I used to work in the IT end of the insurance industry, and believe me, data is their bread and butter. Insurance companies would love to have something like this.
I also have to agree with the other posters: as we have seen in recent years with TOS from Facebook, Google and others, if it's in there, they're probably going to do it. They don't hire lawyers to put that stuff in there for no reason... it isn't worded in such a way that it would really cover their asses for any liability, if they DON'T do it. So then... why else is it there?
Third, "anonymized" data, as we know very well by now, does not guarantee privacy. Especially location data. If you know where somebody lives, it should be easy to follow their movements with that data, anonymized or not.
And finally: after all these years, I get to say "I told you so" to the people who got OnStar. After all, it's not as though this wasn't foreseen by a lot of people.
This situation reminds me very much of Kilimanjaro. The loss of snow and ice on Kilimanjaro has oft been cited by warming alarmists as proof of their theories, and in fact a picture of Kilimanjaro featured prominently in Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth".
However, the inconvenience was ultimately for the alarmists, since it has long been known (well before his movie came out) that the loss of snow and ice on Kilimanjaro is due to deforestation (logging by humans) at lower altitudes, and has little to nothing to do with ambient temperature. Less vegetation means less moisture for the air to pick up at lower altitudes, in turn meaning less precipitation for it to drop on the mountain when the air is blown up to high altitudes and cools down. And with drier air comes sublimation from the constant wind.
I do not claim the globe isn't warming. I'm not even claiming that CO2 isn't part of it... but I doubt it amounts to very much. But it's really kind of hard to tell, when the "authorities" and the media keep spouting such blatant bullshit.
"These days most employers have some boilerplate they hand out when you take a job that says they will do this if they feel it necessary."
But that's really begging the question. My assertion was that I don't think they should be able to monitor you electronically without informing you of that fact. Handing me a piece of boilerplate saying that I might be monitored is a different thing altogether. It does not inform you that you are being monitored.
But however much I disagree with the law, last I looked (which was 10 years ago) it was nevertheless the law. I agree with you that GPS goes beyond -- I would say far beyond -- any right of an employer to monitor an employee.
Monitoring trucks is a different matter, because that is their workplace.
I don't think employers should be able to electronically monitor you at all, without your knowledge.
About 10 years ago, I had reason to look up the law. I found to my surprise that in my state, and employer can use hidden cameras and monitor your email, etc. without even telling you about it.
Of course that was 10 years ago, and things might have changed since. But I see no ethical reason why an employer should be able to monitor an employee without their knowledge. I would have a lot less problem with the idea if the law simply required that people be informed about it.
I hadn't considered the time aspect. Of course, if there isn't plenty of time then BOINC would not be a very good idea.
But I disagree with the "unless it's very interesting to the general public" part. Protein folding is not very interesting to the "general public", but it has been a great success on BOINC.
"The law that mad it a misdemeanor was already on the books."
Citation needed.
I am not aware of any law that makes violation of TOS a crime.
The act that made "unauthorized computer access" a crime has been consistently ruled by the courts to not apply to TOS, for the very reason that it would allow site owners to make their own laws, by changing the terms of their TOS.
The winning move would have been to fight tooth and nail to prevent this idiotic legislation from being passed in the first place. I mean really, it says what? "Let's punish whoever we can get our hands on, for someone else's crime."
Although I am from the US, I tend to agree with many of the criticisms saying that we are responsible as a group for our own loss of freedom. People didn't speak up when they should have. Now they suffer. That's the way it works.
Spend the money on a programmer to parallelize the algorithm on standard CPUs, and put it out on BOINC. People volunteer their spare cycles for BOINC projects that are barely more interesting than the chemistry of aardvark snot. She would likely get volunteers if there's anything of even passing interest in her research.
"So if a set A under one operation is congruent to a subset B under another operation, with a bijection between A and B, is there a rigorous way to determine which has a greater magnitude? You could solve this by linking to an existing accepted definition (e.g. on Mathworld or Wikipedia or some mathematics professor's web site) of the "magnitude" of a set that is not cardinality. "
Well, I certainly have to apologize for too loosely using the word "congruent", but I don't feel that it is necessary to be quite so literal to get across this concept. If all you want to do is have a pissing contest over semantics, I guess it won't hurt me to let you win, because I don't have the slightest interest.
"The sets are not equal, as they don't have the same elements, but that doesn't mean that either is "larger" than the other. Would city B be more populous than city A if the residents of the former were twice as heavy as those of the latter? In such a case, we simply look at the number of residents and not their individual sizes."
I understand. My point was simply that cardinality is not the be-all and end-all of infinite sets. They have other properties as well.
"They could remedy the situation by providing actual evidence that they own the works. If a bill collector called me up, they'd have to prove that they do indeed own debt that I'm responsible for paying. I'm not sure why that shouldn't apply to copyright notices as well."
That would probably be an improvement, but what evidence is appropriate?
With today's easy graphics editing, simply a name stamp or something of the sort on a picture isn't evidence of pretty much anything.
"Kinda odd to have one free look per year. Here the system works so that if you credit rating is changed, you must be informed about it in advance and you have couple weeks time to challenge it if the filing is erronous."
The whole DMCA takedown thing needs to be dismantled. What it amounts to is guilty until proven innocent, and that's just plain un-American.
If there are actual infringers out there, ingringing real works in a damaging way, then the studios will probably find them. There is no need for this Draconian, too-easily-abused takedown system.
Of course they thought through it already. That doesn't mean that their solutions are terribly effective.
Encrypted signals, and even comparing encrypted to non-encrypted signals, are completely useless against a properly modulated, strong enough jamming signal. You can't get around the physics of radio, dude.
Re:Without remorse there is no rehabilitation.
on
Kevin Mitnick Answers
·
· Score: 1
Let me put this a different way:
What if one day you committed the "crime" of downloading a newspaper you did not actually subscribe to, yet you were arrested and convicted in Federal court for grand larceny and worse?
What if you stole a candy bar and went to prison for rape?
It really isn't that much different.
You want him to have "regrets"? Are you nuts? If justice were actually served, the United States deserves from Kevin Mitnick a gigantic "Fuck You!"
Yet he decided to become a productive member of society anyway. We should be grateful that Mitnick is the man that he is. Otherwise your credit cards might actually be stolen, this time for real, and this time for genuinely nefarious purposes.
I understand that it is common to refer to the "magnitude" of different sets as their cardinality. But that's not what I am referring to (nor is it by any means the only definition of "magnitude").
I was referring to the relative sizes of the elements of different sets. While I am well aware that infinite sets can be congruent with at least one of their own subsets (actually it is the definition), they are not necessarily (or perhaps even commonly) congruent with ALL of their own subsets.
Therefore there are infinite sets of equal cardinality that cannot be said to be "equal" in other ways.
What I mean is that cardinality is simply the numbering of the elements of the set... the same cardinality simply means that each set has the same number of elements. It has nothing to do with the size or other measure of those elements.
If one set has the same number of elements as another set, but one set's elements are, individually, twice as big as the other's, can they be said to be "equal" in any real sense? I would argue no.
Slashdot Mirror
... that CAMERAS can actually be used to take pictures of naked people?!
It's foolish to blame the tool for the crime. That takes people.
I used to work in the IT end of the insurance industry, and believe me, data is their bread and butter. Insurance companies would love to have something like this.
I also have to agree with the other posters: as we have seen in recent years with TOS from Facebook, Google and others, if it's in there, they're probably going to do it. They don't hire lawyers to put that stuff in there for no reason... it isn't worded in such a way that it would really cover their asses for any liability, if they DON'T do it. So then... why else is it there?
Third, "anonymized" data, as we know very well by now, does not guarantee privacy. Especially location data. If you know where somebody lives, it should be easy to follow their movements with that data, anonymized or not.
And finally: after all these years, I get to say "I told you so" to the people who got OnStar. After all, it's not as though this wasn't foreseen by a lot of people.
This situation reminds me very much of Kilimanjaro. The loss of snow and ice on Kilimanjaro has oft been cited by warming alarmists as proof of their theories, and in fact a picture of Kilimanjaro featured prominently in Al Gore's "An Inconvenient Truth".
However, the inconvenience was ultimately for the alarmists, since it has long been known (well before his movie came out) that the loss of snow and ice on Kilimanjaro is due to deforestation (logging by humans) at lower altitudes, and has little to nothing to do with ambient temperature. Less vegetation means less moisture for the air to pick up at lower altitudes, in turn meaning less precipitation for it to drop on the mountain when the air is blown up to high altitudes and cools down. And with drier air comes sublimation from the constant wind.
I do not claim the globe isn't warming. I'm not even claiming that CO2 isn't part of it... but I doubt it amounts to very much. But it's really kind of hard to tell, when the "authorities" and the media keep spouting such blatant bullshit.
"These days most employers have some boilerplate they hand out when you take a job that says they will do this if they feel it necessary."
But that's really begging the question. My assertion was that I don't think they should be able to monitor you electronically without informing you of that fact. Handing me a piece of boilerplate saying that I might be monitored is a different thing altogether. It does not inform you that you are being monitored.
But however much I disagree with the law, last I looked (which was 10 years ago) it was nevertheless the law. I agree with you that GPS goes beyond -- I would say far beyond -- any right of an employer to monitor an employee.
Monitoring trucks is a different matter, because that is their workplace.
I don't think employers should be able to electronically monitor you at all, without your knowledge.
About 10 years ago, I had reason to look up the law. I found to my surprise that in my state, and employer can use hidden cameras and monitor your email, etc. without even telling you about it.
Of course that was 10 years ago, and things might have changed since. But I see no ethical reason why an employer should be able to monitor an employee without their knowledge. I would have a lot less problem with the idea if the law simply required that people be informed about it.
Do you know what a rhetorical question is?
I hadn't considered the time aspect. Of course, if there isn't plenty of time then BOINC would not be a very good idea.
But I disagree with the "unless it's very interesting to the general public" part. Protein folding is not very interesting to the "general public", but it has been a great success on BOINC.
Africa was a business trip.
Honest.
"The law that mad it a misdemeanor was already on the books."
Citation needed.
I am not aware of any law that makes violation of TOS a crime.
The act that made "unauthorized computer access" a crime has been consistently ruled by the courts to not apply to TOS, for the very reason that it would allow site owners to make their own laws, by changing the terms of their TOS.
I agree. Mod up. I don't know what the truth is, but I think Intel's explanation is BS.
SPDIF has been around for years, and it isn't terribly expensive. I can get a 6 ft. cable for $2.99.
It's so "expensive" that's it's built into the headphone and line in jacks on my Mac, and most people don't even realize it's there.
So tell me: why doesn't it work the way it should? Hint: it used to. So what has changed?
The winning move would have been to fight tooth and nail to prevent this idiotic legislation from being passed in the first place. I mean really, it says what? "Let's punish whoever we can get our hands on, for someone else's crime."
Although I am from the US, I tend to agree with many of the criticisms saying that we are responsible as a group for our own loss of freedom. People didn't speak up when they should have. Now they suffer. That's the way it works.
Spend the money on a programmer to parallelize the algorithm on standard CPUs, and put it out on BOINC. People volunteer their spare cycles for BOINC projects that are barely more interesting than the chemistry of aardvark snot. She would likely get volunteers if there's anything of even passing interest in her research.
"So if a set A under one operation is congruent to a subset B under another operation, with a bijection between A and B, is there a rigorous way to determine which has a greater magnitude? You could solve this by linking to an existing accepted definition (e.g. on Mathworld or Wikipedia or some mathematics professor's web site) of the "magnitude" of a set that is not cardinality. "
Well, I certainly have to apologize for too loosely using the word "congruent", but I don't feel that it is necessary to be quite so literal to get across this concept. If all you want to do is have a pissing contest over semantics, I guess it won't hurt me to let you win, because I don't have the slightest interest.
"The sets are not equal, as they don't have the same elements, but that doesn't mean that either is "larger" than the other. Would city B be more populous than city A if the residents of the former were twice as heavy as those of the latter? In such a case, we simply look at the number of residents and not their individual sizes."
I understand. My point was simply that cardinality is not the be-all and end-all of infinite sets. They have other properties as well.
"They could remedy the situation by providing actual evidence that they own the works. If a bill collector called me up, they'd have to prove that they do indeed own debt that I'm responsible for paying. I'm not sure why that shouldn't apply to copyright notices as well."
That would probably be an improvement, but what evidence is appropriate?
With today's easy graphics editing, simply a name stamp or something of the sort on a picture isn't evidence of pretty much anything.
"Kinda odd to have one free look per year. Here the system works so that if you credit rating is changed, you must be informed about it in advance and you have couple weeks time to challenge it if the filing is erronous."
I rather like that setup. Where is "here"?
The whole DMCA takedown thing needs to be dismantled. What it amounts to is guilty until proven innocent, and that's just plain un-American.
If there are actual infringers out there, ingringing real works in a damaging way, then the studios will probably find them. There is no need for this Draconian, too-easily-abused takedown system.
It STILL makes you a frigging war criminal. Your arguments change nothing.
It's not that I don't understand, at all.
Of course they thought through it already. That doesn't mean that their solutions are terribly effective.
Encrypted signals, and even comparing encrypted to non-encrypted signals, are completely useless against a properly modulated, strong enough jamming signal. You can't get around the physics of radio, dude.
Let me put this a different way:
What if one day you committed the "crime" of downloading a newspaper you did not actually subscribe to, yet you were arrested and convicted in Federal court for grand larceny and worse?
What if you stole a candy bar and went to prison for rape?
It really isn't that much different.
You want him to have "regrets"? Are you nuts? If justice were actually served, the United States deserves from Kevin Mitnick a gigantic "Fuck You!"
Yet he decided to become a productive member of society anyway. We should be grateful that Mitnick is the man that he is. Otherwise your credit cards might actually be stolen, this time for real, and this time for genuinely nefarious purposes.
Let me try to be more clear:
I understand that it is common to refer to the "magnitude" of different sets as their cardinality. But that's not what I am referring to (nor is it by any means the only definition of "magnitude").
I was referring to the relative sizes of the elements of different sets. While I am well aware that infinite sets can be congruent with at least one of their own subsets (actually it is the definition), they are not necessarily (or perhaps even commonly) congruent with ALL of their own subsets.
Therefore there are infinite sets of equal cardinality that cannot be said to be "equal" in other ways.
And I would have to ask: why don't you?
Where have you gotten the idea that cardinality is the only measure of a set?
To be more specific, say for set A, each successive element is equal to its cardinal number: 1, 2, 3...
...
And for set B, each successive element is its cardinal number squared: 1, 4, 9
Are these sets "equal"? I should say not.
What I mean is that cardinality is simply the numbering of the elements of the set... the same cardinality simply means that each set has the same number of elements. It has nothing to do with the size or other measure of those elements.
If one set has the same number of elements as another set, but one set's elements are, individually, twice as big as the other's, can they be said to be "equal" in any real sense? I would argue no.