These are not the same tags they are proposing for inventory control in retail outlets dispite what both the Wired article and the slashdot submitter imply. These are designed to be read from a longer distance and used specifically to track people. You can still call anti inventory control RFID privacy nuts 'paranoid'.
I don't know, kids understand the conditioning we give them that drugs are bad, and ignore it. They understand and accept that they can't, drink, drive, vote, or join the military until a specific age.
Telling kids that "drugs are bad" a couple times per year is in no way the same as tracking their movements continuously.
Trust me, kids will both understand and know that tracking them is a violation of the rights of an adult. However, it's very important that kids learn that kids aren't adults, and they don't have the rights adults have. They get them as they earn them.
Which rights would those be? Life? Liberty? Persuit of Happyness? If people needed to "earn" the right to vote we wouldn't have such sleezeballs in office. Hell people don't "earn" any of the rights you mention, they just get older.
Presumably if they're going to the trouble of determining all those other parameters, they'll also determine if the average distance between any two tags remains two low (ie, within two inches of each other because they're both around the same student's neck)
So one goes in a pocket. They are not going to know their location within inches anyway.
or if the correlation between the positions of any two tags is too high (ie, because one's around a student's neck and the other is in his pocket for two straight hours).
Big deal, they have 2 classes together. Unless you're talking about a really big school I think you'll find that most students have a few friends in just about all of their classes. Also what is to stop them from trading between classes?
How exactly does this take away from the child's freedom again?
Well, wouldn't YOU find it degrading?
Their choices have consequences, and this technology will make sure those consequences are dealt as impersonally as a photo-radar speed trap
Teaching people to be obedient is NOT the same as teaching people to be responsible.
I'm pretty far left-of-center,
Great so maybe you'll understand better when we implement this first with minorities and the poor OK? I mean they are the ones in underfunded schools where noone gives a damn so we'll just be "protecting" them right?
and I think this illustrates a much bigger problem of breakdown in trusting relationships between parents, teachers and kids, but could someone explain this one to me please?
It's "wrong" because it's degrading It's a bad idea because building trusting relationships requires trust which is exactly what this removes.
I don't see anything terribly wrong with helping the nurses keep track of old people. Imagine a few hundred old people on a field trip to a museum. It'd be a lot easier and safer if the old people were all tagged so if they went out of a certain perimeter the chaperones could go find them right away. There also wouldn't be the problem of continuous head counts or leaving someone behind. Tagging old people is a bit weird, but the world's gotten more than a bit weird. Old people sometimes have alzhimers and sometimes they get lost. now, after all. RFID tagging younger old people seems a bit pointless though.
You do realize that these kids who you want trained that "right == what I can get away with" are going to be the ones in charge of you eventually right?
Here's a tip. THE WORLD HAS ALWAYS BEEN WEIRD! Turning the next generation into a bunch of min
Now if this were to find it's way into the workplace, that would suck. But not all monitoring technology is a bad thing.
Right, so long as it's being done to someone else it's OK. When will people realize that if you won't defend other peoples rights noone will defend yours?
ugh.. as nice as it would be to say proprietary software is bad, these are the results. That just is not the case.
I think it would be more accurate to say the "this is one of the risks of using proprietary software"
Proprietary software failed in this case because the people using it (stupidly) paid a lot of money for software that had no contingency plan or guarantee.
Which is true for many if not most software users out there. Almost every small business I know of has at least one piece of proprietary software that is central to their business and I can't think of any that has a contingency plan that is worth anything. Even with escrow there are plenty of ways for things to go badly wrong but still not force the escrow agent to hand over the code in a usable form (or at all).
I don't know how many are out there but I can recomend SQL-Ledger as one good example. I think there was a Linux Journal article reviewing some of the options a few months back.
In 1997 there was a case where Gateway shipped a computer along with a list of terms including one that required arbitration in the case of any dispute. Initially the court ruled that since the terms wern't made available at the time of purchase they didn't count but an appeals court reversed that due to the fact that the customer had an opportunity to return the product if they didn't agree. They used the ProCD case as support for this decision. I don't agree with any of this but apparently you CAN be bound by terms that are disclosed only after you've paid your money.
I wonder if there might be a way to turn this around on vendors? In cases where you are buying something on "store credit" maybe a counter offer in the memo of your first payment would be enough?
he bottom line is, you can buy a dove-tail jig, so its obvious the jigs to make dovetail jigs have been arround for I'd guess a century or two. Somewhere along the line somebody either got a patent that expired long-ago, was turned down due to art prori or lack of unobviosness.
They won't get a patent on "making a dovetail jig" but maybe they can get one on "making a dovetail jig of this exact shape/design"?
I don't think EULAs hold any legality whatsoever, at least in my country. The only laws and right restrictions that can be legally enforced on a user installing software are the laws that regulate sales, and all written contracts signed by said user. Nowhere does the EULA fits into this, except in the case of most site-licenses, where there is a written, signed agreement.
I'm not sure what country you are talking about but in most states in the US a contract does NOT need to be written or signed. The purpose of a written and signed contract is to show that both parties understood what they were getting into. If you can do that in some other way the agreement is still binding. For example, verbal contracts are just as legally binding as written ones with the main difference being that they are harder to prove.
It is only legally-binding the author, not the user.
Contracts normally require "consideration" on the part of each party. If someone gives you a car they may be able to sue to get it back, even if they write down on paper that they are giving it to you. If they sell you a car even for a trivial amount of money (or in exchange for something of value) then they would have to prove that you didn't live up to your part of the bargin or find a loophole like maybe they wern't of legal age etc.
You know, you SHOULD be right but at least some clauses in eulas HAVE been upheld in court. I believe that at least one reason is that these eulas are a "common practice in the industry". That's why I cringe every time I point out a particularly nasty eula to a customer and they say "yeah that's bad but they could never enforce it". Apparently just allowing these things to exist is enough to set some sort of precidnet.
My guess is that they think that the more good free movies are out there the less their copyrighted stuff will be worth. They probably feel that ANYTHING that makes them more money is good for the public because it gives them the capital to create more new movies.
That little realization is really scary to me. I don't FEEL above average. Actually I feel I could be a hell of a lot smarter. My IQ is above 150, and I'm well educated. (It's not bragging from an "anonymous handle" is it?) Yet I feel dumb often.
I expect that Joe & Mary Sixpack are becoming more aware of spam very quickly.
Most people are already aware of spam. The problem is that many just can't seem to wrap their brains around the idea that even responding to the 1 in 1000 spams for "legitimate" products just encourages the other 999 spammers to keep trying. They just don't understand what would happen if every legitamate company on the plannet decided it was OK to send them unrequested adds.
I don't see how you can make the argument that "NAFTA has been bad for... all three countries." Ross Perot's "giant sucking sound" failed to materialize, as the growth in international trade helped create new jobs in the US as many manufacturing jobs headed south. While Perot predicted massive unemployment under NAFTA, in actuality US unemployment hit historic lows throughout most of the 90's, and is still relatively low considering the economy over the last couple years.
Well,trading $15/hr factory jobs for $7/hr retail jobs doesn't affect the unemployment rate but it's not what I'd call a win either. Also the "unemployment rate" only covers people currently getting unemployment benifits. Once your benefits run out you're no longer "unemployed" as far as that particular statistic is concerned.
For many "standard parts", you can pay the manufacturer extra money to cherry pick the best parts from the production line.
Do you have ANY evidence that Apple does this (or that it's even possible) for hard drives? I could see how you might be able to pick out those drives that are going to die VERY soon but chances are the manufacturers already do this.
All the Macs I've had, I've never had a hard drive fail. As far as I know, this is normal for Mac users.
In fairness a sample of 1 doesn't mean much, there are millions of PC users that have never had a drive failure either. Hell, I've still got an old 20MB hard drive from an early PC-AT clone that still works (or did a few months ago when I fired it up. I also use a lot of old (486 and early pentium class) PCs for routers, print servers etc and I almost never have drive failures in those (the drives that were going to fail have already done so years ago). That said, if there is a difference in the average lifespan of hard drives on PCs and Macs I'd say that it's due to the poor design and low quality supporting parts used in many PCs. Poor quality power supplies, crappy cases that allow the drive to vibrate and don't allow adequate cooling could all raise the failure rate at least a little.
No it's not. GIMP for Windows (and possibly for all platforms?) can't (won't) save as GIFs. That's a pretty big gap for a product that professes to be an alternative for Photoshop!
Gimp by default doesn't (or at least didn't) ship with the ability to save as GIF due to the GIF patent, not any technical problem and at least on Linux it was still possible to get an add on to do that.
Do you think the people who sell multi-thousand dollar ads using Photoshop give a crap about the $900 sticker price?
No but I think that's a pretty small fraction of the people using Photoshop and when the rest are gone the sticker price is going to have to go way up to make up the difference.
Now consider how many people are going to go through the trouble of poring through source code of voting programs. Arguably fewer, since voting programs are a small subset of the set of open-source software.
Each candidate would have incentive to verify the process as would the media and elections commission. Also there would be many more interested parties (voters) than use any other piece of open source software.
Just because anything can be cheated given unlimited money/power/influence in a hypothetical world, does not make them all the SAME!
Cheating in elections using paper ballots isn't hypothetical, it's something that has happened and will happen. I don't think it's a given that paper balots are always safer from fraud or mistakes than electronic systems.
want your fussy child to go to bed when she wakes up at 2:00 am? sit down on the couch with a bottle of milk, and put on C-SPAN (or C-SPAN2).
No need for fussy children here, when the wife is working nights I can't sleep so around 3-5am I just lay down on the couch and put on C-SPAN. Works like a charm.
Quite frankly I think it's inevitable that a channel dedicated to science is created as more and more bandwidth becomes available for more and more different cable/satelite channels. The only question is when it will happen. I hope soon.
There's already plenty of spare bandwidth but apparently it's more profitable to use it for infomercials than programming.
But would it work? Most of American knows nothing about science. They are far more likely to be entertained and interested in psychics, the paranormal, and well, science-esque stories that they can understand.
Does it have to appeal to most Americans? I've got hundreds of channels and all I want is just one that does science (and maybe some other geek stuff) without assuming that the entire audience knows nothing about the topic at hand. Not EVERYTHING has to be introductory does it? Then again they'd have to hire writers who know the topic too and that might be too much. There's nothing like seeing some Discovery Channel special where they start out talking to some scientist and then switch to a narrator who spouts some nonsense misinterpretation of what the scientist just said.
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These are not the same tags they are proposing for inventory control in retail outlets dispite what both the Wired article and the slashdot submitter imply. These are designed to be read from a longer distance and used specifically to track people. You can still call anti inventory control RFID privacy nuts 'paranoid'.
In a school the children ARE the inventory.
I don't know, kids understand the conditioning we give them that drugs are bad, and ignore it. They understand and accept that they can't, drink, drive, vote, or join the military until a specific age.
Telling kids that "drugs are bad" a couple times per year is in no way the same as tracking their movements continuously.
Trust me, kids will both understand and know that tracking them is a violation of the rights of an adult. However, it's very important that kids learn that kids aren't adults, and they don't have the rights adults have. They get them as they earn them.
Which rights would those be? Life? Liberty? Persuit of Happyness? If people needed to "earn" the right to vote we wouldn't have such sleezeballs in office. Hell people don't "earn" any of the rights you mention, they just get older.
Presumably if they're going to the trouble of determining all those other parameters, they'll also determine if the average distance between any two tags remains two low (ie, within two inches of each other because they're both around the same student's neck)
So one goes in a pocket. They are not going to know their location within inches anyway.
or if the correlation between the positions of any two tags is too high (ie, because one's around a student's neck and the other is in his pocket for two straight hours).
Big deal, they have 2 classes together. Unless you're talking about a really big school I think you'll find that most students have a few friends in just about all of their classes. Also what is to stop them from trading between classes?
How exactly does this take away from the child's freedom again?
Well, wouldn't YOU find it degrading?
Their choices have consequences, and this technology will make sure those consequences are dealt as impersonally as a photo-radar speed trap
Teaching people to be obedient is NOT the same as teaching people to be responsible.
I'm pretty far left-of-center,
Great so maybe you'll understand better when we implement this first with minorities and the poor OK? I mean they are the ones in underfunded schools where noone gives a damn so we'll just be "protecting" them right?
and I think this illustrates a much bigger problem of breakdown in trusting relationships between parents, teachers and kids, but could someone explain this one to me please?
It's "wrong" because it's degrading It's a bad idea because building trusting relationships requires trust which is exactly what this removes.
I don't see anything terribly wrong with helping the nurses keep track of old people. Imagine a few hundred old people on a field trip to a museum. It'd be a lot easier and safer if the old people were all tagged so if they went out of a certain perimeter the chaperones could go find them right away. There also wouldn't be the problem of continuous head counts or leaving someone behind. Tagging old people is a bit weird, but the world's gotten more than a bit weird. Old people sometimes have alzhimers and sometimes they get lost. now, after all. RFID tagging younger old people seems a bit pointless though.
You do realize that these kids who you want trained that "right == what I can get away with" are going to be the ones in charge of you eventually right?
Here's a tip. THE WORLD HAS ALWAYS BEEN WEIRD! Turning the next generation into a bunch of min
Now if this were to find it's way into the workplace, that would suck. But not all monitoring technology is a bad thing.
Right, so long as it's being done to someone else it's OK. When will people realize that if you won't defend other peoples rights noone will defend yours?
ugh.. as nice as it would be to say proprietary software is bad, these are the results. That just is not the case.
I think it would be more accurate to say the "this is one of the risks of using proprietary software"
Proprietary software failed in this case because the people using it (stupidly) paid a lot of money for software that had no contingency plan or guarantee.
Which is true for many if not most software users out there. Almost every small business I know of has at least one piece of proprietary software that is central to their business and I can't think of any that has a contingency plan that is worth anything. Even with escrow there are plenty of ways for things to go badly wrong but still not force the escrow agent to hand over the code in a usable form (or at all).
Even if you cannot afford the developer effort needed to completely take over a dead project OSS still gives you some additional options:
1. Work with other stranded customers/users to share the cost of development.
2. Hire just a single developer to handle immediate problems and buy some time.
3. Find a replacement OSS project and pay one of the developers a months wages to create a conversion tool for your data.
I don't know how many are out there but I can recomend SQL-Ledger as one good example. I think there was a Linux Journal article reviewing some of the options a few months back.
In 1997 there was a case where Gateway shipped a computer along with a list of terms including one that required arbitration in the case of any dispute. Initially the court ruled that since the terms wern't made available at the time of purchase they didn't count but an appeals court reversed that due to the fact that the customer had an opportunity to return the product if they didn't agree. They used the ProCD case as support for this decision. I don't agree with any of this but apparently you CAN be bound by terms that are disclosed only after you've paid your money.
I wonder if there might be a way to turn this around on vendors? In cases where you are buying something on "store credit" maybe a counter offer in the memo of your first payment would be enough?
he bottom line is, you can buy a dove-tail jig, so its obvious the jigs to make dovetail jigs have been arround for I'd guess a century or two. Somewhere along the line somebody either got a patent that expired long-ago, was turned down due to art prori or lack of unobviosness.
They won't get a patent on "making a dovetail jig" but maybe they can get one on "making a dovetail jig of this exact shape/design"?
I don't think EULAs hold any legality whatsoever, at least in my country. The only laws and right restrictions that can be legally enforced on a user installing software are the laws that regulate sales, and all written contracts signed by said user. Nowhere does the EULA fits into this, except in the case of most site-licenses, where there is a written, signed agreement.
I'm not sure what country you are talking about but in most states in the US a contract does NOT need to be written or signed. The purpose of a written and signed contract is to show that both parties understood what they were getting into. If you can do that in some other way the agreement is still binding. For example, verbal contracts are just as legally binding as written ones with the main difference being that they are harder to prove.
It is only legally-binding the author, not the user.
Contracts normally require "consideration" on the part of each party. If someone gives you a car they may be able to sue to get it back, even if they write down on paper that they are giving it to you. If they sell you a car even for a trivial amount of money (or in exchange for something of value) then they would have to prove that you didn't live up to your part of the bargin or find a loophole like maybe they wern't of legal age etc.
You know, you SHOULD be right but at least some clauses in eulas HAVE been upheld in court. I believe that at least one reason is that these eulas are a "common practice in the industry". That's why I cringe every time I point out a particularly nasty eula to a customer and they say "yeah that's bad but they could never enforce it". Apparently just allowing these things to exist is enough to set some sort of precidnet.
My guess is that they think that the more good free movies are out there the less their copyrighted stuff will be worth. They probably feel that ANYTHING that makes them more money is good for the public because it gives them the capital to create more new movies.
That little realization is really scary to me. I don't FEEL above average. Actually I feel I could be a hell of a lot smarter. My IQ is above 150, and I'm well educated. (It's not bragging from an "anonymous handle" is it?) Yet I feel dumb often.
That may not be such a bad thing:
http://www.apa.org/journals/psp/psp7761121.html
I expect that Joe & Mary Sixpack are becoming more aware of spam very quickly.
Most people are already aware of spam. The problem is that many just can't seem to wrap their brains around the idea that even responding to the 1 in 1000 spams for "legitimate" products just encourages the other 999 spammers to keep trying. They just don't understand what would happen if every legitamate company on the plannet decided it was OK to send them unrequested adds.
I don't see how you can make the argument that "NAFTA has been bad for... all three countries." Ross Perot's "giant sucking sound" failed to materialize, as the growth in international trade helped create new jobs in the US as many manufacturing jobs headed south. While Perot predicted massive unemployment under NAFTA, in actuality US unemployment hit historic lows throughout most of the 90's, and is still relatively low considering the economy over the last couple years.
Well,trading $15/hr factory jobs for $7/hr retail jobs doesn't affect the unemployment rate but it's not what I'd call a win either. Also the "unemployment rate" only covers people currently getting unemployment benifits. Once your benefits run out you're no longer "unemployed" as far as that particular statistic is concerned.
For many "standard parts", you can pay the manufacturer extra money to cherry pick the best parts from the production line.
Do you have ANY evidence that Apple does this (or that it's even possible) for hard drives? I could see how you might be able to pick out those drives that are going to die VERY soon but chances are the manufacturers already do this.
All the Macs I've had, I've never had a hard drive fail. As far as I know, this is normal for Mac users.
In fairness a sample of 1 doesn't mean much, there are millions of PC users that have never had a drive failure either. Hell, I've still got an old 20MB hard drive from an early PC-AT clone that still works (or did a few months ago when I fired it up. I also use a lot of old (486 and early pentium class) PCs for routers, print servers etc and I almost never have drive failures in those (the drives that were going to fail have already done so years ago). That said, if there is a difference in the average lifespan of hard drives on PCs and Macs I'd say that it's due to the poor design and low quality supporting parts used in many PCs. Poor quality power supplies, crappy cases that allow the drive to vibrate and don't allow adequate cooling could all raise the failure rate at least a little.
No it's not. GIMP for Windows (and possibly for all platforms?) can't (won't) save as GIFs. That's a pretty big gap for a product that professes to be an alternative for Photoshop!
Gimp by default doesn't (or at least didn't) ship with the ability to save as GIF due to the GIF patent, not any technical problem and at least on Linux it was still possible to get an add on to do that.
Do you think the people who sell multi-thousand dollar ads using Photoshop give a crap about the $900 sticker price?
No but I think that's a pretty small fraction of the people using Photoshop and when the rest are gone the sticker price is going to have to go way up to make up the difference.
Now consider how many people are going to go through the trouble of poring through source code of voting programs. Arguably fewer, since voting programs are a small subset of the set of open-source software.
Each candidate would have incentive to verify the process as would the media and elections commission. Also there would be many more interested parties (voters) than use any other piece of open source software.
Just because anything can be cheated given unlimited money/power/influence in a hypothetical world, does not make them all the SAME!
Cheating in elections using paper ballots isn't hypothetical, it's something that has happened and will happen. I don't think it's a given that paper balots are always safer from fraud or mistakes than electronic systems.
want your fussy child to go to bed when she wakes up at 2:00 am? sit down on the couch with a bottle of milk, and put on C-SPAN (or C-SPAN2).
No need for fussy children here, when the wife is working nights I can't sleep so around 3-5am I just lay down on the couch and put on C-SPAN. Works like a charm.
Quite frankly I think it's inevitable that a channel dedicated to science is created as more and more bandwidth becomes available for more and more different cable/satelite channels. The only question is when it will happen. I hope soon.
There's already plenty of spare bandwidth but apparently it's more profitable to use it for infomercials than programming.
But would it work? Most of American knows nothing about science. They are far more likely to be entertained and interested in psychics, the paranormal, and well, science-esque stories that they can understand.
Does it have to appeal to most Americans? I've got hundreds of channels and all I want is just one that does science (and maybe some other geek stuff) without assuming that the entire audience knows nothing about the topic at hand. Not EVERYTHING has to be introductory does it? Then again they'd have to hire writers who know the topic too and that might be too much. There's nothing like seeing some Discovery Channel special where they start out talking to some scientist and then switch to a narrator who spouts some nonsense misinterpretation of what the scientist just said.