Following the Bible... Hammurabi's Law... I guess, they were quite common.
Or just commonly written about. Of course, you could always just take your slave and make sure he's locked in a convenient place, then frame him for a crime, since he won't be able to have a defense. Depending on how corrupt/incompetent the local government is, you could just accuse the slave yourself and let the police do the actual killing, You could also just kill him, and say he was sold or ran away, and nobody will bother asking questions.
All of that would be illegal, though, so surely nobody's done it.
I'm currently doing the job of a tech director at my church on a voluntary basis, which would normally be a paid position. The short version of the story is that we can't really afford to hire a tech director, but I think we need one, so I'm doing the job.
Art and design industries are full of talent, but there are very few opportunities for discovery. I know several artists who would gladly get coffee every morning just for the chance to drop a sketchbook on an executive's desk. After all, a few of them work at Starbucks already...
Industries involving manual labor also face a problem where employees are likely "trained" but still don't know what they're doing. Sure, they know exactly what a gently-used widget looks like under the classroom lighting, but out in the field with a few years' dirt on it, the old-model widget looks unrecognizable, so the newbie has to call over a senior to help, wasting time and money. It'd be far more cost-effective for the company (and for the employee, as well) to have the newbie shadow the senior for a while... but that's hard to justify to a manager who just hired somebody "trained".
For more good examples, look through job listings. Any "entry-level" position that's looking for an applicant who already has experience is really looking for an ex-intern. If a short internship , even unpaid, means the difference between being employable or not, why should we limit a job-seeker's options?
Personally, I'd like to see unpaid internships be allowed, but they would be considered somewhere between "employed" and "unemployed"... Eligible for benefits from the company (including time-based seniority) and the company must count them as an employee, but not employed enough to interrupt unemployment benefits from a previous employer or require union membership.
Basically, the intern should be considered an employee with no pay, but not have to pay extra (or lose otherwise-earned income) for the privilege.
Do you have the foggiest idea how many facility tours you would have to do to justify one of these things even if the technology provided some advantage?
If the tour makes a good enough impression to land an extra big contract, one.
(and it doesn't provide any advantage)
I work at a financial services firm whose clients are the ones making those multi-million-dollar deals. Yes, they care about doing things themselves, having those little annoyances stripped away, and just getting business done without wasting time giving trivial orders. There are a few old rich folks who want others to do the work for them, but mostly the people who are still making big deals want to be a part of those deals, not be led around on a leash.
You can keep blindly asserting that this is a frivolous technology, but it just makes it more obvious that you have no understanding of how sales works.
I am an accountant so let me make it simple for you. There is NO company that could possibly economically justify one of these for the purpose of conducting tours. Even if you paid someone $50/hour (which would be absurd) you'd have to use the thing for several hundred hours to just break even.
Alright, Mr. Accountant. Please close the payroll book and look at the marketing budget, instead. Under the "investment" section, note the amount spent on accommodating tours, including coffee, lobby maintenance, distributed sales literature, and the insurance policy for letting visitors poke around the facility. Now look at the ROI for those, and go ask your sales team if a robot would help their presentation.
This is a geeky, because-I-can sort of technology with very narrow, if any, application in the real world.
Just like LED displays, rapid prototyping, data analysis, and all the other narrow-application technologies that are first used for marketing, then move on into less profitable fields.
So mount it to a cart, shout instructions through it, get a better speakerphone and recognize the fact that a robot is not a person. I give facetime tours to family members all the time. It's not perfect but it's fine and having a robot would not actually make the tour better, particularly if there were stairs involved.
While it may be amusing to think that executives are willing to shout and wait for someone to follow their orders, people don't work that way. If a person (even an executive) is curious about something, they want to just go look at it, not ask somebody else to push them over toward that whatchamacallit by the thingy under the wossname.
You are going yourself or you are sending a trusted agent on your behalf.
Eventually, yeah... but the first few facility tours don't need to actually involve a physical presence. It's a sniff test to make sure the outfit meets the unwritten requirements, runs according to the unspoken standards, and generally fits what the executive's looking for. That's hard to trust (or even describe) to a low-pay staffer, so the executives (or other highly-paid officials) end up wasting a lot of time and money flying around to all the facilities being considered. If a facility can offer a telepresence robot as an option, the executive gets to run the tour himself, look at everything he wants to, and still have dinner at home. That makes for a happier prospective customer, which makes for a better chance to win the contract.
This is a minor annoyance affecting people with lots of money being used to justify the development of technology.
The problems with someone carrying a smartphone are that the view will wobble, the carrier is in control of the movement, the speakerphone may not be sufficiently clear, and the phone itself is too small to be easily recognized as a person.
Sure, a smartphone is fine for giving an ill relative a presence at a family gathering. For a multi-million-dollar contract hinging on the tour of a facility, those tiny annoyances getting in the way of clear communication become major obstacles, worth throwing money at until the "visitor" can control a stable view of the facility, speak and hear clearly, and easily have all of the social graces that are expected of a presence rather than a phone call.
Read it again. The Code of Hammurabi refers many times to contracts, which were indeed a major part of Babylonian business. Major transactions would be written up in contracts. If any dispute arose later, judges (up to and including the king) would decide who was right and who was wrong. The Code itself was a set of predetermined judgments for common violations such as polygamy, fraud, and deceit. It also has a set of criminal punishments for immediate justice, as well, and that's what's more widely known.
I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment that minors' rights suck, but...
When you suggest that this is about contract law, you engage in bullshit prevarication.
Contract law is effectively the basis for all law. At its core, a contract is simply defining an agreement that the law will enforce. Whether an agreement is legally protected or not depends on whether the agreement was made in good faith. The contract can't utterly screw over any involved party, and all involved parties must be legal entities and, most importantly, understand the whole agreement.
Since law is based on logic (outward appearances notwithstanding), it then follows that anyone who can enter a contract must be capable of understanding its ramifications, and from that we can assume that they're probably capable of understanding the likely effects of any major action... including committing crimes. Anyone able to legally enter a contract must be assumed to be fully responsible for their actions.
Since of course minors can't be assumed to be responsible (and it's far too difficult for courts to have to determine basic responsibility for each and every case), the "easy way out" many governments have taken is to assume that children aren't responsible people, unless they do something that shows an obvious amount of consideration, like a particularly heinous crime. In that case, it can be shown that the minor was thinking through their actions fully, and they're able to be considered an adult for the trial. Unfortunately, there's no realistic way for a minor to show that they're responsible enough to do things they might want to, like enter a contract, work an adult job, have a romantic relationship, be in public late at night, join the military, or use psychoactive substances.
... If you're a US prosecutor. Anyone with any common sense would be stretching it [unclear] Why would a teen want to send their SO porn?
Sorry... part of your comment was unclear when a loud "WHOOSH" went overhead.
Tangentially, teens would want to send their SO porn for the same reason an adult would: They're sexually mature enough to arouse their partner in the hope that such arousal would be returned. As I've said before, the notion of "18 years" being the magic moment of maturity is a relic from the Puritans' shunning of all things sexual. Really, the development of responsibility is a far more complex subject. Some people are responsible enough at 14 to know that sending naked pictures is a bad idea, and some haven't learned that lesson at 35.
Because different crops are different. They require different care, different equipment, and have different market demands. That means different prices, different profits, and different outcomes. Instead of just growing and harvesting a crop, you're now managing a multi-year multi-stage process across several rotating plots, and a single bad year can disrupt the next several years of work as you try to rebuild that delicate year-to-year balance of nutrients.
I know the nostalgic image of the gentle old-time farmer is romantic, but the simple fact is that modern farms are a production industry. Just like any other production industry, there's a significant expense associated with every redesign and retooling for a new project. Generalization has some benefits (labeling food "organic", for instance), but specialization has its benefits as well (lower expenses).
Source: I grew up in farmland. When the wind blows just right, you can smell the manure from the pig farms. When it blows the opposite direction, you can smell the manure being spread on the crop fields.
The alternative would be continuous recording even when neither side thinks it's a good idea. I'm not sure I want to live in that world.
Effectively, you already do. With drones in the sky and cheap tiny cameras available at convenience stores, everybody can record anything, anywhere, any time. Sure, there are eavesdropping laws that supposedly protect you, but actually using them to your benefit is unlikely at best.
With the ever-increasing likelihood that somebody will see everything you do, the only hope, in my opinion, is to promote responsible use of such recordings. For governments, this means short retention, automatic (and independently-audited) archival systems, and public availability of the raw footage. For individuals, this means we abandon our obsession with disgracing authority, and applaud honesty more than sensationalism.
Bad form to self-reply, but I should note for the sake of the overzealous mods that I'm not advocating confiscating phones... I just can't advocate irresponsible recording, either.
On the one hand, that's a good point. If the stated policy is to be recorded at all times when on duty, then it should be perfectly acceptable for a citizen to record the same event from a different angle, right?
Unfortunately, people aren't recording for the sake of having a complete and accurate record of events. They're recording something spectacular to put on YouTube or Facebook later, and it's a safe bet that the editing will depict the police negatively, regardless of any other circumstances. Then the video goes viral, and official statement from the department is conveniently omitted from the copying frenzy, and the whole police force is disgraced by little more than a rumor.
Now that every teenager is an amateur journalist, they forget too quickly the notion of journalistic integrity, in the pursuit of likes and views. So what if this video title is wrong, or if a little CG hides the moment that knife was visible... If it makes the poster famous, that's what's important, right?
No, I mean efficiency. If your main business is sales, then it means improving sales without raising expenses, but Big Data analysis is useful elsewhere, too. If you'd actually read my comment without the gross prejudice, you'd find several examples of improving efficiency in medicine - more accurately detecting trends, showing comorbidity, and finding doctors that ordered excessive tests. Inefficiencies like that are hard to see individually, but in aggregate, outliers are much easier to see.
Some examples from other industries that I've encountered in research:
Arranging small shipments on large transports.
Determining which screenwriters wrote the best parts of a collaborative work.
Turning off HVAC in unused offices.
Arranging water towers in a city.
Monitoring the growth and migration of endangered species
And taking that same person at the right time and showing them that generic X is equivalent to brand name except for the label and the much cheaper prices increases efficiency. Funny that. Not very "Big Data" efficient, though.
Well, yes, but that's rather unrelated to the advertising-industry obvious example I was talking about. Interestingly, that was one of the capabilities of our medical-data system. It differentiated generic and name-brand prescriptions, so researchers could compare efficacies.
Congratulations. You've proven correlation == causation. Oh, wait, no you didn't.
To quote XKCD: Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.
Ten million people might have a cough because it's flu season. But, Joe may cough because he has lung cancer.
It seems you're suggesting that every unknown cough should be treated like it's cancer. That's exactly one inefficiency that raises healthcare costs so much. Out of fear (mostly of malpractice suits), doctors must order extra tests that don't even make sense, just in case the patient has some rare disorder. Maybe Joe also has a funny feeling in his chest that the doctor should know about. A Big Data system can highlight the correlation between cough, that odd feeling, and cancer, and lead the doctor to ask about the feeling. Then there's an indication for Joe to get the extra test, but not for the ten million with the flu. That's ten million fewer x-rays, and a few hundred million dollars in savings for the hospital, insurance providers, and patients.
So true. Too bad the plural of anecdote isn't data. So Big "Data" isn't inherently good for statistical analysis.
Well, the plural actually is data, but I digress. More accurately, data is a set of anecdotes with their subjective interpretations and biases stripped away. That makes them far more useful for statistical analysis, because they're now reduced to a mere set of facts.
Oh, and did I mention that real statistical analysis is really, really hard? I mean it-requires-a-human hard.
Just like playing chess, recognizing speech, driving a car, optimizing circuits, and all those other "hard" things that we now use computers for daily. The actual computations aren't really hard, but what is difficult is knowing exactly what computations are appropriate for the questions being asked. That's not a problem most Big Data systems even try to solve. Rather, they assemble data and prepare predefined statistics to make it easier for humans to get answers to their questions. For example, we can take a set of millions of medical procedures, and ask "which doctors order more tests than others, over one standard deviation from the average for their diagno
I worked in Big Data on a project involving medical records. We harvested medical data from millions of unsuspecting patients, thanks to a probably-unread clause in hospitals' privacy policy. Patients never knew that we had their data, and we never actually paid anybody for it, to my knowledge. The end product (which the providing hospitals got free (I think) access to) was a system for making drug research far faster and cheaper, and tracking doctors that had statistically-poor outcomes, and tracking hereditary disease, and even predicting diagnoses. The implications are pretty clear: cheaper and better health care for everybody, at the cost of privacy for medical data (which was anonymized, salted, hashed, encrypted, anonymized again, and stored in a secure cluster, to comply with all the madness of regulation).
Everything about Big Data relies on the assumption that having more complete information allows a particular business to improve efficiency. For advertising and medicine, this is pretty obvious. Just saying a brand name to the right person at the right time makes a sale. A doctor who can see the symptoms and outcomes of tens of millions of patients can better match a particular patient's case with an earlier example. If that assumption holds true, Big Data is useful.
This ultimately boils down to the issue of anecdotal vs. statistical evidence. Each individual's information is an anecdote, and holds value to the erson (or people) it relates to, but the anecdote doesn't really provide insight for the future. On the other hand, statistical information is only useful on a large scale with a large sample, collected from people who know little enough about the project to alter its outcome. As you said, the statistical information is worth buying, but anecdotes aren't.
DNA contains many minor (and a few strong) indications of how a particular person's body behaves, but the DNA sequence itself does not account for the person's environmental situation, and it has no notion whatsoever of what the individual considers "private". On the other hand, DNA is left with every fingerprint, so it could be said that a fingerprint does contain that medical data...
The notion that everything medical must somehow be sacredly private is absurd. Security through obscurity hasn't ever worked before, so why should it be our favorite strategy for personally avoiding societal problems? If you have a medical issue that you don't want people to know about, fight for its acceptance in society, rather than fight the myriad ways that people can find out about it.
The fact that he did it for a noble cause is irrelevant. What matters is "criminal intent" - whether he intentionally broke the law.
The expelled student intended to gain unauthorized access to the computer system. He knew that the malware he wrote would harvest credentials of other users, and he knew that he wasn't allowed to log in as someone else. Yet he did so anyway. That certainly seems intentional to me, and that's what matters to prosecutors (and college judiciaries).
The USDA's experts. Genetically-modified food is GRAS, but the crops fall under the authority of the USDA. The FDA only really gets involved for the different chemical effects of the genetic engineering, and that's a separate issue from being patentable. The USDA covers the growing process, the FDA covers what's being eaten, and the patents are on the genetic mechanism that produces the desired effect.
I'm not a geneticist, chemist, or a farmer. I can't tell you with certainty how Roundup works, but I do know enough (from my time in the pocket of Big Pharma) to make some reasonable illustrative (and grossly oversimplified) examples:
Let's suppose that a particular herbicide works by breaking apart a particular protein holding together cell walls. Spray it on plants and you get a nice cytoplasmic jelly. To make crops that are resistant to that herbicide, a GMO company alters the genes for the enzyme that assembles that protein, so the final protein works the same to hold the cell together, but can't be disrupted by the herbicide. That works, and the altered enzyme is patentable. As far as the USDA's concerned, the crop needs testing, because the resistance to herbicide could lead to more of the herbicide in use, which must be studied. The FDA only cares that the enzyme and protein both break down by stomach acids as expected, so they don't need much testing. The patent office allows a patent on the modification to the enzyme, since that's the mechanism.
After further research, a different GMO company finds an alternative: The introduction of a second enzyme, found naturally in beef, that will alter the protein only in the presence of the herbicide. The protein is assembled naturally, then modified when the herbicide's applied, then returns to normal once the herbicide has degraded. Now the USDA cares, because of the earlier herbicide-use issue and the new enzyme's presence. The FDA doesn't really care at all, because the new enzyme is already considered safe, and its behavior is understood well enough to know that it's safe by the time it's actually eaten. The patent office allows a new patent, because though the effect is the same, the mechanism is completely different.
Hopefully that illustrates the different jurisdictions of the groups involved.
Nearly the exact same language was included in a draft Agriculture Appropriations bill in June 2012. If it's a defense from Monsanto, it's not due to a bit of wheat "reported months ago".
Did you really think Congress would move that quickly, even for Monsanto's money? Ha! They're not nearly that competent.
But as it stands Monsanto is imune from liability.
Except that's not actually what the legislation does, but hey... FUD is always good, right?
Really, section 735 just stops the judicial system from interfering with the regulatory process. This is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the courts can't stop farmers from planting questionable crops. On the other hand, the courts can't be abused by farm-sponsored activists to slow down approval for crops that are tested and shown to be perfectly safe. Unfortunately, both of these situations happen routinely.
The article you linked says that the provision "grossly protects biotech corporations such as the Missouri-based Monsanto Company from litigation". However, this statement is incredibly misleading. The provision protects Monsanto from the delays of litigation affecting their product's approval. They're still liable for anything they were last week, but now the court can't say "We don't know what's going on, so we're overruling the experts and banning the scary technology".
Or they could do both, and make even more money, or they could have several different perspectives, each based on a particular set of circumstances, most of which don't apply to them personally.... but yeah, let's go ahead and mock the service sector!
Parent is a dumbass, "somebody else did it first" isn't a legal defense, just wishful thinking.
...especially when the "somebody else" is a completely different type of entity operating in a different jurisdiction with different laws and in different circumstances.
Yes. If someone publishes abusive remarks about you in a newspaper, it doesn't matter if you subscribe to the newspaper or not. You can still sue them, and depending on the jurisdiction you and the newspaper (or Facebook) are in, you might just even win.
The First Amendment stipulates that Congress may not pass laws that prohibit people from expressing their ideas or opinions. If you think the President is utterly wrong about something, you're free to say so, and you don't need to fear any persecution from the government. However, the First Amendment is not a license to say anything you want about anybody without consequences. If you write something false that defames the President's reputation, he can sue you for libel.
The First Amendment goes beyond words, as well. Actions such as protests or demonstrations can be considered speech, but the limits on actions are even harsher. Your free expression may not infringe on anybody else's rights. That means your protest can't block a business, harass someone, disrupt traffic, or damage property. You'll face legal consequences for all of those. If your "speech" is a threat (and you show sufficient capability and intent to follow through with that threat), the person you're threatening may even be able to legally kill you in self-defense.
The First Amendment is not a weapon that you can use to attack someone. It is a freedom that you can use to ensure your ideas are available to the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Depending on the data, some computer memory is read with a Fleshlight.
Following the Bible ... Hammurabi's Law ... I guess, they were quite common.
Or just commonly written about. Of course, you could always just take your slave and make sure he's locked in a convenient place, then frame him for a crime, since he won't be able to have a defense. Depending on how corrupt/incompetent the local government is, you could just accuse the slave yourself and let the police do the actual killing, You could also just kill him, and say he was sold or ran away, and nobody will bother asking questions.
All of that would be illegal, though, so surely nobody's done it.
I'm currently doing the job of a tech director at my church on a voluntary basis, which would normally be a paid position. The short version of the story is that we can't really afford to hire a tech director, but I think we need one, so I'm doing the job.
Art and design industries are full of talent, but there are very few opportunities for discovery. I know several artists who would gladly get coffee every morning just for the chance to drop a sketchbook on an executive's desk. After all, a few of them work at Starbucks already...
Industries involving manual labor also face a problem where employees are likely "trained" but still don't know what they're doing. Sure, they know exactly what a gently-used widget looks like under the classroom lighting, but out in the field with a few years' dirt on it, the old-model widget looks unrecognizable, so the newbie has to call over a senior to help, wasting time and money. It'd be far more cost-effective for the company (and for the employee, as well) to have the newbie shadow the senior for a while... but that's hard to justify to a manager who just hired somebody "trained".
For more good examples, look through job listings. Any "entry-level" position that's looking for an applicant who already has experience is really looking for an ex-intern. If a short internship , even unpaid, means the difference between being employable or not, why should we limit a job-seeker's options?
Personally, I'd like to see unpaid internships be allowed, but they would be considered somewhere between "employed" and "unemployed"... Eligible for benefits from the company (including time-based seniority) and the company must count them as an employee, but not employed enough to interrupt unemployment benefits from a previous employer or require union membership.
Basically, the intern should be considered an employee with no pay, but not have to pay extra (or lose otherwise-earned income) for the privilege.
Do you have the foggiest idea how many facility tours you would have to do to justify one of these things even if the technology provided some advantage?
If the tour makes a good enough impression to land an extra big contract, one.
(and it doesn't provide any advantage)
I work at a financial services firm whose clients are the ones making those multi-million-dollar deals. Yes, they care about doing things themselves, having those little annoyances stripped away, and just getting business done without wasting time giving trivial orders. There are a few old rich folks who want others to do the work for them, but mostly the people who are still making big deals want to be a part of those deals, not be led around on a leash.
You can keep blindly asserting that this is a frivolous technology, but it just makes it more obvious that you have no understanding of how sales works.
I am an accountant so let me make it simple for you. There is NO company that could possibly economically justify one of these for the purpose of conducting tours. Even if you paid someone $50/hour (which would be absurd) you'd have to use the thing for several hundred hours to just break even.
Alright, Mr. Accountant. Please close the payroll book and look at the marketing budget, instead. Under the "investment" section, note the amount spent on accommodating tours, including coffee, lobby maintenance, distributed sales literature, and the insurance policy for letting visitors poke around the facility. Now look at the ROI for those, and go ask your sales team if a robot would help their presentation.
This is a geeky, because-I-can sort of technology with very narrow, if any, application in the real world.
Just like LED displays, rapid prototyping, data analysis, and all the other narrow-application technologies that are first used for marketing, then move on into less profitable fields.
So mount it to a cart, shout instructions through it, get a better speakerphone and recognize the fact that a robot is not a person. I give facetime tours to family members all the time. It's not perfect but it's fine and having a robot would not actually make the tour better, particularly if there were stairs involved.
While it may be amusing to think that executives are willing to shout and wait for someone to follow their orders, people don't work that way. If a person (even an executive) is curious about something, they want to just go look at it, not ask somebody else to push them over toward that whatchamacallit by the thingy under the wossname.
You are going yourself or you are sending a trusted agent on your behalf.
Eventually, yeah... but the first few facility tours don't need to actually involve a physical presence. It's a sniff test to make sure the outfit meets the unwritten requirements, runs according to the unspoken standards, and generally fits what the executive's looking for. That's hard to trust (or even describe) to a low-pay staffer, so the executives (or other highly-paid officials) end up wasting a lot of time and money flying around to all the facilities being considered. If a facility can offer a telepresence robot as an option, the executive gets to run the tour himself, look at everything he wants to, and still have dinner at home. That makes for a happier prospective customer, which makes for a better chance to win the contract.
This is a minor annoyance affecting people with lots of money being used to justify the development of technology.
The problems with someone carrying a smartphone are that the view will wobble, the carrier is in control of the movement, the speakerphone may not be sufficiently clear, and the phone itself is too small to be easily recognized as a person.
Sure, a smartphone is fine for giving an ill relative a presence at a family gathering. For a multi-million-dollar contract hinging on the tour of a facility, those tiny annoyances getting in the way of clear communication become major obstacles, worth throwing money at until the "visitor" can control a stable view of the facility, speak and hear clearly, and easily have all of the social graces that are expected of a presence rather than a phone call.
Read it again. The Code of Hammurabi refers many times to contracts, which were indeed a major part of Babylonian business. Major transactions would be written up in contracts. If any dispute arose later, judges (up to and including the king) would decide who was right and who was wrong. The Code itself was a set of predetermined judgments for common violations such as polygamy, fraud, and deceit. It also has a set of criminal punishments for immediate justice, as well, and that's what's more widely known.
I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment that minors' rights suck, but...
When you suggest that this is about contract law, you engage in bullshit prevarication.
Contract law is effectively the basis for all law. At its core, a contract is simply defining an agreement that the law will enforce. Whether an agreement is legally protected or not depends on whether the agreement was made in good faith. The contract can't utterly screw over any involved party, and all involved parties must be legal entities and, most importantly, understand the whole agreement.
Since law is based on logic (outward appearances notwithstanding), it then follows that anyone who can enter a contract must be capable of understanding its ramifications, and from that we can assume that they're probably capable of understanding the likely effects of any major action... including committing crimes. Anyone able to legally enter a contract must be assumed to be fully responsible for their actions.
Since of course minors can't be assumed to be responsible (and it's far too difficult for courts to have to determine basic responsibility for each and every case), the "easy way out" many governments have taken is to assume that children aren't responsible people, unless they do something that shows an obvious amount of consideration, like a particularly heinous crime. In that case, it can be shown that the minor was thinking through their actions fully, and they're able to be considered an adult for the trial. Unfortunately, there's no realistic way for a minor to show that they're responsible enough to do things they might want to, like enter a contract, work an adult job, have a romantic relationship, be in public late at night, join the military, or use psychoactive substances.
... If you're a US prosecutor. Anyone with any common sense would be stretching it [unclear] Why would a teen want to send their SO porn?
Sorry... part of your comment was unclear when a loud "WHOOSH" went overhead.
Tangentially, teens would want to send their SO porn for the same reason an adult would: They're sexually mature enough to arouse their partner in the hope that such arousal would be returned. As I've said before, the notion of "18 years" being the magic moment of maturity is a relic from the Puritans' shunning of all things sexual. Really, the development of responsibility is a far more complex subject. Some people are responsible enough at 14 to know that sending naked pictures is a bad idea, and some haven't learned that lesson at 35.
Because different crops are different. They require different care, different equipment, and have different market demands. That means different prices, different profits, and different outcomes. Instead of just growing and harvesting a crop, you're now managing a multi-year multi-stage process across several rotating plots, and a single bad year can disrupt the next several years of work as you try to rebuild that delicate year-to-year balance of nutrients.
I know the nostalgic image of the gentle old-time farmer is romantic, but the simple fact is that modern farms are a production industry. Just like any other production industry, there's a significant expense associated with every redesign and retooling for a new project. Generalization has some benefits (labeling food "organic", for instance), but specialization has its benefits as well (lower expenses).
Source: I grew up in farmland. When the wind blows just right, you can smell the manure from the pig farms. When it blows the opposite direction, you can smell the manure being spread on the crop fields.
The alternative would be continuous recording even when neither side thinks it's a good idea. I'm not sure I want to live in that world.
Effectively, you already do. With drones in the sky and cheap tiny cameras available at convenience stores, everybody can record anything, anywhere, any time. Sure, there are eavesdropping laws that supposedly protect you, but actually using them to your benefit is unlikely at best.
With the ever-increasing likelihood that somebody will see everything you do, the only hope, in my opinion, is to promote responsible use of such recordings. For governments, this means short retention, automatic (and independently-audited) archival systems, and public availability of the raw footage. For individuals, this means we abandon our obsession with disgracing authority, and applaud honesty more than sensationalism.
I can dream.
Yeah... all those wars have left such great peace and happiness behind.
Bad form to self-reply, but I should note for the sake of the overzealous mods that I'm not advocating confiscating phones... I just can't advocate irresponsible recording, either.
On the one hand, that's a good point. If the stated policy is to be recorded at all times when on duty, then it should be perfectly acceptable for a citizen to record the same event from a different angle, right?
Unfortunately, people aren't recording for the sake of having a complete and accurate record of events. They're recording something spectacular to put on YouTube or Facebook later, and it's a safe bet that the editing will depict the police negatively, regardless of any other circumstances. Then the video goes viral, and official statement from the department is conveniently omitted from the copying frenzy, and the whole police force is disgraced by little more than a rumor.
Now that every teenager is an amateur journalist, they forget too quickly the notion of journalistic integrity, in the pursuit of likes and views. So what if this video title is wrong, or if a little CG hides the moment that knife was visible... If it makes the poster famous, that's what's important, right?
Clearly the right way to counter one group of thugs is with another group of thugs.
Now, if you mean "improve sales"...
No, I mean efficiency. If your main business is sales, then it means improving sales without raising expenses, but Big Data analysis is useful elsewhere, too. If you'd actually read my comment without the gross prejudice, you'd find several examples of improving efficiency in medicine - more accurately detecting trends, showing comorbidity, and finding doctors that ordered excessive tests. Inefficiencies like that are hard to see individually, but in aggregate, outliers are much easier to see.
Some examples from other industries that I've encountered in research:
And taking that same person at the right time and showing them that generic X is equivalent to brand name except for the label and the much cheaper prices increases efficiency. Funny that. Not very "Big Data" efficient, though.
Well, yes, but that's rather unrelated to the advertising-industry obvious example I was talking about. Interestingly, that was one of the capabilities of our medical-data system. It differentiated generic and name-brand prescriptions, so researchers could compare efficacies.
Congratulations. You've proven correlation == causation. Oh, wait, no you didn't.
To quote XKCD: Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'.
Ten million people might have a cough because it's flu season. But, Joe may cough because he has lung cancer.
It seems you're suggesting that every unknown cough should be treated like it's cancer. That's exactly one inefficiency that raises healthcare costs so much. Out of fear (mostly of malpractice suits), doctors must order extra tests that don't even make sense, just in case the patient has some rare disorder. Maybe Joe also has a funny feeling in his chest that the doctor should know about. A Big Data system can highlight the correlation between cough, that odd feeling, and cancer, and lead the doctor to ask about the feeling. Then there's an indication for Joe to get the extra test, but not for the ten million with the flu. That's ten million fewer x-rays, and a few hundred million dollars in savings for the hospital, insurance providers, and patients.
So true. Too bad the plural of anecdote isn't data. So Big "Data" isn't inherently good for statistical analysis.
Well, the plural actually is data, but I digress. More accurately, data is a set of anecdotes with their subjective interpretations and biases stripped away. That makes them far more useful for statistical analysis, because they're now reduced to a mere set of facts.
Oh, and did I mention that real statistical analysis is really, really hard? I mean it-requires-a-human hard.
Just like playing chess, recognizing speech, driving a car, optimizing circuits, and all those other "hard" things that we now use computers for daily. The actual computations aren't really hard, but what is difficult is knowing exactly what computations are appropriate for the questions being asked. That's not a problem most Big Data systems even try to solve. Rather, they assemble data and prepare predefined statistics to make it easier for humans to get answers to their questions. For example, we can take a set of millions of medical procedures, and ask "which doctors order more tests than others, over one standard deviation from the average for their diagno
Exactly right.
I worked in Big Data on a project involving medical records. We harvested medical data from millions of unsuspecting patients, thanks to a probably-unread clause in hospitals' privacy policy. Patients never knew that we had their data, and we never actually paid anybody for it, to my knowledge. The end product (which the providing hospitals got free (I think) access to) was a system for making drug research far faster and cheaper, and tracking doctors that had statistically-poor outcomes, and tracking hereditary disease, and even predicting diagnoses. The implications are pretty clear: cheaper and better health care for everybody, at the cost of privacy for medical data (which was anonymized, salted, hashed, encrypted, anonymized again, and stored in a secure cluster, to comply with all the madness of regulation).
Everything about Big Data relies on the assumption that having more complete information allows a particular business to improve efficiency. For advertising and medicine, this is pretty obvious. Just saying a brand name to the right person at the right time makes a sale. A doctor who can see the symptoms and outcomes of tens of millions of patients can better match a particular patient's case with an earlier example. If that assumption holds true, Big Data is useful.
This ultimately boils down to the issue of anecdotal vs. statistical evidence. Each individual's information is an anecdote, and holds value to the erson (or people) it relates to, but the anecdote doesn't really provide insight for the future. On the other hand, statistical information is only useful on a large scale with a large sample, collected from people who know little enough about the project to alter its outcome. As you said, the statistical information is worth buying, but anecdotes aren't.
Neither does DNA.
DNA contains many minor (and a few strong) indications of how a particular person's body behaves, but the DNA sequence itself does not account for the person's environmental situation, and it has no notion whatsoever of what the individual considers "private". On the other hand, DNA is left with every fingerprint, so it could be said that a fingerprint does contain that medical data...
The notion that everything medical must somehow be sacredly private is absurd. Security through obscurity hasn't ever worked before, so why should it be our favorite strategy for personally avoiding societal problems? If you have a medical issue that you don't want people to know about, fight for its acceptance in society, rather than fight the myriad ways that people can find out about it.
The fact that he did it for a noble cause is irrelevant. What matters is "criminal intent" - whether he intentionally broke the law.
The expelled student intended to gain unauthorized access to the computer system. He knew that the malware he wrote would harvest credentials of other users, and he knew that he wasn't allowed to log in as someone else. Yet he did so anyway. That certainly seems intentional to me, and that's what matters to prosecutors (and college judiciaries).
The USDA's experts. Genetically-modified food is GRAS, but the crops fall under the authority of the USDA. The FDA only really gets involved for the different chemical effects of the genetic engineering, and that's a separate issue from being patentable. The USDA covers the growing process, the FDA covers what's being eaten, and the patents are on the genetic mechanism that produces the desired effect.
I'm not a geneticist, chemist, or a farmer. I can't tell you with certainty how Roundup works, but I do know enough (from my time in the pocket of Big Pharma) to make some reasonable illustrative (and grossly oversimplified) examples:
Let's suppose that a particular herbicide works by breaking apart a particular protein holding together cell walls. Spray it on plants and you get a nice cytoplasmic jelly. To make crops that are resistant to that herbicide, a GMO company alters the genes for the enzyme that assembles that protein, so the final protein works the same to hold the cell together, but can't be disrupted by the herbicide. That works, and the altered enzyme is patentable. As far as the USDA's concerned, the crop needs testing, because the resistance to herbicide could lead to more of the herbicide in use, which must be studied. The FDA only cares that the enzyme and protein both break down by stomach acids as expected, so they don't need much testing. The patent office allows a patent on the modification to the enzyme, since that's the mechanism.
After further research, a different GMO company finds an alternative: The introduction of a second enzyme, found naturally in beef, that will alter the protein only in the presence of the herbicide. The protein is assembled naturally, then modified when the herbicide's applied, then returns to normal once the herbicide has degraded. Now the USDA cares, because of the earlier herbicide-use issue and the new enzyme's presence. The FDA doesn't really care at all, because the new enzyme is already considered safe, and its behavior is understood well enough to know that it's safe by the time it's actually eaten. The patent office allows a new patent, because though the effect is the same, the mechanism is completely different.
Hopefully that illustrates the different jurisdictions of the groups involved.
Nearly the exact same language was included in a draft Agriculture Appropriations bill in June 2012. If it's a defense from Monsanto, it's not due to a bit of wheat "reported months ago".
Did you really think Congress would move that quickly, even for Monsanto's money? Ha! They're not nearly that competent.
But as it stands Monsanto is imune from liability.
Except that's not actually what the legislation does, but hey... FUD is always good, right?
Really, section 735 just stops the judicial system from interfering with the regulatory process. This is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the courts can't stop farmers from planting questionable crops. On the other hand, the courts can't be abused by farm-sponsored activists to slow down approval for crops that are tested and shown to be perfectly safe. Unfortunately, both of these situations happen routinely.
The article you linked says that the provision "grossly protects biotech corporations such as the Missouri-based Monsanto Company from litigation". However, this statement is incredibly misleading. The provision protects Monsanto from the delays of litigation affecting their product's approval. They're still liable for anything they were last week, but now the court can't say "We don't know what's going on, so we're overruling the experts and banning the scary technology".
Or they could do both, and make even more money, or they could have several different perspectives, each based on a particular set of circumstances, most of which don't apply to them personally.... but yeah, let's go ahead and mock the service sector!
Parent is a dumbass, "somebody else did it first" isn't a legal defense, just wishful thinking.
...especially when the "somebody else" is a completely different type of entity operating in a different jurisdiction with different laws and in different circumstances.
Yes. If someone publishes abusive remarks about you in a newspaper, it doesn't matter if you subscribe to the newspaper or not. You can still sue them, and depending on the jurisdiction you and the newspaper (or Facebook) are in, you might just even win.
The First Amendment stipulates that Congress may not pass laws that prohibit people from expressing their ideas or opinions. If you think the President is utterly wrong about something, you're free to say so, and you don't need to fear any persecution from the government. However, the First Amendment is not a license to say anything you want about anybody without consequences. If you write something false that defames the President's reputation, he can sue you for libel.
The First Amendment goes beyond words, as well. Actions such as protests or demonstrations can be considered speech, but the limits on actions are even harsher. Your free expression may not infringe on anybody else's rights. That means your protest can't block a business, harass someone, disrupt traffic, or damage property. You'll face legal consequences for all of those. If your "speech" is a threat (and you show sufficient capability and intent to follow through with that threat), the person you're threatening may even be able to legally kill you in self-defense.
The First Amendment is not a weapon that you can use to attack someone. It is a freedom that you can use to ensure your ideas are available to the world.