Ross Ulbricht wrote code. The legal equivalent of writing a book. He never sold any drugs.He wasn't prosecuted for buying drugs, cause there was no evidence he ever did. They threw him in prison for practicing his first amendment rights, sending a chilling effect to all programmers everywhere "Don't you dare write code that makes citizens more free, or we will throw you in jail. you should only be writing code that helps us spy on and control our citizens like those good guys at Facebook"

Trump can be a bad guy yet still do a good thing. Ross Ulbricht deserves to be free: just like Kim Dotcom, just like Edward Snowden, and just like the three teenagers who wrote us The Pirate Bay

That's a culture issue, not a storage issue. People shouldn't be embarrassed (themselves or by others) over having done stupid stuff in the past, everyone does that.

I just had to disregard that to be able to continue reading. I believe the location was revealed 2/3 of the way through or so, and at that point many dynamics were already described that didn't match Alpha Centauri at all, so I assumed it was some tight binary.

If it's a chaotic system, an analytical solution won't help you there! You would have to know the starting conditions equally well. In any case, if you can observe the system you can predict it a good ways in advance regardless of the chaoticity - just keep updating the solution based on the known current state. If you want to be fancy you can solve for the divergence in the solution to fix your state estimation as well.

No, it doesn't get better. There is a plot, but it's nonsensical. Here's my summary from 2.5 years ago:

'giga' can be pronounced with a soft g as in 'gigantic'.

Or the first virus that infects your organic battery?

It's for people with lapsed Mathematica licenses, imo!

And it's also free, open source, and capable of being self-hosted! That said, I personally still prefer KeePass (using the KeePassXC client implementation).

That is a very good point, but then should not the complaint be that power is too concentrated? Power comes in many forms besides wealth, as well.

I think it's worth exploring the wealth-power relation and concerns about concentration, but misidentifying (or misstating) one of several contributing factors as the fundamental problem does not help to gain support for the cause - especially when there are other reasons that people complain about wealth inequality. When a topic has multiple reasons for complaint, many people will assume the least valid reason is what is being argued.

Are you saying the rich spend most of their money lobbying, and very little in expanding business? That's what rent seeking means.

Also don't forget that "cash reserves" frequently just mean "easily fungible assets", not actual cash.

Making rich people richer won't help increase average quality of life, because the marginal utility of money has a significant diminishing return.

Regardless, it would probably be better to look at the minimum or perhaps bottom quartile quality of life than the average.

Exactly; somehow, many people don't understand that "investing" is giving other people your money to accomplish work with a promise to pay it back (plus extra, hopefully) in the future.

Smart contracts are programmed using features of ETH itself. But saying this bug is the fault of ETH is like saying a SQL injection bug in an application is the fault of C++.