Well, the average age of an Olympic gymnast is 18, and the Olympics is next year, so I'd say they're going into 10th, 11th, or 12th grade right about now. Unless you mean the Chinese team. They're entering middle school about now.
I see your point, but the counter is that a scientist puts forth ideas with some merit and actually tests them. If you just toss ideas out into the world, you're not a scientist, you're a philosopher. If you just toss ideas out into the world without any regard to reasonableness, you're a crackpot or a crank. For example, if you postulate that long ago some powerful being threw a bunch of people into volcanoes and that those souls or whatever now plague mankind and are responsible for every bad thing that happens to you, you are not a scientist.
I loved the part where a network administrator from UAB claims their network hasn't been compromised. News flash. If you're on a university network--any university network--it's been compromised.
That's not true of all students, and therein lies the problem. The students who ARE there to learn and who don't think it's massively uncool have to deal with the idiots who are there to do nothing but disrupt the learning environment and cause trouble for those who want to learn. So yes, kids who demonstrate that they aren't getting anything out of school and are ruining the opportunity for others should go somewhere else.
Nah, somebody watched "The Day the Earth Stood Still" when they were a kid. So I figure if they show up, we just say Klaatu barado nikto and all will be fine.
By the way, the original theory is that six degrees is the _maximum_ distance between any two living humans, not the average.
If so, that's trivial to disprove. There are about 100 uncontacted tribes of humans in the world. Choose one. Find the shortest path to yourself. There is no path.
I really think that's the truth. The issue is not one of talking on the phone while driving, it's having to drive at all when one would rather be on the phone or sleeping or whatever else. I really look forward to the day when I can get in the car, say "Car, go to work. Alarm on arrival." and take a nap, read a book, or talk on the cell phone the whole time. Some day in the near future, your car will be a better driver than you are. On that day I will gleefully stop driving.
Too many people are really bad drivers, and it's not always the ones you see, or the ones engaging in socially unacceptable behavior like talking on the phone. I think that every time I see a beer can or bottle lying where it was obviously tossed from a vehicle, but it's just as true of the elderly driver plodding along at 15 MPH under the speed limit.
Unfortunately, it's because laws often define the words used in them. Literally define them. Usually those definitions are pretty much what you expect, but that's how you get a law called the so-and-so wiretapping act where the definition of wiretapping could include videotaping someone without consent.
Don't construe this response to be support of this obvious abuse of power. It's clearly exactly that.
Facebook is a communications medium. It's also a tremendously popular and common one. So yes, saying you can speak but not in that common mode where 700 million other people speak, does abridge the freedom of speech.
Let me get this straight. The gimmick is you rent out your place to a total stranger, you don't even meet them face-to-face, and expect them not to run away with all your phat loot ? Moronic
I have to agree. The concept of renting your place out while you're not using it isn't moronic, but the concept of renting your place out filled with your valuables, irreplaceable and otherwise, and a trove of identity stealing documents is really, really stupid.
Or is a billion dollars really so little nowadays.
nah, but a billion dollar valuation is a little different than an actual billion dollars. To get the actual billion, you have to sell the company to some damn fool for that much money. Sadly, that kind of thing really does happen so the line between valuation and value is pretty murky.
Short answer, yes it's a tech bubble, it's irrational, and we should know better but clearly don't.
If there's something in the shrink wrap somewhere, then it gets murky. That's where they can claim that you "agreed" to something you never did, just by opening the package.
I love those sorts of licenses. Be sure to invite them in to discuss the matter. Right after posting a sign in your lobby that by entering the premises they consent to a strip search and body cavity search. With a splintered 2x4. Said sign should only be visible once they've actually entered the premises.
That's one nonsense legal concept that needs to go away NOW. I agree to something by AGREEING to it. Not by tearing plastic. Not by walking into your store. Not by browsing to your web site. It's called informed consent and should apply EVERYWHERE, and NEVER after the fact.
The thing is that a persistent pseudonym accomplishes the same thing. You don't know my name, but this account has been posting on slashdot for over a decade. You can judge whether things I have to say are worth listening to, or whether I'm an astroturfer by the history of things I've had to say. My name is not critical to that decision, nor in fact is my name even unique.
I like the idea of being able to shed a pseudonym over time. People change. I recall hearing politicians lambasted over things they said or did 20 years ago. My opinions have changed in 20 years across a number of spectra (political, philosophical, religious, and more). If I had a pseudonym with a limited lifespan of say 10 years or so, you'd get a much clearer picture of who I am NOW than a simple name could ever give you.
Nonsense. While I'd agree the scenario you raise is possible, it's not at all "bound to occur", let alone within this century. The last time anything like that occurred was over 600 years ago, and the medicine, as such, didn't really exist at all. So, add to your doomsday scenario "untreatable". We also didn't have public health services, who, upon seeing people dropping like flies, are going to institute dramatic quarantine measures to compartmentalize the damage.
We also have very few "highly sterile environments", unless you're talking about places like hospital operating rooms, or the inside of an autoclave or ethylene oxide sterilizer. They are terrible breeding grounds for any disease because they are...sterilized. I'd actually worry a lot more about routine antibiotic use on livestock or patients who take their prescriptions until they feel better then quit before completing the full course for generating the next superbug.
They're not, actually. A frightening amount of the nonsense that got us into this mess is precisely what they teach you NOT to do in business school. Unfortunately, organizations are often run by people with huge egos who are motivated solely by power and wealth. These qualities serve you well in getting to the top of an organization. They don't predispose you to listen to people who actually know things, whether those people have MBAs or PhDs, or whatever degree in a technical discipline you happen to favor.
Honestly, most of the nutty things I see done in business are done by people in leadership positions who don't have MBAs.
You may not realize it, but the TSA and the FAA are not the same thing. All the functions you're worried about being privatized are run by the FAA, not the TSA.
The reason it's SOP to underbid the contract is that it's the only way to actually win the contract.
Having worked in the federal contracting space for about a decade, this simply isn't true. It may be true in some areas, but contracts are won and profitable without underbidding.
That said, a host of people should be out of jobs over this. The notion that anyone, anywhere thought that over HALF A BILLION DOLLARS was a reasonable price for a $#@%@ timekeeping system is beyond outrageous.
Expectation of privacy should be simply what the common man reasonably expects to be true, not what extreme or unusual circumstances make possible. When I was younger, I'd often go on long trips late at night. I'd be the ONLY person on the road for miles. Being a law abiding citizen, I think it's REASONABLE to EXPECT that the appearance of being all alone on the road at 3am meant that no one knew I was there, aside from people I told where I was going. I was aware there could be a state trooper lurking in the dark watching for speeders. We all know that happens, and no one will claim they expected not to find state troopers on highways.
Putting a tracking device on someone's car is radically different. I DO expect that when I go out my door in the morning and drive to work (or wherever), that there isn't anyone watching my every move. I DO believe I have the right and expectation to go about my business without being tracked since I'm not engaged in any illegal conduct.
Your point that tracking via a GPS device isn't functionally different than physically tracking someone is true, but it lowers the bar to the point where misuse is likely. It's really no different than saying wiretapping someone's cell phone without a warrant should be allowed as long as whatever is heard when the person is not in public is inadmissable. After all, you could simply overhear the same content as long as you had an officer tail the person and stay within listening distance.
The bottom line is that the technology has changed, and we as a society need to decide what checks and balances we want to put in place to both allow law enforcement to be effective and protect the rights of citizens. Banning GPS tracking altogether seems inappropriate. Letting police slap one on anybody they want seems inappropriate. "Get a warrant" seems just right.
I can understand the need for law enforcement to operate without fear of being liable for large sums of money
I find that really disturbing. If you or I cause significant harm to someone, we face civil liability or jail time. A group of people who are given greater power than the common citizen to cause significant harm to someone should face GREATER scrutiny and penalties to prevent abuse of that power.
Why shouldn't he get a dime? He was wronged. In our society, the only compensation you can exact from someone who wrongs you is money. If I were this kid, I might agree to having everyone involved stripped naked, marched through town, and barred from ever holding a position where they can do something like that again, but that remedy is not available.
You can't blame the kid for suing for money. That's all he CAN sue for. It's completely unreasonable to tell the kid that he has no remedy because the nut jobs who did this are working for the taxpayers, but if you or I did it, he COULD sue us for money and that'd be totally ok.
If they were secretly taking pictures of children in various states of undress, finding a statue that applies shouldn't be hard. Even if we assume that wasn't their intent, don't you suppose that somewhere in that sequence of 30,000 pictures they took, they saw such things? I mean they're laptops. You log in, check facebook, get dressed for school...
If we were talking a small number of pictures, I might be willing to give them a pass. Perhaps they really were that stupid not to realize that would happen, saw such a picture and had an OMG!!!!! moment and killed the program. But no. Thirty THOUSAND pictures? Nobody in the loop thought they might be doing something wrong here? Yeah, right...
Other forms of power kill more people than nuclear, nuclear just does so in a flashy form and in obvious clusters around the release. Coal, on the other hand, kills a lot more people, but does so over a longer period of time and over the entire area the particulate emissions spread...in other words, everywhere.
But hey, don't let that stop you policy makers. Do the thing that makes it look like you're taking action rather than taking the RIGHT action.
You both seemed to miss the "head of department" bit. I've worked in an environment like that, and can assure you putting an unauthorized device on the network won't get you marched out the door unless it happens to be attached to the mouldering body of Jimmy Hoffa. Even then, it's iffy. Most likely, IT would be directed to deodorize Jimmy and "make it work somehow". There would be a nonzero chance that the uppity little tech who thought he was going to tell a department head what to do would be looking for a new job. Small, but not zero.
OP, there's two problems. No institution can function security when every employee or even every department decides what can go on the network. YOU may be diligent and knowledgeable (or not), but I promise you from experience, others with similar authority will not be, and will do dumber things than you can possibly imagine. So yeah, it's reasonable for them to want to give this box a VERY serious once over if you're asking for a hole in the firewall. It's reasonable for them to require sudo and periodic audits, for that matter. It's reasonable for them to say no altogether.
The second problem, again having worked in such an environment, is that getting central IT to build this for you will cost a mountain of money and months of time. Those of us who think central control is a GOOD thing need to understand that responsive is a requirement if you're going to get people to play along. If users can build the thing they need in a weekend for $400, you're going to face stiff resistance when you want to write up a business case, etc, etc, etc and take 4 months doing the work, then bill them $80,000. That's just as bad as rogue devices, just in a different way.
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Well, the average age of an Olympic gymnast is 18, and the Olympics is next year, so I'd say they're going into 10th, 11th, or 12th grade right about now. Unless you mean the Chinese team. They're entering middle school about now.
I see your point, but the counter is that a scientist puts forth ideas with some merit and actually tests them. If you just toss ideas out into the world, you're not a scientist, you're a philosopher. If you just toss ideas out into the world without any regard to reasonableness, you're a crackpot or a crank. For example, if you postulate that long ago some powerful being threw a bunch of people into volcanoes and that those souls or whatever now plague mankind and are responsible for every bad thing that happens to you, you are not a scientist.
I loved the part where a network administrator from UAB claims their network hasn't been compromised. News flash. If you're on a university network--any university network--it's been compromised.
That's not true of all students, and therein lies the problem. The students who ARE there to learn and who don't think it's massively uncool have to deal with the idiots who are there to do nothing but disrupt the learning environment and cause trouble for those who want to learn. So yes, kids who demonstrate that they aren't getting anything out of school and are ruining the opportunity for others should go somewhere else.
Nah, somebody watched "The Day the Earth Stood Still" when they were a kid. So I figure if they show up, we just say Klaatu barado nikto and all will be fine.
If so, that's trivial to disprove. There are about 100 uncontacted tribes of humans in the world. Choose one. Find the shortest path to yourself. There is no path.
I really think that's the truth. The issue is not one of talking on the phone while driving, it's having to drive at all when one would rather be on the phone or sleeping or whatever else. I really look forward to the day when I can get in the car, say "Car, go to work. Alarm on arrival." and take a nap, read a book, or talk on the cell phone the whole time. Some day in the near future, your car will be a better driver than you are. On that day I will gleefully stop driving.
Too many people are really bad drivers, and it's not always the ones you see, or the ones engaging in socially unacceptable behavior like talking on the phone. I think that every time I see a beer can or bottle lying where it was obviously tossed from a vehicle, but it's just as true of the elderly driver plodding along at 15 MPH under the speed limit.
Unfortunately, it's because laws often define the words used in them. Literally define them. Usually those definitions are pretty much what you expect, but that's how you get a law called the so-and-so wiretapping act where the definition of wiretapping could include videotaping someone without consent.
Don't construe this response to be support of this obvious abuse of power. It's clearly exactly that.
Facebook is a communications medium. It's also a tremendously popular and common one. So yes, saying you can speak but not in that common mode where 700 million other people speak, does abridge the freedom of speech.
I have to agree. The concept of renting your place out while you're not using it isn't moronic, but the concept of renting your place out filled with your valuables, irreplaceable and otherwise, and a trove of identity stealing documents is really, really stupid.
nah, but a billion dollar valuation is a little different than an actual billion dollars. To get the actual billion, you have to sell the company to some damn fool for that much money. Sadly, that kind of thing really does happen so the line between valuation and value is pretty murky.
Short answer, yes it's a tech bubble, it's irrational, and we should know better but clearly don't.
I love those sorts of licenses. Be sure to invite them in to discuss the matter. Right after posting a sign in your lobby that by entering the premises they consent to a strip search and body cavity search. With a splintered 2x4. Said sign should only be visible once they've actually entered the premises.
That's one nonsense legal concept that needs to go away NOW. I agree to something by AGREEING to it. Not by tearing plastic. Not by walking into your store. Not by browsing to your web site. It's called informed consent and should apply EVERYWHERE, and NEVER after the fact.
The thing is that a persistent pseudonym accomplishes the same thing. You don't know my name, but this account has been posting on slashdot for over a decade. You can judge whether things I have to say are worth listening to, or whether I'm an astroturfer by the history of things I've had to say. My name is not critical to that decision, nor in fact is my name even unique.
I like the idea of being able to shed a pseudonym over time. People change. I recall hearing politicians lambasted over things they said or did 20 years ago. My opinions have changed in 20 years across a number of spectra (political, philosophical, religious, and more). If I had a pseudonym with a limited lifespan of say 10 years or so, you'd get a much clearer picture of who I am NOW than a simple name could ever give you.
Nonsense. While I'd agree the scenario you raise is possible, it's not at all "bound to occur", let alone within this century. The last time anything like that occurred was over 600 years ago, and the medicine, as such, didn't really exist at all. So, add to your doomsday scenario "untreatable". We also didn't have public health services, who, upon seeing people dropping like flies, are going to institute dramatic quarantine measures to compartmentalize the damage.
We also have very few "highly sterile environments", unless you're talking about places like hospital operating rooms, or the inside of an autoclave or ethylene oxide sterilizer. They are terrible breeding grounds for any disease because they are...sterilized. I'd actually worry a lot more about routine antibiotic use on livestock or patients who take their prescriptions until they feel better then quit before completing the full course for generating the next superbug.
They're not, actually. A frightening amount of the nonsense that got us into this mess is precisely what they teach you NOT to do in business school. Unfortunately, organizations are often run by people with huge egos who are motivated solely by power and wealth. These qualities serve you well in getting to the top of an organization. They don't predispose you to listen to people who actually know things, whether those people have MBAs or PhDs, or whatever degree in a technical discipline you happen to favor.
Honestly, most of the nutty things I see done in business are done by people in leadership positions who don't have MBAs.
You may not realize it, but the TSA and the FAA are not the same thing. All the functions you're worried about being privatized are run by the FAA, not the TSA.
Having worked in the federal contracting space for about a decade, this simply isn't true. It may be true in some areas, but contracts are won and profitable without underbidding.
That said, a host of people should be out of jobs over this. The notion that anyone, anywhere thought that over HALF A BILLION DOLLARS was a reasonable price for a $#@%@ timekeeping system is beyond outrageous.
Expectation of privacy should be simply what the common man reasonably expects to be true, not what extreme or unusual circumstances make possible. When I was younger, I'd often go on long trips late at night. I'd be the ONLY person on the road for miles. Being a law abiding citizen, I think it's REASONABLE to EXPECT that the appearance of being all alone on the road at 3am meant that no one knew I was there, aside from people I told where I was going. I was aware there could be a state trooper lurking in the dark watching for speeders. We all know that happens, and no one will claim they expected not to find state troopers on highways.
Putting a tracking device on someone's car is radically different. I DO expect that when I go out my door in the morning and drive to work (or wherever), that there isn't anyone watching my every move. I DO believe I have the right and expectation to go about my business without being tracked since I'm not engaged in any illegal conduct.
Your point that tracking via a GPS device isn't functionally different than physically tracking someone is true, but it lowers the bar to the point where misuse is likely. It's really no different than saying wiretapping someone's cell phone without a warrant should be allowed as long as whatever is heard when the person is not in public is inadmissable. After all, you could simply overhear the same content as long as you had an officer tail the person and stay within listening distance.
The bottom line is that the technology has changed, and we as a society need to decide what checks and balances we want to put in place to both allow law enforcement to be effective and protect the rights of citizens. Banning GPS tracking altogether seems inappropriate. Letting police slap one on anybody they want seems inappropriate. "Get a warrant" seems just right.
I find that really disturbing. If you or I cause significant harm to someone, we face civil liability or jail time. A group of people who are given greater power than the common citizen to cause significant harm to someone should face GREATER scrutiny and penalties to prevent abuse of that power.
That should say "The District will not utilize any such input systems."
What it really says is "The District will not utilize any such input systems remotely unless consistent with the law as we interpret it."
Because, of course, the people involved in this debacle didn't think they were doing anything illegal either.
Why shouldn't he get a dime? He was wronged. In our society, the only compensation you can exact from someone who wrongs you is money. If I were this kid, I might agree to having everyone involved stripped naked, marched through town, and barred from ever holding a position where they can do something like that again, but that remedy is not available.
You can't blame the kid for suing for money. That's all he CAN sue for. It's completely unreasonable to tell the kid that he has no remedy because the nut jobs who did this are working for the taxpayers, but if you or I did it, he COULD sue us for money and that'd be totally ok.
This kid is not the bad guy.
If they were secretly taking pictures of children in various states of undress, finding a statue that applies shouldn't be hard. Even if we assume that wasn't their intent, don't you suppose that somewhere in that sequence of 30,000 pictures they took, they saw such things? I mean they're laptops. You log in, check facebook, get dressed for school...
If we were talking a small number of pictures, I might be willing to give them a pass. Perhaps they really were that stupid not to realize that would happen, saw such a picture and had an OMG!!!!! moment and killed the program. But no. Thirty THOUSAND pictures? Nobody in the loop thought they might be doing something wrong here? Yeah, right...
Other forms of power kill more people than nuclear, nuclear just does so in a flashy form and in obvious clusters around the release. Coal, on the other hand, kills a lot more people, but does so over a longer period of time and over the entire area the particulate emissions spread...in other words, everywhere.
But hey, don't let that stop you policy makers. Do the thing that makes it look like you're taking action rather than taking the RIGHT action.
In which case being unable to use a secondary source (self-generated power) would be a bad thing, no?
You both seemed to miss the "head of department" bit. I've worked in an environment like that, and can assure you putting an unauthorized device on the network won't get you marched out the door unless it happens to be attached to the mouldering body of Jimmy Hoffa. Even then, it's iffy. Most likely, IT would be directed to deodorize Jimmy and "make it work somehow". There would be a nonzero chance that the uppity little tech who thought he was going to tell a department head what to do would be looking for a new job. Small, but not zero.
OP, there's two problems. No institution can function security when every employee or even every department decides what can go on the network. YOU may be diligent and knowledgeable (or not), but I promise you from experience, others with similar authority will not be, and will do dumber things than you can possibly imagine. So yeah, it's reasonable for them to want to give this box a VERY serious once over if you're asking for a hole in the firewall. It's reasonable for them to require sudo and periodic audits, for that matter. It's reasonable for them to say no altogether.
The second problem, again having worked in such an environment, is that getting central IT to build this for you will cost a mountain of money and months of time. Those of us who think central control is a GOOD thing need to understand that responsive is a requirement if you're going to get people to play along. If users can build the thing they need in a weekend for $400, you're going to face stiff resistance when you want to write up a business case, etc, etc, etc and take 4 months doing the work, then bill them $80,000. That's just as bad as rogue devices, just in a different way.