Someone volunteering to join the military (e.g. Pfc. Manning) also agrees to be bound by the UCMJ. It's not hipocracy, it's simple reality. If you want members of the military to have the same rights as civilians, you don't want to have a military or the protections it provides. In order for the military to function, it's members must be held to higher standards and have fewer freedoms; otherwise, the whole thing would just fall apart.
Pfc. Manning is in a hell of his own creation for not only did he volunteer to join the military of his own free will, he was granted access to sensitive information and that sets the bar even higher.
Re:Ever Heard of Capitalism?
on
The Web We Lost
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
For better or for worse, these are very important things in a Capitalistic society.
I've often heard of Capitalism but, I don't believe I see it very often. The result of a Capitalistic Society that practices Capitalism would be Open and Free Markets, right? The markets in the U.S., IMHO, run much more like a Plutocracy than an sense of the word Open. Companies like Walmart, the local market, decide who can and can not come to the market, how and how much they can come to the market, set prices for products they don't produce, etc.. Microsoft has forced Dell to change how they sell PCs and laptops. Groups of companies have frequently colluded to control the markets in terms of price and availability or their products.
If Capitalism produces Free Markets and we don't have Free Markets . . .
You'll find few people in the UK who particularly care about CCTV cameras one way or another. Whatever theoretical drawbacks they have, there are few practical issues with them, while there is a measurable reduction in crime rate. And the taking of footage of us in public doesn't qualify as a privacy issue anyway.
Granted I may be wrong in terms of the scope of camera availability. I'd argue that whether this is a privacy issue isn't that clear cut. While a private citizen taking video in public may not be a privacy issue, the collection and storage of video with current technology, facial recognition, etc. is something I would consider a serious privacy issue. The potential for malicious use is too high. Knowing where I am is one things, knowing where I was, how long I was there, how often I was there, etc. is another...
But no one can see much crime-fighting benefit in storing everyone's internet traffic for months, while the drawbacks in terms of ISP costs, which will be passed to the customer, are obvious. And this is a genuine privacy issue, since I consider my emails to my brother or girlfriend to be private in a way that my movements in public are not.
Point taken.
So I'm not sure why you think we don't care about privacy. The UK actually has the strongest existing data privacy laws of any Western country, so far as I am aware. The Data Protection Act was passed in the 80s before the internet and before there was really any need for it. The US has nothing like it. (CCTV gathering is subject to the DPA act, by the way, and people monitoring the feeds have to be licensed.)
Ignorance, difference of opinion, culture, available information . . . Having never been to Britain and having met very few from the U.K. I am left with the reality created by the media I consume as it is colored by personal experience. We must work with the given framework and adjust whenever we find that the structure of our framework doesn't fit our newly perceived reality.
While I would be appalled if such a measure came up on this side of the pond; although we do seemingly allow Facebook and insert any company with an online presence here to do a lot of data collection; I am somewhat surprised to hear about this apparent level of outrage from Britain.
The U.K. has been monitoring its citizens via a network of CCTV cameras for sometime and they appear to be especially prevalent in cities such as London where we have been lead to believe that your movements are recorded as soon as you step onto the street.
What I don't understand is why that much crime is going uninvestigated.
It would depend on your definition of investigated for one, if the cops know about it, there is at least a record/report and the cop asked you some questions...
The other issue, it that most cell phone thefts are likely considered petty theft (which is why the theft of my iPods will never be investigated) and they are not likely to dust for fingerprints or do other than take a report and update their stats for a petty theft.
It would be interesting to see what could be gleamed from just seeing someones eyes without the context of the rest of the face. I'd think the only tell whether their eyes were open, where they were looking and how moist the eye was. The rest of the information about interest and emotional state from viewing the eye in context of the face.
I thought nose was the center of the head, at least from the front, isn't the forehead near the top?
If someone is going to put that level of time and effort into obtaining a goal, chances are they are going to beat any system. Invasive pat downs, luggage screening, limiting liquid volume etc. aren't going to thwart any but, the unprepared. A well trained screener has about the same chance to stop someone and is faster, friendlier and has no interest in touching my genitals.
I cringe every time I hear someone say "well it's for our safety" or something to that effect.
The designer must of taken a whole lunch break to create it.
Mayhaps but, you know it went something like..
Hey we need a new logo Send out the RFP Receive hundreds if not thousand of submissions, most of them decidedly silly Spend hours upon days upon weeks of LSERs (Logo Submission Evaluation Reviews) to narrow the field Toss that into the pot and go with an Execs 5yo did in crayon
Not always. Most customers (the folks who pay for the shows) want the longest show for the least money. I've worked show where we were launching one shell every three seconds in order to meet the show duration requested by the customer. Think this turned a nice 5 minute show into a painful 30 minute experience.
How does is not get better as the time reduces?
As time reduces you approach what we call a sky puke. Okay it's a lotta boom but, you really don't get to see much.
Anyone know which firing system was being used? Was any part of it wireless? Were the barges tethered to tugs with their radars on?
Even if you go with the assumption that the show was programmed and loaded correctly, there are a number of things that could have gone wrong both internal to the system and environmental that could have caused this. I'd be very interested to hear what the findings are of the 'investigation'. My money would be on being they never find out what caused the show to go all at once.
Also without competent, which of course often means properly paid, tech support (she was once told by a tech the printer wouldn't print because she was using a japanese USB cable) adding bandwidth is pointless.
Most of you seem to have missed the above... I know that with a small amount of vision and planning great leaps forward could be made in the usability of these systems. The problem is that the persons to implement and support that infrastructure simply don't exist. The number of botched upgrades, system outages and the overall quality of the network are testament to that. It's doubtful that anyone with vision would be willing to work for the pay most county school systems are able and willing to pay.
Great ideas but, these folks ain't ever gonna be runnin' anything but, Windows.
My wife is a kindergarten teacher. In order for her students to access the content she is required to teach them they must first logon to the machines in the computer lab. (I'll avoid a diatribe on the woes of the poor password practices they are forced to teach these minions...) It can often take 1/3 of her classes computer lab time just to log on; granted much of this wasted time is due to the fact that kindergarteners can't remember their passwords but, an equal amount is also caused by the lag caused when the network is flooded with their logon requests (she has less than 20 students).
Once they've accomplished the herculean task of getting the little minions logged onto the lab computers the real fun begins. Most of the content is only available online from the publishers of the text books the school uses. Adding insult to injury the publishers sites are difficult to navigate often requiring the students to manually type in long cryptic URLs that would make torrent users eyes bleed. While much of the content is colorful, animated and has pleasing sound effects try and imagine what accessing this content is like on a network that can't handle a few dozen simultaneous logons.
While I'm a fan of using online resources, the schools (as directed by their boards of education, county governments etc.) seem to have truly put the digital cart before the horse in the mad dash to move toward education online. Also without competent, which of course often means properly paid, tech support (she was once told by a tech the printer wouldn't print because she was using a japanese USB cable) adding bandwidth is pointless.
Ya, you might want to con somebody else into doing that for you. My assumption would be that they are well aware of the Terms and Conditions and are simply choosing to ignore them. Taking this action, however noble is likely to lead to Moral Option #1 (find a new job) against your will.
If your company is large enough to have a legal or ethics department, that is where I would take this but, all the aforementioned risk still applies.
Ah, the Great Belief (tm) that I (we) should somehow feeling inherently safer, sleep easier at night and be proud to bring our children into a world where only the Trusted Few (tm) know the Awesome Secrets of the Puniverse (tm). I'd like to be the first to call Bullshit but, many Great Seers have come down from the mountain and proclaimed thus before me.
Can we, as a society, not see that it is our fear that puts us at risk and not knowledge? Trust me, the Bad Guys(tm) already know the Bad Stuff(tm). The fear based hording of information won't stop something bad from happening.
While it may be a bit a paranoia, it is certainly not fear mongering. Fingerprint data which is merely an image of the swirls, loops, etc. that make up your finger print basically only one use to show that someone (or thing) left a print a certain location and then to show you are or may have been the person that left that fingerprint.
Your DNA on the other hand is a veritable cornucopia of information. It can reveal your genetic sex, relate you to your family members (who may also be in the database), tell if your a risk for a disease or cancer, a carrier for sickle cell anemia, the list go on and on and well on.
This is a slippery slope issue. New York states that no one else will have access to the information, at least not today. Researchers, medical companies want and eventually ask for and may be granted access to this information to be used to benefit them, not us.
Also consider that processing DNA is much more involved and technically challenging fingerprints, that concerns already exist about chain of custody, accuracy of the information kept and generated...
I can sort of see some merit (from a it's gonna cost me money perspective) to let companies and the government have a brief period, like a month not months, to do some clean up. There are a lot of factors to consider; e.g. it would be devastating to a company to suddenly lose 1/2 of their systems (I think we'd call that a disaster recovery scenario). Giving them an extension seems a bit silly though.
And, you being the honest person that you are, would continue to pay that contract even though you no longer use the phone on the AT&T network.
You're a wonderful human being.
Keep in mind how far AT&T and other vendors are likely to go in order to enforce their contracts. Being three of more months in arrears is a very bad place to be, especially right now. Also, credit ratings are used to determine whether you can get an apartment,...., and cell phone service on a monthly basis. As cell service is paid for in arrears (after service has been rendered), it is only provided to those who are credit worthy.
So great there is this nice new shiny, possibly free awesome cell phone, which is now a brick since no one will give you service.
Jail-breaking the device doesn't let you out of the contract. If I buy a phone from AT&T with a 2 year contract and jail-break it, I still have a two year commitment with AT&T for service. I don't believe that has any bearing on the fact that I bought (not leased) the device, regardless of what I paid for it. If they don't want me to break it, provide access to all the features on the device rather than greatly restricting it.
Just don't see that phone subsidies (read, we pay to much for our wireless service contracts) are an issue at all.
A EULA is a form of 'contract' but, I always though contracts implied some form of negotiation, not just blind (enforced, un-yielding, etc. etc.etc.) acceptance. Who's negotiating for us? At work, our Contracts Department can ask a vendor to change a EULA and there's a chance it will happen but, good luck calling up XYZ Corp and saying, I'd feel better if Clause 4.3.1.2 said foo instead of bar...
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Someone volunteering to join the military (e.g. Pfc. Manning) also agrees to be bound by the UCMJ. It's not hipocracy, it's simple reality. If you want members of the military to have the same rights as civilians, you don't want to have a military or the protections it provides. In order for the military to function, it's members must be held to higher standards and have fewer freedoms; otherwise, the whole thing would just fall apart.
Pfc. Manning is in a hell of his own creation for not only did he volunteer to join the military of his own free will, he was granted access to sensitive information and that sets the bar even higher.
For better or for worse, these are very important things in a Capitalistic society.
I've often heard of Capitalism but, I don't believe I see it very often. The result of a Capitalistic Society that practices Capitalism would be Open and Free Markets, right? The markets in the U.S., IMHO, run much more like a Plutocracy than an sense of the word Open. Companies like Walmart, the local market, decide who can and can not come to the market, how and how much they can come to the market, set prices for products they don't produce, etc.. Microsoft has forced Dell to change how they sell PCs and laptops. Groups of companies have frequently colluded to control the markets in terms of price and availability or their products.
If Capitalism produces Free Markets and we don't have Free Markets . . .
You'll find few people in the UK who particularly care about CCTV cameras one way or another. Whatever theoretical drawbacks they have, there are few practical issues with them, while there is a measurable reduction in crime rate. And the taking of footage of us in public doesn't qualify as a privacy issue anyway.
Granted I may be wrong in terms of the scope of camera availability. I'd argue that whether this is a privacy issue isn't that clear cut. While a private citizen taking video in public may not be a privacy issue, the collection and storage of video with current technology, facial recognition, etc. is something I would consider a serious privacy issue. The potential for malicious use is too high. Knowing where I am is one things, knowing where I was, how long I was there, how often I was there, etc. is another...
But no one can see much crime-fighting benefit in storing everyone's internet traffic for months, while the drawbacks in terms of ISP costs, which will be passed to the customer, are obvious. And this is a genuine privacy issue, since I consider my emails to my brother or girlfriend to be private in a way that my movements in public are not.
Point taken.
So I'm not sure why you think we don't care about privacy. The UK actually has the strongest existing data privacy laws of any Western country, so far as I am aware. The Data Protection Act was passed in the 80s before the internet and before there was really any need for it. The US has nothing like it. (CCTV gathering is subject to the DPA act, by the way, and people monitoring the feeds have to be licensed.)
Ignorance, difference of opinion, culture, available information . . . Having never been to Britain and having met very few from the U.K. I am left with the reality created by the media I consume as it is colored by personal experience. We must work with the given framework and adjust whenever we find that the structure of our framework doesn't fit our newly perceived reality.
While I would be appalled if such a measure came up on this side of the pond; although we do seemingly allow Facebook and insert any company with an online presence here to do a lot of data collection; I am somewhat surprised to hear about this apparent level of outrage from Britain.
The U.K. has been monitoring its citizens via a network of CCTV cameras for sometime and they appear to be especially prevalent in cities such as London where we have been lead to believe that your movements are recorded as soon as you step onto the street.
Has the line finally been crossed?
This is great and has been too long in coming, I'd guess most of the challenges were administrative vs. technical.
What's next? How about iPods?
What I don't understand is why that much crime is going uninvestigated.
It would depend on your definition of investigated for one, if the cops know about it, there is at least a record/report and the cop asked you some questions...
The other issue, it that most cell phone thefts are likely considered petty theft (which is why the theft of my iPods will never be investigated) and they are not likely to dust for fingerprints or do other than take a report and update their stats for a petty theft.
It would be interesting to see what could be gleamed from just seeing someones eyes without the context of the rest of the face. I'd think the only tell whether their eyes were open, where they were looking and how moist the eye was. The rest of the information about interest and emotional state from viewing the eye in context of the face.
I thought nose was the center of the head, at least from the front, isn't the forehead near the top?
And?!?
If someone is going to put that level of time and effort into obtaining a goal, chances are they are going to beat any system. Invasive pat downs, luggage screening, limiting liquid volume etc. aren't going to thwart any but, the unprepared. A well trained screener has about the same chance to stop someone and is faster, friendlier and has no interest in touching my genitals.
I cringe every time I hear someone say "well it's for our safety" or something to that effect.
The word you are looking for is [redacted].
The designer must of taken a whole lunch break to create it.
Mayhaps but, you know it went something like..
Hey we need a new logo
Send out the RFP
Receive hundreds if not thousand of submissions, most of them decidedly silly
Spend hours upon days upon weeks of LSERs (Logo Submission Evaluation Reviews) to narrow the field
Toss that into the pot and go with an Execs 5yo did in crayon
Not always. Most customers (the folks who pay for the shows) want the longest show for the least money. I've worked show where we were launching one shell every three seconds in order to meet the show duration requested by the customer. Think this turned a nice 5 minute show into a painful 30 minute experience.
How does is not get better as the time reduces?
As time reduces you approach what we call a sky puke. Okay it's a lotta boom but, you really don't get to see much.
Anyone know which firing system was being used? Was any part of it wireless? Were the barges tethered to tugs with their radars on?
Even if you go with the assumption that the show was programmed and loaded correctly, there are a number of things that could have gone wrong both internal to the system and environmental that could have caused this. I'd be very interested to hear what the findings are of the 'investigation'. My money would be on being they never find out what caused the show to go all at once.
Also without competent, which of course often means properly paid, tech support (she was once told by a tech the printer wouldn't print because she was using a japanese USB cable) adding bandwidth is pointless.
Most of you seem to have missed the above... I know that with a small amount of vision and planning great leaps forward could be made in the usability of these systems. The problem is that the persons to implement and support that infrastructure simply don't exist. The number of botched upgrades, system outages and the overall quality of the network are testament to that. It's doubtful that anyone with vision would be willing to work for the pay most county school systems are able and willing to pay.
Great ideas but, these folks ain't ever gonna be runnin' anything but, Windows.
My wife is a kindergarten teacher. In order for her students to access the content she is required to teach them they must first logon to the machines in the computer lab. (I'll avoid a diatribe on the woes of the poor password practices they are forced to teach these minions...) It can often take 1/3 of her classes computer lab time just to log on; granted much of this wasted time is due to the fact that kindergarteners can't remember their passwords but, an equal amount is also caused by the lag caused when the network is flooded with their logon requests (she has less than 20 students).
Once they've accomplished the herculean task of getting the little minions logged onto the lab computers the real fun begins. Most of the content is only available online from the publishers of the text books the school uses. Adding insult to injury the publishers sites are difficult to navigate often requiring the students to manually type in long cryptic URLs that would make torrent users eyes bleed. While much of the content is colorful, animated and has pleasing sound effects try and imagine what accessing this content is like on a network that can't handle a few dozen simultaneous logons.
While I'm a fan of using online resources, the schools (as directed by their boards of education, county governments etc.) seem to have truly put the digital cart before the horse in the mad dash to move toward education online. Also without competent, which of course often means properly paid, tech support (she was once told by a tech the printer wouldn't print because she was using a japanese USB cable) adding bandwidth is pointless.
Ya, you might want to con somebody else into doing that for you. My assumption would be that they are well aware of the Terms and Conditions and are simply choosing to ignore them. Taking this action, however noble is likely to lead to Moral Option #1 (find a new job) against your will. If your company is large enough to have a legal or ethics department, that is where I would take this but, all the aforementioned risk still applies.
Buggered up the mark-up on that one...
Ah, the Great Belief (tm) that I (we) should somehow feeling inherently safer, sleep easier at night and be proud to bring our children into a world where only the Trusted Few (tm) know the Awesome Secrets of the Puniverse (tm). I'd like to be the first to call Bullshit but, many Great Seers have come down from the mountain and proclaimed thus before me.
Can we, as a society, not see that it is our fear that puts us at risk and not knowledge? Trust me, the Bad Guys(tm) already know the Bad Stuff(tm). The fear based hording of information won't stop something bad from happening.
While it may be a bit a paranoia, it is certainly not fear mongering. Fingerprint data which is merely an image of the swirls, loops, etc. that make up your finger print basically only one use to show that someone (or thing) left a print a certain location and then to show you are or may have been the person that left that fingerprint.
Your DNA on the other hand is a veritable cornucopia of information. It can reveal your genetic sex, relate you to your family members (who may also be in the database), tell if your a risk for a disease or cancer, a carrier for sickle cell anemia, the list go on and on and well on.
This is a slippery slope issue. New York states that no one else will have access to the information, at least not today. Researchers, medical companies want and eventually ask for and may be granted access to this information to be used to benefit them, not us.
Also consider that processing DNA is much more involved and technically challenging fingerprints, that concerns already exist about chain of custody, accuracy of the information kept and generated...
I simply can't see this ending well.
Apple is vetting their new pricing controls plan.
I can sort of see some merit (from a it's gonna cost me money perspective) to let companies and the government have a brief period, like a month not months, to do some clean up. There are a lot of factors to consider; e.g. it would be devastating to a company to suddenly lose 1/2 of their systems (I think we'd call that a disaster recovery scenario). Giving them an extension seems a bit silly though.
Hmm, sounds like Salvage 1 is about to become reality...
And, you being the honest person that you are, would continue to pay that contract even though you no longer use the phone on the AT&T network.
You're a wonderful human being.
Keep in mind how far AT&T and other vendors are likely to go in order to enforce their contracts. Being three of more months in arrears is a very bad place to be, especially right now. Also, credit ratings are used to determine whether you can get an apartment, ...., and cell phone service on a monthly basis. As cell service is paid for in arrears (after service has been rendered), it is only provided to those who are credit worthy.
So great there is this nice new shiny, possibly free awesome cell phone, which is now a brick since no one will give you service.
Jail-breaking the device doesn't let you out of the contract. If I buy a phone from AT&T with a 2 year contract and jail-break it, I still have a two year commitment with AT&T for service. I don't believe that has any bearing on the fact that I bought (not leased) the device, regardless of what I paid for it. If they don't want me to break it, provide access to all the features on the device rather than greatly restricting it. Just don't see that phone subsidies (read, we pay to much for our wireless service contracts) are an issue at all.
A EULA is a form of 'contract' but, I always though contracts implied some form of negotiation, not just blind (enforced, un-yielding, etc. etc.etc.) acceptance. Who's negotiating for us? At work, our Contracts Department can ask a vendor to change a EULA and there's a chance it will happen but, good luck calling up XYZ Corp and saying, I'd feel better if Clause 4.3.1.2 said foo instead of bar...
Does it take voice commands and say "Roger, Roger"? It really reminds of a cross between battle droids and droid decar with a cyborg feel to it.
Wonder how it would handle off road or on sand?