4) If you want me to check my work e-mail from home (or while away from home), give me a company-issued laptop, blackberry or some other device that I can take home with me for checking my work e-mail.
I'm not sure about PII, but HIPAA would mandate that you not use e-mail to transfer any patient information. If you are dealing with HIPAA protected information via e-mail, you're already in violation of HIPAA regardless of any encryption or lack thereof. I work for a health care organization in the Northeast and we can't even even say "your appointment was approved" via e-mail because that's HIPAA protected information. (We tell users that appointment requests have been "processed" and then require them to log into a secure site to see if "processed" means approved or denied.)
So this hypothetical replacement employee has $2,000 lying around to buy a new computer but doesn't have enough money to feed himself/his family? Something tells me that, had I only $2,000 left in my bank account, I'd use it for food before using it to buy a computer.
Gopher was my first real introduction to the Internet. I remember browsing it in my college's computer lab going from link to link until I came upon one that said "Middle East." I suddenly wondered if clicking it would mean long distance fees would be charged to my college so I didn't click. That reluctance faded away as I learned that, no, long distance fees were nonexistent online (unless you dialed in to a modem a long ways away and then the fees came from your phone company, not your ISP).
Coincidentally, my father brought up the same "long distance" worry a few years later as I downloaded some freeware from a mirror far from our physical location. I had to explain the concept to him (also had to explain how nobody "owned" the Internet as he was convinced that there had to be one "owner" who let us use it all).
Now, of course, the Internet has had a hand in making long distance fees a thing of the past. After all, if you can chat online with someone halfway around the world for free or place a VoIP call to them without a long distance fee, why would you want to pay your local phone company an exorbitant sum just because that person doesn't live in your local zip code?
It really is depressing. People tend to be very short sighted when their taxes are at stake. They see any increase as a fate worse than death and will fight against it vehemently. Then they wonder why the US is dropping so far behind in education.
Better yet, let your child know that the toys that come in McDonald's and other fast food restaurants are cheaply made garbage and they'd be better off saving up for the much better (though perhaps more expensive than a Happy Meal) toys in Target, Toys R Us, etc. Add in about how the food is awful for you (ok, for once in awhile but you shouldn't make it a habit) and you'll steer them towards good choices both in toy selection and (more importantly) food selection.
1. The garbage food is cheap and the fresh food is pricey. Both to buy and prepare. You can buy a few thousand chicken nuggets (now with 10% actual chicken!) and toss them in an oven for a few minutes or you can carve up actual raw chicken (buy knives), season it (don't forget to buy seasoning), and bake it (watch to make sure it doesn't burn).
2. USDA guidelines are completely FUBAR-ed. Jamie served a dish with 3 different veggies in it and was criticized for not having enough veggies according to USDA guidelines. Meanwhile, the "normal school food" line was ok because French Fries counted as 2 veggies. Yes, fresh cut up veggies aren't enough but fry up a few things that used to be potatoes and you're good to go. Also, they were letting kids drink chocolate and strawberry milk with a ton of sugar in it and justifying that by saying "all that extra sugar makes them drink the milk so they get calcium." I guess they'll need those strong bones when they get diabetic.
In some ways, his approach was doomed to fail. It's a chicken and egg scenario. You need support from the schools to change the rules, but the schools need to follow the rules which are set up to prevent them from being changed. Also, you need more money to flow into the schools but people will vote down any tax increase to fund the increase. So the schools wind up serving junk, the kids wind up fat and with tons of health problems (costing us all money via health care costs), the politicians make a few "purely for show" changes that do nothing in the end and parents wonder why things are getting worse.
Incidentally, this is one reason why my son brings in his lunch every day to school. He might not eat 100% healthy food at all times, but I can steer him towards healthier alternatives instead of making his options "pizza or chicken nuggets" every day.
Isn't the Vatican one of the more reasonable major religions when it comes to science and technology? Obviously, you can't expect any religious group to completely dismiss any role for God to play (if they did they wouldn't be a religion), but they've gone on record saying that Evolution is correct.
It's the folks that read a few Bible verses and then take them as the 100% literal History Of The World that really oppose all things science (as opposed to being a book that man needs to interpret).
Fletcher: Your honor, I object! Judge: Why? Fletcher: Because it's devastating to my case! Judge: Overruled. Fletcher: Good call!
Only with SCO it runs like so:
SCO: Your honor, I demand you transfer the UNIX copyrights to us! Judge: Why? SCO: Because not having them is devastating to our case!
Unfortunately, while an "Overruled" is likely, a "Good call" response isn't. They'll just find some other ridiculous thing to sue under or some other method to drag this case out for another year or three.
Easy workaround. Police office comes up to you and asks you to put your hands in the air. You politely ask why. Officer at that point places you under arrest for "obstructing justice" and demands your papers. If you don't comply, you are also "resisting arrest."* If your papers show you are legit, the officer will "generously" let you off with a warning about doing what police tell you to do. If you don't have your papers on you, you're taking a trip to the police station. (NOTE: I'm not saying I support this. Just that the "stop random person on the street" thing is easy to get around.)
*Sure, the "obstructing justice" or "resisting arrest" charges won't stick, but all that matters is that the officer now has a reason to ask for papers.
Kyle: "Hey look, it's our new friend [OBVIOUS VOICEOVER IN COMPLETELY DIFFERENT VOICE]BILL[/VOICEOVER]." New Kid: "Hey Guys." Stan: "Hey, [VOICEOVER]BILL[/VOICEOVER]. Say, [VOICEOVER]BILL[/VOICEOVER], how do you spell your name?" New Kid: "[VOICEOVER]B - I - L - L[EXTREMELY LONG PAUSE WHILE CHARACTER'S LIPS MOVE/][/VOICEOVER]" Cartman: "Is it true that you're religion is [VOICEOVER]SOMETHING WE WON'T EVER MAKE FUN OF FOR FEAR OF VIOLENT REPRISAL[/VOICEOVER]?" (Cartman freezes in place while the voiceover catches up to the real show.) New Kid: "Yes. I am a [VOICEOVER]NICE GUY[/VOICEOVER]."
"Death to all Juice?" Isn't that a bit extreme? I mean, I might not like vegetable juice that much and pineapple juice just doesn't work for me, but apple juice isn't too bad. Neither is orange juice provided there's no pulp... But, god help you if you bring me orange juice with pulp!!!!
The Torah in Judaism is taken as the literal word of God and governs every aspect of a religious Jew's life, from what he eats to how he relates to other people, etc. Yet, the Jews don't have a (recent) history of not being able to fit following their laws in with society at large. That's because Judaism also has a tradition of man being able to interpret "God's laws." If the Torah says "ABC", rabbis can and do study those verses and give reasons why they think it should be interpreted as meaning this or that. They debate it and some follow one interpretation and others follow another interpretation. (Thus the old joke that a Jew stranded on a dessert island builds 2 Temples. One he prays in and one he wouldn't go to if you paid him!) While one rabbi might say the other rabbi is mistaken and doing it wrong, he wouldn't call for that rabbi's death.
A system like this allows rules incompatible with modern life (sacrifices, slavery, stoning for "disrespecting your parents", etc) to be pushed to the side while allowing other laws to adapt to new technological innovations (e.g. is it ok to turn on electrical devices on Shabbat).
It seems like Islam really needs a tradition like Judaism has. They need for Imams to be able to declare formally "this is what this text means" and then peacefully let the people flow one way or another. The sooner they develop something like that, the better for everyone.
Who defines "effective?" I guarantee that it won't be you or me. It'll be the media companies. It won't matter how useless the measure really is, they'll push the courts to rule that that it is effective. It'll be circular reasoning. You can't legally use the tool to break it because the encryption's effective. It is effective because there's no legal tool to break it.
In the entertainment industry's fondest dreams, it doesn't matter if you consume the media or pirate the media or ignore it all-together. You would be charged a "piracy tax" to cover the possibility of you consuming the media in a way the industry hasn't expressly approved. (The funds would go to those poor artists - after the industry takes their cut, of course.) Your freedom to choose electronic devices to use would be limited because some of those devices might, possibly offer avenues for piracy. You would be constantly monitored just in case you even thought about pirating anything. Etc, etc, etc.
So you could cut yourself off from Big Media entirely and still have your life (and wallet) impacted by what they're doing.
Combine this with something like Project Natal so that the window could track the person and update the display depending on where they were and you'd have a near-perfect virtual window. Of course, I don't know how it would handle showing multiple people different views. Still, given some more refinement, you could have a frame that you hang on the wall that includes a screen, tracking hardware, and a specially designed computer to display the videos, etc. Design it right and you could extend it for other uses. Maybe it shows a virtual aquarium until a remote it picked up. Then a display comes up that lets you switch to TV mode (to watch live or recorded shows), Internet Mode (for browsing the web), etc.
I think there are better reasons for us not being able to find alien radio signals than "they're all playing video games." Any alien civilization out there could be undetectable by us for a number of reasons:
1. We've only been listening for alien signals for 40 years. That's not even a blip in the cosmic scale. It's sort of like being in the middle of a giant warehouse, taking two steps forward and declaring that your intensive searching has revealed no "outside world." Perhaps we need to wait a few more decades, centuries, or millennium for the signals to reach us.
2. Perhaps the signals have already passed us. Maybe, sometime during the building of the pyramids, radio signals from an alien world were passing by us. The humans of the time would have had no way of knowing that proof of alien life was right in front of them. By the time SETI began searching for life, the alien signals stopped either due to the civilization dying out or due to the aliens moving on to technology that "leaked" less. We've used radio for a little over a century and are already switching to technologies that don't involve tossing unencrypted signals in the air all over the place. Perhaps there's only a 1 or 2 century window from when a civilization first uses radio to when they move to a different, more undetectable, technology.
3. Perhaps we've seen it but didn't recognize it. Who says that we'd actually recognize an alien signal. If I gave you some network monitoring tools and sent a few hundred streams of data down the pipe, most of which was random but one of which was encoded information, would you be able to tell the random from the information? Even if you didn't know the encoding scheme or what kind of information you were dealing with? I'd bet that it would be tough to do and that's dealing with human-created encryption schemes. Add an alien intelligence to the mix and the difficulty would skyrocket.
4. Maybe we haven't looked in the right place. The universe is huge and we've only searched tiny fragments. Going back to #1's warehouse analogy, it'd be like searching a giant warehouse, opening one box and declaring the item to not be in the warehouse because it wasn't in the first box you opened.
Any of these could easily be the reason why we haven't found intelligent alien life yet and are more likely than "the aliens are playing video games."
I think that the importance of a single tweet varies depending on who is sending it and who is reading it. If I tweet/twitpic about some activity my children are doing, you might think a giant yawn is being generous. Meanwhile, however, a family member or friend reading it might be genuinely interested in that information. To give another example, if @grantimahara tweets about an upcoming episode of Mythbusters, you are a fan of that show, you'd likely find it very interesting. However, someone else who has no interest in the show would find it boring.
All that being said, of course, I don't think the amount of people who find "I'm in the potty" tweets interesting is very large. (Not that I've ever seen one of these, mind you.)
You'll get no argument from me that banks and credit agencies should care more. I also agree that there is too much of a burden on the victim to fix everything and prove every step of the way that they weren't the ones who opened the credit lines. However, I don't think it's so much a "you're at fault for having your ID stolen" attitude but a general "it's someone else's fault, not ours." They reason that since the actual data theft might have occurred elsewhere (a government agency, doctor's office, insurance company, your HR department, etc) that it's not their fault. They act like it isn't their problem. Unfortunately, I don't see this attitude changing anytime soon.
Everything else aside for the moment, how did Kevin Trudeau think that flooding the judges private inbox with spam would get the judge to rule in his favor? If anything, I'd think it'd influence the judge to rule against him. Next up, Kevin tries to get out of a reckless driving ticket by running over the judges foot.
Firstly, they haven't stolen your identity, they have copied some information relating to you. It could be that to do so they have done something illegal (data protection, etc), but you have still not lost anything.
In my case, I was lucky. I caught the ID Theft early and took preventative measures to ensure it won't happen again. Other people aren't so lucky though. Some have thousands rung up under their name and only find out when collections agencies (who don't care that you're not the one who bought a boat in Florida a day after you opened a charge account in California) come knocking. These people can find themselves having to spend a lot of time and money to clear up the mess. That's time and money they don't get back, so yes, they've lost something quite substantial. In addition, until it is cleaned up, their credit might be ruined so they won't be able to buy a car, house, etc when they otherwise would have been able to.
Still others find themselves as criminal suspects because some crook somewhere gave a stolen identity to the police. He hasn't updated in over 2 years, and hopefully that's because he's cleared it all up finally, but I'd read through what happened to Todd Fennell over at http://g27radio.blogspot.com/index.html . I'd say he lost something very important (job, home, life pre-ID Theft, money, time, friends, etc).
This isn't like simply copying a file and saying "well, that file's still on your hard drive too." The data can be used to ruin lives and when it is used like that the victims have lost something big.
Speaking of frozen accounts, that's how we solved our ID Theft problem. We contacted the three major credit agencies and put a freeze on our accounts. This means that no new credit lines can be opened in our names. If we want to open a new credit line (to get a new car, for example), we contact the credit companies, put a temporary thaw on the accounts and then open the new credit line. It's a pain in the rear to deal with, but much less of a pain than getting a knock on the door from collection agencies asking about those thousands in charges you ran up all over the country.
Well, ID Theft is a subset of fraud. Not all fraud involves ID theft (claiming your store burned down by accident and collecting the insurance money as you hide the gas cans and matches, for example). So saying "ID Theft" instead of "Fraud" does serve a purpose as it indicates that a person's private information (e.g. SSN) was used in the fraudulent activity.
Plus, there's the case of people stealing personal information and selling it to other people. Suppose Thief A obtains my Name, SSN and DOB and sells it to Thief B who opens a credit card in my name. Thief B clearly committed fraud using my stolen information. However, Thief A didn't commit fraud. He did, however, steal my identity/personal information and sell it to someone else. That should be illegal.
I had someone open a credit card in my name. They knew my name, address, date of birth and social security number. What they didn't know, however, was my mother's maiden name. However, the credit card company (*cough* Capital One *cough*) ignored this and let them get a credit card in my name via an online form. Then they immediately changed the address to another address in another state halfway across the country. Then they called up and asked for a $5,000 cash advance before the card was even activated. None of these set off red flags apparently.
The only reason it was caught was that the thieves tried to get the card quickly and so paid for "rush delivery." The card was sent out before the address change went through and it wound up at my door. When I called up, the credit card company first gave me the runaround insinuating that perhaps my wife did it. (Neither of us would ever open a credit card without consulting the other. Much less open an account in the other person's name and then try to get a $5,000 advance.) Then they claimed that they couldn't give me any information because (and this is a nearly direct quote) they'd be "liable if I went out and shot the person." Yes, they were now insinuating that I'd commit murder and then *they* would be sued.
Fine, I had the police call them. But they gave the police the runaround also. They insisted the police call a special "police" number, but apparently only an answering machine staffs that number and nobody returns calls from it.
Basically, the credit card company doesn't care *who* they give a card to because they can write off the fraud and will wind up making a profit either way. Fraudulent charges that consumers pay mean credit card company profits. Fraudulent charges that consumers don't pay are charged back to the merchants for no real loss (to the credit card company, the merchant's out the merchandise). In the end, they don't give a rat's posterior about messed up consumer credit or store losses due to fraud/ID theft. They're making a tidy profit and that's all that matters.
Having dealt with identity theft and the police, I think it'd go more like this:
Person A says to cops: "I received spam. Here is copy." Cop says it might not be their jurisdiction and there might not be much they can do about it, but they'll look into it. A month passes and Person A calls the cops to see what progress has been made. Cops reply that they've assigned an officer to the case, but he's got a lot of other cases and he'll get back to Person A. Repeat the last 2 steps until Person A gives up and drops the matter.
Do you really think the police will pursue every spam case that comes their way? A single piece of spam, annoying as it is, is a low-impact event. You get it and delete it and have lost a second or two at maximum. Many departments will simply ignore issues that don't "cost" the person a certain amount (either money, property or life). Their resources are limited and so they need to be careful in what they select to go after. It's sad, but true.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd add:
4) If you want me to check my work e-mail from home (or while away from home), give me a company-issued laptop, blackberry or some other device that I can take home with me for checking my work e-mail.
I'm not sure about PII, but HIPAA would mandate that you not use e-mail to transfer any patient information. If you are dealing with HIPAA protected information via e-mail, you're already in violation of HIPAA regardless of any encryption or lack thereof. I work for a health care organization in the Northeast and we can't even even say "your appointment was approved" via e-mail because that's HIPAA protected information. (We tell users that appointment requests have been "processed" and then require them to log into a secure site to see if "processed" means approved or denied.)
So this hypothetical replacement employee has $2,000 lying around to buy a new computer but doesn't have enough money to feed himself/his family? Something tells me that, had I only $2,000 left in my bank account, I'd use it for food before using it to buy a computer.
Gopher was my first real introduction to the Internet. I remember browsing it in my college's computer lab going from link to link until I came upon one that said "Middle East." I suddenly wondered if clicking it would mean long distance fees would be charged to my college so I didn't click. That reluctance faded away as I learned that, no, long distance fees were nonexistent online (unless you dialed in to a modem a long ways away and then the fees came from your phone company, not your ISP).
Coincidentally, my father brought up the same "long distance" worry a few years later as I downloaded some freeware from a mirror far from our physical location. I had to explain the concept to him (also had to explain how nobody "owned" the Internet as he was convinced that there had to be one "owner" who let us use it all).
Now, of course, the Internet has had a hand in making long distance fees a thing of the past. After all, if you can chat online with someone halfway around the world for free or place a VoIP call to them without a long distance fee, why would you want to pay your local phone company an exorbitant sum just because that person doesn't live in your local zip code?
It really is depressing. People tend to be very short sighted when their taxes are at stake. They see any increase as a fate worse than death and will fight against it vehemently. Then they wonder why the US is dropping so far behind in education.
Better yet, let your child know that the toys that come in McDonald's and other fast food restaurants are cheaply made garbage and they'd be better off saving up for the much better (though perhaps more expensive than a Happy Meal) toys in Target, Toys R Us, etc. Add in about how the food is awful for you (ok, for once in awhile but you shouldn't make it a habit) and you'll steer them towards good choices both in toy selection and (more importantly) food selection.
More like he failed because:
1. The garbage food is cheap and the fresh food is pricey. Both to buy and prepare. You can buy a few thousand chicken nuggets (now with 10% actual chicken!) and toss them in an oven for a few minutes or you can carve up actual raw chicken (buy knives), season it (don't forget to buy seasoning), and bake it (watch to make sure it doesn't burn).
2. USDA guidelines are completely FUBAR-ed. Jamie served a dish with 3 different veggies in it and was criticized for not having enough veggies according to USDA guidelines. Meanwhile, the "normal school food" line was ok because French Fries counted as 2 veggies. Yes, fresh cut up veggies aren't enough but fry up a few things that used to be potatoes and you're good to go. Also, they were letting kids drink chocolate and strawberry milk with a ton of sugar in it and justifying that by saying "all that extra sugar makes them drink the milk so they get calcium." I guess they'll need those strong bones when they get diabetic.
In some ways, his approach was doomed to fail. It's a chicken and egg scenario. You need support from the schools to change the rules, but the schools need to follow the rules which are set up to prevent them from being changed. Also, you need more money to flow into the schools but people will vote down any tax increase to fund the increase. So the schools wind up serving junk, the kids wind up fat and with tons of health problems (costing us all money via health care costs), the politicians make a few "purely for show" changes that do nothing in the end and parents wonder why things are getting worse.
Incidentally, this is one reason why my son brings in his lunch every day to school. He might not eat 100% healthy food at all times, but I can steer him towards healthier alternatives instead of making his options "pizza or chicken nuggets" every day.
Isn't the Vatican one of the more reasonable major religions when it comes to science and technology? Obviously, you can't expect any religious group to completely dismiss any role for God to play (if they did they wouldn't be a religion), but they've gone on record saying that Evolution is correct.
It's the folks that read a few Bible verses and then take them as the 100% literal History Of The World that really oppose all things science (as opposed to being a book that man needs to interpret).
Why am I reminded of a scene from Liar Liar:
Only with SCO it runs like so:
Unfortunately, while an "Overruled" is likely, a "Good call" response isn't. They'll just find some other ridiculous thing to sue under or some other method to drag this case out for another year or three.
Easy workaround. Police office comes up to you and asks you to put your hands in the air. You politely ask why. Officer at that point places you under arrest for "obstructing justice" and demands your papers. If you don't comply, you are also "resisting arrest."* If your papers show you are legit, the officer will "generously" let you off with a warning about doing what police tell you to do. If you don't have your papers on you, you're taking a trip to the police station. (NOTE: I'm not saying I support this. Just that the "stop random person on the street" thing is easy to get around.)
*Sure, the "obstructing justice" or "resisting arrest" charges won't stick, but all that matters is that the officer now has a reason to ask for papers.
Kyle: "Hey look, it's our new friend [OBVIOUS VOICEOVER IN COMPLETELY DIFFERENT VOICE]BILL[/VOICEOVER]." /][/VOICEOVER]"
New Kid: "Hey Guys."
Stan: "Hey, [VOICEOVER]BILL[/VOICEOVER]. Say, [VOICEOVER]BILL[/VOICEOVER], how do you spell your name?"
New Kid: "[VOICEOVER]B - I - L - L[EXTREMELY LONG PAUSE WHILE CHARACTER'S LIPS MOVE
Cartman: "Is it true that you're religion is [VOICEOVER]SOMETHING WE WON'T EVER MAKE FUN OF FOR FEAR OF VIOLENT REPRISAL[/VOICEOVER]?" (Cartman freezes in place while the voiceover catches up to the real show.)
New Kid: "Yes. I am a [VOICEOVER]NICE GUY[/VOICEOVER]."
End scene.
"Death to all Juice?" Isn't that a bit extreme? I mean, I might not like vegetable juice that much and pineapple juice just doesn't work for me, but apple juice isn't too bad. Neither is orange juice provided there's no pulp... But, god help you if you bring me orange juice with pulp!!!!
The Torah in Judaism is taken as the literal word of God and governs every aspect of a religious Jew's life, from what he eats to how he relates to other people, etc. Yet, the Jews don't have a (recent) history of not being able to fit following their laws in with society at large. That's because Judaism also has a tradition of man being able to interpret "God's laws." If the Torah says "ABC", rabbis can and do study those verses and give reasons why they think it should be interpreted as meaning this or that. They debate it and some follow one interpretation and others follow another interpretation. (Thus the old joke that a Jew stranded on a dessert island builds 2 Temples. One he prays in and one he wouldn't go to if you paid him!) While one rabbi might say the other rabbi is mistaken and doing it wrong, he wouldn't call for that rabbi's death.
A system like this allows rules incompatible with modern life (sacrifices, slavery, stoning for "disrespecting your parents", etc) to be pushed to the side while allowing other laws to adapt to new technological innovations (e.g. is it ok to turn on electrical devices on Shabbat).
It seems like Islam really needs a tradition like Judaism has. They need for Imams to be able to declare formally "this is what this text means" and then peacefully let the people flow one way or another. The sooner they develop something like that, the better for everyone.
Who defines "effective?" I guarantee that it won't be you or me. It'll be the media companies. It won't matter how useless the measure really is, they'll push the courts to rule that that it is effective. It'll be circular reasoning. You can't legally use the tool to break it because the encryption's effective. It is effective because there's no legal tool to break it.
In the entertainment industry's fondest dreams, it doesn't matter if you consume the media or pirate the media or ignore it all-together. You would be charged a "piracy tax" to cover the possibility of you consuming the media in a way the industry hasn't expressly approved. (The funds would go to those poor artists - after the industry takes their cut, of course.) Your freedom to choose electronic devices to use would be limited because some of those devices might, possibly offer avenues for piracy. You would be constantly monitored just in case you even thought about pirating anything. Etc, etc, etc.
So you could cut yourself off from Big Media entirely and still have your life (and wallet) impacted by what they're doing.
Combine this with something like Project Natal so that the window could track the person and update the display depending on where they were and you'd have a near-perfect virtual window. Of course, I don't know how it would handle showing multiple people different views. Still, given some more refinement, you could have a frame that you hang on the wall that includes a screen, tracking hardware, and a specially designed computer to display the videos, etc. Design it right and you could extend it for other uses. Maybe it shows a virtual aquarium until a remote it picked up. Then a display comes up that lets you switch to TV mode (to watch live or recorded shows), Internet Mode (for browsing the web), etc.
I think there are better reasons for us not being able to find alien radio signals than "they're all playing video games." Any alien civilization out there could be undetectable by us for a number of reasons:
1. We've only been listening for alien signals for 40 years. That's not even a blip in the cosmic scale. It's sort of like being in the middle of a giant warehouse, taking two steps forward and declaring that your intensive searching has revealed no "outside world." Perhaps we need to wait a few more decades, centuries, or millennium for the signals to reach us.
2. Perhaps the signals have already passed us. Maybe, sometime during the building of the pyramids, radio signals from an alien world were passing by us. The humans of the time would have had no way of knowing that proof of alien life was right in front of them. By the time SETI began searching for life, the alien signals stopped either due to the civilization dying out or due to the aliens moving on to technology that "leaked" less. We've used radio for a little over a century and are already switching to technologies that don't involve tossing unencrypted signals in the air all over the place. Perhaps there's only a 1 or 2 century window from when a civilization first uses radio to when they move to a different, more undetectable, technology.
3. Perhaps we've seen it but didn't recognize it. Who says that we'd actually recognize an alien signal. If I gave you some network monitoring tools and sent a few hundred streams of data down the pipe, most of which was random but one of which was encoded information, would you be able to tell the random from the information? Even if you didn't know the encoding scheme or what kind of information you were dealing with? I'd bet that it would be tough to do and that's dealing with human-created encryption schemes. Add an alien intelligence to the mix and the difficulty would skyrocket.
4. Maybe we haven't looked in the right place. The universe is huge and we've only searched tiny fragments. Going back to #1's warehouse analogy, it'd be like searching a giant warehouse, opening one box and declaring the item to not be in the warehouse because it wasn't in the first box you opened.
Any of these could easily be the reason why we haven't found intelligent alien life yet and are more likely than "the aliens are playing video games."
I think that the importance of a single tweet varies depending on who is sending it and who is reading it. If I tweet/twitpic about some activity my children are doing, you might think a giant yawn is being generous. Meanwhile, however, a family member or friend reading it might be genuinely interested in that information. To give another example, if @grantimahara tweets about an upcoming episode of Mythbusters, you are a fan of that show, you'd likely find it very interesting. However, someone else who has no interest in the show would find it boring.
All that being said, of course, I don't think the amount of people who find "I'm in the potty" tweets interesting is very large. (Not that I've ever seen one of these, mind you.)
You'll get no argument from me that banks and credit agencies should care more. I also agree that there is too much of a burden on the victim to fix everything and prove every step of the way that they weren't the ones who opened the credit lines. However, I don't think it's so much a "you're at fault for having your ID stolen" attitude but a general "it's someone else's fault, not ours." They reason that since the actual data theft might have occurred elsewhere (a government agency, doctor's office, insurance company, your HR department, etc) that it's not their fault. They act like it isn't their problem. Unfortunately, I don't see this attitude changing anytime soon.
Everything else aside for the moment, how did Kevin Trudeau think that flooding the judges private inbox with spam would get the judge to rule in his favor? If anything, I'd think it'd influence the judge to rule against him. Next up, Kevin tries to get out of a reckless driving ticket by running over the judges foot.
In my case, I was lucky. I caught the ID Theft early and took preventative measures to ensure it won't happen again. Other people aren't so lucky though. Some have thousands rung up under their name and only find out when collections agencies (who don't care that you're not the one who bought a boat in Florida a day after you opened a charge account in California) come knocking. These people can find themselves having to spend a lot of time and money to clear up the mess. That's time and money they don't get back, so yes, they've lost something quite substantial. In addition, until it is cleaned up, their credit might be ruined so they won't be able to buy a car, house, etc when they otherwise would have been able to.
Still others find themselves as criminal suspects because some crook somewhere gave a stolen identity to the police. He hasn't updated in over 2 years, and hopefully that's because he's cleared it all up finally, but I'd read through what happened to Todd Fennell over at http://g27radio.blogspot.com/index.html . I'd say he lost something very important (job, home, life pre-ID Theft, money, time, friends, etc).
This isn't like simply copying a file and saying "well, that file's still on your hard drive too." The data can be used to ruin lives and when it is used like that the victims have lost something big.
Speaking of frozen accounts, that's how we solved our ID Theft problem. We contacted the three major credit agencies and put a freeze on our accounts. This means that no new credit lines can be opened in our names. If we want to open a new credit line (to get a new car, for example), we contact the credit companies, put a temporary thaw on the accounts and then open the new credit line. It's a pain in the rear to deal with, but much less of a pain than getting a knock on the door from collection agencies asking about those thousands in charges you ran up all over the country.
Well, ID Theft is a subset of fraud. Not all fraud involves ID theft (claiming your store burned down by accident and collecting the insurance money as you hide the gas cans and matches, for example). So saying "ID Theft" instead of "Fraud" does serve a purpose as it indicates that a person's private information (e.g. SSN) was used in the fraudulent activity.
Plus, there's the case of people stealing personal information and selling it to other people. Suppose Thief A obtains my Name, SSN and DOB and sells it to Thief B who opens a credit card in my name. Thief B clearly committed fraud using my stolen information. However, Thief A didn't commit fraud. He did, however, steal my identity/personal information and sell it to someone else. That should be illegal.
I had someone open a credit card in my name. They knew my name, address, date of birth and social security number. What they didn't know, however, was my mother's maiden name. However, the credit card company (*cough* Capital One *cough*) ignored this and let them get a credit card in my name via an online form. Then they immediately changed the address to another address in another state halfway across the country. Then they called up and asked for a $5,000 cash advance before the card was even activated. None of these set off red flags apparently.
The only reason it was caught was that the thieves tried to get the card quickly and so paid for "rush delivery." The card was sent out before the address change went through and it wound up at my door. When I called up, the credit card company first gave me the runaround insinuating that perhaps my wife did it. (Neither of us would ever open a credit card without consulting the other. Much less open an account in the other person's name and then try to get a $5,000 advance.) Then they claimed that they couldn't give me any information because (and this is a nearly direct quote) they'd be "liable if I went out and shot the person." Yes, they were now insinuating that I'd commit murder and then *they* would be sued.
Fine, I had the police call them. But they gave the police the runaround also. They insisted the police call a special "police" number, but apparently only an answering machine staffs that number and nobody returns calls from it.
Basically, the credit card company doesn't care *who* they give a card to because they can write off the fraud and will wind up making a profit either way. Fraudulent charges that consumers pay mean credit card company profits. Fraudulent charges that consumers don't pay are charged back to the merchants for no real loss (to the credit card company, the merchant's out the merchandise). In the end, they don't give a rat's posterior about messed up consumer credit or store losses due to fraud/ID theft. They're making a tidy profit and that's all that matters.
Having dealt with identity theft and the police, I think it'd go more like this:
Person A says to cops: "I received spam. Here is copy."
Cop says it might not be their jurisdiction and there might not be much they can do about it, but they'll look into it.
A month passes and Person A calls the cops to see what progress has been made.
Cops reply that they've assigned an officer to the case, but he's got a lot of other cases and he'll get back to Person A.
Repeat the last 2 steps until Person A gives up and drops the matter.
Do you really think the police will pursue every spam case that comes their way? A single piece of spam, annoying as it is, is a low-impact event. You get it and delete it and have lost a second or two at maximum. Many departments will simply ignore issues that don't "cost" the person a certain amount (either money, property or life). Their resources are limited and so they need to be careful in what they select to go after. It's sad, but true.