I've had enough conversations with people regarding privacy to realize that people don't even think about it, so the idea they were expecting it is ludicrous.
Social norms are often so ingrained to your behavior that you don't think about them. Acceptable behavior in bathrooms is highly regimented, but it's rarely overtly codified. If you're a man at a urinal, no one has to tell you that you're not supposed to stare at the junk of the man next to you. You just don't do it. You probably don't even classify that as part of "privacy", even though it surely is.
So people have all sorts of expectations that they're not consciously aware of until those expectations are violated. People expect that their company isn't going too far with the privacy policy, so few people bother to check -- and fewer still make a point to ask about it before accepting a job offer. It's only when they come to find out later that the privacy policy is clearly outside of the normal range that people are upset.
I don't know... If you put it in your work contract, I'm not sure what the legal ramifications are, how are you so certain?
I think it's probably illegal, but that's not even the point. All it takes is for one whistleblower to go to their local TV station and then that company becomes a global pariah as a peeping tom -- even if it's technically legal. After that, the company is going to face intense pressure to change their ways. Politicians will face pressure to make it explicitly illegal. This is all part of the process of establishing social norms that I talked about.
Where did you get the 5,000 year figure? The article itself cites clear evidence of human habitation in Europe 41,600 years ago, which is before the earliest painting's date of 40,800 years ago. There are sites even earlier than that. Plus, there is a fundamental problem in that preservation events are rare, so humans were no doubt in the area long before we'd ever find evidence of them.
Meanwhile, Neanderthals had been around in Europe for 300,000 years. Even if your number were right, for 98.3% of their existence, Neanderthals didn't bother making cave paintings.
It's apparently not obvious to the people who tell us "You have zero expectation of privacy at work" and variants of "their property, their rules". It's obvious to you and me that neither of these things are true in the real world.
What matters are the social norms surrounding privacy; if most people expect privacy, then employers will have to abide by that, policy be damned. To go back to my well used example, an employer wouldn't be able get away with putting "we will film you using the toilet" in their policy.
Neanderthals were in Europe by themselves for hundreds of thousands of years without making caving paintings. We're to suppose that they happened to pick up the habit just when modern humans moved into the area. That would be a massive coincidence. It's possible, but unlikely.
People who expect privacy at work are generally wrong and the law generally will not support them.
Generally wrong? Not always wrong? So what you're saying is that there is some level of privacy "generally recognized by society". Such as not filming people when they're on the toilet, even though you're "in their building, using their equipment and resources", namely the toilet.
The process of getting society to generally recognize an expectation in a specific circumstance is a classic debate over social norms. It's the same sort of process that happens when society decides what sorts of clothing (or lack thereof) are allowed in public. Few people are absolutists in either direction; most want some restrictions, but not too much. Likewise, there are and should be some circumstances where your employer is not allowed to intrude on your privacy.
The fact that people like you keep having to repeat this shows it isn't true. People do have an expectation of privacy at work, whether or not you think they should. I'm sure even you expect some level of privacy. Or do you just assume that your employer is filming you while you use the toilet?
Why aren't people hoarding, if they know BitCoins are supposed to be more valuable tomorrow than they are today? My guess is people still don't trust that their BitCoins will be worth anything at all tomorrow.
The Silk Road works like eBay or Craigslist. They don't sell the drugs themselves, they let users sell to other users. Even if a seller did get caught, which I'm sure has already happened, the seller doesn't work for the Silk Road and doesn't know who runs the Silk Road. There's no "boss" for them to roll over on. It's just a website.
With a lot of effort, they can take down individual sellers who are basically no more than street dealers. Infiltrating the Silk Road itself is evidently proving to be much harder.
The original paper includes even more details. Yahoo set up a server in the middle of its login process to record login attempts which hashed passwords with a salt, then produced a histogram of the hashes for demographic subgroups. The researcher did his analysis on the histograms, not the hashes themselves.
But what does hybridization actually do on the genetic level? Genetic material is extracted from one organism and implanted/replaced into another. Only it's a crap shoot, so while you may have wanted mildew resistance, what you got was smaller yields and tasteless product. Genetic engineering lets you select the specific genes that you want and none of the rest.
So far as we can tell, all life on Earth is related to each other and all of it uses the same genetic machinery. The fact that jellyfish are more distantly related -- yet still related -- doesn't mean their genes are inherently dangerous and can't be used safely to good effect. The fact that two varieties are closely related doesn't mean their hybrid is a good thing to eat, either.
The controls on laboratory genetic modification are far, far tougher than the traditional genetic modification done in someone's backyard garden. The fact that it's done in a laboratory makes the kind of tracking and study you want possible. Nobody publishes a peer-reviewed study when your grandma hybridizes a dozen different plant varieties.
Thanks for not doing the research before you shot your mouth off, as actually I'm talking about the PRESENT.
Uh... yeah, thus making it a "recent trend". The AC's critique, which is something of a cheap shot, is that you're looking at a narrow window of time (the PRESENT) and thinking that it represents what the future will be like. Yet maybe the present is actually the outlier and the future will be much different. The reason I think it's a cheap shot is that there's really no other way to do it. Every prediction about the future is subject to the same criticism.
The cloud is only effective as long as YOU PAY YOUR BILL.
Rolling your own solution isn't free, you know. You have to pay the power bill and the ISP bill. You have to pay for the hardware and replace it when it breaks. If you value your time, managing the system is also a cost. By all means, go for it if that's what you want. But the economies of scale I mentioned mean that a large provider is likely to get those costs lower than you could on a per-user basis.
Oh, and your government [...] thinks your files are kosher.
Yeah, I actually agree with you that this is a problem, but unfortunately not that many people seem to care.
There's plenty of good science that needs to be funded yet doesn't have an obvious connection to a monetary payoff. The fact that investors aren't interested in that kind of science doesn't mean it isn't worth doing; it means markets aren't always good at everything.
And the guy talking about PirateBoxes and Thunderbolt drives isn't extrapolating recent trends into the future?
As I said, "the cloud" is just a new word for a very old idea which used to be called mainframe computing. The balance between mainframes and desktops (here I'll include mobile devices) is dictated by economics more than technology. Mainframes concentrate computing power and storage for many users to take advantage of economies of scale. It's the same reason most people get their power from the electric company rather than running their own generator. You always have that option, but per person served, a large provider can usually do the job for less money.
Also, even if the poster is right and innovation in consumer electronics is almost over, innovation in mainframe technology won't end any time soon. Squeezing an extra little bit of performance or cost savings out of an iPad may not be worthwhile, but it is when you multiply it by millions of users for a mainframe.
Except the actual trend is moving everything to "the cloud", which is just a buzzword for giant mainframes that store not just your two terabytes of data, but two terabytes for everyone on the planet, call it 14 zettabytes. Then they make it available to you instantly on any platform without you needing to do anything to explicitly transfer your data. A kid born today won't know what a USB (or Thunderbolt) drive is any more than they would an 8-track tape.
Much of the scientific research that needs to be done is basic science that shows no obvious signs of "panning out" at all. You do the research because you don't know the answer to some question, like how is the XYZ2 gene involved in development. You have no idea if the answer to that question will actually be useful for some purpose. Like as not, all the answer will do is raise more questions, leading to more research. At the end of the day, even if you haven't made a return on investment, at the very least you've added to the body of knowledge of the human race, which someone else may eventually use for something you never thought of.
Investors have very little interest in research like that, which is why it's traditionally done by governments.
On the other hand, a direct transfer is never faster than the most congested link between you and the server. If you have a reasonably fast connection, the bottleneck is often not your connection. Downloading from multiple peers that are likely taking different paths to reach you lets you reach an high overall speed even if all the peers are congested.
Copyright is a government-enforced monopoly. It's really hard to beat monopoly pricing when it comes to making money, but generally we don't think monopolies are a good idea.
If Domino's had a monopoly on pizza, I'm sure they'd make a lot more money than they do now. And if you came along and said, "Hey, maybe you shouldn't have a monopoly on pizza," they'd be upset at the prospect of losing all that revenue. They'd demand that you provide them with a business model that was just as lucrative. If all you could tell them is that their current revenues were artificially inflated because of their monopoly status, they'd dismiss you as not being serious.
In 2008, you could make a plausible case that the media didn't pay attention to him, but this time you're dead wrong. He was in all the debates and got plenty of face time with major news outlets. He was even the center of his own news cycle when the racist newsletters came up again, a reminder that media attention cuts both ways.
The cost of the project goes to paying someone to install the toilet and manage the experiment. The money doesn't go down the toilet, it goes in their pockets. Then they spend it in the community, on food, housing, computer games, etc. That puts money in other people's pockets, who in turn spend it on other things, and so on. Even if the initial activity was in some sense useless, which this experiment isn't, the money goes on to pay for things that are useful. And all along the way, the government gets a slice of that increased economic activity in the form of taxes, which it can use to make payments on the debt.
Now, consider that the effective interest rate after inflation on US government debt is currently negative, meaning investors are paying the government to hold on to their money for a while. If investors thought that the US government was at risk of not being able to pay back its debts, like Greece, the interest rate would be sky high, but it isn't anywhere close. The problem right now is unemployment, not the debt. Employing construction workers and scientists to build grand experiments is as good a way as any to get people back to work.
The derivative works companies build using BSD-licensed software are effectively proprietary software. And if they control the hardware, they can make sure it only runs binaries signed by them, so you can't even run the original unmodified code.
It's also a tax on their investors. Except in an ideal world of perfect competition, the savings from reduced taxes wouldn't be completely passed on to customers; at least some of it would be retained to increase profit margins.
Besides, it only seems fair for the people who benefit from a company's products to contribute to paying its taxes.
Rather than happening all at once, it's more likely that the average human life span will gradually increase as medical technology improves in an iterative fashion. That's been the case for decades now and we're already having to deal with the consequences of an aging population. On the way to figuring out how to forestall indefinitely, we'll have to figure out how to forestall it for a really long time, which will entail making many of the same adjustments to society. These adjustments can also be made gradually, so while life in 2500 may not be recognizable to us in 2012, that doesn't mean it's a threat.
Let's be clear that this guy doesn't have access to any secret information. He's analyzing publicly available information and coming up with his own conclusions about the probable extent of the surveillance. He may well be right, but the summary makes it sound like he's the new Bradley Manning. Quoting:
AMY GOODMAN: Where do you get the number 20 trillion?
WILLIAM BINNEY: Just by the numbers of telecoms, it appears to me, from the questions that CNET posed to them in 2006, and they published the names and how—what the responses were. I looked at that and said that anybody that equivocated was participating, and then estimated from that the numbers of transactions. That, by the way, estimate only was involving phone calls and emails. It didn’t involve any queries on the net or any assembles—other—any financial transactions or credit card stuff, if they’re assembling that. I do not know that, OK.
How many people died of smallpox each year before vaccinations? Now it's zero. While we'll never be able to completely eliminate the theoretical possibility that smallpox may come back at some point in the future, the smallpox vaccine has done tremendous good for mankind.
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I've had enough conversations with people regarding privacy to realize that people don't even think about it, so the idea they were expecting it is ludicrous.
Social norms are often so ingrained to your behavior that you don't think about them. Acceptable behavior in bathrooms is highly regimented, but it's rarely overtly codified. If you're a man at a urinal, no one has to tell you that you're not supposed to stare at the junk of the man next to you. You just don't do it. You probably don't even classify that as part of "privacy", even though it surely is.
So people have all sorts of expectations that they're not consciously aware of until those expectations are violated. People expect that their company isn't going too far with the privacy policy, so few people bother to check -- and fewer still make a point to ask about it before accepting a job offer. It's only when they come to find out later that the privacy policy is clearly outside of the normal range that people are upset.
I don't know... If you put it in your work contract, I'm not sure what the legal ramifications are, how are you so certain?
I think it's probably illegal, but that's not even the point. All it takes is for one whistleblower to go to their local TV station and then that company becomes a global pariah as a peeping tom -- even if it's technically legal. After that, the company is going to face intense pressure to change their ways. Politicians will face pressure to make it explicitly illegal. This is all part of the process of establishing social norms that I talked about.
Where did you get the 5,000 year figure? The article itself cites clear evidence of human habitation in Europe 41,600 years ago, which is before the earliest painting's date of 40,800 years ago. There are sites even earlier than that. Plus, there is a fundamental problem in that preservation events are rare, so humans were no doubt in the area long before we'd ever find evidence of them.
Meanwhile, Neanderthals had been around in Europe for 300,000 years. Even if your number were right, for 98.3% of their existence, Neanderthals didn't bother making cave paintings.
It's apparently not obvious to the people who tell us "You have zero expectation of privacy at work" and variants of "their property, their rules". It's obvious to you and me that neither of these things are true in the real world.
What matters are the social norms surrounding privacy; if most people expect privacy, then employers will have to abide by that, policy be damned. To go back to my well used example, an employer wouldn't be able get away with putting "we will film you using the toilet" in their policy.
Neanderthals were in Europe by themselves for hundreds of thousands of years without making caving paintings. We're to suppose that they happened to pick up the habit just when modern humans moved into the area. That would be a massive coincidence. It's possible, but unlikely.
People who expect privacy at work are generally wrong and the law generally will not support them.
Generally wrong? Not always wrong? So what you're saying is that there is some level of privacy "generally recognized by society". Such as not filming people when they're on the toilet, even though you're "in their building, using their equipment and resources", namely the toilet.
The process of getting society to generally recognize an expectation in a specific circumstance is a classic debate over social norms. It's the same sort of process that happens when society decides what sorts of clothing (or lack thereof) are allowed in public. Few people are absolutists in either direction; most want some restrictions, but not too much. Likewise, there are and should be some circumstances where your employer is not allowed to intrude on your privacy.
You have zero expectation of privacy at work.
The fact that people like you keep having to repeat this shows it isn't true. People do have an expectation of privacy at work, whether or not you think they should. I'm sure even you expect some level of privacy. Or do you just assume that your employer is filming you while you use the toilet?
Why aren't people hoarding, if they know BitCoins are supposed to be more valuable tomorrow than they are today? My guess is people still don't trust that their BitCoins will be worth anything at all tomorrow.
The Silk Road works like eBay or Craigslist. They don't sell the drugs themselves, they let users sell to other users. Even if a seller did get caught, which I'm sure has already happened, the seller doesn't work for the Silk Road and doesn't know who runs the Silk Road. There's no "boss" for them to roll over on. It's just a website.
With a lot of effort, they can take down individual sellers who are basically no more than street dealers. Infiltrating the Silk Road itself is evidently proving to be much harder.
The original paper includes even more details. Yahoo set up a server in the middle of its login process to record login attempts which hashed passwords with a salt, then produced a histogram of the hashes for demographic subgroups. The researcher did his analysis on the histograms, not the hashes themselves.
But what does hybridization actually do on the genetic level? Genetic material is extracted from one organism and implanted/replaced into another. Only it's a crap shoot, so while you may have wanted mildew resistance, what you got was smaller yields and tasteless product. Genetic engineering lets you select the specific genes that you want and none of the rest.
So far as we can tell, all life on Earth is related to each other and all of it uses the same genetic machinery. The fact that jellyfish are more distantly related -- yet still related -- doesn't mean their genes are inherently dangerous and can't be used safely to good effect. The fact that two varieties are closely related doesn't mean their hybrid is a good thing to eat, either.
The controls on laboratory genetic modification are far, far tougher than the traditional genetic modification done in someone's backyard garden. The fact that it's done in a laboratory makes the kind of tracking and study you want possible. Nobody publishes a peer-reviewed study when your grandma hybridizes a dozen different plant varieties.
Thanks for not doing the research before you shot your mouth off, as actually I'm talking about the PRESENT.
Uh... yeah, thus making it a "recent trend". The AC's critique, which is something of a cheap shot, is that you're looking at a narrow window of time (the PRESENT) and thinking that it represents what the future will be like. Yet maybe the present is actually the outlier and the future will be much different. The reason I think it's a cheap shot is that there's really no other way to do it. Every prediction about the future is subject to the same criticism.
The cloud is only effective as long as YOU PAY YOUR BILL.
Rolling your own solution isn't free, you know. You have to pay the power bill and the ISP bill. You have to pay for the hardware and replace it when it breaks. If you value your time, managing the system is also a cost. By all means, go for it if that's what you want. But the economies of scale I mentioned mean that a large provider is likely to get those costs lower than you could on a per-user basis.
Oh, and your government [...] thinks your files are kosher.
Yeah, I actually agree with you that this is a problem, but unfortunately not that many people seem to care.
There's plenty of good science that needs to be funded yet doesn't have an obvious connection to a monetary payoff. The fact that investors aren't interested in that kind of science doesn't mean it isn't worth doing; it means markets aren't always good at everything.
And the guy talking about PirateBoxes and Thunderbolt drives isn't extrapolating recent trends into the future?
As I said, "the cloud" is just a new word for a very old idea which used to be called mainframe computing. The balance between mainframes and desktops (here I'll include mobile devices) is dictated by economics more than technology. Mainframes concentrate computing power and storage for many users to take advantage of economies of scale. It's the same reason most people get their power from the electric company rather than running their own generator. You always have that option, but per person served, a large provider can usually do the job for less money.
Also, even if the poster is right and innovation in consumer electronics is almost over, innovation in mainframe technology won't end any time soon. Squeezing an extra little bit of performance or cost savings out of an iPad may not be worthwhile, but it is when you multiply it by millions of users for a mainframe.
Except the actual trend is moving everything to "the cloud", which is just a buzzword for giant mainframes that store not just your two terabytes of data, but two terabytes for everyone on the planet, call it 14 zettabytes. Then they make it available to you instantly on any platform without you needing to do anything to explicitly transfer your data. A kid born today won't know what a USB (or Thunderbolt) drive is any more than they would an 8-track tape.
Much of the scientific research that needs to be done is basic science that shows no obvious signs of "panning out" at all. You do the research because you don't know the answer to some question, like how is the XYZ2 gene involved in development. You have no idea if the answer to that question will actually be useful for some purpose. Like as not, all the answer will do is raise more questions, leading to more research. At the end of the day, even if you haven't made a return on investment, at the very least you've added to the body of knowledge of the human race, which someone else may eventually use for something you never thought of.
Investors have very little interest in research like that, which is why it's traditionally done by governments.
On the other hand, a direct transfer is never faster than the most congested link between you and the server. If you have a reasonably fast connection, the bottleneck is often not your connection. Downloading from multiple peers that are likely taking different paths to reach you lets you reach an high overall speed even if all the peers are congested.
Copyright is a government-enforced monopoly. It's really hard to beat monopoly pricing when it comes to making money, but generally we don't think monopolies are a good idea.
If Domino's had a monopoly on pizza, I'm sure they'd make a lot more money than they do now. And if you came along and said, "Hey, maybe you shouldn't have a monopoly on pizza," they'd be upset at the prospect of losing all that revenue. They'd demand that you provide them with a business model that was just as lucrative. If all you could tell them is that their current revenues were artificially inflated because of their monopoly status, they'd dismiss you as not being serious.
In 2008, you could make a plausible case that the media didn't pay attention to him, but this time you're dead wrong. He was in all the debates and got plenty of face time with major news outlets. He was even the center of his own news cycle when the racist newsletters came up again, a reminder that media attention cuts both ways.
The cost of the project goes to paying someone to install the toilet and manage the experiment. The money doesn't go down the toilet, it goes in their pockets. Then they spend it in the community, on food, housing, computer games, etc. That puts money in other people's pockets, who in turn spend it on other things, and so on. Even if the initial activity was in some sense useless, which this experiment isn't, the money goes on to pay for things that are useful. And all along the way, the government gets a slice of that increased economic activity in the form of taxes, which it can use to make payments on the debt.
Now, consider that the effective interest rate after inflation on US government debt is currently negative, meaning investors are paying the government to hold on to their money for a while. If investors thought that the US government was at risk of not being able to pay back its debts, like Greece, the interest rate would be sky high, but it isn't anywhere close. The problem right now is unemployment, not the debt. Employing construction workers and scientists to build grand experiments is as good a way as any to get people back to work.
The derivative works companies build using BSD-licensed software are effectively proprietary software. And if they control the hardware, they can make sure it only runs binaries signed by them, so you can't even run the original unmodified code.
It's also a tax on their investors. Except in an ideal world of perfect competition, the savings from reduced taxes wouldn't be completely passed on to customers; at least some of it would be retained to increase profit margins.
Besides, it only seems fair for the people who benefit from a company's products to contribute to paying its taxes.
Rather than happening all at once, it's more likely that the average human life span will gradually increase as medical technology improves in an iterative fashion. That's been the case for decades now and we're already having to deal with the consequences of an aging population. On the way to figuring out how to forestall indefinitely, we'll have to figure out how to forestall it for a really long time, which will entail making many of the same adjustments to society. These adjustments can also be made gradually, so while life in 2500 may not be recognizable to us in 2012, that doesn't mean it's a threat.
Let's be clear that this guy doesn't have access to any secret information. He's analyzing publicly available information and coming up with his own conclusions about the probable extent of the surveillance. He may well be right, but the summary makes it sound like he's the new Bradley Manning. Quoting:
How many people died of smallpox each year before vaccinations? Now it's zero. While we'll never be able to completely eliminate the theoretical possibility that smallpox may come back at some point in the future, the smallpox vaccine has done tremendous good for mankind.