When my kids came home from elementary school lauding the coming of Obama (apparently most of the teachers thought he was The One and gave every impression of that to the kids) I asked them this question:
"How can you tell if a politician is lying?"
Being of a young and impressionable age, they didn't know. The answer, of course, is "His/her lips are moving!" When I told them this, they indignantly told me that Obama wasn't lying. I asked them how they knew - and they got very thoughtful. The same principle applies to advertisers. They are not in business to tell you the plain unvarnished truth about their product. They are there to convince you to buy their product. Always assume that everything you see in a commercial advertisement is, at least in part, a lie. Its not a trusted friend giving you good advice. Its not your family physician giving you his/her honest opinion. Its not your neighbor from down the street. Its a sleazy slimeball trying to convince you that "we have some stuff in the truck left over from another job" [no, its not, and its not "hot" merchandise either - its just cheap crap worth less than the paltry sum we are going to convince you to pay because you think its "hot"]. Its all distortions of truth, known otherwise as lies.
I used Obama here not to pick on him specifically, but to make the point that all politicians lie, either directly or by implication or by omission. To believe otherwise is to show your naiveté. Advertisers are no different. To convince a large group of people, all with differing ideas and opinions, that your candidacy (or product) is THE answer, means that you are probably being at least slightly misleading about either your intentions or your capabilities to realize your intentions (or your product's features or your product's total costs).
I view advertisements *at best* as an indication that a product I might want to check out for myself exists. Nothing more.
Having said that, the guy in that Samsung Galaxy piece on YouTube looks almost just like those guys trying to convince me that they had some high quality speakers left over from another job... carnival hawkers all have a similar look. Learn to spot it, and learn to enjoy the show. But don't think you are getting anything real from it.
I was merely being cautious with my language without cited sources showing content available then and content available now. I was managing the corporate backbone data network for a nationwide defense contractor in 1993 when Mosaic was released... I had just finished putting up new Gopher servers (!) and realized that I had to replace them with HTTP/WWW servers immediately. We were a CERFnet (California Educational Research Foundation network) customer as the commercialized Internet came into being. In 1996, when URLs were on gas pump advertisements at Shell gas stations I laughed at those who claimed the Internet was "just a fad."
With the growth that has occurred, however, I haven't made a habit of tracking just how much content came along at what time...
Good point. I incorrectly attributed the bulk of the revenue to the subscribers themselves rather than to the advertisers who bought space based on the number of hardcopy subscribers. I think it doesn't completely derail my argument, although it does change the possible corrective actions.
It does seem odd that the advertisers aren't willing to pay as much for ads that you can at least show were probably presented on a screen to someone than they are for ones in a newspaper that there is no indication anyone actually looks at. I think the custom apps are the publishers latest attempt to put it together.
Right. Before going much further with their research, I would hope that they would first test their implicit assumption that incidents with the most stressed-out callers are the ones that should be moved to the front of the queue. I believe that they would not find nearly enough correlation to justify that method of triage.
My wife also tends to non-linear responses to accidents. Fortunately, her responses tend to flatten out as things get more serious, and she is reasonably dependable in real emergencies. I've learned to live with the instinctive little jolts my body develops when she responds to minor incidents.
Individual apps used to access premium content have come about, in large part, because the producers of the content are trying to a) provide for electronic distribution of their content, while still b) making a buck for their efforts.
It was great, in the "good old days" to find a newspaper's content on-line. It could be read electronically (yea!) and it could be read for free (double yea!). Who doesn't like free stuff? The problem was that free Internet content at that time depended on the revenue stream from paid subscribers, who received the hardcopy edition. With a small number of Internet-based readers, and lots of hardcopy readers, the system worked well enough. Unfortunately, "the Internet" has been a big success story when measured by subscriber uptake. Just about everyone (including my 75 year-old technologically illiterate mother) is "on the Internet." And the inevitable drop in paid hardcopy subscriptions for media like newspapers and magazines has been enormous. Even if a particular newspaper's or magazine's content isn't available on-line, subscriber/readership of that newspaper or magazine has probably dropped (I'm not in the business, I don't see the numbers, but I hear the mutterings) because there is so much content available on-line and people have developed a preference for that form of media intake. So publishers have responded with custom apps to maintain the revenue stream necessary to justify their existence.
Frankly, I don't see theses types of individual apps as being the things that are "splintering" the Internet. Why? Because the content to which they provide access wasn't previously available on the Internet. I suspect that there is far more content available on the Internet now than there was ten years ago. However, as *everything* moves to the Internet, not everything becomes freely available just because it is on the Internet. It isn't splintering the Internet to add chunks on to it which are only accessible to some while the bulk of the common areas are still present and active. The folks with that expectation that "on the Internet" should mean "free to me" are trying to eat a free lunch, every day. And as everyone should know, TANSTASFL (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch).
The custom apps are just a simple way to package and sell content that otherwise wouldn't be on the Internet (at least, not for long). It costs money to provide content, and those providers wouldn't be in the business of providing content if they couldn't at least break even.
US Nation-wide pagers operate across the US in a broadcast paging mode. The system has no way of knowing where any given pager is at any moment in time, yet the pages get through, so the idea is not complete rubbish. I do not have data on the paging system capacity, nor do I have data on nation-wide cellular call attempt rates, so I can't compare the two. Its an idea, not a thoroughly planned out system.
As I understand it, for regular (tracking-enabled) cell phones, the cellular data-link from a phone to any given tower is used to allow the cell system to ring a phone directly through the cell that the phone is currently connected to - so the cell system has to know where each phone is at each moment in time. Under my proposed system, for a privacy-enabled (non-tracking) cell phone, the cellular data-link would not be used to ring a phone; the cellular data-link would not be established until/unless the phone attempts to answer a call or place a call - then a cellular datalink would have to be established quickly through the nearest cell. I don't have data on cellular data-link establishment latency, nor do I have data on what significant barriers exist to decreasing this latency if it is currently unacceptable. This is the part of the system that I suspect is most problematic with current cellular technology as the expected usage is only when phones power up - migrating the cellular data link from cell to cell obviously works quite quickly, but here the problem is localized and this localization may be a requirement for keeping latency low. One possible solution would be to have an always-on data link that was only known to the localized cell region, and not the central system, but this would not be provably untraceable from the handset perspective.
Global roaming might be problematic. I don't have data on how many call attempts per second there are world-wide, so I don't know what the potential data load for global signaling would be. If global roaming proved to be a problem due to signaling capacity, some means of providing a less-than-global but more-than-local location might be used to restrict the necessary scope of broadcast paging signals to privacy-enabled phones. Its likely that not everyone would want a privacy-enabled cell phone, especially if it cost more $$ to have one than not. This would help bound the signaling problem.
I think a user-controlled technology solution would be more reliable than an administrative process (law, regulation) to protect privacy. To be really useful yet private, we want a cell phone that isn't tracked 24/7, can make outgoing calls, and can receive incoming calls but won't reveal its location until the call is answered iff the person using the phone chooses to answer the call...
Put a privacy button on the phone - this button disables the cellular radio function, but maintains a broadcast paging receiver function. Incoming phone calls are sent out as broadcast pages. If the user chooses to answer the phone, a fast-start cellular radio link is established and the call answered. Outgoing calls use the fast-start cellular radio to establish a link, then dial the phone as usual.
Potential technical problems exist with the time lapse between an incoming call being initiated and the fast-start cellular radio link being established due to a) broadcast paging delay, and b) establishing the cellular radio link, but these might be solvable. Outgoing calls would have a delay as well, but smaller because its only for the cellular radio link establishment.
Presto magico - no tracking because there is no location data unless the user decides to make or take a call, and even that data is only a point, not a track.
That's what I thought at first but that's 350k in three months. Still amounts to "only" $485k a year, though, so I figure they didn't do the actual math.
Its obviously "GRE math" - you are allowed to estimate and round.
The race has already reached the bottom. Capitalism has reached its pathological limit: selling low priced crap to as many people as possible.
The way out is socialism. Readers will disagree because they're still on the winning end of having shafted their fellow man. But there's only so much people will take.
In order to make this statement, wouldn't one have had to have read the book in question to determine that it is low-priced crap? Another analysis would be that by providing a market with a low barrier to entry via Amazon, people who are practicing an art because they enjoy it (story telling, music. etc.) are able to make money, too. And because they love what they do, they can provide a quality product at a low price per item, because the reproduction costs are practically nil for them.
Before the book and recording industries got rolling (yes, I realize they got started quite a few years apart), minstrels traveled around telling stories and singing songs. They didn't get rich doing it, but they presumably liked what they were doing well enough. Once mass-market capabilities came about, the actual story or song creator was marginalized while the producer became king. The publishing houses and recording industry folks held the reins because they controlled the market. New technologies have altered that balance of power. Now, as long as a market like Amazon exists, the original artists can communicate directly with the market. I don't understand how this can't be a good thing. It is capitalism at its finest.
The capitalism denigrated in the quote above is the capitalism that has the few abusing the many to profit. That isn't the only face possible for capitalism to wear, any more than socialism is completely represented by the Soviet Union and Soviet-block countries of the last millennium.
I don't like to wear jewelry, but I do wear a watch when I want to keep close track of the time (which is not all of the time). I find it much less intrusive to wear something small strapped to my wrist than to carry always around an electronic device that needs to be constantly charged, protected against damage, and which allows people (including the government) to track my location at every minute and to interrupt me when I'm thinking (even if I don't answer it).
In the article that I read, a principal in the ChronoPay operation claims that setting up companies for receiving payments is normal process with every payment processor, not the author of the article. I read that as "we didn't do anything wrong, everyone else does the same thing, too." I don't listen to that kind of excuse from my children uncritically - I wouldn't listen to it from ChronoPay, either.
Thank-you for your kind words. I think that you are right - it is an interesting question where to draw the line with respect to detailed surveillance of public activities. I don't have an answer, other than to say that on one end of the extreme I don't think much is required in the way of controls (hey - where is that red Mercury Marquis going right now) while on the other end there should be controls (please start a detailed trace on everyone who lives in this neighborhood; I want to know where their vehicles are at every minute for the next year). I'll be following the case at the start of this post to see where it comes out!
I would be remiss if I did not point out that new technology can make something that was previously infeasible, feasible. When this happens, it is necessary to re-examine hidden assumptions to determine whether an explicit change needs to be made due to the elimination of a hidden assumption.
To make my above general statement more specific, you currently believe that it is legal for a government agency to track someone's car. I'm not going to argue that it isn't (yet). I am going to point out that such tracking had a cost to it that made it infeasible to perform on a broad basis or for long periods of time prior to the production of low-cost GPS-based tracking devices. One hidden assumption behind the postulated legality of the government's tracking of people's cars is that the government can't really afford to do it unless the government is fairly certain that it will yield a desirable result. In the past, the government wasn't likely to start tracking vehicle movement of citizens in fine detail over a long period of time unless the government had a reasonable suspicion through data gathered by other means that this tracking was going to prove something. This assumption is no longer valid. The government can, relatively inexpensively, track vehicles in exact detail over long periods of time, whether or not there is any reasonable suspicion.
In my mind, the question then becomes whether it really is legal for the government to track an individual's movement in fine detail over a long period of time, even if only through the movement of their car? What controls should there be on the government performing this tracking? Should any agent or police officer, on their own initiative, be able to perform this tracking? Should there be judicial oversight? Does such tracking rise to the level of violating one's privacy such that a 4th Amendment requirement for a warrant exists?
If it is judged now "legal" for the government to track any one individual vehicle movements through GPS tracking devices, without a warrant and without reasonable suspicion, can this be expanded to tracking all vehicle movements at all times? Would it be reasonable for the government to have one large "vehicle location over time" database that was fed a constant stream of data from factory-installed tracking devices in all cars? Could such a database be misused? Would it be likely to be misused?
The government has argued in the past that changes in technology required new powers. For example, every regular voice telecommunications carrier in the United States is required to provide an interface through which the government can tap calls placed through the telecommunications provider's network. This was deemed a necessary expansion of government wiretap powers due to the fact that technology improvements made the old methods of tapping largely irrelevant. I think it is reasonable to also consider that changes in technology may require new limitations on what were previously uncontrolled practices, due to the expansion in capability or reduction in cost that technology has brought about where such changes remove artificial governors on those practices.
I agree that one should not have to understand all of the details of a technology in order to use the technology. For example, many people don't understand the least bit about how their car works, but they can make use of them quite readily. That's good technology. Same thing goes for radios, cars, television sets, and computers. But one *should* understand the proper use and limitations of the technology one is using... no matter what the evolutionary level of that technology or the details of its technical implementation. We don't expect our cars to do 0-60 in 3 seconds, to negotiate every turn no matter how fast we are going, nor to run forever on a single tank of gas. The use of a tool like Facebook is no different. I think that in this case, the father should take steps to rectify his daughter's mistaken assumption that her use of Facebook as a permanent archive of her pictures was incorrect - which he has apparently already done. He should then show her how to maintain a local archive of pictures she wants to keep rather than using the instant upload feature that sends them directly to Facebook - which he will no doubt do. There is every reason that the daughter should understand the limitations of the technology she is using, even if she doesn't understand the implementation.
I do agree that it is not proper to say that the daughter "deserves" to lose her data anymore than I would think that a foolish teenage driver "deserves" to run off the road and hit a tree due to excess speed. However, there are inevitable consequences to not understanding the limitations of the technology you are using. It is not the fault of the technology that these limitations exist. Nor is it necessarily so that fault lies with the implementation of the technology, once you consider why the technology exists in the first place. Facebook, the services of which are provided for *FREE*, was crafted to meet certain objectives and with certain assumptions in mind. I don't think there is any "they should..." to what Facebook does or doesn't do except for what the operators of Facebook determine will best keep their user population happy and resident so that the operators can continue to make money off of them. If most Facebook users *are* properly aware of the limitations of uploading pictures without a local archive, why would they create a download capability in Facebook?
Perhaps a suggestion to Facebook that Facebook provide some kind of local archive capability would be welcomed, and implemented readily. Perhaps not. Whichever way Facebook chose to go would not necessarily indicate that Facebook didn't care or didn't know how to provide that functionality. It more likely indicates that they made an informed decision regarding the cost of such an option against the utility of such an option to their userbase, and whether that utility would result in a greater uptake and retention of users. The father obviously believes that this problem may be one for society as a whole, or at least the portion of it that reads Slashdot. He may discover that most others either already understood the limitations of the Facebook technology, or don't think that the loss of the information in question is quite as problematic as he or his daughter does. On the other hand, there may be a million "yea, why can't we do that" responses to his inquiry.
Okay, so this is going to probably incite some serious hatred on me... But I'm quite unclear about why this is illegal
Yes, the FBI was being creepy and I don't condone what they did... BUT lets look at the facts:
1) It was attached with magnets (ie: no damage to the car)
2) The car was likely in public (i.e. government property) when they did so
3) The device was readily removable and findable, though most definitely "hidden in plain sight"
Is it against the law to put something on someone's car when it is in public? Because I see parking tickets and flyers being put on peoples' cars all the time.
Is the tracking illegal because it follows him home to his own private property? I could see this, but then the US doesn't have any laws about such things as satellite imagery that could theoretically do the same.
I'm hoping there is a lawyer -arm chair or otherwise- around that can unofficially shed some light on where the illegality is involved.
tl;dr: Don't support the act, but would it be illegal if I did this? What would I be charged with? Are we just hating on the FBI?
First, although it is not the central point of my response to your posting, I have to question your statement "Your car is government property if it is in public" - really?? What confused notion of property do you have? Property rights do not transfer to the government just because your property is located in a public rather than a private location. I think you may have meant some kind of diminished expectations of privacy (in this case, with respect to the car) when in public, which is generally held to be true. However, the permissibility of the detailed tracking of an individual's every movement does not necessarily follow as an automatic outcome of those movements being in public.
There is an on-going discussion as to what level of monitoring of an individual's movements constitutes a violation of that individual's right to privacy. A "little bit of monitoring" of an individual's public activities isn't the same as place a GPS tracker on their car and building a record of their exact movements over a long period of time. The principle that a large enough difference in degree is a difference of kind should be considered. The debate revolves around whether a warrant should be required for this type of detailed tracking, and what the criteria should be for a judge signing off on that warrant. According to the the US Consitution, "... and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
The reason why the tracking might be illegal (unconstitutional in this case) is that if it is done without proper adherence to the requirements of the US Constitution (and Federal law), then it is illegal. The FBI (nor any other government entity) does not get to make up the law as it goes along, and must operate under and with respect to the US Constitution and Federal law.
Incidentally, I fit the armchair lawyer definition. I believe that you don't (and shouldn't) need to be a lawyer to understand the US Constitution (Federal law gets murkier because of the constant pawing over it by the fine legal minds that enjoy twisting ordinary statements into amazing circumlocutions). The US Constititution wasn't written to be the basis for arcane incantations; it was written to be the foundation of an agreement between the 13 original colonies about how they would divide power up between themselves and the umbrella government structure they wished to establish, yet keep in check. Everyone should read it. Everyone should understand it. A copy of Black's Law Dictionary is a useful aid to understanding at times. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black's_Law_Dictionary
By that same logic, city, county, or state prisons can legally beat and torture their prisoners, unless local law specifically prohibits it. No. Just No.
All those rights provided to citizens of the United States by the constitution and its amendments apply equally in every jurisdiction in the country, it doesn't matter if the police involved are local or federal.
This is not true. For example, (quoting from a news source)... just this past year (in July) the "... US Supreme Court ruled that cities and states must abide by the 2nd Amendment, strengthening the rights of gun owners and opening courthouse doors nationwide for gun rights advocates to argue that restrictions on firearms are unconstitutional.
In a 5-4 decision, the justices said the right to have a handgun for self-defense is "fundamental from an American perspective [and] applies equally to the federal government and the states."
The high court overturned 19th century rulings that said the 2nd Amendment restricted only federal gun laws, not local or state measures. The decision will almost certainly void ordinances in Chicago and Oak Park, Ill., that forbid residents to have handguns at home. The justices ruled in favor of the Chicago residents who wish to have guns and sent the case back to Chicago for a lower court to issue a final ruling."
Some of the basic rights enumerated in the US Constitution are recognized as holding up at both the state and federal levels, but not necessarily all of them. Otherwise it would have required a Supreme Court decision to uphold the 2nd Amendment as applying at the State level in addition to the Federal level. In fact, 4 out of 9 of the Supreme Court justices argued that that the 2nd Amendment was not protected at the State level by its mention in the US Constitution.
That is the most uninformed comment I've ever seen.
In every constitutional democracy the constitution is ABOVE everything. If a law, local or otherwise contradicts the constitution, it can be declared unconstitutional and derogated. If you have broken a law, and you can prove that the law was unconstitutional, you won't be prosecuted.
You don't need to ask permission to follow the constitution, and while following it, you can (in most countries) disregard laws if they conflict with the constitution.
While what you say may be true in European (and other) constitutional democracies, it is not strictly true in the United States. My understanding is that the US Constitution is a document that specifically identifies the limited powers that were agreed by the individual States to be given to the Federal government, with all other powers being reserved to the States, and to the People. There are certain aspects of the incomplete enumeration of fundamental rights in the US Constitution that are held as being inviolable at the state levels as well as the federal level. There is not, however, a complete superiority of the US Constitution over all State law. The powers set aside for the individual States within the United States are more in keeping with sovereign rights of European nation-states, except for certain elements thought to be best exercised by the federal government, such as executing treaties, providing for a common defense, and regulating the commerce between the states. (However, it is true that the role of the federal government in the US has crept more and more towards an all-powerful function as more and more powers are assumed by the federal government with insufficient protests from the States.) Different States in the United States have different laws, and they have their own State Constitutions, some of which are tilted more towards individuals, and others more towards the State.
Mac OS X Server 10.6 features implied a shared Address Book and shared Calendar feature that would be useful to SOHO environments. However, trying to get it up and running is challenging. Once running, the capabilities are less than expected. I wonder if 10.7 will bear fruit towards making the Mac OS X Server platform a one-stop shop for those SOHO environments inclined to use it rather than Microsoft Server with Exchange?
If it's not too much to ask, could you please elaborate a little so kiddies like me can understand what's going on? I'm trying to go through it but it's a lot to work with for someone who started with Clinton.
In order to form your own opinions, I would suggest you read at least a putatively objective account of the legislation being referenced. Biased explanations by those who are already pushing their point are unlikely to help you in this regard. Reading these will give you a start, but you had better be prepared to develop your own ideas about economic theory and political theory as well. Despite economists' belief that they study a science, and the words "political science" used by those who study political theory, neither resembles more traditional scientific disciplines. Both are more about pushing theories than proving them.
I think the hysteria to be on guard against here is that of US policy making officials. We have lots of defense contractors who have been hyping "cyber" for a couple of years now. (That's right - they don't even call it cyberwar, or cybersecurity. Just "cyber." Ooooooo - shivers down my spine.)
When the policy wonks go off half-cocked, and the policy enforcers (CyberCommand, etc.) rush to salute and do their job, we will have wrongly focused substantial attention, and substantial $$$s, on chasing the wrong threat. The defense contractors will be happy, because they will get paid many $$s to "research" and "carry out policy" and the like. Each branch of the military will be busy building up its "cyber" capabilities. The powers that be will be building the legal infrastructure for the big red "kill switch" on the Internet.
The perhaps more expedient practice of getting all of the critical infrastructure crap off of the Internet, where it shouldn't have been placed in the first place, will be overlooked. Its much more exciting to have a big challenge to deal with than to make the problem much more manageable by not being so stupid about things in the first place. Fifteen years ago, the thought that corporations would run corporate networks over the Internet was laughable; everyone knew it was too risky. The idea of connecting SCADA networks up to corporate networks that were connected to the Internet was silly. Slowly, over time, the lure of cost savings grew to be too big to ignore. It can be hard hard to justify not saving large amounts of money due to an ill-defined mysterious threat of "Internet hackers" when no large profile cases of major losses due to these hackers have been observed. Now corporations have their internal networks all built on top of the public Internet (usually with VPN technology to provide some confidentiality/integrity). Availability? Not a problem - it works fine! (As long as their isn't a targeted DOS attack, and the Commander in Chief doesn't flip the "kill switch.") SCADA networks - why, of course they are connected to the corporate network - it makes logical sense, its much easier to manage, its so much cheaper than running a separate network... And now we have a big screaming hysteria over protecting "critical infrastructure" because some portion of it is either accessible through the Internet or is dependent upon the Internet carriers for availability, and it turns out that the Internet threat may have some teeth after all.
The threat to be on guard against is the threat of stupidity in the form of companies that put critical infrastructure on the Internet or through the Internet because it saves them $$s.
Most rapes are non-violent? What kind of world do you live in? Whether accomplished with punches and whacks, overwhelming force, or through drugs, rape is inherently violent. If you are talking about the "the next day I decided that I hadn't really wanted to have sex with him" kind of incident, perhaps we need another name for that than rape so as to not confuse the issue. One person forcing another person to have sex with the first against the will of the second is rape, and it is an ultimate act of violence.
The use of deadly force seems allowable to me to prevent rape; its a bit hard to just stick to "disabling" the rapist while they are bent on forcing themselves upon you. The rapist takes his/her chances when they decide to rape. If the "disabling" action results in the rapist being permanently disabled - oh, well.
I do like the comment about ripping off the rapist's ears. That is a good place to start.
Many food stores in my area (Giant, Safeway) use the loyalty-card system. The "anonymity tax" can be pretty heft at those stores, though. They mark some common items up outrageously, then offer a fair price to those customers using a loyalty card. I used to pay the price once in a while, when it was more convenient to pop into one of them than the one store in town that didn't seem to be caught in a pathological desire to track every aspect of their customer's lives. One day I was trying to buy some chicken for a BBQ at Safeway, and saw that the non-loyalty-card price for the chicken was about $10/pound. That cured me of paying the anonymity tax.
I now do all of my shopping at the one local grocery store chain that doesn't require a loyalty card, Shoppers Food Warehouse.
A long time ago.... at a college far far away... a girl gave me this phone number when I asked for hers... at the time I thought how interesting it was that her phone number matched the one from the song.
Slashdot Mirror
When my kids came home from elementary school lauding the coming of Obama (apparently most of the teachers thought he was The One and gave every impression of that to the kids) I asked them this question:
"How can you tell if a politician is lying?"
Being of a young and impressionable age, they didn't know. The answer, of course, is "His/her lips are moving!" When I told them this, they indignantly told me that Obama wasn't lying. I asked them how they knew - and they got very thoughtful. The same principle applies to advertisers. They are not in business to tell you the plain unvarnished truth about their product. They are there to convince you to buy their product. Always assume that everything you see in a commercial advertisement is, at least in part, a lie. Its not a trusted friend giving you good advice. Its not your family physician giving you his/her honest opinion. Its not your neighbor from down the street. Its a sleazy slimeball trying to convince you that "we have some stuff in the truck left over from another job" [no, its not, and its not "hot" merchandise either - its just cheap crap worth less than the paltry sum we are going to convince you to pay because you think its "hot"]. Its all distortions of truth, known otherwise as lies.
I used Obama here not to pick on him specifically, but to make the point that all politicians lie, either directly or by implication or by omission. To believe otherwise is to show your naiveté. Advertisers are no different. To convince a large group of people, all with differing ideas and opinions, that your candidacy (or product) is THE answer, means that you are probably being at least slightly misleading about either your intentions or your capabilities to realize your intentions (or your product's features or your product's total costs).
I view advertisements *at best* as an indication that a product I might want to check out for myself exists. Nothing more.
Having said that, the guy in that Samsung Galaxy piece on YouTube looks almost just like those guys trying to convince me that they had some high quality speakers left over from another job... carnival hawkers all have a similar look. Learn to spot it, and learn to enjoy the show. But don't think you are getting anything real from it.
I was merely being cautious with my language without cited sources showing content available then and content available now. I was managing the corporate backbone data network for a nationwide defense contractor in 1993 when Mosaic was released... I had just finished putting up new Gopher servers (!) and realized that I had to replace them with HTTP/WWW servers immediately. We were a CERFnet (California Educational Research Foundation network) customer as the commercialized Internet came into being. In 1996, when URLs were on gas pump advertisements at Shell gas stations I laughed at those who claimed the Internet was "just a fad."
With the growth that has occurred, however, I haven't made a habit of tracking just how much content came along at what time...
Good point. I incorrectly attributed the bulk of the revenue to the subscribers themselves rather than to the advertisers who bought space based on the number of hardcopy subscribers. I think it doesn't completely derail my argument, although it does change the possible corrective actions.
It does seem odd that the advertisers aren't willing to pay as much for ads that you can at least show were probably presented on a screen to someone than they are for ones in a newspaper that there is no indication anyone actually looks at. I think the custom apps are the publishers latest attempt to put it together.
Sure, because that guy from a previous post who "accidentally" ran over a cat is probably nearby.
Right. Before going much further with their research, I would hope that they would first test their implicit assumption that incidents with the most stressed-out callers are the ones that should be moved to the front of the queue. I believe that they would not find nearly enough correlation to justify that method of triage.
My wife also tends to non-linear responses to accidents. Fortunately, her responses tend to flatten out as things get more serious, and she is reasonably dependable in real emergencies. I've learned to live with the instinctive little jolts my body develops when she responds to minor incidents.
Individual apps used to access premium content have come about, in large part, because the producers of the content are trying to a) provide for electronic distribution of their content, while still b) making a buck for their efforts.
It was great, in the "good old days" to find a newspaper's content on-line. It could be read electronically (yea!) and it could be read for free (double yea!). Who doesn't like free stuff? The problem was that free Internet content at that time depended on the revenue stream from paid subscribers, who received the hardcopy edition. With a small number of Internet-based readers, and lots of hardcopy readers, the system worked well enough. Unfortunately, "the Internet" has been a big success story when measured by subscriber uptake. Just about everyone (including my 75 year-old technologically illiterate mother) is "on the Internet." And the inevitable drop in paid hardcopy subscriptions for media like newspapers and magazines has been enormous. Even if a particular newspaper's or magazine's content isn't available on-line, subscriber/readership of that newspaper or magazine has probably dropped (I'm not in the business, I don't see the numbers, but I hear the mutterings) because there is so much content available on-line and people have developed a preference for that form of media intake. So publishers have responded with custom apps to maintain the revenue stream necessary to justify their existence.
Frankly, I don't see theses types of individual apps as being the things that are "splintering" the Internet. Why? Because the content to which they provide access wasn't previously available on the Internet. I suspect that there is far more content available on the Internet now than there was ten years ago. However, as *everything* moves to the Internet, not everything becomes freely available just because it is on the Internet. It isn't splintering the Internet to add chunks on to it which are only accessible to some while the bulk of the common areas are still present and active. The folks with that expectation that "on the Internet" should mean "free to me" are trying to eat a free lunch, every day. And as everyone should know, TANSTASFL (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch).
The custom apps are just a simple way to package and sell content that otherwise wouldn't be on the Internet (at least, not for long). It costs money to provide content, and those providers wouldn't be in the business of providing content if they couldn't at least break even.
US Nation-wide pagers operate across the US in a broadcast paging mode. The system has no way of knowing where any given pager is at any moment in time, yet the pages get through, so the idea is not complete rubbish. I do not have data on the paging system capacity, nor do I have data on nation-wide cellular call attempt rates, so I can't compare the two. Its an idea, not a thoroughly planned out system.
As I understand it, for regular (tracking-enabled) cell phones, the cellular data-link from a phone to any given tower is used to allow the cell system to ring a phone directly through the cell that the phone is currently connected to - so the cell system has to know where each phone is at each moment in time. Under my proposed system, for a privacy-enabled (non-tracking) cell phone, the cellular data-link would not be used to ring a phone; the cellular data-link would not be established until/unless the phone attempts to answer a call or place a call - then a cellular datalink would have to be established quickly through the nearest cell. I don't have data on cellular data-link establishment latency, nor do I have data on what significant barriers exist to decreasing this latency if it is currently unacceptable. This is the part of the system that I suspect is most problematic with current cellular technology as the expected usage is only when phones power up - migrating the cellular data link from cell to cell obviously works quite quickly, but here the problem is localized and this localization may be a requirement for keeping latency low. One possible solution would be to have an always-on data link that was only known to the localized cell region, and not the central system, but this would not be provably untraceable from the handset perspective.
Global roaming might be problematic. I don't have data on how many call attempts per second there are world-wide, so I don't know what the potential data load for global signaling would be. If global roaming proved to be a problem due to signaling capacity, some means of providing a less-than-global but more-than-local location might be used to restrict the necessary scope of broadcast paging signals to privacy-enabled phones. Its likely that not everyone would want a privacy-enabled cell phone, especially if it cost more $$ to have one than not. This would help bound the signaling problem.
I think a user-controlled technology solution would be more reliable than an administrative process (law, regulation) to protect privacy. To be really useful yet private, we want a cell phone that isn't tracked 24/7, can make outgoing calls, and can receive incoming calls but won't reveal its location until the call is answered iff the person using the phone chooses to answer the call...
Put a privacy button on the phone - this button disables the cellular radio function, but maintains a broadcast paging receiver function. Incoming phone calls are sent out as broadcast pages. If the user chooses to answer the phone, a fast-start cellular radio link is established and the call answered. Outgoing calls use the fast-start cellular radio to establish a link, then dial the phone as usual.
Potential technical problems exist with the time lapse between an incoming call being initiated and the fast-start cellular radio link being established due to a) broadcast paging delay, and b) establishing the cellular radio link, but these might be solvable. Outgoing calls would have a delay as well, but smaller because its only for the cellular radio link establishment.
Presto magico - no tracking because there is no location data unless the user decides to make or take a call, and even that data is only a point, not a track.
That's what I thought at first but that's 350k in three months. Still amounts to "only" $485k a year, though, so I figure they didn't do the actual math.
Its obviously "GRE math" - you are allowed to estimate and round.
The race has already reached the bottom. Capitalism has reached its pathological limit: selling low priced crap to as many people as possible.
The way out is socialism. Readers will disagree because they're still on the winning end of having shafted their fellow man. But there's only so much people will take.
In order to make this statement, wouldn't one have had to have read the book in question to determine that it is low-priced crap? Another analysis would be that by providing a market with a low barrier to entry via Amazon, people who are practicing an art because they enjoy it (story telling, music. etc.) are able to make money, too. And because they love what they do, they can provide a quality product at a low price per item, because the reproduction costs are practically nil for them.
Before the book and recording industries got rolling (yes, I realize they got started quite a few years apart), minstrels traveled around telling stories and singing songs. They didn't get rich doing it, but they presumably liked what they were doing well enough. Once mass-market capabilities came about, the actual story or song creator was marginalized while the producer became king. The publishing houses and recording industry folks held the reins because they controlled the market. New technologies have altered that balance of power. Now, as long as a market like Amazon exists, the original artists can communicate directly with the market. I don't understand how this can't be a good thing. It is capitalism at its finest.
The capitalism denigrated in the quote above is the capitalism that has the few abusing the many to profit. That isn't the only face possible for capitalism to wear, any more than socialism is completely represented by the Soviet Union and Soviet-block countries of the last millennium.
I don't like to wear jewelry, but I do wear a watch when I want to keep close track of the time (which is not all of the time). I find it much less intrusive to wear something small strapped to my wrist than to carry always around an electronic device that needs to be constantly charged, protected against damage, and which allows people (including the government) to track my location at every minute and to interrupt me when I'm thinking (even if I don't answer it).
In the article that I read, a principal in the ChronoPay operation claims that setting up companies for receiving payments is normal process with every payment processor, not the author of the article. I read that as "we didn't do anything wrong, everyone else does the same thing, too." I don't listen to that kind of excuse from my children uncritically - I wouldn't listen to it from ChronoPay, either.
Thank-you for your kind words. I think that you are right - it is an interesting question where to draw the line with respect to detailed surveillance of public activities. I don't have an answer, other than to say that on one end of the extreme I don't think much is required in the way of controls (hey - where is that red Mercury Marquis going right now) while on the other end there should be controls (please start a detailed trace on everyone who lives in this neighborhood; I want to know where their vehicles are at every minute for the next year). I'll be following the case at the start of this post to see where it comes out!
I would be remiss if I did not point out that new technology can make something that was previously infeasible, feasible. When this happens, it is necessary to re-examine hidden assumptions to determine whether an explicit change needs to be made due to the elimination of a hidden assumption.
To make my above general statement more specific, you currently believe that it is legal for a government agency to track someone's car. I'm not going to argue that it isn't (yet). I am going to point out that such tracking had a cost to it that made it infeasible to perform on a broad basis or for long periods of time prior to the production of low-cost GPS-based tracking devices. One hidden assumption behind the postulated legality of the government's tracking of people's cars is that the government can't really afford to do it unless the government is fairly certain that it will yield a desirable result. In the past, the government wasn't likely to start tracking vehicle movement of citizens in fine detail over a long period of time unless the government had a reasonable suspicion through data gathered by other means that this tracking was going to prove something. This assumption is no longer valid. The government can, relatively inexpensively, track vehicles in exact detail over long periods of time, whether or not there is any reasonable suspicion.
In my mind, the question then becomes whether it really is legal for the government to track an individual's movement in fine detail over a long period of time, even if only through the movement of their car? What controls should there be on the government performing this tracking? Should any agent or police officer, on their own initiative, be able to perform this tracking? Should there be judicial oversight? Does such tracking rise to the level of violating one's privacy such that a 4th Amendment requirement for a warrant exists?
If it is judged now "legal" for the government to track any one individual vehicle movements through GPS tracking devices, without a warrant and without reasonable suspicion, can this be expanded to tracking all vehicle movements at all times? Would it be reasonable for the government to have one large "vehicle location over time" database that was fed a constant stream of data from factory-installed tracking devices in all cars? Could such a database be misused? Would it be likely to be misused?
The government has argued in the past that changes in technology required new powers. For example, every regular voice telecommunications carrier in the United States is required to provide an interface through which the government can tap calls placed through the telecommunications provider's network. This was deemed a necessary expansion of government wiretap powers due to the fact that technology improvements made the old methods of tapping largely irrelevant. I think it is reasonable to also consider that changes in technology may require new limitations on what were previously uncontrolled practices, due to the expansion in capability or reduction in cost that technology has brought about where such changes remove artificial governors on those practices.
I agree that one should not have to understand all of the details of a technology in order to use the technology. For example, many people don't understand the least bit about how their car works, but they can make use of them quite readily. That's good technology. Same thing goes for radios, cars, television sets, and computers. But one *should* understand the proper use and limitations of the technology one is using... no matter what the evolutionary level of that technology or the details of its technical implementation. We don't expect our cars to do 0-60 in 3 seconds, to negotiate every turn no matter how fast we are going, nor to run forever on a single tank of gas. The use of a tool like Facebook is no different. I think that in this case, the father should take steps to rectify his daughter's mistaken assumption that her use of Facebook as a permanent archive of her pictures was incorrect - which he has apparently already done. He should then show her how to maintain a local archive of pictures she wants to keep rather than using the instant upload feature that sends them directly to Facebook - which he will no doubt do. There is every reason that the daughter should understand the limitations of the technology she is using, even if she doesn't understand the implementation.
I do agree that it is not proper to say that the daughter "deserves" to lose her data anymore than I would think that a foolish teenage driver "deserves" to run off the road and hit a tree due to excess speed. However, there are inevitable consequences to not understanding the limitations of the technology you are using. It is not the fault of the technology that these limitations exist. Nor is it necessarily so that fault lies with the implementation of the technology, once you consider why the technology exists in the first place. Facebook, the services of which are provided for *FREE*, was crafted to meet certain objectives and with certain assumptions in mind. I don't think there is any "they should ..." to what Facebook does or doesn't do except for what the operators of Facebook determine will best keep their user population happy and resident so that the operators can continue to make money off of them. If most Facebook users *are* properly aware of the limitations of uploading pictures without a local archive, why would they create a download capability in Facebook?
Perhaps a suggestion to Facebook that Facebook provide some kind of local archive capability would be welcomed, and implemented readily. Perhaps not. Whichever way Facebook chose to go would not necessarily indicate that Facebook didn't care or didn't know how to provide that functionality. It more likely indicates that they made an informed decision regarding the cost of such an option against the utility of such an option to their userbase, and whether that utility would result in a greater uptake and retention of users. The father obviously believes that this problem may be one for society as a whole, or at least the portion of it that reads Slashdot. He may discover that most others either already understood the limitations of the Facebook technology, or don't think that the loss of the information in question is quite as problematic as he or his daughter does. On the other hand, there may be a million "yea, why can't we do that" responses to his inquiry.
Okay, so this is going to probably incite some serious hatred on me... But I'm quite unclear about why this is illegal
Yes, the FBI was being creepy and I don't condone what they did... BUT lets look at the facts:
1) It was attached with magnets (ie: no damage to the car) 2) The car was likely in public (i.e. government property) when they did so 3) The device was readily removable and findable, though most definitely "hidden in plain sight"
Is it against the law to put something on someone's car when it is in public? Because I see parking tickets and flyers being put on peoples' cars all the time.
Is the tracking illegal because it follows him home to his own private property? I could see this, but then the US doesn't have any laws about such things as satellite imagery that could theoretically do the same.
I'm hoping there is a lawyer -arm chair or otherwise- around that can unofficially shed some light on where the illegality is involved.
tl;dr: Don't support the act, but would it be illegal if I did this? What would I be charged with? Are we just hating on the FBI?
First, although it is not the central point of my response to your posting, I have to question your statement "Your car is government property if it is in public" - really?? What confused notion of property do you have? Property rights do not transfer to the government just because your property is located in a public rather than a private location. I think you may have meant some kind of diminished expectations of privacy (in this case, with respect to the car) when in public, which is generally held to be true. However, the permissibility of the detailed tracking of an individual's every movement does not necessarily follow as an automatic outcome of those movements being in public.
There is an on-going discussion as to what level of monitoring of an individual's movements constitutes a violation of that individual's right to privacy. A "little bit of monitoring" of an individual's public activities isn't the same as place a GPS tracker on their car and building a record of their exact movements over a long period of time. The principle that a large enough difference in degree is a difference of kind should be considered. The debate revolves around whether a warrant should be required for this type of detailed tracking, and what the criteria should be for a judge signing off on that warrant. According to the the US Consitution, "... and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."
The reason why the tracking might be illegal (unconstitutional in this case) is that if it is done without proper adherence to the requirements of the US Constitution (and Federal law), then it is illegal. The FBI (nor any other government entity) does not get to make up the law as it goes along, and must operate under and with respect to the US Constitution and Federal law.
Incidentally, I fit the armchair lawyer definition. I believe that you don't (and shouldn't) need to be a lawyer to understand the US Constitution (Federal law gets murkier because of the constant pawing over it by the fine legal minds that enjoy twisting ordinary statements into amazing circumlocutions). The US Constititution wasn't written to be the basis for arcane incantations; it was written to be the foundation of an agreement between the 13 original colonies about how they would divide power up between themselves and the umbrella government structure they wished to establish, yet keep in check. Everyone should read it. Everyone should understand it. A copy of Black's Law Dictionary is a useful aid to understanding at times. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black's_Law_Dictionary
I'm sorry, what?
By that same logic, city, county, or state prisons can legally beat and torture their prisoners, unless local law specifically prohibits it. No. Just No.
All those rights provided to citizens of the United States by the constitution and its amendments apply equally in every jurisdiction in the country, it doesn't matter if the police involved are local or federal.
This is not true. For example, (quoting from a news source)... just this past year (in July) the "... US Supreme Court ruled that cities and states must abide by the 2nd Amendment, strengthening the rights of gun owners and opening courthouse doors nationwide for gun rights advocates to argue that restrictions on firearms are unconstitutional.
In a 5-4 decision, the justices said the right to have a handgun for self-defense is "fundamental from an American perspective [and] applies equally to the federal government and the states."
The high court overturned 19th century rulings that said the 2nd Amendment restricted only federal gun laws, not local or state measures. The decision will almost certainly void ordinances in Chicago and Oak Park, Ill., that forbid residents to have handguns at home. The justices ruled in favor of the Chicago residents who wish to have guns and sent the case back to Chicago for a lower court to issue a final ruling."
Some of the basic rights enumerated in the US Constitution are recognized as holding up at both the state and federal levels, but not necessarily all of them. Otherwise it would have required a Supreme Court decision to uphold the 2nd Amendment as applying at the State level in addition to the Federal level. In fact, 4 out of 9 of the Supreme Court justices argued that that the 2nd Amendment was not protected at the State level by its mention in the US Constitution.
That is the most uninformed comment I've ever seen.
In every constitutional democracy the constitution is ABOVE everything. If a law, local or otherwise contradicts the constitution, it can be declared unconstitutional and derogated. If you have broken a law, and you can prove that the law was unconstitutional, you won't be prosecuted.
You don't need to ask permission to follow the constitution, and while following it, you can (in most countries) disregard laws if they conflict with the constitution.
While what you say may be true in European (and other) constitutional democracies, it is not strictly true in the United States. My understanding is that the US Constitution is a document that specifically identifies the limited powers that were agreed by the individual States to be given to the Federal government, with all other powers being reserved to the States, and to the People. There are certain aspects of the incomplete enumeration of fundamental rights in the US Constitution that are held as being inviolable at the state levels as well as the federal level. There is not, however, a complete superiority of the US Constitution over all State law. The powers set aside for the individual States within the United States are more in keeping with sovereign rights of European nation-states, except for certain elements thought to be best exercised by the federal government, such as executing treaties, providing for a common defense, and regulating the commerce between the states. (However, it is true that the role of the federal government in the US has crept more and more towards an all-powerful function as more and more powers are assumed by the federal government with insufficient protests from the States.) Different States in the United States have different laws, and they have their own State Constitutions, some of which are tilted more towards individuals, and others more towards the State.
Mac OS X Server 10.6 features implied a shared Address Book and shared Calendar feature that would be useful to SOHO environments. However, trying to get it up and running is challenging. Once running, the capabilities are less than expected. I wonder if 10.7 will bear fruit towards making the Mac OS X Server platform a one-stop shop for those SOHO environments inclined to use it rather than Microsoft Server with Exchange?
If it's not too much to ask, could you please elaborate a little so kiddies like me can understand what's going on? I'm trying to go through it but it's a lot to work with for someone who started with Clinton.
In order to form your own opinions, I would suggest you read at least a putatively objective account of the legislation being referenced. Biased explanations by those who are already pushing their point are unlikely to help you in this regard. Reading these will give you a start, but you had better be prepared to develop your own ideas about economic theory and political theory as well. Despite economists' belief that they study a science, and the words "political science" used by those who study political theory, neither resembles more traditional scientific disciplines. Both are more about pushing theories than proving them.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal_Reserve_Act
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass–Steagall_Act
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garn–St._Germain_Depository_Institutions_Act
I think the hysteria to be on guard against here is that of US policy making officials. We have lots of defense contractors who have been hyping "cyber" for a couple of years now. (That's right - they don't even call it cyberwar, or cybersecurity. Just "cyber." Ooooooo - shivers down my spine.)
When the policy wonks go off half-cocked, and the policy enforcers (CyberCommand, etc.) rush to salute and do their job, we will have wrongly focused substantial attention, and substantial $$$s, on chasing the wrong threat. The defense contractors will be happy, because they will get paid many $$s to "research" and "carry out policy" and the like. Each branch of the military will be busy building up its "cyber" capabilities. The powers that be will be building the legal infrastructure for the big red "kill switch" on the Internet.
The perhaps more expedient practice of getting all of the critical infrastructure crap off of the Internet, where it shouldn't have been placed in the first place, will be overlooked. Its much more exciting to have a big challenge to deal with than to make the problem much more manageable by not being so stupid about things in the first place. Fifteen years ago, the thought that corporations would run corporate networks over the Internet was laughable; everyone knew it was too risky. The idea of connecting SCADA networks up to corporate networks that were connected to the Internet was silly. Slowly, over time, the lure of cost savings grew to be too big to ignore. It can be hard hard to justify not saving large amounts of money due to an ill-defined mysterious threat of "Internet hackers" when no large profile cases of major losses due to these hackers have been observed. Now corporations have their internal networks all built on top of the public Internet (usually with VPN technology to provide some confidentiality/integrity). Availability? Not a problem - it works fine! (As long as their isn't a targeted DOS attack, and the Commander in Chief doesn't flip the "kill switch.") SCADA networks - why, of course they are connected to the corporate network - it makes logical sense, its much easier to manage, its so much cheaper than running a separate network... And now we have a big screaming hysteria over protecting "critical infrastructure" because some portion of it is either accessible through the Internet or is dependent upon the Internet carriers for availability, and it turns out that the Internet threat may have some teeth after all.
The threat to be on guard against is the threat of stupidity in the form of companies that put critical infrastructure on the Internet or through the Internet because it saves them $$s.
Most rapes are non-violent? What kind of world do you live in? Whether accomplished with punches and whacks, overwhelming force, or through drugs, rape is inherently violent. If you are talking about the "the next day I decided that I hadn't really wanted to have sex with him" kind of incident, perhaps we need another name for that than rape so as to not confuse the issue. One person forcing another person to have sex with the first against the will of the second is rape, and it is an ultimate act of violence.
The use of deadly force seems allowable to me to prevent rape; its a bit hard to just stick to "disabling" the rapist while they are bent on forcing themselves upon you. The rapist takes his/her chances when they decide to rape. If the "disabling" action results in the rapist being permanently disabled - oh, well.
I do like the comment about ripping off the rapist's ears. That is a good place to start.
Many food stores in my area (Giant, Safeway) use the loyalty-card system. The "anonymity tax" can be pretty heft at those stores, though. They mark some common items up outrageously, then offer a fair price to those customers using a loyalty card. I used to pay the price once in a while, when it was more convenient to pop into one of them than the one store in town that didn't seem to be caught in a pathological desire to track every aspect of their customer's lives. One day I was trying to buy some chicken for a BBQ at Safeway, and saw that the non-loyalty-card price for the chicken was about $10/pound. That cured me of paying the anonymity tax.
I now do all of my shopping at the one local grocery store chain that doesn't require a loyalty card, Shoppers Food Warehouse.
A long time ago.... at a college far far away... a girl gave me this phone number when I asked for hers... at the time I thought how interesting it was that her phone number matched the one from the song.