That would be security problem in itself. The sucuritly line at a big airport is like the perfect freaking place for a suicide bombing; lots of people in at least for many airports a pretty confined area.
Easy way to trigger you bomb to just wait for a current across the pins. Letting people 'plug stuff in' in the security line seems like a terrible idea to me.
In theory if you can't get through the security check you are allowed to leave with your property. In practice people have been prevented from doing so.
If someone does arrive at the security checkpoint with a $600 dollar tablet that happens to have a dead battery, for their $130 flight is the TSA going to let them just leave?
Right, but that can probably be pretty well managed with opiate pain killers, for any major procedure it generally has to be anyway. Addiction issues aside they risk of cardiac, respiratory failure, liver and kidney damage etc, is much lower when you are not using as many drugs and in such high dosages to leave someone unconscious.
There is also the issue that these drugs stress the body during the already stressful surgical procedure.
I am not a medical professional but if there was a safe way to just turn off someones awareness during a surgery and then limit anesthesia to post operative pain management I suspect safety could be improved a great deal.
The punishment would still be the fact that your are deprived of years of your life. I think it would still suck pretty hard to essentially wake up one morning and find yourself 10 years older.
They probably can't, the dog more than likely alerts are just about anything with electronics, but hey that is all the "probable cause" they need.
I suspect this one will end up back at the SCOTUS They are going to be forced to expand on that ruling last year about bring a dog onto someones porch.
This ^^. Lots of people are going to point out statistically the layoffs and firings are lower than ever but it isn't really true. Companies just game the numbers by using contractors to fill what really are permeate positions.
Spying on your enemies makes sense, they are after all your enemies.
Spying on your allies makes sense to a degree as well in that everyone has always done it. You might for example want to develop your own assessment of their military readiness and capabilities. You might try to obtain information about their long term economic prospects such as total mineral reserves and stuff like that as well. What you generally do not do is industrial espionage and you probably should not be directly spying on their secret government proceedings and the like, least it be discovered and you suddenly take on the unfriendly appearance of possibly attempting to manipulate or subvert their sovereignty; that is the sort of thing that turns allies into enemies.
Its a fine line, but at least when we are talking about a stable and relatively open society I think we should be erring on the side of "don't do it", especially if you think the revelation of it would be the least bit astonishing to anyone not completely naive about statecraft.
There is already a remedy for that though, if its libel than you sue for libel; so either this law is nothing new or its something entirely new that people claim it is and away for people to whitewash facts about themselves.
if people and companies always had "good judgement" there would be no need for laws and legal precedents in the first place. Laws are a fundamentally there to replace judgment, they provide a prescription of what one can or may do given a set of facts. They replace the use of ones judgement.
Maybe the EC should recognize that the problem lies with their law codes and their courts and not with Google.
Burn is a huge problem on plasma screens and there are still lots of those out there, there is NO WAY a set top box maker should be shipping something without a screen saver on by default!
It would be nice if they had settings to turn it off if you wanted and maybe even send a CEC power off to the TV if you like, but at the very least set top boxes still MUST have a screen saver. Now in another 10 years when most of the plasma TVs have been put out to pasture, it will be a different story.
I don't like caps. I don't think they should sell you bandwidth and than charge for data. I also understand the need for ISPs to over subscribe. Its simple economics most users are going to use very little of the bandwidth most of the time.
I suspect a lot of throughput is consumed by malfunctioning stuff that dumbly makes the same requests over and over and things like this. Why can't the ISPs just kill the caps and let customers know in a not so threatening letter, "hey I think you have a problem Did you know your port is lit up at 80% capacity 24-7 if you do that's find but if not there is probably something really wrong on your network"
RSS is the right way. Distributions lists for notifications of this type have been done with mail historically because it was there not because it was a good medium.
Consider if you use e-mail for this sort of thing you need to take care of several functions e-mail does not itself take care of: *allow people to subscript *allow people to unsubscribe *scrub you mailing lists for dead addresses.
Your mail servers might be stuck with large disk queues waiting on dead domains where the MX server does not answer etc too because well that his how mail works. All of these things are not as simple as they first appear. Do you remove an address the first time you get a 500 error? Because some admins server sends an improper error code, then a bunch of users start screening about how they signed up and never get their news letter.
With RSS you just put the link out there, you don't have to manage your subscribers. You don't have to provide any unsubscribe function users can take care of themselves. You if anything from your web logs get better feedback about how often the messages are viewed because you can assume people pulling the feed actually receive it and that its not just getting filtered off to junk/spam folders.
Frankly I am glad to see someone actually doing some real research on the carbon cycle so we can understand the real issues and plan accordingly.
As opposed to what usually goes on where someone fancies up a computer model based on thirty year old assumptions backed up with shitty data from terrestrial monitoring stations down wind of localized heat sources and carbon emitters. Finally using their 'results' to push some political agenda and grab some more grant money.
This is a good thing it will put some hard facts on where the real problems are. I for one continue to suspect the biggest driver of climate change and CO2 levels will prove to be deforestation not humanities use of hydrocarbon fuel sources.
Facebook stepped over an ethical line in their "research". No, nobody got (badly) hurt but that doesn't make it acceptable.
Yes actually it does make it acceptable because the people doing the experiment knew that it was very very unlikely to cause anyone serious injury. When an psychological experiment amounts to no more than making people aware their buddies had a shitty day at work by their own account, I don't think it actually rises to the level of requiring consent.
Humans conduct experiments all the time; its how any self aware being interacts with the world around them. It just on a small scale so nobody cares, I bet plenty of sales professionals have at leas t informally experimented around if asking about peoples kids, helps them close deals. If every little experiment no matter how benign really requires informed consent then all anyone will have time to do ever again is sue each other over if their actions constituted an experiment or not.
Advertising is not always identified. How often have you gotten a letter, that is designed to look like an insurance invoice or bank check. Many look official enough I have spend at least 20 seconds deciding if its something I really need to act upon. All kinds of advertisers take out full page ads and do their damnedest to disguise them as articles in print magazines and news papers.
Sure there is always some fine print somewhere that says "advertisement" but then I would argue facebooks EULA qualifies as fine print.
Also facebook was not altering the messages or their presentation, they were filtering them. Just like they always filter what goes in your news feed, some of the filter criteria you control in the user preferences much of it you do not; all they did is change the filter criteria which users never had full control over. I think its a little crazy to get up in arms about about that.
Finally advertisers do borrow what people say to promote products. They quote celebrities and other people all the time, and they don't need to make any payment or get consent for that either as long as they keep it a direct quote; even when they use it well out of context.
That is kinda my reaction as well. It seems this issue people have here is that facebook sought to manipulate peoples emotional state. The thing is that is exactly what just about every advertiser does all the time.
Home Security System ads: clearly designed to make you feel vulnerable and threatened.
Cosmetic surgery ads: clearly designed to make you feel inadequate.
Beer ads: very often designed to make you feel less accepted, you need their product to be preceived as cool, ditto for clothing, and personal care products
Political ads: feelings of security and family (at least if you pick their candidate)
This list goes on...
It might not have the same rigor as the academic world but they absolutely do focus group this stuff and find out how people 'feel' the marketers have researched what words, phrases, and imagery can best evoke these feelings. If what facebook did is illegal or even just unethical than so is pretty much everything the modern advertising industry has been up to for the past 70 years.
I am sure many people would actually agree with that, but I don't see why its suddenly so shocking and deserving of attention just because facespace does it.
Why seems like a perfectly reasonable name to me, given what the group does and where they operate.
I am not an expert by any means but my understanding of the last organization to use that name is they rarely if ever put someone on a train or other railway conveyance at all let alone one that went underground. If anything they should have called themselves "The Discrete Walk North". Which I admit does not have the same ring to it, but is at least better in terms of descriptiveness. I guess it just shows you how this country really always been about marketing.
That is the sort of thinking that has gotten us into so much trouble in the first place. Honestly basic physics says there is no free lunch. With the exception of solar ( which isn't a renewable ) you are pulling energy out of something. I am sure if we put up enough turbines we can and will impact atmospheric conditions.
Just because something is plentiful does not make wastefulness a good idea.
I think you need to read each situation. You are correct there is no reason to be dick to someone who is just doing their job and isn't in a position to effect policy.
That said you also need to be able to take charge of the situation and look out for your interests. If you find yourself uncomfortable its a good idea to have those phrases rehearsed and ready to use in your mind.
Officers need to recognize two things:
1) They are not entitled to your time any more than anyone else is unless they have a specific reason for accosting you and that most people probably don't want to be interrupted for more than a momentary exchange of pleasantries without some reason. They should not take offense at a citizen asserting their right and desire to move along.
2) We have a system of law that is no so complex most people out walking around don't know if they are breaking some law or not. Most "good people" are not causing any real trouble even if they are violating some dusty statute about not feeding the ducks when the moon was full on the previous Tuesday. They also are not looking for any trouble and an LEO represents the potential for lots of it, in their lives. Its not the LEOs fault and its not theirs, but LEOs need to understand this is another reason why at least while they are on duty the public is going to be rather nervous around them and will want to keep their interactions brief and pro forma.
^^THIS^^ but to take it a step farther the real solution to the illegal immigration problem is to take away the incentive.
We should do away with all the quotas and pretty much all the requirements. Lets let people show up tell us where they plan to live; agree to drop the federal government a post card with their new address when they relocate and after two years without any felony convictions call them citizens.
Lets let anyone already here step forward and start their two year probation period too.
After we do that we could then pretty safely conclude anyone who still remains here or enters illegally really is the sort of ne'er do well that should deported and permanently denied re-entry.
Anything that makes it easy for people to move to where the programming jobs are entrenches that place as being where the programmers and the programming jobs will be.
I don't buy it. Possibly for other industries sure but not for software developers. It isn't as if software development has huge capital requirements. You don't need a bunch of software firms around you to get a job developing software. The vast vast majority of developers work in firms outside the software industry. Every large retail corporation for example is going to have developers on staff, but exactly none of them will have their own aluminum smelting team. Anyone who needs software can stand up a software team just about anywhere anytime.
If we were talking about metallurgists you'd have a point but most programmers I don't think size of local industry is their main obstacle to employment nor do I think the availability of workers is a driver for the size of the industry.
So you are saying that anyone can just park a largish airborne platform over top of important important government facilities but I still have to get pat down at the airport to fly commercial.
That just shows to go you how pointless all this security theater really is! I mean fill the cockpit with potassium perchlorate and just let the balloon go once you are over the target.
It can't really still be that easy can it? Not that we have exactly solved the truck bomb problem, but you can't get an unauthorized vehicle especially close to most sensitive targets anymore.
Because I think the direct election of Senators has turned it into a rather stupid popularity contest where incumbents who control vast amounts of money and have long list of corporate sponsors hold office for decades.
When the Senate is supposed to be appointed by the state governments to give them a voice. Its supposed to check federal power and protect States rights. Cooperative federalism is destroying the fundamental structure of how this country was designed to operate and its only possible because the 17th amendment killed state power.
Also its harder to buy off a plurality of state legislators who have a much higher turnover rate to keep 'your guy' in federal office.
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That would be security problem in itself. The sucuritly line at a big airport is like the perfect freaking place for a suicide bombing; lots of people in at least for many airports a pretty confined area.
Easy way to trigger you bomb to just wait for a current across the pins. Letting people 'plug stuff in' in the security line seems like a terrible idea to me.
In theory if you can't get through the security check you are allowed to leave with your property. In practice people have been prevented from doing so.
If someone does arrive at the security checkpoint with a $600 dollar tablet that happens to have a dead battery, for their $130 flight is the TSA going to let them just leave?
Right, but that can probably be pretty well managed with opiate pain killers, for any major procedure it generally has to be anyway. Addiction issues aside they risk of cardiac, respiratory failure, liver and kidney damage etc, is much lower when you are not using as many drugs and in such high dosages to leave someone unconscious.
There is also the issue that these drugs stress the body during the already stressful surgical procedure.
I am not a medical professional but if there was a safe way to just turn off someones awareness during a surgery and then limit anesthesia to post operative pain management I suspect safety could be improved a great deal.
The punishment would still be the fact that your are deprived of years of your life. I think it would still suck pretty hard to essentially wake up one morning and find yourself 10 years older.
They probably can't, the dog more than likely alerts are just about anything with electronics, but hey that is all the "probable cause" they need.
I suspect this one will end up back at the SCOTUS They are going to be forced to expand on that ruling last year about bring a dog onto someones porch.
This ^^. Lots of people are going to point out statistically the layoffs and firings are lower than ever but it isn't really true. Companies just game the numbers by using contractors to fill what really are permeate positions.
Spying on your enemies makes sense, they are after all your enemies.
Spying on your allies makes sense to a degree as well in that everyone has always done it. You might for example want to develop your own assessment of their military readiness and capabilities. You might try to obtain information about their long term economic prospects such as total mineral reserves and stuff like that as well. What you generally do not do is industrial espionage and you probably should not be directly spying on their secret government proceedings and the like, least it be discovered and you suddenly take on the unfriendly appearance of possibly attempting to manipulate or subvert their sovereignty; that is the sort of thing that turns allies into enemies.
Its a fine line, but at least when we are talking about a stable and relatively open society I think we should be erring on the side of "don't do it", especially if you think the revelation of it would be the least bit astonishing to anyone not completely naive about statecraft.
There is already a remedy for that though, if its libel than you sue for libel; so either this law is nothing new or its something entirely new that people claim it is and away for people to whitewash facts about themselves.
if people and companies always had "good judgement" there would be no need for laws and legal precedents in the first place. Laws are a fundamentally there to replace judgment, they provide a prescription of what one can or may do given a set of facts. They replace the use of ones judgement.
Maybe the EC should recognize that the problem lies with their law codes and their courts and not with Google.
Burn is a huge problem on plasma screens and there are still lots of those out there, there is NO WAY a set top box maker should be shipping something without a screen saver on by default!
It would be nice if they had settings to turn it off if you wanted and maybe even send a CEC power off to the TV if you like, but at the very least set top boxes still MUST have a screen saver. Now in another 10 years when most of the plasma TVs have been put out to pasture, it will be a different story.
I don't like caps. I don't think they should sell you bandwidth and than charge for data. I also understand the need for ISPs to over subscribe. Its simple economics most users are going to use very little of the bandwidth most of the time.
I suspect a lot of throughput is consumed by malfunctioning stuff that dumbly makes the same requests over and over and things like this. Why can't the ISPs just kill the caps and let customers know in a not so threatening letter, "hey I think you have a problem Did you know your port is lit up at 80% capacity 24-7 if you do that's find but if not there is probably something really wrong on your network"
Its not another channel its just a XML document on a webserver (pretty sure MS already runs a number of those)
RSS is the right way. Distributions lists for notifications of this type have been done with mail historically because it was there not because it was a good medium.
Consider if you use e-mail for this sort of thing you need to take care of several functions e-mail does not itself take care of:
*allow people to subscript
*allow people to unsubscribe
*scrub you mailing lists for dead addresses.
Your mail servers might be stuck with large disk queues waiting on dead domains where the MX server does not answer etc too because well that his how mail works. All of these things are not as simple as they first appear. Do you remove an address the first time you get a 500 error? Because some admins server sends an improper error code, then a bunch of users start screening about how they signed up and never get their news letter.
With RSS you just put the link out there, you don't have to manage your subscribers. You don't have to provide any unsubscribe function users can take care of themselves. You if anything from your web logs get better feedback about how often the messages are viewed because you can assume people pulling the feed actually receive it and that its not just getting filtered off to junk/spam folders.
Frankly I am glad to see someone actually doing some real research on the carbon cycle so we can understand the real issues and plan accordingly.
As opposed to what usually goes on where someone fancies up a computer model based on thirty year old assumptions backed up with shitty data from terrestrial monitoring stations down wind of localized heat sources and carbon emitters. Finally using their 'results' to push some political agenda and grab some more grant money.
This is a good thing it will put some hard facts on where the real problems are. I for one continue to suspect the biggest driver of climate change and CO2 levels will prove to be deforestation not humanities use of hydrocarbon fuel sources.
Facebook stepped over an ethical line in their "research". No, nobody got (badly) hurt but that doesn't make it acceptable.
Yes actually it does make it acceptable because the people doing the experiment knew that it was very very unlikely to cause anyone serious injury. When an psychological experiment amounts to no more than making people aware their buddies had a shitty day at work by their own account, I don't think it actually rises to the level of requiring consent.
Humans conduct experiments all the time; its how any self aware being interacts with the world around them. It just on a small scale so nobody cares, I bet plenty of sales professionals have at leas t informally experimented around if asking about peoples kids, helps them close deals. If every little experiment no matter how benign really requires informed consent then all anyone will have time to do ever again is sue each other over if their actions constituted an experiment or not.
Advertising is not always identified. How often have you gotten a letter, that is designed to look like an insurance invoice or bank check. Many look official enough I have spend at least 20 seconds deciding if its something I really need to act upon. All kinds of advertisers take out full page ads and do their damnedest to disguise them as articles in print magazines and news papers.
Sure there is always some fine print somewhere that says "advertisement" but then I would argue facebooks EULA qualifies as fine print.
Also facebook was not altering the messages or their presentation, they were filtering them. Just like they always filter what goes in your news feed, some of the filter criteria you control in the user preferences much of it you do not; all they did is change the filter criteria which users never had full control over. I think its a little crazy to get up in arms about about that.
Finally advertisers do borrow what people say to promote products. They quote celebrities and other people all the time, and they don't need to make any payment or get consent for that either as long as they keep it a direct quote; even when they use it well out of context.
That is kinda my reaction as well. It seems this issue people have here is that facebook sought to manipulate peoples emotional state. The thing is that is exactly what just about every advertiser does all the time.
Home Security System ads: clearly designed to make you feel vulnerable and threatened.
Cosmetic surgery ads: clearly designed to make you feel inadequate.
Beer ads: very often designed to make you feel less accepted, you need their product to be preceived as cool, ditto for clothing, and personal care products
Political ads: feelings of security and family (at least if you pick their candidate)
This list goes on...
It might not have the same rigor as the academic world but they absolutely do focus group this stuff and find out how people 'feel' the marketers have researched what words, phrases, and imagery can best evoke these feelings. If what facebook did is illegal or even just unethical than so is pretty much everything the modern advertising industry has been up to for the past 70 years.
I am sure many people would actually agree with that, but I don't see why its suddenly so shocking and deserving of attention just because facespace does it.
Why seems like a perfectly reasonable name to me, given what the group does and where they operate.
I am not an expert by any means but my understanding of the last organization to use that name is they rarely if ever put someone on a train or other railway conveyance at all let alone one that went underground. If anything they should have called themselves "The Discrete Walk North". Which I admit does not have the same ring to it, but is at least better in terms of descriptiveness. I guess it just shows you how this country really always been about marketing.
That is the sort of thinking that has gotten us into so much trouble in the first place. Honestly basic physics says there is no free lunch. With the exception of solar ( which isn't a renewable ) you are pulling energy out of something. I am sure if we put up enough turbines we can and will impact atmospheric conditions.
Just because something is plentiful does not make wastefulness a good idea.
I think you need to read each situation. You are correct there is no reason to be dick to someone who is just doing their job and isn't in a position to effect policy.
That said you also need to be able to take charge of the situation and look out for your interests. If you find yourself uncomfortable its a good idea to have those phrases rehearsed and ready to use in your mind.
Officers need to recognize two things:
1) They are not entitled to your time any more than anyone else is unless they have a specific reason for accosting you and that most people probably don't want to be interrupted for more than a momentary exchange of pleasantries without some reason. They should not take offense at a citizen asserting their right and desire to move along.
2) We have a system of law that is no so complex most people out walking around don't know if they are breaking some law or not. Most "good people" are not causing any real trouble even if they are violating some dusty statute about not feeding the ducks when the moon was full on the previous Tuesday. They also are not looking for any trouble and an LEO represents the potential for lots of it, in their lives. Its not the LEOs fault and its not theirs, but LEOs need to understand this is another reason why at least while they are on duty the public is going to be rather nervous around them and will want to keep their interactions brief and pro forma.
Joe -is a great editor (he/it) all the features I typically need for small and medium sized software projects.
^^THIS^^ but to take it a step farther the real solution to the illegal immigration problem is to take away the incentive.
We should do away with all the quotas and pretty much all the requirements. Lets let people show up tell us where they plan to live; agree to drop the federal government a post card with their new address when they relocate and after two years without any felony convictions call them citizens.
Lets let anyone already here step forward and start their two year probation period too.
After we do that we could then pretty safely conclude anyone who still remains here or enters illegally really is the sort of ne'er do well that should deported and permanently denied re-entry.
Anything that makes it easy for people to move to where the programming jobs are entrenches that place as being where the programmers and the programming jobs will be.
I don't buy it. Possibly for other industries sure but not for software developers. It isn't as if software development has huge capital requirements. You don't need a bunch of software firms around you to get a job developing software. The vast vast majority of developers work in firms outside the software industry. Every large retail corporation for example is going to have developers on staff, but exactly none of them will have their own aluminum smelting team. Anyone who needs software can stand up a software team just about anywhere anytime.
If we were talking about metallurgists you'd have a point but most programmers I don't think size of local industry is their main obstacle to employment nor do I think the availability of workers is a driver for the size of the industry.
So you are saying that anyone can just park a largish airborne platform over top of important important government facilities but I still have to get pat down at the airport to fly commercial.
That just shows to go you how pointless all this security theater really is! I mean fill the cockpit with potassium perchlorate and just let the balloon go once you are over the target.
It can't really still be that easy can it? Not that we have exactly solved the truck bomb problem, but you can't get an unauthorized vehicle especially close to most sensitive targets anymore.
Because I think the direct election of Senators has turned it into a rather stupid popularity contest where incumbents who control vast amounts of money and have long list of corporate sponsors hold office for decades.
When the Senate is supposed to be appointed by the state governments to give them a voice. Its supposed to check federal power and protect States rights. Cooperative federalism is destroying the fundamental structure of how this country was designed to operate and its only possible because the 17th amendment killed state power.
Also its harder to buy off a plurality of state legislators who have a much higher turnover rate to keep 'your guy' in federal office.