Ha. The place where I get my groceries doesn't require me to walk past a cashier in the first place.

Payment does not just come in the form of money.

I keep coming across people that claim open-source is bad, that it's insecure, that it's always worse than closed-source software because developers are not getting paid for it, that they would never trust open-source software, etc etc. Besides this being factually incorrect, I always wonder if these people realize that they are constantly using services provided by open-source software without even knowing it.

Downloaded Firefox or Chrome? Open-source.

Visited a website served by Apache, Lighttpd, or nginx? Open-source.

Reading email in Thunderbird? Open-source.

Got nephew to install OpenOffice/LibreOffice? Open-source.

Using any kind of online service that is provided by a server running Linux? Open-source.

Building a website using Joomla? Open-source.

Making a blog using Wordpress? Open-source.

And so on, and so on, and so on...

I would actually recommend using Geany (http://www.geany.org/). Like Notepad++, but much cleaner, cross-platform, much lighter, has better autocompletion and code 'understanding', proper code collapsing, and a whole bunch of features that don't get in your way but are still very useful. I would choose it over Notepad++ any day.

Welcome to modern web development, "Web2.0"!

I don't see how it would make you more sensitive to anything, other than in your own perception. Which essentially brings me back to my point about government fearmongering.

Not sure if srs...

I would say... none.

If you want to store considerable amounts of Bitcoins.... do a bit of research (use the forum search feature or use google) to find out how to make a secure wallet. It really isn't *that* hard if you just follow the instructions in the guides. There will always be a trade-off between security and convenience and I believe that in the case of considerable amounts, security is the more important factor.

I have to agree with this 100%. Apart from Japan (which I did not even know about), there's also the Greeks where it, as far as I know, was perfectly normal for teenagers to engage in sex with adults.

Be sure to read the rules of said tracker to make sure that selling invites is allowed - and to the buyer, please check this beforehand as well.

Some sites will ban both the seller and the buyer if it turns out the invite was sold.

Unlikely. I have never seen a reverse proxy or tunneling solution that stopped listening on a local port if the backend/network was not reachable. There would also be no reason to do so.

The internet.
Distributed currencies (Bitcoin), distributed DNS systems, distributed filesharing and storage (Tahoe-LAFS, torrents, etc), distributed darknets (I2P), and other distributed concepts that basically take away more and more power from centralized organizations and really build a decentralized global communication network. With the newer WiFi standards that are being worked on, for example, mesh networking becomes more feasible.

Anonymous. Or rather its concept.
While a lot of people may be convinced that it's "just about taking down sites and script kiddies playing around", this is definitely not the case. More and more serious things are starting to happen within Anonymous, now that people with a vision are starting to understand the concept, and are starting to get used to the characteristic that the good comes with the bad. People who are serious about something they want to fight for no longer run away from Anonymous because they hate "LOIC monkeys", they realize that Anonymous is not a unified group, embrace the concept and freedoms, and disregard the 'bad'. I'm not saying Anonymous as a name will have any future, because I simply can't predict it... but I think the concept of internet-originating movements that do not have a central face, ideology, or goal have a serious role in the future, allowing people to identify as one with a much lower 'entry barrier'.

Smaller self-sufficient communities.
Things like the Zeitgeist Movement and the Venus Project are of course very well known, but from my (somewhat biased) viewpoint I have the idea more and more small communities of like-minded people are popping up that try to basically 'run their own thing' - here, again, it seems the internet is often the ideal place for these people to meet. Things like the freeman-on-the-land concept may contribute to this.

Basically, the internet. I believe the internet as a global communication network without borders, allowing almost real-time communication, is one of the factors that is going to determine what the future is going to look like. That is also why I believe protecting freedom on the internet - to extreme extents - is one of the most important things at this point.
Try forgetting everything you know about the current world. Try pretending you live 50 years ago in a time there was no internet or any such thing, and someone would walk up to you and tell you there is a way to talk to millions of people around the world in real-time - people who have similar viewpoints, people who may have similar ideas. A way to collaborate with people over the world towards a common goal. What would your response be?

The internet has a massive potential to change the world and the future, you just have to realize it.

Allowing trade to be problematic will only harm that city itself. It is in the best interest of that city to ease trade.


Also, this would only work if there were a possibility to start a new city without having to receive permission from existing cities. Not sure how you would pull that off though.

Being the same uptime and having similar properties is one of the main characteristics of two VMs on the same host machine. If the host machine gets restarted, so will the VMs, meaning they all have the same uptime if they are on the same machine. A lot of similar characteristics would also be logical if they were two VMs on the same host machine. Of course it's possible that they are from the same owner, and my theory may indeed be unlikely - however, unlikely is not the same as impossible. And in my opinion my theory is reasonable enough to at least consider it, and not blindly assume they are from the same owner. I'm not saying I'm right, just that it may be a possibility
Sorry, I should have said 'fairly often used' rather than 'fairly well-known'. I see people connecting to my own IRC network and other places rather often from Blutmagie, along with formlessnetworking and torservers.net. Probably because they have most bandwidth.

Because otherwise probably only those who already agreed with my viewpoint would read it, which is not my intended target group.

That's why the first line in the post is there in bold

I recall seeing a Bitcoin meme thread before, but I can't find it anymore, so let's start a new one!

I'll start out with this one I saw in another thread:

I cannot see how visual depiction of a non-consenting person in sexual acts/poses would fall under free speech (which is essentially what we are talking about when talking about child porn) - my definition of 'non-consenting person' being someone who either did not agree with it happening regardless of age, or someone who does not fully understand what he is doing (which is for example the case with pre-pubescent kids). I do however feel that most of the psychological consequences of this 'abuse' are not due to what actually happened, but due to their environment telling them it is bad, and making a fuss out of it.

That being said, 'child porn', and generally pedophilia/ephebophilia (for the record, that is not equal to a child molester) in general, have become a scare tactic like terrorism is. A way to push regulations that otherwise noone would agree with. The entire 'your child may be next!' crusade by governments around the world is simply sickening, as it is essentially manipulating people by exploiting their moral judgment. A very good example of people being influenced by this is the very first post in this topic:
The abuse that children undergo does not become worse or less worse depending on whether you have kids or not. All you are doing is falling for the 'your kid is next' fearmongering.

Some of the issues arising as a consequence of this, are that for example stories or drawn/animated porn involving minors (where is the injured/abused party?) have also become socially unacceptable and in many cases illegal. Another issue is that the very moment you do NOT condemn pedophiles and child porn completely and entirely, and you do not call them monsters... you are immediately labelled a pedophile yourself. "If you're not against them, you're one of them."

People have to realize that logically reasoning about a situation does not mean that you morally approve of every aspect of it. People have to realize that a pedophile is someone with a love/sexual interest in prepubescent kids, that an ephebophile is someone with an interest in pubescent kids, and that neither has actually abused anyone until they engage in non-consentual sex, at which moment they are a child molester. The terms are not interchangeable. Pedophile and ephebophile signify an interest, a sexual orientation (one that, for the record, you are born with and do not have a choice in), something that is (thankfully) not illegal yet (thoughtcrimes anyone?) - whereas child molester signifies an actual action. There are plenty of pedophiles and ephebophiles who do absolutely nothing wrong, who try to suppress their feelings and fall back to animated/drawn porn and stories to satisfy their feelings without actually hurting or abusing any real live person - yet they are automatically labeled monsters of society, thanks to these scare tactics employed by governments.

People also have to realize that nature doesn't listen to man-made numbers called 'age'. Children are sexually mature when they are sexually mature, and no matter how much you would want it to be, 18 years old (in some jurisdictions 15, 16, 21) is not some magical age barrier where someone is suddenly aware of who they are, what they want (both sexually and in other areas) and can act for himself. Children will be curious, and try things. If you do some actual research into the history of things like age of consent, child pornography, and such, you will find that at some points in time this was just a way 'to earn an extra buck', and that many 'children' (teenagers) engaged in child porn production as actors, entirely voluntary.

As a final note I wish to say that I would not approve of killing any person, regardless of situation. In my opinion not a single person on this earth (or any other planet, if you happen to know any aliens) has the authority to take anothers life without consent.

TL;DR: If you are reading this line first you either do not care about the post, or you are looking for the easy way and only skimmed the text. I suggest you read the actual post entirely before raging at me

To possibly clarify what I mean:

Why would being anonymous be a bad thing for a currency that is supposed to be anonymous? I'd say it meets the specification.

People should realize they don't HAVE to always have an opinion ready... and that if they don't know enough about a subject, they should just look into it before judging.

I can literally not see a single way how Bitcoin would be defined as 'Web2.0'.

Of course, every VPS will have its own IP (if it doesn't, I suggest you start looking for a different provider). However, these IPs were not identical, they were just in the same range. Almost every VPS provider will have the different VMs on one machine, all in the same range (at least for IPv4 addresses), to keep it easier to oversee what VM is hosted on what physical server.

Considering Leaseweb is fairly popular for somewhat more questionable content (including TOR nodes) it is not unlikely there are simply two unrelated TOR nodes on the same physical server, purely by accident. Not to mention that, as far as I am aware, Blutmagie is a fairly well-known TOR node.

No, it's not.

Bitcoin being anonymous (no, not untraceable, I stick to the same definitions I have always sticked to) is actually just a property of it.

It appears there are more and more people that say "it's a shame that Bitcoin is X and Y". These people do not appear to realize that strength is in variety. That Bitcoin is not like other currencies (in that it, for example, has methods to track back fraud), does that mean it's bad? No. It means it's different. It's up to you whether you want to use Bitcoin or not. It has its own properties, its own pros and cons. It means you have a choice.

It is completely pointless to aim at everything being the same, and Bitcoin being anonymous is not a 'fault' that has to be solved - it's a main property of the concept. Stop trying to say "Bitcoin is bad because it doesn't provide any anti-fraud measures". It's not. It's different.

It's a bit hard to put my idea into words, but I hope you get what I mean. Bitcoin is what it is. There is no need for it to have the exact same pros as everything else, if it offers different pros that other currencies or methods do not offer. It's freedom. It's a choice. Stop complaining about it.