Perhaps. But even so, if there were only one or two patents issued per year, it'd have been easy to see the duplication. As it is, there's a sea capable of hiding much more duplication.
I'd like to offer some counterpoint. There is some truth to what you say, certainly. Fluency/competence is important in both arenas. However, quite a number of years ago (1990), I made the observation (in the context of a discussion about intellectual property and whether copyright should apply) that literature is essentially a "divergent" activity and that programming, being an engineering activity, is "convergent". That is, if assigned an English paper to write, there's a very high chance that you will be graded down if you turn in the same answer as someone else. By contrast, if assigned a piece of code to write, you will often be graded down if you turn in a different answer than someone else.
This should give you pause as you consider things like copyrights and patents, given that the engineering activity wants to guide you to both copy and independently create works similar to what others have done, while that's not true of literature, yet the same copyright property laws span both of these areas. There's something odd about that.
Anyway, independent of the IP issues, there are good reasons that we want engineers to learn to do similar things and writers to do different things. So I don't doubt that you're right that there is some overlap of skill and activity, but I wanted to point out that the skill of being a writer of literature and of being a writer of code also have some really material differences.
I've long suggested that what we should do with software patents is dispense with most of them and instead turn the quest for software excellence from a race to make inane patents into a competition for an elite prize, such as the Nobel. It would eliminate many bogus patents, plus no one would be confused about what was patented and what wasn't, since almost nothing would be patented.
I'd have maybe given Nobels for things like RSA encryption or LZW compression, for example--things that took a work to create, aren't likely to be independently created and really serve people. The "prize" could be getting the patent, which most things would not get—though a maximum 5 year term would be best, any more is too long in the modern world of computers. Getting a patent would mean you didn't need a monetary prize, which would make the award cheap to offer.:)
we need to move to two-factor authentication schemes ASAP.
And by this I assume you don't mean first letting the attacker guess our regular password and then second letting them guess our cousin's middle name or some such other bit of info trivially available from facebook or ancestry.com.:)
Sigh. I've bargained down to where I'd think it a major step forward if there were at least a law against using the word "security" as part of the name for those stupid fixed-set questions. It's probably more than one can hope for to actually forbid their use.
As a treatment in an emergency to quickly resolve a bad situation on a temporary basis, it sounds fine. As a therapy to hold back trouble, it sounds less fine. Not that the same isn't perhaps true of aspirin in some ways but since one can quantify the effect here and since one might not see as many negatives, I predict this will get used with less reservation than aspirin. What holds people back from using aspirin more is the fear of side-effects, but if you were assuming there were fewer to this, you might be inclined to lean more heavily on this one's stated capacity limitations. It eliminates a margin for error such that if a person really regularly took advantage of it, they'd be well over the maximum limit and any failure to use the magnets would sound fatal.
Moreover, it won't surprise me if it creates some situation in which a bunch of aligned things, while normally they work well, can also create unexpected kinds of clots or other problems not previously possible to create in more chaotic systems.
It certainly doesn't sound as glowingly positive to me as a term like "drug-free therapy" is supposed to imply. It sounds more like the potential pitfalls are hidden in different places, like the way nuclear radiation is "drug-free". Not that we're talking radiation effects here, but we're definitely not talking automatically safer than drugs, either.
But they still owe the State of Texas $269 million
I was looking for a comment by someone noting this. It seemed unlikely someone (corporations are people, too) could just leave and be absolved of taxes.
they were supposed to be collecting that money from their customers
Thanks for making this point, too.
I wonder, though, if this is just posturing to create negotiating room for special treatment in exchange for protecting some jobs.
It could even be an orchestrated bit of theatre to offer foundation for some politician's "government overhead is hurting business" claim.
What's most troubling to me is that there is little harm to businesses for such temper tantrums. It may seem good to their bottom line to make such threats, but at the end of the day even if it improves their bottom line it comes at great cost to communities. And they did sales, should have known this was a cost, were permitted to pass the cost visibly to customers, so I just don't see how they were wronged and why this tantrum is righteous.
Perhaps they should just slow the net down in that case, since it's really speed that's the problem. Things happen too fast in an attack so if you can just make things run in slow-motion, you have time to act. Oh, wait, we already have a way to slow things down: We can just give up on net neutrality. Then we'll have slowness built into at least part of the system from the get-go--no need for a switch. At first it will be a bummer being on the slow net and envying the guys on the fast net getting data back and forth at lightning speed, but when viruses get released, they'll go first to the people on the fast net and the "little people" on the slow net can just sit and watch and take notes, so that eventually when the virus traffic "trickles down," they'll be ready, not to mention thankful to have the premium people out there on the front lines as the First Adopters for the virusware. (Yeah, I'm just kidding, but...)
It may also be necessary for the personal safety of people who are being stalked, doing whistleblowing, or even just dating and wanting to chat without committing.
It can be necessary to express any unpopular political opinion. Note that popular opinions require no protection but that if we assume that what's popular never changes we can just have one vote and then be done and never vote again. All political change begins as a minority viewpoint. For example, labor organization is more easily suppressed if one can keep the organization from ever happening. The movement to stop a war might start small.
For some public figures, it allows the freedom to relax and speak without having their political motives challenged or their well-known credentials inappropriately applied since their voice is not as loud as when it is their well-known self, and since anonymous speech is evaluated for the worth of the statement rather than for who said it.
It allows the underappreciated option of having an opinion you might later want to change without being quoted for life.
It allows one to perform an act like shopping without having marketers of the future be able to log the action as a sign of potential interest.
On juries (and in paper review for refereed scientific and technical journals, for that matter), anonymous voting is considered a way of encouraging frankness and honesty.
In voting for politicians and political initiatives, it is considered a way to assure that votes are hard to buy or force because compliance with an improper promise or attempted coercion is not possible to track.
Certain people will not approach a help desk for things like medical care, contemplating suicide, or other issues if they don't believe it's anonymous.
Some people are just shy and prefer to speak anonymously.
Some religions teach that it's more humble to contribute money, time, energy, etc.) anonymously, not drawing attention to self.
The old print papers can't survive. Their cost structure is too high, their product is stale before it's off the presses,
I wasn't talking just about print publishing, I was talking about "the media of the day". In fact, in writing the sentence you quote, I was as much talking about TV and how TV news took a back seat. (As illustrated, for example, if you prefer non-print media, in the movie Network or the Earth to the Moon's episode on Apollo 13.) It's all the same. The issue of getting distribution to work is a problem they've actively confronted on the web. They get news out as fast as anyone. But that's not the problem. The problem is people don't value news, or that the market model for valuation is wrong. They will value it if it goes away. They'll say more should have been done. They're just making a gamble they won't have to value.
It's the same as what's going on with the environment. When it goes away, people will say we should have done more. But right now they're engaged in a dangerous gamble that doing nothing is enough. It is inappropriate to conclude from this dangerous gamble that no one cares about having news or having a biosphere. It just means market models are not sensitive to all the correct variables. They favor the high-order-bit-of-the-moment and have no way of very usefully assigning proper value to the "stealth" (lower order, but up-and-coming) bits, the ones that will be tomorrow's high order bit in a world that's full of, if you'll pardon the nerdy pun, bit rot.
The problem of capitalism is that it assumes that it's perfectly ok for people to be whimsy, and for many things it is, just not all. News is something that can't be left to the whims of the market. Which is why I focused on the issue of profit centers.
And, incidentally, I'm not anti-capitalism. I have no agenda to make the world socialist or anything like that. I just see capitalism as a tool with limitations like any other tool, not as a religion. Capitalism only works when the market's use of money maps correctly to people's real interests. And I simply worry that treating news like any other entertainment is very, very bad in a democracy that relies on voters to have good information in order to make good choices.
It won't work. They already know this - they've tried it before. Stupidity is doing the same thing you did before and expecting different results. "This time it's different!" Yes, it is. Much more competition, the Great Recession, high unemployment. 3 more reasons to fail. The industry needs massive consolidation - like maybe 90% of the print papers folding.
Actually, I think the real rule is that stupidity is trying the same thing you did before in the same circumstances and expecting different results. But the circumstances are not the same, as you indicate. Now it's true the outcome may not be different, but it's not true that it's obvious that the outcome will not be different.
What's ironic and sad about the fact that you cite the recession is that one reason there's a recession is a lack of jobs. And the lack of jobs is created by a lack of money to hire people, including at the New York Times. They are not wanting to charge because they want to stick it to you, they want to survive and to keep people employed.
So if you think the recession matters--and you must, since you cited it as relevant here--then you should buy a subscription. And tell your friends to. And soon if everyone does, it may be seen as a valid business model.
Imagine that--paying for content. I know it sounds quaint, but think of the implications: The actual producers of content would be benefiting for the content they actually produced. Why on Earth would you be smugly suggesting it was somehow better for people to be feebly rewarded by advertising dollars, which (a) doesn't reward the content producers really, (b) does reward the advertisers when they didn't do anything except pay feeble amounts that don't buy a cup of coffee for most content producers, and (c) drags the entire industry off in search of content that advertisers like instead of in search of content that end-users want.
Forget the pay scheme. I, the end user, want to read stuff because it's good to read, not because someone can find a way to make a buck on accessories for it. I don't want people preferring to write about the planet Saturn rather than the planet Jupiter because there's a car named Saturn that might put up its ads next to remarks about the planet Saturn. I want people to write good stuff about any topic they want and then to get paid in proportion to their goodness. Like used to happen. Quaint? I think not. More like lost rationality.
Yes, it might not work. But like getting a decent health care system, I'd rather see them fail trying than give up because it's a lost cause. Don't be defeatist, be encouraging.
One final point: These are people among the most trusted in the world to report on politics. If they fold
because you insist they have old-fashioned ways and should yield to the "advertising" model of free content,
the problem is that we may soon find that advertisers are trying to sway them away from things that good
reporters need to cover. What then? The news industry suffered a serious blow in the late 60's or maybe early
70's, don't quite recall, when news went commercial and had to show a profit. That's a tough thing. But at
least let them show a profit on their actual news, don't make them have to contort news content to be profitable
on some other basis. If not for them, do it for us: the citizens. When things go wrong (oops, they have: economy, health, climate change, wars, torture,...) it may turn out to matter.
And news is not just any industry. I'm actually not sure most industries are served by lack of variety, but certainly the news industry is not. So your admonition that a leading free-thinker in news should "consolidate" seems... well, short-sighted.
Here are two more recollections in case they help:
When I worked in the mid 1980's, probably around 1986, at the now-defunct Symbolics on MACSYMA, a symbolic algebra system that lives (in an alternate timeline/universe from what some know today as MAXIMA), there was one customer who wanted a special deal and someone was foolish enough to sell it to them. The customer explained that they did not plan to use all of MACSYMA (who ever uses all of any language?) and so wanted to only pay a proportional fee for the parts of the language they planned to use. So we did extra custom work in compliance with the contract in order to build a special version of MACSYMA that had only parts of the functionality and we had the ability to unlock individual functions when they realized they had asked too little. It had to be specially administered, specially QA'd, etc. It was a huge lot of extra work. And they paid us less for it on the theory that they were not using the full thing. Bleah. (It was a brilliant query for the customer to ask but stupid for us to accept. I knew it was a disaster from the moment they said it. We should have just written it off as an error on our part and given them a full license at reduced price.)
Although MACSYMA as a user application is not an operating system by the traditional meaning of the word, I have heard programs as varied as APL and Emacs described as "operating systems" because for some users they were the only thing the user planned to really use on the machine and they wanted to use all things from within it. It's not a stretch to say that MACSYMA qualified similarly as an operating system in that regard, and would be an example of prior art if foolish one-off custom contracts counted as such.
Even earlier, when I was at MIT, I think around 1980 or 1981 (I have records but not handy as I write this),
after Scheme was invented but before it was integrated into MIT's programming classes, Gerry Sussman taught a transitional version of his class
that was not yet 6.001 / Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs in its final form.
One term he used a Lisp dialect that I had conjured on the spur of the moment (it was missing tail recursion, which drove Sussman nuts, but it was all he had
on that platform at that time, so he went with it). For editing programs for this hacked up Lisp,
I hastily conjured together a little editor out of TECO which was similar in command set to Emacs
but was hardened to be not customizable or extensible so we could document something simple for students.
I hate to characterize others' emotional states, but I think it's fair to say that Stallman hated it and got really mad at me for calling
it MinEmacs because he said it was not an Emacs. He said he didn't care about the command set being Emacs-like because that didn't make something
an Emacs, and that it could be a vi command set for all he cared as long as it was exensible and customizable. I explained that there were things
students would trip over that they didn't want them to. He wrote a library called NOVICE that was the compromise and that kept a profile of users
preferences, disabling commands by default but when you invoked them asking you if you knew what you were doing and allowing you to proceed if you
answered yes. This seemed reasonable and I think it was used by many people. This was still TECO-based Emacs on the PDP-10. Later, when he created
gnu emacs, he built that functionality into the core system. But basically, the NOVICE library for TECO-based Emacs, and later the gnu Emacs stuff generally was a system that had a protected set of commands that could be selectively re-enabled. It differed only in politics--the re-enabling was not held centrally by the vendor (in true Stallman fashion) but was instead left to the individual. But technologically, it seems to me that the concept is really the same
as what is discussed in the summary of this topic. I didn't read the patent.
This list of ten is not bad. Some terms are a bit vague. What "one's own hardware" is or "any device" is might require refinement. Item 9 is controversial and its presence would likely sink the proposed bill of rights, losing the others with it; I'd leave it out even though I like it conceptually for most purposes. There are cases where anonymity breach is important to allow; they're just rare. Item 10 might have a minor glitch over the definition of "speech", but no worse than the First Amendment already has.
When I saw the original article's title, I wanted to rush to promo my thoughts on Universal Business Access. Looks like its article 2 addresses it a different way, which is probably mostly ok. But the original article has problems for me in Articles 3 and 4. Article 3 looks well-meaning but likely to be full of problems; I can easily imagine a need for exceptions. As for Article 4, if someone's not being forced to buy the closed source software, I don't see why more than just market dynamics is required.
Putting these kinds of things in a Bill of Rights seems a little off. Mostly I think rights should be things that can be asserted against the state (or a state-like monopoly provider like an ISP or cable provider), not against individuals and they shouldn't be full of details that might need to change.
Your list of 10 looks to be in better syntactic form for a bill of rights.
No, it will PRODUCE exactly zero power (unless you want to set foot in negative-number territory). It might SAVE nine MW of power that won't be used to heat homes anymore, but it isn't producing anything except heat.
With "science" reporting like this, it's no wonder our world is slipping back into the superstitions of the Dark Ages.
True, but I think this war has already been lost. Have you noticed how much difficulty they're having labeling new energy-efficient light bulbs for people who think "watts" are a unit of brightness?
It would only cost $2 to $10 a month (still in the works, they want our input)... what more do you guys want?
I have to say this sounds a lot to me like a person who is very frugal going out to dinner
with a bunch of other people who order extravagant food options and then having someone want
to split the bill at the end.
I mostly don't listen to music. $2 to $10 per month is $25-$125/yr or $100-$500 over the course of a four year college. That's about $90 to $490 more than I would have paid if buying a la carte
every piece of music I wanted to buy. That's money I could have spent on things that matter to me.
Will you be as excited about anteing up $2 to $10 per month to cover some routine cost that I pay for
and that bores you to tears, just to bring my price down?
To employ a musical reference, does the phrase "tyrrany of the majority" ring any bells?
Tell me why it isn't just fair that people should pay for what they use?
The only problem with your rational is that if all the competition was from commercial entities, and not from people willing to work without compensation, then the bottom line would not be zero. Yes, competition would force the price lower, but the limit would be considerably nonzero. In theory all the competitors but one would eventually be weeded out as the company with the most efficient infrastructure (assuming the product quality was equal amongst all competitors) managed to sell the product for the lowest possible price while still maintaining the ability to pay for its business costs.
I had a similar thing happen to me as what is described in the article.
I wasted a half a year developing something that was undercut by a free offering that came out of
the blue.
The problem with free software is that one cannot predict if/when it will arrive, so you need to assume it always will arrive soon. It's bad to bet on there being
an ability to charge anything for what you've asked. (There's a big difference between
anything and nothing. One of those scales way better.)
It's not like making a really nice desk out of wood, where you know in the end you'll be able
to sell it for something, even if you have to lower the price a little.
And if you have to give software away and hope for consulting revenue,
then what you're saying is the software creation industry no longer exists, there is only
a software maintenance industry. What will happen if you give away a well-written piece of
software is that others will take it over and maintain it. Of course, if you've obfuscated it or
left bugs in it or made it hard to extend, you might have a shot of still being needed for a while to maintain it. Is that what we want to claim we as a society want to encourage? Creating things
that are just not complete enough to take and use?
Don't existing trademark laws already protect your brand?
I'm not a lawyer (patent or otherwise) myself, but...
If you have acquired a registered trademark, it's probably easier to keep people from stepping on your brand. Paraphrased for emphasis: If you're a big enough business to afford to buy tons of domains without caring, you probably don't need to.
If you are just a small business trying to establish yourself, what I've read suggests that your claim could be diluted if you don't zealously defend your mark, and I would assume failure to buy up the space might be construed as that. But a small business is least capable of affording to do that.
As I understand it, to even apply for a trademark, you must already be using and asserting the trademark (using a TM marker), among other requirements, and then when you are finally granted a registered trademark (where you get to use ®) the matter is clearer.
Corrections from anyone more familiar with the law are welcome. I don't mean to be spreading misinformation, just offering a foothold on info that people can go look up for themselves.
So what I want is to buy.extort1 as a TLD for 180K and then basically open up shop
so anyone who wants to get foo.com but can't afford it can get foo.extort1 instead.
This means the owner of the name foo will have to pay me to keep their brand pure,
since they'll want to own foo.extort1. Then when I need more cash, I can make a.extort2 and
start selling foo again as foo.extort2 unless foo again pays me to hold their brand.
Well, ok, so probably.extort1 won't sound so good and no one will want to visit it so the
foo owner may not care. But if foo is a brand of shoes and I buy a.shoes or a.clothes or a.footwear or a.america or a.united-states or a.united-states-of-america or a.english-speaking
or even nuisance names like.go or.yes or.buy or.super or.comm then there are going to be lots
of opportunities to extort the owner of foo.com over and over and over.
And to whose benefit? Are there really so many businesses in the world that need domain names?
An awful lot of decent domain names don't command much of a price these days now that there
are auction sites that show them side-by-side so you can see that the space is really rich with
options, and now that domain sales agencies already suggest dozens of reasonable name combinations
not yet taken.
This is just a scam pushed by people who want to make money, and it just causes the little guy
who is trying to build and protect a brand to scramble. Coke or Disney may not have much trouble covering,
since it's a tiny fraction of their operation, but someone trying to build a reasonable brand from
nothing may have a great deal of difficulty. And yet, big companies can already afford to just buy out whatever
names it wants (or push people out by applying appropriate legal means around an established trademark).
And smaller operations can better afford to use a longer name than they can to get a good short name and then
never be able to protect it because of a proliferation of more-or-less-duplicates under different top level domains.
And none of this considers the way that heuristics work in text editors, recognizing foo.org as a URL without anyone
having to say. When.anything can be a domain name, how will text editors know whether you just forgot to insert a
space or you intentionally wanted to auto-highlight something as a domain name.
There are plenty enough domain names. The one thing there might not be is a fair distribution of them across
non-English languages or non-US countries. But that isn't what it sounds like their mechanism will fix. If anything
it will take the existing problem and compound it.
This sounds like a good ruling to me at first blush.
The functional effect of an md5 hash is effectively equivalent to taking a photograph if the item were something visual.
Consider the following hypothetical:
You're accused of a crime and the police can't search your house because they don't have a warrant, so they assert the
right to invade your privacy by flying tiny cameras into the space and photographing everything. They promise not to
use the evidence they find unless they get a warrant, but they now have evidence obtained in advance of prosecution
should an after-the-fact reason become known.
Why would the police, having this power, not just prospectively photograph all aspects of everything all the time "just in case"?
An md5 hash is weaker than a photo because there are other things that could decode to the same hash, but for the most part what
it will do is serve as a way of telling that nothing changed, and in fact will be a way of verifying that the image you're looking at
now is "reliable" (to some degree) as a picture of what you had before. And so in effect, it's a way of (almost) getting a picture
of what you had before--certainly it transforms a picture of what you have now into something that can be claimed to be a picture of
what you had before. And so it's a way of reaching into the past and creating evidence at that time and, constructively, it amounts
to the taking of evidence before-the-fact.
It's often hard for people to understand why that's bad, since it falls easiliy prey to the "if you have nothing to hide, why do you
care?" argument. But it depends on what you value about a free society. If you're comfortable with the idea of police searching your
house any time they want just because they're not going to find anything, I guess there's no issue. But me, I don't even like my friends
rummaging my house. I value the concept of privacy as an intrinsic thing.
Naturally we all want the "evil doers" brought to justice, and this case probably troubles most people, but the issue is that it sets
a precedent that's usable in other cases, and you don't want that precedent to be that just because it was convenient to get one guy on
one day, all of our rights suffer forever after. So I'm happy that it sounds like there was a conservative ruling on this. (Where I mean "conservative" in the traditional meaning of the word, not the neocon meaning.)
I think the people saying to use hibernation/sleep features are probably closest to right for
most practical purposes now. I thought I'd add a historical side-note...
In the 1980's,
MIT Lisp Machines were often used in demos for visitors from funding agencies.
Probably mostly people from (D)ARPA. And things would often go wrong.
Things had to reboot.
Now instruction times were a lot slower then, but you'd be surprised how little
boot times have changed over the years. Seems like every time someone speeds up the hardware, they also slow down the
speed of booting of both at least the operating system and maybe also the programs.
So normal booting was a process of 30 seconds or a minute, as I recall.
And that was inconvenient for these demos.
So someone worked out a way that you could do something called instaboot. You'd load up everything you needed and would save the image, kind of like going into
standby mode on your computer. But it was intended to be restarted multiple times. When you started, it
would just pull in the pages that you needed first to let you run, pulling in other things you needed on demand.
You could save it in whatever state you wanted, for example with the editor already loaded and started. Even with files loaded ito editor buffers if you wanted, though that obviously ran the risk that if you later edited them on two subsequent occasions, you might get a conflict. But that was up to you.
Nothing kept you from trying.
The effect was startling. You could reboot the machine and be up and running in about a second, maybe two.
The only evidence was that the screen would change and would kind of bounce (some sort of sync pulse or degaussing thing or something, I never quite knew what that was).
So demos were always loaded and saved, then booted into. When the demo went bad, you just hit reboot. It was so fast, people would notice something had happened but often wouldn't know what. "Just garbage collecting," we would say. Well, it was sort of true. Rebooting is a particularly efficient way to garbage collect.
For some reason, that feature was not carried forward into later models of the Lisp Machine. It was only there on the CADR at MIT (and perhaps the LM-2 and the TI Explorer and LMI Lambda, I'm not sure, since I never used those, though they were repackaged variants of the same thing). It didn't go into the Symbolics 3600 nor later series machines.
So now you want to increase the prison population by another quantum jump? The US already has one of the highest prison populations per capita of any nation on earth. Why is this?
Heh. You ask the question and then you lead the answer a certain direction that seems to suit you.
Let me suggest another that perhaps either didn't occur to you or doesn't suit you as well:
The reason we have a high prison population is that we have two classes: the imprisonable and the rich. And the criminal laws are made by the rich, not the imprisonable, to apply to what I'm sure
they view as the lesser classes... If the people making the laws are confident they won't be
affected by the laws (not because they don't plan to violate them, but because they plan to buy
their way out if they do), then they don't mind making stupid laws that overfill the prisons.
I don't do drugs. Never even tried 'em. Never would advise anyone to. But I'm still no fan of
the war on drugs. It seems a foolish way to drive up the price of drugs, feeding money to the
underworld, making addicts need to rob more money than they'd have to otherwise just to feed a habit,
robbing the government of legitimate tax revenue, and, yes, overfilling prisons. So if you're
looking for space in the prisons, I'd swap some of the marijuana users right out of there and happily
fill the prisons with someone from the elite class who was warned to safeguard someone's data but
didn't. (Note: Not retroactively applying new laws. Post the new rules. Give people time to
convert over. But then hold them to doing the right thing going forward.)
This second actor should be held responsible to bear the entire cost of the fraud.
The crime of failing to safeguard someone else's identity can have dire consequences that go beyond those
affected...
What if I were on my way to visit a sick relative when I fell victim to identity theft? What if by the time my credit cards got unlocked, the relative was dead? How am I reimbursed for losing
that time together? What if the relative died
because I didn't reach them?
What if I were trying to make it big in business and needed the money then. What if by the
time I got the money, my business opportunity was lost?
How does one really reimburse these things? What kind of attitude is it to say that
as long as it gets paid back later, it's ok?
All making a company pay can do is ultimately recover money, and usually
not all of it. Lawyers fees get lost along the way. And lots of time is lost that is not
billable, going to visit lawyers and courts, fretting generally, etc.
Some people can't be bothered to pursue things.
Some don't know how. Some are intimidated out of their share. It is simply not the same.
The problem with the world today is that certain people don't fear things any more.
They've studied the system and figured out how they can work it. And so they are without shame in
how they exploit it. Restoring a bit of healthy fear for actions that really should never happen
is not a bad thing. That doesn't mean that the government doesn't menace people for the wrong reasons.
It means that you have to make sure the rules are the right ones. I feel more comfortable saying
that businesses should safeguard data on pain of criminal penalty than I feel telling someone they can't smoke marijuana on pain of criminal penalty though.
Subsidized child care and similar benefits reward parents at the expense of other employees.
Only if there is not a compensating benefit that rewards non-parents but is of no use to parents.
It really depends a lot on how the benefit package is constructed.
The interesting metric is whether a business has policies that allow its employees to "grow up".
If they do not, then eventually as people get older, they will be forced at some point to say that
in order to merely accommodate the ordinary and anticipatable life events, they must go to a different
company or face a pay cut because the benefits they used to like are now no longer benefits.
For example, why should an employee who has a family at home shopping and fixing food be penalized
because of the availability of free food at work that surely must be paid for somehow. Google has
an open cafeteria, and tons of free junk food in the hallways, which people who have a life do not
need. But it has been said of Google (and I am trying to be neutral about expressing an opinion myself, only observing that it's a topic worthy of discussion) that it prefers employees who are
willing to work long hours and sleep under their desks to employees who want to have families and
lives outside of work. Now if this were true, you might not see it as age discrimination. And it
might really not be. But it's a reasonable observation to make or question to ask, given that the
set of people who don't mind this kind of lifestyle is probably unevenly distributed agewise.
So if
Google is offering both the daycare and the cafeteria, then maybe it's balanced. But if it's giving
up the daycare expenses to focus on cafeteria expenses, then maybe there are questions to ask.
Just as one example for conversation--if I knew their benefit policy, maybe something else better
would present itself.
In fact, I bet whether you think this is an age issue varies by age, suggesting at least the
possibility that some people who thought it wasn't an age issue changed their mind with experience,
as well as the possibility that some who are quite sure it's not will eventually come to decide
they were wrong.
Google offers itself as an ethical company. Here's my definition of ethical: Ethical means you
continue to ask yourself hard questions and to not quite be sure you're ethical.
So people will evaluate the answer to these questions differently,
but the day Google thinks the questions are inappropriate to ask is the day it's lost its ethics.
Ethics are an exercise in continuous choice, and everything about intent.
Once choice is sacrificed,
you're at best coincidentally aligned with those whose outcomes are the same, but as the result of
an actual thoughtful choice. If outcome without choice can be deemed ethical,
then there are rocks that may be more
ethical than some people...
This would be a great civil class action case, but criminal?...
When I was doing standards work, I was introduced to the notion that only "must" and "shall" (i.e.,
imperative words) mean something you have to do. Words like "should" are really synonymous with
"don't really have to at all" in standards lingo. They just mean you have to answer for something
in words when someone calls you on it, but ultimately that no one can force you.
So too the real difference between civil and criminal is that civil means you can buy your way out
pf doing the wrong thing and criminal means you really have to do the right thing. So people can choose.
Asking whether civil or criminal law applies isn't the thing to do. The thing to do is to ask whether
this is really something that has to be done or whether it's ok to just let people do the wrong thing
and then occasionally pay a fine. If you don't mind having your identity stolen and you think maybe
courts will operate efficiently in your favor to reimburse you with extra dollars to spare for your
trouble whenever it happens, you definitely want the civil penalty approach. Or if you have a magic
way to have the problem not happen to you and you just don't care that it happens to someone else who
is in the unfortunate set that you have excluded you from. But otherwise, I see no option other than
to say criminal.
That doesn't mean I think criminal law should be retroactively applied. It just means I think business people take very seriously the criminal law, and that if this is on that level of
magnitude, then that'st he approach. But I'd decide first just the question of whether this is a
"should" or a "must". The rest will just follow from that.
Present attitudes in business tells you businesses think
it's a "should" (meaning "don't really have to at all").
The question is, does the public agree? For the public to establish
"civil penalties only" is, I suspect, the same
as saying the public agrees it's a "should"--a mere cost to be managed, often after-the-fact.
Slashdot Mirror
Perhaps. But even so, if there were only one or two patents issued per year, it'd have been easy to see the duplication. As it is, there's a sea capable of hiding much more duplication.
I'd like to offer some counterpoint. There is some truth to what you say, certainly. Fluency/competence is important in both arenas. However, quite a number of years ago (1990), I made the observation (in the context of a discussion about intellectual property and whether copyright should apply) that literature is essentially a "divergent" activity and that programming, being an engineering activity, is "convergent". That is, if assigned an English paper to write, there's a very high chance that you will be graded down if you turn in the same answer as someone else. By contrast, if assigned a piece of code to write, you will often be graded down if you turn in a different answer than someone else.
This should give you pause as you consider things like copyrights and patents, given that the engineering activity wants to guide you to both copy and independently create works similar to what others have done, while that's not true of literature, yet the same copyright property laws span both of these areas. There's something odd about that.
Anyway, independent of the IP issues, there are good reasons that we want engineers to learn to do similar things and writers to do different things. So I don't doubt that you're right that there is some overlap of skill and activity, but I wanted to point out that the skill of being a writer of literature and of being a writer of code also have some really material differences.
I've long suggested that what we should do with software patents is dispense with most of them and instead turn the quest for software excellence from a race to make inane patents into a competition for an elite prize, such as the Nobel. It would eliminate many bogus patents, plus no one would be confused about what was patented and what wasn't, since almost nothing would be patented. I'd have maybe given Nobels for things like RSA encryption or LZW compression, for example--things that took a work to create, aren't likely to be independently created and really serve people. The "prize" could be getting the patent, which most things would not get—though a maximum 5 year term would be best, any more is too long in the modern world of computers. Getting a patent would mean you didn't need a monetary prize, which would make the award cheap to offer. :)
And by this I assume you don't mean first letting the attacker guess our regular password and then second letting them guess our cousin's middle name or some such other bit of info trivially available from facebook or ancestry.com. :)
Sigh. I've bargained down to where I'd think it a major step forward if there were at least a law against using the word "security" as part of the name for those stupid fixed-set questions. It's probably more than one can hope for to actually forbid their use.
As a treatment in an emergency to quickly resolve a bad situation on a temporary basis, it sounds fine. As a therapy to hold back trouble, it sounds less fine. Not that the same isn't perhaps true of aspirin in some ways but since one can quantify the effect here and since one might not see as many negatives, I predict this will get used with less reservation than aspirin. What holds people back from using aspirin more is the fear of side-effects, but if you were assuming there were fewer to this, you might be inclined to lean more heavily on this one's stated capacity limitations. It eliminates a margin for error such that if a person really regularly took advantage of it, they'd be well over the maximum limit and any failure to use the magnets would sound fatal. Moreover, it won't surprise me if it creates some situation in which a bunch of aligned things, while normally they work well, can also create unexpected kinds of clots or other problems not previously possible to create in more chaotic systems. It certainly doesn't sound as glowingly positive to me as a term like "drug-free therapy" is supposed to imply. It sounds more like the potential pitfalls are hidden in different places, like the way nuclear radiation is "drug-free". Not that we're talking radiation effects here, but we're definitely not talking automatically safer than drugs, either.
I was looking for a comment by someone noting this. It seemed unlikely someone (corporations are people, too) could just leave and be absolved of taxes.
Thanks for making this point, too. I wonder, though, if this is just posturing to create negotiating room for special treatment in exchange for protecting some jobs. It could even be an orchestrated bit of theatre to offer foundation for some politician's "government overhead is hurting business" claim.
What's most troubling to me is that there is little harm to businesses for such temper tantrums. It may seem good to their bottom line to make such threats, but at the end of the day even if it improves their bottom line it comes at great cost to communities. And they did sales, should have known this was a cost, were permitted to pass the cost visibly to customers, so I just don't see how they were wronged and why this tantrum is righteous.
Perhaps they should just slow the net down in that case, since it's really speed that's the problem. Things happen too fast in an attack so if you can just make things run in slow-motion, you have time to act. Oh, wait, we already have a way to slow things down: We can just give up on net neutrality. Then we'll have slowness built into at least part of the system from the get-go--no need for a switch. At first it will be a bummer being on the slow net and envying the guys on the fast net getting data back and forth at lightning speed, but when viruses get released, they'll go first to the people on the fast net and the "little people" on the slow net can just sit and watch and take notes, so that eventually when the virus traffic "trickles down," they'll be ready, not to mention thankful to have the premium people out there on the front lines as the First Adopters for the virusware. (Yeah, I'm just kidding, but...)
I wasn't talking just about print publishing, I was talking about "the media of the day". In fact, in writing the sentence you quote, I was as much talking about TV and how TV news took a back seat. (As illustrated, for example, if you prefer non-print media, in the movie Network or the Earth to the Moon's episode on Apollo 13.) It's all the same. The issue of getting distribution to work is a problem they've actively confronted on the web. They get news out as fast as anyone. But that's not the problem. The problem is people don't value news, or that the market model for valuation is wrong. They will value it if it goes away. They'll say more should have been done. They're just making a gamble they won't have to value.
It's the same as what's going on with the environment. When it goes away, people will say we should have done more. But right now they're engaged in a dangerous gamble that doing nothing is enough. It is inappropriate to conclude from this dangerous gamble that no one cares about having news or having a biosphere. It just means market models are not sensitive to all the correct variables. They favor the high-order-bit-of-the-moment and have no way of very usefully assigning proper value to the "stealth" (lower order, but up-and-coming) bits, the ones that will be tomorrow's high order bit in a world that's full of, if you'll pardon the nerdy pun, bit rot.
The problem of capitalism is that it assumes that it's perfectly ok for people to be whimsy, and for many things it is, just not all. News is something that can't be left to the whims of the market. Which is why I focused on the issue of profit centers.
And, incidentally, I'm not anti-capitalism. I have no agenda to make the world socialist or anything like that. I just see capitalism as a tool with limitations like any other tool, not as a religion. Capitalism only works when the market's use of money maps correctly to people's real interests. And I simply worry that treating news like any other entertainment is very, very bad in a democracy that relies on voters to have good information in order to make good choices.
Actually, I think the real rule is that stupidity is trying the same thing you did before in the same circumstances and expecting different results. But the circumstances are not the same, as you indicate. Now it's true the outcome may not be different, but it's not true that it's obvious that the outcome will not be different.
What's ironic and sad about the fact that you cite the recession is that one reason there's a recession is a lack of jobs. And the lack of jobs is created by a lack of money to hire people, including at the New York Times. They are not wanting to charge because they want to stick it to you, they want to survive and to keep people employed.
So if you think the recession matters--and you must, since you cited it as relevant here--then you should buy a subscription. And tell your friends to. And soon if everyone does, it may be seen as a valid business model.
Imagine that--paying for content. I know it sounds quaint, but think of the implications: The actual producers of content would be benefiting for the content they actually produced. Why on Earth would you be smugly suggesting it was somehow better for people to be feebly rewarded by advertising dollars, which (a) doesn't reward the content producers really, (b) does reward the advertisers when they didn't do anything except pay feeble amounts that don't buy a cup of coffee for most content producers, and (c) drags the entire industry off in search of content that advertisers like instead of in search of content that end-users want.
Forget the pay scheme. I, the end user, want to read stuff because it's good to read, not because someone can find a way to make a buck on accessories for it. I don't want people preferring to write about the planet Saturn rather than the planet Jupiter because there's a car named Saturn that might put up its ads next to remarks about the planet Saturn. I want people to write good stuff about any topic they want and then to get paid in proportion to their goodness. Like used to happen. Quaint? I think not. More like lost rationality.
Yes, it might not work. But like getting a decent health care system, I'd rather see them fail trying than give up because it's a lost cause. Don't be defeatist, be encouraging.
One final point: These are people among the most trusted in the world to report on politics. If they fold because you insist they have old-fashioned ways and should yield to the "advertising" model of free content, the problem is that we may soon find that advertisers are trying to sway them away from things that good reporters need to cover. What then? The news industry suffered a serious blow in the late 60's or maybe early 70's, don't quite recall, when news went commercial and had to show a profit. That's a tough thing. But at least let them show a profit on their actual news, don't make them have to contort news content to be profitable on some other basis. If not for them, do it for us: the citizens. When things go wrong (oops, they have: economy, health, climate change, wars, torture, ...) it may turn out to matter.
And news is not just any industry. I'm actually not sure most industries are served by lack of variety, but certainly the news industry is not. So your admonition that a leading free-thinker in news should "consolidate" seems ... well, short-sighted.
Here are two more recollections in case they help:
When I worked in the mid 1980's, probably around 1986, at the now-defunct Symbolics on MACSYMA, a symbolic algebra system that lives (in an alternate timeline/universe from what some know today as MAXIMA), there was one customer who wanted a special deal and someone was foolish enough to sell it to them. The customer explained that they did not plan to use all of MACSYMA (who ever uses all of any language?) and so wanted to only pay a proportional fee for the parts of the language they planned to use. So we did extra custom work in compliance with the contract in order to build a special version of MACSYMA that had only parts of the functionality and we had the ability to unlock individual functions when they realized they had asked too little. It had to be specially administered, specially QA'd, etc. It was a huge lot of extra work. And they paid us less for it on the theory that they were not using the full thing. Bleah. (It was a brilliant query for the customer to ask but stupid for us to accept. I knew it was a disaster from the moment they said it. We should have just written it off as an error on our part and given them a full license at reduced price.)
Although MACSYMA as a user application is not an operating system by the traditional meaning of the word, I have heard programs as varied as APL and Emacs described as "operating systems" because for some users they were the only thing the user planned to really use on the machine and they wanted to use all things from within it. It's not a stretch to say that MACSYMA qualified similarly as an operating system in that regard, and would be an example of prior art if foolish one-off custom contracts counted as such.
Even earlier, when I was at MIT, I think around 1980 or 1981 (I have records but not handy as I write this), after Scheme was invented but before it was integrated into MIT's programming classes, Gerry Sussman taught a transitional version of his class that was not yet 6.001 / Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs in its final form. One term he used a Lisp dialect that I had conjured on the spur of the moment (it was missing tail recursion, which drove Sussman nuts, but it was all he had on that platform at that time, so he went with it). For editing programs for this hacked up Lisp, I hastily conjured together a little editor out of TECO which was similar in command set to Emacs but was hardened to be not customizable or extensible so we could document something simple for students. I hate to characterize others' emotional states, but I think it's fair to say that Stallman hated it and got really mad at me for calling it MinEmacs because he said it was not an Emacs. He said he didn't care about the command set being Emacs-like because that didn't make something an Emacs, and that it could be a vi command set for all he cared as long as it was exensible and customizable. I explained that there were things students would trip over that they didn't want them to. He wrote a library called NOVICE that was the compromise and that kept a profile of users preferences, disabling commands by default but when you invoked them asking you if you knew what you were doing and allowing you to proceed if you answered yes. This seemed reasonable and I think it was used by many people. This was still TECO-based Emacs on the PDP-10. Later, when he created gnu emacs, he built that functionality into the core system. But basically, the NOVICE library for TECO-based Emacs, and later the gnu Emacs stuff generally was a system that had a protected set of commands that could be selectively re-enabled. It differed only in politics--the re-enabling was not held centrally by the vendor (in true Stallman fashion) but was instead left to the individual. But technologically, it seems to me that the concept is really the same as what is discussed in the summary of this topic. I didn't read the patent.
So maybe some of that would be useful as prior
This list of ten is not bad. Some terms are a bit vague. What "one's own hardware" is or "any device" is might require refinement. Item 9 is controversial and its presence would likely sink the proposed bill of rights, losing the others with it; I'd leave it out even though I like it conceptually for most purposes. There are cases where anonymity breach is important to allow; they're just rare. Item 10 might have a minor glitch over the definition of "speech", but no worse than the First Amendment already has.
When I saw the original article's title, I wanted to rush to promo my thoughts on Universal Business Access. Looks like its article 2 addresses it a different way, which is probably mostly ok. But the original article has problems for me in Articles 3 and 4. Article 3 looks well-meaning but likely to be full of problems; I can easily imagine a need for exceptions. As for Article 4, if someone's not being forced to buy the closed source software, I don't see why more than just market dynamics is required. Putting these kinds of things in a Bill of Rights seems a little off. Mostly I think rights should be things that can be asserted against the state (or a state-like monopoly provider like an ISP or cable provider), not against individuals and they shouldn't be full of details that might need to change.
Your list of 10 looks to be in better syntactic form for a bill of rights.
True, but I think this war has already been lost. Have you noticed how much difficulty they're having labeling new energy-efficient light bulbs for people who think "watts" are a unit of brightness?
Hmmm. Maybe they'll have me come lecture about my not-terribly-famous Theory of RelativeTV.
I have to say this sounds a lot to me like a person who is very frugal going out to dinner with a bunch of other people who order extravagant food options and then having someone want to split the bill at the end.
I mostly don't listen to music. $2 to $10 per month is $25-$125/yr or $100-$500 over the course of a four year college. That's about $90 to $490 more than I would have paid if buying a la carte every piece of music I wanted to buy. That's money I could have spent on things that matter to me.
Will you be as excited about anteing up $2 to $10 per month to cover some routine cost that I pay for and that bores you to tears, just to bring my price down?
To employ a musical reference, does the phrase "tyrrany of the majority" ring any bells?
Tell me why it isn't just fair that people should pay for what they use?
I had a similar thing happen to me as what is described in the article. I wasted a half a year developing something that was undercut by a free offering that came out of the blue.
The problem with free software is that one cannot predict if/when it will arrive, so you need to assume it always will arrive soon. It's bad to bet on there being an ability to charge anything for what you've asked. (There's a big difference between anything and nothing. One of those scales way better.)
It's not like making a really nice desk out of wood, where you know in the end you'll be able to sell it for something, even if you have to lower the price a little.
And if you have to give software away and hope for consulting revenue, then what you're saying is the software creation industry no longer exists, there is only a software maintenance industry. What will happen if you give away a well-written piece of software is that others will take it over and maintain it. Of course, if you've obfuscated it or left bugs in it or made it hard to extend, you might have a shot of still being needed for a while to maintain it. Is that what we want to claim we as a society want to encourage? Creating things that are just not complete enough to take and use?
I'm not a lawyer (patent or otherwise) myself, but...
If you have acquired a registered trademark, it's probably easier to keep people from stepping on your brand. Paraphrased for emphasis: If you're a big enough business to afford to buy tons of domains without caring, you probably don't need to.
If you are just a small business trying to establish yourself, what I've read suggests that your claim could be diluted if you don't zealously defend your mark, and I would assume failure to buy up the space might be construed as that. But a small business is least capable of affording to do that.
As I understand it, to even apply for a trademark, you must already be using and asserting the trademark (using a TM marker), among other requirements, and then when you are finally granted a registered trademark (where you get to use ®) the matter is clearer.
Corrections from anyone more familiar with the law are welcome. I don't mean to be spreading misinformation, just offering a foothold on info that people can go look up for themselves.
It cost me money to protect my brand. But at least it was a finite TLD not a call for open season on such things. Same with .info.
So what I want is to buy .extort1 as a TLD for 180K and then basically open up shop
so anyone who wants to get foo.com but can't afford it can get foo.extort1 instead.
This means the owner of the name foo will have to pay me to keep their brand pure,
since they'll want to own foo.extort1. Then when I need more cash, I can make a .extort2 and
start selling foo again as foo.extort2 unless foo again pays me to hold their brand.
Well, ok, so probably .extort1 won't sound so good and no one will want to visit it so the
foo owner may not care. But if foo is a brand of shoes and I buy a .shoes or a .clothes or a .footwear or a .america or a .united-states or a .united-states-of-america or a .english-speaking
or even nuisance names like .go or .yes or .buy or .super or .comm then there are going to be lots
of opportunities to extort the owner of foo.com over and over and over.
And to whose benefit? Are there really so many businesses in the world that need domain names? An awful lot of decent domain names don't command much of a price these days now that there are auction sites that show them side-by-side so you can see that the space is really rich with options, and now that domain sales agencies already suggest dozens of reasonable name combinations not yet taken.
This is just a scam pushed by people who want to make money, and it just causes the little guy who is trying to build and protect a brand to scramble. Coke or Disney may not have much trouble covering, since it's a tiny fraction of their operation, but someone trying to build a reasonable brand from nothing may have a great deal of difficulty. And yet, big companies can already afford to just buy out whatever names it wants (or push people out by applying appropriate legal means around an established trademark). And smaller operations can better afford to use a longer name than they can to get a good short name and then never be able to protect it because of a proliferation of more-or-less-duplicates under different top level domains.
And none of this considers the way that heuristics work in text editors, recognizing foo.org as a URL without anyone having to say. When .anything can be a domain name, how will text editors know whether you just forgot to insert a
space or you intentionally wanted to auto-highlight something as a domain name.
There are plenty enough domain names. The one thing there might not be is a fair distribution of them across non-English languages or non-US countries. But that isn't what it sounds like their mechanism will fix. If anything it will take the existing problem and compound it.
This sounds like a good ruling to me at first blush.
The functional effect of an md5 hash is effectively equivalent to taking a photograph if the item were something visual. Consider the following hypothetical:
Why would the police, having this power, not just prospectively photograph all aspects of everything all the time "just in case"?
An md5 hash is weaker than a photo because there are other things that could decode to the same hash, but for the most part what it will do is serve as a way of telling that nothing changed, and in fact will be a way of verifying that the image you're looking at now is "reliable" (to some degree) as a picture of what you had before. And so in effect, it's a way of (almost) getting a picture of what you had before--certainly it transforms a picture of what you have now into something that can be claimed to be a picture of what you had before. And so it's a way of reaching into the past and creating evidence at that time and, constructively, it amounts to the taking of evidence before-the-fact.
It's often hard for people to understand why that's bad, since it falls easiliy prey to the "if you have nothing to hide, why do you care?" argument. But it depends on what you value about a free society. If you're comfortable with the idea of police searching your house any time they want just because they're not going to find anything, I guess there's no issue. But me, I don't even like my friends rummaging my house. I value the concept of privacy as an intrinsic thing.
Naturally we all want the "evil doers" brought to justice, and this case probably troubles most people, but the issue is that it sets a precedent that's usable in other cases, and you don't want that precedent to be that just because it was convenient to get one guy on one day, all of our rights suffer forever after. So I'm happy that it sounds like there was a conservative ruling on this. (Where I mean "conservative" in the traditional meaning of the word, not the neocon meaning.)
Cool! Thanks for the cross-reference.
I think the people saying to use hibernation/sleep features are probably closest to right for most practical purposes now. I thought I'd add a historical side-note...
In the 1980's, MIT Lisp Machines were often used in demos for visitors from funding agencies. Probably mostly people from (D)ARPA. And things would often go wrong. Things had to reboot.
Now instruction times were a lot slower then, but you'd be surprised how little boot times have changed over the years. Seems like every time someone speeds up the hardware, they also slow down the speed of booting of both at least the operating system and maybe also the programs. So normal booting was a process of 30 seconds or a minute, as I recall. And that was inconvenient for these demos.
So someone worked out a way that you could do something called instaboot. You'd load up everything you needed and would save the image, kind of like going into standby mode on your computer. But it was intended to be restarted multiple times. When you started, it would just pull in the pages that you needed first to let you run, pulling in other things you needed on demand.
You could save it in whatever state you wanted, for example with the editor already loaded and started. Even with files loaded ito editor buffers if you wanted, though that obviously ran the risk that if you later edited them on two subsequent occasions, you might get a conflict. But that was up to you. Nothing kept you from trying.
The effect was startling. You could reboot the machine and be up and running in about a second, maybe two. The only evidence was that the screen would change and would kind of bounce (some sort of sync pulse or degaussing thing or something, I never quite knew what that was).
So demos were always loaded and saved, then booted into. When the demo went bad, you just hit reboot. It was so fast, people would notice something had happened but often wouldn't know what. "Just garbage collecting," we would say. Well, it was sort of true. Rebooting is a particularly efficient way to garbage collect.
For some reason, that feature was not carried forward into later models of the Lisp Machine. It was only there on the CADR at MIT (and perhaps the LM-2 and the TI Explorer and LMI Lambda, I'm not sure, since I never used those, though they were repackaged variants of the same thing). It didn't go into the Symbolics 3600 nor later series machines.
Heh. You ask the question and then you lead the answer a certain direction that seems to suit you. Let me suggest another that perhaps either didn't occur to you or doesn't suit you as well:
The reason we have a high prison population is that we have two classes: the imprisonable and the rich. And the criminal laws are made by the rich, not the imprisonable, to apply to what I'm sure they view as the lesser classes ... If the people making the laws are confident they won't be
affected by the laws (not because they don't plan to violate them, but because they plan to buy
their way out if they do), then they don't mind making stupid laws that overfill the prisons.
I don't do drugs. Never even tried 'em. Never would advise anyone to. But I'm still no fan of the war on drugs. It seems a foolish way to drive up the price of drugs, feeding money to the underworld, making addicts need to rob more money than they'd have to otherwise just to feed a habit, robbing the government of legitimate tax revenue, and, yes, overfilling prisons. So if you're looking for space in the prisons, I'd swap some of the marijuana users right out of there and happily fill the prisons with someone from the elite class who was warned to safeguard someone's data but didn't. (Note: Not retroactively applying new laws. Post the new rules. Give people time to convert over. But then hold them to doing the right thing going forward.)
The crime of failing to safeguard someone else's identity can have dire consequences that go beyond those affected...
What if I were on my way to visit a sick relative when I fell victim to identity theft? What if by the time my credit cards got unlocked, the relative was dead? How am I reimbursed for losing that time together? What if the relative died because I didn't reach them?
What if I were trying to make it big in business and needed the money then. What if by the time I got the money, my business opportunity was lost?
How does one really reimburse these things? What kind of attitude is it to say that as long as it gets paid back later, it's ok?
All making a company pay can do is ultimately recover money, and usually not all of it. Lawyers fees get lost along the way. And lots of time is lost that is not billable, going to visit lawyers and courts, fretting generally, etc. Some people can't be bothered to pursue things. Some don't know how. Some are intimidated out of their share. It is simply not the same.
The problem with the world today is that certain people don't fear things any more. They've studied the system and figured out how they can work it. And so they are without shame in how they exploit it. Restoring a bit of healthy fear for actions that really should never happen is not a bad thing. That doesn't mean that the government doesn't menace people for the wrong reasons. It means that you have to make sure the rules are the right ones. I feel more comfortable saying that businesses should safeguard data on pain of criminal penalty than I feel telling someone they can't smoke marijuana on pain of criminal penalty though.
Only if there is not a compensating benefit that rewards non-parents but is of no use to parents. It really depends a lot on how the benefit package is constructed.
The interesting metric is whether a business has policies that allow its employees to "grow up". If they do not, then eventually as people get older, they will be forced at some point to say that in order to merely accommodate the ordinary and anticipatable life events, they must go to a different company or face a pay cut because the benefits they used to like are now no longer benefits.
For example, why should an employee who has a family at home shopping and fixing food be penalized because of the availability of free food at work that surely must be paid for somehow. Google has an open cafeteria, and tons of free junk food in the hallways, which people who have a life do not need. But it has been said of Google (and I am trying to be neutral about expressing an opinion myself, only observing that it's a topic worthy of discussion) that it prefers employees who are willing to work long hours and sleep under their desks to employees who want to have families and lives outside of work. Now if this were true, you might not see it as age discrimination. And it might really not be. But it's a reasonable observation to make or question to ask, given that the set of people who don't mind this kind of lifestyle is probably unevenly distributed agewise.
So if Google is offering both the daycare and the cafeteria, then maybe it's balanced. But if it's giving up the daycare expenses to focus on cafeteria expenses, then maybe there are questions to ask. Just as one example for conversation--if I knew their benefit policy, maybe something else better would present itself.
In fact, I bet whether you think this is an age issue varies by age, suggesting at least the possibility that some people who thought it wasn't an age issue changed their mind with experience, as well as the possibility that some who are quite sure it's not will eventually come to decide they were wrong.
Google offers itself as an ethical company. Here's my definition of ethical: Ethical means you continue to ask yourself hard questions and to not quite be sure you're ethical. So people will evaluate the answer to these questions differently, but the day Google thinks the questions are inappropriate to ask is the day it's lost its ethics. Ethics are an exercise in continuous choice, and everything about intent. Once choice is sacrificed, you're at best coincidentally aligned with those whose outcomes are the same, but as the result of an actual thoughtful choice. If outcome without choice can be deemed ethical, then there are rocks that may be more ethical than some people...
When I was doing standards work, I was introduced to the notion that only "must" and "shall" (i.e., imperative words) mean something you have to do. Words like "should" are really synonymous with "don't really have to at all" in standards lingo. They just mean you have to answer for something in words when someone calls you on it, but ultimately that no one can force you.
So too the real difference between civil and criminal is that civil means you can buy your way out pf doing the wrong thing and criminal means you really have to do the right thing. So people can choose.
Asking whether civil or criminal law applies isn't the thing to do. The thing to do is to ask whether this is really something that has to be done or whether it's ok to just let people do the wrong thing and then occasionally pay a fine. If you don't mind having your identity stolen and you think maybe courts will operate efficiently in your favor to reimburse you with extra dollars to spare for your trouble whenever it happens, you definitely want the civil penalty approach. Or if you have a magic way to have the problem not happen to you and you just don't care that it happens to someone else who is in the unfortunate set that you have excluded you from. But otherwise, I see no option other than to say criminal.
That doesn't mean I think criminal law should be retroactively applied. It just means I think business people take very seriously the criminal law, and that if this is on that level of magnitude, then that'st he approach. But I'd decide first just the question of whether this is a "should" or a "must". The rest will just follow from that. Present attitudes in business tells you businesses think it's a "should" (meaning "don't really have to at all"). The question is, does the public agree? For the public to establish "civil penalties only" is, I suspect, the same as saying the public agrees it's a "should"--a mere cost to be managed, often after-the-fact.