This is not, however, an FOIA-like request. The state of Washington requires erotic dancers to hold a license to be allowed to work, much like a builder or a barber. If the state is going to require such licensing and prevent non-licensed workers from performing the service, then there needs to be a way for employers and consumers to verify the information as needed. After all, I don't want to be cited for hiring a non-licensed dancer for an event.
Of course, the very obvious answer is that there is absolutely no reason for the government to be involved in this transaction, but once they become involved, the privacy implications take second seat to the enforcement needs.
Incorrect. The "consumption" described here is electricity consumption, not consumption of light. Electricity is one of the raw inputs required. It's certainly possible for efficiency gains to allow for an equal or increased amount of final product (light) with a reduced input of raw materials (electricity). The ratio of desired outputs to the raw materials inputs is the definition of efficiency.
Anyone can start an ISP as long as they are willing to pay for the infrastructure to deliver the last mile connection to their customers.
Not true.
I've always said, the battle for broadband isn't at the national, state, or even regional utility level. It's in the city utility easements.
City and county governments make exclusivity deals with providers. Back when DSL was first rolling out in the late 90s, states mandated that the monopoly easement holders offer their copper wire and telecom junction box space to competitors in return for their cabling monopoly. The phone companies tore the startups to pieces with bogus charges and quality problems, insuring that the phone company service worked OK while the competitors' equipment worked like crap and would never make any money. On the argument that they could provide better service, the phone companies lobbied to get the competition requirements pulled, and they have for the most part.
The cable and phone companies will never, ever allow a competing wired standard into the utility easements. They will fight it at every level, and throw obscene amounts of money around. Only a handful of super-rich companies have managed to bust these agreements. Google Fiber, for example, in very limited areas.
And if you wonder whether they have been successful, check your junction box and see how many data-capable cables are currently entering it. I'm betting it's 1 or 2, and those probably belong to the phone and cable company that have been operating in your locality for at least 30 years.
Good grief. If the FBI keylogs your machine, or you are compelled to testify and then gag-ordered, does that make you a collaborator?
If a convenience store records you on camera, do you hold the camera company responsible?
You assignments of blame are misplaced.
It's the intent, not the method that determines if something is helpful or harmful.
Good grief, no. It's the result, not the intent, that determines is something is helpful or harmful. Bad regulations are always defended on good intentions, because intentions are not a measure of performance.
regulations prohibit engine destroying additives being added to fuel, encourage electrical systems to have devices that prevent electrocution
Consumers and courts can do that just fine without regulation.
lower prices by fostering a single standard that is available for everyone
It's like we've learned nothing from the Communications Act of 1934. It's been almost a hundred years since we made these mistakes. We can do better.
The Death of the PC has been predicted many times. I can believe that the modern surge of high-powered phones and tablets will displace laptops, but general purpose computing workstations? Engineers and scientists need lots of computrons in close communication with local high-speed storage and graphics hardware, so consequently there will always be a stream of low-to-mid-range server technology feeding into general purpose computing workstations, and so there will always be something for hobbyists.
I suspect that any significant regulatory forcing in this ecology would affect scientific and engineering innovation to such a degree that any nation implementing draconian technology restrictions would soon find itself at the bottom of the heap. Those who allow free technology will define the next generation.
When you consider the utter mess we're making of this planet, reduced shipping capacity isn't that bad of a thing to accept.
Actually, it is a bad thing to accept. If products could be created with less work (e.g. energy and consequently pollution) using local capital and labor, then we wouldn't be shipping them in the first place. Displacing the labor from an efficient location to a less efficient location will have costs, and some those costs will be environmental.
How is The Ribbon (trademark, whatever) different from the palettes in Adobe creative products that have been there since the early 90s, or the tool palettes any number of programs? The main difference seems to be that the Ribbon can't be moved or resized like those palettes, and its controls cannot be customized or changed.
Honestly, I don't see anything here that is conceptually different from, say, Superpaint circa 1990, or MacDraw Pro, or... sheesh. They all had dockable tool palettes with a combination of buttons, menus, and dialog box poppers. If you want fixed palettes of controls, go to (for example) Adobe Photodeluxe circa 2001.
I mean, I give credit to MS for realizing that menu bars were an early 90s solution to the problem of organizing software functionality, and a palette arrangement could expose more functionality on new displays with more pixel space. But others had come to that conclusion much earlier, and the fixed palette they call "The Ribbon" does not have new features that you would not find in any number applications that use tool palettes.
I see students failing papers because the Word on one machine does not read word files created on another machine in a different version.
I have to call FUD on that -- Word 2007 will read file formats from before those students were born. If they are claiming that Word ate their homework, they are lying.
Microsoft has locked out some older file formats, such as PowerPoint before Office 97, because they don't want to maintain security on the conversion code. Organizations with long memories (like the company I work for) have bumped into that issue.
... because you only have to use Google Docs for about 2 minutes to run into commonly-used features from Microsoft Office that just don't exist. I create a chart and I can't format the axes, I can't put in a trend line, I can't copy and paste it into a document. The drawing tools are laughably unsophisticated. Google Docs doesn't offer feature parity with a 1993 copy of Clarisworks, much less Microsoft Office.
I like Google Docs as a handy scratchpad to create documents accessible from anywhere and quickly exportable as PDFs. I have dozens of little things transcribed in it. But production work has to meet standards for fonts, formatting, chart appearance, etc that Google Docs cannot produce. The reality is that Office + Exchange + Sharepoint offers a collaboration environment that is unmatched -- it's an expensive combination, but if you need the features, there is no competitive option. Google's services are light years behind, and OpenOffice is not bad at all (and tantalizingly better than Office in a handful of areas) but the collaboration features are not there.
I was at a swap meet a month ago and saw a *pallet* of Core I7 processors. I used Red Laser to scan the UPC codes (they were "Extreme" models selling for $650+ on the open market), and a quick volume computation (the pallet was about 12 high, about 20 horizontal each way) suggested that I was looking at about $3 million worth of processors.
Except, they weren't actual processors. According to the person selling them, they were "fake" processors, but the heatsinks and fans were real and could be used with other processors and motherboards.
Uh-huh. Carrying the original UPC codes. I'm still not sure what to make of it.
Apple is thoroughly infused with self-righteous a..holes. That's the image one gets from the top down. I think they may even work on it. It's a valued trait in the company.
Well, duh. A smug sense of superiority is one of the things they are selling. Yes, I think they do cultivate it, just like Whole Foods and Coach bags. Although I don't buy Macs for that reason, I certainly recognize marketing when I see it.
The issue is not whether smoking is legal or illegal; there are plenty of legal things you can do a computer that would void the warranty. If they're going to make this argument, they simply need to support the claim that the damage to the computer goes beyond normal wear and tear.
For example, computers in chemical labs often fail because small amounts of airborne chemicals attack the PC boards and chassis. I've worked on boxes that look like they'd been strapped to the bottom of a battleship for a few years.
Having seen the office accommodations of some chain smokers, I can't say I blame Apple. I've seen environments where every surface is coated with brown, sticky residue and a multi-millimeter thick layer of dust and ash.
As long as you're demanding that somebody do something they might
not otherwise do, and the demand is backed by a threat of some sort,
it's blackmail.
"Obey the law or I'll report you to the authorities," is not blackmail. Period. No court would throw someone in jail for a good-faith effort to demand compliance with the law, and in fact the law specifically protects the rights of various classes of whistleblowers precisely so they can demand compliance without fear of losing their jobs.
It only becomes blackmail if you demand something other than compliance with the law.
Apple has a vested interest in maintaining their defacto monopoly
on online music sales though their vertical product pipeline.
Are you certifiably insane? They have no such monopoly. You can buy music all over the place, without DRM. I've been buying music on-line for years, and I think the last iTune I purchased was 2005. Heck, Amazon's downloader (native versions for Win, Mac and I think Linux) will download albums and add them to iTunes for you, utterly transparently, and they have since at least 2007, which is long time on the technology clock. In that time I've moved my entire music collection from Win, to Linux, to Mac, back to Win without so much as a blip.
Do they have a de facto monopoly on portable video solutions that actually work? I might give you that, but it's purely de facto. They aren't preventing others from entering the market or abusing market power. It's hardly Apple's fault that nobody else (except Pirate Bay) can do it correctly.
Sturgeon's law still applies. I've paid for apps with prices ranging from $0.99 to $189.99 (no, I'm not kidding, and that app was worth 10 times that much).
Wasn't the same thing true on every shelf at Babbages or Egghead? A tiny selection of good games and useful applications surrounded by an ocean of unremarkable shovelware. And the lower bar to entry for the App Store means that even more stuff will be crap. When TFA says things like, "But while the chance for success may indeed exist, the odds of triumphing are still pretty long", they act like it's a casino instead of a marketplace. It's not.
> they should be taught trust and responsibility
Of course, monitoring and control are part of trust and responsibility. First you monitor and control them, then you monitor them and let them control themselves, then you let them monitor and control themselves with periodic verification. That's how you learn responsible behavior.
Once they pay for their own car/cell phone/credit card, they will *have* to monitor and control themselves. So monitoring and control have to be part of the learning process.
And you'll be setting up a special call center to teach people how to switch their boot drive on BRAND X PC to the CD-ROM?
"Yes ma'am. I know it says LG-DVD. No, not the movie kind of DVDs. Yes, well, I guess it could play movies. No, ma'am, there's no movie on the CD we gave you. I know I said that, but the CD will work in a DVD player. No, ma'am, you have to use it with your computer, I mean the DVD player that's in your computer. Now press F10 and... what? No ma'am, don't select RESET. No, oh crap, now you've totally pooched it. No, ma'am don't cry. Please don't cry."
Just so we're all clear, this is already illegal. If they are engaging in this kind of activity, then it's just a law enforcement issue.
Is it? Compensated endorsement doesn't always come with disclaimers. I don't know any of the law on the subject, but it seems like there is a pretty long history of "experts" offering compensated opinions without any particular disclaimers.
FAN 1: "Your science fiction is really just fantasy, not hard science fiction."
FAN 2: "No, your science fiction is really just fantasy."
BOOKSTORE MANAGER: "Quit yelling in the Fantasy & Science Fiction section, you geeks."
It's nice that a movie generates this kind of discussion, but seriously. Did anybody ever think that there was a meaningful difference between fantasy & science fiction? John Varley's _Titan_ is little more than an excuse for angels and centaurs in a "hard SF" setting. Silverberg's _Majipoor Chronicles_ use science fiction and space colonization as a backdrop for an agricultural, feudal backwater world where technology is a kind of magic. Gibson's _Neuromancer_ borrows (overtly) from both genres; just look at the name.
It is a simple reductio ad absurdum argument: if you don't like the logical conclusion of the premise that anything in public is open to anyone regardless of how they use it, then you don't get to rely on that premise to defend Street View.
I see. So Google Street View implies that the anything in public is open to anyone regardless of how they use it? That is a laughable straw man.
I classed Google Street View with "candid photography taken for purposes of journalism, hobbies, and reference". In your mind, this is in principle the same as following people around and photographing their PIN codes?
There are lots of ways to use photos taken on public property that would put you at liability. You can take pictures of a someone and use the photo to imply endorsement of your product. You can take a picture and misstate the time and location where it was taken, creating a libelous accusation. You could take a photo where there was a reasonable expectation of privacy, for example when entering a PIN code, leading to financial fraud.
You can follow someone around in such a way that a judge considers it harassment. Although, for the record, few celebrities have managed to successfully prosecute such cases, so indeed it might be possible to follow someone around as you suggest.
Now, explain again how a photo taken from a van driving down the street is *anything like any of these proscribed scenarios*. Google isn't following people around, they're taking routine, non-targeted pictures from the street for cartographic purposes. It's not the same as stalking, any more than aerial cartographic photographs are.
Slashdot Mirror
This is not, however, an FOIA-like request. The state of Washington requires erotic dancers to hold a license to be allowed to work, much like a builder or a barber. If the state is going to require such licensing and prevent non-licensed workers from performing the service, then there needs to be a way for employers and consumers to verify the information as needed. After all, I don't want to be cited for hiring a non-licensed dancer for an event. Of course, the very obvious answer is that there is absolutely no reason for the government to be involved in this transaction, but once they become involved, the privacy implications take second seat to the enforcement needs.
Incorrect. The "consumption" described here is electricity consumption, not consumption of light. Electricity is one of the raw inputs required. It's certainly possible for efficiency gains to allow for an equal or increased amount of final product (light) with a reduced input of raw materials (electricity). The ratio of desired outputs to the raw materials inputs is the definition of efficiency.
I smell a lot of "probably" coming off of this post.
Not true.
I've always said, the battle for broadband isn't at the national, state, or even regional utility level. It's in the city utility easements.
City and county governments make exclusivity deals with providers. Back when DSL was first rolling out in the late 90s, states mandated that the monopoly easement holders offer their copper wire and telecom junction box space to competitors in return for their cabling monopoly. The phone companies tore the startups to pieces with bogus charges and quality problems, insuring that the phone company service worked OK while the competitors' equipment worked like crap and would never make any money. On the argument that they could provide better service, the phone companies lobbied to get the competition requirements pulled, and they have for the most part.
The cable and phone companies will never, ever allow a competing wired standard into the utility easements. They will fight it at every level, and throw obscene amounts of money around. Only a handful of super-rich companies have managed to bust these agreements. Google Fiber, for example, in very limited areas.
And if you wonder whether they have been successful, check your junction box and see how many data-capable cables are currently entering it. I'm betting it's 1 or 2, and those probably belong to the phone and cable company that have been operating in your locality for at least 30 years.
Good grief. If the FBI keylogs your machine, or you are compelled to testify and then gag-ordered, does that make you a collaborator? If a convenience store records you on camera, do you hold the camera company responsible? You assignments of blame are misplaced.
Good grief, no. It's the result, not the intent, that determines is something is helpful or harmful. Bad regulations are always defended on good intentions, because intentions are not a measure of performance.
Consumers and courts can do that just fine without regulation.
It's like we've learned nothing from the Communications Act of 1934. It's been almost a hundred years since we made these mistakes. We can do better.
The Death of the PC has been predicted many times. I can believe that the modern surge of high-powered phones and tablets will displace laptops, but general purpose computing workstations? Engineers and scientists need lots of computrons in close communication with local high-speed storage and graphics hardware, so consequently there will always be a stream of low-to-mid-range server technology feeding into general purpose computing workstations, and so there will always be something for hobbyists. I suspect that any significant regulatory forcing in this ecology would affect scientific and engineering innovation to such a degree that any nation implementing draconian technology restrictions would soon find itself at the bottom of the heap. Those who allow free technology will define the next generation.
Actually, it is a bad thing to accept. If products could be created with less work (e.g. energy and consequently pollution) using local capital and labor, then we wouldn't be shipping them in the first place. Displacing the labor from an efficient location to a less efficient location will have costs, and some those costs will be environmental.
Prior art:
http://graphicssoft.about.com/od/photoshop/ig/20-Years-of-Photoshop/Photoshop-Elements-1-0-2001.htm
Button and menu controls on the palettes, tabs to switch between control palettes, all of it. Just 'cause the Ribbon is blue doesn't make it new.
How is The Ribbon (trademark, whatever) different from the palettes in Adobe creative products that have been there since the early 90s, or the tool palettes any number of programs? The main difference seems to be that the Ribbon can't be moved or resized like those palettes, and its controls cannot be customized or changed.
Honestly, I don't see anything here that is conceptually different from, say, Superpaint circa 1990, or MacDraw Pro, or... sheesh. They all had dockable tool palettes with a combination of buttons, menus, and dialog box poppers. If you want fixed palettes of controls, go to (for example) Adobe Photodeluxe circa 2001.
I mean, I give credit to MS for realizing that menu bars were an early 90s solution to the problem of organizing software functionality, and a palette arrangement could expose more functionality on new displays with more pixel space. But others had come to that conclusion much earlier, and the fixed palette they call "The Ribbon" does not have new features that you would not find in any number applications that use tool palettes.
I have to call FUD on that -- Word 2007 will read file formats from before those students were born. If they are claiming that Word ate their homework, they are lying.
Microsoft has locked out some older file formats, such as PowerPoint before Office 97, because they don't want to maintain security on the conversion code. Organizations with long memories (like the company I work for) have bumped into that issue.
... because you only have to use Google Docs for about 2 minutes to run into commonly-used features from Microsoft Office that just don't exist. I create a chart and I can't format the axes, I can't put in a trend line, I can't copy and paste it into a document. The drawing tools are laughably unsophisticated. Google Docs doesn't offer feature parity with a 1993 copy of Clarisworks, much less Microsoft Office.
I like Google Docs as a handy scratchpad to create documents accessible from anywhere and quickly exportable as PDFs. I have dozens of little things transcribed in it. But production work has to meet standards for fonts, formatting, chart appearance, etc that Google Docs cannot produce. The reality is that Office + Exchange + Sharepoint offers a collaboration environment that is unmatched -- it's an expensive combination, but if you need the features, there is no competitive option. Google's services are light years behind, and OpenOffice is not bad at all (and tantalizingly better than Office in a handful of areas) but the collaboration features are not there.
Yeah, they've said almost exactly this on Twitter.
I was at a swap meet a month ago and saw a *pallet* of Core I7 processors. I used Red Laser to scan the UPC codes (they were "Extreme" models selling for $650+ on the open market), and a quick volume computation (the pallet was about 12 high, about 20 horizontal each way) suggested that I was looking at about $3 million worth of processors.
Except, they weren't actual processors. According to the person selling them, they were "fake" processors, but the heatsinks and fans were real and could be used with other processors and motherboards.
Uh-huh. Carrying the original UPC codes. I'm still not sure what to make of it.
Well, duh. A smug sense of superiority is one of the things they are selling. Yes, I think they do cultivate it, just like Whole Foods and Coach bags. Although I don't buy Macs for that reason, I certainly recognize marketing when I see it.
The issue is not whether smoking is legal or illegal; there are plenty of legal things you can do a computer that would void the warranty. If they're going to make this argument, they simply need to support the claim that the damage to the computer goes beyond normal wear and tear.
For example, computers in chemical labs often fail because small amounts of airborne chemicals attack the PC boards and chassis. I've worked on boxes that look like they'd been strapped to the bottom of a battleship for a few years.
Having seen the office accommodations of some chain smokers, I can't say I blame Apple. I've seen environments where every surface is coated with brown, sticky residue and a multi-millimeter thick layer of dust and ash.
"Obey the law or I'll report you to the authorities," is not blackmail. Period. No court would throw someone in jail for a good-faith effort to demand compliance with the law, and in fact the law specifically protects the rights of various classes of whistleblowers precisely so they can demand compliance without fear of losing their jobs.
It only becomes blackmail if you demand something other than compliance with the law.
Are you certifiably insane? They have no such monopoly. You can buy music all over the place, without DRM. I've been buying music on-line for years, and I think the last iTune I purchased was 2005. Heck, Amazon's downloader (native versions for Win, Mac and I think Linux) will download albums and add them to iTunes for you, utterly transparently, and they have since at least 2007, which is long time on the technology clock. In that time I've moved my entire music collection from Win, to Linux, to Mac, back to Win without so much as a blip.
Do they have a de facto monopoly on portable video solutions that actually work? I might give you that, but it's purely de facto. They aren't preventing others from entering the market or abusing market power. It's hardly Apple's fault that nobody else (except Pirate Bay) can do it correctly.
Sturgeon's law still applies. I've paid for apps with prices ranging from $0.99 to $189.99 (no, I'm not kidding, and that app was worth 10 times that much). Wasn't the same thing true on every shelf at Babbages or Egghead? A tiny selection of good games and useful applications surrounded by an ocean of unremarkable shovelware. And the lower bar to entry for the App Store means that even more stuff will be crap. When TFA says things like, "But while the chance for success may indeed exist, the odds of triumphing are still pretty long", they act like it's a casino instead of a marketplace. It's not.
Kick him with your Converse shoe, all the way to Timbuktu.
> they should be taught trust and responsibility Of course, monitoring and control are part of trust and responsibility. First you monitor and control them, then you monitor them and let them control themselves, then you let them monitor and control themselves with periodic verification. That's how you learn responsible behavior. Once they pay for their own car/cell phone/credit card, they will *have* to monitor and control themselves. So monitoring and control have to be part of the learning process.
press a bunch of "Banking liveCDs"
And you'll be setting up a special call center to teach people how to switch their boot drive on BRAND X PC to the CD-ROM?
"Yes ma'am. I know it says LG-DVD. No, not the movie kind of DVDs. Yes, well, I guess it could play movies. No, ma'am, there's no movie on the CD we gave you. I know I said that, but the CD will work in a DVD player. No, ma'am, you have to use it with your computer, I mean the DVD player that's in your computer. Now press F10 and... what? No ma'am, don't select RESET. No, oh crap, now you've totally pooched it. No, ma'am don't cry. Please don't cry."
Just so we're all clear, this is already illegal. If they are engaging in this kind of activity, then it's just a law enforcement issue.
Is it? Compensated endorsement doesn't always come with disclaimers. I don't know any of the law on the subject, but it seems like there is a pretty long history of "experts" offering compensated opinions without any particular disclaimers.
It's nice that a movie generates this kind of discussion, but seriously. Did anybody ever think that there was a meaningful difference between fantasy & science fiction? John Varley's _Titan_ is little more than an excuse for angels and centaurs in a "hard SF" setting. Silverberg's _Majipoor Chronicles_ use science fiction and space colonization as a backdrop for an agricultural, feudal backwater world where technology is a kind of magic. Gibson's _Neuromancer_ borrows (overtly) from both genres; just look at the name.
It is a simple reductio ad absurdum argument: if you don't like the logical conclusion of the premise that anything in public is open to anyone regardless of how they use it, then you don't get to rely on that premise to defend Street View.
I see. So Google Street View implies that the anything in public is open to anyone regardless of how they use it? That is a laughable straw man.
I classed Google Street View with "candid photography taken for purposes of journalism, hobbies, and reference". In your mind, this is in principle the same as following people around and photographing their PIN codes?
There are lots of ways to use photos taken on public property that would put you at liability. You can take pictures of a someone and use the photo to imply endorsement of your product. You can take a picture and misstate the time and location where it was taken, creating a libelous accusation. You could take a photo where there was a reasonable expectation of privacy, for example when entering a PIN code, leading to financial fraud.
You can follow someone around in such a way that a judge considers it harassment. Although, for the record, few celebrities have managed to successfully prosecute such cases, so indeed it might be possible to follow someone around as you suggest.
Now, explain again how a photo taken from a van driving down the street is *anything like any of these proscribed scenarios*. Google isn't following people around, they're taking routine, non-targeted pictures from the street for cartographic purposes. It's not the same as stalking, any more than aerial cartographic photographs are.