Actually, it's not illegal to monitor police transmissions. They are supposed to be public servants operating publicly for the good of the public, that's how fucking public they are, and in fact you can listen to feeds of these transmissions online right now. You clearly don't have a sound grasp of ethics or law.
Oh shit! You mean Google could cross-index publicly available addresses with publicly available OUI registries and find out I have a Broadcom card?! Those evil, scheming muthafuckas!! I mean think of the damage they could do if only they knew my love of Senao/Engenius, or that I sometimes change my MACs to 00:0A:DE:XX:XX:XX because it's funny. Look it up.
I would so mod you up if I could. In addition to companies like Skyhook, private hobbyist groups like Wigle have been doing this for years. Wigle is up to 20 million logged and geolocated APs. And if you download their client and play with the request constraints enough, you could retrieve every one of those entries with a little patience.
Do you know anything about networking? The MAC of the AP/router does not face the interwebs. If it's an AP it will be connecting through another cable/DSL/T1/whatever that has its own MAC address. If it's a router the WAN port will have a different MAC address than the WLAN.
Smart? Try lazy, cowardly, or more likely just plain apathetic. We need more people like Rachner to push back, to take stands. He uncovered a potentially huge conspiracy to withhold evidence from trials. His stubborn and clever tenacity held the system accountable. People like him make the system wary enough so that it can't deal with all the 'smart' people in too harsh a manner. They have it easy because some people aren't afraid to do the right thing, even it's hard.
You're conflating what I would do with what I recognize as permissible to do. (Though to be fair I probably wouldn't balk at this particular scenario.)
There are many, many things I don't do that I could do. I've had people hit my car and rather than go all apeshit on them and go after their insurance, I have the common decency to realize that my car was old, not really damaged, and I just let the go on their way. I eat food that is not the way I ordered it. Most of the time in fact I accept what comes my way and move on, because I don't like making a big deal out of things. That doesn't mean that I'm blind to the issues of responsibility. That doesn't mean I trust everything with a pulse, and I don't respect people who are so naive that they do.
Even with that justification removed, it's still amusing to get people riled up occasionally. It's just a matter of balance. I frequently post long, well-researched, and wholly polite things. If I never lashed out I probably couldn't keep going. It's called being human, and I am unashamed of it.
This depends on their status. Yes, there is Title 45 Part 46 of the CFR, but that only applies to federally-regulated research. Whether this falls into that category or not I am not informed enough to say. Other organizational policy issues are of course between the researchers and their organization.
Did I give you the DNA voluntarily without any written terms to limit its use? Then I guess I'm not going to object, because that would only highlight what an irresponsible idiot I am, and how I'm willing to shift that blame for how irresponsible I am on to other people.
I have never lent somebody a car in my life, because with rare exceptions that would be an extremely dumb and irresponsible thing to do. Just like what these people did. They gave over samples apparently with no written guaranty of how they would be used, and now they're stunned that they have been used for other things. No shit.
Somebody could get drunk in my car and kill somebody. That's why I would only lend a car to somebody I knew fairly intimately, whose behavior I could predict based on precedents, which would mitigate my fears over the financial and/or criminal liability I would inherit by volunteering my property for another person's use. Like I said, never done it, probably won't for anybody not related by blood. It's called taking responsibility. These people didn't, now they're bitching like it's the researchers' fault that they never required them to agree to any terms before releasing the samples. Absurd.
Yeah, but you're assuming I'm dumb enough to let somebody borrow one of my guns. Like hell I would. These people did something dumb, and now they're complaining about it. If they wanted to have expansive use definitions for samples that they voluntarily surrendered, they should have had those terms in writing. Then if this had still happened, they could sue. The end.
I'm probably not the intended audience, as I'm a right-wing secular humanist. However I think the consensus among most atheists is that all religions are bullshit, regardless of the size or standing of the culture they come from. Usually the people who defend the right of smaller groups to have their ignorance unassailed are left-wing postmodern cultural relativist Christians like Unitarians. Oh snap!
If I gave a DNA sample to somebody (like your mom last night) without making them sign some sort of agreement as to how that sample was to be used, what expectation would I reasonably have that the use would be exclusive? Did these researchers obligate themselves verbally to an exclusive use? Just saying 'we will use these for x' is not exclusive by itself. Unless the researchers said 'we will use these for x and nothing else ' then these whiners have no ground to stand on, except being stupid and careless.
(The 'your mom' joke was just low hanging fruit to the subject, and I would have used it in my reply to anybody. It is not intended as a personal provocation.)
Ok, you're right, the analogy was not sufficiently similar to the situation. Replace 'eat a sandwich' with 'donate $10000 to charity'. By itself, donating $10000 to charity would be a good thing, but when it is the foreknown catalyst for a crazy person to kill somebody, it ceases to be admirable in that context.
I'm not arguing that in and of itself that Google exposing the Chinese government is wrong. I support ending all internet censorship everywhere unconditionally. By itself, Google exposing China's oppression is absolutely the right thing to do, but at what cost? I'm not willing to send people to prison against their will to make a political statement, no matter how good that statement may be. Like I said a few posts ago, I would be totally supportive if one of Google's Chinese employees took one for the team and volunteered to take any fallout for the release of that information, but it must be their choice.
Which brings me back to another earlier point left unaddressed. Even if you set all these issues aside, you'll still have the problem of the perception of Google throwing people under the bus. If I worked for Google Egypt and saw this happen I would run, not walk away from working for such a company in a dicey socio-political environment.
Your hypothetical about "What if China demanded that Google started censoring search results everywhere..." would almost certainly result in some kind of international action by various governments (as it would be an aggressive overreach of sovereignty), which would make any response directly from Google secondary to the issue.
Paul is an easy scapegoat, as in many ways he was an interloper given credence by later church conferences, but no such exists for muslims. The Quran is written by one man (who borrowed lazily from other Abrahamic religions), and the priority of its teachings are chronological. Whatever was said of a thing last would be given the greatest weight, and all the peaceful parts are earliest when the religion was only tenuously established. The later parts are more violent because the 'Prophet' felt emboldened by his established power base and didn't care about peace so much anymore.
There is no 'extremely peaceful' 'true Islam'. I would recommend you look at the violence section of Skeptic's Annotated Quran. (They also have a chronological index of suras.)
"Racist protectionism" indeed. In the first place, when jury trials were first codified in medieval English law, there weren't really any 'race' issues round about Runnymede in the 13th century. You're anachronistically applying an American-centered standard. And where that is concerned, there was nothing inherently racist about the jury system in the US, it was merely a reflection and extrapolation of the racism of the broader society and the nature of enfranchisement/suffrage in America at those times.
However I do agree that expert witnesses should be presented in dissenting pairs wherever possible.
Even if jurors are chosen for their persuadability, which I don't disagree that they are, that is immaterial to the fact that there are two sides equally attempting to persuade. I think that the instances where personality overcomes evidence are rare enough to be within tolerable limits, especially lacking a better model with which to replace it.
You talk about 'protection' and 'pressure' and I agree, neither is Google's job to do in China. However, I don't think you understand the ethics of the situation. If China's government gets a burr up its ass right now and goes after current/former Google employees with no discernible cause/effect provocation, certainly Google shouldn't and couldn't do anything nor should they be held responsible.
However, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about Google taking an action that is reasonably expected to provoke China to imprison current/former employees. Where Google is the cause, they are responsible. Yes, ultimately China makes the decision to imprison, but it will be based on a known and established 'legal' process that Google would have understood before it acted.
If a crazy guy has a gun to a kid's head and says he'll kill the kid if you eat a sandwich in front of him, and then you eat a sandwich, it doesn't matter that what you did was in of itself innocuous. It doesn't matter that you didn't pull the trigger. You knew what would happen, so you share responsibility. Google is in that position. They aren't responsible for actively protecting their employees, but they are responsible for not taking voluntary actions that are reasonably expected to endanger them.
The Voir Dire system normalizes juries. When you select people in a purely random way with no intervention, you could easily end up with a jury that is stacked one way or the other by complete coincidence. Of course this intervention creates the possibility of using it to unbalance juries that otherwise would have been balanced, but I think that occurs less often than the aforementioned condition it is designed to prevent. However this is a subjective matter of opinion that would be almost impossible to test.
That juries are composed of people who are likely to be swayed by lawyers is immaterial. That's why both sides have lawyers. Of course people are going to whine about how 'whichever side gives the jury a better show' wins, but that's a jaded and cynical view. Lawyers are there to provide the most convincing perspective that favors their client that they can, but I don't think that it happens very often that their individual talents are so imbalanced that a criminal goes free or an innocent man is sentenced. It still happens occasionally, but anybody who says that the system should be thrown out because it fails a small percentage of the time is a fool. Justice can't be suspended simply because occasionally some people make mistakes. That's the cost of the human condition.
I will say that your 'hybrid' suggestion is a good one, except that I worry that it would in most cases cause the lay jurors to crystalize around the professional jurors through direct or implied appeals to authority, and this would probably frequently negate the utility of lay jurors as a balance.
You really think that China is going to care who knows that they would imprison ex-Google employees for exposing state secrets? China WANTS people to know, especially their own citizens. It's called 'deterrence'.
Oh and the term you were looking for here is 'gwailo' (or 'gweilo') not 'gaijin'.
You're on the right track when you say, "Google is a company, not a country." But when you turn around and say, "We don’t negotiate with terrorists," it seems like you're missing your own point. It is not for Google to ape US foreign policy or some kind of pseudo-national corporate sovereignty. Google must think about its employees in China because Google is not a government.
If something Google does results in its employees' imprisonment then a) that undermines the faith that Google employees place in their employer at satellite offices worldwide and b) that leaves Google few if any options to apply pressure to China directly. Google can't 'sanction' China. There is no 'Google' seat at the UN. Google doesn't have an extraterritorial embassy in China staffed by people with diplomatic immunity that can 'save' its employees from the Chinese government's grip like in some Cold War thriller movie. Google simply can't play those games.
Their position is inherently weaker than that of sovereign nations. Consequently, they are responsible for what China does if the company is a catalyst, because after being that catalyst and ruining some peoples' lives, all Google can do is say, 'come and see the violence inherent in the system!' But otherwise they can do nothing to help, nothing to even reasonably appear to be trying to help, and all the while there will be families torn apart and lives ruined involuntarily. (I would wholehearted support them if some Chinese Google employees politically/criminally martyred themselves by disclosing all the requests, but that would have to be their decision, not corporate's back in the safety of the US.)
What exactly is your frame of reference here? Basically every state in the US has rural areas, even the smallest ones like Rhode Island and Delaware. The big ones like Montana and Texas are demographically similar to the way you're describing Canada, tons of small towns separated by miles and miles of sparsely populated land.
Slashdot Mirror
Just as redundant as 'NIC card' and I can't get people to stop saying that either.
Actually, it's not illegal to monitor police transmissions. They are supposed to be public servants operating publicly for the good of the public, that's how fucking public they are, and in fact you can listen to feeds of these transmissions online right now. You clearly don't have a sound grasp of ethics or law.
Oh shit! You mean Google could cross-index publicly available addresses with publicly available OUI registries and find out I have a Broadcom card?! Those evil, scheming muthafuckas!! I mean think of the damage they could do if only they knew my love of Senao/Engenius, or that I sometimes change my MACs to 00:0A:DE:XX:XX:XX because it's funny. Look it up.
I would so mod you up if I could. In addition to companies like Skyhook, private hobbyist groups like Wigle have been doing this for years. Wigle is up to 20 million logged and geolocated APs. And if you download their client and play with the request constraints enough, you could retrieve every one of those entries with a little patience.
It does need to be explained that wardriving is not the same as piggybacking.
Do you know anything about networking? The MAC of the AP/router does not face the interwebs. If it's an AP it will be connecting through another cable/DSL/T1/whatever that has its own MAC address. If it's a router the WAN port will have a different MAC address than the WLAN.
Wardriving is not 'theft of bandwidth'. That's piggybacking.
Smart? Try lazy, cowardly, or more likely just plain apathetic. We need more people like Rachner to push back, to take stands. He uncovered a potentially huge conspiracy to withhold evidence from trials. His stubborn and clever tenacity held the system accountable. People like him make the system wary enough so that it can't deal with all the 'smart' people in too harsh a manner. They have it easy because some people aren't afraid to do the right thing, even it's hard.
You're conflating what I would do with what I recognize as permissible to do. (Though to be fair I probably wouldn't balk at this particular scenario.)
There are many, many things I don't do that I could do. I've had people hit my car and rather than go all apeshit on them and go after their insurance, I have the common decency to realize that my car was old, not really damaged, and I just let the go on their way. I eat food that is not the way I ordered it. Most of the time in fact I accept what comes my way and move on, because I don't like making a big deal out of things. That doesn't mean that I'm blind to the issues of responsibility. That doesn't mean I trust everything with a pulse, and I don't respect people who are so naive that they do.
Even with that justification removed, it's still amusing to get people riled up occasionally. It's just a matter of balance. I frequently post long, well-researched, and wholly polite things. If I never lashed out I probably couldn't keep going. It's called being human, and I am unashamed of it.
This depends on their status. Yes, there is Title 45 Part 46 of the CFR, but that only applies to federally-regulated research. Whether this falls into that category or not I am not informed enough to say. Other organizational policy issues are of course between the researchers and their organization.
My excellent karma disagrees. I actually drop edgy posts now and then specifically so I don't get flooded with more mod points than I really want.
Did I give you the DNA voluntarily without any written terms to limit its use? Then I guess I'm not going to object, because that would only highlight what an irresponsible idiot I am, and how I'm willing to shift that blame for how irresponsible I am on to other people.
I have never lent somebody a car in my life, because with rare exceptions that would be an extremely dumb and irresponsible thing to do. Just like what these people did. They gave over samples apparently with no written guaranty of how they would be used, and now they're stunned that they have been used for other things. No shit.
Somebody could get drunk in my car and kill somebody. That's why I would only lend a car to somebody I knew fairly intimately, whose behavior I could predict based on precedents, which would mitigate my fears over the financial and/or criminal liability I would inherit by volunteering my property for another person's use. Like I said, never done it, probably won't for anybody not related by blood. It's called taking responsibility. These people didn't, now they're bitching like it's the researchers' fault that they never required them to agree to any terms before releasing the samples. Absurd.
Yeah, but you're assuming I'm dumb enough to let somebody borrow one of my guns. Like hell I would. These people did something dumb, and now they're complaining about it. If they wanted to have expansive use definitions for samples that they voluntarily surrendered, they should have had those terms in writing. Then if this had still happened, they could sue. The end.
I'm probably not the intended audience, as I'm a right-wing secular humanist. However I think the consensus among most atheists is that all religions are bullshit, regardless of the size or standing of the culture they come from. Usually the people who defend the right of smaller groups to have their ignorance unassailed are left-wing postmodern cultural relativist Christians like Unitarians. Oh snap!
If I gave a DNA sample to somebody (like your mom last night) without making them sign some sort of agreement as to how that sample was to be used, what expectation would I reasonably have that the use would be exclusive? Did these researchers obligate themselves verbally to an exclusive use? Just saying 'we will use these for x' is not exclusive by itself. Unless the researchers said 'we will use these for x and nothing else ' then these whiners have no ground to stand on, except being stupid and careless.
(The 'your mom' joke was just low hanging fruit to the subject, and I would have used it in my reply to anybody. It is not intended as a personal provocation.)
Ok, you're right, the analogy was not sufficiently similar to the situation. Replace 'eat a sandwich' with 'donate $10000 to charity'. By itself, donating $10000 to charity would be a good thing, but when it is the foreknown catalyst for a crazy person to kill somebody, it ceases to be admirable in that context.
..." would almost certainly result in some kind of international action by various governments (as it would be an aggressive overreach of sovereignty), which would make any response directly from Google secondary to the issue.
I'm not arguing that in and of itself that Google exposing the Chinese government is wrong. I support ending all internet censorship everywhere unconditionally. By itself, Google exposing China's oppression is absolutely the right thing to do, but at what cost? I'm not willing to send people to prison against their will to make a political statement, no matter how good that statement may be. Like I said a few posts ago, I would be totally supportive if one of Google's Chinese employees took one for the team and volunteered to take any fallout for the release of that information, but it must be their choice.
Which brings me back to another earlier point left unaddressed. Even if you set all these issues aside, you'll still have the problem of the perception of Google throwing people under the bus. If I worked for Google Egypt and saw this happen I would run, not walk away from working for such a company in a dicey socio-political environment.
Your hypothetical about "What if China demanded that Google started censoring search results everywhere
Paul is an easy scapegoat, as in many ways he was an interloper given credence by later church conferences, but no such exists for muslims. The Quran is written by one man (who borrowed lazily from other Abrahamic religions), and the priority of its teachings are chronological. Whatever was said of a thing last would be given the greatest weight, and all the peaceful parts are earliest when the religion was only tenuously established. The later parts are more violent because the 'Prophet' felt emboldened by his established power base and didn't care about peace so much anymore.
There is no 'extremely peaceful' 'true Islam'. I would recommend you look at the violence section of Skeptic's Annotated Quran. (They also have a chronological index of suras.)
"Racist protectionism" indeed. In the first place, when jury trials were first codified in medieval English law, there weren't really any 'race' issues round about Runnymede in the 13th century. You're anachronistically applying an American-centered standard. And where that is concerned, there was nothing inherently racist about the jury system in the US, it was merely a reflection and extrapolation of the racism of the broader society and the nature of enfranchisement/suffrage in America at those times.
However I do agree that expert witnesses should be presented in dissenting pairs wherever possible.
Even if jurors are chosen for their persuadability, which I don't disagree that they are, that is immaterial to the fact that there are two sides equally attempting to persuade. I think that the instances where personality overcomes evidence are rare enough to be within tolerable limits, especially lacking a better model with which to replace it.
You talk about 'protection' and 'pressure' and I agree, neither is Google's job to do in China. However, I don't think you understand the ethics of the situation. If China's government gets a burr up its ass right now and goes after current/former Google employees with no discernible cause/effect provocation, certainly Google shouldn't and couldn't do anything nor should they be held responsible.
However, that's not what we're talking about. We're talking about Google taking an action that is reasonably expected to provoke China to imprison current/former employees. Where Google is the cause, they are responsible. Yes, ultimately China makes the decision to imprison, but it will be based on a known and established 'legal' process that Google would have understood before it acted.
If a crazy guy has a gun to a kid's head and says he'll kill the kid if you eat a sandwich in front of him, and then you eat a sandwich, it doesn't matter that what you did was in of itself innocuous. It doesn't matter that you didn't pull the trigger. You knew what would happen, so you share responsibility. Google is in that position. They aren't responsible for actively protecting their employees, but they are responsible for not taking voluntary actions that are reasonably expected to endanger them.
The Voir Dire system normalizes juries. When you select people in a purely random way with no intervention, you could easily end up with a jury that is stacked one way or the other by complete coincidence. Of course this intervention creates the possibility of using it to unbalance juries that otherwise would have been balanced, but I think that occurs less often than the aforementioned condition it is designed to prevent. However this is a subjective matter of opinion that would be almost impossible to test.
That juries are composed of people who are likely to be swayed by lawyers is immaterial. That's why both sides have lawyers. Of course people are going to whine about how 'whichever side gives the jury a better show' wins, but that's a jaded and cynical view. Lawyers are there to provide the most convincing perspective that favors their client that they can, but I don't think that it happens very often that their individual talents are so imbalanced that a criminal goes free or an innocent man is sentenced. It still happens occasionally, but anybody who says that the system should be thrown out because it fails a small percentage of the time is a fool. Justice can't be suspended simply because occasionally some people make mistakes. That's the cost of the human condition.
I will say that your 'hybrid' suggestion is a good one, except that I worry that it would in most cases cause the lay jurors to crystalize around the professional jurors through direct or implied appeals to authority, and this would probably frequently negate the utility of lay jurors as a balance.
You really think that China is going to care who knows that they would imprison ex-Google employees for exposing state secrets? China WANTS people to know, especially their own citizens. It's called 'deterrence'.
Oh and the term you were looking for here is 'gwailo' (or 'gweilo') not 'gaijin'.
You're on the right track when you say, "Google is a company, not a country." But when you turn around and say, "We don’t negotiate with terrorists," it seems like you're missing your own point. It is not for Google to ape US foreign policy or some kind of pseudo-national corporate sovereignty. Google must think about its employees in China because Google is not a government.
If something Google does results in its employees' imprisonment then a) that undermines the faith that Google employees place in their employer at satellite offices worldwide and b) that leaves Google few if any options to apply pressure to China directly. Google can't 'sanction' China. There is no 'Google' seat at the UN. Google doesn't have an extraterritorial embassy in China staffed by people with diplomatic immunity that can 'save' its employees from the Chinese government's grip like in some Cold War thriller movie. Google simply can't play those games.
Their position is inherently weaker than that of sovereign nations. Consequently, they are responsible for what China does if the company is a catalyst, because after being that catalyst and ruining some peoples' lives, all Google can do is say, 'come and see the violence inherent in the system!' But otherwise they can do nothing to help, nothing to even reasonably appear to be trying to help, and all the while there will be families torn apart and lives ruined involuntarily. (I would wholehearted support them if some Chinese Google employees politically/criminally martyred themselves by disclosing all the requests, but that would have to be their decision, not corporate's back in the safety of the US.)
What exactly is your frame of reference here? Basically every state in the US has rural areas, even the smallest ones like Rhode Island and Delaware. The big ones like Montana and Texas are demographically similar to the way you're describing Canada, tons of small towns separated by miles and miles of sparsely populated land.