So "literal" now means "not literal". Now I'm just hanging out for "true" being an informal use of "false" so we can discard useful communication altogether. Reminds me why I speak English and not American.
Yeah, and so is your name. HIPAA doesn't have anything to do with whether something's public or private or not. It's legislation surrounding your medical records.
Yeah right. If they don't fine companies for exposing people's credit card numbers and SSNs, there's no way they're going to do it for exposing someone's DOB or address (which are generally public information to begin with).
I agree with you in general, but after looking at some of the links on the site, it becomes pretty obvious they have an agenda.
SOLR Quote:
Charleston, W.Va., 2007. Melissa Hicks did not mention any sexual improprieties during the divorce proceedings against her husband, David. But after she was not granted custody of their two daughters, he became the pariah of the neighborhood and was sentenced to 30 years in prison for alleged misdeeds with various little girls.
Quote from linked FBI file:
The evidence presented at trial established that Hicks, a father of two girls under the age of 10, frequently had his older daughter’s friends spend the night as guests. Five of these juveniles, girls between the ages of nine and 12, testified at trial. During their testimony, the girls stated Hicks frequently took photos of them while they were at the home, commented on his ability to see through their clothing, walked in on them while they were changing or bathing, watched and photographed them through the blinds of the home while they were swimming in his pool, and physically touched more than one of them inappropriately. Many of the photos taken by Hicks were located on his computer in a special archive folder. The photos were of his daughter’s friends either nude or partially nude.
The evidence also established that Hicks is a trained computer expert who maintained a computer in his bedroom that had four separate hard drives. These hard drives, in addition to numerous compact disks, contained thousands of images and movies of prepubescent children engaged in sexually explicit conduct. Forensic analysis of this electronic media revealed Hicks searched for sexually explicit movie clips of children using a peer-to-peer file sharing program, and then downloaded the movie clips to his computer. Hicks forfeited all of his computer equipment associated with these crimes.
So yeah, SOLR's quote is technically true. It just doesn't mention that the "alleged offences" were also confirmed in a court of law, due in part to photographic evidence.
The laws that apply in this case refer to data that you didn't agree to such as location tracking (for which Apple is under investigation), or the wi-fi scanning that Google got into trouble earlier.
It's hard to say what the laws in this case are, going from the article. All they say is a Google acquisition called "AdMob" got in trouble for collecting location data - they mention nothing about consent, or even how the information as obtained.
In any event, I was mostly responding to your implication that companies should only be able to collect data that is deemed "necessary" by, I imagine, some sort of government mandate (restricting companies to collecting data that they believe necessary being rather pointless).
Ýou may disagree but I wouldn't call upholding people's rights to privacy as 'vote-pandering'.. this is a rare case of a law that makes sense and should be implemented across other countries.
No, it's a case of executing policy instead of holding people accountable for stupidity. The wi-fi scanning is a case in point; people configured wireless routers to spew their data to anything that knew how to listen. They didn't bother to educate themselves on how the system worked, or listen to the experts who've been telling people to secure their routers for years. Then when they get bitten, instead of accepting their mistake and securing their damn routers, they expect government to protect them from the repercussions of their own stupidity.
I don't know about Apple (don't own an iPhone), but my Android phone told me explicitly (via a popup window, not buried in a EULA) before it enabled assisted GPS mode, and sent my location data to Google's servers. I'm against bloated and far-reaching EULAs as much as anyone else, but I'm also against punishing companies because their customers don't know enough to realise that sending location data is inherent in some location-based services and are too lazy to actually read anything that tells them this is the case.
Not sure why so many people seem to be suggesting that Google (or any other company) should be collect all sorts of data at will.
Probably because there's another solution that involves personal responsibility, rather than knee-jerk reactions by vote-pandering politicians: if you don't want Google to know something, don't tell them. Also, the idea of outlawing "knowing" something strikes a bad chord with many people.
Ask the US. That's exactly the situation they were in. A decade ago, they had so much excess bandwidth, that there was no conceivable way their subscribers could use it all. All their plans were unlimited data. There ISPs did nothing (except pocket the money) and consumers were generally not tech-savvy, so they didn't know the ISPs should be doing anything.
Exactly. "America" is not a country - it's a continent. The population of that continent - Americans. The country is "United States of America". Citizens of that country? Well, you don't really have a name, which is why the OP had to use a more recently coined one - USians.
You're Americans, but you're not the only Americans. USians creates a distinction between you lot, and your southern neighbours that also inhabit the American continent. If he'd said "Americans" he would have been incorrect, as he was actually referring only to a subset of Americans.
Why would the government do that when they're busy shoveling bribes from the communications industry into their own pockets? The fundamental problem here isn't free market vs regulation, it's a government that isn't representing its people.
But me, I prefer to live in a more modern society, with an elected government body that represent the people. And I want laws that I know are good for *everyone*, not just for a *select few*.
Well, congratulations, it's your "elected government body representing the people" that granted these monopolies (in violation of the concept of the free market) after accepting huge bribes from the corporations it's supposedly not representing. Oh, and good on you for throwing a bit of anti-religious flamebait into the mix for good measure.
You really need a solid whack over the head with the clue stick.
There is a limit - there has to be, somewhere, in a physical system. I dunno about Sweden, but in Australia at least, its our international links; no matter how much our ISPs upgrade our internal infrastructure, there's a finite amount of bandwidth available on the hugely-expensive undersea cables they share that connect us to the outside world.
Europe's different because it's so geographically close, and also because of the fragmentation of languages; because we speak English in Australia, US and British resources are just as valuable to us as native ones; on the other hand, nobody produces Swedish language resources other than Sweden, which promotes a lot more internal traffic - even taking into account that many (most?) Swedes are also familiar with English and would access English resources too (like Slashdot).
But somewhere in the system, there is a limit. It may be so high that it has no practical impact at the moment, but it's there. It may not even be something your ISPs can really control. And changes in capacity utilisation in this space happen so quickly that what seems like a reasonable limit now may not seem so in a mere decade.
As a father, you probably should be more worried. If you, your wife and your immediate friends aren't abusing your children, then their chances of being abused are infinitesimal. Meanwhile, their chances of going to jail and being registered as a sex offender for taking a photo of their own body has probably skyrocketed.
with a proven track record of developing software that people buy
How many people do you know with a WinCE (or whatever their last name was) phone? If they wanted proven track record, they would have gone with Android, which is the only option with a significant market share atm (I doubt Apple's going to licence them iOS). Windows mobile platform is essentially non-existent at the moment.
No, it would only be like auto cover if the comprehensive cover were mandated. If people could sue you for transmitting a disease to them, and you could buy insurance for damage caused by your illness to third parties, then mandating that insurance would be parallel to mandating third party auto insurance.
So, mandating health insurance is like mandating auto insurance - it is to protect the other people (ie keeping them from paying extra).
So instead of subsidizing the uninsured via your premiums, you subsidize them via your taxes - and remove any incentive to actually get health insurance, cause if they don't the government will get it for them?
August 2005: A magistrate in Sydney, Australia threw out a speeding case after the police said it had no evidence that an image from an automatic speed camera had not been doctored. This case revolved around the integrity of MD5, a digital signature algorithm, intended to prove that pictures have not been doctored after their recording. It is believed that this ruling may allow any driver caught by a speed camera to mount the same defense.
Dunno how it works in the US, but here in Australia, the only compulsory insurance is the third party one - that is, you are covered for the damage you deal to other people and their property if you crash into them. Comprehensive cover, which includes damage to yourself and your property, is completely optional.
Health insurance is like the optional comprehensive cover not third party; it covers you, not innocent third parties you harm.
Where you ranch has very little to do with energy waste or pollution.
It depends exactly on what you mean by "wasted energy". If cattle are grazed on land that could otherwise be used for raising corn/wheat, then you could say that they are "wasting" the energy difference between the expected output of a crop, and the expected output of the cattle. If you graze them in places where corn couldn't be grown anyway, they "waste" no energy (or at least, no energy that wasn't already being wasted by people not eating the grass).
Cattle produce huge amounts of greenhouse gases irrespective of where you put them, among other things
Cattle only produce the huge amounts of greenhouse gases when people start feeding them stuff that's cheap, rather than the stuff their systems were designed to handle. Using natural pasture mixes instead of quick-growing ryegrass, or farmed cereals reduces methane output significantly. Not to mention, there's ongoing research into methane reduction; adding garlic into the diet has been found to result in a large reduction, for example.
More importantly, you have to feed a cow a lot more energy than you can possibly get back out
Which is why you feed it grass, a source of energy that would otherwise be wasted, instead of grain/corn. A lot of current beef production does use corn, but it doesn't have to be done.
Whatever problems you cause by harvesting crops are automatically worse for farming because you have to farm more to feed the cows than you would have to feed people directly
Hence, grazing them. You don't raise crops that would otherwise feed people and feed them to the cows, you feed them on stuff that people don't eat, and will grow in places where food-crops won't.
I'm not saying that much of our modern beef production isn't wasteful - it is. But that's not a necessary result of raising beef, it's all about the way we've gone about it. It's perfectly possible to raise cattle sustainably - and was done for centuries before we moved to the current model. It's not as cost or land-effective as the current methods - which is why we moved to feedlots - but as environmental/sustainability concerns begin to compete with cost concerns, there's no reason we can't change our methods. Oh, and for comparison, in Australia (where I live) only 40% of beef production is through feedlots. I understand it's much higher in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
So "literal" now means "not literal". Now I'm just hanging out for "true" being an informal use of "false" so we can discard useful communication altogether. Reminds me why I speak English and not American.
Yeah, and so is your name. HIPAA doesn't have anything to do with whether something's public or private or not. It's legislation surrounding your medical records.
Yeah right. If they don't fine companies for exposing people's credit card numbers and SSNs, there's no way they're going to do it for exposing someone's DOB or address (which are generally public information to begin with).
As if the average /b/ denizens would/could pony up £30
I agree with you in general, but after looking at some of the links on the site, it becomes pretty obvious they have an agenda.
SOLR Quote:
Charleston, W.Va., 2007. Melissa Hicks did not mention any sexual improprieties during the divorce proceedings against her husband, David. But after she was not granted custody of their two daughters, he became the pariah of the neighborhood and was sentenced to 30 years in prison for alleged misdeeds with various little girls.
Quote from linked FBI file:
The evidence presented at trial established that Hicks, a father of two girls under the age of 10, frequently had his older daughter’s friends spend the night as guests. Five of these juveniles, girls between the ages of nine and 12, testified at trial. During their testimony, the girls stated Hicks frequently took photos of them while they were at the home, commented on his ability to see through their clothing, walked in on them while they were changing or bathing, watched and photographed them through the blinds of the home while they were swimming in his pool, and physically touched more than one of them inappropriately. Many of the photos taken by Hicks were located on his computer in a special archive folder. The photos were of his daughter’s friends either nude or partially nude.
The evidence also established that Hicks is a trained computer expert who maintained a computer in his bedroom that had four separate hard drives. These hard drives, in addition to numerous compact disks, contained thousands of images and movies of prepubescent children engaged in sexually explicit conduct. Forensic analysis of this electronic media revealed Hicks searched for sexually explicit movie clips of children using a peer-to-peer file sharing program, and then downloaded the movie clips to his computer. Hicks forfeited all of his computer equipment associated with these crimes.
So yeah, SOLR's quote is technically true. It just doesn't mention that the "alleged offences" were also confirmed in a court of law, due in part to photographic evidence.
The laws that apply in this case refer to data that you didn't agree to such as location tracking (for which Apple is under investigation), or the wi-fi scanning that Google got into trouble earlier.
It's hard to say what the laws in this case are, going from the article. All they say is a Google acquisition called "AdMob" got in trouble for collecting location data - they mention nothing about consent, or even how the information as obtained.
In any event, I was mostly responding to your implication that companies should only be able to collect data that is deemed "necessary" by, I imagine, some sort of government mandate (restricting companies to collecting data that they believe necessary being rather pointless).
Ýou may disagree but I wouldn't call upholding people's rights to privacy as 'vote-pandering' .. this is a rare case of a law that makes sense and should be implemented across other countries.
No, it's a case of executing policy instead of holding people accountable for stupidity. The wi-fi scanning is a case in point; people configured wireless routers to spew their data to anything that knew how to listen. They didn't bother to educate themselves on how the system worked, or listen to the experts who've been telling people to secure their routers for years. Then when they get bitten, instead of accepting their mistake and securing their damn routers, they expect government to protect them from the repercussions of their own stupidity.
I don't know about Apple (don't own an iPhone), but my Android phone told me explicitly (via a popup window, not buried in a EULA) before it enabled assisted GPS mode, and sent my location data to Google's servers. I'm against bloated and far-reaching EULAs as much as anyone else, but I'm also against punishing companies because their customers don't know enough to realise that sending location data is inherent in some location-based services and are too lazy to actually read anything that tells them this is the case.
Peter Wiggin did it in Ender's Game - dunno if it happened in reality as well.
Not sure why so many people seem to be suggesting that Google (or any other company) should be collect all sorts of data at will.
Probably because there's another solution that involves personal responsibility, rather than knee-jerk reactions by vote-pandering politicians: if you don't want Google to know something, don't tell them. Also, the idea of outlawing "knowing" something strikes a bad chord with many people.
Yes, because this is the first generation ever to use contractions
Seriously? A debit card tied to your primary checking account used to pay for DLC?
Epic fail dude.
In other news, it's a woman's fault if she gets raped; that's what she should expect, wearing such a skimpy outfit.
Ask the US. That's exactly the situation they were in. A decade ago, they had so much excess bandwidth, that there was no conceivable way their subscribers could use it all. All their plans were unlimited data. There ISPs did nothing (except pocket the money) and consumers were generally not tech-savvy, so they didn't know the ISPs should be doing anything.
Exactly. "America" is not a country - it's a continent. The population of that continent - Americans. The country is "United States of America". Citizens of that country? Well, you don't really have a name, which is why the OP had to use a more recently coined one - USians.
No, Americans think citizen of the US. The fact that Americans associate themselves with "normal people" really says all that needs to be said.
Probably because it's illegal to; yay government-sponsored local monopolies.
You're Americans, but you're not the only Americans. USians creates a distinction between you lot, and your southern neighbours that also inhabit the American continent. If he'd said "Americans" he would have been incorrect, as he was actually referring only to a subset of Americans.
Why would the government do that when they're busy shoveling bribes from the communications industry into their own pockets? The fundamental problem here isn't free market vs regulation, it's a government that isn't representing its people.
But me, I prefer to live in a more modern society, with an elected government body that represent the people. And I want laws that I know are good for *everyone*, not just for a *select few*.
Well, congratulations, it's your "elected government body representing the people" that granted these monopolies (in violation of the concept of the free market) after accepting huge bribes from the corporations it's supposedly not representing. Oh, and good on you for throwing a bit of anti-religious flamebait into the mix for good measure.
You really need a solid whack over the head with the clue stick.
There is a limit - there has to be, somewhere, in a physical system. I dunno about Sweden, but in Australia at least, its our international links; no matter how much our ISPs upgrade our internal infrastructure, there's a finite amount of bandwidth available on the hugely-expensive undersea cables they share that connect us to the outside world.
Europe's different because it's so geographically close, and also because of the fragmentation of languages; because we speak English in Australia, US and British resources are just as valuable to us as native ones; on the other hand, nobody produces Swedish language resources other than Sweden, which promotes a lot more internal traffic - even taking into account that many (most?) Swedes are also familiar with English and would access English resources too (like Slashdot).
But somewhere in the system, there is a limit. It may be so high that it has no practical impact at the moment, but it's there. It may not even be something your ISPs can really control. And changes in capacity utilisation in this space happen so quickly that what seems like a reasonable limit now may not seem so in a mere decade.
The thing about that is - and this applies equally to thermonuclear war - it only works if both players stop playing.
As a father, you probably should be more worried. If you, your wife and your immediate friends aren't abusing your children, then their chances of being abused are infinitesimal. Meanwhile, their chances of going to jail and being registered as a sex offender for taking a photo of their own body has probably skyrocketed.
with a proven track record of developing software that people buy
How many people do you know with a WinCE (or whatever their last name was) phone? If they wanted proven track record, they would have gone with Android, which is the only option with a significant market share atm (I doubt Apple's going to licence them iOS). Windows mobile platform is essentially non-existent at the moment.
No, it would only be like auto cover if the comprehensive cover were mandated. If people could sue you for transmitting a disease to them, and you could buy insurance for damage caused by your illness to third parties, then mandating that insurance would be parallel to mandating third party auto insurance.
So, mandating health insurance is like mandating auto insurance - it is to protect the other people (ie keeping them from paying extra).
So instead of subsidizing the uninsured via your premiums, you subsidize them via your taxes - and remove any incentive to actually get health insurance, cause if they don't the government will get it for them?
There was also this:
August 2005: A magistrate in Sydney, Australia threw out a speeding case after the police said it had no evidence that an image from an automatic speed camera had not been doctored. This case revolved around the integrity of MD5, a digital signature algorithm, intended to prove that pictures have not been doctored after their recording. It is believed that this ruling may allow any driver caught by a speed camera to mount the same defense.
Dunno how it works in the US, but here in Australia, the only compulsory insurance is the third party one - that is, you are covered for the damage you deal to other people and their property if you crash into them. Comprehensive cover, which includes damage to yourself and your property, is completely optional.
Health insurance is like the optional comprehensive cover not third party; it covers you, not innocent third parties you harm.
Where you ranch has very little to do with energy waste or pollution.
It depends exactly on what you mean by "wasted energy". If cattle are grazed on land that could otherwise be used for raising corn/wheat, then you could say that they are "wasting" the energy difference between the expected output of a crop, and the expected output of the cattle. If you graze them in places where corn couldn't be grown anyway, they "waste" no energy (or at least, no energy that wasn't already being wasted by people not eating the grass).
Cattle produce huge amounts of greenhouse gases irrespective of where you put them, among other things
Cattle only produce the huge amounts of greenhouse gases when people start feeding them stuff that's cheap, rather than the stuff their systems were designed to handle. Using natural pasture mixes instead of quick-growing ryegrass, or farmed cereals reduces methane output significantly. Not to mention, there's ongoing research into methane reduction; adding garlic into the diet has been found to result in a large reduction, for example.
More importantly, you have to feed a cow a lot more energy than you can possibly get back out
Which is why you feed it grass, a source of energy that would otherwise be wasted, instead of grain/corn. A lot of current beef production does use corn, but it doesn't have to be done.
Whatever problems you cause by harvesting crops are automatically worse for farming because you have to farm more to feed the cows than you would have to feed people directly
Hence, grazing them. You don't raise crops that would otherwise feed people and feed them to the cows, you feed them on stuff that people don't eat, and will grow in places where food-crops won't.
I'm not saying that much of our modern beef production isn't wasteful - it is. But that's not a necessary result of raising beef, it's all about the way we've gone about it. It's perfectly possible to raise cattle sustainably - and was done for centuries before we moved to the current model. It's not as cost or land-effective as the current methods - which is why we moved to feedlots - but as environmental/sustainability concerns begin to compete with cost concerns, there's no reason we can't change our methods. Oh, and for comparison, in Australia (where I live) only 40% of beef production is through feedlots. I understand it's much higher in the US.