To any given government, Bitcoin looks like just another foreign currency. In many foreign countries, you can get dollar denominated bank accounts. How is Bitcoin any different than this status quo?
Bitcoin does solve an economic problem: it sidesteps the usurious interchange fees of Visa and MasterCard, allowing low friction micro payments to become a reality on the web. One doesn't even need to hold any Bitcoins to make use of this feature; just convert on demand.
It is reassuring to see that the US is not falling behind in the spy vs spy arms race. Technology is making it easier and easier to conceal conspiracies or national security initiatives. If applied judiciously, this is a valuable asset. There is the danger of misuse, as with many US government assets: nukes, chemical weapons, and guns, to name a few.
It does have the advantage of being extremely quiet. If you find yourself looking at it in disgust, you could probably put it inside the hollowed shell of an old Mac Pro. Or just put it behind your monitor or under your desk.
Not really: the stipulations in the agreement you make with the cloud provider explicitly cover data rights. Rights to subpoena data is completely different.
It's a bit laughable to presume that the NSA would be interested in a random company's laundry, or would divulge it to anyone else. Snowden's leaks do not contain any evidence of this, and yet it is well known that the Chinese, in fact, do spy for corporate gain.
The world, especially the intelligence world, is more than black and white. A myriad hues exist, some of them dark and dirty, some grey. Here is a portrait of a man who is color blind. Experiencing the world only through a computer, he lacks the judgement to jump to the right conclusions, and goes thermonuclear only to find that mainstream Americans don't share his disability. He wants to be another Assange, but in the end he is another Manning.
“The status quo is just not going to work,” said draper. “The existing breadth of industry and various interests in California is untenable.”
Are there specific examples of problems that splitting CA would fix? It seems that a split would make many of these new states more extreme than the average of old CA, but perhaps that is a good thing.
Wealth, by definition, is what other people want. Therefore, by making what other people want, you're making wealth. Making more wealth is what drives society forward.
The main selling point of Uber is the app--but eventually Yellow Cab, et al will also have slick apps. What's the long term competitive advantage, besides evading regulation? Self driving cars, most likely.
This kind of education is priceless. Once the kids figure out what's been happening, they'll never listen to Creationists, or any other religious dogma, in the same way again.
I suspect the intrigue and conspiracy is the dark money at work.
Water vapor traps heat very well. CO2 does too. If enough CO2 gets into the atmosphere to heat Earth enough that more water vapor collects in the atmosphere, there's a feedback effect which will cook the planet a bit.
Try proving that, though. Unlike ozone depletion, which can be shown in a laboratory, only one Earth exists, and it is rather complex. The basic mechanism is well understood but the non-linear feedback mechanisms of the world are not.
I think that many comments are negative because most new things fail--especially in software and the Internet, where only the best survive. Is it doing anyone a service to pretend otherwise?
Could he harassment, but, on the other hand, plenty of governments would love to get their hands on the rest of the Snowden cache. This may be one such attempt. Besides the US, you have China and Russia.
Appelbaum is in possession of stolen information. He is being surveilled and surreptitiously searched like any common suspect might be. The FBI conducts secret sneak and peaks all the time, legally. Public arrests may or may not happen, but that's not the game right now. The first order of business is identifying who has what information and with whom they might be sharing it. An arrest would cause any extant network or conspiracy to go further underground.