Debatable. You could make it a multifactor security procedure (what you have, what you know, what you are...i.e. a smartcard, the ID number, and a biometric). Only the ID number would be given out, and wouldn't be enough to completely validate your ID. The rest could be done through an indirect service of some kind such that your doctor's office doesn't have a complete copy of your identification to store.
Heck, you can accomplish a less secure version of the same thing by assigning people two numbers--one is the SSN and the other is your identifying passcode that other entities are absolutely forbidden to store or share by law. All they can do is call the (presumed) US passcode service to verify that that passcode you give them at time of identification matches that SSN. At the same time, they'd establish an audit record with the passcode service to prove they checked the ID. If someone steals your identity and there's no audit record, that means someone accepted it without checking, and you can gut them in court. It'd still be miles better than what we have now, if only because you could -change the passcode- without invalidating every bit of paperwork that currently exists about you.
There's lots you can do if you don't count on one unchangeable number to be the be-all-end-all of the identification.
But you can't have it both ways--you can't be anonymous -and- be securely identifiable, at least until someone comes up with an impossible-to-counterfeit smartcard or implant, so you can carry the whole of your identification around with you. I tend to view anything that relies on an "impossible-to..." device as a bit of a pipe dream.
I don't know about such a gene. I can tell you that shortly after getting my first car GPS last year, I nearly caused an accident on a private road surrounding a shopping mall trying to follow it. Ultimately, I was paying more attention to the GPS than the traffic around me, and managed to cut someone off pretty blatantly. Generally speaking, I'm not a bad driver (yes, everyone self-reports above average, but I actually stop, signal, and don't have any tickets or accidents in the last five years) so the new factor was the GPS. I'd like to think I'm aware enough not to do this on a freeway at 100mph, but plainly, the tendency was there.
Well, and the thing is, it's not exactly a bad analogy. I think I would have an initial reaction of a little condescension, but I think I'd be wrong.
Tired, in a biological organism, involves some sort of biological mechanism that runs at a loss which, over time, reduces the capacity of the organism to perform (whether it's through acid buildup, oxygen debt, or whatever). Similarly, keep loading enough programs into a machine (in which case you're causing the overall loss) or load something with a memory leak, and you have a mechanism that runs at a loss which, over time, reduces the capacity of the computer to perform (whether it's through garbage buildup, CPU cycle debt, or whatever).
So where's "round here"? I don't think I want to work anywhere where developers have that grossly exaggerated of a sense of entitlement. There's an entire process that you're just a cog in, you know. If nobody understands your software, your work is worse than useless. Its presence will discourage people from starting actually-usable projects that would have done the same thing.
To deny someone the ability to take control of their own machine is barbaric - I think we all agree with that statement. We can't lock users out of taking control of those center ring privileges, unless you're the head of IT and those machines are under you "watch".
Doesn't that pretty much describe every business desktop? For that matter, I wouldn't mind locking my mom out of some of the stuff on her machine--it'd beat having to clean off her damned spyware every few months.
(Yes, I've tried explaining it and SpyBot, etc. No, she doesn't get it. Yes, she's closer to the average user than you are.)
I agree, I wouldn't want anyone to be able to look any of those things up in government records. That's why they shouldn't be publicly accessible at all. Are they now? Ethnicity is the only one I can think of that might be somewhere, and that's the least secret and transitory of the bunch. The forms one probably gets better with this model, actually; it's easier to only collate part of the entered data in the first place than it is to redact copies or scans on request.
Truly, I think the key to this argument is "what should I expect to be private?" Ease of collation was always a BS mitigating factor--it was only going to get easier as tech marched on, as anyone since the database was invented could have told you. Obviously, there are a handful of things that -must- be private to make society work, such as medical or legal disclosures to a professional advocate.
But isn't the solution to saying "so and so entity will do evil things with all this information" to make the evil things illegal or impossible to do? Otherwise, once the cat's out of the bag, it's out, and face it...for those with enough resources, the cat's been out of the bag for a long time. It's like the SSN situation--what's the real problem, that your SSN gets leaked all over the place, or that someone was dumb enough to make a single 9 digit number that you can't easily change and have to give to a ton of entities the secret key to your identity?
One other point: I think part of the reason people recoil is because they're overlaying pre-database expectations of discretion on a post-database world. If everybody has every single point of their public record out there, lots of things that were shocking won't be so shocking anymore. Coming from a standpoint of "I don't want anyone to know anything about me," everyone has embarrassing details. Once they're all out in the open, sure, there's going to be a pain period (that will probably result in some degree of information reform) but there will also be an acclimation afterwards where this stuff just isn't shocking anymore.
Heh. Having been around the block once or twice myself, it's hard for me to disagree with you. Unfortunately, the alternative is to not innovate government procedures at all.
My hope is that Google is creating/pushing generic access APIs for the current electronic stores of public information, so that anyone can write a search engine (or tool) for it. As much as Google's been disappointing me lately by their new "be juts a little evil" policy, they're probably the guys to do that. Unfortunately, I'm not clear from the article.
We already have. It's just that only people with lots of money or time or government support can reasonably collate the information.
Your current expectations of privacy reflect a misconception that obscurity is somehow the same thing as privacy. It's not and never was. This effort will draw a clear line between what's private and what isn't and correct any misconceptions.
I don't know if I agree with you. If it's public, everyone should have access. If it shouldn't be public, it should be taken out of the searchable network. Either way, this gets all the cards on the table.
By and large, I do think anything the government tracks, short of an active investigation, should be available publically. Transparency is an important check; I wish we had it now with the current administration.
If you're concerned about embarrassing or damaging information being fossilized in public records, don't do anything embarrassing or damaging in public. It really is that simple.
If it's a public benefit to everyone, that's pretty much what taxes are for, yes. I'd much sooner see my tax dollars go to a public information network than corporate favoritism.
In practice, I suspect those admin/handling fees were pulled straight out of someone's rear as "what's the maximum they won't object to?" rather than reflecting any real cost. They're only unreasonable after they've been declared so in court.
We've always maintained this weird security-through-obscurity dichotomy with public records. Technically the information is available to everyone by law, but it's such a pain to get it that nobody bothers
This has given people a false sense of security when it comes to government data collation. I don't think most people realize just how much public information this out there that anyone with a few bucks and who knows who to ask can see it. On the flip side, it means there's almost no public benefit from the government keeping the information because it can't be easily collated by a private citizen.
This is the best thing that could happen--let's dump it all out on the net and make it easy to see someone's entire public record. Let's go for complete transparency and let public information really be public information. If the government really is overreaching, the outrage should be enough to throttle them back. And maybe they aren't; maybe this really is in the public interest. Now we can find out. Either way, it's going to force a resolution.
On another positive side note, this'll also gut the cottage ripoff industry that's grown around public records research. You shouldn't have to pay some PI wannabe $$ to walk across the street and meet his records-room friend at the Capitol.
Search for "sunlamp vitamin d" on Google, and you'll find information just as authoritative, if not more, than what you'll get off Slashdot. Short answer, yeah, they sure -claim- to stimulate Vitamin D production.
Re: the your last paragraph, all I can tell you is that my ability to properly triage long-term goals has risen exponentially with age and experience. Personally, I'd go out of my way to get the proper UV exposure, and failing that, I'd supplement. Your body is plainly built to require it, whatever the cancer link is.
And speaking as someone who is having both a parent and a good friend go through chemo, the downside if you lose that "pretty good treatment" bet of yours is notable.
Well, that's the thing. I wouldn't -buy- DRM'd files, and I do rip my CDs to MP3 for all of your reasons But I'm already paying for the service as a music audition service, so I don't lose anything by also having the ability to play the files off-computer.
If there was someone who, for $10 a month, would legally give me all the un-DRM'd MP3s I wanted out of 10000+ albums, I'd probably go with them instead. Until then, this is the best thing running.
I think was modded down unfairly. I've been a Rhapsody subscriber since the launch of the service, and I'm extremely happy with it for all the reasons listed. In fact, I'm strongly considering switching from iPod to Zen Vision to get the To Go service.
I don't think any of the releases have suggested online multiplayer would be a downloadable content item. I think the article was just trollishly and confusingly referring to the Xbox Live fee.
It's a little late now, but the real problem is how you picked your email aliases. Start them all with the same prefix. Like, if I'm wordplay@foozle.com (I'm not, btw, so don't mail me), I might use wp-paypal@foozle.com, wp-ebay@foozle.com, etc. Then I can filter anything that's not addressed to wordplay or wp-*.
Movie rating enforcement is voluntary by the industry (theaters and studios).
There's a huge difference between the industry voluntarily rating themselves and passing a law such that the government does it for them.
Voluntary rating is done mostly in response to market forces; if Mom and Dad mistakenly let little Timmy in to see -Last Tango in Paris- because it looks "artsy", they get pissy and quit seeing movies. So, the studios warn Mom and Dad that the movie is at least one stick of butter away from being appropriate for little Timmy. While the ratings themselves are oddly prioritized IMO, movie ratings are undeniably a valuable service to parents. Otherwise, parents would have to preview everything.
Ditto video games. Voluntary ratings are a good thing there too, since it lets parents make some basic decisions about game content without having to actually pre-buy and pre-play the game itself.
Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing the comics industry self-rate, for much the same reason. It's a medium with a large crossover between adult and juvenile audiences (and a strong public perception of being largely juvenile, though that's untrue). All comic shops I've seen separate out the truly adult content, but there's a lot of hard-R content remaining in Vertigo, Marvel MAX, Wildstorm, and the independents. Even the ostensibly all-ages titles are pretty PG-13 nowadays.
But for the government to step in and tell us what's OK...that's different. One is the industry saying "warning, this may upset parents if their kids see it" and the other is saying "you can't have this because We know better." The Constitution protects us from the latter.
Yeah. Smash Bros is going that route, which I think is a smart one. Once there are a couple of high-profile games that do that, perhaps more companies will consider it an option. Right now, I suspect they would view it as losing the one differentiating factor for that game.
Except that by and large, the Wii interface decisions aren't very good. There are a small handful of games that use the interface uniquely and very well (SSX, WarioWare, Trauma Center, Elebits, etc.) and a handful that use it unimaginatively, but well (racing and FPS games). The rest--and particularly the cross-platform ones--graft awkward gestures onto a traditional interface.
The problem with the Wii controllers are that they're -so- suited for their element that once you take them out and try to do a traditional setup on them, they kind of suck. There aren't enough buttons, what there are are weirdly placed, and they're all the same color and size in a cluster. It's kind of an ergonomic disaster...until you play a nice 1st party game with a Wii-specific interface. Then they're awesome.
So yeah, cross-platform is going to be a killer. With the control issues and the musclepower issues, count on them almost universally sucking on the Wii unless someone does a platform-specific spinoff (e.g. Spider-Man 3)
I think the Wii is an excellent second console, just like the GameCube was. But it's not going to keep up as a primary console. There are just too many compromises.
First, if I show you something at 50FPS, but every frame is duplicated (your above analogy) I'm really showing you something at 25FPS with no duplication. Think about it.
Second, that's not how interlacing works. Interlacing works like (assuming 25FPS movement on 50FPS interlace):
tv frame 0: text at position x tv frame 1: text at position x (text logically updates to x - 1, waiting for display) tv frame 2: half of text at position x - 1 (every 2nd horizontal line moves) tv frame 3: rest of text at position x - 1 (text logically updates to x - 2) tv frame 4: half of text at position x - 2 tv frame 5: rest of text at position x - 2
It's the half-the-text moving at a time (the interlace) that you're noticing. What you're referring to, I think, is the extra frames that get put in when you make a 24FPS movie run at 25FPS or 30FPS. That's compensated for in most DVD players and TVs by 3:2 pulldown.
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Debatable. You could make it a multifactor security procedure (what you have, what you know, what you are...i.e. a smartcard, the ID number, and a biometric). Only the ID number would be given out, and wouldn't be enough to completely validate your ID. The rest could be done through an indirect service of some kind such that your doctor's office doesn't have a complete copy of your identification to store.
Heck, you can accomplish a less secure version of the same thing by assigning people two numbers--one is the SSN and the other is your identifying passcode that other entities are absolutely forbidden to store or share by law. All they can do is call the (presumed) US passcode service to verify that that passcode you give them at time of identification matches that SSN. At the same time, they'd establish an audit record with the passcode service to prove they checked the ID. If someone steals your identity and there's no audit record, that means someone accepted it without checking, and you can gut them in court. It'd still be miles better than what we have now, if only because you could -change the passcode- without invalidating every bit of paperwork that currently exists about you.
There's lots you can do if you don't count on one unchangeable number to be the be-all-end-all of the identification.
But you can't have it both ways--you can't be anonymous -and- be securely identifiable, at least until someone comes up with an impossible-to-counterfeit smartcard or implant, so you can carry the whole of your identification around with you. I tend to view anything that relies on an "impossible-to..." device as a bit of a pipe dream.
I don't know about such a gene. I can tell you that shortly after getting my first car GPS last year, I nearly caused an accident on a private road surrounding a shopping mall trying to follow it. Ultimately, I was paying more attention to the GPS than the traffic around me, and managed to cut someone off pretty blatantly. Generally speaking, I'm not a bad driver (yes, everyone self-reports above average, but I actually stop, signal, and don't have any tickets or accidents in the last five years) so the new factor was the GPS. I'd like to think I'm aware enough not to do this on a freeway at 100mph, but plainly, the tendency was there.
The privacy problem with SSNs stems from trying to use the SSN number as a secret, not from the fact that everyone has an SSN.
Well, and the thing is, it's not exactly a bad analogy. I think I would have an initial reaction of a little condescension, but I think I'd be wrong.
Tired, in a biological organism, involves some sort of biological mechanism that runs at a loss which, over time, reduces the capacity of the organism to perform (whether it's through acid buildup, oxygen debt, or whatever). Similarly, keep loading enough programs into a machine (in which case you're causing the overall loss) or load something with a memory leak, and you have a mechanism that runs at a loss which, over time, reduces the capacity of the computer to perform (whether it's through garbage buildup, CPU cycle debt, or whatever).
On the plus side, it would have special attachments so you could hold down five bucky-bits at once and still hit your command key.
So where's "round here"? I don't think I want to work anywhere where developers have that grossly exaggerated of a sense of entitlement. There's an entire process that you're just a cog in, you know. If nobody understands your software, your work is worse than useless. Its presence will discourage people from starting actually-usable projects that would have done the same thing.
Ah, that explains why I'm the only one who ever reads my documentation.
To deny someone the ability to take control of their own machine is barbaric - I think we all agree with that statement. We can't lock users out of taking control of those center ring privileges, unless you're the head of IT and those machines are under you "watch".
Doesn't that pretty much describe every business desktop? For that matter, I wouldn't mind locking my mom out of some of the stuff on her machine--it'd beat having to clean off her damned spyware every few months.
(Yes, I've tried explaining it and SpyBot, etc. No, she doesn't get it. Yes, she's closer to the average user than you are.)
I agree, I wouldn't want anyone to be able to look any of those things up in government records. That's why they shouldn't be publicly accessible at all. Are they now? Ethnicity is the only one I can think of that might be somewhere, and that's the least secret and transitory of the bunch. The forms one probably gets better with this model, actually; it's easier to only collate part of the entered data in the first place than it is to redact copies or scans on request.
You make some interesting points.
Truly, I think the key to this argument is "what should I expect to be private?" Ease of collation was always a BS mitigating factor--it was only going to get easier as tech marched on, as anyone since the database was invented could have told you. Obviously, there are a handful of things that -must- be private to make society work, such as medical or legal disclosures to a professional advocate.
But isn't the solution to saying "so and so entity will do evil things with all this information" to make the evil things illegal or impossible to do? Otherwise, once the cat's out of the bag, it's out, and face it...for those with enough resources, the cat's been out of the bag for a long time. It's like the SSN situation--what's the real problem, that your SSN gets leaked all over the place, or that someone was dumb enough to make a single 9 digit number that you can't easily change and have to give to a ton of entities the secret key to your identity?
One other point: I think part of the reason people recoil is because they're overlaying pre-database expectations of discretion on a post-database world. If everybody has every single point of their public record out there, lots of things that were shocking won't be so shocking anymore. Coming from a standpoint of "I don't want anyone to know anything about me," everyone has embarrassing details. Once they're all out in the open, sure, there's going to be a pain period (that will probably result in some degree of information reform) but there will also be an acclimation afterwards where this stuff just isn't shocking anymore.
Heh. Having been around the block once or twice myself, it's hard for me to disagree with you. Unfortunately, the alternative is to not innovate government procedures at all.
My hope is that Google is creating/pushing generic access APIs for the current electronic stores of public information, so that anyone can write a search engine (or tool) for it. As much as Google's been disappointing me lately by their new "be juts a little evil" policy, they're probably the guys to do that. Unfortunately, I'm not clear from the article.
We already have. It's just that only people with lots of money or time or government support can reasonably collate the information.
Your current expectations of privacy reflect a misconception that obscurity is somehow the same thing as privacy. It's not and never was. This effort will draw a clear line between what's private and what isn't and correct any misconceptions.
I don't know if I agree with you. If it's public, everyone should have access. If it shouldn't be public, it should be taken out of the searchable network. Either way, this gets all the cards on the table.
By and large, I do think anything the government tracks, short of an active investigation, should be available publically. Transparency is an important check; I wish we had it now with the current administration.
If you're concerned about embarrassing or damaging information being fossilized in public records, don't do anything embarrassing or damaging in public. It really is that simple.
If it's a public benefit to everyone, that's pretty much what taxes are for, yes. I'd much sooner see my tax dollars go to a public information network than corporate favoritism.
In practice, I suspect those admin/handling fees were pulled straight out of someone's rear as "what's the maximum they won't object to?" rather than reflecting any real cost. They're only unreasonable after they've been declared so in court.
We've always maintained this weird security-through-obscurity dichotomy with public records. Technically the information is available to everyone by law, but it's such a pain to get it that nobody bothers
This has given people a false sense of security when it comes to government data collation. I don't think most people realize just how much public information this out there that anyone with a few bucks and who knows who to ask can see it. On the flip side, it means there's almost no public benefit from the government keeping the information because it can't be easily collated by a private citizen.
This is the best thing that could happen--let's dump it all out on the net and make it easy to see someone's entire public record. Let's go for complete transparency and let public information really be public information. If the government really is overreaching, the outrage should be enough to throttle them back. And maybe they aren't; maybe this really is in the public interest. Now we can find out. Either way, it's going to force a resolution.
On another positive side note, this'll also gut the cottage ripoff industry that's grown around public records research. You shouldn't have to pay some PI wannabe $$ to walk across the street and meet his records-room friend at the Capitol.
Search for "sunlamp vitamin d" on Google, and you'll find information just as authoritative, if not more, than what you'll get off Slashdot. Short answer, yeah, they sure -claim- to stimulate Vitamin D production.
Re: the your last paragraph, all I can tell you is that my ability to properly triage long-term goals has risen exponentially with age and experience. Personally, I'd go out of my way to get the proper UV exposure, and failing that, I'd supplement. Your body is plainly built to require it, whatever the cancer link is.
And speaking as someone who is having both a parent and a good friend go through chemo, the downside if you lose that "pretty good treatment" bet of yours is notable.
Well, that's the thing. I wouldn't -buy- DRM'd files, and I do rip my CDs to MP3 for all of your reasons But I'm already paying for the service as a music audition service, so I don't lose anything by also having the ability to play the files off-computer.
If there was someone who, for $10 a month, would legally give me all the un-DRM'd MP3s I wanted out of 10000+ albums, I'd probably go with them instead. Until then, this is the best thing running.
I think was modded down unfairly. I've been a Rhapsody subscriber since the launch of the service, and I'm extremely happy with it for all the reasons listed. In fact, I'm strongly considering switching from iPod to Zen Vision to get the To Go service.
"I think that we can agree that this man is the best person to be head of Apple."
No previous state implied.
I don't think any of the releases have suggested online multiplayer would be a downloadable content item. I think the article was just trollishly and confusingly referring to the Xbox Live fee.
It's a little late now, but the real problem is how you picked your email aliases. Start them all with the same prefix. Like, if I'm wordplay@foozle.com (I'm not, btw, so don't mail me), I might use wp-paypal@foozle.com, wp-ebay@foozle.com, etc. Then I can filter anything that's not addressed to wordplay or wp-*.
Movie rating enforcement is voluntary by the industry (theaters and studios).
There's a huge difference between the industry voluntarily rating themselves and passing a law such that the government does it for them.
Voluntary rating is done mostly in response to market forces; if Mom and Dad mistakenly let little Timmy in to see -Last Tango in Paris- because it looks "artsy", they get pissy and quit seeing movies. So, the studios warn Mom and Dad that the movie is at least one stick of butter away from being appropriate for little Timmy. While the ratings themselves are oddly prioritized IMO, movie ratings are undeniably a valuable service to parents. Otherwise, parents would have to preview everything.
Ditto video games. Voluntary ratings are a good thing there too, since it lets parents make some basic decisions about game content without having to actually pre-buy and pre-play the game itself.
Personally, I wouldn't mind seeing the comics industry self-rate, for much the same reason. It's a medium with a large crossover between adult and juvenile audiences (and a strong public perception of being largely juvenile, though that's untrue). All comic shops I've seen separate out the truly adult content, but there's a lot of hard-R content remaining in Vertigo, Marvel MAX, Wildstorm, and the independents. Even the ostensibly all-ages titles are pretty PG-13 nowadays.
But for the government to step in and tell us what's OK...that's different. One is the industry saying "warning, this may upset parents if their kids see it" and the other is saying "you can't have this because We know better." The Constitution protects us from the latter.
Yeah. Smash Bros is going that route, which I think is a smart one. Once there are a couple of high-profile games that do that, perhaps more companies will consider it an option. Right now, I suspect they would view it as losing the one differentiating factor for that game.
Except that by and large, the Wii interface decisions aren't very good. There are a small handful of games that use the interface uniquely and very well (SSX, WarioWare, Trauma Center, Elebits, etc.) and a handful that use it unimaginatively, but well (racing and FPS games). The rest--and particularly the cross-platform ones--graft awkward gestures onto a traditional interface.
The problem with the Wii controllers are that they're -so- suited for their element that once you take them out and try to do a traditional setup on them, they kind of suck. There aren't enough buttons, what there are are weirdly placed, and they're all the same color and size in a cluster. It's kind of an ergonomic disaster...until you play a nice 1st party game with a Wii-specific interface. Then they're awesome.
So yeah, cross-platform is going to be a killer. With the control issues and the musclepower issues, count on them almost universally sucking on the Wii unless someone does a platform-specific spinoff (e.g. Spider-Man 3)
I think the Wii is an excellent second console, just like the GameCube was. But it's not going to keep up as a primary console. There are just too many compromises.
First, if I show you something at 50FPS, but every frame is duplicated (your above analogy) I'm really showing you something at 25FPS with no duplication. Think about it.
Second, that's not how interlacing works. Interlacing works like (assuming 25FPS movement on 50FPS interlace):
tv frame 0: text at position x
tv frame 1: text at position x
(text logically updates to x - 1, waiting for display)
tv frame 2: half of text at position x - 1 (every 2nd horizontal line moves)
tv frame 3: rest of text at position x - 1
(text logically updates to x - 2)
tv frame 4: half of text at position x - 2
tv frame 5: rest of text at position x - 2
It's the half-the-text moving at a time (the interlace) that you're noticing. What you're referring to, I think, is the extra frames that get put in when you make a 24FPS movie run at 25FPS or 30FPS. That's compensated for in most DVD players and TVs by 3:2 pulldown.