Law enforcement doesn't enter into this until after the fact. The photos were seized by a private organization operating on behalf of the legitimate owner of the property
Which is why she's suing the software company and the police department.
Aw, being gullible isn't a crime. She probably should have known it was shady (and maybe she did know it was shady), but the court let her off the hook. That part of the story is over.
The owner of the device authorized lojack to gather evidence by accessing the owner's device. Just because somebody else possessed the device doesn't change who the owner is. And these photos were legitimate evidence because they were pictures of the people who possessed the stolen laptop.
Suppose somebody else didn't steal the device. Suppose the owner loaned it to them, then used LoJack to take pictures of them in their bedroom. Sounds pretty illegal to me -- just because the owner "authorized" LoJack to take the pictures doesn't mean it's not an illegal wiretap.
It's unclear whether the theft of the laptop changes this. If I setup hidden cameras inside your house because I think you're the neighborhood thief and I want to catch you coming in the door with a stolen TV, that's pretty definitely illegal. On the other hand, if the stolen thing itself is what's taking the pictures, weeellllll.... that might be different. Or it might not; I'm not a judge.
As to your line, "this isn't any different than if a landlord puts a secret camera in an apartment.", your argument is a straw man. It's a more accurate analogy...
The term "straw man" refers to a logical fallacy, not an inaccurate analogy. In this particular case, whether the analogy proves accurate or not seems to be a matter of law, to be decided by the court.
If she took the guy who sold her the laptop to court, the most she would probably be able to get is the amount she paid for the laptop (and he might be required by the court to repay that anyway). Instead she's suing the police department and the software manufacturer for privacy and constitutional violations -- things that have statutory damages attached. In other words, more money this way.
And I might counter with the principle that law enforcement is only entitled to search for those things that are actually relevant to the commission of a crime. Search warrants have to be very specific. If the police think I've stolen an elephant, and they get a warrant to search my property for the elephant, they can't search my dresser drawers; there's no way an elephant would fit in there. In this case, police were looking for a stolen laptop and they somehow came into possession of naked pictures of consenting adults -- which are not only irrelevant to the location of said laptop, but they're also not evidence of any crime. Similarly, police have very stringent requirements for wiretaps. If they're tapping your phone because they believe you might give evidence of a crime over the phone, and your grandma calls, they're supposed to shut off the tape; that call is not pertinent to the investigation. How were these naked photos pertinent, except as a way to humiliate a suspect (who, BTW, eventually had her charges dismissed; she was never convicted of anything).
The 'enter' key has no onscreen hint to let you know it exists either.
It does have a label marked "Enter" on it, though. If you ever go to a foreign country, you will be surprised how useful the little labels on the keys actually can be. And significantly, "Enter" pretty much means "Enter" all the time. When you're typing it means "insert carriage return," like a typewriter; otherwise it means "OK," pretty much all the time. On the other hand, the contextual menu will have different things on it depending on which application or even which mode you are using. You have to actually click it and read through the options to figure out whether that was the right way to find what you wanted to do. That's pretty non-intuitive.
Surprisingly enough, these days pretty much everybody has gotten used to the idea that the right mouse button brings up a context menu.
Instead I see you saying how it's also free to incorporate other rights -- such as property rights -- whose exercise technically restricts what actions others can take, but nevertheless maximizes freedom.
But surely you see that copyright -- which is the basis of the GPL -- is a property right?
Argue how that makes you less free, in a way that isn't either sociopathic*, or idiotically literal, or please to be shoving off.
Your sentence, as phrased, describes freedom with a significant restriction, which is ipso facto less free than freedom without restriction. You apparently can't see that because you're hung up on calling people "sociopaths," which frankly is a word you do not understand.
Your phrase is also an inaccurate description of what the GPL does. If I download a piece of GPL code, modify it, and give a copy of my modified version to a friend, I haven't denied you anything except the right to use my work. You can still download the same piece of GPL code that I did, make any modifications you want, or even the same modifications I made. I'm just denying you the right to see my work. The GPL forbids this, which is why it is a "less free" license than the BSD license (and some others). Wanting to share my code only with the people of my own choosing does not make me a "sociopath." It just means I disagree with the people who release code under GPL, who have other aims -- one of which is the desire to restrict my freedom to conduct my affairs the way I wish. Because of this disagreement, I shouldn't use GPL code in my projects, because to do so would be against its author's wishes. And that's that; your finger-pointing must make you feel good, but it serves no purpose and has no relevance to real life.
"Free to do anything but restrict the freedom of others" is only "non-free" to sociopaths.
Errr, no. If you walk into any corner store or 7-Eleven in America, you will see a sign saying, "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone." That does not make 7-Eleven a sociopathic organization; sorry. If 7-Eleven were not able to restrict your freedoms in that way, it would basically be "not free" to conduct a business.
Similarly, if I have house, I expect to be "free" to do just about anything I want within my house (let's just assume I'd never think of doing something that's actually against the law), but I also expect to be free to deny others access to that same house. Like me, you can do whatever you want; you just can't help yourself to my house to do it in. That's not a sociopathic concept either. In fact, it's codified in the Third Amendment of the Constitution. I think most Americans agree that if we were not permitted to restrict the freedom of soldiers to enter our houses during peacetime, we would basically be a "non-free" country.
Yes I figured you could minimize it. That doesn't help when you need a function accessed through the ribbon.
Such as? Tell the truth: As of right now, you don't use the menus at all. You use the right-click contextual menu for just about everything. That was the whole point of changing the UI: It's obviously ineffective the way it is, because only 10% of anything that happens in Explorer happens because somebody used a menu. That was the result of Microsoft's user testing, it certainly fits my use case, so I bet it fits yours, too. So how is this change bad? They're getting rid of a UI system that doesn't work, replacing it with one that has been demonstrably successful elsewhere and that is based on heavy user testing and data collection, and if you don't like it you can still use the right-click menu like you do now.
The number of options available in a file manager are considerably less than those available in an average word processor. I see little enough to be gained here.
Actually, I'm not so sure about that. If I open a file window right now and right-click my C: drive, I see seventeen options. Two of those have submenus and several have ellipses after them (...), which means they will open a new dialog box. As TFA points out, having users access all of these options via an "invisible" control system (the right-click menu, which has no onscreen hint to let you know it even exists) is suboptimal. But that's what happens right now; most people use the context menu rather than the menubar. Microsoft hopes to change that by bringing in the Ribbon.
You call that "better information"? How about reading the thing you're criticizing instead of just looking at the pretty pictures. Right below Microsoft's graph about command usage -- which you try to use as evidence that Microsoft is stupid or not paying attention -- is the following:
With greater than 85% of command usage being invoked using a method other than the primary UI, there was clearly an opportunity to improve the Explorer user experience to make it more effective—more visible and uniformly accessible.
And your counter-argument is that they shouldn't touch the UI because nobody uses it? You should send Microsoft a resume; I'm sure they could use a big thinker like you.
Every time a discussion of Office or the Ribbon UI comes up, I am amazed yet again that there are people who read Slashdot who can't figure out how to minimize the Ribbon. Hint: You double click it.
Does Zynga really use CloudStack? In its pre-IPO filing, Zynga says this:
Our technology infrastructure is critical to the performance of our games and to player satisfaction. Our games run on a complex distributed system, or what is commonly known as cloud computing. We own, operate and maintain elements of this system, but significant elements of this system are operated by third parties that we do not control and which would require significant time to replace. We expect this dependence on third parties to continue. In particular, a significant majority of our game traffic is hosted by Amazon Web Services, or AWS, which service uses multiple locations.
"Ripped off", how? This was a public speech. If you want to reserve rights to something, then do it in a studio or in front of a paying audience, not in front of thousands of people, in a park, for free.
While I agree with you in principle with regard to the content of MLK's speech specifically, think about what you're saying. Lots of bands give free concerts; that doesn't mean they don't retain rights to the public performance. Or to put it another way, in this society there's a difference between "free as in speech" and "free as in beer." I believe MLK's intent was the former, but that's not true of everyone who gives you something without making you pay for it.
This is actually the way its been in Corporate IT for quite a while. It's much easier to make a web app that gets update once on the server than to manage thousands of client updates, worry about security issues, etc.
And before that it was Lotus Notes, and before that it was mainframes and AS/400s, etc. It has always been easier (and arguably better) to run certain types of applications on servers, particularly when the application's purpose is to give an arbitrary number of employees access to the same information store. Where the model has yet to be proven, IMHO, is when the purpose of the application is to enable an individual to perform an individual task (e.g. a word processor or a graphics program).
I'd like to see many more media statements backed by explicit wagers, and not just the indirect gamble of the stock market.
What?
Is Timothy seriously saying he wants journalists to have a direct financial stake in the outcome of the events they cover?
It also sounds like he's saying most journalists gamble on their reporting by investing in the stock market. Reputable publications tend to have ethics policies that forbid that.
Whether Tesla ships its car or not, this whole "bet" is nothing more than a self-promotional push by a conceited glory-hound.
I've used it for that but I don't agree that it's better, even indoors. I don't like reading on a glowing screen. When I pick up a book (or e-book) I like it that it's sort of an escape from the computer. I don't feel like it's an escape when I'm reading on a tablet. Unfortunately, though, my (original) Nook screen fits far less text on the screen per page, so the tablet does have the advantage there.
I have a friend who has no task manager, is constantly installing and trying out all kinds of crap on his phone, and his battery rarely lasts longer than 4 hours. Take a peek at what's running in the background, and damn near every app installed on the phone is running in the background.
My phone came with a task manager and I never use it. I get maybe 20 hours battery. I feel like people who spend all day fiddling around with task managers for Android must have bad batteries or really poorly designed phones.
What this guy said. The Economist app is actually pretty nice, and preferable to reading it on the Web even on a regular PC. It also lets you download the audio edition on the fly, if you prefer to listen to it rather than read it. I generally pooh-pooh a lot of apps, but they're usually apps for things I don't do that much anyway. When it's something I actually use, apps can be much preferable to Web pages.
Slashdot Mirror
Law enforcement doesn't enter into this until after the fact. The photos were seized by a private organization operating on behalf of the legitimate owner of the property
Which is why she's suing the software company and the police department.
Aw, being gullible isn't a crime. She probably should have known it was shady (and maybe she did know it was shady), but the court let her off the hook. That part of the story is over.
The owner of the device authorized lojack to gather evidence by accessing the owner's device. Just because somebody else possessed the device doesn't change who the owner is. And these photos were legitimate evidence because they were pictures of the people who possessed the stolen laptop.
Suppose somebody else didn't steal the device. Suppose the owner loaned it to them, then used LoJack to take pictures of them in their bedroom. Sounds pretty illegal to me -- just because the owner "authorized" LoJack to take the pictures doesn't mean it's not an illegal wiretap.
It's unclear whether the theft of the laptop changes this. If I setup hidden cameras inside your house because I think you're the neighborhood thief and I want to catch you coming in the door with a stolen TV, that's pretty definitely illegal. On the other hand, if the stolen thing itself is what's taking the pictures, weeellllll.... that might be different. Or it might not; I'm not a judge.
As to your line, "this isn't any different than if a landlord puts a secret camera in an apartment.", your argument is a straw man. It's a more accurate analogy ...
The term "straw man" refers to a logical fallacy, not an inaccurate analogy. In this particular case, whether the analogy proves accurate or not seems to be a matter of law, to be decided by the court.
If she took the guy who sold her the laptop to court, the most she would probably be able to get is the amount she paid for the laptop (and he might be required by the court to repay that anyway). Instead she's suing the police department and the software manufacturer for privacy and constitutional violations -- things that have statutory damages attached. In other words, more money this way.
And I might counter with the principle that law enforcement is only entitled to search for those things that are actually relevant to the commission of a crime. Search warrants have to be very specific. If the police think I've stolen an elephant, and they get a warrant to search my property for the elephant, they can't search my dresser drawers; there's no way an elephant would fit in there. In this case, police were looking for a stolen laptop and they somehow came into possession of naked pictures of consenting adults -- which are not only irrelevant to the location of said laptop, but they're also not evidence of any crime. Similarly, police have very stringent requirements for wiretaps. If they're tapping your phone because they believe you might give evidence of a crime over the phone, and your grandma calls, they're supposed to shut off the tape; that call is not pertinent to the investigation. How were these naked photos pertinent, except as a way to humiliate a suspect (who, BTW, eventually had her charges dismissed; she was never convicted of anything).
The 'enter' key has no onscreen hint to let you know it exists either.
It does have a label marked "Enter" on it, though. If you ever go to a foreign country, you will be surprised how useful the little labels on the keys actually can be. And significantly, "Enter" pretty much means "Enter" all the time. When you're typing it means "insert carriage return," like a typewriter; otherwise it means "OK," pretty much all the time. On the other hand, the contextual menu will have different things on it depending on which application or even which mode you are using. You have to actually click it and read through the options to figure out whether that was the right way to find what you wanted to do. That's pretty non-intuitive.
Surprisingly enough, these days pretty much everybody has gotten used to the idea that the right mouse button brings up a context menu.
Tell that to a Mac user.
Instead I see you saying how it's also free to incorporate other rights -- such as property rights -- whose exercise technically restricts what actions others can take, but nevertheless maximizes freedom.
But surely you see that copyright -- which is the basis of the GPL -- is a property right?
"Free to do anything but deny freedom to others."
Argue how that makes you less free, in a way that isn't either sociopathic*, or idiotically literal, or please to be shoving off.
Your sentence, as phrased, describes freedom with a significant restriction, which is ipso facto less free than freedom without restriction. You apparently can't see that because you're hung up on calling people "sociopaths," which frankly is a word you do not understand.
Your phrase is also an inaccurate description of what the GPL does. If I download a piece of GPL code, modify it, and give a copy of my modified version to a friend, I haven't denied you anything except the right to use my work. You can still download the same piece of GPL code that I did, make any modifications you want, or even the same modifications I made. I'm just denying you the right to see my work. The GPL forbids this, which is why it is a "less free" license than the BSD license (and some others). Wanting to share my code only with the people of my own choosing does not make me a "sociopath." It just means I disagree with the people who release code under GPL, who have other aims -- one of which is the desire to restrict my freedom to conduct my affairs the way I wish. Because of this disagreement, I shouldn't use GPL code in my projects, because to do so would be against its author's wishes. And that's that; your finger-pointing must make you feel good, but it serves no purpose and has no relevance to real life.
"Free to do anything but restrict the freedom of others" is only "non-free" to sociopaths.
Errr, no. If you walk into any corner store or 7-Eleven in America, you will see a sign saying, "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone." That does not make 7-Eleven a sociopathic organization; sorry. If 7-Eleven were not able to restrict your freedoms in that way, it would basically be "not free" to conduct a business.
Similarly, if I have house, I expect to be "free" to do just about anything I want within my house (let's just assume I'd never think of doing something that's actually against the law), but I also expect to be free to deny others access to that same house. Like me, you can do whatever you want; you just can't help yourself to my house to do it in. That's not a sociopathic concept either. In fact, it's codified in the Third Amendment of the Constitution. I think most Americans agree that if we were not permitted to restrict the freedom of soldiers to enter our houses during peacetime, we would basically be a "non-free" country.
Yes I figured you could minimize it. That doesn't help when you need a function accessed through the ribbon.
Such as? Tell the truth: As of right now, you don't use the menus at all. You use the right-click contextual menu for just about everything. That was the whole point of changing the UI: It's obviously ineffective the way it is, because only 10% of anything that happens in Explorer happens because somebody used a menu. That was the result of Microsoft's user testing, it certainly fits my use case, so I bet it fits yours, too. So how is this change bad? They're getting rid of a UI system that doesn't work, replacing it with one that has been demonstrably successful elsewhere and that is based on heavy user testing and data collection, and if you don't like it you can still use the right-click menu like you do now.
The number of options available in a file manager are considerably less than those available in an average word processor. I see little enough to be gained here.
Actually, I'm not so sure about that. If I open a file window right now and right-click my C: drive, I see seventeen options. Two of those have submenus and several have ellipses after them (...), which means they will open a new dialog box. As TFA points out, having users access all of these options via an "invisible" control system (the right-click menu, which has no onscreen hint to let you know it even exists) is suboptimal. But that's what happens right now; most people use the context menu rather than the menubar. Microsoft hopes to change that by bringing in the Ribbon.
I know it's a radical concept, but maybe you should read TFA, specifically the subsection labeled "Designing for a wider screen."
You call that "better information"? How about reading the thing you're criticizing instead of just looking at the pretty pictures. Right below Microsoft's graph about command usage -- which you try to use as evidence that Microsoft is stupid or not paying attention -- is the following:
With greater than 85% of command usage being invoked using a method other than the primary UI, there was clearly an opportunity to improve the Explorer user experience to make it more effective—more visible and uniformly accessible.
And your counter-argument is that they shouldn't touch the UI because nobody uses it? You should send Microsoft a resume; I'm sure they could use a big thinker like you.
Every time a discussion of Office or the Ribbon UI comes up, I am amazed yet again that there are people who read Slashdot who can't figure out how to minimize the Ribbon. Hint: You double click it.
Does Zynga really use CloudStack? In its pre-IPO filing, Zynga says this:
Our technology infrastructure is critical to the performance of our games and to player satisfaction. Our games run on a complex distributed system, or what is commonly known as cloud computing. We own, operate and maintain elements of this system, but significant elements of this system are operated by third parties that we do not control and which would require significant time to replace. We expect this dependence on third parties to continue. In particular, a significant majority of our game traffic is hosted by Amazon Web Services, or AWS, which service uses multiple locations.
(emphasis mine)
"Ripped off", how? This was a public speech. If you want to reserve rights to something, then do it in a studio or in front of a paying audience, not in front of thousands of people, in a park, for free.
While I agree with you in principle with regard to the content of MLK's speech specifically, think about what you're saying. Lots of bands give free concerts; that doesn't mean they don't retain rights to the public performance. Or to put it another way, in this society there's a difference between "free as in speech" and "free as in beer." I believe MLK's intent was the former, but that's not true of everyone who gives you something without making you pay for it.
This is actually the way its been in Corporate IT for quite a while. It's much easier to make a web app that gets update once on the server than to manage thousands of client updates, worry about security issues, etc.
And before that it was Lotus Notes, and before that it was mainframes and AS/400s, etc. It has always been easier (and arguably better) to run certain types of applications on servers, particularly when the application's purpose is to give an arbitrary number of employees access to the same information store. Where the model has yet to be proven, IMHO, is when the purpose of the application is to enable an individual to perform an individual task (e.g. a word processor or a graphics program).
If there is code verification for it to succeed, you must only allows a subset of X86 to be run else you run into the halting problem.
I don't think you understand the meaning of the term "code verification" in this context, or for that matter the term "halting problem."
not native speed as to sandbox you must create a vm like system.
Go read up on how Native Client actually works. It's not like it's a secret.
How is using Pepper different than ActiveX with Internet Explorer?
In at least one significant way: The Native Client code is all open source, like Chromium itself.
I'd like to see many more media statements backed by explicit wagers, and not just the indirect gamble of the stock market.
What?
Is Timothy seriously saying he wants journalists to have a direct financial stake in the outcome of the events they cover?
It also sounds like he's saying most journalists gamble on their reporting by investing in the stock market. Reputable publications tend to have ethics policies that forbid that.
Whether Tesla ships its car or not, this whole "bet" is nothing more than a self-promotional push by a conceited glory-hound.
I've used it for that but I don't agree that it's better, even indoors. I don't like reading on a glowing screen. When I pick up a book (or e-book) I like it that it's sort of an escape from the computer. I don't feel like it's an escape when I'm reading on a tablet. Unfortunately, though, my (original) Nook screen fits far less text on the screen per page, so the tablet does have the advantage there.
I have a friend who has no task manager, is constantly installing and trying out all kinds of crap on his phone, and his battery rarely lasts longer than 4 hours. Take a peek at what's running in the background, and damn near every app installed on the phone is running in the background.
My phone came with a task manager and I never use it. I get maybe 20 hours battery. I feel like people who spend all day fiddling around with task managers for Android must have bad batteries or really poorly designed phones.
What this guy said. The Economist app is actually pretty nice, and preferable to reading it on the Web even on a regular PC. It also lets you download the audio edition on the fly, if you prefer to listen to it rather than read it. I generally pooh-pooh a lot of apps, but they're usually apps for things I don't do that much anyway. When it's something I actually use, apps can be much preferable to Web pages.
And e-readers are still a big ripoff also.
Really? Just how much cheaper than $139, brand-new, do you expect any electronic device to be? Would $114 be cheap enough?