Honda parts may only work in Hondas, but that doesn't mean only Honda can make Honda parts. Some things (spark plugs, batteries) can be made by anyone and work in Hondas. (It may be that only Honda makes some Honda parts, but that's probably because they have a stronger incentive and already have factories to produce them, whereas the cost-to-benefit ratio isn't worth it for third parties.)
There's absolutely no functional difference between black ink in a Lexmark printer and black ink in a HP printer. If someone decides the cost-benefit ratio of reverse-engineering the computer chip and setting up a manufacturing process to sell ink is worth the risk, why shouldn't produce ink? The problem is more analagous to Honda making computer-chip authorized batteries, then suing someone for making batteries that work in a Honda.
This is why (all together now) the DMCA is such a bad law.
If you drive a car while drunk, is it the car manufacturer's fault if you drive into a tree and are severely wounded?
Why is the the person being drunk important? Do drunk people drive into trees in ways I couldn't? It seems a drunk driver plowing into a tree would do the same thing to the driver and to the car that a completely sober person being run off the road by another driver and plowing into a tree would do.
The problem is there are too many idealists out there, or idealists have too much sway (I feel it's worth the aside to mention that this is not a liberal conservative thing. The problem is universal.)
What is wrong with maintaining a "good enough" or "this is the best we got" solution while we look for better solutions? The homeless shelter you mention may not have been up to code, but it was better than nothing. Similarly the fuzzy words may prevent blind people from registering, but preventing bots from registering for accounts without that image is non-trivial. Heck, the entire internet right now is not very blind-friendly.
I'm not saying blind people shouldn't pressure the industry to pursue solutions, but we have to realize these solutions are hard, and won't be ready tomorrow. It's like someone in a wheelchair suing a store for not having ramp access, except we don't know what a ramp is. Or at least I don't.
It instructed judges to examine the scientific method underlying expert evidence and to admit only that evidence that was both ?relevant and reliable.?
Herein lies the problem. Judges are not scientific experts and cannot be expected to judge the scientific methods used except in the most trivial experiments or studies. I'm not trying to sound elitist here, because frankly neither am I.
If they let the evidence in, however, it will be the jury examining the scientific methods used. Most anyone who gets jury duty and is interviewed for a case that relied on science will be thrown out by one side or the other if they have a college education. The jury simply won't be equipped to properly judge scientific data either.
The only solution I can think of is to have a seperate pre-trial jury for scientific evidence, but the methods of selecting those jurors will be both highly selective to get scientific experts and will probably have to prevent the attorneys for both sides from rejecting them. If we do that, it's no longer really a trial by our peers, but a trial (at least in part) by appointed scientists.
Now - and this is the "important" part - what's more likely to make the e-commerce giants wake the hell up and respect customer privacy: this Washington Post article sparking "the masses" to "raise privacy concerns", or LOSING SALES AS PEOPLE WHO VALUE THEIR PRIVACY TAKE THEIR DOLLARS ELSEWHERE.
You are absolutely right: losing sales is a much more reliable way for a company to change than hoping(and working) for legislation. However, there are so many people who have absolutely no idea the extent of the loss of their privacy. Ask a liberal arts major what a "cookie" is and you've got a good chance of getting a black stare. Watch a commercial for a firewall product and you'll notice the concern is that someone might get into your computer, whereas I install firewalls at home to keep stuff from getting out.
On a positive note, people seem to be catching on and learning exactly how much they give up to these unethical practices. There still needs to be a lot more awareness before large companies see a change in their bottom line, though.
I bet if every psychiatrist went to a particular website at once, there would be a similar effect. Yet how many people here keep up with NIH funding and FDA findings and how new theories or studies impact us? We probably hear only the most important things that have been filtered through a large body of specialists and were decided to be important enough to let everyone know about.
We specialize in technology, and most of us study the way changes in technology can change our lives. When something important like this comes around, we send it up to the rest of the world and say "Hey! We found something important!" just like every other specialist group. (We wisely keep it to ourselves that we can put linux on Xboxen and microwaves.)
So most of the time we are part of the masses, but when something falls into our area of expertise/interest, we are separated for a while because we are more informed.
Their pissed that whenever foreign competition threatens a US industry, taxes are unfairly introduced
Hell, taxes are going easy on those foreign industries. Anyone remember that nice agreement we signed with South Africa? (or maybe it was several sub-Saharan countries; South Africa is the second most ambiguous name for a country, following the nickname 'America') Basically, in exchange for continued foreign aid (read:we can take this money away, see?) they agreed to get all their anti-AIDS drugs from USian companies, when they were previously getting the exact same drugs from India for a fraction of the cost.
By the way, IAAA (I am an American). Not all of us are asleep, we just don't know what to do about corruption in our government any more than you do.
Your address doesn't really "belong" to you. I'm guessing it's much like your phone number, which is a "fact" and therefore publishable (IANAL, but I'm thinking of the case where one phone book company was suing a new phone book company for stealing their info).
It seems we have no legal recourse to protect our information. We can read privacy policies carefully all we want, but they'll just change them or exploit loopholes. I doubt there would be a legal leg to stand on if we wanted to sue, and even if there was, I doubt we'd win.
I am glad the Washington Post is on top of this. I doubt I would have ever figured this out on my own.
Newsflash:
The Washington Post is not a geek publication. It is a publication intended for the masses. The news here on slashdot is not that businesses are choosing profit over privacy, because as you pointed out, everyone here already knows. The news is that a major publication just brought it to the attention of the general public. (Of course, other papers have already, so this is a semi-dupe:))
Why is bringing this to the masses important? You mentioned profit over customer/employee safety. The masses demanded, and received, laws to establish safety guidelines so businesses couldn't completely sacrifice those things for profit. If privacy concerns are raised more vocally and more often, the masses may begin demanding privacy guidelines as well.
IE and Netscape aren't just the only browsers to the average user, but to most relatively advanced users as well. My father is an electrical engineer and programs occasionally. He has no skills at all (for example, he can't grasp the concept of a pointer), but he's still a long way from being scared of the control panel.
Whenever I talk to my parents I always hear them complaining about how much Netscape 6 sucks, but they refuse to use IE (good for them). I've tried so many times to say "use mozilla or opera" but it just doesn't get through. Finally I installed opera 7 on my mom's computer since she's the more clueless of the two ("I connect to the internet through Netscape. Or through google. Should I try connecting through yahoo?"). Hopefully they'll catch on.
It's about power, and how knowledge is power. Politicians (as you mentioned), CEO's, and other powerful high profile people will tend to protect their privacy while seeking to violate ours. They can project any image of themselves they want so long as their privacy is intact, and anyone who challenges their authority automatically gets whatever skeletons they have in their closet dragged out into the public eye.
The situation is exacerbated by our tendency to develop our definitions of normal by, at least in part, observing high-profile people. Even if buying swank is statistically normal, you can bet it would damage your reputation if it a newspaper wrote an article about it. Even if we all agreed it's normal and you're not a pervert, you would be known for buying swank instead of whatever you wanted to be known for.
It's not at all important that we keep such things private. It's probably even better we all admit to surfing for porn and getting high at parties. However, it's even more important to keep from having a double standard of privacy.
Re:Not just for tagging consumers' chlotes.
on
RFID Explained
·
· Score: 1
That's just about the greatest FUD I've ever seen. What is your point? That we should not be using, or have even invented RF tages because they could be useful to slave traders?
And since criminals are always the first to adopt new technologies for these devious purposes
That statement made me laugh. What, criminals are the first to adopt new technologies for [slave trading]? How did this get mod points for 'Insightful'?
This never would've been possible if we'd stuck to normal barcodes
This meaning slave trading? Funny, you pointed out earlier in your post slave trading is a problem. They don't need to use barcodes.
What you said could be applied to any technological advance. The internet/email makes slave trading easier. I fail to see how pointing out a way to use RF tags to kidnap people adds anything to this discussion.
They can't be geeks. They must be from marketing or management. A real geek writes a variant of 'I am l33t' into every telecommunications device she tries for the first time. The part about scaring off friends still applies, of course, though it's likely that has already happened if they read slashdot.
I hate to say it, but when I read changelogs for many Linux apps (or the kernel), they simply say "Fixed bug in foo.c". That doesn't tell me a whole lot as an end-user.
Contrast with:
Access Violation Occurs in Fcachdll.dll
Access Violation Error Message in Explorer.exe
An Access Violation Occurs in Rsvpsp.dll
Etc. No one wants to read paragraph-long bug fixes, so whichever fix explanations don't fit in a nice sound byte get summarized down to a completely unhelpful sentence.
Pfff, I viewed it in IE (not my choice, attending an oracle class right now), and it looks like crap. One can only assume this web master never even looked at his page in any browser.
I don't know what you're looking at, but I'll give $5 to the first person to track down that web master, etch "tr valign=top" into a baseball bat and hammer him over the head with it.
But this means that the court should do something along the lines of squashing that version of Java, not promoting the "real" one.
I don't think the court should necessarily 'squash' Microsoft's java per se. We can't (and shoudln't) prevent Microsoft from writing their own JVM any more than we should stop them from writing their own browser. The (IMHO IANAL without RTFA) illegal step comes when they bundle it with their monopoly status operating system. The logical and fairest solution seems to be stopping MS from bundling their crap with their OS.
SpamAssassin is nice, but it's nowhere near the 99% elimination claim in the article (an vaporous claim in the article? The hell you say!)
SpamAssassin, set at 5 (after I got a false positive at 4) stops about 75-80% of spam, but with some more rules from me (how did SpamAssassin let 'huge c-cks' get through?!) stop closer to 90%.
The only solution I've tried that worked well has been white lists, but that only works so well because I don't make a lot of new friends:)
You're getting modding as funny, but I just figured out exactly how true this is. My main email account is used primarily for work, so it was very easy to set up white lists for 30 or so email addresses with a few family and friends thrown in, and route to a special folder. I still check the default folder, of course, but I turned off notification for everything except the white folder.
I went from checking my email every 5-10 minutes to a handful of times a day.
But what is the ratio of suppliers to downloaders on P2P networks? I know there are many people who cheat the system and download only, but I'm willing to bet the ratio is much greater than drug dealing (which, except for those drug 'dealers' who pick up some extra for their friends, probably has a much smaller supplier to dealer ratio than 1:20).
It is also much simpler to go after the downloaders because it is easier to demonstrate that they are willfully breaking a law. How many suppliers are simply going to say 'I ripped these from CD's. When I installed KaZaa, I didn't know you could disable sharing of certain directories.' That argument won't protect them from the consequences (because it is, legally speaking, bullshit) but may at least prevent them from receiving the maximum penalty.
Can't we let just one person complain about the general quality of comments on slashdot without asking if they're new here? It's going to turn into another 'In Soviet Russia Natalie Portman pours hot grits down your pants while the internet LOGS ON TO YOU!' and frankly, I'd rather that not happen.
Then again, maybe now I sound like I'm new here....
I'm really more concerned about the chilling effect that the industry has on technology
Excellent, that's definitely the much more important issue, especially considering how much music is manufactured mainly through the effort of the RIAA. It's also probably the only reason this story got on slashdot in the first place. There are certainly very talented music artists getting raped by the recording industry, but it seems things are much bleaker for, say, your average writer of romance or sci-fi novels (both genres being, sorry Star Trek fans, approximately as saturated and homogenized as MTV). Or, to bring this home to slashdotters, what percentage of DiabloII sales went to programmers?
I'm not prepared to call the 12% "fair" compensation because, well, last time I inadvertently checked I wasn't made of asbestos. It just seems the RIAA's grab for control of technology has automatically made everything they do suddenly more evil than, say, the average (insert media here) publisher. Is the RIAA evil? I think so. But not for this reason. If we want to all gather around and yell about them being evil, let's at least focus our efforts, and talk about buying congress(wo)men, selling broken media, and generally using their monopolistic status to stifle an industry.
Slashdot Mirror
Honda parts may only work in Hondas, but that doesn't mean only Honda can make Honda parts. Some things (spark plugs, batteries) can be made by anyone and work in Hondas. (It may be that only Honda makes some Honda parts, but that's probably because they have a stronger incentive and already have factories to produce them, whereas the cost-to-benefit ratio isn't worth it for third parties.)
There's absolutely no functional difference between black ink in a Lexmark printer and black ink in a HP printer. If someone decides the cost-benefit ratio of reverse-engineering the computer chip and setting up a manufacturing process to sell ink is worth the risk, why shouldn't produce ink? The problem is more analagous to Honda making computer-chip authorized batteries, then suing someone for making batteries that work in a Honda.
This is why (all together now) the DMCA is such a bad law.
The problem is there are too many idealists out there, or idealists have too much sway (I feel it's worth the aside to mention that this is not a liberal conservative thing. The problem is universal.)
What is wrong with maintaining a "good enough" or "this is the best we got" solution while we look for better solutions? The homeless shelter you mention may not have been up to code, but it was better than nothing. Similarly the fuzzy words may prevent blind people from registering, but preventing bots from registering for accounts without that image is non-trivial. Heck, the entire internet right now is not very blind-friendly.
I'm not saying blind people shouldn't pressure the industry to pursue solutions, but we have to realize these solutions are hard, and won't be ready tomorrow. It's like someone in a wheelchair suing a store for not having ramp access, except we don't know what a ramp is. Or at least I don't.
If they let the evidence in, however, it will be the jury examining the scientific methods used. Most anyone who gets jury duty and is interviewed for a case that relied on science will be thrown out by one side or the other if they have a college education. The jury simply won't be equipped to properly judge scientific data either.
The only solution I can think of is to have a seperate pre-trial jury for scientific evidence, but the methods of selecting those jurors will be both highly selective to get scientific experts and will probably have to prevent the attorneys for both sides from rejecting them. If we do that, it's no longer really a trial by our peers, but a trial (at least in part) by appointed scientists.
On a positive note, people seem to be catching on and learning exactly how much they give up to these unethical practices. There still needs to be a lot more awareness before large companies see a change in their bottom line, though.
I bet if every psychiatrist went to a particular website at once, there would be a similar effect. Yet how many people here keep up with NIH funding and FDA findings and how new theories or studies impact us? We probably hear only the most important things that have been filtered through a large body of specialists and were decided to be important enough to let everyone know about.
We specialize in technology, and most of us study the way changes in technology can change our lives. When something important like this comes around, we send it up to the rest of the world and say "Hey! We found something important!" just like every other specialist group. (We wisely keep it to ourselves that we can put linux on Xboxen and microwaves.)
So most of the time we are part of the masses, but when something falls into our area of expertise/interest, we are separated for a while because we are more informed.
By the way, IAAA (I am an American). Not all of us are asleep, we just don't know what to do about corruption in our government any more than you do.
Your address doesn't really "belong" to you. I'm guessing it's much like your phone number, which is a "fact" and therefore publishable (IANAL, but I'm thinking of the case where one phone book company was suing a new phone book company for stealing their info).
It seems we have no legal recourse to protect our information. We can read privacy policies carefully all we want, but they'll just change them or exploit loopholes. I doubt there would be a legal leg to stand on if we wanted to sue, and even if there was, I doubt we'd win.
The Washington Post is not a geek publication. It is a publication intended for the masses. The news here on slashdot is not that businesses are choosing profit over privacy, because as you pointed out, everyone here already knows. The news is that a major publication just brought it to the attention of the general public. (Of course, other papers have already, so this is a semi-dupe
Why is bringing this to the masses important? You mentioned profit over customer/employee safety. The masses demanded, and received, laws to establish safety guidelines so businesses couldn't completely sacrifice those things for profit. If privacy concerns are raised more vocally and more often, the masses may begin demanding privacy guidelines as well.
IE and Netscape aren't just the only browsers to the average user, but to most relatively advanced users as well. My father is an electrical engineer and programs occasionally. He has no skills at all (for example, he can't grasp the concept of a pointer), but he's still a long way from being scared of the control panel.
Whenever I talk to my parents I always hear them complaining about how much Netscape 6 sucks, but they refuse to use IE (good for them). I've tried so many times to say "use mozilla or opera" but it just doesn't get through. Finally I installed opera 7 on my mom's computer since she's the more clueless of the two ("I connect to the internet through Netscape. Or through google. Should I try connecting through yahoo?"). Hopefully they'll catch on.
I got my internet emulator to run on linux between my XBox and my microwave.
I partially agree, but to play devil's advocate:
It's about power, and how knowledge is power. Politicians (as you mentioned), CEO's, and other powerful high profile people will tend to protect their privacy while seeking to violate ours. They can project any image of themselves they want so long as their privacy is intact, and anyone who challenges their authority automatically gets whatever skeletons they have in their closet dragged out into the public eye.
The situation is exacerbated by our tendency to develop our definitions of normal by, at least in part, observing high-profile people. Even if buying swank is statistically normal, you can bet it would damage your reputation if it a newspaper wrote an article about it. Even if we all agreed it's normal and you're not a pervert, you would be known for buying swank instead of whatever you wanted to be known for.
It's not at all important that we keep such things private. It's probably even better we all admit to surfing for porn and getting high at parties. However, it's even more important to keep from having a double standard of privacy.
That statement made me laugh. What, criminals are the first to adopt new technologies for [slave trading]? How did this get mod points for 'Insightful'?
This meaning slave trading? Funny, you pointed out earlier in your post slave trading is a problem. They don't need to use barcodes.
What you said could be applied to any technological advance. The internet/email makes slave trading easier. I fail to see how pointing out a way to use RF tags to kidnap people adds anything to this discussion.
They can't be geeks. They must be from marketing or management. A real geek writes a variant of 'I am l33t' into every telecommunications device she tries for the first time. The part about scaring off friends still applies, of course, though it's likely that has already happened if they read slashdot.
- Access Violation Occurs in Fcachdll.dll
- Access Violation Error Message in Explorer.exe
- An Access Violation Occurs in Rsvpsp.dll
Etc. No one wants to read paragraph-long bug fixes, so whichever fix explanations don't fit in a nice sound byte get summarized down to a completely unhelpful sentence.Pfff, I viewed it in IE (not my choice, attending an oracle class right now), and it looks like crap. One can only assume this web master never even looked at his page in any browser.
I don't know what you're looking at, but I'll give $5 to the first person to track down that web master, etch "tr valign=top" into a baseball bat and hammer him over the head with it.
Too bad that won't happen.
SpamAssassin is nice, but it's nowhere near the 99% elimination claim in the article (an vaporous claim in the article? The hell you say!)
:)
SpamAssassin, set at 5 (after I got a false positive at 4) stops about 75-80% of spam, but with some more rules from me (how did SpamAssassin let 'huge c-cks' get through?!) stop closer to 90%.
The only solution I've tried that worked well has been white lists, but that only works so well because I don't make a lot of new friends
You're getting modding as funny, but I just figured out exactly how true this is. My main email account is used primarily for work, so it was very easy to set up white lists for 30 or so email addresses with a few family and friends thrown in, and route to a special folder. I still check the default folder, of course, but I turned off notification for everything except the white folder.
I went from checking my email every 5-10 minutes to a handful of times a day.
But what is the ratio of suppliers to downloaders on P2P networks? I know there are many people who cheat the system and download only, but I'm willing to bet the ratio is much greater than drug dealing (which, except for those drug 'dealers' who pick up some extra for their friends, probably has a much smaller supplier to dealer ratio than 1:20).
It is also much simpler to go after the downloaders because it is easier to demonstrate that they are willfully breaking a law. How many suppliers are simply going to say 'I ripped these from CD's. When I installed KaZaa, I didn't know you could disable sharing of certain directories.' That argument won't protect them from the consequences (because it is, legally speaking, bullshit) but may at least prevent them from receiving the maximum penalty.
Can't we let just one person complain about the general quality of comments on slashdot without asking if they're new here? It's going to turn into another 'In Soviet Russia Natalie Portman pours hot grits down your pants while the internet LOGS ON TO YOU!' and frankly, I'd rather that not happen.
Then again, maybe now I sound like I'm new here....
I'm not prepared to call the 12% "fair" compensation because, well, last time I inadvertently checked I wasn't made of asbestos. It just seems the RIAA's grab for control of technology has automatically made everything they do suddenly more evil than, say, the average (insert media here) publisher. Is the RIAA evil? I think so. But not for this reason. If we want to all gather around and yell about them being evil, let's at least focus our efforts, and talk about buying congress(wo)men, selling broken media, and generally using their monopolistic status to stifle an industry.