Google Maps could be construed as a form of journalism quite reasonably. Just as a newspaper has restaurant reviews that report on where a restaurant is, what it's ambience was like, how the food was, etc, GMaps reports on where it is and the surrounding area.
You don't actually have permission to take photos of any faces in public. It's the same law in other countries. People have to consent to having their picture taken. Of course there is spillage and people unwittingly enter millions of tourist happy-snaps.
You can't cite any cases on this in most countries that are unexceptional. I'll bet you can't cite a single case in even one country.
People are not allowed to "claim offense" (if by this you mean some seek and successfully obtain some legal remedy) by me seeing their faces if I was physically there and they were visible from a public place. So if I'm viewing an image that was taken under same conditions, what's the difference?
The big ethical problem is that if there aren't these controls on how your photo/voice/identity is used, then people get exploited.
No. It's when people aren't allowed to inform others about events that occurred in public places that people get exploited. This is why journalism laws protect photojournalism in most sane places in the world.
In many countries, you are not even permitted to photograph the front lawn of someone's private residence, even though it is the 'public face' of his home. Not everybody wants their stuff photographed, thank you very much.
Then you shouldn't have any trouble citing a case where damages were awarded. But I think you will. In fact, I know of one case in New York city where a man routinely would expose his naked body in the window of his apartment to others in neighboring buildings, and was eventually successfully prosecuted for indecent exposure. The evidence: one of the neighbors was fed up and took video of him doing it.
I don't understand this French law thing. Let me see if I can get it straight...
If I'm walking down a public street in Paris, I assume I'm allowed to look at other people, and be looked at by other people. If I have a camera with me I assume I'm allowed to take pictures, as I do not, and no one else, has any expectation of privacy. You're on a public street.
Now if I publish those photos, given that any person viewing the images could have just as well been there at the scene at the time I took the images and seen it for themselves without violating anyone's privacy, I assume that there's no violation of privacy there either.
Thus we find ourselves in Google's situation. So what is the privacy problem here?
If they were to pick a person at random and use that person in advertising in a way that made it seem the person was endorsing something, then that shouldn't really be allowed unless the person actually does endorse the product and agreed to be represented as such. But that's not happening here.
If the person had some reasonable expectation of privacy, such as walking around a gym locker room in the buff, or in a public restroom, or in their own home or on private property not viewable from a public area, that would be different. Doesn't seem like that's happening here either.
Where is the big ethical problem here? I just don't see it.
They don't have to do audio captchas where you type in directly what is said. They could require simple calculations or something like that to make it very hard for a computer to crack without sophisticated natural language processing.
Enter the first letter of each word: Light Apples Meddle Blindly. (User enters: LAMB) Enter every other word: big white ben light. (User enters: "big ben" or "white light"). What is 14 plus 9? (User enters: 25)
Add static and nonsense voices and these are all difficult things for the computer to figure out. From an audio stream, it would have to understand an instruction given in natural language and then carry it out. The universe of simple problems that could be presented to users is virtually unlimited.
<super nazi>Actually...hats off is typically intoned as a command, as in, [Take your] hats off to Bob for his wonderful accomplishment!</super nazi>
This expression isn't intended to passively describe a situation, it's intended to encourage action...specifically, figurative recognition, and that makes the use of the possessive apostrophe incorrect. Not that I much care, it's just you guys were talking about it and I couldn't bear to sit by and see misinformation abound.
Yes, but in this case, the person-in-question may not have been of sound mind enough to have his wishes respected even in a legal context. In some cases, it is the respect for privacy / individualism / freedom of expression / etc that makes some individuals feel cut off from the world and plays a part in their decision to shoot up a school or take their own life.
I'm not saying that we should do away with privacy or any of the things I mention above. However, sometimes between family members and friends there is a need to invade the personal space of others with caring intent—in fact, nature pretty much compels parents to begin their interactions with offspring in this way and gradually taper off as the child grows up (I feel this is relevant because I'm assuming the kid was still in their house, hadn't yet graduated high school). In many cases, the individual's crying out for a sign that someone actually cares enough to overstep usual boundaries...that's one of the main functions of parents.
In this case, I think that TFA may have put undue attention on funeral costs—I'm sure that's a footnote to the family's real wish to answer their questions about what happened. They may feel a little guilty about invading his personal space posthumously, and I think these feelings are understandable but misplaced. If this was a suicide, it is definitely within reason that this kid's last authentic wish would be for someone to notice and figure out what was going on with him. If it wasn't a suicide, then I know I would certainly want that discovered and my family's pain somewhat tempered.
I would be very interested if anyone who knows can post here: if someone dies, does their next of kin inherit their data? Shouldn't the online services like Myspace and Google open his accounts up for them?
No! It doesn't matter if it works or not! I will not have anyone having fun in schools I'm paying tax money for. Fun doesn't help anyone learn, it doesn't set the right frame of mind for absorbing information, and it doesn't provide any kind of motivation to learn.
Oh wait...now that I think about it, it's actually the exact opposite.
I think the general tenor of your comment is sort of paranoid. (It's not anything more specific than the complete lack of foundation or facts not presented alongside your extremely opinionated point of view...I think you'll find that has this effect on people. You haven't exactly done a bang-up job of connecting this new info presented in TFA with your claim that there's some kind of privacy issue here...which I don't really see, vague notions aside...) Having said that, I think that Google does have access and control over a lot of information, which is inevitable in their mission statement to organize the world's information.
So, I'm agreeing with you that Google needs to get out—way out—in front of this digital rights and privacy thing by giving people lots of control over their own info. They could start by rolling out a simple desktop app that lets people encrypt and dump info up to their GDrive in a way that's totally secure (in other words, if you do something to destroy / lose your key, you lose your info because it's totally inaccessible). Then, once you get used to using that app for keeping a small set of data, they can start clustering the other things they know about you into that encrypted vault, which is only available to their processing when you are actively using an application (like GMail) and they're parsing the content for ad purposes (like the GMail banner).
I'm sure this won't fit all of the use cases they have to deal with, but it's a good start. I'd feel a lot better knowing that unless I'm using an app, the feds could kick in Google's doors with a warrant and get all the data off their servers and have to come begging me for my key. The law may compel me to give it, but at least I'd be part of the process of the disclosure of my information.
Reading a site like this is going to expand your knowledge, but not by handing you all the information on a silver platter. All it can do is show you the door, but you are the one that must go through it.
The rule is that anything visible from public property is fair game. To me, this is a fairly sensible rule, and I wouldn't expect that others would allow me to unduly infringe on their rights by demanding they shield their eyes from things I emit into the public spectrum.
One exception to this rule, notably, is that the government (only, this doesn't apply to private citizens) may not sense and record non-visible parts of the spectrum without your permission...apparently the law holds that if you emit infrared or ultraviolet radiation into a public space, and the government detects and records that, it constitutes unreasonable search and seizure. A few years ago DEA agents used an infrared camera to detect the goings-on inside a meth lab and tried to include it as evidence in the case, and it was promptly thrown out.
In your example, if you sunbathe nude in your back yard, you should make sure that you are not visible to the public, pure and simple. Up until now, we didn't have technology (at least, not technology that was pervasive enough to make it an issue) to worry about being photographed from above, or from space, and now that's a problem. However, it poses an interesting problem. You might say that constitutes an unreasonable invasion of privacy, but I might say the value of being able to take high-res satellite photos from space and view them on the web outweighs that.
The future is fast coming, people, you'd best prepare for it. The day is soon approaching when many people will have eye implants that allow them to see, even to detect non-visible parts of the spectrum and see thru clothes, makeup, etc. Heck, right now anyone with a modified camera and the right optical filter can do that (warning: not necessarily safe for work). Someday soon thereafter those implants will be able to dump much of what someone sees to a personal HD or upload it to an off-site location. When the image falling on anyone's eyes becomes exportable, what happens to privacy?
As an amateur photographer myself, I'm occasionally accosted by someone trying to prevent me from taking pictures of their house, their kids, their observatory (yes, this happened to me at the top of Mauna Kea). It's ridiculous. For the most part, if I can see it, the law allows me to photograph it. If you don't want me photographing it, then you probably shouldn't let me see it. And this applies not just to public land, but also any situation in which I'm not trespassing—that is, if you invited me onto your property, provided I wasn't shooting a situation where the subject has an expectation of privacy, it's perfectly legal.
Now I had other questions as well, such as can I put a camera in her bedroom, where she sometimes brings the baby; what about in the bathroom, where she sometimes bathes the baby; can I hide it; do I have to tell her; and what do I do if I see something really bad -- can I turn it over to the police and will it be admissible evidence?
The short answer? There is no short answer. [source]
I definitely don't have all the answers on this topic, but I can say with confidence that it's a complicated issue that will likely have a complicated answer.
Actually, I think this platform could be very useful for running product demos if not products themselves. It would be trivially simple to fire off a few checks to outsource developers in Bangalore or Shanghai with some demo specs and have them quickly pound it out.
Next up—someone needs to write an app that allows me to run functional and load tests on my Google App. Or will they provide that next...?
Sounds to me like Google is betting people just want the end result of having the app available without all the headache of administering a server, virtual though it may be. It's a fair bet.
I think the grandparent is referring to the more general security risks inherent in having a web application, a bank account, letting those dad-gummed kids on his lawn, etc.
I've run Ubuntu up on 3 machines, two with ATI video cards, and never had a problem. Perhaps the latest version of Ubuntu would go on your system ok? (I don't know, I don't think either of my experiences were with that particular card.)
Don't give up on linux altogether though. I had given up and when Ubuntu came along, I thought...one last time. Now I'm more productive and I can sleep at night.:-)
I've also witnessed the same behavior using IE. (I'm using the same versions of both apps as you are...did you try ctrl-L-C from Firefox, then shift-tab to open Outlook message, ctrl-V? I don't know if using the keyboard shortcuts changes anything...)
That's funny. From the grandparent AC post above, he made it sound like the MS apps run in the cloud. Taken together with what you're saying here, if the MS one is set up at your office, that would imply that you also had to set up a rack of servers in which to run the cloud, into which the apps are deployed?
Somehow, methinks not.
No, I'm sure I know what the AC was referring to. MS has long been ahead of Google in terms of integrating the Internet with their Office suite. For instance, whenever I cut'n'paste a link from the Firefox URL bar into an Outlook email, you would expect the URL to paste into the email, right? NO! Because MS is so awesome and Outlook is Internet-aware, instead it pastes a cryptic little graphical question mark in a box. (I can't be certain—no one can be—but I think it assumes that I want the little URL bar icon next to the URL as well as the URL itself, and helpfully inserts the entire mess as a useless graphic.)
Of course, this is useful to no one, and causes me several attempts of doing the exact same thing before it works nearly every time. (Question: why does doing the exact same thing 2 or 3 times eventually result in different behavior? That's what I like to call an MS Puzzler(TM)!) But every time I leave the experience a happy user, because look at how awesome it is that Outlook knows about the INtar-wEBz!
Just as a degenerate example of a little thought experiment...what if I use PKE to encrypt a message to the person on the other end of the line and then write it out in hex? The conversation would go something like: "A! F! 3! 8! 8! 4! 9! BEEEEE!!!"
This is, of course, the most trivially stupid possible way to do this. Much better would be to write a small program that translates the encrypted message to, say, base-256 and then bleeps short tones in one of 256 different frequencies to the receiver program, which collects and decodes the message (with some extra tones reserved for ECC, of course). They don't even need to be fixed tones, I could set the baseline with a tone pattern up front.
You know, the neat thing about sound is that you can send multiple tones at once. Instead of one tone at a time, I could easily figure out a way to time-pack the signals so tones can be played simultaneously or overlap.
Of course, the whole point of steganography is to transmit an encoded message with Eve being none the wiser that such a message was even transacted. So I suppose we'd have to choose a set of words out of the dictionary that map to a particular set of tones, and then design a conversation in which those words are present in the right order. I could easily send this one-time pad to my target (as an encrypted email attachment, of course) in the form of a key that can easily be plugged into a voice recognition program that picks up those words and decodes the message.
There's only like a million ways to defeat such an idiotic thing. Why are they so interested in preventing me from communicating in private anyway? (Hey, yea, that's a good question severoon!)
This is something I've yet to understand. Most marketing nowadays focuses on selling us stuff we don't particularly want or need at a time when we're not looking for it.
When is someone going to make an ad directory that companies can post their ads to and customers can navigate to and browse? On such a site, each person could set up their profile any way they want, sharing their past ad directory browsing habits with companies as they choose. Did you ever notice that, despite the pervasive advertising we are all expected to put up with, when it comes time to buy a car, it's not so easy to figure out what all the current offerings are? It requires "research". If an ad directory existed, I could go to it, put in "4-door sedan around $25k" and see commercial after commercial, info sheet after info sheet, enticement after enticement, targeted based on the information I've chosen to share with those companies.
I would think that such a site would be a huge moneymaker, as they could charge the car company each time an ad is viewed...not just by anyone, but by someone actually seeking to buy their product, and therefore much more likely to do so. As a user of this site, I could sign up for new product notifications, deals that meet certain pricing thresholds I've set, etc. (If I share my pricing threshold data—my choice—with advertisers, that could be important feedback as to the perceived value of their offering. Valuable enough information to pay the ad directory to gain access to, I'd say.)
Well, it sounds like your argument is now a lot more rational that it at first seemed, however, I think we might be hung up on semantics here. I'm not quite sure anyone else in this discussion (myself included) is quite clear on what the exact meaning of right and protected right are as you're using them. I presume you're using the same meaning of right as is meant in the Constitution—which could precipitate considerable debate in its own right—but in my way of thinking that definition would leave little air for a distinction between itself and a protected right. I would think that by virtue of being a right, it's something worth protecting.
I don't mean to discount your historical examples out-of-hand, but I'm not sure of their usefulness in this discussion. There are lots of examples throughout American history of actions taken by the government that are to varying degrees unConstitutional—from the examples you cite to Japanese internment camps to wiretapping MLK to Lincoln's suspension of habeus corpus—each a complex Constitutional issue in its own right, but more to the point, each requires interpretation. We cannot point to something the government did and say it is, by virtue of the fact that it was done, somehow impactful to this discussion. The fact that something was done in the past and ensuing opinion about that action does not bear on its Constitutionality (and then there's the more complex issue of whether it is Constitutional by today's standards—it is recognized by most that the interpretation of the Constitution has always been intended to change with the times).
In any case, my basic stance in this discussion is this: the Constitution does not grant the people rights—to the contrary, it limits the rights of the people. Its primary purpose is to grant the government specific and limited rights, with the assumption that anything which is not explicitly set forth is by default assumed to be in favor of the people. (I also think that if Jefferson were alive today and watched how our system operates, his first reaction might just be to go running for his musket.) So I don't think the possible futures you set forth are all Constitutionally possible. Abortion is a complex example, but I believe the basic legal premise for the current federal stance is:
a fetus is not legally considered a separate life
there is nothing in the Constitution that specifically provides the government rights to interfere with a woman's choices about her own body—which, legally, whether you like it or not, is what a fetus is...part of the woman's body
therefore the government has no Constitutional right to infringe on a woman's decision to terminate a pregnancy, and thusly, we are currently a pro-choice nation at the federal level
So, like I say above, this particular example you chose is unfortunate because it is so complex (life, states' rights, etc) and depends so much upon interpretation, but the basic premise is that the Constitution should be regarded as a government white list, not a people's black list, of rights.
So let me get this straight. According to your argument, the Constitution does not specifically grant the right to live, therefore Americans don't have an inborn and innate right to life? Before you answer, I recommend you read everything you've written in this thread thus far.
Really? So I guess life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness aren't rights either, because the government removes all three from some felons. (And that last one from nearly everyone at times.)
'In the early days of C++, I worried a lot about "not being able to teach teachers fast enough." I had reason to worry because much of the obvious poor use of C++ can be traced to fundamental misunderstandings among educators. I obviously failed to articulate my ideals and principles sufficiently.'
Yes, clearly that was the problem—you failed to articulate bad ideas sufficiently. Not that they were overarticulated and everyone has 50 different ways to do the same thing.
'Given that the problems are not restricted to C++, I'm not alone in that. As far as I can see, every large programming community suffers, so the problem is one of scale.'
I'm a Java programmer myself, after struggling with idiocies of C and C++ for a long time (#include, anyone? care to chase down this header for me?). Java has shown when you start with better principles, you get a better language...and then eventually foul that up, too.
It boggles me that there are still people trying to breathe life into C++. If you are a university student at this very moment, do yourself a favor: realize that if you learn C++, and decide to base a career on knowing it, you will be doing legacy programming until you lose your job and there is no other. Legacy programming means that you will be mostly working on maintaining and occasionally extending bad ideas poorly written. This has only marginally to do with the language itself, but there it is. If you decide Java is your thing, then after you've worked about another 5 years, you'll find yourself in the same state, because I give Java until about 2013 the way things are going. Then again, maybe we'll move at "Internet speed" and it'll only be 2010 until people are wondering if Java's worth anything any more.
(The harbinger of evil on Java was marked by the introduction of varargs in Java 5, if you're wondering. I can think of no better way to say, Hey, let's do something pointless that will make it tough to resolve which method is getting called! And slow too, can we make it slow? Oh and also we should say we're doing this so you only have to write one method instead of a bunch, but actually you should have to write a bunch of methods when you only wanted to write one!...just check out that ugly-ass of() method. Of course, now I think about it we did really need it...after all there's no other way that already existed to accomplish the same thing -ahemcoughcougharraycoughcollectionscough-. I'm sure there are lots of good reasons that are sound design for a developer to shroud a method prototype in a could of mystery.)
So if you're a uni student, learn Java, b/c god knows you'll need it for that first job out of college. But do yourself a big favor and start preparing for the inevitable gigacore processors that will be all the rage by 2015...learn Haskell and LISP. Go write something that runs on a Beowulf cluster (yea, I said it). Figure out how to make an AJAX call to a Java servlet that farms out jobs to an Erlang ring. You'll be glad you did.
I think old tech survives because of two reasons, one following the other. First, businesses develop inertia along a certain platform. For example, banks write a lot of code that is restricted to run in a mainframe environment (for whatever reason, it can't be moved off). "Inertia," in this case, means that a lot of code and business processes and practice have been developed around that platform. Perhaps even jobs have been created that are primarily concerned with the care and feeding of this platform and all it supports.
Then, time passes. People forget, and people leave. New people take over. At some point, if enough complexity develops and sits over a long enough period of time, the entity that owns the platform and all it supports basically loses control of it. They have no knowledge contained outside the system itself...to make significant changes requires someone to delve into it and tease out the why's and wherefore's of how it works. Either that, or replace it wholesale, abandoning all of the functionality of the code and the stability that comes along with the associated business processes.
If no one quite understands how something works, or even the totality of what it does, then it becomes easier to upgrade an existing platform than replace it. In some cases, the platform can only be upgraded in certain ways that maintains some restrictions of the original platform. And that's why old tech has staying power. No one knows what it does, how it works, or understands the impact of or effort required to replace it.
I think this cycle is inevitable to some extent where complex systems are required to fulfill some needed function. However, I also think there is much that businesses could do to prevent these issues where they are not necessary. I think the fundamental thing that needlessly ties businesses down to old tech is an improper segmentation of responsibilities within the company. Many times, departments and created and responsibilities assigned based not on the actual work that needs to be done, but rather the prejudices of executive management. A work force should be divided up based on areas of related responsibility and the dependencies between those groups, and nothing else. (This is usually how things are done at the low level of organizing groups, but go one or two levels up on the org chart and the concept seems to no longer apply at most places.)
Slashdot Mirror
Google Maps could be construed as a form of journalism quite reasonably. Just as a newspaper has restaurant reviews that report on where a restaurant is, what it's ambience was like, how the food was, etc, GMaps reports on where it is and the surrounding area.
People are not allowed to "claim offense" (if by this you mean some seek and successfully obtain some legal remedy) by me seeing their faces if I was physically there and they were visible from a public place. So if I'm viewing an image that was taken under same conditions, what's the difference?
No. It's when people aren't allowed to inform others about events that occurred in public places that people get exploited. This is why journalism laws protect photojournalism in most sane places in the world. Then you shouldn't have any trouble citing a case where damages were awarded. But I think you will. In fact, I know of one case in New York city where a man routinely would expose his naked body in the window of his apartment to others in neighboring buildings, and was eventually successfully prosecuted for indecent exposure. The evidence: one of the neighbors was fed up and took video of him doing it.I don't understand this French law thing. Let me see if I can get it straight...
If I'm walking down a public street in Paris, I assume I'm allowed to look at other people, and be looked at by other people. If I have a camera with me I assume I'm allowed to take pictures, as I do not, and no one else, has any expectation of privacy. You're on a public street.
Now if I publish those photos, given that any person viewing the images could have just as well been there at the scene at the time I took the images and seen it for themselves without violating anyone's privacy, I assume that there's no violation of privacy there either.
Thus we find ourselves in Google's situation. So what is the privacy problem here?
If they were to pick a person at random and use that person in advertising in a way that made it seem the person was endorsing something, then that shouldn't really be allowed unless the person actually does endorse the product and agreed to be represented as such. But that's not happening here.
If the person had some reasonable expectation of privacy, such as walking around a gym locker room in the buff, or in a public restroom, or in their own home or on private property not viewable from a public area, that would be different. Doesn't seem like that's happening here either.
Where is the big ethical problem here? I just don't see it.
They don't have to do audio captchas where you type in directly what is said. They could require simple calculations or something like that to make it very hard for a computer to crack without sophisticated natural language processing.
Enter the first letter of each word: Light Apples Meddle Blindly. (User enters: LAMB) Enter every other word: big white ben light. (User enters: "big ben" or "white light"). What is 14 plus 9? (User enters: 25)
Add static and nonsense voices and these are all difficult things for the computer to figure out. From an audio stream, it would have to understand an instruction given in natural language and then carry it out. The universe of simple problems that could be presented to users is virtually unlimited.
<super nazi>Actually...hats off is typically intoned as a command, as in, [Take your] hats off to Bob for his wonderful accomplishment!</super nazi>
This expression isn't intended to passively describe a situation, it's intended to encourage action...specifically, figurative recognition, and that makes the use of the possessive apostrophe incorrect. Not that I much care, it's just you guys were talking about it and I couldn't bear to sit by and see misinformation abound.
Yes, but in this case, the person-in-question may not have been of sound mind enough to have his wishes respected even in a legal context. In some cases, it is the respect for privacy / individualism / freedom of expression / etc that makes some individuals feel cut off from the world and plays a part in their decision to shoot up a school or take their own life.
I'm not saying that we should do away with privacy or any of the things I mention above. However, sometimes between family members and friends there is a need to invade the personal space of others with caring intent—in fact, nature pretty much compels parents to begin their interactions with offspring in this way and gradually taper off as the child grows up (I feel this is relevant because I'm assuming the kid was still in their house, hadn't yet graduated high school). In many cases, the individual's crying out for a sign that someone actually cares enough to overstep usual boundaries...that's one of the main functions of parents.
In this case, I think that TFA may have put undue attention on funeral costs—I'm sure that's a footnote to the family's real wish to answer their questions about what happened. They may feel a little guilty about invading his personal space posthumously, and I think these feelings are understandable but misplaced. If this was a suicide, it is definitely within reason that this kid's last authentic wish would be for someone to notice and figure out what was going on with him. If it wasn't a suicide, then I know I would certainly want that discovered and my family's pain somewhat tempered.
I would be very interested if anyone who knows can post here: if someone dies, does their next of kin inherit their data? Shouldn't the online services like Myspace and Google open his accounts up for them?
No! It doesn't matter if it works or not! I will not have anyone having fun in schools I'm paying tax money for. Fun doesn't help anyone learn, it doesn't set the right frame of mind for absorbing information, and it doesn't provide any kind of motivation to learn.
Oh wait...now that I think about it, it's actually the exact opposite.
Really? He stores and catalogues for posterity every website he's ever visited? With no exceptions?
Somehow, methinks not. Either that, or his descendants will someday get an eyeful of whatever freaky kink he's into.
I think the general tenor of your comment is sort of paranoid. (It's not anything more specific than the complete lack of foundation or facts not presented alongside your extremely opinionated point of view...I think you'll find that has this effect on people. You haven't exactly done a bang-up job of connecting this new info presented in TFA with your claim that there's some kind of privacy issue here...which I don't really see, vague notions aside...) Having said that, I think that Google does have access and control over a lot of information, which is inevitable in their mission statement to organize the world's information.
So, I'm agreeing with you that Google needs to get out—way out—in front of this digital rights and privacy thing by giving people lots of control over their own info. They could start by rolling out a simple desktop app that lets people encrypt and dump info up to their GDrive in a way that's totally secure (in other words, if you do something to destroy / lose your key, you lose your info because it's totally inaccessible). Then, once you get used to using that app for keeping a small set of data, they can start clustering the other things they know about you into that encrypted vault, which is only available to their processing when you are actively using an application (like GMail) and they're parsing the content for ad purposes (like the GMail banner).
I'm sure this won't fit all of the use cases they have to deal with, but it's a good start. I'd feel a lot better knowing that unless I'm using an app, the feds could kick in Google's doors with a warrant and get all the data off their servers and have to come begging me for my key. The law may compel me to give it, but at least I'd be part of the process of the disclosure of my information.
Reading a site like this is going to expand your knowledge, but not by handing you all the information on a silver platter. All it can do is show you the door, but you are the one that must go through it.
The rule is that anything visible from public property is fair game. To me, this is a fairly sensible rule, and I wouldn't expect that others would allow me to unduly infringe on their rights by demanding they shield their eyes from things I emit into the public spectrum.
One exception to this rule, notably, is that the government (only, this doesn't apply to private citizens) may not sense and record non-visible parts of the spectrum without your permission...apparently the law holds that if you emit infrared or ultraviolet radiation into a public space, and the government detects and records that, it constitutes unreasonable search and seizure. A few years ago DEA agents used an infrared camera to detect the goings-on inside a meth lab and tried to include it as evidence in the case, and it was promptly thrown out.
In your example, if you sunbathe nude in your back yard, you should make sure that you are not visible to the public, pure and simple. Up until now, we didn't have technology (at least, not technology that was pervasive enough to make it an issue) to worry about being photographed from above, or from space, and now that's a problem. However, it poses an interesting problem. You might say that constitutes an unreasonable invasion of privacy, but I might say the value of being able to take high-res satellite photos from space and view them on the web outweighs that.
The future is fast coming, people, you'd best prepare for it. The day is soon approaching when many people will have eye implants that allow them to see, even to detect non-visible parts of the spectrum and see thru clothes, makeup, etc. Heck, right now anyone with a modified camera and the right optical filter can do that (warning: not necessarily safe for work). Someday soon thereafter those implants will be able to dump much of what someone sees to a personal HD or upload it to an off-site location. When the image falling on anyone's eyes becomes exportable, what happens to privacy?
As an amateur photographer myself, I'm occasionally accosted by someone trying to prevent me from taking pictures of their house, their kids, their observatory (yes, this happened to me at the top of Mauna Kea). It's ridiculous. For the most part, if I can see it, the law allows me to photograph it. If you don't want me photographing it, then you probably shouldn't let me see it. And this applies not just to public land, but also any situation in which I'm not trespassing—that is, if you invited me onto your property, provided I wasn't shooting a situation where the subject has an expectation of privacy, it's perfectly legal.
I definitely don't have all the answers on this topic, but I can say with confidence that it's a complicated issue that will likely have a complicated answer.Actually, I think this platform could be very useful for running product demos if not products themselves. It would be trivially simple to fire off a few checks to outsource developers in Bangalore or Shanghai with some demo specs and have them quickly pound it out. Next up—someone needs to write an app that allows me to run functional and load tests on my Google App. Or will they provide that next...?
Sounds to me like Google is betting people just want the end result of having the app available without all the headache of administering a server, virtual though it may be. It's a fair bet.
I think the grandparent is referring to the more general security risks inherent in having a web application, a bank account, letting those dad-gummed kids on his lawn, etc.
I've run Ubuntu up on 3 machines, two with ATI video cards, and never had a problem. Perhaps the latest version of Ubuntu would go on your system ok? (I don't know, I don't think either of my experiences were with that particular card.) Don't give up on linux altogether though. I had given up and when Ubuntu came along, I thought...one last time. Now I'm more productive and I can sleep at night. :-)
I've also witnessed the same behavior using IE. (I'm using the same versions of both apps as you are...did you try ctrl-L-C from Firefox, then shift-tab to open Outlook message, ctrl-V? I don't know if using the keyboard shortcuts changes anything...)
That's funny. From the grandparent AC post above, he made it sound like the MS apps run in the cloud. Taken together with what you're saying here, if the MS one is set up at your office, that would imply that you also had to set up a rack of servers in which to run the cloud, into which the apps are deployed?
Somehow, methinks not.
No, I'm sure I know what the AC was referring to. MS has long been ahead of Google in terms of integrating the Internet with their Office suite. For instance, whenever I cut'n'paste a link from the Firefox URL bar into an Outlook email, you would expect the URL to paste into the email, right? NO! Because MS is so awesome and Outlook is Internet-aware, instead it pastes a cryptic little graphical question mark in a box. (I can't be certain—no one can be—but I think it assumes that I want the little URL bar icon next to the URL as well as the URL itself, and helpfully inserts the entire mess as a useless graphic.)
Of course, this is useful to no one, and causes me several attempts of doing the exact same thing before it works nearly every time. (Question: why does doing the exact same thing 2 or 3 times eventually result in different behavior? That's what I like to call an MS Puzzler(TM)!) But every time I leave the experience a happy user, because look at how awesome it is that Outlook knows about the INtar-wEBz!
Just as a degenerate example of a little thought experiment...what if I use PKE to encrypt a message to the person on the other end of the line and then write it out in hex? The conversation would go something like: "A! F! 3! 8! 8! 4! 9! BEEEEE!!!"
This is, of course, the most trivially stupid possible way to do this. Much better would be to write a small program that translates the encrypted message to, say, base-256 and then bleeps short tones in one of 256 different frequencies to the receiver program, which collects and decodes the message (with some extra tones reserved for ECC, of course). They don't even need to be fixed tones, I could set the baseline with a tone pattern up front.
You know, the neat thing about sound is that you can send multiple tones at once. Instead of one tone at a time, I could easily figure out a way to time-pack the signals so tones can be played simultaneously or overlap.
Of course, the whole point of steganography is to transmit an encoded message with Eve being none the wiser that such a message was even transacted. So I suppose we'd have to choose a set of words out of the dictionary that map to a particular set of tones, and then design a conversation in which those words are present in the right order. I could easily send this one-time pad to my target (as an encrypted email attachment, of course) in the form of a key that can easily be plugged into a voice recognition program that picks up those words and decodes the message.
There's only like a million ways to defeat such an idiotic thing. Why are they so interested in preventing me from communicating in private anyway? (Hey, yea, that's a good question severoon!)
This is something I've yet to understand. Most marketing nowadays focuses on selling us stuff we don't particularly want or need at a time when we're not looking for it.
When is someone going to make an ad directory that companies can post their ads to and customers can navigate to and browse? On such a site, each person could set up their profile any way they want, sharing their past ad directory browsing habits with companies as they choose. Did you ever notice that, despite the pervasive advertising we are all expected to put up with, when it comes time to buy a car, it's not so easy to figure out what all the current offerings are? It requires "research". If an ad directory existed, I could go to it, put in "4-door sedan around $25k" and see commercial after commercial, info sheet after info sheet, enticement after enticement, targeted based on the information I've chosen to share with those companies.
I would think that such a site would be a huge moneymaker, as they could charge the car company each time an ad is viewed...not just by anyone, but by someone actually seeking to buy their product, and therefore much more likely to do so. As a user of this site, I could sign up for new product notifications, deals that meet certain pricing thresholds I've set, etc. (If I share my pricing threshold data—my choice—with advertisers, that could be important feedback as to the perceived value of their offering. Valuable enough information to pay the ad directory to gain access to, I'd say.)
Where's my ad directory?
Huh. If that black hole is the planet's mama, then we should definitely get that planet that one t-shirt that says I tore mommy a new one!
Well, it sounds like your argument is now a lot more rational that it at first seemed, however, I think we might be hung up on semantics here. I'm not quite sure anyone else in this discussion (myself included) is quite clear on what the exact meaning of right and protected right are as you're using them. I presume you're using the same meaning of right as is meant in the Constitution—which could precipitate considerable debate in its own right—but in my way of thinking that definition would leave little air for a distinction between itself and a protected right. I would think that by virtue of being a right, it's something worth protecting.
I don't mean to discount your historical examples out-of-hand, but I'm not sure of their usefulness in this discussion. There are lots of examples throughout American history of actions taken by the government that are to varying degrees unConstitutional—from the examples you cite to Japanese internment camps to wiretapping MLK to Lincoln's suspension of habeus corpus—each a complex Constitutional issue in its own right, but more to the point, each requires interpretation. We cannot point to something the government did and say it is, by virtue of the fact that it was done, somehow impactful to this discussion. The fact that something was done in the past and ensuing opinion about that action does not bear on its Constitutionality (and then there's the more complex issue of whether it is Constitutional by today's standards—it is recognized by most that the interpretation of the Constitution has always been intended to change with the times).
In any case, my basic stance in this discussion is this: the Constitution does not grant the people rights—to the contrary, it limits the rights of the people. Its primary purpose is to grant the government specific and limited rights, with the assumption that anything which is not explicitly set forth is by default assumed to be in favor of the people. (I also think that if Jefferson were alive today and watched how our system operates, his first reaction might just be to go running for his musket.) So I don't think the possible futures you set forth are all Constitutionally possible. Abortion is a complex example, but I believe the basic legal premise for the current federal stance is:
- a fetus is not legally considered a separate life
- there is nothing in the Constitution that specifically provides the government rights to interfere with a woman's choices about her own body—which, legally, whether you like it or not, is what a fetus is...part of the woman's body
- therefore the government has no Constitutional right to infringe on a woman's decision to terminate a pregnancy, and thusly, we are currently a pro-choice nation at the federal level
So, like I say above, this particular example you chose is unfortunate because it is so complex (life, states' rights, etc) and depends so much upon interpretation, but the basic premise is that the Constitution should be regarded as a government white list, not a people's black list, of rights.So let me get this straight. According to your argument, the Constitution does not specifically grant the right to live, therefore Americans don't have an inborn and innate right to life? Before you answer, I recommend you read everything you've written in this thread thus far.
Really? So I guess life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness aren't rights either, because the government removes all three from some felons. (And that last one from nearly everyone at times.)
Yes, clearly that was the problem—you failed to articulate bad ideas sufficiently. Not that they were overarticulated and everyone has 50 different ways to do the same thing.
I'm a Java programmer myself, after struggling with idiocies of C and C++ for a long time (#include, anyone? care to chase down this header for me?). Java has shown when you start with better principles, you get a better language...and then eventually foul that up, too.
It boggles me that there are still people trying to breathe life into C++. If you are a university student at this very moment, do yourself a favor: realize that if you learn C++, and decide to base a career on knowing it, you will be doing legacy programming until you lose your job and there is no other. Legacy programming means that you will be mostly working on maintaining and occasionally extending bad ideas poorly written. This has only marginally to do with the language itself, but there it is. If you decide Java is your thing, then after you've worked about another 5 years, you'll find yourself in the same state, because I give Java until about 2013 the way things are going. Then again, maybe we'll move at "Internet speed" and it'll only be 2010 until people are wondering if Java's worth anything any more.
(The harbinger of evil on Java was marked by the introduction of varargs in Java 5, if you're wondering. I can think of no better way to say, Hey, let's do something pointless that will make it tough to resolve which method is getting called! And slow too, can we make it slow? Oh and also we should say we're doing this so you only have to write one method instead of a bunch, but actually you should have to write a bunch of methods when you only wanted to write one!...just check out that ugly-ass of() method. Of course, now I think about it we did really need it...after all there's no other way that already existed to accomplish the same thing -ahemcoughcougharraycoughcollectionscough-. I'm sure there are lots of good reasons that are sound design for a developer to shroud a method prototype in a could of mystery.)
So if you're a uni student, learn Java, b/c god knows you'll need it for that first job out of college. But do yourself a big favor and start preparing for the inevitable gigacore processors that will be all the rage by 2015...learn Haskell and LISP. Go write something that runs on a Beowulf cluster (yea, I said it). Figure out how to make an AJAX call to a Java servlet that farms out jobs to an Erlang ring. You'll be glad you did.
I think old tech survives because of two reasons, one following the other. First, businesses develop inertia along a certain platform. For example, banks write a lot of code that is restricted to run in a mainframe environment (for whatever reason, it can't be moved off). "Inertia," in this case, means that a lot of code and business processes and practice have been developed around that platform. Perhaps even jobs have been created that are primarily concerned with the care and feeding of this platform and all it supports.
Then, time passes. People forget, and people leave. New people take over. At some point, if enough complexity develops and sits over a long enough period of time, the entity that owns the platform and all it supports basically loses control of it. They have no knowledge contained outside the system itself...to make significant changes requires someone to delve into it and tease out the why's and wherefore's of how it works. Either that, or replace it wholesale, abandoning all of the functionality of the code and the stability that comes along with the associated business processes.
If no one quite understands how something works, or even the totality of what it does, then it becomes easier to upgrade an existing platform than replace it. In some cases, the platform can only be upgraded in certain ways that maintains some restrictions of the original platform. And that's why old tech has staying power. No one knows what it does, how it works, or understands the impact of or effort required to replace it.
I think this cycle is inevitable to some extent where complex systems are required to fulfill some needed function. However, I also think there is much that businesses could do to prevent these issues where they are not necessary. I think the fundamental thing that needlessly ties businesses down to old tech is an improper segmentation of responsibilities within the company. Many times, departments and created and responsibilities assigned based not on the actual work that needs to be done, but rather the prejudices of executive management. A work force should be divided up based on areas of related responsibility and the dependencies between those groups, and nothing else. (This is usually how things are done at the low level of organizing groups, but go one or two levels up on the org chart and the concept seems to no longer apply at most places.)