The iPod was not the first MP3 player or anything. What it was is a fashion accessory.
I see people writing that now and then, and it's become clear that this sort of sentiment is disguised bitterness. It's nowhere near sufficient to explain what happened.
No, the iPod was not the first MP3, but it was the first one that that most people could stand to use. Seriously. I'm a tech person. I use Linux. I'm not trendy, and I don't have any interest in being trendy. But if I'm going to own an MP3 player, I want one that doesn't have a terrible design, and for some reason Apple seems to be the only tech company interested in solving their customer's problems.
Just for example, I had an iPhone for a couple years and liked it alright, but had some frustrations. I was talking to some pro-Android/anti-Apple people in various places (including on Slashdot), and I had become convinced that Android had gotten to be a good, stable, worthwhile phone OS. So I happily made the switch. I bought an HTC Incredible.
At first I was really happy and impressed. If it were a matter of fashion and image, I liked what it said about me that I no longer had an iPhone. But then so many damned thing just didn't work right. The audio player was crap. The picture viewer was ok, but sub-par. It would randomly crash and reboot itself. Battery life was not what it should be-- I could never go two days straight without charging. The available apps were pretty crappy. The notifications were excessive, and the included tones were grating. Over the course of a couple months, I began remembering why it was that I always hated cell phones. I found myself swearing at it under my breath. I started imagine that the phone was an object with free will, hellbent on frustrating me.
I managed to wriggle out of my contract and went back to AT&T (which I hate) and got an iPhone again. I'm not like "Oh wow, the iPhone is super-cool and I'm awesome for having one." It's more like I forget that I own an iPhone, and I forget why I hate cell phones, and I just use it.
And my story and perspective are not remotely unique. This is exactly why Apple has developed a following.
Voice recognition is much easier when you limit the vocabulary to a finite set of commands.
That said, I've never really seen the value of voice commands and voice recognition. It's one of those things that people get super-excited about because it seems all science-fictiony, but it's a poorly performing solution in search of a problem.
Verizon doesn't have the ability to limit my speech right now, but that's the whole point: I don't want them to gain the power to censor me. That's exactly the power they could have if net neutrality is not maintained.
Yes, really. Notice that you've linked to CNN, on the air, criticizing the government?
If you're asking me whether the government should generally be more transparent, I'd definitely say yes. If you're asking me whether I'm completely unconcerned with the government infringing on my freedom of speech, I'd say no, I *am* concerned.
BUT if I had to either trust the government or BP to give me real facts about the oil spill, I'd sooner trust the government. Not that I would absolutely trust the government, but the government at least has a theoretical obligation to be honest with me. BP doesn't even have that. Likewise, provided the practical ability to censor my speech, I would sooner trust the government to protect my anti-government speech than I would trust Verizon to protect my anti-Verizon speech. Yes I would.
I don't usually respond to ACs, but since you're voicing some arguments in need of rebuttal:
A profit-driven organization, in a free market (really free, meaning NO government intervention at all), can only make a profit if customers choose to buy its products.
That's only true if you assume that, without government intervention, no profit-driven organization can attain a level of economic power that allows them to be abusive. So, for example, what if one company owns all the good farmland and the entire food distribution system and says, "If you want food, you're going to have to do what we say!"? I guess that company's customers can opt to starve, but that's not much of a choice.
So are you really going to claim that no company can monopolistic power without governmental support? Or are you claiming that no company would abuse monopolistic power without governmental intervention? Even if one company couldn't form a monopoly, what makes you think that a number of companies wouldn't form cartels that enable them to abuse and extort from their own customers?
History is full of counter-examples, of companies which get into the position of being able to abuse their customers. That's why we have things like anti-trust laws.
If not enough customers choose to buy the company's products, the company loses money and eventually will go under. Thus a profit-driven organization is indeed very much accountable, to its customers.
Only insofar as the customers and the profit-driven organization are on equal footing. A large company with a lot of economic power can withstand a lot of customer dissatisfaction before anything bad happens. Sure you can say "eventually" it will go under. All things end "eventually".
BY CONTRAST, the government isn't accountable to anyone.
Bullshit. You can elect someone else. Failing that, if you're really dissatisfied enough you can overthrow the whole damned government. The US constitution was designed to allow rebellion if enough people were dissatisfied enough.
But even before you get to that point, there's the separation of powers, the checks and balances. There are rules about transparency that the government does not generally break. Contrary to your silly rhetoric, the government does not generally go around breaking their own rules in serious and egregious ways all the time. At least, the amount of stuff that the government does within its own rules far outweighs the times when it breaks those rules. And governments need not be corrupt and break their own rules as long as the people hold them accountable.
The US government is actually not even all that corrupt given the amount of power it has. The bigger problem is that it's run badly, partially because so many people have bought into the rhetoric that governments must necessarily be stupid and inefficient and worthless. When you set low expectations, people tend to meet them.
The telcos have a long history of skillful lobbying...
This is the sort of argument I hate the most. It boils down to, "We can't make laws to decide what's acceptable in our country and punish the wrongdoers! If we did, the rich and powerful would just subvert those laws!" And there are 2 big problems with that argument:
1) It's not true. Look back historically, and you'll find that the government has regulated food, working conditions, land use, medical manufacturing, car manufacturing, and a host of other things that have made our lives better and safer. Making it illegal to have excessive amounts of mercury in your food does not result in the food industry lobbying those regulations away.
2) The proposed solution inevitably ends up being, "...so we should just let people do whatever they want and hope it works out." It's kind of like saying, "People sometimes get away with theft, so let's just go ahead and make theft legal."
Now I'd agree that there are bad/counterproductive regulations. There are regulations that can lead to corruption. There are regulations that go to far, and regulations that don't go far enough. There are people who will defy the regulations you make, and there are people who will try to subvert the process of making regulations. However, none of that is sufficient to say that regulations are bad or useless. Don't let "perfect" become the enemy of "good".
The way I see it is that the Internet is infrastructure. We wouldn't let GM buy all the roads and dictate which cars are allowed to drive on them. We wouldn't let GE own all the the electricity infrastructure in this country and decide what kind of appliances we're all allowed to run. Yet somehow we're content to hand our telecommunications infrastructure over to Verizon and let them decide what kind of traffic can pass over it.
What's more, a decade ago we had a rash of (arguably irresponsible) deregulation, showing that it's not true that, "give power to the government, they'll just try to take more". Sometimes they toss power aside in favor of pleasing their constituents (either people or companies), in order to cut their budget, or in order to abdicate responsibility.
The government is run by the people. Or at least it would be, if people were willing to step up and run it instead of whining about how much the government sucks.
But to get to your real question, I have to say that our democratically elected government has a piss-poor record when it comes to passing rules.
Citation needed.
If you're going to go the "slippery slope" route, then you have to provide some good arguments and evidence that the slope is indeed slippery. If the government wanted to filter all "packets critical of the demopublican party", how much closer does net neutrality bring them to that? What barrier to filtering does a non-neutral net offer that a neutral net doesn't?
See, because I could see an argument that net neutrality potentially makes is *harder* for the government to filter things. If Verizon is allowed to filter things however they want, then the US government just needs to put pressure on Verizon to filter "packets critical of the demopublican party". However, if you insist that material isn't allowed to be filtered based on content and source, it makes it much harder to hide any nefarious filters.
But ultimately, as things are today, I trust our Federal government to not-censor my speech against the government much more than I trust Verizon to not-censor my speech against Verizon. Verizon has no court system, no jury of my peers. Saying, "At least if they violate our contract, I can sue them." indicates that you, too, trust the government to decide matters justly.
So if there are few choices for many now, we fix this by eliminating what choices that do exist?
No, the point is that many of us have *no* choice right now. They use the ISP available to them, or they don't get Internet access.
So the question is, who do you feel is more likely to treat you fairly: a profit-driven organization with absolutely no accountability to anyone, the the same profit-driven organization with *some* rules of fair dealing enforced by a democratically elected government?
I'm not sure if that's quite the case - the economic ideology of the free market and the economic ideology of centralized control are *both* confounded by irrational humans.
Well it's a bit more complicated than that, isn't it?
Because one of the ideas that has worked out pretty well for humans is the idea of careful distribution of power (checks and balances). This idea would hold that you don't want centralized power in a government or in large corporations, and in fact you actually want tension between large private organizations and large public organizations. The two can ideally balance each other out. So in this view, you want a strong market with good competition, but lightly regulated with a public interest in mind.
However, the prevailing "conservative" view (which is not conservative, but is actually fairly radical) is basically to do away with the checks and balances that governments can provide through regulation, and instead concentrate *all* power in whichever body has the most economic power. From there, magical "free market" forces will sort everything out, because supposedly economic power cannot be abused.
Well I got pretty poor performance on my Linux computer (which is admittedly 6 years old, but it's capable of playing video normally) and had trouble on another computer because (apparently?) there's no 64-bit version and so I couldn't get it installed through Ubuntu's normal package management. I admit I gave up pretty easily. When I could get Flash to run, it still crashed relatively often and sometimes rendered things wrong.
And I got absolutely terrible performance out of my HTC Incredible.
So though I don't really know, I'll posit that you get great performance out of *your* Linux computer and *your* Android-based phone, but it definitely doesn't seem like you can count on that.
If we can't be sustainable even with all the resources available on Earth, then we probably can't be sustainable on a spaceship small enough to push to fast enough speeds to get anywhere we want to go.
Developing a self-contained system that can sustain human life indefinitely is an absolute necessity for serious space travel. Of course, one of the big problems will be energy. If you're talking about interstellar travel, you could easily hit a point where you can't carry enough fuel, and you get too far away from a star for solar power to do you much good.
I think our big hope for space travel might be getting onto a planet-sized spacecraft capable of sustaining life, and then getting it stuck in orbit around a star that can be used for energy, and then hoping the star takes us someplace we want to go.:-)
Well... except some of the issues very connected. In order to make long-term space travel possible, we'll need to create some kind of a sustainable ecosystem on the spacecraft to create perpetual supplies of food, air, and water. In addition, we'll need massive amounts of energy.
Meanwhile, we don't seem to be able to maintain a pre-existing sustainable ecosystem on a "spaceship" the size of a whole planet, and we can't generate enough energy to sustain ourselves right here on Earth.
It's pretty silly to expect long-range space travel before these issues are solved.
Fortunately, in the long run, they're probably shooting themselves in the foot. The only reason anyone would go to Yelp is to get unbiased reviews. As it becomes more bias, it becomes less useful, and they'll probably lose their audience to someone doing a better job.
Also they've built up a narrative about what Obama is painting him variously as a Muslim spy or an unapologetic communist, and at other times claiming he's "just like Bush" or even "too much like Bush". It's really a shocking level of inconsistency, claiming that Obama hasn't done anything very different from Bush's policies in order to associate Obama with Bush's incompetence, and then two seconds later trying to claim that Bush really didn't do anything wrong and that all of our problems were caused by Obama, Clinton, or Carter.
In reality, Obama has been very moderate. He's been so reasonable that Republicans have had to take increasingly bizarre positions (e.g. refusing to extend unemployment, opposing their own healthcare reforms) in order to stay in opposition.
I'm kind of surprised I haven't seen any comments on the bigger issue - the IT folks entrusted with this data who let data leak (or at least rumors of the content).
Well it might just be a rumor that the IT people leaked stuff.
Of course, IT people should be discreet and generally make efforts to keep personal stuff confidential. Still, this quote is striking:
I have personal stuff in Outlook folders that I would not want someone in IT to see...
This is just a terrible idea. IT departments will often have policies where anything stored on their computers or passing through their networks will not be considered "private". It will be monitored, and perhaps shared with HR or your boss. Right or wrong, that's the way it is for many businesses.
I worked at a company where, if we saw an email containing evidence of illegal or unethical behavior on the part of the employee, we were required to go to HR and often then asked to send the information to that person's boss. That was company policy. We also had software that monitored all web activity, and would periodically be asked to send reports on employee usage to managers. The reports included approximations on how long each individual was browsing the Internet as well as which sites they were visiting.
I would constantly tell people "Don't store anything on your computer or send anything through company email that you wouldn't want shared with both me and your boss."
Re:Don't f* with the IT guy like at restaurant you
on
Child Porn As a Weapon
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· Score: 1
Nowadays, that kind of letter could land me in prison, given a hysterical enough judge.
Yeah, there have even been cases recently where teenage girls had to register as sex offenders for possessing/distributing nude photos of themselves. Yeesh.
But the crazy thing about pictures of nude children-- if you're not a pedophile, it doesn't necessarily occur to you that there's anything sexual about the photos.
Slashdot Mirror
The iPod was not the first MP3 player or anything. What it was is a fashion accessory.
I see people writing that now and then, and it's become clear that this sort of sentiment is disguised bitterness. It's nowhere near sufficient to explain what happened.
No, the iPod was not the first MP3, but it was the first one that that most people could stand to use. Seriously. I'm a tech person. I use Linux. I'm not trendy, and I don't have any interest in being trendy. But if I'm going to own an MP3 player, I want one that doesn't have a terrible design, and for some reason Apple seems to be the only tech company interested in solving their customer's problems.
Just for example, I had an iPhone for a couple years and liked it alright, but had some frustrations. I was talking to some pro-Android/anti-Apple people in various places (including on Slashdot), and I had become convinced that Android had gotten to be a good, stable, worthwhile phone OS. So I happily made the switch. I bought an HTC Incredible.
At first I was really happy and impressed. If it were a matter of fashion and image, I liked what it said about me that I no longer had an iPhone. But then so many damned thing just didn't work right. The audio player was crap. The picture viewer was ok, but sub-par. It would randomly crash and reboot itself. Battery life was not what it should be-- I could never go two days straight without charging. The available apps were pretty crappy. The notifications were excessive, and the included tones were grating. Over the course of a couple months, I began remembering why it was that I always hated cell phones. I found myself swearing at it under my breath. I started imagine that the phone was an object with free will, hellbent on frustrating me.
I managed to wriggle out of my contract and went back to AT&T (which I hate) and got an iPhone again. I'm not like "Oh wow, the iPhone is super-cool and I'm awesome for having one." It's more like I forget that I own an iPhone, and I forget why I hate cell phones, and I just use it.
And my story and perspective are not remotely unique. This is exactly why Apple has developed a following.
Voice recognition is much easier when you limit the vocabulary to a finite set of commands.
That said, I've never really seen the value of voice commands and voice recognition. It's one of those things that people get super-excited about because it seems all science-fictiony, but it's a poorly performing solution in search of a problem.
Verizon doesn't have the ability to limit my speech right now, but that's the whole point: I don't want them to gain the power to censor me. That's exactly the power they could have if net neutrality is not maintained.
I am not exaggerating in the least. In fact, I was very careful to include all my options, even the options that I don't consider viable.
In my view, only option 1 is a real viable option, which means I have no choice at all.
Nope. No DSL. I live probably a mile away from midtown manhattan, and Verizon doesn't even offer DSL.
Yes, really. Notice that you've linked to CNN, on the air, criticizing the government?
If you're asking me whether the government should generally be more transparent, I'd definitely say yes. If you're asking me whether I'm completely unconcerned with the government infringing on my freedom of speech, I'd say no, I *am* concerned.
BUT if I had to either trust the government or BP to give me real facts about the oil spill, I'd sooner trust the government. Not that I would absolutely trust the government, but the government at least has a theoretical obligation to be honest with me. BP doesn't even have that. Likewise, provided the practical ability to censor my speech, I would sooner trust the government to protect my anti-government speech than I would trust Verizon to protect my anti-Verizon speech. Yes I would.
A profit-driven organization, in a free market (really free, meaning NO government intervention at all), can only make a profit if customers choose to buy its products.
That's only true if you assume that, without government intervention, no profit-driven organization can attain a level of economic power that allows them to be abusive. So, for example, what if one company owns all the good farmland and the entire food distribution system and says, "If you want food, you're going to have to do what we say!"? I guess that company's customers can opt to starve, but that's not much of a choice.
So are you really going to claim that no company can monopolistic power without governmental support? Or are you claiming that no company would abuse monopolistic power without governmental intervention? Even if one company couldn't form a monopoly, what makes you think that a number of companies wouldn't form cartels that enable them to abuse and extort from their own customers?
History is full of counter-examples, of companies which get into the position of being able to abuse their customers. That's why we have things like anti-trust laws.
If not enough customers choose to buy the company's products, the company loses money and eventually will go under. Thus a profit-driven organization is indeed very much accountable, to its customers.
Only insofar as the customers and the profit-driven organization are on equal footing. A large company with a lot of economic power can withstand a lot of customer dissatisfaction before anything bad happens. Sure you can say "eventually" it will go under. All things end "eventually".
BY CONTRAST, the government isn't accountable to anyone.
Bullshit. You can elect someone else. Failing that, if you're really dissatisfied enough you can overthrow the whole damned government. The US constitution was designed to allow rebellion if enough people were dissatisfied enough.
But even before you get to that point, there's the separation of powers, the checks and balances. There are rules about transparency that the government does not generally break. Contrary to your silly rhetoric, the government does not generally go around breaking their own rules in serious and egregious ways all the time. At least, the amount of stuff that the government does within its own rules far outweighs the times when it breaks those rules. And governments need not be corrupt and break their own rules as long as the people hold them accountable.
The US government is actually not even all that corrupt given the amount of power it has. The bigger problem is that it's run badly, partially because so many people have bought into the rhetoric that governments must necessarily be stupid and inefficient and worthless. When you set low expectations, people tend to meet them.
Great, because I really want the responsibility of running a tiny ISP.
The telcos have a long history of skillful lobbying...
This is the sort of argument I hate the most. It boils down to, "We can't make laws to decide what's acceptable in our country and punish the wrongdoers! If we did, the rich and powerful would just subvert those laws!" And there are 2 big problems with that argument:
1) It's not true. Look back historically, and you'll find that the government has regulated food, working conditions, land use, medical manufacturing, car manufacturing, and a host of other things that have made our lives better and safer. Making it illegal to have excessive amounts of mercury in your food does not result in the food industry lobbying those regulations away.
2) The proposed solution inevitably ends up being, "...so we should just let people do whatever they want and hope it works out." It's kind of like saying, "People sometimes get away with theft, so let's just go ahead and make theft legal."
Now I'd agree that there are bad/counterproductive regulations. There are regulations that can lead to corruption. There are regulations that go to far, and regulations that don't go far enough. There are people who will defy the regulations you make, and there are people who will try to subvert the process of making regulations. However, none of that is sufficient to say that regulations are bad or useless. Don't let "perfect" become the enemy of "good".
The way I see it is that the Internet is infrastructure. We wouldn't let GM buy all the roads and dictate which cars are allowed to drive on them. We wouldn't let GE own all the the electricity infrastructure in this country and decide what kind of appliances we're all allowed to run. Yet somehow we're content to hand our telecommunications infrastructure over to Verizon and let them decide what kind of traffic can pass over it.
What's more, a decade ago we had a rash of (arguably irresponsible) deregulation, showing that it's not true that, "give power to the government, they'll just try to take more". Sometimes they toss power aside in favor of pleasing their constituents (either people or companies), in order to cut their budget, or in order to abdicate responsibility.
The government is run by the people. Or at least it would be, if people were willing to step up and run it instead of whining about how much the government sucks.
But to get to your real question, I have to say that our democratically elected government has a piss-poor record when it comes to passing rules.
Citation needed.
If you're going to go the "slippery slope" route, then you have to provide some good arguments and evidence that the slope is indeed slippery. If the government wanted to filter all "packets critical of the demopublican party", how much closer does net neutrality bring them to that? What barrier to filtering does a non-neutral net offer that a neutral net doesn't?
See, because I could see an argument that net neutrality potentially makes is *harder* for the government to filter things. If Verizon is allowed to filter things however they want, then the US government just needs to put pressure on Verizon to filter "packets critical of the demopublican party". However, if you insist that material isn't allowed to be filtered based on content and source, it makes it much harder to hide any nefarious filters.
But ultimately, as things are today, I trust our Federal government to not-censor my speech against the government much more than I trust Verizon to not-censor my speech against Verizon. Verizon has no court system, no jury of my peers. Saying, "At least if they violate our contract, I can sue them." indicates that you, too, trust the government to decide matters justly.
Nope, not even DSL. And it's not just my building, it's my whole neighborhood. And the next neighborhood over (actually quite a large area).
If I'm willing to spend a couple thousand dollars a month, they'll run a commercial connection over. Otherwise, Verizon offers no data service.
I live in NYC and ultimately I have 4 options:
1) Time Warner Cable
2) dialup
3) cell phone data plans (expensive, slow, and capped)
4) don't use the Internet
That's in one of the biggest/densest cities in the world.
So if there are few choices for many now, we fix this by eliminating what choices that do exist?
No, the point is that many of us have *no* choice right now. They use the ISP available to them, or they don't get Internet access.
So the question is, who do you feel is more likely to treat you fairly: a profit-driven organization with absolutely no accountability to anyone, the the same profit-driven organization with *some* rules of fair dealing enforced by a democratically elected government?
I'm not sure if that's quite the case - the economic ideology of the free market and the economic ideology of centralized control are *both* confounded by irrational humans.
Well it's a bit more complicated than that, isn't it?
Because one of the ideas that has worked out pretty well for humans is the idea of careful distribution of power (checks and balances). This idea would hold that you don't want centralized power in a government or in large corporations, and in fact you actually want tension between large private organizations and large public organizations. The two can ideally balance each other out. So in this view, you want a strong market with good competition, but lightly regulated with a public interest in mind.
However, the prevailing "conservative" view (which is not conservative, but is actually fairly radical) is basically to do away with the checks and balances that governments can provide through regulation, and instead concentrate *all* power in whichever body has the most economic power. From there, magical "free market" forces will sort everything out, because supposedly economic power cannot be abused.
Well I got pretty poor performance on my Linux computer (which is admittedly 6 years old, but it's capable of playing video normally) and had trouble on another computer because (apparently?) there's no 64-bit version and so I couldn't get it installed through Ubuntu's normal package management. I admit I gave up pretty easily. When I could get Flash to run, it still crashed relatively often and sometimes rendered things wrong.
And I got absolutely terrible performance out of my HTC Incredible.
So though I don't really know, I'll posit that you get great performance out of *your* Linux computer and *your* Android-based phone, but it definitely doesn't seem like you can count on that.
Running OSX, Flash crashing constantly.
If we can't be sustainable even with all the resources available on Earth, then we probably can't be sustainable on a spaceship small enough to push to fast enough speeds to get anywhere we want to go.
Developing a self-contained system that can sustain human life indefinitely is an absolute necessity for serious space travel. Of course, one of the big problems will be energy. If you're talking about interstellar travel, you could easily hit a point where you can't carry enough fuel, and you get too far away from a star for solar power to do you much good.
I think our big hope for space travel might be getting onto a planet-sized spacecraft capable of sustaining life, and then getting it stuck in orbit around a star that can be used for energy, and then hoping the star takes us someplace we want to go. :-)
Well... except some of the issues very connected. In order to make long-term space travel possible, we'll need to create some kind of a sustainable ecosystem on the spacecraft to create perpetual supplies of food, air, and water. In addition, we'll need massive amounts of energy.
Meanwhile, we don't seem to be able to maintain a pre-existing sustainable ecosystem on a "spaceship" the size of a whole planet, and we can't generate enough energy to sustain ourselves right here on Earth.
It's pretty silly to expect long-range space travel before these issues are solved.
Fortunately, in the long run, they're probably shooting themselves in the foot. The only reason anyone would go to Yelp is to get unbiased reviews. As it becomes more bias, it becomes less useful, and they'll probably lose their audience to someone doing a better job.
Also they've built up a narrative about what Obama is painting him variously as a Muslim spy or an unapologetic communist, and at other times claiming he's "just like Bush" or even "too much like Bush". It's really a shocking level of inconsistency, claiming that Obama hasn't done anything very different from Bush's policies in order to associate Obama with Bush's incompetence, and then two seconds later trying to claim that Bush really didn't do anything wrong and that all of our problems were caused by Obama, Clinton, or Carter.
In reality, Obama has been very moderate. He's been so reasonable that Republicans have had to take increasingly bizarre positions (e.g. refusing to extend unemployment, opposing their own healthcare reforms) in order to stay in opposition.
Well you can read their reasoning here. Pay special attention to reason #6.
I'm not saying you can't disagree with their reasoning, but obviously they have their reasons.
It also runs poorly on OSX. And Linux. And really anything other than Windows.
Actually, based on the way Apple has talked about Flash, I'd expect that Flash will perform poorly, crash often, and drain battery life.
How much do you want to bet that it's true?
I'm kind of surprised I haven't seen any comments on the bigger issue - the IT folks entrusted with this data who let data leak (or at least rumors of the content).
Well it might just be a rumor that the IT people leaked stuff.
Of course, IT people should be discreet and generally make efforts to keep personal stuff confidential. Still, this quote is striking:
I have personal stuff in Outlook folders that I would not want someone in IT to see...
This is just a terrible idea. IT departments will often have policies where anything stored on their computers or passing through their networks will not be considered "private". It will be monitored, and perhaps shared with HR or your boss. Right or wrong, that's the way it is for many businesses.
I worked at a company where, if we saw an email containing evidence of illegal or unethical behavior on the part of the employee, we were required to go to HR and often then asked to send the information to that person's boss. That was company policy. We also had software that monitored all web activity, and would periodically be asked to send reports on employee usage to managers. The reports included approximations on how long each individual was browsing the Internet as well as which sites they were visiting.
I would constantly tell people "Don't store anything on your computer or send anything through company email that you wouldn't want shared with both me and your boss."
Nowadays, that kind of letter could land me in prison, given a hysterical enough judge.
Yeah, there have even been cases recently where teenage girls had to register as sex offenders for possessing/distributing nude photos of themselves. Yeesh.
But the crazy thing about pictures of nude children-- if you're not a pedophile, it doesn't necessarily occur to you that there's anything sexual about the photos.