Correct me if I'm wrong, but if a doctor killed their patient somehow, wouldn't that be a wrongful death and not a malpractice claim? If so, claim limitations from this law would not apply.
Besides, I'm not sure a 401k wouldn't be considered "lost earnings" anyway.
People have been saying that since this whole thing started. But think about it: anybody who got in when it started is rich now.
You don't have to believe in the company to invest. You don't even have to believe they will win their lawsuits. All you have to believe is that others are going to invest after you do and take a chance of getting out at the right time. It might be too late now, but if it's still going up, maybe not.
I agree that judges should clamp down harder, especially when it is fairly clear that parties are stalling.
However, the reason we have so many lawsuits, at least as a constitutional law teacher back in high school explained, is the 7th amendment which reads: "In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law."
He, at least, reads this to mean that people have a constitutional right to file lawsuits. If this is indeed the case--I can't quote precedent because I never asked him to, but he was quite a brilliant guy who could always quote cases off the top of his head--then what people want, even judges and legislators, wouldn't mean a lot.
The problem with throwing out frivolous lawsuits is that you have to determine they're frivolous, and that of course means in the legal sense. For example with the SCO matters they are alledging things that they have the right to claim damages for so the judge has to persue it. And even if, say, SCO stalled long enough that the judge dismissed the case, they would almost certainly dismiss it without prejudice, meaning that SCO could file the same suit again and begin anew.
It's tough. I'm sick of the lawsuits too. What I honestly think needs to change for them to stop is the greed. Even if you are legally right to sue a homeowner who did not keep the sidewalk in front of their house shoveled, or the store who forgot to put a "Wet Floor" sign out after mopping, doesn't mean you should run off to find an attorney. As long as that is a person's first instinct, we'll have this problem.
Stress is created by improper management of things. Manage your time improperly, and you will have stress. Manage your employees improperly, and you will have stress. Manage your technology improperly, or your projects improperly, and you will have stress.
You're certainly not wrong in saying those things create stress, but I think it might be too simple of a view. For instance, I might manage my time perfectly, but a co-worker might not. What if we're on a project together? Or instead of me being the boss and not managing employees well, what if MY boss doesn't manage ME and fellow employees well? Both situations are likely to create stress and are largely out of your control. You can quit, or transfer, of course; or see if you can get a co-worker reassigned or talk to him and hope he picks up the slack and a million other possibilities, but they are not always workable.
Similarly, with technology, things essentially out of my control can be stressful. I might be doing everything exactly right and find my hard drive has died on me. That's stressful, even if I have the money to buy a new one and even if all my data was backed up 20 minutes before.
As for the original question or whether or not technology creates stress, I think it does much more for people who don't enjoy technology. For instance the computer programmer or systems engineer would surely find a lot of stressing problems in their work, but they probably enjoy the hunt for them. A secretary trying to use a scheduling program that keeps crashing is going to feel even more stress. Not only will she feel the stress of the program not working and her not being able to get her work done, but she may well feel the stress of helplessness, knowing she can't do anything to fix the problem except call technical support and pray.
So yes, I think technology can create stress. It can also reduce it by making previously time-consuming tasks much simpler; spreadsheets come instantly to mind. Easier to balance a check book or a budget with a spreadsheet than doing the math by hand. Likewise, electronic databases of information are more conveinient for the average person than having to head to the library to examine books on the subject.
In short, it depends on who you are, what you're using it for and mostly, your comfort level with what you're doing.
You gamble with your child's life when you buy a house, drive him/her somewhere, buy food, check to see if he is ill, put him to bed, take him to the zoo, etc.
There are risks in everything in life, that does not make them dangerous. Buying food is hardly on the level of knowingly disabling a device that you know can cost you your life or well being. Buying a house, checking if a child is ill or putting them to bed are hardly the same either. It is more akin to taking the battery out of your smoke detector--and how many have died who might have lived if working detectors were installed?
Driving is certainly dangerous, I give you that. But driving is considerably more necessary than an untraceable phone. No, you don't have to go to the zoo or to Florida for vacation, but you DO have to get to work and school and home and the store and any number of other places that would simply be a direct, major impact on your life if they had to be cut out or relocated. If you throw in recreation as a necessary, it becomes that much more so.
But here is the bottom line as I see it: 911 location services are not a bad thing, they save lives. There is the potential for abuse--there is the potential for abuse anywhere--but in this case I think the risks are reasonable for the benefits. Legally speaking (although I am not a lawyer), I would draw it up this way: A person has a reasonable expectation of privacy when they are on the phone, so I would object to any ability of government to use this sort of a system to pinpoint anybody (I'm not even a huge fan of line traces or wiretaps on land lines); however, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy, regarding your location, when you are in danger or under direst such that you need to call 911 in the first place. Your expectation is that somebody--police, fire or ambulance--is going to come to your aide at your location.
Due vigilance in the way government and law enforcement can operate is always prudent and I support it. However in this situation, I don't think trying to get rid of (or prevent creation of) a valuable system is the right response.
I've posted a similar reply elsewhere, but will do so again:
Let's say you're a big privacy advocate, and so you choose to go with a service that does not provide 911 location. Your company tells you. You're fully aware of it and you're fine with it. And you have a child.
If something happens for want of that service, and the child dies, who is to blame? The parent? Yep. Should they be thrown in jail for endangerment? Maybe. And yet for whatever reasons they chose the untraceable service, they are now alive and their child is now dead.
Unrealistic? Maybe, but then again most people I've seen have not argued against the usefulness of the 911 location service so there must be examples of where it helps to save lives.
Somebody else I saw gave the example of going to a friend's house and something happening and them without the location service. Same idea.
If your decisions affected only you, I would say choose away; your life if you want to gamble with it. But this decision, at least, has the potential to affect others and I don't think you should be permitted to gamble with your child's life.
If they choose a VoIP provider without 911 then it's their problem (or perhaps they use it as a second line and have 911 on their POTS).
Whose problem is it when a parent choose a non-911 VOIP provider to save a few pennies (dollars even) and their child dies because of lack of that service in an emergency? Yes, we can blame the parent, but it is the child--who probably didn't even have any input into the situation--who suffers the consequences.
It's easy to say that people can make their own decisions about their lives and usually I agree, but it is not always as cut and dry as "everybody can choose, let's not regulate."
There is no problem with linux acceptance. I defy you to show me one, or to even prove that such acceptance is necessary to me.
Okay, I'm sorry, but that is just funny. You defy me to show you a problem -- but just incase I manage to do so it's not important to you anyway? Please. You want illustration of a problem with people accepting linux? Just look at market share. Linux is not widely accepted whether you want it to be or not. And yes, Microsoft is a monopoly; and yes, Microsoft utilizes its massive market share to squash competition; and yes, to all of that stuff you are likely to spout about how evil MS is. I agree. But it doesn't change the facts.
It's funny how to me, it is you who come off sounding like a zealot.
Maybe because you don't know what the word zealot means. I have no cause to trumpet here. I run Windows on my laptop, I run linux on my desktop. I personally favor the latter and keep the former around for compatabiltiy issues with friends and family.
However pissing off people or not is way way down on the list of concerns for most of us then actually making sure that our system of free software stands on firm legal ground and is protected.
Hey, I'm all for free software. I am not much of a programmer, certainly nobody who would be effected by whether or not driver source was released, but I also wish Intel would have released the source for their linux drivers--just out of principle. But I am not going to shove them back in Intel's face and tell them what they're willing to give me isn't good enough.
Do you believe that if they were taken to court and lost, that Intel would release the source? I bet not. I bet that they have already made a conscious decision to not release their source. An adverse ruling, if folks could even attain one, would only make them angry, would only make them pack up their bags and go. If you really think that is how open source is best served, more power to you. I don't. I find more possibilities in cooperation rather than spitting in somebody's face when they try to do something that would help me.
This is part of the problem with linux and linux acceptance. There are always zealots who are not happy with what they get. Intel is offering these people linux drivers and their response is to say they're not legal?
For that matter I don't even agree. I can't imagine any court upholding that writing a driver for an operating system must comply with the OS's licenses.
Pick your battles folks. Pissing off potential allies is never a good practice even if you're right.
People chipping away at civil liberties is always a concern and something we should be vigilant of.
I do wonder though: If you agree with me (that the police had reasonable suspicion), why the concern over the Supreme Court creating a new and expanded meaning? It seems they will either affirm the meaning under which he was arrested or reverse themselves and find in favor of expanded privacy.
The Supreme Court has made a number of decisions I don't agree with one way or another, but I think they do a fair job of balancing justice and privacy. I'm more concerned with Bush and Ashcroft legislating away our privacy, personally.
Unless I missed something (and I did RTFA and WTFM-Watched the fine movie) they didn't know who he was. And they never asked.
Actually I admit I did not RTFA--at least not the one linked. It was slashdotted by the time I got to it. However, I did find another link in the comments which I scanned over. The link was http://www.epic.org/privacy/hiibel/default.html.
Of particular note to me,
A Humboldt Country sheriff's deputy
responded to a concerned bystander's phone call reporting that a man had struck a female passenger inside a truck. The officer arrived on the scene and was directed by the citizen to Hiibel standing next to a parked truck with his daughter inside. The officer observed skid marks which led him to believe that the truck had been pulled over "in a sudden and aggressive manner." After speaking to Hiibel and observing his behavior, the officer became suspicious that Hiibel might have been driving while intoxicated. Hiibel refused eleven times to provide identification and was subsequently arrested under Nevada Revised Statute 171.123(3), which allows an officer to detain a person to ascertain his identity when there are circumstances reasonably indicating that person has committed a crime.
(Emphasis is mine.)
Maybe our only hang up here is what was meant by "had an idea who he was." I did not mean to imply that they knew his name, but rather that they knew he was the suspect in the crime that had been reported.
They didn't ask his name, they were going to verify name by identification. I think what the Supreme Court is going to clarify is where reasonable suspicion has been met. The Nevada law permits an officer with such suspicion to "ascertain [the suspect's] identity." To me, ascertain says ID check if it is available. I think the ruling will come down on whether or not somebody being pointed out as a potential participant in a crime is reasonable suspicion.
The situations are not the same. If your story goes as described, you were walking down the street and were stopped. There was no reasonable suspicion.
However, in the story, the officer was called by a bystander who saw a fight. The officer was motioned over to the man and his wife(?) as the people who were fighting. That creates the reasonable suspicion to ask for identification. He wasn't picked randomly off the street.
I'm sensitive about civil rights, but I think this one is a non-issue. I'd be much more concerned about other post-9/11 infringements of privacy such as the Patriot Act.
Boy, this is one of the saddest posts I have ever seen.
It's their job to identify you, not vice versa.
It is your job to comply with the requests of the police officer. In most states, and evidently the one in question, it is an arrestable offense to refuse to give your name to a police officer. He refused and he was arrested.
and from the moment I'm not free to leave, you're going to know nothing about me except the name and phone number of my attorney.
No. From the moment you're not free to leave you're only going to give the name and phone number of your attorney. Once they arrest your ass for obstruction, they will search you and find the wallet with that ID you refused to hand over in the first place; you know, the one that could have saved you arrest had you truly not been the person they were looking for.
Remember the whole presumption of innocence doctrine?
You are presumed innocent. That does not mean you are presumed not to be the person they're looking for unless they can prove differently. The one link I can get to right now provides no information, but obviously the police officer had some sort of information on the man--maybe a description, maybe a license plate, maybe somebody pointed right at him and said "that's him." Fitting a description provides the officer with reasonable suspicion, and reasonable suspicion is justification enough to ask for the presentation of identification.
If they don't have an idea who you are, they have no business accusing you of being the person they suspect.
They had an idea of who he was. They walked right up to him. They simply asked for his ID to ensure he was who they thought to SAVE AN INCONVEINIENCE for the person in case they were wrong. What a crime. If he wasn't who they were looking for, they would have tipped their hat, apologized for wasting the man's time and been on their way. If he WAS who they were looking for, he would still be presumed innocent of the crimes he is accused of. He would likely be arrested and brought before a court to determine his guilt or innocence. Arrest does not mean guilt.
I don't think you'd be happy living in a military dictatorship.
What the hell kind of bullshit is that? Nowhere did the word "military" or "dictatorship" enter into anything. And you do realize that slippery slope crap is a logic error, right? Unless you have evidence that allowing one thing will allow the other, then you're just a fool spouting off without any sense of reality. Then again you did post as AC, so I shouldn't be surprised that you are.
Yet then he claims that a spammer's costs are zero. What about their computers? Email addresses? Bandwidth? Hard drive space? Those certainly aren't less costly than the same types of resources for each individual recipient.
That depends on who your spammer is. If it is a firm somewhere that actually spams to bring in revenue, then I agree. However, if the spammer is somebody who, say, signed up to some affiliate program, or even a shady business enterprise, or was simply promised money to help deliver these spams for whomever, I don't agree.
Why? Because while their computers and Internet access certainly cost them money, I sincerely doubt most of those people bought their computers and 'Net access to spam. If you object to the statement that their costs are zero, you can instead think of it as a "what do I have to lose?" Set up some spam to fire before you go to bed, see if you've made any money in the morning. People probably don't make much, if anything, but it is essentially free money to them. I don't mean to imply that the spammers aren't tech-savvy or anything, some are, simply that most didn't buy their setup to spam; they just found that to be an advantage. As far as costs of email addresses and hard drive space for the spammer, these are nearly non-existant. Open relays and/or legitimate free email accounts make that cost nothing and unless the spammer is stupid enough to save a copy of every spam he sends to every person, storage space is minimal as well. If they have a list of email addresses the cost of hard drive space increases, but hard drive space is hardly costly nowadays. Even a 500 meg file of email addresses nowadays isn't that big a strain.
As for those spam firms, they are likely the ones who are going to be conforming with recent spam laws and are the most likely to get caught. Increasingly I think that sort of spam will be easy to filter away if the government actually enforces the laws. It's the "little guy" hiding behind proxies in China that is going to give the biggest headache.
I wonder if there is too much absoluteness to all sides of the argument. Nobody likes fence-sitting; it pisses off people on both sides who can't understand why a decision isn't made one way or another.
Perhaps the problem is that view is too simplistic. It shouldn't be unreasonable for a company to, as you say, expound on the virtues of open source while at the same time saying that open source is great, but in our circumstance, it's not the best solution for Java.
I like open source. I like the principles and of course I have taken advantage myself. And yet, if I were a commercial software developer, I don't know that I would release under an open source license. Money CAN be made with open source, I have no doubt of that, but I question whether the same amount of money can be made in the same timeframe with the same ease. Good arguments exist on both sides, but we seem to believe only one of them can be right. One may be right in one situation and not in another. I think perhaps we just need to let people, companies especially, decide what is right for them for themselves.
It's an interesting idea, and it definitely has the possibility to, as you say, slip through. The question I have is, is that legal? If it came right down to it and they demanded possession of your work based on a clause you had crossed out and you ended up in a court fight, would you come out on top?
need to be introduced to the system, and with the vast majority of people being the grandmother type with some knowledge of Windows, this isnt going to be as spectacularly easy as most people on here think it will be.
--strikes me funny. I'm not attempting to troll or anything here, but how much knowledge of Windows (or ANY) OS does the average Thai have? If it is true that most Thai people still find the cost of a computer to be too high their experience might be nonexistant, even if the cost to grab XP illegal off the street is extremely low. An OS doesn't do much good without a computer to run it on.
The rest can certainly be problems. Linux on average doesn't seem to work as well out of the box as a Windows distribution (and yes, I know about things like Knoppix and they work alright), so that's something to take into account.
Then again all our programming jobs are going that way anyway. Maybe they'll make linux for the desktop truly boom.;)
This may very well be because the developers were more familiar with Windows as opposed to MacOS, but was it the better decision?
I don't think that's the reason. There are a lot of people in the *nix communities who balk at making anything work like Windows. They're certainly not wrong; Windows is not perfect by far stretch and it would be nice to be able to make a better product.
At the same time, there is an equally large group of people who want to expand the linux userbase to desktop machines, and they will argue that the nearer it looks and works to Windows--in short, the smaller the learning curve is--the more willing the average person will be to adopting it. They are also not wrong.
Basically what the best decision is depends on what side of the argument you fall on. Is your goal attracting Windows users to *nix or making the most efficient GUI possible? (And for the record, I suspect "the most efficient" will be something that is not entirely any current system.)
We're quibbling over 10% instead of 12.5% now? Looks like just another excuse to bitch about the posters to me.
I remember reading in the FAQs here once something along the lines of "if you can't be insightful, be funny." I guess that has been degraded to "if you can't be insightful, bitch and moan about the people who actually contributed."
I've heard "English units" all of MY life and all throughout school. Whether or not it is technically right it is easy for people to understand since the US is one of few countries not using the metric system.
I really don't see where he mentioned media, but...
No media should be "trusted" to the extent that anything you hear you believe. It would be nice if all the news agencies had that sort of integrity, but enough don't--liberal and conservative--that we have to be wary.
However, the cries of foul about media coverage isn't because it "reports something that they dislike," it is because they twist things from what they were into what they want to report. A prime example just turned up regarding the RNC Chairman and the Drudge Report when they attempted to slander Wes Clark and kill his political run by taking his quotes out of context so badly they changed the entire meaning. In fact, they were taken so out of context that between the sets of ellipses in the quotes was 11,500 words. Feel free to read the article yourself. Or if you're untrusting of that article, you can read the transcript yourself. Ordinarily I'd be pissed at the Drudge Report and little more, but the big problem is that other news agencies, in this case The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, reported what Druge said as fact. Oopsie?
You're right that some people will cry "conservative!" when they do things like that. In a reverse situation others might shout "liberal!" But the bottom line is there are a distortion or deliberate twisting of the facts involved. That shouldn't be tolerated. If they report something PROPERLY, it should be embraced, regardless of whether or not one agrees.
Re:IPv6 is MUCH more than a replacement for IPv4
on
The State of IPv6
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· Score: 1
True, but I don't think that will carry over into the world of IP-enabled toasters and other devices for two basic reasons. The first is pressure, both from consumers who want to be able to communicate with their toaster from work and from the toaster makers who want to sell that ability to begin with. The second reason is really one of logic. Ostensibly the reason for not permitting servers is traffic management; that is, web servers, FTP servers and the like have the ability to end up sucking huge amounts of bandwidth. Even if you're supposedly guaranteed an upstream, you are still sucking bandwidth from the ISP's WAN lines. That, at least, is a somewhat valid argument. But how much bandwidth could a toaster really suck? You tell it when to start and stop; it could probably be done with little noticeable lag over a 56k modem.
Of course, none of this is IPv6's problem. IPv6 enables a lot of things, the consumer market will ultimately demand which take hold.
Actually I consider this not the fault of the lawyers, but of the legal system. If I were the judge in this case, I would have given SCO until I finished my lunch to produce evidence or I would had dismissed the case with prejudice.
Okay, okay, maybe not that quick, but not months either. IBM might get months--they are the respondent to the claims--but if the petitioner doesn't know what he is petitioning the court for the minute he walks in, he's not going to receive my sympathy. If they "know" there is infringement, they should "know" where what they consider infringement occurs. They should be able to pull this "they're infringing but I don't know how or where yet, may I have a look at all of their code please?" bullcrap.
The lawyers are doing their job. Unfortunately because of convoluded and protracted legal processes, they're increasingly necessary for even what seems to be the simplest action.
I think it would only take a handful of authoratative judges to turn things around. Same thing on the other side of the legal spectrum, with Michael Jackson's case. He wants to waltz in 20 minutes late because he was standing on his taxi waving to his fans? Great. He can spend the next 20 minutes bitching as he writes out a check to pay a fine for contempt.
They have terms and conditions people automatically agree to when they use TurnItIn.com
By submitting the paper to begin with, you no doubt agree to the terms you say they have. Writing on your paper, "I had my fingers crossed!" doesn't make a difference. You can't agree to their terms to permit them to do whatver they want and expect them to abide by your terms limiting what they can do. You've already agreed to their terms and theirs supercede yours.
Now if, on the other hand, you gave the paper to a friend to look over with a clause that they could not do anything to make money from it, and they did, your terms would seem to apply.
The gray area is who sbumits your paper. If you do yourself and the profs check it from the service, see paragraph 1. If you give it to the teacher who puts it throw the system, you have an issue: Did you explicitly agree to permitting your professor to do that? If not, it seems your professor would be the one in violation of your terms, not TurnItIn.com. If you did give explicit permission, then you have essentially waved your terms.
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that's how it would go.
Slashdot Mirror
Correct me if I'm wrong, but if a doctor killed their patient somehow, wouldn't that be a wrongful death and not a malpractice claim? If so, claim limitations from this law would not apply.
Besides, I'm not sure a 401k wouldn't be considered "lost earnings" anyway.
How? What idiot would buy stock now?
People have been saying that since this whole thing started. But think about it: anybody who got in when it started is rich now.
You don't have to believe in the company to invest. You don't even have to believe they will win their lawsuits. All you have to believe is that others are going to invest after you do and take a chance of getting out at the right time. It might be too late now, but if it's still going up, maybe not.
I agree that judges should clamp down harder, especially when it is fairly clear that parties are stalling.
However, the reason we have so many lawsuits, at least as a constitutional law teacher back in high school explained, is the 7th amendment which reads: "In suits at common law, where the value in controversy shall exceed twenty dollars, the right of trial by jury shall be preserved, and no fact tried by a jury, shall be otherwise reexamined in any court of the United States, than according to the rules of the common law."
He, at least, reads this to mean that people have a constitutional right to file lawsuits. If this is indeed the case--I can't quote precedent because I never asked him to, but he was quite a brilliant guy who could always quote cases off the top of his head--then what people want, even judges and legislators, wouldn't mean a lot.
The problem with throwing out frivolous lawsuits is that you have to determine they're frivolous, and that of course means in the legal sense. For example with the SCO matters they are alledging things that they have the right to claim damages for so the judge has to persue it. And even if, say, SCO stalled long enough that the judge dismissed the case, they would almost certainly dismiss it without prejudice, meaning that SCO could file the same suit again and begin anew.
It's tough. I'm sick of the lawsuits too. What I honestly think needs to change for them to stop is the greed. Even if you are legally right to sue a homeowner who did not keep the sidewalk in front of their house shoveled, or the store who forgot to put a "Wet Floor" sign out after mopping, doesn't mean you should run off to find an attorney. As long as that is a person's first instinct, we'll have this problem.
Stress is created by improper management of things. Manage your time improperly, and you will have stress. Manage your employees improperly, and you will have stress. Manage your technology improperly, or your projects improperly, and you will have stress.
You're certainly not wrong in saying those things create stress, but I think it might be too simple of a view. For instance, I might manage my time perfectly, but a co-worker might not. What if we're on a project together? Or instead of me being the boss and not managing employees well, what if MY boss doesn't manage ME and fellow employees well? Both situations are likely to create stress and are largely out of your control. You can quit, or transfer, of course; or see if you can get a co-worker reassigned or talk to him and hope he picks up the slack and a million other possibilities, but they are not always workable.
Similarly, with technology, things essentially out of my control can be stressful. I might be doing everything exactly right and find my hard drive has died on me. That's stressful, even if I have the money to buy a new one and even if all my data was backed up 20 minutes before.
As for the original question or whether or not technology creates stress, I think it does much more for people who don't enjoy technology. For instance the computer programmer or systems engineer would surely find a lot of stressing problems in their work, but they probably enjoy the hunt for them. A secretary trying to use a scheduling program that keeps crashing is going to feel even more stress. Not only will she feel the stress of the program not working and her not being able to get her work done, but she may well feel the stress of helplessness, knowing she can't do anything to fix the problem except call technical support and pray.
So yes, I think technology can create stress. It can also reduce it by making previously time-consuming tasks much simpler; spreadsheets come instantly to mind. Easier to balance a check book or a budget with a spreadsheet than doing the math by hand. Likewise, electronic databases of information are more conveinient for the average person than having to head to the library to examine books on the subject.
In short, it depends on who you are, what you're using it for and mostly, your comfort level with what you're doing.
You gamble with your child's life when you buy a house, drive him/her somewhere, buy food, check to see if he is ill, put him to bed, take him to the zoo, etc.
There are risks in everything in life, that does not make them dangerous. Buying food is hardly on the level of knowingly disabling a device that you know can cost you your life or well being. Buying a house, checking if a child is ill or putting them to bed are hardly the same either. It is more akin to taking the battery out of your smoke detector--and how many have died who might have lived if working detectors were installed?
Driving is certainly dangerous, I give you that. But driving is considerably more necessary than an untraceable phone. No, you don't have to go to the zoo or to Florida for vacation, but you DO have to get to work and school and home and the store and any number of other places that would simply be a direct, major impact on your life if they had to be cut out or relocated. If you throw in recreation as a necessary, it becomes that much more so.
But here is the bottom line as I see it: 911 location services are not a bad thing, they save lives. There is the potential for abuse--there is the potential for abuse anywhere--but in this case I think the risks are reasonable for the benefits. Legally speaking (although I am not a lawyer), I would draw it up this way: A person has a reasonable expectation of privacy when they are on the phone, so I would object to any ability of government to use this sort of a system to pinpoint anybody (I'm not even a huge fan of line traces or wiretaps on land lines); however, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy, regarding your location, when you are in danger or under direst such that you need to call 911 in the first place. Your expectation is that somebody--police, fire or ambulance--is going to come to your aide at your location.
Due vigilance in the way government and law enforcement can operate is always prudent and I support it. However in this situation, I don't think trying to get rid of (or prevent creation of) a valuable system is the right response.
I've posted a similar reply elsewhere, but will do so again:
Let's say you're a big privacy advocate, and so you choose to go with a service that does not provide 911 location. Your company tells you. You're fully aware of it and you're fine with it. And you have a child.
If something happens for want of that service, and the child dies, who is to blame? The parent? Yep. Should they be thrown in jail for endangerment? Maybe. And yet for whatever reasons they chose the untraceable service, they are now alive and their child is now dead.
Unrealistic? Maybe, but then again most people I've seen have not argued against the usefulness of the 911 location service so there must be examples of where it helps to save lives.
Somebody else I saw gave the example of going to a friend's house and something happening and them without the location service. Same idea.
If your decisions affected only you, I would say choose away; your life if you want to gamble with it. But this decision, at least, has the potential to affect others and I don't think you should be permitted to gamble with your child's life.
If they choose a VoIP provider without 911 then it's their problem (or perhaps they use it as a second line and have 911 on their POTS).
Whose problem is it when a parent choose a non-911 VOIP provider to save a few pennies (dollars even) and their child dies because of lack of that service in an emergency? Yes, we can blame the parent, but it is the child--who probably didn't even have any input into the situation--who suffers the consequences.
It's easy to say that people can make their own decisions about their lives and usually I agree, but it is not always as cut and dry as "everybody can choose, let's not regulate."
There is no problem with linux acceptance. I defy you to show me one, or to even prove that such acceptance is necessary to me.
Okay, I'm sorry, but that is just funny. You defy me to show you a problem -- but just incase I manage to do so it's not important to you anyway? Please. You want illustration of a problem with people accepting linux? Just look at market share. Linux is not widely accepted whether you want it to be or not. And yes, Microsoft is a monopoly; and yes, Microsoft utilizes its massive market share to squash competition; and yes, to all of that stuff you are likely to spout about how evil MS is. I agree. But it doesn't change the facts.
It's funny how to me, it is you who come off sounding like a zealot.
Maybe because you don't know what the word zealot means. I have no cause to trumpet here. I run Windows on my laptop, I run linux on my desktop. I personally favor the latter and keep the former around for compatabiltiy issues with friends and family.
However pissing off people or not is way way down on the list of concerns for most of us then actually making sure that our system of free software stands on firm legal ground and is protected.
Hey, I'm all for free software. I am not much of a programmer, certainly nobody who would be effected by whether or not driver source was released, but I also wish Intel would have released the source for their linux drivers--just out of principle. But I am not going to shove them back in Intel's face and tell them what they're willing to give me isn't good enough.
Do you believe that if they were taken to court and lost, that Intel would release the source? I bet not. I bet that they have already made a conscious decision to not release their source. An adverse ruling, if folks could even attain one, would only make them angry, would only make them pack up their bags and go. If you really think that is how open source is best served, more power to you. I don't. I find more possibilities in cooperation rather than spitting in somebody's face when they try to do something that would help me.
This is part of the problem with linux and linux acceptance. There are always zealots who are not happy with what they get. Intel is offering these people linux drivers and their response is to say they're not legal?
For that matter I don't even agree. I can't imagine any court upholding that writing a driver for an operating system must comply with the OS's licenses.
Pick your battles folks. Pissing off potential allies is never a good practice even if you're right.
People chipping away at civil liberties is always a concern and something we should be vigilant of.
I do wonder though: If you agree with me (that the police had reasonable suspicion), why the concern over the Supreme Court creating a new and expanded meaning? It seems they will either affirm the meaning under which he was arrested or reverse themselves and find in favor of expanded privacy.
The Supreme Court has made a number of decisions I don't agree with one way or another, but I think they do a fair job of balancing justice and privacy. I'm more concerned with Bush and Ashcroft legislating away our privacy, personally.
Unless I missed something (and I did RTFA and WTFM-Watched the fine movie) they didn't know who he was. And they never asked.
Actually I admit I did not RTFA--at least not the one linked. It was slashdotted by the time I got to it. However, I did find another link in the comments which I scanned over. The link was http://www.epic.org/privacy/hiibel/default.html.
Of particular note to me,
(Emphasis is mine.)
Maybe our only hang up here is what was meant by "had an idea who he was." I did not mean to imply that they knew his name, but rather that they knew he was the suspect in the crime that had been reported.
They didn't ask his name, they were going to verify name by identification. I think what the Supreme Court is going to clarify is where reasonable suspicion has been met. The Nevada law permits an officer with such suspicion to "ascertain [the suspect's] identity." To me, ascertain says ID check if it is available. I think the ruling will come down on whether or not somebody being pointed out as a potential participant in a crime is reasonable suspicion.
The situations are not the same. If your story goes as described, you were walking down the street and were stopped. There was no reasonable suspicion.
However, in the story, the officer was called by a bystander who saw a fight. The officer was motioned over to the man and his wife(?) as the people who were fighting. That creates the reasonable suspicion to ask for identification. He wasn't picked randomly off the street.
I'm sensitive about civil rights, but I think this one is a non-issue. I'd be much more concerned about other post-9/11 infringements of privacy such as the Patriot Act.
Boy, this is one of the saddest posts I have ever seen.
It's their job to identify you, not vice versa.
It is your job to comply with the requests of the police officer. In most states, and evidently the one in question, it is an arrestable offense to refuse to give your name to a police officer. He refused and he was arrested.
and from the moment I'm not free to leave, you're going to know nothing about me except the name and phone number of my attorney.
No. From the moment you're not free to leave you're only going to give the name and phone number of your attorney. Once they arrest your ass for obstruction, they will search you and find the wallet with that ID you refused to hand over in the first place; you know, the one that could have saved you arrest had you truly not been the person they were looking for.
Remember the whole presumption of innocence doctrine?
You are presumed innocent. That does not mean you are presumed not to be the person they're looking for unless they can prove differently. The one link I can get to right now provides no information, but obviously the police officer had some sort of information on the man--maybe a description, maybe a license plate, maybe somebody pointed right at him and said "that's him." Fitting a description provides the officer with reasonable suspicion, and reasonable suspicion is justification enough to ask for the presentation of identification.
If they don't have an idea who you are, they have no business accusing you of being the person they suspect.
They had an idea of who he was. They walked right up to him. They simply asked for his ID to ensure he was who they thought to SAVE AN INCONVEINIENCE for the person in case they were wrong. What a crime. If he wasn't who they were looking for, they would have tipped their hat, apologized for wasting the man's time and been on their way. If he WAS who they were looking for, he would still be presumed innocent of the crimes he is accused of. He would likely be arrested and brought before a court to determine his guilt or innocence. Arrest does not mean guilt.
I don't think you'd be happy living in a military dictatorship.
What the hell kind of bullshit is that? Nowhere did the word "military" or "dictatorship" enter into anything. And you do realize that slippery slope crap is a logic error, right? Unless you have evidence that allowing one thing will allow the other, then you're just a fool spouting off without any sense of reality. Then again you did post as AC, so I shouldn't be surprised that you are.
Yet then he claims that a spammer's costs are zero. What about their computers? Email addresses? Bandwidth? Hard drive space? Those certainly aren't less costly than the same types of resources for each individual recipient.
That depends on who your spammer is. If it is a firm somewhere that actually spams to bring in revenue, then I agree. However, if the spammer is somebody who, say, signed up to some affiliate program, or even a shady business enterprise, or was simply promised money to help deliver these spams for whomever, I don't agree.
Why? Because while their computers and Internet access certainly cost them money, I sincerely doubt most of those people bought their computers and 'Net access to spam. If you object to the statement that their costs are zero, you can instead think of it as a "what do I have to lose?" Set up some spam to fire before you go to bed, see if you've made any money in the morning. People probably don't make much, if anything, but it is essentially free money to them. I don't mean to imply that the spammers aren't tech-savvy or anything, some are, simply that most didn't buy their setup to spam; they just found that to be an advantage. As far as costs of email addresses and hard drive space for the spammer, these are nearly non-existant. Open relays and/or legitimate free email accounts make that cost nothing and unless the spammer is stupid enough to save a copy of every spam he sends to every person, storage space is minimal as well. If they have a list of email addresses the cost of hard drive space increases, but hard drive space is hardly costly nowadays. Even a 500 meg file of email addresses nowadays isn't that big a strain.
As for those spam firms, they are likely the ones who are going to be conforming with recent spam laws and are the most likely to get caught. Increasingly I think that sort of spam will be easy to filter away if the government actually enforces the laws. It's the "little guy" hiding behind proxies in China that is going to give the biggest headache.
I wonder if there is too much absoluteness to all sides of the argument. Nobody likes fence-sitting; it pisses off people on both sides who can't understand why a decision isn't made one way or another.
Perhaps the problem is that view is too simplistic. It shouldn't be unreasonable for a company to, as you say, expound on the virtues of open source while at the same time saying that open source is great, but in our circumstance, it's not the best solution for Java.
I like open source. I like the principles and of course I have taken advantage myself. And yet, if I were a commercial software developer, I don't know that I would release under an open source license. Money CAN be made with open source, I have no doubt of that, but I question whether the same amount of money can be made in the same timeframe with the same ease. Good arguments exist on both sides, but we seem to believe only one of them can be right. One may be right in one situation and not in another. I think perhaps we just need to let people, companies especially, decide what is right for them for themselves.
It's an interesting idea, and it definitely has the possibility to, as you say, slip through. The question I have is, is that legal? If it came right down to it and they demanded possession of your work based on a clause you had crossed out and you ended up in a court fight, would you come out on top?
I agree with most of what you say, but this--
need to be introduced to the system, and with the vast majority of people being the grandmother type with some knowledge of Windows, this isnt going to be as spectacularly easy as most people on here think it will be.
--strikes me funny. I'm not attempting to troll or anything here, but how much knowledge of Windows (or ANY) OS does the average Thai have? If it is true that most Thai people still find the cost of a computer to be too high their experience might be nonexistant, even if the cost to grab XP illegal off the street is extremely low. An OS doesn't do much good without a computer to run it on.
The rest can certainly be problems. Linux on average doesn't seem to work as well out of the box as a Windows distribution (and yes, I know about things like Knoppix and they work alright), so that's something to take into account.
Then again all our programming jobs are going that way anyway. Maybe they'll make linux for the desktop truly boom. ;)
This may very well be because the developers were more familiar with Windows as opposed to MacOS, but was it the better decision?
I don't think that's the reason. There are a lot of people in the *nix communities who balk at making anything work like Windows. They're certainly not wrong; Windows is not perfect by far stretch and it would be nice to be able to make a better product.
At the same time, there is an equally large group of people who want to expand the linux userbase to desktop machines, and they will argue that the nearer it looks and works to Windows--in short, the smaller the learning curve is--the more willing the average person will be to adopting it. They are also not wrong.
Basically what the best decision is depends on what side of the argument you fall on. Is your goal attracting Windows users to *nix or making the most efficient GUI possible? (And for the record, I suspect "the most efficient" will be something that is not entirely any current system.)
We're quibbling over 10% instead of 12.5% now? Looks like just another excuse to bitch about the posters to me.
I remember reading in the FAQs here once something along the lines of "if you can't be insightful, be funny." I guess that has been degraded to "if you can't be insightful, bitch and moan about the people who actually contributed."
I've heard "English units" all of MY life and all throughout school. Whether or not it is technically right it is easy for people to understand since the US is one of few countries not using the metric system.
I really don't see where he mentioned media, but...
No media should be "trusted" to the extent that anything you hear you believe. It would be nice if all the news agencies had that sort of integrity, but enough don't--liberal and conservative--that we have to be wary.
However, the cries of foul about media coverage isn't because it "reports something that they dislike," it is because they twist things from what they were into what they want to report. A prime example just turned up regarding the RNC Chairman and the Drudge Report when they attempted to slander Wes Clark and kill his political run by taking his quotes out of context so badly they changed the entire meaning. In fact, they were taken so out of context that between the sets of ellipses in the quotes was 11,500 words. Feel free to read the article yourself. Or if you're untrusting of that article, you can read the transcript yourself. Ordinarily I'd be pissed at the Drudge Report and little more, but the big problem is that other news agencies, in this case The Washington Post and the Wall Street Journal, reported what Druge said as fact. Oopsie?
You're right that some people will cry "conservative!" when they do things like that. In a reverse situation others might shout "liberal!" But the bottom line is there are a distortion or deliberate twisting of the facts involved. That shouldn't be tolerated. If they report something PROPERLY, it should be embraced, regardless of whether or not one agrees.
Or maybe it's a troll. I can't quite decide.
True, but I don't think that will carry over into the world of IP-enabled toasters and other devices for two basic reasons. The first is pressure, both from consumers who want to be able to communicate with their toaster from work and from the toaster makers who want to sell that ability to begin with. The second reason is really one of logic. Ostensibly the reason for not permitting servers is traffic management; that is, web servers, FTP servers and the like have the ability to end up sucking huge amounts of bandwidth. Even if you're supposedly guaranteed an upstream, you are still sucking bandwidth from the ISP's WAN lines. That, at least, is a somewhat valid argument. But how much bandwidth could a toaster really suck? You tell it when to start and stop; it could probably be done with little noticeable lag over a 56k modem.
Of course, none of this is IPv6's problem. IPv6 enables a lot of things, the consumer market will ultimately demand which take hold.
Actually I consider this not the fault of the lawyers, but of the legal system. If I were the judge in this case, I would have given SCO until I finished my lunch to produce evidence or I would had dismissed the case with prejudice.
Okay, okay, maybe not that quick, but not months either. IBM might get months--they are the respondent to the claims--but if the petitioner doesn't know what he is petitioning the court for the minute he walks in, he's not going to receive my sympathy. If they "know" there is infringement, they should "know" where what they consider infringement occurs. They should be able to pull this "they're infringing but I don't know how or where yet, may I have a look at all of their code please?" bullcrap.
The lawyers are doing their job. Unfortunately because of convoluded and protracted legal processes, they're increasingly necessary for even what seems to be the simplest action.
I think it would only take a handful of authoratative judges to turn things around. Same thing on the other side of the legal spectrum, with Michael Jackson's case. He wants to waltz in 20 minutes late because he was standing on his taxi waving to his fans? Great. He can spend the next 20 minutes bitching as he writes out a check to pay a fine for contempt.
They have terms and conditions people automatically agree to when they use TurnItIn.com
By submitting the paper to begin with, you no doubt agree to the terms you say they have. Writing on your paper, "I had my fingers crossed!" doesn't make a difference. You can't agree to their terms to permit them to do whatver they want and expect them to abide by your terms limiting what they can do. You've already agreed to their terms and theirs supercede yours.
Now if, on the other hand, you gave the paper to a friend to look over with a clause that they could not do anything to make money from it, and they did, your terms would seem to apply.
The gray area is who sbumits your paper. If you do yourself and the profs check it from the service, see paragraph 1. If you give it to the teacher who puts it throw the system, you have an issue: Did you explicitly agree to permitting your professor to do that? If not, it seems your professor would be the one in violation of your terms, not TurnItIn.com. If you did give explicit permission, then you have essentially waved your terms.
IANAL, but I'm pretty sure that's how it would go.