I think the point was that making a Dummy Facebook Account is against the Terms of Use - so you can either risk your account or find out what Facebook is really sharing about you.
Well, I think I may need to create a dummy account just so I can violate their terms of service. I might even make it fairly obvious.
Except for specific instances, I bet if Facebook went through and tried to identify any profiles with invalid information... they'd likely end up clearing out a vast amount of stuff. What fraction of Facebook information is real?
A groupon bought for $X and worth $2X of services reverts to the original paid value of $X after it expires. Seemed like a perfectly fair solution to me.
Really? Because if Groupon took half of $X, you're getting $X/2, and if you'd let them have it at the original $2X, you'd be earning $X/4. Unless your markup is obscene, and you sell a boatload and generate repeat business, I don't see how vendors make any money at this.
Reading the article, I can see why certain business just aren't suited to this. In the case of the pizza shop, that might have gotten more people to try them... but reading the article, it sounds like you generally give stuff away, and split the revenue with Groupon.
I remember seeing a story (possibly even on Slashdot) about some photographer in the UK who had more or less signed up to do an impossible amount of work for next to nothing... it worked out to be almost a year of professional time or something obscene.
What I don't understand is why they wouldn't want as much independent coverage of the incident / whatever as possible.
So there's nothing to dispute their version of events, and to make sure that when they do break the law, they can't get prosecuted for it.
They'll say they don't want snippets taken out of context, or that it's unfair to them or whatever... but mostly this is about covering their own asses, and using their powers to intimidate the population from monitoring them.
Not all cops are jackbooted thugs... but they tend to circle the wagons around the ones that are. It happens everywhere. And, it's only when someone has them on video you can do anything about it.
My English Comp professor used to outright reject papers with more than 2 or 3 errors like this...people complained, but really, how hard is it to proofread something before you submit it? Apparently damn hard...
Well, if the little red squiggle shows up, you typed it wrong, what else it there to know?:-P
Wee went their too sea if they're was anything two bee scene... that would pass a spell checker. It's almost gibberish unless you say it outloud and ignore the words as written.
If you simply don't know that you're using the completely wrong word, proof-reading doesn't get you anything. My English teachers from elementary school would be appalled at things you see nowadays.
You do know that governors, the executive branch, don't write the laws, right?
No, usually a corporation hands it to them, and they just sponsor it. That's the most infuriating part.
And in response to the posters below: do keep in mind, we're not ALL inbred cretins here in Tennessee.
*laugh* I wasn't asserting that... but, one kinda does expect the people in the executive branch to have at least a working knowledge of the Constitution, and have a grasp of what laws they can and can't pass.
Unfortunately, it seems like the cretins are increasingly taking over the world, and are quite happy to pass laws that completely go against pretty much all of the founding principles of the US.
I find that sad -- 235 years of tradition and history, wiped out by drooling morons who think they should be able to pass a law that says Pi is 3.
If the US fucks this up, the rest of the world is pretty much screwed.
How exactly does a sentence which starts with "here at The New York Times" ends up having two grammatical mistakes in it?
Sadly, I read the news often (both online and in dead tree format)... I see an astonishing amount of evidence that even people who work for major news media are slipping in their ability to write properly.
I see typos, misuse of their/there, and plenty of other things... I think grammar and spelling seem to be in decline everywhere. Time was, these guys were the ones who really knew the rules of English... now they've got Microsoft Word to tell them that they've done a good job.
You guys just have absolutely no sense of humor... Come on, this is hilarious.
No, it's pathetic.
Either a state government ha a bunch of incompetent fools running their IT, and it's "impracticable" to distribute electronically because they don't know how... or they're deliberately making it tough for people to actually receive the data they're entitled to ask for.
Saying we'll hand you (in person, at this location, only on Tuesdays between 1:pm and 1:06pm) a bundle of 24,000 (!) pages is foot dragging, or incompetence.
They have a legal responsibility to be able to provide this information... and if they don't have someone with the technical know how to put the emails into electronic form, they're idiots.
Executives are not very computer savvy. And this is a surprise because....
Well, TFA is Slashdotted, but TFS seems to indicate that these are tech bigwigs.
If the executives of your tech company aren't computer savvy... then maybe the reason your business is in the shitter is because your executives don't understand what it is that you do because they're a bunch of MBAs who don't know your industry well enough.
I'm sorry, but if you're running a tech company, you have no excuse for not being computer savvy. I don't expect you to be able to code, but I don't expect you to be a friggin' n00b either.
The first amendment guarantees the right to offend, and obviously the law can only apply to people who are in Tennessee.
Attention governor Haslam... you probably have a tiny penis, and aren't smart enough to be writing laws. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.
Enshrining into law the right not to be offended is as stupid as you can get... hell, I'm offended by your law. Now go to jail.
Unverified self-reported numbers that come from such people are used as the basis for calculating losses that are based on, at best, guesstimates.
Unfortunately, this is also how Microsoft comes up with numbers for piracy... they pull them out of their ass, and build guesstimates to suggest they've lost eleventy trillion dollars to piracy. Same goes for the RIAA/MPAA and the BSA. They have no objective numbers.
Microsoft just doesn't like these ones because their OS is at the heart of much of it.
You can't go dissing the methodology when you don't want them to be true, and using the methodology when it suits you. Although, corporations don't seem concerned by such things as logical inconsistencies.
After crashing into the sea upon launch, PLAN has decided to claim that the orbiter is doing so well they've sent it off into deep space, never to return.
Except, I believe at a minimum, the US and Russia have the tools to verify this, and would have tracked it had it crashed into the ocean. Possibly anyone with ICBMs or a space program.
I'm pretty sure if anybody tried to 'claim' they'd gone to L2 but had crashed into the ocean... it would be easy to disprove them. There's likely enough ground-based observation equipment to be able to confirm this.
That takes balls or stupidity... seriously, who sues the American Bar Association? That's like... suing all of the lawyers, isn't it?
And, really, if I read the blog correctly... it sounds that all this guy did was to voice an opinion (mirroring that of the trial judge) that this wet-behind-the-ears lawyer was out of his depth in this murder trial. And, ultimately did a very piss-poor job of it -- so much so the judge had to declare a mistrial.
From the sounds of it, he doesn't have a pot to piss in (or a hat to shit in).
Oh, and for Joseph Rakofsky... Ha ha... sue my ass punk, I'm not even in the US. Who is going to trust a lawyer with a Justin Bieber haircut?
This is what I don't understand. With all the discussions over this, how has this not been fully tested and answered? How can we not have a definitive answer by now? And if it has been answered, why it is still being debated?
Because.. testing every possible consumer electronics device which might end up on an aircraft, against all the possible aircraft, and all of the possible variations of an aircraft is damned near impossible.
Some aircraft have been in production for a long time (I think over 40 years for the 747). It's got a whole boatload of variations, and has been tweaked, updated, and re-arranged by different carriers over the years. It's got different generations of avionics, in-flight systems, entertainment systems... and who knows what else. I've seen the inside of a 747 when it was stripped down to an empty shell... it's got literally miles of wiring.
Now, think about all of the different models of aircraft in the world. You would need to test 'em all.
I get the impression to be able to definitively say that no aircraft could ever be affected by this, you'd need to do testing of every possible emission from the device to coincide with every possible state of the aircraft... and some of those interferences might be intermittent or not 100% repeatable, or might be compounded by other factors they can't anticipate.
I don't think anybody has the resources to rule it out... so they've erred on the side of safety. The sheer cost of trying to test this extensively would be enormous.
And, really, unlike the pharma industry which waits until you can prove that something is causing harm before they pull it, the airline industry is waiting for proof that it doesn't cause harm before they allow it.
you know the answers to all those questions. you were not born yesterday.
if individuals get any justice today, its by accident. corps own the world after only a brief interlude that we had a few decades ago. its basically back to barons and serfs again, just without the drab clothing we used to have to wear.
So, America has jumped the shark, and finally become the oligarchy I've been saying they would for years, then?
So, shouldn't we be asking serious questions about why Homeland Security and ICE are running a one-sided, misleading corporate propaganda video, created and owned by a private company, without mentioning the rather pertinent information of who made it?
There's no need to ask.
Laws in the US are written at the behest of large corporations, to serve large corporations, with the people who enact those laws being paid by those large corporations.
The fact that the Department of Homeland Security is performing raids to protect the intellectual property of corporations is pretty much proof of that. Why is an agency tasked with the physical security of a nation responsible for seizing domain names suspect of copyright infringement? Because pretty much all US law and policy is in service to the wishes of the owners of this intellectual property.
When Goldman Sachs writes your economic policy, you seriously need to ask these questions?
Companies really need to start getting slapped with very large fines for stuff like this.
Being incompetent to actually protect the data of your clients doesn't mean you simply get to say "oops" and act like nothing happened.
Someone needs to start holding these companies accountable for stuff like this. You're a bank (albeit a sketchy, annoying one who keeps sending me offers for cards and a bunch of other crap I don't want)... you're supposed to have a legal obligation to protect this information.
From the annoying telemarketing and other crap they send me in the mail, I already can't stand Citibank. An inability to actually protect data is just further proof of why I'd never actually deal with Citibank. They just don't give off the feel of actually being a reputable organization to me.
What was true then is true today. No GUI comes close to matching the expressive power of the command line. GUIs are still a silly prop for kids.
It depends on what you're doing, really. For a lot of tasks, I actually find a GUI to be well suited.
However, I've also copied files from a Windows machine to a UNIX machine as recently as last week so I could do a little command line grep/cut/sed magic on them and produce something else. For cajoling text into a new form, a command line is still the best thing ever. Same goes for anything that wants to be automated (provided they gave you commands for it to be scripted).
A GUI has its place, but it can't fully replace a command line. I like having the option for both
Facebook's more than 500 million users have been automatically included in the database, but the company is allowing each person to choose whether to be identified by toggling a pane in the account's privacy settings.
The tool would still scan that person's face and figure out who it is, but it won't display that information. People can still manually tag friends.
The linked article could be talking out of their ass... but I'm not making up assertions to support my own paranoia. I'm commenting on the story as written -- I R'd TFA, and that's what I got out of it.
Do you have a link which indicates that they won't do the facial recognition except outside of your list of Facebook friends?
Facebook's more than 500 million users have been automatically included in the database, but the company is allowing each person to choose whether to be identified by toggling a pane in the account's privacy settings.
The tool would still scan that person's face and figure out who it is, but it won't display that information. People can still manually tag friends.
Whether or not it allows me to tag it, or even see it... the recognition has been done, and is likely recorded in the system.
Which means all of the potential for abuse has been done, and recorded, just not displayed.
So when DHS shows up and wants the unfettered database so they can take random snaps of crowds and more or less have Facebook do the work for them of identifying everyone... it's too fucking late to worry about the fact that when I post pictures of strangers, they're already being run through facial recognition.
And, given that Zuckerburg is a lying sack of shit, and Facebook doesn't actually adhere to anything like a privacy policy... they'll either turn this on and make it public by default, or they'll make it available to governments or corporations if it suits them.
If you don't see a problem with a web-site being able to gather far more information about people than they realize... fine, live in ignorance. But don't act like there's nothing bad that can happen from this.
Apparently you didn't read the graffiti on the stall walls of pay toilets when they were common. As posted, that's the exact version I saw written on countless toilets back when it cost a dime to get into the stall.
Nobody ever said the people who write graffiti on bathroom walls studied iambic pentameter and rhyming couplets.:-P
And, as anybody who found themselves without a dime in their pocket when these things were common... I say good riddance to pay toilets.
Why do you need Facebook to keep up with your friends? You could try actually spending time with them, talking to them, etc.
As one of the last remaining hold-outs not using Facebook... it's actually surprising to hear from friends just how much they see updates from other friends. They can pretty much tell you what a bunch of people all did over the last few weeks, because they see the status updates. They share pics of their kids, or what have you.
When I get together with them, it's like "so, what have you been doing"... whereas the rest of them are more like "oh, I saw you did x, how was that?".
If all of your friends are using Facebook as the primary way keep people up to date... sometimes you find yourself being a little out of the loop. Not that I'm going to open a Facebook account... but sometimes it's hard not to notice this stuff.
Hell, occasionally I hear my mother complaining about some of the pointless and inane stuff that the rest of my family puts on their Facebook pages. When someone in their 70's is aware of it... it's hard to act like you're not aware of how widespread usage of Facebook actually is.
None, because presumably none of them are friends with you.
Typical Slashdot knee-jerk reaction.
How so? Just because they're not my friends, doesn't mean that the facial recognition won't attempt to assign whatever token or ID to a given face it's going to do.
They've already done the recognition at that point, and it's very likely if it matches anybody in their database, that record is present.
They may not show it to me, but it's been done. It's not like the algorithm is going to say "well, I'm only going to compare this face to faces in your group of friends".
Based on some actual knowledge of this, can you say that it won't be possible to match random people from a picture of a crowd? Or are you merely going to trust that it doesn't, and that even if it does, they wouldn't ever do that? Given the number of people with Facebook accounts, you could probably start taking random crowd pics and the technique would likely start generating hits... even if they won't display them to me, behind the scenes I would be completely unsurprised if some part of the machine goes "bing" and says "hey, that's Alice from over here" and quietly makes a note of it.
Money is fungible. You seem to have this visions of dollar bills with your name on them flowing to one artist or another. It does not work that way.
So, I buy a NoFX album and Justin Bieber gets paid? I think not. That's what happens in your scenario.
It's the same result you get in selling any product -- the most popular ones make the most money. What is there not to "get" here?
Because in one instance, people actually buy the product, and the ones they bought get compensated in proportion to what is bought on the assumption they're being ripped off in equal proportion.
In the second case... nobody has actually bought it, but they tax everyone so they can re-allocate funding to people on the hypothetical basis that if I did buy products, it would be those products. I don't want any of this money I have no choice but to pay to go to Justin Bieber... I don't listen to him, so WTF does he get a share of my money for?
It's completely detached from any actual purchases I make... it's more or less just giving a percentage of all money to those artists (or, more accurately, the record labels so they can take their cut and dole out a few pence to the artists).
In this case, if 50% of the downloads are band B, but band A sold 99% of the records in stores... Band A gets 99% of the tax money. It's not based on what's actually being downloaded and by whom... it's a complete WAG.
You might as well say that 1% of all of my income should go directly to Coca Cola, because apparently 1% of all money spent is on products owned by Coca Cola. (Yes, I pulled that number out of my ass).
It's a formula that is detached from any reality. And, if everyone stopped downloading music... they'd still be getting paid on the assumption that everyone is still downloading music and they're entitled to the money. Which is what the media levy is... an assumption that I'm using the digital media to pirate their wares.
Slashdot Mirror
Well, I think I may need to create a dummy account just so I can violate their terms of service. I might even make it fairly obvious.
Except for specific instances, I bet if Facebook went through and tried to identify any profiles with invalid information ... they'd likely end up clearing out a vast amount of stuff. What fraction of Facebook information is real?
Really? Because if Groupon took half of $X, you're getting $X/2, and if you'd let them have it at the original $2X, you'd be earning $X/4. Unless your markup is obscene, and you sell a boatload and generate repeat business, I don't see how vendors make any money at this.
Reading the article, I can see why certain business just aren't suited to this. In the case of the pizza shop, that might have gotten more people to try them ... but reading the article, it sounds like you generally give stuff away, and split the revenue with Groupon.
I remember seeing a story (possibly even on Slashdot) about some photographer in the UK who had more or less signed up to do an impossible amount of work for next to nothing ... it worked out to be almost a year of professional time or something obscene.
So there's nothing to dispute their version of events, and to make sure that when they do break the law, they can't get prosecuted for it.
They'll say they don't want snippets taken out of context, or that it's unfair to them or whatever ... but mostly this is about covering their own asses, and using their powers to intimidate the population from monitoring them.
Not all cops are jackbooted thugs ... but they tend to circle the wagons around the ones that are. It happens everywhere. And, it's only when someone has them on video you can do anything about it.
Well, if the little red squiggle shows up, you typed it wrong, what else it there to know? :-P
Wee went their too sea if they're was anything two bee scene ... that would pass a spell checker. It's almost gibberish unless you say it outloud and ignore the words as written.
If you simply don't know that you're using the completely wrong word, proof-reading doesn't get you anything. My English teachers from elementary school would be appalled at things you see nowadays.
Spelling cunts. ;-)
No, usually a corporation hands it to them, and they just sponsor it. That's the most infuriating part.
*laugh* I wasn't asserting that ... but, one kinda does expect the people in the executive branch to have at least a working knowledge of the Constitution, and have a grasp of what laws they can and can't pass.
Unfortunately, it seems like the cretins are increasingly taking over the world, and are quite happy to pass laws that completely go against pretty much all of the founding principles of the US.
I find that sad -- 235 years of tradition and history, wiped out by drooling morons who think they should be able to pass a law that says Pi is 3.
If the US fucks this up, the rest of the world is pretty much screwed.
Sadly, I read the news often (both online and in dead tree format) ... I see an astonishing amount of evidence that even people who work for major news media are slipping in their ability to write properly.
I see typos, misuse of their/there, and plenty of other things ... I think grammar and spelling seem to be in decline everywhere. Time was, these guys were the ones who really knew the rules of English ... now they've got Microsoft Word to tell them that they've done a good job.
No, it's pathetic.
Either a state government ha a bunch of incompetent fools running their IT, and it's "impracticable" to distribute electronically because they don't know how ... or they're deliberately making it tough for people to actually receive the data they're entitled to ask for.
Saying we'll hand you (in person, at this location, only on Tuesdays between 1:pm and 1:06pm) a bundle of 24,000 (!) pages is foot dragging, or incompetence.
They have a legal responsibility to be able to provide this information ... and if they don't have someone with the technical know how to put the emails into electronic form, they're idiots.
I got "Internal Server Error", which is a 500 ... maybe if we keep trying, we can collect the whole set. :-P
Well, TFA is Slashdotted, but TFS seems to indicate that these are tech bigwigs.
If the executives of your tech company aren't computer savvy ... then maybe the reason your business is in the shitter is because your executives don't understand what it is that you do because they're a bunch of MBAs who don't know your industry well enough.
I'm sorry, but if you're running a tech company, you have no excuse for not being computer savvy. I don't expect you to be able to code, but I don't expect you to be a friggin' n00b either.
I see two main options ... the first, as you pointed out, is that they are stonewalling. The second one is that they really are incompetent.
Either way ... this is pretty stupid.
Is Tennessee that backwards?
The first amendment guarantees the right to offend, and obviously the law can only apply to people who are in Tennessee.
Attention governor Haslam ... you probably have a tiny penis, and aren't smart enough to be writing laws. Your mother was a hamster and your father smelt of elderberries.
Enshrining into law the right not to be offended is as stupid as you can get ... hell, I'm offended by your law. Now go to jail.
Unfortunately, this is also how Microsoft comes up with numbers for piracy ... they pull them out of their ass, and build guesstimates to suggest they've lost eleventy trillion dollars to piracy. Same goes for the RIAA/MPAA and the BSA. They have no objective numbers.
Microsoft just doesn't like these ones because their OS is at the heart of much of it.
You can't go dissing the methodology when you don't want them to be true, and using the methodology when it suits you. Although, corporations don't seem concerned by such things as logical inconsistencies.
Except, I believe at a minimum, the US and Russia have the tools to verify this, and would have tracked it had it crashed into the ocean. Possibly anyone with ICBMs or a space program.
I'm pretty sure if anybody tried to 'claim' they'd gone to L2 but had crashed into the ocean ... it would be easy to disprove them. There's likely enough ground-based observation equipment to be able to confirm this.
That takes balls or stupidity ... seriously, who sues the American Bar Association? That's like ... suing all of the lawyers, isn't it?
And, really, if I read the blog correctly ... it sounds that all this guy did was to voice an opinion (mirroring that of the trial judge) that this wet-behind-the-ears lawyer was out of his depth in this murder trial. And, ultimately did a very piss-poor job of it -- so much so the judge had to declare a mistrial.
From the sounds of it, he doesn't have a pot to piss in (or a hat to shit in).
Oh, and for Joseph Rakofsky ... Ha ha ... sue my ass punk, I'm not even in the US. Who is going to trust a lawyer with a Justin Bieber haircut?
Because .. testing every possible consumer electronics device which might end up on an aircraft, against all the possible aircraft, and all of the possible variations of an aircraft is damned near impossible.
Some aircraft have been in production for a long time (I think over 40 years for the 747). It's got a whole boatload of variations, and has been tweaked, updated, and re-arranged by different carriers over the years. It's got different generations of avionics, in-flight systems, entertainment systems ... and who knows what else. I've seen the inside of a 747 when it was stripped down to an empty shell ... it's got literally miles of wiring.
Now, think about all of the different models of aircraft in the world. You would need to test 'em all.
I get the impression to be able to definitively say that no aircraft could ever be affected by this, you'd need to do testing of every possible emission from the device to coincide with every possible state of the aircraft ... and some of those interferences might be intermittent or not 100% repeatable, or might be compounded by other factors they can't anticipate.
I don't think anybody has the resources to rule it out ... so they've erred on the side of safety. The sheer cost of trying to test this extensively would be enormous.
And, really, unlike the pharma industry which waits until you can prove that something is causing harm before they pull it, the airline industry is waiting for proof that it doesn't cause harm before they allow it.
So, America has jumped the shark, and finally become the oligarchy I've been saying they would for years, then?
There's no need to ask.
Laws in the US are written at the behest of large corporations, to serve large corporations, with the people who enact those laws being paid by those large corporations.
The fact that the Department of Homeland Security is performing raids to protect the intellectual property of corporations is pretty much proof of that. Why is an agency tasked with the physical security of a nation responsible for seizing domain names suspect of copyright infringement? Because pretty much all US law and policy is in service to the wishes of the owners of this intellectual property.
When Goldman Sachs writes your economic policy, you seriously need to ask these questions?
Companies really need to start getting slapped with very large fines for stuff like this.
Being incompetent to actually protect the data of your clients doesn't mean you simply get to say "oops" and act like nothing happened.
Someone needs to start holding these companies accountable for stuff like this. You're a bank (albeit a sketchy, annoying one who keeps sending me offers for cards and a bunch of other crap I don't want) ... you're supposed to have a legal obligation to protect this information.
From the annoying telemarketing and other crap they send me in the mail, I already can't stand Citibank. An inability to actually protect data is just further proof of why I'd never actually deal with Citibank. They just don't give off the feel of actually being a reputable organization to me.
It depends on what you're doing, really. For a lot of tasks, I actually find a GUI to be well suited.
However, I've also copied files from a Windows machine to a UNIX machine as recently as last week so I could do a little command line grep/cut/sed magic on them and produce something else. For cajoling text into a new form, a command line is still the best thing ever. Same goes for anything that wants to be automated (provided they gave you commands for it to be scripted).
A GUI has its place, but it can't fully replace a command line. I like having the option for both
I know this as best as I can because one of the links in TFS says so.
The linked article could be talking out of their ass ... but I'm not making up assertions to support my own paranoia. I'm commenting on the story as written -- I R'd TFA, and that's what I got out of it.
Do you have a link which indicates that they won't do the facial recognition except outside of your list of Facebook friends?
Read the second to last link in TFS:
Whether or not it allows me to tag it, or even see it ... the recognition has been done, and is likely recorded in the system.
Which means all of the potential for abuse has been done, and recorded, just not displayed.
So when DHS shows up and wants the unfettered database so they can take random snaps of crowds and more or less have Facebook do the work for them of identifying everyone ... it's too fucking late to worry about the fact that when I post pictures of strangers, they're already being run through facial recognition.
And, given that Zuckerburg is a lying sack of shit, and Facebook doesn't actually adhere to anything like a privacy policy ... they'll either turn this on and make it public by default, or they'll make it available to governments or corporations if it suits them.
If you don't see a problem with a web-site being able to gather far more information about people than they realize ... fine, live in ignorance. But don't act like there's nothing bad that can happen from this.
Apparently you didn't read the graffiti on the stall walls of pay toilets when they were common. As posted, that's the exact version I saw written on countless toilets back when it cost a dime to get into the stall.
Nobody ever said the people who write graffiti on bathroom walls studied iambic pentameter and rhyming couplets. :-P
And, as anybody who found themselves without a dime in their pocket when these things were common ... I say good riddance to pay toilets.
As one of the last remaining hold-outs not using Facebook ... it's actually surprising to hear from friends just how much they see updates from other friends. They can pretty much tell you what a bunch of people all did over the last few weeks, because they see the status updates. They share pics of their kids, or what have you.
When I get together with them, it's like "so, what have you been doing" ... whereas the rest of them are more like "oh, I saw you did x, how was that?".
If all of your friends are using Facebook as the primary way keep people up to date ... sometimes you find yourself being a little out of the loop. Not that I'm going to open a Facebook account ... but sometimes it's hard not to notice this stuff.
Hell, occasionally I hear my mother complaining about some of the pointless and inane stuff that the rest of my family puts on their Facebook pages. When someone in their 70's is aware of it ... it's hard to act like you're not aware of how widespread usage of Facebook actually is.
How so? Just because they're not my friends, doesn't mean that the facial recognition won't attempt to assign whatever token or ID to a given face it's going to do.
They've already done the recognition at that point, and it's very likely if it matches anybody in their database, that record is present.
They may not show it to me, but it's been done. It's not like the algorithm is going to say "well, I'm only going to compare this face to faces in your group of friends".
Based on some actual knowledge of this, can you say that it won't be possible to match random people from a picture of a crowd? Or are you merely going to trust that it doesn't, and that even if it does, they wouldn't ever do that? Given the number of people with Facebook accounts, you could probably start taking random crowd pics and the technique would likely start generating hits ... even if they won't display them to me, behind the scenes I would be completely unsurprised if some part of the machine goes "bing" and says "hey, that's Alice from over here" and quietly makes a note of it.
I may be paranoid ... but you may be naive.
So, I buy a NoFX album and Justin Bieber gets paid? I think not. That's what happens in your scenario.
Because in one instance, people actually buy the product, and the ones they bought get compensated in proportion to what is bought on the assumption they're being ripped off in equal proportion.
In the second case ... nobody has actually bought it, but they tax everyone so they can re-allocate funding to people on the hypothetical basis that if I did buy products, it would be those products. I don't want any of this money I have no choice but to pay to go to Justin Bieber ... I don't listen to him, so WTF does he get a share of my money for?
It's completely detached from any actual purchases I make ... it's more or less just giving a percentage of all money to those artists (or, more accurately, the record labels so they can take their cut and dole out a few pence to the artists).
In this case, if 50% of the downloads are band B, but band A sold 99% of the records in stores ... Band A gets 99% of the tax money. It's not based on what's actually being downloaded and by whom ... it's a complete WAG.
You might as well say that 1% of all of my income should go directly to Coca Cola, because apparently 1% of all money spent is on products owned by Coca Cola. (Yes, I pulled that number out of my ass).
It's a formula that is detached from any reality. And, if everyone stopped downloading music ... they'd still be getting paid on the assumption that everyone is still downloading music and they're entitled to the money. Which is what the media levy is ... an assumption that I'm using the digital media to pirate their wares.