They don't at our cottage, where this is already in place. Instead, the boxes are about half as big as necessary, and the driver sticks a card in the box. You get to drive in to town to pick them up at the post office.
On-line ordering depends on cheap physical-world delivery, and this will drive them out of business.
If they cut off mail, we'll either be reduced to post-boxes or parcel delivery.
Boxes don't work for parcels, even in apartment buildings, where they used heavily. Parcel delivery has the same problem with boxes: everyone ends up getting a postcard and schlepping off to the local pickup point because the darned boxes aren't big enough to hold the parcel. And big boxes are unaffordable!
Parcel delivery, on the other hand, is insanely more expensive: it loses out on the efficiency of loading up a truck and doing every house on the street, one after another. Parcel guys have to solve the "travelling salesman problem" in their head as they zig-zag across the city. Street-by-street delivery is O(n), parcel delivery O(n!) (and NP-hard in the general case).
In effect, the government proposes we go back to the 18th century, and pick up rare and expensive parcels at a local substation, and pay through the nose for the manual handling that involves.
If you aren't one of the 1% who can have their servants pick up the goods they ordered, you're not going to order anything on-line. You'll go to the store, just like grandpa and grandma. (Of course, the government says they're "conservative", so maybe that's what they intended (;-))
Previously when I've seen a set of principles espoused to a government by a group of competitors that don't currently follow those principles, it's been a polite request to "give us all a level playing field" by banning something.
If my leaky memory is correct, an association of competing car dealers asked Canada (or perhaps merely Ontario) to set rules about resetting odometers. Customers strongly distrusted odometer readings in those days, and suspected universal dishonesty by used-car dealers. So they asked for it to be made illegal.
It was widely thought that they wished to give up a self-destructive practice, but feared individual business failures if they didn't all give it up at the same time.
If Google and friends say "snooping should be illegal, even for the police", then they need not engage in a race to the bottom with each other.
Methinks we may need a general mechanism for identifying nutters that's hard to spoof, so that the folks who used to spend their days flaming innocent passers-by on usenet can't just migrate here.
This is probably an instance of a byzantine fault-tolerance problem, as solved by Barbara Liskov. As a bad example, consider displaying one of those little bi-coloured pills one uses for friends and foes, with the numbers voting shown in each side. ONLY if N people vote him "id10t" and N is at least one greater than 3 times the the people who vote him legit, mind you! Generally displaying reputation or friend/foes icons would just lead to flaming about reputations and scores.
They're called "moral" rights to distinguish them from economic rights. In your case, they allow you to control whether your name is on the work or whether you wish a pseudonym used to prevent your name from being mentioned in reference to it (;-))
In Canada they came out of a Criminal Code amendment to prevent plays from being stolen and the author's name changed. The theft was breach of an economic right, the renaming a breach of a moral right.
In countries like Canada, authors have "moral rights" under copyright law, specifically including the right to be be named as the author of a work, even if it is paid for by another. These cannot be waived, and in some specific cases can only be assigned.
One might declare a non-assignable moral right to make available one's work, including for purposes of showing a "portfolio" of one's work, or making scholarly works available to other scholars.
Quaetions tell you what part of the lawyer's arguments need expansion. Sometimes that can mean "you guys need to respond to this" (decision about to go one way), and sometimes questions can mean "are you really serious about this?" (decision about to go the other way).
They use witnesses to get facts, experts to get facts and expert opinion, and lawyers to get logic, then apply facts to the logic and expert opinion. If they were programmers, they'd be doing a transitive closure on ((facts + opinions) * logic) and pruning off all the branches that evaluate to "factually wrong" or "invalid logic". What comes out are prospective solutions, which then get pattern-matched against rules of law and legislation, looking for a fit (:-))
When there isn't a unique answer, they probe for more facts and logical arguments. Thus the questions.
I should be able to have my desktop use my phone and a password to do a 2-factor authentication, and transparently share with my pad, and with the older pad that lives in my office. I should be able to have one reference book open on the pad, a second open on the old pad, and a notepad program and open office open on my desktop, and cut and paste from any of them.
The author of the article does stats, while I write books and programs. I should have some serious support from all my hardware vendors for what I do for a living, instead of phone support for messaging, pad support for "consuming" media and desktop support for doing actual work.
--dave
Joking aside, robot police need to be policed
on
R2-D2: Mall Cop
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
In particular, they need to delete "yesterday's tape" except for events submitted to the human police for a prosecution.
This is what Canadian law requires for business information not needed for explicit, agreed-upon business purposes. Bell, for example, can't divulge my address to a third party without my permission, and must delete it after the business relationship has come to an end.
We may need a law or a decision setting out the limits of what one implicitly consents to in entering a privately owned place open to the public: different jurisdictions are more or less protective of shoppers' privacy in malls, where the problem has first shown up.
There are truly out-of-control entities, such as criminal gangs, but most snoops have to obey laws, and if they are businesses generally chose to do as a cost-avoidance strategy (;-))
This large group of commercial snoops are currently trying to capture as many unhappy people as they can, and within a few years are in line for a harsh slapping about from enraged politicians: see the UK for a picture of what happens when newspapers crack people's cell phones. Now imagine what response you get when they start losing snooped credit card numbers.
Amex is already sensitive to this and related problems seen by their customers, and will issue short-term and single-use credit card numbers for transactions with doubtful merchants. I have every expectation that they will be asked to offer "avatar" cards, and after hemming and hawing, will issue me a card in my pen name, after taking some steps to make sure they can't be blamed if I'm the crook, not the merchant.
Given that, I'll have an avatar on steam with the ability to buy and sell things without exposing who I am. People named "John Smith" already have lots of avatars, all of whom think they're the real John Smith. This will do nicely for anything on-line or credit-card-centric.
Physical presence and photos are a different problem: we have weak laws about what used to be called "database matching", and we may need laws against keeping photos of me paying with a credit card any longer than it takes for the credit to clear. Of course, if I "pay" with a shotgun, I have to expect the pictures to be kept until they're thrown my ass in jail (:-))
Retaining data, and using it without the permission of the person who provided it has been a problem since the printing press was invented. Public libraries found that the were being asked for patron's reading histories, and created the now common policy of retaining the patron-book relationship only until the book was returned or replaced.
Private photos and lifelogs are harder to manage, but less harmful, as there are so very many of them, and are private to that person...
Medical records, especially of certain kinds of injuries, are highly desired by the various security services. Medical organizations resist releasing them and have to be legislated into, for example, reporting possible stab and gunshot wounds. Other organizations, which purport to keep medical records securely, grant full access to their DBAs and sysadmins.
In the era of 8" tape, such an organization gave used but unerased tapes to a local university, much to the surprise of a close friend who chanced to read a "scratch tape" and found a list of STD victims.
As a contractor at such an organization, I or any one of my colleagues could have walked off with a modern thumb-drive full of database dumps, rather like a U.S contractor of note.
Gee, I wonder if one of his other thumb-drives is full of Canadian medical records?
Yup! I worked as part of a company that also did headhunting, in Canada where the H1B visa problem doesn't exist, and we noticed that the computer-oriented part of the HR industry has fallen into a faddish practice from the last boom in California.
HR looks for a person doing exactly the same job at a competitor, and tries to hire them away. That works in periods on very high employment, albeit as something of the best of a bad lot. It's pessimal in periods of low employment. In both cases it selects for content, not skill.
To get past HR, you have to write a cover letter whose first sentence says "I'm doing that today", and hope the second sentence sounds attractive to the actual hiring manager.
That should bias the respondents toward even lower-cost alternatives, such as "steal this book". It should also apply to used CDs, etc, something that they did no report.
I buy e-books from companies who expect me to treat them like physical books. If I lend a colleague a copy, I tell him if he likes it he should buy one. General speaking, (s)he does. Sometimes electronic, sometimes paper.
One publisher puts a "bookplate" in that says "This electronic copy of <title> belongs to David Collier-Brown, davecb@spamcop.net", in the top half of a page that contains a simplified set of terms and conditions, which explicitly says "treat me like a hardcover book".
I could remove it easily enough, it's just epub, but I don't care to. I agree with the publisher, and I want borrowers to know who they borrowed the book from, so they'll tell me if they buy their own. I expect most of my friends could pirate the book as well, and that they don't care to.
The publishers know I can pirate the book, but that I bought it. They take a risk that I may lend a copy to someone who "won't give it back", in the sense that he will keep it and won't buy his own copy. That tends to make me reluctant to lend him either electronic or physical books, just like I would if he didn't return a hardcover he borrowed.
In short, they expect most people are honest, can pirate and will buy books they like. See any of my postings about O'Reilly's Using Samba for proof that people did exactly that.
Yes: one of my customers is a major publisher, and the printing costs, warehousing and transport are indeed a huge part of the cost of a book, certainly on the order of 40%. Some of this can avoided by the publisher, by having a retailer warehouse the books, but the retailer still has to pay for the warehouse, and therefor adds that cost into the price.
"attempting to obtain money upon a false and fraudulent pretense", an offence under the criminal code, 380(1)(a), 6 month to 2 years, or just possibly extortion, 253(1.3), good for 14 years. Consult a detective, not a lawyer.
The burden of proof is higher than a suit, but the consequences for the criminal are much more appropriate (:-))
Every government wants to know who read books they don't approve of. Libraries (and library software) carefully protect borrower privacy by only keeping borrowers names recorded with the book borrowed until they have been returned.
This is the law in several privacy-protective countries, and to sell software, you have to adhere to the law. Other countries don't prohibit privacy, so the software is saleable everywhere.
Then multiply the base rate fallacy's number by the number of people they're matching against and you get a startingly large number.
This is, by the way, the same reason you see the "birthday paradox". You think it's the probability of a false positive times the number screened. It's actually the probability of a false positive times (number of people screened * number of bad guys in your database).
--dave
Slashdot Mirror
Yes! I want to file for a change of government tomorrow (:-))
--dave
They don't at our cottage, where this is already in place. Instead, the boxes are about half as big as necessary, and the driver sticks a card in the box. You get to drive in to town to pick them up at the post office.
On-line ordering depends on cheap physical-world delivery, and this will drive them out of business.
If they cut off mail, we'll either be reduced to post-boxes or parcel delivery. Boxes don't work for parcels, even in apartment buildings, where they used heavily. Parcel delivery has the same problem with boxes: everyone ends up getting a postcard and schlepping off to the local pickup point because the darned boxes aren't big enough to hold the parcel. And big boxes are unaffordable!
Parcel delivery, on the other hand, is insanely more expensive: it loses out on the efficiency of loading up a truck and doing every house on the street, one after another. Parcel guys have to solve the "travelling salesman problem" in their head as they zig-zag across the city. Street-by-street delivery is O(n), parcel delivery O(n!) (and NP-hard in the general case).
In effect, the government proposes we go back to the 18th century, and pick up rare and expensive parcels at a local substation, and pay through the nose for the manual handling that involves.
If you aren't one of the 1% who can have their servants pick up the goods they ordered, you're not going to order anything on-line. You'll go to the store, just like grandpa and grandma. (Of course, the government says they're "conservative", so maybe that's what they intended (;-))
--dave
If they snoop on their masters, treason.
Previously when I've seen a set of principles espoused to a government by a group of competitors that don't currently follow those principles, it's been a polite request to "give us all a level playing field" by banning something.
If my leaky memory is correct, an association of competing car dealers asked Canada (or perhaps merely Ontario) to set rules about resetting odometers. Customers strongly distrusted odometer readings in those days, and suspected universal dishonesty by used-car dealers. So they asked for it to be made illegal.
It was widely thought that they wished to give up a self-destructive practice, but feared individual business failures if they didn't all give it up at the same time.
If Google and friends say "snooping should be illegal, even for the police", then they need not engage in a race to the bottom with each other.
--dave
Methinks we may need a general mechanism for identifying nutters that's hard to spoof, so that the folks who used to spend their days flaming innocent passers-by on usenet can't just migrate here.
This is probably an instance of a byzantine fault-tolerance problem, as solved by Barbara Liskov. As a bad example, consider displaying one of those little bi-coloured pills one uses for friends and foes, with the numbers voting shown in each side. ONLY if N people vote him "id10t" and N is at least one greater than 3 times the the people who vote him legit, mind you! Generally displaying reputation or friend/foes icons would just lead to flaming about reputations and scores.
--dave
If we seriously wanted to know if it was necessary and sufficient, I'd suggest we ask Whitfield Diffie, who is a nice man and would probably answer...
Americans don't have moral rights, only economic ones (;-))
They're called "moral" rights to distinguish them from economic rights. In your case, they allow you to control whether your name is on the work or whether you wish a pseudonym used to prevent your name from being mentioned in reference to it (;-))
In Canada they came out of a Criminal Code amendment to prevent plays from being stolen and the author's name changed. The theft was breach of an economic right, the renaming a breach of a moral right.
Universities in at least Canada are starting to push back against "copyright collectives", and have similar concerns about scholarly publishers.
In countries like Canada, authors have "moral rights" under copyright law, specifically including the right to be be named as the author of a work, even if it is paid for by another. These cannot be waived, and in some specific cases can only be assigned.
One might declare a non-assignable moral right to make available one's work, including for purposes of showing a "portfolio" of one's work, or making scholarly works available to other scholars.
Quaetions tell you what part of the lawyer's arguments need expansion. Sometimes that can mean "you guys need to respond to this" (decision about to go one way), and sometimes questions can mean "are you really serious about this?" (decision about to go the other way).
They use witnesses to get facts, experts to get facts and expert opinion, and lawyers to get logic, then apply facts to the logic and expert opinion. If they were programmers, they'd be doing a transitive closure on ((facts + opinions) * logic) and pruning off all the branches that evaluate to "factually wrong" or "invalid logic". What comes out are prospective solutions, which then get pattern-matched against rules of law and legislation, looking for a fit (:-))
When there isn't a unique answer, they probe for more facts and logical arguments. Thus the questions.
--dave (not totally seriously, but close) c-b
I should be able to have my desktop use my phone and a password to do a 2-factor authentication, and transparently share with my pad, and with the older pad that lives in my office. I should be able to have one reference book open on the pad, a second open on the old pad, and a notepad program and open office open on my desktop, and cut and paste from any of them.
The author of the article does stats, while I write books and programs. I should have some serious support from all my hardware vendors for what I do for a living, instead of phone support for messaging, pad support for "consuming" media and desktop support for doing actual work.
--dave
In particular, they need to delete "yesterday's tape" except for events submitted to the human police for a prosecution.
This is what Canadian law requires for business information not needed for explicit, agreed-upon business purposes. Bell, for example, can't divulge my address to a third party without my permission, and must delete it after the business relationship has come to an end.
We may need a law or a decision setting out the limits of what one implicitly consents to in entering a privately owned place open to the public: different jurisdictions are more or less protective of shoppers' privacy in malls, where the problem has first shown up.
--dave
There are truly out-of-control entities, such as criminal gangs, but most snoops have to obey laws, and if they are businesses generally chose to do as a cost-avoidance strategy (;-))
This large group of commercial snoops are currently trying to capture as many unhappy people as they can, and within a few years are in line for a harsh slapping about from enraged politicians: see the UK for a picture of what happens when newspapers crack people's cell phones. Now imagine what response you get when they start losing snooped credit card numbers.
Amex is already sensitive to this and related problems seen by their customers, and will issue short-term and single-use credit card numbers for transactions with doubtful merchants. I have every expectation that they will be asked to offer "avatar" cards, and after hemming and hawing, will issue me a card in my pen name, after taking some steps to make sure they can't be blamed if I'm the crook, not the merchant.
Given that, I'll have an avatar on steam with the ability to buy and sell things without exposing who I am. People named "John Smith" already have lots of avatars, all of whom think they're the real John Smith. This will do nicely for anything on-line or credit-card-centric.
Physical presence and photos are a different problem: we have weak laws about what used to be called "database matching", and we may need laws against keeping photos of me paying with a credit card any longer than it takes for the credit to clear. Of course, if I "pay" with a shotgun, I have to expect the pictures to be kept until they're thrown my ass in jail (:-))
Retaining data, and using it without the permission of the person who provided it has been a problem since the printing press was invented. Public libraries found that the were being asked for patron's reading histories, and created the now common policy of retaining the patron-book relationship only until the book was returned or replaced.
Private photos and lifelogs are harder to manage, but less harmful, as there are so very many of them, and are private to that person...
--dave
Medical records, especially of certain kinds of injuries, are highly desired by the various security services. Medical organizations resist releasing them and have to be legislated into, for example, reporting possible stab and gunshot wounds. Other organizations, which purport to keep medical records securely, grant full access to their DBAs and sysadmins.
In the era of 8" tape, such an organization gave used but unerased tapes to a local university, much to the surprise of a close friend who chanced to read a "scratch tape" and found a list of STD victims.
As a contractor at such an organization, I or any one of my colleagues could have walked off with a modern thumb-drive full of database dumps, rather like a U.S contractor of note.
Gee, I wonder if one of his other thumb-drives is full of Canadian medical records?
--dave
Yup! I worked as part of a company that also did headhunting, in Canada where the H1B visa problem doesn't exist, and we noticed that the computer-oriented part of the HR industry has fallen into a faddish practice from the last boom in California.
HR looks for a person doing exactly the same job at a competitor, and tries to hire them away. That works in periods on very high employment, albeit as something of the best of a bad lot. It's pessimal in periods of low employment. In both cases it selects for content, not skill.
To get past HR, you have to write a cover letter whose first sentence says "I'm doing that today", and hope the second sentence sounds attractive to the actual hiring manager.
Similie.
That should bias the respondents toward even lower-cost alternatives, such as "steal this book". It should also apply to used CDs, etc, something that they did no report.
I buy e-books from companies who expect me to treat them like physical books. If I lend a colleague a copy, I tell him if he likes it he should buy one. General speaking, (s)he does. Sometimes electronic, sometimes paper.
One publisher puts a "bookplate" in that says "This electronic copy of <title> belongs to David Collier-Brown, davecb@spamcop.net", in the top half of a page that contains a simplified set of terms and conditions, which explicitly says "treat me like a hardcover book".
I could remove it easily enough, it's just epub, but I don't care to. I agree with the publisher, and I want borrowers to know who they borrowed the book from, so they'll tell me if they buy their own. I expect most of my friends could pirate the book as well, and that they don't care to.
The publishers know I can pirate the book, but that I bought it. They take a risk that I may lend a copy to someone who "won't give it back", in the sense that he will keep it and won't buy his own copy. That tends to make me reluctant to lend him either electronic or physical books, just like I would if he didn't return a hardcover he borrowed.
In short, they expect most people are honest, can pirate and will buy books they like. See any of my postings about O'Reilly's Using Samba for proof that people did exactly that.
--dave
Yes: one of my customers is a major publisher, and the printing costs, warehousing and transport are indeed a huge part of the cost of a book, certainly on the order of 40%. Some of this can avoided by the publisher, by having a retailer warehouse the books, but the retailer still has to pay for the warehouse, and therefor adds that cost into the price.
There ain't no free lunch (;-))
--dave
"attempting to obtain money upon a false and fraudulent pretense", an offence under the criminal code, 380(1)(a), 6 month to 2 years, or just possibly extortion, 253(1.3), good for 14 years. Consult a detective, not a lawyer.
The burden of proof is higher than a suit, but the consequences for the criminal are much more appropriate (:-))
--dave
Every government wants to know who read books they don't approve of. Libraries (and library software) carefully protect borrower privacy by only keeping borrowers names recorded with the book borrowed until they have been returned.
This is the law in several privacy-protective countries, and to sell software, you have to adhere to the law. Other countries don't prohibit privacy, so the software is saleable everywhere.
--dave
Then multiply the base rate fallacy's number by the number of people they're matching against and you get a startingly large number. This is, by the way, the same reason you see the "birthday paradox". You think it's the probability of a false positive times the number screened. It's actually the probability of a false positive times (number of people screened * number of bad guys in your database). --dave
--dave