The "Chinese Room" always makes me think of examples such as the one analyzed in this article. Look through the archive at engrish.com for many, many more examples, many quite funny. Here's one of my favorites. (How would an AI - or a human - know that this isn't the correct translation, unless they had and understood a lot of the context? It is a valid translation of the two characters, after all.;-)
The ongoing attempts to make computers handle human languages keep falling afoul of this sort of problem. The above article uses the term "dictionaryitis" to characterize such translations, which are especially common with Chinese.
But it's a good, reliable source of humor.
Recently, foreigners in China have been lamenting the fact that, with the expected surge of tourism during the 2008 Olympics, Beijing has been redoing a lot of their bilingual signs. The improved translations have eliminated a lot of the fun of reading signs while travelling around the area.
He's saying we have a right to use the Earth, but we don't have a right to damage it.
Well, he's going against one of the important doctrines of much of Christianity. A great many of them interpret the appropriate biblical passages to mean that their God gave them the right to do as they wish with their Earth.
Of course, some Christian theologians have insisted that we only have a right to "stewardship" of the planet. But the original Hebrew is brief and somewhat vague about the details, so such theologians are widely ignored. It's clear that the (supposedly) Christian folks now running the US government don't accept such heretical interpretations, and believe that they have a God-given right to exploit the planet maximally for their own short-term gain.
Actually, there is a fair amount of discussion of exactly this, in a lot of scientific fora. People are pointing out that it's becoming feasible now, and it's just the inherently slow, careful nature of scientific methodology that has prevented it from happening.
The most common suggestion is that the data for all published papers should go into online archives at the time of publication, with complete data descriptions (and maybe sample parsing code) along with the data. We can expect a lot of scientific organizations to implement this in the coming years.
Then it'll be fun to watch the flame wars from the scientifically illiterate (and innumerate) as they do the traditional sort of bogus analyses of the data.
We can see this already, of course, in the climate-change debate, as various interested parties "cherry pick" the data to produce support for their views. They are helped tremendously by the fact that climate is a hugely complex, semi-chaotic system. We can expect a lot of this as the raw data starts going online.
because the total heat content of the of the earth, or "globe" if you will, and its atmosphere is expected to rise.
Actually, the documented changes are really just in the atmosphere and oceans, and maybe the top few meters of the crust, which are less than 1% of the planet's mass. That's where all the multicellular life lives, of course, so it's the part that's most interesting to us.
But the Earth's core and mantle probably haven't been affected at all, and won't be during any of our lifetimes. All those big, slow creatures living down there in the depths probably won't ever notice what we're doing to the wispy top layer.
|If someone makes a deceitful argument, I would hope they would be exposed as a liar, not simply contradicted.
He also makes a cogent political and religious argument in the same section of his letter.
Ah, but you should know that being an expert in any technical subject disqualifies a person from making any comments on politics or economics. If a scientist makes public political comments, that totally discredits their science.
Those pesky scientists should just leave politics to the politicians and economics to the economists. (And to the people who aren't experts in anything.)
When traveling overseas, it always seemed like the drinkers survived while the non-drinkers came down with some stomach illness.
There was a study of this published some years back. The researchers travelled around the world, visiting various eateries (and drinkeries). Instead of eating and drinking, they took the food and drink back to their hotel room, where they had a portable lab setup.
One of their conclusions was that if you want a simple rule for finding a liquid to drink, the rule is: Drink beer. Beer was the only drinkable that they never found contaminated by bacteria or other nasties. Wine was the second best, but they did find a few contaminated samples (and there were some bad-wine reports in the press at the time).
Followups by brewers explained that this was reasonable. With wine, you can get something that usually tastes good just by squeezing fruit juice into a jug and storing it in a closet for a week or two. But sometimes it'll be subtly bad because the yeast didn't get going fast enough to poison some other organism with the alcohol.
As any beer brewer knows well, to make beer you must be fastidious about cleanliness. You boil the ingredients to sterilize them, and add a good yeast culture. If you don't, you don't get beer at all; you get an awful, disgusting sort of glop that nobody will come near. There isn't any intermediate result; it's either drinkable beer or disgusting glop. And brewers everywhere make beer in the same sort of big stainless-steel vats that European and American brewers use, resulting in what's basically the same end product every time. The taste differs depending on the ingredients that every "How to brew beer" book describes, but that's just the surface taste. The basic yeast+grain+water+hops is the same everywhere, and must be prepared carefully if it's to work at all.
As I recall, they didn't have any simple rules for eatable material.
(And distilled beverages are probably quite safe, but they aren't very good for quenching thirst.;-)
[Y]ou could say that animal life (including us) is the pinnacle of bacterial evolution, at least on this planet. The life of almost every cell in our bodies depends utterly on one particular, very specialized bacteria: the mitochondria.
True; and you could generalize a bit. There is growing evidence that eukaryotic cell (with a nucleus) arose as a colonial combination of archaea and bacteria. Of course, something so basic and ancient is difficult to test.
Ken Lay's conviction was vacated. This means his family walks off with a huge amount of money that should have gone to the victims.
Heh. Between writing the message that you replied to, and reading your reply, I wrote essentially the same thing in response to another message in this discussion.
But for the purpose of this thread, we should note that Key Lay was prosecuted and convicted of some rather serious criminal charges. The fact that he was CEO of Enron didn't protect him. Vacating the charges happened because he die during the appeal process. That's really an independent bit of legal absurdity from the question of whether CEOs ever get prosecuted for their company's crimes.
And we should duly note that this is an exceedingly rare occurrence. Corporate officers normally don't much about such prosecution into account, because it's so rare. You have to commit not just illegal acts, but acts that lead to a lot of spectacular publicity, in order to be taken to court for what your corporation does.
[W]ho is responsible for enforcing HIPAA penalties, and how many have been levied for this yet?
Well, I thought I could get an answer quickly by googling for the obvious keywords. Nope. I found lots and lots of discussions and analyses by various legal and medical people, and even discussions of what it might mean for the IT people. I found several discussions of the Supreme Court's absurd decision that pharmacists are not Healthcare Providers, and are thus exempt from HIPAA rules. I found a few reports of people using HIPAA to block parents' learning about a child's medical records. There are a few "abstract appeals" in the works to clarify the rules. And lots of things like this discussion.
But I didn't find any actual court decisions fining anyone for violating HIPAA rules. I wonder if I just haven't guessed the right keywords? You'd think that by now, there would be a few court cases, right? So where are they?
[citations needed] -- Maybe I should make that my new sig.
HIPPA laws are no joke. There are serious fines and even criminal penalties for letting confidential patient records out. It's so serious that companies working with health care data often have special training programs for their employees that handle any sort of hospital data -- even for IT workers.
But when you look into the software that implements it, you find that most of it is available only as a Windows binary. So maybe the laws aren't jokes, but the implementations are.
(Hey, someone has to get in some MS bashing here.;-)
Actually, I'm not kidding. My wife works for a major HMO, in the "IT" part. She sees a lot of the medical records as part of software testing, and they try hard to follow the rules. I've been showing her things I read that are relevant to their security concerns. Needless to say, almost all the problems are with Windows-based systems. The supporters, as usual, claim that this is because nobody every uses any other OS. And this is quite true; she comments that she has no choice but to use Windows, because that's all they have at work. There are no problem with other systems because there are no other systems.
If they were serious about the HIPAA security stuff, they wouldn't permit implementing it on top of the least secure platform that's available. The obvious conclusion is that it's all PR, with little actual concern with real security. (Much like airport security, y'know.;-)
One interesting side note about this is that corporations are suppose to have nearly all the same rights as humans. But they do not have the same responsibility. That is, they can not be jailed for 20 years or even executed.
Actually, they can be "executed", in the obvious sense that in most countries a judge can order the dissolution of a corporation (or the canceling of its charter or whatever the local legal jargon is). Of course, this has significantly less impact on a corporate "person" as it has on a living person. This has happened a few times in US and UK history. And a few corporations have been "jailed" by being ordered to suspend business for a period of time or until conditions are met. [citations needed;-]
And for both human and corporate "persons", death can have important effects on legal proceedings. Consider the recent conviction of Ken Lay (of Enron fame) here in the US. He died of heart problems while the appeal was under way. As a result, the judge "vacated" the lower court's conviction. This means that no further appeals will happen, and more importantly, no sentence will be imposed. This is important, because the courts would very likely have imposed a multi-million dollar fine. With the case vacated, his family now has those millions of ill-gotten dollars, and no worry that the money will ever be taken away from them.
Chances are that similar laws apply wherever you live. If a corporation can "die" during a prosecution, this will likely terminate the court case and no fine will ever be imposed on the (now non-existent) corporation. Any of the corporation's officers will thus keep whatever money they were able to send to foreign banks before the "death", with very little fear of any future government attempts to take the money.
In this case, the corporation has already died (at the hands of its officers;-), so it probably can't be punished further. The question is whether its officers can be made to pay for its actions before it died.
Metaphors can be fun. Especially when the law decrees that the metaphor is valid.
Actually, engineers routinely do get out of responsibility for disasters. Part of the reason is that they let their bosses and the prosecutors know about the "paper trail" that they have kept. They threaten to show in court that they knew about the problems, warned their superiors about the problems, and were ordered to ignore the problems. The prosecutors then carefully forget about them.
The poster child for this, of course, is NASA's history after the Challenger disaster. The immediate desire was to blame the engineers. But the engineers were happy to cooperate with the investigations, because they had copious records showing that they knew about the potential problems, tried to delay the launch, and were overridden by management. Subsequent analyses (by engineers;-) showed that what went wrong was a known possibility during cold-weather launches, and that a lot of the engineers had indeed tried to delay the launch.
The real disappointment in this and similar disasters is that the managers who override (or ignore) the engineers are almost never held responsible. NASA did do a bit of management shuffling, true, but nobody takes this seriously. With most corporate disasters, even when the CEO or other officer "resigns", he typically walks off with huge amounts of money and no punishment at all. The exceptions are so rare (think Ken Lay) that corporate managers really don't consider it a serious possibility.
In the case of software, it's routine for management to order the use of packages that the engineers know to be insecure and/or unsecurable. I've seen it over and over. The developers know that they just have to live with this, and make the best of a bad management decision. The only way to change this is to make the actual decision makers responsible for the consequences. Does anyone seriously think this is likely to ever happen?
Nobody is held accountable for the actions of a corporation. The board of directors and all officers should be held personally liable.
Ah, but if you dig into the history of how corporations came to be, and why they are legally considered "persons", you'll find that the primary purpose of a corporation has always been to insulate the officers from prosecution.
"I didn't do it; the corporation did it." Without this protection, there would be no real reason for corporations.
In a case like this, I can guess with some confidence what happened. I've worked on a lot of web sites. In every one of the, with no exceptions, my bosses have ordered me to use software that I knew to be insecure and unsecurable (at least within the time frame that I was allowed). Every time. But there's no chance whatsoever that any managers will be prosecuted for the results of such orders.
Management is highly susceptible to the claims made by software snake-oil salesmen, especially for products like those now labelled "Web 2.0". If you want to be hired to work on web sites, you have to be prepared to deal with such things, and make the best you can of them.
If we "software engineers" (chuckle;-) were legally responsible for the effects of software that we're ordered to use (or be fired) by management, you'd be seeing a lot fewer web sites, because you wouldn't be able to hire a web developer.
Maybe that would be for the better. But it's not the way business wants to move, and they're the ones paying Congress and other legislatures for the laws.
Not all poor people are dumb farmers that live in mud huts located in the middle of no where. Bangkok has many poor people and they have power and food but no education. Even in the country side people don't live in mud huts with no electricity.
We might note that "mud hut" technically includes brick construction, which isn't necessarily primitive. And you might be surprised at what a bit of electronic communication can do to a rural area.
I saw an interesting example 15 years ago, while visiting some friends of friends in a rural part of central Finland. No mud huts; wood construction is more practical there. Their farm looked rustic, and they liked it that way. But while I was there, I was in their computer room several times. The first time was when my tape recorder's microphone stopped working, and I found that they had tools to take it apart and fix it. Then, a few days later, they decided that a field of cabbage was ready for harvest. So they did what modern Finnish farmers all did: They sent off email messages saying what they had, how much of it, and how soon they could have it picked. A couple of hours later, they had replies and had agreements with several local delivery guys to pick up the crop and deliver it.
The interesting thing here was that all the delivery was handled locally. The family spent a couple of days picking the cabbage and packing it into large boxes. Several times, guys would show up with large vans, load up the boxes, and drive off. The destination was local food stores and restaurants.
They commented on how much easier farming had become since the government had spread the internet through the countryside a few years earlier. They no longer had to deal with the big, impersonal corporate warehouses. The delivery guys were all local "family" operations. Most of them had only two or three trucks. They arranged pickup and delivery directly. Local buyers can post online what they're looking for and a price range; suppliers can quickly and efficiently arrange sales and deliveries. Without the usual impersonal infrastructure of "middlemen", the end customers paid less, delivery was cheaper because it was local, and the farmer got a much better price. And the customers got fresher produce at a lower cost than the big suppliers could provide.
The only losers here were the big corporations. They're still around, of course, because Finland doesn't produce many bananas or coconuts. But the massive warehouse and trucking operations are no longer needed for crops that can be produced locally.
Another of their comments was that their (teenage) kids were seriously looking at carrying on the family farm. They don't feel isolated on the farm. They have the whole world immediately accessible via the internet. Farming does have times of hard work, but it also has times of leisure waiting for things to grow, when they can take a week off to drop in on friends in England or Mallorca (actual examples;-).
It's easy to see the OLPC project enabling this sort of shift in a lot of the world. Email by itself can break the hold that a corrupt, oligarchic infrastructure system often has on the rural folks. The Web gives people access to information that has never been available before. People can learn about options and opportunities, and take charge of the local economy themselves. You can organize local end runs around the former tough guys that ran things. If someone is making local life bad, you can document it and tell the world about it.
A little gadget with a builtin camera and an internet connection just might be as revolutionary as the OLPC gang thinks it is. Especially in those remote, primitive, rural areas that the sophisticated city folks in the "first world" hold in such contempt. Knowledge is power, y'know. I expect to read a lot of similar stories from around the world, once this thing gets moving.
"we all know that many on this board will bail on their ISP if they were the first to go to usage-based pricing"
No; I would go with whatever I consider my best interest among whatever is offered.
So where in the world do you guys live that you can do such ISP shopping?
Here in the US, and in a lot of the rest of the world, most people have at most one ISP. If they don't like what the local legal monopoly offers, they can cancel their Internet service. Or move somewhere else.
The idea that there's some sort of Internet "market" where there's competition is a curious myth. What percent of the world's people have access to even two ISPs?
(Actually, hereabouts in the suburbs of a major US city, a lot of people do have two ISPs, the phone company and the cable company. Funny thing: There are no significant differences in their terms of service. Even if it's not legally a monopoly, with only two suppliers, behind-the-scene deals are quite sufficient for eliminating any threat of an actual "market".)
To quote Abraham Lincoln: "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time".
Ah, but Karl Rove understands quite well that Honest Abe was wrong. In US politics, you only need to fool 51% of the people all the time to maintain your dominance. And with the aid of people like the Supreme Court and Diebold Corp., you really don't even need 51%. Karl probably also understands that famous quote from Joe Stalin, that it doesn't matter who casts the votes; it only matters who counts the votes.
His resignation is almost certainly a recognition that he can't accomplish anything more with the current administration, and he's better off leaving to work behind the scenes on the next election. We haven't heard the last from him.
I once got a bill from my (former)phone company for 0.00 bucks.
Back in the 70s, this was an ongoing joke, often accompanied by details of the bill and the company that did it. A number of the stories had the victim finally giving in and sending a bill for $0.00, which of course the company's accounts people sent through channels (probably with big grins when they realized what the idiot computers had done). Very often, this crashed a number of the computers in the accounting chain.
Typically, when someone investigated, it turned out that the computers were doing all calculations to a few extra decimal places, and the result was a balance less that $0.005 but greater than $0.00, and it was rounded down. The software thus saw a nonzero balance, but displayed it as zero. Why a payment of $0.00 would kill the software was never quite explained, probably out of embarrassment.
It's fun to know that such problems are still with us. But then, the accountants still use a lot of COBOL (and even worse, RPG;-), so it's not much of a surprise.
I kept waiting for someone to just ignore such bills, to see them eventually go through a collection agency and end up on their credit record. It would be a lot of fun to read about the lawsuit over this. But if this has happened, I haven't ever read about it.
Re:Easy one!
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· Score: 3, Insightful
Actually, I'd agree with pretty much everything you wrote. And I'd say that it supports my point: A big corporation (or a little one with backing from a big one) can take anyone to court and bankrupt them with legal expenses, even if there was no merit to their claims.
If Novell hadn't had some big-guy backing, they would be the ones now bankrupt rather than SCO. This fact isn't lost on a lot of managers. It is a good part of what has supported IBM's and Microsoft's dominance in the computer market. "Nobody ever got fired for buying..." We can also add "Nobody ever got sued for buying..." Business folks everywhere understand this, and it's a lot of why even the ones who understand that IBM and MS stuff is mostly crap will still buy it, because it's the safest thing for their careers.
Even though SCO (and their supporter Microsoft) have just had a major legal setback, they have already "won" this one in the sense that matters economically. They've shown that they can haul you and me into court on bogus charges, and make us spend millions of dollars defending ourselves. Whether they actually win the court case isn't important; what's important is that they can drag it out for years without even presenting evidence, and run up the legal bills to more than most small companies' net worth. The legal system strongly supports this situation. You and I have no defense other than to sell ourselves to a company that's big enough to defend us in court.
(That's unless you happen to be a multi-billionaire yourself, in which case forget I said anything.;-)
Should copyright just be abolished because we want free access to tv shows and movie clips?
Nah; the copyright system should be abolished because it leads to our current mess in which a few giant companies use it to deprive the artists of their rightful income. We should toss such copyright laws, and devise a revised scheme that guarantees that the artists get most of the money.
Or we can continue along the path of zillions of skirmishes that hurt everyone, until it settles down to a new system. And hope that that new system can't find a new way to steal most of the artists' income and give it to a few fat cats who have a stranglehold on the distribution channels.
Heh. I'd have to agree with you. I mean, I absorbed a couple of years of college-level courses over a couple of months in my 16th year; how hard can it be.
I think it's generally a case like that model of Barbie Doll, which, when you pulled its string (or pushed its button or whatever), one of the things it would say is "Math is hard." It's all propaganda to convince most of the students that it's too difficult for their tender little minds, and they should leave it to the few nerds who are actually interested in such stuff.
My main point was that, as a student who was actually interested in learning, I found that I had teachers who actively interfered with my learning, because I "wasn't ready for such difficult stuff". This didn't really say much about me; I was just a kid asking for some books. It mostly said something about the supposed "teachers".
(I might add one positive to the story: The school principal got wind of the story, and put me in touch with a number of people at the nearby college. He also pointed out that it might be good politics to not mention this to any of the teachers in his school. And he later helped me get some scholarships at a good university. Sometimes there are subversives in the school who encourage kids who want to learn, and sometimes they are in high positions.)
Re:Let me be the first to say...
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All right, all you Doubting Thomases. I double dog dare you to complain about the US court system now.
Easy: How many years has this taken? What ever happened to our Constitutional guarantee of a speedy trial?
If it just comes down to who owns the copyrights, why the hell wasn't that discovered during the preliminaries? Why did this case ever come to trial? Why wasn't it dismissed out of hand right at the start?
In fact, one can argue that, as has happened before, Microsoft/SCO won in a very real sense: They demonstrated that they can take you to court on bogus claims, never present any evidence against you, and make you pay millions of dollars over several years. The main reason they "lost" was that they took on a group that included IBM, who has very deep pockets. If it had been most of us fighting them alone, we would have been bankrupt long ago, and thus unable to continue the court battle.
This was a successful demonstration of how people with money can use the court system to drag their opponents down and impose huge expenses on them. Many managers in many companies understand this, and have learned the intended lesson: If you want to avoid such court proceedings that drag on for years, you should just buy the stuff sold by the big guys. Stay away from the stuff sold by the little guys, and you'll be safe from the flocks of lawyers.
It's a lesson that needs reinforcing every few years.
Slashdot Mirror
The "Chinese Room" always makes me think of examples such as the one analyzed in this article. Look through the archive at engrish.com for many, many more examples, many quite funny. Here's one of my favorites. (How would an AI - or a human - know that this isn't the correct translation, unless they had and understood a lot of the context? It is a valid translation of the two characters, after all. ;-)
The ongoing attempts to make computers handle human languages keep falling afoul of this sort of problem. The above article uses the term "dictionaryitis" to characterize such translations, which are especially common with Chinese.
But it's a good, reliable source of humor.
Recently, foreigners in China have been lamenting the fact that, with the expected surge of tourism during the 2008 Olympics, Beijing has been redoing a lot of their bilingual signs. The improved translations have eliminated a lot of the fun of reading signs while travelling around the area.
I notice, by the way that you are posting on a free ad-funded Web site.
Slashdot doesn't try to sell me religious fanaticism and far right wing bullshit.
What? Slashdot had ads?
Who knew?
He's saying we have a right to use the Earth, but we don't have a right to damage it.
Well, he's going against one of the important doctrines of much of Christianity. A great many of them interpret the appropriate biblical passages to mean that their God gave them the right to do as they wish with their Earth.
Of course, some Christian theologians have insisted that we only have a right to "stewardship" of the planet. But the original Hebrew is brief and somewhat vague about the details, so such theologians are widely ignored. It's clear that the (supposedly) Christian folks now running the US government don't accept such heretical interpretations, and believe that they have a God-given right to exploit the planet maximally for their own short-term gain.
Hansen had better watch his back.
Release the data, all of it, openly.
Actually, there is a fair amount of discussion of exactly this, in a lot of scientific fora. People are pointing out that it's becoming feasible now, and it's just the inherently slow, careful nature of scientific methodology that has prevented it from happening.
The most common suggestion is that the data for all published papers should go into online archives at the time of publication, with complete data descriptions (and maybe sample parsing code) along with the data. We can expect a lot of scientific organizations to implement this in the coming years.
Then it'll be fun to watch the flame wars from the scientifically illiterate (and innumerate) as they do the traditional sort of bogus analyses of the data.
We can see this already, of course, in the climate-change debate, as various interested parties "cherry pick" the data to produce support for their views. They are helped tremendously by the fact that climate is a hugely complex, semi-chaotic system. We can expect a lot of this as the raw data starts going online.
because the total heat content of the of the earth, or "globe" if you will, and its atmosphere is expected to rise.
Actually, the documented changes are really just in the atmosphere and oceans, and maybe the top few meters of the crust, which are less than 1% of the planet's mass. That's where all the multicellular life lives, of course, so it's the part that's most interesting to us.
But the Earth's core and mantle probably haven't been affected at all, and won't be during any of our lifetimes. All those big, slow creatures living down there in the depths probably won't ever notice what we're doing to the wispy top layer.
|If someone makes a deceitful argument, I would hope they would be exposed as a liar, not simply contradicted.
He also makes a cogent political and religious argument in the same section of his letter.
Ah, but you should know that being an expert in any technical subject disqualifies a person from making any comments on politics or economics. If a scientist makes public political comments, that totally discredits their science.
Those pesky scientists should just leave politics to the politicians and economics to the economists. (And to the people who aren't experts in anything.)
When traveling overseas, it always seemed like the drinkers survived while the non-drinkers came down with some stomach illness.
;-)
There was a study of this published some years back. The researchers travelled around the world, visiting various eateries (and drinkeries). Instead of eating and drinking, they took the food and drink back to their hotel room, where they had a portable lab setup.
One of their conclusions was that if you want a simple rule for finding a liquid to drink, the rule is: Drink beer. Beer was the only drinkable that they never found contaminated by bacteria or other nasties. Wine was the second best, but they did find a few contaminated samples (and there were some bad-wine reports in the press at the time).
Followups by brewers explained that this was reasonable. With wine, you can get something that usually tastes good just by squeezing fruit juice into a jug and storing it in a closet for a week or two. But sometimes it'll be subtly bad because the yeast didn't get going fast enough to poison some other organism with the alcohol.
As any beer brewer knows well, to make beer you must be fastidious about cleanliness. You boil the ingredients to sterilize them, and add a good yeast culture. If you don't, you don't get beer at all; you get an awful, disgusting sort of glop that nobody will come near. There isn't any intermediate result; it's either drinkable beer or disgusting glop. And brewers everywhere make beer in the same sort of big stainless-steel vats that European and American brewers use, resulting in what's basically the same end product every time. The taste differs depending on the ingredients that every "How to brew beer" book describes, but that's just the surface taste. The basic yeast+grain+water+hops is the same everywhere, and must be prepared carefully if it's to work at all.
As I recall, they didn't have any simple rules for eatable material.
(And distilled beverages are probably quite safe, but they aren't very good for quenching thirst.
[Y]ou could say that animal life (including us) is the pinnacle of bacterial evolution, at least on this planet. The life of almost every cell in our bodies depends utterly on one particular, very specialized bacteria: the mitochondria.
True; and you could generalize a bit. There is growing evidence that eukaryotic cell (with a nucleus) arose as a colonial combination of archaea and bacteria. Of course, something so basic and ancient is difficult to test.
Ken Lay's conviction was vacated. This means his family walks off with a huge amount of money that should have gone to the victims.
Heh. Between writing the message that you replied to, and reading your reply, I wrote essentially the same thing in response to another message in this discussion.
But for the purpose of this thread, we should note that Key Lay was prosecuted and convicted of some rather serious criminal charges. The fact that he was CEO of Enron didn't protect him. Vacating the charges happened because he die during the appeal process. That's really an independent bit of legal absurdity from the question of whether CEOs ever get prosecuted for their company's crimes.
And we should duly note that this is an exceedingly rare occurrence. Corporate officers normally don't much about such prosecution into account, because it's so rare. You have to commit not just illegal acts, but acts that lead to a lot of spectacular publicity, in order to be taken to court for what your corporation does.
[W]ho is responsible for enforcing HIPAA penalties, and how many have been levied for this yet?
Well, I thought I could get an answer quickly by googling for the obvious keywords. Nope. I found lots and lots of discussions and analyses by various legal and medical people, and even discussions of what it might mean for the IT people. I found several discussions of the Supreme Court's absurd decision that pharmacists are not Healthcare Providers, and are thus exempt from HIPAA rules. I found a few reports of people using HIPAA to block parents' learning about a child's medical records. There are a few "abstract appeals" in the works to clarify the rules. And lots of things like this discussion.
But I didn't find any actual court decisions fining anyone for violating HIPAA rules. I wonder if I just haven't guessed the right keywords? You'd think that by now, there would be a few court cases, right? So where are they?
[citations needed] -- Maybe I should make that my new sig.
HIPPA laws are no joke. There are serious fines and even criminal penalties for letting confidential patient records out. It's so serious that companies working with health care data often have special training programs for their employees that handle any sort of hospital data -- even for IT workers.
;-)
;-)
But when you look into the software that implements it, you find that most of it is available only as a Windows binary. So maybe the laws aren't jokes, but the implementations are.
(Hey, someone has to get in some MS bashing here.
Actually, I'm not kidding. My wife works for a major HMO, in the "IT" part. She sees a lot of the medical records as part of software testing, and they try hard to follow the rules. I've been showing her things I read that are relevant to their security concerns. Needless to say, almost all the problems are with Windows-based systems. The supporters, as usual, claim that this is because nobody every uses any other OS. And this is quite true; she comments that she has no choice but to use Windows, because that's all they have at work. There are no problem with other systems because there are no other systems.
If they were serious about the HIPAA security stuff, they wouldn't permit implementing it on top of the least secure platform that's available. The obvious conclusion is that it's all PR, with little actual concern with real security. (Much like airport security, y'know.
One interesting side note about this is that corporations are suppose to have nearly all the same rights as humans. But they do not have the same responsibility. That is, they can not be jailed for 20 years or even executed.
;-]
;-), so it probably can't be punished further. The question is whether its officers can be made to pay for its actions before it died.
Actually, they can be "executed", in the obvious sense that in most countries a judge can order the dissolution of a corporation (or the canceling of its charter or whatever the local legal jargon is). Of course, this has significantly less impact on a corporate "person" as it has on a living person. This has happened a few times in US and UK history. And a few corporations have been "jailed" by being ordered to suspend business for a period of time or until conditions are met. [citations needed
And for both human and corporate "persons", death can have important effects on legal proceedings. Consider the recent conviction of Ken Lay (of Enron fame) here in the US. He died of heart problems while the appeal was under way. As a result, the judge "vacated" the lower court's conviction. This means that no further appeals will happen, and more importantly, no sentence will be imposed. This is important, because the courts would very likely have imposed a multi-million dollar fine. With the case vacated, his family now has those millions of ill-gotten dollars, and no worry that the money will ever be taken away from them.
Chances are that similar laws apply wherever you live. If a corporation can "die" during a prosecution, this will likely terminate the court case and no fine will ever be imposed on the (now non-existent) corporation. Any of the corporation's officers will thus keep whatever money they were able to send to foreign banks before the "death", with very little fear of any future government attempts to take the money.
In this case, the corporation has already died (at the hands of its officers
Metaphors can be fun. Especially when the law decrees that the metaphor is valid.
Actually, engineers routinely do get out of responsibility for disasters. Part of the reason is that they let their bosses and the prosecutors know about the "paper trail" that they have kept. They threaten to show in court that they knew about the problems, warned their superiors about the problems, and were ordered to ignore the problems. The prosecutors then carefully forget about them.
;-) showed that what went wrong was a known possibility during cold-weather launches, and that a lot of the engineers had indeed tried to delay the launch.
The poster child for this, of course, is NASA's history after the Challenger disaster. The immediate desire was to blame the engineers. But the engineers were happy to cooperate with the investigations, because they had copious records showing that they knew about the potential problems, tried to delay the launch, and were overridden by management. Subsequent analyses (by engineers
The real disappointment in this and similar disasters is that the managers who override (or ignore) the engineers are almost never held responsible. NASA did do a bit of management shuffling, true, but nobody takes this seriously. With most corporate disasters, even when the CEO or other officer "resigns", he typically walks off with huge amounts of money and no punishment at all. The exceptions are so rare (think Ken Lay) that corporate managers really don't consider it a serious possibility.
In the case of software, it's routine for management to order the use of packages that the engineers know to be insecure and/or unsecurable. I've seen it over and over. The developers know that they just have to live with this, and make the best of a bad management decision. The only way to change this is to make the actual decision makers responsible for the consequences. Does anyone seriously think this is likely to ever happen?
Nobody is held accountable for the actions of a corporation. The board of directors and all officers should be held personally liable.
Ah, but if you dig into the history of how corporations came to be, and why they are legally considered "persons", you'll find that the primary purpose of a corporation has always been to insulate the officers from prosecution.
"I didn't do it; the corporation did it." Without this protection, there would be no real reason for corporations.
In a case like this, I can guess with some confidence what happened. I've worked on a lot of web sites. In every one of the, with no exceptions, my bosses have ordered me to use software that I knew to be insecure and unsecurable (at least within the time frame that I was allowed). Every time. But there's no chance whatsoever that any managers will be prosecuted for the results of such orders.
Management is highly susceptible to the claims made by software snake-oil salesmen, especially for products like those now labelled "Web 2.0". If you want to be hired to work on web sites, you have to be prepared to deal with such things, and make the best you can of them.
If we "software engineers" (chuckle;-) were legally responsible for the effects of software that we're ordered to use (or be fired) by management, you'd be seeing a lot fewer web sites, because you wouldn't be able to hire a web developer.
Maybe that would be for the better. But it's not the way business wants to move, and they're the ones paying Congress and other legislatures for the laws.
Can't they plug the hole with some kind of high-tech epoxy goo?
There have already been a few cartoons published showing a couple of guys in space suits next to the shuttle, unwinding a big roll of duct tape.
Not all poor people are dumb farmers that live in mud huts located in the middle of no where. Bangkok has many poor people and they have power and food but no education. Even in the country side people don't live in mud huts with no electricity.
;-).
We might note that "mud hut" technically includes brick construction, which isn't necessarily primitive. And you might be surprised at what a bit of electronic communication can do to a rural area.
I saw an interesting example 15 years ago, while visiting some friends of friends in a rural part of central Finland. No mud huts; wood construction is more practical there. Their farm looked rustic, and they liked it that way. But while I was there, I was in their computer room several times. The first time was when my tape recorder's microphone stopped working, and I found that they had tools to take it apart and fix it. Then, a few days later, they decided that a field of cabbage was ready for harvest. So they did what modern Finnish farmers all did: They sent off email messages saying what they had, how much of it, and how soon they could have it picked. A couple of hours later, they had replies and had agreements with several local delivery guys to pick up the crop and deliver it.
The interesting thing here was that all the delivery was handled locally. The family spent a couple of days picking the cabbage and packing it into large boxes. Several times, guys would show up with large vans, load up the boxes, and drive off. The destination was local food stores and restaurants.
They commented on how much easier farming had become since the government had spread the internet through the countryside a few years earlier. They no longer had to deal with the big, impersonal corporate warehouses. The delivery guys were all local "family" operations. Most of them had only two or three trucks. They arranged pickup and delivery directly. Local buyers can post online what they're looking for and a price range; suppliers can quickly and efficiently arrange sales and deliveries. Without the usual impersonal infrastructure of "middlemen", the end customers paid less, delivery was cheaper because it was local, and the farmer got a much better price. And the customers got fresher produce at a lower cost than the big suppliers could provide.
The only losers here were the big corporations. They're still around, of course, because Finland doesn't produce many bananas or coconuts. But the massive warehouse and trucking operations are no longer needed for crops that can be produced locally.
Another of their comments was that their (teenage) kids were seriously looking at carrying on the family farm. They don't feel isolated on the farm. They have the whole world immediately accessible via the internet. Farming does have times of hard work, but it also has times of leisure waiting for things to grow, when they can take a week off to drop in on friends in England or Mallorca (actual examples
It's easy to see the OLPC project enabling this sort of shift in a lot of the world. Email by itself can break the hold that a corrupt, oligarchic infrastructure system often has on the rural folks. The Web gives people access to information that has never been available before. People can learn about options and opportunities, and take charge of the local economy themselves. You can organize local end runs around the former tough guys that ran things. If someone is making local life bad, you can document it and tell the world about it.
A little gadget with a builtin camera and an internet connection just might be as revolutionary as the OLPC gang thinks it is. Especially in those remote, primitive, rural areas that the sophisticated city folks in the "first world" hold in such contempt. Knowledge is power, y'know. I expect to read a lot of similar stories from around the world, once this thing gets moving.
"we all know that many on this board will bail on their ISP if they were the first to go to usage-based pricing"
No; I would go with whatever I consider my best interest among whatever is offered.
So where in the world do you guys live that you can do such ISP shopping?
Here in the US, and in a lot of the rest of the world, most people have at most one ISP. If they don't like what the local legal monopoly offers, they can cancel their Internet service. Or move somewhere else.
The idea that there's some sort of Internet "market" where there's competition is a curious myth. What percent of the world's people have access to even two ISPs?
(Actually, hereabouts in the suburbs of a major US city, a lot of people do have two ISPs, the phone company and the cable company. Funny thing: There are no significant differences in their terms of service. Even if it's not legally a monopoly, with only two suppliers, behind-the-scene deals are quite sufficient for eliminating any threat of an actual "market".)
Your wife? You, sir, have fallen for the biggest scam of all time.
This sort of scam has been documented by the media.
To quote Abraham Lincoln: "You can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time".
Ah, but Karl Rove understands quite well that Honest Abe was wrong. In US politics, you only need to fool 51% of the people all the time to maintain your dominance. And with the aid of people like the Supreme Court and Diebold Corp., you really don't even need 51%. Karl probably also understands that famous quote from Joe Stalin, that it doesn't matter who casts the votes; it only matters who counts the votes.
His resignation is almost certainly a recognition that he can't accomplish anything more with the current administration, and he's better off leaving to work behind the scenes on the next election. We haven't heard the last from him.
I once got a bill from my (former)phone company for 0.00 bucks.
;-), so it's not much of a surprise.
Back in the 70s, this was an ongoing joke, often accompanied by details of the bill and the company that did it. A number of the stories had the victim finally giving in and sending a bill for $0.00, which of course the company's accounts people sent through channels (probably with big grins when they realized what the idiot computers had done). Very often, this crashed a number of the computers in the accounting chain.
Typically, when someone investigated, it turned out that the computers were doing all calculations to a few extra decimal places, and the result was a balance less that $0.005 but greater than $0.00, and it was rounded down. The software thus saw a nonzero balance, but displayed it as zero. Why a payment of $0.00 would kill the software was never quite explained, probably out of embarrassment.
It's fun to know that such problems are still with us. But then, the accountants still use a lot of COBOL (and even worse, RPG
I kept waiting for someone to just ignore such bills, to see them eventually go through a collection agency and end up on their credit record. It would be a lot of fun to read about the lawsuit over this. But if this has happened, I haven't ever read about it.
Actually, I'd agree with pretty much everything you wrote. And I'd say that it supports my point: A big corporation (or a little one with backing from a big one) can take anyone to court and bankrupt them with legal expenses, even if there was no merit to their claims.
..." We can also add "Nobody ever got sued for buying ..." Business folks everywhere understand this, and it's a lot of why even the ones who understand that IBM and MS stuff is mostly crap will still buy it, because it's the safest thing for their careers.
;-)
If Novell hadn't had some big-guy backing, they would be the ones now bankrupt rather than SCO. This fact isn't lost on a lot of managers. It is a good part of what has supported IBM's and Microsoft's dominance in the computer market. "Nobody ever got fired for buying
Even though SCO (and their supporter Microsoft) have just had a major legal setback, they have already "won" this one in the sense that matters economically. They've shown that they can haul you and me into court on bogus charges, and make us spend millions of dollars defending ourselves. Whether they actually win the court case isn't important; what's important is that they can drag it out for years without even presenting evidence, and run up the legal bills to more than most small companies' net worth. The legal system strongly supports this situation. You and I have no defense other than to sell ourselves to a company that's big enough to defend us in court.
(That's unless you happen to be a multi-billionaire yourself, in which case forget I said anything.
Should copyright just be abolished because we want free access to tv shows and movie clips?
Nah; the copyright system should be abolished because it leads to our current mess in which a few giant companies use it to deprive the artists of their rightful income. We should toss such copyright laws, and devise a revised scheme that guarantees that the artists get most of the money.
Or we can continue along the path of zillions of skirmishes that hurt everyone, until it settles down to a new system. And hope that that new system can't find a new way to steal most of the artists' income and give it to a few fat cats who have a stranglehold on the distribution channels.
Earth to nerd - calculus isn't that hard.
Heh. I'd have to agree with you. I mean, I absorbed a couple of years of college-level courses over a couple of months in my 16th year; how hard can it be.
I think it's generally a case like that model of Barbie Doll, which, when you pulled its string (or pushed its button or whatever), one of the things it would say is "Math is hard." It's all propaganda to convince most of the students that it's too difficult for their tender little minds, and they should leave it to the few nerds who are actually interested in such stuff.
My main point was that, as a student who was actually interested in learning, I found that I had teachers who actively interfered with my learning, because I "wasn't ready for such difficult stuff". This didn't really say much about me; I was just a kid asking for some books. It mostly said something about the supposed "teachers".
(I might add one positive to the story: The school principal got wind of the story, and put me in touch with a number of people at the nearby college. He also pointed out that it might be good politics to not mention this to any of the teachers in his school. And he later helped me get some scholarships at a good university. Sometimes there are subversives in the school who encourage kids who want to learn, and sometimes they are in high positions.)
Wow, what do I do with my SCO server coupons now?
You can always sell them on eBay.
All right, all you Doubting Thomases. I double dog dare you to complain about the US court system now.
Easy: How many years has this taken? What ever happened to our Constitutional guarantee of a speedy trial?
If it just comes down to who owns the copyrights, why the hell wasn't that discovered during the preliminaries? Why did this case ever come to trial? Why wasn't it dismissed out of hand right at the start?
In fact, one can argue that, as has happened before, Microsoft/SCO won in a very real sense: They demonstrated that they can take you to court on bogus claims, never present any evidence against you, and make you pay millions of dollars over several years. The main reason they "lost" was that they took on a group that included IBM, who has very deep pockets. If it had been most of us fighting them alone, we would have been bankrupt long ago, and thus unable to continue the court battle.
This was a successful demonstration of how people with money can use the court system to drag their opponents down and impose huge expenses on them. Many managers in many companies understand this, and have learned the intended lesson: If you want to avoid such court proceedings that drag on for years, you should just buy the stuff sold by the big guys. Stay away from the stuff sold by the little guys, and you'll be safe from the flocks of lawyers.
It's a lesson that needs reinforcing every few years.