The thing I absolutely _LOVE_ about the Apple ecosystem is the absolute certainty of the people who just got one that they know _everything_ there ever was to know about them, back to the original Apple I to hear some talk about it.
Case in point, I own an iPad 1, actually won it in a contest, but, whatever, we've had it since about 3 months after the iPad first came out. A few months ago, the USB-30pin cable that came with it died - bad strain relief, pretty typical of Apple products of the era, including MacBookPro mag-lock power connectors, but, whatever, it lasted like five years or whatever it's been, pretty good in my book. So, we go to the Apple store, wait in line to talk to a hipster/genius/whatever they call them, and he proceeds to inform me with absolute certainty that my cable is 3rd party cheap junk, and that's why it failed, and see here how the "real" Apple cables are made differently... and he can't even comprehend when I told him that this is the OEM cable that came with the iPad, out of the factory box, and I've never bought a 3rd party cable in my life...
So, about that option that doesn't exist on Tomcat or whatever the hell they call it this week, the option was present in Tiger, or was it Leopard?, whatever they shipped with my MacBookPro in mid 2006. Yes, oh my gawd, like almost ten years ago, how can you even think that it's like the same company? Well, they still act like the same company, and encrypting home folders has been "a thing" since the early 1990s, so I thought that after, you know, like 15 years of development, that an option that was shown prominently in the stark, minimalist, brushed metal system settings window of the "just works" OS might, you know, work? Properly, even? But, alas, some driver problem with the OS vendor's bespoke graphics chip was causing shutdown problems, leading to improper shutdown, leading to corruption of the encrypted home folder, leading to inability to boot. Bricked inside a week, call Jesus.
And, yes, there's a world of difference between the desktop OS and the mobile OS, most notably the "walled garden, can't run that here" attitude of the mobile OS that leaves me happily developing my wares outside, for other platforms. So, sorry if I called the feral cat desktop OS by it's mobile sibling's over-hyped market name. I'm stuck here waiting for an extended file transfer and have nothing better to do than ramble, for the moment. If you're not entertained, please move along.
I tried the iOS encrypt home drive option once, bricked my new MacBookPro inside a week, had to reinstall iOS from scratch with special help from a tech named Jesus.
Layers upon layers - there's the "common" model that goes out to all field personnel and is assumed to be compromised within a few months.
Then, there's high security model that is designed to look like the common model, but goes only to high value targets and might be redesigned and redeployed every time one gets lost.
Then, there's the higher security model that is designed to look like the high security model, but....
Is it any wonder that a toilet seat can cost $9,000?
If I were an average ATM attacker, I'd be more interested in the cash it contains than any data. You can pick up credit account info anywhere, Target, for instance.
It's a cultural thing, passed down from the 17th century BCE when the mob would kidnap people who didn't pay their debts, haul them out to the desert and bury them to "sleep with the cheeses."
The "why" has been forgotten, but the distaste for cheese lingers on.
I don't think there is any clear conversion of liability in dollars to liability in bitcoins.
They are liable for Bitcoins that they don't have, they will likely never pay those back, just like their shortfall on the dollar side.
As any rabid Bitcoin user will tell you - conversion to dollars is irrelevant, the value is intrinsic. (Surpass any mint-stick, Or marshmallow mouthful you munch.)
Nobody slips on a banana and falls into prison. It takes hard work and long term dedication to get there.
Or, you can just piss off a cop - you know, give him an excuse to charge you with attempted vehicular manslaughter for pissing him off and then driving near him.
Think that doesn't happen? Try it and tell me how you do.
Next, tell me how most cops are great people and don't get into the profession just to throw their weight around and pay back injustices dealt to them. I agree - _most_ cops are great people. Now go piss off one who isn't - there are still plenty of them out there.
Does flinging poo explain all 81,000 people in solitary today? Even half of them?
I refer now to Toy Story 3 and the reset Buzz Lightyear's guard routine - do anything out of line and you go to "the box." There's a reason that skit resonates with people, it's all too real - the control freak's fantasy of what to do with their prisoners.
And, no, those weren't Lincoln Logs in the sandbox...
I guess that's what I'm saying, it's as simple as asking "do you live here?" If the person lies to them, they don't have time or resources to sort that out.
Cops don't have time for determining property ownership. If a person looks like a resident of a dwelling, then they are a resident of the dwelling.
Arguably, the warrant is all about the cops making time to determine whether or not they should be entering without permission.... I think this particular ruling is going to get nuanced, several times, before settling down as well understood case law.
Much of the value attributed to Bitcoin comes from the perception that it can be traded, easily, for traditional currency
I think this is definitely wrong and a large supermajority of Bitcoin users would say that exchanging it for traditional currencies is relatively difficult
Maybe. I used to be a Bitcoin user, I wouldn't have been if it had no fungibility, arguably, nobody would be. I held a coin for awhile, when my $5 "investment" could be cashed out for $150, I did.
I know a guy who was actively trading Bitcoins, around that $50 to $300 price window-time - he was effectively "making market" in coin, trading between several different exchanges, playing the classic buy low, sell high game. Maybe he wasn't a "Bitcoin user," but he, and thousands like him, are responsible for the real world valuation of Bitcoin becoming something resembling stable and attractive - without those kinds of market makers, you'd have to pay twice as much for a commodity as you could turn around and sell it for.
This is bait, but, without trading for real world currency, what, exactly, are Bitcoins good for? Sure, you can exchange them for goods and services at thousands of points in the world. I live in Jacksonville, and there are two registered Bitcoin accepters here, a lawyer and a parked web domain. So, how, in real life, does the lawyer spend these bitcoins he accepts for his services? The parked web domain doesn't seem to be offering anything of value. Meanwhile, there are 800,000 other people here, nearly all of whom will accept and give real world currency for goods and services.
Back in the day when a coin was $5 (I actually had one of those...), I think you would have been right - if MtGox had imploded then, in this fashion, it could have tailspun the whole thing into non-existence.
Not that Bitcoin is now "too big to fail," but I think that enough people are deeply enough invested into it at this point to rationalize their fears away and carry on - and probably invest a little bit in educating the world about how "it's really not as scary as all that." That education/pr campaign is going to be a lot more expensive now than it would have been if MtGox hadn't screwed up, but I think it's possible.
Me, personally, I can't get behind the whole Bitcoinesque cryptocurrency concept that requires global block chain validations - I can't conceive of that scaling well when attempting to replace even 1% of today's real money transactions, but that's my personal problem, it doesn't seem to bother the people who have invested 7 Billion-ish USD so far.
Funny, on the other end of this thread, I've got people telling me how MtGox hasn't been the "go-to" exchange for nearly six months now - an eternity in Bitcoin time.
I think FDIC came around in the 1930s - well before my parents were born in any case.
Well, the main place to do it is (was) MtGox. No it wasn't and hasn't been for a long time
Spoken like a truly "hip" trader of 'coin.
Value doesn't come from you guys, value comes from the unwashed masses who see a story on CNN and say "how can I get in on this Bitcoin thing?" Where, until very recently, would they end up placing their first buy order?
There's a budding market in Ford turn indicator lenses - they're exposed to unusually high levels of breakage and common across a large number of models, and the supplier that makes them is having labor troubles, something about the paperwork required to certify them for use growing exponentially.
So, some guy sets up an overseas depot that makes a market in these turn indicator lenses, they'll hook up buyers and sellers of the lenses and allow the market to find its own price point. For convenience, they will hold the actual lenses for you and you can just deal with them in cash.
Somebody runs a classic scam, resulting in less lenses being held at the depot than are promised to be held there. Now, if everybody wants to get their lenses all at once, there won't be enough to go around. The depot halts trading while they sort things out. Unless the scammer is caught and forced to cough up the goods, people are going to be taking a loss due to the missing lenses.
Other depots around the world haven't been scammed, that we know of, so they continue to trade.
One difference, most US "banks" that little kids are told are safe to put their money in have a little sticker in the window that says "FDLC insured" - meaning that your little slips of paper are not only backed by the bank, but also by the government.
Much of the value attributed to Bitcoin comes from the perception that it can be traded, easily, for traditional currency, and how do you do that? Well, the main place to do it is (was) MtGox.
If you hold a stock that trades on the NYSE, part of its value is that NYSE market. When stocks fall off the major exchanges onto "the pink sheets," they almost invariably lose value just from the de-listing.
The MtGox failure is worse, it's like a bank failure - your coins are in there, but can you get them out now?
Regardless of history, it is true that Bitcoin is "just another cryptocurrency" and MtGox is "just another exchange" but, they are both significant brands in their space, and perception of them will weigh heavily on all similar cryptocurrencies and exchanges, regardless of "reality."
I hired in "computer graphics" for many years. The post-interview test (50% weed out based on interview) was "transform this program that draws an empty box to draw a sine wave." 90% failure rate. I hired some of the failures and used them for other things with great success. I "helped" some of the near misses and gave them a trial run at a job that needed graphics programming skills - that was always a mistake.
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The thing I absolutely _LOVE_ about the Apple ecosystem is the absolute certainty of the people who just got one that they know _everything_ there ever was to know about them, back to the original Apple I to hear some talk about it.
Case in point, I own an iPad 1, actually won it in a contest, but, whatever, we've had it since about 3 months after the iPad first came out. A few months ago, the USB-30pin cable that came with it died - bad strain relief, pretty typical of Apple products of the era, including MacBookPro mag-lock power connectors, but, whatever, it lasted like five years or whatever it's been, pretty good in my book. So, we go to the Apple store, wait in line to talk to a hipster/genius/whatever they call them, and he proceeds to inform me with absolute certainty that my cable is 3rd party cheap junk, and that's why it failed, and see here how the "real" Apple cables are made differently... and he can't even comprehend when I told him that this is the OEM cable that came with the iPad, out of the factory box, and I've never bought a 3rd party cable in my life...
So, about that option that doesn't exist on Tomcat or whatever the hell they call it this week, the option was present in Tiger, or was it Leopard?, whatever they shipped with my MacBookPro in mid 2006. Yes, oh my gawd, like almost ten years ago, how can you even think that it's like the same company? Well, they still act like the same company, and encrypting home folders has been "a thing" since the early 1990s, so I thought that after, you know, like 15 years of development, that an option that was shown prominently in the stark, minimalist, brushed metal system settings window of the "just works" OS might, you know, work? Properly, even? But, alas, some driver problem with the OS vendor's bespoke graphics chip was causing shutdown problems, leading to improper shutdown, leading to corruption of the encrypted home folder, leading to inability to boot. Bricked inside a week, call Jesus.
And, yes, there's a world of difference between the desktop OS and the mobile OS, most notably the "walled garden, can't run that here" attitude of the mobile OS that leaves me happily developing my wares outside, for other platforms. So, sorry if I called the feral cat desktop OS by it's mobile sibling's over-hyped market name. I'm stuck here waiting for an extended file transfer and have nothing better to do than ramble, for the moment. If you're not entertained, please move along.
There's the low cost version that just looks like the secure one and is mandated for use by all contracted workers.
I had a Blackberry like that once.
I tried the iOS encrypt home drive option once, bricked my new MacBookPro inside a week, had to reinstall iOS from scratch with special help from a tech named Jesus.
Layers upon layers - there's the "common" model that goes out to all field personnel and is assumed to be compromised within a few months.
Then, there's high security model that is designed to look like the common model, but goes only to high value targets and might be redesigned and redeployed every time one gets lost.
Then, there's the higher security model that is designed to look like the high security model, but....
Is it any wonder that a toilet seat can cost $9,000?
If I were an average ATM attacker, I'd be more interested in the cash it contains than any data. You can pick up credit account info anywhere, Target, for instance.
"screws with a tamper-proof coating, revealing if a person has tried to disassemble it"
I'm pretty sure I would notice if someone took a dremel to my phone.
Yes, but would the data-wiping routines get activated? (Probably yes, unless you have a couple of phones to practice on and/or a good X-ray machine.)
It's a cultural thing, passed down from the 17th century BCE when the mob would kidnap people who didn't pay their debts, haul them out to the desert and bury them to "sleep with the cheeses."
The "why" has been forgotten, but the distaste for cheese lingers on.
I don't think there is any clear conversion of liability in dollars to liability in bitcoins.
They are liable for Bitcoins that they don't have, they will likely never pay those back, just like their shortfall on the dollar side.
As any rabid Bitcoin user will tell you - conversion to dollars is irrelevant, the value is intrinsic. (Surpass any mint-stick, Or marshmallow mouthful you munch.)
Nobody slips on a banana and falls into prison. It takes hard work and long term dedication to get there.
Or, you can just piss off a cop - you know, give him an excuse to charge you with attempted vehicular manslaughter for pissing him off and then driving near him.
Think that doesn't happen? Try it and tell me how you do.
Next, tell me how most cops are great people and don't get into the profession just to throw their weight around and pay back injustices dealt to them. I agree - _most_ cops are great people. Now go piss off one who isn't - there are still plenty of them out there.
Does flinging poo explain all 81,000 people in solitary today? Even half of them?
I refer now to Toy Story 3 and the reset Buzz Lightyear's guard routine - do anything out of line and you go to "the box." There's a reason that skit resonates with people, it's all too real - the control freak's fantasy of what to do with their prisoners.
And, no, those weren't Lincoln Logs in the sandbox...
I guess that's what I'm saying, it's as simple as asking "do you live here?" If the person lies to them, they don't have time or resources to sort that out.
Horseshoe crabs are hardly a forgotten species when they breed on beaches outside your back door...
Maybe this guy also forgot about the baby fur seals until somebody showed him a picture.
Cops don't have time for determining property ownership. If a person looks like a resident of a dwelling, then they are a resident of the dwelling.
Arguably, the warrant is all about the cops making time to determine whether or not they should be entering without permission.... I think this particular ruling is going to get nuanced, several times, before settling down as well understood case law.
I think this is definitely wrong and a large supermajority of Bitcoin users would say that exchanging it for traditional currencies is relatively difficult
Maybe. I used to be a Bitcoin user, I wouldn't have been if it had no fungibility, arguably, nobody would be. I held a coin for awhile, when my $5 "investment" could be cashed out for $150, I did.
I know a guy who was actively trading Bitcoins, around that $50 to $300 price window-time - he was effectively "making market" in coin, trading between several different exchanges, playing the classic buy low, sell high game. Maybe he wasn't a "Bitcoin user," but he, and thousands like him, are responsible for the real world valuation of Bitcoin becoming something resembling stable and attractive - without those kinds of market makers, you'd have to pay twice as much for a commodity as you could turn around and sell it for.
This is bait, but, without trading for real world currency, what, exactly, are Bitcoins good for? Sure, you can exchange them for goods and services at thousands of points in the world. I live in Jacksonville, and there are two registered Bitcoin accepters here, a lawyer and a parked web domain. So, how, in real life, does the lawyer spend these bitcoins he accepts for his services? The parked web domain doesn't seem to be offering anything of value. Meanwhile, there are 800,000 other people here, nearly all of whom will accept and give real world currency for goods and services.
So, it was the classic double payment scam, and there might have been a lot of scammers taking advantage.
Personally, I'd like MtGox to pursue the scammers and expose some of the worst ones, just to deflate this whole anonymity of Bitcoin myth.
Back in the day when a coin was $5 (I actually had one of those...), I think you would have been right - if MtGox had imploded then, in this fashion, it could have tailspun the whole thing into non-existence.
Not that Bitcoin is now "too big to fail," but I think that enough people are deeply enough invested into it at this point to rationalize their fears away and carry on - and probably invest a little bit in educating the world about how "it's really not as scary as all that." That education/pr campaign is going to be a lot more expensive now than it would have been if MtGox hadn't screwed up, but I think it's possible.
Me, personally, I can't get behind the whole Bitcoinesque cryptocurrency concept that requires global block chain validations - I can't conceive of that scaling well when attempting to replace even 1% of today's real money transactions, but that's my personal problem, it doesn't seem to bother the people who have invested 7 Billion-ish USD so far.
Banks have been gaining importance over the centuries.
Used to be that having a good store of grain for the winter was far more important than a few gold coins that you could keep in a pot behind the bed.
Funny, on the other end of this thread, I've got people telling me how MtGox hasn't been the "go-to" exchange for nearly six months now - an eternity in Bitcoin time.
I think FDIC came around in the 1930s - well before my parents were born in any case.
Thanks, though you reinforce my point, exact knowledge of the acronym isn't required to gain trust from the concept.
Well, the main place to do it is (was) MtGox.
No it wasn't and hasn't been for a long time
Spoken like a truly "hip" trader of 'coin.
Value doesn't come from you guys, value comes from the unwashed masses who see a story on CNN and say "how can I get in on this Bitcoin thing?" Where, until very recently, would they end up placing their first buy order?
Too simple, try this:
There's a budding market in Ford turn indicator lenses - they're exposed to unusually high levels of breakage and common across a large number of models, and the supplier that makes them is having labor troubles, something about the paperwork required to certify them for use growing exponentially.
So, some guy sets up an overseas depot that makes a market in these turn indicator lenses, they'll hook up buyers and sellers of the lenses and allow the market to find its own price point. For convenience, they will hold the actual lenses for you and you can just deal with them in cash.
Somebody runs a classic scam, resulting in less lenses being held at the depot than are promised to be held there. Now, if everybody wants to get their lenses all at once, there won't be enough to go around. The depot halts trading while they sort things out. Unless the scammer is caught and forced to cough up the goods, people are going to be taking a loss due to the missing lenses.
Other depots around the world haven't been scammed, that we know of, so they continue to trade.
One difference, most US "banks" that little kids are told are safe to put their money in have a little sticker in the window that says "FDLC insured" - meaning that your little slips of paper are not only backed by the bank, but also by the government.
MtGox is a large part of the Bitcoin "brand."
Much of the value attributed to Bitcoin comes from the perception that it can be traded, easily, for traditional currency, and how do you do that? Well, the main place to do it is (was) MtGox.
If you hold a stock that trades on the NYSE, part of its value is that NYSE market. When stocks fall off the major exchanges onto "the pink sheets," they almost invariably lose value just from the de-listing.
The MtGox failure is worse, it's like a bank failure - your coins are in there, but can you get them out now?
Regardless of history, it is true that Bitcoin is "just another cryptocurrency" and MtGox is "just another exchange" but, they are both significant brands in their space, and perception of them will weigh heavily on all similar cryptocurrencies and exchanges, regardless of "reality."
Risk? In a commodity that has regular 2x and 0.5x value swings in a single day? Say it isn't so!
I hired in "computer graphics" for many years. The post-interview test (50% weed out based on interview) was "transform this program that draws an empty box to draw a sine wave." 90% failure rate. I hired some of the failures and used them for other things with great success. I "helped" some of the near misses and gave them a trial run at a job that needed graphics programming skills - that was always a mistake.