Not true; currency is a tool used by governments to manage the exchange of goods produced by citizens for services provided by the government. We pay for government services with taxes paid in currency (issued by the government), and the government pays for private sector goods and services will currency. Currency has value because citizens are required to pay taxes; you cannot opt out of paying for government services (one might argue that by virtue of being a citizen, you are receiving those services [e.g. the government is defending you from foreign enemies], and not paying would amount to theft).
Before currency, of course, taxes were collected by government agents taking goods directly from the citizens -- say, 2 head of cattle, or perhaps some fraction of the grain produced by your fields, etc. Currency is much more convenient, since government agents do not have to judge whether or not a piece of gold or some paper money or a check is healthy and disease-free (they would have to do this with cattle, of course). Currency also allows the government to provide a much broader array of services, because it simplifies the system of paying the cost of those services -- salaries paid in currency are a lot easier to compute than salaries paid in physical goods.
I know, in high school we are all told that currency gets its value because everyone in society agrees to it, as if some magical process occurred. The agreement is simply an part of the broader agreement to be governed; there is no magic here, just politics and economics.
I imagine that around April, the value of bitcoin will plummet, as a bunch of American bitcoin holders try to dump their bitcoins for dollars in order to pay their taxes. How exactly will bitcoin regain that value, other than speculation (which is not going to last much longer)?
Right now, we are in a bitcoin speculative bubble. The bubble will burst eventually, and then bitcoins will be worthless, since there is no ultimate source of bitcoin value. Nobody can pay their taxes with bitcoins, and hence nobody needs bitcoin -- compare with the US Dollar, which America citizens need in order to pay their taxes, and which American bitcoin holders will likely try to trade their bitcoins for when tax season rolls around.
To put it another way, it is about demand, and the demand for bitcoins will not be very high in the long run (unless a government somewhere starts accepting bitcoins for tax purposes).
There is a reason for the volatility: bitcoins have no real value. The only reason you can get dollars (or other currency) for bitcoins is that we are currently in a speculative bubble. At the end of the day, bitcoins do not have any real economic value, because unlike other currencies, nobody needs bitcoins. Unlike, say, the US Dollar, you cannot use a bitcoin to pay your taxes.
When someone can point me to the source of value for bitcoins, and demonstrate why bitcoin holders won't start dumping their bitcoins when tax season rolls around, I might adopt a more positive attitude about the project.
American government have no problem stomping on rights of citizens because of the "war on terror" (read: against us, Muslims), surely, they would have no problem restricting them in order to suppress the culture of drugs in US.
You must not have been paying attention: our rights have already been stomped on by the war on drugs, right from the very beginning. You do realize that cocaine was first made illegal because congress was told that "cocaine niggers" (black men who used cocaine) became unstoppable monsters with superior aim with a handgun, right? Shortly after the New York Times published the story detailing how "the cocaine nigger sure is hard to kill," souther police forces began increasing the caliber of their standard issue handguns. Marijuana was made illegal under similar circumstances; it helped that industries that competed with the hemp industry put pressure on congress.
You think your rights have not been stomped on? Take a look around. The United States has police forces that can only be described as paramilitary squads. When the local cops are as heavily armed as a small army unit, we are in serious trouble. If you need something more concrete than the abstract, "militant police forces are a problem," consider this:
Yes, the obvious reading is the correct one: a police force that pays its own wages by seizing assets from drug dealers. This is not limited to Florida:
The only reason you do not perceive your rights being stomped on by the war on drugs is that it has been happening for so long now that you and most other people have generally forgotten that they ever had the rights they lost. Remember the days when the police had to obtain a warrant to search your home? Not anymore:
You used to be able to make large cash transactions in private; now that is automatically reported to the government, as part of an effort to crack down on drug dealers. Even so much as a misdemeanor drug offense now causes a person's right to buy a gun to be denied. Any company that does contracting work for the government is required, by law, to maintain a "drug free workplace." A drug offense can mean the loss of scholarships for students, regardless of their academic merit.
Given that people are going to obtain and use cocaine -- I do not think that this is in question -- would you prefer to see the sale of unregulated, adulterated and untaxed cocaine by murderers, or the sale of regulated, unadulterated, and taxed cocaine by licensed shop owners? Personally, I would take the latter, since that approach has been hugely successful when it comes to alcohol and tobacco.
There's a reason why the constitution doesn't include the right to do whatever drug you might want to do.
Funny how over a century passed between the constitutional convention and the beginning of the drug war. I suspect the constitution does not explicitly grant the right to use drugs because the founding fathers could not envision a world in which the US government would try to outlaw the use of hemp/marijuana, coca, or opium, let alone the broad classes of plants and chemicals that are illegal to possess in this country.
Yes, legalize cocaine. Legalize it, regulate it, and tax it, just like coffee, alcohol and tobacco are currently regulated. Do you think that throwing the word "cocaine" around is going to scare us? Cocaine used to be legal in this country, until a bunch of southern cops began to complain about "cocaine niggers" and how "the cocaine nigger sure is hard to kill."
Note that the three girls who took the photographs -- photographs of themselves -- were arrested, as were the boys who received them. Not one of the people arrested here was over the age of 16.
This "people who break the law should not have any doubt as to whether or not what they are doing is illegal" assertion says more about idiots committing the crime than it does about the law.
Oh yeah? Are you sure that you have never committed a felony? These people were pretty sure too:
Did you remember to check all the paperwork relating to your hobbies? Obviously importing orchids without doing so is something you can go to jail for, right?
We should not have any permanent laws, only permanent protections from the law (i.e. the constitution). Times change, the needs of society change, and attitudes about what should be legal change. Laws should have a mandatory maximum lifespan of 10 years; if there is a need to keep laws on the books (for example, a law prohibiting murder), then the law should be renewed by an act of the legislature. Yes, this would mean a lot of boring days in congress, but it would help keep our legal system under control and prevent us from getting into the situation we are currently in.
The problem with narrow and precise means that you need more laws to cover all of the things that should, justly, be illegal.
We are way past that point right now. We live in a world where people can go to prison for possession of certain comic books. You can be arrested and imprisoned for growing a plant. Teenagers have been arrested for photographing themselves. Court cases often come down to arguments about a person's "intent" and not what the person actually did. It is becoming uncommon for defendants to face only one criminal accusation.
As I said, nobody should ever be surprised when they are arrested -- people who break the law should not have any doubt as to whether or not what they are doing is illegal, unless they never had access to a single book or television. "Narrow and precise" does not mean "so extremely narrow that the law is meaningless," it means a legal system with clearly defined boundaries between "legal" and "illegal." There will always been edge cases and situations where it is not entirely clear if a law was broken, which is why we have a system of appeals, but for the most part people should be able to say with confidence that they are not in violation of the law.
While I agree that as a whole it should be reduced there are many places where it should be expanded
Where do you think our criminal code needs to be expanded? I cannot think of any such category of behavior, but maybe I am not creative enough.
For example, quite often it is necessary to keep facts of some cases secret until a suspect is arrested
They should require a special court order for such cases; I cannot imagine that the majority of serious crime (e.g. murder, rape) would fall into this category. They should also be required to release the secret details in a timely fashion, to prevent the formation of a large body of inaccessible police files from forming. Sorry, but I simply do not buy the argument that the police would not be able to arrest dangerous people if they had to open their operations to the public, and I am even less inclined to be believe that argument when we are talking about local police forces. I can understand the need for an occasional secret investigation, but that should not be the norm.
Also, remember that police are people too. Sometimes they have their own private conversations.
Not in the course of their official duties. When they are off-duty and not acting in an official capacity, they should be entitled to all the same rights as any other citizen, but an on-duty police officer should not expect any privacy. We are talking about a group of people who have the authority to deprive others of their rights (i.e. by arresting and holding people against their will) -- we should be taking a great deal of caution when it comes to what sort of rights and powers we grant such a group.
unless the police are doing something in a place that allows them an expectation of privacy
The police should have no expectation of privacy when they are performing their official duties; they are servants of the public, and the public has a right to know what the police are doing. If the police need to remain secretive in order to enforce a particular law, then we need to re-examine that law.
Agents of the government do not have an expectation of privacy when carrying out their official duties; private citizens should have an expectation of privacy whenever they are not in a public place. This is an important distinction, necessary to protect us from the sort of tyranny that people in some other countries face, and unfortunately it is a distinction that people frequently forget. We, as citizens, must have the ability to keep our private lives private; this right should only be revoked when there is evidence that a crime has been committed behind closed doors. The police, as government agents, should never be able to act secretly; we should be able to review everything the police do, in order to guard against wrongdoing and abuses of power.
Let this be a lesson to all those people who, when confronted with an overly broad law, say, "Well, yes, you could go after innocent people with this, but the police would not do such thing; they need this law to make it easier for them to get the bad guys." Laws should be narrow, precise, and low in number; nobody should ever be confused about why they are being arrested, and nobody should ever be surprised to find out they have broken a law. The police have far too much power, and far too many ways to justify arresting someone, and we should be talking about ways to solve that problem, rather than making it worse.
When I took a photography course some years back, we were given a 5 minute introduction to photography law: it is legal to photograph people in public places. You have no expectation of privacy in public, at least not when it comes to cameras. Why the police would be any different, or why a video recording is any different, is a mystery to me.
That is a surprisingly rational way to refer to child pornography: it both describes the real problem (that children are being abused) and excludes things like "sexting" (at least as a descriptive term it does; I am not a UK citizen and I cannot comment on whether the government there considers a teenager taking a nude self-portrait to be "sexual abuse").
Except when companies like Eharmony get to patent mathematics. Really, a software patent is a mathematics patent, with concrete and potentially meaningful names assigned to the variables. Software is mathematics (CL, Lambda calculus, mu-recursive functions, etc.) dressed up to look prettier and be more human-readable (and perhaps machine readable too). A patent on software, without a specific underlying machine (e.g. like the original software patent from which this entire mess is descended), is a patent on mathematics. A patent on software coupled with a specific underlying machine is about as far as patents should be allowed to go, and only because of the modern reality of industrial processes and control equipment.
Police makes this "great" arrests instead of arresting the drug dealers and murderers
So we are supposed to believe that by virtue of selling drugs, someone must be a bad person? Obviously selling drugs makes you worse than violating copyrights, and puts you on the same level as a murderer, right?
It also has pushed out F/OSS solutions because without "due diligence" (which means products need FIPS certifications, Common Criteria, yadda, yadda, pretty tags that require a lot of money to pay an independent testing lab to get approved), people might see prison time.
Except that there are free software systems that have FIPS and CC certifications -- RHEL certainly comes to mind (no surprises there, considering who their customers are).
Security should not be based on a single system like that. Your firewall may be compromised, an attacker may access to a system behind the firewall, etc. It is just bad practice to leave critical vulnerabilities unpatched.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, yes, all currency is imaginary.
Not true; currency is a tool used by governments to manage the exchange of goods produced by citizens for services provided by the government. We pay for government services with taxes paid in currency (issued by the government), and the government pays for private sector goods and services will currency. Currency has value because citizens are required to pay taxes; you cannot opt out of paying for government services (one might argue that by virtue of being a citizen, you are receiving those services [e.g. the government is defending you from foreign enemies], and not paying would amount to theft).
Before currency, of course, taxes were collected by government agents taking goods directly from the citizens -- say, 2 head of cattle, or perhaps some fraction of the grain produced by your fields, etc. Currency is much more convenient, since government agents do not have to judge whether or not a piece of gold or some paper money or a check is healthy and disease-free (they would have to do this with cattle, of course). Currency also allows the government to provide a much broader array of services, because it simplifies the system of paying the cost of those services -- salaries paid in currency are a lot easier to compute than salaries paid in physical goods.
I know, in high school we are all told that currency gets its value because everyone in society agrees to it, as if some magical process occurred. The agreement is simply an part of the broader agreement to be governed; there is no magic here, just politics and economics.
The US dollar is backed by the need American citizens have to pay their taxes, since the Treasury only accepts dollars for tax purposes.
I imagine that around April, the value of bitcoin will plummet, as a bunch of American bitcoin holders try to dump their bitcoins for dollars in order to pay their taxes. How exactly will bitcoin regain that value, other than speculation (which is not going to last much longer)?
Right now, we are in a bitcoin speculative bubble. The bubble will burst eventually, and then bitcoins will be worthless, since there is no ultimate source of bitcoin value. Nobody can pay their taxes with bitcoins, and hence nobody needs bitcoin -- compare with the US Dollar, which America citizens need in order to pay their taxes, and which American bitcoin holders will likely try to trade their bitcoins for when tax season rolls around.
To put it another way, it is about demand, and the demand for bitcoins will not be very high in the long run (unless a government somewhere starts accepting bitcoins for tax purposes).
There is a reason for the volatility: bitcoins have no real value. The only reason you can get dollars (or other currency) for bitcoins is that we are currently in a speculative bubble. At the end of the day, bitcoins do not have any real economic value, because unlike other currencies, nobody needs bitcoins. Unlike, say, the US Dollar, you cannot use a bitcoin to pay your taxes.
When someone can point me to the source of value for bitcoins, and demonstrate why bitcoin holders won't start dumping their bitcoins when tax season rolls around, I might adopt a more positive attitude about the project.
American government have no problem stomping on rights of citizens because of the "war on terror" (read: against us, Muslims), surely, they would have no problem restricting them in order to suppress the culture of drugs in US.
You must not have been paying attention: our rights have already been stomped on by the war on drugs, right from the very beginning. You do realize that cocaine was first made illegal because congress was told that "cocaine niggers" (black men who used cocaine) became unstoppable monsters with superior aim with a handgun, right? Shortly after the New York Times published the story detailing how "the cocaine nigger sure is hard to kill," souther police forces began increasing the caliber of their standard issue handguns. Marijuana was made illegal under similar circumstances; it helped that industries that competed with the hemp industry put pressure on congress.
You think your rights have not been stomped on? Take a look around. The United States has police forces that can only be described as paramilitary squads. When the local cops are as heavily armed as a small army unit, we are in serious trouble. If you need something more concrete than the abstract, "militant police forces are a problem," consider this:
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/drugs/interviews/wald.html
Yes, the obvious reading is the correct one: a police force that pays its own wages by seizing assets from drug dealers. This is not limited to Florida:
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91490480
The only reason you do not perceive your rights being stomped on by the war on drugs is that it has been happening for so long now that you and most other people have generally forgotten that they ever had the rights they lost. Remember the days when the police had to obtain a warrant to search your home? Not anymore:
http://www.upi.com/Top_News/US/2011/05/16/Warrantless-searches-expanded-in-drug-case/UPI-27821305557337/
It has gotten so bad that the DEA can now unilaterally declare a drug to be illegal for an entire year, without congressional approval:
http://www.dosenation.com/listing.php?smlid=8021
You used to be able to make large cash transactions in private; now that is automatically reported to the government, as part of an effort to crack down on drug dealers. Even so much as a misdemeanor drug offense now causes a person's right to buy a gun to be denied. Any company that does contracting work for the government is required, by law, to maintain a "drug free workplace." A drug offense can mean the loss of scholarships for students, regardless of their academic merit.
Your rights were trampled long ago, sir.
Given that people are going to obtain and use cocaine -- I do not think that this is in question -- would you prefer to see the sale of unregulated, adulterated and untaxed cocaine by murderers, or the sale of regulated, unadulterated, and taxed cocaine by licensed shop owners? Personally, I would take the latter, since that approach has been hugely successful when it comes to alcohol and tobacco.
There's a reason why the constitution doesn't include the right to do whatever drug you might want to do.
Funny how over a century passed between the constitutional convention and the beginning of the drug war. I suspect the constitution does not explicitly grant the right to use drugs because the founding fathers could not envision a world in which the US government would try to outlaw the use of hemp/marijuana, coca, or opium, let alone the broad classes of plants and chemicals that are illegal to possess in this country.
even marijuana, when abused has some long-lasting side effects.
[citation needed]
Some drugs are very, very harmful
I assume you mean drugs like this one:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tobacco
Yes, legalize cocaine. Legalize it, regulate it, and tax it, just like coffee, alcohol and tobacco are currently regulated. Do you think that throwing the word "cocaine" around is going to scare us? Cocaine used to be legal in this country, until a bunch of southern cops began to complain about "cocaine niggers" and how "the cocaine nigger sure is hard to kill."
What the hell does this mean "go to prison for possession of certain comic books"
No, that was not an exaggeration:
http://boingboing.net/2009/05/27/manga-collector-face.html
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/05/manga-porn/
Did you think I was just making it up? Or were you not paying attention to the sorts of laws that have been passed in the United States?
Again I think you are leaving out a couple of facts with this beauty "Teenagers have been arrested for photographing themselves".
No, actually, I left nothing out; just ask these teenagers:
http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,479803,00.html
Oh, sorry, that was a Fox News link. Here, something less fair and balanced:
http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2009/03/aclu-sues-da-ov/
Note that the three girls who took the photographs -- photographs of themselves -- were arrested, as were the boys who received them. Not one of the people arrested here was over the age of 16.
This "people who break the law should not have any doubt as to whether or not what they are doing is illegal" assertion says more about idiots committing the crime than it does about the law.
Oh yeah? Are you sure that you have never committed a felony? These people were pretty sure too:
http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/oct/05/criminalizing-everyone/
Did you remember to check all the paperwork relating to your hobbies? Obviously importing orchids without doing so is something you can go to jail for, right?
We should not have any permanent laws, only permanent protections from the law (i.e. the constitution). Times change, the needs of society change, and attitudes about what should be legal change. Laws should have a mandatory maximum lifespan of 10 years; if there is a need to keep laws on the books (for example, a law prohibiting murder), then the law should be renewed by an act of the legislature. Yes, this would mean a lot of boring days in congress, but it would help keep our legal system under control and prevent us from getting into the situation we are currently in.
The problem with narrow and precise means that you need more laws to cover all of the things that should, justly, be illegal.
We are way past that point right now. We live in a world where people can go to prison for possession of certain comic books. You can be arrested and imprisoned for growing a plant. Teenagers have been arrested for photographing themselves. Court cases often come down to arguments about a person's "intent" and not what the person actually did. It is becoming uncommon for defendants to face only one criminal accusation.
As I said, nobody should ever be surprised when they are arrested -- people who break the law should not have any doubt as to whether or not what they are doing is illegal, unless they never had access to a single book or television. "Narrow and precise" does not mean "so extremely narrow that the law is meaningless," it means a legal system with clearly defined boundaries between "legal" and "illegal." There will always been edge cases and situations where it is not entirely clear if a law was broken, which is why we have a system of appeals, but for the most part people should be able to say with confidence that they are not in violation of the law.
While I agree that as a whole it should be reduced there are many places where it should be expanded
Where do you think our criminal code needs to be expanded? I cannot think of any such category of behavior, but maybe I am not creative enough.
For example, quite often it is necessary to keep facts of some cases secret until a suspect is arrested
They should require a special court order for such cases; I cannot imagine that the majority of serious crime (e.g. murder, rape) would fall into this category. They should also be required to release the secret details in a timely fashion, to prevent the formation of a large body of inaccessible police files from forming. Sorry, but I simply do not buy the argument that the police would not be able to arrest dangerous people if they had to open their operations to the public, and I am even less inclined to be believe that argument when we are talking about local police forces. I can understand the need for an occasional secret investigation, but that should not be the norm.
Also, remember that police are people too. Sometimes they have their own private conversations.
Not in the course of their official duties. When they are off-duty and not acting in an official capacity, they should be entitled to all the same rights as any other citizen, but an on-duty police officer should not expect any privacy. We are talking about a group of people who have the authority to deprive others of their rights (i.e. by arresting and holding people against their will) -- we should be taking a great deal of caution when it comes to what sort of rights and powers we grant such a group.
unless the police are doing something in a place that allows them an expectation of privacy
The police should have no expectation of privacy when they are performing their official duties; they are servants of the public, and the public has a right to know what the police are doing. If the police need to remain secretive in order to enforce a particular law, then we need to re-examine that law.
Agents of the government do not have an expectation of privacy when carrying out their official duties; private citizens should have an expectation of privacy whenever they are not in a public place. This is an important distinction, necessary to protect us from the sort of tyranny that people in some other countries face, and unfortunately it is a distinction that people frequently forget. We, as citizens, must have the ability to keep our private lives private; this right should only be revoked when there is evidence that a crime has been committed behind closed doors. The police, as government agents, should never be able to act secretly; we should be able to review everything the police do, in order to guard against wrongdoing and abuses of power.
Let this be a lesson to all those people who, when confronted with an overly broad law, say, "Well, yes, you could go after innocent people with this, but the police would not do such thing; they need this law to make it easier for them to get the bad guys." Laws should be narrow, precise, and low in number; nobody should ever be confused about why they are being arrested, and nobody should ever be surprised to find out they have broken a law. The police have far too much power, and far too many ways to justify arresting someone, and we should be talking about ways to solve that problem, rather than making it worse.
When I took a photography course some years back, we were given a 5 minute introduction to photography law: it is legal to photograph people in public places. You have no expectation of privacy in public, at least not when it comes to cameras. Why the police would be any different, or why a video recording is any different, is a mystery to me.
This is exactly why we should not allow censorship at all
FTFY
That is a surprisingly rational way to refer to child pornography: it both describes the real problem (that children are being abused) and excludes things like "sexting" (at least as a descriptive term it does; I am not a UK citizen and I cannot comment on whether the government there considers a teenager taking a nude self-portrait to be "sexual abuse").
Except when companies like Eharmony get to patent mathematics. Really, a software patent is a mathematics patent, with concrete and potentially meaningful names assigned to the variables. Software is mathematics (CL, Lambda calculus, mu-recursive functions, etc.) dressed up to look prettier and be more human-readable (and perhaps machine readable too). A patent on software, without a specific underlying machine (e.g. like the original software patent from which this entire mess is descended), is a patent on mathematics. A patent on software coupled with a specific underlying machine is about as far as patents should be allowed to go, and only because of the modern reality of industrial processes and control equipment.
Police makes this "great" arrests instead of arresting the drug dealers and murderers
So we are supposed to believe that by virtue of selling drugs, someone must be a bad person? Obviously selling drugs makes you worse than violating copyrights, and puts you on the same level as a murderer, right?
Considering the amount of money WoW brings in for Blizzard...
It also has pushed out F/OSS solutions because without "due diligence" (which means products need FIPS certifications, Common Criteria, yadda, yadda, pretty tags that require a lot of money to pay an independent testing lab to get approved), people might see prison time.
Except that there are free software systems that have FIPS and CC certifications -- RHEL certainly comes to mind (no surprises there, considering who their customers are).
Security should not be based on a single system like that. Your firewall may be compromised, an attacker may access to a system behind the firewall, etc. It is just bad practice to leave critical vulnerabilities unpatched.