Bitcoin is still an experimental currency. Why would we want to suppress discussion of similar experiments?

Yes, since I am allergic to cats, I may consider a catfish instead if I can afford a large enough tank.

Hint: The umbrella in the picture is an important detail.

I will respond here for the moment because I don't feel like registering yet another password to keep track of.

My most imortant question is: how essential is the walkie-talkie format?

As Asimov1 pointed out, you are going to find yourself duplicating the existing cell-phone network in many ways.

I can confirm that it will be difficult to broadcast 10 miles. CB radios can do it, but they use about 4 watts of power. The USB interface supplies only 2.5 Watts.

Highly directional antennas will only work on a base station (read: not constantly moving around); also known as a "radio tower" if mounted above the ground for good coverage.

Patents came up. The 802.11n standard uses spatial-division multiplexing. Multiple antennas are driven slightly out-of-phase (glossing over details I don't know alert) allowing the beam pattern to be "steered" somewhat (all without moving parts). Any radio technology from the last 20 years is likely dripping with patents.

Finding spectrum will be a problem. During the last sectrum auction in Canada, the incumbents doubled their ammortized infrastructure costs by bidding something stupid like $4 Billion. They expect to make that back by charging the average cell-phone user $40/month. You will have trouble getting spectrum cheaper because the incumbents won't sell spectrum for less than they paid at auction. So, you are limited to the very limited "free for all" spectrum slices. These typically restrict transmit power, such that your range is likely to be closer to 1 mile than 10. Using the visible spectrum is a possibility for line-of-sight hops.

Finally, I would advise you to not mix the merkleweb proposal with the IP-Walkietalkie proposal. Both are complicated enough on their own that the chance of failure is high. If both projects are successful, you can combine them later.

Smaller sites participating is not pointless if you can get a critical mass.

The Long Tail is on our side.

Smaller sites are also more agile and able to actually implement the black-out on short notice.

IMO, we need a contingency plan in case the big players decide a protest would cost them too much money.

The big names have not set a date (AFAIK), but reddit has: January 18th from 8am–8pm EST (1300–0100 UTC).

Stopped they must be; on this all depends.

Wikipedia may join in:
Wikipedia:SOPA initiative

I plan on replacing my "index" pages with an anti-SOPA message, and encourage people to contact their Member of Parliament. By that time, I hope to have read the bill so that I can understand the implications for sites such as mine with a .CA domain name, hosted in Canada, but using an ARIN IP address (considered "domestic" by the bill). Specific sub-pages will simply be turned black with the text still readable.

Genius! imgur appears to be a victim of it's own success.

Subversive too. (from the FAQ):

Imgur can't easily make the URLs longer (with more entropy) because that would break all existing links out in the wild, which is considered bad form. Is Imgur a plot to get racey pictures of people's girlfriends?

Edit: The Terms Of Service say no:

They go on to prohibit nudity, among other things.

PS: It appears they can fix this by converting the image URLs to a longer format, then turing the "image's page on Imgur, which is the same link as the image but without the file extension" into a HTTP redirect to the image's new, more secure location. The sever can then detect and block random scans at it's leisure.
PPS: Once the hotlinks go live (assuming they are used), the people at Imgur will be reading this thread.
PPPS: No 'sleep 1;'? What is the rush? Wget sleeps for one second between fetches by default. However, you circumvent that with your loop.

Until SOPA passes, it does matter. I pay approximately 10x more that I would for a comparable service in the US to host my website in Canada. I also use a .CA domain name because the Department of Homeland security has been known the seize .com and .org/net domain names.

Servers hosted in the US are also subject to the US Patriot Act. As far as I know, you are not allowed to tell us if law enforcement has requested server logs. Most of the information on this forum is intended to be public anyway, so I am not sure how much of a concern that is.

PGP hasn't gained wide adoption because maintaining proper security is hard. Before signing somebody's key, you are supposed to meet them in person (or at least out-of-band) to exchange Public Key Fingerprints. You then use that fingerprint (hash) to verify that the published public key is correct. Most people are not in the habit of publishing their public bitcoin addresses because the information is so sensitive: the public transaction record would let you trace everything that they do.

I am relatively new to PGP, so have not had to handle key management yet. Before your key expires (PGP keys expire, bitcoins don't),  you have to generate a new key and sign it with your old one. That way, you don't have to go around in person to sign keys again. However, if you have received any encrypted messages, you should keep the old keys around for decryption purposes. If you old keys are later considered weak, you have to decide if you want to re-encrypt your old messages with your old keys. Doing so would likely invalidate any signatures from the sender.

PGP's strength is that it has been tested and answering these questions for over a decade. Most people simply decide they don't really care that much about security. That may or may not change with Bitcoin, the balkanization of the DNS roots, the rise of oinion routing and mesh networking, etc.

PS: PGP also supports key revocation in case it gets leaked. Bitcoin has no such mechanism other than spending the funds before the attacker does.

I don't run Microsoft Windows. If I have any chance of running the program, it has to avoid undocumented features and quirks. That means no DRM. Requiring a constant heartbeat to the authentication server is not an acceptable alternative.

I have given up on buying commercial proprietary, boxed software. The DRM is rarely if ever explained on the box anyway. I decided against buying a copy of Quake 4, despite ID software's reputation for supporting GNU/Linux and later releasing the source code because: the box said "May not work with SCSI CD-ROMs". That was code for "DRM desiged to detect drive cloning software is included."

Ubisoft's "Prince of Persia: Sands Of Time" was at one point announced to be DRM free (on the forums), despite the box saying otherwise. After the person in charge got some (undisclosed) results he didn't like, DRM was somehow put back in. I suspect it was always present and the assumption was only "pirates" would notice the DRM.

Even if I was running Microsoft Windows, I would not be able to play "AAA" games on a computer used for banking or work (or bitcoin) purposes. The DRM prevents installation as a limited user because it needs to install a "rootkit." Even the newer ones that allow you to play as a limited user, still require you to install the DRM as an Administrative user. As a result, the whole machine is "Tainted" and can be considered a "game console." AAA games also tend to require relatively recent hardware as well, so are unlikely to run well in a virtual machine (assuming they don't detect that condition and refuse to run on principle).

TL;DR: Yes, I think the majority of people in charge of software companies are idiots. I did not even get to the conspiracy theories like: "The true puropose of DRM is to shut down the second-hand market." The practice of using complicated, limited authentication codes makes the process of backing up a machine extremely difficult. Steam gets around that by saying: "you can install as many copies as you want... as long as you play at most 1 at a time." Steam still shuts down the second-hand market by not letting you transfer your games to other users. It also makes it difficult for multiple users share a game serially as well, with the focus on "achievements."

Edit: at a previous workplace, the label printing software used a dongle that I suspect corrupted the printouts; and according to the documentation, limited the print speed to "Standard Parallel Port" (Instead of EPP or ECP) speeds. Never did get permission to install a second port to test my theory.
TL;DR: Dongles are even worse.

Edit2: Why is it hard to find old versions of so many games? Though to be honest, I did not yet follow through on my promise to buy a copy of (DRM-free) Duke-3D (DOS version) when I learned that Duke Nukem Forver would employ DRM. My latest computer is MIPS based (asside: I no longer trust Intel due to their continued support of DRM) and I don't yet have DOSbox running with acceptable performance
DRM likely would prevent such emulation in 15 years' time from working anyway. That is, the games become some kind of software-as-a-service, rather than a work of art that can be studied for the ages.

It may not work, but since signing the 1996 WIPO "Copyright" and "Performances an Phonographs" treaties, as well as the 2010 "Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement", goverments have been under pressure to make circumventing Effective Technological Measures illegal. Note: I have to update that document because the wording of the WIPO treaties can be interpreted in such a way that author are *not* allowed to re-write copyright law at will.

PGP is designed for secure communication, Bitcoin is designed for secure transactions.

While there is some overlap, using PGP will be better for secure communication. For example, it allows you to more easily change things like the encryption algorithm and keysize. If the encryption cryptographic authentication used by bitcoin fails, we will likely have to move to a new block-chain to fix the problem. Hopefull if (when) that happens, people will have enough notice for an orderly transition. It is only money after all.

I have a gut feeling that Bitcoin has actually compromized on security in order to keep the public addresses compact. While it is still secure, so long SHA-256 is not broken, it is something to keep in mind.

Laser printers have always been full-fledged computers. The Original Apple LaserWriters had more CPU and memory than the computers they were typically hooked up to (running a GUI).

Being able to hack your printer is a good thing: if it is properly documented. It allows you to replace the firmware with your own firmware, for example.

As a rule of thumb, if it has built-in network access, it is a full-fledged computer. Before printing bitcoin you should determine how to isolate the printer from the network (not so easy with built-in wireless capability), and how to clear the memory afterward. I am not sure how far you will get asking the manufacturer how to clear the memory and restore the original firmware.

One thing the printer manufacturer won't want to talk about is any Currency Detection Module that may be present (especially colour models).

They can't. They are relying on the thief making a mistake. That is why MagicalTux doesn't want to comment, other than to say they won't respond to e-mail. Silence in itself is not incriminating either, but prevents the thief (if the the correct account has indeed been frozen) from making further mistakes.

As long as the random object was really worth about 20BTC, that would be plausible deniability IMO.

Edit: That does not mean any investigation is automatically closed. If you make a habit out of buying random objects for exacly 20 BTC, regardless of the exchange rate, the police would likely still be suspicious.

Don't follow addresses; follow the money. If the same, exact amount moves from address to address (especially if it is a weird one), it would be hard to come up with legitimate transactions to explain the funds.

To truly steal bitcoin and disappear without a trace, you need to not spend them. Not quite as fun.

Until it is possible to easily buy and sell bitcoin, speculating is the cheapest way to buy them. International wire transfers cost around $50. Using a wire transfer to buy $5 worth of bitcoin would be stupid. I am planning a $500 or larger transfer, just to keep the transaction costs below 10%.

Since I have no immediate plans to spend those funds, I would mainly be buying and holding. I would likely try to convince businesses I deal with (especially remotely) to accept them, but they would likely incur the same fees while converting back to fiat.

OP has one thing correct: the fundamentals of the bitcoin economy are more important than the price. OP seems to feel that the fundamentals won't develop in the face of rapid speculation (which is probably true). However, the converse is also true: the fundamentals of the bitcoin economy can not improve without pushing up the price. Every exchange puts upward pressure on the price of bitcoin.

Second attempt to post this. Web-fourms seem to be designed to discourage well-reseached posts.
http://yro.slashdot.org/story/12/01/02/157217/net-companies-consider-the-nuclear-option-to-combat-sopa

- http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2011/12/30/will-google-amazon-and-facebook-blackout-net/

Does anybody think that smaller sites should participate in an Internet black-out if the big players set a date? It may not happen, but there is less than a month left for planning. If smaller sites are going to participate, we should start making plans now.

An open question is how drastic should the black-out be? Should the site be replaced completely, or simply have an anti-SOPA banner/black colour theme? My own website already has a black background/white text style-sheet I can set to the default.

I an also not sure what people outside the United States should be encouraged to do. I don't feel it is may place to contact congress people directly. Should I contact my Member of Parliament instead? If enough MPs hear from their constituents, the government will know about it. If the President of the United States hears through diplomatic channels that people worldwide are contacting their representatives about proposed US legislation, he may be forced to do something about it (he does have veto power IIRC).

I assumed the waving dick avatar was a prank, not deliberate choice.

Which one? I don't recall in in HTML 4.01. The blink tag has also been removed.

That is only half the story. Western Union has it set up so that when your local grocery store or Post Office handles Western Union remitances, they don't need a Money Service Business license. The local outlet simply acts as a franchise following Western Union procedures/fees. That way, they can use Western Union's Money Service Business License instead.

As far as I can tell, Bitcoin will have a hard time following MSB requirements unless the regulations are chanaged. For example, you are required to send customer details along with the electronic transaction. Only certain bank wires are exempt. Bitcoin would need its own exemption. Even if you expend resources to embed this information in the block-chain, you would be running afoul with privacy legislation.