Re:privacy in a store is not present
on
Walmart to Push RFID
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Can anyone actually provide evidence that it is technologically possible (not just theoretically, but practically in terms of present or near-future capabilities) to achieve this level of monitoring? You have to walk between a pair of very obvious posts just to activate a simple anti-theft tag. Is there any basis for the concern that someone can scan these weak transmitters from an effective distance, particularly among the babble of a few thousand of them in a concentrated space where I can't even pick up a cell phone signal?
REPEAL the anti-circumvention garbage in the DMCA. Then companies would be free to sell DVD-copying technology, or stream decryptors, or DRM-busters, or whatever.
Sounds like a pointless "arms race" between encryptors and decrypters to me. Why should consumers have to pay for products, then pay for other products to make them usable? How long would it be before you had the same companies playing both sides of the fence?
If more people voted their conscience, rather than their party, I think you would find that congresspeople themselves would follow suit.
It seems to me the party-line vote largely arises out of the party dynamics of elections. If reps/sens vote against their party, then they lose its support and that impedes their progress in the system. If party support was less important than truly serving the constituency, the partisanship would be much reduced and we would find congress doing the will of the people rather than playing a power-sharing game between two elite groups.
You have a good point. I am not for wanton and unnecessary expansion of the law. A perfect example in this context is DMCA, which criminalizes technology when copyright law already exists to prosecute criminals.
However, copy protection limits fair-use rights that are explicit in the US Code and are upheld by such case law as the Sony Betamax case and the failed attempt to shutdown Diamond Rio. For that reason, it is not so far out to stop companies from employing technological protections that impede the already enumerated rights of consumers, no?
Come to think of it, I'm curious why noone has yet argued the case that copyright protection technologies themselves are already illegal because they impede fair use.
I believe there are about 5 of them in the Senate...
You got a +5 funny mod, but I'm not sure you weren't being serious. I can only think of three in either house who have come out in favor of this sort of thing: Lofgren (BALANCE act), Boucher (DMCRA), and now this guy.
There's also Zoe Lofgren's BALANCE act. I tend to be as cynical as the next guy when it comes to my expectations of Congress to watch the interests of consumers, but there are a handful of folks there who seem to get it.
Ultimately, whatever the lobbyists are pumping in, the one thing corporations don't have is the vote, and as consumers at large become aware of what's going on, I bet you will see more Congresspeople under pressure to come around to "our side".
but there is no digital security to defeat in any sewing pattern I've ever seen.
They used provisions of the DMCA to successfully shut down the Web site advertising the patterns because the DMCA basically says ISPs have to kiss the ass of any copyright holder that comes whining or face liability for the infringement, yet they can't be liable for screwing the person whose business they illegitimately shut down.
It has nothing to do with a complaint of circumvention, which is another part of The Act.
Likewise, if somebody in your behalf (children, their children, etc.) continues this tradition... I see no reason why the copyright should not legally be able to be maintained forever.
In the US, the reason would be the Constitution, which wisely states that copyrights are of limited duration.
Copyrights are not property rights, but a limited monopoly qranted by the government to creators in order to incentivize creative work. The payback for this protection is that the works must ultimately be given back to the public domain for the enrichment of society as a whole.
Ask yourself, does Joe's drugstore in Podunk, TN carry RU-486? Probably not, so why should Wal-mart in Podunk?
That actually supports my argument. Wal-mart is not a local pharmacy in Podunk supporting its Podunk market. It is a global business attempting to make every town a Podunk by applying a least common denominator approach to their stock. Just like the fifteen radio stations on my dial playing either Hip Hop, Teen Pop, or Young Country. It's a classic "tyrrany of the majority" situation, only the corporations actually tell the majority what they want and then give it to them.
I contend that we are just now seeing a free flow of information, 100 channels of TV, newspapers from national to neighborhood, radio stations from NPR to Limbaugh, all competeing with each other for your time to spread their view
And all owned by roughly five parent companies who will be sure none of their subjugates does anything to endanger shareholder value. Seriously, when did you last hear a truly controversial view on mainstream TV? And I'm not talking about the Sharpton or Santorum pablum that substitutes for contraversy.
, not to mention the competion that the internet provides were I can see and hear every side to every issue with a quick trip to google.
Another topic entirely: those with the means to afford Internet access deserve information more than those who don't?!
OK. I'm off to play with my daughter for the evening, but thank you for a delightful exchange that never once included the word "moron" in the second person. Must be those shared Kentucky manners.
If you want to carry this on off board, you can reach me alb at popes dot com.
What makes one corporation better than another, perhaps its a value judgement on what you want to hear?
That does seem to be the opinion of a lot of people, but it's certainly not mine. Fox and Disney are just different flavors of evil when their respective quests for ultimate profit sets them against the public good.
In my (admittedly left-leaning) view, the free flow of accurate information is something far too important to be completely in the hands of corporate interests because the opportunities for abuse are just too great. It is economically unsound for them to report news that runs against their potential for profit or, in other cases, the political whims of their ownership.
I see it as the media analogue of Wal-Mart coming into town and pricing the Mom-and-Pop shops out of business, then deciding they won't carry M-Rated video games, Maxim or RU-486. Their market dominance is illegitimately flexed as the muscle of public policy. Being able to sell cereal at 10% less than your competition doesn't give you moral authority to decide what I can play or read.
Wouldn't you only be hosting the "spam" if you had elected to download and serve it? It wasn't clear to me from the article that you'd have to host everything that anyone made available.
BTW, I quote spam because it doesn't qualify if someone chooses to receive it. It is only spam if it is pushed on a user unrequested. Losing that distinction muddies an extremely important issue about our right to control what communication we receive.
4193 Dopey Avenue == 12345-6789 doesn't seem too hard for a postal carrier. As I understand it, they have their own maps of the universe anyway which don't necessarily always correspond to our notions of names and numbers.
Maybe the ultimate goal is to strip the address down to these sequences, and we're just preserving the rest for the luddites as it is. Seems like
Personal Name Unit # Zip + 4
ought to be enough in most cases, personal name only being necessary because people move but lots usually don't.
I'll ignore your political troll and stick to the thread.
I've obviously been asleep at the set, because I've yet to hear about any of this opposition from CNN, CBS, ABC and NBC. As I mentioned, I didn't hear a peep on the topic from them at all until a few days ago. Can you provide a few sources on this opposition?
On at least one point, I don't need a source check to know you are right: The viewers are by and large apathetic sheep. If they weren't, we wouldn't need to be concerned about overconsolidation because intelligent consumers could keep the market in check much better than any FCC regulations. Too bad intelligent consumers are more endangered than the Minnesota Prairie Squid.
It was the "only house for miles around" case I meant to say wasn't abundant these days. Dang my sloppy grammar...
Actually, the complex I moved out of last Fall had such a situation, where +4s in the neighborhood resolved to groups of 2 or 3 buildings. To the initial point, in my view it's not an invasion of individual privacy to know what someone in a building housing 200 watches anymore than it is to know that someone on a street with as many residents.
For the record, I live in S. Florida now (no election jokes please) but, ironically enough, I did once live in Boston.
Then why do people need to write the rest of my address on the envelope? Zip+4 may in some cases may indicate as much as the same apartment building (if it has sufficient units) or resolve to the same single-family house if you happen to be the only house for miles around (in which case you probably never use the +4) but I doubt these cases are abundant.
For the record, I believe the poster merely advocated the BBC as a source with wider variety on the entertainment content and reporting of news that is, for one reason or another, neglected in the major US media.
Nonetheless, comparing the BBC to an unregulated corporate convergence in the US media is similarly stupid. The forces involved are just too different. A service that answers to the government (nominally the public) and one that answers only to the bottom line are two entirely different things. The BBC has much more in common with, say, NPR than it does with Viacom or News Corp.
Take the FCC rule changes as a case in point. I have known about it for months because I follow things like slashdot and NPR, but the first mention I heard of it on NBC was a week ago, and on CNN just this past weekend. Gee, I can't imagine why these corporate news sources that stand to benefit most from the rule changes didn't bother to mention them until it was too late for anyone to react and they were just an aside for a foregone conclusion. This above all other things has me thinking these rule changes were a seriously bad idea.
And the lack of it makes what? the thought police inevitable?
I'm not accusing you of lacking, of course, as your post was considerably funnier than the Nigerian Email Conference site. I only hope it was deliberate.
I don't get your point. Is it that a DA shouldn't be involved in a civil case?
The issue is before the CA Supreme Court, though, as a constitutional free-speech issue. It's moved beyond the realm of a civil conflict between parties at that point, no?
Good God! I really hoped that this Minnis character was making a sarcastic statement with that bill and that it wasn't intended to be taken seriously. However, after looking at his Web site, he apparently really is that psychotic...
Slashdot Mirror
Can anyone actually provide evidence that it is technologically possible (not just theoretically, but practically in terms of present or near-future capabilities) to achieve this level of monitoring? You have to walk between a pair of very obvious posts just to activate a simple anti-theft tag. Is there any basis for the concern that someone can scan these weak transmitters from an effective distance, particularly among the babble of a few thousand of them in a concentrated space where I can't even pick up a cell phone signal?
Sounds like a pointless "arms race" between encryptors and decrypters to me. Why should consumers have to pay for products, then pay for other products to make them usable? How long would it be before you had the same companies playing both sides of the fence?
At risk of going off topic:
If more people voted their conscience, rather than their party, I think you would find that congresspeople themselves would follow suit.
It seems to me the party-line vote largely arises out of the party dynamics of elections. If reps/sens vote against their party, then they lose its support and that impedes their progress in the system. If party support was less important than truly serving the constituency, the partisanship would be much reduced and we would find congress doing the will of the people rather than playing a power-sharing game between two elite groups.
You have a good point. I am not for wanton and unnecessary expansion of the law. A perfect example in this context is DMCA, which criminalizes technology when copyright law already exists to prosecute criminals.
However, copy protection limits fair-use rights that are explicit in the US Code and are upheld by such case law as the Sony Betamax case and the failed attempt to shutdown Diamond Rio. For that reason, it is not so far out to stop companies from employing technological protections that impede the already enumerated rights of consumers, no?
Come to think of it, I'm curious why noone has yet argued the case that copyright protection technologies themselves are already illegal because they impede fair use.
You got a +5 funny mod, but I'm not sure you weren't being serious. I can only think of three in either house who have come out in favor of this sort of thing: Lofgren (BALANCE act), Boucher (DMCRA), and now this guy.
There's also Zoe Lofgren's BALANCE act. I tend to be as cynical as the next guy when it comes to my expectations of Congress to watch the interests of consumers, but there are a handful of folks there who seem to get it.
Ultimately, whatever the lobbyists are pumping in, the one thing corporations don't have is the vote, and as consumers at large become aware of what's going on, I bet you will see more Congresspeople under pressure to come around to "our side".
They used provisions of the DMCA to successfully shut down the Web site advertising the patterns because the DMCA basically says ISPs have to kiss the ass of any copyright holder that comes whining or face liability for the infringement, yet they can't be liable for screwing the person whose business they illegitimately shut down.
It has nothing to do with a complaint of circumvention, which is another part of The Act.
Well, considering where most of the material produced by the corps that lobbied successfully for DMCA belongs...
In the US, the reason would be the Constitution, which wisely states that copyrights are of limited duration.
Copyrights are not property rights, but a limited monopoly qranted by the government to creators in order to incentivize creative work. The payback for this protection is that the works must ultimately be given back to the public domain for the enrichment of society as a whole.
There are five things we will be good at. He forgot about suing each other...
That actually supports my argument. Wal-mart is not a local pharmacy in Podunk supporting its Podunk market. It is a global business attempting to make every town a Podunk by applying a least common denominator approach to their stock. Just like the fifteen radio stations on my dial playing either Hip Hop, Teen Pop, or Young Country. It's a classic "tyrrany of the majority" situation, only the corporations actually tell the majority what they want and then give it to them.
And all owned by roughly five parent companies who will be sure none of their subjugates does anything to endanger shareholder value. Seriously, when did you last hear a truly controversial view on mainstream TV? And I'm not talking about the Sharpton or Santorum pablum that substitutes for contraversy.
Another topic entirely: those with the means to afford Internet access deserve information more than those who don't?!
OK. I'm off to play with my daughter for the evening, but thank you for a delightful exchange that never once included the word "moron" in the second person. Must be those shared Kentucky manners.
If you want to carry this on off board, you can reach me alb at popes dot com.
Cheers,
Tony
That does seem to be the opinion of a lot of people, but it's certainly not mine. Fox and Disney are just different flavors of evil when their respective quests for ultimate profit sets them against the public good.
In my (admittedly left-leaning) view, the free flow of accurate information is something far too important to be completely in the hands of corporate interests because the opportunities for abuse are just too great. It is economically unsound for them to report news that runs against their potential for profit or, in other cases, the political whims of their ownership.
I see it as the media analogue of Wal-Mart coming into town and pricing the Mom-and-Pop shops out of business, then deciding they won't carry M-Rated video games, Maxim or RU-486. Their market dominance is illegitimately flexed as the muscle of public policy. Being able to sell cereal at 10% less than your competition doesn't give you moral authority to decide what I can play or read.
Wouldn't you only be hosting the "spam" if you had elected to download and serve it? It wasn't clear to me from the article that you'd have to host everything that anyone made available.
BTW, I quote spam because it doesn't qualify if someone chooses to receive it. It is only spam if it is pushed on a user unrequested. Losing that distinction muddies an extremely important issue about our right to control what communication we receive.
4193 Dopey Avenue == 12345-6789 doesn't seem too hard for a postal carrier. As I understand it, they have their own maps of the universe anyway which don't necessarily always correspond to our notions of names and numbers.
Maybe the ultimate goal is to strip the address down to these sequences, and we're just preserving the rest for the luddites as it is. Seems like
Personal Name
Unit #
Zip + 4
ought to be enough in most cases, personal name only being necessary because people move but lots usually don't.
I'll ignore your political troll and stick to the thread.
I've obviously been asleep at the set, because I've yet to hear about any of this opposition from CNN, CBS, ABC and NBC. As I mentioned, I didn't hear a peep on the topic from them at all until a few days ago. Can you provide a few sources on this opposition?
On at least one point, I don't need a source check to know you are right: The viewers are by and large apathetic sheep. If they weren't, we wouldn't need to be concerned about overconsolidation because intelligent consumers could keep the market in check much better than any FCC regulations. Too bad intelligent consumers are more endangered than the Minnesota Prairie Squid.
BTW, salute from a fellow UK alum (98 MSc CS).
It was the "only house for miles around" case I meant to say wasn't abundant these days. Dang my sloppy grammar...
Actually, the complex I moved out of last Fall had such a situation, where +4s in the neighborhood resolved to groups of 2 or 3 buildings. To the initial point, in my view it's not an invasion of individual privacy to know what someone in a building housing 200 watches anymore than it is to know that someone on a street with as many residents.
For the record, I live in S. Florida now (no election jokes please) but, ironically enough, I did once live in Boston.
No issue there either because, in practice, noone will ever buy a demographic for 5 people.
Then why do people need to write the rest of my address on the envelope? Zip+4 may in some cases may indicate as much as the same apartment building (if it has sufficient units) or resolve to the same single-family house if you happen to be the only house for miles around (in which case you probably never use the +4) but I doubt these cases are abundant.
However, you do have an interesting point...
For the record, I believe the poster merely advocated the BBC as a source with wider variety on the entertainment content and reporting of news that is, for one reason or another, neglected in the major US media.
Nonetheless, comparing the BBC to an unregulated corporate convergence in the US media is similarly stupid. The forces involved are just too different. A service that answers to the government (nominally the public) and one that answers only to the bottom line are two entirely different things. The BBC has much more in common with, say, NPR than it does with Viacom or News Corp.
Take the FCC rule changes as a case in point. I have known about it for months because I follow things like slashdot and NPR, but the first mention I heard of it on NBC was a week ago, and on CNN just this past weekend. Gee, I can't imagine why these corporate news sources that stand to benefit most from the rule changes didn't bother to mention them until it was too late for anyone to react and they were just an aside for a foregone conclusion. This above all other things has me thinking these rule changes were a seriously bad idea.
And the lack of it makes what? the thought police inevitable?
I'm not accusing you of lacking, of course, as your post was considerably funnier than the Nigerian Email Conference site. I only hope it was deliberate.
Sorry. I meant AG, not DA, but come to think of it, that makes it even more repulsive!
I don't get your point. Is it that a DA shouldn't be involved in a civil case?
The issue is before the CA Supreme Court, though, as a constitutional free-speech issue. It's moved beyond the realm of a civil conflict between parties at that point, no?
I expect this kind of nonsense from "the industry". What's terrifying is they have a DA doing their name calling for them!
Conservatic? Is that like fanatic? or lunatic? I like it! Sometimes typos have astonishing insight! :-)
Good God! I really hoped that this Minnis character was making a sarcastic statement with that bill and that it wasn't intended to be taken seriously. However, after looking at his Web site, he apparently really is that psychotic...