It is illegal to point security cameras at public spaces without special permission.
Says who? And Where?
This is certainly not true anywhere in North America.
In Sweden you need to have a warning sign outside if your store/office/etc has recording security cameras. As the GP also said, you aren't generally allowed to point recording cameras outside on public street and so on - you need a permission for that.
Many people on this story seem to point that you have privacy outside your house (in US), but these kinds of things are greatly different in most of the Europe. People here value their privacy a lot more, for historical reasons too.
The problem here is that the noise ratio is way too high to meaningfully know or write down every dream or though you have about the future, in combination with the fact that these events happen really, really rarely. On top of that, it's something you have no control over - you cannot just try to "think" about future, it's just something that comes to your mind and because of the noise ratio you only notice it later. This is why you cannot take it as "thinking into the future" or take advantage of it.
btw, they have tried to study deja vu in laboratory situations - but because of the aforementioned reasons it's been impossible to get any results.
We remember the past but we don’t remember the future.
In a way you can "remember" future, it's called deja vu. The few times I've had it, everything matched perfectly what I already knew. I knew what was going to happen and what there was around me and what was different than how it usually is, ie. what items were in different location or not there. Like most people, I attributed it to a past dream. I am certain it didn't happen before in reality nor was it some anomaly from memory.
This leads me to believe there is a timeline. Everything happening all the time has a position and state on that timeline. We try to explain time with physics and our current knowledge. This is somewhat related to physics - if you're moving faster, you're aging slower (your time is going slower). This is true on airplanes and true when moving at light speed. If you moved fast enough, everyone on Earth could age 70 years while you only aged a few minutes.
But this only works towards future. Nevertheless, if it works towards future it must also work towards past. I think the plain movement speed isn't what's causing the differences in passing time, but it triggers something else. We as humans have (admittedly bad) memory of everything that has happened in the past. There is our own state and time. Why there couldn't be global state and time, a timeline? A timeline you could warp within, even if you did exactly the same things again.
If you combine it with filters (found in most rss programs), password-protected rss feeds (possible) and some algorithm that tries to decide what's important news to you (Facebook seriously sucks at this though), then yes it's basically the same thing.
There are existing mechanisms that allow a user to display information about other users. Some mechanisms may allow the user to select particular news items for immediate viewing. Typically, however, these news items are disparate and disorganized. In other words, the user must spend time researching a news topic by searching for, identifying, and reading individual news items that are not presented in a coherent, consolidated manner. Often, many of the news are not relevant to the user. Just as often, the user remains unaware of the existence of some news items that were not captured in the user's research. What is needed is an automatically generated display that contains information relevant to a user about another user of a social network.
So what they invented is a couple of WHERE and ORDER BY clauses in a sql query based on what the algorithm thinks is relevant to the user?
Sounds like this is the second coming of Einstein.
That's obviously an option, but I don't think they will yet do so. It still doesn't make EU hypocrisy to try to apply good privacy laws within other EU member countries and trying to make UK comply to them too.
As someone earlier pointed out, EU has been trying to make UK comply. That's rarely any hypocrisy. What do you suggest other EU members do if UK doesn't comply? Declare war to UK?
Yeah, so they have been prosecuted for such in the EU. GP's "who seems to have exactly no problem at all with Britain's blatant and constant violations" doesn't really hold. At least they're trying to make UK comply.
They asked and Google complied, but it doesn't change the fact that it was still against law to do so and then putting it on the Internet (and you know how easy it is to take down something once put on the Internet)
No, but you know the camera is on top of the van (and itself quite tall), so it photographs places otherwise not visible. Lets try again: if you climbed on top of a van to photograph private properties otherwise not visible and took pictures of people without clothes there, you would be violating law.
What impossible thing is mandated here? EU is just saying Google needs to fix their blurring technology as it violates privacy laws or stop doing what they're doing. If it's not technically possible for Google to automatically blur faces, then they need to hire people to do manual blurring or forget the whole thing in EU area.
If I remember correctly, that case involved Google's van photographing him over his garden wall, so no, he wasn't clearly visible to anyone just walking by. If you climbed up the garden wall and photographed people without clothes in their private property, you would be breaking law too. Even without even putting them on the Internet for everyone to see.
And even newspapers and tv channels have to be careful about it if normal people are involved. For example if you publish a photograph of someone accused of some crime with his face being identifiable, and it turns out he is innocent, newspapers will be liable to pay big sums for damages. This is also why the European versions of "Cops" always have peoples faces blurred while it doesn't seem to be so in the American version.
However, remember that the Google van has the camera a lot higher than what you could see walking on the street. For example there has been many cases where the camera has photographed inside peoples apartment or over garden walls, even people without clothes. If you went taking photos of someones backyard that is otherwise shield, you would be violating law. Same thing if you went taking pictures of someone through his/her window. Google is doing exactly this, on a mass scale, and then putting them on the internet for everyone to see.
That's solely UK's own issue. EU isn't a government nor does it work like US. If UK blatantly and explicitly goes directly against some EU law, then they might say something about it.
No, companies don't really care if they need to pay a few hundred to get the programmer Visual Studio and increase his productivity by 1500% instead of using the free Dev-C++.
Same thing as most companies working with graphics aren't shy to buy Photoshop instead of frustrating their workers with GIMP.
No, you're mistaken. Men koalas just sleep, wake up for a bit and decide to go back to sleep. When they finally wake up, they go rape some of the female koalas and afterwards gets high eating eucalyptus, and then gets back to sleep. (it's true, actually)
But has there been any open source games that are good at story, art, animation, music, dialog and vocal performance? Those are actually the things that are missing in them most of all. As someone here points out, there's technical problems like path finding etc too, but some of the games are technically ok (like nethack, as the previous poster mentioned). But they all lack that polished art, music and story even more.
With closed source/proprietary projects it usually happens for different reasons, mostly income being the reason. With proprietary projects there will always be coders, and the existing coders will stay coding, because there is income involved with that. Money is a good motivator to continue doing projects you otherwise would had lost interest on.
Great example of this is really the games. Gaming industry develops some really stunning games, and theres big corporations like EA, Activision Blizzard and Ubisoft and then theres the small indie developers and everything in between. But what about open source games? They're mediocre at best, almost always unfinished, and otherwise pretty much shitty. These are long projects, taking up to 500-2000+ men work years to finish, and the quality difference in that comes from the fact that the developers are paid to have the interest to finish the product instead of jumping to their latest new idea.
It happens to a lot of OSS projects. Suddenly the developers interest just dies and they start doing something else. Just like in our childhood we coded some funny little game for a day (not that I didn't make some cool stuff back then:) and then started on an another project. It needs more motivation to continue some project past the starting interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
It is illegal to point security cameras at public spaces without special permission.
Says who?
And Where?
This is certainly not true anywhere in North America.
In Sweden you need to have a warning sign outside if your store/office/etc has recording security cameras. As the GP also said, you aren't generally allowed to point recording cameras outside on public street and so on - you need a permission for that.
Many people on this story seem to point that you have privacy outside your house (in US), but these kinds of things are greatly different in most of the Europe. People here value their privacy a lot more, for historical reasons too.
Or even better why don't you conduct studies yourself - they are not difficult.
Exactly what kind of studies?
However imagine for a moment you are right:
The problem here is that the noise ratio is way too high to meaningfully know or write down every dream or though you have about the future, in combination with the fact that these events happen really, really rarely. On top of that, it's something you have no control over - you cannot just try to "think" about future, it's just something that comes to your mind and because of the noise ratio you only notice it later. This is why you cannot take it as "thinking into the future" or take advantage of it.
btw, they have tried to study deja vu in laboratory situations - but because of the aforementioned reasons it's been impossible to get any results.
We remember the past but we don’t remember the future.
In a way you can "remember" future, it's called deja vu. The few times I've had it, everything matched perfectly what I already knew. I knew what was going to happen and what there was around me and what was different than how it usually is, ie. what items were in different location or not there. Like most people, I attributed it to a past dream. I am certain it didn't happen before in reality nor was it some anomaly from memory.
This leads me to believe there is a timeline. Everything happening all the time has a position and state on that timeline. We try to explain time with physics and our current knowledge. This is somewhat related to physics - if you're moving faster, you're aging slower (your time is going slower). This is true on airplanes and true when moving at light speed. If you moved fast enough, everyone on Earth could age 70 years while you only aged a few minutes.
But this only works towards future. Nevertheless, if it works towards future it must also work towards past. I think the plain movement speed isn't what's causing the differences in passing time, but it triggers something else. We as humans have (admittedly bad) memory of everything that has happened in the past. There is our own state and time. Why there couldn't be global state and time, a timeline? A timeline you could warp within, even if you did exactly the same things again.
If you combine it with filters (found in most rss programs), password-protected rss feeds (possible) and some algorithm that tries to decide what's important news to you (Facebook seriously sucks at this though), then yes it's basically the same thing.
Here's the patent info.
There are existing mechanisms that allow a user to display information about other users. Some mechanisms may allow the user to select particular news items for immediate viewing. Typically, however, these news items are disparate and disorganized. In other words, the user must spend time researching a news topic by searching for, identifying, and reading individual news items that are not presented in a coherent, consolidated manner. Often, many of the news are not relevant to the user. Just as often, the user remains unaware of the existence of some news items that were not captured in the user's research. What is needed is an automatically generated display that contains information relevant to a user about another user of a social network.
So what they invented is a couple of WHERE and ORDER BY clauses in a sql query based on what the algorithm thinks is relevant to the user?
Sounds like this is the second coming of Einstein.
That's obviously an option, but I don't think they will yet do so. It still doesn't make EU hypocrisy to try to apply good privacy laws within other EU member countries and trying to make UK comply to them too.
As someone earlier pointed out, EU has been trying to make UK comply. That's rarely any hypocrisy. What do you suggest other EU members do if UK doesn't comply? Declare war to UK?
Yeah, so they have been prosecuted for such in the EU. GP's "who seems to have exactly no problem at all with Britain's blatant and constant violations" doesn't really hold. At least they're trying to make UK comply.
It's the way the world is nowadays and making it illegal won't make the fundamental technology go away.
Just because we developed guns we should be allowed to use them as we like?
They asked and Google complied, but it doesn't change the fact that it was still against law to do so and then putting it on the Internet (and you know how easy it is to take down something once put on the Internet)
No, but you know the camera is on top of the van (and itself quite tall), so it photographs places otherwise not visible. Lets try again: if you climbed on top of a van to photograph private properties otherwise not visible and took pictures of people without clothes there, you would be violating law.
What impossible thing is mandated here? EU is just saying Google needs to fix their blurring technology as it violates privacy laws or stop doing what they're doing. If it's not technically possible for Google to automatically blur faces, then they need to hire people to do manual blurring or forget the whole thing in EU area.
If I remember correctly, that case involved Google's van photographing him over his garden wall, so no, he wasn't clearly visible to anyone just walking by. If you climbed up the garden wall and photographed people without clothes in their private property, you would be breaking law too. Even without even putting them on the Internet for everyone to see.
And even newspapers and tv channels have to be careful about it if normal people are involved. For example if you publish a photograph of someone accused of some crime with his face being identifiable, and it turns out he is innocent, newspapers will be liable to pay big sums for damages. This is also why the European versions of "Cops" always have peoples faces blurred while it doesn't seem to be so in the American version.
However, remember that the Google van has the camera a lot higher than what you could see walking on the street. For example there has been many cases where the camera has photographed inside peoples apartment or over garden walls, even people without clothes. If you went taking photos of someones backyard that is otherwise shield, you would be violating law. Same thing if you went taking pictures of someone through his/her window. Google is doing exactly this, on a mass scale, and then putting them on the internet for everyone to see.
Technical incapability isn't an excuse to break laws.
That's solely UK's own issue. EU isn't a government nor does it work like US. If UK blatantly and explicitly goes directly against some EU law, then they might say something about it.
What EU privacy law is UK specifically violating?
ISP's already have to keep connection log data in EU.
US would be out of its mind if it attacked EU.
No, companies don't really care if they need to pay a few hundred to get the programmer Visual Studio and increase his productivity by 1500% instead of using the free Dev-C++.
Same thing as most companies working with graphics aren't shy to buy Photoshop instead of frustrating their workers with GIMP.
No, you're mistaken. Men koalas just sleep, wake up for a bit and decide to go back to sleep. When they finally wake up, they go rape some of the female koalas and afterwards gets high eating eucalyptus, and then gets back to sleep. (it's true, actually)
Awesome lifestyle, one could say.
But has there been any open source games that are good at story, art, animation, music, dialog and vocal performance? Those are actually the things that are missing in them most of all. As someone here points out, there's technical problems like path finding etc too, but some of the games are technically ok (like nethack, as the previous poster mentioned). But they all lack that polished art, music and story even more.
With closed source/proprietary projects it usually happens for different reasons, mostly income being the reason. With proprietary projects there will always be coders, and the existing coders will stay coding, because there is income involved with that. Money is a good motivator to continue doing projects you otherwise would had lost interest on.
Great example of this is really the games. Gaming industry develops some really stunning games, and theres big corporations like EA, Activision Blizzard and Ubisoft and then theres the small indie developers and everything in between. But what about open source games? They're mediocre at best, almost always unfinished, and otherwise pretty much shitty. These are long projects, taking up to 500-2000+ men work years to finish, and the quality difference in that comes from the fact that the developers are paid to have the interest to finish the product instead of jumping to their latest new idea.
It happens to a lot of OSS projects. Suddenly the developers interest just dies and they start doing something else. Just like in our childhood we coded some funny little game for a day (not that I didn't make some cool stuff back then :) and then started on an another project. It needs more motivation to continue some project past the starting interesting.