Free Republic

The very beginning of Holocene :-) One could make pretty nice living there with modern knowledge.

Hmm, let me see. Straight men won't deal with him/her because he/she is not a girl; and gay men won't deal with him/her because he/she looks like a girl. I guess he/she should look for another transgender, just in reverse polarity :-)

Even a nominal Muslim, who was born into the religion but does not believe in it and does not follow the rituals, is still counted as a Muslim and is added into the pool of "peaceful" adherents. But in reality that person is not religious at all and should not be counted. This technique creates a significant error when the entire population of a country is counted as Muslim, even though only a much smaller number cares about Islam and chooses to dedicate some resources to it (even if it's just their own time.)

In what role?

It is patently obvious that after four years of war in Syria, after destruction of whole cities in that war, after hundreds of thousands are displaced and tens of thousands killed with no record of it, there is absolutely no chance of vetting any one of those applicants.

Each one of the terrorists in Paris killed 15 innocents (on average.) That is considering that they used a very simple tactic of running into the crowd with guns blazing. More sophisticated attackers (like Breivik) can kill far more.

Besides, if those photos of "refugees" are in any way representative, it would be hard to find 20% of non-terrorists among them. They look like ISIS soldiers taken from the front lines for another duty. There are only a few women and children in each photo. Most likely nobody can leave Syria without going through a filter that is controlled by ISIS - and we can imagine who they will let through and who will be sent back.

Those who made it through are likely more competent and better prepared.

If they are terrorists, it's nearly certain that they would be told only about *their* mission, not about other missions that are about to happen on another end of the planet. If the planners are smart, though, the soldiers would be only told to get in, establish a base, and then contact an anonymous handler over the Internet.

The immigrants (including the imams who preach jihad) were accepted on an assumption that they will join the society and become citizens just like everyone else is. That assumption was wrong. The least painful solution would be to undo the grant of citizenship... but many of the immigrants have no other citizenship at the moment, and cannot be sent anywhere. The EU has very few options left:

1) Do nothing. Suffer terrorism, whack a mole when you can, but the opponent's human resources exceed yours, and their population grows while yours shrinks. This will not work in the long term, and the nation will cease to exist as soon as the Muslim population gets numerous enough to control the country through the democratic mechanisms. (That's where another Pinochet might step in.)

2) Dedicate some part of your territory to the opponent. Let them have their own state there. Build a wall and guard that border. This is technically doable. Legally, it's borderline; Stalin exiled several nations for their behavior during the World War II. Today collective punishment is illegal, but this separation is not punishment - it's a grant of statehood. France will lose some territory, but then it will be rid of the unwanted people. Islam would be outlawed in France, probably.

3) Allow a civil war to start; let the population fight it out. The end result will be the (2) above, only with far more dead and with lasting hate between the groups. This development promises no advantage, especially if Islamists win the war.

4) Use methods that are universally recognized as unacceptable today, like genocide or forced deportations into faraway lands. Even if attempted, this is going to create a lot of backlash, unless done exactly by Machiavelli's recommendations. Technically, it's not very likely. Legally... it might work if, say, Islamists get a nuke and explode it in some important place. Then the whole world will donate a few more nukes to them, free air delivery.

These problems are not unique to France; they will be the burden of every country that has a significant number of radical Muslims.

States, for all practical purposes, have no such power. If a refugee gets a green card, it won't say much about his terrorist intentions, if he has any. If the police checks the document and finds that the subject is an immigrant... nothing can be concluded from that. Furthermore, if someone does conclude something, it may be illegal. The right to be on the US soil is given by the federal government, as it controls the border. The states have no easy means, outside of Congress, of questioning it:

"Today's ruling appropriately bars the state of Arizona from effectively criminalizing unlawful status in the state and confirms the federal government's exclusive authority to regulate in the area of immigration," Attorney General Eric Holder said in a statement.

All that the states can do is to not extend certain social programs to those invaders poor refugees. However if those guys are not interested in getting the social assistance, they are absolutely free to go anywhere within the USA and to live wherever they please.

Chances are that the new cells will be financed from abroad and domestically, just as 9/11 terrorists were. They will not apply for social security; they will avoid all contacts with the government. Perhaps they will be employed by "moderate muslims."

Quite a few people have already offered their opinions. Here is one more:

The generals in command of the French Air Force cannot singlehandedly reject demands of the EU bureaucrats, or to start deportations. But they can order bombing raids without asking for a permission slip from Merkel or even Hollande (if someone in the EU cares what he thinks.) The military command does what they can.

Hey, you have to work hard to become a Colonel, in KGB or anywhere else. A Colonel in the Army commands a brigade (four to six thousand men.) Obama has no history of command; he wouldn't even qualify to command a squad.

One wouldn't be able to see a laser beam from the side. The whole point of laser is that the beam is narrow and condensed. Even if it were like a 3" diameter white-hot steel pipe all the way from the ground to the clouds, you'd be hard pressed to see it from a distance.

Particle beam... there is a reason why particles in LHC are accelerated in vacuum. Otherwise they wouldn't travel very far; air is just too dense. Particle beam weapons are only for spaceships.

FR's Web site is so safe (and old) that it refuses to understand UTF-8. The UTF-8 character encoding method sometimes needs two characters to encode one - if those are foreign or special characters. Some quotes are special and require two consequent bytes to create one glyph. FR's software erroneously treats them as individual characters instead of composing them into one UNICODE codepoint. It is perfectly safe, though. Only ugly.

Here is something else:

Critics of evolution have always maintained that mutations and selection can only produce new varieties inside a certain species, that one could not have new species emerging via such a process. This idea has finally been empirically rebutted: scientists have now observed the actual emergence of new species.

Written in 2006, nearly 10 years ago.

I wonder how then the BTC differs from gold as currency. The same proof of work was present then, as gold is hard to mine (at least in Europe, before they came to Americas.)

In this aspect gold is better because it is useful (for jewelry, electronics, science) and it does not depend on social acceptance to have value. BTC has no inherent value, and thus all the work that went into minting the BTC hinges on acceptance. As you can see, BTC combines the worst characteristics of currencies - it is hard to mine, like precious metals, but it has no inherent value, like paper money.

I can only speak for myself. New currencies often have legitimacy crisis. If a large country, seemingly acting reasonably, introduces a new currency, it is easier. Euro is one such example. If an individual, who keeps his true identity secret, introduces a currency and keeps some for himself, this becomes a much dicier proposition.

Some of the key factors that a customer considers are:

• How widespread this currency will likely be?
• Will it have captive market? (Such as taxes to be paid in it)
• Does the issuer have physical goods to back it?
• What is the history of this particular issuer?
• Does it have any other specific risks?

One desired quality of money is that the tokens themselves should have minimal cost; preferrably zero. Paper money comes close to that, as paper is reasonably inexpensive. Electronic money as they exist today in banks and on our credit cards have zero cost. This is good because the token itself should not be an expensive good. You do not want to pay for your cup of coffee with an original painting by a famous artist - even if the nominal value of that "coin" is one cup of coffee. This issue also affected gold coins, as they had value close to their face value - and that resulted in debasement of coins.

Unfortunately, BTC is not free. BTC costs a lot of money (electric power) to produce. This is a waste. This also results in a situation when nobody can offer BTC as a handy replacement for barter items, as you have to purchase the coin first - and the act of purchase of a coin has nothing to do with the exchange that the coin facilitates.

Here is an example, with barter and with BTC.

BARTER. Bob built a chair and wants to sell it. Alice wants to buy that chair. Bob needs a loaf of bread, and Alice just baked one. They exchange goods. Bob now has bread, and Alice can sit on her new chair. All the work was exchanged, and none were leaking to 3rd parties.

BTC. Bob built a chair and wants to sell it for 1 BTC. Alice wants to buy that chair for 1 BTC. However Alice does not have 1 BTC. Each BTC costs, in whatever money, close to its face value. Alice takes one loaf of bread to the exchange and procures one BTC from the miner Mike for that bread. Now Alice comes back and gives the 1 BTC to Bob, and collects her chair. Bob still wants his bread, and Alice doesn't have her bread anymore.

What would happen now in our "normal" economy? Bob would go to Mike the miner, give him 1 BTC, and take the bread. This would complete the exchange because the value of the token (paper money or iron/nickel coins) is nearly zero.

This is different in the BTC world. When Bob goes to Mike and offers him his BTC, Mike says that he already gave one half of his bread to the power company, and another half to the company that made a BTC mining machine for him. He has no bread to sell anymore!

You can see now that the high cost of the token is now sunk into tokens themselves. The society has to bear the extreme expense of calculating otherwise pointless and valueless numbers, just so they could be exchanged for very inexpensive goods. This is one of many issues that plague digital coins. To put it simply, digital money must be very inexpensive to generate and to process. BTC does not offer either - minting of coins is very expensive, and transfers of BTC require massive worldwide calculations. Compare with cash, which costs nothing to print and the only person who counts it is the clerk at the store. Plastic cash (cards) costs even less.

Yes, just like paper money or gold bars. There is only one kind of exchange that does not depend on trust in value of an otherwise valueless good. That is called barter.

Bitcoin and its friends are not particularly different in this aspect from other currencies. Right now acceptance of BTC is low because so many people (nearly everyone) refuse to exchange their hard work for a coin that may have no value. It does not matter that the coin in question is digital; it wouldn't be any better if Satoshi Nakamoto came up with a truckload of unforgeable metal coins. We trust [some] currencies because, in our estimate, they are built into large, stable economies. BTC, or Zimbabwean Dollar, are not.

If nobody had faith in bitcoin wouldn't it be valueless?

Yes; just as sea shells of Pacific Islanders are only souvenirs today, not money as they used to be. That also applies to other currencies, and history gives us many examples. Value of a coin is defined by you, in the market. If you are not willing to part with your goods for $n coins, the coins lose value until you change your mind.

R-Pi or BBB is cheaper. But Linux works fine on Atoms in any case.