Your mistake was not to do explicit capital allocation in your portfolio to that Apple stock. Basically, you should have explicitly planned to keep your Apple stake within a certain size; either an absolute size ("I will hold no more than $10,000 on AAPL at any one time") or as a percentage of your portfolio ("I will hold no more than 5% of my portfolio on AAPL"). Then, when the stock skyrocketed, you should have sold shares to account for the excess value of your holding relative to your planned cap.
Anyway, AAPL closed at 85.33 today. If you paid $50 for it, that's a 70% total return. Looking at the stock prices chart, AAPL was around that level at the following times: Sep. 2005 and Jul. 2006. In the former case, that's about a 17.41% annualized return; in the latter, it's about 23.84%. You haven't done badly in any sense. Just do make sure that you set a good rule for when to sell, and follow it strictly and mechanically.
The problem, as TFA itself says is that the non-Mediterranean routes would be through politically-unstable countries or regions, like eastern Turkey (site of a long-running conflict between the Kurdish minority and the government), Iraq, Iran, etc.
Ok, but let's just presume for the sake of argument that no one has a picture of your naked wife, and it's just Google with a picture of the outside of your house, latitude and longitude, and address with those pictures. They can also go down the street and see pictures of your neighbors houses in the same way. Is that an invasion of privacy, in and of itself?
I think you're too hung up on this concept of "invasion," which, in my opinion, is too closely linked to existing privacy law. I think the real questions should be: (a) what is privacy, and (b) how should the law protect people's privacy?
The way I see it, privacy is your ability to control what information other people can learn about you. Privacy is the law's recognition that people have a right to conceal various kinds of information about themselves from others, either because some people may find such information discreditable, or simply because the information would cause embarassment (though deep down I think the latter is just a special case of the first).
Of course, privacy has never meant that a person is allowed to conceal any facts about themselves. There has always been information about oneself which the law requires to be a matter of public record (e.g., your criminal record, or what real property you own); and also, one person's right to privacy has to be carefully balanced with other people's right to learn and disseminate facts about others. This stuff falls squarely in the intersection of law, ethics and sociology, and is insanely context-sensitive and subtle. For example, if you see my last name and try to find out whether I'm Mexican or some other Hispanic nationality, it can make a big difference whether you're a member of the Mexican-American Students Association trying to recruit people for your association, or somebody who's evaluating my job application. Basically, there are vague, ethical and legal rules of what information various people should be allowed to consider in which contexts, and what information they should not be allowed to consider.
But I digress. If privacy is about controlling what information others can learn about you, then we can see privacy in terms of these three components:
What information about you other people can obtain directly;
What information about you people can disseminate to others;
What information about you people can infer from other facts they know.
The idea of an "invasion" of privacy really boils down to acts that violate the rules for (1), and in some cases (2); somebody invades your privacy when they directly obtain a fact about you that they do not have the right to obtain (or example, when they take a picture of your naked wife inside your house, and give it to somebody else.) My argument is that our privacy laws have been built to deal with cases (1) and (2) there, because, historically, (2) was less of a problem than now (there was no Internet), and (3) wasn't really a problem (there were no computers!). So we need to come up with laws to regulate (3); which doesn't mean to forbid (3), but rather, to strike a balance between people's rights to conceal about themselves and to learn about others.
So, to answer your question: if an "invasion of privacy" means a violation of rules about (1) or (2), then no, I don't believe that Google is "invading" your privacy by taking and publishing a picture of what anybody who goes by my house can see. The thing that concerns me is that Google and other folks are working very actively on technologies that affect my privacy via route (3), and what kinds of laws we should have in other to protect people's privacy in that regard. Basically, I'm worried in general about cases where many individual pieces of information, licitly obtained and disseminated, allow somebody equipped with newer technology to infer facts about me and use them to make decisions that negatively impact me, in a way that is u
And in this hypothetical case, the risk was caused by a photo with GPS coordinates and a map. Street view was totally unnecessary to compound the privacy violation.
There were two hypothetical cases there, and this only holds true of one. The 4chan/b/tards started with a GPS-tagged photo, and managed to convert it to a street address (and driving directions). The potential employer started with a street address, and managed to convert it into a photo of a naked inhabitant. In the latter case, the web database that indexed locations to photos taken near that location was essential.
I'm not sure I understand why a picture of your house, taken from a public road, constitutes an invasion of privacy.
But that's the whole point: the picture of your house, taken from a public road, as one isolated token of information, does not posit much risk to your privacy at all. Tons of individual people in our society own cameras, and take photos in public places that depict other people's property, and everybody agrees that the owners of said property should not have a right in general to prevent others from taking such photos. The privacy laws we have are built to protect individuals' rights in that sort of isolated case.
The problem is when a corporation starts taking such photos systematically, aggregating them all together and correlating them with other systematic data sets. In that situation, a photo that just happens to contain your house is no longer just that; it's a piece of information that can be used to access many other pieces of information that may allow somebody to infer facts about you that you would rather prefer they couldn't.
Google Street View is only the start. Just wait for the day when digital cameras commonly include GPS units and automatically tag each photo with a precise location and time, which can then be cross-indexed with a geographical information system like Google Maps. I can imagine it already: your wife carelessly forgets to close the window shades one day when they're changing. A neighbor takes a photo of her naked, and posts it to 4chan. Thousands of folks copy the photo all over the web. The photo has GPS information in the EXIF tags. Creepy/b/tards start stalking your wife. You give a resume to a potential employer with your residential address in it; they look up the address in Google Maps, click on the link to show image search results taken nearby, and are treated to a naked picture of your wife.
That's an example where the photo in question is probably illegal to take, but other examples may be concocted where the picture, by itself, is fine. The point of the example isn't the photo; it's how the technologies that we have today for associating one item of information to others make it too easy for people to find out more about you than they should be able to.
To sum up, the privacy laws we have today are laws that were designed to protect people's privacy in yesterday's, pre-computer world. Because of this, they primarily address things like whether somebody had the right to take a given individual photo, and not whether somebody is empowering others to infer facts about you by correlating many individually innocuous items of information.
However, this information also falls under libel laws in cases which it false and harms the subject.
It may not have come across, but I was assuming that the information in question was true, and, taken on its own, largely trivial and harmless. I'm not thinking of a case where, for example, somebody says on their blog that you committed incest with your aunt. I'm thinking of cases like, for example, a hypothetical social networking application that allows people to list you as somebody they know, without requiring your authorization. An application like that would be just as much subject to the kind of analysis detailed in the article, which could easily uncover lots of information about people who never volunteered any of it.
It may be a stretch to call it this, but posting stories and pictures usually is a form or journalism, regardless the content and methodology of dissemination. Also, photographers need a release whenever the photo is not taken in a public area, or accessible from a public area of a person who does not consent. It is not a crime to fail to get a release, but a nice tort claim.
So, what's really the essential difference between these three acts?
Showing your friends, in person, a printed-out photo of some people at your party, and pointing out which of them is Joe Smith.
Uploading the photo to your Facebook page, and tagging it with Joe Smith's name.
Publishing a hard copy book or newsletter that shows the photo, and label the photo with Joe Smith's name.
The law was created to make a distinction between informal sharing and dissemination of the first sort, and "publication" of the third sort. You don't need any model release for #1, and the journalism or modeling arguments are largely irrelevant.
The problem here is that case #2 falls squarely between #1 and #2. Should it be subject to the law for informal sharing, the law for printed publications, or some new, yet-to-be-developed body of law? (And would the court system be able to handle the caseload that treating informal online sharing always as "publication" would imply? People share stuff informally all the time, and they increasingly do it online.)
Google, as long as they obey the law in terms of public/private property, they have full legal standing, and shouldn't be regulated.
"As long as Google obeys the current law, they're obeying the current law, and therefore, we shouldn't change the law."
Um, what? That's a transparently bad argument. This is an argument about whether the law should be changed. Whether Google is following the current law correctly is completely irrelevant. You can't defend againt an argument that the law is wrong by saying that the acts allowed by the law are allowed by the law!
Guess what: You have as much access to the same pictures as I do.
Transparently bad argument too. "It's ok if I have access to these photos that I shouldn't have access to, because you also do have access to them."
Also in the "what do you expect?" vein, you're putting lots of personal information on various websites that are publicly available worldwide. What kind of privacy are you expecting?
While that is a completely fair thing to point out, there is a very important thing that it misses: other people can put information about you online, without your permission, and that information is just as subject to analysis as what you put up.
The two best examples that come to mind right away:
Facebook allows users to tag photos with the names of the people who appear in them.
Google Street View puts photos of your residence without asking you for permission, and correlates it to a bunch of other stuff like geographic information, satellite images, yellow page listings, web search results, etc..
Notice that both of these acts are perfectly legal, and while the second arguably should be regulated and restricted by law (the aggregation, correlation and publication parts, not the picture-taking part), the first one ought not to.
This is a case where multiple pieces of information, that individually do not compromise one's privacy, can actually do so when aggregated and correlated together.
This sort of pattern is why something like Google Street View subverts the privacy laws that we have. Yes, a photo taken from a public location of things viewable from that location, by itself, does not violate privacy, and privacy law has been developed so that each individual photo that Google takes and publishes does not, on its own, violate anybody's privacy. What the law fails to capture is that putting a vast number of such photos together, correlating them with a geographical information system, yellow page listings, satellite imagery, internet search results, and offering it to the general public to use for free, without any restrictions of purpose, does massively violate privacy. So the standard response to privacy challenges to Street View ("the law allows you to take photos of any public place you want") just massively misses the point.
Some other people have given you decent answers, but I'll add another simple answer.
I apologize if this is a ridiculously simplistic question, but how do you have a LAN with IPv6? If I want to connect to my file server from my laptop now, I just use a local 192.x.x.x address now and it goes straight to my server. Is there something like that for IPv6 so that I don't have to go all the way out to the internet to get back to my file server?
I think this can be broken into three subquestions:
How do I assign IP addresses to computers in my LAN?
How I keep traffic between computers in my LAN inside the LAN?
How do I prevent unauthorized computers outside my LAN from connecting to computers into my LAN?
For the first question, there are two possible answers: (a) if your LAN is connected to the IPv6 internet, your ISP assigns your router an IPv6 address range, and your LAN clients autoconfigure themselves on startup with an IPv6 address in that range; (b) if your LAN is not so connected, then you need to pick one of the private address ranges that another poster mentioned, and have your LAN clients use that.
The second question boils down to how routers work. A router connects two separate networks. Your LAN will have a router at the border between the LAN and the WAN. The router and the devices in your LAN, once they have their IPv6 autoconfiguration done, will figure out automatically which traffic is destined to the computers inside the LAN and which is for computers outside the LAN, so that LAN-to-LAN traffic will flow only over your internal network.
The answer to the third question is to use a firewall. The one thing that might be confusing you here is the notion of "public" addresses. IPv6 is designed to allow every single machine connected to the Internet to have a unique, "public" address. Thus, in the case where you have a LAN connected to the IPv6 Internet through your router, your router automatically gets an IPv6 address range from your ISP, and your LAN clients automatically get IPv6 addresses from your router. "Public" in this context just means that each computer in your LAN is guaranteed to have an IPv6 address that no other computer in the Internet has.
That doesn't mean that any computer in the Internet can initiate a connection to any of your LAN clients that have a "public" address; your firewall is responsible for deciding which traffic is allowed in and out of your LAN. The way a stateful firewall will handle it is to allow packets from outside into your LAN when they are responses to connections that your LAN clients initiated. Thus, in a typical configuration, a computer outside your LAN will only be allowed to send packets to a computer inside it when those packets are a response to a connection that your clients initiated.
Ahh, but here's your mistake. You're applying Supply and Demand rules to a commodity that has effectively infinite supply. Prices go up with demand as a result of scarcity. The market is essentially an auction in that respect. In the download world, the cost isn't the commodity being sold, but rather the storefront itself. iTMS costs the same to run whether it's selling a million songs, or only a single song.
You're failing to grasp the whole point of copyright. There is an infinite supply of the finished product, but the resources needed to produce it are pretty scarce. Copyright artificially limits the supply of the finished product to match the scarcity of the resources required to produce it. The point is to make the market for the finished products decide how much resource should be invested in their production.
You can keep pointing out that the finished product has effectively unlimited supply till you're blue on the face; that was known from day one, when copyright was invented to benefit the (paper) publishing industry. Copyright is a law, i.e., a conventional rule, not an intrinsic economic limit. The question you really need to address is how will resources be allocated to the production of musical recordings, and how any scheme you propose compares to copyright.
The Handbook is valuable (but not necessarily the best source) for showing that Unix is, in many ways, a regression in OS design. Unix basically tossed out a bunch of problems that other OSes regarded as central to the OS, and put the burden on the user programs to deal with those. Things like deadlock detection, record-based I/O, or device support (the Unix policy of "everything is a terminal"). None of these were the great paragons of OS design that today's revisionist Unix history makes them out to be; they were first due to the fact that the PDP machines that Unix first ran on weren't powerful enough for a "real" OS by the standards of the day.
So, basically, Unix punted on a lot of OS problems, and solutions for these have had to be bolted onto it ever since.
I'm curious, assuming you really don't "believe in evolution," what do you believe stops it? Leptons and quarks organize themselves into atoms, atoms into molecules, molecules into amino acids and peptide chains. All of this has been observed in nature or laboratory facsimiles thereof. So what magical force prevents organization from continuing to higher and higher levels, especially once rudimentary feedback loops form?
I'm not a creationist, but I'll try to put their position as charitably as I can, and answer your question, since I do believe it is flawed.
Creationists tend to make a distinction between "microevolution" and "macroevolution," precisely in response to what you're pointing out. In effect, any sort of natural selection that can be demonstrated in the present-day, over short term timescales, they label "microevolution" and do not contest. Basically, modern creationism involves accepting that natural selection can turn gray moths into black moths or produce antibiotic tolerance in bacteria, but can't turn fish into people (either not at all, or over the time range claimed by evolutionists).
Put very succintly, the most advanced kinds of creationism don't attack the principle of natural selection; they attack the theory of common descent of all living things, and the theory of abiogenesis. So, the creationist doesn't need to posit anything that stops natural selection from happening, nor to deny self-organization that can be observed in the lab. They just need to attack the idea that natural selection or other forms of self-organization can explain the range of variation that we observe in the natural world in terms of common descent.
Or even simpler: your argument assumes that, given some forms of self-organization that you point out, that these necessarily and inexorably lead toward forms of life as we observe them today, unless something external to the system steps in to stop this from happening. This assumption is just wrong; you have shown us nothing that guarantees that the specific forms of self-organization that you mention can lead to the observed outcome in the timeframe in question. (And in fact, I'd claim that that undertakement would be hopeless.)
It's really best to tackle creationists on politics, not on science. Evolutionary theory (and natural science in general) isn't a completed edifice, so there will always be weaknesses that an informed person will be able to exploit to cast doubt on it. Creationists will always be able to point at genuine weaknesses in evolutionary theory; the problem is that they're singling out evolutionary theory for political and religious reasons, and it's far more important to address those reasons.
Unix time is kept in the only unit that doesn't change: seconds elapsed since a defined point in time (milliseconds actually, but the base unit is the second).
Um, no, that is not true. Unix time is kept in non-leap seconds elapsed since a defined point in time. Look it up.
What the law boils down to is a procedural requirement that you register before you sue. The logic is that registration doesn't grant you copyright; it is nothing more than a public claim that you hold the copyright to a certain work. Unless you're contractually required to surrender it, you automatically have copyright over every work that you create.
So basically, the law requires you to make a formal, public claim of copyright over your work before you can sue somebody over infringements. I.e., you have some paperwork to do before going to court.
If the organization or group you are in is being lead in a direction you are opposed to and you have no say in that course, then you should leave. To stay is to explicitly condone the actions of the leadership.
Brilliant advice, genius. Now please take note of the fact that Islam doesn't have a central leadership. Are you implying that the extremists are the "leaders" of Islam? Good job there!
He didn't accuse Islam of murderous tendencies, he asked that if you were a muslim that you not kill him.
Oh, I see. He just made a request of GP that presupposes that GP, being a muslim, is likely to murder him. That's different, yes.
Like it or not, Muslims are more likely to kill in response to perceived offenses against their religion, and his post makes light of that fact.
...and therefore, GP is more likely to kill GGP than you and me are likely to kill GP?
If you're a moderate muslim and you find that offensive, then you need to do two things: get over it, since free speech is a right in the U.S.A. and therefore you're likely to find offensive speech living here, or on the internet; secondly, you should be decrying the violence promulgated by extremist muslims in the name of Islam.
How often do you actually bother to check how various individual muslims and islamic groups decry the violence of other muslims? Like, how much time each month?
I'm going to assume you're an American. What concrete actions do you regularly take to decry the violence that the US government and its armed forces have inflicted across the third world? How much time have you spent doing those actions? And how much does that time compare to the too-small amount of time that you've oh-so-carefully noted that muslims spend decrying the violence of other muslims?
In many developed countries (Europe, Japan,...), many people have a single account which supports both checks and debit cards. Mine is also used as a brokerage account, but I'm probably not a typical client.
That is also common in the USA. As another poster mentioned, debit cards and credit cards use the same networks, but have some extremely fundamental differences.
It is also common to have brokerage and banking accounts linked; a lot of "banks" and "brokerages" are in fact holding companies that own both a bank and a brokerage, but have most of their market share in one of the two. So Wells Fargo (a retail bank) and E-Trade (a discount broker) offer a similar range of services, allow you to fund your investments from your bank accounts, and allow you to sweep money from your investments right into your bank accounts.
I do think it's more common for people to have separate companies for banks and brokerages in the USA, but only because that's the best deal that way. A retail bank gives you access to a much better ATM network, but usually isn't as good as a brokerage as a company that specializes at that. (And also, in the USA, the cheapest and way to build an investment portfolio is to open an account at a large mutual fund company like Vanguard, and buy their funds direct from them, with no brokerage commissions.)
Instead of doing Shady and immoral accounting practices why not do what honest small business do. YOU HAVE THE CASH ON HAND TO PAY YOUR BILLS.
Because once a business gets large enough, the cash flow becomes enormously more complex, and very short term credit becomes a cost-effective way of managing cash flow.
Basically, a business wants to match cash inflows with outflows (and to simplify the model, we'll count "profits" as one of the outflows). The problem is when you know that your business is owed cash that's going to arrive in unpredictable payments over the next 30-90 days. Setting up the cash outflows so that they precisely match the inflows becomes hellishly more complex when the number of transactions gets big enough. Short term debt provides a buffer that allows a business to simplify this.
In principle, yes, a business could do the same thing by keeping cash reserves as a buffer, too. But when you take into account the time value of money, that really comes down to the same thing: by keeping cash, the business implicitly pays the opportunity cost of keeping that cash. (And with an inflationary monetary policy, of course, the cash itself becomes less valuable over time.)
So, to sum up, the money owed to the business over the short terms is its accounts receivable; short-term debt allows a business to convert, for a fee, a large fraction of its accounts receivable into cash, and therefore, to draw upon its accounts receivable to finance its operations. I.e., instead of having n dollars of pure, unencumbered cash at its disposal at any one time, it can have n + ((accounts_receivable * reliable_fraction_of_a_r) - interest_on_short_term_debt)); or, equivalently, to keep less unencumbered cash than it would otherwise need to.
Besides consumer banking, can somebody explain to me why we NEED "commercial paper"? Yes, I've read the wikipedia page and I know how it's used, but I don't understand why it's needed. If you can't make payroll then you're pulling from your credit one way or another - why do we need separate instruments for a 2 week loan versus a longer term loan, or a credit card, or whatever?
Because the risks, terms and structures of the loans are different between the different products, and it requires different expertise to successfully make loans of one kind vs. another. Not to mention that the borrowers are different for each product. This means that the separation of the loans into distinct product types represents a division of labor among lenders.
Just to list some of the important factors:
Commercial loans vs. consumer loans
Large corporations vs. small businesses
Large loans ($100k+) vs. smaller loans
Fixed term and rate vs. revolving loan
Secured vs. unsecured loans
Secured loans with different types of collateral
Large volume of small transactions vs. small volume of large transactions
Prepayment options
etc.
This is not to say that the line of product offerings doesn't have any significant overlaps, but most pairs of products you can think of are differentiated along at least one of these, if not others. The commercial paper market, for example, exists because large corporations seeking large ($100k+) short-term loans can get better rates than at other kinds of credit product. Large corporations with good credit ratings also get better rates on long-term borrowing by issuing bonds than they could by going to a bank. Credit cards feature point-of-sale networks and allow for a large volume of small transactions, while personal lines of credit require you to borrow in much bigger chunks at a time in exchange for a better rate (a volume discount, so to speak). And so on.
I think that the people who are discomforted by the network neutrality implications of Google's move are't worried specifically about this one deal. What they're worried about is the possibility that the last-mile ISPs will switch strategies and try to use edge caching anticompetitively to achieve the same goals as they hope to achieve using non-neutral traffic management. Edge caching, coupled with divestment of resources toward the upstream bandwidth, can be used to meet the letter of the common definitions of net neutrality (treat all traffic the same way), while violating the spirit (delivering good bandwidth for their own in-house content and select content producers that pay them for edge caching).
So really, the thing to keep in mind here is the business models and network architecture. The network architecture choices are the following:
Build a lot more bandwidth at the core of the network and the upstream uplinks, and have content providers host anywhere they like.
Don't build as much bandwidth at the core of the network and the uplinks, and have the content providers host locally at all of the last-mile providers whose customer base they want to reach.
It is pretty obvious which of these the last-mile ISPs would prefer from a business standpoint; they get more power from the second one. The second architecture might technically be OK (or even a great idea); but IMHO the important questions are: (a) how to prevent the last-mile ISPs from abusing their position in this architecture; (b) how to implement the model without making it too costly for small content providers (who can't go and negotiate a deal with every last-mile ISP in the country or planet).
Suppose I own a big last-mile ISP. I see how this edge caching business works, and I decide: hey, guess what, I was planning to enlarge my upstream pipes and to prioritize traffic to outside destinations that pay me protection money, but screw that. Now I'm going to treat all inbound and outbound traffic equally, but give up improving my uplink bandwidth and demand that the big content providers engage me in extortionate, anti-competitive edge caching deals.
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Your mistake was not to do explicit capital allocation in your portfolio to that Apple stock. Basically, you should have explicitly planned to keep your Apple stake within a certain size; either an absolute size ("I will hold no more than $10,000 on AAPL at any one time") or as a percentage of your portfolio ("I will hold no more than 5% of my portfolio on AAPL"). Then, when the stock skyrocketed, you should have sold shares to account for the excess value of your holding relative to your planned cap.
Anyway, AAPL closed at 85.33 today. If you paid $50 for it, that's a 70% total return. Looking at the stock prices chart, AAPL was around that level at the following times: Sep. 2005 and Jul. 2006. In the former case, that's about a 17.41% annualized return; in the latter, it's about 23.84%. You haven't done badly in any sense. Just do make sure that you set a good rule for when to sell, and follow it strictly and mechanically.
The problem, as TFA itself says is that the non-Mediterranean routes would be through politically-unstable countries or regions, like eastern Turkey (site of a long-running conflict between the Kurdish minority and the government), Iraq, Iran, etc.
I think you're too hung up on this concept of "invasion," which, in my opinion, is too closely linked to existing privacy law. I think the real questions should be: (a) what is privacy, and (b) how should the law protect people's privacy?
The way I see it, privacy is your ability to control what information other people can learn about you. Privacy is the law's recognition that people have a right to conceal various kinds of information about themselves from others, either because some people may find such information discreditable, or simply because the information would cause embarassment (though deep down I think the latter is just a special case of the first).
Of course, privacy has never meant that a person is allowed to conceal any facts about themselves. There has always been information about oneself which the law requires to be a matter of public record (e.g., your criminal record, or what real property you own); and also, one person's right to privacy has to be carefully balanced with other people's right to learn and disseminate facts about others. This stuff falls squarely in the intersection of law, ethics and sociology, and is insanely context-sensitive and subtle. For example, if you see my last name and try to find out whether I'm Mexican or some other Hispanic nationality, it can make a big difference whether you're a member of the Mexican-American Students Association trying to recruit people for your association, or somebody who's evaluating my job application. Basically, there are vague, ethical and legal rules of what information various people should be allowed to consider in which contexts, and what information they should not be allowed to consider.
But I digress. If privacy is about controlling what information others can learn about you, then we can see privacy in terms of these three components:
The idea of an "invasion" of privacy really boils down to acts that violate the rules for (1), and in some cases (2); somebody invades your privacy when they directly obtain a fact about you that they do not have the right to obtain (or example, when they take a picture of your naked wife inside your house, and give it to somebody else.) My argument is that our privacy laws have been built to deal with cases (1) and (2) there, because, historically, (2) was less of a problem than now (there was no Internet), and (3) wasn't really a problem (there were no computers!). So we need to come up with laws to regulate (3); which doesn't mean to forbid (3), but rather, to strike a balance between people's rights to conceal about themselves and to learn about others.
So, to answer your question: if an "invasion of privacy" means a violation of rules about (1) or (2), then no, I don't believe that Google is "invading" your privacy by taking and publishing a picture of what anybody who goes by my house can see. The thing that concerns me is that Google and other folks are working very actively on technologies that affect my privacy via route (3), and what kinds of laws we should have in other to protect people's privacy in that regard. Basically, I'm worried in general about cases where many individual pieces of information, licitly obtained and disseminated, allow somebody equipped with newer technology to infer facts about me and use them to make decisions that negatively impact me, in a way that is u
There were two hypothetical cases there, and this only holds true of one. The 4chan /b/tards started with a GPS-tagged photo, and managed to convert it to a street address (and driving directions). The potential employer started with a street address, and managed to convert it into a photo of a naked inhabitant. In the latter case, the web database that indexed locations to photos taken near that location was essential.
But that's the whole point: the picture of your house, taken from a public road, as one isolated token of information, does not posit much risk to your privacy at all. Tons of individual people in our society own cameras, and take photos in public places that depict other people's property, and everybody agrees that the owners of said property should not have a right in general to prevent others from taking such photos. The privacy laws we have are built to protect individuals' rights in that sort of isolated case.
The problem is when a corporation starts taking such photos systematically, aggregating them all together and correlating them with other systematic data sets. In that situation, a photo that just happens to contain your house is no longer just that; it's a piece of information that can be used to access many other pieces of information that may allow somebody to infer facts about you that you would rather prefer they couldn't.
Google Street View is only the start. Just wait for the day when digital cameras commonly include GPS units and automatically tag each photo with a precise location and time, which can then be cross-indexed with a geographical information system like Google Maps. I can imagine it already: your wife carelessly forgets to close the window shades one day when they're changing. A neighbor takes a photo of her naked, and posts it to 4chan. Thousands of folks copy the photo all over the web. The photo has GPS information in the EXIF tags. Creepy /b/tards start stalking your wife. You give a resume to a potential employer with your residential address in it; they look up the address in Google Maps, click on the link to show image search results taken nearby, and are treated to a naked picture of your wife.
That's an example where the photo in question is probably illegal to take, but other examples may be concocted where the picture, by itself, is fine. The point of the example isn't the photo; it's how the technologies that we have today for associating one item of information to others make it too easy for people to find out more about you than they should be able to.
To sum up, the privacy laws we have today are laws that were designed to protect people's privacy in yesterday's, pre-computer world. Because of this, they primarily address things like whether somebody had the right to take a given individual photo, and not whether somebody is empowering others to infer facts about you by correlating many individually innocuous items of information.
It may not have come across, but I was assuming that the information in question was true, and, taken on its own, largely trivial and harmless. I'm not thinking of a case where, for example, somebody says on their blog that you committed incest with your aunt. I'm thinking of cases like, for example, a hypothetical social networking application that allows people to list you as somebody they know, without requiring your authorization. An application like that would be just as much subject to the kind of analysis detailed in the article, which could easily uncover lots of information about people who never volunteered any of it.
So, what's really the essential difference between these three acts?
The law was created to make a distinction between informal sharing and dissemination of the first sort, and "publication" of the third sort. You don't need any model release for #1, and the journalism or modeling arguments are largely irrelevant.
The problem here is that case #2 falls squarely between #1 and #2. Should it be subject to the law for informal sharing, the law for printed publications, or some new, yet-to-be-developed body of law? (And would the court system be able to handle the caseload that treating informal online sharing always as "publication" would imply? People share stuff informally all the time, and they increasingly do it online.)
"As long as Google obeys the current law, they're obeying the current law, and therefore, we shouldn't change the law."
Um, what? That's a transparently bad argument. This is an argument about whether the law should be changed. Whether Google is following the current law correctly is completely irrelevant. You can't defend againt an argument that the law is wrong by saying that the acts allowed by the law are allowed by the law!
Transparently bad argument too. "It's ok if I have access to these photos that I shouldn't have access to, because you also do have access to them."
While that is a completely fair thing to point out, there is a very important thing that it misses: other people can put information about you online, without your permission, and that information is just as subject to analysis as what you put up.
The two best examples that come to mind right away:
Notice that both of these acts are perfectly legal, and while the second arguably should be regulated and restricted by law (the aggregation, correlation and publication parts, not the picture-taking part), the first one ought not to.
This is a case where multiple pieces of information, that individually do not compromise one's privacy, can actually do so when aggregated and correlated together.
This sort of pattern is why something like Google Street View subverts the privacy laws that we have. Yes, a photo taken from a public location of things viewable from that location, by itself, does not violate privacy, and privacy law has been developed so that each individual photo that Google takes and publishes does not, on its own, violate anybody's privacy. What the law fails to capture is that putting a vast number of such photos together, correlating them with a geographical information system, yellow page listings, satellite imagery, internet search results, and offering it to the general public to use for free, without any restrictions of purpose, does massively violate privacy. So the standard response to privacy challenges to Street View ("the law allows you to take photos of any public place you want") just massively misses the point.
Some other people have given you decent answers, but I'll add another simple answer.
I think this can be broken into three subquestions:
For the first question, there are two possible answers: (a) if your LAN is connected to the IPv6 internet, your ISP assigns your router an IPv6 address range, and your LAN clients autoconfigure themselves on startup with an IPv6 address in that range; (b) if your LAN is not so connected, then you need to pick one of the private address ranges that another poster mentioned, and have your LAN clients use that.
The second question boils down to how routers work. A router connects two separate networks. Your LAN will have a router at the border between the LAN and the WAN. The router and the devices in your LAN, once they have their IPv6 autoconfiguration done, will figure out automatically which traffic is destined to the computers inside the LAN and which is for computers outside the LAN, so that LAN-to-LAN traffic will flow only over your internal network.
The answer to the third question is to use a firewall. The one thing that might be confusing you here is the notion of "public" addresses. IPv6 is designed to allow every single machine connected to the Internet to have a unique, "public" address. Thus, in the case where you have a LAN connected to the IPv6 Internet through your router, your router automatically gets an IPv6 address range from your ISP, and your LAN clients automatically get IPv6 addresses from your router. "Public" in this context just means that each computer in your LAN is guaranteed to have an IPv6 address that no other computer in the Internet has.
That doesn't mean that any computer in the Internet can initiate a connection to any of your LAN clients that have a "public" address; your firewall is responsible for deciding which traffic is allowed in and out of your LAN. The way a stateful firewall will handle it is to allow packets from outside into your LAN when they are responses to connections that your LAN clients initiated. Thus, in a typical configuration, a computer outside your LAN will only be allowed to send packets to a computer inside it when those packets are a response to a connection that your clients initiated.
You're failing to grasp the whole point of copyright. There is an infinite supply of the finished product, but the resources needed to produce it are pretty scarce. Copyright artificially limits the supply of the finished product to match the scarcity of the resources required to produce it. The point is to make the market for the finished products decide how much resource should be invested in their production.
You can keep pointing out that the finished product has effectively unlimited supply till you're blue on the face; that was known from day one, when copyright was invented to benefit the (paper) publishing industry. Copyright is a law, i.e., a conventional rule, not an intrinsic economic limit. The question you really need to address is how will resources be allocated to the production of musical recordings, and how any scheme you propose compares to copyright.
Installing your own RAM doesn't void the warranty. (Unless you break your computer while doing it, in which case it does.)
The Handbook is valuable (but not necessarily the best source) for showing that Unix is, in many ways, a regression in OS design. Unix basically tossed out a bunch of problems that other OSes regarded as central to the OS, and put the burden on the user programs to deal with those. Things like deadlock detection, record-based I/O, or device support (the Unix policy of "everything is a terminal"). None of these were the great paragons of OS design that today's revisionist Unix history makes them out to be; they were first due to the fact that the PDP machines that Unix first ran on weren't powerful enough for a "real" OS by the standards of the day.
So, basically, Unix punted on a lot of OS problems, and solutions for these have had to be bolted onto it ever since.
I'm not a creationist, but I'll try to put their position as charitably as I can, and answer your question, since I do believe it is flawed.
Creationists tend to make a distinction between "microevolution" and "macroevolution," precisely in response to what you're pointing out. In effect, any sort of natural selection that can be demonstrated in the present-day, over short term timescales, they label "microevolution" and do not contest. Basically, modern creationism involves accepting that natural selection can turn gray moths into black moths or produce antibiotic tolerance in bacteria, but can't turn fish into people (either not at all, or over the time range claimed by evolutionists).
Put very succintly, the most advanced kinds of creationism don't attack the principle of natural selection; they attack the theory of common descent of all living things, and the theory of abiogenesis. So, the creationist doesn't need to posit anything that stops natural selection from happening, nor to deny self-organization that can be observed in the lab. They just need to attack the idea that natural selection or other forms of self-organization can explain the range of variation that we observe in the natural world in terms of common descent.
Or even simpler: your argument assumes that, given some forms of self-organization that you point out, that these necessarily and inexorably lead toward forms of life as we observe them today, unless something external to the system steps in to stop this from happening. This assumption is just wrong; you have shown us nothing that guarantees that the specific forms of self-organization that you mention can lead to the observed outcome in the timeframe in question. (And in fact, I'd claim that that undertakement would be hopeless.)
It's really best to tackle creationists on politics, not on science. Evolutionary theory (and natural science in general) isn't a completed edifice, so there will always be weaknesses that an informed person will be able to exploit to cast doubt on it. Creationists will always be able to point at genuine weaknesses in evolutionary theory; the problem is that they're singling out evolutionary theory for political and religious reasons, and it's far more important to address those reasons.
Um, no, that is not true. Unix time is kept in non-leap seconds elapsed since a defined point in time. Look it up.
What the law boils down to is a procedural requirement that you register before you sue. The logic is that registration doesn't grant you copyright; it is nothing more than a public claim that you hold the copyright to a certain work. Unless you're contractually required to surrender it, you automatically have copyright over every work that you create.
So basically, the law requires you to make a formal, public claim of copyright over your work before you can sue somebody over infringements. I.e., you have some paperwork to do before going to court.
Brilliant advice, genius. Now please take note of the fact that Islam doesn't have a central leadership. Are you implying that the extremists are the "leaders" of Islam? Good job there!
Oh, I see. He just made a request of GP that presupposes that GP, being a muslim, is likely to murder him. That's different, yes.
...and therefore, GP is more likely to kill GGP than you and me are likely to kill GP?
How often do you actually bother to check how various individual muslims and islamic groups decry the violence of other muslims? Like, how much time each month?
I'm going to assume you're an American. What concrete actions do you regularly take to decry the violence that the US government and its armed forces have inflicted across the third world? How much time have you spent doing those actions? And how much does that time compare to the too-small amount of time that you've oh-so-carefully noted that muslims spend decrying the violence of other muslims?
You're welcome. Good luck eating your gold in a deflationary spiral. (Good news: it's actually edible.)
I recommend you read this discussion of the history of subprime lending. To put it shortly, the issues around subprime lending are a lot more nuanced than you seem to think.
Subprime lending in general has never been forbidden. What change in the law do you have in mind?
That is also common in the USA. As another poster mentioned, debit cards and credit cards use the same networks, but have some extremely fundamental differences.
It is also common to have brokerage and banking accounts linked; a lot of "banks" and "brokerages" are in fact holding companies that own both a bank and a brokerage, but have most of their market share in one of the two. So Wells Fargo (a retail bank) and E-Trade (a discount broker) offer a similar range of services, allow you to fund your investments from your bank accounts, and allow you to sweep money from your investments right into your bank accounts.
I do think it's more common for people to have separate companies for banks and brokerages in the USA, but only because that's the best deal that way. A retail bank gives you access to a much better ATM network, but usually isn't as good as a brokerage as a company that specializes at that. (And also, in the USA, the cheapest and way to build an investment portfolio is to open an account at a large mutual fund company like Vanguard, and buy their funds direct from them, with no brokerage commissions.)
Because once a business gets large enough, the cash flow becomes enormously more complex, and very short term credit becomes a cost-effective way of managing cash flow.
Basically, a business wants to match cash inflows with outflows (and to simplify the model, we'll count "profits" as one of the outflows). The problem is when you know that your business is owed cash that's going to arrive in unpredictable payments over the next 30-90 days. Setting up the cash outflows so that they precisely match the inflows becomes hellishly more complex when the number of transactions gets big enough. Short term debt provides a buffer that allows a business to simplify this.
In principle, yes, a business could do the same thing by keeping cash reserves as a buffer, too. But when you take into account the time value of money, that really comes down to the same thing: by keeping cash, the business implicitly pays the opportunity cost of keeping that cash. (And with an inflationary monetary policy, of course, the cash itself becomes less valuable over time.)
So, to sum up, the money owed to the business over the short terms is its accounts receivable; short-term debt allows a business to convert, for a fee, a large fraction of its accounts receivable into cash, and therefore, to draw upon its accounts receivable to finance its operations. I.e., instead of having n dollars of pure, unencumbered cash at its disposal at any one time, it can have n + ((accounts_receivable * reliable_fraction_of_a_r) - interest_on_short_term_debt)); or, equivalently, to keep less unencumbered cash than it would otherwise need to.
Because the risks, terms and structures of the loans are different between the different products, and it requires different expertise to successfully make loans of one kind vs. another. Not to mention that the borrowers are different for each product. This means that the separation of the loans into distinct product types represents a division of labor among lenders.
Just to list some of the important factors:
This is not to say that the line of product offerings doesn't have any significant overlaps, but most pairs of products you can think of are differentiated along at least one of these, if not others. The commercial paper market, for example, exists because large corporations seeking large ($100k+) short-term loans can get better rates than at other kinds of credit product. Large corporations with good credit ratings also get better rates on long-term borrowing by issuing bonds than they could by going to a bank. Credit cards feature point-of-sale networks and allow for a large volume of small transactions, while personal lines of credit require you to borrow in much bigger chunks at a time in exchange for a better rate (a volume discount, so to speak). And so on.
I think that the people who are discomforted by the network neutrality implications of Google's move are't worried specifically about this one deal. What they're worried about is the possibility that the last-mile ISPs will switch strategies and try to use edge caching anticompetitively to achieve the same goals as they hope to achieve using non-neutral traffic management. Edge caching, coupled with divestment of resources toward the upstream bandwidth, can be used to meet the letter of the common definitions of net neutrality (treat all traffic the same way), while violating the spirit (delivering good bandwidth for their own in-house content and select content producers that pay them for edge caching).
So really, the thing to keep in mind here is the business models and network architecture. The network architecture choices are the following:
It is pretty obvious which of these the last-mile ISPs would prefer from a business standpoint; they get more power from the second one. The second architecture might technically be OK (or even a great idea); but IMHO the important questions are: (a) how to prevent the last-mile ISPs from abusing their position in this architecture; (b) how to implement the model without making it too costly for small content providers (who can't go and negotiate a deal with every last-mile ISP in the country or planet).
Suppose I own a big last-mile ISP. I see how this edge caching business works, and I decide: hey, guess what, I was planning to enlarge my upstream pipes and to prioritize traffic to outside destinations that pay me protection money, but screw that. Now I'm going to treat all inbound and outbound traffic equally, but give up improving my uplink bandwidth and demand that the big content providers engage me in extortionate, anti-competitive edge caching deals.