So what is the net benefit to companies who chose to move to Georgia as opposed to India or China or the Asian countries or Ireland or other European countries with tax breaks? Heck, Canada seems to be doing pretty well in the games development area with their rebates.
Does anyone know what special benefits Georgia offers beyond this abscence of tax? Is there a friendly judicial system? How's the IP protection? Do they have a significant body of skilled workers? Whats the infrastructure like? Is there a lot of access to the European market or benefits that aren't accessible any other way?
I don't know where he's getting his numbers but I found some numbers specifically for Washington at http://www.sgc.wa.gov/PUBS/SSOSAReport.pdf which found that, among other things,
On average sex offenders serve longer terms in prison and jail than persons convicted of other felony offenses. In fiscal year 2003, the average sentence length for all felonies was 37.3 months, compared to 90.8 months for sex offenses.
Do you really believe that child porn is that pervasive? I'm asking a serious question here, at most I would have thought it represented the smallest fraction of content out there - and would surely not be offered for free, be it in popup or not, on any adult website. Even if you're aggregating over thousands of five-knuckle breaks, I don't see how that could possibly be true. Is the problem that much more significant than I'm aware of? A couple thousand pictures at most, surely? And that among probably billions of the other sort.
Perhaps you're refering to the sliding notion of what constitutues child porn? The shift to include ever more under the umbrella?
Huh, that I didn't know. Thanks for the clarification - so we're talking about a far more radical shift than I thought in the first place. Maybe that's part of the problem, if a self described Star Trek fan (aka geek) was unaware that this represented a significant shift in the permitted intrusion into the private sphere then what hope do we have that your average stay-at-home mom is going to up to date on the facts?
The original directive can be found here:
http://eur-lex.europa.eu/LexUriServ/LexUriServ.do?uri=OJ:L:2006:105:0054:0063:EN:PDF and I’ve copied out the internet-relevant portions for ease of discussion. Could someone with the relevant European legislative knowledge perhaps give a less hysterical assessment than the usual suspects? As far as I can see the directive would require ISPs to record what sites I visit, not what I do on them. Isn’t this what they already do? Isn’t that information already available following a warrant anyway? Heck, isn’t it good that the Directive lays out explicit retention and destruction requirements?
Member States shall ensure that the following categories of data are retained under this Directive:
(a) data necessary to trace and identify the source of a communication:
(2) concerning Internet access, Internet e-mail and Internet telephony:
(i) the user ID(s) allocated;
(ii) the user ID and telephone number allocated to any communication entering the public telephone
network;
(iii) the name and address of the subscriber or registered user to whom an Internet Protocol (IP) address, user
ID or telephone number was allocated at the time of the communication;
(b) data necessary to identify the destination of a communication:
(2) concerning Internet e-mail and Internet telephony:
(i) the user ID or telephone number of the intended recipient(s) of an Internet telephony call;
(ii) the name(s) and address(es) of the subscriber(s) or registered user(s) and user ID of the intended recipient of the communication;
(c) data necessary to identify the date, time and duration of a communication:
(2) concerning Internet access, Internet e-mail and Internet telephony:
(i) the date and time of the log-in and log-off of the Internet access service, based on a certain time zone, together with the IP address, whether dynamic or static, allocated by the Internet access service provider
to a communication, and the user ID of the subscriber or registered user;
(ii) the date and time of the log-in and log-off of the Internet e-mail service or Internet telephony service, based on a certain time zone;
(d) data necessary to identify the type of communication:
(2) concerning Internet e-mail and Internet telephony: the Internet service used;
(e) data necessary to identify users’ communication equipment or what purports to be their equipment:
(3) concerning Internet access, Internet e-mail and Internet telephony:
(i) the calling telephone number for dial-up access;
(ii) the digital subscriber line (DSL) or other end point of the originator of the communication;
2. No data revealing the content of the communication may be retained pursuant to this Directive.
architecture, construction and engineering, solar systems and hot water, energy balance, comfort conditions, usage, communications and social media, industrialization and market viability, innovation, sustainability
That point is actually made in the originally cited FiveThirtyEight post and then somewhat undermined.
The Republican crossover theory debunked. In addition to many smart comments from 538 readers to the previous post on the SC race, I received an email from one particularly astute reader named Harrison Brown. Complete with an excel spreadsheet to back up his conclusions, Brown basically argues that there's neither any logic to, nor statistical evidence to support, the idea of Republicans crossing over to infiltrate the Democratic primary. Here are the key sections from his email to me, verbatim:
1. Suppose people were being brought into the Democratic-primary voting pool (from unregistered voters, the Republican faithful, or wherever) for the sole purpose of voting for Greene. Imagine a variable encapsulating the proportion of primary voters in each county who are Greene partisans; this (hidden) variable ought to be strongly positively correlated with both Greene's final results and with the participation rate in each county. In particular, this implies that Greene's vote share and the participation rate, both of which we can measure, would be correlated. But this is not the case -- under either linear or rank correlation! The R-squared and rho-squared are both effectively 0.
2. Even if that effect didn't show up, there should still be other signs. For instance, we can see if there are any counties where turnout for the Democratic primary exceeded the number of votes Barack Obama received in 2008; those would be prime suspects for Republican influence. And, in fact, there are three such counties: Hampton, Lee, and Union. But these are all fairly small counties where McCain/Palin received under 30% of the vote -- hardly Republican-dominated...
A more robust analysis of turnout levels reveals similar patterns. Although I didn't collect data for Republican voters (except for the McCain vote share), I came up with a rough estimate of GOP voters in 2008 by assuming the two-party share was 100% in each county. Running a linear regression to predict the number of Democratic primary voters from the number of votes Obama and McCain received, we find that the McCain raw vote total is statistically significant--but it has a negative coefficient. If anything, this points to voter suppression (no real surprises) rather than ballot box stuffing.
3. Finally, there's the simple question of where the Republican voters would have come from! From eyeballing the GOP primary totals, it seems like turnout in that elections was almost ludicrously high, which seems more-or-less corroborated by what Google's told me. But barring widespread voter fraud and/or corruption by local election officials, high turnout in the GOP primary should be incompatible with infiltration into the Democratic primary.
In conclusion, while the voting patterns in the D-Senate primary are strange and may not be totally legitimate, they don't bear the expected hallmarks that would arise in the case of a Republican plant.
With all that now added to the record, so to speak, how does the matter now stand?
Well, I think it's safe to say that the third possibility I raised in the previous post--GOP cross-primary infiltration--can be eliminated. There doesn't seem to be any direct or circumstantial evidence for that, and there were sufficient motives to participate in the very contentious GOP gubernatorial primary (especially with Nikki Haley running). So we can almost certainly eliminate the idea that there was a coordinated GOP effort to get Republican and/or conservative voters to pick up Democratic ballots with the intent of selecting Greene as DeMint's general election opponent.
Read the article, there are some very relevent facts in there.
The allegations in the complaint offer some sense of just how much material is being accessed through electronic course content systems on college campuses: publishers claim that at Georgia State, more than 6,700 works were "made available through a variety of online systems and outlets" without permission, representing "systematic, widespread, and unauthorized copying and distribution of a vast amount of copyrighted works" for students in more than 600 courses.
These guidelines, or "best practices," have mostly satisfied publishers so far. They generally instruct those who wish to post e-reserves of some basic conditions so they can determine whether their use is fair use. For example, e-reserve readings can make up only a small portion of the total assigned readings for any one course; access is limited to students enrolled in the class; and the readings should be hosted on a secure, password-protected server and not left up from semester to semester.
Thatcher, meanwhile, says that Georgia State University was among the universities AAP tried to engage in a discussion about guidelines, but that university officials "rebuffed every attempt."
Curious about how a verdict against Georgia State might play out, Smith recently asked Duke's e-reserves staff to give him random examples of recent permission fees. "For the 2007 book No Caption Needed, we paid $150 for permission to make just 17% of the work available to 12 students. This amounts to over $12 per student to gain access to less than a fifth of a work that sells for $35 retail. For an older work—Dealing with Terrorism: Stick or Carrot?—we paid about $10 per student to make 21% of this $30 book available." These are not extreme examples, Smith insists. In another example, fees exceeded $1,000, more than $25 per student. "As we are asked to pay ever-increasing costs for decreasing value," he observes, "it seems that an unsustainable system is being created."
All relevent and important things to note. The University of Georgia had been previously approached about their actions and ignored all attempts at dialogue. There is a system in place that regulates the activity, permitting it within specific guidelines, that the university ignored. There was a huge amount of copyrghted information sloshing around the system such that 600 courses and 6700 portions of texts were unregulated. Both the Oxford and Cambridge presses, who are both included in the action, direct their profits to the universities in question and therefore relieve the pressure on British taxpayers.
While the practises of certain academic publishers are worthy of scorn this case is more complicated than people are admitting. You may hate the system but allowing the debate to be so coloured with hyperbole does no-one any good. The University of Georgia willingly and deliberatly ignored the presses and their interests. There is a clear and obvious harm done. There is a clear and obvious benefit as a result of their actions. Whether those two balance is the question we should be considering.
UPDATE: Slate’s Big Money reports that a cartoon version of an Oscar Wilde story got the black-block image-censor treatment over a gay kiss. The iPad really is turning into a Victorian computer. UPDATE 2: Looks like Apple has yet again decided to undo its policing once enough media piles on. According to a comment from the “Ulysses Unseen” guys, Apple has asked them to re-submit and the Oscar Wilde comic is also getting its censor blocks removed, according to other press reports.
UPDATE: Slate’s Big Money reports that a cartoon version of an Oscar Wilde story got the black-block image-censor treatment over a gay kiss. The iPad really is turning into a Victorian computer.
UPDATE 2: Looks like Apple has yet again decided to undo its policing once enough media piles on. According to a comment from the “Ulysses Unseen” guys, Apple has asked them to re-submit and the Oscar Wilde comic is also getting its censor blocks removed, according to other press reports.
Doesn't this raise interesting privacy questions? I mean we have a man who is recording everything he sees and doing with that whatever he likes - its like CCTV for the private citizen.
Our technology has shrunk the world – what was once local and limited now has the potential to be broadcast globally in a matter of seconds. Those images and videos can in turn be used for a vast number of purposes – from entertainment to advertisement, from ridicule to prosecution. Doesn’t the advent of certain technologies demand that we reassess that whole “no expectation of privacy in public spaces” thing? Shouldn’t there be a social guarantee of some limited amount of privacy, or at least the right to avoid having my minor local transgressions elevated and exaggerated through cell-phones and digital cameras to a level of state-wide, national, or even international infamy?
Say this guy walks down the street and catches an image of you kissing an attractive young lady. A young lady who also doesn’t happen to be your wife. Back forty years ago it wouldn’t have mattered. He doesn’t know you, you don’t know him. He saw what he saw in public, perhaps there was some discomfort, but that’s where it ended. A few hours later he couldn’t have picked you out in a line-up, and the matter would likely have ended. That’s not the process now. This cam projects those images online. Your wife views the video three hours away, while on her lunch break. Or maybe on TV during an episode of comedic bloopers. Maybe your kids see the stills when they’re doing an image search for funny public pictures. Your religious boss gets included in on the local gossip emails and sees. While it was a reasonable expectation that you’d get caught in public and people would see you with your paramour, it’s hardly reasonable to expect any of the other potential consequences.
I guess what I’m saying is that technology has changed the idea of reasonable expectations – it’s dramatically altered the degree to which public performance extends out into the public consciousness. Get caught with your pants down in Illinois? Expect it to affect your job search in London twenty years from now. That seems crazy.
According to the Daily Beast, Manning apparently had “special access to cables prepared by diplomats and State Department officials throughout the Middle East regarding the workings of Arab governments and their leaders.”
The cables date back several years and traversed interagency computer networks that are available to the Army. They contain information about U.S. diplomatic and intelligence efforts in the Iraq and Afghanistan war zones, the diplomat said.
In chats with Lamo that Wired.com has examined, Manning said he had access to two classified networks from two separate secured laptops: SIPRnet, the Secret-level network used by the Department of Defense and the State Department, and the Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System which serves both agencies at the Top Secret/SCI level.
The networks, he said, were both “air-gapped” from unclassified networks, but the environment at the base made it easy to smuggle data out.
“I would come in with music on a CD-RW labeled with something like ‘Lady Gaga,’ erase the music then write a compressed split file,” he wrote. “No one suspected a thing and, odds are, they never will.”
“listened and lip-synced to Lady Gaga’s ‘Telephone’ while exfiltrating possibly the largest data spillage in American history,” he added later. ”Weak servers, weak logging, weak physical security, weak counterintelligence, inattentive signal analysis a perfect storm.”
Regarding the State Department cables specifically, Manning told Lamo, “State dept fucked itself. Placed volumes and volumes of information in a single spot, with no security.”
Manning described personal issues that got him into trouble with his superiors and left him socially isolated. He said he had been demoted after he punched a colleague in the face during an argument, and was reassigned to a job in a supply office pending early discharge. He also told Lamo, “I’m restricted to SIPR now, because of the discharge proceedings.”
But in his chats with Lamo, Manning told the ex-hacker that all traces of evidence had been deleted from his work computers as part of the troop-withdrawal procedures that have started in Iraq.
“I had two computers. One connected to SIPRnet the other to JWICS,” he wrote. “They’ve been zero-filled. Because of the pullout, evidence was destroyed by the system itself.”
He also told Lamo that network security monitoring and logging was ineffective or nonexistent.
“There’s god-awful accountability of IP addresses,” he wrote. “The network was upgraded, and patched up so many times, and systems would go down, logs would be lost. And when moved or upgraded, hard drives were zeroed. It’s impossible to trace much on these field networks."
I'm confused by the slant in those articles. It seems the Australians are considering a European-style policy ie. the content of internet use isn't stored but its participants are. They know a variety of low level data regarding log in times, durations, sign-in names and the such, but nothing more.
The only place I can see the hyperbole is in the rather vague assertions of anonymous sources. Heck the Delimiter link makes it clear in the first paragraph that the more egregious claims are factually questionable.
I'm all for righteous outrage, when it's deserved and reasonable. We don't have nearly enough information yet to leap to the pitchforks, so far all that's been said is that the government is reviewing the European system. I read a really good article on Global Warming which made a fantastic point - the constant exaggeration, hyperbole, and raw sensationalism does more to harm a cause than anything else. If we're serious about making positive social change shouldn't we be doing our utmost to avoid this level of hysteria in discussion?
I'm genuinely interested by people's extreme reactions - is there a better compromise availible given the fact that there are reasonable problems arising from internet use in the present day.
To be fair the FTC required a fair bit more than the summary is stating.
...requires that the software provide notice that the program has been downloaded and obtain consent from computer owners before the software can be installed.
According to papers filed with the court, the defendants provided their clients with detailed instructions explaining how to disguise the spyware as an innocuous file, such as a photo, attached to an e-mail... The final Order bars the defendants from providing purchasers with the means to disguise the product as an innocent file or e-mail attachment. It also requires that they inform purchasers that improper use of the software may violate state or federal law. The final Order also requires the defendants to take measures to reduce the risk that their spyware is misused, encrypt data transmitted over the Internet, police their affiliates to ensure they comply with the order, and remove legacy versions of the software from computers on which it was previously installed.
It's easier to find numbers for televisions than invisible pink unicorns?
More seriously, the idea is that Apple now had access to a huge and amazing content delivery system. It's a reasonable point if poor sourced and confusing in the origins of its numbers.
Ignoring all the other problems, the post fails at basic math. The US population in 1959 was just under 178mil as per the census (http://www.census.gov/popest/archives/1990s/popclockest.txt). Google tells me that we're at about 307mil right now (http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=uspopulation&met=population&tdim=true&dl=en&hl=en&q=usa+population). 63/178 > 90/307. Methinks someone got confused between greater-than and less-than.
Does anyone know anything about how the US network integrates with it's foreign equivelants? Is there any integratation? The ESA and Japanese Agency both profess to have, albeit limited, capabilities in this area and I seem to remember a little collaboration between the various structures. Am I just imagining things?
Regardless, doesn't it make sense for this sort of mission to occur within an international framework. Metric jokes aside, wouldn't it be fairer for everyone to take on the cost of these satellite systems? Perhaps I'm confused as to what they're there for - are they an investement into modelling and technology so as to promote American scientific superiority, some kind of early warning and monitoring system, or an elaborate dick waiving contest?
A little further research suggests that the comments could also run foul of the anti-obscenity rulings that have been made regarding student speech. At first look Bethel School District v. Fraser may apply.
It is a highly appropriate function of public school education to prohibit the use of vulgar and offensive terms in public discourse. Nothing in the Constitution prohibits the states from insisting that certain modes of expression are inappropriate and subject to sanctions. The inculcation of these values is truly the work of the school, and the determination of what manner of speech is inappropriate properly rests with the school board. First Amendment jurisprudence recognizes an interest in protecting minors from exposure to vulgar and offensive spoken language,
I guess the important question is if the speech in it's original form could be construed as related to the school or the educational context. If it it then all the precident kicks in and the the students will likey lose. That being said, "public discourse" is rather vague - the case was specifically considering a speech given by a student to other students that were physically present. Does a myspace posting count as some kind of cyber-speech to an audiance of peers? Maybe it comes down to the expected and desired audiance? If the students created these sites so as to deliberatly reach out to their peers then is it all that different from standing up in an assembly and making the point there?
The ACLU page gives more details about the cases including:
In one case, student Justin Layshock used his grandmother's computer to post a mock profile of his principal on MySpace, using the principal's name and picture to pretend it was the principal. The profile said things like the principal was "too drunk to remember" his birthday and has been drunk many times; was a "big steroid freak" and belonged to "Steroids International," in the past month smoked a "big blunt" (I'm guessing most of you don't need me to explain what blunt means in a footnote, like the court did!), and took "pills"; does not have a "big dick," is a "big fag" and is "transgender."
Justin's principal was displeased (go figure!) so he suspended him for 10 days, kicked him out of all interscholastic activities, removed him from AP classes and stuck him in a class with low-performing students. The ACLU sued and got Justin back into classes pretty quickly.
and:
In the other case, student J.S. used her parents' computer to post a mock profile of her principal on MySpace, not using his name but including his picture and suggesting he was a principal in Alabama. The profile said things like the principal was a "tight ass," "wonderful, hairy expressionless, sex addict, fagass put on this world with a small dick"; spent time with his child who "looks like a gorilla"; likes "fucking in [his] office" and "hitting on students and their parents"; and loves "sex of any kind," being a "dick head," and his "darling wife who looks like a man."
J.S.'s principal wasn't pleased either, so he suspended J.S. for 10 days.
Oh, one more difference: the judges. Six different judges on the two cases. Justin won his case 3-0. J.S. lost her case 2-1. So four appeals court judges thought that the schools violated the students' rights. Two judges, one of whom was district court judge specially assigned to hear the case, thought otherwise.
It’s a tough one. The courts have found repeatedly that children don’t enjoy complete constitutional rights, especially within the context of schooling. However they do have some degree of first amendment right – as long as that doesn’t prove to be a disruption. The court is supposed to apply the Tinker Test (derived from Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District which can be found http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinker_v._Des_Moines_Independent_Community_School_District) – which comes down to an assessment of whether behaviour “"materially and substantially interferes with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school.” There are subsequent cases that further refined the Tinker standard, which can be read about at the wiki page, but they all repeated the general rule that students do not enjoy unabridged free speech.
So the question for us really is whether the creation of those fake profiles could be counted as disruptive to discipline in the operation of the school. There are, of course, compelling points on both sides. The question of defamation and the extreme damage accusations of paedophilia causes are also relevant.
What I found most interesting was the methodology section which reads:
In January 2010, The NPD Group fielded an online survey that was completed by 18,872 consumer panel members ages 2 and older. Responses for individuals ages 13 and older were captured directly, and responses for individuals ages 2-12 were captured by “surrogate reporting,” whereby a parent/guardian brings the child to the computer to answer questions, and the child then answers either with or without the guardian’s assistance. Final survey data was weighted and balanced to represent the U.S. population of individuals ages 2 and older.
I guess the most obvious way in which error could slip in is via the on-line nature of the survey - possibly their weighting forumla could use some tweaking too?
For anyone else who didn't know what the mystery was - the researcher was looking into establishing exactly which meteor and comets were referenced in the poem. If you want spoilers....it was the meteor procession of 1860.
As the commentor above mentioned, this field seems to be a little ill-defined. When I read the article the first academic division I thought of was Archaeoastronomy. Wikipedia's definition is servicable:
Archaeoastronomy (also spelled archeoastronomy) is the study of how past people "have understood the phenomena in the sky, how they used phenomena in the sky and what role the sky played in their cultures."[1] Clive Ruggles argues it is misleading to consider archaeoastronomy to be the study of ancient astronomy, as modern astronomy is a scientific discipline, while archaeoastronomy considers other cultures' symbolically rich cultural interpretations of phenomena in the sky.[2][3] It is often twinned with ethnoastronomy, the anthropological study of skywatching in contemporary societies. Archaeoastronomy is also closely associated with historical astronomy, the use of historical records of heavenly events to answer astronomical problems and the history of astronomy, which uses written records to evaluate past astronomical practice.
For anyone interested, Dr. Anthony Aveni has written a lot of interesting stuff in the field.
That's an interesting point, I'd not heard of Samizdat before. For anyone else who's out of the know - wikipedia defines it as
Samizdat was a key form of dissident activity across the Soviet bloc in which individuals reproduced censored publications by hand and passed the documents from reader to reader, thus building a foundation for the successful resistance of the 1980s
.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that WikiLeaks is straddling the gap between public interest and public concern in a way that is beginning to make me feel uncomfortable. Just me. Despite what the mods have deigned from on high I'm not trying to troll or anything like that. I am genuinly concerned that the project is grounded in what I consider to be ethically-suspect actions that potentially reflect an attitude to privacy, security, and mature discussion that I find distasteful.
As to the accuracy, who knows what they're chosing not to show? That's a somewhat facicious point but there is an element of truth. If they're not above a little serrupticious information gathering then how can I trust that they're not also willing to make a few alterations here and there in what they chose to publisize. When they posted that video of military action the New Yorker ran an interesting piece at http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/2010/04/truth-but-not-the-whole-truth.html which makes some compelling points about the video as presented:
The producers themselves have chosen not to provide them. There appears to be a purpose to the omissions, which is underlined by the Orwell quote at the start, the prefatory explanation, the quotes and dedication at the end, even the way the helicopter crew’s cruel remarks are edited in a few places for effect. Although the producers identify the camera of the Reuters journalist who, along with his assistant, will be killed by Apache cannon fire, they don’t point to the AK-47 or the RPG launcher carried by other men with whom the journalists are walking in a group. Stripped of much context and weighted with commentary, this video is both an important document of the war, courageously leaked after the military had steadily refused to release it, and, in its way, a propaganda film.
I'm concerned that we're trading one kind of spin for another.
Personally reading the linked articles made me really, really uncomfortable. Obviously wiki-leaks as a site has its own particular biases and political goals, everyone does, but the way in which they went about gathering this payload fills me with a really agonising ambivalence.
It really strikes to the heart of my feelings about wikileaks itself. Democracies require informed populations and accountability – they’re premised on the fundamental idea that the voting public makes choices based on more than partisan, or self, interest. For the most part, when considered on a population-wide basis, this tends to happen. For every insane extremist there is a balance on the opposite side of the political spectrum leaving those who cluster around the middle to chart a more reasonable course. That being said, moderation is not always the best of all options (only killing half of all people with foreign accents is hardly the ideal resolution to the war on terror) but it’s the best one we have. Wiki gives us a level of information we previously lacked.
However, the fact that they were born out of some ethically questionable actions worries me. It makes me question the source of their information, its reliability, and its purpose to a far greater extent than previously. I am forced to wonder what their goal actually is, and worry that I’ve been naive in believing that they’re interested in mature and reasoned public discourse. Perhaps that’s an over-reaction. Does the idea of Fruit-from-a-poison-tree apply here?
I think the articles may be misstating the patents in question. You can't patent mathemetical formulae BUT you can patent their application. I would imagine that the patents specifically refer to the use of said equations in ensuring wi-fi reliability as suggested by the article's comment
The CSIRO first applied for its Australian Wi-Fi patent in 1992, which solved the problem of patchy wireless reception caused by waves bouncing off objects
Slashdot Mirror
So what is the net benefit to companies who chose to move to Georgia as opposed to India or China or the Asian countries or Ireland or other European countries with tax breaks? Heck, Canada seems to be doing pretty well in the games development area with their rebates.
Does anyone know what special benefits Georgia offers beyond this abscence of tax? Is there a friendly judicial system? How's the IP protection? Do they have a significant body of skilled workers? Whats the infrastructure like? Is there a lot of access to the European market or benefits that aren't accessible any other way?
Then there was the recent Supreme Court ruling that "federal officials can indefinitely hold inmates considered "sexually dangerous," even after they complete their prison terms." which you can read more about at http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=126887029. The case itself can be found at http://www.supremecourt.gov/opinions/09pdf/08-1224.pdf .
Do you really believe that child porn is that pervasive? I'm asking a serious question here, at most I would have thought it represented the smallest fraction of content out there - and would surely not be offered for free, be it in popup or not, on any adult website. Even if you're aggregating over thousands of five-knuckle breaks, I don't see how that could possibly be true. Is the problem that much more significant than I'm aware of? A couple thousand pictures at most, surely? And that among probably billions of the other sort.
Perhaps you're refering to the sliding notion of what constitutues child porn? The shift to include ever more under the umbrella?
Huh, that I didn't know. Thanks for the clarification - so we're talking about a far more radical shift than I thought in the first place. Maybe that's part of the problem, if a self described Star Trek fan (aka geek) was unaware that this represented a significant shift in the permitted intrusion into the private sphere then what hope do we have that your average stay-at-home mom is going to up to date on the facts?
All relevent and important things to note. The University of Georgia had been previously approached about their actions and ignored all attempts at dialogue. There is a system in place that regulates the activity, permitting it within specific guidelines, that the university ignored. There was a huge amount of copyrghted information sloshing around the system such that 600 courses and 6700 portions of texts were unregulated. Both the Oxford and Cambridge presses, who are both included in the action, direct their profits to the universities in question and therefore relieve the pressure on British taxpayers.
While the practises of certain academic publishers are worthy of scorn this case is more complicated than people are admitting. You may hate the system but allowing the debate to be so coloured with hyperbole does no-one any good. The University of Georgia willingly and deliberatly ignored the presses and their interests. There is a clear and obvious harm done. There is a clear and obvious benefit as a result of their actions. Whether those two balance is the question we should be considering.
Doesn't this raise interesting privacy questions? I mean we have a man who is recording everything he sees and doing with that whatever he likes - its like CCTV for the private citizen.
Our technology has shrunk the world – what was once local and limited now has the potential to be broadcast globally in a matter of seconds. Those images and videos can in turn be used for a vast number of purposes – from entertainment to advertisement, from ridicule to prosecution. Doesn’t the advent of certain technologies demand that we reassess that whole “no expectation of privacy in public spaces” thing? Shouldn’t there be a social guarantee of some limited amount of privacy, or at least the right to avoid having my minor local transgressions elevated and exaggerated through cell-phones and digital cameras to a level of state-wide, national, or even international infamy?
Say this guy walks down the street and catches an image of you kissing an attractive young lady. A young lady who also doesn’t happen to be your wife. Back forty years ago it wouldn’t have mattered. He doesn’t know you, you don’t know him. He saw what he saw in public, perhaps there was some discomfort, but that’s where it ended. A few hours later he couldn’t have picked you out in a line-up, and the matter would likely have ended. That’s not the process now. This cam projects those images online. Your wife views the video three hours away, while on her lunch break. Or maybe on TV during an episode of comedic bloopers. Maybe your kids see the stills when they’re doing an image search for funny public pictures. Your religious boss gets included in on the local gossip emails and sees. While it was a reasonable expectation that you’d get caught in public and people would see you with your paramour, it’s hardly reasonable to expect any of the other potential consequences.
I guess what I’m saying is that technology has changed the idea of reasonable expectations – it’s dramatically altered the degree to which public performance extends out into the public consciousness. Get caught with your pants down in Illinois? Expect it to affect your job search in London twenty years from now. That seems crazy.
The things that stood out to me:
I'm confused by the slant in those articles. It seems the Australians are considering a European-style policy ie. the content of internet use isn't stored but its participants are. They know a variety of low level data regarding log in times, durations, sign-in names and the such, but nothing more. The only place I can see the hyperbole is in the rather vague assertions of anonymous sources. Heck the Delimiter link makes it clear in the first paragraph that the more egregious claims are factually questionable.
I'm all for righteous outrage, when it's deserved and reasonable. We don't have nearly enough information yet to leap to the pitchforks, so far all that's been said is that the government is reviewing the European system. I read a really good article on Global Warming which made a fantastic point - the constant exaggeration, hyperbole, and raw sensationalism does more to harm a cause than anything else. If we're serious about making positive social change shouldn't we be doing our utmost to avoid this level of hysteria in discussion?
I'm genuinely interested by people's extreme reactions - is there a better compromise availible given the fact that there are reasonable problems arising from internet use in the present day.
Ouch, methinks someone needed to do a read-through before clicking submit.
It's easier to find numbers for televisions than invisible pink unicorns?
More seriously, the idea is that Apple now had access to a huge and amazing content delivery system. It's a reasonable point if poor sourced and confusing in the origins of its numbers.
Ignoring all the other problems, the post fails at basic math. The US population in 1959 was just under 178mil as per the census (http://www.census.gov/popest/archives/1990s/popclockest.txt). Google tells me that we're at about 307mil right now (http://www.google.com/publicdata?ds=uspopulation&met=population&tdim=true&dl=en&hl=en&q=usa+population). 63/178 > 90/307. Methinks someone got confused between greater-than and less-than.
Does anyone know anything about how the US network integrates with it's foreign equivelants? Is there any integratation? The ESA and Japanese Agency both profess to have, albeit limited, capabilities in this area and I seem to remember a little collaboration between the various structures. Am I just imagining things?
Regardless, doesn't it make sense for this sort of mission to occur within an international framework. Metric jokes aside, wouldn't it be fairer for everyone to take on the cost of these satellite systems? Perhaps I'm confused as to what they're there for - are they an investement into modelling and technology so as to promote American scientific superiority, some kind of early warning and monitoring system, or an elaborate dick waiving contest?
Sorry...Bethel v. Fraser can be found at http://supreme.justia.com/us/478/675/ - hit submit a little too quickly.
I guess the important question is if the speech in it's original form could be construed as related to the school or the educational context. If it it then all the precident kicks in and the the students will likey lose. That being said, "public discourse" is rather vague - the case was specifically considering a speech given by a student to other students that were physically present. Does a myspace posting count as some kind of cyber-speech to an audiance of peers? Maybe it comes down to the expected and desired audiance? If the students created these sites so as to deliberatly reach out to their peers then is it all that different from standing up in an assembly and making the point there?
and:
It’s a tough one. The courts have found repeatedly that children don’t enjoy complete constitutional rights, especially within the context of schooling. However they do have some degree of first amendment right – as long as that doesn’t prove to be a disruption. The court is supposed to apply the Tinker Test (derived from Tinker v. Des Moines Independent Community School District which can be found http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tinker_v._Des_Moines_Independent_Community_School_District) – which comes down to an assessment of whether behaviour “"materially and substantially interferes with the requirements of appropriate discipline in the operation of the school.” There are subsequent cases that further refined the Tinker standard, which can be read about at the wiki page, but they all repeated the general rule that students do not enjoy unabridged free speech.
So the question for us really is whether the creation of those fake profiles could be counted as disruptive to discipline in the operation of the school. There are, of course, compelling points on both sides. The question of defamation and the extreme damage accusations of paedophilia causes are also relevant.
What I found most interesting was the methodology section which reads:
I guess the most obvious way in which error could slip in is via the on-line nature of the survey - possibly their weighting forumla could use some tweaking too?
As the commentor above mentioned, this field seems to be a little ill-defined. When I read the article the first academic division I thought of was Archaeoastronomy. Wikipedia's definition is servicable:
For anyone interested, Dr. Anthony Aveni has written a lot of interesting stuff in the field.
. I guess what I'm trying to say is that WikiLeaks is straddling the gap between public interest and public concern in a way that is beginning to make me feel uncomfortable. Just me. Despite what the mods have deigned from on high I'm not trying to troll or anything like that. I am genuinly concerned that the project is grounded in what I consider to be ethically-suspect actions that potentially reflect an attitude to privacy, security, and mature discussion that I find distasteful.
As to the accuracy, who knows what they're chosing not to show? That's a somewhat facicious point but there is an element of truth. If they're not above a little serrupticious information gathering then how can I trust that they're not also willing to make a few alterations here and there in what they chose to publisize. When they posted that video of military action the New Yorker ran an interesting piece at http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/georgepacker/2010/04/truth-but-not-the-whole-truth.html which makes some compelling points about the video as presented:
Personally reading the linked articles made me really, really uncomfortable. Obviously wiki-leaks as a site has its own particular biases and political goals, everyone does, but the way in which they went about gathering this payload fills me with a really agonising ambivalence.
It really strikes to the heart of my feelings about wikileaks itself. Democracies require informed populations and accountability – they’re premised on the fundamental idea that the voting public makes choices based on more than partisan, or self, interest. For the most part, when considered on a population-wide basis, this tends to happen. For every insane extremist there is a balance on the opposite side of the political spectrum leaving those who cluster around the middle to chart a more reasonable course. That being said, moderation is not always the best of all options (only killing half of all people with foreign accents is hardly the ideal resolution to the war on terror) but it’s the best one we have. Wiki gives us a level of information we previously lacked.
However, the fact that they were born out of some ethically questionable actions worries me. It makes me question the source of their information, its reliability, and its purpose to a far greater extent than previously. I am forced to wonder what their goal actually is, and worry that I’ve been naive in believing that they’re interested in mature and reasoned public discourse. Perhaps that’s an over-reaction. Does the idea of Fruit-from-a-poison-tree apply here?