No -- the power sellers are absolutely wrong. Anyone who has bought something knows that the sellers use feedback in a retaliatory fashion. Ebay realized that buyers were not trusting the rating system. Take away buyers' trust, and the system will fall apart. Sure, the fees are made from sellers but if they can't sell, they'll quit ebay.
And as pointed out by an Ebay executive when the new system went into place -- if a buyer has bad service from a seller, and then gets hit with retaliatory feedback after leaving an honest message -- that buyer is not coming back. And he's right -- I've become extremely hesitant to buy anything off Ebay after getting hit unfairly by retaliatory feedback. That hurts all sellers if enough people decide to just bag it. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080206-ebays-new-feedback-policy-no-real-feedback.html
... But one of the criticisms of the eBay feedback system--probably the largest public forum for judging the reputation of a business in the world--is that its ratings are far too positive to be believed.
Go ahead, browse the site. You'll see that the vast majority of sellers have 99+% positive ratings. If you were grading on a curve, a 98% would probably be equivalent to a "C" on a report card--and it's relatively hard to find buyers with this rating. Below 97%? Forget it. No one's going to buy from you.
There are some who point to the consistently high ratings as a sign the system is working. After all, so this line of argument goes, all the bad sellers are simply weeded out. They get bad ratings, they can't sell, they withdraw their sorry little wares from eBay. End of story.
But there's another, less positive explanation: People are afraid of what is referred to in the eBay community as "retaliatory feedback." That's when a seller (or a buyer--it can happen on both sides) becomes annoyed or enraged at a negative comment posted by someone else about them, and in retaliation posts a negative comment in return.
I'll bet RedHat hasn't totally borked the multiple desktop metaphor. Apple's Spaces does application partitioning -- not task partition. God forbid you actually try have two windows from the same application open on different desktops. And if you are using forwarded X sessions via SSH -- you might as well just give up doing any work ever... till you revert to Tiger and your trusty 3d party multiple desktop program.
try it out fn-home does absolutely nothing. Yup, just tried and cursor did: absolutely nothing. This is true on my macbook and powerbook. It has always mystified me.
You know, there are keys labeled "home" and "end" on my mac keyboard and I too have wondered why they don't do anything. Seriously, why paint the words on the key if it doesn't do squat?
Trust me, if you expect "Spaces" to be like the virtual desktops you're used to in Gnome or KDE -- it isn't. It's practically useless in fact being based on the notion of application partitioning rather than task partitioning. This means if you try to spread out windows from one program over several desktops, you're in for some confusing behavior. And if you used forwarded X sessions over X11 via ssh -- get ready for really crazy behavior unless you keep all your windows on one desktop, and DO NOT open any other terminal windows from your login terminal window -- you'll find you can't even click on previously opened windows if you do that. Of course, it sort of defeats the whole purpose of multiple desktops if you have to keep every application related to X11 open on the one desktop.
I like OS X (Tiger and below), but I'm totally burned with Leopard. The 3d party desktop managers don't even work anymore. I'm ticked and I plan to be noisy about. How many years have I waited for an integrated solution for multiple desktops? And this is what I get? Utter crap that reduces functionality.
Yeah -- Leopard needs a manual if consider how boogered up X11 was until the 10.5.2 release, and how amazingly useless Spaces is -- seriously, I had no idea that it was possible to misapply up the multiple desktop metaphor, but Leaopard has "screwed the pooch" on this front, giving us some strange mutant iteration of multiple desktops. It's litterally impossible to do X forwarding from a single terminal and then spread forwarded windows out over two or more "spaces". I'm reverting to Tiger till the 3d party virtual desktop programmers decide they bailed too early on their projects and bring them back from the dead (no -- they dont work in Leopard as is).
For instance, say I paid for 6 mbits. Boost me to 100 mbits if you like for the first few seconds, but after that, give me my 6 mbits.
I don't even get that for my $55/month for Comcast, but it's really obvious they are gaming the system. Here's a nice comparison:
Speakeasy: 5706 kbps down (note: 713.25 KB/s)
scp from a server I have: 100% 1122KB 124.6KB/s 00:09
Yeah -- cheap server, ssh overhead, any other excuse. I know that there are times I'll be surfing and even google won't be loading. I go to speakeasy and still get high (for me) numbers. Comcast is expensive and it totally sucks. Thank's to their monopoly in my area, it's that or dial-up.
Fair enough -- my test didn't take all those things into account.
As for what "time machine" is, it's what rsync would do with a good script and and cron. Nothing earth shattering, but easy enough so anyone can use it. It isn't very configurable -- "on" or "off" and you can pick which external drive to use -- but I imagine it is going to save a lot of the "that was my only copy" pain that unsophisticated users often endure from not knowing how to back up, and the same pain for more sophisticated users who find backing up to be too rote or dull.
I can attest to this. I wanted to test it out to see if it really worked as promised. So I duped my macbook to be safe, made time machine do one last backup, then formatted the laptop drive and installed Leopard. During the first bootup process, I just ticked the option to recover from Time Machine, and everything transferred -- my mail boxes, rules, accounts, passwords. I was quite impressed. It does hourly, daily and weekly snapshots and is brain dead simple to run, and brain dead simple to restore from.
A customer arrives at a car lot for a new car. The salesman steers him toward the top of the line model with all the newest bells and whistles. While they're out on the test drive, the salesman tells the potential buyer that the radio is so advanced, it understands voice commands. To demonstrate, the salesman says "classical", and wouldn't you know it, a classical station is automatically tuned in. He tells the driver to try, and he says "classic rock". Before you can blink, Led Zepplin is pulsing through the speakers. The driver is duly impressed and is about to comment on how cool that is, when some punk kid in a riced out civic cuts him off. The driver yells "ASSHOLE".... and the radio tunes to Rush Limbaugh.
You need to apply the dictionary definition of "maintain" because if "maintain" is not otherwise defined, that is what the court will use. Your narrow definition may have a special use that you are familiar with -- try not to get hung up on that.
Secondly, the purpose of the statute is not to prevent data loss in the "my hard drive died" sense. It is meant to prevent data _release_ and thereby prevent identity theft.
As for damages, $54m is obviously way to high, but getting that wasn't her intent. No matter what happens now, she has won because of the publicity generated. It was a brilliant move on her part. As for the actual damages, who knows how much that would be. It would likely bear some relation to the costs of curing identity theft. I would think an award in the $20-30k range would be adequate but I'm just guessing. That would protect the plaintiff against the potential for future harm, and encourage BB to be a good citizen without being silly high. Even if she gets nothing though, she has to consider this a complete victory. She's on the "front page" of Google News Sci/Tech section and who knows where else.
Oh yeah, aside from the statute, the common law still applies. So throw this into the analysis too in the form of an additional alternate method to recovery. BB was a commercial voluntary bailee. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailment.
I'm sure the company will be held to "reasonably prudent person" standard, tinged with the notion they know more about computers than the average idiot and are thus held to a "reasonably prudent person knowledgeable about computers" standard. Any such person would know that the computer would likely have confidential info.
The law says you're responsible for data you own maintain. It does not make you responsible for data you don't own/maintain. What's so hard to undertand about that?
You are applying a very narrow definition of the word "maintain". Why do you refuse to understand that the normal dictionary definition will be used, and that "maintain" means, among other things, to keep something in such a manner that it isn't destroyed or lost. It does not mean: "personally generate or create the thing for one's own use". The legislature would have used a word like "generate" or "create" or "develop" if that is what it meant. The legislature however, used "maintain" which in ordinary parlance, simply means to keep without allowing degradation. Seriously -- go look it up instead of relying on what you think it means.
Ok -- I'm through. I don't think any rational judge is going to read the statute in a manner so narrow that it loses its obvious purpose. To win your argument in front of rational people, you have to explain why a company should be punished when it releases information about a person that it transcribed into its own database (e.g. account number), and not be punished when it releases that same information (e.g. account number) by losing a computer entrusted to its care. The law is clearly designed to punish companies that imperil people through the release of confidential information. Who gives a rip who transcribed the data?
Tullys is just another franchise. That isn't an independent coffee house at all. This is a great independent coffee house: http://www.theblackdrop.com/
breach_of_the_security_of_the_system() {
return (unauthorized acquisition && ((computerized || other electronic data) || ((equipment || device) && (storing data)))) && compromises && (security || confidentiality || integrity) && personal information && maintained by (person || business));
}
At this point, you need to be aware of the canons of statutory construction. One is that statutes are read as a whole so that no part is rendered meaningless. Another is that if a term is otherwise undefined, the normal dictionary definition of that term is used. Always, the purpose or intent of the statute should be maintained. (heh).
Your code works fine when converted to English -- you're problem is that you are saying the very last clause "&& maintained ( person || business)" means that BB generated and "owns" the data, and that there is no breach unless that is the case. What you have left out are the unwritten rules, those cannons of construction I mention above.
If you change the word that is misleading you to "kept", your correct program won't return a wrong result. BB kept the data for X number of days till they lost it. That is indisputable.
From Merriam-Webster: Maintain "1: to keep in an existing state (as of repair, efficiency, or validity) : preserve from failure or decline [maintain machinery]2: to sustain against opposition or danger : uphold and defend [maintain a position]3: to continue or persevere in : carry on, keep up [couldn't maintain his composure]4 a: to support or provide for [has a family to maintain] b: sustain [enough food to maintain life]5: to affirm in or as if in argument : assert [maintained that the earth is flat]".
As for reading the parts of the statute together, the first part is clearly meant to be a punishment applied to any entity that in any way handles other people's data carelessly. So to limit the effect of the statute with an exceptionally narrow interpretation of the word "maintain" just doesn't square with what seems to be the purpose of the statute.
The law is not much different than code. It's written the same way. When there's an AND operator, and that and operator is false, none of the other operators matter.
Do ctrl-f on the next part. Get back to me when you find an AND. I see a bunch of ORs.
See sect. 28-3852(b): "Any person or entity who maintains, handles, or otherwise possesses computerized or other electronic data that includes personal information that the person or entity does not own shall notify the owner or licensee of the information of any breach of the security of the system in the most expedient time possible following discovery."
"(1) "Breach of the security of the system" means unauthorized acquisition of
computerized or other electronic data, or any equipment or device storing such data, that
compromises the security, confidentiality, or integrity of personal information maintained by the
person or business.
Re:Sorry, I quoted the right part. Try again.
on
The $54 Million Laptop
·
· Score: 2, Informative
OK -- I just read this. Here is what I got out of it. BB definitely handled and possessed her confidential computerized data. They didn't own the data, but the law "includes personal information that the person or entity does not own". So doesn't matter if the data was somehow generated by BB and owned by it. They merely need to have it.
Then looking at the "breach of the security system" definition, plainly there was "unauthorized acquisition... [of] equipment or [a] device storing such data" because a) if the laptop was stolen, she certainly didn't authorize that and the robber acquired it, or b) if the laptop was lost by BB, then BB acquired it by rendering the computer not findable in their storage room. Certainly she did not authorize BB to lose the computer but because it did, it arguably acquired the device... it must be there somewhere if it is simply lost. If it went out in the garbage, then the garbage collector acquired it. Plainly, some entity not the original owner has acquired the laptop. It may be under 5 tons of rotting lettuce, but someone got it. It's important to note the law does not require the acquiring entity to misuse the data -- only to be an unauthorized recipient.
Anyway, if she had banking info on there, and everyone does, that would clearly compromise "the security, confidentiality, OR integrity" of the data. Pick any of these, not all are required.
Returning then to the earlier part, if BB did not tell her in the most expedient fashion possible that her data was at risk, then they're liable.
Don't get hung up on "maintained" as in "made backups and stored it securely on tapes in someone's car". All BB had to do was possess the device -- which they did, allow it to be acquired by an unauthorized entity (including themselves), and then not tell her about the loss quickly.
You aren't by chance a shill poster for BB are you?
No, I'm thinking of corn ethanol, backed by tax dollars to hide the fact that AT BEST, it produces 10% more fuel than is used in the production of it. Reality is probably much lower than the our friendly lobbyists from Iowa would have us believe.
Now I wish I hadn't posted -- I would have used my mod points to correct the unfair "offtopic" mod. The question in my mind would be: insightful or funny.
Life doesn't create hydrocarbons, hydrocarbons are the basis of life. The interesting part is how short chains turned into long chains, and then into self replicating groupings of long chains, who eventually realize that decomposed long chains from previous iterations will chemically react with oxygen to make cars go.
Aside from that, all hydrocarbons are organic in the chemical sense. Maybe not in the "organic gardening" sense -- but gasoline is just as organic as pesticide free carrots.
Slashdot Mirror
Who cares about suction. As long as it doesn't nag, whine, or yell, it sounds like bliss.
And as pointed out by an Ebay executive when the new system went into place -- if a buyer has bad service from a seller, and then gets hit with retaliatory feedback after leaving an honest message -- that buyer is not coming back. And he's right -- I've become extremely hesitant to buy anything off Ebay after getting hit unfairly by retaliatory feedback. That hurts all sellers if enough people decide to just bag it. http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20080206-ebays-new-feedback-policy-no-real-feedback.html
And of course, retaliation is no secret:
Dang -- my mod points expired else I'd have pushed you to plus 5. IMO, DST is pure evil. It takes me months to get over it.
I'll bet RedHat hasn't totally borked the multiple desktop metaphor. Apple's Spaces does application partitioning -- not task partition. God forbid you actually try have two windows from the same application open on different desktops. And if you are using forwarded X sessions via SSH -- you might as well just give up doing any work ever ... till you revert to Tiger and your trusty 3d party multiple desktop program.
try it out fn-home does absolutely nothing. Yup, just tried and cursor did: absolutely nothing. This is true on my macbook and powerbook. It has always mystified me.
You know, there are keys labeled "home" and "end" on my mac keyboard and I too have wondered why they don't do anything. Seriously, why paint the words on the key if it doesn't do squat?
Who cares why -- it is what he wants. That is enough.
Re: Virtual Desktops
Trust me, if you expect "Spaces" to be like the virtual desktops you're used to in Gnome or KDE -- it isn't. It's practically useless in fact being based on the notion of application partitioning rather than task partitioning. This means if you try to spread out windows from one program over several desktops, you're in for some confusing behavior. And if you used forwarded X sessions over X11 via ssh -- get ready for really crazy behavior unless you keep all your windows on one desktop, and DO NOT open any other terminal windows from your login terminal window -- you'll find you can't even click on previously opened windows if you do that. Of course, it sort of defeats the whole purpose of multiple desktops if you have to keep every application related to X11 open on the one desktop.
I like OS X (Tiger and below), but I'm totally burned with Leopard. The 3d party desktop managers don't even work anymore. I'm ticked and I plan to be noisy about. How many years have I waited for an integrated solution for multiple desktops? And this is what I get? Utter crap that reduces functionality.
Yeah -- Leopard needs a manual if consider how boogered up X11 was until the 10.5.2 release, and how amazingly useless Spaces is -- seriously, I had no idea that it was possible to misapply up the multiple desktop metaphor, but Leaopard has "screwed the pooch" on this front, giving us some strange mutant iteration of multiple desktops. It's litterally impossible to do X forwarding from a single terminal and then spread forwarded windows out over two or more "spaces". I'm reverting to Tiger till the 3d party virtual desktop programmers decide they bailed too early on their projects and bring them back from the dead (no -- they dont work in Leopard as is).
I don't even get that for my $55/month for Comcast, but it's really obvious they are gaming the system. Here's a nice comparison:
Yeah -- cheap server, ssh overhead, any other excuse. I know that there are times I'll be surfing and even google won't be loading. I go to speakeasy and still get high (for me) numbers. Comcast is expensive and it totally sucks. Thank's to their monopoly in my area, it's that or dial-up.
Fair enough -- my test didn't take all those things into account.
As for what "time machine" is, it's what rsync would do with a good script and and cron. Nothing earth shattering, but easy enough so anyone can use it. It isn't very configurable -- "on" or "off" and you can pick which external drive to use -- but I imagine it is going to save a lot of the "that was my only copy" pain that unsophisticated users often endure from not knowing how to back up, and the same pain for more sophisticated users who find backing up to be too rote or dull.
I can attest to this. I wanted to test it out to see if it really worked as promised. So I duped my macbook to be safe, made time machine do one last backup, then formatted the laptop drive and installed Leopard. During the first bootup process, I just ticked the option to recover from Time Machine, and everything transferred -- my mail boxes, rules, accounts, passwords. I was quite impressed. It does hourly, daily and weekly snapshots and is brain dead simple to run, and brain dead simple to restore from.
You need to apply the dictionary definition of "maintain" because if "maintain" is not otherwise defined, that is what the court will use. Your narrow definition may have a special use that you are familiar with -- try not to get hung up on that.
Secondly, the purpose of the statute is not to prevent data loss in the "my hard drive died" sense. It is meant to prevent data _release_ and thereby prevent identity theft.
As for damages, $54m is obviously way to high, but getting that wasn't her intent. No matter what happens now, she has won because of the publicity generated. It was a brilliant move on her part. As for the actual damages, who knows how much that would be. It would likely bear some relation to the costs of curing identity theft. I would think an award in the $20-30k range would be adequate but I'm just guessing. That would protect the plaintiff against the potential for future harm, and encourage BB to be a good citizen without being silly high. Even if she gets nothing though, she has to consider this a complete victory. She's on the "front page" of Google News Sci/Tech section and who knows where else.
Oh yeah, aside from the statute, the common law still applies. So throw this into the analysis too in the form of an additional alternate method to recovery. BB was a commercial voluntary bailee. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bailment.
You are applying a very narrow definition of the word "maintain". Why do you refuse to understand that the normal dictionary definition will be used, and that "maintain" means, among other things, to keep something in such a manner that it isn't destroyed or lost. It does not mean: "personally generate or create the thing for one's own use". The legislature would have used a word like "generate" or "create" or "develop" if that is what it meant. The legislature however, used "maintain" which in ordinary parlance, simply means to keep without allowing degradation. Seriously -- go look it up instead of relying on what you think it means.
Ok -- I'm through. I don't think any rational judge is going to read the statute in a manner so narrow that it loses its obvious purpose. To win your argument in front of rational people, you have to explain why a company should be punished when it releases information about a person that it transcribed into its own database (e.g. account number), and not be punished when it releases that same information (e.g. account number) by losing a computer entrusted to its care. The law is clearly designed to punish companies that imperil people through the release of confidential information. Who gives a rip who transcribed the data?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Statutory_interpretation
Tullys is just another franchise. That isn't an independent coffee house at all. This is a great independent coffee house: http://www.theblackdrop.com/
Your code works fine when converted to English -- you're problem is that you are saying the very last clause "&& maintained ( person || business)" means that BB generated and "owns" the data, and that there is no breach unless that is the case. What you have left out are the unwritten rules, those cannons of construction I mention above.
If you change the word that is misleading you to "kept", your correct program won't return a wrong result. BB kept the data for X number of days till they lost it. That is indisputable.
As for reading the parts of the statute together, the first part is clearly meant to be a punishment applied to any entity that in any way handles other people's data carelessly. So to limit the effect of the statute with an exceptionally narrow interpretation of the word "maintain" just doesn't square with what seems to be the purpose of the statute.
OK -- I just read this. Here is what I got out of it. BB definitely handled and possessed her confidential computerized data. They didn't own the data, but the law "includes personal information that the person or entity does not own". So doesn't matter if the data was somehow generated by BB and owned by it. They merely need to have it.
... [of] equipment or [a] device storing such data" because a) if the laptop was stolen, she certainly didn't authorize that and the robber acquired it, or b) if the laptop was lost by BB, then BB acquired it by rendering the computer not findable in their storage room. Certainly she did not authorize BB to lose the computer but because it did, it arguably acquired the device ... it must be there somewhere if it is simply lost. If it went out in the garbage, then the garbage collector acquired it. Plainly, some entity not the original owner has acquired the laptop. It may be under 5 tons of rotting lettuce, but someone got it. It's important to note the law does not require the acquiring entity to misuse the data -- only to be an unauthorized recipient.
Then looking at the "breach of the security system" definition, plainly there was "unauthorized acquisition
Anyway, if she had banking info on there, and everyone does, that would clearly compromise "the security, confidentiality, OR integrity" of the data. Pick any of these, not all are required.
Returning then to the earlier part, if BB did not tell her in the most expedient fashion possible that her data was at risk, then they're liable.
Don't get hung up on "maintained" as in "made backups and stored it securely on tapes in someone's car". All BB had to do was possess the device -- which they did, allow it to be acquired by an unauthorized entity (including themselves), and then not tell her about the loss quickly.
You aren't by chance a shill poster for BB are you?
No, I'm thinking of corn ethanol, backed by tax dollars to hide the fact that AT BEST, it produces 10% more fuel than is used in the production of it. Reality is probably much lower than the our friendly lobbyists from Iowa would have us believe.
Now I wish I hadn't posted -- I would have used my mod points to correct the unfair "offtopic" mod. The question in my mind would be: insightful or funny.
I saw Bush and Cheney on youtube once. So that makes two for me.
Life doesn't create hydrocarbons, hydrocarbons are the basis of life. The interesting part is how short chains turned into long chains, and then into self replicating groupings of long chains, who eventually realize that decomposed long chains from previous iterations will chemically react with oxygen to make cars go.
Aside from that, all hydrocarbons are organic in the chemical sense. Maybe not in the "organic gardening" sense -- but gasoline is just as organic as pesticide free carrots.