I had a client who, before she got busted, had a good color copier that I couldn't have afforded and assume she stole. She wold print up duplicates of stolen checks and had a group of people fan out and pass them. I had another famous con man client earlier one of whose scams was selling memberships in the Mafia; nobody ever complained and I always wondered what happened the first time one of those marks tried to use that in Chicago. What I don't understand is how you can print a scanner as distinguished from running in ours ahead of the real one. How does this work? Don't they have to be connected to something? I guess all the real experts on SD know but I don't. None of my computer geek buddies will even teach me to hack into the local university and change grades or issue degrees, or into the big banks, the IRS, or the White House. Where on SD or some other site can I get the instructions for this so I can make a little tax-free cash on the side?
Oh, come, now, I saw plenty of coverage of the union people physically taking over the capitol of Wisconsin. Not only was this not suppressed, their Republican opposition wanted people to see this resort to force by the unions and their left-wing allies after they couldn't win the argument at te ballot box or in the legislature by logical persuasion. I also saw a few pictures of the damage the mob did and left for the state to clean up at considerable expense.
In my law school days, while working for an entity funded by the liberal Ford Foundation, part of my job was to monitor and collect mainstream print media coverage of litigation and other activities on a major issue. I noted an article in the liberal New York Times about a large demonstration having occurred in a location that just happened to be right outside my window and also across from where I lived. The rub was that it never happened, then or ever. I had, in fact, walked through the location several times during this alleged demonstration for other, routine, purposes. There wasn't even a poster about this alleged demonstration, which I would have attended as part of my job. We never found anyone on campus who ever heard of it except from the alleged news article. When i lived in western Pennsylvania, earlier, the media didn't cover the union thugs beating people up for trying to carry their own television sets and other packagers home from stores against they were striking. I'm more than a little suspicious of the liberal establishment media when it comes to such issues. As for coverage of the Tea Party, we keep hearing of racist influence and signs but nobody shows pictures of them or even gives the same account of what they allegedly said. I've seen one picture of one racist sign and heard of one or two racist shouts but no credible evidence that anybody with any real connection to, or authority in, the Tea Party even knew about or could control this. I've worked appearances by Presidents and we had people assigned to cover up obscene signs planted in the crowd by our opponents to get TV exposure and make our people look bad but not normal heckling which our candidates. handled.
I think Slashdot hit rock bottom, not to mention 180 degrees off topic, on this one.
Trying to figure out how to mod this down but my first try didn't work.
The author's pending Ph.D. seems like a parody of the proliferation of useless degrees issued by colleges and universities these days, and may be a tip-off that this is a put-on. Or maybe it's an extreme advertisement for some current or actuallyh proposed amusement ride. The appeal of a lot of these seems to be some illusion of danger. I've been on some big ones at Six Flags etc. and far and away the scariest ride I've ever been on was a little portable one at the county fair. Now what someone might do with this is hook up with Al Gore and the rest of those who talk about reducing the population of the world by a third and maybe you can get a big government grant or loan from Obama or Rick Perry, blow the money on riotous living, go broke, and do it again. who are
Suicide happens to be one of the things upon which I have become an expert in my life and career. It is almost always an irrational act. People I know who have somehow survived having shot themselves in the head, taken cyanide, staken 2 poerful sleeping pills with alcohol, hung himself off a railroad trestle with 20' of new rope that broke, etc., much less had their attempts interrupted unexpectedly, are glad they didn't die. I've been with a dozen people who were suffering suicidal depression and not one of them agreed that any of the others should die even when they thought they should. These included teachers, lawyers, bankers, pharmacists, and other smart and educated people, and people lI consider valuable. I'd rather be governed by a lot of the people I knew who had been psych hospital patients for suicidal depression than by a lot of the politicians of both parties I know. I've represented young pre-school kids on up who have attempted suicide and know of completed suicides as young as 8 or 9. A school superintendent showed us figures for suicides, suicide attempts, and other life-threatening behaviors among school kids, and the percentage who had attempted and those who had seriously contemplated suicide were both shocking. After dropping, the rate among yhoung people is moving significantly back upward. Experts I have good reason to believe are right argue convincingly that the decision whether they would kill themselves if things got bad enough in their eyes is often made at about age four or five, too young to comprehend death or the significance of life, and then kill themselves later when triggered by some event back to the ego state of a hurt four year old Child. Almost always, to quote one of the leading professional experts in America, "Treatment and therapy, not suicide, is indicated." This is not something people should be encouraging.
I'm a believer in free enterprise a la Adam Smith. Most people who profess to believe in free enterprise have never actually read either Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations or his writings on ethics, just as too many Keynsians do not appear ever to have actually read his key writings. Smith was suspicious of, among other things, spendthrift trusts and very large business enterprises with the power to set their own prices or "drive down the cost."
You have to wonder how and why the supposedly well educated, experienced, business geniuses who end up on the boards of directors of such major corporations, among others, so often ignore the basic principles and lessons of business management and make mistakes that would get a branch manager in Podunk fired, not to mention how their commercial and investment bankers, likewise supposedly business geniuses, their consultants, their legal counsel, key stockholders, etc., don't call them to account before they provide the latest in a seemingly endless supply of business stories characterized by "How the [actually or allegedly] best and brightest blew it." They teach some of these cases in business school. There are actually a finite number of definable mistakes that cause most of the severe damage, disaster, and destruction in business, and somebody on these boards, or their professional outside consultants and advisers, should at least stick their neck up every once in awhile and point out that they are in danger of making one, and how to avoid it.
I once read the report of the examination of a substantial bank in a major metropolitan market that said, for example, "This bank's weak and self-serving board and management has repeatedly been warned to stop . . . " Nine of the ten largest banks in that key market managed to go broke. You have to work hard at it, and violate several principles of sound business, much less banking, that any freshman knew and the members of their boards and senior management knew or should have known, to do that. You can't make money indefinitely as a pig. I think one of the real problems is the institutionalized matter of "expectations" and short horizons for these.
Deja vu all over again. The big banks and other financial institutions involved in this kind of gambling all knew v3ery well that another such actually or allegedly rogue trader had done this at another big bank based in Britain and the Far East, among other times this has happened. The very idea that they let one lone trader expose them to this kind of losses without a senior execjutgive, without the trader's motive to take risks with the company's and its depositors' money, closely supervising this activity, is incredible in every sense of the word. If the top dogs didn't know, especially over this time frame, it was because they didn't want to know.
As another posted, even credit card companies have computer programs to alert them to unusual activity in real time. Of course American Express and others let someone else run up bills on my cards that they never would have let me run, greatly exceeding not only my highest balance but my reported annual income. What kind of accounting do these big outfits use that they wouldn't hvae a running live record of their major positions?
There is another looming question here. When you start having trading activity of such huge volume that it materially affects the value of currencies, here reportedly affected the value of the Swiss franc, why didn't one or more of the affected governments, as well as the bank, check on this?
I have had one nagging question for some time. All of the big banks and financial outfits are deeply into the zero-sum trading game because they all appear to find it so profitable. The idea that banks would make loans, based upon character, capacity, capital, and collateral, to real businesses, has largely gone by the wayside in favor of such zero sum gambling. The reported news is all about big profits, big bonuses for traders, etc. Why don't we seem, and I repeat seem, to hear about the necessary corresponding losses except in this kind of context in which somebody, always an allegedly brilliant trader (gambler) working for the company, racks up a staggering, huge loss for the institution, and is always branded a rogue, a crook, etc.
Assuming, for openers, that you have your cell phone with you, and that it keeps track of and causes wherever you have been to be stored, somebody besides Al Franken and his liberal colleague should be concerned about the potential for invasions of reasonable and legitimate expectations of privacy 'which 'society' is prepared to recognize," in the troublingly anomalous language of the Supreme Court's Fourth Amendment case law. "Society" does not exist, and certainly has never been nad is not prepared to recognize and protect privacy or other individual rights unless clearly required by the Constitution or other applicable law. The Court, under both "liberal" and "conservative" control, has too often used "useful in fighting [pick one] "the [phony sham and scam that used to be called] the War on Drugs," or "terrorism," etc., ad infinitum, as justifications for invasions of privacy. The same argument could be made for mandatory brain chips or the rack and thumbscrews.
Where you are is rarely a private matter regardless of what you are doing. If you are operating a car on a public street, that is not private and you have no right to expect privacy, or an absence of red light cameras, etc. If you go to a grocery or gun store, Carnegie Hall, or a porno movie house, you have to know there will be Other People and assume that one or more of them will be happy to photograph you with their cell phone and post it, or just tell someone else, including tghe cops, where you were. I'm a retired lawyer and the foolishness of crooks, from the low level idiots to top lawyers and bankers who should know better, never ceased to amaze me. I was robbed in broad daylight in front of several witnesses including a reserve cop and his wife. An experienced lawyer from a big firm drew hundreds of thousands of dollars out of the bank, when he knew or should know that they were required to report that, washed it in a washing machine to remove fingerprints, and gave it to an accomplice who deposited it in his bank, again triggering reporting, and it still took seventeen years before they got caught. One of my genius clients committed a kidnapping with intent to comit rape withn brick-throwingdistance and line of sight from the lighted front door of a police station after having identified himself acrtoss the street. The fun case for me was the client arrested running from the scene of an aggravated robbery and attempted murder because the real criminal threatened and shot at him. Of course the police got the victim to identify my client's picture and coerced him into signing a confession, after the real criminal had confessed, so goess who they prosecuted? We won. I'm fascinated by what this technology would have done to another case where the alleged victim had positively identified the arrested suspect but the jury caught on when he produced his prison record photo showing a tattoo he still had but which the alleged victim had sworn he did not have. I still don't think that robbery ever happened.
After the data has been stored for some time, you might be more likely to find yourself needing an alibi than worried aboiut having to explain why you were at the location of a crime, the police station the address of which the police at the county seat here swore twice was "a high crime area," etc. Of course you might have any number of legitimate reasons for being at a crime scene or other suspicious location.
It probably doesn't cost much to store collected data indefinitely, but it would be my guess that its potential value for any legitimate or illegitimate purpose would diminish rapidly over time.
I'm much more concerned about tracking in cyberspace than the real world. My Web searches and Email are more likely to reveal things that are legally privileged and confidential, or which I am generally more concerned about keeping private.
Normally, nobody cares enough about where you go or what you do to justify the cost of tracking you, but as the cost drops and the process gets easier that primary protection begins
Statistics are practically useless when, as on this issue, what you are trying to do is predict the net effect of divese influences, such as violent video games," not on a cage full of mice but on one unique individual child. On top of that fact and problem, the odds of anyone working on this actually having enough accurate information about the many and complex influences upon a given child, much less a thousand children in a study, to be able to say with any real confidence, or any statistical level of confidence, would be nil. Of course, when you move from your theoretical sample to the real world, you enter a loop in which the kids who are allowed to and do play these violent video games, or do so for the lengths of time we're talking about here, and probably the ones with lousy parents who are more likely to be violent anyway. Anybody who doesn't have a financial stake in these games and who ever sees kids who do and do not play them, or spend huge amounts of time playing them, knows perfectly well that games, and other media, are very carefully crafted to impact kids, bypass certain higher centers of thought, and influence them. When I was practicing juvenile law, the kids who were allowed ot and did listen to Marilyn Manson, Death Metal, etc.play such games extensively, or both, wee the ones who got into serious and repeated violent and other legal trouble.
Right. The students who have been given any parenting, and anything resembling education and guidance at school, atre already taking Algebra II.
Actually, while taking and succeeding at Algebra II may be a good predictor of success in high school, college, work, and life, the one and only variable that really, consistently, affects and contributes materially to, as well as predicting, such outcomes and each of them, is parental interest and involvement. Try correlating the kids who take and succeed at Algebra II with active parental interest and involvement sometime.
I took, and passed, four years of math in high school, which, back then, pre-Sputnik, did not include Analytic Geometry, Pre-Calculus, and Calculus, or any computer courses. I loved it, despite knowing that I wasn't the best math student and had some trouble with it. My 99 3/4th percentile verbal scores got me offers from several good engineering schools, MIT, m first choicek bieng the only one smart enough to turn me down with a 70th percentile math score, What nobody told me, until I hit college and, having repeatedly tested out of freshman college math, took Analytic Geometry and Calculus, was that, as the grader put it when he sent me a note to "See the professor immediately!" was that I had been and was "doing all the problems a-- backwards." One morning, the professor opened with "With a fifth-order determinant, we can demonstrate . . . " and I raised my hand and asked him what that was, he said two words, the first of which was "Oh." I knocked a letter grade off my undergraduate average, and nearly killed myself, trying, repeatedly, to pass those courses. I did manage a B in Statistics.
We didn't learn until many years later, after I had switched majors and practiced law for years, that I had been born without a piece of brain structure crucial to higher math. We had always attributed any problems to a known uncorrectable congenital neurological vision problem which had got me refused admission to the Washington, D. C. school system.
The school systems in this state university town and the county seat turn out winners in robotics competition, etc., sponsored by a business enterprise, and have some good teachers, and students, but way too many of their students, including some I hired and some we couldn't use, couldn't alphabetize, spell "secretary" or "Algebra," compose a proper simple business letter in WordPerfect or Word, or otherwise, or balance a checkbook, etc. The salutatorian, second in her class, at another nearby school district got a scholarship to the state university here and had to be put into both remedial reading and remedial math.
I have friends on the verge of completing doctorate degrees in math and sciences who can't find jobs at living pay in their fileds and have ended up roofing, driving a truck, and two are teaching English in China. People who wee making six-figure incomes in computer science are working temporary gigs at anything they can get, about $10 per hour, and have lost their homes. The number and percentage of boys going on to college has dropped like a rock. Half the people I know are working well below their eduction, skill, and experience level, and practically everybody I know working a legitimate job or jobs is making less than htey used to. The official figures for unemployment, under-employment, inflation, etc. are sick jokes.
Some of you understand the software engineering of this a lot better than I do. Can, or how can, we prevent and deal with these crimes on the technical side? I'm a retired lawyer with medical and other privacy law expertise and this is just one of many areas where our legal system doesn't work except for the vrey rich criminals. If there is any advice you technical experts can give Congress while they are working on yet another computer privacy bill right now, please do so and please publish your advice, both in code etc. and in language Members of Congress, and those of us whose doctorates are not in math or computers can understand.
These recurring breaches, ranging from hacking into supposedly protected stolen laptops to things like this, would probably not happen, or be as common, if we could and did dry up the money in and market for stolen personal data. I suspect nobody in government or either political party wants to really stop this. The companies that gather and sell personally identifiable information know that a lot of what they are buying from such thieves is not only stolen but is, or should be, protected by law.
Most of us have to use Loyalty Cards, etc., which "give" us "savings" that come out of the stores having systematically overcharged us in the first place. Likewise coupons. On top of that, the best published data indicates that these stores charge more than others even after these "discounts." The stores know how much of each brand of what they sell, and their keeping records that identify individual customers for prescription medications, etc. and using, sharing, o selling this should be outlawed.
Anyone with the buying records of customers of Kroger's pharmacies, college scholarship applicants, and others whose rights to privacy were apparently violated here, has power that nobody should be allowed to have. Of course it will be misused, either by the original holders or those who actually or allegedly stole it--or did they really buy it?--from them. Nobody ever gets busted when the academic and medical records of a generation of university students and faculty are, for some inexplicable reason, on a laptop computer that then somehow gets left behind somewhere and actually or allegedly stolen.
If you gather up a large quantity of sewage, toxic chemical waste, plague virus, or the like, you are responsible for keeping it confined. Nobody is really held accountable for what happens to this stolen private personal data because the buyers are rich and rich people are extremely unlikely to get investigated and prosecuted, not to mention that nobody outside their dirty little market in personal data knows who has what, much less what is and isn't accurate, stolen, or being used for illegal purposes. Of course, if you steal a confidential file that incriminates the right police officers and politicians you're home free.
I was a lawyer handling criminal defense, and representing a lot of incest survivors, when the geniuses at the local police department sold me the departments recently replaced, and un-erased much less formatted, hard drive.
California Healthcare Provider Wants Illness-Predicting Algorithm
Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 30, @07:04AM
from the make-hospitals-smaller dept.
alphadogg writes "The Heritage Provider Network wants to do for healthcare what technology in the film Minority Report did for police work. In other words, it wants to use technology to pre-emptively predict when illness is likely to strike and take measures to prevent costly hospitalizations. This week Heritage announced that it was offering a prize of $3 million for any developer who successfully created a 'breakthrough algorithm that uses available patient data, including health records and claims data, to predict and prevent unnecessary hospitalizations.'"
Oh. Lord!
An insurance company using “available patient data, including health records and claims data, to predict and prevent unnecessary hospitalizations,” much less an algorithm based thereupon, “to predict and prevent unnecessary hospitalizations,” would produce a whole stack of disasters for patients, the healthcare system, and its own ‘bottom line.” “Minority Report,” to which the contributor compared this, was a sci-fi horror show, so I hope he understood this fact, but many others may not.
An insurer spending $3 million on this project at this point in the process of computerization of patient health records, federal subsidies for this and related processes, and medical knowledge, would guarantee the ultimate “garbage in, garbage out” results.
If anyone ever invents an algorithm that would have “predict[ed] and prevent[ed]” most of my hospitalizations, or most of those of others that I know about, he could undoubtedly invent another one that would “predict and prevent” death, injury, losses in the stock market or casino, divorce, and inclement weather.
I’m not sure what kind of medical records this insurance or healthcare company may have, or think it has, on its customers or patients, or how far ahead of the rest of the country California health records just might be, but I’ve been dealing with, trying to get, and trying to unscrew my own and my clients’ healthcare records for many years, and most of them are somewhere between useless and downright dangerous even without having been run through some new algorithm, which woujld present whole new universes of possible errors.
I live in an exurban county with one [public] general and one private mental hosipital, one other dominant lab for diagnostic scan, and assorted other procedures, and lots of doctors’ offices and practices, several of which have osme of this same kind of equipment. The hospital, the primary private imaging company, used by many doctors, and the various doctors’ offices can’t read each other’s MRI, CT, and other results. I fell and broke my wrist, was taken to two successive emergency rooms and then to a third hospital in another county becxuse nobody here and available did hands and wrists, and we ended up with at least six (6) different sets of results produced at different entities in four counties. It was not until some time after my surgery that my hand surgeon sent me to another facility, that can take X-ray and MRI pictures showing vital information that the others could and did not, that we discovered a major part of the problem. Except for the X-rays on film, nobody has equipment that can read all of these.
The local hospital’s off-site records contractor charged me several dollars a page for what were supposed to be records of several stays for different things, not one of which could have been, much less was, predicted or diagnosed hours, much less days or months, in advance. The hospitals have no copies of these that I can get. Every page of these records, from several stays in two of the hospital’s facilities in different towns, was totally blacked out except for a white dot in the center.
When I lived in Dallas earlier, someone with an X-ray lab and I discovered
I know experts, credible in other things I know more about, who say that they have helped persons wo self-identified as "gay but wanted to become "straight" to do so, and others who insist that this is impossible. This isn't my area of expertise, but evidence, including scientific evidence, and the First Amendment and freedom and competition in ideas are among those in which I do have expertise. I've read a number of things by experts on both sides of this issue, and, frankly, come away with the impression that both sides' cases leave much to be desired. I have talked to people who tell me they have chosen to anfd successfully changed, and others who say it can't be done but none of those who have talked to me, in or out of privileged and confidential relationships, tell me they really tried.
Apps are a form of expression, and I think Apple, etc., set a dangerous precedent when they allow organized pressure groups' petition campaigns, threats, etc., to persuade them to suppress expression on controversial issues, regardless of which side has the current temporary majority on them. What's next, caving to pressure by the same people to pull Biblical and religious apps because the Old and New Testaments both contain strong language about this issue? Sprint, my cell phone carrier to which I am indentured for years, is going to offer the Android HTC but not the iPhone4, and I'm having trouble getting detailed information about its capabilities and available apps relevant to my legal and other interests to help me decide whether to upgrade or not. Do we really want Apple, Microsoft, Google, GE, or the Democrats or Republicans, or some of their big money backers, or whoever, effectively censoring apps or Ebooks on the basis of the authors' opinions?
"Tort reform for the Rich. Crime and Punishment for the poor." Right. Look at the hedge fund manager in Palm Beach sort of prosecuted for systematic child sexual abuse, or any number of other such cases.
Amen! IAAL (retired, long story), worked for both a plaintiff's and an insurance-defense firm before going solo years ago, and have seen far more abuse on the defense than the plaintiff's side. "Tort reform" is just a thumb or both feet on the side of the scale, usually defendants', that tends to favor the side that has the money and makes the big "campaign contributions" (payoffs). I'm a values and economic free enterprise conservative on most issues but this has gone way off track, among some other issues. Funny how certain politicians vilify "trial lawyers" until they need one, or appoint one who has represented MS and worked for them in the White House for the Supreme Court. Texas Lawyer notes that, this year, even some of the civil practice defense bar is saying some of the latest batch of sop-called "tort reform" bills in the legislature go too far.
FOIA requests for political purposes are as old as, and were clearly included within the scope of, freedom of information and open records laws, which wisely do not require that the requesting party give any reason for wanting the public governmental information requested. This is only a news story for the New York Times or other liberal organs if the request comes from the Republican Party as here or another organization not on their approved list of leftist Establishment groups.
There are some loopholes you can drive a truck through. Doesn't it ever occur to politicians and those seeking to buy access to and influence with them, the only way I know to get either, to meet in the restroom and whisper or pass a note, or use a separate political Email account, address, and maybe a separate computer system so these don't get stored on the government server? Actually, I think if a politician sent or received an occasional Email from his wife or child, or other personal matters disclosure of which would be highly offensive to a reasonable person, or even about his and/or his mistress' of either sex's testing, that ought to be outside the scope of FOIA in most instances. Of course no politician of either party would bge stupid enough to Email anything illegal or embarrassing, get caught with a $5,000.00 an hour or $5.00 a pop hooker or a freeaer full of cash, etc. They never lie or take bribes, either.
I'm in Texas. Under our state Open Records law, the Attorney General's office demanded payment, within ten days, of about half my monthly income just to answer a basic question, on a subject addressed on his campaign and official Web sites, about what position he had taken, on the record, on behalf of the State on the Constitutionality of the Americans with Disabilities Act. They insisted that the hundreds of thousands of disabled citizens were not "significant" for purposes of a provision permitting waiver of such prohibitive expenses.
I once found a sworn lawsuit, in the open public court records, where the plaintiff sued the defendant for failing to pay him on a contract to "ascertain the confidential plans of the State Highway Department relating to acquisition of land for . ..." One of the Plaintiff's attorneys in that case was a state legislator and later on our State Supreme Court.
I’m a retired Texas lawyer. I have won a 5:7 jury deadlock in the first of 87 dope delivery cases to go to trial using an entrapment defense, resulting in all the offers including the one to my first offender, avidly recruited over time with a series of parties featuring steaks and beer, etc., coming down from 40-60 years to probation. Of course, the risky thing about an entrapment defense is that your client has to tell the jury “I did it” right up front but then demonstrate that he would not have engaged in the conduct but for the officials’ persuasive misconduct. Merely offering someone the opportunity to violate the law if he is so inclined is not entrapment, but there is one U. S. Supreme Court case in which the majority of Justices found and held that the government had been so persistent and persuasive in finally getting someone with no known history of interest or viewing to order child porn, by mail, that it crossed the line and created the crime. I, and some other lawyers in the same building, received one similar mailing, which may have been from the same government operation, years ago, but I sent it to the Postal Inspectors, and never received any more, nor did I hear any more about this until I read the Supreme Court opinion later.
I have represented a few child molesters, after and as a direct result of having, very unexpectedly, found myself representing and in other privileged and confidential relationships with an awful lot of survivors of childhood sexual abuse, most of which is incest. Some of the abusers, unlike this defendant who looks like Central Casting’s or the average person’s picture of a perp, were socially, economically, and politically prominent and powerful (palmed off on us by both parties) so didn’t get busted.
It is entirely legal and proper for the authorities to offer willing would-be criminals the opportunity to commit crimes and then catch and bust them, as long as the government and its agents do not affirmatively persuade them to commit or attempt to commit the crime. If you don’t see a cop so you speed, and get caught by a cop behind a billboard, that’s your problem because you should not have been speeding. If you try to buy child porn, which can’t be made without abusing a child, or to buy or otherwise solicit sex from someone you believe to be a child too young to consent, dope, an illegal firearm or one you are legally ineligible to possess, or hire a hit-man to kill someone, and get caught because you were really dealing with a cop, you are morally and legally guilty.
Assuming that it would be reasonably foreseeable that anyone would be persuaded by “animated emoticons” to try to get something he didn’t want and intend to buy anyway, much less sex with a child which anyone knows is illegal, the short answer to this rather ludicrously desperate argument is that the defendant went looking for sex with a child on line, but for which search, and opening the link, he would never have come to the pitch much less these “animated emoticons.” Trying to have sex with an underage girl is crime one element of which, that the government must prove beyond reasonable doubt, is specific intent.
I have not read the Dutch statute in issue or the case brought under it, but, as a retired lawyer, my guess or guesses would be that the law under which they tried to bring this case was intended to deal with hacking into computers to steal data, which anyone knows or should know is wrong and illegal, and the people drafting and voting on it probably did not have WfFi, routers, hot spots, "war-driving," or anything like this in mind, so they didn't mention or deal with it. I suspect that the legislature will amend the law to include, or, better, pass a separate law dealing with. this subject. It occurs to me that casually accessing the Internet through an open WiFi connection should be treated a little differently as to penalties. Criminal laws have to be sufficiently specific to give a person of ordinary intelligence fair notice of what is and is not prohibited.
This law may well have been written and passed before WiFi and this whole issue came to most legislators' attention.
A college teacher of computer science came to my law office, back in the good old days of DOS 5.0, so I asked him to take a look at our computer. When a C prompt came up, he said "I see you're using C language." I thought he was kidding or making fun of me. He may have been an expert at something but it did not include personal computers or how to set up and use them in a law office.
I'm a lawyer, not a computer scientist or software engineer, and came to the computer revolution late in the 80s.
"people like us, who would know how to spot a botnet." I live across the street from a university with a computer science department, and know some of their professors, and a couple of computer geniuses in the defense contract industry, and I don't know anybody who could "spot a botnet" or tell me how to "spot a botnet," be sure my computer wasn't infected with one, or do anything about it if it were. I wish somebody would post how, or a link to how, to defend effectively against such things and, while you're at it, against having your Email and other data hacked.
Hush. You should be shut up. Do you think the First Amendment actually guarantees the right to tell the truth? You are ruining the movie by giving way the plot and ending. The Government, which is supposedly representative of us, engages regularly in a species of speech which the Supreme Cort itself calls "government speech," which is different from the speech of human being, and even corporate persons and, in part because of the doctrines of sovereign and official immunity, are subject to reviews and compensation for damages for falsehood by nobody.
I've read one article in the New York Times, years ago during my law school days, about a large assembly and demonstration on my campus at Vanderbilt in Nashville that absolutely never happened. It would have been my job to cover it if it had, and it didn't. It would have been directly between my living quarters and my office on campus, and there was nobody there. I never could find even a leaflet or poster trying to organize it, in those pre-Internet days. When I had been state editor of another publication for students in undergraduate school, I was inundated with outrageously, and easily checked, defamatory information for publication, most of it generated by well-known left-leaning agencies of a church and several Establishment entities still regularly quoted in the liberal media to this day. I also got some propaganda that had been found libelous in courts long before. Pick any government or media source or sources you wish and tell me that any figure used by either party or candidate during the 2008 campaign, or the debate over the Obamacare bill, was either honest or reasonably reliable. I dare you. Every candidate nominated by either party since 2001 has told us that he, and only he, could and would catch Osama Bin Laden, too.
Both parties, and the government under Presidents and Congresses of both parties, have been propagandizing us, which is supposed to be illegal, for years. A short-wave listener, I discovered during the Korean "police action (war) that U. S. sources would say the enemy lost a large specific number of planes and we didn't lose any, the Soviets would pretty much reverse these figures, and the BBC, Swiss, etc. would provide another set or sets of figures which I suspected then and now were closer ot the truth. Since the enemy knew how many planes they had lost, these figures had to be for home consumption.
I am somewhat curious how our government, or the parties in control of the White House and Senate, and of the House, respectively, could have been so stupid as to permit the leaking and publication of a "defense" contract regarding deceptive propaganda, which should have been highly classified.
Now if our intelligence in, or the responsible people's knowledge of the geography and history of, the Middle East and Muslim Crescent, except what we get from the Israelis, was any good, we would, or at least might, have avoided a lot of strategic and tactical blunders in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. You can have all the electronic bells and whistles you want,m but without very good intelligence, designing propaganda based upon a thorough knowledge of the target audience, you're going to blow it.
Anybody who doesn't believe that, once perfected at government, i.e., our, expense, this technology would not be deployed in politics here at home, is dreadfully naive.
I post only very, very little of what I post on the Net on Facebook, but the interesting computer angle here sweems to me, to be how any normal teenager's Facebook page would have come to the attention of more than 2o00,000 people? I could get rich if I could attract that many to a Web site. 70,000 for theWhat kind of settings did she use? Nobody has that many even FB friends new party? How many of these were real and how many virtual fakes? Nobody has that many even FB "friends."
A retired lawyer,I have substantial uncorrectable vision and coordination problems, but am not legally blind. I had not tried to use Google Apps and this is the first I have become aware of this problem. Have been considering upgrading to Android smart phone as Sprint to which we are indentured for years does not have the Ipad recommended for those with vision problems. My wife has the Android and it does have some features my current phone lacks. Rather than trying to use the phone's EReader function I wish somebody would make a good EBook reader that doubles as a smart phone, or, better yet, a laptop with both sets of electronics bujilt in.
Correcting one person commenting on your post, a private university that accepts money from nearly ubiquitous federal aid, including federal Pell grants or federal student loans, is covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) as amended by the ADA Amendments Act (ADAAA) as to students and would also be covered as an employer.
I am rather surprised that Google would have failed to ensure that its products complied with the ADA and ADAAA, failed to run them by sources like the NFB, and would not have cured this problem voluntarily after being made aware of it without the necessity of a formal complaint to the Department of Justice (DCOJ).
I adopted Firefox on the recommendation of the people at Rescuit Tech Support because it permits some adjustments for my limited vision that IE does not have, though IU keep both on tap and use both, but its accessibility plug-in has not been updated since XP and I'm not sure what it would offer if that were done by their volunteer base.
There are some things in MS Vista, MS Office, etc. and many Web sites that make no provision for the usual enlargement and can run me up a stump. Considering the ADA, the DOJ's compliance resources, Bobby compliance seals, and the apparent ease with which these could apparently be cured at that end, I am troubled that they have not been cured. Many functions simply disappear if you even enlarge the page to fit a normal wide screen monitor, much less enlarge the text, tc. Many sign-in screens for user name, password, etc., where catching errors is critical, can't be enlarged. Many style sheets and cascading style sheets won't let you change font sizes or fonts, or throw the edges of text off the page instead of scrolling it down as a Bobby-compliant page does. Some Captcha images can be frustrating and the audible alternatives are equally fuzzy.
In the bad old days before the ADA, my late sister, later an editor at a major magazine and then a teacher, who had had polio and used cane, and I, I were both refused admission to the Washington, D.C. public schools though we needed only minimal reasonable accommodations.
I wanted to take some computer courses at the local state university but, like many other books, the standard texts are available only in compressed very small type in which I can read text briefly but cannot read the code, etc. The university's disability office did not know of a solution. If anybody knows of a solution, please let me know.
If this is true, and not just another political gambit, it might possibly be interesting. My Representative, Senators, and Presidents, ob both political parties, have been responding to my correspondence abbot privacy issues by telling me they’re taking care of this for about fifty years now and they mostly lied about that, not to mention everything else. My law dean and professor was fond of Will Rogers’ comment that “Whenever Congress makes a joke, it’s a law, and whenever they pass a law, it’s a joke.” Congress has passed assorted laws that purport to protect privacy and several of them actually say you don’t have much if any and others appear to be subsidies for paper companies. It was on a computer-related site that I first learned that the legal people for the companies developing computerized medical records systems with government support and compulsion don’t think they are covered by the HIPAA medical privacy law, for example.
Please somebody post Bill Numbers, links to the full text of the Commerce Department report upon which this is supposed to be based, House and Senate Bills, legislative hearings, etc. As of now I can’t find the bill on the usual thomas.loc.gov site, nor have I ever found the original report.
And somebody kindly post the names, positions, and Email etc. of any actual computer experts consulted and actually listened to by the politicians in drafting any such legislation, and their recommendations. I read several recommendations in computer publications on line that seem to make sense but never see them embodied in any of the various computer-related laws passed. There really is nothing in the Constitution that requires Congress not to lay down some basic principles that would cover emerging technology.
Not everything that may add to the bottom line of anything that calls itself a business enterprise is either consistent with free enterprise or good public policy.
I use a lot of ad-supported content. Most people couldn’t afford a lot of what we get via broadcast and cable TV, the Internet, etc. otherwise. A retired lawyer still active in issues and moving toward going back into active practice, I research a lot of arcane issues ranging from medicine to child abuse to construction, and, apparently as a result, I get some very interesting targeted ads. The New York Times has, for years, been, and still is, constantly feeding me ads for residential treatment for the serious problems of the daughter I don’t have. If I go to certain reputable medical sites and check out any story about anything remotely sexual, I get Emails from someone else, with lots of English and spelling errors, telling me, in foul language my wife would never use, that she says I’m no good in bed and offering me fake Viagra substitutes. Setting up a filter that starts with George Carlin’s famous “seven words” cut my spam in half. What bugs me is that some of these somehow use the correct and less common spelling of her name. Checking out some sites for the side of a campaign or issue I oppose has got me Emails thinking me for going on record supporting something I oppose. Maybe some sharp computer expert can explain why I get Email that appears to be addressed only to other people.
You've got to be kidding. IAAL, and you wouldn't believe the ways criminals guarantee that they will get caught and convicted, like using their own driver's license to hock stolen property with someone else's number engraved n it, or to buy guns using someone else's stolen credit card to turn over to their boyfriend who can't buy one because he's got a record, identifying themselves right before committing kidnapping and rape literally within the light from the front door of the police station. bank forgeries on camera, etc. Psychopaths lie when the truth would serve them better, including lying to their lawyers, and they don't learn from expe4rience. As for giving up privacy to avoid crime, that's downright asinine. Look at all the crime that goes on, on camera, and despite all the other loss of privacy, within jails and prisons.
He who would sacrifice liberty--of which personal privacy is an essential condition and element--for security deserves and will have neither.
There's a third. Great cases, like hard cases [not to mention easy cases] make bad law.
If you do something where you know or should realize that somebody can watch you and testify that they saw you do it, you have no kick if they do, unless you have some reasonable assurance, that society is prepared to recognize as reasonable, that they won't. The next easy step is that if it is legally OK for me to watch you doing something, it is at least probably OK to photograph this and make that available if the picture fairly depicts what you did.
This isn't window-peeping, violating your legal right to medical privacy, or seducing you and secretly photographing you making out, which would be an invasion of your privacy highly offensive to a person of ordinary sensibilities.
I don't have the citation or free access to the case but, since just taking a drink would typically not have any significant probative value or effect in a child custody case, suspect that the subject may have walked herself into a trap and made this relevant by lying and saying she wasn't there and doesn't drink, she's an alcoholic and should not drink, got plastered and abandoned, drove drunk or with, or otherwise endangered, a child.
My favorite such case, for sheer stupidity, was the client of mine who overlooked and didn't tell me that he had invited his estranged wife to come clean his apartment, where he had left child porn, while they were engaged in a contested child custody case. I hate losing because my client is stupid and doens't tell me the whole truth. Telling four different stories, all incriminating, punctuated with obscenities tat escalate along with the incrimination, while in a cop car with the red light on the video camera on, is also ill-advised, but that wasn't my client. .
Actually, now that many ATM and other financial transactions, and robberies, are routinely photographed, and everybody carries, and anyone with any brains should realize that everybody carries, a camera on their cell phone, there are some things it is more risky to do than it used to be. Then there are the people, like one politician I know of, who insist that it is an invasion of his privacy to photograph him driving through a red light without stopping, as though driving on a public street were a private act.
"This makes too much sense. Sooner or later, any school board member, administrator, sate regulator, etc., will figure thatoutand come up with some rule that says it can't be done because it might foul up the attendance count, enable a student to learn something, or whatever.
What does the robot add to the teleconferencing process?
Hopefully any such equipment will be rugged enough.
Now if they could just figure out how to engage students and teachers and actually teach any of them to reasd, write, balance a checkbook, etc. I've hired and represented a lot of high school students and too many who don't learn at home never really get good at reading, writing, math, etc.
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I had a client who, before she got busted, had a good color copier that I couldn't have afforded and assume she stole. She wold print up duplicates of stolen checks and had a group of people fan out and pass them. I had another famous con man client earlier one of whose scams was selling memberships in the Mafia; nobody ever complained and I always wondered what happened the first time one of those marks tried to use that in Chicago. What I don't understand is how you can print a scanner as distinguished from running in ours ahead of the real one. How does this work? Don't they have to be connected to something? I guess all the real experts on SD know but I don't. None of my computer geek buddies will even teach me to hack into the local university and change grades or issue degrees, or into the big banks, the IRS, or the White House. Where on SD or some other site can I get the instructions for this so I can make a little tax-free cash on the side?
Oh, come, now, I saw plenty of coverage of the union people physically taking over the capitol of Wisconsin. Not only was this not suppressed, their Republican opposition wanted people to see this resort to force by the unions and their left-wing allies after they couldn't win the argument at te ballot box or in the legislature by logical persuasion. I also saw a few pictures of the damage the mob did and left for the state to clean up at considerable expense. In my law school days, while working for an entity funded by the liberal Ford Foundation, part of my job was to monitor and collect mainstream print media coverage of litigation and other activities on a major issue. I noted an article in the liberal New York Times about a large demonstration having occurred in a location that just happened to be right outside my window and also across from where I lived. The rub was that it never happened, then or ever. I had, in fact, walked through the location several times during this alleged demonstration for other, routine, purposes. There wasn't even a poster about this alleged demonstration, which I would have attended as part of my job. We never found anyone on campus who ever heard of it except from the alleged news article. When i lived in western Pennsylvania, earlier, the media didn't cover the union thugs beating people up for trying to carry their own television sets and other packagers home from stores against they were striking. I'm more than a little suspicious of the liberal establishment media when it comes to such issues. As for coverage of the Tea Party, we keep hearing of racist influence and signs but nobody shows pictures of them or even gives the same account of what they allegedly said. I've seen one picture of one racist sign and heard of one or two racist shouts but no credible evidence that anybody with any real connection to, or authority in, the Tea Party even knew about or could control this. I've worked appearances by Presidents and we had people assigned to cover up obscene signs planted in the crowd by our opponents to get TV exposure and make our people look bad but not normal heckling which our candidates. handled.
I think Slashdot hit rock bottom, not to mention 180 degrees off topic, on this one. Trying to figure out how to mod this down but my first try didn't work. The author's pending Ph.D. seems like a parody of the proliferation of useless degrees issued by colleges and universities these days, and may be a tip-off that this is a put-on. Or maybe it's an extreme advertisement for some current or actuallyh proposed amusement ride. The appeal of a lot of these seems to be some illusion of danger. I've been on some big ones at Six Flags etc. and far and away the scariest ride I've ever been on was a little portable one at the county fair. Now what someone might do with this is hook up with Al Gore and the rest of those who talk about reducing the population of the world by a third and maybe you can get a big government grant or loan from Obama or Rick Perry, blow the money on riotous living, go broke, and do it again. who are Suicide happens to be one of the things upon which I have become an expert in my life and career. It is almost always an irrational act. People I know who have somehow survived having shot themselves in the head, taken cyanide, staken 2 poerful sleeping pills with alcohol, hung himself off a railroad trestle with 20' of new rope that broke, etc., much less had their attempts interrupted unexpectedly, are glad they didn't die. I've been with a dozen people who were suffering suicidal depression and not one of them agreed that any of the others should die even when they thought they should. These included teachers, lawyers, bankers, pharmacists, and other smart and educated people, and people lI consider valuable. I'd rather be governed by a lot of the people I knew who had been psych hospital patients for suicidal depression than by a lot of the politicians of both parties I know. I've represented young pre-school kids on up who have attempted suicide and know of completed suicides as young as 8 or 9. A school superintendent showed us figures for suicides, suicide attempts, and other life-threatening behaviors among school kids, and the percentage who had attempted and those who had seriously contemplated suicide were both shocking. After dropping, the rate among yhoung people is moving significantly back upward. Experts I have good reason to believe are right argue convincingly that the decision whether they would kill themselves if things got bad enough in their eyes is often made at about age four or five, too young to comprehend death or the significance of life, and then kill themselves later when triggered by some event back to the ego state of a hurt four year old Child. Almost always, to quote one of the leading professional experts in America, "Treatment and therapy, not suicide, is indicated." This is not something people should be encouraging.
I'm a believer in free enterprise a la Adam Smith. Most people who profess to believe in free enterprise have never actually read either Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations or his writings on ethics, just as too many Keynsians do not appear ever to have actually read his key writings. Smith was suspicious of, among other things, spendthrift trusts and very large business enterprises with the power to set their own prices or "drive down the cost." You have to wonder how and why the supposedly well educated, experienced, business geniuses who end up on the boards of directors of such major corporations, among others, so often ignore the basic principles and lessons of business management and make mistakes that would get a branch manager in Podunk fired, not to mention how their commercial and investment bankers, likewise supposedly business geniuses, their consultants, their legal counsel, key stockholders, etc., don't call them to account before they provide the latest in a seemingly endless supply of business stories characterized by "How the [actually or allegedly] best and brightest blew it." They teach some of these cases in business school. There are actually a finite number of definable mistakes that cause most of the severe damage, disaster, and destruction in business, and somebody on these boards, or their professional outside consultants and advisers, should at least stick their neck up every once in awhile and point out that they are in danger of making one, and how to avoid it. I once read the report of the examination of a substantial bank in a major metropolitan market that said, for example, "This bank's weak and self-serving board and management has repeatedly been warned to stop . . . " Nine of the ten largest banks in that key market managed to go broke. You have to work hard at it, and violate several principles of sound business, much less banking, that any freshman knew and the members of their boards and senior management knew or should have known, to do that. You can't make money indefinitely as a pig. I think one of the real problems is the institutionalized matter of "expectations" and short horizons for these.
Deja vu all over again. The big banks and other financial institutions involved in this kind of gambling all knew v3ery well that another such actually or allegedly rogue trader had done this at another big bank based in Britain and the Far East, among other times this has happened. The very idea that they let one lone trader expose them to this kind of losses without a senior execjutgive, without the trader's motive to take risks with the company's and its depositors' money, closely supervising this activity, is incredible in every sense of the word. If the top dogs didn't know, especially over this time frame, it was because they didn't want to know. As another posted, even credit card companies have computer programs to alert them to unusual activity in real time. Of course American Express and others let someone else run up bills on my cards that they never would have let me run, greatly exceeding not only my highest balance but my reported annual income. What kind of accounting do these big outfits use that they wouldn't hvae a running live record of their major positions? There is another looming question here. When you start having trading activity of such huge volume that it materially affects the value of currencies, here reportedly affected the value of the Swiss franc, why didn't one or more of the affected governments, as well as the bank, check on this? I have had one nagging question for some time. All of the big banks and financial outfits are deeply into the zero-sum trading game because they all appear to find it so profitable. The idea that banks would make loans, based upon character, capacity, capital, and collateral, to real businesses, has largely gone by the wayside in favor of such zero sum gambling. The reported news is all about big profits, big bonuses for traders, etc. Why don't we seem, and I repeat seem, to hear about the necessary corresponding losses except in this kind of context in which somebody, always an allegedly brilliant trader (gambler) working for the company, racks up a staggering, huge loss for the institution, and is always branded a rogue, a crook, etc.
Assuming, for openers, that you have your cell phone with you, and that it keeps track of and causes wherever you have been to be stored, somebody besides Al Franken and his liberal colleague should be concerned about the potential for invasions of reasonable and legitimate expectations of privacy 'which 'society' is prepared to recognize," in the troublingly anomalous language of the Supreme Court's Fourth Amendment case law. "Society" does not exist, and certainly has never been nad is not prepared to recognize and protect privacy or other individual rights unless clearly required by the Constitution or other applicable law. The Court, under both "liberal" and "conservative" control, has too often used "useful in fighting [pick one] "the [phony sham and scam that used to be called] the War on Drugs," or "terrorism," etc., ad infinitum, as justifications for invasions of privacy. The same argument could be made for mandatory brain chips or the rack and thumbscrews. Where you are is rarely a private matter regardless of what you are doing. If you are operating a car on a public street, that is not private and you have no right to expect privacy, or an absence of red light cameras, etc. If you go to a grocery or gun store, Carnegie Hall, or a porno movie house, you have to know there will be Other People and assume that one or more of them will be happy to photograph you with their cell phone and post it, or just tell someone else, including tghe cops, where you were. I'm a retired lawyer and the foolishness of crooks, from the low level idiots to top lawyers and bankers who should know better, never ceased to amaze me. I was robbed in broad daylight in front of several witnesses including a reserve cop and his wife. An experienced lawyer from a big firm drew hundreds of thousands of dollars out of the bank, when he knew or should know that they were required to report that, washed it in a washing machine to remove fingerprints, and gave it to an accomplice who deposited it in his bank, again triggering reporting, and it still took seventeen years before they got caught. One of my genius clients committed a kidnapping with intent to comit rape withn brick-throwingdistance and line of sight from the lighted front door of a police station after having identified himself acrtoss the street. The fun case for me was the client arrested running from the scene of an aggravated robbery and attempted murder because the real criminal threatened and shot at him. Of course the police got the victim to identify my client's picture and coerced him into signing a confession, after the real criminal had confessed, so goess who they prosecuted? We won. I'm fascinated by what this technology would have done to another case where the alleged victim had positively identified the arrested suspect but the jury caught on when he produced his prison record photo showing a tattoo he still had but which the alleged victim had sworn he did not have. I still don't think that robbery ever happened. After the data has been stored for some time, you might be more likely to find yourself needing an alibi than worried aboiut having to explain why you were at the location of a crime, the police station the address of which the police at the county seat here swore twice was "a high crime area," etc. Of course you might have any number of legitimate reasons for being at a crime scene or other suspicious location. It probably doesn't cost much to store collected data indefinitely, but it would be my guess that its potential value for any legitimate or illegitimate purpose would diminish rapidly over time. I'm much more concerned about tracking in cyberspace than the real world. My Web searches and Email are more likely to reveal things that are legally privileged and confidential, or which I am generally more concerned about keeping private. Normally, nobody cares enough about where you go or what you do to justify the cost of tracking you, but as the cost drops and the process gets easier that primary protection begins
Statistics are practically useless when, as on this issue, what you are trying to do is predict the net effect of divese influences, such as violent video games," not on a cage full of mice but on one unique individual child. On top of that fact and problem, the odds of anyone working on this actually having enough accurate information about the many and complex influences upon a given child, much less a thousand children in a study, to be able to say with any real confidence, or any statistical level of confidence, would be nil. Of course, when you move from your theoretical sample to the real world, you enter a loop in which the kids who are allowed to and do play these violent video games, or do so for the lengths of time we're talking about here, and probably the ones with lousy parents who are more likely to be violent anyway. Anybody who doesn't have a financial stake in these games and who ever sees kids who do and do not play them, or spend huge amounts of time playing them, knows perfectly well that games, and other media, are very carefully crafted to impact kids, bypass certain higher centers of thought, and influence them. When I was practicing juvenile law, the kids who were allowed ot and did listen to Marilyn Manson, Death Metal, etc.play such games extensively, or both, wee the ones who got into serious and repeated violent and other legal trouble.
Right. The students who have been given any parenting, and anything resembling education and guidance at school, atre already taking Algebra II. Actually, while taking and succeeding at Algebra II may be a good predictor of success in high school, college, work, and life, the one and only variable that really, consistently, affects and contributes materially to, as well as predicting, such outcomes and each of them, is parental interest and involvement. Try correlating the kids who take and succeed at Algebra II with active parental interest and involvement sometime. I took, and passed, four years of math in high school, which, back then, pre-Sputnik, did not include Analytic Geometry, Pre-Calculus, and Calculus, or any computer courses. I loved it, despite knowing that I wasn't the best math student and had some trouble with it. My 99 3/4th percentile verbal scores got me offers from several good engineering schools, MIT, m first choicek bieng the only one smart enough to turn me down with a 70th percentile math score, What nobody told me, until I hit college and, having repeatedly tested out of freshman college math, took Analytic Geometry and Calculus, was that, as the grader put it when he sent me a note to "See the professor immediately!" was that I had been and was "doing all the problems a-- backwards." One morning, the professor opened with "With a fifth-order determinant, we can demonstrate . . . " and I raised my hand and asked him what that was, he said two words, the first of which was "Oh." I knocked a letter grade off my undergraduate average, and nearly killed myself, trying, repeatedly, to pass those courses. I did manage a B in Statistics. We didn't learn until many years later, after I had switched majors and practiced law for years, that I had been born without a piece of brain structure crucial to higher math. We had always attributed any problems to a known uncorrectable congenital neurological vision problem which had got me refused admission to the Washington, D. C. school system. The school systems in this state university town and the county seat turn out winners in robotics competition, etc., sponsored by a business enterprise, and have some good teachers, and students, but way too many of their students, including some I hired and some we couldn't use, couldn't alphabetize, spell "secretary" or "Algebra," compose a proper simple business letter in WordPerfect or Word, or otherwise, or balance a checkbook, etc. The salutatorian, second in her class, at another nearby school district got a scholarship to the state university here and had to be put into both remedial reading and remedial math. I have friends on the verge of completing doctorate degrees in math and sciences who can't find jobs at living pay in their fileds and have ended up roofing, driving a truck, and two are teaching English in China. People who wee making six-figure incomes in computer science are working temporary gigs at anything they can get, about $10 per hour, and have lost their homes. The number and percentage of boys going on to college has dropped like a rock. Half the people I know are working well below their eduction, skill, and experience level, and practically everybody I know working a legitimate job or jobs is making less than htey used to. The official figures for unemployment, under-employment, inflation, etc. are sick jokes.
Some of you understand the software engineering of this a lot better than I do. Can, or how can, we prevent and deal with these crimes on the technical side? I'm a retired lawyer with medical and other privacy law expertise and this is just one of many areas where our legal system doesn't work except for the vrey rich criminals. If there is any advice you technical experts can give Congress while they are working on yet another computer privacy bill right now, please do so and please publish your advice, both in code etc. and in language Members of Congress, and those of us whose doctorates are not in math or computers can understand. These recurring breaches, ranging from hacking into supposedly protected stolen laptops to things like this, would probably not happen, or be as common, if we could and did dry up the money in and market for stolen personal data. I suspect nobody in government or either political party wants to really stop this. The companies that gather and sell personally identifiable information know that a lot of what they are buying from such thieves is not only stolen but is, or should be, protected by law. Most of us have to use Loyalty Cards, etc., which "give" us "savings" that come out of the stores having systematically overcharged us in the first place. Likewise coupons. On top of that, the best published data indicates that these stores charge more than others even after these "discounts." The stores know how much of each brand of what they sell, and their keeping records that identify individual customers for prescription medications, etc. and using, sharing, o selling this should be outlawed. Anyone with the buying records of customers of Kroger's pharmacies, college scholarship applicants, and others whose rights to privacy were apparently violated here, has power that nobody should be allowed to have. Of course it will be misused, either by the original holders or those who actually or allegedly stole it--or did they really buy it?--from them. Nobody ever gets busted when the academic and medical records of a generation of university students and faculty are, for some inexplicable reason, on a laptop computer that then somehow gets left behind somewhere and actually or allegedly stolen. If you gather up a large quantity of sewage, toxic chemical waste, plague virus, or the like, you are responsible for keeping it confined. Nobody is really held accountable for what happens to this stolen private personal data because the buyers are rich and rich people are extremely unlikely to get investigated and prosecuted, not to mention that nobody outside their dirty little market in personal data knows who has what, much less what is and isn't accurate, stolen, or being used for illegal purposes. Of course, if you steal a confidential file that incriminates the right police officers and politicians you're home free. I was a lawyer handling criminal defense, and representing a lot of incest survivors, when the geniuses at the local police department sold me the departments recently replaced, and un-erased much less formatted, hard drive.
California Healthcare Provider Wants Illness-Predicting Algorithm Posted by timothy on Wednesday March 30, @07:04AM from the make-hospitals-smaller dept. alphadogg writes "The Heritage Provider Network wants to do for healthcare what technology in the film Minority Report did for police work. In other words, it wants to use technology to pre-emptively predict when illness is likely to strike and take measures to prevent costly hospitalizations. This week Heritage announced that it was offering a prize of $3 million for any developer who successfully created a 'breakthrough algorithm that uses available patient data, including health records and claims data, to predict and prevent unnecessary hospitalizations.'" Oh. Lord! An insurance company using “available patient data, including health records and claims data, to predict and prevent unnecessary hospitalizations,” much less an algorithm based thereupon, “to predict and prevent unnecessary hospitalizations,” would produce a whole stack of disasters for patients, the healthcare system, and its own ‘bottom line.” “Minority Report,” to which the contributor compared this, was a sci-fi horror show, so I hope he understood this fact, but many others may not. An insurer spending $3 million on this project at this point in the process of computerization of patient health records, federal subsidies for this and related processes, and medical knowledge, would guarantee the ultimate “garbage in, garbage out” results. If anyone ever invents an algorithm that would have “predict[ed] and prevent[ed]” most of my hospitalizations, or most of those of others that I know about, he could undoubtedly invent another one that would “predict and prevent” death, injury, losses in the stock market or casino, divorce, and inclement weather. I’m not sure what kind of medical records this insurance or healthcare company may have, or think it has, on its customers or patients, or how far ahead of the rest of the country California health records just might be, but I’ve been dealing with, trying to get, and trying to unscrew my own and my clients’ healthcare records for many years, and most of them are somewhere between useless and downright dangerous even without having been run through some new algorithm, which woujld present whole new universes of possible errors. I live in an exurban county with one [public] general and one private mental hosipital, one other dominant lab for diagnostic scan, and assorted other procedures, and lots of doctors’ offices and practices, several of which have osme of this same kind of equipment. The hospital, the primary private imaging company, used by many doctors, and the various doctors’ offices can’t read each other’s MRI, CT, and other results. I fell and broke my wrist, was taken to two successive emergency rooms and then to a third hospital in another county becxuse nobody here and available did hands and wrists, and we ended up with at least six (6) different sets of results produced at different entities in four counties. It was not until some time after my surgery that my hand surgeon sent me to another facility, that can take X-ray and MRI pictures showing vital information that the others could and did not, that we discovered a major part of the problem. Except for the X-rays on film, nobody has equipment that can read all of these. The local hospital’s off-site records contractor charged me several dollars a page for what were supposed to be records of several stays for different things, not one of which could have been, much less was, predicted or diagnosed hours, much less days or months, in advance. The hospitals have no copies of these that I can get. Every page of these records, from several stays in two of the hospital’s facilities in different towns, was totally blacked out except for a white dot in the center. When I lived in Dallas earlier, someone with an X-ray lab and I discovered
I know experts, credible in other things I know more about, who say that they have helped persons wo self-identified as "gay but wanted to become "straight" to do so, and others who insist that this is impossible. This isn't my area of expertise, but evidence, including scientific evidence, and the First Amendment and freedom and competition in ideas are among those in which I do have expertise. I've read a number of things by experts on both sides of this issue, and, frankly, come away with the impression that both sides' cases leave much to be desired. I have talked to people who tell me they have chosen to anfd successfully changed, and others who say it can't be done but none of those who have talked to me, in or out of privileged and confidential relationships, tell me they really tried. Apps are a form of expression, and I think Apple, etc., set a dangerous precedent when they allow organized pressure groups' petition campaigns, threats, etc., to persuade them to suppress expression on controversial issues, regardless of which side has the current temporary majority on them. What's next, caving to pressure by the same people to pull Biblical and religious apps because the Old and New Testaments both contain strong language about this issue? Sprint, my cell phone carrier to which I am indentured for years, is going to offer the Android HTC but not the iPhone4, and I'm having trouble getting detailed information about its capabilities and available apps relevant to my legal and other interests to help me decide whether to upgrade or not. Do we really want Apple, Microsoft, Google, GE, or the Democrats or Republicans, or some of their big money backers, or whoever, effectively censoring apps or Ebooks on the basis of the authors' opinions?
"Tort reform for the Rich. Crime and Punishment for the poor." Right. Look at the hedge fund manager in Palm Beach sort of prosecuted for systematic child sexual abuse, or any number of other such cases. Amen! IAAL (retired, long story), worked for both a plaintiff's and an insurance-defense firm before going solo years ago, and have seen far more abuse on the defense than the plaintiff's side. "Tort reform" is just a thumb or both feet on the side of the scale, usually defendants', that tends to favor the side that has the money and makes the big "campaign contributions" (payoffs). I'm a values and economic free enterprise conservative on most issues but this has gone way off track, among some other issues. Funny how certain politicians vilify "trial lawyers" until they need one, or appoint one who has represented MS and worked for them in the White House for the Supreme Court. Texas Lawyer notes that, this year, even some of the civil practice defense bar is saying some of the latest batch of sop-called "tort reform" bills in the legislature go too far.
FOIA requests for political purposes are as old as, and were clearly included within the scope of, freedom of information and open records laws, which wisely do not require that the requesting party give any reason for wanting the public governmental information requested. This is only a news story for the New York Times or other liberal organs if the request comes from the Republican Party as here or another organization not on their approved list of leftist Establishment groups. There are some loopholes you can drive a truck through. Doesn't it ever occur to politicians and those seeking to buy access to and influence with them, the only way I know to get either, to meet in the restroom and whisper or pass a note, or use a separate political Email account, address, and maybe a separate computer system so these don't get stored on the government server? Actually, I think if a politician sent or received an occasional Email from his wife or child, or other personal matters disclosure of which would be highly offensive to a reasonable person, or even about his and/or his mistress' of either sex's testing, that ought to be outside the scope of FOIA in most instances. Of course no politician of either party would bge stupid enough to Email anything illegal or embarrassing, get caught with a $5,000.00 an hour or $5.00 a pop hooker or a freeaer full of cash, etc. They never lie or take bribes, either. I'm in Texas. Under our state Open Records law, the Attorney General's office demanded payment, within ten days, of about half my monthly income just to answer a basic question, on a subject addressed on his campaign and official Web sites, about what position he had taken, on the record, on behalf of the State on the Constitutionality of the Americans with Disabilities Act. They insisted that the hundreds of thousands of disabled citizens were not "significant" for purposes of a provision permitting waiver of such prohibitive expenses. I once found a sworn lawsuit, in the open public court records, where the plaintiff sued the defendant for failing to pay him on a contract to "ascertain the confidential plans of the State Highway Department relating to acquisition of land for . . .." One of the Plaintiff's attorneys in that case was a state legislator and later on our State Supreme Court.
I’m a retired Texas lawyer. I have won a 5:7 jury deadlock in the first of 87 dope delivery cases to go to trial using an entrapment defense, resulting in all the offers including the one to my first offender, avidly recruited over time with a series of parties featuring steaks and beer, etc., coming down from 40-60 years to probation. Of course, the risky thing about an entrapment defense is that your client has to tell the jury “I did it” right up front but then demonstrate that he would not have engaged in the conduct but for the officials’ persuasive misconduct. Merely offering someone the opportunity to violate the law if he is so inclined is not entrapment, but there is one U. S. Supreme Court case in which the majority of Justices found and held that the government had been so persistent and persuasive in finally getting someone with no known history of interest or viewing to order child porn, by mail, that it crossed the line and created the crime. I, and some other lawyers in the same building, received one similar mailing, which may have been from the same government operation, years ago, but I sent it to the Postal Inspectors, and never received any more, nor did I hear any more about this until I read the Supreme Court opinion later. I have represented a few child molesters, after and as a direct result of having, very unexpectedly, found myself representing and in other privileged and confidential relationships with an awful lot of survivors of childhood sexual abuse, most of which is incest. Some of the abusers, unlike this defendant who looks like Central Casting’s or the average person’s picture of a perp, were socially, economically, and politically prominent and powerful (palmed off on us by both parties) so didn’t get busted. It is entirely legal and proper for the authorities to offer willing would-be criminals the opportunity to commit crimes and then catch and bust them, as long as the government and its agents do not affirmatively persuade them to commit or attempt to commit the crime. If you don’t see a cop so you speed, and get caught by a cop behind a billboard, that’s your problem because you should not have been speeding. If you try to buy child porn, which can’t be made without abusing a child, or to buy or otherwise solicit sex from someone you believe to be a child too young to consent, dope, an illegal firearm or one you are legally ineligible to possess, or hire a hit-man to kill someone, and get caught because you were really dealing with a cop, you are morally and legally guilty. Assuming that it would be reasonably foreseeable that anyone would be persuaded by “animated emoticons” to try to get something he didn’t want and intend to buy anyway, much less sex with a child which anyone knows is illegal, the short answer to this rather ludicrously desperate argument is that the defendant went looking for sex with a child on line, but for which search, and opening the link, he would never have come to the pitch much less these “animated emoticons.” Trying to have sex with an underage girl is crime one element of which, that the government must prove beyond reasonable doubt, is specific intent.
I have not read the Dutch statute in issue or the case brought under it, but, as a retired lawyer, my guess or guesses would be that the law under which they tried to bring this case was intended to deal with hacking into computers to steal data, which anyone knows or should know is wrong and illegal, and the people drafting and voting on it probably did not have WfFi, routers, hot spots, "war-driving," or anything like this in mind, so they didn't mention or deal with it. I suspect that the legislature will amend the law to include, or, better, pass a separate law dealing with. this subject. It occurs to me that casually accessing the Internet through an open WiFi connection should be treated a little differently as to penalties. Criminal laws have to be sufficiently specific to give a person of ordinary intelligence fair notice of what is and is not prohibited. This law may well have been written and passed before WiFi and this whole issue came to most legislators' attention.
Thanks. I shudder at scanning a computer textbook even with document feeder but you have given me some ideas.
A college teacher of computer science came to my law office, back in the good old days of DOS 5.0, so I asked him to take a look at our computer. When a C prompt came up, he said "I see you're using C language." I thought he was kidding or making fun of me. He may have been an expert at something but it did not include personal computers or how to set up and use them in a law office. I'm a lawyer, not a computer scientist or software engineer, and came to the computer revolution late in the 80s.
"people like us, who would know how to spot a botnet." I live across the street from a university with a computer science department, and know some of their professors, and a couple of computer geniuses in the defense contract industry, and I don't know anybody who could "spot a botnet" or tell me how to "spot a botnet," be sure my computer wasn't infected with one, or do anything about it if it were. I wish somebody would post how, or a link to how, to defend effectively against such things and, while you're at it, against having your Email and other data hacked.
Hush. You should be shut up. Do you think the First Amendment actually guarantees the right to tell the truth? You are ruining the movie by giving way the plot and ending. The Government, which is supposedly representative of us, engages regularly in a species of speech which the Supreme Cort itself calls "government speech," which is different from the speech of human being, and even corporate persons and, in part because of the doctrines of sovereign and official immunity, are subject to reviews and compensation for damages for falsehood by nobody. I've read one article in the New York Times, years ago during my law school days, about a large assembly and demonstration on my campus at Vanderbilt in Nashville that absolutely never happened. It would have been my job to cover it if it had, and it didn't. It would have been directly between my living quarters and my office on campus, and there was nobody there. I never could find even a leaflet or poster trying to organize it, in those pre-Internet days. When I had been state editor of another publication for students in undergraduate school, I was inundated with outrageously, and easily checked, defamatory information for publication, most of it generated by well-known left-leaning agencies of a church and several Establishment entities still regularly quoted in the liberal media to this day. I also got some propaganda that had been found libelous in courts long before. Pick any government or media source or sources you wish and tell me that any figure used by either party or candidate during the 2008 campaign, or the debate over the Obamacare bill, was either honest or reasonably reliable. I dare you. Every candidate nominated by either party since 2001 has told us that he, and only he, could and would catch Osama Bin Laden, too. Both parties, and the government under Presidents and Congresses of both parties, have been propagandizing us, which is supposed to be illegal, for years. A short-wave listener, I discovered during the Korean "police action (war) that U. S. sources would say the enemy lost a large specific number of planes and we didn't lose any, the Soviets would pretty much reverse these figures, and the BBC, Swiss, etc. would provide another set or sets of figures which I suspected then and now were closer ot the truth. Since the enemy knew how many planes they had lost, these figures had to be for home consumption. I am somewhat curious how our government, or the parties in control of the White House and Senate, and of the House, respectively, could have been so stupid as to permit the leaking and publication of a "defense" contract regarding deceptive propaganda, which should have been highly classified. Now if our intelligence in, or the responsible people's knowledge of the geography and history of, the Middle East and Muslim Crescent, except what we get from the Israelis, was any good, we would, or at least might, have avoided a lot of strategic and tactical blunders in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. You can have all the electronic bells and whistles you want,m but without very good intelligence, designing propaganda based upon a thorough knowledge of the target audience, you're going to blow it. Anybody who doesn't believe that, once perfected at government, i.e., our, expense, this technology would not be deployed in politics here at home, is dreadfully naive.
I post only very, very little of what I post on the Net on Facebook, but the interesting computer angle here sweems to me, to be how any normal teenager's Facebook page would have come to the attention of more than 2o00,000 people? I could get rich if I could attract that many to a Web site. 70,000 for theWhat kind of settings did she use? Nobody has that many even FB friends new party? How many of these were real and how many virtual fakes? Nobody has that many even FB "friends."
A retired lawyer,I have substantial uncorrectable vision and coordination problems, but am not legally blind. I had not tried to use Google Apps and this is the first I have become aware of this problem. Have been considering upgrading to Android smart phone as Sprint to which we are indentured for years does not have the Ipad recommended for those with vision problems. My wife has the Android and it does have some features my current phone lacks. Rather than trying to use the phone's EReader function I wish somebody would make a good EBook reader that doubles as a smart phone, or, better yet, a laptop with both sets of electronics bujilt in. Correcting one person commenting on your post, a private university that accepts money from nearly ubiquitous federal aid, including federal Pell grants or federal student loans, is covered by the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) as amended by the ADA Amendments Act (ADAAA) as to students and would also be covered as an employer. I am rather surprised that Google would have failed to ensure that its products complied with the ADA and ADAAA, failed to run them by sources like the NFB, and would not have cured this problem voluntarily after being made aware of it without the necessity of a formal complaint to the Department of Justice (DCOJ). I adopted Firefox on the recommendation of the people at Rescuit Tech Support because it permits some adjustments for my limited vision that IE does not have, though IU keep both on tap and use both, but its accessibility plug-in has not been updated since XP and I'm not sure what it would offer if that were done by their volunteer base. There are some things in MS Vista, MS Office, etc. and many Web sites that make no provision for the usual enlargement and can run me up a stump. Considering the ADA, the DOJ's compliance resources, Bobby compliance seals, and the apparent ease with which these could apparently be cured at that end, I am troubled that they have not been cured. Many functions simply disappear if you even enlarge the page to fit a normal wide screen monitor, much less enlarge the text, tc. Many sign-in screens for user name, password, etc., where catching errors is critical, can't be enlarged. Many style sheets and cascading style sheets won't let you change font sizes or fonts, or throw the edges of text off the page instead of scrolling it down as a Bobby-compliant page does. Some Captcha images can be frustrating and the audible alternatives are equally fuzzy. In the bad old days before the ADA, my late sister, later an editor at a major magazine and then a teacher, who had had polio and used cane, and I, I were both refused admission to the Washington, D.C. public schools though we needed only minimal reasonable accommodations. I wanted to take some computer courses at the local state university but, like many other books, the standard texts are available only in compressed very small type in which I can read text briefly but cannot read the code, etc. The university's disability office did not know of a solution. If anybody knows of a solution, please let me know.
If this is true, and not just another political gambit, it might possibly be interesting. My Representative, Senators, and Presidents, ob both political parties, have been responding to my correspondence abbot privacy issues by telling me they’re taking care of this for about fifty years now and they mostly lied about that, not to mention everything else. My law dean and professor was fond of Will Rogers’ comment that “Whenever Congress makes a joke, it’s a law, and whenever they pass a law, it’s a joke.” Congress has passed assorted laws that purport to protect privacy and several of them actually say you don’t have much if any and others appear to be subsidies for paper companies. It was on a computer-related site that I first learned that the legal people for the companies developing computerized medical records systems with government support and compulsion don’t think they are covered by the HIPAA medical privacy law, for example. Please somebody post Bill Numbers, links to the full text of the Commerce Department report upon which this is supposed to be based, House and Senate Bills, legislative hearings, etc. As of now I can’t find the bill on the usual thomas.loc.gov site, nor have I ever found the original report. And somebody kindly post the names, positions, and Email etc. of any actual computer experts consulted and actually listened to by the politicians in drafting any such legislation, and their recommendations. I read several recommendations in computer publications on line that seem to make sense but never see them embodied in any of the various computer-related laws passed. There really is nothing in the Constitution that requires Congress not to lay down some basic principles that would cover emerging technology. Not everything that may add to the bottom line of anything that calls itself a business enterprise is either consistent with free enterprise or good public policy. I use a lot of ad-supported content. Most people couldn’t afford a lot of what we get via broadcast and cable TV, the Internet, etc. otherwise. A retired lawyer still active in issues and moving toward going back into active practice, I research a lot of arcane issues ranging from medicine to child abuse to construction, and, apparently as a result, I get some very interesting targeted ads. The New York Times has, for years, been, and still is, constantly feeding me ads for residential treatment for the serious problems of the daughter I don’t have. If I go to certain reputable medical sites and check out any story about anything remotely sexual, I get Emails from someone else, with lots of English and spelling errors, telling me, in foul language my wife would never use, that she says I’m no good in bed and offering me fake Viagra substitutes. Setting up a filter that starts with George Carlin’s famous “seven words” cut my spam in half. What bugs me is that some of these somehow use the correct and less common spelling of her name. Checking out some sites for the side of a campaign or issue I oppose has got me Emails thinking me for going on record supporting something I oppose. Maybe some sharp computer expert can explain why I get Email that appears to be addressed only to other people.
You've got to be kidding. IAAL, and you wouldn't believe the ways criminals guarantee that they will get caught and convicted, like using their own driver's license to hock stolen property with someone else's number engraved n it, or to buy guns using someone else's stolen credit card to turn over to their boyfriend who can't buy one because he's got a record, identifying themselves right before committing kidnapping and rape literally within the light from the front door of the police station. bank forgeries on camera, etc. Psychopaths lie when the truth would serve them better, including lying to their lawyers, and they don't learn from expe4rience. As for giving up privacy to avoid crime, that's downright asinine. Look at all the crime that goes on, on camera, and despite all the other loss of privacy, within jails and prisons. He who would sacrifice liberty--of which personal privacy is an essential condition and element--for security deserves and will have neither.
There's a third. Great cases, like hard cases [not to mention easy cases] make bad law. If you do something where you know or should realize that somebody can watch you and testify that they saw you do it, you have no kick if they do, unless you have some reasonable assurance, that society is prepared to recognize as reasonable, that they won't. The next easy step is that if it is legally OK for me to watch you doing something, it is at least probably OK to photograph this and make that available if the picture fairly depicts what you did. This isn't window-peeping, violating your legal right to medical privacy, or seducing you and secretly photographing you making out, which would be an invasion of your privacy highly offensive to a person of ordinary sensibilities. I don't have the citation or free access to the case but, since just taking a drink would typically not have any significant probative value or effect in a child custody case, suspect that the subject may have walked herself into a trap and made this relevant by lying and saying she wasn't there and doesn't drink, she's an alcoholic and should not drink, got plastered and abandoned, drove drunk or with, or otherwise endangered, a child. My favorite such case, for sheer stupidity, was the client of mine who overlooked and didn't tell me that he had invited his estranged wife to come clean his apartment, where he had left child porn, while they were engaged in a contested child custody case. I hate losing because my client is stupid and doens't tell me the whole truth. Telling four different stories, all incriminating, punctuated with obscenities tat escalate along with the incrimination, while in a cop car with the red light on the video camera on, is also ill-advised, but that wasn't my client. . Actually, now that many ATM and other financial transactions, and robberies, are routinely photographed, and everybody carries, and anyone with any brains should realize that everybody carries, a camera on their cell phone, there are some things it is more risky to do than it used to be. Then there are the people, like one politician I know of, who insist that it is an invasion of his privacy to photograph him driving through a red light without stopping, as though driving on a public street were a private act.
"This makes too much sense. Sooner or later, any school board member, administrator, sate regulator, etc., will figure thatoutand come up with some rule that says it can't be done because it might foul up the attendance count, enable a student to learn something, or whatever. What does the robot add to the teleconferencing process? Hopefully any such equipment will be rugged enough. Now if they could just figure out how to engage students and teachers and actually teach any of them to reasd, write, balance a checkbook, etc. I've hired and represented a lot of high school students and too many who don't learn at home never really get good at reading, writing, math, etc.