I agree with you that something with the apparent brightness of the Sun but the apparent size of a star would be extremely dangerous, if it's the brightness of Venus or the Moon it's not a problem.
The image formed on the retina is not a single point: its size is governed by the diffraction limit of the human eye.
Since both Venus and the supernova have an angular size much smaller than the eye's diffraction limit of 0.5 arcminutes, the light from both will be smeared out to cover the same amount of retinal area. So if its brightness is the same as Venus, and the part of the eye illuminated is the same as Venus, it will do as much retinal damage as Venus, which is to say, none.
If the supernova is as bright as the Moon, you start having to do math.
Intensity of supernova image = Supernova brightness / (area of supernova image) Intensity of Sun's image = Sun's brightness / (area of sun image)
Ratio of supernova to sun intensity = (SN brightness / Sun brightness ) * (Sun image diam / SN image diam)^2
If the supernova is as bright as the moon (magnitude -13), and the Sun's magnitude is -27, the brightness ratio is 2.512^(-14) = 2.5 x 10^-6.
The sun's diameter is 30 arcminutes; the supernova's apparent diameter to the naked eye is 0.5 arcminutes, so the diameter ratio is 60.
Ratio of supernova to sun intensity = 2.5 x 10^-6 * (60)^2 = 0.009
The intensity of the supernova would be 1% of the brightness of the sun. This is comparable to looking at the Sun through heavy clouds. Not real good for you, but permanent damage is unlikely.
(Note that it's *not* the same as looking at a sun during a 99% partial eclipse, because in that case while you see less of the sun, the parts you can see project the same intensity on your retina as usual.)
I'm not up on this research, but I think it's a little unclear whether Betelgeuse will turn into a black hole. It all depends on how much mass is left behind after it blows off most of its mass during the supernova explosion. To say this is a difficult computational problem is putting it mildly.
For comparison, the Cygnus X-1 black hole may have come from a star that was originally 40 solar masses in size, while the Crab Nebula's star may have been about 9-11 solar masses. Betelgeuse is about 19 solar masses in size.
I guess we'll find out!
But yes, if it did go black hole, it would be the closest one to us.
This is part of the price of doing business with Apple. If you think this is news you haven't been dealing with Apple very long: they've been trying to lock people out of their hardware since at *least* the Mac Plus, which required a narrow six-inch long Torx driver to open. (And this was in the days when it was easier to find a sonic screwdriver than a Torx bit.)
Apple's chutzpa in doing this is matched only by the author of the original fixit.com article, who in the same paragraph berates Apple for trying to make a quick buck, and then shamelessly tries to make a quick buck selling you the WRONG SCREWDRIVER for the job.
Us long-term Mac fanboys know that it's a useless effort, that in a few days you'll be able to buy an evil flower-head screwdriver from any of a dozen Chinese toolmakers.
But you don't need to buy one. If you take your Mac in to be fixed and it comes back with evil flower screws, just make a stink. Say they've broken your Mac, now the screws don't work as they did when you bought it. Demand they "fix it" and if they won't, start getting gradually annoyed. There are lots of problems with Apple, but one really *good* thing about them is their pride in in-person customer service. Every Apple store I've visited has fallen over themselves to go beyond their warranty obligations, when you show up in person.
The real solution is to get rid of these pesky screws so you can use a normal Phillips screwdriver on them.... So go ahead, set your iPhone free with our iPhone 4 Liberation Kit! Rid your phone of those terrible Pentalobe screws forever. The $9.95 kit includes a Pentalobe driver, 2 replacement PHILLIPS screws, and a regular #00 Phillips screwdriver.
So Google Ads now rewrites the articles and offers products for sale inside the text of blog news postings? Wow, no wonder they're making money.
GP is right: Apple may be trying to make a quick buck by locking you out of your hardware, but the "journalists" reporting on it are nothing but salesmen out to make a quick buck themselves.
Here's the deal though: if it's been six years and nobody's bothered to close these security holes --- and the searches still work, I just tried --- then *THAT* is news.
Finding a security exploit is not big news. Leaving a security hole unfixed for six years *is* big news, especially if it's done by companies for whom "security" is literally their middle name.
This quote is from five years ago. At the time, I doubt his investors had even heard of him. So it says nothing about his investors, but it does say something about his character.
Bastardi hasn't given enough details to make a bet concrete enough for a bookie to accept. But just to be definite, let's say he's talking about MSU T2LT data, averaged over 12 month intervals. He predicts this will decrease between 0.1 and 0.2 degrees over the coming decade.
It so happens that we already have 30 years' worth of that data, and have been arguing about climate change for at least that long. Here are the chances that Bastardi would have won his bet, had he placed it any time between 1978 and 2000:
He would have won his bet 3% of the time (basically, only if he'd placed it in 1983.) He would have bet too *high* 7% of the time (temperatures dropped by more than 0.2 degrees in a couple of years) He would have bet too *low* 90% of the time (temperatures actually rose, or dropped by less than 0.1 degrees, 29 out of 32 years.)
This is a stunt bet which Bastardi is almost certain to lose. Even if you thought global warming was a myth, and believed change in temperature over 1 decade was *totally random*, it would be an idiotic bet because this measurement varies over a 1.0 degree range from year to year. Picking a decrease in the range 0.1-0.2 in this case is like betting that you'll roll a 5 on a pair of dice.
At this point, it should be clear that Bastardi's bet is not based on any scientific data, or even on savvy oddsmaking: it's just pure blind faith. SO. I will take the bet, and I will even offer 2-to-1 odds: I'll pay $100 if temperature change is inside his range; he'll pay me $50 if it's outside that range, either high or low.
The actual data this press release is based on is here.
Versions of this data released to the media generally don't include error bars, though they should. But the methodology is the same as Hansen's 2006 paper:
"Estimated 2-sigma error (95% confidence) in comparing nearby years of global temperature (Fig. 1A), such as 1998 and 2005, decreases from 0.1C at the beginning of the 20th century to 0.05C in recent decades (4)."
Thus, the data errors are just a little smaller than the year-to-year variations, but are far, far smaller than the century-long trend. Which is why Hansen stresses that it doesn't really matter exactly which year is the hottest on record: what matters is how this decade stacks up to the rest of the 20th century.
This is true. Anyone who tells you anthropogenic climate change means the end of the world is an idiot -- and I say that as a climate scientist.
However, many people including Crichton go on to conclude that human influence on climate is irrelevant and negligible. This is the logical equivalent of saying that since sticking your hand in a bucket of lye probably won't kill you, it's perfectly safe to go ahead and do it on a regular basis.
Thanks to people who linked to the patent, I think I understand what's going on now. My guess was mostly right...
A liquid crystal material consists of long rod-shaped molecules. They have the funny property that light passes through them at a different speed depending on whether the light is polarized parallel to or perpendicular to the axis of the rods. This is called "birefringence".
Normally, if a thin layer of liquid crystal is sandwiched between two glass plates, the molecules line up parallel to the plates. However, if you put a voltage across the plates, the molecules line up end-to-end, perpendicular to the plates.
Therefore, applying a voltage effectively changes the speed of light passing through the liquid crystal. Glass optics work because the speed of light in glass is slower than in air: the difference in speed causes the light to be bent. Since liquid crystals can *change* their speed of light electrically, if you create a LC layer with exactly the right shape you can make a "lens" that vanishes when you switch off the voltage.
There's a lot of technical details (rather than creating a classical lens, the liquid crystals impersonate a Fresnel lens, requiring specific shapes and voltages for the electrodes) but that's the gist of it.
Where I was being led astray was by the effect liquid crystals have on *rotating the polarization* of light. This is a crucial part of understanding how LCD monitors work, but after thinking about it I realize that when used in these glasses, the liquid crystal will indeed rotate the polarization, but that's not something the human eye can detect.
Okay after racking my brain for a few minutes, I have one guess: an electrical field orients liquid crystals so their long axis is parallel to the light path -- as opposed to traditional LCDs where the crystal elements are aligned perpendicular to the light path. But that's just a guess: I have no idea if that's even *possible*.
OK, here's me. I'm a physics professor. I don't do optoelectronics research, but I do teach optics sometimes. I'm pretty savvy about electricity, magnetism, optics, chemistry, etc. I know how LCDs work, in detail.
WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN HOW THESE SUCKERS WORK? IT'S DRIVING ME CRAZY!
How the hell do you change the index of refraction of a material for *both polarizations* simultaneously? Liquid crystals are birefringent, but that's not enough to make a *lens*.
Also, what does it say about Slashdot and the rest of the geek community websites reporting this story that nobody else is asking this question? Aren't you guys supposed to be curious about how things work, or have you become like the rest of humanity, taking technology to be a miracle handed down from on high?
Deer's other report indicates that Wakefield and/or his co-authors changed the medical histories of the patients when writing the study
Yep, but the examples I've seen of that have been shifting dates and adding details -- stuff that could be deliberate fraud with intent to deceive, but could also be a misguided attempt to "enhance" a connection that's already clear to you.
It's a subtle distinction, I know, and requires us to get into Wakefield's personal head games, but it's the same sort of thing as distinguishing between murder and manslaughter. Just by way of example.
Fact is, most of the people remaining at Gitmo are bad, bad, men
Who decides what's a "fact"? No, I'm not gonna get all postmodern on you: we have a system for establishing facts like these in this country. It involves two lawyers, a judge, and usually twelve citizens.
Yes, it's difficult to use it now, but only because the previous administration fucked up the process so badly at the start. If I'm making cookies from a cookbook recipe and I add motor oil in with the other ingredients at the start, do I really have grounds to yell "this cookbook is useless!" when the cookies come out horrible at the end? And then hand the disgusting cookie dough off to my brother, and say "OK you're so smart, *you* make some tasty cookies out of this!"
I agree and I made this same point. However, it's worth pointing out that his original scientific focus was on the connection between measles and *bowel disease*. He only got on to the autism thing after he was approached by a lawyer for a vaccines=autism group and offered a £150/hour retainer. At this point his science shifted toward a three-way connection between vaccine, autism, and bowel disease, and later to autism alone.
So while I agree that Wakefield may truly have believed his theory was correct, and he may not have intended fraud per se, the quick bucks started *before* the bad science, and clearly shaped his scientific process.
Not quite, if you look at the timeline. He was receiving payments from a MMR=autism lawyer before he performed his study (such as it was), and he *investigated* the possibility of profiting off the research results, but he didn't actually incorporate the company until just after the Lancet paper was published.
I think Burnhard has a good point. Doctors and scientists form companies to profit from their discoveries all the time -- so long as the science is good, the results are published in open literature, and funding sources are disclosed, this is considered acceptable. In this case the science was truly bad and the funding sources were murky if not hidden outright, but I think it's still possible that Wakefield truly believed there was a connection between MMR and autism, and was lured by the money and potential fame into serious scientific misconduct.
The key lies in his hospital's "dismissal letter", not really a dismissal at all, which gave him a year with pay to work on reproducing his findings. He seems to have ignored this opportunity and used it to score "the man is trying to shut me down" points, which is pretty damning, but doesn't necessarily prove "mens rea".
Agree. I've got nothing good to say about my country's use of Guantanamo Bay, but the (paranoid) thinking behind it is clear. Gitmo is for people who the Feds are afraid to put on trial because they might A) be acquitted and go on to blow something up, or B) say something at their trial that instructs their henchmen to go blow something up.
The US government is really pissed at Julian Assange, but they do not believe that he or his henchmen will actually blow stuff up. Therefore, the Gitmo argument is pure hyperbole.
I'm old enough to know that they're probably gonna make us pick between exactly those two choices. And for the narrow question of maintaining my personal data, I'll take Big Government over Big Business, for exactly the reason you mentioned:
because governments cannot go out of business.
When the Big Business who owns your personal info goes bankrupt, that info is just another asset to be liquidated.
But the question is not simply ethics violations, it's specifically that of maintaining personal data. How many people at TJX are going to jail for losing 50 million credit card numbers? Even more, how many people at your local supermarket chain are going to jail for selling their customer loyalty card data to outside interests? How many at your credit-score company get arrested for selling your profile to mortgage advertisers? Oh right, that's not a crime, those people got *promotions*.
The difference between the state, and anyone else, is that modern states have a monopoly on force.
And the difference between a *democratic* state, and anyone else (including both the corporations and the various governments you mentioned) is that the modern state is responsible to the people who grant it the use of force.
Without that key element, I agree, there is no difference between a government, a corporation, or your neighborhood mafia. But even in a total "might makes right" world, corporations are no *better* than governments in terms of information trust, because the government can take your information from the corporations using their monopoly on force.
But really, if you think democracy is a negligible factor in American politics, there's no point in us discussing this further.
The problem comes when this person isn't responsible to the people.
Nail on the head. You're right to point out that government officials' responsibility to the people is imperfect. But *corporate* officials are responsible to their stockholders, not to "the people" at all.
Slashdot Mirror
I agree with you that something with the apparent brightness of the Sun but the apparent size of a star would be extremely dangerous, if it's the brightness of Venus or the Moon it's not a problem.
The image formed on the retina is not a single point: its size is governed by the diffraction limit of the human eye.
Since both Venus and the supernova have an angular size much smaller than the eye's diffraction limit of 0.5 arcminutes, the light from both will be smeared out to cover the same amount of retinal area. So if its brightness is the same as Venus, and the part of the eye illuminated is the same as Venus, it will do as much retinal damage as Venus, which is to say, none.
If the supernova is as bright as the Moon, you start having to do math.
Intensity of supernova image = Supernova brightness / (area of supernova image)
Intensity of Sun's image = Sun's brightness / (area of sun image)
Ratio of supernova to sun intensity = (SN brightness / Sun brightness ) * (Sun image diam / SN image diam)^2
If the supernova is as bright as the moon (magnitude -13), and the Sun's magnitude is -27, the brightness ratio is 2.512^(-14) = 2.5 x 10^-6.
The sun's diameter is 30 arcminutes; the supernova's apparent diameter to the naked eye is 0.5 arcminutes, so the diameter ratio is 60.
Ratio of supernova to sun intensity = 2.5 x 10^-6 * (60)^2 = 0.009
The intensity of the supernova would be 1% of the brightness of the sun. This is comparable to looking at the Sun through heavy clouds. Not real good for you, but permanent damage is unlikely.
(Note that it's *not* the same as looking at a sun during a 99% partial eclipse, because in that case while you see less of the sun, the parts you can see project the same intensity on your retina as usual.)
I'm not up on this research, but I think it's a little unclear whether Betelgeuse will turn into a black hole. It all depends on how much mass is left behind after it blows off most of its mass during the supernova explosion. To say this is a difficult computational problem is putting it mildly.
For comparison, the Cygnus X-1 black hole may have come from a star that was originally 40 solar masses in size, while the Crab Nebula's star may have been about 9-11 solar masses. Betelgeuse is about 19 solar masses in size.
I guess we'll find out!
But yes, if it did go black hole, it would be the closest one to us.
Marry that girl.
"I specialized in the arts not the sciences"
See? It's not a serious question; it's plain ignorance.
On behalf of physicists everywhere, I'd like to apologize for the pompous dick above.
This is part of the price of doing business with Apple. If you think this is news you haven't been dealing with Apple very long: they've been trying to lock people out of their hardware since at *least* the Mac Plus, which required a narrow six-inch long Torx driver to open. (And this was in the days when it was easier to find a sonic screwdriver than a Torx bit.)
Apple's chutzpa in doing this is matched only by the author of the original fixit.com article, who in the same paragraph berates Apple for trying to make a quick buck, and then shamelessly tries to make a quick buck selling you the WRONG SCREWDRIVER for the job.
Us long-term Mac fanboys know that it's a useless effort, that in a few days you'll be able to buy an evil flower-head screwdriver from any of a dozen Chinese toolmakers.
But you don't need to buy one. If you take your Mac in to be fixed and it comes back with evil flower screws, just make a stink. Say they've broken your Mac, now the screws don't work as they did when you bought it. Demand they "fix it" and if they won't, start getting gradually annoyed. There are lots of problems with Apple, but one really *good* thing about them is their pride in in-person customer service. Every Apple store I've visited has fallen over themselves to go beyond their warranty obligations, when you show up in person.
From TFA:
The real solution is to get rid of these pesky screws so you can use a normal Phillips screwdriver on them. ... So go ahead, set your iPhone free with our iPhone 4 Liberation Kit! Rid your phone of those terrible Pentalobe screws forever. The $9.95 kit includes a Pentalobe driver, 2 replacement PHILLIPS screws, and a regular #00 Phillips screwdriver.
So Google Ads now rewrites the articles and offers products for sale inside the text of blog news postings? Wow, no wonder they're making money.
GP is right: Apple may be trying to make a quick buck by locking you out of your hardware, but the "journalists" reporting on it are nothing but salesmen out to make a quick buck themselves.
Here's the deal though: if it's been six years and nobody's bothered to close these security holes --- and the searches still work, I just tried --- then *THAT* is news.
Finding a security exploit is not big news. Leaving a security hole unfixed for six years *is* big news, especially if it's done by companies for whom "security" is literally their middle name.
This quote is from five years ago. At the time, I doubt his investors had even heard of him. So it says nothing about his investors, but it does say something about his character.
Bastardi hasn't given enough details to make a bet concrete enough for a bookie to accept. But just to be definite, let's say he's talking about MSU T2LT data, averaged over 12 month intervals. He predicts this will decrease between 0.1 and 0.2 degrees over the coming decade.
It so happens that we already have 30 years' worth of that data, and have been arguing about climate change for at least that long. Here are the chances that Bastardi would have won his bet, had he placed it any time between 1978 and 2000:
He would have won his bet 3% of the time (basically, only if he'd placed it in 1983.)
He would have bet too *high* 7% of the time (temperatures dropped by more than 0.2 degrees in a couple of years)
He would have bet too *low* 90% of the time (temperatures actually rose, or dropped by less than 0.1 degrees, 29 out of 32 years.)
This is a stunt bet which Bastardi is almost certain to lose. Even if you thought global warming was a myth, and believed change in temperature over 1 decade was *totally random*, it would be an idiotic bet because this measurement varies over a 1.0 degree range from year to year. Picking a decrease in the range 0.1-0.2 in this case is like betting that you'll roll a 5 on a pair of dice.
At this point, it should be clear that Bastardi's bet is not based on any scientific data, or even on savvy oddsmaking: it's just pure blind faith. SO. I will take the bet, and I will even offer 2-to-1 odds: I'll pay $100 if temperature change is inside his range; he'll pay me $50 if it's outside that range, either high or low.
The actual data this press release is based on is here.
Versions of this data released to the media generally don't include error bars, though they should. But the methodology is the same as Hansen's 2006 paper:
"Estimated 2-sigma error (95% confidence) in comparing nearby years of global temperature (Fig. 1A), such as 1998 and 2005, decreases from 0.1C at the beginning of the 20th century to 0.05C in recent decades (4)."
Thus, the data errors are just a little smaller than the year-to-year variations, but are far, far smaller than the century-long trend. Which is why Hansen stresses that it doesn't really matter exactly which year is the hottest on record: what matters is how this decade stacks up to the rest of the 20th century.
This is true. Anyone who tells you anthropogenic climate change means the end of the world is an idiot -- and I say that as a climate scientist.
However, many people including Crichton go on to conclude that human influence on climate is irrelevant and negligible. This is the logical equivalent of saying that since sticking your hand in a bucket of lye probably won't kill you, it's perfectly safe to go ahead and do it on a regular basis.
Thanks to people who linked to the patent, I think I understand what's going on now. My guess was mostly right...
A liquid crystal material consists of long rod-shaped molecules. They have the funny property that light passes through them at a different speed depending on whether the light is polarized parallel to or perpendicular to the axis of the rods. This is called "birefringence".
Normally, if a thin layer of liquid crystal is sandwiched between two glass plates, the molecules line up parallel to the plates. However, if you put a voltage across the plates, the molecules line up end-to-end, perpendicular to the plates.
Therefore, applying a voltage effectively changes the speed of light passing through the liquid crystal. Glass optics work because the speed of light in glass is slower than in air: the difference in speed causes the light to be bent. Since liquid crystals can *change* their speed of light electrically, if you create a LC layer with exactly the right shape you can make a "lens" that vanishes when you switch off the voltage.
There's a lot of technical details (rather than creating a classical lens, the liquid crystals impersonate a Fresnel lens, requiring specific shapes and voltages for the electrodes) but that's the gist of it.
Where I was being led astray was by the effect liquid crystals have on *rotating the polarization* of light. This is a crucial part of understanding how LCD monitors work, but after thinking about it I realize that when used in these glasses, the liquid crystal will indeed rotate the polarization, but that's not something the human eye can detect.
Not sure if this is a very clever joke or a genuine question. Two orthogonal LC layers on top of each other would be totally opaque.
Okay after racking my brain for a few minutes, I have one guess: an electrical field orients liquid crystals so their long axis is parallel to the light path -- as opposed to traditional LCDs where the crystal elements are aligned perpendicular to the light path. But that's just a guess: I have no idea if that's even *possible*.
OK, here's me. I'm a physics professor. I don't do optoelectronics research, but I do teach optics sometimes. I'm pretty savvy about electricity, magnetism, optics, chemistry, etc. I know how LCDs work, in detail.
WILL SOMEONE PLEASE EXPLAIN HOW THESE SUCKERS WORK? IT'S DRIVING ME CRAZY!
How the hell do you change the index of refraction of a material for *both polarizations* simultaneously? Liquid crystals are birefringent, but that's not enough to make a *lens*.
Also, what does it say about Slashdot and the rest of the geek community websites reporting this story that nobody else is asking this question? Aren't you guys supposed to be curious about how things work, or have you become like the rest of humanity, taking technology to be a miracle handed down from on high?
I'm baffled on both counts.
This isn't Big Pharma. This is little startup pharma, plus lawyers. Read the article.
Deer's other report indicates that Wakefield and/or his co-authors changed the medical histories of the patients when writing the study
Yep, but the examples I've seen of that have been shifting dates and adding details -- stuff that could be deliberate fraud with intent to deceive, but could also be a misguided attempt to "enhance" a connection that's already clear to you.
It's a subtle distinction, I know, and requires us to get into Wakefield's personal head games, but it's the same sort of thing as distinguishing between murder and manslaughter. Just by way of example.
Fact is, most of the people remaining at Gitmo are bad, bad, men
Who decides what's a "fact"? No, I'm not gonna get all postmodern on you: we have a system for establishing facts like these in this country. It involves two lawyers, a judge, and usually twelve citizens.
Yes, it's difficult to use it now, but only because the previous administration fucked up the process so badly at the start. If I'm making cookies from a cookbook recipe and I add motor oil in with the other ingredients at the start, do I really have grounds to yell "this cookbook is useless!" when the cookies come out horrible at the end? And then hand the disgusting cookie dough off to my brother, and say "OK you're so smart, *you* make some tasty cookies out of this!"
I agree and I made this same point. However, it's worth pointing out that his original scientific focus was on the connection between measles and *bowel disease*. He only got on to the autism thing after he was approached by a lawyer for a vaccines=autism group and offered a £150/hour retainer. At this point his science shifted toward a three-way connection between vaccine, autism, and bowel disease, and later to autism alone.
So while I agree that Wakefield may truly have believed his theory was correct, and he may not have intended fraud per se, the quick bucks started *before* the bad science, and clearly shaped his scientific process.
Not quite, if you look at the timeline. He was receiving payments from a MMR=autism lawyer before he performed his study (such as it was), and he *investigated* the possibility of profiting off the research results, but he didn't actually incorporate the company until just after the Lancet paper was published.
I think Burnhard has a good point. Doctors and scientists form companies to profit from their discoveries all the time -- so long as the science is good, the results are published in open literature, and funding sources are disclosed, this is considered acceptable. In this case the science was truly bad and the funding sources were murky if not hidden outright, but I think it's still possible that Wakefield truly believed there was a connection between MMR and autism, and was lured by the money and potential fame into serious scientific misconduct.
The key lies in his hospital's "dismissal letter", not really a dismissal at all, which gave him a year with pay to work on reproducing his findings. He seems to have ignored this opportunity and used it to score "the man is trying to shut me down" points, which is pretty damning, but doesn't necessarily prove "mens rea".
Agree. I've got nothing good to say about my country's use of Guantanamo Bay, but the (paranoid) thinking behind it is clear. Gitmo is for people who the Feds are afraid to put on trial because they might A) be acquitted and go on to blow something up, or B) say something at their trial that instructs their henchmen to go blow something up.
The US government is really pissed at Julian Assange, but they do not believe that he or his henchmen will actually blow stuff up. Therefore, the Gitmo argument is pure hyperbole.
I'm old enough to know that they're probably gonna make us pick between exactly those two choices. And for the narrow question of maintaining my personal data, I'll take Big Government over Big Business, for exactly the reason you mentioned:
because governments cannot go out of business.
When the Big Business who owns your personal info goes bankrupt, that info is just another asset to be liquidated.
How many public servants do you know who are serving prison sentences for breaking ethics rules?
You kidding? Just off the top of my head,
this guy, this guy, local to me this lady, and this guy who just got out last year.
But the question is not simply ethics violations, it's specifically that of maintaining personal data. How many people at TJX are going to jail for losing 50 million credit card numbers? Even more, how many people at your local supermarket chain are going to jail for selling their customer loyalty card data to outside interests? How many at your credit-score company get arrested for selling your profile to mortgage advertisers? Oh right, that's not a crime, those people got *promotions*.
The difference between the state, and anyone else, is that modern states have a monopoly on force.
And the difference between a *democratic* state, and anyone else (including both the corporations and the various governments you mentioned) is that the modern state is responsible to the people who grant it the use of force.
Without that key element, I agree, there is no difference between a government, a corporation, or your neighborhood mafia. But even in a total "might makes right" world, corporations are no *better* than governments in terms of information trust, because the government can take your information from the corporations using their monopoly on force.
But really, if you think democracy is a negligible factor in American politics, there's no point in us discussing this further.
The problem comes when this person isn't responsible to the people.
Nail on the head. You're right to point out that government officials' responsibility to the people is imperfect. But *corporate* officials are responsible to their stockholders, not to "the people" at all.