A couple of key points to consider.... the first being that such a recommendation is infinitely more acceptable in college than it is in high school, and the second being that even in college, such a recommendation would generally come from that person's academic historical record, which was not the case in the above person's anecdote.
got asked by the teacher why did I want to go for computer science instead of humanities. I told that I like computer science better. His answer: "you know, some guys going for computer science are very good. It would be easier for you in humanities." It was NOT after failed test or anything like that. It was in the beginning of school year and he knew nothing about me.
And if a daughter of mine came home from school with a story like that, I'd have been all over it, asking why teachers are discouraging somebody from taking a class about something that the student indicated a preference for. What difference should it make how good other may be compared to how hard the course might be for somebody else? Some of the people in humanities could also be very good too... should they also be discouraged from taking that class as well simply on that premise? Sure, it's definitely possible that it might not interest you as much as you had hoped in the beginning, but you'd learn that over the year as you took the class. What kind of basis would a teacher use for deciding that a student was liable to change their mind about how much interest they had in a subject when they plainly said that they liked it?
I'd be expecting an apology from that teacher to be delivered to my daughter the following day, or else I'd be wanting to see that teacher fired.
Wow.... just wow. How *DARE* that teacher suggest that you wouldn't be any good or have any significant interest in computer science just because you happen to have ovaries.
Perhaps you are missing a key factor in that the article specifically says that the source "doesnâ(TM)t say whether the police took any action against Rogers", and that there is certainly precedent for people who have done something similar ending up getting arrested, some of who are still in prison.
Considering the statements 'We know everyone who breaks the law, we know when you're doing it" vs "We do not track our customers in their cars without their approval or consent."....
I cannot for the life of me reconcile how both of these statements can be true except in pathological cases that would not affect most people. If they know when a person is breaking the law, then since people who break the law are generally not trying to be caught in the act, then it cannot be the case that they do not track people without their consent. If they really don't track people without their consent, then the only people that they would know about when they break the law are people whose approach to the law would, I imagine, fall several standard deviations away from what is considered typical for people who deliberately break the law.
Since it is possible for the second statement to be false without automatically making the first statement true (although such a situation would enable the first statement to be true), I believe logic demands that both statements be taken as vacuous.... that is, that Ford may or may not track customers without their consent, but if they were to, the information they would receive from such tracking would not necessarily enable them to be able to really know who is breaking the law or where.
I believe the topic at hand had moved to covering the case of somebody doing this in America, where "Big Pharma" could possibly enjoy at least some control. In Africa it's a moot point, since it's not illegal there.
:So prohibit sharing that private information with others. That is the a thing you might do with that information that can harm someone.
Absolutely... and indeed, someplaces already have laws in place which expressly govern that exact issue. Currently, however, what you can find out about someone via google is not legally recognized as "private information".
The best way to make sure someone doesn't discriminate against you for something they know about you is to have them not know.
Possibly... but you can't legislate the flow of knowledge, you can only legislate what people actually do about it.
But how would that stop anyone from making an artificial limb for themselves, exactly? Or are you suggesting a prohibition against self-made artificial limbs similar to prohibitions against 3d printed guns? We all know how effective *that* law is....
Individual privacy anywhere that a person has no personal and direct control over who can see or hear them (ie, inside of their own privately owned property) is destined to be unsustainable in any environment where there is sufficient interest in finding out about that person.
Privacy is not a right, per se... It is only a courtesy that gets afforded to people out of either politeness or respect.
you never hear a feminist say that we're post-consent because there is rape
False analogy... rape is an act of violence against a person, and causes harm against that person, while the mere act of knowing something about someone else which they may not have wanted anyone else to know is not, and does not really infringe on their rights in any way. What a person *does* with that information might hurt somebody, but the mere fact that they know it does not, and privacy only covers what people simply know about, not necessarily what they do with the information.
So in a post-privacy world, it may be obvious that some legislation will need to be made in what a person is legally allowed to practice based on information that they discovered without the knowledge or consent of the person that they discovered it about. Enforcement of such legislation would be similar to enforcement on laws prohibiting sexual or racial discrimination in a workplace.
The interesting thing is, however, as that sort of situation becomes increasingly common in our society, most people are going to eventually learn that they shouldn't be making judgmental decisions about somebody based only on what they find online any more than they should be making such decisions based on other superficial factors.... like race, age, et al. It will never be perfect, of course... but to be honest, you can still find racist jerks too, even in places which are very culturally diverse.
I agree that the deal was broken, but two wrongs do not make a right. The fix is to actually fix what was broken, not to simply throw the whole damn thing away.
Damnit... preview button and submit button are too close together! Slashdot missed my entire second paragraph!
What's missing was the following:
Easily, there are but two significant problems with copyright today. The first, as it currently is implemented, is its absurdly long duration... that should be brought down to a fixed, and non-extensible period of no more than 40 years... and probably much less for certain types of works which may tend to be rendered obsolete relatively quickly.
Is it really too much to ask for slashdot to have an "edit" link on a person's own posts, that can stay active for the first couple of minutes?
As you say, you can protect information by keeping it secret... copyright is supposed to encourage those who might have otherwise kept their stuff secret to publish them by giving them some assurance, for what is supposed to be a limited time, that they will be the only ones allowed to copy it. What the general public gets out of this is access to the content in the first place, and in turn, society can be enriched by it. Society is expected to respect this system largely in good faith, although there can and often is legal repercussions for people failing to do so. If, however, the general public does not respect this system, then the mechanism breaks down, the content provider has no reason to trust copyright, and therefore ends up resorting to means of their own devising to try to protect the information, practically all of which will create limits how much society can be enriched by the content because the general public will not have as much as access to it as they otherwise would (mechanisms such as self censorship, or DRM, for example).
But the main other problem with copyright as it currently exists is equally (and in some ways more) problematic... and a potentially much harder one to fix, and that is the fact that many people in today's society simply do not have any significant interest in respecting such an arbitrary label anymore... they fail to realize or simply do not care about the potential long term benefits to society that might arise by choosing to respect copyright, and with a general prevalence of this apathy, no copyright-based system can possibly succeed. If it were abolished utterly, however, it is all but certain that another mechanism for controlling content would arise, one in which society would receive far less than what they were originally offered by copyright.
Do *NOT* create any kind of web interface which automatically will send a letter to them based on some kind of template.
Someone who was very well meaning in Canada did this during our copyright consultation and the results backfired heavily... they received a staggering number of submissions, but because of the lack of effort that it takes to simply use a website, fill in your name in an appropriate field and hit "submit" without altering any of the letter content, and the fact that a very significant majority of the letter submissions were unaltered verbatim copies of one particular website's letter, the government chose to completely ignore those submissions... although the remainder of submissions that said similar ideas but were not based on that template still accounted for a majority of the total submissions, discounting that many submissions entirely almost certainly had a negative impact on how the government interpreted the consultation and the actions that they took in the aftermath of it. If even a quarter of those so called automated submissions had been an original letter from a concerned citizen which expressed the same basic ideas, I expect that the government may have interpreted the results of that consultation very differently than they did.
Ah... I didn't make the mental connection that "securities" referred to shares. It seems obvious now in hindsight, but I didn't make that connection when I read the article.
Slashdot Mirror
A couple of key points to consider.... the first being that such a recommendation is infinitely more acceptable in college than it is in high school, and the second being that even in college, such a recommendation would generally come from that person's academic historical record, which was not the case in the above person's anecdote.
And if a daughter of mine came home from school with a story like that, I'd have been all over it, asking why teachers are discouraging somebody from taking a class about something that the student indicated a preference for. What difference should it make how good other may be compared to how hard the course might be for somebody else? Some of the people in humanities could also be very good too... should they also be discouraged from taking that class as well simply on that premise? Sure, it's definitely possible that it might not interest you as much as you had hoped in the beginning, but you'd learn that over the year as you took the class. What kind of basis would a teacher use for deciding that a student was liable to change their mind about how much interest they had in a subject when they plainly said that they liked it?
I'd be expecting an apology from that teacher to be delivered to my daughter the following day, or else I'd be wanting to see that teacher fired.
Wow.... just wow. How *DARE* that teacher suggest that you wouldn't be any good or have any significant interest in computer science just because you happen to have ovaries.
Look at it this way... there exists a universe where you *DO* live there...
Perhaps you are missing a key factor in that the article specifically says that the source "doesnâ(TM)t say whether the police took any action against Rogers", and that there is certainly precedent for people who have done something similar ending up getting arrested, some of who are still in prison.
Considering the statements 'We know everyone who breaks the law, we know when you're doing it" vs "We do not track our customers in their cars without their approval or consent."....
I cannot for the life of me reconcile how both of these statements can be true except in pathological cases that would not affect most people. If they know when a person is breaking the law, then since people who break the law are generally not trying to be caught in the act, then it cannot be the case that they do not track people without their consent. If they really don't track people without their consent, then the only people that they would know about when they break the law are people whose approach to the law would, I imagine, fall several standard deviations away from what is considered typical for people who deliberately break the law.
Since it is possible for the second statement to be false without automatically making the first statement true (although such a situation would enable the first statement to be true), I believe logic demands that both statements be taken as vacuous.... that is, that Ford may or may not track customers without their consent, but if they were to, the information they would receive from such tracking would not necessarily enable them to be able to really know who is breaking the law or where.
I believe the topic at hand had moved to covering the case of somebody doing this in America, where "Big Pharma" could possibly enjoy at least some control. In Africa it's a moot point, since it's not illegal there.
Absolutely... and indeed, someplaces already have laws in place which expressly govern that exact issue. Currently, however, what you can find out about someone via google is not legally recognized as "private information".
Possibly... but you can't legislate the flow of knowledge, you can only legislate what people actually do about it.
When you can ever begin to enforce a restraining order prohibiting anyone from googling you, you may have a point.
But how would that stop anyone from making an artificial limb for themselves, exactly? Or are you suggesting a prohibition against self-made artificial limbs similar to prohibitions against 3d printed guns? We all know how effective *that* law is....
Individual privacy anywhere that a person has no personal and direct control over who can see or hear them (ie, inside of their own privately owned property) is destined to be unsustainable in any environment where there is sufficient interest in finding out about that person.
Privacy is not a right, per se... It is only a courtesy that gets afforded to people out of either politeness or respect.
Except it's not a crime to make an unapproved artificial limb for yourself.
You are confllating what people know vs what people do.
False analogy... rape is an act of violence against a person, and causes harm against that person, while the mere act of knowing something about someone else which they may not have wanted anyone else to know is not, and does not really infringe on their rights in any way. What a person *does* with that information might hurt somebody, but the mere fact that they know it does not, and privacy only covers what people simply know about, not necessarily what they do with the information.
So in a post-privacy world, it may be obvious that some legislation will need to be made in what a person is legally allowed to practice based on information that they discovered without the knowledge or consent of the person that they discovered it about. Enforcement of such legislation would be similar to enforcement on laws prohibiting sexual or racial discrimination in a workplace.
The interesting thing is, however, as that sort of situation becomes increasingly common in our society, most people are going to eventually learn that they shouldn't be making judgmental decisions about somebody based only on what they find online any more than they should be making such decisions based on other superficial factors.... like race, age, et al. It will never be perfect, of course... but to be honest, you can still find racist jerks too, even in places which are very culturally diverse.
How can "Big Pharma" stomp on this, exactly? There's no "company" to buy out or try to shut down.
Are you lending your money to a landlord for letting you live in his apartment for a month, when you are going to move out next month?
I agree that the deal was broken, but two wrongs do not make a right. The fix is to actually fix what was broken, not to simply throw the whole damn thing away.
[nt]
What's missing was the following:
Is it really too much to ask for slashdot to have an "edit" link on a person's own posts, that can stay active for the first couple of minutes?
As you say, you can protect information by keeping it secret... copyright is supposed to encourage those who might have otherwise kept their stuff secret to publish them by giving them some assurance, for what is supposed to be a limited time, that they will be the only ones allowed to copy it. What the general public gets out of this is access to the content in the first place, and in turn, society can be enriched by it. Society is expected to respect this system largely in good faith, although there can and often is legal repercussions for people failing to do so. If, however, the general public does not respect this system, then the mechanism breaks down, the content provider has no reason to trust copyright, and therefore ends up resorting to means of their own devising to try to protect the information, practically all of which will create limits how much society can be enriched by the content because the general public will not have as much as access to it as they otherwise would (mechanisms such as self censorship, or DRM, for example).
But the main other problem with copyright as it currently exists is equally (and in some ways more) problematic... and a potentially much harder one to fix, and that is the fact that many people in today's society simply do not have any significant interest in respecting such an arbitrary label anymore... they fail to realize or simply do not care about the potential long term benefits to society that might arise by choosing to respect copyright, and with a general prevalence of this apathy, no copyright-based system can possibly succeed. If it were abolished utterly, however, it is all but certain that another mechanism for controlling content would arise, one in which society would receive far less than what they were originally offered by copyright.
Copyright being enforced badly doesn't make the concept of copyright bad... it makes how it is enforced bad.
They *CAN* be separate... at least in theory.
Do *NOT* create any kind of web interface which automatically will send a letter to them based on some kind of template.
Someone who was very well meaning in Canada did this during our copyright consultation and the results backfired heavily... they received a staggering number of submissions, but because of the lack of effort that it takes to simply use a website, fill in your name in an appropriate field and hit "submit" without altering any of the letter content, and the fact that a very significant majority of the letter submissions were unaltered verbatim copies of one particular website's letter, the government chose to completely ignore those submissions... although the remainder of submissions that said similar ideas but were not based on that template still accounted for a majority of the total submissions, discounting that many submissions entirely almost certainly had a negative impact on how the government interpreted the consultation and the actions that they took in the aftermath of it. If even a quarter of those so called automated submissions had been an original letter from a concerned citizen which expressed the same basic ideas, I expect that the government may have interpreted the results of that consultation very differently than they did.
In Edmonton, where I come from, we would get one chinook a year.
Although most people just called it summer.
Ah... I didn't make the mental connection that "securities" referred to shares. It seems obvious now in hindsight, but I didn't make that connection when I read the article.
Where do you see that in the article?