Wait. So are you saying that if the several state governments had this sort of control, that would be amenable?
The 9th and 10th amendments are both boilerplate contract disclaimers. Any power or right claimed under them, by a state or individual, needs to be argued in a Federal court before policy can be adequately set. Look at the state of the Civil Rights movement, and what a mess that was before we settled against "separate but equal" in courts. And that was over enumerated rights!
These would be unenumerated. It is an agonizingly slow process which would likely take decades to come to fruition. It's the worst way, in our government, to set policy. It can be said that when the courts have to set policy, the other two branches have utterly failed. Such failures cause riots before the courts finally rule.
These issues must be addressed with laws written by people who have electricity, and word processors, and Lexis/Nexis, and a modern knowledge of interstate commerce regulation/national security.
At this point, we have a bunch of agencies just grabbing up any random powers they can dream up, whatever they think they can get away with, and the 9th and 10th amendments were written to encourage that sort of opportunistic behavior, not prohibit it.
New laws are needed everywhere. Data mining is out of control. We need a way for the private individual to guarantee and verify destruction of records he no longer wishes to be in another's control. The individual needs more rights of control over such records, and rights that are enforceable by take-down notices as powerful as in the DMCA, with accessible courts to arbitrate any conflicts. Facebook should be required by law to certify that they can completely destroy truly "personal" information when asked, not simply take it off-line.
That means that if someone's hosting private information, there should be no way for it to be crawled, bled out to third parties, accidentally retained through database replication, backups, etc.
The extreme end of this would be to hold it to HIPAA standards, but that would be silly.
But to some lesser standard, if they can't guarantee it, the site itself should be illegal. This is an exaggerated and harsh hard-line, but we should be thinking in these terms and moving rapidly towards that hard-line if we are serious about our privacy.
Either that, or we give up on the idea of privacy at all. It's already 85% illusory.
This means more regulations and L.E. infrastructure to deal with it. The L.E. infrastructure is coming either way. The only question is: Will it work to the benefit of individual rights, or to the benefit of government and corporate bureaucracies that generally wish to go on merrily and expediently while ignoring individual rights and privacy concerns outside their mission?
It's a brave new world.
We all need to bone up on our critical thinking skills, and that was my original point when I suggested that people who put anything on Facebook which they wish to remain "private" need to bone up on those skills.
What Canada has done here doesn't go far enough. No one has the laws to handle where this thing is going, and I'd like to see them before we get there.
I'm optimistic, but action is needed, and time is running out. If the legal status quo is held, the individual will be owned by the cloud in a century.
We are describing the universe with mathematics. Mathematics are wholly invented by man. The rules are deterministic. Where we get unexpected results, such as with chaos mathematics, all we can do is map the boundaries and boggle.
Eventually, when you do enough math, everything you can understand about the universe with math alone is going to look deterministic because of the semantic properties of the language you are using to describe it.
So the question is, what are we leaving out by boiling the universe down to a mathematical model, and is that undiscovered area of knowledge worth studying/of use to us? What is the end point of Newton's insistence that God described the universe with math, instead of just Newton alone, projecting his own ideas upon a God that may or may not exist?
I get excited when I see reports like this, because it may indicate a time for a paradigm shift, proven necessary because we've exhausted the mathematical possibilities, and that may lead us to a new revolution in knowledge.
Maybe we'll see technological singularity yet. Is it too much to hope in my lifetime?
Why not? Belief systems still function even though we don't understand why or how they work. For most of the population, quantum physics might as well be magic!
I have a particular opinion about which is a better model, but I'm an admittedly lousy "magical thinker.";^)
In fact, I'd say that Occam's Razor is a tautology. What it really says is that a simpler solution/explanation is more easily implemented/grasped. More useful and productive.
No matter how complex things actually are, it's nothing but art appreciation if you can't wrap your head around the idea, understand, and produce something with that understanding.
Not false anything according the TOS I read when I signed up. It disclaims any and all liability as a condition of normal site use. You may as well be signing up to be a citizen of Facebook.
You have to read the fine print. People are dumb that way, no matter how many times folks are told, everyone ignores the fine print from time to time. Some more than others.
This includes myself. Everyone is a willing participant in their own deception once in a while. Everybody plays the fool.
Caveat emptor is the first and only rule of the cloud. Your data is effectively not yours unless it is on a machine you own or control.
That's the only reasonable expectation until there is some law that says otherwise. It's about time that Congress realized that 50+ year old telcom laws do not cut it when all that communication can be stored permanently, for little to no money. It's a game changer.
New laws are needed. Until then, maybe we should stop it with the "Barney reflex." Sharing is not always good, or even wanted. We're raising a generation of idiots who can't keep their personal lives personal, and expect it to remain that way even as they broadcast their every thought on Twitter.
9 times out of 10 they won't be falsely accusing anyone. The person is probably stealing music, or at least using government computers for recreational purposes. The estimate that 10% of such activity will be legit is generous, but in the supposed 10% of times that they are mistaken, the person will be embarrassed for pointing and exclaiming, and the downloader will be able to quickly explain himself.
Point is, downloading music is pretty darned unusual government computer use in most offices. I imagine the FCC has some guidelines that may supersede these, if music downloading is commonplace.
So I would think that context and severity of course of action are everything here. These people do not actually work in the music biz, regardless of the usual scuttlebutt to the contrary.
The severity matches the context here. No one's telling them to press charges. They're telling them to bust up abuse of government property, and it'll be right more than 9 times out of 10.
That's a difference in audience, not a difference in willingness to innovate or shock. If Microsoft had a teenaged audience for its OS, they would be releasing Windows Butcher Edition in a heartbeat.
You remember what happened when Lennon said they were the "biggest thing... since Christ?" White bread America set their shit on fire.
The Beatles always had to be careful about what they could get away with, and they rarely pushed the envelope.
Time for some regulation that levels the playing field and gives the consumer some choices, and allows the consumer to choose the winners with their patronage. Clamping down on a fundamentally unfair monopolistic system with increased Federal bureaucracy would akin to how we handled Ma Bell before the breakup. It didn't work.
Good luck getting sense out of this Congress, though. We're going to have to visit the voting booth before we get what is needed.
It is good to hear that Windows 7 is decent business software. Microsoft might still be sweating bullets, though. Though it seems that Windows 7 will be a reasonably valuable, reliable operating system, will businesses have the money to upgrade in the middle of this massive economic downturn?
The virtual XP mode is a nod towards compatibility, but what sort of nod is MS going to have to give towards mass conversion pricing, especially if it is accompanied by hardware upgrades?
The OS might be great, but the marketing fundamentals are unsound. This could be bad timing indeed. Though there may be a will, the real question is: is there a way?
The answer to problems created by government regulation is not more regulation.
Interesting bias, but utterly wrong in this case. The answer to severe problems created by dopey regional and local government "regulations" (I would term them franchise agreements, absent of any regulation and loaded with exclusivity) has always been Federal oversight and, if that fails, Federal regulation.
Stating that 90 percent of all bills in the US--even those that stay out of circulation in large cities--are carriers of cocaine is most likely an overstatement.
So basically, we're not being given the real statistic, just a hyped up statistic. Have these people been talking to climatologists?
Jeez. Could I have my science without hype please? Hype-ity hype, wonderful hype!
Yeah, um... have you seen the cover of "Meet the Beatles?" They were whitebread brits with novel mop-top haircuts, comparable to the Jonas Brothers in marketing and social impact, though clearly superior in talent.
Christ. The Doctor had the same haircut! They were utterly mainstream.
They didn't get rebellious until they were assured of their wealth in perpetuity, round Rubber Soul. Then they rapidly train wrecked after a few albums because they couldn't get along.
And none of it is worthy of much lasting artistic impact. It ain't Mozart. They were ever following, rarely leading. Like Microsoft, they scooped up whatever was being innovated and killed with their marketing muscle.
They were most certainly not ever "the first," any more than Microsoft was "the first" to bring the GUI, the web browser, or SQL.
After all, when asked about the color of the sky, a parent could answer like this.
Let us give thanks that some people have the sense and honesty to say "I don't know," and try not to look down our noses at them. Bad parenting is darned hard to unlearn.
Define "fine." Last I checked, you have to uninstall it separately in every user account on your machine, instead of just uninstalling it once.
I haven't tried creating a new user account to see if it installs itself there automatically, but it wouldn't surprise me if it did.
It's still a damned mess, and all Microsoft needed to do was put in a single checkbox *asking* if people wanted it in the.NET 3.5 install, like Adobe Reader or Foxit does, and they would have their answer.
Slashdot Mirror
The 9th and 10th Amendments will suffice.
Wait. So are you saying that if the several state governments had this sort of control, that would be amenable?
The 9th and 10th amendments are both boilerplate contract disclaimers. Any power or right claimed under them, by a state or individual, needs to be argued in a Federal court before policy can be adequately set. Look at the state of the Civil Rights movement, and what a mess that was before we settled against "separate but equal" in courts. And that was over enumerated rights!
These would be unenumerated. It is an agonizingly slow process which would likely take decades to come to fruition. It's the worst way, in our government, to set policy. It can be said that when the courts have to set policy, the other two branches have utterly failed. Such failures cause riots before the courts finally rule.
These issues must be addressed with laws written by people who have electricity, and word processors, and Lexis/Nexis, and a modern knowledge of interstate commerce regulation/national security.
At this point, we have a bunch of agencies just grabbing up any random powers they can dream up, whatever they think they can get away with, and the 9th and 10th amendments were written to encourage that sort of opportunistic behavior, not prohibit it.
--
Toro
Okay, wake up call.
New laws are needed everywhere. Data mining is out of control. We need a way for the private individual to guarantee and verify destruction of records he no longer wishes to be in another's control. The individual needs more rights of control over such records, and rights that are enforceable by take-down notices as powerful as in the DMCA, with accessible courts to arbitrate any conflicts. Facebook should be required by law to certify that they can completely destroy truly "personal" information when asked, not simply take it off-line.
That means that if someone's hosting private information, there should be no way for it to be crawled, bled out to third parties, accidentally retained through database replication, backups, etc.
The extreme end of this would be to hold it to HIPAA standards, but that would be silly.
But to some lesser standard, if they can't guarantee it, the site itself should be illegal. This is an exaggerated and harsh hard-line, but we should be thinking in these terms and moving rapidly towards that hard-line if we are serious about our privacy.
Either that, or we give up on the idea of privacy at all. It's already 85% illusory.
This means more regulations and L.E. infrastructure to deal with it. The L.E. infrastructure is coming either way. The only question is: Will it work to the benefit of individual rights, or to the benefit of government and corporate bureaucracies that generally wish to go on merrily and expediently while ignoring individual rights and privacy concerns outside their mission?
It's a brave new world.
We all need to bone up on our critical thinking skills, and that was my original point when I suggested that people who put anything on Facebook which they wish to remain "private" need to bone up on those skills.
What Canada has done here doesn't go far enough. No one has the laws to handle where this thing is going, and I'd like to see them before we get there.
I'm optimistic, but action is needed, and time is running out. If the legal status quo is held, the individual will be owned by the cloud in a century.
--
Toro
We are describing the universe with mathematics. Mathematics are wholly invented by man. The rules are deterministic. Where we get unexpected results, such as with chaos mathematics, all we can do is map the boundaries and boggle.
Eventually, when you do enough math, everything you can understand about the universe with math alone is going to look deterministic because of the semantic properties of the language you are using to describe it.
So the question is, what are we leaving out by boiling the universe down to a mathematical model, and is that undiscovered area of knowledge worth studying/of use to us? What is the end point of Newton's insistence that God described the universe with math, instead of just Newton alone, projecting his own ideas upon a God that may or may not exist?
I get excited when I see reports like this, because it may indicate a time for a paradigm shift, proven necessary because we've exhausted the mathematical possibilities, and that may lead us to a new revolution in knowledge.
Maybe we'll see technological singularity yet. Is it too much to hope in my lifetime?
Wondrous.
--
Toro
And the path of least resistance is inevitably entropy. The abyss called, it wants to stare back at you.
Scary to consider, but I think you're dead on.
--
Toro
Why not? Belief systems still function even though we don't understand why or how they work. For most of the population, quantum physics might as well be magic!
I have a particular opinion about which is a better model, but I'm an admittedly lousy "magical thinker." ;^)
--
Toro
In fact, I'd say that Occam's Razor is a tautology. What it really says is that a simpler solution/explanation is more easily implemented/grasped. More useful and productive.
No matter how complex things actually are, it's nothing but art appreciation if you can't wrap your head around the idea, understand, and produce something with that understanding.
That is the essence of Occam's Razor.
--
Toro
Not false anything according the TOS I read when I signed up. It disclaims any and all liability as a condition of normal site use. You may as well be signing up to be a citizen of Facebook.
You have to read the fine print. People are dumb that way, no matter how many times folks are told, everyone ignores the fine print from time to time. Some more than others.
This includes myself. Everyone is a willing participant in their own deception once in a while. Everybody plays the fool.
Caveat emptor is the first and only rule of the cloud. Your data is effectively not yours unless it is on a machine you own or control.
That's the only reasonable expectation until there is some law that says otherwise. It's about time that Congress realized that 50+ year old telcom laws do not cut it when all that communication can be stored permanently, for little to no money. It's a game changer.
New laws are needed. Until then, maybe we should stop it with the "Barney reflex." Sharing is not always good, or even wanted. We're raising a generation of idiots who can't keep their personal lives personal, and expect it to remain that way even as they broadcast their every thought on Twitter.
--
Toro
Facebook really doesn't like giving your rights back.
Especially when they have been handed over voluntarily. Jeez. It's not like they forced anyone to give up information. ;^)
--
Toro
That's still no reason to falsely accuse someone.
9 times out of 10 they won't be falsely accusing anyone. The person is probably stealing music, or at least using government computers for recreational purposes. The estimate that 10% of such activity will be legit is generous, but in the supposed 10% of times that they are mistaken, the person will be embarrassed for pointing and exclaiming, and the downloader will be able to quickly explain himself.
Point is, downloading music is pretty darned unusual government computer use in most offices. I imagine the FCC has some guidelines that may supersede these, if music downloading is commonplace.
So I would think that context and severity of course of action are everything here. These people do not actually work in the music biz, regardless of the usual scuttlebutt to the contrary.
The severity matches the context here. No one's telling them to press charges. They're telling them to bust up abuse of government property, and it'll be right more than 9 times out of 10.
--
Toro
That's a difference in audience, not a difference in willingness to innovate or shock. If Microsoft had a teenaged audience for its OS, they would be releasing Windows Butcher Edition in a heartbeat.
You remember what happened when Lennon said they were the "biggest thing... since Christ?" White bread America set their shit on fire.
The Beatles always had to be careful about what they could get away with, and they rarely pushed the envelope.
The Doors or the Stones they weren't.
--
Toro
I agree.
Time for some regulation that levels the playing field and gives the consumer some choices, and allows the consumer to choose the winners with their patronage. Clamping down on a fundamentally unfair monopolistic system with increased Federal bureaucracy would akin to how we handled Ma Bell before the breakup. It didn't work.
Good luck getting sense out of this Congress, though. We're going to have to visit the voting booth before we get what is needed.
--
Toro
It is good to hear that Windows 7 is decent business software. Microsoft might still be sweating bullets, though. Though it seems that Windows 7 will be a reasonably valuable, reliable operating system, will businesses have the money to upgrade in the middle of this massive economic downturn?
The virtual XP mode is a nod towards compatibility, but what sort of nod is MS going to have to give towards mass conversion pricing, especially if it is accompanied by hardware upgrades?
The OS might be great, but the marketing fundamentals are unsound. This could be bad timing indeed. Though there may be a will, the real question is: is there a way?
As in, what sort of upgrade path do we have?
--
Toro
The answer to problems created by government regulation is not more regulation.
Interesting bias, but utterly wrong in this case. The answer to severe problems created by dopey regional and local government "regulations" (I would term them franchise agreements, absent of any regulation and loaded with exclusivity) has always been Federal oversight and, if that fails, Federal regulation.
Has been that way since the Civil War.
Also, see this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commerce_Clause
Federal "regulation" is a Constitutionally mandated solution to this sort of nonsense.
--
Toro
Only terrorists carry cash anyway. ;^)
--
Toro
Stating that 90 percent of all bills in the US--even those that stay out of circulation in large cities--are carriers of cocaine is most likely an overstatement.
So basically, we're not being given the real statistic, just a hyped up statistic. Have these people been talking to climatologists?
Jeez. Could I have my science without hype please? Hype-ity hype, wonderful hype!
--
Toro
Yeah, um... have you seen the cover of "Meet the Beatles?" They were whitebread brits with novel mop-top haircuts, comparable to the Jonas Brothers in marketing and social impact, though clearly superior in talent.
Christ. The Doctor had the same haircut! They were utterly mainstream.
They didn't get rebellious until they were assured of their wealth in perpetuity, round Rubber Soul. Then they rapidly train wrecked after a few albums because they couldn't get along.
And none of it is worthy of much lasting artistic impact. It ain't Mozart. They were ever following, rarely leading. Like Microsoft, they scooped up whatever was being innovated and killed with their marketing muscle.
They were most certainly not ever "the first," any more than Microsoft was "the first" to bring the GUI, the web browser, or SQL.
--
Toro
After all, when asked about the color of the sky, a parent could answer like this.
Let us give thanks that some people have the sense and honesty to say "I don't know," and try not to look down our noses at them. Bad parenting is darned hard to unlearn.
--
Toro
Karmic is in alpha, right? It's open source, right?
Somebody FORK that sucker. Bwahahahaha. ;^P
--
Toro
Define "fine." Last I checked, you have to uninstall it separately in every user account on your machine, instead of just uninstalling it once.
I haven't tried creating a new user account to see if it installs itself there automatically, but it wouldn't surprise me if it did.
It's still a damned mess, and all Microsoft needed to do was put in a single checkbox *asking* if people wanted it in the .NET 3.5 install, like Adobe Reader or Foxit does, and they would have their answer.
And we would have our choice.
--
Toro
And be sure to check your e-meter regularly.
(Couldn't resist)
--
Toro
Again? That was my first reply, and it's a joke referencing Casablanca. I can format it the other way, if you like:
I am shocked, shocked, to find half-baked misinformation on this Slashdot web-forum.
Your reply is a meme syntax error: Response Out Of Range: !Sense of Humor ;^)
--
Toro
I am shocked, shocked, to find unbounded buffer use in this open-source application.
--
Toro
Consider who was President at the time of the Apollo 11 landing, and then realize that it's unsurprising that there is a 2-hour gap in the tapes. ;^)
--
Toro
Dammit Jim, I'm a DOCTOR not an analgesic!
Tell that to Gary Killdall.
My first computer experience was a Commodore PET. The only thing I can say in Gates' favor is that he inherited his empire from IBM.
--
Toro