I'll agree. one does not think "felon" when one thinks of little 7 year old Johnny hiding under the playground. Not that little Johnny should be trusted with a camera, but parents are dumb enough to give lil johnny an iPad....with a camera built in. Any adult, however, who TELLS little Johnny to go take those pictures...should be in a world of trouble.
The adult would be considered the guilty party there under the laws of most if not all of the states--Little Johnny becomes the "innocent agent." (You could also charge it as conspiracy, which is a federal crime and adds five years onto the sentence, but it would be more likely to be prosecuted under the innocent agent model.)
Age difference should matter when you're talking about people under 18. A sixteen-year-old who does this to another 16-year-old should be guilty of no more than a misdemeanor if an adult would be guilty of no more than a misdemeanor for the same behavior with another adult.
Make a stupid comment, get downmodded, is more like it. The "politically correct dogma" Slashdot is working on is that highly intelligent people who have studied something all their professional lives are likely to be closer to being correct than people who just don't get thermodynamics.
I'd say this is about 50-50. A good part of the slashdot crowd respects professionalism. Unless it comes from Microsoft, for example. Or the NSA. The Police. Or a politician. The really insightful, professional, insightful answers do rise to the top about 50% of the time, which is pretty good, but there's also a lot of groupthink.
but that dude has a serious under-appreciation for abusively long run-on sentences
I though you Americans were supposed to grow up reading Moby Dick to get used to such things? Awesome book, but you probably have to be able to write like Melville to get away with writing a lot of paragraph long sentences.
Actually, I don't believe any American has read all of Moby Dick. At least not deliberately.
There's nothing that makes one more stupid than being too arrogant to learn from one's mistakes. Accept corrections, like compliments, gracefully and move on.
Not so. Arrogance bothers us emotionally and the inability to learn from mistakes bothers us as scientists. Yet I could pick out dozens of people easily who would remain smarter than the vast majority of the population if they never learned another thing.
Stupidity is relative, and at any given moment, we all have different starting points.
That isn't true. The term law was used in the past with the expectation that certain things were settled. The philosophical underpinnings of science have advanced since then and the term law is no longer used.
I find this funny because many of our laws change more frequently than our theories.
This is beginning to remind me of the annexation of Czechoslovakia, let's hope this time around the Western powers will have enough spine to stand up to the dictator in stead of encouraging him with appeasement. We are gettign to the point where threatenign to move a few NATO divisions to the Urainian border would seem appropriate, at least that was the only thing that seemed to work on Hitler.
We moved F-22s and submarines carrying hundreds of nuclear warheads toward the conflict area.
Lead! The Romans used the stuff for pipes, and so did we in the fifties. We use graphite in pencils now, so we don't use it there. Where do we use lead these days? Nuclear containment and superman films? (And probably illegal Manhattan plumbing repairs, where legacy systems would be impractical to replace)
I rented a Ford Fusion a few months back. The MSFT in-vehicle tech worked perfectly well.
I know it's anecdotal, and I'm all for competition, but I wonder if this was a good decision. When the car company cites licensing costs that can't be much per vehicle as a reason to change a technology, you begin to feel they're cutting corners.
I questioned the Hummer when it first came out - was it really better than the seven Korea era jeeps it cost to build?
Actually, yes. If you're riding through unsecured territory, do you want to be in an armored Hummer with a 50 cal mounted on top, or a light open Jeep with your trusty sidearm?
Neither. You want to be in an MRAP. (At least for some definitions of unsecured.) MRAPs were going to take years in the regular military procurement cycle and Secretary Gates cut through a lot of red tape and fast-tracked them into pretty much the fastest major U.S. military procurement operation in... decades, maybe?
Some procurements are stupid--mostly because of Congressional pork, somewhat because of problems with Defense bureaucracy that keeps front-line needs from being relayed up the chain of command fast-enough and keeps them from being killed in favor of someone's pet project's budget. But some are really an improvement... it very-much takes a case-by-case analysis, both from the view of the soldier on the ground *and* from a more strategic view, planning for all of the forseeable defense-related tasks: counterinsurgency, antipiracy, invasion of a small nation, all-out-war against a major power, peacekeeping, special ops, etc...
The *manufacturer* has a vested interest in making sure your car has a safety update--it's a bit different than just the neighbor's concern. Think about it. If you make a product that *will* kill a few hundred people over its lifetime unless you fix it, and only half of the owners will bring it in for an upgrade, wouldn't you rather be able to push the upgrade out?
An auto-upgrade is a major safety feature. Is there a security issue? Yes. But not an unsolvable one.
Every manufacturer will switch to auto-upgrades when the first one loses a massive tort case over failure to auto-upgrade.
I caught an unmarked "police" car methodically casing our office complex parking lot. I happed to walk right by as he entered a dead end area of our parking lot. He had a laptop and there were four rectangle boxes mounted on the trunk with lenses pointing outward. Our security group confirmed from videos that they cased our lot as well as nearby businesses. So, at what point is this trespassing? We didn't invite law enforcement on to our lot to collect data. We now know it was the local police department and they've since added these readers to several marked vehicles and have stationed them alongside roadways collecting data. They've recently been sued over refusal to release information under state sunshine laws but I doubt that will stop them. We now have several police departments in the metro area using this. What next? Will they be installed on stop lights right next to the red light cameras?
1. It usually becomes trespassing if someone with authority asks them to leave and they don't, although it varies based on state law.
2. You can, however, sue them for violating four fourth amendment right to be free from unreasonable search. I don't know that you would win, but if it's a private parking lot, you might.
3. They already use these on the West Side Highway as a pilot program for fully automated tolls. Everyone either has EZ-pass or gets billed through the mail based on their license plate. My guess is they're imaging every license plate on all of the entries to NYC (if not, they certainly will be within a little while).
As if the privacy implications and police overreach weren't bad enough, I have been feeling more and more frustrated over the financial aspect of programs like these. Who decided that this program was good or desirable in the first place? We've been getting along fine for a long time now without a national database of license-plate scans.
The same can be said for many other surveillance and technology initiatives by police and government agencies. These programs cost vast amounts of money which could be used for cancer research, or schools, or bridge repairs, or space exploration, or countless other positive things. Alternatively, just give the money back to the taxpayers and let them put it to good use. I'm pretty sure that only a tiny percentage of people would volunteer to fund programs like these out of their own pockets.
A program like this is relatively cheap and easy. I would expect it is already in place on a smaller level in a lot of municipalities (and certainly in DC). ICE probably withdrew it because they were afraid, in the current climate, that a legal challenge might (barely) succeed and threaten all of those prorams.
The benefits to the program are also substantial--it gives you a lot of information for law enforcement *and* for anti-terrorism. They can use that to investigate crimes (who was in area X) (if you said your alibi was Y, why were you driving the other way?). If your goal is to prevent crime and to make investigation in the aftermath of an attack easier, you want this.
It does, obviously, come at a privacy cost. But realistically, we're already living with it, and they're not going to stop unless a court orders them to--which is somewhat unlikely.
To do so whilst reserving the ability of the limo owners cameras to work is unreasonable, and doesn't deserve any suggestions.
Not necessarily--suppose the limo camera is basically there for security, and will only be examined in the event of the investigation of criminal activity, a lawsuit, or missing luggage, and otherwise it gets destroyed after, say, a year. Now the drunk pop star doing cocaine off the congressional aide is somewhat safe from photographs getting out (unless there is a criminal investigation for other reasons).
I wish they would stop misusing the term "cord cutting" for not subscribing to television while still getting Internet via cable, as it is confusing and stupid.
Yeah. They're literally cutting their own balls off by doing that.
Am I to understand, that a lawyer is complaining about something sleazy and underhanded? Really? A lawyer? The same guys who sleaze their way to the top, then get political jobs so they can sleazy their way to the top again? They are the ones complaining about something possible being sleazy happening to them? Really? Let me get you a tissue.
Also the same guys and girls who are the first to defend the people from government overreach. Who serve nonprofits and NGOs and the public sector and the poor. Some lawyers are assholes. Others dedicate their lives in service.
Either way, do you really think it's a good idea to have the government listening in when you go to get legal advice about your problems with them or someone else?
Actual judges will side against you if you are the one writting the contract. So if you think you can commit fraud by writing a sh*tty contract then you are due for a rude awakening.
You can come very close to fraud, but can't actually commit it. There's a rule that keep evidence from prior to the contract formation (e.g. your email chain about how you would do the project) out of court, but the rule doesn't apply to evidence of fraud. That being said, depending on the state and a bunch of variables, if the contract explicitly waives reliance on a certain representation--like by saying "you are not relying on any representations the contractor made about X," then someone is MUCH more likely to get away with what would otherwise be fraud. But just a "you are not relying on any representations..." is much less useful than "not relying on any representations about X" if someone alleges fraud.
Disclaimer: YMMV, do NOT commit fraud, I am not your lawyer, consult a lawyer, etc...
As another poster said, this isn't fair. Lots of us drive with winter tires, I doubt anyone down there has even heard of them.
We (most Canadians) have the equipment and machinery to clear snow, maintain highways, and the experience to get around in these conditions. They don't.
DC is generally comic in snow, mostly because the drivers just don't know how to drive in it. I remember seeing a UPS truck try to get unstuck for an hour with no progress.
Around New York, you get a lot of people who basically know how to deal with it, but they don't always do it very intelligently. The left and right turn lanes on United States Route 1 in New Rochelle, for example, have been covered in snow for a week and they don't bother to plow them, instead just keeping the main lanes clear and letting people turn out of those.
In Canada, they are used to snow and *know* they they could get another six feet of it to deal with in the next two or three storms, so they keep the roads cleared *WAY* back. The undivided two-lane highways with unpaved shoulders are plowed to ten feet off the road in either side.
Nutshell. While your ISP can't control anything beyond their edge, your ISP or any of its links should NEVER be the reason, and your ISP should make sure the same is also true for anyone they link with. The core network should never be a limitation and only the end-points should be.
This would be a really bad way to design a network--it would result in building for tremendous overcapacity. Realistically, it is exceptionally rare that a customer will use his entire pipe for the entire month. Designing for that would be like designing a house with the assumption that one sumo wrestler will be living on each square foot of flooring.
Providers should be able to rely on certain historically tested assumptions when they size their pipes--like what is peak load for a suburban community with x-thousand-users?
Put another way, everyone in NYC does not use 12 MBps at the same time. In fact, if they do, the RIGHT response is to not let it all through--because it means there's a *massive* DDOS going on.
Are you fucking kidding me? Are you a shill or just stupid?
Neither. I am guesing (s)he is an IP lawyer. Used to thinking about how the company can get its way within the bounds of the law rather than asking whether things like investigating a scientist's wife in the hope of discrediting his research should be permissible in a civilized society. Maybe she does have a bias--maybe she got dumped by your company's CEO. But there's a big difference between *knowing* she has a bias and trying to cook one up.
The company's POV may be valid, but not all of the actions it intended in support of them--whether legal or not--are moral.
The real issue is that any reputable company in response to science that is bad for their products should be saying "this science showed that maybe there's a problem here, we'd better make sure we're not hurting our customers or their neighbors, let's do some research and legitimately see what the deal is." Resorting to discrediting the other guy should only come up, maybe, when and if you've established that his research is wrong, that the product is safe, that the guy's data is wrong, and that he's basically a crackpot. Unfortunately economic incentives make most people feel free to allow their product to poison or even murder despite the science. (See, e.g., cigarettes.) This is actually a good reason for broad diversification--the smaller a percentage of revenue is dependent on one product, the more willing a company is to do the right thing when one product proves unsafe.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll agree. one does not think "felon" when one thinks of little 7 year old Johnny hiding under the playground. Not that little Johnny should be trusted with a camera, but parents are dumb enough to give lil johnny an iPad....with a camera built in. Any adult, however, who TELLS little Johnny to go take those pictures...should be in a world of trouble.
The adult would be considered the guilty party there under the laws of most if not all of the states--Little Johnny becomes the "innocent agent." (You could also charge it as conspiracy, which is a federal crime and adds five years onto the sentence, but it would be more likely to be prosecuted under the innocent agent model.)
Age difference should matter when you're talking about people under 18. A sixteen-year-old who does this to another 16-year-old should be guilty of no more than a misdemeanor if an adult would be guilty of no more than a misdemeanor for the same behavior with another adult.
Make a stupid comment, get downmodded, is more like it. The "politically correct dogma" Slashdot is working on is that highly intelligent people who have studied something all their professional lives are likely to be closer to being correct than people who just don't get thermodynamics.
I'd say this is about 50-50. A good part of the slashdot crowd respects professionalism. Unless it comes from Microsoft, for example. Or the NSA. The Police. Or a politician. The really insightful, professional, insightful answers do rise to the top about 50% of the time, which is pretty good, but there's also a lot of groupthink.
I though you Americans were supposed to grow up reading Moby Dick to get used to such things?
Awesome book, but you probably have to be able to write like Melville to get away with writing a lot of paragraph long sentences.
Actually, I don't believe any American has read all of Moby Dick. At least not deliberately.
There's nothing that makes one more stupid than being too arrogant to learn from one's mistakes. Accept corrections, like compliments, gracefully and move on.
Not so. Arrogance bothers us emotionally and the inability to learn from mistakes bothers us as scientists. Yet I could pick out dozens of people easily who would remain smarter than the vast majority of the population if they never learned another thing.
Stupidity is relative, and at any given moment, we all have different starting points.
That isn't true. The term law was used in the past with the expectation that certain things were settled. The philosophical underpinnings of science have advanced since then and the term law is no longer used.
I find this funny because many of our laws change more frequently than our theories.
If mistakes AREN'T being found in these "sciences" they aren't progressing.
WOW! English litcrit must be the most advanced science in the world! :)
Rocky's Boots.
'Nuff said.
This is beginning to remind me of the annexation of Czechoslovakia, let's hope this time around the Western powers will have enough spine to stand up to the dictator in stead of encouraging him with appeasement. We are gettign to the point where threatenign to move a few NATO divisions to the Urainian border would seem appropriate, at least that was the only thing that seemed to work on Hitler.
We moved F-22s and submarines carrying hundreds of nuclear warheads toward the conflict area.
Lead! The Romans used the stuff for pipes, and so did we in the fifties. We use graphite in pencils now, so we don't use it there. Where do we use lead these days? Nuclear containment and superman films? (And probably illegal Manhattan plumbing repairs, where legacy systems would be impractical to replace)
I rented a Ford Fusion a few months back. The MSFT in-vehicle tech worked perfectly well.
I know it's anecdotal, and I'm all for competition, but I wonder if this was a good decision. When the car company cites licensing costs that can't be much per vehicle as a reason to change a technology, you begin to feel they're cutting corners.
I questioned the Hummer when it first came out - was it really better than the seven Korea era jeeps it cost to build?
Actually, yes. If you're riding through unsecured territory, do you want to be in an armored Hummer with a 50 cal mounted on top, or a light open Jeep with your trusty sidearm?
Neither. You want to be in an MRAP. (At least for some definitions of unsecured.) MRAPs were going to take years in the regular military procurement cycle and Secretary Gates cut through a lot of red tape and fast-tracked them into pretty much the fastest major U.S. military procurement operation in... decades, maybe?
Some procurements are stupid--mostly because of Congressional pork, somewhat because of problems with Defense bureaucracy that keeps front-line needs from being relayed up the chain of command fast-enough and keeps them from being killed in favor of someone's pet project's budget. But some are really an improvement... it very-much takes a case-by-case analysis, both from the view of the soldier on the ground *and* from a more strategic view, planning for all of the forseeable defense-related tasks: counterinsurgency, antipiracy, invasion of a small nation, all-out-war against a major power, peacekeeping, special ops, etc...
Absolutely. Long overdue.
- because your phone comes with built-in wireless networking but your car doesn't?
- because your phone isn't a 4,000-pound hunk of metal and glass frequently moving at a hundred feet per second in public?
Just a couple thoughts...
Remember when mobile phones were the size of a suitcase?
The *manufacturer* has a vested interest in making sure your car has a safety update--it's a bit different than just the neighbor's concern. Think about it. If you make a product that *will* kill a few hundred people over its lifetime unless you fix it, and only half of the owners will bring it in for an upgrade, wouldn't you rather be able to push the upgrade out?
An auto-upgrade is a major safety feature. Is there a security issue? Yes. But not an unsolvable one.
Every manufacturer will switch to auto-upgrades when the first one loses a massive tort case over failure to auto-upgrade.
I caught an unmarked "police" car methodically casing our office complex parking lot. I happed to walk right by as he entered a dead end area of our parking lot. He had a laptop and there were four rectangle boxes mounted on the trunk with lenses pointing outward. Our security group confirmed from videos that they cased our lot as well as nearby businesses. So, at what point is this trespassing? We didn't invite law enforcement on to our lot to collect data. We now know it was the local police department and they've since added these readers to several marked vehicles and have stationed them alongside roadways collecting data. They've recently been sued over refusal to release information under state sunshine laws but I doubt that will stop them. We now have several police departments in the metro area using this. What next? Will they be installed on stop lights right next to the red light cameras?
1. It usually becomes trespassing if someone with authority asks them to leave and they don't, although it varies based on state law.
2. You can, however, sue them for violating four fourth amendment right to be free from unreasonable search. I don't know that you would win, but if it's a private parking lot, you might.
3. They already use these on the West Side Highway as a pilot program for fully automated tolls. Everyone either has EZ-pass or gets billed through the mail based on their license plate. My guess is they're imaging every license plate on all of the entries to NYC (if not, they certainly will be within a little while).
As if the privacy implications and police overreach weren't bad enough, I have been feeling more and more frustrated over the financial aspect of programs like these. Who decided that this program was good or desirable in the first place? We've been getting along fine for a long time now without a national database of license-plate scans.
The same can be said for many other surveillance and technology initiatives by police and government agencies. These programs cost vast amounts of money which could be used for cancer research, or schools, or bridge repairs, or space exploration, or countless other positive things. Alternatively, just give the money back to the taxpayers and let them put it to good use. I'm pretty sure that only a tiny percentage of people would volunteer to fund programs like these out of their own pockets.
A program like this is relatively cheap and easy. I would expect it is already in place on a smaller level in a lot of municipalities (and certainly in DC). ICE probably withdrew it because they were afraid, in the current climate, that a legal challenge might (barely) succeed and threaten all of those prorams.
The benefits to the program are also substantial--it gives you a lot of information for law enforcement *and* for anti-terrorism. They can use that to investigate crimes (who was in area X) (if you said your alibi was Y, why were you driving the other way?). If your goal is to prevent crime and to make investigation in the aftermath of an attack easier, you want this.
It does, obviously, come at a privacy cost. But realistically, we're already living with it, and they're not going to stop unless a court orders them to--which is somewhat unlikely.
To do so whilst reserving the ability of the limo owners cameras to work is unreasonable, and doesn't deserve any suggestions.
Not necessarily--suppose the limo camera is basically there for security, and will only be examined in the event of the investigation of criminal activity, a lawsuit, or missing luggage, and otherwise it gets destroyed after, say, a year. Now the drunk pop star doing cocaine off the congressional aide is somewhat safe from photographs getting out (unless there is a criminal investigation for other reasons).
I wish they would stop misusing the term "cord cutting" for not subscribing to television while still getting Internet via cable, as it is confusing and stupid.
Yeah. They're literally cutting their own balls off by doing that.
Am I to understand, that a lawyer is complaining about something sleazy and underhanded? Really? A lawyer? The same guys who sleaze their way to the top, then get political jobs so they can sleazy their way to the top again? They are the ones complaining about something possible being sleazy happening to them? Really? Let me get you a tissue.
Also the same guys and girls who are the first to defend the people from government overreach. Who serve nonprofits and NGOs and the public sector and the poor. Some lawyers are assholes. Others dedicate their lives in service.
Either way, do you really think it's a good idea to have the government listening in when you go to get legal advice about your problems with them or someone else?
US Per Capita GDP is 51,704. French per capita GDP is 35,392. Americans work about 200 hours more per year.
Actual judges will side against you if you are the one writting the contract. So if you think you can commit fraud by writing a sh*tty contract then you are due for a rude awakening.
You can come very close to fraud, but can't actually commit it. There's a rule that keep evidence from prior to the contract formation (e.g. your email chain about how you would do the project) out of court, but the rule doesn't apply to evidence of fraud. That being said, depending on the state and a bunch of variables, if the contract explicitly waives reliance on a certain representation--like by saying "you are not relying on any representations the contractor made about X," then someone is MUCH more likely to get away with what would otherwise be fraud. But just a "you are not relying on any representations..." is much less useful than "not relying on any representations about X" if someone alleges fraud.
Disclaimer: YMMV, do NOT commit fraud, I am not your lawyer, consult a lawyer, etc...
As another poster said, this isn't fair. Lots of us drive with winter tires, I doubt anyone down there has even heard of them.
We (most Canadians) have the equipment and machinery to clear snow, maintain highways, and the experience to get around in these conditions. They don't.
DC is generally comic in snow, mostly because the drivers just don't know how to drive in it. I remember seeing a UPS truck try to get unstuck for an hour with no progress.
Around New York, you get a lot of people who basically know how to deal with it, but they don't always do it very intelligently. The left and right turn lanes on United States Route 1 in New Rochelle, for example, have been covered in snow for a week and they don't bother to plow them, instead just keeping the main lanes clear and letting people turn out of those.
In Canada, they are used to snow and *know* they they could get another six feet of it to deal with in the next two or three storms, so they keep the roads cleared *WAY* back. The undivided two-lane highways with unpaved shoulders are plowed to ten feet off the road in either side.
Nutshell. While your ISP can't control anything beyond their edge, your ISP or any of its links should NEVER be the reason, and your ISP should make sure the same is also true for anyone they link with. The core network should never be a limitation and only the end-points should be.
This would be a really bad way to design a network--it would result in building for tremendous overcapacity. Realistically, it is exceptionally rare that a customer will use his entire pipe for the entire month. Designing for that would be like designing a house with the assumption that one sumo wrestler will be living on each square foot of flooring.
Providers should be able to rely on certain historically tested assumptions when they size their pipes--like what is peak load for a suburban community with x-thousand-users?
Put another way, everyone in NYC does not use 12 MBps at the same time. In fact, if they do, the RIGHT response is to not let it all through--because it means there's a *massive* DDOS going on.
Are you fucking kidding me? Are you a shill or just stupid?
Neither. I am guesing (s)he is an IP lawyer. Used to thinking about how the company can get its way within the bounds of the law rather than asking whether things like investigating a scientist's wife in the hope of discrediting his research should be permissible in a civilized society. Maybe she does have a bias--maybe she got dumped by your company's CEO. But there's a big difference between *knowing* she has a bias and trying to cook one up.
The company's POV may be valid, but not all of the actions it intended in support of them--whether legal or not--are moral.
The real issue is that any reputable company in response to science that is bad for their products should be saying "this science showed that maybe there's a problem here, we'd better make sure we're not hurting our customers or their neighbors, let's do some research and legitimately see what the deal is." Resorting to discrediting the other guy should only come up, maybe, when and if you've established that his research is wrong, that the product is safe, that the guy's data is wrong, and that he's basically a crackpot. Unfortunately economic incentives make most people feel free to allow their product to poison or even murder despite the science. (See, e.g., cigarettes.) This is actually a good reason for broad diversification--the smaller a percentage of revenue is dependent on one product, the more willing a company is to do the right thing when one product proves unsafe.