumbling fools with too much power, bad luck, freak accidents, etc, and nobody can ever get rid of all that stuff.

Washington DC burbs (Northern VA) here. Cabs buses and trains either cost much more in pure dollars, or significantly more in time (as the network of them is so poor here).

Just my own data point... My 12 mile commute would cost $25 (w/o tip) each way in a taxi. I'm able to drive from my garage, directly into a parking garage, so no need to step outside when there's rain, snow, or wind. If there was convenient public transportation, I'd certainly consider it.

Maybe you could clarify it for us.

Interesting study on gender differences regarding spatial relations. forbid that there might be actual differences between the sexes...sorry, I just despise political correctness.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2909401/

Sponsored by Luminosity

Did you have an actual point to your tirade? Have you even attempted tournament level chess? No, there are no pretty colors, or toons with inflated boobies, only real head to head mental stimulation. And believe it or not, some people are actually capable of playing both chess and video games.

From http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bird_strike#Incidents

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) estimates the problem costs US aviation 400 million dollars annually and has resulted in over 200 worldwide deaths since 1988.[40] In the United Kingdom, the Central Science Laboratory estimates[6] that, worldwide, the cost of birdstrikes to airlines is around US$1.2 billion annually. This cost includes direct repair cost and lost revenue opportunities while the damaged aircraft is out of service. Estimating that 80% of bird strikes are unreported, there were 4,300 bird strikes listed by the United States Air Force and 5,900 by US civil aircraft in 2003.

As a rule of thumb (I'm not talking about this case), I'll agree. But, there are many cases where you should disobey. I certainly would if my boss directed me to do something illegal, and in some cases, you would still be held legally accountable if you were directed and didn't disobey.

As one of my bosses likes to say. "I'll listen to your complaint, but then I'm going to make a decision, and expect you to shut up and color."

I'm assuming you weren't referring to DHS when you mentioned increasing homeland defenses. DHS is a useless money pit.

As for the military being able to take and hold things, does Somolia ring a bell?...Black Hawk Down? We couldn't even handle that little piece of shit, so don't be so sure about our capabilities. If you were talking about wars with tanks and ships and planes, it's all good, but then you're referring to the types of enemies we worried about during the Cold War. Times have changed, and an insurgent war on their turf ain't so easy a nut to crack.

I first traveled through Frankfurt airport back in '79, where the Polizi sported them. It was disconcerting at first, but you certainly do get used to it.

Isn't this just like everyone in the US is responsible for what (pick your poison...NSA, TSA, Geo. Bush, Congress, Barak Obama) did? Same reasoning, no?

This might help you... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flying_height

Heads fly, and you don't "fly" in a vacuum.

For all values of ___, never pay for an encrypted ___ service. Whether it's mass storage, email, or whatever. All service providers who offer this kind of stuff, are snake oil sellers. What happened to Lavabit this year wasn't news; we already knew about CALEA and have known for twenty years.

Twenty years in the tech world is a long time and ought to have conditioned your thinking by now. Even well-meaning, loyal professional allies can be subverted. The popular example case is government pointing guns (a.k.a. "court orders") at peoples' heads, saying to share the secret and keep it a secret that it's being shared. But really, once you even allow for that to be a possibility, all sorts of other things are possible. Replace the gun with a software bug exploit, replace the government with some random script kiddie with pretty much any agenda that you can think of. Anything goes.

Crypto is something that is performed by your machine, always done by software that you can understand (i.e. not proprietary). You never think about additional crypto that somebody else may or may not be doing, or by software not under your control. That's why you use a storage service that doesn't advertise crypto, you use a plain IMAP provider (if you some weird reason you're not handling that yourself), etc. Any service that tries to lure you with "security" is probably lying, unless by "security" they mean certain areas that intersect with reliability, such as DoS resistance.

Buy you're wrong. The answer is 1 penny plus 1 cup. That's why you always need to be explicit with units, to avoid making the mistake of thinking it's merely just one penny.