Governments are as governments are. So they agreed to Verizon's request now, but what's to say that once Verizon makes this investment that they won't turn around and demand similar clauses to lease to competitors once the infrastructure is in place? Assuming that is what the game is, it's a perfect play of a business.
Of course, it could be an elitest establishment buying into some sham, failing to recall the public good as their motivation. Somehow, I bet the latter. (sigh)
Device drivers installed and the presence of an 'interface' device between host and guest OS, most likely. At least, I know that VMWare Server and Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 both present a device that, once proper drivers are installed for OS integration, will allow the guest and host to operate cooperatively. Even if the drivers aren't installed, the device is still there and could likely be probed for it's existence.
I walk into a store, find a CD I like, give the clerk money, and take it home. This, by definition, is a sale. That CD is mine to do what I want with. At no point in time during this transaction was it brought to my attention that I was actually agreeing to a license.
Copyright isn't a license. Copyright is a law granting certain rights and privileges to the creator of that work in return for the eventual handover of that work to the public domain for the public good. When you walk into that store and buy that CD, you didn't have to agree to any license. By living in a society where copyright is a recognized law, and by not having similarly like-minded individuals to abolish such a thing, you are required to honor that law until such time as you can convince a sufficient percentage of the population that it should be removed. That copyright states what you can and cannot do in reproducing or replicating that work. In some cases, where the literal copying of the work doesn't make sense or doesn't well fit (playing a recording of a performance for profit), the law seeks to cover those situations as "fairly" agreed upon by a "majority" of the population. "Fairly" and "majority" in quotations because this tends to get skewed in easily corruptible societies.
As for there being more specific terms of a copyright "license", all that should really be is a written form of granted rights that the creator of the work is granting the owner of that copy. Think GPL. In the forum of software, copyright applies just as it does in any other realm. However, the terms of the GPL do not seek to limit further than the law states, it seeks to grant additional rights to the 'owner' of that copy of the software, with additional terms and conditions in place for that grant. If you choose not to abide by those terms, then your standard copyright law would apply and you would be prevented from doing whatever copyright has disallowed you to.
If you enter into a contract that seeks to restrict beyond copyright, then yes, those terms should be plain, in writing, and agreed upon by both parties. The car analogy that was given was not an invalid analogy, even though it is a car analogy. In the analogy, a prototype (unique, one of a kind) is available to you, but in order for the creator to allow you to purchase it, they want you to sign a contract that will bind you to additional terms and conditions. As long as it is agreed upon by both parties and you enter into that contract to buy that car, even though you "purchased" that car, you are still held accountable for the conditions stipulated in that contract you signed. You agreed to them before purchasing the car, therefor being (to me and apparently the parent of your post) an ethical, legal, and proper agreement.
Of course, these are all 'ideal world' statements, and simply my opinion and understanding of how it should operate. You don't need to agree to laws to be bound by them, and copyright is a law. There are a great many I don't agree with, but until/unless I can convince enough other people that they are useless laws, the 'majority' feel that it is the public interest to have them, and so they will stay. Oh ya, and IANAL so I may have made mistakes in my understanding of the laws.
As someone else said, WSUS is really not useful for when you go visit a relative and all they have is dialup. Where's the WSUS server in that setup? Oh ya.
You're taking the statements I made and slamming them over to the extreme and stating that we should never do anything that takes power from one form and converts it into a form we can use for our needs. To quote myself, let me explain:
However, until we know for certain what the ramifications of such a system would be, we should consider it potentially dangerous.
See, I'm all for cars. They're a useful piece of technology. However, when the gasoline engine was invented and put to use, whatever consequences were never fully explored, nor did they take their investigation (if there was one) to the extreme and account for 300 million Americans with 2-3 cars per family running them for several hours a day. And that's just the USA. One car by itself doesn't contribute enough CO2 to the air to make a dent in it. 600-900 million is a different story.
As for wind turbines, yes, I am a little cautious about that. I can see a potential for harm to the natural flow of heat from place to place. However, in this instance, I don't think ground-based wind turbines are really going to cause a huge problem. Put a huge wind farm up in the stratosphere with the jet stream with it's "unlimited power(!)" and you may see that it suddenly changes things. That's what these ocean currents are, that big jet stream just in water. There aren't many of them, and even if they are big and move a lot of mass from place to place, we do have the capacity (if not now, in the future) to really screw ourselves up if we do not have a proper understanding of what sapping energy from that system will do to the rest of the ecosystem.
I just want people to think about things first, not go "oh my god, there's so much power there, and it's all ours!" No, it isn't. If some/most of it isn't left in place, the ecosystem we've come to love and enjoy might just collapse around us. There is no such thing as 'unlimited power' or (to coin a fun phrase) 'free beer'. There's always a cost involved, we just have to figure out what it is to see if it's a cost we're willing to pay.
Isn't that what they said about global warming, that we're basically so insignificant to the size of the planet that nothing we could possibly do would harm the environment (hint: look at measurements for human-caused CO2 emissions into the air)? And wait, didn't we just read about (at least on a lower scale) China happily forcing the white dolphin to extinction because of their insignificant push on the environment (yay, toxic dumping!)?
Don't for a second dismiss out of hand the effect we might have on the environment simply because "it's so big compared to what WE could do." That's how we've gotten in trouble already, and you want to be so stupid as to continue down that path? If you want to ensure your untimely demise, by all means, get a gun and pop one into your cranium. However, until we know for certain what the ramifications of such a system would be, we should consider it potentially dangerous.
Frankly, it scares me to death when people start talking about tapping into the few things like ocean currents that keep the heat circulating from hot places to cold places. Shut those down and the hot places are going to get incredibly hot and the cold places are going to be terribly frigid. Some all-fired nasty storms happen when you have colliding air masses with huge variations in temperature.
Take a look at it a different way. If the company in question, Knowledge Networks, had bought and purchased one set of encyclopedias, or one set of magazines, they could probably make use of those works with the limited copies they had for citation and research. HOWEVER, the first time you 'photocopy' or 'replicate' any of those works, you have just violated copyright, the right granted that allows the creator to determine how, if at all, his or her creation is to be replicated and distributed. They have every legal right to go after you, even if it is distribution internally, since you effectively have more copies of the work (in full) than you bought.
The example above can be easily applied to online articles, press releases, etc, regardless of whether or not previous author information was preserved. If the aforementioned items, articles, etc were from a 'fee based' site, the same applies. That 'fee' can either be up front (subscription) or ad-based. By making a copy and redistributing it, you are violating copyright if no such allowances are permitted by the author.
Removing the author's information and citing it as your own, that is called plagiarism.
I would imagine much of this distrust stems from Microsoft's tendency to stifle competition and get away with it. That is not to say that this move of theirs isn't appropriate, genuine, or truly innovative. Once you've been bitten once (or several times), you tend to look at the person biting you with a more cautious eye and wonder if/how/when they're going to bite you again.
Why not prove me wrong by finding a more reputable source that states a different thing than attacking the statement based on the source alone? No finer example of a logical fallacy than that.
I'm not sure that Cancer cells have 'undone' differentiation and their own preprogrammed lifespan. I recall reading research that detailed errant stem cells, replicating uncontrolled, directly related to the proliferation of particular types of cancer. In the examples, one type of fast growing cancer had 3x the number of stem cells in it than a slower growing one did. It would also seem to play into the difficulty of treatment, as stem cells are/have to be far more resistant and resilient to environmental influences. (Ref from New York Times).
Of course, this statement can't state that ALL cancers are from stem cells, or that the two types are even in conflict. But it does make more sense if the cancer stems from a cell already able to reproduce forever and just normally chooses not to.
"In the context of biology, poisons, or atters are substances that can cause damage, illness, or death to organisms, usually by chemical reaction or other activity on the molecular scale, when a sufficient quantity is absorbed by an organism."
Carbon Dioxide meets all those requirements as, with increasing concentrations, it displaces Oxygen in hemoglobin (a molecular scale reaction) causing damage and death to organisms. Wikipedia reference
Drowning or suffocation and CO2 poisoning are basically the same thing as the CO2 concentrations in blood rise to the point of being toxic. How again do you figure that CO2 is not a poison?
The Chicago example may not speak specifically to any one argument you and I were making, but it does describe how the government eventually perceives things. Give the government a way to track down dangerous drivers (ie: those running red lights and causing accidents) and it will soon drift from enforcement of safety (good) to a convenient way to collect revenue or further other political goals (bad). It might not even start out noble and be about the Public Good, but simply look like it benefits the public in some way (read: PATRIOT act). I can concede that there probably should be some kind of check and balance against the police 'letting off friends' and 'punishing their enemies' through use of selective enforcement of the law. I can see that the desire to have hard and fast rules about social behavior is appealing to some, though I don't personally agree. You have to weigh in all the situations that a person and police might find themselves in.
I found myself in a car chase once, where I (a teen) and my sister and her friend (younger than I) were getting chased and harassed by other high school teens from a rival school. Some of the maneuvers I did probably bordered on illegal, though I did my best not to be a danger. I was nervous, and was trying to avoid confrontation as the other kids would jump out at stop lights and approach my car. If I were to have gotten pulled over by a police officer, that didn't happen to see the trailing car, should I have been locked away for reckless driving, or given an escort home out of harm's way? A hard and fast rule says arrested. One understanding of the situation might read it differently. Fortunately, my solution to the problem did not include getting pulled over, but it was something your ordinary person might not have had access to do.
Try Infrared beacons. I hear they blind CCD-based cameras pretty well. At least, that's what they were looking at using to combat people with cameras in movie theaters.
CO2 may not be a pollutant in the common sense (it obscures vision) but it is a poison to people in sufficient quantities, and it does have a major effect on the environment as it serves to trap heat within the atmosphere. In terms of Global Warming, that right there presents itself as a pollutant and something of high interest. In terms of those not caring about Global Warming, if the CO2 levels in a local area (room, building, or depending on speed of production, a city) are too high, you could start to kill a great many people from oxygen deprivation (or related incidents).
So how do you figure into that the notion of speed limits? Speed limits have been studied in various contexts and found to be, on occasion, set lower than is reasonably safe for that environment. In fact, the speed limit as set actually increases accidents, though speed limits are intended to enforce vehicular safety. To note, the speed limits are set like this because the state actually depends on this income for state programs and NOT for deterrents for would-be offenders. This would be a classic example of the law being abused for an unstated purpose.
Another example is this. Chicago is looking to ban a device that would improve safety by alerting people they are coming up to a camera-enforced stop light. This device would improve the safety of those intersections by warning people, but the Alderman (or a few) have out right stated that it is about the fine money, roughly $2 million or so, that is collected and earmarked for various city projects. Safety is not a primary concern at times for local, city, state, or federal government. The collection of money for their projects is.
Besides, how can you say the law is absolute when the very nebulous entity of intent must be applied to the transgression? I cannot go and shoot someone that I dislike, but I can shoot someone that is threatening my life. I cannot speed, but if I am legitimately rushing someone to the hospital and had a lapse of judgment (ie: waiting for an ambulance to get there) or could not wait for one, the normal fine for the infraction might be commuted based on circumstance. Technology is not suited to address the issue of intent, nor should it. The law can only properly be interpreted by people in the context that it happens.
So how do you think this would deter someone who expects to be dead committing the act of violence? Do you think the 19 terrorists for the 9-11 attack were actually expecting to walk away from their crash landings?
And, sad, hitting submit before getting all one's thoughts in one post...
"How about we go one step further. Is it the fault of someone handing their credit card to a merchant that someone behind them snapped a photo of the number? Hopefully, your answer to these questions is that it is the fault of the person stealing the information, not the fault of the victim or the bank."
This would be traditional fraud rather than internet and it's straying from the current discussion; but obviously it wouldn't be their fault.
I don't see where applying the term 'On the Internet' and any kind of activity (patent, fraud, etc) changes the nature of the activity at all, and how that deviates from the discussion. Fraud is Fraud, no matter how it takes place. You're just slapping an adjective on it to describe the how of the activity. Fraudulent online banking may have additional laws to include it into the legal fraud framework, but I imagine the punishments for engaging in that activity are just the same, regardless if it is 'traditional' or 'new age/internet'
I wonder what would happen to a fraud claim if a customer simply refused to allow access to their PC based on privacy concerns. Note that privacy concerns does not mean that you are trying to hide wrongdoing, but that you do not trust that the entity requesting access will look only for the stated information and/or will not use other information against you. If you're not expected to be a security expert, one can also assume that the people the banks would be demanding this access of will not be computer experts enough to validate the only items inspected are as stated.
Admittedly, given a hacker and sufficient interest, most systems can be broken or spied upon. My primary point was that it is possible to implement solutions on the bank's property to aid in removing fraudulent activity. Demanding (or even requesting) access to a customer's PC (if they even used their own PC) in order to claim that the customer had a hand in the fraud is simply a very poor and inappropriate approach to take.
There's so many parallels that can be drawn. Leaving a car's doors unlocked and the keys inside does not make the victim of car theft responsible for it, the thief is responsible for stealing it. A woman dressing in provocative clothing is not responsible for the actions of a rapist that attacks her. And so on. It can be said that the situations that bring on the 'easy crime' can be avoided, and should be, but to even take it to the step of considering the victim at fault for being stupid is, as I said, an attempt to absolve oneself of liability and the need to go after the real thief.
That brings up an interesting question. Would a customer using someone else's machine (one unpatched for a specific vulnerability that would cause a fraud claim to be denied) be held liable for that transaction?
I didn't say I had a warm fuzzy about it, but I did say that it was an approach they could handle on the Server side of things, rather than simply jumping to the conclusion that it's the victim's fault for whatever reason. Yes, I'm aware that a simple recording of the mouse location during a click could be recorded instead of an ASCII code, but you'd also need to know the locations of the characters on the screen, as those change. You would have to get not only mouse position but screen shot to know what letter it is. I would imagine a system intrusive enough to send out mouse coordinates plus screen shots would impact a connection enough to raise eyebrows (since, you know, people click the mouse button a lot and it would be a little more interesting to know WHEN to start snapping screen shots instead of every time). A key logger would not be as intrusive, as it is painfully low impact to send out text characters.
I'm not saying this system is perfect, far from it. However, it is the appropriate way to approach this. Secure the server side and set up a system that would allow better accountability and authorization that the person making the transactions is in fact the account holder. Inspecting an account holder's machine is likely to lead to quite a privacy problem, as well as give the bank owner a reason to deny legitimate fraud claims.
but if you have nine key-loggers installed from torrent trojans they can't do shit about it and it is YOUR fault your money was stolen.
So what happens if say a few of those keyloggers were installed via a mechanism that is, as of the time, unpatched by the OS developers? Is that your fault or the fault of the OS developer? What about if it was buried so deeply in your system and affected things so little that, unless you were some Guru, did not know it was even there? How about we go one step further. Is it the fault of someone handing their credit card to a merchant that someone behind them snapped a photo of the number? Hopefully, your answer to these questions is that it is the fault of the person stealing the information, not the fault of the victim or the bank.
Plain and simple, this is an effort by the banks to absolve themselves of transactional fraud, place liability on the customers, and not be required to take action themselves. There are solutions that break keyloggers and all that jazz and provide a relatively secure environment from the SERVER side of things. I believe my bank took that approach.
The basics? If you're connecting from an authorized computer, all you need provide is the account and pin numbers. However, if you are connecting from 'any old computer', a second form of authorization in the form of a mouse-clicked word is requested. This is not something that you will ever use from YOUR PC nor is it anything a keylogger (in the common sense of the concept) pick up on. Net result? It helps secure their server just that much more and yet allows the customer to continue to do business from any location.
Excellent points, and ones I ask when this crap comes up. People will do what makes them feel good. I wonder if that behavior falls within the realm of 'addiction'. If so, I wonder what 'normal' is, to walk around in a dull kind of vegetable state, getting little to no enjoyment out of anything you do? If so, screw that. I'll remain addicted.
I wish rights were so black and white, but just read the Constitution sometime and see how 'clear cut' rights written back in the day are upheld today, or how well they even apply to our current society. I would definitely see no issue with amending current law to state that those without a formal, permanent address of their own could use another to register to vote. On the flip side, though, simply allowing anyone to register without an address of any kind opens a potential abuse of the electoral system that members outside a community may override the desires of that community to enact whatever changes to that government, law, etc. It serves as both protection and validation that those voting on local, city, state, or even federal affairs reside within the boundaries of that entity and should be granted their voice.
Personally, I'm not so keen on asking for help and tend to avoid doing so whenever possible. Pride, I guess. However, that there are people out there willing to help should not affect whether a person should be denied the right to vote. And, while it would be awesome to say it is 'free' to get the ID to vote, nothing comes without cost, SOMEWHERE. If it were 'free' in the sense that it cost $0 to get one at the time, the cost for the manpower, materials, and infrastructure to support the ID system would be taken out of funds given to the government through taxes. Either way, those unable to pay would still be 'borrowing' against the goodwill of others to acquire the necessary paperwork, but the overall cost would be spread much thinner.
I agree, and actually, I have voted in the middle of moving. All you have to do is go to the precinct you were registered in and vote there. That works great on anything federal, state or such but not so good on local or city levels. It was pretty easy to do. That's why I tagged that as a 'bad example'.
However, I just wonder the hypothetical situation of being 'divested' of one's local address or residence through whatever means (government or private) and, through that, being denied voice in government.
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Governments are as governments are. So they agreed to Verizon's request now, but what's to say that once Verizon makes this investment that they won't turn around and demand similar clauses to lease to competitors once the infrastructure is in place? Assuming that is what the game is, it's a perfect play of a business.
Of course, it could be an elitest establishment buying into some sham, failing to recall the public good as their motivation. Somehow, I bet the latter. (sigh)
Device drivers installed and the presence of an 'interface' device between host and guest OS, most likely. At least, I know that VMWare Server and Microsoft Virtual PC 2007 both present a device that, once proper drivers are installed for OS integration, will allow the guest and host to operate cooperatively. Even if the drivers aren't installed, the device is still there and could likely be probed for it's existence.
Of course, this is just a guess.
Copyright isn't a license. Copyright is a law granting certain rights and privileges to the creator of that work in return for the eventual handover of that work to the public domain for the public good. When you walk into that store and buy that CD, you didn't have to agree to any license. By living in a society where copyright is a recognized law, and by not having similarly like-minded individuals to abolish such a thing, you are required to honor that law until such time as you can convince a sufficient percentage of the population that it should be removed. That copyright states what you can and cannot do in reproducing or replicating that work. In some cases, where the literal copying of the work doesn't make sense or doesn't well fit (playing a recording of a performance for profit), the law seeks to cover those situations as "fairly" agreed upon by a "majority" of the population. "Fairly" and "majority" in quotations because this tends to get skewed in easily corruptible societies.
As for there being more specific terms of a copyright "license", all that should really be is a written form of granted rights that the creator of the work is granting the owner of that copy. Think GPL. In the forum of software, copyright applies just as it does in any other realm. However, the terms of the GPL do not seek to limit further than the law states, it seeks to grant additional rights to the 'owner' of that copy of the software, with additional terms and conditions in place for that grant. If you choose not to abide by those terms, then your standard copyright law would apply and you would be prevented from doing whatever copyright has disallowed you to.
If you enter into a contract that seeks to restrict beyond copyright, then yes, those terms should be plain, in writing, and agreed upon by both parties. The car analogy that was given was not an invalid analogy, even though it is a car analogy. In the analogy, a prototype (unique, one of a kind) is available to you, but in order for the creator to allow you to purchase it, they want you to sign a contract that will bind you to additional terms and conditions. As long as it is agreed upon by both parties and you enter into that contract to buy that car, even though you "purchased" that car, you are still held accountable for the conditions stipulated in that contract you signed. You agreed to them before purchasing the car, therefor being (to me and apparently the parent of your post) an ethical, legal, and proper agreement.
Of course, these are all 'ideal world' statements, and simply my opinion and understanding of how it should operate. You don't need to agree to laws to be bound by them, and copyright is a law. There are a great many I don't agree with, but until/unless I can convince enough other people that they are useless laws, the 'majority' feel that it is the public interest to have them, and so they will stay. Oh ya, and IANAL so I may have made mistakes in my understanding of the laws.
As someone else said, WSUS is really not useful for when you go visit a relative and all they have is dialup. Where's the WSUS server in that setup? Oh ya.
You're taking the statements I made and slamming them over to the extreme and stating that we should never do anything that takes power from one form and converts it into a form we can use for our needs. To quote myself, let me explain:
See, I'm all for cars. They're a useful piece of technology. However, when the gasoline engine was invented and put to use, whatever consequences were never fully explored, nor did they take their investigation (if there was one) to the extreme and account for 300 million Americans with 2-3 cars per family running them for several hours a day. And that's just the USA. One car by itself doesn't contribute enough CO2 to the air to make a dent in it. 600-900 million is a different story.
As for wind turbines, yes, I am a little cautious about that. I can see a potential for harm to the natural flow of heat from place to place. However, in this instance, I don't think ground-based wind turbines are really going to cause a huge problem. Put a huge wind farm up in the stratosphere with the jet stream with it's "unlimited power(!)" and you may see that it suddenly changes things. That's what these ocean currents are, that big jet stream just in water. There aren't many of them, and even if they are big and move a lot of mass from place to place, we do have the capacity (if not now, in the future) to really screw ourselves up if we do not have a proper understanding of what sapping energy from that system will do to the rest of the ecosystem.
I just want people to think about things first, not go "oh my god, there's so much power there, and it's all ours!" No, it isn't. If some/most of it isn't left in place, the ecosystem we've come to love and enjoy might just collapse around us. There is no such thing as 'unlimited power' or (to coin a fun phrase) 'free beer'. There's always a cost involved, we just have to figure out what it is to see if it's a cost we're willing to pay.
Isn't that what they said about global warming, that we're basically so insignificant to the size of the planet that nothing we could possibly do would harm the environment (hint: look at measurements for human-caused CO2 emissions into the air)? And wait, didn't we just read about (at least on a lower scale) China happily forcing the white dolphin to extinction because of their insignificant push on the environment (yay, toxic dumping!)?
Don't for a second dismiss out of hand the effect we might have on the environment simply because "it's so big compared to what WE could do." That's how we've gotten in trouble already, and you want to be so stupid as to continue down that path? If you want to ensure your untimely demise, by all means, get a gun and pop one into your cranium. However, until we know for certain what the ramifications of such a system would be, we should consider it potentially dangerous.
Frankly, it scares me to death when people start talking about tapping into the few things like ocean currents that keep the heat circulating from hot places to cold places. Shut those down and the hot places are going to get incredibly hot and the cold places are going to be terribly frigid. Some all-fired nasty storms happen when you have colliding air masses with huge variations in temperature.
Take a look at it a different way. If the company in question, Knowledge Networks, had bought and purchased one set of encyclopedias, or one set of magazines, they could probably make use of those works with the limited copies they had for citation and research. HOWEVER, the first time you 'photocopy' or 'replicate' any of those works, you have just violated copyright, the right granted that allows the creator to determine how, if at all, his or her creation is to be replicated and distributed. They have every legal right to go after you, even if it is distribution internally, since you effectively have more copies of the work (in full) than you bought.
The example above can be easily applied to online articles, press releases, etc, regardless of whether or not previous author information was preserved. If the aforementioned items, articles, etc were from a 'fee based' site, the same applies. That 'fee' can either be up front (subscription) or ad-based. By making a copy and redistributing it, you are violating copyright if no such allowances are permitted by the author.
Removing the author's information and citing it as your own, that is called plagiarism.
I would imagine much of this distrust stems from Microsoft's tendency to stifle competition and get away with it. That is not to say that this move of theirs isn't appropriate, genuine, or truly innovative. Once you've been bitten once (or several times), you tend to look at the person biting you with a more cautious eye and wonder if/how/when they're going to bite you again.
Why not prove me wrong by finding a more reputable source that states a different thing than attacking the statement based on the source alone? No finer example of a logical fallacy than that.
I'm not sure that Cancer cells have 'undone' differentiation and their own preprogrammed lifespan. I recall reading research that detailed errant stem cells, replicating uncontrolled, directly related to the proliferation of particular types of cancer. In the examples, one type of fast growing cancer had 3x the number of stem cells in it than a slower growing one did. It would also seem to play into the difficulty of treatment, as stem cells are/have to be far more resistant and resilient to environmental influences. (Ref from New York Times).
Of course, this statement can't state that ALL cancers are from stem cells, or that the two types are even in conflict. But it does make more sense if the cancer stems from a cell already able to reproduce forever and just normally chooses not to.
First line of the Wikipedia article on Poison:
"In the context of biology, poisons, or atters are substances that can cause damage, illness, or death to organisms, usually by chemical reaction or other activity on the molecular scale, when a sufficient quantity is absorbed by an organism."
Carbon Dioxide meets all those requirements as, with increasing concentrations, it displaces Oxygen in hemoglobin (a molecular scale reaction) causing damage and death to organisms. Wikipedia reference
Drowning or suffocation and CO2 poisoning are basically the same thing as the CO2 concentrations in blood rise to the point of being toxic. How again do you figure that CO2 is not a poison?
1) Make announcement of a revolutionary new Operating System ... Internet Cloud ...
2)
3) Profit!
The Chicago example may not speak specifically to any one argument you and I were making, but it does describe how the government eventually perceives things. Give the government a way to track down dangerous drivers (ie: those running red lights and causing accidents) and it will soon drift from enforcement of safety (good) to a convenient way to collect revenue or further other political goals (bad). It might not even start out noble and be about the Public Good, but simply look like it benefits the public in some way (read: PATRIOT act). I can concede that there probably should be some kind of check and balance against the police 'letting off friends' and 'punishing their enemies' through use of selective enforcement of the law. I can see that the desire to have hard and fast rules about social behavior is appealing to some, though I don't personally agree. You have to weigh in all the situations that a person and police might find themselves in.
I found myself in a car chase once, where I (a teen) and my sister and her friend (younger than I) were getting chased and harassed by other high school teens from a rival school. Some of the maneuvers I did probably bordered on illegal, though I did my best not to be a danger. I was nervous, and was trying to avoid confrontation as the other kids would jump out at stop lights and approach my car. If I were to have gotten pulled over by a police officer, that didn't happen to see the trailing car, should I have been locked away for reckless driving, or given an escort home out of harm's way? A hard and fast rule says arrested. One understanding of the situation might read it differently. Fortunately, my solution to the problem did not include getting pulled over, but it was something your ordinary person might not have had access to do.
Try Infrared beacons. I hear they blind CCD-based cameras pretty well. At least, that's what they were looking at using to combat people with cameras in movie theaters.
CO2 may not be a pollutant in the common sense (it obscures vision) but it is a poison to people in sufficient quantities, and it does have a major effect on the environment as it serves to trap heat within the atmosphere. In terms of Global Warming, that right there presents itself as a pollutant and something of high interest. In terms of those not caring about Global Warming, if the CO2 levels in a local area (room, building, or depending on speed of production, a city) are too high, you could start to kill a great many people from oxygen deprivation (or related incidents).
So how do you figure into that the notion of speed limits? Speed limits have been studied in various contexts and found to be, on occasion, set lower than is reasonably safe for that environment. In fact, the speed limit as set actually increases accidents, though speed limits are intended to enforce vehicular safety. To note, the speed limits are set like this because the state actually depends on this income for state programs and NOT for deterrents for would-be offenders. This would be a classic example of the law being abused for an unstated purpose.
Another example is this. Chicago is looking to ban a device that would improve safety by alerting people they are coming up to a camera-enforced stop light. This device would improve the safety of those intersections by warning people, but the Alderman (or a few) have out right stated that it is about the fine money, roughly $2 million or so, that is collected and earmarked for various city projects. Safety is not a primary concern at times for local, city, state, or federal government. The collection of money for their projects is.
Besides, how can you say the law is absolute when the very nebulous entity of intent must be applied to the transgression? I cannot go and shoot someone that I dislike, but I can shoot someone that is threatening my life. I cannot speed, but if I am legitimately rushing someone to the hospital and had a lapse of judgment (ie: waiting for an ambulance to get there) or could not wait for one, the normal fine for the infraction might be commuted based on circumstance. Technology is not suited to address the issue of intent, nor should it. The law can only properly be interpreted by people in the context that it happens.
So how do you think this would deter someone who expects to be dead committing the act of violence? Do you think the 19 terrorists for the 9-11 attack were actually expecting to walk away from their crash landings?
And, sad, hitting submit before getting all one's thoughts in one post...
I don't see where applying the term 'On the Internet' and any kind of activity (patent, fraud, etc) changes the nature of the activity at all, and how that deviates from the discussion. Fraud is Fraud, no matter how it takes place. You're just slapping an adjective on it to describe the how of the activity. Fraudulent online banking may have additional laws to include it into the legal fraud framework, but I imagine the punishments for engaging in that activity are just the same, regardless if it is 'traditional' or 'new age/internet'
I wonder what would happen to a fraud claim if a customer simply refused to allow access to their PC based on privacy concerns. Note that privacy concerns does not mean that you are trying to hide wrongdoing, but that you do not trust that the entity requesting access will look only for the stated information and/or will not use other information against you. If you're not expected to be a security expert, one can also assume that the people the banks would be demanding this access of will not be computer experts enough to validate the only items inspected are as stated.
Admittedly, given a hacker and sufficient interest, most systems can be broken or spied upon. My primary point was that it is possible to implement solutions on the bank's property to aid in removing fraudulent activity. Demanding (or even requesting) access to a customer's PC (if they even used their own PC) in order to claim that the customer had a hand in the fraud is simply a very poor and inappropriate approach to take.
There's so many parallels that can be drawn. Leaving a car's doors unlocked and the keys inside does not make the victim of car theft responsible for it, the thief is responsible for stealing it. A woman dressing in provocative clothing is not responsible for the actions of a rapist that attacks her. And so on. It can be said that the situations that bring on the 'easy crime' can be avoided, and should be, but to even take it to the step of considering the victim at fault for being stupid is, as I said, an attempt to absolve oneself of liability and the need to go after the real thief.
That brings up an interesting question. Would a customer using someone else's machine (one unpatched for a specific vulnerability that would cause a fraud claim to be denied) be held liable for that transaction?
I didn't say I had a warm fuzzy about it, but I did say that it was an approach they could handle on the Server side of things, rather than simply jumping to the conclusion that it's the victim's fault for whatever reason. Yes, I'm aware that a simple recording of the mouse location during a click could be recorded instead of an ASCII code, but you'd also need to know the locations of the characters on the screen, as those change. You would have to get not only mouse position but screen shot to know what letter it is. I would imagine a system intrusive enough to send out mouse coordinates plus screen shots would impact a connection enough to raise eyebrows (since, you know, people click the mouse button a lot and it would be a little more interesting to know WHEN to start snapping screen shots instead of every time). A key logger would not be as intrusive, as it is painfully low impact to send out text characters.
I'm not saying this system is perfect, far from it. However, it is the appropriate way to approach this. Secure the server side and set up a system that would allow better accountability and authorization that the person making the transactions is in fact the account holder. Inspecting an account holder's machine is likely to lead to quite a privacy problem, as well as give the bank owner a reason to deny legitimate fraud claims.
So what happens if say a few of those keyloggers were installed via a mechanism that is, as of the time, unpatched by the OS developers? Is that your fault or the fault of the OS developer? What about if it was buried so deeply in your system and affected things so little that, unless you were some Guru, did not know it was even there? How about we go one step further. Is it the fault of someone handing their credit card to a merchant that someone behind them snapped a photo of the number? Hopefully, your answer to these questions is that it is the fault of the person stealing the information, not the fault of the victim or the bank.
Plain and simple, this is an effort by the banks to absolve themselves of transactional fraud, place liability on the customers, and not be required to take action themselves. There are solutions that break keyloggers and all that jazz and provide a relatively secure environment from the SERVER side of things. I believe my bank took that approach.
The basics? If you're connecting from an authorized computer, all you need provide is the account and pin numbers. However, if you are connecting from 'any old computer', a second form of authorization in the form of a mouse-clicked word is requested. This is not something that you will ever use from YOUR PC nor is it anything a keylogger (in the common sense of the concept) pick up on. Net result? It helps secure their server just that much more and yet allows the customer to continue to do business from any location.
Hilarious. Absolutely hilarious. :) Thank you for making my evening. :)
Excellent points, and ones I ask when this crap comes up. People will do what makes them feel good. I wonder if that behavior falls within the realm of 'addiction'. If so, I wonder what 'normal' is, to walk around in a dull kind of vegetable state, getting little to no enjoyment out of anything you do? If so, screw that. I'll remain addicted.
I wish rights were so black and white, but just read the Constitution sometime and see how 'clear cut' rights written back in the day are upheld today, or how well they even apply to our current society. I would definitely see no issue with amending current law to state that those without a formal, permanent address of their own could use another to register to vote. On the flip side, though, simply allowing anyone to register without an address of any kind opens a potential abuse of the electoral system that members outside a community may override the desires of that community to enact whatever changes to that government, law, etc. It serves as both protection and validation that those voting on local, city, state, or even federal affairs reside within the boundaries of that entity and should be granted their voice.
Personally, I'm not so keen on asking for help and tend to avoid doing so whenever possible. Pride, I guess. However, that there are people out there willing to help should not affect whether a person should be denied the right to vote. And, while it would be awesome to say it is 'free' to get the ID to vote, nothing comes without cost, SOMEWHERE. If it were 'free' in the sense that it cost $0 to get one at the time, the cost for the manpower, materials, and infrastructure to support the ID system would be taken out of funds given to the government through taxes. Either way, those unable to pay would still be 'borrowing' against the goodwill of others to acquire the necessary paperwork, but the overall cost would be spread much thinner.
I agree, and actually, I have voted in the middle of moving. All you have to do is go to the precinct you were registered in and vote there. That works great on anything federal, state or such but not so good on local or city levels. It was pretty easy to do. That's why I tagged that as a 'bad example'.
However, I just wonder the hypothetical situation of being 'divested' of one's local address or residence through whatever means (government or private) and, through that, being denied voice in government.