flyinRyan

>all you need is to bring down a high enough percentage of nodes, which will effectively take down the network through capacity constraints

On a fully distributed network, that's pretty hard to do. DDOS works by having tons of nodes to attack with. That won't work very well when your target has as many or more nodes than you do.

Taking down a centralized target is vastly easier.

>Combine this with auto-updating clients and you've got a crashing software bug that brings down the whole network.

Only if I can't role my client back nor turn off auto-update.

>There are people who are sitting in jail right now who have pled guilty to plotting terrorist attacks that were prevented.

Well that proves it doesn't it! Except that those people were entrapped by the US government. Talked into doing attacks they'd have never actually done sans government involvement and suggestion.

The actual terrorist attacks that have been tried either worked or failed because the terrorist was incompetent. In any case, terrorism is such a minuscule cause of death or injury that there is no reason to even consider it. Just ignore it like the gnat that it is.

I'm very aware of the reasons the North actually went to war. It was, incidentally, that southern stubbornness that lost the South the war since France would have almost certainly come in on their side (and from the Northern front where Grant couldn't have hoped to deal with them) had Robert E. Lee been half as smart as Lincoln and simply claimed they wanted to be a separate country.

But you can't ignore the slavery though. Without it, there would have been no wealth in the south worth going to war for (nor enough resources to support succession).

It's not "their money after all". They did not make it alone, they were supported by the community in countless ways. How do you propose the government be paid for? How do you propose we deal with people for which there is no work to do?

If you don't have some kind of solution for the poor then they'll simply kill these rich people and take everything they have. And since you don't want taxes to pay for the police, they'll be shooting in the same direction.

Well yes, I rather intended it to be insulting as I find the fact that in today's world of instant connections to information, the fact that people still see Libertarianism itself as legitimate as insane and insulting. Any movement that considers Ayn Rand anything other then the uninventive, unoriginal hack she was is worthy only of ridicule.

And I suspect any international "Libertarian" parties are actually american expats. The international community does have something comparable though: ancaps. I feel the same about them.

>Well, since I'm also an opponent of fiat currency, the government couldn't very well print any money :)

So you want the gold standard again? Hasn't being in the EU shown you the dangers of having a currency you can't adjust to respond to international conditions?

>I'd prefer a night-watchman state, with the government handling police, courts, the military and possibly other services relating to emergency rescue, the justice system or government administration.

And somehow you imagine that the megarich corporations aren't instantly going to (a) start using unregulated practices to set up all kinds of monopolies and (b) start spending money to turn the country to their favor resorting in the exact same place the US is right now?

>1. Donations, 2. Fees, 3. A small flat tax levied either as an income tax or a corporate tax.

Donations? Seriously, donations? The police, military and so on will be at the mercy of what people decide to give of their own free will? Why am I not surprised to see such a position from a self proclaimed Libertarian.

>Until such a time, I'll try to make the situation better where I happen to reside.

Turning Sweden even more over to corporations isn't going to make it better, you must be out of your mind.

Of course. If Libertarians ever got their paradise it would quickly devolve to exactly what you have now: a Corporatocracy.

Sadly, you sound very much like what I'd expect from a red state. I bet you also think Obama is very left wing, don't you?

>since you don't consider things like "trickle down economics" (sure seemed to work better for us in the '80s than what's been tried after Clinton)

If you're not going to educate yourself, there's not much point in bothering with this. The stats are in, trickle down never worked [1]. And trickle down was continued through Clinton (somehow you don't realize he was more conservative than a lot of so-called republicans) on to the present time.

>or our "libertarianism" AKA classical liberalism at least debatable points vs akin to the KKK....

Of course libertarianism has some debatable points. But luckily, those points also belong to legitimate political movements as well (minus the naivety inherent in an-cap/libertarianism).

>I mean, is there any room in your world view for religion, e.g. "Man does not live by bread alone"

Sure.

> non-economic principles that are worth dying for???

As a matter of fact there are, though I would phrase it as "worth risking your life for" since simply dying is extremely unlikely to help anything.

>Any non-economic reason why anyone would volunteer for the military?

Sure. For example, if an imperialist, evil world power claimed my country was "terrorists friendly", "has weapons of mass destruction" or some such nonsense I would volunteer for the military to try and help push back these scum from our lands.

But blind patriotism? No. I don't believe someone "died for my freedoms" simply because they joined the military and died. For me to believe they died for my freedoms, my freedoms would have to be in danger from something they actually fought.

[1] Starting point, not that you'll care: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trickle-down_economics#Criticis...

My point wasn't about what actually happened in the McDonald's coffee incident but rather how many people perceived it.

Well, it will probably make him more money and power but working on something immoral and evil makes you immoral and evil. Fuck this guy.

>No, but it's not about helping myself, it's about having a system which I consider ethical.

It's not about helping yourself. It's about consistent voting. If everyone votes for the rich person, the entire system will be skewed hopeless in their favor.

You think taxes are unethical? Then how does the government pay for itself? Would you rather they just printed the money they need? That would also be a tax; a flat tax.

And if you don't believe the government should exist then that's anarchist, not libertarian. Though if you want anarchism then you can't have a barter system.

>I'm from Sweden. I understand very well why the Libertarian Party exists. We do have (very small) parties in Sweden which correspond quite well to the libertarian party.

By "very small" you mean "fringe". Like the BNP in the UK no doubt. If you truly have "US Libertarian" parties in Sweden, then how about instead of ruining your country you just move the US so you can enjoy what a Libertarian paradise is actually like.

>There's plenty of historical precedent where the US democracy worked.

And at least as many where it didn't.

>Recently SOPA and PIPA were close to passing. A lot of people in the tech community raised hell, and the bills went down in flames.

Haha, no. A lot of big companies put their lobby dollars behind a position and that position got adopted. No one in the US government cares about a bunch of blog posts, email or online surveys.

> etc. can have big effects, but in the end the voters know a lot about lying, duplicity, manipulation, etc. I believe that the Internet will be helping

No they don't! And even if they did, I'm not sure they can stop it (in the same way that knowing you're taking a placebo won't alter its effectiveness). It's getting more and more documented about just how effective marketing can be.

Some have gone so far as to ban certain kinds of advertising [1].

>it seems to have helped a lot with SOPA and PIPA and to have gotten the Snowden efforts front and center.

What? Outside of sites like HN, pretty much no one cares about Snowden. The mainstream press was already over him the next day.

>Once a politician gives a speech, then due to YouTube the politician can't assume that the voters will easily forget.

Except they do forget, and sites like political compass help them forget by trying to look official but producing padded stats. You can probably find every one of Obama's speeches on youtube yet there are still people who claim he hasn't broken any big promises.

[1] http://parenting.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/07/13/ban-on-adverti...

>It is likely true that the court wants to maintain a lot of respect from the citizens, but their level of respect is fairly high now.

No it isn't likely true. It is likely true they want to make a lot of money. They don't care about the citizens, why would they? They have jobs for life.

>My reading is that at the present time, US citizens are heavily on the side of keeping their phone calls, e-mail contents, Internet usage, etc. private instead of trashing the Constitution so that the NSA can try to catch another Boston bomber.

And where on earth are you getting such a reading? By a large margin people are currently willing to let these breaches of privacy go on because they truly believe there is some global terrorist network out there bent on destroying them. I mean, even right here on HN the 4th amendment violations aren't globally seen as a bad thing.

This is one again a case of you imagining things to be how you wish they were as opposed to what actual evidence would tell you.

>The way I have tried to put the issue is to say that the Constitution is a big part of what is worth protecting in the US so that it is logically impossible both to protect the US and trash the Constitution and, instead, we need to protect both the Constitution and the rest of the US. For this goal, maybe we need some better police work.

The constitution has been shat on almost since before the ink dried. As soon as you have lawyers, you have people who are finding a way to interpret any law in a way favorable to their clients.

Outside of high school "American History" classes, the constitution isn't that big a deal. It's mostly just a handy extra piece of leverage for a branch of government to do something they wanted to do anyway. Had the constitution been in the way of their goals they would simply ignore it or try to interpret it in some more favorable way.

How old are you? You seem extremely young from everything you're writing. Probably still in school getting actively brain washed by the school system about how the US works.

>The US is somehow a naive country (for no good reason) with more money than wisdom about 'foreign adventures'.

They are not, not even a little. They simply do not care about anyone or anything other than american interests. They don't do the things they do because they didn't realize it might cause an international incident. They simply don't care. They have the biggest military and biggest market, what is anyone going to do to them?

>As Churchill observed long ago, the US always does the right thing after trying everything else.

This quote points out that this is nothing new for the US. It will do the right thing if there is literally no other choice. But they are constantly working to make sure there will be other choices.

>If the US gets itself all bent out of shape over lives such as that of that young mother, then we will be chasing absurd 'foreign adventures' until we are white from loss of blood. To avoid this, we have to wise up.

This whole story is just common media manipulation. Make the enemy seem like barbarians so no one will look too deeply if we go to war with them.

>In my mind, the only way to vote is to vote your conscience, not what happens to give me the greatest personal gain.

Then you should abstain from voting in the present US system because that's not how it works nor how it was designed to work. It's a combative system where compromise is achieved by basically averaging the desires of the interested parties.

> 'Always devise your rules as if you didn't know whether you were going be at the top or the bottom of the pecking order.'

This is a Utopian way to govern, which would be great. But it doesn't apply to the US system. If your position is reasonable and the other side is pushing extremely toward their interests you're going to end up with the middle point between you both.

> as a libertarian, I consider taxes to be unethical regardless of whether I gain a net profit from them or not.

Fine, consider what ever you like. But when you vote you should vote for what directly helps you personally. Giving billionaires tax breaks can't possibly help you in any manner.

I look forward to the day when the US reaches the level of political enlightenment that having an uncle who is a libertarian is as embarrassing a revelation as having an uncle in the KKK is today. There is a reason that this party exists only inside the US and probably couldn't even be sensibly articulated to anyone from another country.

>The problem that bugs me is this presumption that the people are not cognizant of what is good for them.

Go to America. Live there for a while. Move to a red state and actually talk to people. This presumption won't seem so arrogant when you meet so many people for which there is no other logical conclusion to make.

>I would argue that it is not in Warren Buffett's self interest to vote for higher taxes

It's not, but the voting environment has gotten so skewed that people like Buffet feel they have to abandon voting in their best interests to try and get some kind of balance. At least they claim to publicly.

Because other people are clueless and apathetic?

No, I'm saying no one cared then and disater or tragedy struck anyway. There is little correlation about how we feel vs. what happens to us.

There could be many reasons for that. I would like to see the comparisons between Americans life expectancy after retirement vs. Europeans (removing all people who quickly start work again after retirement).

People who have stressful jobs and then go on long vacations often get sick the first few days into it. It seems to me to be some kind of "stress dump" as your body and mind begin to ease into a lower stress environment. In the US we get such a small amount of vacation days, my personal (completely unchecked) hypothesis is that when people retire they finally get to do that dump that Europeans are doing once or more per year but the strain of a 60+ year dump is too much for their bodies to handle.

>The fact that someone would say, on a forum called Hacker News, that the free software movement is a hopeless ideology is astonishing.

Patent free is what I'm calling hopeless. Nice try though, I guess.

>Hardly. Ubuntu is about as popular now as Macs were a few years ago, or at least in the same league.

Uh, no. Unless by "years" you mean "decades".

>Ubuntu has many productivity advantages over both OSX and Windows.

I've used Windows for years. I've used OS X for a few years now. I've used Unix for years and I've used Ubuntu off and on since it was started. Ubuntu had some advantages over windows for me but day-to-day OS X is simpler in every possible way. Except the "do tons of tweaking of every pixel on my desktop" way.

Interesting that not a single one of your proposed counter-options is any nicer than the one you dislike.

Alarming? The lack of understanding from the government is all that has kept the internet relatively safe so far.

>That is patronizing. There is a wide spectrum of reasons why one might say vote for lower/higher taxes between "they worked hard, so they deserve it" and "fuck you, I want mine".

Since I never clarified what I meant and you came up with such a specific notion, it would appear you're projecting some defensiveness here.

But I will go ahead and clarify my position: The fact of the matter is, the US is a combative system. For it to work properly, each side has to take the extremes of their own position so the result ends up in the middle.

The rich don't need the poor or middle class to vote as a rich person, they can literally pay people to do that for them if they wish. A poor person should vote for issues that help them specifically and directly. Forget trickle-down even if you're ignorant enough to believe in it.

A perfect example is right-to-work states. Within the last year or so I read a story about a husband in (I believe it was) Kentucky who was sent out on a neglected platform to do some work, it collapsed and he died. The family was simply out a husband, father and provider. They couldn't even sue because the way the laws worked in that state meant the company would have literally had to try and murder the man for the family to be able to sue over the indecent.

I bet if you talked to most people in that state, they would be for this law because they don't want people suing McDonald's over hot coffee, for example. But why would they care? They're closer to the burned woman than they are McDonald's, voting their interests would mean they vote for the ability to sue McDonald's if they accidentally burn themselves.

Of course ditto-heads will scream "yea but if we did that it would ruin the whole country!" and indeed if the poor and middle class always got their way it would. But that wouldn't happen. Voting their own interests would simply pull the final result closer to the middle. That is, it would present ridiculous situations like a family not even being able to sue a company for a true case of near-criminal negligence and wrongful death.

>This shows that Facebook doesn't care about what users want from Facebook anymore, but about what's going to make Facebook the most money.

What? When has this ever not been the case? Have you actually used facebook from the (near) beginning? Because it's never been about anything but what makes the most money. Zuck and co have screwed everyone to cater to advertisers since they first opened to the non-university internet (and I wouldn't be surprised to learn it was going on even before that).

Houses in the US are flimsy. Even brick homes are actually just 2x4s spaces 1.5 feet apart with insulation in between. The brick is just stack up on the outside with an air gap between. In Europe that entire space will often be completely solid.

I heard of a guy who built a German standard home in a hurricane zone in Florida (must have been insanely expensive). When the next hurricane did come the only damage to his house came from the shrapnel of broken apart american-style houses.

>This is why I believe a Job Guarantee to be a better policy. Basically, have a program that ensures infinite demand for labor at a fixed wage.

Oh good lord no. First of all, this means the creation of countless "dig a hole, fill it back in" jobs. Second of all, it will leave us stuck in this barbaric form of living once we can automate everything because the mega-rich with their robot work force aren't going to want to contribute "their" earnings to basic income.

And finally, basic income is just that: it's income for everyone. It doesn't mean you can't work if you want to. In fact it's better because it means you can truly choose what you want to do with your life instead of being under pressure to avoid starvation or living on the street.

Only if you had to use supernodes. All you had to do was open an outside port for skype and you wouldn't need supernodes for anything.

That's not true. The whole network was effected because the centralization point they chose had a client bug and since the whole network had to use these nodes it took them down.

To take down a decentralized network with a bug you'd have to have every user on the exact same version and no way for them to simply role back to the previous version. I.e. nearly impossible.

People's feelings about something is an irrelevant metric. It doesn't fucking matter if no one is concerned. There are plenty of past disasters and tragedies that happened because no one was concerned.

I don't believe in karma and don't think Ubuntu can ignore the game of patents. They've been able to so far because they are irrelevant in the desktop space.

Personally, I'm not willing to hobble my computing experience due to some hopeless ideology.