We didn't have computers in the schools when I started. I learned division by looking at a quarter in the third grade. The cirriculum didn't have it for another few months, as it was just getting into multiplication.
I also taught my daughter the Pythagorean Theorem using pennies, the week before she started kindergarten. And the week before first grade, and the week before second grade. By the fourth grade she remembered it.
Excellent! Whatever tool works. I learned all this at home; computers in school were nowhere near as educational, probably because activities on them were more directed. Although I'm also a big fan of taking the computer and TV away for at least a summer or two, so that books and activities are the only entertainment available...
Educational Video games are a great idea. When I was a kid they taught me fractions, algebra, digital logic, and other basic academic skills. I would not have learned those for another 5-10 years if I had waited for adults to teach them.
Sigh... this issue is so bloody simple to resolve.
1. Default to a default set of morals.
2. Make a straightforward procedure for people to customize the vehicle's morals.
Sort of. Realize that your moral choice will affect your insurance rates. Also most companies (manufacturers, renters, even taxi services) will default to protect people other than the passenger, because they have an agreement with the passenger that they can use to help limit their liability, but they don't have that agreement with third parties. The only way that changes is if they compete on morality--but that seems unlikely.
This[1] article says almost $100 million per year for the Hubble. So they'll have to compare how much science they could get per year for $100 million if they spent it on other projects.
But as long as it's fairly functional I imagine they'll keep it up there.
It's not just about "how much science." NASA has had four missions that every child knows about, that have helped the agency and mankind a thousandfold more than the science we've gotten from them. That is because of the effect they have had at capturing the public imagination and inspiring people about science, about the quest for knowledge and exploration, about a hopeful future.
The Moon Landing. Pioneer 10. The Spirit and Opportunity Rovers. Hubble.
The success of Hubble is not in its ability to generate science; it is in its ability to show the stars to millions of everyday people through the amazing pictures it takes. If it did that and we had learned nothing new from it to contribute to our science, it would still have been one of the most effective projects in the history of civilization.
This ruling, if upheld, would hurt Microsoft and every other company more than it helps them. There is no conspiracy here, just a federal judge who made the wrong call. It is less common than you would think because Federal Judges tend to be great and thoughtful people. But it happens.
Microsoft has no obligation to follow the Fourth Amendment, which protects individuals against intrusion by the state. An exception arises if Microsoft is acting as an agent for the state. Some other laws may occasionally protect your privacy against companies; the Fourth Amendment does not.
However, the fourth amendment does protect companies against unreasonable warrantless search and seizure, just like it protects individuals.
So this ruling would diminish the freedoms and liberties of every person and corporation in America if it were upheld on appeal.
Everyone knows that the truth has a strong bias toward whichever political party we happen to support. Any investigation of bias can also take this into account and therefore show it does not exist. However, it also means we can perceive bias and there can be actual bias where others do not intend to be acting in a biased way.
Real communication is about getting past talking points and ad hominem attacks, of course. About questioning our own beliefs and those of our fellow human beings, and building compromises that drive society forward. About questioning our own biases and being able to work with those whose biases are different. The best is almost always the enemy of the good, in large part because we will always find much more disagreement over what is best.
Assuming the accuracy of the summary, shame on those who voted for this.
Consider a simple hypothetical. Suppose a piece on Al-Jazeera critical of America gets flagged so that when the reader interacts with a customs official or a police officer or a TSA agent, "reads anti-American Al-Jazeera articles" comes up as extra information on that public servant's screen.
Guess who is going to be retaliated against for having once followed a link to a web page? Guess who is going to risk losing the ability to fly?
This proposal discourages freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of association, criticism of any actions of the US or the Administration here and abroad, research on the enemy, and simple academic free thought. It is the equivalent of monitoring you for checking "subversive" material out of a library.
As someone who very occasionally reads foreign news sources so that my view of the world is a little less dependent on the domestic American narratives and worldview that dominate the American Press, I find the potential for abuse here staggering. As a practical matter, this kind of surveillance penalizes thinking and reading.
The only way around that would be VERY strict controls on when it could be used, combined with good oversight and accountability, which right now we simply do not have. There are lots of very nice and good people involved in the three letter agencies, but they are not the only ones there and the system as a whole has incredible potential for abuse and keeps getting caught abusing its power. Expanding NSL Authority is not the answer.
it shows that some in the academic research community are still intent on patching the holes that their peers are helping government hackers exploit.
So, to recap, the government-paid researchers are fighting the efforts of government-paid hackers to make the tool, that the government paid to create as a secure one, less so.
You have multiple countries with teams of very smart people working to crack everything crackable that protects privacy--because what allows private communication necessarily allows evasion of monitoring.
Of course, there are a lot of kinds of monitoring. Most obvious categories include:
1. Good purposes (attacking and/or defending against terrorists/child pornographers/organized crime/repressive regimes; tracking and blocking malware and other electronic attacks; etc...). 2. Middle-ground purposes (arguably ends-justify-the-means-behavior like violating some civil liberties while hunting white-collar criminals, child support nonpayment grey market income, doing propaganda against people in group #1). 3. Bad purposes (hunting political opposition, tracking and classifying people based on their political opinions or other things that should be prevented by freedom of speech, finding dirt for blackmail, gathering evidence of and prosecuting someone for common civil ordinance violations and petty crimes in a way which chills and stifles free speech and gives the monitoring agency unfettered power, etc...)
We should celebrate his life and work, and take the most important reminders we can from his unnecessary death at only 27 years old. It is fitting, and not only because learning and growing and facing the evils of life with hope were always at the core of Star Trek.
There are three I see: (1) life is short and can be over at any time, (2) we should build every day on the work we leave behind, because see #1, and (3) use your parking break and never get out of your car without verifying that it is holding its own weight while your feet are no longer on the pedals.
"Seize the time, Meribor. Live now. Make now always the most precious time. Now will never come again." -- Picard, The Inner Light
Our "democratic" process is just an elaborate dog-and-pony show designed to make us feel like we have a voice in governance, when really the only voices that matter are those of the super-rich.
People get really defensive when I point this out, because they like believing that we live in a democracy (ahem, constitutional republic), and that our representatives represent us, and that our votes matter.
Wanting something to be true does not make it true.
Close, but not quite.
The super-rich voices matter a lot, but (1) there are some issues where even an individual letter or call can tip the scale--not many, but they exist. (2) Congresspeople need so much money every day that most of the time, your money doesn't buy you a voice on an issue. Also, (3) there are LOTS of ways to be listened to--but they involve using leverage. You don't approach your person individually most of the time--you do it by supporting an organization that lobbies or otherwise works on issues you care about, whether they do that through legislators or through direct service or through the courts.
The ACLU does an amazing amount of work fighting for individual liberties, for example, filing briefs in lots of important cases throughout the country defending your rights. But whether you do it through the ACLU or the EFF or the AFL-CIO or even the NRA, unless you are amazing at influencing public discourse then you get YOUR influence by supporting the specific groups you mostly agree with. What the super-rich buy with money, you buy with a voting block and a block of voices.
(Also, by acting to influence your local and state reps.)
It's more than a mockery of "don't be evil." Rather than just going to the Arbitration Rules for general disputes, I bet they're going to the arbitration rules of the Communications Industry. Industries literally write their own rules now for disputes with customers.
Good luck with the Multi-Dwelling Units. You can run fiber to the building (an Optical Network Terminator (ONT)), but running it to the unit is pretty damn difficult. Most MDUs don't have conduit suitable for fiber, most just have old telephone cable (no CAT5/e/6/etc), and the cable companies just run their cable up the outside of the building and drill a hole through the walls (which is unsightly and may not be allowed by the building owner). Wireless seems to be crap in terms of delivering services to them as well.
MDUs are hard unless they are properly wired when they are built. If someone has figured out the right approach, I'd love to know what it is. The payback on running fiber to an MDU is "Never".
Throw in a DSLAM in the building. The newer DSL gives you perfectly adequate speeds within the building unless you're moving massive datasets or non-incremental hard drive backups every day, for example. I have about 60/75 MBps and the limiting factor is probably the wireless, not the DSL connection over the POTS line. Sure, it's not giving you high-speed fiber, but it's fine for most stuff.
The FBI's concerns are legitimate, but should not be the end of the story.
The answer to this is to do a case-by-case redaction where an active investigation is threatened, but to produce the total number and identify those that do not threaten an investigation, and to identify for each camera (redacted or not) whether a warrant was obtained for a specific camera and investigation (as opposed to a general warrant for thirty cameras, etc...). You can't have freedom unless your security has some measure of transparency and meaningful, critical oversight.
Why do that when you can just get the OS vendors to give you backdoors and control? That way you can access everyone, not just the few that have this extra hardware feature...
Some three-letter agencies (US and foreign) have better access to (or can make less detectable modification of) hardware manufacture than to O/S code. Think how complicated the logistical operation would be to make sure you had a really secure computer.
Heinlein's The Long Watch is well worth a read. A quick story, but powerful, if you appreciate the implications of technological power and in particular of atomic fission for human society and for the human condition.
The original Day the Earth Stood Still came out just a few years later and also embraces the concept of absolute power used to prevent the ultimate war. There is a wisdom to it. "We do not claim to have achieved perfection. But we do have a system. And it works."
Trek was more hopeful than Heinlein about the institutions of mankind, about building a society stronger together than apart. But there is a strong streak of Heinlein in it, especially in TOS.
I wondered why I've been hearing about macros malware again! Granted, I haven't used office in a looong time. But I thought, wasn't that solved in like 1993... don't allow macros? Guess history does repeat itself.
Defenses to threats that are not exploited become de-prioritized over time, especially when an "almost extinct" vector is the threat and you are asking hundreds of millions of people to click an extra dialog that they don't understand to begin with.
It's like smallpox. It is basically eradicated, but if it comes back we'll have an issue because we're not strict about vaccinating for it, because it's basically extinct.
This is based on a ridiculous ruling that phone numbers dialed are not private information because they're voluntarily shared with a third party (the phone company) and therefore don't have am expectation of privacy. The case is Smith v. Maryland (1979). Basically they ruled that because phone companies keep records of the numbers dialed that users shouldn't expect any privacy and therefore no warrant is required. This ruling could easily be extended to content with that same logic. For example, Facebook has to keep a record of the messages you send in Messenger because they show your conversation history. You've voluntarily shared that content with them. Phone companies now back up SMS messages in the cloud that can be restored to a new phone or after a factory data reset. In either case, you've voluntarily shared the content with a third party and therefore the same logic could be used to argue no expectation of privacy exists there, either. It is, of course, an awful ruling with ludicrous logic applied. It is one of the most shameful rulings ever issued by SCOTUS.
The first question when analyzing a search issue is whether a person has an expectation of privacy in the information. When Smith v. Maryland was decided, the judges on SCOTUS had grown up in an era when "party line" telephone lines were used. On a "party line," you share the telephone line with your neighbor or neighbors and your neighbor can listen to your call by picking up their phone. While you are right that they used the sharing-numbers-dialed-with-the-phone-company as the formal reason for a lack of an expectation of privacy, the judges on the Court who decided that case were also just raised in an era when a phone *was* a much less private thing.
Lead pipes were banned in 1961. Lead solder use in plumbing was banned in 1987.
So if your house was built after 1961, it is unlikely that you have much lead in your water, and if it was built after 1987, it is unlikely you have more than a trace. Most lead in drinking water comes from household plumbing, not from the water supply or distribution pipes.
If you live in an older house, and have kids, or especially if you are planning to have kids, you should have your water tested. Lead is very damaging to developing fetal nervous systems.
I am thinking of a wealthy suburban town on the east coast where the town plumber chatted with me for a while about all the lead plumbing under the streets. I agree it's generally quite unlikely, notably for newer homes, but $50 for a test is a small price to pay compared to the risk to a kid.
If you have a child, you would be insane to rely on public tests subject to political pressures and that may not reflect your particular household's water situation. Have your household water tested (you can collect a sample and send it to a lab) and test the water at your child's school. This is doubly true if your house or school are more than forty years old, although newer buildings are not a guaranty that the water supply lacks lead because there can be old pipes under the street.
You guys really need to dig deeper for political talent. We in the outside world are getting worried about you if the current crop of clowns is the best you can find!
The problem is not political talent, but the ability to rule wisely and well. Our institutions, unfortunately, do not optimize for selection of a person with that skill set. And our press and population are, unfortunately, more interested in outrageous stories that generate lots of clicks and outrage than they are in reasonable discussions of issues which would recognize the interests of stakeholders and strive to develop meaningful plans.
Most people probably do not encounter a single meaningful expert panel discussion on any policy issue even once in their lives. Our presidential debates are like children throwing sand in the sandbox when held against those.
Points 4 and 6 are rather obvious to me at this point, and I hardly pay attention to this particular market. The voice search capability on a two-year-old Google phone makes #6 relatively easy to predict. The degree to which Facebook messenger is the primary means for a lot of social communication among young people, even young professionals, makes #4 obvious.
But that is not the only update. You have to follow the references.
They update the law to define scan as being something that "means data resulting from an in-person process whereby a part of the body is traversed by a detector or an electronic beam."
But "Biometric identifier" means a retina or iris scan, fingerprint, voiceprint, or scan of hand or face geometry. The definition also explicitly excludes photographs, and with the update clarifies that it excludes physical and digital photographs.
The New version of the law then changes the definition of "biometric identifier" so that it cannot include information derived from anything explicitly excluded from these "biometric identifiers."
So if you can derive biometric identifiers (such as a scan of face geometry before they change the definition of scan) from a photograph, it is no longer covered under the proposed law.
So start your OWN free-to-users social media platform. Figure out how to pay for that mammoth infrastructure and operations overhead while making it perfect for users like you who want nothing to do with any system that involves advertising or user profiles - and you'll have a millions of users instantly.
It doesn't work that way. Unfortunately, Facebook is a natural monopoly--the network effects are massive and capture the market, and while the infrastructure cost of entering the market is relatively low, the user acquisition cost when competing against them becomes massive. No effective competitor has emerged in a decade. They are practically a utility and real consideration should be given to at least a certain level of regulation for such reasons as consumer privacy, accountability, and limiting the potential for abuse of market power. The current generation of regulators will not see that, but give it ten or fifteen years.
Slashdot Mirror
Can we crowd fund a DDoS attack on TVT? Any takers?
No. This is what diplomacy is for.
We didn't have computers in the schools when I started. I learned division by looking at a quarter in the third grade. The cirriculum didn't have it for another few months, as it was just getting into multiplication.
I also taught my daughter the Pythagorean Theorem using pennies, the week before she started kindergarten. And the week before first grade, and the week before second grade. By the fourth grade she remembered it.
Excellent! Whatever tool works. I learned all this at home; computers in school were nowhere near as educational, probably because activities on them were more directed. Although I'm also a big fan of taking the computer and TV away for at least a summer or two, so that books and activities are the only entertainment available...
Educational Video games are a great idea. When I was a kid they taught me fractions, algebra, digital logic, and other basic academic skills. I would not have learned those for another 5-10 years if I had waited for adults to teach them.
Sigh... this issue is so bloody simple to resolve.
1. Default to a default set of morals.
2. Make a straightforward procedure for people to customize the vehicle's morals.
Sort of. Realize that your moral choice will affect your insurance rates. Also most companies (manufacturers, renters, even taxi services) will default to protect people other than the passenger, because they have an agreement with the passenger that they can use to help limit their liability, but they don't have that agreement with third parties. The only way that changes is if they compete on morality--but that seems unlikely.
Why not use it until it's completely broken?
This[1] article says almost $100 million per year for the Hubble. So they'll have to compare how much science they could get per year for $100 million if they spent it on other projects.
But as long as it's fairly functional I imagine they'll keep it up there.
It's not just about "how much science." NASA has had four missions that every child knows about, that have helped the agency and mankind a thousandfold more than the science we've gotten from them. That is because of the effect they have had at capturing the public imagination and inspiring people about science, about the quest for knowledge and exploration, about a hopeful future.
The Moon Landing.
Pioneer 10.
The Spirit and Opportunity Rovers.
Hubble.
The success of Hubble is not in its ability to generate science; it is in its ability to show the stars to millions of everyday people through the amazing pictures it takes. If it did that and we had learned nothing new from it to contribute to our science, it would still have been one of the most effective projects in the history of civilization.
This ruling, if upheld, would hurt Microsoft and every other company more than it helps them. There is no conspiracy here, just a federal judge who made the wrong call. It is less common than you would think because Federal Judges tend to be great and thoughtful people. But it happens.
Microsoft has no obligation to follow the Fourth Amendment, which protects individuals against intrusion by the state. An exception arises if Microsoft is acting as an agent for the state. Some other laws may occasionally protect your privacy against companies; the Fourth Amendment does not.
However, the fourth amendment does protect companies against unreasonable warrantless search and seizure, just like it protects individuals.
So this ruling would diminish the freedoms and liberties of every person and corporation in America if it were upheld on appeal.
Everyone knows that the truth has a strong bias toward whichever political party we happen to support. Any investigation of bias can also take this into account and therefore show it does not exist. However, it also means we can perceive bias and there can be actual bias where others do not intend to be acting in a biased way.
Real communication is about getting past talking points and ad hominem attacks, of course. About questioning our own beliefs and those of our fellow human beings, and building compromises that drive society forward. About questioning our own biases and being able to work with those whose biases are different. The best is almost always the enemy of the good, in large part because we will always find much more disagreement over what is best.
Assuming the accuracy of the summary, shame on those who voted for this.
Consider a simple hypothetical. Suppose a piece on Al-Jazeera critical of America gets flagged so that when the reader interacts with a customs official or a police officer or a TSA agent, "reads anti-American Al-Jazeera articles" comes up as extra information on that public servant's screen.
Guess who is going to be retaliated against for having once followed a link to a web page? Guess who is going to risk losing the ability to fly?
This proposal discourages freedom of assembly, freedom of speech, freedom of association, criticism of any actions of the US or the Administration here and abroad, research on the enemy, and simple academic free thought. It is the equivalent of monitoring you for checking "subversive" material out of a library.
As someone who very occasionally reads foreign news sources so that my view of the world is a little less dependent on the domestic American narratives and worldview that dominate the American Press, I find the potential for abuse here staggering. As a practical matter, this kind of surveillance penalizes thinking and reading.
The only way around that would be VERY strict controls on when it could be used, combined with good oversight and accountability, which right now we simply do not have. There are lots of very nice and good people involved in the three letter agencies, but they are not the only ones there and the system as a whole has incredible potential for abuse and keeps getting caught abusing its power. Expanding NSL Authority is not the answer.
So, to recap, the government-paid researchers are fighting the efforts of government-paid hackers to make the tool, that the government paid to create as a secure one, less so.
Whichever side wins, we, the taxpayers lose...
You have multiple countries with teams of very smart people working to crack everything crackable that protects privacy--because what allows private communication necessarily allows evasion of monitoring.
Of course, there are a lot of kinds of monitoring. Most obvious categories include:
1. Good purposes (attacking and/or defending against terrorists/child pornographers/organized crime/repressive regimes; tracking and blocking malware and other electronic attacks; etc...).
2. Middle-ground purposes (arguably ends-justify-the-means-behavior like violating some civil liberties while hunting white-collar criminals, child support nonpayment grey market income, doing propaganda against people in group #1).
3. Bad purposes (hunting political opposition, tracking and classifying people based on their political opinions or other things that should be prevented by freedom of speech, finding dirt for blackmail, gathering evidence of and prosecuting someone for common civil ordinance violations and petty crimes in a way which chills and stifles free speech and gives the monitoring agency unfettered power, etc...)
We should celebrate his life and work, and take the most important reminders we can from his unnecessary death at only 27 years old. It is fitting, and not only because learning and growing and facing the evils of life with hope were always at the core of Star Trek.
There are three I see: (1) life is short and can be over at any time, (2) we should build every day on the work we leave behind, because see #1, and (3) use your parking break and never get out of your car without verifying that it is holding its own weight while your feet are no longer on the pedals.
"Seize the time, Meribor. Live now. Make now always the most precious time. Now will never come again." -- Picard, The Inner Light
Our "democratic" process is just an elaborate dog-and-pony show designed to make us feel like we have a voice in governance, when really the only voices that matter are those of the super-rich.
People get really defensive when I point this out, because they like believing that we live in a democracy (ahem, constitutional republic), and that our representatives represent us, and that our votes matter.
Wanting something to be true does not make it true.
Close, but not quite.
The super-rich voices matter a lot, but (1) there are some issues where even an individual letter or call can tip the scale--not many, but they exist. (2) Congresspeople need so much money every day that most of the time, your money doesn't buy you a voice on an issue. Also, (3) there are LOTS of ways to be listened to--but they involve using leverage. You don't approach your person individually most of the time--you do it by supporting an organization that lobbies or otherwise works on issues you care about, whether they do that through legislators or through direct service or through the courts.
The ACLU does an amazing amount of work fighting for individual liberties, for example, filing briefs in lots of important cases throughout the country defending your rights. But whether you do it through the ACLU or the EFF or the AFL-CIO or even the NRA, unless you are amazing at influencing public discourse then you get YOUR influence by supporting the specific groups you mostly agree with. What the super-rich buy with money, you buy with a voting block and a block of voices.
(Also, by acting to influence your local and state reps.)
It's more than a mockery of "don't be evil." Rather than just going to the Arbitration Rules for general disputes, I bet they're going to the arbitration rules of the Communications Industry. Industries literally write their own rules now for disputes with customers.
Good luck with the Multi-Dwelling Units. You can run fiber to the building (an Optical Network Terminator (ONT)), but running it to the unit is pretty damn difficult. Most MDUs don't have conduit suitable for fiber, most just have old telephone cable (no CAT5/e/6/etc), and the cable companies just run their cable up the outside of the building and drill a hole through the walls (which is unsightly and may not be allowed by the building owner). Wireless seems to be crap in terms of delivering services to them as well.
MDUs are hard unless they are properly wired when they are built. If someone has figured out the right approach, I'd love to know what it is. The payback on running fiber to an MDU is "Never".
Throw in a DSLAM in the building. The newer DSL gives you perfectly adequate speeds within the building unless you're moving massive datasets or non-incremental hard drive backups every day, for example. I have about 60/75 MBps and the limiting factor is probably the wireless, not the DSL connection over the POTS line. Sure, it's not giving you high-speed fiber, but it's fine for most stuff.
The FBI's concerns are legitimate, but should not be the end of the story.
The answer to this is to do a case-by-case redaction where an active investigation is threatened, but to produce the total number and identify those that do not threaten an investigation, and to identify for each camera (redacted or not) whether a warrant was obtained for a specific camera and investigation (as opposed to a general warrant for thirty cameras, etc...). You can't have freedom unless your security has some measure of transparency and meaningful, critical oversight.
Why do that when you can just get the OS vendors to give you backdoors and control? That way you can access everyone, not just the few that have this extra hardware feature...
Some three-letter agencies (US and foreign) have better access to (or can make less detectable modification of) hardware manufacture than to O/S code. Think how complicated the logistical operation would be to make sure you had a really secure computer.
Shines the name, shines the name of Rodger Young.
Heinlein's The Long Watch is well worth a read. A quick story, but powerful, if you appreciate the implications of technological power and in particular of atomic fission for human society and for the human condition.
The original Day the Earth Stood Still came out just a few years later and also embraces the concept of absolute power used to prevent the ultimate war. There is a wisdom to it. "We do not claim to have achieved perfection. But we do have a system. And it works."
Trek was more hopeful than Heinlein about the institutions of mankind, about building a society stronger together than apart. But there is a strong streak of Heinlein in it, especially in TOS.
I wondered why I've been hearing about macros malware again! Granted, I haven't used office in a looong time. But I thought, wasn't that solved in like 1993... don't allow macros? Guess history does repeat itself.
Defenses to threats that are not exploited become de-prioritized over time, especially when an "almost extinct" vector is the threat and you are asking hundreds of millions of people to click an extra dialog that they don't understand to begin with.
It's like smallpox. It is basically eradicated, but if it comes back we'll have an issue because we're not strict about vaccinating for it, because it's basically extinct.
This is based on a ridiculous ruling that phone numbers dialed are not private information because they're voluntarily shared with a third party (the phone company) and therefore don't have am expectation of privacy. The case is Smith v. Maryland (1979). Basically they ruled that because phone companies keep records of the numbers dialed that users shouldn't expect any privacy and therefore no warrant is required. This ruling could easily be extended to content with that same logic. For example, Facebook has to keep a record of the messages you send in Messenger because they show your conversation history. You've voluntarily shared that content with them. Phone companies now back up SMS messages in the cloud that can be restored to a new phone or after a factory data reset. In either case, you've voluntarily shared the content with a third party and therefore the same logic could be used to argue no expectation of privacy exists there, either. It is, of course, an awful ruling with ludicrous logic applied. It is one of the most shameful rulings ever issued by SCOTUS.
The first question when analyzing a search issue is whether a person has an expectation of privacy in the information. When Smith v. Maryland was decided, the judges on SCOTUS had grown up in an era when "party line" telephone lines were used. On a "party line," you share the telephone line with your neighbor or neighbors and your neighbor can listen to your call by picking up their phone. While you are right that they used the sharing-numbers-dialed-with-the-phone-company as the formal reason for a lack of an expectation of privacy, the judges on the Court who decided that case were also just raised in an era when a phone *was* a much less private thing.
Lead pipes were banned in 1961.
Lead solder use in plumbing was banned in 1987.
So if your house was built after 1961, it is unlikely that you have much lead in your water, and if it was built after 1987, it is unlikely you have more than a trace. Most lead in drinking water comes from household plumbing, not from the water supply or distribution pipes.
If you live in an older house, and have kids, or especially if you are planning to have kids, you should have your water tested. Lead is very damaging to developing fetal nervous systems.
I am thinking of a wealthy suburban town on the east coast where the town plumber chatted with me for a while about all the lead plumbing under the streets. I agree it's generally quite unlikely, notably for newer homes, but $50 for a test is a small price to pay compared to the risk to a kid.
If you have a child, you would be insane to rely on public tests subject to political pressures and that may not reflect your particular household's water situation. Have your household water tested (you can collect a sample and send it to a lab) and test the water at your child's school. This is doubly true if your house or school are more than forty years old, although newer buildings are not a guaranty that the water supply lacks lead because there can be old pipes under the street.
You guys really need to dig deeper for political talent. We in the outside world are getting worried about you if the current crop of clowns is the best you can find!
The problem is not political talent, but the ability to rule wisely and well. Our institutions, unfortunately, do not optimize for selection of a person with that skill set. And our press and population are, unfortunately, more interested in outrageous stories that generate lots of clicks and outrage than they are in reasonable discussions of issues which would recognize the interests of stakeholders and strive to develop meaningful plans.
Most people probably do not encounter a single meaningful expert panel discussion on any policy issue even once in their lives. Our presidential debates are like children throwing sand in the sandbox when held against those.
Using chat to buy things strikes me as an idiot's way of losing money hand over fist.
Not necessarily--any means of communication can work for low-value purchases. Ordering a pizza, for example.
Points 4 and 6 are rather obvious to me at this point, and I hardly pay attention to this particular market. The voice search capability on a two-year-old Google phone makes #6 relatively easy to predict. The degree to which Facebook messenger is the primary means for a lot of social communication among young people, even young professionals, makes #4 obvious.
But that is not the only update. You have to follow the references.
They update the law to define scan as being something that "means data resulting from an in-person process whereby a part of the body is traversed by a detector or an electronic beam."
But "Biometric identifier" means a retina or iris scan, fingerprint, voiceprint, or scan of hand or face geometry. The definition also explicitly excludes photographs, and with the update clarifies that it excludes physical and digital photographs.
The New version of the law then changes the definition of "biometric identifier" so that it cannot include information derived from anything explicitly excluded from these "biometric identifiers."
So if you can derive biometric identifiers (such as a scan of face geometry before they change the definition of scan) from a photograph, it is no longer covered under the proposed law.
So start your OWN free-to-users social media platform. Figure out how to pay for that mammoth infrastructure and operations overhead while making it perfect for users like you who want nothing to do with any system that involves advertising or user profiles - and you'll have a millions of users instantly.
It doesn't work that way. Unfortunately, Facebook is a natural monopoly--the network effects are massive and capture the market, and while the infrastructure cost of entering the market is relatively low, the user acquisition cost when competing against them becomes massive. No effective competitor has emerged in a decade. They are practically a utility and real consideration should be given to at least a certain level of regulation for such reasons as consumer privacy, accountability, and limiting the potential for abuse of market power. The current generation of regulators will not see that, but give it ten or fifteen years.