Yes, but like many synonyms, the definitions are not identical.; For example, your boss has authority over you, but he does not actually control you. Authority is a right that needs to be respected to function, while control implies something that is far more absolute.
I understand that people want their files back, but the law does not exist to compensate people for wrong actions against them, that is the job of civil court. The law is supposed to, to the best of its ability provide some disincentive to disobeying it. If it is illegal to pay the ransom without police involvement, people who consider their files to be more important than the law will do so, but the existence of that law *will* still act as some disincentive for the people who intend on following the law, since they will have otherwise done nothing wrong, while the people who distribute such ransomware are already breaking the law anyways, so adding another law to their list of infractions isn't going to change anything.
Ultimately an employer/employee relationship is defined by the existence of authority. Somebody sets your rates, sets your hours, and you agree to submit to their authority and let them do these things to you - if those things are present, then you're an employee.
It's less a matter of authority than it is an issue of control. Uber does not have place requirements in how much work there is for its drivers to do or how often they must work for Uber. Uber does *NOT* cover any of the costs that the driver might incur as a result of doing the work, and those costs must come out of the amount paid for the job. If the amount paid does not cover the costs of doing the job, then the person who accepted that rate of pay has not managed their costs well enough to make doing that work viable. If the drivers were compensated for gasoline over and above whatever the rate of pay that they specified was, the drivers would definitely be employees. If Uber owned the cars that its workers drove, then the drivers would also definitely be employees.
The fact that Uber does not set a minimum or limit the maximum number of hours that the driver can work beyond the amount of work that is avialable to do for whatever drivers that will accept the rate of pay that Uber has given is a chief factor that would make its driver's independent contractors... It's the worker who chooses how often to work, and just repeatedly acccepting jobs for the same company should not obligate the company to treat that worker like an employee because the company never agreed to such a relationship.
Does Uber require that the person they are paying to drive actually be the driver? If so, then the drivers are definitely employees, but if the person they are paying is allowed to subcontract someone else to do their work (and presumably still make a profit while doing so), then the driver is not.
My "dumbass comment" was meant toungue-in-cheek, to illustrate the logical absurdity of the notion that having only one client somehow must somehow automatically make somebody an employee. It's not much less absurd to think that an independent contractor can also somehow force a company that they work for which intended to hire them as an independent contractor to treat them as an employee just by repeatedly taking jobs for that same company, and doing it enough that they end up working full-time hours for them.
First, around here anyway, any "business owner" needs to have more than one client
True... to an extent. But there is nothing stopping an independent contractor from only working for one client at any given time. Somebody I hired as an independent contractor can't turn around and tell me that he's supposed to be an employee just because he doesn't have any other clients at the moment.
I can't have a programming business if I only program for one client.
Uh... no..
First of all, if business is slow you might only have one client you are dealing with at the moment. also, taken to its logical extreme, you could never have a programming business in the first place since at some point you would have to get your first client.
Also, it means that if a company is the first one to offer a particular style of service, it is impossible for them to hire independent contractors to do the work because there is no other company out there for the people they contract to do the same kind of work for.
If I say I will pay a person $x to shovel the snow from my walkway, and I'm not willing to negotiate the price, that does *NOT* make whoever accepts that rate an employee of mine. The fact that Uber is unwilling to negotiate with its drivers over how much it pays them is immaterial to whether they should be considered employees or not.
If Uber is the client of the driver, then sure the driver may not be able to negotiate the pay rate with uber..... but they should be allowed to set their prices for their OWN customers on the other end of the transaction.
The passengers are not the driver's customers in the first place, so he has no business trying to negotiate any payment details with them. The passengers are clients of Uber, not the driver.
If someone agrees to drive for Uber as an independent contractor, then Uber is that person's client. If an independent contractor agrees to work for a client who isn't willing to negotiate their pay rate, then that's on that person, that doesn't mean they are suddenly not an independent contractor just because they don't have any ability to control their rate of pay. Further, the passengers are not the driver's clients, they are Uber's, so any negotiation with the passengers over price or how the passengers pay for the trips is none of the driver's business.
There may certainly be other reasons to consider Uber drivers as employees and not contractors, but I am baffled as to why these same points keep getting brought up over and over again or why they form some kind of basis for a decision every single time like they are somehow actually relevant.
No... what I'm saying is that they shouldn't pay in the first place... and the only way to discourage this would be to make it illegal unless you had the cooperation of law enforcement (and even then only so that it was legal for law enforcement to use means at their disposal to trace a transaction, if it were technologically feasible). If people kept the fact that they had been infected to themselves (their only option if they intend to pay the ransom despite its illegality unless they also wish to pay whatever penalty is in place for breaking that law), there would be no widespread impression of how effective ransomware was at getting people to pay the ransom, thereby not fanning the flame that might make ransomware appear like a viable revenue stream to people who might consider it but are not yet using it, and the existing organizations that try and utilize it to extort money from people would, over time, fizzle out, and the problem will be largely solved.
.... wouldn't it be more logical to make it illegal to PAY said ransom, unless doing so is part of an active criminal investigation to identify the person or persons that are receiving the money? This would tend to force people who try to spread ransomware to shorten the window in which they are allowed to pay the ransom so that the victims have less time to consider whether they should go to the authorities, and would have to just quickly pay the money, regardless of the legality, just to get their files back. If, however, this window is too short, then it may not leave some people with enough time to even send the money, and with an increase in the number of people that lose their files anyways despite paying the ransom, the perceived effectiveness of paying the ransom to get one's files back is diminished. Confidence that paying anything will be beneficial in such circumstances is destroyed, and the people who would spread ransomware have reduced incentive to do so, since fewer people end up ever actually paying.
Well, owing to the fact that Apple had its more colorful rainbow-like logo for almost 2 years before the rainbow flag was used for the first time as a symbol for gays, It's dubious that there was any intent on Apple's part to show such affiliation.
The changing of Apple's logo from its original colorful one to the current grey one was coincident with Steve Jobs return to Apple in 1997.... This change was one of perhaps about a dozen other significant changes that Jobs was making in the company at the time, wanting to "bury the past", and give the company a whole new look on the inside and out. The logo change was more likely reflective of Job's intent to completely overhaul how Apple would be seen by the general public and its consumers than it was intended to dissociate from any perception that may have arisen in more recent times that it was affiliated with gay pride. .
1997 was, incidentally, during the time of OS8, not OSX. OSX was first released in 2001.
When I first made my first comment on this thread, I was talking about its relevance to this story... nothing more, and nothing less. You can imagine that Apple blocking others from implementing this may have impacted this story, but you are going *entirely* on a hypothetical tangent. My only failing here was in that I did not realize that this is what was occurring sooner, and I thought that the comments to which I was replying were still somehow trying to be representative of the facts that we can know to be true. I don't think that failing to see that makes me an idiot, particularly given that the original comment to which I replied did not use any language that suggested it was purely speculative, but you are entitled to your opinion too.
Yep. I read the patent in question. What, I think, allows the patent to be vague on the matter is that it is not the "scenery analyzer" itself that is being patented. The patent only appears to claim that said "scenery analyzer" could pinpoint where the user was within a moving vehicle. I am skeptical that this is actually even technologically possible right now without cooperation from vehicle manufacturers, and which the patent said would not be required. However, my point remains... the difficulty in practically implementing such a system would be no easier for Skype than for Facetime, and so there's no real reason to think that Apple's blocking others from using the tech would have an impact on this particular case.
No, he's pretty clearly making the argument that Facetime may have had the feature if Skype was allowed to use the feature as a point of competition.
That was not what I took from the initial comment:
Sueing Apple for using the patent system to block others from implementing this particular technology and deciding to not implement it themselves seems to be at the heart of this
Sure, you can *speculate* that Apple might have implemented this tech on Facetime if they hadn't have been blocking others from implementing it, however, there are a plethora of other reasons that Apple may not have included the tech which they patented... For example, while we know that Apple has this patented, do we have any evidence that it is feasible for them to implement without affecting legtiimate functions? For example, in real-world use, how would it affect use of the feature by a passenger? Although the patent mentions it will use a "scenery analyzer" to deterrmine its location in the car, it provides no description of how this would work, or evidence that they had already designed it or even if they knew how to design it at the time they applied for the patent. It is, as far as the patent description is concerned, a magic box. Bear in mind that it is supposed to operate without any assistance from vehicle manufacturers here, so how does it even know where in the car a driver is *supposed* to be? Even it makes some assumptions, what if the car is not a standard one for its region?
My point being that even *IF* Apple hadn't blocked other parties from using the tech, other parties would be just as stymied as Apple on how to implement it and make it practical, and it would have remained just as unavailable.
What the hell are you even talking about? The story states that the driver who caused the accident was using Facetime... it does not mention Skype at all. If Skype had been blocked by Apple from using the technology that may have prevented this accident, it would still be inapplicable to this story because the driver that caused the accident was not using Skype in the first place.
Perhaps, however, it has evidently escaped your attention that nobody else was involved with this incident that was perhaps also blocked from implementing some similar technology. Apple may have blocked other manufacturers or developers from doing something similar, but such blocking is inapplicable to this particular story because the person who was using Facetime while driving was explicitly using Apple's technology and not another manufacturer's. With respect to this particular incident, I suppose one could always try and allege that if Apple had not blocked other manufacturers from implementing such tech, the driver who caused the accident may have chosen to use such alternative technology and thus not caused the accident in the first place, but I think that this argument is a very thinly stretched one that would be unlikely to withstand any critical analysis, given all of the circumstances that actually occurred and what people were really doing at the time of the accident.
Sure, but preventing skype from implementing this feature still doesn't have anything to do with this incident because the person who caused the accident was not using skype, they were using facetime.
Now you might try and make the argument that they might have been using skype if Apple had allowed skype to implement their blocking technology but considering what the driver who caused the accident was doing in the first place, I suspect that is highly unlikely.
Perhaps, but this story has nothing to do with skype... the driver that caused the accident was using Apple's own technology... so any notions of Apple blocking other people from implementing the tech are inapplicable to the repercussions of this story. I'm unsure why my remark was tagged as flamebait... perhaps it was because I expressed a sincere sentiment about my estimate of the intelligence level of someone that would try to use a video chat system on a hand-held while they are supposed to be concentrating on driving?
It is apparent that you failed to notice that the young woman was not the one who was using video chat at the time of the accident, rather, the driver of the *other* vehicle was.
As another commenter has pointed out, it is most likely that the driver of the other vehicle did not have deep enough pockets to be worth going after.
Since the idiotic driver that caused the accident was using Apple's own Facetime video chat at the time, how does Apple blocking others from implementing this technology come into play here?
Not that I think Apple should be held accountable here, but since Apple was the one who patented it, its patent status would not have been an impediment for them to include it.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but like many synonyms, the definitions are not identical.; For example, your boss has authority over you, but he does not actually control you. Authority is a right that needs to be respected to function, while control implies something that is far more absolute.
I understand that people want their files back, but the law does not exist to compensate people for wrong actions against them, that is the job of civil court. The law is supposed to, to the best of its ability provide some disincentive to disobeying it. If it is illegal to pay the ransom without police involvement, people who consider their files to be more important than the law will do so, but the existence of that law *will* still act as some disincentive for the people who intend on following the law, since they will have otherwise done nothing wrong, while the people who distribute such ransomware are already breaking the law anyways, so adding another law to their list of infractions isn't going to change anything.
It's less a matter of authority than it is an issue of control. Uber does not have place requirements in how much work there is for its drivers to do or how often they must work for Uber. Uber does *NOT* cover any of the costs that the driver might incur as a result of doing the work, and those costs must come out of the amount paid for the job. If the amount paid does not cover the costs of doing the job, then the person who accepted that rate of pay has not managed their costs well enough to make doing that work viable. If the drivers were compensated for gasoline over and above whatever the rate of pay that they specified was, the drivers would definitely be employees. If Uber owned the cars that its workers drove, then the drivers would also definitely be employees.
The fact that Uber does not set a minimum or limit the maximum number of hours that the driver can work beyond the amount of work that is avialable to do for whatever drivers that will accept the rate of pay that Uber has given is a chief factor that would make its driver's independent contractors... It's the worker who chooses how often to work, and just repeatedly acccepting jobs for the same company should not obligate the company to treat that worker like an employee because the company never agreed to such a relationship.
Does Uber require that the person they are paying to drive actually be the driver? If so, then the drivers are definitely employees, but if the person they are paying is allowed to subcontract someone else to do their work (and presumably still make a profit while doing so), then the driver is not.
What... are you saying that you think those things are an intended consequence?
My "dumbass comment" was meant toungue-in-cheek, to illustrate the logical absurdity of the notion that having only one client somehow must somehow automatically make somebody an employee. It's not much less absurd to think that an independent contractor can also somehow force a company that they work for which intended to hire them as an independent contractor to treat them as an employee just by repeatedly taking jobs for that same company, and doing it enough that they end up working full-time hours for them.
True... to an extent. But there is nothing stopping an independent contractor from only working for one client at any given time. Somebody I hired as an independent contractor can't turn around and tell me that he's supposed to be an employee just because he doesn't have any other clients at the moment.
Uh... no..
First of all, if business is slow you might only have one client you are dealing with at the moment. also, taken to its logical extreme, you could never have a programming business in the first place since at some point you would have to get your first client.
Also, it means that if a company is the first one to offer a particular style of service, it is impossible for them to hire independent contractors to do the work because there is no other company out there for the people they contract to do the same kind of work for.
If I say I will pay a person $x to shovel the snow from my walkway, and I'm not willing to negotiate the price, that does *NOT* make whoever accepts that rate an employee of mine. The fact that Uber is unwilling to negotiate with its drivers over how much it pays them is immaterial to whether they should be considered employees or not.
The passengers are not the driver's customers in the first place, so he has no business trying to negotiate any payment details with them. The passengers are clients of Uber, not the driver.
If someone agrees to drive for Uber as an independent contractor, then Uber is that person's client. If an independent contractor agrees to work for a client who isn't willing to negotiate their pay rate, then that's on that person, that doesn't mean they are suddenly not an independent contractor just because they don't have any ability to control their rate of pay. Further, the passengers are not the driver's clients, they are Uber's, so any negotiation with the passengers over price or how the passengers pay for the trips is none of the driver's business.
There may certainly be other reasons to consider Uber drivers as employees and not contractors, but I am baffled as to why these same points keep getting brought up over and over again or why they form some kind of basis for a decision every single time like they are somehow actually relevant.
No... what I'm saying is that they shouldn't pay in the first place... and the only way to discourage this would be to make it illegal unless you had the cooperation of law enforcement (and even then only so that it was legal for law enforcement to use means at their disposal to trace a transaction, if it were technologically feasible). If people kept the fact that they had been infected to themselves (their only option if they intend to pay the ransom despite its illegality unless they also wish to pay whatever penalty is in place for breaking that law), there would be no widespread impression of how effective ransomware was at getting people to pay the ransom, thereby not fanning the flame that might make ransomware appear like a viable revenue stream to people who might consider it but are not yet using it, and the existing organizations that try and utilize it to extort money from people would, over time, fizzle out, and the problem will be largely solved.
.... wouldn't it be more logical to make it illegal to PAY said ransom, unless doing so is part of an active criminal investigation to identify the person or persons that are receiving the money? This would tend to force people who try to spread ransomware to shorten the window in which they are allowed to pay the ransom so that the victims have less time to consider whether they should go to the authorities, and would have to just quickly pay the money, regardless of the legality, just to get their files back. If, however, this window is too short, then it may not leave some people with enough time to even send the money, and with an increase in the number of people that lose their files anyways despite paying the ransom, the perceived effectiveness of paying the ransom to get one's files back is diminished. Confidence that paying anything will be beneficial in such circumstances is destroyed, and the people who would spread ransomware have reduced incentive to do so, since fewer people end up ever actually paying.
Well, owing to the fact that Apple had its more colorful rainbow-like logo for almost 2 years before the rainbow flag was used for the first time as a symbol for gays, It's dubious that there was any intent on Apple's part to show such affiliation.
The changing of Apple's logo from its original colorful one to the current grey one was coincident with Steve Jobs return to Apple in 1997.... This change was one of perhaps about a dozen other significant changes that Jobs was making in the company at the time, wanting to "bury the past", and give the company a whole new look on the inside and out. The logo change was more likely reflective of Job's intent to completely overhaul how Apple would be seen by the general public and its consumers than it was intended to dissociate from any perception that may have arisen in more recent times that it was affiliated with gay pride. .
1997 was, incidentally, during the time of OS8, not OSX. OSX was first released in 2001.
Fine, but women who are doing it because they want to don't generally have pimps.
When I first made my first comment on this thread, I was talking about its relevance to this story... nothing more, and nothing less. You can imagine that Apple blocking others from implementing this may have impacted this story, but you are going *entirely* on a hypothetical tangent. My only failing here was in that I did not realize that this is what was occurring sooner, and I thought that the comments to which I was replying were still somehow trying to be representative of the facts that we can know to be true. I don't think that failing to see that makes me an idiot, particularly given that the original comment to which I replied did not use any language that suggested it was purely speculative, but you are entitled to your opinion too.
Yep. I read the patent in question. What, I think, allows the patent to be vague on the matter is that it is not the "scenery analyzer" itself that is being patented. The patent only appears to claim that said "scenery analyzer" could pinpoint where the user was within a moving vehicle. I am skeptical that this is actually even technologically possible right now without cooperation from vehicle manufacturers, and which the patent said would not be required. However, my point remains... the difficulty in practically implementing such a system would be no easier for Skype than for Facetime, and so there's no real reason to think that Apple's blocking others from using the tech would have an impact on this particular case.
That was not what I took from the initial comment:
Sure, you can *speculate* that Apple might have implemented this tech on Facetime if they hadn't have been blocking others from implementing it, however, there are a plethora of other reasons that Apple may not have included the tech which they patented... For example, while we know that Apple has this patented, do we have any evidence that it is feasible for them to implement without affecting legtiimate functions? For example, in real-world use, how would it affect use of the feature by a passenger? Although the patent mentions it will use a "scenery analyzer" to deterrmine its location in the car, it provides no description of how this would work, or evidence that they had already designed it or even if they knew how to design it at the time they applied for the patent. It is, as far as the patent description is concerned, a magic box. Bear in mind that it is supposed to operate without any assistance from vehicle manufacturers here, so how does it even know where in the car a driver is *supposed* to be? Even it makes some assumptions, what if the car is not a standard one for its region?
My point being that even *IF* Apple hadn't blocked other parties from using the tech, other parties would be just as stymied as Apple on how to implement it and make it practical, and it would have remained just as unavailable.
I'm not disputing that.... I have only ever said that it has nothing to do with this particular story, and for that, I was called an idiot.
What the hell are you even talking about? The story states that the driver who caused the accident was using Facetime... it does not mention Skype at all. If Skype had been blocked by Apple from using the technology that may have prevented this accident, it would still be inapplicable to this story because the driver that caused the accident was not using Skype in the first place.
Perhaps, however, it has evidently escaped your attention that nobody else was involved with this incident that was perhaps also blocked from implementing some similar technology. Apple may have blocked other manufacturers or developers from doing something similar, but such blocking is inapplicable to this particular story because the person who was using Facetime while driving was explicitly using Apple's technology and not another manufacturer's. With respect to this particular incident, I suppose one could always try and allege that if Apple had not blocked other manufacturers from implementing such tech, the driver who caused the accident may have chosen to use such alternative technology and thus not caused the accident in the first place, but I think that this argument is a very thinly stretched one that would be unlikely to withstand any critical analysis, given all of the circumstances that actually occurred and what people were really doing at the time of the accident.
Sure, but preventing skype from implementing this feature still doesn't have anything to do with this incident because the person who caused the accident was not using skype, they were using facetime.
Now you might try and make the argument that they might have been using skype if Apple had allowed skype to implement their blocking technology but considering what the driver who caused the accident was doing in the first place, I suspect that is highly unlikely.
Perhaps, but this story has nothing to do with skype... the driver that caused the accident was using Apple's own technology... so any notions of Apple blocking other people from implementing the tech are inapplicable to the repercussions of this story. I'm unsure why my remark was tagged as flamebait... perhaps it was because I expressed a sincere sentiment about my estimate of the intelligence level of someone that would try to use a video chat system on a hand-held while they are supposed to be concentrating on driving?
It is apparent that you failed to notice that the young woman was not the one who was using video chat at the time of the accident, rather, the driver of the *other* vehicle was.
As another commenter has pointed out, it is most likely that the driver of the other vehicle did not have deep enough pockets to be worth going after.
Since the idiotic driver that caused the accident was using Apple's own Facetime video chat at the time, how does Apple blocking others from implementing this technology come into play here?
Not that I think Apple should be held accountable here, but since Apple was the one who patented it, its patent status would not have been an impediment for them to include it.
How deliciously ironic.