If you're talking about using encryption rather than broadcasting everything you do to everyone on your block, I disagree. You can, and you should.
Sorry, this is really a non issue for me. Google went around and did the equivalent of listening while people shouted from their rooftops. If you don't want people knowing what you're saying, don't shout it from your rooftop. The same goes for spewing unencrypted traffic across your neighborhood.
I don't know who is responsible for the loss of patent data under HIPAA [wikipedia.org] regulations
Your dentist is. They can transfer or share that responsibility with the IT vendor through a business partner agreement, but there's no magic claim of "Oh, I thought the IT vendor would know what to do!"
That said, pretty much nobody gets fined under HIPAA. The first fine wasn't that long ago:
Don't know about you, but I can't forget the numerous stories of terrorist strapping explosives to women and sending them out to be blown up.
Really? Funny, but I can't remember a single example of a 4-year-old obviously American child traveling in the US with her grandmother who has ever blown anything up.
Your internet security comparison is spot on, however like most internet security people, you fail to understand that sometimes holes are OK. Plugging holes costs something. In the IT world, plugging holes costs money and sometimes makes other work impossible to do or more difficult, which costs time and money. We need to strike a balance, not provide impenetrable security at any cost. In this case, plugging holes costs you your privacy and perhaps your right to protect your children (Did they seriously say they wanted to take a 4-year-old girl to a private room WITHOUT a family member present?).
Just doing some quick googling, about 640 million times last year, a passenger got on a plane in the US and flew somewhere. Zero times they were blown up by a terrorist. If you extend that back 11 years so we can catch 9/11, that's ~7 billion passengers and 246 who were blown up by a terrorist. Well, crashed into something, and again, zero who were killed by 4-year-old American child terrorists.
Maybe I'm just not risk averse enough, but I prefer the 28,000,000 to one chance terrorists are going to take out the plane, or almost infinity-to-one that it's going to be done by a 4-year-old, over the much-smaller-number to 1 chance that my kid is going to be groped.
I'd be OK with electronic texts as long as I get to keep a copy forever and it's in a format that guarantees it's not just an encrypted useless blob at some point in the future. Obviously, that's not how the publishers want to do it. One of the reasons I'm where I am today is because my aunts and uncles left old college textbooks at my grandparents' house. I read them and was inspired to go learn. For the same reason, I never sold back a single college textbook.
Fair enough, so we get a new edition of a textbook every 50 years. Let's be generous, and say every 10. Is that what happens now? No, it isn't. When I was in college not THAT long ago, using last year's edition was generally frowned upon but not quite forbidden. Not because the meat of the course was different, but because things like page numbers might be different, problems might be different, et cetera. Now, does that speak to a massive increase in didactic power, or precisely what you, the publisher, would do if you wanted to force students to buy new books instead of used ones?
A college education is getting very expensive. This is okay, because a college education is enormously valuable. Nevertheless, we are entirely right to want to crush waste out of a very expensive system. I learned from my expensive econ textbooks that this is going to happen whether you like it or not because rich profits attract competition, and competition drives prices down. Switching around the pages, updating the examples in ways that doesn't change the content meaningfully, and changing the practice problems around is simply an artificial price support. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Forget mathematical prowess, learn their marketing. Tip #1, if you're going to predict the apocalypse, predict it so far in the future that everyone you're talking to will be dead. Some will still be awed by your power to know such things, but never see you for the fraud you are. Today's crackpots always get that wrong, going around rounding up gullible souls for their commune or whatever because the world is going to end in May. Then June comes and they're revealed to be charlatans.
Maybe you should have talked to a future professor.:)
People might have said the same thing about software. Plenty still do, but free software does quite well these days. Some of it is terrible. Some of it is spectacularly good. The bottom line is enough of it is good enough.
This also ties in with a story last week or so about Florida (I think) not wanting to be bothered with correcting their tests where students were directed to pick the right answer out of four, but in some cases three of them were technically correct. The stuff we pay good money for isn't very good, either.
Part of what you're describing is what libraries are for. That's where we should be simply curating collections of human knowledge. Advancing them? Ok, I'll put that in universities. Yes, those libraries could also be...university libraries!
I do agree with you about the value of having a set of people who know everything about narrow and arguably useless disciplines simply to preserve the knowledge. The thing is how many you choose to have around, and whether that number should grow or shrink. It always bugged me that we massively overproduce certain degrees. I read once that the thing a PhD in English prepares you for is creating other PhDs in English, and that there were about 1,000 newly minted English PhDs every year for every such job opening. We need to tell people things like this. College advising mostly sucked when I went. I was appalled to hear one advisor's whole routine more or less summed up as "what do you like? Then try these courses..." What you like is all well and good, but this whole degree thing is a big commitment, and often costs a lot of money. Making sure you get fair return, which is NOT necessarily money, is important. Maybe there are 100 people in the US who know the inner politics of ancient Sumeria. That means about 3 jobs a year should open up. If we're producing 1,000 PhDs in the subject, 997 of which go on to be bitter Mickey D's workers lamenting the crushing burden of their student loans, perhaps we should should consider that.
Also, I might argue that the support of knowledge with no hope of return, no value save in preserving it, should be funded by people with spare cash and the desire to do so, not out of the general fund of any state.
The best way to save UF CS department is to get donations from CS alumni or to make donations directly to the CS department.
You may be right, but this is a desperately sad state of affairs. Tuition of the students attending should be sufficient to pay for the CS department. If it's not, they shouldn't have a CS department. I know many are desperate for uniformity, but it's really OK if not every single institution offers exactly the same programs of study. Schools also do a ridiculous bunch of things that I, as a former tuition paying student, don't want them spending my money on. Stop that.
Actually, what happened is the moron teenager was found liable for the accident and his insurance company bought me a new car. I assume they also bought the lady behind me a car. The car in front of me was an old, very solid pickup truck that didn't seem to suffer much damage. I assume any damage was paid for by said moron teenager's insurance company. No claims were placed against my insurance.
I know it's shocking, but a rational thing happened in the legal world.
You're pointing out that almost everything can be used for good or evil. Obviously, I would oppose a system like you describe. A system that simply records how I'm driving, doesn't get reported to my insurance company or anyone else EVER unless there's legal cause to do so (accident, for example) is ok by me. I'm not saying I'm ok with forcing everyone to have one, but I wouldn't mind an immutable record of what happens to my car, even though I know if I cause an accident, it will be evidence to prove it.
Nothing could be more stupid than blaming the middle of three cars, all of which were stopped at a red light, for a fourth car plowing into all three of them. It's nonsensical to expect people to leave enough space between stopped cars at a traffic light such that if they're surprised nailed by a 45 mph car, that they won't hit anything.
I've actually thought about putting one in my own car. I was sitting at a stop light maybe 10 years ago when some moron teenager was speeding down the road at 45 mph while fishing around for CDs on the floor of his car. He hit the car BEHIND me without so much as tapping his brakes. That car smashed into mine, totalling it. My car then hit the guy in front of me. Imagine my outrage when talking to some insurance drone who told me he had to talk to the other drivers to see if they felt one impact or two. The theory being that if it was one, it was because *I* was moving and hit the guy in front of me, causing them all to pile into me. If it was more than one, the story was as I related.
I wouldn't have minded having a/var/log somewhere that said 22:34:02: velocity 0.00 m/s accel 0.00 g throttle 0% brakes 5%....22:34:45 velocity 35.33 m/s accel 12.1 g throttle 0% brakes 0%. Hard data would have shown beyond a shadow of a doubt I was in a stationary car that suddenly accelerated like it was hit by a moving SUV.
Of course, many will point out that people have been tinkering with cars since they were invented, and that's true. But generally in the past, it took at least a modicum of skill to work on a car.
Does it really? My mother got into an accident because some dbag for some reason took his wheel off, as in removed the lug nuts, pulled off the tire, for some reason also pulled the nut off the end of the axle, then put the tire back on and tightened up the lug nuts. You miss the important omission? No nut holding the wheel to the axle. Just grease adhesion and the lateral friction of the bearings. Guy made it about a mile before the tire, rim, and hub came off. His car came to an immediate stop, as you might imagine. The wheel kept on going at about 40mph into the side of my mother's car.
It doesn't take skill to work on a car. It takes a ratchet and a socket.
Yep, this is it. Sometimes the solution is not perfect technology, or making things like this impossible to do. It's catching the guy using investigation and legal process and sending him to jail with 78 consecutive sentences for making a bomb threat. The next frat boy who wants to do this may be significantly deterred. If I were running the college at the next one, my PR would include a reference to this guy and how he's spending the rest of his life in jail so you might want to knock it off.
I think we do. There's a lot of zealotry out there. I lot of vigorous disagreement over whether it's ok to be, say, gay or not. Get an abortion or not. Use one kind of drug or another. Be a member of one religion or another. I should be free to anonymously buy...whatever gay people buy...if I want. I should be able to go anonymously buy a nice bottle of scotch. I can now. If I want to drop a $20 in the collection plate, I can and no one's the wiser.
We should be able to focus less on proving we didn't do anything wrong and more on the idea that we don't HAVE to prove we didn't do anything wrong. The whole presumption of innocence thing, ya know?
I'd urge you to think about that. You are suggesting that we should wait until we've been hurt fairly severely before we defend ourselves? Believe me, I'm very opposed to killing people, but if you're genuinely afraid for your life, are you really going to wait until the guy hurts you badly? Once he does, you may be in no position to stop him from doing whatever he wants.
Of course I don't want fights to escalate into killings. I'm not even in favor of people getting into fights, honestly. But I do think we need to consider before swinging that first punch that once you do, you lose some control over how vigorous the other guy's defense is going to be.
First degree murder is premeditated. The fact that Zimmerman called the cops is pretty strong evidence that he didn't set out intending to kill Martin.
Oh, easily. Look for the guy, walk up to him and say, "Excuse me, sir. Hi, my name is George. I'm captain of the neighborhood watch and like to introduce myself to people I haven't met." Somewhere between that exchange happening and the phone call we've all heard, Martin jumps you and commences to beat the ever loving crap out of you. In fear of your life, you shoot him.
I'm not saying that's what happened. As I'm not a witness (or Zimmerman), I have no idea what happened. It's definitely possible, though.
That's not terribly unreasonable, actually, if it's true that subsequent PURCHASES won't be eligible for returns/exchanges. Fine, so long as I know that, I won't make any.
Of course, I also won't give you my phone number, as some stores seem to want for returns, and you may not make a copy of my drivers license. I have this crazy idea that you should never give out information you don't want used. Since I don't want Best Buy calling me or mailing me junk, Best Buy doesn't get my phone number or address.
I noticed during checkout that the bottom seal on a cordless phone I was buying was torn open, upon opening and unpacking it while the manager was telling me loudly not to, it was clear that it had been opened before and everything had been previously taken out of the bags and un-packed, to top it off the handset battery was missing. He tried to make me buy that unit and return it for refund but I hadn't swiped my card yet and was not going to.
Probably lucky it worked out for you that way as you're the one person who obviously had opened it. Personally, I'd have stopped at the manager telling me loudly not to with a "Fine. Here. I don't want it." and leave.
Slashdot Mirror
If you're talking about using encryption rather than broadcasting everything you do to everyone on your block, I disagree. You can, and you should.
Sorry, this is really a non issue for me. Google went around and did the equivalent of listening while people shouted from their rooftops. If you don't want people knowing what you're saying, don't shout it from your rooftop. The same goes for spewing unencrypted traffic across your neighborhood.
God as my witness, I've known this all along.
Your dentist is. They can transfer or share that responsibility with the IT vendor through a business partner agreement, but there's no magic claim of "Oh, I thought the IT vendor would know what to do!"
That said, pretty much nobody gets fined under HIPAA. The first fine wasn't that long ago:
http://threatpost.com/en_us/blogs/hipaa-bares-its-teeth-43m-fine-privacy-violation-022311
Really? Funny, but I can't remember a single example of a 4-year-old obviously American child traveling in the US with her grandmother who has ever blown anything up.
Your internet security comparison is spot on, however like most internet security people, you fail to understand that sometimes holes are OK. Plugging holes costs something. In the IT world, plugging holes costs money and sometimes makes other work impossible to do or more difficult, which costs time and money. We need to strike a balance, not provide impenetrable security at any cost. In this case, plugging holes costs you your privacy and perhaps your right to protect your children (Did they seriously say they wanted to take a 4-year-old girl to a private room WITHOUT a family member present?).
Just doing some quick googling, about 640 million times last year, a passenger got on a plane in the US and flew somewhere. Zero times they were blown up by a terrorist. If you extend that back 11 years so we can catch 9/11, that's ~7 billion passengers and 246 who were blown up by a terrorist. Well, crashed into something, and again, zero who were killed by 4-year-old American child terrorists.
Maybe I'm just not risk averse enough, but I prefer the 28,000,000 to one chance terrorists are going to take out the plane, or almost infinity-to-one that it's going to be done by a 4-year-old, over the much-smaller-number to 1 chance that my kid is going to be groped.
I'd be OK with electronic texts as long as I get to keep a copy forever and it's in a format that guarantees it's not just an encrypted useless blob at some point in the future. Obviously, that's not how the publishers want to do it. One of the reasons I'm where I am today is because my aunts and uncles left old college textbooks at my grandparents' house. I read them and was inspired to go learn. For the same reason, I never sold back a single college textbook.
Fair enough, so we get a new edition of a textbook every 50 years. Let's be generous, and say every 10. Is that what happens now? No, it isn't. When I was in college not THAT long ago, using last year's edition was generally frowned upon but not quite forbidden. Not because the meat of the course was different, but because things like page numbers might be different, problems might be different, et cetera. Now, does that speak to a massive increase in didactic power, or precisely what you, the publisher, would do if you wanted to force students to buy new books instead of used ones?
A college education is getting very expensive. This is okay, because a college education is enormously valuable. Nevertheless, we are entirely right to want to crush waste out of a very expensive system. I learned from my expensive econ textbooks that this is going to happen whether you like it or not because rich profits attract competition, and competition drives prices down. Switching around the pages, updating the examples in ways that doesn't change the content meaningfully, and changing the practice problems around is simply an artificial price support. Enjoy it while it lasts.
Forget mathematical prowess, learn their marketing. Tip #1, if you're going to predict the apocalypse, predict it so far in the future that everyone you're talking to will be dead. Some will still be awed by your power to know such things, but never see you for the fraud you are. Today's crackpots always get that wrong, going around rounding up gullible souls for their commune or whatever because the world is going to end in May. Then June comes and they're revealed to be charlatans.
Maybe you should have talked to a future professor. :)
People might have said the same thing about software. Plenty still do, but free software does quite well these days. Some of it is terrible. Some of it is spectacularly good. The bottom line is enough of it is good enough.
This also ties in with a story last week or so about Florida (I think) not wanting to be bothered with correcting their tests where students were directed to pick the right answer out of four, but in some cases three of them were technically correct. The stuff we pay good money for isn't very good, either.
Part of what you're describing is what libraries are for. That's where we should be simply curating collections of human knowledge. Advancing them? Ok, I'll put that in universities. Yes, those libraries could also be...university libraries!
I do agree with you about the value of having a set of people who know everything about narrow and arguably useless disciplines simply to preserve the knowledge. The thing is how many you choose to have around, and whether that number should grow or shrink. It always bugged me that we massively overproduce certain degrees. I read once that the thing a PhD in English prepares you for is creating other PhDs in English, and that there were about 1,000 newly minted English PhDs every year for every such job opening. We need to tell people things like this. College advising mostly sucked when I went. I was appalled to hear one advisor's whole routine more or less summed up as "what do you like? Then try these courses..." What you like is all well and good, but this whole degree thing is a big commitment, and often costs a lot of money. Making sure you get fair return, which is NOT necessarily money, is important. Maybe there are 100 people in the US who know the inner politics of ancient Sumeria. That means about 3 jobs a year should open up. If we're producing 1,000 PhDs in the subject, 997 of which go on to be bitter Mickey D's workers lamenting the crushing burden of their student loans, perhaps we should should consider that.
Also, I might argue that the support of knowledge with no hope of return, no value save in preserving it, should be funded by people with spare cash and the desire to do so, not out of the general fund of any state.
You may be right, but this is a desperately sad state of affairs. Tuition of the students attending should be sufficient to pay for the CS department. If it's not, they shouldn't have a CS department. I know many are desperate for uniformity, but it's really OK if not every single institution offers exactly the same programs of study. Schools also do a ridiculous bunch of things that I, as a former tuition paying student, don't want them spending my money on. Stop that.
Actually, what happened is the moron teenager was found liable for the accident and his insurance company bought me a new car. I assume they also bought the lady behind me a car. The car in front of me was an old, very solid pickup truck that didn't seem to suffer much damage. I assume any damage was paid for by said moron teenager's insurance company. No claims were placed against my insurance.
I know it's shocking, but a rational thing happened in the legal world.
You're pointing out that almost everything can be used for good or evil. Obviously, I would oppose a system like you describe. A system that simply records how I'm driving, doesn't get reported to my insurance company or anyone else EVER unless there's legal cause to do so (accident, for example) is ok by me. I'm not saying I'm ok with forcing everyone to have one, but I wouldn't mind an immutable record of what happens to my car, even though I know if I cause an accident, it will be evidence to prove it.
Nothing could be more stupid than blaming the middle of three cars, all of which were stopped at a red light, for a fourth car plowing into all three of them. It's nonsensical to expect people to leave enough space between stopped cars at a traffic light such that if they're surprised nailed by a 45 mph car, that they won't hit anything.
I've actually thought about putting one in my own car. I was sitting at a stop light maybe 10 years ago when some moron teenager was speeding down the road at 45 mph while fishing around for CDs on the floor of his car. He hit the car BEHIND me without so much as tapping his brakes. That car smashed into mine, totalling it. My car then hit the guy in front of me. Imagine my outrage when talking to some insurance drone who told me he had to talk to the other drivers to see if they felt one impact or two. The theory being that if it was one, it was because *I* was moving and hit the guy in front of me, causing them all to pile into me. If it was more than one, the story was as I related.
I wouldn't have minded having a /var/log somewhere that said 22:34:02: velocity 0.00 m/s accel 0.00 g throttle 0% brakes 5%....22:34:45 velocity 35.33 m/s accel 12.1 g throttle 0% brakes 0%. Hard data would have shown beyond a shadow of a doubt I was in a stationary car that suddenly accelerated like it was hit by a moving SUV.
Does it really? My mother got into an accident because some dbag for some reason took his wheel off, as in removed the lug nuts, pulled off the tire, for some reason also pulled the nut off the end of the axle, then put the tire back on and tightened up the lug nuts. You miss the important omission? No nut holding the wheel to the axle. Just grease adhesion and the lateral friction of the bearings. Guy made it about a mile before the tire, rim, and hub came off. His car came to an immediate stop, as you might imagine. The wheel kept on going at about 40mph into the side of my mother's car.
It doesn't take skill to work on a car. It takes a ratchet and a socket.
I still love
Q: What's the difference between Larry Ellison and God?
A: God doesn't think he's Larry Ellison!
You've clearly never been to traffic court.
You: "Was your view obstructed in any way?"
Officer: "No."
You: >.<
Yep, this is it. Sometimes the solution is not perfect technology, or making things like this impossible to do. It's catching the guy using investigation and legal process and sending him to jail with 78 consecutive sentences for making a bomb threat. The next frat boy who wants to do this may be significantly deterred. If I were running the college at the next one, my PR would include a reference to this guy and how he's spending the rest of his life in jail so you might want to knock it off.
I think we do. There's a lot of zealotry out there. I lot of vigorous disagreement over whether it's ok to be, say, gay or not. Get an abortion or not. Use one kind of drug or another. Be a member of one religion or another. I should be free to anonymously buy...whatever gay people buy...if I want. I should be able to go anonymously buy a nice bottle of scotch. I can now. If I want to drop a $20 in the collection plate, I can and no one's the wiser.
We should be able to focus less on proving we didn't do anything wrong and more on the idea that we don't HAVE to prove we didn't do anything wrong. The whole presumption of innocence thing, ya know?
I'd urge you to think about that. You are suggesting that we should wait until we've been hurt fairly severely before we defend ourselves? Believe me, I'm very opposed to killing people, but if you're genuinely afraid for your life, are you really going to wait until the guy hurts you badly? Once he does, you may be in no position to stop him from doing whatever he wants.
Of course I don't want fights to escalate into killings. I'm not even in favor of people getting into fights, honestly. But I do think we need to consider before swinging that first punch that once you do, you lose some control over how vigorous the other guy's defense is going to be.
Is sustaining injuries sufficient to require hospitalization necessary before you can defend yourself?
First degree murder is premeditated. The fact that Zimmerman called the cops is pretty strong evidence that he didn't set out intending to kill Martin.
Oh, easily. Look for the guy, walk up to him and say, "Excuse me, sir. Hi, my name is George. I'm captain of the neighborhood watch and like to introduce myself to people I haven't met." Somewhere between that exchange happening and the phone call we've all heard, Martin jumps you and commences to beat the ever loving crap out of you. In fear of your life, you shoot him.
I'm not saying that's what happened. As I'm not a witness (or Zimmerman), I have no idea what happened. It's definitely possible, though.
That's not terribly unreasonable, actually, if it's true that subsequent PURCHASES won't be eligible for returns/exchanges. Fine, so long as I know that, I won't make any.
Of course, I also won't give you my phone number, as some stores seem to want for returns, and you may not make a copy of my drivers license. I have this crazy idea that you should never give out information you don't want used. Since I don't want Best Buy calling me or mailing me junk, Best Buy doesn't get my phone number or address.
Probably lucky it worked out for you that way as you're the one person who obviously had opened it. Personally, I'd have stopped at the manager telling me loudly not to with a "Fine. Here. I don't want it." and leave.