Or maybe they see the value in having a supplier that doesn't represent a conflict of interest.
They need to look for an established, large manufacturer who can quickly produce millions of reliable components for Apple. On the other hand, the same manufacturer must not have any business with any of Apple's competitors - who are in the majority and are busily flooding the planet with hordes of Androids.
In other words, they want a manufacturer with a death wish. The only way a chip maker can agree to those conditions if Apple completely buys it.
How is that different from now, where you can have the browser autocomplete the password for most login forms anyways?
To begin with, my browser saves my password for Slashdot, but not for my bank. I make that decision.
Secondly, when I connect to something from a remote, possibly untrusted location (like the work computer) I can choose to not store anything at all, and perhaps even run in the "private browsing" mode.
This system would insist on having a private key, one way or another, for a login into a protected site. That private key is a file; once you store it onto the disk you never know that it had been successfully deleted - especially on a computer that is not entirely under your control. Today it's guaranteed that all private keys end up "in the cloud" - on Google, for example - because it is so easy, and in fact you need access to those keys all the time.
If someone wants a single sign-on then they are welcome to this system. It is not any worse than any other form of a single sign-on.
However I don't feel a need for such a system. I either remember my passwords, or I have them written down, or they could be encrypted on a separate device. I don't want any key material to land onto the HDD.
The problem with server side security can be easily fixed by not storing plaintext passwords, for example. Or you can store whatever you want, but do it on a separate box that has no TCP/IP and can't be hacked. There are many possibilities, and they all permit you to have a separate identity for each Web site you visit - and you are in control of what identities, if any, you want to share among what kind of sites.
I've always envied people who can make an 8,000 mile trip into a whole season, even earning a modest living as they go.
It is much easier today if you are developing software for your own company. You can work anywhere; in fact, there is hardly any difference between working from your home office and working from your hotel office. I did that, and it was quite productive. Writers are very fond of traveling "to get inspiration" - but programmers need it too!
It's like getting into a line at the airport where you know that you are either going to be scanned or patted down
Why do you think she knew? These patdowns were put in place only after the underpants bomber, and it was what - a year ago? Is she a frequent flier? Did anyone explain to her that you can enter but you cannot leave? There are no other places in this country (except perhaps the border) where you can't revoke your consent and leave.
then yelling obscenities and creating a disturbance when you are asked to go through the scanner or be patted down
A certain Obfuscant went into a book store once. However inside he was told by a group of burly security men that he can't leave just like that - he needs to either have his left eye taken out, or his right hand chopped off. I wonder what will Mr. Obfuscant choose?
It's not like she didn't see this happening to every person ahead of her in line
You can't see a foot ahead of you, and TSA checks your boarding passes and blocks your retreat far before you can see what's going on. Besides, she had every right in the world to not worry about such things. When I enter a grocery store I don't make a mental plan of retreat in case there are terrorists inside.
She could have gotten out of line at any time.
She couldn't get out after she was told to choose between two unacceptable choices.
she chose to create a disturbance by yelling obscenities at the screener.
We are back to the little problem that Mr. Obfuscant has at a book store. Apparently Mr. Obfuscant is intent on keeping his eye and his hand, how silly of him!
(This example is shamelessly borrowed from Lexx, with Mr. Obfuscant playing the role of Stanley H. Tweedle.)
You don't have a clue about what the country is like either if your family is bickering the entire time
You should think of that *before* you marry, not after:-) Family is taxing regardless of how you travel. If you fly you simply can be rid of them as soon as possible.
But I can certainly understand that family men are denied many simple joys. Picking a road and driving forward, not caring too much about the route, is one of them. When you are alone you do things just as you want. When you are with someone you have to trade.
Those 6 hours are much longer than 12 hours you can spend driving on an excellent road. In the end of those 6 hours you see nothing, feel nothing, experience nothing. You just got delivered, blindfolded, from San Diego to NYC, and you have no clue what country lies in between. Perhaps that's how you want to travel for business, but a vacation suggests a better tactic, with emphasis on vacation and not on getting from point A to point B.
3,000 miles? On a 14-day vacation you've spent 6 days travelling.
Traveling by a car is a part of vacation. You see places, people, dine in towns that you never saw. Basically you see the world.
But traveling by an airplane is a boring chore. Not only you have to worry about getting to the airport and from it. You have to go through the indignity of an illegal search by TSA; then you are herded into the airplane and lifted so high that you can't see anything down below - even if you sit by the window. But you can see (and hear) perfectly well the noisy children all around you, mountains of luggage everywhere, your legs that you have to fold in most unnatural way, etc. etc. As a free bonus you get a bit of ionizing radiation, and you get to share your sneezes with everybody else on the airplane. There is no restaurant you can spot and drive the airplane to; there is no food even.
I travel by car from time to time, and 400-500 miles per day is not a concern at all, easily doable between 9am and 5pm with a good lunch somewhere, in a spacious restaurant (even McD is spacious, compared to airplanes) and on terra firma. If I feel tired by the end of the day I can stop at any hotel I like. I can have as much luggage as I want but I don't need to carry any of it, and nobody is going to rummage through my bags. Traveling in your own castle is very comfortable.
I can't understand why we're seriously discussing this.
Perhaps because the decision to use drugs the very first time (and not to seek treatment) belongs to the person. Very few people in the world become addicts because some Men in Black forcibly injected them. But practically every addict becomes one because he seeks more pleasure.
If you have free will you can use drugs or jump off the bridge or do none of that. You are free to choose. Of course once you stepped on some path you may trigger events that are hard to reverse. If you are jumping off the bridge, it's not easy to reverse your decision mid-fall. But that only means that you have no decision point there.
Denying what drugs do to a person [...] is beyond moronic.
Nobody denies that. If you go and stick your arm into the furnace you will get burned - but you are free (and stupid) to do that.
and what they will do to loads of people if this legalization happens
That is a different question. The reason why we are discussing it lies in fact that the war on drugs is a failure. Any reasonable person would have to ask "what else can we do to fix the problem?
One answer to that (not necessarily the best or the only one) is to legalize drugs and allow the weak-willed people to kill themselves with them if they don't choose to seek treatment. The rest will stay away from drugs naturally.
The war on drugs cultivates personal irresponsibility, and on top of that it creates a huge crime wave. The crime wave hits innocents - people who don't do drugs, have jobs and have valuables in their homes. The more important members of the society are sacrificed for pleasure of less important members of the society. Black is white, and so on.
From everything that doctors say - and from what your own post says - drug addicts are nearly hopeless. They can't get jobs, they can't work, they can't earn money honestly, and their existence is dependent on a steady supply of drugs. Why don't then we admit that those guys are dead men walking? Why should we hold them at the threshold? Read again the short story called The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar - it is a perfect fit here.
I don't pretend to have a well thought out plan. But the basics of it are simple. Anyone willing to take drugs should first go through a course where physicians explain - and show on addicts in final stages of the disease - what happens if you take drugs. Then you are given a card that says you have been duly informed and now it's up to you to choose.
Then if you want you go to a clinic where for a small fee (if not free) you can inject yourself with a drug of your choice. You will then remain in the clinic (in a cell, more likely) until the effects of the drug are gone and you are not a danger to yourself and others.
Perhaps this is inconvenient for new users, and that's how it should be. But a junkie in a need of injection will not think twice about going to the clinic. A King is used to dine in his palace, but when he is hungry he will gladly go to a fast food joint.
The reason for all that is simple: people want to use drugs. No war can fix that. We can only change the people - something that no society on this planet was able to do, ever - or we can remove those people from the society. If they want they can stay behind walls, in refurbished prisons, and be fed as much drugs as they want, for the rest of their lives. I don't want them dead, I want them out of my life. They have no moral right to take drugs *and* stay in the society of normal people. It's a choice, and they are free to make it.
My passphrase WOULD actually increment me. So no, they can't have it.
The judge will give you immunity from prosecution that is based on whatever your passphrase incriminates you with. If you then don't cooperate, into the cell you go, until you change your mind.
This reasoning suggests that if you do have some criminal evidence in the encrypted file you'd better make a passphrase that is directly related to that crime - a confession, for example.
The courts cannot compel a defendant to reveal a combination to safe since the combination is inside the defendant's mind. On the other, SCOTUS found that it's constitutional to compel a defendant to produce the key to a strongbox since the overt act of producing the key is not self-incriminating.
That means that the defendant can be forced to give to authorities a certain file - say, a keyring - containing keys for the encrypted material. This is because the existence of the file is a physical reality, just like the key from a strongbox - it can be seen, found, taken, copied and inserted into the lock, all without the defendant even being involved.
However this also means that the defendant can't be forced to reveal the passphrase for that keyring (or any passphrase that is not a physical item.) That passphrase is a mere idea; it does not exist until it is written down. Can the defendant be forced to create something? What if the defendant is not capable of creating such a thing?
AES-256 is very close an ideal symmetric cipher in terms randomly mixing the plaintext and key data.
You can make it even simple. When you need to encrypt a document (say, 1 MB in size) you simply XOR every byte of it with a random keystream (which will be also 1 MB.)
Then you take the ciphertext and XOR it with Romeo and Juliet. The result, also 1 MB long, will be your key for plausible deniability. If you reveal this key and it is used against the ciphertext it will create the harmless document.
The only difference between using XOR and using AES is maybe the key length, but even that is not that massively different. You still need to keep the key for each block. But the key for Shakespeare can be stored in plain view; the key for the secret text can be generated out of a few MP3 files that need to be concatenated in a certain order, or - if you are devious - need to be first processed by Audacity, with very specific processing parameters. Just changing the volume by 1% will be enough; but that process is completely deterministic.
Obscurity, sure, but it will work. In fact, if you build a real Rube Goldberg machine this way and the LEOs somehow figure it out, their description of the necessary steps will be laughed out of the court: "and then we added the defendant's year of birth, encoded in base 14, and then..." - your lawyer will gleefully submit his own "key" as Exhibit N which will decrypt the same ciphertext into something completely different and funny:-)
in my religion, I am not allowed to speak or type the name of my god if anyone is watching
FSM is always watching, so you are a sinner already.
Besides, if you can prove to the judge that your specific religion is so particular, you will be allowed to type the password without anyone looking at the keyboard. Once you decrypt the disk they will make a plaintext copy.
While looking for the weapon, I find a bunch of illegal narcotics, say, a pot growing operation. Do I have to ignore that while looking for the murder weapon?
Based on what I saw on TV, if the drugs are in plain sight then you are welcome to include them in your report. However if they are not in plain sight then, I believe, you can't seize them as evidence unless the search warrant names them too.
So, people get that story as for why I don't drink
You shouldn't even need to give a story. I personally just say "I don't drink this stuff" and that's it. If the other people can't take it, too bad for them. I don't care what they think, I have my own life to live.
Yes, legally you are welcome to fight all the way to the Supreme Court. Some cases that originate in some backwater places do end up there. If you invest your money and/or your connections you can even win. But will that victory be large enough for your lawyer friend to work on contingency? Can you claim a violation of your civil rights? I doubt that. If you show up in court with a star team of lawyers, the judge will just say "Case dismissed" and that's it. You have no claim against the city that could be used to pay your lawyers.
One problem is that the local court is minimally favorable to you. That court can be wrong, and on appeal that can be corrected, but you need first to live through the trial - which costs money and time. If you are an eccentric millionaire who is willing to spend resources on defending his good name *and* has nothing better to do, then perhaps you should fight and probably you will win.
But municipalities that do this kind of highway robbery are not interested in outliers. They are interested in averages. For example, there is a place in CA called King City, it is on highway 101. It is well known for aggressive policing to supply the city with cash. If the fines are small enough most people just pay up and go on with their lives, just as the city expects them to do.
California still lives under a Jim Crow era law where a person must prove "need" to carry a concealed weapon
That is true. However it's not a big deal. Most of crimes are occurring in two places - in private homes and in businesses (largely pharmacies.) Not too many people are mugged in the street, in part because nobody walks in CA - everyone drives.
One area of conflict would be bars in bad parts of towns. But you don't want guys there to carry weapons, legal or not. Where else would you need to carry concealed? If you are a business owner or an employee it is already legal to carry in any way you want, as long as the management is OK with that. Go visit some gun shops here - the clerks are armed. Not only they advertise the goods this way, they also protect the merchandise.
You can also legally carry loaded and/or concealed firearms on your property. If you live in a city that means within your home and perhaps in your enclosed backyard. If you live in the county and have a few acres of land you can carry anywhere you want - within your property lines and without scaring passerbys.
Homes are often the target of crime because that's where the money and saleable goods are. Homes are also where you can have loaded weapons. There is not much difference in this aspect between TX and CA. If I even had a CCW I wouldn't want to carry a firearm on a daily basis. You are very vulnerable in the street, and a few guys (who you can't preemptively attack) can just grab you and take everything you have, including the weapon. Even one guy can throw a brick at you and take you out. There are very, very few real CCW situations when having a weapon could make a positive difference. Your cell phone can be far more effective - instead of shooting at the car with escaping criminals (which is illegal and will surely land you in jail) you instead should tell the 911 call taker how the car looks like, the plate, the direction of travel, condition of the victim, etc. It's hard to outrun Motorola; you need to get more people on your side as fast as possible.
There is also another old trick. You confront some criminal and draw on him to stop the crime. He stops and runs away. Then he calls 911 and reports you, the CCW holder, to the police - and the police will put you through the grinder for alleged "brandishing." Good luck with that - you may need a good lawyer and lots of luck. Criminals are good at lying, and they can deliver witnesses who actually haven't been there but say they were. If you have five witnesses against you your goose is cooked.
You are right here. But the real problem is that all known human systems are flawed, in one way or another. Do you think USSR had no crime? China had no crime? What country, ever, had no crime, had plenty of jobs and money and everything?
There is no shortage of people who criticize systems. However it is fairly obvious to a programmer (or someone else who thinks logically) that different orientation of deck chairs on Titanic is not likely to be effective.
The main problem here is that you are solving y = x - 10 but your boss insists that for x=0 he needs a positive y because his political theories demand that. It would be stupid to deny reality because you don't like it. But it is done all the time in politics. Until that changes we will not see a dent in anything from crime to intelligence to wealth of the country. A whole bunch of theories of political correctness need to be scrapped; we need to become realists and deal with facts as they are, not as we'd like them to be.
Marxism, by the way, is not an answer here. Marx himself was a journalist, a man of middle class, and his understanding of people was laughable, to put it in the least offensive way. All his formulas don't deal with the simple fact that the normal human (not his idealized man of the future) will minimize his contributions and maximize his take. If everyone does that the society falls. See USSR for details.
Please elaborate the portion where you explain how people who have been so "tagged" are able to find legitimate sources of income, so they do not return to crime.
This whole scenario has been discussed many times on many forums. Basically there are three ways you can deal with criminals: rehabilitation, permanent incarceration or extermination. Anything else simply allows the criminal to walk free and commit more crime.
The world in general tries to rehabilitate criminals. Some do get better - those that weren't a lost bunch to begin with. You might one day get drunk, drive a car and kill someone. You'd be sorry the moment you sobered up, and probably you won't even contest the accusations. You'd take your punishment, get released and never do such a thing again. But far more criminals don't feel remorse, and they will gladly do the same thing again. (They aren't smart, and it shows.) They can't be rehabilitated.
Imprisonment for life (or exile to Australia) is not possible for many reasons. The system of parole is working overtime; but in any case the costs of keeping a man alive and reasonably well for all his life are astronomical.
Extermination was common in past centuries, and while it physically culled the population of criminals, it didn't actually serve as a warning to others. Every criminal (not being very smart) believed that he will not get caught. Perhaps there was some statistic in favor of that opinion. Jack the Ripper was never caught, for example.
To summarize, people who can be rehabilitated should be released back into society and all their rights should be restored, in full. They paid the price already. Anything less would only serve to further demoralize them. Other help may be necessary, like changing the name. The law enforcement would know who is who, but the employer in a different city will not. If we give a man a second chance we should do it well.
However if a person commits a crime for the second time he should be incarcerated for life. To save costs, that life should be limited to a few weeks while his appeals are reviewed. Once that is over, the convict is terminated. Perhaps this is barbaric, but the last thing we have shortage of on this planet is people; and of all people, the last kind we need is recidivists.
owing to the number of them that I happen to personally know and can personally vouch for
Your sample set is biased, unless you picked your cop friends using a RNG. However when you are stopped in the street your choice of a cop is very much random, and the circumstances of the meeting are far more strained.
Good cops can be found, especially if they are fresh from the Academy, idealists on a mission to improve the world. That's often why they signed up for the job - not because they love to chase armed, crazy criminals under pouring or freezing rain, in darkness.
As those cops learn the ropes, they learn from other cops that the most important task a cop has is to survive the shift and go home. This puts a dent into their friendly approach. They learn to "be polite and professional, but have a plan to kill everyone they meet." They are wary of people; they can't relax their guard anymore. In that condition they are not corrupt yet (and may never become corrupt) but they can't be anyone's friends. At best they are heartless robots. Meet such a cop and count your blessings when he departs. There are plenty of them.
It might be, and you are welcome to come to the court in due course - say, 3 months from now and 1,000 miles from wherever you live - to debate the issue. Bring your lawyer, of course. That can't cost you more than a few $K. Alternatively, you can just pay the unofficial road toll of $180 and be out of there.
Those fines are carefully calculated to be as high as possible, but contesting them has to remain not practical if you are not a local guy.
Slashdot Mirror
Or maybe they see the value in having a supplier that doesn't represent a conflict of interest.
They need to look for an established, large manufacturer who can quickly produce millions of reliable components for Apple. On the other hand, the same manufacturer must not have any business with any of Apple's competitors - who are in the majority and are busily flooding the planet with hordes of Androids.
In other words, they want a manufacturer with a death wish. The only way a chip maker can agree to those conditions if Apple completely buys it.
How is that different from now, where you can have the browser autocomplete the password for most login forms anyways?
To begin with, my browser saves my password for Slashdot, but not for my bank. I make that decision.
Secondly, when I connect to something from a remote, possibly untrusted location (like the work computer) I can choose to not store anything at all, and perhaps even run in the "private browsing" mode.
This system would insist on having a private key, one way or another, for a login into a protected site. That private key is a file; once you store it onto the disk you never know that it had been successfully deleted - especially on a computer that is not entirely under your control. Today it's guaranteed that all private keys end up "in the cloud" - on Google, for example - because it is so easy, and in fact you need access to those keys all the time.
If someone wants a single sign-on then they are welcome to this system. It is not any worse than any other form of a single sign-on.
However I don't feel a need for such a system. I either remember my passwords, or I have them written down, or they could be encrypted on a separate device. I don't want any key material to land onto the HDD.
The problem with server side security can be easily fixed by not storing plaintext passwords, for example. Or you can store whatever you want, but do it on a separate box that has no TCP/IP and can't be hacked. There are many possibilities, and they all permit you to have a separate identity for each Web site you visit - and you are in control of what identities, if any, you want to share among what kind of sites.
I've always envied people who can make an 8,000 mile trip into a whole season, even earning a modest living as they go.
It is much easier today if you are developing software for your own company. You can work anywhere; in fact, there is hardly any difference between working from your home office and working from your hotel office. I did that, and it was quite productive. Writers are very fond of traveling "to get inspiration" - but programmers need it too!
I'm willing to bet that there's very little of this between where you live and Hawaii.
You will lose your bet if I live in Hawaii :-)
I wonder how much cheering the huge line of people behind her did when the cop finally arrested her?
"I'm so glad," said one sheep to another, "that the black sheep is finally kicked out and the rest of us can move forward."
The sheep were in line for slaughter.
She could have taken a car, a bus, or a train
You can enter the TSA checkpoint but you can't leave (without either being groped or rape-scanned.) That option of yours doesn't exist.
It's like getting into a line at the airport where you know that you are either going to be scanned or patted down
Why do you think she knew? These patdowns were put in place only after the underpants bomber, and it was what - a year ago? Is she a frequent flier? Did anyone explain to her that you can enter but you cannot leave? There are no other places in this country (except perhaps the border) where you can't revoke your consent and leave.
then yelling obscenities and creating a disturbance when you are asked to go through the scanner or be patted down
A certain Obfuscant went into a book store once. However inside he was told by a group of burly security men that he can't leave just like that - he needs to either have his left eye taken out, or his right hand chopped off. I wonder what will Mr. Obfuscant choose?
It's not like she didn't see this happening to every person ahead of her in line
You can't see a foot ahead of you, and TSA checks your boarding passes and blocks your retreat far before you can see what's going on. Besides, she had every right in the world to not worry about such things. When I enter a grocery store I don't make a mental plan of retreat in case there are terrorists inside.
She could have gotten out of line at any time.
She couldn't get out after she was told to choose between two unacceptable choices.
she chose to create a disturbance by yelling obscenities at the screener.
We are back to the little problem that Mr. Obfuscant has at a book store. Apparently Mr. Obfuscant is intent on keeping his eye and his hand, how silly of him!
(This example is shamelessly borrowed from Lexx, with Mr. Obfuscant playing the role of Stanley H. Tweedle.)
What if your choice was taking a TSA lackey job or letting your children starve?
What if your choice was to become a hitman or let your children starve? What if targets of your hits are other children?
Besides, in Obama's America nobody starves yet.
You don't have a clue about what the country is like either if your family is bickering the entire time
You should think of that *before* you marry, not after :-) Family is taxing regardless of how you travel. If you fly you simply can be rid of them as soon as possible.
But I can certainly understand that family men are denied many simple joys. Picking a road and driving forward, not caring too much about the route, is one of them. When you are alone you do things just as you want. When you are with someone you have to trade.
Those 6 hours are much longer than 12 hours you can spend driving on an excellent road. In the end of those 6 hours you see nothing, feel nothing, experience nothing. You just got delivered, blindfolded, from San Diego to NYC, and you have no clue what country lies in between. Perhaps that's how you want to travel for business, but a vacation suggests a better tactic, with emphasis on vacation and not on getting from point A to point B.
3,000 miles? On a 14-day vacation you've spent 6 days travelling.
Traveling by a car is a part of vacation. You see places, people, dine in towns that you never saw. Basically you see the world.
But traveling by an airplane is a boring chore. Not only you have to worry about getting to the airport and from it. You have to go through the indignity of an illegal search by TSA; then you are herded into the airplane and lifted so high that you can't see anything down below - even if you sit by the window. But you can see (and hear) perfectly well the noisy children all around you, mountains of luggage everywhere, your legs that you have to fold in most unnatural way, etc. etc. As a free bonus you get a bit of ionizing radiation, and you get to share your sneezes with everybody else on the airplane. There is no restaurant you can spot and drive the airplane to; there is no food even.
I travel by car from time to time, and 400-500 miles per day is not a concern at all, easily doable between 9am and 5pm with a good lunch somewhere, in a spacious restaurant (even McD is spacious, compared to airplanes) and on terra firma. If I feel tired by the end of the day I can stop at any hotel I like. I can have as much luggage as I want but I don't need to carry any of it, and nobody is going to rummage through my bags. Traveling in your own castle is very comfortable.
I can't understand why we're seriously discussing this.
Perhaps because the decision to use drugs the very first time (and not to seek treatment) belongs to the person. Very few people in the world become addicts because some Men in Black forcibly injected them. But practically every addict becomes one because he seeks more pleasure.
If you have free will you can use drugs or jump off the bridge or do none of that. You are free to choose. Of course once you stepped on some path you may trigger events that are hard to reverse. If you are jumping off the bridge, it's not easy to reverse your decision mid-fall. But that only means that you have no decision point there.
Denying what drugs do to a person [...] is beyond moronic.
Nobody denies that. If you go and stick your arm into the furnace you will get burned - but you are free (and stupid) to do that.
and what they will do to loads of people if this legalization happens
That is a different question. The reason why we are discussing it lies in fact that the war on drugs is a failure. Any reasonable person would have to ask "what else can we do to fix the problem?
One answer to that (not necessarily the best or the only one) is to legalize drugs and allow the weak-willed people to kill themselves with them if they don't choose to seek treatment. The rest will stay away from drugs naturally.
The war on drugs cultivates personal irresponsibility, and on top of that it creates a huge crime wave. The crime wave hits innocents - people who don't do drugs, have jobs and have valuables in their homes. The more important members of the society are sacrificed for pleasure of less important members of the society. Black is white, and so on.
From everything that doctors say - and from what your own post says - drug addicts are nearly hopeless. They can't get jobs, they can't work, they can't earn money honestly, and their existence is dependent on a steady supply of drugs. Why don't then we admit that those guys are dead men walking? Why should we hold them at the threshold? Read again the short story called The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar - it is a perfect fit here.
I don't pretend to have a well thought out plan. But the basics of it are simple. Anyone willing to take drugs should first go through a course where physicians explain - and show on addicts in final stages of the disease - what happens if you take drugs. Then you are given a card that says you have been duly informed and now it's up to you to choose.
Then if you want you go to a clinic where for a small fee (if not free) you can inject yourself with a drug of your choice. You will then remain in the clinic (in a cell, more likely) until the effects of the drug are gone and you are not a danger to yourself and others.
Perhaps this is inconvenient for new users, and that's how it should be. But a junkie in a need of injection will not think twice about going to the clinic. A King is used to dine in his palace, but when he is hungry he will gladly go to a fast food joint.
The reason for all that is simple: people want to use drugs. No war can fix that. We can only change the people - something that no society on this planet was able to do, ever - or we can remove those people from the society. If they want they can stay behind walls, in refurbished prisons, and be fed as much drugs as they want, for the rest of their lives. I don't want them dead, I want them out of my life. They have no moral right to take drugs *and* stay in the society of normal people. It's a choice, and they are free to make it.
My passphrase WOULD actually increment me. So no, they can't have it.
The judge will give you immunity from prosecution that is based on whatever your passphrase incriminates you with. If you then don't cooperate, into the cell you go, until you change your mind.
This reasoning suggests that if you do have some criminal evidence in the encrypted file you'd better make a passphrase that is directly related to that crime - a confession, for example.
The courts cannot compel a defendant to reveal a combination to safe since the combination is inside the defendant's mind. On the other, SCOTUS found that it's constitutional to compel a defendant to produce the key to a strongbox since the overt act of producing the key is not self-incriminating.
That means that the defendant can be forced to give to authorities a certain file - say, a keyring - containing keys for the encrypted material. This is because the existence of the file is a physical reality, just like the key from a strongbox - it can be seen, found, taken, copied and inserted into the lock, all without the defendant even being involved.
However this also means that the defendant can't be forced to reveal the passphrase for that keyring (or any passphrase that is not a physical item.) That passphrase is a mere idea; it does not exist until it is written down. Can the defendant be forced to create something? What if the defendant is not capable of creating such a thing?
AES-256 is very close an ideal symmetric cipher in terms randomly mixing the plaintext and key data.
You can make it even simple. When you need to encrypt a document (say, 1 MB in size) you simply XOR every byte of it with a random keystream (which will be also 1 MB.)
Then you take the ciphertext and XOR it with Romeo and Juliet. The result, also 1 MB long, will be your key for plausible deniability. If you reveal this key and it is used against the ciphertext it will create the harmless document.
The only difference between using XOR and using AES is maybe the key length, but even that is not that massively different. You still need to keep the key for each block. But the key for Shakespeare can be stored in plain view; the key for the secret text can be generated out of a few MP3 files that need to be concatenated in a certain order, or - if you are devious - need to be first processed by Audacity, with very specific processing parameters. Just changing the volume by 1% will be enough; but that process is completely deterministic.
Obscurity, sure, but it will work. In fact, if you build a real Rube Goldberg machine this way and the LEOs somehow figure it out, their description of the necessary steps will be laughed out of the court: "and then we added the defendant's year of birth, encoded in base 14, and then..." - your lawyer will gleefully submit his own "key" as Exhibit N which will decrypt the same ciphertext into something completely different and funny :-)
in my religion, I am not allowed to speak or type the name of my god if anyone is watching
FSM is always watching, so you are a sinner already.
Besides, if you can prove to the judge that your specific religion is so particular, you will be allowed to type the password without anyone looking at the keyboard. Once you decrypt the disk they will make a plaintext copy.
While looking for the weapon, I find a bunch of illegal narcotics, say, a pot growing operation. Do I have to ignore that while looking for the murder weapon?
Based on what I saw on TV, if the drugs are in plain sight then you are welcome to include them in your report. However if they are not in plain sight then, I believe, you can't seize them as evidence unless the search warrant names them too.
So, people get that story as for why I don't drink
You shouldn't even need to give a story. I personally just say "I don't drink this stuff" and that's it. If the other people can't take it, too bad for them. I don't care what they think, I have my own life to live.
Still... that strongly suggests to me that the impression that all police are corrupt is an overbroad generalization that borders on slander.
It could be so; however, as you know, one bad apple spoils the whole barrel.
any sampling bias I may have is based only on the cities where I have lived
That is also an important point. A police department in a corrupt city is more likely to be corrupt, see New Orleans.
Yes, legally you are welcome to fight all the way to the Supreme Court. Some cases that originate in some backwater places do end up there. If you invest your money and/or your connections you can even win. But will that victory be large enough for your lawyer friend to work on contingency? Can you claim a violation of your civil rights? I doubt that. If you show up in court with a star team of lawyers, the judge will just say "Case dismissed" and that's it. You have no claim against the city that could be used to pay your lawyers.
One problem is that the local court is minimally favorable to you. That court can be wrong, and on appeal that can be corrected, but you need first to live through the trial - which costs money and time. If you are an eccentric millionaire who is willing to spend resources on defending his good name *and* has nothing better to do, then perhaps you should fight and probably you will win.
But municipalities that do this kind of highway robbery are not interested in outliers. They are interested in averages. For example, there is a place in CA called King City, it is on highway 101. It is well known for aggressive policing to supply the city with cash. If the fines are small enough most people just pay up and go on with their lives, just as the city expects them to do.
California still lives under a Jim Crow era law where a person must prove "need" to carry a concealed weapon
That is true. However it's not a big deal. Most of crimes are occurring in two places - in private homes and in businesses (largely pharmacies.) Not too many people are mugged in the street, in part because nobody walks in CA - everyone drives.
One area of conflict would be bars in bad parts of towns. But you don't want guys there to carry weapons, legal or not. Where else would you need to carry concealed? If you are a business owner or an employee it is already legal to carry in any way you want, as long as the management is OK with that. Go visit some gun shops here - the clerks are armed. Not only they advertise the goods this way, they also protect the merchandise.
You can also legally carry loaded and/or concealed firearms on your property. If you live in a city that means within your home and perhaps in your enclosed backyard. If you live in the county and have a few acres of land you can carry anywhere you want - within your property lines and without scaring passerbys.
Homes are often the target of crime because that's where the money and saleable goods are. Homes are also where you can have loaded weapons. There is not much difference in this aspect between TX and CA. If I even had a CCW I wouldn't want to carry a firearm on a daily basis. You are very vulnerable in the street, and a few guys (who you can't preemptively attack) can just grab you and take everything you have, including the weapon. Even one guy can throw a brick at you and take you out. There are very, very few real CCW situations when having a weapon could make a positive difference. Your cell phone can be far more effective - instead of shooting at the car with escaping criminals (which is illegal and will surely land you in jail) you instead should tell the 911 call taker how the car looks like, the plate, the direction of travel, condition of the victim, etc. It's hard to outrun Motorola; you need to get more people on your side as fast as possible.
There is also another old trick. You confront some criminal and draw on him to stop the crime. He stops and runs away. Then he calls 911 and reports you, the CCW holder, to the police - and the police will put you through the grinder for alleged "brandishing." Good luck with that - you may need a good lawyer and lots of luck. Criminals are good at lying, and they can deliver witnesses who actually haven't been there but say they were. If you have five witnesses against you your goose is cooked.
Wrong -- Capitalism is a flawed human system
You are right here. But the real problem is that all known human systems are flawed, in one way or another. Do you think USSR had no crime? China had no crime? What country, ever, had no crime, had plenty of jobs and money and everything?
There is no shortage of people who criticize systems. However it is fairly obvious to a programmer (or someone else who thinks logically) that different orientation of deck chairs on Titanic is not likely to be effective.
The main problem here is that you are solving y = x - 10 but your boss insists that for x=0 he needs a positive y because his political theories demand that. It would be stupid to deny reality because you don't like it. But it is done all the time in politics. Until that changes we will not see a dent in anything from crime to intelligence to wealth of the country. A whole bunch of theories of political correctness need to be scrapped; we need to become realists and deal with facts as they are, not as we'd like them to be.
Marxism, by the way, is not an answer here. Marx himself was a journalist, a man of middle class, and his understanding of people was laughable, to put it in the least offensive way. All his formulas don't deal with the simple fact that the normal human (not his idealized man of the future) will minimize his contributions and maximize his take. If everyone does that the society falls. See USSR for details.
Please elaborate the portion where you explain how people who have been so "tagged" are able to find legitimate sources of income, so they do not return to crime.
This whole scenario has been discussed many times on many forums. Basically there are three ways you can deal with criminals: rehabilitation, permanent incarceration or extermination. Anything else simply allows the criminal to walk free and commit more crime.
The world in general tries to rehabilitate criminals. Some do get better - those that weren't a lost bunch to begin with. You might one day get drunk, drive a car and kill someone. You'd be sorry the moment you sobered up, and probably you won't even contest the accusations. You'd take your punishment, get released and never do such a thing again. But far more criminals don't feel remorse, and they will gladly do the same thing again. (They aren't smart, and it shows.) They can't be rehabilitated.
Imprisonment for life (or exile to Australia) is not possible for many reasons. The system of parole is working overtime; but in any case the costs of keeping a man alive and reasonably well for all his life are astronomical.
Extermination was common in past centuries, and while it physically culled the population of criminals, it didn't actually serve as a warning to others. Every criminal (not being very smart) believed that he will not get caught. Perhaps there was some statistic in favor of that opinion. Jack the Ripper was never caught, for example.
To summarize, people who can be rehabilitated should be released back into society and all their rights should be restored, in full. They paid the price already. Anything less would only serve to further demoralize them. Other help may be necessary, like changing the name. The law enforcement would know who is who, but the employer in a different city will not. If we give a man a second chance we should do it well.
However if a person commits a crime for the second time he should be incarcerated for life. To save costs, that life should be limited to a few weeks while his appeals are reviewed. Once that is over, the convict is terminated. Perhaps this is barbaric, but the last thing we have shortage of on this planet is people; and of all people, the last kind we need is recidivists.
owing to the number of them that I happen to personally know and can personally vouch for
Your sample set is biased, unless you picked your cop friends using a RNG. However when you are stopped in the street your choice of a cop is very much random, and the circumstances of the meeting are far more strained.
Good cops can be found, especially if they are fresh from the Academy, idealists on a mission to improve the world. That's often why they signed up for the job - not because they love to chase armed, crazy criminals under pouring or freezing rain, in darkness.
As those cops learn the ropes, they learn from other cops that the most important task a cop has is to survive the shift and go home. This puts a dent into their friendly approach. They learn to "be polite and professional, but have a plan to kill everyone they meet." They are wary of people; they can't relax their guard anymore. In that condition they are not corrupt yet (and may never become corrupt) but they can't be anyone's friends. At best they are heartless robots. Meet such a cop and count your blessings when he departs. There are plenty of them.
Why isn't that considered entrapment?
It might be, and you are welcome to come to the court in due course - say, 3 months from now and 1,000 miles from wherever you live - to debate the issue. Bring your lawyer, of course. That can't cost you more than a few $K. Alternatively, you can just pay the unofficial road toll of $180 and be out of there.
Those fines are carefully calculated to be as high as possible, but contesting them has to remain not practical if you are not a local guy.