There are only three types of people who I can think of that would be interested in doing this:
1.) Industry insiders who want to make sure their grants are accepted or their competitors' are rejected.
2.) Crusaders trying to bend the process to whatever their particular ideology is.
3.) Unemployable losers with nothing better to do.
...surely the government could toss in a couple hundred thousand to pay people to do the job.
On the other hand, I'm tempted to question how much it improves your situation to pay people to do the job. Mightn't you end up with the same group of people whether you pay or not-- well, ok, if you're paying then you might argue that the unemployed losers cease to be unemployed.
And there's the other side of the argument, which is that if people are working on something because they have an interest, they might do a better job than someone just doing it for a paycheck. Use someone with an interest, they might follow their own bias, but use someone without an interest, and their only bias is "whatever gets me a paycheck". This is the sort of angle people sometimes use to argue the value of volunteer contribution to open source.
Anyway, I think the important thing is often not who does the work, but what review process it goes through to make sure the work is done well.
It's a logic issue because if you aren't responsible for your property, then who is.
Sure, and I can stipulate that a corporation is capable of owning something and being responsible for the things that they own-- at least to a large extent.
None of that really indicates that they need to be considered a legal "person" with all the rights, privileges, and protections which people enjoy.
When you remove that ability to act on it's own and independent from the owners, then it becomes nothing more then a dog or a car you own in which you are responsible for any damage it causes.
Well just to pick apart where you're going with this a little, you're not always entirely responsible for what happens with the things you own, right? I'm not necessarily liable if the car I own was involved in an accident. The car doesn't need to be granted legal personhood in order to avoid me getting charged with manslaughter if someone else, driving my car, runs someone over. There generally needs to be some kind of action or reckless inaction on the part of the owner. Or to backtrack to your earlier example:
Our courts don't allow a ladder to be responsible for breaking and someone falling, it's the person who owns the ladder and offered it for service in an unsafe condition
You can't hold the ladder responsible for breaking, but you probably can't hold me responsible for simply owning a ladder which breaks, either. Offering it for service in an unsafe condition is another matter, and I might be able to be sued for that even if I don't own the ladder, right?
if you do something not in the best interest of the company which causes the investment to decrease in value, other partial owners will have a claim against your actions.
So in this scenario I'm one of the owners of the company? I didn't get that in the original example. I thought I was just some random dude who liked cap and trade. Or... well it's still not quite clear to me.
Why should being an owner in the company require me to not do things which might harm another person's investment in that company? What's the legal requirement there? Was it part of the agreement when I bought into the company? Or is there a law somewhere that says that being a partial owner of a company requires you to avoid doing anything which might harm others' investments in that company?
If so, I'm not sure I understand the point of that law. Someone outside the company is easily allowed to harm their investments (e.g. if I were just "some dude who liked cap and trade") without any grounds of a lawsuit, so I don't see why you need the extra incentive to benefit the company for someone who is an owner, and therefore probably already has some economic incentive to see the company do well.
How can you treat an group made up entirely of individuals as having LESS rights than an individual?
I'm not suggesting that individuals in a group should have less access to their rights than they would individually, but why should they be assumed to have more rights by granting additional rights to the group itself on top of the rights of those individuals?
If I form several corporations, should each get a vote in the election? If they manage to exist for 65 years, can they collect social security? If I try to put you out of business, can I be charged with assault? If I succeed, is that murder?
Corporations aren't people, and they don't (and shouldn't) have the rights and protections which people have. I have a freedom to speak, but that freedom should neither be enhanced nor diminished by participation in some particular joint venture.
Further, corporations are fully artificial legal constructs. There should be no moral qualms about contriving their rights in such a way as to benefit society most, so long as we're not violating the rights of participating individuals.
I doubt I know enough to answer your question, but your question itself confuses me. You understand why someone would want to run "remote X clients", but you don't understand why someone would want to run "remote X servers". If you don't have a server, then who is the client connecting to?
It's actually a logic issue. Entities are owned by people.
I'm not sure it makes sense to call it a "logic issue". You're asserting something as a premise, but that doesn't mean the issue is one of "logic". I think "entities are owned by people" is logically problematic since companies can own things too, and companies are obviously not people. Therefore, things which are not people can own things.
You see, if the corporation wasn't able to act on it's own behalf separate from the owners and investors, then if you supported some environmental restriction like say the cap and trade laws which would increase costs and make the corporation less profitable, then I as an investor could sue you for the losses of your political stance in which you poisoned my investment by intentionally attempting to harm it.
Errr... why? If I support cap and trade laws, then anyone whose investment would be lessened in value as a result of cap and trade laws would be able to sue me? But that's prevented by corporations being "people"? I think you need to expand that out a little before it starts making some kind of sense.
Being a separate person means that the actions of the corporation which is not the result of the investors actions do not travel back to the investors.
Well first, I'm not sure why you can't allow such a legal construct without talking about the corporation as a "person".
But also, none of that really addresses the question of the negative consequences of saying, "Corporations are not people and are not necessarily entitled to all of the same human rights as people, and therefore are not entitled to contribute to political campaigns."
I think it makes sense to make a legal distinction of being able to assign legal responsibility for an action to either the employee working for a company, the company itself, or the investor funding the company. I think all of that can be handled, however, without trying to grant inalienable human rights to the corporation.
A corporation is ultimately made of people. Just because it is a collection of them, not a single individual, shouldn't make them have any less rights than a person does.
Right, but I'm not asking why a person doesn't retain his own rights while engaged in business as part of a corporation. I'm asking why the corporation needs to be treated as a person in itself with its own rights. A corporation is just a legal construct, so why can't we give it whatever rights we deem appropriate? Why do people talk about it as though the corporation has inalienable rights of its own, independent of the people involved?
That is good information, but my question was more as to the philosophical/economic/sociological reasons why it makes sense to grant them "personhood". What kind of bad stuff do people expect to happen if we say corporations are not "people", and do not have the right to make political contributions.
I mean, besides the politicians who expect their money to go away.
Yeah, I would question both of those, but particularly the first. Why should a corporation be considered a "person"? I could see it being valid to give corporations some set of rights which may be a subset of the rights we give people, but they still aren't people. Can anyone explain this? I don't think I've ever even heard a theory as to why corporations need to be treated as "people".
It seems valid that corporations could be given a more limited form of free speech that didn't include campaign contributions, even if we assumed that campaign contributions were simply a free speech issue.
2. the work depicts/describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law.
I've always found it kind of amusing that it's basically all about sex and pooping. Of all the forms of speech that can be censored due to being offensive, of all the activities which we can't tolerate because they're too objectionable, we've picked out sex and pooping.
Is it immoral, illegal, or unethical for a homeowner to deduct their mortgage? I don't believe so. But why do we allow people to deduct mortgage payments at all? On the one hand, people will say, "to encourage home ownership." On the other hand, you could view it as a penalty on renters, who are often renting because they already can't afford to buy a home. So you take someone who's in worse financial shape, and you put a greater tax burden on them?
Why should you get to deduct your Internet access, books, cell phone, and mileage when your average worker can't deduct his? Are you more in need of the money? Are we assuming that your buying books is of greater value to our society than the other guy's?
The system was built to be manipulated so rich people could get out of your fair tax burden. I don't blame the rich people for taking advantage of it, but it's still a fucked up system.
You do know how GPS works, right? I mean, I only have a general sense of it, but what your tax dollars are paying for is just the satellites, and the satellites basically just broadcast the time (maybe that's not exactly it, but like I said, I only have a general sense).
So you still need a device that's going to receive the signal and convert that to a position, which means hardware costs. You still need someone to provide the map and routing directions, and someone is going to have to pay the voice actors for your audible directions, all of which is also going to cost money. If you want to keep those maps up to date, someone is going to have to do work there, and they're going to need some kind of business model to pay for people to travel the country updating maps.
Your tax dollars don't pay for most of that stuff.
Sure, but my point is, why should we have these games at all? In many cases, it has the effect of saying, "Taxes are for those without the time (and sense) to study the intricacies of our tax code and find ways to dodge." Why should our tax code say that? If two people make the same amount of money and spend their money on the same things, why should our tax code reward one of them for gaming his tax return?
What would I want in a monitoring system? The first thing that pops into my head is "lots and lots of knobs." The kind where when you turn them you get a nice satisfying click. And blinking lights. Lots of switches. Things that go "ping" at regular intervals would be nice. Oh! And a nice big screen that says, "All systems nominal" all the time.
Like I said, I'm not criticizing. It's kind of a "don't hate the player, hate the game" thing in my mind. I'm not bothered so much by the people who take advantages of the tax breaks open to them, but I think it's a little silly that it works this way. Especially so when if we can assume (which I think we can) it's often the people who don't have the time and resources to go around researching every little loophole in the tax code who can use the tax breaks the most.
If you're great at managing people, they will increase your responsibilities, inching you closer to your Peter Point.
There's nothing wrong with inching closer to the Peter Point. It seems to me like the best possible situation would be if everyone was just barely short of their respective Peter Points. Otherwise, wouldn't we all just try to stay the lowest man on the totem?
many of the "skills, techniques, and tools" that managers try to stay up on are merely bullshit...
Yeah, I'm not sure about "staying up on" skills, techniques, and tools for management. Having done a bit of management myself, it seems different from technical positions in that a lot of the skills/techniques/tools are a lot more timeless, and don't change from year to year.
That's not to say that management is easy, or that it's something you just learn and then you're all set. You might have to study quite a lot to keep up on the projects that you're managing, and what might be changing in the big picture and in the small picture. You have to keep up on your people, what's going on with them, how they're performing, whether their work or behavior is changing. And yes, you have to learn new techniques. They might not be entirely "new", but that doesn't mean they aren't new to you.
In my experience, even when management is less work, it's harder. You end up being confronted with nebulous situations where it's not clear what problems need to be solved because it's not even clear what your goals should be. You have to define your goals, and then formulate a set of requirements and a plan to meet those requirements. It's much easier, in a certain way, to be the person who just receives the requirements and then gets to work meeting them.
I hate this sort of crap. Not to criticize you. You're probably playing by the rules, and I'm sure your advice is good.
But I hate all this game-playing with money and taxes. Because you're clever and are in a position to play these games, you get to keep your money. Lots of poor schmoes with a 9 to 5 who don't know any better, meanwhile, are being taken to the cleaners every year come tax time.
It seems like it should be a viable argument, but I doubt it will be accepted. From the news I read, it seems like somehow the judicial branch is as anti-consumer as the other branches of government.
The thing is, I think they have this totally backward. They allow IPs as evidence of who was committing copyright infringement, but disallow the argument that IP collection is an invasion of privacy. However, an IP address is personally identifiable of the person who is paying for Internet service*** and not of the person who is originating the traffic. Therefore, in collecting IP addresses you are generally invading the privacy of the person paying for service (by monitoring the use that he's paying for). On the other hand, the link between the traffic over a connection and the person paying for it should be considered circumstantial at best.
If I own a plot of land and a dead body is found on that land, does it naturally follow that I'm the murderer? No. On the other hand, if Microsoft keeps surveillance on that plot of land, isn't that still an invasion of my privacy?
*** The summary has it wrong, and IP addresses do not identify a computer.
No, ocularDeathRay, not exactly. I'm not a good guesser at all.
Though it may at times seem like I'm responding to other people's posts-- like where you mention that I knew he read the tags-- I assure you that all of my posts are just random rants without any attention paid to the posts I'm responding to. If the response seems appropriate, it's just a wild coincidence. And yes, Linux is awesome.
See! I just said "Linux is awesome" even though that's completely irrelevant to what we're talking about. Why would I even say that until I had no idea what we were talking about? I bet you feel silly now.
Yeah, given the attitude you hear from some congressmen, I wouldn't be surprised if they just taxed us all and fed the money to record labels without regard to whether they earned the money. And somehow the action will be praised as a defense of "free market ideals", since it's believed to be a god-given right for large companies to make huge profits.
It depends. If I buy from NewEgg on a regular basis, I might be fine with them keeping my address and purchase history on file, and I would like to be able to view that information myself. That doesn't mean I want them making that information publicly available to anyone who asks for it.
Listening now, but given that you have a strong opinion on the matter, do you care to explain? In fact, does anyone knowledgeable care to explain what arguments were made about these recordings, why they should or shouldn't be public, etc.? I scanned the linked articles and nothing caught my eye as a clear explanation of what's going on.
Also, its possible that data is being stored in various ways/stats, for example I may have come up with a single number to represent a user's political preferences (left, right and such) by consolidation of many other 'simple' stats. Disclosing this opens my 'better' algorithm to the rest of the industry.
Well it seems like it would be valid for a law to require that companies show you any raw data they collect on you, but not require that those companies show information that the company derives from that data. Even if you allow people to demand that specific data be deleted, you could just require that the company delete any derivative data (or recalculate based on remaining data) without disclosing the original derivative data to anyone else.
So, given your example, the company would have to disclose all the stats which they have collected on a user without disclosing the single number they use to represent the user's political preference, without disclosing which information is used to calculate the political preference, or even without disclosing that there is a single number used to represent political preference. Even if the user could opt to delete some of that information from the company's records, the law could require that the number be deleted from the company's databases, but allow it to be recalculated from remaining data (if any data remains).
It might be tricky to craft a law that accounts for that without opening other loopholes for misbehavior, but it doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem.
Slashdot Mirror
There are only three types of people who I can think of that would be interested in doing this:
1.) Industry insiders who want to make sure their grants are accepted or their competitors' are rejected.
2.) Crusaders trying to bend the process to whatever their particular ideology is.
3.) Unemployable losers with nothing better to do.
...surely the government could toss in a couple hundred thousand to pay people to do the job.
On the other hand, I'm tempted to question how much it improves your situation to pay people to do the job. Mightn't you end up with the same group of people whether you pay or not-- well, ok, if you're paying then you might argue that the unemployed losers cease to be unemployed.
And there's the other side of the argument, which is that if people are working on something because they have an interest, they might do a better job than someone just doing it for a paycheck. Use someone with an interest, they might follow their own bias, but use someone without an interest, and their only bias is "whatever gets me a paycheck". This is the sort of angle people sometimes use to argue the value of volunteer contribution to open source.
Anyway, I think the important thing is often not who does the work, but what review process it goes through to make sure the work is done well.
It's a logic issue because if you aren't responsible for your property, then who is.
Sure, and I can stipulate that a corporation is capable of owning something and being responsible for the things that they own-- at least to a large extent.
None of that really indicates that they need to be considered a legal "person" with all the rights, privileges, and protections which people enjoy.
When you remove that ability to act on it's own and independent from the owners, then it becomes nothing more then a dog or a car you own in which you are responsible for any damage it causes.
Well just to pick apart where you're going with this a little, you're not always entirely responsible for what happens with the things you own, right? I'm not necessarily liable if the car I own was involved in an accident. The car doesn't need to be granted legal personhood in order to avoid me getting charged with manslaughter if someone else, driving my car, runs someone over. There generally needs to be some kind of action or reckless inaction on the part of the owner. Or to backtrack to your earlier example:
Our courts don't allow a ladder to be responsible for breaking and someone falling, it's the person who owns the ladder and offered it for service in an unsafe condition
You can't hold the ladder responsible for breaking, but you probably can't hold me responsible for simply owning a ladder which breaks, either. Offering it for service in an unsafe condition is another matter, and I might be able to be sued for that even if I don't own the ladder, right?
if you do something not in the best interest of the company which causes the investment to decrease in value, other partial owners will have a claim against your actions.
So in this scenario I'm one of the owners of the company? I didn't get that in the original example. I thought I was just some random dude who liked cap and trade. Or... well it's still not quite clear to me.
Why should being an owner in the company require me to not do things which might harm another person's investment in that company? What's the legal requirement there? Was it part of the agreement when I bought into the company? Or is there a law somewhere that says that being a partial owner of a company requires you to avoid doing anything which might harm others' investments in that company?
If so, I'm not sure I understand the point of that law. Someone outside the company is easily allowed to harm their investments (e.g. if I were just "some dude who liked cap and trade") without any grounds of a lawsuit, so I don't see why you need the extra incentive to benefit the company for someone who is an owner, and therefore probably already has some economic incentive to see the company do well.
How can you treat an group made up entirely of individuals as having LESS rights than an individual?
I'm not suggesting that individuals in a group should have less access to their rights than they would individually, but why should they be assumed to have more rights by granting additional rights to the group itself on top of the rights of those individuals?
If I form several corporations, should each get a vote in the election? If they manage to exist for 65 years, can they collect social security? If I try to put you out of business, can I be charged with assault? If I succeed, is that murder?
Corporations aren't people, and they don't (and shouldn't) have the rights and protections which people have. I have a freedom to speak, but that freedom should neither be enhanced nor diminished by participation in some particular joint venture.
Further, corporations are fully artificial legal constructs. There should be no moral qualms about contriving their rights in such a way as to benefit society most, so long as we're not violating the rights of participating individuals.
I doubt I know enough to answer your question, but your question itself confuses me. You understand why someone would want to run "remote X clients", but you don't understand why someone would want to run "remote X servers". If you don't have a server, then who is the client connecting to?
It's actually a logic issue. Entities are owned by people.
I'm not sure it makes sense to call it a "logic issue". You're asserting something as a premise, but that doesn't mean the issue is one of "logic". I think "entities are owned by people" is logically problematic since companies can own things too, and companies are obviously not people. Therefore, things which are not people can own things.
You see, if the corporation wasn't able to act on it's own behalf separate from the owners and investors, then if you supported some environmental restriction like say the cap and trade laws which would increase costs and make the corporation less profitable, then I as an investor could sue you for the losses of your political stance in which you poisoned my investment by intentionally attempting to harm it.
Errr... why? If I support cap and trade laws, then anyone whose investment would be lessened in value as a result of cap and trade laws would be able to sue me? But that's prevented by corporations being "people"? I think you need to expand that out a little before it starts making some kind of sense.
Being a separate person means that the actions of the corporation which is not the result of the investors actions do not travel back to the investors.
Well first, I'm not sure why you can't allow such a legal construct without talking about the corporation as a "person".
But also, none of that really addresses the question of the negative consequences of saying, "Corporations are not people and are not necessarily entitled to all of the same human rights as people, and therefore are not entitled to contribute to political campaigns."
I think it makes sense to make a legal distinction of being able to assign legal responsibility for an action to either the employee working for a company, the company itself, or the investor funding the company. I think all of that can be handled, however, without trying to grant inalienable human rights to the corporation.
A corporation is ultimately made of people. Just because it is a collection of them, not a single individual, shouldn't make them have any less rights than a person does.
Right, but I'm not asking why a person doesn't retain his own rights while engaged in business as part of a corporation. I'm asking why the corporation needs to be treated as a person in itself with its own rights. A corporation is just a legal construct, so why can't we give it whatever rights we deem appropriate? Why do people talk about it as though the corporation has inalienable rights of its own, independent of the people involved?
That is good information, but my question was more as to the philosophical/economic/sociological reasons why it makes sense to grant them "personhood". What kind of bad stuff do people expect to happen if we say corporations are not "people", and do not have the right to make political contributions.
I mean, besides the politicians who expect their money to go away.
Yeah, I would question both of those, but particularly the first. Why should a corporation be considered a "person"? I could see it being valid to give corporations some set of rights which may be a subset of the rights we give people, but they still aren't people. Can anyone explain this? I don't think I've ever even heard a theory as to why corporations need to be treated as "people".
It seems valid that corporations could be given a more limited form of free speech that didn't include campaign contributions, even if we assumed that campaign contributions were simply a free speech issue.
2. the work depicts/describes, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct or excretory functions specifically defined by applicable state law.
I've always found it kind of amusing that it's basically all about sex and pooping. Of all the forms of speech that can be censored due to being offensive, of all the activities which we can't tolerate because they're too objectionable, we've picked out sex and pooping.
Legal? Yes. Ethical? Sure. A dodge? Still, yes.
Is it immoral, illegal, or unethical for a homeowner to deduct their mortgage? I don't believe so. But why do we allow people to deduct mortgage payments at all? On the one hand, people will say, "to encourage home ownership." On the other hand, you could view it as a penalty on renters, who are often renting because they already can't afford to buy a home. So you take someone who's in worse financial shape, and you put a greater tax burden on them?
Why should you get to deduct your Internet access, books, cell phone, and mileage when your average worker can't deduct his? Are you more in need of the money? Are we assuming that your buying books is of greater value to our society than the other guy's?
The system was built to be manipulated so rich people could get out of your fair tax burden. I don't blame the rich people for taking advantage of it, but it's still a fucked up system.
You do know how GPS works, right? I mean, I only have a general sense of it, but what your tax dollars are paying for is just the satellites, and the satellites basically just broadcast the time (maybe that's not exactly it, but like I said, I only have a general sense).
So you still need a device that's going to receive the signal and convert that to a position, which means hardware costs. You still need someone to provide the map and routing directions, and someone is going to have to pay the voice actors for your audible directions, all of which is also going to cost money. If you want to keep those maps up to date, someone is going to have to do work there, and they're going to need some kind of business model to pay for people to travel the country updating maps.
Your tax dollars don't pay for most of that stuff.
Sure, but my point is, why should we have these games at all? In many cases, it has the effect of saying, "Taxes are for those without the time (and sense) to study the intricacies of our tax code and find ways to dodge." Why should our tax code say that? If two people make the same amount of money and spend their money on the same things, why should our tax code reward one of them for gaming his tax return?
What would I want in a monitoring system? The first thing that pops into my head is "lots and lots of knobs." The kind where when you turn them you get a nice satisfying click. And blinking lights. Lots of switches. Things that go "ping" at regular intervals would be nice. Oh! And a nice big screen that says, "All systems nominal" all the time.
Like I said, I'm not criticizing. It's kind of a "don't hate the player, hate the game" thing in my mind. I'm not bothered so much by the people who take advantages of the tax breaks open to them, but I think it's a little silly that it works this way. Especially so when if we can assume (which I think we can) it's often the people who don't have the time and resources to go around researching every little loophole in the tax code who can use the tax breaks the most.
If you're great at managing people, they will increase your responsibilities, inching you closer to your Peter Point.
There's nothing wrong with inching closer to the Peter Point. It seems to me like the best possible situation would be if everyone was just barely short of their respective Peter Points. Otherwise, wouldn't we all just try to stay the lowest man on the totem?
many of the "skills, techniques, and tools" that managers try to stay up on are merely bullshit...
Yeah, I'm not sure about "staying up on" skills, techniques, and tools for management. Having done a bit of management myself, it seems different from technical positions in that a lot of the skills/techniques/tools are a lot more timeless, and don't change from year to year.
That's not to say that management is easy, or that it's something you just learn and then you're all set. You might have to study quite a lot to keep up on the projects that you're managing, and what might be changing in the big picture and in the small picture. You have to keep up on your people, what's going on with them, how they're performing, whether their work or behavior is changing. And yes, you have to learn new techniques. They might not be entirely "new", but that doesn't mean they aren't new to you.
In my experience, even when management is less work, it's harder. You end up being confronted with nebulous situations where it's not clear what problems need to be solved because it's not even clear what your goals should be. You have to define your goals, and then formulate a set of requirements and a plan to meet those requirements. It's much easier, in a certain way, to be the person who just receives the requirements and then gets to work meeting them.
I hate this sort of crap. Not to criticize you. You're probably playing by the rules, and I'm sure your advice is good.
But I hate all this game-playing with money and taxes. Because you're clever and are in a position to play these games, you get to keep your money. Lots of poor schmoes with a 9 to 5 who don't know any better, meanwhile, are being taken to the cleaners every year come tax time.
It seems like it should be a viable argument, but I doubt it will be accepted. From the news I read, it seems like somehow the judicial branch is as anti-consumer as the other branches of government.
The thing is, I think they have this totally backward. They allow IPs as evidence of who was committing copyright infringement, but disallow the argument that IP collection is an invasion of privacy. However, an IP address is personally identifiable of the person who is paying for Internet service*** and not of the person who is originating the traffic. Therefore, in collecting IP addresses you are generally invading the privacy of the person paying for service (by monitoring the use that he's paying for). On the other hand, the link between the traffic over a connection and the person paying for it should be considered circumstantial at best.
If I own a plot of land and a dead body is found on that land, does it naturally follow that I'm the murderer? No. On the other hand, if Microsoft keeps surveillance on that plot of land, isn't that still an invasion of my privacy?
*** The summary has it wrong, and IP addresses do not identify a computer.
No, ocularDeathRay, not exactly. I'm not a good guesser at all.
Though it may at times seem like I'm responding to other people's posts-- like where you mention that I knew he read the tags-- I assure you that all of my posts are just random rants without any attention paid to the posts I'm responding to. If the response seems appropriate, it's just a wild coincidence. And yes, Linux is awesome.
See! I just said "Linux is awesome" even though that's completely irrelevant to what we're talking about. Why would I even say that until I had no idea what we were talking about? I bet you feel silly now.
You read the tags? I just blindly comment without even reading the post I'm replying to.
Yeah, given the attitude you hear from some congressmen, I wouldn't be surprised if they just taxed us all and fed the money to record labels without regard to whether they earned the money. And somehow the action will be praised as a defense of "free market ideals", since it's believed to be a god-given right for large companies to make huge profits.
It depends. If I buy from NewEgg on a regular basis, I might be fine with them keeping my address and purchase history on file, and I would like to be able to view that information myself. That doesn't mean I want them making that information publicly available to anyone who asks for it.
Listening now, but given that you have a strong opinion on the matter, do you care to explain? In fact, does anyone knowledgeable care to explain what arguments were made about these recordings, why they should or shouldn't be public, etc.? I scanned the linked articles and nothing caught my eye as a clear explanation of what's going on.
Also, its possible that data is being stored in various ways/stats, for example I may have come up with a single number to represent a user's political preferences (left, right and such) by consolidation of many other 'simple' stats. Disclosing this opens my 'better' algorithm to the rest of the industry.
Well it seems like it would be valid for a law to require that companies show you any raw data they collect on you, but not require that those companies show information that the company derives from that data. Even if you allow people to demand that specific data be deleted, you could just require that the company delete any derivative data (or recalculate based on remaining data) without disclosing the original derivative data to anyone else.
So, given your example, the company would have to disclose all the stats which they have collected on a user without disclosing the single number they use to represent the user's political preference, without disclosing which information is used to calculate the political preference, or even without disclosing that there is a single number used to represent political preference. Even if the user could opt to delete some of that information from the company's records, the law could require that the number be deleted from the company's databases, but allow it to be recalculated from remaining data (if any data remains).
It might be tricky to craft a law that accounts for that without opening other loopholes for misbehavior, but it doesn't seem like an insurmountable problem.