You're assuming that $1 in the future is worth
$1 today. In reality, the farther into the future
you look, the less a dollar then is worth today.
In other words, why not lend me a million bucks;
I'll pay it all back in thirty years, OK? No?
Why not?
A basic problem with all this is that people
are making very approximate guesses, and then
multiplying them by very large factors (the
number of people/computers/companies in the
state/country/world) to get impressive, but
ultimately irrelevant, numbers. Integrating
those numbers over time from now to infinity
makes it even more impressive, but no more
relevant.
The full name is "C & H Sales"; according
to the phone book they're at 2176 Colorado Bl.
As I recall, they're on the south side of the
street, near the corner of Colorado and Craig.
They used to be open more or less 9 to 5, Monday
thru Friday. I haven't been there for years; now
I'm getting the urge to visit!
Not quite an example, but here in California,
retail sales of iodine (yes, the element) must
be recorded in detail (including getting the
buyer's drivers' license number, I believe).
Supposedly, iodine is used in the manufacture of
some illegal drug or other.
The owners (2 older women) of a feed store in
the Antelope Valley (Lancaster or Palmdale, I forget which) keep appearing on the TV news because
they're being threatened with jail time for
keeping incomplete records. Apparently iodine
is also used for medicinal purposes on horses.
So here, the crime was keeping inadequate shopping
records for law enforcement uses.
A couple points you missed (they were in the
ejournalism.com summary, but I don't think they
were in the sfgate.com story).
Individual uses service to send threat. (not cool)
Annoy.com's claim was that the Police/Authorities
did nothing to establish that the communication in question was in fact a threat,
and not just a joke. If you read the
original
card, while crude, vulgar, offensive, and
perhaps harrassing, it makes no
reference to force, only
to sexual activities. Not that I'd be happy to receive something similar.
Police/Authorities ask that proceedings be
'closed' so that investigation can proceed
without individual learning of it. (cool, it's under the eye of the
judiciary, and ISP/Annoy has ability to comment/be-involved in legal proceedings to protect their anonymous users from un-necessary discloser)
Prosecutors asked that the proceedings be
closed forever, and not just that
they're investigating some alleged threat, but
every aspect of the case. Why didn't the prosecutors ask that the identities of the parties involved, and perhaps the exact nature of the threat, be closed for a limited time (how long did they expect to be investigating this alleged threat)?
And Annoy.com was not allowed access to parts of the prosecution's legal arguments about why
Annoy.com should comply.
In other words, they were told that if they wanted to respond, they had to do so blind-folded!
A YEAR LATER, police/authorities drop request, as it's now way too late to be useful. (damn unfortunate)
I found no mention of when the
prosecutors dropped their request, but my impression was that they lost interest in pursuing
the original investigation after much less than a year,
while still maintaining that Annoy.com was not allowed to talk about it (perhaps a matter of saving face?).
Bunch of people foaming at the mouth display their ignorance of anything deeper than 'obvious' by raving and rantin on about how 'injust' it is that the
proceedings were 'hidden'. (lamers).
It was unjust that the gag order was indefinite and overly broad, when arguably a much narrower
gag order would have sufficed. After all, if
Annoy.com publicly said "investigators want the
identity of one of our users whom they claim threatened someone", do you really think that would narrow things down enough to tip off the subject of the investigation, given the sort of
people who apparently use Annoy.com in such huge
numbers?
Re:spying on children too... risky indeed
on
Mattel Spyware
·
· Score: 1
The article never actually said they were spying on children; it just said that they could have been.
It's possible that Mattel was actually trying to gather information about who was running their software, but I think it's more likely they just wanted to be able to download new content or (more likely) ads.
My guess is that it was a (stupid) experiment, someone saying "Hey, ya know, we could get into the advertising business... tell the programmers to make it so our products can be upgraded to display ads later if we feel like it". Then, they got their fingers burned, or got scared by COPPA, and back-pedaled.
I know that back when I was writing "educational software", I saw my share of that sort of management cluelessness and fumbling (not that management is necessarily better in other fields, either!).
Umm, besides being "chairman of Web privacy organization TrustE... an advertising executive by trade", isn't Lori Fena still Chairman of the EFF Board of Directors and EFF Executive Director (President)? At least that's what it says at http://www.eff.org/homes/. I would assume that's at least as relevant to this discussion as her "trade", right?
Disclaimer: this is just what I got from a Google search for Lori Fena. I met Ms. Fena a couple times years ago, but I don't know much about her professional career.
Remember, Microsoft's first product (Basic for the Altair, I think) was supposedly largely developed and tested on an emulator running on a government-funded computer at Harvard.
The whole question is pretty murky: can't someone make the effort of translating it all (copyright laws and various licenses) in formal logic so we can be sure, once and for all, what it all means?
The trouble is, you'd have to translate all the precedents (laws, judicial decisions, and common law) that it depends on or refers to as well. I'm pretty confident that the entire body of law is not logically self-consistent (in a formal, absolute sense).
Third: It's already required for a person to send in an e-mail address when registering. Perhaps it would be best if only one account were allowed per e-mail address. Couple this with the idea posted earlier in this thread that a person whose post gets moderated to Flamebait or Troll (this would have to be changed to require a consensus of three moderators in order to change a person's post to Troll status) cannot post anything more until the next day. The result would help to cut down on trolling, since a person cannot simply create another account and continue on. Since there's already a "Post Anonymously" checkbox there isn't a need for more than one account per person anyway. E-mail addresses can't be faked, since the password is sent to the e-mail address given when a person registers (so an account with a faked address is useless since you can't log on).
Don't forget, generating new e-mail addresses is trivial. There are all the free web mail providers, and also (if you want messages to reach your "real" mailbox) sendmail is often configured to ignore anything after a comment character (typically '+') in the username.
For example, I typically add a '+' followed by a unique code whenever I submit my address to a web site, so I can tell who's selling my address to spammers.
So "e-mail addresses can't be faked" is not quite accurate; limiting anything based on e-mail addresses is kind of pointless.
You don't think it's a problem when a park is flooded with 3-1/2 MILLION gallons of raw sewage thanks to a y2k test? (wtf did this really happen? or what.. if not my responce)
The sewage in the park was near here in Los Angeles, I believe. A city sewage treatment plant was being tested to make sure that it would switch over to a backup generator in the event of a power failure. The test (cutting main power) caused a valve to close, which caused sewage which was supposed to be entering the plant to back up, into the storm drains and eventually up into the park (which is in a large flood control basin). There's a brief description in RISKS-20.46. The RISKS article has a link to a more in-depth LA Times article, which you have to pay for, except they seem to be having database problems.
Umm, I think the point had to do with the fact that the music industry is screaming their collective head off about how much downloading of music (as represented by the MP3 format) is hurting them. Jon was suggesting that the film industry think about what will happen to them when downloading movies reaches the same level of technological feasibility.
Slashdot Mirror
In other words, why not lend me a million bucks; I'll pay it all back in thirty years, OK? No? Why not?
A basic problem with all this is that people are making very approximate guesses, and then multiplying them by very large factors (the number of people/computers/companies in the state/country/world) to get impressive, but ultimately irrelevant, numbers. Integrating those numbers over time from now to infinity makes it even more impressive, but no more relevant.
The full name is "C & H Sales"; according to the phone book they're at 2176 Colorado Bl. As I recall, they're on the south side of the street, near the corner of Colorado and Craig. They used to be open more or less 9 to 5, Monday thru Friday. I haven't been there for years; now I'm getting the urge to visit!
The owners (2 older women) of a feed store in the Antelope Valley (Lancaster or Palmdale, I forget which) keep appearing on the TV news because they're being threatened with jail time for keeping incomplete records. Apparently iodine is also used for medicinal purposes on horses.
So here, the crime was keeping inadequate shopping records for law enforcement uses.
Individual uses service to send threat. (not cool)
Annoy.com's claim was that the Police/Authorities did nothing to establish that the communication in question was in fact a threat, and not just a joke. If you read the original card, while crude, vulgar, offensive, and perhaps harrassing, it makes no reference to force, only to sexual activities. Not that I'd be happy to receive something similar.
Police/Authorities ask that proceedings be 'closed' so that investigation can proceed without individual learning of it. (cool, it's under the eye of the judiciary, and ISP/Annoy has ability to comment/be-involved in legal proceedings to protect their anonymous users from un-necessary discloser)
Prosecutors asked that the proceedings be closed forever, and not just that they're investigating some alleged threat, but every aspect of the case. Why didn't the prosecutors ask that the identities of the parties involved, and perhaps the exact nature of the threat, be closed for a limited time (how long did they expect to be investigating this alleged threat)?
And Annoy.com was not allowed access to parts of the prosecution's legal arguments about why Annoy.com should comply. In other words, they were told that if they wanted to respond, they had to do so blind-folded!
A YEAR LATER, police/authorities drop request, as it's now way too late to be useful. (damn unfortunate)
I found no mention of when the prosecutors dropped their request, but my impression was that they lost interest in pursuing the original investigation after much less than a year, while still maintaining that Annoy.com was not allowed to talk about it (perhaps a matter of saving face?).
Bunch of people foaming at the mouth display their ignorance of anything deeper than 'obvious' by raving and rantin on about how 'injust' it is that the proceedings were 'hidden'. (lamers).
It was unjust that the gag order was indefinite and overly broad, when arguably a much narrower gag order would have sufficed. After all, if Annoy.com publicly said "investigators want the identity of one of our users whom they claim threatened someone", do you really think that would narrow things down enough to tip off the subject of the investigation, given the sort of people who apparently use Annoy.com in such huge numbers?
It's possible that Mattel was actually trying to gather information about who was running their software, but I think it's more likely they just wanted to be able to download new content or (more likely) ads.
My guess is that it was a (stupid) experiment, someone saying "Hey, ya know, we could get into the advertising business... tell the programmers to make it so our products can be upgraded to display ads later if we feel like it". Then, they got their fingers burned, or got scared by COPPA, and back-pedaled.
I know that back when I was writing "educational software", I saw my share of that sort of management cluelessness and fumbling (not that management is necessarily better in other fields, either!).
Umm, besides being "chairman of Web privacy organization TrustE... an advertising executive by trade", isn't Lori Fena still Chairman of the EFF Board of Directors and EFF Executive Director (President)? At least that's what it says at http://www.eff.org/homes/. I would assume that's at least as relevant to this discussion as her "trade", right?
Disclaimer: this is just what I got from a Google search for Lori Fena. I met Ms. Fena a couple times years ago, but I don't know much about her professional career.
Jeremy
Remember, Microsoft's first product (Basic for
the Altair, I think) was supposedly largely
developed and tested on an emulator running on
a government-funded computer at Harvard.
Or so I've heard...
The trouble is, you'd have to translate all the precedents (laws, judicial decisions, and common law) that it depends on or refers to as well. I'm pretty confident that the entire body of law is not logically self-consistent (in a formal, absolute sense).
Third: It's already required for a person to send in an e-mail address when registering. Perhaps it would be best if only one account were allowed per e-mail address. Couple this with the idea posted earlier in this thread that a person whose post gets moderated to Flamebait or Troll (this would have to be changed to require a consensus of three moderators in order to change a person's post to Troll status) cannot post anything more until the next day. The result would help to cut down on trolling, since a person cannot simply create another account and continue on. Since there's already a "Post Anonymously" checkbox there isn't a need for more than one account per person anyway. E-mail addresses can't be faked, since the password is sent to the e-mail address given when a person registers (so an account with a faked address is useless since you can't log on).
Don't forget, generating new e-mail addresses is trivial. There are all the free web mail providers, and also (if you want messages to reach your "real" mailbox) sendmail is often configured to ignore anything after a comment character (typically '+') in the username.
For example, I typically add a '+' followed by a unique code whenever I submit my address to a web site, so I can tell who's selling my address to spammers.
So "e-mail addresses can't be faked" is not quite accurate; limiting anything based on e-mail addresses is kind of pointless.
(wtf did this really happen? or what.. if not my responce)
The sewage in the park was near here in Los Angeles, I believe. A city sewage treatment plant was being tested to make sure that it would switch over to a backup generator in the event of a power failure. The test (cutting main power) caused a valve to close, which caused sewage which was supposed to be entering the plant to back up, into the storm drains and eventually up into the park (which is in a large flood control basin). There's a brief description in RISKS-20.46. The RISKS article has a link to a more in-depth LA Times article, which you have to pay for, except they seem to be having database problems.
Umm, I think the point had to do with the fact that the music industry is screaming their collective head off about how much downloading of music (as represented by the MP3 format) is hurting them. Jon was suggesting that the film industry think about what will happen to them when downloading movies reaches the same level of technological feasibility.
Trivia: Esther Dyson is Freeman Dyson's daughter.