Yes, it is a contradiction. But I think a value based on the fact that some people will take your stuff and rob you of your freedom if you don't give them some of those things is a pretty poor shadow of a value based on what people are voluntarily willing to trade you for them. I think the majority of the value USD has is because of what people are voluntarily willing to trade for them. And I think that value is based completely on the collective imagination.
Now, if I told you that just about any person can close a distance of 21 feet in approximately 1.5 seconds would you be surprised? Would you be more surprised to learn that the typical police officer needs approximately 1.5 seconds to draw his pistol from his holster and bring the front sight to eye level? Now remember, most if not all cops have retention holsters, i.e., holsters that must me manipulated in a certain way to release the firearm. And, brining the front sight to eye even doesn't mean you have actually had time to put that sight to the center mass of the person you are about to shoot.
I would not be surprised that someone could do that. I have timed myself and how fast I can move at various times, and that doesn't strike me as being all that difficult, even from a standing start. It's also not too surprising that a police officer's weapon isn't drawn trivially easily. That makes it so that someone's surprise attempt to steal their weapon turns into a struggle instead of shots being fired.
"Seattle Police Detective Jeffery Mudd also testified that he would have dropped a knife if ordered to do so at gunpoint by a police officer.
I have read that. And my opinion on his culpability drops from 2nd degree murder to manslaughter.
Ian Burke was a rookie cop who created a situation for himself that he couldn't handle appropriately. Detective Mudd's comment is completely irrelevant here. Almost anybody will do almost anything a police officer demands they do at gunpoint. Refusing to do so when you are not actually committing a crime (or, if for some weird reason, that is a crime, then some other crime), should not be considered grounds for shooting someone. And I don't think it should be considered a crime at all.
The officer created the situation by giving confronting the guy and giving the order in the first place. As far as I can tell from what I've read of the case, the guy was wandering along with a knife in his hand before Ian Burke decided that wasn't something he liked to see. Ian then decided to hop out of his car and do something about this scary looking (but, as far as he could ascertain) law abiding citizen. This citizen did not comply relatively quickly with a yelled order at gunpoint, and as far as Ian was concerned (since we only have his word on the topic) looked ever scarier than before he decided to confront him. So Ian shot him because he felt that he was now in danger.
If anybody but a police officer had done those things, they would be convicted of (at the very least) voluntary manslaughter. I'm willing to give Ian Burke the benefit of a doubt for being a frightened rookie cop who was out of his depth and say that's all he should be convicted of too.
The dollar has no viable value, except in our collective imaginations. Even the fact that the US government demands taxes paid in it giving it value is an artifact of our collective imagination. For example, if the US government started demanding payment in sycamore leaves, I doubt it would really cause people to start a brisk trade in sycamore leaves. People would just trade in them the minimal amount necessary to pay taxes.
People have used a whole ton of odd things for curency. Stone coins on the Yap Islands. Tally sticks. Knots in rope. Cowry shells. Some of these things have worked more or less well than others for various reasons. Bitcoin is an attempt to create a completely digital system that has attributes that make it an excellent means of exchanging value using tokens of a sort that are otherwise meaningless.
Every merchant that willingly accepts bitcoins for payment adds to how valuable bitcoins are. It will start with niches that are currently ill-served by US currency. Gambling, illegal drugs, prostitution and other consensual crime are big ones here. And it will slowly spill over into other things.
Do some research on what people have used as currency in the past, and why those things have or haven't worked so well. If you can wrap your mind around the idea that a sea shell was, at one point, a very important carrier of value, then you might be in a position to evaluate whether or not bitcoin has a chance.
As for commenting that it has no value, I disagree with you completely. Currently my store of bitcoins has a value of over a thousand dollars. And that's because I could, should I so chose, go and trade them all for those USD. Those USD are valuable because I can trade them for all kinds of random stuff, and pay taxes in them.
Tomorrow, their value may be 50 USD or even less. But I don't think that's likely because there are so many other things you can trade bitcoins for that I think people will want them and trade their USD for them at something close to the current market rates.
Applied Cryptography is an awful book if you really want to build something. It's basically a giant algorithm survey. And while some of the more unusual algorithms are pretty useful in some limited contexts, it gives you very little guidance on which algorithms to use when and why.
I would instead suggest Practical Cryptography. It has the information the OP would need to answer the exact questions he's asking. It gives you really good information about which algorithms to use when and why, and how to design secure systems by combining the various kinds of algorithms and offers guidance on how to pick them.
It definitely is and assuming that this is a somewhat accurate description of what happened, the police officers involved could easily find themselves behind bars for witness tampering, destruction of evidence amongst other things. And police officers do get sent to prison from time to time for this sort of behavior.
Every once in a great while when there is a massive public outcry and there are no other politically viable alternatives, yes, they do. This is far, far less often than it should happen. Of the instances of police overstepping their bounds I have heard of exactly one police officer being fired, and that was for a clear case of murder that was committed on camera and the victim was a homeless person who was well known and liked. The officer's excuse was that the man (who was known as 'the woodcarver' by locals) had a knife, and he did not put it down in the 2.5 seconds between the time the officer told him to and the time he fired. The man made no threatening gesture with the knife.
I have never heard of a police officer going to jail.
No, it won't. But that's just because I am one boring person and I don't share much online. But hats off to your ridiculous fear mongering. While Gennette Cordova herself wasn't a celebrity or public figure, she worked for one and probably should have been careful about broadcasting that to the world.
Oh, yes, it's her fault for revealing who she worked for. I love your logic. Do you apply that to women who wear skimpy outfits in dark alleys too?
I can certainly sympathise with the disrespect people would have for PETA if it believes we should all go vegetarian and does so in a militant fashion. That certainly crosses a line beyond rationality.
There's a reason the backronym 'People Eating Tasty Animals' is so popular here. While the issues they raise about factory farming are worthwhile, they do so in a way that implies any use of animals for food (including eggs or milk) are ethically questionable. Though, protests about these sorts of things are usually a step below violence. Just public displays that are purposely very shocking and that feel like attacks even though no physical harm is being done.
I like to know that the code for the software I run could be independently evaluated by a third party. Whenever I run Windows, I'm worried my computer is doing something behind my back that I don't want it to be doing and have no control over.
I always like to replace the word Anonymous in these stories with the phrase "The Internet".
Yes, that's an insightful way of seeing things.
I do not participate in Anonymous in any way (though, of course, I would be a fool to admit it if I did). But I am working on trying to improve the technical infrastructure of the Internet to make it even harder for governments to meddle with than it already is.
I think Iran's toying with the idea of a 'private Internet' is very telling. The Internet is so very corrosive that it's tempting to create an internet that's missing 99.9% of the value of the real Internet just to try to limit the scope of the corrosion. I doubt it will work.
I can only hope that Anonymous exceeds their expectations. Right now, it looks like they think Anonymous is a threat they can crush. I dearly hope that it isn't. My government should be quaking in its boots at the thought of angering a significant minority of those it governs. "Government by consent of the governed." has meant far too little for far too long.
I'm not equating all vegetarians with PETA or stating the cruelty or mistreatment of animals is OK and we should be trying to denigrate organizations that stand against that sort of mistreatment.
I'm saying that the extremes of position we see in the US are, in my opinion, at least partly the result of how disconnected and insulated people are from the source of their food. Here PETA is known for being very extreme and calling absolutely any use of animals for food in any way a horrible abuse. They've been known to sometimes use violence (though generally not deadly violence) to make their point.
the hope they'll be shocked into going vegetarian or something?
Actually, the opposite. I trace the existence of PETA directly to people being unaware of how nature actually functions or where their food comes from at a fairly early age.
I still think a lot of people's reaction is along the same lines as why Japan has the Burakumin class. And I think most people would benefit from a visit to a farm or a slaughterhouse and maybe doing a bit of that work themselves. I feel that we (as a society) have become very disconnected from certain realities and that it would do people some benefit to become reconnected with them.
When we're talking about someone who judging by past comments and actions seems somewhat of a sociopath, one with quite a hunger for power, coupled with the fact there's a list of animals he's killed and a comment of how he killed one as if he's tallying them up on a scorecard or something (Chicken- tick, pig- tick, goat- tick, horse- tick, human- tick), then I'm not really suprised people think he may have gone off his rocker a little. That's not to say that means people like you who did this out of necessity are also in the same boat however.
This is the only part of your post I agree with. But, I do agree with it. I don't think it's a PR stunt for him, but I can agree that keeping a list is rather strange, and perhaps a bit disturbed.
On the other hand, I remember most of the animals we slaughtered since we had a fairly small farm. And while I don't really like to talk about it in detail, if I felt I had to talk about it, I would likely do so in a very cool and detached way, and it might sound to some people like checkmarks on a list.
It's my theory that if you successfully pulled this off, NASA would find a way to keep the stuff out of private hands anyway. Perhaps by exercising eminent domain or something.
Given that, I would not be surprised in NASA 'leaned' on countries to suddenly have 'no state gifts to private individuals' laws. My suspicion is that someone in NASA thinks its vitally important that there be no private ownership of moon rocks. I suspect the person has motives that seem on the surface to be altruistic (prevention of fraud, prevention of the private ownership of space, etc...) but are actually about power.
You also can be more flexible in recovery options. If the stuff slams into the Earth pretty hard, you don't really care, as long as it doesn't hit anybody. The other way in which you can be more flexible is that you can adopt a flight path that will take months instead of days.
But, I agree, it's an expensive proposition, and I think your estimate is still pretty close to accurate. Though I suspect you might be able to get that price for your moon rock if you marketed it well.
Oh, that bothers me too. But there are ways to test that a moon rock is authentic. From what I know there are things about the chemistry and macroscopic composition that are unique to moon rocks.
No, what bothers me is one single authority having a monopoly on something.
The idea that all the moon rock in the world is owned by the US government and any in private hands must therefor be stolen is somehow very annoying to me. Makes me wonder if you could finance a robotic trip to the moon that had the goal of returning 100kg of moonrock and selling it on the open market. Then NASA would have a much harder time proving that people didn't privately own moonrock.
It’s the belief that you’re somehow better than other people for only eating what you kill yourself that is a sign of “going off the deep end”. It’s also smug and rather offensive. (I also don’t see him living on a farm, doing all the work it takes before you actually put the animals to slaughter.)
I didn't get the sense of smugness at all. It seemed to me like it was a personal choice motivated by a desire to fully appreciate where his meat came from.
And that's true, I can't really see him putting in the time and effort to make a farm work himself. Even going to a farm will help you appreciate just how much time and effort it is, but yeah, I still agree with you there.:-)
When you live on a farm where you raise animals and eat them, yes, killing animals for food is normal.
When you live in a big city and you normally never come close to an animal while it is alive, switching to a mode where you eat no animals except those you've personally killed is "going off the deep end".
On the contrary. I think someone who was raised on a farm who decides that they must only eat animals they've killed themselves is a bit strange. They already have had to face exactly what goes on.
Someone who never has, I can understand deciding that slaughtering your own animals is the only way to bring the point home to yourself. It's very easy to not really understand. I think it's a moral ill of society that most people don't really know.
Primitive hunter-gatherers understood. Many of them had rituals thanking the animal for its life. In modern society its all packaged so most people can avoid having to know or think about it. As I said, I think that we're poorer for it. I wish more people realized. We'd have more vegetarians, and I think a better appreciation for the fact that we're part of the ecosystem.
I think people's 'ick' reaction is a perfect example. They don't want to have to think about it. And think people who put themselves in the position of having to must be somehow broken or disturbed. If he had lived in a house where a housekeeper always did the cleaning, nobody would raise an eyebrow if he said he was going to fire his housekeeper and do his own housecleaning for awhile in order to understand the housekeeper's life a bit better.
I doubt he'll do it forever. It's very time consuming. But I don't really care if he does, and I don't think it's in any way a negative thing.
Presumably you raised livestock and sold it for money knowing full well it would be slaughtered for others to eat.
Nope, we butchered all of our own animals. Sometimes we sold the meat to neighbors. But we were not a big operation, just a fairly small family farm designed mostly to feed ourselves.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it is a contradiction. But I think a value based on the fact that some people will take your stuff and rob you of your freedom if you don't give them some of those things is a pretty poor shadow of a value based on what people are voluntarily willing to trade you for them. I think the majority of the value USD has is because of what people are voluntarily willing to trade for them. And I think that value is based completely on the collective imagination.
Now, if I told you that just about any person can close a distance of 21 feet in approximately 1.5 seconds would you be surprised? Would you be more surprised to learn that the typical police officer needs approximately 1.5 seconds to draw his pistol from his holster and bring the front sight to eye level? Now remember, most if not all cops have retention holsters, i.e., holsters that must me manipulated in a certain way to release the firearm. And, brining the front sight to eye even doesn't mean you have actually had time to put that sight to the center mass of the person you are about to shoot.
I would not be surprised that someone could do that. I have timed myself and how fast I can move at various times, and that doesn't strike me as being all that difficult, even from a standing start. It's also not too surprising that a police officer's weapon isn't drawn trivially easily. That makes it so that someone's surprise attempt to steal their weapon turns into a struggle instead of shots being fired.
Also, read the rest of Birk's testimony: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2013905500_inquest12m.html [nwsource.com]
"Seattle Police Detective Jeffery Mudd also testified that he would have dropped a knife if ordered to do so at gunpoint by a police officer.
I have read that. And my opinion on his culpability drops from 2nd degree murder to manslaughter.
Ian Burke was a rookie cop who created a situation for himself that he couldn't handle appropriately. Detective Mudd's comment is completely irrelevant here. Almost anybody will do almost anything a police officer demands they do at gunpoint. Refusing to do so when you are not actually committing a crime (or, if for some weird reason, that is a crime, then some other crime), should not be considered grounds for shooting someone. And I don't think it should be considered a crime at all.
The officer created the situation by giving confronting the guy and giving the order in the first place. As far as I can tell from what I've read of the case, the guy was wandering along with a knife in his hand before Ian Burke decided that wasn't something he liked to see. Ian then decided to hop out of his car and do something about this scary looking (but, as far as he could ascertain) law abiding citizen. This citizen did not comply relatively quickly with a yelled order at gunpoint, and as far as Ian was concerned (since we only have his word on the topic) looked ever scarier than before he decided to confront him. So Ian shot him because he felt that he was now in danger.
If anybody but a police officer had done those things, they would be convicted of (at the very least) voluntary manslaughter. I'm willing to give Ian Burke the benefit of a doubt for being a frightened rookie cop who was out of his depth and say that's all he should be convicted of too.
The dollar has no viable value, except in our collective imaginations. Even the fact that the US government demands taxes paid in it giving it value is an artifact of our collective imagination. For example, if the US government started demanding payment in sycamore leaves, I doubt it would really cause people to start a brisk trade in sycamore leaves. People would just trade in them the minimal amount necessary to pay taxes.
People have used a whole ton of odd things for curency. Stone coins on the Yap Islands. Tally sticks. Knots in rope. Cowry shells. Some of these things have worked more or less well than others for various reasons. Bitcoin is an attempt to create a completely digital system that has attributes that make it an excellent means of exchanging value using tokens of a sort that are otherwise meaningless.
Every merchant that willingly accepts bitcoins for payment adds to how valuable bitcoins are. It will start with niches that are currently ill-served by US currency. Gambling, illegal drugs, prostitution and other consensual crime are big ones here. And it will slowly spill over into other things.
Do some research on what people have used as currency in the past, and why those things have or haven't worked so well. If you can wrap your mind around the idea that a sea shell was, at one point, a very important carrier of value, then you might be in a position to evaluate whether or not bitcoin has a chance.
As for commenting that it has no value, I disagree with you completely. Currently my store of bitcoins has a value of over a thousand dollars. And that's because I could, should I so chose, go and trade them all for those USD. Those USD are valuable because I can trade them for all kinds of random stuff, and pay taxes in them.
Tomorrow, their value may be 50 USD or even less. But I don't think that's likely because there are so many other things you can trade bitcoins for that I think people will want them and trade their USD for them at something close to the current market rates.
They'll trade the bitcoin for actual currency.
I object to your use of the word 'actual' here. Perhaps you might use 'a more commonly traded' instead. Bitcoin is as 'actual' as any other currency.
Applied Cryptography is an awful book if you really want to build something. It's basically a giant algorithm survey. And while some of the more unusual algorithms are pretty useful in some limited contexts, it gives you very little guidance on which algorithms to use when and why.
I would instead suggest Practical Cryptography. It has the information the OP would need to answer the exact questions he's asking. It gives you really good information about which algorithms to use when and why, and how to design secure systems by combining the various kinds of algorithms and offers guidance on how to pick them.
It definitely is and assuming that this is a somewhat accurate description of what happened, the police officers involved could easily find themselves behind bars for witness tampering, destruction of evidence amongst other things. And police officers do get sent to prison from time to time for this sort of behavior.
Every once in a great while when there is a massive public outcry and there are no other politically viable alternatives, yes, they do. This is far, far less often than it should happen. Of the instances of police overstepping their bounds I have heard of exactly one police officer being fired, and that was for a clear case of murder that was committed on camera and the victim was a homeless person who was well known and liked. The officer's excuse was that the man (who was known as 'the woodcarver' by locals) had a knife, and he did not put it down in the 2.5 seconds between the time the officer told him to and the time he fired. The man made no threatening gesture with the knife.
I have never heard of a police officer going to jail.
No, it won't. But that's just because I am one boring person and I don't share much online. But hats off to your ridiculous fear mongering. While Gennette Cordova herself wasn't a celebrity or public figure, she worked for one and probably should have been careful about broadcasting that to the world.
Oh, yes, it's her fault for revealing who she worked for. I love your logic. Do you apply that to women who wear skimpy outfits in dark alleys too?
I can certainly sympathise with the disrespect people would have for PETA if it believes we should all go vegetarian and does so in a militant fashion. That certainly crosses a line beyond rationality.
There's a reason the backronym 'People Eating Tasty Animals' is so popular here. While the issues they raise about factory farming are worthwhile, they do so in a way that implies any use of animals for food (including eggs or milk) are ethically questionable. Though, protests about these sorts of things are usually a step below violence. Just public displays that are purposely very shocking and that feel like attacks even though no physical harm is being done.
I like to know that the code for the software I run could be independently evaluated by a third party. Whenever I run Windows, I'm worried my computer is doing something behind my back that I don't want it to be doing and have no control over.
I always like to replace the word Anonymous in these stories with the phrase "The Internet".
Yes, that's an insightful way of seeing things.
I do not participate in Anonymous in any way (though, of course, I would be a fool to admit it if I did). But I am working on trying to improve the technical infrastructure of the Internet to make it even harder for governments to meddle with than it already is.
I think Iran's toying with the idea of a 'private Internet' is very telling. The Internet is so very corrosive that it's tempting to create an internet that's missing 99.9% of the value of the real Internet just to try to limit the scope of the corrosion. I doubt it will work.
I can only hope that Anonymous exceeds their expectations. Right now, it looks like they think Anonymous is a threat they can crush. I dearly hope that it isn't. My government should be quaking in its boots at the thought of angering a significant minority of those it governs. "Government by consent of the governed." has meant far too little for far too long.
I'm not equating all vegetarians with PETA or stating the cruelty or mistreatment of animals is OK and we should be trying to denigrate organizations that stand against that sort of mistreatment.
I'm saying that the extremes of position we see in the US are, in my opinion, at least partly the result of how disconnected and insulated people are from the source of their food. Here PETA is known for being very extreme and calling absolutely any use of animals for food in any way a horrible abuse. They've been known to sometimes use violence (though generally not deadly violence) to make their point.
the hope they'll be shocked into going vegetarian or something?
Actually, the opposite. I trace the existence of PETA directly to people being unaware of how nature actually functions or where their food comes from at a fairly early age.
I still think a lot of people's reaction is along the same lines as why Japan has the Burakumin class. And I think most people would benefit from a visit to a farm or a slaughterhouse and maybe doing a bit of that work themselves. I feel that we (as a society) have become very disconnected from certain realities and that it would do people some benefit to become reconnected with them.
When we're talking about someone who judging by past comments and actions seems somewhat of a sociopath, one with quite a hunger for power, coupled with the fact there's a list of animals he's killed and a comment of how he killed one as if he's tallying them up on a scorecard or something (Chicken- tick, pig- tick, goat- tick, horse- tick, human- tick), then I'm not really suprised people think he may have gone off his rocker a little. That's not to say that means people like you who did this out of necessity are also in the same boat however.
This is the only part of your post I agree with. But, I do agree with it. I don't think it's a PR stunt for him, but I can agree that keeping a list is rather strange, and perhaps a bit disturbed.
On the other hand, I remember most of the animals we slaughtered since we had a fairly small farm. And while I don't really like to talk about it in detail, if I felt I had to talk about it, I would likely do so in a very cool and detached way, and it might sound to some people like checkmarks on a list.
But I kind of doubt that's what's up here.
They have unlimited data, unlimited SMS and a fairly reasonable number of minutes. And the price isn't so bad either.
The coverage could use a little work, but it's pretty good in cities and on the freeways between them.
I will be quite unhappy if they are swallowed by AT&T. They are the least bad of all the cell phone operators.
It's my theory that if you successfully pulled this off, NASA would find a way to keep the stuff out of private hands anyway. Perhaps by exercising eminent domain or something.
Given that, I would not be surprised in NASA 'leaned' on countries to suddenly have 'no state gifts to private individuals' laws. My suspicion is that someone in NASA thinks its vitally important that there be no private ownership of moon rocks. I suspect the person has motives that seem on the surface to be altruistic (prevention of fraud, prevention of the private ownership of space, etc...) but are actually about power.
You also can be more flexible in recovery options. If the stuff slams into the Earth pretty hard, you don't really care, as long as it doesn't hit anybody. The other way in which you can be more flexible is that you can adopt a flight path that will take months instead of days.
But, I agree, it's an expensive proposition, and I think your estimate is still pretty close to accurate. Though I suspect you might be able to get that price for your moon rock if you marketed it well.
And I'm pretty sure they would also try some sneaky legal trick (maybe eminent domain) to make sure your moon rocks were not privately distributed.
Oh, that bothers me too. But there are ways to test that a moon rock is authentic. From what I know there are things about the chemistry and macroscopic composition that are unique to moon rocks.
No, what bothers me is one single authority having a monopoly on something.
I didn't say there was anything wrong. I simply said it was annoying.
The idea that all the moon rock in the world is owned by the US government and any in private hands must therefor be stolen is somehow very annoying to me. Makes me wonder if you could finance a robotic trip to the moon that had the goal of returning 100kg of moonrock and selling it on the open market. Then NASA would have a much harder time proving that people didn't privately own moonrock.
It’s the belief that you’re somehow better than other people for only eating what you kill yourself that is a sign of “going off the deep end”. It’s also smug and rather offensive. (I also don’t see him living on a farm, doing all the work it takes before you actually put the animals to slaughter.)
I didn't get the sense of smugness at all. It seemed to me like it was a personal choice motivated by a desire to fully appreciate where his meat came from.
And that's true, I can't really see him putting in the time and effort to make a farm work himself. Even going to a farm will help you appreciate just how much time and effort it is, but yeah, I still agree with you there. :-)
When you live on a farm where you raise animals and eat them, yes, killing animals for food is normal.
When you live in a big city and you normally never come close to an animal while it is alive, switching to a mode where you eat no animals except those you've personally killed is "going off the deep end".
On the contrary. I think someone who was raised on a farm who decides that they must only eat animals they've killed themselves is a bit strange. They already have had to face exactly what goes on.
Someone who never has, I can understand deciding that slaughtering your own animals is the only way to bring the point home to yourself. It's very easy to not really understand. I think it's a moral ill of society that most people don't really know.
Primitive hunter-gatherers understood. Many of them had rituals thanking the animal for its life. In modern society its all packaged so most people can avoid having to know or think about it. As I said, I think that we're poorer for it. I wish more people realized. We'd have more vegetarians, and I think a better appreciation for the fact that we're part of the ecosystem.
I think people's 'ick' reaction is a perfect example. They don't want to have to think about it. And think people who put themselves in the position of having to must be somehow broken or disturbed. If he had lived in a house where a housekeeper always did the cleaning, nobody would raise an eyebrow if he said he was going to fire his housekeeper and do his own housecleaning for awhile in order to understand the housekeeper's life a bit better.
I doubt he'll do it forever. It's very time consuming. But I don't really care if he does, and I don't think it's in any way a negative thing.
Presumably you raised livestock and sold it for money knowing full well it would be slaughtered for others to eat.
Nope, we butchered all of our own animals. Sometimes we sold the meat to neighbors. But we were not a big operation, just a fairly small family farm designed mostly to feed ourselves.