It doesn't matter if a polygraph is used in court here in America; the police are allowed to lie to suspects in an attempt to trick the suspects into a confession. Your polygraph could show that you told the truth about not committing any crimes, and the police might tell you that it detected lies just to scare you into confessing. There is also a psychological effect: a suspect who does not believe they will pass a polygraph test may choose to confess, believing that it will look better than getting caught in a lie.
I cannot speak for Sweden, but in the United States, there is nothing you say that can help you once you have been arrested. The police are not required to report every word that comes out of your mouth, they will only report the incriminating things you say when it comes to trial. It makes no difference whether or not you are innocent, the police are on the same side as the prosecutor and will try to provide the prosecutor with any evidence that can be used against you. The police are not your friends when they arrest you, and they are not going to release you because of something you say to them.
Of course, people with better educations and people who are informed about politics and law will already know this, and will wait for their lawyer to arrive before they say anything. The system is slanted against the uneducated, which in America basically means it is slanted against the poor.
All of this is based on a flawed premise. The situation you describe should never exist. If you are guilty talking to the police can never help.
Says an educated person. Uneducated people often think that they can talk their way out of the police station, and routinely say things to the police that wind up hurting them at trial. Worse still, it is often the case that innocent people wind up hurting their legal case by trying to explain to the police that they are innocent.
The nature of our legal system is slanted against uneducated people.
However, someone who does not think they can beat a polygraph may opt to confess to their crimes, thinking that it is better than lying and getting caught. Of course, this also means that better educated people will be less likely to go to prison, but that would be true without the polygraph: educated people will not say anything until they have spoken with a lawyer.
The point of these sorts of security systems is not to stop a determined attacker, or even to stop an attacker with a low-level of expertise. The point is to be a speedbump, to prevent people from breaking the security system just long enough for the companies to turn a profit. It is also a way to play on consumer ignorance, since most computer users do not know how to set up OCR systems and hack Flash applets.
Really, a highly knowledgeable attacker will just take a snapshot of the memory of the process and pull the text right out of there. There is nothing they can do, short of mandatory TPM use, to prevent that sort of thing (and even then, it is likely that the TPM will fall victim to some kind of attack).
You forgot "discretion" -- high class prostitutes do not run around telling people about who they are having sex with. If you are a rich and powerful man, for whom a sex scandal could mean serious damage to your ability to do your work (whatever that may be), I can understand paying thousands of dollars an hour for sex with someone who is not going to go blabbing to people you know. This represents a minority of people, of course, but for those people this is a factor that comes into consideration.
Except that the moral majority is also opposed to sex with a single partner, except in the context of marriage. They are also opposed to the sale of sex toys, pornography, homosexual sex, sex enhancing drugs, and many other sexual activities that carry little risk. Their opposition is not to high-risk sexual activity, but to any sexual activity that maximizes pleasure over reproduction.
The far-right's attack on sexuality goes beyond just advising people of risky behaviors. Their attack is on the very idea that sex is for any purpose other than procreation, and they want all procreation to be done within a marriage. They would even deny married couples access to things like handcuffs, whips, and vibrating rings, because they call these things "obscene," for the simple reason that they enhance pleasure.
I must have missed something; did the currency issued by now-defunct governments lose its properties that made it useful as a means of exchange? No, it would be just as easy to hand someone a worthless bank note as it would be to hand them a dollar bill.
It is not a fallacy; even under extreme inflation, the government could adjust taxes to match the low value of a single unit of currency. It would be absurd to speak of paying trillions of dollars in taxes, but it would work out economically (although there would be damaging inflationary effects). The United States periodically updates its tax code to keep pace with inflation. Currencies only become worthless when they are no longer backed by a government, or essentially when nobody can use the currency to settle their debts with the government.
It is not just demand; supply matters too. Demand comes from taxes; not just on income, but on things like property, certain industries, importing certain goods, etc. Supply is controlled by the government, and is determined by the interaction between the government and banks, and of course how much money the government mints and destroys.
Both are needed, but the ultimate value of currency comes from the demand for it, which is the need to settle a tax debt. There are plenty of fixed tariffs out there (for example, a $200 tax on sound suppressors for firearms), which helps establish a baseline of sorts (relative to the demand for whatever the tariff is on). The supply the second in determining what money can get you, in the sense that supply is make irrelevant if there is no demand.
Scarcity does not create value. Case-in-point: the drawings I created in preschool are extremely rare, but nobody wants them and I doubt I could get a full penny for them.
Value is created by scarcity coupled with demand. The demand for money is ultimately created by people who need money to settle a debt with the government; for most people that is called "paying taxes." We used to use gold for this purpose because it is difficult to counterfeit, it is durable, and it is scarce enough to ensure that people would not just create money digging through their backyards. Now we use paper currency because we are good at fighting counterfeiting and know how to make durable paper currency, and paper money has an advantage over gold in that governments can issue it and destroy it as needed for an economic policy.
Bitcoin's value is flimsy at best: a few people will accept bitcoin as payment, mainly because they believe they can get their country's currency in exchange for bitcoins (and thus settle their own tax obligations). This is purely speculation, of course, and will ultimately spell doom for bitcoin.
No, bitcoins are worthless outside of a speculative bubble. Unlike other currencies, the demand for bitcoin is flimsy and based solely on speculation; other currencies have demand created by the need of people to pay taxes. Bitcoin is not legal tender for debts owed to any government, and people are only willing to trade with it because they think they can eventually exchange it for a currency with real value.
I am actually a big fan of digital cash, because of its protection against fraudulent charges, but Bitcoin is the wrong thing. The right thing is to have digital cash tokens issued by banks, in exchange for currency, and for the value of those tokens to be fixed to the currency they were issued for. Offline transactions should be possible, and the ability to divide the digital cash should be possible. Anonymity should only be guaranteed to people who do not cheat; that is how you catch counterfeiters. At the end of the day, people should have a guarantee that their digital cash tokens can be exchanged for real cash, and there should be no mystery relating to the cash they will receive for their digital cash tokens.
Bitcoin is a poorly thought out approach to money, based on the common misconception that money gets its value by some magical agreement amongst people. Value comes from the relationship between supply and demand; the demand for money comes from its unique ability to be used to settle debts and other obligations with the government that issued it. Since Bitcoin lacks such a property, its value is about the same as the value of a Chuck-e-cheese token: worthless outside of a few shops that will let you exchange it for something.
Those are not dangers related to cocaine (which as it turns out is not a narcotic), those are dangers resulting from black market sales of the drug. This is no different than the danger of unregulated alcohol, which could easily be poisonous or of unknown potency.
And I believe there are two main types of ciphers: those that have not been broken, and those that will be.
Essentially, this implies that you believe that P=NP, since there are ciphers that can be shown to be at least as hard to break as it would be to solve some NP-hard problem in the worst case. Some of those proofs are based on an assumption of quantum computing (that is, the cipher is secure against quantum computers under an assumption that is essentially the quantum equivalent of P =/= NP). If I were asked, I would put my money on P=/=NP, but that is still just a conjecture.
As for the value of diamonds and the value of bitcoins, there is nothing pretty looking about a bitcoin. Aside from being transferable, bitcoins have no real use, which raises even more questions about the value of bitcoins than that of diamonds (particularly since bitcoins are not legal tender for debts owed to any government).
Your premise seems to be that cocaine is bad and should not be used; that is a mostly irrelevant opinion. The question is, do you want to continue to live in a world where cocaine sales line the wallets of dangerous, violent gangs, and where cocaine consumers have no guarantee about the purity or potency of their drug? Right now, alcohol comes with a warning label, an indication of its concentration, and consumers have legal recourse if their alcohol is adulterated with a (more) dangerous chemical. The culture surrounding alcohol is irrelevant here; the point is that nobody is being murdered over the drug, and nobody drinks whiskey without knowing how strong it is.
The government is not in the business of enforcing morality or a particular culture. The government's purpose is to serve the citizens, and that is not happening when it comes to cocaine.
No, if you buy a house using Bitcoins, then you own the house and are obligated to pay taxes on it -- not much different than your obligation to pay taxes on a house you were given for free. No, the US government would not accept Bitcoin for property tax -- you would be obligated to pay taxes with US Dollars, and you would need to find a way to get those dollars.
Owning a home but lacking the dollars needed to pay tax on that home will result in you losing your home. It makes no difference how you came to own the property.
Except that cars and units of work have economic value (diamonds do to some degree also, but nothing near what people pay for them; jewellery is a money sink, always has been). You can use a car to travel places, and "units of work" are valuable because the work creates something valuable. Aside from trying to play hot potato with bitcoins, what exactly makes bitcoins valuable? I can't take a bitcoin and turn it into energy, or use it to move things, or settle a tax debt.
Bitcoin has roughly the same real value as Chuck-e-cheese tokens do: you can take Bitcoins to a few stores that will accept them as payment, but for the most part they have no actual value. The only reason you can trade Bitcoin for other currencies is the speculation that surrounds Bitcoin. The only people who will profit from Bitcoin are the early investors; people who are getting into the game at this point will face significant long-term losses.
The ultimate value of the US Dollar is that the US government will accept it for tax purposes (and other debts). You may not pay taxes to the US government, but there are plenty of other people who do, and they create the demand for dollars. If there were no demand for dollars, you would not be able to buy anything with dollars anywhere.
The ultimate value of Bitcoin does not seem to exist; Bitcoin is only worth something right now because of speculation about its future value. Eventually, either Bitcoin will never get big and the speculative bubble will burst, or it will become big and people will start dumping bitcoins for the currencies they need to settle their debts with their respective governments, and Bitcoin will decline in value as demand is eroded.
There is no magic; currency is valuable because citizens of a country need that country's currency to settle their tax obligations and other debts to the government. The US Dollar is backed by the fact that most US citizens need to pay their taxes, and that the Treasury will not accept Bitcoins, Chuck-e-cheese tokens, hall passes, or 2 head of cattle as tax payments (but they will accept dollars).
So, if I manage to exclusively work to earn bitcoins, and exclusively pay with bitcoins, never touching a dollar, the US government will very kindly not tax me?
Sure, if you also own no property, run no services that are taxable by the government, produce no goods that require tax payments, etc. Taxes on not just on income.
Essentially, to live without paying taxes of any kind, you would need to be a homeless beggar who buys nothing and lives only on the charity of others.
Slashdot Mirror
Yet the US senate has the law on its side, and LulzSec does not.
I could see this case going either way, to be honest.
It doesn't matter if a polygraph is used in court here in America; the police are allowed to lie to suspects in an attempt to trick the suspects into a confession. Your polygraph could show that you told the truth about not committing any crimes, and the police might tell you that it detected lies just to scare you into confessing. There is also a psychological effect: a suspect who does not believe they will pass a polygraph test may choose to confess, believing that it will look better than getting caught in a lie.
I cannot speak for Sweden, but in the United States, there is nothing you say that can help you once you have been arrested. The police are not required to report every word that comes out of your mouth, they will only report the incriminating things you say when it comes to trial. It makes no difference whether or not you are innocent, the police are on the same side as the prosecutor and will try to provide the prosecutor with any evidence that can be used against you. The police are not your friends when they arrest you, and they are not going to release you because of something you say to them.
Of course, people with better educations and people who are informed about politics and law will already know this, and will wait for their lawyer to arrive before they say anything. The system is slanted against the uneducated, which in America basically means it is slanted against the poor.
All of this is based on a flawed premise. The situation you describe should never exist. If you are guilty talking to the police can never help.
Says an educated person. Uneducated people often think that they can talk their way out of the police station, and routinely say things to the police that wind up hurting them at trial. Worse still, it is often the case that innocent people wind up hurting their legal case by trying to explain to the police that they are innocent.
The nature of our legal system is slanted against uneducated people.
What purpose does the hardware serve? Why do we need to plug something into a USB port to write programs?
However, someone who does not think they can beat a polygraph may opt to confess to their crimes, thinking that it is better than lying and getting caught. Of course, this also means that better educated people will be less likely to go to prison, but that would be true without the polygraph: educated people will not say anything until they have spoken with a lawyer.
No, not an interest in pornography -- an attachment to the point of referring to porn actresses as "wife."
The point of these sorts of security systems is not to stop a determined attacker, or even to stop an attacker with a low-level of expertise. The point is to be a speedbump, to prevent people from breaking the security system just long enough for the companies to turn a profit. It is also a way to play on consumer ignorance, since most computer users do not know how to set up OCR systems and hack Flash applets.
Really, a highly knowledgeable attacker will just take a snapshot of the memory of the process and pull the text right out of there. There is nothing they can do, short of mandatory TPM use, to prevent that sort of thing (and even then, it is likely that the TPM will fall victim to some kind of attack).
...and to me. I do all of my arithmetic in base 2, to get rid of the guesswork.
You forgot "discretion" -- high class prostitutes do not run around telling people about who they are having sex with. If you are a rich and powerful man, for whom a sex scandal could mean serious damage to your ability to do your work (whatever that may be), I can understand paying thousands of dollars an hour for sex with someone who is not going to go blabbing to people you know. This represents a minority of people, of course, but for those people this is a factor that comes into consideration.
I feel a profound sense of pity for that person. To me, that choice of passwords suggests an unhealthy attachment to pornography.
Except that the moral majority is also opposed to sex with a single partner, except in the context of marriage. They are also opposed to the sale of sex toys, pornography, homosexual sex, sex enhancing drugs, and many other sexual activities that carry little risk. Their opposition is not to high-risk sexual activity, but to any sexual activity that maximizes pleasure over reproduction.
The far-right's attack on sexuality goes beyond just advising people of risky behaviors. Their attack is on the very idea that sex is for any purpose other than procreation, and they want all procreation to be done within a marriage. They would even deny married couples access to things like handcuffs, whips, and vibrating rings, because they call these things "obscene," for the simple reason that they enhance pleasure.
I must have missed something; did the currency issued by now-defunct governments lose its properties that made it useful as a means of exchange? No, it would be just as easy to hand someone a worthless bank note as it would be to hand them a dollar bill.
It is not a fallacy; even under extreme inflation, the government could adjust taxes to match the low value of a single unit of currency. It would be absurd to speak of paying trillions of dollars in taxes, but it would work out economically (although there would be damaging inflationary effects). The United States periodically updates its tax code to keep pace with inflation. Currencies only become worthless when they are no longer backed by a government, or essentially when nobody can use the currency to settle their debts with the government.
It is not just demand; supply matters too. Demand comes from taxes; not just on income, but on things like property, certain industries, importing certain goods, etc. Supply is controlled by the government, and is determined by the interaction between the government and banks, and of course how much money the government mints and destroys.
Both are needed, but the ultimate value of currency comes from the demand for it, which is the need to settle a tax debt. There are plenty of fixed tariffs out there (for example, a $200 tax on sound suppressors for firearms), which helps establish a baseline of sorts (relative to the demand for whatever the tariff is on). The supply the second in determining what money can get you, in the sense that supply is make irrelevant if there is no demand.
Scarcity does not create value. Case-in-point: the drawings I created in preschool are extremely rare, but nobody wants them and I doubt I could get a full penny for them.
Value is created by scarcity coupled with demand. The demand for money is ultimately created by people who need money to settle a debt with the government; for most people that is called "paying taxes." We used to use gold for this purpose because it is difficult to counterfeit, it is durable, and it is scarce enough to ensure that people would not just create money digging through their backyards. Now we use paper currency because we are good at fighting counterfeiting and know how to make durable paper currency, and paper money has an advantage over gold in that governments can issue it and destroy it as needed for an economic policy.
Bitcoin's value is flimsy at best: a few people will accept bitcoin as payment, mainly because they believe they can get their country's currency in exchange for bitcoins (and thus settle their own tax obligations). This is purely speculation, of course, and will ultimately spell doom for bitcoin.
No, bitcoins are worthless outside of a speculative bubble. Unlike other currencies, the demand for bitcoin is flimsy and based solely on speculation; other currencies have demand created by the need of people to pay taxes. Bitcoin is not legal tender for debts owed to any government, and people are only willing to trade with it because they think they can eventually exchange it for a currency with real value.
I am actually a big fan of digital cash, because of its protection against fraudulent charges, but Bitcoin is the wrong thing. The right thing is to have digital cash tokens issued by banks, in exchange for currency, and for the value of those tokens to be fixed to the currency they were issued for. Offline transactions should be possible, and the ability to divide the digital cash should be possible. Anonymity should only be guaranteed to people who do not cheat; that is how you catch counterfeiters. At the end of the day, people should have a guarantee that their digital cash tokens can be exchanged for real cash, and there should be no mystery relating to the cash they will receive for their digital cash tokens.
Bitcoin is a poorly thought out approach to money, based on the common misconception that money gets its value by some magical agreement amongst people. Value comes from the relationship between supply and demand; the demand for money comes from its unique ability to be used to settle debts and other obligations with the government that issued it. Since Bitcoin lacks such a property, its value is about the same as the value of a Chuck-e-cheese token: worthless outside of a few shops that will let you exchange it for something.
Those are not dangers related to cocaine (which as it turns out is not a narcotic), those are dangers resulting from black market sales of the drug. This is no different than the danger of unregulated alcohol, which could easily be poisonous or of unknown potency.
And I believe there are two main types of ciphers: those that have not been broken, and those that will be.
Essentially, this implies that you believe that P=NP, since there are ciphers that can be shown to be at least as hard to break as it would be to solve some NP-hard problem in the worst case. Some of those proofs are based on an assumption of quantum computing (that is, the cipher is secure against quantum computers under an assumption that is essentially the quantum equivalent of P =/= NP). If I were asked, I would put my money on P=/=NP, but that is still just a conjecture.
As for the value of diamonds and the value of bitcoins, there is nothing pretty looking about a bitcoin. Aside from being transferable, bitcoins have no real use, which raises even more questions about the value of bitcoins than that of diamonds (particularly since bitcoins are not legal tender for debts owed to any government).
Your premise seems to be that cocaine is bad and should not be used; that is a mostly irrelevant opinion. The question is, do you want to continue to live in a world where cocaine sales line the wallets of dangerous, violent gangs, and where cocaine consumers have no guarantee about the purity or potency of their drug? Right now, alcohol comes with a warning label, an indication of its concentration, and consumers have legal recourse if their alcohol is adulterated with a (more) dangerous chemical. The culture surrounding alcohol is irrelevant here; the point is that nobody is being murdered over the drug, and nobody drinks whiskey without knowing how strong it is.
The government is not in the business of enforcing morality or a particular culture. The government's purpose is to serve the citizens, and that is not happening when it comes to cocaine.
No, if you buy a house using Bitcoins, then you own the house and are obligated to pay taxes on it -- not much different than your obligation to pay taxes on a house you were given for free. No, the US government would not accept Bitcoin for property tax -- you would be obligated to pay taxes with US Dollars, and you would need to find a way to get those dollars.
Owning a home but lacking the dollars needed to pay tax on that home will result in you losing your home. It makes no difference how you came to own the property.
Why would drug dealers continue to accept Bitcoins, if they cannot trade Bitcoins for other currencies?
Except that cars and units of work have economic value (diamonds do to some degree also, but nothing near what people pay for them; jewellery is a money sink, always has been). You can use a car to travel places, and "units of work" are valuable because the work creates something valuable. Aside from trying to play hot potato with bitcoins, what exactly makes bitcoins valuable? I can't take a bitcoin and turn it into energy, or use it to move things, or settle a tax debt.
Bitcoin has roughly the same real value as Chuck-e-cheese tokens do: you can take Bitcoins to a few stores that will accept them as payment, but for the most part they have no actual value. The only reason you can trade Bitcoin for other currencies is the speculation that surrounds Bitcoin. The only people who will profit from Bitcoin are the early investors; people who are getting into the game at this point will face significant long-term losses.
The ultimate value of the US Dollar is that the US government will accept it for tax purposes (and other debts). You may not pay taxes to the US government, but there are plenty of other people who do, and they create the demand for dollars. If there were no demand for dollars, you would not be able to buy anything with dollars anywhere.
The ultimate value of Bitcoin does not seem to exist; Bitcoin is only worth something right now because of speculation about its future value. Eventually, either Bitcoin will never get big and the speculative bubble will burst, or it will become big and people will start dumping bitcoins for the currencies they need to settle their debts with their respective governments, and Bitcoin will decline in value as demand is eroded.
There is no magic; currency is valuable because citizens of a country need that country's currency to settle their tax obligations and other debts to the government. The US Dollar is backed by the fact that most US citizens need to pay their taxes, and that the Treasury will not accept Bitcoins, Chuck-e-cheese tokens, hall passes, or 2 head of cattle as tax payments (but they will accept dollars).
So, if I manage to exclusively work to earn bitcoins, and exclusively pay with bitcoins, never touching a dollar, the US government will very kindly not tax me?
Sure, if you also own no property, run no services that are taxable by the government, produce no goods that require tax payments, etc. Taxes on not just on income.
Essentially, to live without paying taxes of any kind, you would need to be a homeless beggar who buys nothing and lives only on the charity of others.