I once wanted to name an module in some fortran code 'data', but, of course, that's a protected word, so I called it 'brentSpiner' instead. I don't think my supervisor watched star trek though, so he didn't really get the joke. </boring nostalgic story>
to continue your train of thought: So she can use the monitor from the desktop Pc (with a switcher) and a cheap USB keyboard if she wants to do serious work with it.
therwise everyone, including murderers caught red-handed at the scene of the crime, could simply claim they were resisting arrest because they thought the police had no right to arrest them Yes, they could claim that, but the fact that they were subsequently charged and convicted of the murder would nullify it as a defence. I'm not talking about what people think the situation is as being a deciding factor, I'm talking about what the situation ACTUALLY is.
You say that caps aren't judge and executioner, but you support the idea of any officer being able to issue a 1-day prison sentence on a whim, and requiring whoever they issue it to to be entirely passive about the whole affair if they want it overturned. The only slightly fair situation is to look at it after the fact, and judge everyone's actions according to the facts of the situation, rather than nebulous ideas about what people thought the situation was at the time - if you're absolutely certain that the reason you're being arrested for (and yes, officers should be required to give a reason for an arrest at the time) is invalid then you should be able to resist all you like, and when it's actually established that the cops were in the wrong, they can suck it up. If you establish that they didn't do what they were arrested for, but pin something else on them instead, they would still be entitled to have resisted the original arrest because it was false.
If you're not certain, you come along quietly and sue later. But requiring people who are in the right and know it to come along anyway, with stiff peanlties if they don't is just wrong.
If you want your 'everyone must come quietly' system, I propose that officers are properly and personally held liable for each and every incorrect arrest that they make - jail time and compensating the arrestee - if you want absolute power, you accept absolute responsibility.
so, do you agree that that's a 110% screwed up situation? Because if you don't, you probably shouldn't be allowed to interract with other people without supervision.
Liberty counts for nothing if people are expected to allow it to be arbitrarilly taken, and then hope for recourse later. Being able to later sucessfully sue for monetary compensation because your freedom was taken away is not, in any sense, the same thing as having had the freedom in the first place.
yes, and that if it does happen, you're missing a frickin' eye!
It's crappy that it boils down to lawsuits, but I think you're going to have a much better chance of convincing a judge and jury that the force used was unjustified if you're mssing an eye, or walk into the court room wearing a plaster cast ("see that? that's trauma!" - Dr. Nick Riviera), than if you walk in, and all you have to present is your testimony that it "really, really hurt".
The lack of physical damage is a great barrier to convincing people that there even was damage and that you're not just whining when you 'got what you damned-well deserved'. Maybe all jurors on such cases should be tasered before they start deliberating.
I'd be interested to hear your argument about how discriminating against people who aren't physically capable of doing the job is wrong. What if you had a job where being small and nible was necessary, so you didn't employ 250lb people? After all, most people who weigh 250lb are men...
My thought is, if they REALLY needed rescue, they'd call. Unfortunately, by the time that most people have figured out that they really do need rescuing and can't get out of this on their own, you'll almost certainly have lost a lot of time which could have been spent searching for or rescuing them.
The chances of sucessfully rescuing someone go down as time goes on. If you KNOW that you're going to get a whacking great bill, possibly a bankrupting one, you're not going to call at the first inkling of trouble. Then, when you know that you REALLY need rescuing, you have a lower chance of being rescued because you waited. This is not The Matrix. You don't suddenly get plucked out of danger when you pick up a phone.
Case in point; the French Navy charges for rescuing people at sea, the RNLI does not. British sailors who get into trouble, even when in sight of France, would still rather call the RNLI and wait for several hours, in a powerless and possibly stricken craft, for the RNLI to cross the channel to get to them than call the French.
The underlying fact is that humans make stupid decisions when they have to consider a balance that is guaranteed to have their wallet on one side, and has an unknown chance to have their life on the other.
a few good reasons:
1) Dependent on your field of work, obviously, you could well end up having to work harder than you would normally
2) The pay is a pittance, and if it's less than you'd earn by doing your day job, tough.
3) When you get back to your day job, you're going to have to catch up on the work you missed = harder work for the same pay
4) You're going to be in a situation where you have to modify your behaviour to satisfy the whims of a petit dictator in an effeminate wig. I don't fancy being exposed to potential liability for contempt of court because a judge doesn't like the wording on my T-shirt.
5) You have to put every other aspect of your life on hold - maybe you don't normally work Fridays (and work Saturday instead) because your wife's working arrangements force her into that cycle and you like to spend Friday together - the court will not be giving you Friday off
6) Your prior arrangements are unlikely to count for much - you got a holiday booked? tough. (which may not be a problem if you have travel insurance which will pay out for that contingency, but if your holiday is something like a cruise on a specific route, you may not be able to simply postpone your holiday)
7) The above may be avoidable if you give a date in the next 12 months when you will definately be available instead - dunno about you but I don't have things planned out that far ahead; I'm a Masters student, I ought to finish my course at the end of September, if I got called now I'd probably try to defer, but until when? early October, probably. What happens if I find a Ph.D course between now & then but that I have to start in early October? Bye-bye that opportunity - can't defer twice.
8) The court may be a LOT more awkward to get to than where you normally go - my local magistrates court is badly served by buses and trains, has no nearby parking and to cycle to requires one to cycle straight across the most dangerous junction in the city and straight across a dual-carriageway in rush hour. Not a pleasant journey and not one that I'd want to have to make frequently, particularly as travel compensation for cycling is an insulting 20p
9) You may have to change your whole lifestyle - if you're one of those lucky dabs who work at home, starting at 11 every day, wearing jeans and a hoody, you may find yourself having to alter your whole sleep cycle so you can get up at 7:30 in the morning, put on a tie, and venture across town - it's not just a case of walking in to building on the other side of the road each morning for a week or so.
10) Major, MAJOR, contempt of court liability if you discuss the case. Frankly, I find it difficult to not discuss with other people whatever I'm thinking about. If you tell me information A, and I'll be liable to a fine of £2000 or more if I divulge that information to party X, I don't want you to tell me information A in the first place! If I don't want the potential liability of driving a heavy good vehicle, I won't drive one; if I don't want the potential liability of breaching the official secrets act, I won't get a job with MI5. Why, then if I want to avoid this liability, would I not try to avoid having you give me information that I can't subsequently divulge in the first place?
no, just that they should have a better way of dealing with it than deleting personal data at a seemingly arbitrary time (i.e. when they happen to find it) and without notice to the owner of the data.
If data storage with overhead and backup and whatever is SO expensive that you can't spare a few gigs for a while, then why was there such profligacy in the allocation of space in the first place?
I'm assuming that this data has a value because they're all legitimately purchased files. My point was never that the company should be happy to store someone's music indefinately, but that the problem should never have been allowed to arise and that once it had arisen, there should have been enough slack in the system to hold onto the files for a week or so whilst their owner took them away.
hmm, sadly the new comment system wiped out my post when I went to look at exactly what you'd said originally.
But suffice it to say, it seems to me that the reason you don't want to answer questions about why you deleted a 30GB music collection comes down to the fact that it's because, either:
Your incredibly irresponsible - the kind of people who keep their iTunes collection on the company server do not organise their files well, and nuking the whole directory runs a serious risk of nuking actual work that's in there as well.
You can't do a simple cost\benefit analysis, because if you could you would realise that the time necessary to go through someone else's files to make sure that the above doesn't happen would cost many times more than more storage would cost.
You're a crappy sysadmin, who, though he knew he couldn't get more HD space because the budget people aren't very generous, didn't keep a closer eye on resource allocations before someone's storage got out of control to the tune of 30GB of music (excuse the pun).
Or, although the actual storage space doesn't matter, you're a vindictive asshat who wants to royally screw people and then point at the acceptable use policy whilst saying "rules are rules".
To use a bad car analogy:
If your company has an acceptable use policy governing use of the car park, including that someone may not park across two spaces, and someone parks their $7,500 car across two spaces one day, which somehow costs the company $6, should you be allowed to remove and crush the car, no questions asked? no attempt to ask the employee to move their car?
"I don't feel the need to explain why I deleted your iTunes directory off of my server that was taking up 30gigs of storage space... but was asked to."
Well, if those were all downloads, you did delete ~ $7,500 worth of data - I'd be pretty keen to know why you did that to save (at today's prices) $6 of storage space.
prove to me that you have NO iron in your body. Assuming that we could safely disassemble and reassemble you, we'd have to pass every atom in your body through a mass spectrometer. Any idea how many atoms there are in your body?
Or better yet, prove that you have no weapons of mass destruction.
Or prove that you haven't recieved money from the pharma companies, ok, so it's not in your current account, but what about that swiss bank account in a false name? what do you mean you haven't got one? prove it.
Infact, I still think that you're made of iron, just elaborately disguised iron so that it doesn't look like iron, prove that it isn't. You're conducting this 400V supply fine - iron would do that.
well ok, they can have a 2 minute deposition wherein they ask her 'are you being paid by the pharmacutical companies?'. Depositions are given under oath (or, at least, lying counts as perjury). If they subsequently believe that she may have lied and can build a reasonable case to show that that may be the case, they can issue a more wide-ranging subpoena later. As it is, they're swanning over and demanding that she prove that she isn't in the pocket of the pharma companies - note that that's asking her to prove a negative, which is basically impossible.
just a nit. He can apply to have his fingerprint records destroyed, but not the DNA. (Well, he can APPLY to have the DNA destroyed, but the police use their discretion to actually do that less than ~10 times a year). That's still far too much power of course. You should be able to chuckle when you see "...or face being arrested", but in the UK now arrest is itself a fairly harsh punishment.
Whoever put together the regulations surrounding fingerprints had an ounce of sanity, and so far attempts to dispose of protections for the public have been resisted, but DNA has come about so quickly and advanced so rapidly, that three acts of parliament in rapid succession have taken DNA from being treated like fingerprints to being treated by the police like torchwood treats alien technology.
They can now keep on permanent record any DNA that they get hold of, not only from people arrested who turn out to be innocent, but from people arrested to satisfy an extradition request, people who give their DNA voluntarily for elimination purposes, children who have their DNA registered because their parents think it will help keep them safe, the DNA of the suspect for absolutely any minor offence for an indefinite amount of time (and they can check it against any other DNA they get later; so steal something as a kid, leave DNA, get picked up 15 years later when your uncle is arrested for drunk driving - no statue of limitations in the UK), etc.,.
ok, but say that they get the hash of the file you're offering somehow (does kazaa do this? I don't use it. Bittorrent certainly does.), and they get the file name as a starter, and encode\hash the single and album releases of that track with a variety of common encoders, bitrates and popular track information databases for tagging and find a matching hash, they can know with 99.9999% (number from posterior, but you get the idea) certainty that you're offering that music track, not a poem about how that track makes you feel. Processing power is easily at the level where they could trawl like this if they wanted to.
I'm studying data compression (when I say 'studying' I mean 1/18 of my course this year is on it), but don't know this, so can someone answer:
If you take two copies of a particular music single (i.e. two externally identical retail CDs), run them through the same version of an MP3 encoder (say LAME) on two different computers at the same bitrate (say 128kbps), having got the track information from the same database, and with identical filenames, will you get the same checksum or hash or whatever?
i.e., all other things being equal will the same input track produce the same lossy-compressed output file?
yeah, because those few words are crafted as a general, catch-all, ass-covering notice. Anything goes wrong; you weren't using competent supervision. "but I was watching them"; then you're not competent - nothing can go wrong as long as competent supervision is provided. If that didn't wash, they'd write something more verbose.
To quote Humpy: "Almost anything can be attacked as a loss of amenity, while anything can be defended as not a significant loss of amenity."
Slashdot Mirror
I once wanted to name an module in some fortran code 'data', but, of course, that's a protected word, so I called it 'brentSpiner' instead. I don't think my supervisor watched star trek though, so he didn't really get the joke.
</boring nostalgic story>
to continue your train of thought:
So she can use the monitor from the desktop Pc (with a switcher) and a cheap USB keyboard if she wants to do serious work with it.
I'm not talking about what people think the situation is as being a deciding factor, I'm talking about what the situation ACTUALLY is.
You say that caps aren't judge and executioner, but you support the idea of any officer being able to issue a 1-day prison sentence on a whim, and requiring whoever they issue it to to be entirely passive about the whole affair if they want it overturned.
The only slightly fair situation is to look at it after the fact, and judge everyone's actions according to the facts of the situation, rather than nebulous ideas about what people thought the situation was at the time - if you're absolutely certain that the reason you're being arrested for (and yes, officers should be required to give a reason for an arrest at the time) is invalid then you should be able to resist all you like, and when it's actually established that the cops were in the wrong, they can suck it up. If you establish that they didn't do what they were arrested for, but pin something else on them instead, they would still be entitled to have resisted the original arrest because it was false.
If you're not certain, you come along quietly and sue later. But requiring people who are in the right and know it to come along anyway, with stiff peanlties if they don't is just wrong.
If you want your 'everyone must come quietly' system, I propose that officers are properly and personally held liable for each and every incorrect arrest that they make - jail time and compensating the arrestee - if you want absolute power, you accept absolute responsibility.
so, do you agree that that's a 110% screwed up situation? Because if you don't, you probably shouldn't be allowed to interract with other people without supervision.
Liberty counts for nothing if people are expected to allow it to be arbitrarilly taken, and then hope for recourse later. Being able to later sucessfully sue for monetary compensation because your freedom was taken away is not, in any sense, the same thing as having had the freedom in the first place.
yes, and that if it does happen, you're missing a frickin' eye!
It's crappy that it boils down to lawsuits, but I think you're going to have a much better chance of convincing a judge and jury that the force used was unjustified if you're mssing an eye, or walk into the court room wearing a plaster cast ("see that? that's trauma!" - Dr. Nick Riviera), than if you walk in, and all you have to present is your testimony that it "really, really hurt".
The lack of physical damage is a great barrier to convincing people that there even was damage and that you're not just whining when you 'got what you damned-well deserved'. Maybe all jurors on such cases should be tasered before they start deliberating.
I'd be interested to hear your argument about how discriminating against people who aren't physically capable of doing the job is wrong.
What if you had a job where being small and nible was necessary, so you didn't employ 250lb people? After all, most people who weigh 250lb are men...
it had 'decimated' her creative ability. I don't see why she can't write a book with the other 90% of it, frankly.
The chances of sucessfully rescuing someone go down as time goes on. If you KNOW that you're going to get a whacking great bill, possibly a bankrupting one, you're not going to call at the first inkling of trouble. Then, when you know that you REALLY need rescuing, you have a lower chance of being rescued because you waited. This is not The Matrix. You don't suddenly get plucked out of danger when you pick up a phone.
Case in point; the French Navy charges for rescuing people at sea, the RNLI does not. British sailors who get into trouble, even when in sight of France, would still rather call the RNLI and wait for several hours, in a powerless and possibly stricken craft, for the RNLI to cross the channel to get to them than call the French.
The underlying fact is that humans make stupid decisions when they have to consider a balance that is guaranteed to have their wallet on one side, and has an unknown chance to have their life on the other.
a few good reasons:
1) Dependent on your field of work, obviously, you could well end up having to work harder than you would normally
2) The pay is a pittance, and if it's less than you'd earn by doing your day job, tough.
3) When you get back to your day job, you're going to have to catch up on the work you missed = harder work for the same pay
4) You're going to be in a situation where you have to modify your behaviour to satisfy the whims of a petit dictator in an effeminate wig. I don't fancy being exposed to potential liability for contempt of court because a judge doesn't like the wording on my T-shirt.
5) You have to put every other aspect of your life on hold - maybe you don't normally work Fridays (and work Saturday instead) because your wife's working arrangements force her into that cycle and you like to spend Friday together - the court will not be giving you Friday off
6) Your prior arrangements are unlikely to count for much - you got a holiday booked? tough. (which may not be a problem if you have travel insurance which will pay out for that contingency, but if your holiday is something like a cruise on a specific route, you may not be able to simply postpone your holiday)
7) The above may be avoidable if you give a date in the next 12 months when you will definately be available instead - dunno about you but I don't have things planned out that far ahead; I'm a Masters student, I ought to finish my course at the end of September, if I got called now I'd probably try to defer, but until when? early October, probably. What happens if I find a Ph.D course between now & then but that I have to start in early October? Bye-bye that opportunity - can't defer twice.
8) The court may be a LOT more awkward to get to than where you normally go - my local magistrates court is badly served by buses and trains, has no nearby parking and to cycle to requires one to cycle straight across the most dangerous junction in the city and straight across a dual-carriageway in rush hour. Not a pleasant journey and not one that I'd want to have to make frequently, particularly as travel compensation for cycling is an insulting 20p
9) You may have to change your whole lifestyle - if you're one of those lucky dabs who work at home, starting at 11 every day, wearing jeans and a hoody, you may find yourself having to alter your whole sleep cycle so you can get up at 7:30 in the morning, put on a tie, and venture across town - it's not just a case of walking in to building on the other side of the road each morning for a week or so.
10) Major, MAJOR, contempt of court liability if you discuss the case. Frankly, I find it difficult to not discuss with other people whatever I'm thinking about. If you tell me information A, and I'll be liable to a fine of £2000 or more if I divulge that information to party X, I don't want you to tell me information A in the first place! If I don't want the potential liability of driving a heavy good vehicle, I won't drive one; if I don't want the potential liability of breaching the official secrets act, I won't get a job with MI5. Why, then if I want to avoid this liability, would I not try to avoid having you give me information that I can't subsequently divulge in the first place?
nah, you just need to grease them properly before use.
no, just that they should have a better way of dealing with it than deleting personal data at a seemingly arbitrary time (i.e. when they happen to find it) and without notice to the owner of the data.
If data storage with overhead and backup and whatever is SO expensive that you can't spare a few gigs for a while, then why was there such profligacy in the allocation of space in the first place?
I'm assuming that this data has a value because they're all legitimately purchased files. My point was never that the company should be happy to store someone's music indefinately, but that the problem should never have been allowed to arise and that once it had arisen, there should have been enough slack in the system to hold onto the files for a week or so whilst their owner took them away.
But suffice it to say, it seems to me that the reason you don't want to answer questions about why you deleted a 30GB music collection comes down to the fact that it's because, either:
To use a bad car analogy:
If your company has an acceptable use policy governing use of the car park, including that someone may not park across two spaces, and someone parks their $7,500 car across two spaces one day, which somehow costs the company $6, should you be allowed to remove and crush the car, no questions asked? no attempt to ask the employee to move their car?
"I don't feel the need to explain why I deleted your iTunes directory off of my server that was taking up 30gigs of storage space... but was asked to."
Well, if those were all downloads, you did delete ~ $7,500 worth of data - I'd be pretty keen to know why you did that to save (at today's prices) $6 of storage space.
eew
- The test can take place at a place of my choosing
- I can use as much fuel as I like getting to the start point
- The driver doesn't have to come back
Space, here I come. Well, here comes the poor chap I trick into driving the thing anyway.prove to me that you have NO iron in your body. Assuming that we could safely disassemble and reassemble you, we'd have to pass every atom in your body through a mass spectrometer. Any idea how many atoms there are in your body? Or better yet, prove that you have no weapons of mass destruction. Or prove that you haven't recieved money from the pharma companies, ok, so it's not in your current account, but what about that swiss bank account in a false name? what do you mean you haven't got one? prove it. Infact, I still think that you're made of iron, just elaborately disguised iron so that it doesn't look like iron, prove that it isn't. You're conducting this 400V supply fine - iron would do that.
well ok, they can have a 2 minute deposition wherein they ask her 'are you being paid by the pharmacutical companies?'. Depositions are given under oath (or, at least, lying counts as perjury). If they subsequently believe that she may have lied and can build a reasonable case to show that that may be the case, they can issue a more wide-ranging subpoena later. As it is, they're swanning over and demanding that she prove that she isn't in the pocket of the pharma companies - note that that's asking her to prove a negative, which is basically impossible.
it's 20p of 1p and 2p coins, actually, not £2
Ulster TeleVision, among other things.
Face it, every reasonable length acronym has been used at least once by now
just a nit. He can apply to have his fingerprint records destroyed, but not the DNA. (Well, he can APPLY to have the DNA destroyed, but the police use their discretion to actually do that less than ~10 times a year). That's still far too much power of course. You should be able to chuckle when you see "...or face being arrested", but in the UK now arrest is itself a fairly harsh punishment.
Whoever put together the regulations surrounding fingerprints had an ounce of sanity, and so far attempts to dispose of protections for the public have been resisted, but DNA has come about so quickly and advanced so rapidly, that three acts of parliament in rapid succession have taken DNA from being treated like fingerprints to being treated by the police like torchwood treats alien technology.
They can now keep on permanent record any DNA that they get hold of, not only from people arrested who turn out to be innocent, but from people arrested to satisfy an extradition request, people who give their DNA voluntarily for elimination purposes, children who have their DNA registered because their parents think it will help keep them safe, the DNA of the suspect for absolutely any minor offence for an indefinite amount of time (and they can check it against any other DNA they get later; so steal something as a kid, leave DNA, get picked up 15 years later when your uncle is arrested for drunk driving - no statue of limitations in the UK), etc.,.
ok, but say that they get the hash of the file you're offering somehow (does kazaa do this? I don't use it. Bittorrent certainly does.), and they get the file name as a starter, and encode\hash the single and album releases of that track with a variety of common encoders, bitrates and popular track information databases for tagging and find a matching hash, they can know with 99.9999% (number from posterior, but you get the idea) certainty that you're offering that music track, not a poem about how that track makes you feel. Processing power is easily at the level where they could trawl like this if they wanted to.
I'm studying data compression (when I say 'studying' I mean 1/18 of my course this year is on it), but don't know this, so can someone answer:
If you take two copies of a particular music single (i.e. two externally identical retail CDs), run them through the same version of an MP3 encoder (say LAME) on two different computers at the same bitrate (say 128kbps), having got the track information from the same database, and with identical filenames, will you get the same checksum or hash or whatever?
i.e., all other things being equal will the same input track produce the same lossy-compressed output file?
yeah, because those few words are crafted as a general, catch-all, ass-covering notice. Anything goes wrong; you weren't using competent supervision. "but I was watching them"; then you're not competent - nothing can go wrong as long as competent supervision is provided. If that didn't wash, they'd write something more verbose.
To quote Humpy: "Almost anything can be attacked as a loss of amenity, while anything can be defended as not a significant loss of amenity."
"so it'd be useful to be able to go over something that could be kept in my pocket, ready to sue at a moments notice."
Pocket lawyer!