They can claim all the authority they want. The source code is open. They can also claim authority to regulate the process of calculus too. They can pay rewards to snitches who turn in people doing unreported calculus, and some people will probably get caught.
The US government does have a great deal of control over the US dollar. So they might be able to regulate the trading of US dollars with bitcoin, but this will be as limited as the government's ability to prevent other illegal things with US currency. And they will have zero control over trading bitcoin with currencies they do not control.
You can get HIV from hunting primates in Africa.
I am not talking about what can and can't be reasonably be inferred from knowing someone has an STD. I am saying that the actual reasons for why they have those STDs are likely to be in their medical records, and lots of that information can be used to blackmail those people.
Watch less TV and read more!
I actually don't watch TV at all. It was a joke. Furthermore, what you read matters. This idea that reading text is inherently better than listening to speech, is nonsense. Watching a good movie or documentary that causes you to grow as a person is going to be better than reading some trashy novel like 50 shades of gray. Not to mention the fact that knowing how to decode Latin symbols into the English language does not necessarily imply comprehension.
There is a difference between paying taxes to entity X and having that money spent on entity X. If some of my tax money goes to helping earthquake victims in Haiti, it doesn't make me a Haitian taxpayer.
I don't think the soccer moms would like it very much if the school reacting hysterically by calling the cops on white kids for having cell phones that might be used to trigger IEDs.
People don't get STDs in monogamous relationships. Part of dealing with an STD is figuring out how you got it, who you got it from and who you maybe gave it to, and that is all stuff you may have told your doctor if you want good healthcare. The reason medical record are confidential is because honesty is crucial to good healthcare. Have you not seen House?
I think it's very plausible that you might tell your doctor that you have not been monogamous or that you have hired prostitutes or used illegal drugs, etc. These are all things you can be blackmailed with.
Well given that about 70% of Americans (men and women) have cheated on their partners, and the number of people that have actually committed treason against the United States is a much smaller percentage (far less than 1%), I'd say that your claim that cheating on your partner implies a willingness to be disloyal to your country is about as false as any claim can be.
That's like saying being a non-virgin implies that you are willing to be a rapist. The facts simply do not support these claims.
So even if you're not a Texas, you pay taxes that are spent there
Which is still different than being a Texas taxpayer. Federal tax money is *spent* all over the globe. I don't consider myself to be a taxpayer in every country in the world where Federal money is spent.
There is a difference between personally possessing unknown electronics and distributing unknown electronics all across the city in populated public places.
The same response may have happened if they were caught distributing backpacks all over town.
Simply having electronics is nothing like what happened in Boston.
There are people who don't pay taxes. For instance, I am not a Texas taxpayer. I pay no taxes to Texas. "Taxpayer" is a convenient way to denote the people who pay taxes in the context of where the term is used.
It can refer to particular jurisdictions: Nation, state, county, city, etc. It can refer to particular taxes: income, sales, property, gas, consumption, estate, capital gains, etc.
Furthermore, there are no doubt, some people who indeed pay no taxes, and the term "taxpayer" distinguishes those people from the people who do.
The fact that some people need to be corrected in their conflation of "tax payer" with "federal income tax payer" is not a good reason to legitimize this inference.
I would imagine that the TSA has a better idea (I hope anyway) what a bomb actually looks like. And that picture actually does kind of look like a bomb (i.e. unlike the hobby clock referenced in this article).
I don't expect a school teacher to know what a bomb looks like. I would also hope that a school teacher realizes they don't know what a bomb looks like, and have some fucking common sense and "electronics + muslim == bomb" doesn't count.
So lets say a teacher calls the swat team on a kid with a cell phone, thinking that cell phones are used to blow up IEDs. How fucking stupid does a decision have to be before the "I was just being cautious" no longer work as a reasonable defense?
The problem isn't reacting when there is a reasonable threat, it is misjudging a ridiculous threat to be reasonable. For the same reason that tackling a kid with a cellphone (possibly an IED detonator) is retarded, tackling a kid with Muslim parents holding a circuit board "he claims is a clock he made" is also retarded.
They are not reacting logically. Yes it is logical to react very cautiously if there is a good reason to assume there is actually a bomb. The dumb part is assuming that circuit boards (if possessed by a muslim kid) are bombs. There are circuit boards in every computer and most of the electronics in that school.
They may as well arrest the kid for having a cell phone, because cell phones are used to blow up IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan.
If you need someone to blame, blame idiot parents.
Rather than blaming the kids parents for fostering an interest in electronics (and giving their child a name consistent with their culture/religion), I would much rather blame idiot adults who base their decisions on what they see in television shows (bombs are circuit boards, and muslims are terrorists).
Former secretary of state and Democratic presidential candidiate Hillary Clinton joined the tidal wave of tweets supporting Mohamed Ahmed after his arrest Monday for bringing a homemade digital clock to school.
"Assumptions and fear don't keep us safe -- they hold us back. Ahmed, stay curious and keep building," Clinton's tweet read.
Hillary Clinton, in the 2008 democratic primary race, circulated pictures of Barack Obama in "Muslim" (actually African) clothing, in order to feed into the false narrative that Barack Obama was a secret Muslim. Hillary Clinton knows all about fears and assumptions, especially when it comes to Muslim stereotypes.
Clinton trying to take the high ground, when she is one of the worst offenders, is her modus operandi. I don't think I would necessarily like a president Trump (or any of the current republican field) either, but a President Hillary Clinton is a pretty horrendous outcome in my mind.
Another way to put it... If we find an instance of a kangaroo court that occurred in Denmark's history, can we as the US claim to have a justice system of equal fairness to Denmark? If you really believe that justice is binary (a system is either just or unjust/ there is not spectrum of Justice), then what you are saying is that Somalia is as just as Denmark (i.e. equally imperfect and unjust).
A kangaroo court is inherently unjust. There isn't one that is any less than the other, unless you're willing to say that some types of unfairness in the court are okay but others are not.
Saying A is worse than B, is not the same as saying B is OK.
Saying the holocaust was worse than the murder of a random person on a subway, does not mean that murdering people randomly on the subway is OK.
Arguably, due to the way the corruption is open to the general public and not just the wealthy (as is the case in the US), the russian courts are more fair since everyone legitimately has the option to pay their way out.
Yeah everyone has the option to pay their way out, including the thugs who murdered your whole family. Allowing everyone to avoid justice through bribery is simply evidence of a complete lack of a justice system. It is simply a system of extortion masquerading as a justice system.
And yes we have corruption in our justice system in the US, but it is still a justice system, if albeit an imperfect one.
This is not condoning bribery, but we shouldn't point to someone else's shit to cover up the stink of our own.
We also shouldn't let our own stink blind us to obvious differences in magnitude of stink.
If you look at rankings of corruption by country the US is 17th and Russia is 136th out of 175 total countries ranked. No justice system is perfect, but It's absolutely crazy to say that Denmark is equally corrupt as Somalia, if they've had at least one kangaroo court in their history.
To ignore differences in magnitude is to say that there is no point in making our justice system better, because until we make it perfect (which is impossible), we will be inherently just as bad as Russia.
The problem is that existing governmental currencies are printed by those governments. Bitcoin is "mined" (meaning it can't simple be printed through very little effort). A government could decide to adopt and sanction a crypto-currency like bitcoin if it wanted, but it would have no direct control over the creation of that currency.
Bitcoin is basically like gold that is easier to store and transfer. No government gets to decide to make more gold simply by typing a sequence of keys on a keyboard. Mining gold comes at a cost, and this cost of mining gold is what prevents the price of gold from falling below some reasonable minimum.
If the Federal Reserve wanted to, they could hyper-inflate the USD to being worth not even the paper it's printed on (by simply creating as muhc of it as they want). Obviously they don't want to, but other governments have done exactly that. The Federal Reserve would not be able to as easily effect the price of gold with so little effort. The worst they could do is try to mine as much gold as possible and flood the market, but the effect would be limited to the amount of gold they could actually mine.
Stealing is still illegal, even if the thing being stolen is not currency backed by a world government. Hell, someone can steal US$ from you, and if it wasn't in an FDIC insured account, the US government won't reimburse you either.
There are plenty of dumb things done by the people who had their bitcoins stolen. Investing in a currency that is not controlled by a world government isn't one of them. Look at all the people who had held Yugoslavian dinars or Zimbabwe dollars.
pretty much still can not choose whether or not you want Microsoft products (and associated costs) when you buy a new machine.
I've literally never purchased a computer that came with a windows license. And I've purchased maybe 25 or so in my life. I probably will at some point. I am not morally opposed to it. But it is certainly possible.
Maybe google should take a page from microsoft and simply combine the android OS with the services it bundles. Then it won't be bundling anything. It will simply be offering an OS that you can choose to use or not use.
You think that somehow the US kangaroo courts are any more just?
Exactly. The kangaroo courts in Russia are definitely less just than US kangaroo courts. Just like how we have corruption in the US, and it is that much less than the corruption in Russia.
The difference between the corruption of the USA and Russia is like the difference in the destructive power of a tomahawk missile and a nuclear bomb. Yes they are both very destructive, but one is many orders of magnitude more destructive.
Slashdot Mirror
They can claim all the authority they want. The source code is open. They can also claim authority to regulate the process of calculus too. They can pay rewards to snitches who turn in people doing unreported calculus, and some people will probably get caught.
The US government does have a great deal of control over the US dollar. So they might be able to regulate the trading of US dollars with bitcoin, but this will be as limited as the government's ability to prevent other illegal things with US currency. And they will have zero control over trading bitcoin with currencies they do not control.
You can get herpes from a drinking glass
You can get HIV from hunting primates in Africa. I am not talking about what can and can't be reasonably be inferred from knowing someone has an STD. I am saying that the actual reasons for why they have those STDs are likely to be in their medical records, and lots of that information can be used to blackmail those people.
Watch less TV and read more!
I actually don't watch TV at all. It was a joke. Furthermore, what you read matters. This idea that reading text is inherently better than listening to speech, is nonsense. Watching a good movie or documentary that causes you to grow as a person is going to be better than reading some trashy novel like 50 shades of gray. Not to mention the fact that knowing how to decode Latin symbols into the English language does not necessarily imply comprehension.
There is a difference between paying taxes to entity X and having that money spent on entity X. If some of my tax money goes to helping earthquake victims in Haiti, it doesn't make me a Haitian taxpayer.
The "simple" fix is more litigation?
I don't think the soccer moms would like it very much if the school reacting hysterically by calling the cops on white kids for having cell phones that might be used to trigger IEDs.
People don't get STDs in monogamous relationships. Part of dealing with an STD is figuring out how you got it, who you got it from and who you maybe gave it to, and that is all stuff you may have told your doctor if you want good healthcare. The reason medical record are confidential is because honesty is crucial to good healthcare. Have you not seen House?
I think it's very plausible that you might tell your doctor that you have not been monogamous or that you have hired prostitutes or used illegal drugs, etc. These are all things you can be blackmailed with.
Well given that about 70% of Americans (men and women) have cheated on their partners, and the number of people that have actually committed treason against the United States is a much smaller percentage (far less than 1%), I'd say that your claim that cheating on your partner implies a willingness to be disloyal to your country is about as false as any claim can be.
That's like saying being a non-virgin implies that you are willing to be a rapist. The facts simply do not support these claims.
So even if you're not a Texas, you pay taxes that are spent there
Which is still different than being a Texas taxpayer. Federal tax money is *spent* all over the globe. I don't consider myself to be a taxpayer in every country in the world where Federal money is spent.
There is a difference between personally possessing unknown electronics and distributing unknown electronics all across the city in populated public places.
The same response may have happened if they were caught distributing backpacks all over town.
Simply having electronics is nothing like what happened in Boston.
There are people who don't pay taxes. For instance, I am not a Texas taxpayer. I pay no taxes to Texas. "Taxpayer" is a convenient way to denote the people who pay taxes in the context of where the term is used.
It can refer to particular jurisdictions: Nation, state, county, city, etc. It can refer to particular taxes: income, sales, property, gas, consumption, estate, capital gains, etc.
Furthermore, there are no doubt, some people who indeed pay no taxes, and the term "taxpayer" distinguishes those people from the people who do.
The fact that some people need to be corrected in their conflation of "tax payer" with "federal income tax payer" is not a good reason to legitimize this inference.
You still live under the impression of American Exceptionalism
You apparently can't read.
I'm not sure how being 17th counts as exceptionalism. We are terrible. This doesn't change the fact that Russia is *worse* in this regard.
I would imagine that the TSA has a better idea (I hope anyway) what a bomb actually looks like. And that picture actually does kind of look like a bomb (i.e. unlike the hobby clock referenced in this article).
I don't expect a school teacher to know what a bomb looks like. I would also hope that a school teacher realizes they don't know what a bomb looks like, and have some fucking common sense and "electronics + muslim == bomb" doesn't count.
So lets say a teacher calls the swat team on a kid with a cell phone, thinking that cell phones are used to blow up IEDs. How fucking stupid does a decision have to be before the "I was just being cautious" no longer work as a reasonable defense?
The problem isn't reacting when there is a reasonable threat, it is misjudging a ridiculous threat to be reasonable. For the same reason that tackling a kid with a cellphone (possibly an IED detonator) is retarded, tackling a kid with Muslim parents holding a circuit board "he claims is a clock he made" is also retarded.
They are not reacting logically. Yes it is logical to react very cautiously if there is a good reason to assume there is actually a bomb. The dumb part is assuming that circuit boards (if possessed by a muslim kid) are bombs. There are circuit boards in every computer and most of the electronics in that school.
They may as well arrest the kid for having a cell phone, because cell phones are used to blow up IEDs in Iraq and Afghanistan.
If you need someone to blame, blame idiot parents.
Rather than blaming the kids parents for fostering an interest in electronics (and giving their child a name consistent with their culture/religion), I would much rather blame idiot adults who base their decisions on what they see in television shows (bombs are circuit boards, and muslims are terrorists).
Former secretary of state and Democratic presidential candidiate Hillary Clinton joined the tidal wave of tweets supporting Mohamed Ahmed after his arrest Monday for bringing a homemade digital clock to school.
"Assumptions and fear don't keep us safe -- they hold us back. Ahmed, stay curious and keep building," Clinton's tweet read.
Hillary Clinton, in the 2008 democratic primary race, circulated pictures of Barack Obama in "Muslim" (actually African) clothing, in order to feed into the false narrative that Barack Obama was a secret Muslim. Hillary Clinton knows all about fears and assumptions, especially when it comes to Muslim stereotypes.
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2008/feb/25/barackobama.hillaryclinton
Clinton trying to take the high ground, when she is one of the worst offenders, is her modus operandi. I don't think I would necessarily like a president Trump (or any of the current republican field) either, but a President Hillary Clinton is a pretty horrendous outcome in my mind.
Another way to put it... If we find an instance of a kangaroo court that occurred in Denmark's history, can we as the US claim to have a justice system of equal fairness to Denmark? If you really believe that justice is binary (a system is either just or unjust/ there is not spectrum of Justice), then what you are saying is that Somalia is as just as Denmark (i.e. equally imperfect and unjust).
A kangaroo court is inherently unjust. There isn't one that is any less than the other, unless you're willing to say that some types of unfairness in the court are okay but others are not.
Saying A is worse than B, is not the same as saying B is OK.
Saying the holocaust was worse than the murder of a random person on a subway, does not mean that murdering people randomly on the subway is OK.
Arguably, due to the way the corruption is open to the general public and not just the wealthy (as is the case in the US), the russian courts are more fair since everyone legitimately has the option to pay their way out.
Yeah everyone has the option to pay their way out, including the thugs who murdered your whole family. Allowing everyone to avoid justice through bribery is simply evidence of a complete lack of a justice system. It is simply a system of extortion masquerading as a justice system.
And yes we have corruption in our justice system in the US, but it is still a justice system, if albeit an imperfect one.
This is not condoning bribery, but we shouldn't point to someone else's shit to cover up the stink of our own.
We also shouldn't let our own stink blind us to obvious differences in magnitude of stink.
If you look at rankings of corruption by country the US is 17th and Russia is 136th out of 175 total countries ranked. No justice system is perfect, but It's absolutely crazy to say that Denmark is equally corrupt as Somalia, if they've had at least one kangaroo court in their history.
To ignore differences in magnitude is to say that there is no point in making our justice system better, because until we make it perfect (which is impossible), we will be inherently just as bad as Russia.
The problem is that existing governmental currencies are printed by those governments. Bitcoin is "mined" (meaning it can't simple be printed through very little effort). A government could decide to adopt and sanction a crypto-currency like bitcoin if it wanted, but it would have no direct control over the creation of that currency.
Bitcoin is basically like gold that is easier to store and transfer. No government gets to decide to make more gold simply by typing a sequence of keys on a keyboard. Mining gold comes at a cost, and this cost of mining gold is what prevents the price of gold from falling below some reasonable minimum.
If the Federal Reserve wanted to, they could hyper-inflate the USD to being worth not even the paper it's printed on (by simply creating as muhc of it as they want). Obviously they don't want to, but other governments have done exactly that. The Federal Reserve would not be able to as easily effect the price of gold with so little effort. The worst they could do is try to mine as much gold as possible and flood the market, but the effect would be limited to the amount of gold they could actually mine.
Stealing is still illegal, even if the thing being stolen is not currency backed by a world government. Hell, someone can steal US$ from you, and if it wasn't in an FDIC insured account, the US government won't reimburse you either.
There are plenty of dumb things done by the people who had their bitcoins stolen. Investing in a currency that is not controlled by a world government isn't one of them. Look at all the people who had held Yugoslavian dinars or Zimbabwe dollars.
That's like saying a VW bus and a galaxy are both big.
pretty much still can not choose whether or not you want Microsoft products (and associated costs) when you buy a new machine.
I've literally never purchased a computer that came with a windows license. And I've purchased maybe 25 or so in my life. I probably will at some point. I am not morally opposed to it. But it is certainly possible.
That explains why corruption is equally problematic in Denmark as in Somalia. /s
Maybe google should take a page from microsoft and simply combine the android OS with the services it bundles. Then it won't be bundling anything. It will simply be offering an OS that you can choose to use or not use.
You think that somehow the US kangaroo courts are any more just?
Exactly. The kangaroo courts in Russia are definitely less just than US kangaroo courts. Just like how we have corruption in the US, and it is that much less than the corruption in Russia.
The difference between the corruption of the USA and Russia is like the difference in the destructive power of a tomahawk missile and a nuclear bomb. Yes they are both very destructive, but one is many orders of magnitude more destructive.