But once again how is tracking a car with a GPS different then tracking the car with a person tailing the car?
How is listening to a conversation in a public place different from tapping a person's phone? A police "tail" can not enter private property. People have the right to keep personal secrets.
Fourth Amendment: The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
The current argument are on the exact meanings we can infer from "secure" and "searches."
Remember the root of secret is the same root of secure and have a common etymology. What is a "search?"
The 4th amendment isn't about protecting guilty, but preventing over-reaching governments creating a prosecution from innocuous facts.
Remember this quote when considering the motivation of the 4th amendment:
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.â
Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642)
It is a proud declaration that even the most innocent have something very real to fear from any police or enforcement organization and the government.
Police: "Did you put the GPS tracker we put on your car on the cross country bus?"
You: "GPS tracker? What's that? I saw something stuck to my car, but I thought it was someone's "hide a key," so I took it off and put it on the curb so the person who owns it could come find it." Like I said, I didn't know what it was and I didn't put it there, so I took it off. It wasn't mine. I don't know what happened to it.
In short, they may put it on my car, but I am under moral or legal obligation to practice "ordinary care." I can't take it and sell it as if it belongs to me, but I certainly don't have to protect it in any way.
In this day and age, just block all cookies by default, and allow ones from sites you use. This will even block "doubleclick" cookies as those aren't from the site you are visiting.
This doesn't address IP address, but it is a step.
The American middle class is crumbling. if the jobs aren't being moved off shore, foreign contractors are being shipped here from some east asian hell hole to work at 1/3 or 1/2 the prevailing wage.
Emigration? I have no problem letting people in. If people want to move here, live here, be citizens, hell yea! Let them in!!
The H1B visa program is a club INS gives to corporations to beat down the middle class.
If you want to intern, intern in your own damn country and leave opportunities in the U.S.A. for full fledged citizens. It isn't like a kid in the U.S.A. has many opportunities to intern in Europe.
At some point, "definition" is useless. Look at digital cameras, The race was on for resolution at the beginning, but when they have about as much resolution as a 35mm camera, only professionals can really take advantage of the difference.
(I'm am a photog in my copious spare time, accept what I said as a generalization, yes I know YOU have a need for more than 8mpi).
The upsampling DVD players with standard DVDs are better all around for the home user.
If my wife wants to watch a movie and we are using the TV in the living room, she uses her laptop in another room. Same with me. I can use my laptop on the plane, or where ever. The picture may be better (with the right equipment) with a blue-ray, but so much better that you have to give up all your compatibility and flexibility?
I heard rumor that Toshiba is making a high-def format that is backward compatible with standard DVD. That will be a winner.
While I can see a lot of bashing here, but we should be VERY CAREFULL about bashing the labor laws that protect the middle class and the economy.
Businesses like to bash unions, but unions delivered this country into prosperity along with the aftermath of WWII.
Will I say unions are not corrupt? of course not, but the real problem with business/unions is that there is an adversarial relationship between those who work and those who control capital.
At this point in time, unions need to fight hard for benefits and wages. Why? Because businesses don't want to pay workers. Every time a union has tried to be flexible with big business, buy taking pay and benefit cuts in hard times, the business don't restore the levels on the turn around. So it is a constant fight, businesses can't expect an cooperative relationship if there is no fair "give and take." Lost in the "shareholder value" Juggernaut is the workers and stake holders who get shafted who must have some rights in a fair society.
CEOs and stock holders get all the money. The people who work and produce the product would all be eliminated if possible. That's what off shoring is all about.
Say what ever you want, but that is NOT the way to make a lasting free society.
Sure it *sounds* ridiculous to say you can't lower salaries without a programmer, but I bet it is a fairly complex batch program that has to run. You don't want people hand entering 200,000 payroll changes. If it takes 30 seconds (on average) to do each one by hand, that would be 41 weeks for a person to make all the changes. (assuming a 40 hour work week)
Don't forget, the good governator is probably payed by that system too and you know HIS pay ain't going down.
So, not only is it a HUGE number of data entries AND a complex filter on job classification. ALSO mistakes are something you don't want to make on payroll!
Exploited against you, not me; I develop primarily for Microsoft's market.
Well, unless you have been in the situation where microsoft decides to compete against you AFTER you've create the market, you are either young or lucky. More than once, I have been on the receiving end of microsoft's monopoly machine either giving away a clone of the product or incorporation of the features of the product in Windows.
If you don't give them the chance to become a good citizen, they never will. This is somewhat naive--but I lose nothing if they return to form.
Speaking from my experience with Microsoft, they are not good corporate citizens and never will be.
Really! It undercuts the competitive environment by being another choice? Interesting...sounds like insecurity.
The introduction of false choice is not competitive. Giving Microsoft's HUGE amount of cash and influence any support is a waste of our time and bad for the market. If there is the illusion of support for a Microsoft proprietary standard it will be exploited by Microsoft against us.
History has shown that everyone that works with Microsoft eventually gets screwed.
We need "interoperability" only in as much as benefits our cause. Microsoft is hostile to open source and Linux.
mono and moonbat are not a "must haves" yet, and supporting them is a mistake that undercuts the competitive environment. We should be driving open and usable standards, not the convicted monopolist.
Sorry, it isn't flame bait. To some it may be, but this is my honest opinion.
Microsoft's actions on OOXML, alone, show that it can not be trusted to play fair. I see no rational reason why the open source movement should validate *any* of their technology without a clear and unambiguous free and open license and a durable specification that does not become a never ending game of catch up.
Microsoft is the enemy of innovation and open source/free software.
In the vocabulary of international politics, we need to "trust but verify." Which means no trust at all.
There needs to be a mechanism where a vendor or site can send you a certificate in a way that can't be spoofed. And can then be verified. Maybe it is an email, maybe it is snail mail?
What I don't like about SSL in web browsers, is that they have ignored the "verify" aspect of trust by abdicating the responsibility to a "pay for trust" regime which is bogus. If they can pay, they are trust worthy, right?
Ideally, I should be able to receive a password in the mail (or some form of communication) to unlock a "key" file sent to me from someone I want to trust. I then unlock and install that key on my system and only keys *I* trust get trusted.
It should be easy and standardized across most platforms. Anything less is broken.
Please! Please know the meaning of words you are throwing around. "Facism" is so often misused in the US
Don't embarrass YOURSELF by being an idiot and making assumptions about people you don't know. I said "fascism" and I meant exactly that.
American Heritage Dictionary:
fasÂcism n.
1. often Fascism
1. A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
2. A political philosophy or movement based on or advocating such a system of government.
2. Oppressive, dictatorial control.
No person or entity can remain true to two or more masters. As long as there is an "agent" involved who must answer to some other authority, the punishment of not cooperating the "other" master will be weight against protecting you.
The best bet is to encrypt locally with your own self-certified keys, only give the public keys on a need-to-know basis.
If you can add an obscure encryption scheme on top of that, so much the better. If underneath all that you can use an obscure document encoding and character format, or even unused language like Navaho, you're good to go.
Children are self aware from day one? What is day one? Conception?
I'm speaking about birth, but probably before that as well. While I get your point I think you miss mine.
Your assertion that a sufficiently complex computer will not become self aware is as groundless as the contrary point of view. There really is no good evidence either way.
You are in the realm of science fiction. What is "self aware" and how could software get to that point? I've been watching the notion of machine intelligence since I first saw 2001 as a kid. My first job in the early 80s was Denning Mobile Robotics and our project was an autonomous mobile robot.
The problem with AI is that people confuse the appearance of intelligence with intelligence. Like a magic trick, it may look like the object vanished in thin air, but it is really a very well staged trick.
Will a computer ever, without ever being programed too do so, contemplate the unintended consequences of its actions and refuse to function? Could a computer program see a previously unrealized problem? Will it contemplate the future by evaluating the past? These are intelligent attributes and we may be able to "simulate" the appearance of them, but they will never spontaneously arise out of mere complexity.
We see them doing it on science fiction, but it is not possible with our current technology.
Nonsense. It's a trivial programming exercise to give a computer the ability to learn to do something like book recommendations.
. One thought is that when you do build a machine with the capacity to combine all the individual examples of intelligence it will become self aware.
This is the point I was trying to make. I am reminded of the line from "Young Frankenstein" "Hearts and kidneys are tinkertoys, I talking about the central nervous system."
In the vein, there are lots of systems that appear intelligent but are nothing more than the sum of their parts. The systems have not, and can not, add to their capabilities anything we have not provisioned.
The HAL9000 is probably impossible with deterministic serial processing units like our current computers. "Thinking" is not the same as "processing"
The problem with conversation is that the quintessential question, "what is intelligence?" has not been sufficiently answered. Right now, we have only begun augmenting our intelligence with computers with tools like recommendations engines, search engines, spread sheets, etc.
The theory that once a computer acquires enough information it will be "self aware" ignores the growth of children who have little or no information and are self aware from day one.
First: The internet is an "external" medium. A hard disk and OS is an "internal" medium.
I can use my laptop during a power failure or out in the field without the internet. If the power goes out in my house, I have a generator and can run my TV, refrigerator, or computers. If I have a web-based thin client system, I'll be dead.
Second: Security is horrible. No matter how much an entity promises not to turn over your private information, they can not and will not take that responsibility as seriously as you would. It is best just not to let them have it.
A thin client system will inevitably expose your behaviors and actions to the hosting system and anyone in between that can spy on your packets.
I periodically run wireshark on my router to monitor what is connecting to whom and am sometimes surprised and have to block ports. Can you imagine what Microsoft would phone home with?
Slashdot Mirror
But once again how is tracking a car with a GPS different then tracking the car with a person tailing the car?
How is listening to a conversation in a public place different from tapping a person's phone? A police "tail" can not enter private property. People have the right to keep personal secrets.
Fourth Amendment:
The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.
The current argument are on the exact meanings we can infer from "secure" and "searches."
Remember the root of secret is the same root of secure and have a common etymology. What is a "search?"
The 4th amendment isn't about protecting guilty, but preventing over-reaching governments creating a prosecution from innocuous facts.
Remember this quote when considering the motivation of the 4th amendment:
"If you give me six lines written by the hand of the most honest of men, I will find something in them which will hang him.â
Cardinal Richelieu (1585-1642)
It is a proud declaration that even the most innocent have something very real to fear from any police or enforcement organization and the government.
One phrase: Plausible Deniability
Police: "Did you put the GPS tracker we put on your car on the cross country bus?"
You: "GPS tracker? What's that? I saw something stuck to my car, but I thought it was someone's "hide a key," so I took it off and put it on the curb so the person who owns it could come find it." Like I said, I didn't know what it was and I didn't put it there, so I took it off. It wasn't mine. I don't know what happened to it.
In short, they may put it on my car, but I am under moral or legal obligation to practice "ordinary care." I can't take it and sell it as if it belongs to me, but I certainly don't have to protect it in any way.
This is simultaneously one of the more interesting, exciting, and terrifying news Items I've seen a while.
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0079285/
In this day and age, just block all cookies by default, and allow ones from sites you use. This will even block "doubleclick" cookies as those aren't from the site you are visiting.
This doesn't address IP address, but it is a step.
The American middle class is crumbling. if the jobs aren't being moved off shore, foreign contractors are being shipped here from some east asian hell hole to work at 1/3 or 1/2 the prevailing wage.
Emigration? I have no problem letting people in. If people want to move here, live here, be citizens, hell yea! Let them in!!
The H1B visa program is a club INS gives to corporations to beat down the middle class.
If you want to intern, intern in your own damn country and leave opportunities in the U.S.A. for full fledged citizens. It isn't like a kid in the U.S.A. has many opportunities to intern in Europe.
At some point, "definition" is useless. Look at digital cameras, The race was on for resolution at the beginning, but when they have about as much resolution as a 35mm camera, only professionals can really take advantage of the difference.
(I'm am a photog in my copious spare time, accept what I said as a generalization, yes I know YOU have a need for more than 8mpi).
The upsampling DVD players with standard DVDs are better all around for the home user.
If my wife wants to watch a movie and we are using the TV in the living room, she uses her laptop in another room. Same with me. I can use my laptop on the plane, or where ever. The picture may be better (with the right equipment) with a blue-ray, but so much better that you have to give up all your compatibility and flexibility?
I heard rumor that Toshiba is making a high-def format that is backward compatible with standard DVD. That will be a winner.
While I can see a lot of bashing here, but we should be VERY CAREFULL about bashing the labor laws that protect the middle class and the economy.
Businesses like to bash unions, but unions delivered this country into prosperity along with the aftermath of WWII.
Will I say unions are not corrupt? of course not, but the real problem with business/unions is that there is an adversarial relationship between those who work and those who control capital.
At this point in time, unions need to fight hard for benefits and wages. Why? Because businesses don't want to pay workers. Every time a union has tried to be flexible with big business, buy taking pay and benefit cuts in hard times, the business don't restore the levels on the turn around. So it is a constant fight, businesses can't expect an cooperative relationship if there is no fair "give and take." Lost in the "shareholder value" Juggernaut is the workers and stake holders who get shafted who must have some rights in a fair society.
CEOs and stock holders get all the money. The people who work and produce the product would all be eliminated if possible. That's what off shoring is all about.
Say what ever you want, but that is NOT the way to make a lasting free society.
Sure it *sounds* ridiculous to say you can't lower salaries without a programmer, but I bet it is a fairly complex batch program that has to run. You don't want people hand entering 200,000 payroll changes. If it takes 30 seconds (on average) to do each one by hand, that would be 41 weeks for a person to make all the changes. (assuming a 40 hour work week)
Don't forget, the good governator is probably payed by that system too and you know HIS pay ain't going down.
So, not only is it a HUGE number of data entries AND a complex filter on job classification. ALSO mistakes are something you don't want to make on payroll!
Exploited against you, not me; I develop primarily for Microsoft's market.
Well, unless you have been in the situation where microsoft decides to compete against you AFTER you've create the market, you are either young or lucky. More than once, I have been on the receiving end of microsoft's monopoly machine either giving away a clone of the product or incorporation of the features of the product in Windows.
If you don't give them the chance to become a good citizen, they never will. This is somewhat naive--but I lose nothing if they return to form.
Speaking from my experience with Microsoft, they are not good corporate citizens and never will be.
I can't fault FF's default behavior, but it would have been nice to have had other options.
I fault the infrastructure 100% It is designed around "trust proxies" and not "trust relationships" and that's what's wrong.
Really! It undercuts the competitive environment by being another choice? Interesting...sounds like insecurity.
The introduction of false choice is not competitive. Giving Microsoft's HUGE amount of cash and influence any support is a waste of our time and bad for the market. If there is the illusion of support for a Microsoft proprietary standard it will be exploited by Microsoft against us.
History has shown that everyone that works with Microsoft eventually gets screwed.
We need "interoperability" only in as much as benefits our cause. Microsoft is hostile to open source and Linux.
mono and moonbat are not a "must haves" yet, and supporting them is a mistake that undercuts the competitive environment. We should be driving open and usable standards, not the convicted monopolist.
Embrace and extend clouds?
Sorry, it isn't flame bait. To some it may be, but this is my honest opinion.
Microsoft's actions on OOXML, alone, show that it can not be trusted to play fair. I see no rational reason why the open source movement should validate *any* of their technology without a clear and unambiguous free and open license and a durable specification that does not become a never ending game of catch up.
Microsoft is the enemy of innovation and open source/free software.
He is either Blind, Stupid, or in Microsoft's pocket. There are no other possible options.
In the vocabulary of international politics, we need to "trust but verify." Which means no trust at all.
There needs to be a mechanism where a vendor or site can send you a certificate in a way that can't be spoofed. And can then be verified. Maybe it is an email, maybe it is snail mail?
What I don't like about SSL in web browsers, is that they have ignored the "verify" aspect of trust by abdicating the responsibility to a "pay for trust" regime which is bogus. If they can pay, they are trust worthy, right?
Ideally, I should be able to receive a password in the mail (or some form of communication) to unlock a "key" file sent to me from someone I want to trust. I then unlock and install that key on my system and only keys *I* trust get trusted.
It should be easy and standardized across most platforms. Anything less is broken.
Please! Please know the meaning of words you are throwing around. "Facism" is so often misused in the US
Don't embarrass YOURSELF by being an idiot and making assumptions about people you don't know. I said "fascism" and I meant exactly that.
American Heritage Dictionary:
fasÂcism
n.
1. often Fascism
1. A system of government marked by centralization of authority under a dictator, stringent socioeconomic controls, suppression of the opposition through terror and censorship, and typically a policy of belligerent nationalism and racism.
2. A political philosophy or movement based on or advocating such a system of government.
2. Oppressive, dictatorial control.
No person or entity can remain true to two or more masters. As long as there is an "agent" involved who must answer to some other authority, the punishment of not cooperating the "other" master will be weight against protecting you.
The best bet is to encrypt locally with your own self-certified keys, only give the public keys on a need-to-know basis.
If you can add an obscure encryption scheme on top of that, so much the better. If underneath all that you can use an obscure document encoding and character format, or even unused language like Navaho, you're good to go.
But...
If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have to at least consider that it is a bird of the family anatidae (apologies to Douglas Adams)
This is outrageous! and a 4th amendment violation.
Hitler may have lost WWII, but the forces of fascism and totalitarianism are still fighting the war and are winning.
Children are self aware from day one? What is day one? Conception?
I'm speaking about birth, but probably before that as well. While I get your point I think you miss mine.
Your assertion that a sufficiently complex computer will not become self aware is as groundless as the contrary point of view. There really is no good evidence either way.
You are in the realm of science fiction. What is "self aware" and how could software get to that point? I've been watching the notion of machine intelligence since I first saw 2001 as a kid. My first job in the early 80s was Denning Mobile Robotics and our project was an autonomous mobile robot.
The problem with AI is that people confuse the appearance of intelligence with intelligence. Like a magic trick, it may look like the object vanished in thin air, but it is really a very well staged trick.
Will a computer ever, without ever being programed too do so, contemplate the unintended consequences of its actions and refuse to function? Could a computer program see a previously unrealized problem? Will it contemplate the future by evaluating the past? These are intelligent attributes and we may be able to "simulate" the appearance of them, but they will never spontaneously arise out of mere complexity.
We see them doing it on science fiction, but it is not possible with our current technology.
Nonsense. It's a trivial programming exercise to give a computer the ability to learn to do something like book recommendations.
. One thought is that when you do build a machine with the capacity to combine all the individual examples of intelligence it will become self aware.
This is the point I was trying to make. I am reminded of the line from "Young Frankenstein" "Hearts and kidneys are tinkertoys, I talking about the central nervous system."
In the vein, there are lots of systems that appear intelligent but are nothing more than the sum of their parts. The systems have not, and can not, add to their capabilities anything we have not provisioned.
The HAL9000 is probably impossible with deterministic serial processing units like our current computers. "Thinking" is not the same as "processing"
The problem with conversation is that the quintessential question, "what is intelligence?" has not been sufficiently answered. Right now, we have only begun augmenting our intelligence with computers with tools like recommendations engines, search engines, spread sheets, etc.
The theory that once a computer acquires enough information it will be "self aware" ignores the growth of children who have little or no information and are self aware from day one.
First: The internet is an "external" medium. A hard disk and OS is an "internal" medium.
I can use my laptop during a power failure or out in the field without the internet. If the power goes out in my house, I have a generator and can run my TV, refrigerator, or computers. If I have a web-based thin client system, I'll be dead.
Second: Security is horrible. No matter how much an entity promises not to turn over your private information, they can not and will not take that responsibility as seriously as you would. It is best just not to let them have it.
A thin client system will inevitably expose your behaviors and actions to the hosting system and anyone in between that can spy on your packets.
I periodically run wireshark on my router to monitor what is connecting to whom and am sometimes surprised and have to block ports. Can you imagine what Microsoft would phone home with?
You are John Searle and I claim my five pounds!
Thanks for the compliment, but no.