I'm pretty sure the trademark office operates on the "Announce, Listen, Revoke" model.  Doing the research up front is horribly wasteful.  Consider the history of the Linux trademark.

Does this guy have any idea of the hacker retribtion he will be subject to if this goes through?

Damn really? I had one of those when I was in third grade, it died in a week, how the hell do you keep it alive this entire time?

TheGer,

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2011/20110112_globalstats.html

http://www.noaanews.noaa.gov/stories2010/20100728_stateoftheclimate.html

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/22/science/earth/22warming.html

Miners calling it quits?

My $0.02.  

I only just read over this and someone correct me if I'm wrong but this appears to be using Xen to isolate (groups of) applications in their own VM on a single host.

My short answer:

This is at best a one trick pony and it's possibly the wrong approach.

Why (or my long answer):

I'm going to talk about some  "classes" of defense here (and these are terms I just made up so feel free to take some shots at them):

i) A defense which foils an attack (or some significant percentage of attacks) forcing attackers to use a completely different approach (ALSR - I'm sure everyones sick of me mentioning this)
ii) A defense which introduces a measurable and significant increase in difficulty to exploiting an existing flaw. (Password complexity rules, firewalls)
iii) A defense that removes one attack vector with known problems and replaces it with another which is less known. (Switching from IIS to Apache in an IIS shop)

I submit that i) is intrinsically superior to ii) and both are superior to iii)

VM isolation is at best a "Type II" defense, as it introduces the problem of detecting and compromising the hypervisor before compromising the machine and at worst it could be considered a Type III defense.  My assumption here is that a successful attack on the hypervisor means complete ownership of the machine.  Ergo,  we have reduced the problem for attackers from attacking application X from a very large selection of applications.   To attacking Hypervisor X for which the list is much smaller.    The upside is that - hopefully this also reduces the attack surface for the defenders.   This would normally be a good thing but it's only true if you assume the hypervisior is more secure than your other applications.

e.g. If I had a machine that had to run a webserver and Tomcat to provide a very simple web service to a very targeted application.  Removing that and replacing it with a few lines of well audited code could be considered reducing the attack surface of that machine.   However the hypervisor isn't a small piece of software and it's attack surface isn't well known.

It might be safer if I couldn't already do half the job: Detect running in a VM.   For lots of people who haven't installed the vmware tools on their host a simple check of the time with an external source will tell you that you're running on a VM.   Depending on the guest OS I've read about at least fifty different markers for VM detection.

Also it's worth noting that the point of Qubes seems to be the antithesis of what I understand to be best practice with regard to VM's these days.  Some of us think that depending on VM isolation is a bad idea.  It violates the principle of DiD.  So, like in my shop we consider it a bad idea to mix VMs with differing security privileges on the same host.  In other words we don't run the payment gateway software on a VM on the same machine we are running the Drupal VM.  Yet this seems to be the whole point of Qubes.  

This is a good presentation. http://handlers.sans.org/tliston/ThwartingVMDetection_Liston_Skoudis.pdf

More info on the VMChat teaser at the end: http://www.foolmoon.net/cgi-bin/blog/index.cgi?category=Security%20News

ownership is really the right to borrow a government's capacity for violence against trespassers, no?

Not if I can help it.

*cocks gun*

The government doesn't even protect us anyhow. Americans aren't entitled to it according to a court ruling.

That's one good reason. Here are a few more:

1. Perhaps the owner will die one day, and someone else would like to the owner of it?

2. Perhaps the vegetation and ecosystem which was stripped off of it contained information in its natural complexity that current technology could not understand, but future technology will.

3. Perhaps the drainage networks that the land depends upon on either side are severely disrupted, resulting in issues downstream.

4. Perhaps it disrupts the migration routes of fauna, which has a disruptive effect on the ecology outside of the owner's jurisdiction.

5. Perhaps his mining equipment pollutes the environment, both in the air and in the water, which flows downstream.

6. Perhaps his mining equipment makes excessive noise for his neighbors.

7. And most importantly, by picking this low hanging piece of fruit, it's no longer there for prosperity. He would've been better off abstaining, and biting the bullet by developing more efficient technologies which would obviate the need to strip mine in the first place.

Then why do organizations and societies engage in these activities?

Private ownership of resources is the best way to ensure their conservation.

'k. So, What's with that?

What does that have to do with a Libertarian society?

I think it's huge that a Howard Johnson hotel is taking Bitcoins.

Remind me again what the title of the thread is?

Seriously, though, how would a libertarian society address global warming?

It does. The individuals who recognize this oncoming disaster will curtail their damage, and encourage others to do so as well. Those who agree will avoid the ones who don't, and if enough agree, disaster will be averted. Or it won't. Either way, Planet keeps on chugging, regardless of what we do. It's not 'Save the Planet!'. it's 'Save the Status Quo!!'

The individuals who recognize this oncoming disaster will curtail their damage, and encourage others to do so as well.