It's not the same as deciding he's innocent, that's true: in the "deciding" sense of "a legal decision". Since the charges are dropped, there is no legal decision. Since you're innocent until proven guilty, he remains (is now and was before) innocent.
In the other sense of "decide", the prosecutor made a decision to drop the case, and now he remains innocent.
Your false dichotomy assumes that the chance of the interference from a personal electronic device is either 0% or 100%. (Or at least, near enough to 100% to be used as an attack.)
It's obviously not 100%. I know plenty of people who have forgotten to turn off cell phones and other devices for the entire duration of the flight. That doesn't guarantee that the interference from the devices could never cause a fatal problem.
Assuming the sensor isn't destroyed by the lightning, the EM radiation from a lightning strike that would cause interference is short-lived. It probably does cause interference with a number of sensors, but only for a short time. If a personal electronic device is causing interference, that interference is likely to persist for the entire flight.
I didn't say it was likely, I said it was possible. The summary, and perhaps the article, probably discard qualifiers. But, for that matter, I don't think the world of "real hackers" is particularly vast. Even the world of online criminals is often mentioned as being not particularly vast: one website will broker half of stolen credit card trades, three banks process the sales from most spam, one botnet is responsible for 75% of spam, etc.
While your complaint is legitimate, there's nothing inherently uncountable in a vast, anonymous group. Consider a group where (a) there are lots of members (b) you don't know the real identities of any of those members (c) you do have a complete listing of the fake identities of all of the members. It's vast, anonymous, and countable.
I don't forget it: in account of money supply, the liability to the bank doesn't count. If the bank has third-party reserves, both Charlie's money and Alice's money can be "spent". The total actual currency remains fixed at 100 bc, but the money supply is increased by virtue of making partial-reserve loans.
Both Wikipedia and Khan Academy have fairly good descriptions of this not-so-obvious effect.
Except in this case there really would be 100 bitcoins because anyone could go look at the hash chain and discover exactly who (or which public key) has the bitcoins they just deposited in the bank.
It depends on your definition of "how much money" there is. You can do fractional-reserve banking and artificially increase the money supply even with things like pieces of gold. (It's easier if you can issue promissory notes that people accept as money, but that's not mandatory.) Sure, you can accurately measure where the money is and what the money multiplier is, but you can do a pretty decent job of that now.
A purchase and a debt are not the same thing. A person is not required to accept U.S. currency in exchange for goods or services. However, creditors must accept U.S. currency to pay off debts.
Don't worry, this doesn't count as defending bitcoins.
How would you able to give more in loans, than what you've collected in debit accounts?
Oh, you can't. Well, you could, if people accepted promissory notes from your bank as acceptable payment. But let's assume they don't do that.
This is a ten-second lesson on how banks increase the money supply: Alice deposits 100 bitcoins in the Bank. Alice has a 100-bc deposit receipt. The Bank has a 100 bc and a 100-bc liability to Alice. Charlie loans 100 bitcoins from the Bank. Charlie has 100 bc and Alice has a 100-bc deposit receipt. The Bank has 0 bc, a 100-bc liability, and 100 bc owed to it.
While someone who is trying to track where the "real" currency is will say that only 100 bc exists between the three entities, by typical accounting methods, the three people combined now have 200 bc: Charlie's cash and Alice's promissory note.
A fair objection is that you can't spend this promissory note, but to handle this, you need a bigger example: a bank that has many deposits, makes a fair number of loans, and then keeps a fraction of the deposited currency in cash to cover withdrawals. Averaged over all the depositors, the course of a transaction goes: a person withdraws a small fraction of their total deposit for a purchase, the money is transferred to the other party in the transaction, the other party deposits it in their bank. The actual cash is outside of banks for a brief time. Now you just need a system where if too much cash accrues in one bank and too little in the other, the banks exchange cash reserves. Welcome to fractional-reserve banking, the modern method for increasing the money supply.
There's actually multiple definitions: Medically, a narcotic is a drug that induces sleep. Chemically, "narcotic" usually now refers to opioids (this is the definition you had in mind). Legally, "narcotic" refers to classes of drugs that are prohibited or strictly controlled, regardless of whether they meet one of the above definitions (this is the sense the article uses).
Actually, the primary use of bitcoin is as an intermediary. You buy bitcoins for dollars, make a transaction, and the other party sells the bitcoins for dollars. You have to pay some fees, but these are comparable to the fees you'd pay for, say, using PayPal to transfer money. You also take on the risk that over the course of the transaction the value of a bitcoin (in dollars) changes, so you probably want to hold bitcoins for as short a time as possible. What you get in return is that the only traceable transactions are between each party and the bitcoin exchange; there's no traceable transaction between the two parties. That's the same benefit you get with cash, except that you can send bitcoins digitally and you can't send cash digitally.
And yes, people really use bitcoins to buy things: drugs.
It has already been subject to staggering inflation: the value of a bitcoin relative to purchasable goods (and to other currencies) has increased dramatically.
The creators seem to think that you can't "create more bitcoins" outside of the predetermined schedule (and eventually, can't create any at all), which is only true in a sense. If bitcoins were popular enough, an enterprising individual would set up a bitcoin bank where you can invest bitcoins and take out bitcoin loans. There, now you've created bitcoins in exactly the same way that modern banks create money (er, "increase the money supply") without actually mining new bitcoins.
Of course, once you're near the bitcoin limit, it would be silly to take on bitcoin debt. Since there's a fixed quantity of backing (real bitcoins, as opposed to bitcoin-denominated notes), it could easily experience deflation, which makes debt very expensive.
While certain sorts of people like to claim that inflation is a tax, it promotes owning equity over currency and is beneficial for anyone with debt. Deflation is fairly destructive. (Hoping for neither never seems to work out.)
If both parties in the trade, the website facilitating the trade, the domain registrar for the website, and "financial agencies" brokering the transaction are all located outside the U.S., nothing.
Exchanges like Mt. Gox will trade dollars for bitcoins and vice versa.
There was an article recently on a popular drug-purchasing website that is hosted as a Tor service and uses bitcoins. The drugs are sent to you in the mail. This of course gives you no anonymity at all. Only the money and the website are anonymous.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not the same as deciding he's innocent, that's true: in the "deciding" sense of "a legal decision". Since the charges are dropped, there is no legal decision. Since you're innocent until proven guilty, he remains (is now and was before) innocent.
In the other sense of "decide", the prosecutor made a decision to drop the case, and now he remains innocent.
It's completely reasonable to act on one ethical problem and ignore another. That approach may offend *your* sense of ethics, but you're not Apple.
Cell phones emit enough power to induce measurable currents in the cell tower they're connected to, which is usually more than a couple feet away.
Your false dichotomy assumes that the chance of the interference from a personal electronic device is either 0% or 100%. (Or at least, near enough to 100% to be used as an attack.)
It's obviously not 100%. I know plenty of people who have forgotten to turn off cell phones and other devices for the entire duration of the flight. That doesn't guarantee that the interference from the devices could never cause a fatal problem.
Assuming the sensor isn't destroyed by the lightning, the EM radiation from a lightning strike that would cause interference is short-lived. It probably does cause interference with a number of sensors, but only for a short time. If a personal electronic device is causing interference, that interference is likely to persist for the entire flight.
The age distribution isn't particularly balanced, but you can find measured age distributions: Nielsen measures it for each console every month.
Have you ever stopped to think that someone has probably actually measured the age distribution of Xbox gamers?
The answer is that 44% are under 18, and another 26% are 18-24.
Only if everyone has debts.
I didn't say it was likely, I said it was possible. The summary, and perhaps the article, probably discard qualifiers. But, for that matter, I don't think the world of "real hackers" is particularly vast. Even the world of online criminals is often mentioned as being not particularly vast: one website will broker half of stolen credit card trades, three banks process the sales from most spam, one botnet is responsible for 75% of spam, etc.
Nope. The anode and cathode in a car battery are lead/lead oxide/lead sulfate plates. There's an aqueous electrolyte, like in any wet cell battery.
While your complaint is legitimate, there's nothing inherently uncountable in a vast, anonymous group. Consider a group where (a) there are lots of members (b) you don't know the real identities of any of those members (c) you do have a complete listing of the fake identities of all of the members. It's vast, anonymous, and countable.
I don't forget it: in account of money supply, the liability to the bank doesn't count. If the bank has third-party reserves, both Charlie's money and Alice's money can be "spent". The total actual currency remains fixed at 100 bc, but the money supply is increased by virtue of making partial-reserve loans.
Both Wikipedia and Khan Academy have fairly good descriptions of this not-so-obvious effect.
Except in this case there really would be 100 bitcoins because anyone could go look at the hash chain and discover exactly who (or which public key) has the bitcoins they just deposited in the bank.
It depends on your definition of "how much money" there is. You can do fractional-reserve banking and artificially increase the money supply even with things like pieces of gold. (It's easier if you can issue promissory notes that people accept as money, but that's not mandatory.) Sure, you can accurately measure where the money is and what the money multiplier is, but you can do a pretty decent job of that now.
A purchase and a debt are not the same thing. A person is not required to accept U.S. currency in exchange for goods or services. However, creditors must accept U.S. currency to pay off debts.
You most certainly can.
I really hate to defend Bitcoin, but ...
Don't worry, this doesn't count as defending bitcoins.
How would you able to give more in loans, than what you've collected in debit accounts?
Oh, you can't. Well, you could, if people accepted promissory notes from your bank as acceptable payment. But let's assume they don't do that.
This is a ten-second lesson on how banks increase the money supply:
Alice deposits 100 bitcoins in the Bank. Alice has a 100-bc deposit receipt. The Bank has a 100 bc and a 100-bc liability to Alice.
Charlie loans 100 bitcoins from the Bank. Charlie has 100 bc and Alice has a 100-bc deposit receipt. The Bank has 0 bc, a 100-bc liability, and 100 bc owed to it.
While someone who is trying to track where the "real" currency is will say that only 100 bc exists between the three entities, by typical accounting methods, the three people combined now have 200 bc: Charlie's cash and Alice's promissory note.
A fair objection is that you can't spend this promissory note, but to handle this, you need a bigger example: a bank that has many deposits, makes a fair number of loans, and then keeps a fraction of the deposited currency in cash to cover withdrawals. Averaged over all the depositors, the course of a transaction goes: a person withdraws a small fraction of their total deposit for a purchase, the money is transferred to the other party in the transaction, the other party deposits it in their bank. The actual cash is outside of banks for a brief time. Now you just need a system where if too much cash accrues in one bank and too little in the other, the banks exchange cash reserves. Welcome to fractional-reserve banking, the modern method for increasing the money supply.
Those are used until a name is decided on.
There's actually multiple definitions:
Medically, a narcotic is a drug that induces sleep.
Chemically, "narcotic" usually now refers to opioids (this is the definition you had in mind).
Legally, "narcotic" refers to classes of drugs that are prohibited or strictly controlled, regardless of whether they meet one of the above definitions (this is the sense the article uses).
Actually, the primary use of bitcoin is as an intermediary. You buy bitcoins for dollars, make a transaction, and the other party sells the bitcoins for dollars. You have to pay some fees, but these are comparable to the fees you'd pay for, say, using PayPal to transfer money. You also take on the risk that over the course of the transaction the value of a bitcoin (in dollars) changes, so you probably want to hold bitcoins for as short a time as possible. What you get in return is that the only traceable transactions are between each party and the bitcoin exchange; there's no traceable transaction between the two parties. That's the same benefit you get with cash, except that you can send bitcoins digitally and you can't send cash digitally.
And yes, people really use bitcoins to buy things: drugs.
You can use the dollar to pay U.S. taxes or to pay any debt in the U.S.
It has already been subject to staggering inflation: the value of a bitcoin relative to purchasable goods (and to other currencies) has increased dramatically.
The creators seem to think that you can't "create more bitcoins" outside of the predetermined schedule (and eventually, can't create any at all), which is only true in a sense. If bitcoins were popular enough, an enterprising individual would set up a bitcoin bank where you can invest bitcoins and take out bitcoin loans. There, now you've created bitcoins in exactly the same way that modern banks create money (er, "increase the money supply") without actually mining new bitcoins.
Of course, once you're near the bitcoin limit, it would be silly to take on bitcoin debt. Since there's a fixed quantity of backing (real bitcoins, as opposed to bitcoin-denominated notes), it could easily experience deflation, which makes debt very expensive.
While certain sorts of people like to claim that inflation is a tax, it promotes owning equity over currency and is beneficial for anyone with debt. Deflation is fairly destructive. (Hoping for neither never seems to work out.)
If both parties in the trade, the website facilitating the trade, the domain registrar for the website, and "financial agencies" brokering the transaction are all located outside the U.S., nothing.
Exchanges like Mt. Gox will trade dollars for bitcoins and vice versa.
There was an article recently on a popular drug-purchasing website that is hosted as a Tor service and uses bitcoins. The drugs are sent to you in the mail. This of course gives you no anonymity at all. Only the money and the website are anonymous.
That's only one step worse than most Slashdot readers, who apparently have only read one book.
I won't keep you in suspense. It's 1984. Although a few real bookworms have also read Atlas Shrugged.
No, you can buy unpasteurized cheese in the US.