Does the CC company, or does the CC company not, have your SSN? It is a binary question. Either they do or do not; there is no try.
If they have your SSN, then they can use it for whatever purposes they want (defined in the contract you sign).
Sure, they can, but just because they have your SSN doesn't mean they're going to let anyone who knows your SSN access your account.
And yes, CC companies *do* store SSNs in their databases.
You don't seem to be following the thread. There's nothing wrong with storing your SSN in a database. What's wrong is when someone assumes that just because someone knows your SSN, they must be you.
You *do* realize that credit card companies are required by law, since the 9/11 attacks (I think it was a provision in the PATRIOT Act), to collect peoples' SSNs for "anti-terrorism" purposes?
Collecting SSNs is completely different from using SSNs for identification/authentication.
The federal gummint requires you to attach your SSN to all financial accounts. That way they can tax you more efficiently.... Actually, they're calling it your "Taxpayer ID Number" nowadays, right?
No, a TIN is what you get if you're not eligible for social security.
And you get one assigned before the umbilical cord is even cut as you come out of your mother's womb.
It's technically up to your parents. But if you don't give your child a social security number you can't claim him as a dependent or exemption or for the EIC, you don't get the child tax credit, etc. And as your child grows up, he can't work for anyone, get a bank account (thanks to the Patriot Act), lend people money without being subject to backup withholding, etc. And then there's the part I don't fully understand: you can't get a TIN if you're eligible for an SSN; if you don't put an SSN or TIN on your tax return, your return is rejected; but you're required by law to file a tax return if you have a certain amount of gross income. I'm not sure this has ever been tested in the court's though. What happens if you don't have an SSN but you manage to have enough gross income to be required to file?
Remember when your Social Security Card stated right on it something to the effect that the number was NOT FOR IDENTIFICATION? That was ignored by everybody that wanted to uniquely identify you but was too lazy to make up their own unique identifier in their own ID space for you. Now even the government ignores it.
It was a pretty dumb thing to put on there in the first place - made about as much sense as those "DO NOT REMOVE UNDER PENALTY OF LAW" tags on mattresses (though it at least doesn't mention anything about there being a law). In fact, if they had just allowed the SSN to be used for identification in the first place, we probably wouldn't have all these problems we're having today.
What we need is a law that says that any organization that uses a SSAN as a password does so entirely at its own risk and thereafter cannot take any action whatsoever which would be financially adverse to the holder of the SSAN.
We basically already have such a law, but it depends how you see "financially adverse". Is it "financially adverse" for someone to have to spend hours on the phone cleaning up their credit? I guess it is, but I don't think anything stops you from suing the bank that put the information on your credit report for libel. It's just that most people aren't going to go through the trouble of doing that. Maybe what we need is a few really big class action suits.
Exactly. Imagine if all the places in the country did this. It'd make identity theft a lot harder. A person's social security number should be no more private than a person's name - that's all it is, a way to identify a person. Any bank stupid enough to let someone take out a loan because they know a number deserves to lose their money. The law only needs to make it easier to sue credit reporting agencies for libel when they report false information, and easier to sue the banks for damages when they make you take a day off work to fix your credit report.
To put it another way, Bill Gates social security number is 539-60-5125. Let's see you use this information to steal money from him...
People often claim that when we can all talk to computers that it will do away with this, that, and the other input device, but that's complete bullshit. Talking to a computer is far too much work, even if the voice recognition is spot on all the time and can accurately predict any sort of formatting of the voice commands that you might want.
I agree to some extent, but being able to talk to computers implies that computers have natural language processing abilities, and that implies that computers will be able to talk to each other. So yeah, if we want to send a 5 page letter to Grandma typing it will probably be the fastest route (unless you don't really want to write the letter and would prefer your computer do it for you). But at the same time, the need for people to communicate with their computers in the first place will likely greatly decrease in volume. We do so much typing and mousing right now because computers are so stupid that our instructions have to be incredibly detailed.
I'm not sure the mouse, for instance, will survive (except in niche places). I think a monitor is better suited for an output-only device than having it cluttered up by navigational tools. Certainly the concept of dragging is not a particularly efficient method of communication. Perhaps lowering costs for touch-screens will render this moot, however. I'm a big fan of the tablet PC being the only type of traditional computer in the average house of the future (there will probably have to also be a storage device, which will probably also contain some extra processing power, but I consider it 50/50 whether that device will be in the home or in some colocation facility). 'Course that means the keyboard will be a very de-emphasized device.
To give an analogy from computer programming, not everyone likes learning about pointers or data types or other fundamentals to Computer Science
Carrying that along, I'm sure the introduction of java has reduced the average CS graduate's ability to efficiently allocate and free memory. Is that a bad thing?
I'd say it's only a bad thing in a very limited sense. Obviously some people need to know how to do these things (at the very least someone has to maintain the garbage collectors), and the very best programmers will probably have this in the back of their head (because knowing how things are working behind the scenes is key to writing excellent software). But if even 80 or 90 percent of the code monkeys out there don't know this stuff, it's not a bad thing for society. They probably wouldn't have been very good at it anyway.
Re:One Point For Gmail
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Gmail vs Pine
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· Score: 1
You are allowing Google to both hold your messages (privacy may become an issue at some point) and you rely on them to stay available to you -- they could decide to drop GMail at any time, or the servers could crash, etc.
Privacy and SMTP don't mix. Anything transmitted via email should be presumed public knowledge. Sure, you can use encryption, but a) who actually does that? and b) you could do that through gmail as well (slightly more of a pain, but considering the first point it isn't going to come up that often anyway).
As for your second point, sure, you're relying on gmail to stay available, as opposed to relying on your ISP/computer/etc to be available. Now for some people (apparently including you, that equation is going to come out with Google being less reliable, but I'd venture a guess that you're in the minority there). As for Google "deciding to drop GMail at any time", I think the chances they'd do that without any warning are essentially zero, but personally I automatically forward every single GMail message I get to my own personal backup system. And since I use my own domain name to forward messages to gmail, I wouldn't have to change my email address either. In the utterly unlikely event that gmail shut down without any warning right now, I'd be back up within 24 hours and would lose at the very most one day of email (assuming gmail accepted the messages and dropped them rather than bouncing them so they get resent).
As far as I know the fire station I used to volunteer for didn't even really use the term. Number of alarms was more a term used by the media. Also, this was a couple years ago, but I seriously doubt things have gotten *that* federalized since then.
I can't even get through to read the story. From the headlines, it seems like they might have been negligent, or they might not have. Just knowing that he was "put on hold" doesn't really tell you anything.
Anyway, disclaimers don't really mean that much if the employee handling the phone call wasn't following procedure.
Some departments that would mean Chief, tanker, ladder, all hands medical and help from another dept.
That's a five-alarm? That's pretty much the standard response for a working fire where I used to live. I thought the number of alarms represented the number of different stations. (In which case 5 alarms is pretty damn big, though with the fact that the guy kept going back in the building to save his computers maybe they reported possible entrapment).
Could you post an example of your notes for one class? I'd be interested in what they look like. Because, enough people have said they benefit from using laptops that there must be some way of taking notes which I've never dreamed of. What program do you use?
What's to prevent someone from saying that the scratching of the pen or pencil on the paper is a distraction to them?
Nothing. Personally I think a professor would be wrong (for most classes) if they said that the detriments of allowing note taking outweighed the benefits, but not so strongly that I'd say it isn't within the professors rights to take the opposite position. I even had a few professors who banned note-taking during lecture, and I didn't find the class any worse (but then again, I'm not a big note-taker anyway).
In the case of typing I think the detriments clearly outweigh the benefits. In fact, with the current software that I know of, I really don't see much of any benefit at all of allowing the use of laptops. Anything of real length and substance in a lecture should be repeated in the handouts and/or textbook. The only exception I can think of is a class in which the professor integrates the laptop use into the lecture.
It seems to me that I could come up with an objection to any technology you chose to use to take notes. And then there's the issue of loud breathing. I don't think people that breath loudly should be allowed to pollute my learning environment.
Obviously breathing is required! But otherwise, it's a matter of balance, and it's up to the professor to decide where that balance ends up, at least initially. If you don't like the choice, there's probably another class. If not, maybe you could appeal to the school, and if you lose that there's always another school.
However, I'd expect a law student to come up with something more innovative than a petition. Something like using a laptop as a reasonable accomodation under the ADA . . ..
Allowing the use of a laptop might be *one* reasonable accomodation for a particular disability. Of course, the law student would have to find someone with that disability taking such a class for which the professor refuses the use of a laptop and also refuses other reasonable accomodations (for instance, the student could be allowed a videotape of the lecture).
There's a wide gulf between someone playing a game with the sound up in class, obviously distracting students, and students that are taking notes on a laptop (or, god forbid, amusing themselves during a boring stretch.)
I don't think there is. Even if the laptop is otherwise silent, the simple sound of the keys being typed on would be enough to distract me. Having a screen in front of me where someone was playing solitare would be distracting too.
If you're that bored in class don't go. If you can't take notes with a pen and paper, I doubt a laptop is going to help you.
That said, I believe those who have done so have every right to choose to use mandatory attendance. If they run the class, it's their decision.
Unfortunately, in many schools, it isn't.
When I am running a lecture, you can be damn sure I won't require students to sign in.
I was told by a number of my professors that they were required by law to take attendance. Something about the school receiving federal funding. Is this just nonsense, is it just not applicable to your schools, or do you just fudge it?
Anyway, I for the most part agree with your philosophy that someone has to be in charge of a classroom, and the only reasonable choice is the teacher, at least to the extent that the rules affect others in any way however miniscule (laptops are certainly a potential distraction). Of course, I think that philosophy fits in perfectly well with a customer/business relationship. When I go to the movie theater they can certainly kick me out for being disruptive - they certainly have the right to ban the use of cell phones, for instance. I don't think there are many rational adults that would try to say they paid for their ticket so they have the right to do anything they want.
Finally, I think a rule against laptops is a reasonable one. In fact, I'd say in most cases it's probably a good rule to have. Unless the class is specifically geared towards laptop use (which kind of presumes every student has one), I really don't see how they're at all useful without being distractive. Most classes should probably allow tablets and PDAs, though.
I'm certainly not a luddite, but maybe I am a little too "old-school". Back when I was in college pretty much no one had laptops, and we did perfectly fine.
It's not so much that we can't distinguish, it's that we all have different definitions of what offensive or non-offensive content is.
True, that's a better way of putting it.
For this type of filter to be effective it would have to be programmable to the user's particular specifications of what constitues porn.
I don't really think that's reasonable. For one thing, it would be quite time consuming (and quite possibly offensive) drawing a very good line between what is and what isn't acceptable. Even then, context seems to always be a factor. The same exact image could be used on a porn site or in an encyclopedia and many people would find it offensive in the one context but not offensive in the other. In that sense maybe the more crude blocking mechanisms that turn on or off entire sites is better.
I suppose this tool could be useful in situations where lots of false positives are acceptable. But I don't really see much usefulness in that - not for blocking, anyway.
I'm not sure which is more sad - that some employers won't hire someone because they might have smoked pot in the past, or that some employees are so desperate for work that they are willing to work for such an employer.
If I was an employer, only two things would really concern me. One, the candidates competance and skill at performing the required labour, and two, the amount of compensation the candidate was willing to perform the labour for.
The thing is, you can't find out this information very well during a single interview. What do you think, you can just say "rate yourself from one to ten at how good you are at X and tell me the absolute minimum amount of pay you're willing to accept for doing so"?
I really don't care if; you go out every night goofing off with your buddies, have a myspace account with silly pictures, vote for another political party, have an unusual sexual orientation, are religious, have extra curricular activities, can sing or dance, eat parsnips, use black pens, build rockets, watch anime etc, etc, etc....
It's no wonder you said *if* you were an employer. What a person does outside of work can tell you a lot about what kind of person they're going to be *at* work. Sure, there are exceptions, and a really good employer is going to have an open and frank discussion with the prospective employee to find out if one of them is applicable.
This won't go anywhere for a long time, until image recognition technology catches up.
Even then, one person's "porn" is another's "art". Even a human can't correctly distinguish offensive vs. non-offensive content with all that much accuracy. (This is besides the fact that around the same time as image recognition technology catches up computers will have overtaken the world and we'll be following their rules rather than our own.)
Unfortunately the fifth amendment doesn't really apply to a passphrase required to decrypt files discovered during execution of a search warrant.
What's even more unfortunate is that the first amendment doesn't really apply to compelled speech by judges (and congress, for that matter).
Failure to provide the passphrase upon court order can (and has many times) result in a defendant being jailed for contempt of court.
I've heard this from a few people now, but I really find it hard to believe. It seems to go against all common sense. Do you (or does anyone) have a citation for this?
And before you start, please don't object that the person affected is a defendant in a criminal proceeding, because that's quite beside the point. The point is that Google has this information on you, and will hand it over upon request.
Well, they will hand it over upon a valid court order.
But yeah, if it's imperative that some information not become released to the government, you shouldn't be sending or receiving it unencrypted through email.
They are a corporation, so if you want to determine their motivation for any particular thing, look at what motivates all corporations: money.
Actually, corporations don't have motives. They don't even think. They're not human beings, you know...
People have motivations, and while the directors of Google, the marketers of Google, the engineers at Google, etc., are all *supposed* to have making money for the shareholders as their sole motivation, they certainly don't.
You should be slightly concerned if you got your domains from one of the really cheap services. If they didn't pay in advance to the registry, and the registry raises rates, the registrar might just wind up going bankrupt. You'll get to keep your domain by transferring it elsewhere, but you might have to pay all over again for all those years you prepaid for.
You'll just see these cheap websites switch back to third level domains. Remember ml.org? The market for third level domains largely died out when the price of second level domains went from $100 to $10. And cheap hosting has been around longer than cheap domains anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
Does the CC company, or does the CC company not, have your SSN? It is a binary question. Either they do or do not; there is no try.
If they have your SSN, then they can use it for whatever purposes they want (defined in the contract you sign).
Sure, they can, but just because they have your SSN doesn't mean they're going to let anyone who knows your SSN access your account.
And yes, CC companies *do* store SSNs in their databases.
You don't seem to be following the thread. There's nothing wrong with storing your SSN in a database. What's wrong is when someone assumes that just because someone knows your SSN, they must be you.
You *do* realize that credit card companies are required by law, since the 9/11 attacks (I think it was a provision in the PATRIOT Act), to collect peoples' SSNs for "anti-terrorism" purposes?
Collecting SSNs is completely different from using SSNs for identification/authentication.
The federal gummint requires you to attach your SSN to all financial accounts. That way they can tax you more efficiently.... Actually, they're calling it your "Taxpayer ID Number" nowadays, right?
No, a TIN is what you get if you're not eligible for social security.
And you get one assigned before the umbilical cord is even cut as you come out of your mother's womb.
It's technically up to your parents. But if you don't give your child a social security number you can't claim him as a dependent or exemption or for the EIC, you don't get the child tax credit, etc. And as your child grows up, he can't work for anyone, get a bank account (thanks to the Patriot Act), lend people money without being subject to backup withholding, etc. And then there's the part I don't fully understand: you can't get a TIN if you're eligible for an SSN; if you don't put an SSN or TIN on your tax return, your return is rejected; but you're required by law to file a tax return if you have a certain amount of gross income. I'm not sure this has ever been tested in the court's though. What happens if you don't have an SSN but you manage to have enough gross income to be required to file?
Remember when your Social Security Card stated right on it something to the effect that the number was NOT FOR IDENTIFICATION? That was ignored by everybody that wanted to uniquely identify you but was too lazy to make up their own unique identifier in their own ID space for you. Now even the government ignores it.
It was a pretty dumb thing to put on there in the first place - made about as much sense as those "DO NOT REMOVE UNDER PENALTY OF LAW" tags on mattresses (though it at least doesn't mention anything about there being a law). In fact, if they had just allowed the SSN to be used for identification in the first place, we probably wouldn't have all these problems we're having today.
What we need is a law that says that any organization that uses a SSAN as a password does so entirely at its own risk and thereafter cannot take any action whatsoever which would be financially adverse to the holder of the SSAN.
We basically already have such a law, but it depends how you see "financially adverse". Is it "financially adverse" for someone to have to spend hours on the phone cleaning up their credit? I guess it is, but I don't think anything stops you from suing the bank that put the information on your credit report for libel. It's just that most people aren't going to go through the trouble of doing that. Maybe what we need is a few really big class action suits.
Exactly. Imagine if all the places in the country did this. It'd make identity theft a lot harder. A person's social security number should be no more private than a person's name - that's all it is, a way to identify a person. Any bank stupid enough to let someone take out a loan because they know a number deserves to lose their money. The law only needs to make it easier to sue credit reporting agencies for libel when they report false information, and easier to sue the banks for damages when they make you take a day off work to fix your credit report.
To put it another way, Bill Gates social security number is 539-60-5125. Let's see you use this information to steal money from him...
People often claim that when we can all talk to computers that it will do away with this, that, and the other input device, but that's complete bullshit. Talking to a computer is far too much work, even if the voice recognition is spot on all the time and can accurately predict any sort of formatting of the voice commands that you might want.
I agree to some extent, but being able to talk to computers implies that computers have natural language processing abilities, and that implies that computers will be able to talk to each other. So yeah, if we want to send a 5 page letter to Grandma typing it will probably be the fastest route (unless you don't really want to write the letter and would prefer your computer do it for you). But at the same time, the need for people to communicate with their computers in the first place will likely greatly decrease in volume. We do so much typing and mousing right now because computers are so stupid that our instructions have to be incredibly detailed.
I'm not sure the mouse, for instance, will survive (except in niche places). I think a monitor is better suited for an output-only device than having it cluttered up by navigational tools. Certainly the concept of dragging is not a particularly efficient method of communication. Perhaps lowering costs for touch-screens will render this moot, however. I'm a big fan of the tablet PC being the only type of traditional computer in the average house of the future (there will probably have to also be a storage device, which will probably also contain some extra processing power, but I consider it 50/50 whether that device will be in the home or in some colocation facility). 'Course that means the keyboard will be a very de-emphasized device.
To give an analogy from computer programming, not everyone likes learning about pointers or data types or other fundamentals to Computer Science
Carrying that along, I'm sure the introduction of java has reduced the average CS graduate's ability to efficiently allocate and free memory. Is that a bad thing?
I'd say it's only a bad thing in a very limited sense. Obviously some people need to know how to do these things (at the very least someone has to maintain the garbage collectors), and the very best programmers will probably have this in the back of their head (because knowing how things are working behind the scenes is key to writing excellent software). But if even 80 or 90 percent of the code monkeys out there don't know this stuff, it's not a bad thing for society. They probably wouldn't have been very good at it anyway.
You are allowing Google to both hold your messages (privacy may become an issue at some point) and you rely on them to stay available to you -- they could decide to drop GMail at any time, or the servers could crash, etc.
Privacy and SMTP don't mix. Anything transmitted via email should be presumed public knowledge. Sure, you can use encryption, but a) who actually does that? and b) you could do that through gmail as well (slightly more of a pain, but considering the first point it isn't going to come up that often anyway).
As for your second point, sure, you're relying on gmail to stay available, as opposed to relying on your ISP/computer/etc to be available. Now for some people (apparently including you, that equation is going to come out with Google being less reliable, but I'd venture a guess that you're in the minority there). As for Google "deciding to drop GMail at any time", I think the chances they'd do that without any warning are essentially zero, but personally I automatically forward every single GMail message I get to my own personal backup system. And since I use my own domain name to forward messages to gmail, I wouldn't have to change my email address either. In the utterly unlikely event that gmail shut down without any warning right now, I'd be back up within 24 hours and would lose at the very most one day of email (assuming gmail accepted the messages and dropped them rather than bouncing them so they get resent).
As far as I know the fire station I used to volunteer for didn't even really use the term. Number of alarms was more a term used by the media. Also, this was a couple years ago, but I seriously doubt things have gotten *that* federalized since then.
I can't even get through to read the story. From the headlines, it seems like they might have been negligent, or they might not have. Just knowing that he was "put on hold" doesn't really tell you anything.
Anyway, disclaimers don't really mean that much if the employee handling the phone call wasn't following procedure.
Some departments that would mean Chief, tanker, ladder, all hands medical and help from another dept.
That's a five-alarm? That's pretty much the standard response for a working fire where I used to live. I thought the number of alarms represented the number of different stations. (In which case 5 alarms is pretty damn big, though with the fact that the guy kept going back in the building to save his computers maybe they reported possible entrapment).
I'm sure you can get a cell phone and keep the batteries charged for less than $12/month.
Could you post an example of your notes for one class? I'd be interested in what they look like. Because, enough people have said they benefit from using laptops that there must be some way of taking notes which I've never dreamed of. What program do you use?
What's to prevent someone from saying that the scratching of the pen or pencil on the paper is a distraction to them?
Nothing. Personally I think a professor would be wrong (for most classes) if they said that the detriments of allowing note taking outweighed the benefits, but not so strongly that I'd say it isn't within the professors rights to take the opposite position. I even had a few professors who banned note-taking during lecture, and I didn't find the class any worse (but then again, I'm not a big note-taker anyway).
In the case of typing I think the detriments clearly outweigh the benefits. In fact, with the current software that I know of, I really don't see much of any benefit at all of allowing the use of laptops. Anything of real length and substance in a lecture should be repeated in the handouts and/or textbook. The only exception I can think of is a class in which the professor integrates the laptop use into the lecture.
It seems to me that I could come up with an objection to any technology you chose to use to take notes. And then there's the issue of loud breathing. I don't think people that breath loudly should be allowed to pollute my learning environment.
Obviously breathing is required! But otherwise, it's a matter of balance, and it's up to the professor to decide where that balance ends up, at least initially. If you don't like the choice, there's probably another class. If not, maybe you could appeal to the school, and if you lose that there's always another school.
However, I'd expect a law student to come up with something more innovative than a petition. Something like using a laptop as a reasonable accomodation under the ADA . . . .
Allowing the use of a laptop might be *one* reasonable accomodation for a particular disability. Of course, the law student would have to find someone with that disability taking such a class for which the professor refuses the use of a laptop and also refuses other reasonable accomodations (for instance, the student could be allowed a videotape of the lecture).
There's a wide gulf between someone playing a game with the sound up in class, obviously distracting students, and students that are taking notes on a laptop (or, god forbid, amusing themselves during a boring stretch.)
I don't think there is. Even if the laptop is otherwise silent, the simple sound of the keys being typed on would be enough to distract me. Having a screen in front of me where someone was playing solitare would be distracting too.
If you're that bored in class don't go. If you can't take notes with a pen and paper, I doubt a laptop is going to help you.
That said, I believe those who have done so have every right to choose to use mandatory attendance. If they run the class, it's their decision.
Unfortunately, in many schools, it isn't.
When I am running a lecture, you can be damn sure I won't require students to sign in.
I was told by a number of my professors that they were required by law to take attendance. Something about the school receiving federal funding. Is this just nonsense, is it just not applicable to your schools, or do you just fudge it?
Anyway, I for the most part agree with your philosophy that someone has to be in charge of a classroom, and the only reasonable choice is the teacher, at least to the extent that the rules affect others in any way however miniscule (laptops are certainly a potential distraction). Of course, I think that philosophy fits in perfectly well with a customer/business relationship. When I go to the movie theater they can certainly kick me out for being disruptive - they certainly have the right to ban the use of cell phones, for instance. I don't think there are many rational adults that would try to say they paid for their ticket so they have the right to do anything they want.
Finally, I think a rule against laptops is a reasonable one. In fact, I'd say in most cases it's probably a good rule to have. Unless the class is specifically geared towards laptop use (which kind of presumes every student has one), I really don't see how they're at all useful without being distractive. Most classes should probably allow tablets and PDAs, though.
I'm certainly not a luddite, but maybe I am a little too "old-school". Back when I was in college pretty much no one had laptops, and we did perfectly fine.
It's not so much that we can't distinguish, it's that we all have different definitions of what offensive or non-offensive content is.
True, that's a better way of putting it.
For this type of filter to be effective it would have to be programmable to the user's particular specifications of what constitues porn.
I don't really think that's reasonable. For one thing, it would be quite time consuming (and quite possibly offensive) drawing a very good line between what is and what isn't acceptable. Even then, context seems to always be a factor. The same exact image could be used on a porn site or in an encyclopedia and many people would find it offensive in the one context but not offensive in the other. In that sense maybe the more crude blocking mechanisms that turn on or off entire sites is better.
I suppose this tool could be useful in situations where lots of false positives are acceptable. But I don't really see much usefulness in that - not for blocking, anyway.
I'm not sure which is more sad - that some employers won't hire someone because they might have smoked pot in the past, or that some employees are so desperate for work that they are willing to work for such an employer.
If I was an employer, only two things would really concern me. One, the candidates competance and skill at performing the required labour, and two, the amount of compensation the candidate was willing to perform the labour for.
The thing is, you can't find out this information very well during a single interview. What do you think, you can just say "rate yourself from one to ten at how good you are at X and tell me the absolute minimum amount of pay you're willing to accept for doing so"?
I really don't care if; you go out every night goofing off with your buddies, have a myspace account with silly pictures, vote for another political party, have an unusual sexual orientation, are religious, have extra curricular activities, can sing or dance, eat parsnips, use black pens, build rockets, watch anime etc, etc, etc....
It's no wonder you said *if* you were an employer. What a person does outside of work can tell you a lot about what kind of person they're going to be *at* work. Sure, there are exceptions, and a really good employer is going to have an open and frank discussion with the prospective employee to find out if one of them is applicable.
This won't go anywhere for a long time, until image recognition technology catches up.
Even then, one person's "porn" is another's "art". Even a human can't correctly distinguish offensive vs. non-offensive content with all that much accuracy. (This is besides the fact that around the same time as image recognition technology catches up computers will have overtaken the world and we'll be following their rules rather than our own.)
Unfortunately the fifth amendment doesn't really apply to a passphrase required to decrypt files discovered during execution of a search warrant.
What's even more unfortunate is that the first amendment doesn't really apply to compelled speech by judges (and congress, for that matter).
Failure to provide the passphrase upon court order can (and has many times) result in a defendant being jailed for contempt of court.
I've heard this from a few people now, but I really find it hard to believe. It seems to go against all common sense. Do you (or does anyone) have a citation for this?
And before you start, please don't object that the person affected is a defendant in a criminal proceeding, because that's quite beside the point. The point is that Google has this information on you, and will hand it over upon request.
Well, they will hand it over upon a valid court order.
But yeah, if it's imperative that some information not become released to the government, you shouldn't be sending or receiving it unencrypted through email.
They are a corporation, so if you want to determine their motivation for any particular thing, look at what motivates all corporations: money.
Actually, corporations don't have motives. They don't even think. They're not human beings, you know...
People have motivations, and while the directors of Google, the marketers of Google, the engineers at Google, etc., are all *supposed* to have making money for the shareholders as their sole motivation, they certainly don't.
You should be slightly concerned if you got your domains from one of the really cheap services. If they didn't pay in advance to the registry, and the registry raises rates, the registrar might just wind up going bankrupt. You'll get to keep your domain by transferring it elsewhere, but you might have to pay all over again for all those years you prepaid for.
You'll just see these cheap websites switch back to third level domains. Remember ml.org? The market for third level domains largely died out when the price of second level domains went from $100 to $10. And cheap hosting has been around longer than cheap domains anyway.