So, you're saying that both Safari and Slashdot need these special new contact lenses?

The joke is that when most people say "diploma mill" what they mean is "Any school less prestigious, however slightly, than the one I attended." But the term means something specific: fake schools that offer no instruction and just sell unrecognized credentials for cash. Many for profit schools may be expensive and unremarkable, but that doesn't mean they're diploma mills.

Maybe not -- at this rate it will probably take us until 2061 to get out of LEO again anyway.

Shouldn't a ship called Discovery take them to Europa? (Or Iapetus?)

Yes, actually. Unfortunately, though, not everyone who runs a business believes in competing in a free market. Many of them, especially executives at large corporations, believe in exploiting government to given themselves an artificial advantage over their competition. Copyright is related to this, because it's a state-granted entitlement, so it wouldn't even exist in a free market.

Neither was e-gold, but this is exactly what the feds used to bring them down.

The assumption seems to be that the U.S. federal government is the moral equivalent to the Assad regime. I may have a lot of concerns about the former, but I don't believe it's as bad as the latter.

Well, you get points for snarkiness, but you should have a few beers with me before you decide it's either paranoia or a delusion of grandeur. I don't think I'm important, if that's what you mean, but I used to do moneypunk stuff (like Bitcoin, except with gold and it was twelve years ago) and a number of people I worked with in that time have been imprisoned. Besides, I expect their watchlist is long, that the threshold for being on it is low, and that being on it doesn't lead to immediate obvious consequences.

Not exactly. The Russians are arming a mass murdering dicatator, the Americans are arming the allies of al-Qaeda. The responsible thing would be to do neither.

Sad about it, I agree with you. But only that.

That's muddle-headed thinking. Be proud or ashamed of your own actions, not those of strangers.

Since mods use Troll as a substitute for "I think you're wrong" about opinions, perhaps they're just also using it that way now for facts.

You know your civil liberties are in trouble when you're desperate enough to pretend that involving the UN wouldn't be an even bigger anti-freedom clusterfuck.

Read below, I already responded to why I don't think it matters what would work best in a clean room implementation of economics, and it's not from being thick or simplistic (although nice ad hominem there).

Okay, that was kind of flippant of me. And in theory I can see how you're right. In practice, though, I doubt once the situation is so dire that even those in Congress are willing to implement far reaching spending cuts, I don't think they'll still have the luxury of deciding how they'll go about it -- I think they'll just keep up the pretence that they can spin gold out of straw until it all crashes.