It worked fine before public funded education took over the religious imperative to educate children.  Still would, if the government would get out of the way.  Public education isn't about education, it's about social indoctrination.  Always has been, and the early proponents were pretty open about that.  They were, predominately, pro-eugenics fascists; before those were "bad".  They honestly believed that the lower classes needed to be 'indoctrinated' and acclimatized to the industrial factory work. 


They can and will, if that is what is left to them.  Some will fail, obviously; or be failed by their parents.  There is nought that public education is going to do to stop such trend, if the US is in long term decline.  For that matter, they have been trying to do exactly that since truancy laws were introduced to the US; and moreso since the Department of Education was established, and have always failed.  Try as they (and you) might, with the best of intentions, you cannot educate those who do not see value in it.  I attended a private school my entire childhood, at great expense to my parents, because of the sorry state of publicly funded education; yet the private schools are still modeled after the public institutions.  They end up that way because of efficiency.  My children are homeschooled, mostly by my wife who has a BS in Biology.  They make me look ignorant.  The major difference is that they don't spend hours each day in educational theater, surrounded by peers who do not wish to participate in the soul-crushing day-prison.  Ever wonder how a well behaved child can be a discipline nightmare at school?  It's often a direct result of the educational environment itself.


Good for you, but don't delude yourself about their education.  Your efforts would be fruitless if not for their own efforts and the desires of their parents.  The average homeschooled child spends only 2-3 hours each day actually working on intentionally educational work.  So if you think about it, the truly successful students who are institutionally educated (public or private) are being homeschooled by their involved parents anyway.  It's just under the direction of the institution.

The "Hidden Wiki" that they refer to is on Tor, which means that they able to identify the actual servers that host the Hidden Wiki, as well as the servers that host the CP sites noted.  This is supposed to be so difficult as to be practially impossible to do, and according to the author, this feat took only a few minutes.  

Is that right?  So the "cyber" defense contractor that they humiliated to the point of the CEO publicly asking for their mercy just a couple of months ago, they were just a bunch of stupid contractors working for an even more stupid federal government willing to pay them?

That's not exactly fair, is it?  That was a civil war based upon tribal differences, but one tribe had a complete lock on government, and thus is was also an ethnic cleaning by a government.  That fact gave one tribe an unacceptable force advantage over the other.

The wars would be reduced in scope, but a fued between large family clans (hatfields and McCoys?) is still a war of sorts.  However, the scale of the conflict does matter.  The other people who live in the area are likely to intercede.

A lightweight client that only uses block headers would simply have to choose three different sources at random, download the block headers from all three sources, and check them against each other to make certain that they agree.  If they don't dump all data collected from that set of three and start over with another set.  Change your set of three every couple thousand blocks, and you're pretty well protected.  This is similar to what the full client does when accepting a new block.

The government did not invent the Internet.  At most, the Defense budget paid for it.

You would be wrong.

It'd be hilarious if "Lolita City" was a honeypot op set up by one federal agency, only to be largely populated by undercover CP investigators busilly trading in CP already captured in previous cases, while desperately trying to make a case against each other.

In fact, "Lolita City" does seem kind of rediculously obvious, and Tor itself was developed by Navy Intelligence.

That would make a great plotline to Hackers 2.

No, the comment is only internal to your logs unless you are directly connected to the receiving client daemon, which is only likely using the -sendtoipaddress flag that is deprecated due to other security issues.

Yes, but only after the scripting function is enabled, which will allow you to associate a particular transaction to an external document on the web, among many other complex things.

atlas is the screenname of a teenaged forum member, who recently changed his screenname due to gaining a rep that was attracting constant attacks from a subset of the forum membership.

I believe that she softened later in life, and this quote came from this period.  If you have ever read her magnum opus, Atlas Shrugged and recognized it for what it really is, a philosophy book wrapped up as a work of fiction, it's pretty obvious that she didn't feel this way when the book was written.  The main character has many famous lines, not the least of which, involves John Galt telling another character to lead a moral life by never letting the word "give" cross her lips.

The process of transfering funds around the Internet is a service that the bitcoin network performs with near zero cost, but that service is neither an inherent feature of the currency that is bitcoin, nor is it possible for a service to also be a consumable with an alternative use than it's monetary intent.

Thus, back as square one.  Bitcoin is a currency, and only a currency, because it's intended to be used as such and cannot serve in any other capacity.

And the words money and currency are not interchangable.

I doubt it.  Atlas was a hardcore objectivist.  Ayn Rand's root premise regarding charity was that it always did more harm than good, and that (as an atheist) she believed that the Judeo-Christian tradition of aiding the poor was BS.

What do you get when you combine a sociopath and a narcisist?

A congressman.

The day that I can take a bitcoin and hammer it into a virtual salad bowl is the day that I will agree that bitcoin is a commodity.

No, I won't.


We likely will.  The great disagreement between sides in this thread thus far is the definition of property and whether or not 'products of the mind' qualify as property.  The framers of the US Constittution considered that question, and soundly rejected the notion that such 'products' were property of their creators, and with that the concept that copyright is a 'natural right' that can be inherited or even transfered.  However, they also recognized the social value in 'patronage' of artists and thinkers.  They encoded copyright into the constitution as an intentionally limited term monopoly on commercial copying of works in order to promote the arts, but this monopoly was not only limited to 15 years originally, it wasn't absolute either.  It didn't apply to the average man in any real sense, it applied to copying for personal gain.  Anyone not in the business of publication could copy any book that he could get his hands on, by hand or otherwise, for his own needs or the education of others, but just couldn't sell the end result for 15 years.  This kind of exception also applied to libraries and educational institutions, and largely still does.  A library can copy any work in their possession, no matter how they came to possess it (including inter-library loan) and lend it out to valid membership without risk of getting sideways with copyright laws.  I've seen it done with music CDs, as well as lending out of self-made copies of reference only books.  The key differences in approach are important, because in order to balance the net effect of copyright, the Constitution also explicitly established the Library of Congress, which has the privilage under the law to receive a copy of every published work without cost to itself, and to do with it whatever they wish.  This was to allow a citizen access to culturally significant works even if they didn't have the means, as well as provide for an archive of works.


Certainly at the time, but that's now debatable.  It would take quite a large hard drive, but it's now possible for an individual to own a computer with every book, movie and music ever produced in the US saved onto it's drive.  The Internet has largely made archives such as the Library of Congress redundant.  Also, the Constitution is a social contract that predates all of us.  Thomas Jefferson openly questioned whether it was even proper for one generation to establish such a social contract to be imposed upon following generations by default, and without their explicit consent, but he couldn't offer a better solution either.  And neither can I, since unlike our more anarchist membership, I recognize that there really are a small minority of the population that (even with a proper and functioning educational system) cannot be trusted to govern themselves, even though the vast majority of the population undoubtedly can do exactly that.

I guess you could say that my issue is with representative democracy, but since this is a federated republic and not a democracy, is such a complaint unfair?

Ironicly, they do suck.  And it's not that I'm arguing that IP is akin to slavery.  I'm arguing that their support for IP laws are forced upon a wider public that did not agree to the terms; and like slavery and (more recently) segregation, society will eventually look upon such laws as fundamentally immoral favoritism of one group of people over another.

I shall address the reasons why copyright exists in the Constitution, and why it's there in another post.