The tone of the TSA agent really set my teeth on edge.
“(She) told me in a very stern voice with quite a bit of attitude that they were not going through that X-ray,” Sabrina Birge, an airport security officer, told police.
Yeah how dare a mother exhibit "quite a bit of attitude" in defending her daughter from unreasonable search and touching. The shame! The horror! It is the TSA agent's privilege and power that is shameful in this situation, and to a far greater degree, the TSA itself along with its needlessly invasive security theater.
Interestingly enough the woman attempted to take a video of the incident:
At one point, Abbott tried unsuccessfully to take a video with her cellphone.
It looks like:
Refuse to go along quietly
Describe the problem loudly enough for other to hear ("saying she did not want her daughter to be “touched inappropriately or have her “crotch grabbed,” a police report states.")
Attempt to obtain evidence
and you get stuck with disorderly conduct and sent directly to jail.
Frankenstein is the Doctor's name. He was brought to life in the traditional manner.
Yeah in the original. In Frankenstein Squared: Dark Side of the Moon and Predjudice, Dr Frankenstein was created in a lab by Go-Bots Vampires to fight the Autobot zombie hordes and entertain Mr. Darcy with droll stories of creating life from corpses.
Well, presuming these are photos and bits of data that were made available to the extended network. There's the possibility some of this data was restricted to "friends of friends" and "friends". But even if we take the wider social circle of "people in my network", that's definitely not perceived as being "out on the internet for anyone to find". Perhaps it is a meaningless and even misleading privacy setting for Facebook to have in the first place.
As I see it the problem is really the potential for abuse, rather than the expectation of privacy being shattered. What we have are more and more people putting things online with an expectation of privacy, and finding that what they presumed to be private isn't. Further, we have individuals and corporations alike exploiting this data for various purposes, from hiring to harassment.
In the case of the study itself, if this data was truly public, then their utilizing it for a study is fine. Their publishing it online crossed the line however, because suddenly one might find not only information about one's self you expected, but analysis of that information that could be viewed and used by potential employers, significant others, etc. One of the complaints the researchers brought up is that increasingly they are being pressured to make their data public, and that in some cases that might not be in the best interests of the people they are researching. At the very least it would suggest that they have an ethical obligation to obtain informed consent.
But here's where things get sketchy. Mr. Kaufman apparently used Harvard students as research assistants to download the data. That's important, because they had access to profiles that students might have set to be visible to Harvard's Facebook network but not to the whole world, Mr. Zimmer argues in a 2010 paper about the case published in Ethics and Information Technology. The assistants' potentially privileged access "should have triggered an ethical concern over whether each student truly intended to have their profile data publicly visible and accessible for downloading," Mr. Zimmer says in an e-mail.
So students who might have posted photos, updates, notes, political commentary, expecting it to be shown only to friends, friends of friends, or people in their network, might suddenly find ALL of that data, plus extrapolations about what it says about them, displayed publicly.
Sounds like a clear cut privacy violation, they were right to pull the data.
They do not address the issues of oversight and transparency because they want neither. They are using the horrifying crime of child sexual abuse as a shield to deflect objections to censorship, and it has worked. Governments the world over want more oversight and control over what their citizens do. In some cases (China) they simply implement that control to their heart's content. In others, like the USA, I am sure our own government will be watching how the public reacts intently - with an eye towards similar measures here at home.
Consider Verizon or Comcast. "Just don't participate in the industry?". So do without a cell phone or internet access? Yeah one consumer doing that is sure to make them quake. It discounts utterly people who depend upon services that ought to be classified as essential (like electricity).
Further, creating a competitor - outside the dreamland of web applications - takes serious resources. There are a number of great alternatives trying to do that (check out http://www.mysimplemobile.com/), but look at their coverage map vs Verizon. Your comment simply does not take into account the pragmatic concerns of corporations with too much power.
Also of note, in a mixed market (which is what we have, no one has a completely free market), you can regulate price. You can prevent collusion (which is what the telecoms are doing), price gouging, and a range of predatory practices.
Exactly. It isn't hard to imagine why someone would prefer this stay private. What if a minor is using FitBit? What if it is being used by someone who lives in a repressive religious community? A prospective employer could check it out, and they wouldn't even have to use it to screen applicants: would you want your boss knowing how frequently you have sex, and how many calories you burn while doing it? Some might find it threatening, especially if that info is used to sexually harass an employee or co-worker. But all of this is moot. The real problem is the "totally open and public by default" attitude some social networking sites seem to feel is just fine.
Why can't we vote with regulation? We don't allow companies to dump massive amounts of toxic wastes into rivers, why do we allow them to dump toxic code into their products? Plus you don't always have a vote. Take Verizon for example. They screw their customers over regularly (charges for going over your allotted minutes, axing unlimited internet to get the same scam going for internet access, high text charges, random monthly fees (like the bogus "tax-recovery" fee they still charge). But when the competition is doing the same thing, and the competition lacks the one essential feature of a carrier (reception), you are stuck. In Sony's case there is robust competition for gaming, (though they have a tight grip on blu-ray). But even with gaming, what do we do when Nintendo (which has already shown its true colors with some of their licensing craziness for the ds) and Microsoft inevitably join Sony in making the same kinds of decisions? Better yet, do we trust Microsoft and Nintendo not to? At that point "voting with our dollars" becomes a fantasy, a weak "the market will fix it" dream that will never come true.
You can still benefit from the Ubuntu forums (when users are able/inclined to answer questions) while using Mint. Really any distro with gnome classic, kde, or xfce slapped on will do. Mint has the Software Center which is a lot like the app store, and a great way to discover new open source programs. It also has amazing hardware support (except for webcam - which is terrible). The only problem with Mint is the spammy, ugly* search page they've hacked into web browsers by default (but a knowledgeable user can remove this).
*If they'd at least style it to look and function just like google's search page, I doubt anyone would mind or notice.
Not at all. I wish I still had mod points to mod you up. We already put a range of materials in socks, shoes, and other clothing. Some are touted as anti-fungal, others have a blanket "anti-microbial" label. I wonder what the long term effects might be...
While I do think there is some voter fraud in the modern era, and would point to Florida in the 2000 election and Ohio in 2004, it is often twisted and blown out of proportion to fuel a hysteria that we need to make it harder to vote. So we end up with laws that make it harder to vote for those who vote Democratic. I find it hard to believe that is an accident.
What we need is a way to verify votes that does not end up constituting an effective poll tax, and keeping people who have a right to vote from the polls. I wonder if any slashdot readers have any suggestions? I'd be quite hopeful on that account, some rather clever people read this site and have left encouraging comments on past articles about voting.
Maybe a liberal* utopia where the punishment follows, rather than precedes, the guilty verdict? But some people are just old fashioned that way I guess. Pre 9/11 mentality. (That being said, if it was done after he was found guilty, a punishment like this seems far more just than having a child serve a sentence or have his parents burdened with a hefty fine. Even better, have the kid meet the people he stole from. Nothing changes perspective like removing the "otherness".)
*Sadly, maybe that is a liberal utopia. Conservatives and Liberals really should be united on stuff like that.
The parent isn't stupid. AZ is doing everything they can to make life unpleasant for anyone who even speaks spanish, never mind is an immigrant from south america. Your response is essentially the "but I have a black friend" defense. Oh so you have a supervisor who is Mexican and he supports it? Even if that is true, why should we care? Would it justify prop 8 if a gay guy supported it?
The bill is racist and furthers the police state mentality that is seeing our basic rights abandoned in a race to the bottom.
I guess its our doom to be treated to an annual "end of books" prediction, alongside "the year of linux on the desktop", "the year desktops go away and everyone gets an ipad", "the year ipads go away and everyone gets a specific e-device for every task they used desktops for in ancient times", etc. At least this prediction has the tact to place itself out "a few generations", alongside flying cars and the end of disease.
We'd hope the US Congress would dare to collect real citizen input on its legislation, rather than just doing lip service or useless political arguments.
We'd hope the Chinese government would dare allow citizens to speak their minds, protest, and vote freely without fear of being sent to a labor camp, tortured, or held indefinitely as a political dissident.
This sounds more like opinion polling anyway, and yes there is polling in the US. It is just as binding (aka not at all). The biggest difference seems to be the scale.
The final nail in the coffin is the phrase "doing lip service or useless political arguments". Democracy is chaotic, and those arguments - whether one finds them useful is itself political - are at the center of being a truly democratic state.
I'm not saying the US is perfect, it is deeply, deeply flawed (look at the role of money in elections just as a start), but we don't jail members of the opposition parties as a matter of policy, censor the internet for purely political content, or crack down violently on peaceful religious organizations.
Its completely different. You are talking about a sales tax (not sure why you added in rants about the legitimacy of government and how they handle what they collect). What is in question is undeclared income. Frankly what's surprising to me is simply the scale. They seem to be going after the small fry while corporations appear to get away (even more surprisingly, legally!) with paying little or no taxes (which is being hotly debated currently, and played a role in some of the protests against austerity measures. After all its a bit annoying when the government claims they need to make cuts to core services while corporations escape paying their fair share).
ps I do agree in the US it would be wonderful to see a shift to a better personal and corporate tax structure replacing the sales tax, for a host of reasons. Not least of which is the impact on a consumer-driven economy.
Now we'll have a way to circumvent ICE copyright censorship, attempts by government officials to target critical bloggers, and of course everyone's favorite restrictions on videos/recordings of police actions. Let's boot this baby up and see what it can do....
localhost$shadowtubez start
==Welcome to ShadowTubez==
Fight the Power, with the help of the USA!
(Connecting to shadowtubez.us.gov to establish freedom fighter credentials...)
Ah of course, the original article I linked to is talking about ionizing radiation. Therefore I must be entirely wrong, and need to go back to school.
You clearly win, and with such humility and class. Meanwhile I'm sure there's no issue at all with non ionizing radiation. Keep dreaming.
Before dismissing my question by attempting to act like a frustrated school teacher, perhaps you ought to consider the merits of my argument. Simply saying "mobile phone radiation is non ionizing you noob" misses the point entirely: That non ionizing radiation can have a cumulative negative impact on health. You fail.
How is this marked insightful? You want a good job, you find a good worker and pay them well. You want an excellent job, you find a great worker and pay then exceptionally well. It sounds insightful, doesn't it? But is it actually based on anything tangible/testable?
The only difference between a contractor and an employee is compensation. Contractors typically make more, employees typically have more benefits (though these rarely add up to the same net value as the difference in compensation). A contractor is financially incentivized to work longer hours, and a salaried employee less hours. When companies hire someone on full time, there's an illusion of stability that goes along with that, but in this economy who is fooled by that anymore? It just comes down to money.
If you want loyalty, make sure however you compensate your employees beats the market, you provide them with a great working environment, and work hard to mitigate job related stress. If you can't bring yourself to do that and still want loyalty, use a quote like the parent's and see if anyone buys your bs. Or get a puppy.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah how dare a mother exhibit "quite a bit of attitude" in defending her daughter from unreasonable search and touching. The shame! The horror! It is the TSA agent's privilege and power that is shameful in this situation, and to a far greater degree, the TSA itself along with its needlessly invasive security theater.
Interestingly enough the woman attempted to take a video of the incident:
It looks like:
and you get stuck with disorderly conduct and sent directly to jail.
Yeah in the original. In Frankenstein Squared: Dark Side of the Moon and Predjudice, Dr Frankenstein was created in a lab by Go-Bots Vampires to fight the Autobot zombie hordes and entertain Mr. Darcy with droll stories of creating life from corpses.
I wonder how Firefox 8 stacks up against Firefox 1? Back when the goal was to create an efficient, stable, fast browser.
Well, presuming these are photos and bits of data that were made available to the extended network. There's the possibility some of this data was restricted to "friends of friends" and "friends". But even if we take the wider social circle of "people in my network", that's definitely not perceived as being "out on the internet for anyone to find". Perhaps it is a meaningless and even misleading privacy setting for Facebook to have in the first place.
As I see it the problem is really the potential for abuse, rather than the expectation of privacy being shattered. What we have are more and more people putting things online with an expectation of privacy, and finding that what they presumed to be private isn't. Further, we have individuals and corporations alike exploiting this data for various purposes, from hiring to harassment.
In the case of the study itself, if this data was truly public, then their utilizing it for a study is fine. Their publishing it online crossed the line however, because suddenly one might find not only information about one's self you expected, but analysis of that information that could be viewed and used by potential employers, significant others, etc. One of the complaints the researchers brought up is that increasingly they are being pressured to make their data public, and that in some cases that might not be in the best interests of the people they are researching. At the very least it would suggest that they have an ethical obligation to obtain informed consent.
So students who might have posted photos, updates, notes, political commentary, expecting it to be shown only to friends, friends of friends, or people in their network, might suddenly find ALL of that data, plus extrapolations about what it says about them, displayed publicly.
Sounds like a clear cut privacy violation, they were right to pull the data.
They do not address the issues of oversight and transparency because they want neither. They are using the horrifying crime of child sexual abuse as a shield to deflect objections to censorship, and it has worked. Governments the world over want more oversight and control over what their citizens do. In some cases (China) they simply implement that control to their heart's content. In others, like the USA, I am sure our own government will be watching how the public reacts intently - with an eye towards similar measures here at home.
Consider Verizon or Comcast. "Just don't participate in the industry?". So do without a cell phone or internet access? Yeah one consumer doing that is sure to make them quake. It discounts utterly people who depend upon services that ought to be classified as essential (like electricity).
Further, creating a competitor - outside the dreamland of web applications - takes serious resources. There are a number of great alternatives trying to do that (check out http://www.mysimplemobile.com/), but look at their coverage map vs Verizon. Your comment simply does not take into account the pragmatic concerns of corporations with too much power.
Also of note, in a mixed market (which is what we have, no one has a completely free market), you can regulate price. You can prevent collusion (which is what the telecoms are doing), price gouging, and a range of predatory practices.
Exactly. It isn't hard to imagine why someone would prefer this stay private. What if a minor is using FitBit? What if it is being used by someone who lives in a repressive religious community? A prospective employer could check it out, and they wouldn't even have to use it to screen applicants: would you want your boss knowing how frequently you have sex, and how many calories you burn while doing it? Some might find it threatening, especially if that info is used to sexually harass an employee or co-worker. But all of this is moot. The real problem is the "totally open and public by default" attitude some social networking sites seem to feel is just fine.
Why can't we vote with regulation? We don't allow companies to dump massive amounts of toxic wastes into rivers, why do we allow them to dump toxic code into their products? Plus you don't always have a vote. Take Verizon for example. They screw their customers over regularly (charges for going over your allotted minutes, axing unlimited internet to get the same scam going for internet access, high text charges, random monthly fees (like the bogus "tax-recovery" fee they still charge). But when the competition is doing the same thing, and the competition lacks the one essential feature of a carrier (reception), you are stuck. In Sony's case there is robust competition for gaming, (though they have a tight grip on blu-ray). But even with gaming, what do we do when Nintendo (which has already shown its true colors with some of their licensing craziness for the ds) and Microsoft inevitably join Sony in making the same kinds of decisions? Better yet, do we trust Microsoft and Nintendo not to? At that point "voting with our dollars" becomes a fantasy, a weak "the market will fix it" dream that will never come true.
(Accidentally posted this whilst not logged in).
Precisely.
You can still benefit from the Ubuntu forums (when users are able/inclined to answer questions) while using Mint. Really any distro with gnome classic, kde, or xfce slapped on will do. Mint has the Software Center which is a lot like the app store, and a great way to discover new open source programs. It also has amazing hardware support (except for webcam - which is terrible). The only problem with Mint is the spammy, ugly* search page they've hacked into web browsers by default (but a knowledgeable user can remove this).
*If they'd at least style it to look and function just like google's search page, I doubt anyone would mind or notice.
Not at all. I wish I still had mod points to mod you up. We already put a range of materials in socks, shoes, and other clothing. Some are touted as anti-fungal, others have a blanket "anti-microbial" label. I wonder what the long term effects might be...
I can counter your right wing sources with left wing ones:
http://thinkprogress.org/politics/2011/03/27/153179/report-from-poll-taxes-to-voter-id-laws-a-short-history-of-conservative-voter-suppression/
http://www.prwatch.org/news/2011/05/10711/voter-suppression-bills-sweep-country
http://motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2011/06/voter-fraud-or-voter-suppression
http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/10/15/voter_suppression
While I do think there is some voter fraud in the modern era, and would point to Florida in the 2000 election and Ohio in 2004, it is often twisted and blown out of proportion to fuel a hysteria that we need to make it harder to vote. So we end up with laws that make it harder to vote for those who vote Democratic. I find it hard to believe that is an accident.
What we need is a way to verify votes that does not end up constituting an effective poll tax, and keeping people who have a right to vote from the polls. I wonder if any slashdot readers have any suggestions? I'd be quite hopeful on that account, some rather clever people read this site and have left encouraging comments on past articles about voting.
Maybe a liberal* utopia where the punishment follows, rather than precedes, the guilty verdict? But some people are just old fashioned that way I guess. Pre 9/11 mentality. (That being said, if it was done after he was found guilty, a punishment like this seems far more just than having a child serve a sentence or have his parents burdened with a hefty fine. Even better, have the kid meet the people he stole from. Nothing changes perspective like removing the "otherness".)
*Sadly, maybe that is a liberal utopia. Conservatives and Liberals really should be united on stuff like that.
The parent isn't stupid. AZ is doing everything they can to make life unpleasant for anyone who even speaks spanish, never mind is an immigrant from south america. Your response is essentially the "but I have a black friend" defense. Oh so you have a supervisor who is Mexican and he supports it? Even if that is true, why should we care? Would it justify prop 8 if a gay guy supported it?
The bill is racist and furthers the police state mentality that is seeing our basic rights abandoned in a race to the bottom.
I thought Pajiba nailed it.
I guess its our doom to be treated to an annual "end of books" prediction, alongside "the year of linux on the desktop", "the year desktops go away and everyone gets an ipad", "the year ipads go away and everyone gets a specific e-device for every task they used desktops for in ancient times", etc. At least this prediction has the tact to place itself out "a few generations", alongside flying cars and the end of disease.
We'd hope the Chinese government would dare allow citizens to speak their minds, protest, and vote freely without fear of being sent to a labor camp, tortured, or held indefinitely as a political dissident.
This sounds more like opinion polling anyway, and yes there is polling in the US. It is just as binding (aka not at all). The biggest difference seems to be the scale.
The final nail in the coffin is the phrase "doing lip service or useless political arguments". Democracy is chaotic, and those arguments - whether one finds them useful is itself political - are at the center of being a truly democratic state.
I'm not saying the US is perfect, it is deeply, deeply flawed (look at the role of money in elections just as a start), but we don't jail members of the opposition parties as a matter of policy, censor the internet for purely political content, or crack down violently on peaceful religious organizations.
Its completely different. You are talking about a sales tax (not sure why you added in rants about the legitimacy of government and how they handle what they collect). What is in question is undeclared income. Frankly what's surprising to me is simply the scale. They seem to be going after the small fry while corporations appear to get away (even more surprisingly, legally!) with paying little or no taxes (which is being hotly debated currently, and played a role in some of the protests against austerity measures. After all its a bit annoying when the government claims they need to make cuts to core services while corporations escape paying their fair share).
ps I do agree in the US it would be wonderful to see a shift to a better personal and corporate tax structure replacing the sales tax, for a host of reasons. Not least of which is the impact on a consumer-driven economy.
localhost$shadowtubez start
==Welcome to ShadowTubez==
Fight the Power, with the help of the USA!
(Connecting to shadowtubez.us.gov to establish freedom fighter credentials...)
Doh!
Ah of course, the original article I linked to is talking about ionizing radiation. Therefore I must be entirely wrong, and need to go back to school. You clearly win, and with such humility and class. Meanwhile I'm sure there's no issue at all with non ionizing radiation. Keep dreaming.
If Wednesday's post doesn't secure angel funding I've lost faith in America.
Before dismissing my question by attempting to act like a frustrated school teacher, perhaps you ought to consider the merits of my argument. Simply saying "mobile phone radiation is non ionizing you noob" misses the point entirely: That non ionizing radiation can have a cumulative negative impact on health. You fail.
WIN. The company blog will just write itself.
How is this marked insightful? You want a good job, you find a good worker and pay them well. You want an excellent job, you find a great worker and pay then exceptionally well. It sounds insightful, doesn't it? But is it actually based on anything tangible/testable?
The only difference between a contractor and an employee is compensation. Contractors typically make more, employees typically have more benefits (though these rarely add up to the same net value as the difference in compensation). A contractor is financially incentivized to work longer hours, and a salaried employee less hours. When companies hire someone on full time, there's an illusion of stability that goes along with that, but in this economy who is fooled by that anymore? It just comes down to money.
If you want loyalty, make sure however you compensate your employees beats the market, you provide them with a great working environment, and work hard to mitigate job related stress. If you can't bring yourself to do that and still want loyalty, use a quote like the parent's and see if anyone buys your bs. Or get a puppy.