fatca
We have to keep building and maintaining a kernel, a libc, and other basic infrastructure software. Should we also do that in a language that implements the missing things already? Maybe the CPU itself should implement these common data structures?
What solution do you propose?
People who live in a G4 country are apparently incapable of imagining that the situation elsewhere is seriously different than in their own country.
There are lots of Mickey Mouse fiat currencies around issued by the banana republics that keep debasing them until they collapse. Even the Russian ruble is a joke that became entirely worthless, three times, in the span of two decades.
Instead of dollarizing during a monetary crisis, as these smaller/weaker fiat currency areas used to do in the past, they may elect to bitcoinize.
If that happens, you could end up with an entire country using bitcoin. As soon as this happens, nobody will ever manage to eliminate bitcoin in that country.
History does not repeat itself. Collapsing currencies now face a prospect of hysteresis. Reintroducing fiat currency will not work if people have already moved over to bitcoin.
With smaller fiat currencies collapsing one by one -- as they always do -- bitcoin will keep growing stronger and stronger.
Both India and China are nuclear powers. Between them, half of the world population lives there.
If I were India, I would not give in one single inch. Eventually, all respect is ultimately based on the fear for reprisals. Just as a matter of principle, I would rather press the nuclear button.
As long as you keep murdering just goatherders, you may indeed still get away with this kind of impunity. You fail to understand, however, how vulnerable the ones doing the killing are, to reprisals and retaliations.
It only takes a small bit of serious hacking and/or data mining to figure out the home addresses of everyone involved in these massacres, and from there to schedule them one by one for termination. The 40 million Target credit cards were much more difficult to obtain than that.
There is a tremendous asymmetry of information between your centralized murder engine and your decentralized enemies. The database of everyone involved on your side exists and can be stolen. The other way around is not true, regardless of all the surveillance that the NSA does. Therefore, the murderers are guaranteed to lose this conflict.