Interesting, something similar happened to me.. it never occurred to me this could be widespread. I went to the police station a while back to report someone smashing my car with a bat, and after telling the story, the police started 'interrogating' me, asking me questions like, what did I 'do to the guy', 'why did I attack him' etc. (I hadn't, it was total bullshit the cops were making up)... the police started getting so aggressive in questioning me I actually got scared and left.
US have a track record of benign management of the aspects under discussion, so I admittedly don't see what's "broken" that needs "fixing".
I'm not sure you understand the point though. The Internet is a collection of, and I repeat myself, mostly privately built networks. If I string network cable around my house, that is also just another privately built network... can you tell me why any government should in any meaningful way be allowed to use force to assert and maintain significant and meaningful measures of control over the network in my house? And if not that, why any other private network? Same principle, just a matter of scale.
The only role governments may morally play, is voluntary services to help manage those networks, not control.
The UN isn't "no country", it's the governments of a bunch of actual countries... FTA, this sentence cuts to the core here: "Observers say a number of authoritarian states will back the move". What this effectively is, is an attempt by immoral governments to forcibly assert power and control over private networks.
The Internet is a collection of mostly privately built and maintained networks and interconnections; no "country", has any right to "control" it, per se, in any meaningful way. No government or governments, and certainly not the UN.
This system was developed by the military, not by businesses... that should give at least some clue as to who is developing this and what their initial intentions probably are, for whatever that's worth.. from the paper:
This research was sponsored by the Army Research Laboratory and was accomplished under Cooperative Agreement Number W911NF-10-2-0061. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either expressed or implied, of the Army Research Laboratory or the U.S. Government.
Regardless, systems like this are coming, and they are going to be ubiquitous, from governments to massive corporations to malls to schools to roadways etc.... we need to think sensibly about how to deal with and implement these things in a moral way, while not just allowing our rights to be roughshodden by ruling sociopaths.
I wonder how long until it is until "automated activity prediction" is claimed to be "probable cause" to violate the 4th Amendment.
Sigh... breaking a private rule on private property is not "breaking the law". How does somebody even get this confused?
Analogy: Say you have a party at your house. Say you have a private rule in your house that you don't want anybody feeding your cat from the table. One of your invited guests decides to feed your cat. Are you saying that guest has "no legal right" to feed your cat, and that you are now allowed to arrest them, physically assault them, and seize any property on their person? That would be extremely stupid and would be a catastrophically violent society to live in. The only thing you have a "legal right" to do if someone violates your arbitrary private rules on private property (e.g. 'no cameras' rule in a private mall) is ask them to leave. Not assault them, not take their property. If you commit assault against them they have a right to defend themselves, even on private property (if you tried to assault your house guest for feeding your cat he would also have a legal right to defend himself from your illegal aggressive attack). Once you ask someone to leave, then only if they refuse to leave, are they committing a crime (and a different one entirely that has nothing to do with the no cameras rule - namely, trespass on private property). If the article is true, then this wasn't trespass though, because the teen was trying to leave of his own free will, and was stopped from doing so by the guards.
Those security guards had no authority except to ask you to leave
This is a key point... the only thing they could rightly do is ask him to leave, even if they have a 'no camera' rule in place.
The equivalent is, say you have a party at your house, and one of your invited guests start behaving in a manner you don't like, but is otherwise legal. You don't suddenly get the right to assault them or take or destroy their property, even if you claim to have a "rule" in your house that allows you to do so. You can ask them to leave. Once you've asked, if they refuse to leave, only then are they trespassing. This doesn't seem to be what happened to the teen, because, according to the article, he was in fact trying to leave the mall of his own volition.
You know, if you're going to criticize libertarianism, could you at least do better than founding your criticism on pure and utter lies? If you have to lie, does that mean you lack real counterpoints? I know a lot of libertarians and not one of them would agree it should be for companies to "doctor" drugs. Also, almost all of them believe that bankers who commit fraud should go to jail (I've only met one libertarian, EVER, who claimed bankers should just do what they want and enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else... and every other libertarian in the discussion disagreed). If you're going to criticize libertarianism, at least learn some facts about it first, so you don't sound like a teenager bashing strawmen or someone willfully sociopathic.
Effectively, the underlying reason you can't sell a drink in a bottle "just like Coke's" is because you would be deceptively creating the fraudulent impression that the product you are offering is made by the Coca Cola company... i.e. effectively a deceptive claim about who the manufacturer is, and what that thus implies (e.g. in terms of reputation of offered product).
There is no other valid basis on which to assert a 'design patent', so the only real question from a rights violation perspective would be if Samsumg were deliberately trying to pass their products off as Apple products to trick consumers. Given the products say "Samsung" instead of "Apple", I think this would be a highly dubious claim.
Patents in general are immoral and amount to a law against inventing.
To be fair, historically, one of the reasons for this unprecedentedly massive glut in cheap global labor is that countries like China had been artificially made very poor by Communism. The Cultural Revolution and its effects were brutal and massive. So you have a billion people right there who are rising up out of dire poverty due, and that is why are they so desperate and so willing to work for so little.
But this distorted imbalance is a historical blip... the global Gini coefficient has actually been improving for decades, quality of life is rising in the East, more and more historically 'cheap labor' jurisdictions are enacting minimum wage (e.g. in many parts of China even) and implementing other labor improvements, so what we are arriving at is that this imbalance is leveling itself out.
Just in time for the rise of automation, robots... technological labor redundancy... a far bigger threat than immigration, but could be a panacea if managed well.
We need to think about the problems of the future, not the problems of the past.
Which gives employers their ammo that "we just can't find qualified US applicants."
I don't think you have the first clue how H1-B hiring actually works, do you? It's very costly, it involves hiring lawyers and enormous amounts of bureaucracy and paperwork, it's a very lengthy and time-consuming process (can easily take multiple years to get someone in), and it's very risky and unreliable from a hiring perspective (because at least half of H1-B's are rejected (at random!) due to the highly limited quota, and if you don't make it, it's literally a year before you can try again - and the company must wait a year and try again.
The fact that companies hire H1-B's in spite of how badly artificially crippled they are (and how much of an artificial advantage an American citizen has... there is no wait, no extra costs, you can walk in off the street and start immediately etc.), suggests that maybe, just maybe, it really is difficult to find qualified people in the US in the skills-shortage fields.
The reason first-generation immigrants from some countries are sometimes very tight with their money is from habit - they are usually those that come from previously very poor countries, and probably spent the equivalent of their life savings just to get into the US. These people then tend to have children - second-generation immigrants - who grow up and live like ordinary middle-class Americans. I guess you don't spend much time with such people, but you might learn a few things if you did... some of your friends might even be second-generation and you don't even realize it.
This makes no sense. H1-B is an immigration-path visa... if you just want to work temporarily in the US and then go back, there are much easier and more reliable ways. If you're going through the pain of H1-B it's because you want to stick around.
Is this really true? I have yet to find a single example of someone on an H1-B and is being paid below the average. I myself am paid at par with my American colleagues.
It is actually against the law in the United States to pay an H1-B worker below the so-called "market rate" of their labor. And I know a few H1-B's (in reputable companies), they are very good programmers, and they are paid on par with their colleagues. I haven't RTA but it sounds like the issue is with a minority of dodgy companies that try get away with paying below market rate.
What seems to escape the attention of those crying 'loss of jobs', is that IT jobs are already being outsourced... and if a skilled programmer can't get into the United States, he/she can anyway do the equivalent work - and will do it for far less than if on an H1-B - from his/her own country. We're talking about a field that still has a shortage of skilled labor... it makes more sense to have these people in the US, where they are usually paid market rates, and where they create many indirect jobs.
Another thing, with the chronic deficit problems, and an economy not really growing, then to pay down the national debt and still maintain quality of life for those on social security etc., immigration actually helps grow the absolute size of the economic base, allowing higher tax revenue.
Why should the rule not be that, absent my express permission for them to track my comings and goings, they do not have permission?
Basically, it should be, this is common sense. The problem now is for those in the advertising industry whose business model has been based on the ability to deceptively trick the majority of users into not realizing just how badly they're being tracked online and how broadly their info is being sold etc.
I think if your business model is based on tricking people into doing something that they would reject if they fully knew and understood what you were doing, then you are doing something wrong.
That said, I think the claims that the industry would just die without the ability to track users are overblown. I think the effectiveness of personalized advertising is exaggerated, as well as the perceived value in compiling detailed user profiles with full web histories. The reason is that targeted advertising doesn't really increase the number of dollars available to chase after goods. Example: you don't really suddenly decide to buy a motorcycle because of a targeted advert... in most cases you probably decided you wanted a motorcycle first, and then you probably anyway ignored most the adverts in order to do some more solidly grounded market research, e.g. looking at the specs of the bikes, getting some advice from friends or online forums, and looking at what motorcycles actually appeal to you. A targeted ad in that case might make you statistically very slightly more likely to favor another brand.... but for most people the decision will be based mostly on things like advice from friends, comparison of specs, and test rides. And after you buy the motorcycle, those dollars are basically no longer available to spend on all the other crap being advertised online to you.
If targeted advertising based on tracking your data etc. was as useful as has been claimed, Facebook would have made a killing from it, but instead it was a flop, and they have now desperately resorted to just making companies pay for 'sponsored posts' now instead to dump the crap in your feed.
I think that if it can become more common in consumer video recording devices, I can imagine that a lot of people would like to have that kind of resolution for recording personal events... e.g. weddings, childbirth, etc.
FFS, NOWHERE do they claim to have "discovered" forward error correction, NOWHERE do they claim this is "revolutionary". All they're claiming is an incremental improvement in efficiencies of existing networking, and if it works even half as well as claimed, then it is correct and useful (unlike stupid snarky posts on/. by people who think that bashing something makes them smart... what is your contribution to the field of networking?)
Slashdot has really gone down compared to its early days if a comment gets +5 of someone stating that error correction codes for lossy data transfer is only now being applied to networks (and then boasting 'surprised it took so long' as if the poster is chuffed at how presumably smart he is then because this is so 'obvious'). I remember implementing such error correction schemes back in the 90s.
Slashdot Mirror
Interesting, something similar happened to me .. it never occurred to me this could be widespread. I went to the police station a while back to report someone smashing my car with a bat, and after telling the story, the police started 'interrogating' me, asking me questions like, what did I 'do to the guy', 'why did I attack him' etc. (I hadn't, it was total bullshit the cops were making up) ... the police started getting so aggressive in questioning me I actually got scared and left.
Wow, just wow - put words in peoples mouths much?
US have a track record of benign management of the aspects under discussion, so I admittedly don't see what's "broken" that needs "fixing".
I'm not sure you understand the point though. The Internet is a collection of, and I repeat myself, mostly privately built networks. If I string network cable around my house, that is also just another privately built network ... can you tell me why any government should in any meaningful way be allowed to use force to assert and maintain significant and meaningful measures of control over the network in my house? And if not that, why any other private network? Same principle, just a matter of scale.
The only role governments may morally play, is voluntary services to help manage those networks, not control.
The UN has this predilection for, quite frankly, giving very repugnant regimes equal say with democracies.
But how can you not simply fall over with deferential reverence for an organization that asked mass-murderer Robert Mugabe to be a UN 'leader for tourism'.
The UN isn't "no country", it's the governments of a bunch of actual countries ... FTA, this sentence cuts to the core here: "Observers say a number of authoritarian states will back the move". What this effectively is, is an attempt by immoral governments to forcibly assert power and control over private networks.
Yup, it's about 'money and power', 'money and power', make no mistake. All the waffle and hot air is just to sell the idea to the public.
The Internet is a collection of mostly privately built and maintained networks and interconnections; no "country", has any right to "control" it, per se, in any meaningful way. No government or governments, and certainly not the UN.
This system was developed by the military, not by businesses ... that should give at least some clue as to who is developing this and what their initial intentions probably are, for whatever that's worth .. from the paper:
This research was sponsored by the Army Research Laboratory
and was accomplished under Cooperative Agreement
Number W911NF-10-2-0061. The views and conclusions contained
in this document are those of the authors and should
not be interpreted as representing the official policies, either
expressed or implied, of the Army Research Laboratory or
the U.S. Government.
Regardless, systems like this are coming, and they are going to be ubiquitous, from governments to massive corporations to malls to schools to roadways etc. ... we need to think sensibly about how to deal with and implement these things in a moral way, while not just allowing our rights to be roughshodden by ruling sociopaths.
I wonder how long until it is until "automated activity prediction" is claimed to be "probable cause" to violate the 4th Amendment.
I've read the article and the paper and I can't see anything to indicate it's vaporware ... by all accounts there appears to be a working basic system.
Hes lucky he wasnt shot ( i would have, in an instant )
Thankfully for the rest of us, you would fail cop training on this point before even remotely managing to become a LEO.
In the US you don't need permission to take pictures, malls are public space
Even if this wasn't the case, nurb432 would still be wrong. He would be wrong either way.
Sigh ... breaking a private rule on private property is not "breaking the law". How does somebody even get this confused?
Analogy: Say you have a party at your house. Say you have a private rule in your house that you don't want anybody feeding your cat from the table. One of your invited guests decides to feed your cat. Are you saying that guest has "no legal right" to feed your cat, and that you are now allowed to arrest them, physically assault them, and seize any property on their person? That would be extremely stupid and would be a catastrophically violent society to live in. The only thing you have a "legal right" to do if someone violates your arbitrary private rules on private property (e.g. 'no cameras' rule in a private mall) is ask them to leave. Not assault them, not take their property. If you commit assault against them they have a right to defend themselves, even on private property (if you tried to assault your house guest for feeding your cat he would also have a legal right to defend himself from your illegal aggressive attack). Once you ask someone to leave, then only if they refuse to leave, are they committing a crime (and a different one entirely that has nothing to do with the no cameras rule - namely, trespass on private property). If the article is true, then this wasn't trespass though, because the teen was trying to leave of his own free will, and was stopped from doing so by the guards.
Those security guards had no authority except to ask you to leave
This is a key point ... the only thing they could rightly do is ask him to leave, even if they have a 'no camera' rule in place.
The equivalent is, say you have a party at your house, and one of your invited guests start behaving in a manner you don't like, but is otherwise legal. You don't suddenly get the right to assault them or take or destroy their property, even if you claim to have a "rule" in your house that allows you to do so. You can ask them to leave. Once you've asked, if they refuse to leave, only then are they trespassing. This doesn't seem to be what happened to the teen, because, according to the article, he was in fact trying to leave the mall of his own volition.
You know, if you're going to criticize libertarianism, could you at least do better than founding your criticism on pure and utter lies? If you have to lie, does that mean you lack real counterpoints? I know a lot of libertarians and not one of them would agree it should be for companies to "doctor" drugs. Also, almost all of them believe that bankers who commit fraud should go to jail (I've only met one libertarian, EVER, who claimed bankers should just do what they want and enrich themselves at the expense of everyone else ... and every other libertarian in the discussion disagreed). If you're going to criticize libertarianism, at least learn some facts about it first, so you don't sound like a teenager bashing strawmen or someone willfully sociopathic.
Effectively, the underlying reason you can't sell a drink in a bottle "just like Coke's" is because you would be deceptively creating the fraudulent impression that the product you are offering is made by the Coca Cola company ... i.e. effectively a deceptive claim about who the manufacturer is, and what that thus implies (e.g. in terms of reputation of offered product).
There is no other valid basis on which to assert a 'design patent', so the only real question from a rights violation perspective would be if Samsumg were deliberately trying to pass their products off as Apple products to trick consumers. Given the products say "Samsung" instead of "Apple", I think this would be a highly dubious claim.
Patents in general are immoral and amount to a law against inventing.
To be fair, historically, one of the reasons for this unprecedentedly massive glut in cheap global labor is that countries like China had been artificially made very poor by Communism. The Cultural Revolution and its effects were brutal and massive. So you have a billion people right there who are rising up out of dire poverty due, and that is why are they so desperate and so willing to work for so little.
But this distorted imbalance is a historical blip ... the global Gini coefficient has actually been improving for decades, quality of life is rising in the East, more and more historically 'cheap labor' jurisdictions are enacting minimum wage (e.g. in many parts of China even) and implementing other labor improvements, so what we are arriving at is that this imbalance is leveling itself out.
Just in time for the rise of automation, robots ... technological labor redundancy ... a far bigger threat than immigration, but could be a panacea if managed well.
We need to think about the problems of the future, not the problems of the past.
Which gives employers their ammo that "we just can't find qualified US applicants."
I don't think you have the first clue how H1-B hiring actually works, do you? It's very costly, it involves hiring lawyers and enormous amounts of bureaucracy and paperwork, it's a very lengthy and time-consuming process (can easily take multiple years to get someone in), and it's very risky and unreliable from a hiring perspective (because at least half of H1-B's are rejected (at random!) due to the highly limited quota, and if you don't make it, it's literally a year before you can try again - and the company must wait a year and try again.
The fact that companies hire H1-B's in spite of how badly artificially crippled they are (and how much of an artificial advantage an American citizen has ... there is no wait, no extra costs, you can walk in off the street and start immediately etc.), suggests that maybe, just maybe, it really is difficult to find qualified people in the US in the skills-shortage fields.
The reason first-generation immigrants from some countries are sometimes very tight with their money is from habit - they are usually those that come from previously very poor countries, and probably spent the equivalent of their life savings just to get into the US. These people then tend to have children - second-generation immigrants - who grow up and live like ordinary middle-class Americans. I guess you don't spend much time with such people, but you might learn a few things if you did ... some of your friends might even be second-generation and you don't even realize it.
This makes no sense. H1-B is an immigration-path visa ... if you just want to work temporarily in the US and then go back, there are much easier and more reliable ways. If you're going through the pain of H1-B it's because you want to stick around.
Is this really true? I have yet to find a single example of someone on an H1-B and is being paid below the average. I myself am paid at par with my American colleagues.
It is actually against the law in the United States to pay an H1-B worker below the so-called "market rate" of their labor. And I know a few H1-B's (in reputable companies), they are very good programmers, and they are paid on par with their colleagues. I haven't RTA but it sounds like the issue is with a minority of dodgy companies that try get away with paying below market rate.
What seems to escape the attention of those crying 'loss of jobs', is that IT jobs are already being outsourced ... and if a skilled programmer can't get into the United States, he/she can anyway do the equivalent work - and will do it for far less than if on an H1-B - from his/her own country. We're talking about a field that still has a shortage of skilled labor ... it makes more sense to have these people in the US, where they are usually paid market rates, and where they create many indirect jobs.
Another thing, with the chronic deficit problems, and an economy not really growing, then to pay down the national debt and still maintain quality of life for those on social security etc., immigration actually helps grow the absolute size of the economic base, allowing higher tax revenue.
Why should the rule not be that, absent my express permission for them to track my comings and goings, they do not have permission?
Basically, it should be, this is common sense. The problem now is for those in the advertising industry whose business model has been based on the ability to deceptively trick the majority of users into not realizing just how badly they're being tracked online and how broadly their info is being sold etc.
I think if your business model is based on tricking people into doing something that they would reject if they fully knew and understood what you were doing, then you are doing something wrong.
That said, I think the claims that the industry would just die without the ability to track users are overblown. I think the effectiveness of personalized advertising is exaggerated, as well as the perceived value in compiling detailed user profiles with full web histories. The reason is that targeted advertising doesn't really increase the number of dollars available to chase after goods. Example: you don't really suddenly decide to buy a motorcycle because of a targeted advert ... in most cases you probably decided you wanted a motorcycle first, and then you probably anyway ignored most the adverts in order to do some more solidly grounded market research, e.g. looking at the specs of the bikes, getting some advice from friends or online forums, and looking at what motorcycles actually appeal to you. A targeted ad in that case might make you statistically very slightly more likely to favor another brand .... but for most people the decision will be based mostly on things like advice from friends, comparison of specs, and test rides. And after you buy the motorcycle, those dollars are basically no longer available to spend on all the other crap being advertised online to you.
If targeted advertising based on tracking your data etc. was as useful as has been claimed, Facebook would have made a killing from it, but instead it was a flop, and they have now desperately resorted to just making companies pay for 'sponsored posts' now instead to dump the crap in your feed.
I think you need to get better quality porn.
I think that if it can become more common in consumer video recording devices, I can imagine that a lot of people would like to have that kind of resolution for recording personal events ... e.g. weddings, childbirth, etc.
Oh, and not to mention Ultra HD porn.
But these will be terrorists with pacemakers.
FFS, NOWHERE do they claim to have "discovered" forward error correction, NOWHERE do they claim this is "revolutionary". All they're claiming is an incremental improvement in efficiencies of existing networking, and if it works even half as well as claimed, then it is correct and useful (unlike stupid snarky posts on /. by people who think that bashing something makes them smart ... what is your contribution to the field of networking?)
Slashdot has really gone down compared to its early days if a comment gets +5 of someone stating that error correction codes for lossy data transfer is only now being applied to networks (and then boasting 'surprised it took so long' as if the poster is chuffed at how presumably smart he is then because this is so 'obvious'). I remember implementing such error correction schemes back in the 90s.