So by your argument, we must already have criminal gangs infiltrating phone companies so that they can run a database query on all their subscribers for those whose phone usage has had a significant drop in the last few days?
You got that half right. There are criminal gangs exploiting phone billing information. Just that its a lot more lucrative with a lot less risk to use that information in other ways than to directly rob a house, like sell it to 3rd parties. You may have heard about that being a widespread problem in the news over the last few years, if you were paying attention.
Nope I didn't note that, because 90% of your message was about how abuse of that information doesn't matter to you. Its possible to care about more than one thing at a time.
if your house is being cased for a Robbery, they won't glean the information from a spread sheet.
Wow, yet another person who subscribes to the school of "all criminals are terminally stupid."
Did it really never occur to you that what is being 'cased' is the entire population via means of a computer search to return all houses that have a significant drop in consumption over the last few days?
Ah, but parent was referring to warrantless monitoring of hourly electricity usage.
No he wasn't. The circumstances are exactly the same. In Kyllo the cops used the results from the IR monitor to obtain a search warrant. In the two referenced cases (out of hundreds if not thousands all very similar) the electricity consumption was used to obtain a search warrant.
what are the chances that someone from the electric company is going to monitor your house, waiting to rob it? OK, now how much greater are they with this smart meter?
Wow, you must be from the school of "all criminals are terminally stupid."
Only the dumbest criminal is going to pick a house and then wait for the owners to go on vacation when all they have to is make the computer give them a list of homes that appear to already be on vacation.
I'd be pretty surprised if the expected cost of this extremely unlikely hypothetical robbery makes smart meters not worthwhile.
The problem with your math is that the only thing you are accounting for as a cost is something I thought of in 10 seconds. Give the criminals a couple of years to think about the system and you can be sure that there will be a lot more exploits.
Nevermind the fact that deliberately ceding control of yet more private information to the state is yet another encroachment of big brother.
The difference is that all of your examples are under the control of the potential victim. They chose to put it on facebook. They chose to 'leave a note on the door' instead of directly telling 'the milkman' (lol! at that bs) They chose to not have a neighbor pick up their mail.
Why is it that guys like you claim the whole counter-terrorism thing
Uh, you've got your wires crossed, this is about efficient electric meters, ain't no counter-terrorism under discussion here. Which should be a big fucking clue to you that there is a common principle that transcends specific justifications.
Personally - I really don't care what kind of dodgy information they could gleen from a smart meter. I only really care about the fact that power could (or will here in Oz) cost more.
Or that nobody has been home for a couple of days so you are probably on vacation and your home would be a good target for robbery! Yeah, that's worth saving a few bucks a month on electricity.
So I'm curious how a city wide effort would work and what its results are.
Look at London - the effect appears to be that only a very small subset of crimes are affected, and those are primarily moved to 'blind-spots' between cameras. All the other sorts of crime continues on business as usual. Some will say that this happens because the criminals know that 99.99% of the time no-one is watching the cameras anyway. But, to me at least, that just seems like one more step down the slipperly slope. The same people were the ones saying that just having cameras would be a pancea itself - ultimately they will get to the point of arguing that the only way a bunch of cameras can make a significant difference is if we implement an extremely authoritarian regime to back them up and if that's the case they might as well just come clean and say big brother is the end game instead of boiling our frog.
Seriously, though, other than the fact that it's the Evil Empire's search, I think this is mostly good. Competition breeds better products.
The one thing msnbing kicks google's ass at is their mapping. Google's only got a straight 'overhead' view - bing's got perspective shots (they call then 'bird's eye'), usually from all four points on the compass. 99% of the time it is way more useful than google's plain old 'satellite' view.
(That is, you buy a product through a bing search, and you get a certain amount of money returned to you)
Which means they are giving away all kinds of personal information to microsoft in return, right? (I honestly don't know, I'm on fatwallet everyday, but I never do the things that require trading my privacy for a discount/rebate, not even fatwallet's own fatcash(?) thing).
A good developer will attend to function first and form second. Part of function is efficiency. A bad developer barely even understands the concept of efficiency and function is frequently their last priority - just barely enough of a requirement to justify the site in the first place.
Look at slashdot for fuck's sake - you can't even metamod without javascript. Like we need fucking javascript to click a fucking radio button for good/bad/no-rating?
Is a teacher an employee or a contractor? Are their benefits provided by the union, or by the employer? Do they have to renew their employment contract each year?
The typical answers to those questions suggest that they are contractors.
Oh, and by the way, given the outcome of the world of warcraft glider bot case, even your set of machinations of modifying the software for the user probably aren't enough to overcome the fundamental stupidity of the law in this area.
All these machinations ignore the fundamental stupidity of the court.
The court wants us to believe that bits from one source are different from identical bits from another source.
This is the same principle that took out mp3.com and it was just as irrational then as it is now, if not more so. It is an example of the process of applying previously existing legal principles from one domain to another domain being taken too far. Digital bits are different enough from pieces of paper and other methods of fixing copyright material to physical objects that simply treating them the same way just creates excessive costs that do nothing but support an excessively convoluted and archaic legal system. The legal system should be there to support people and their businesses, not the other way around.
You (and many others in this discussion) seem to be deliberately sidestepping the the main point: creating a derivative work and then selling multiple copies of it without the copyright holder's permission is the point.
You seem to be misunderstanding the point of the referenced tile case. Go read it. The defendant was NOT MAKING MULTIPLE COPIES. They were buying individual pictures, cutting them out and affixing them to tiles. Capiche?
I'm surprised that at this point the discussion no comment pointing out the similarities with Open Source Software has been modded up to a 3 or higher.
Some of these teachers are making money on these lesson plans, while others only want credit but don't have a good mechanism to attribute credit (one teacher mentioned in the article says one of her lesson plans that she gave away was so popular it made it to another school district but had no attribution). This stuff might as well be open source software programs for young minds, the parallels are so close.
While the profit motive is all fine and good and, from the tone of the article, is being met by multiple websites rooted in the old copyright-based fee-for-distribution model, what the rest of the teachers need is a "sourceforge for teachers." A set of tools to easily enable the creation, modification and distribution of lesson plans for free with the option of significant collaborative participation.
The rampant out-of-control population increases are all in "developing" countries full of brown people, a very inconvenient truth that you will never hear during the eugenics debate.
While what you write is technically true, it is exceptionally misleading. Someone I once knew liked to call statements like that "hate facts."
The fact is that the "countries full of brown people" are approaching the point of population stabilization far more rapidly than the first world did. It took the US roughly 150 years to do it, it took south korea roughly 30 years to do it and the other countries still in he process will get there even faster if current trends continue.
I fail to see how this raises any questions too. The schools pay the teachers, the lesson plans belong to the school.
Unless the employment contract explicitly transfers ownership of creative works to the employer then the lesson plans legally do not belong to the school. In the world of copyrights and contracts this stuff is cut and dry, the default in all cases - including software development - is for ownership to rest with the creator, full stop.
First sale will allow you to resell a copyrighted work that you have purchased; if, however, it's been modified enough to constitute a derivative work, you'll run afoul of copyright law.
So, if you do not add sufficient new creativity to the original work, then you are home free. But if you do add something new, then you are screwed.
Which is totally against the intent of copyright in the first place - to promote the progress of science and the useful arts.
This isn't a problem with Obama, it's a problem with the TSA and their culture of secrecy.
Sure sounds like it. The spokesperson essentially admitted that they would disclose it in response to a FOIA request and Obama's order essentially says that if it would be released under FOIA, then just release it now and skip the song-and-dance. The TSA complains that it is unfairly maligned, but insisting on the song-and-dance like that is exactly the kind of BS that makes people lose any faith or confidence in the agency that they might have had.
Who has the time to do a clean - professional-looking - edit of every episode of Law & Order?
I find that doing the edit for an hour long show takes roughly 10 minutes or less. If I do the part of setting the cut points while I am watching another show, then that's effectively zero time spent. Given that there are roughly 20 minutes of commercials in an hour long show, it works out to a significant net time savings and at the end of the process, I have a clean, professional looking edit of every episode of tv that I've watched, just ready to share with friends or rewatch a few years later. That's especially nice for shows that are unlikely to ever make it to bluray like sitcoms.
Rather than filtering per se, I think they would be better off limiting the amount of data that any one user can consume over a period of time. Something like 10MB/hour would probably do it. Most users are only going to browse the web and read email, as long as they stay away from the likes of youtube they should be fine. But 10MB/hour would be prohibitively slow for even just one super-compressed 600MB movie. Unless the guy is an employee in the court house. In which case, he's probably violating at least one condition of employment.
Slashdot Mirror
So by your argument, we must already have criminal gangs infiltrating phone companies so that they can run a database query on all their subscribers for those whose phone usage has had a significant drop in the last few days?
You got that half right. There are criminal gangs exploiting phone billing information. Just that its a lot more lucrative with a lot less risk to use that information in other ways than to directly rob a house, like sell it to 3rd parties. You may have heard about that being a widespread problem in the news over the last few years, if you were paying attention.
Nope I didn't note that, because 90% of your message was about how abuse of that information doesn't matter to you.
Its possible to care about more than one thing at a time.
Almost:
http://www.hypebot.com/hypebot/2009/06/band-shoots-free-video-with-surveillance-cameras.html
if your house is being cased for a Robbery, they won't glean the information from a spread sheet.
Wow, yet another person who subscribes to the school of "all criminals are terminally stupid."
Did it really never occur to you that what is being 'cased' is the entire population via means of a computer search to return all houses that have a significant drop in consumption over the last few days?
Ah, but parent was referring to warrantless monitoring of hourly electricity usage.
No he wasn't. The circumstances are exactly the same.
In Kyllo the cops used the results from the IR monitor to obtain a search warrant.
In the two referenced cases (out of hundreds if not thousands all very similar) the electricity consumption was used to obtain a search warrant.
Either way - end result was a search warrant.
what are the chances that someone from the electric company is going to monitor your house, waiting to rob it? OK, now how much greater are they with this smart meter?
Wow, you must be from the school of "all criminals are terminally stupid."
Only the dumbest criminal is going to pick a house and then wait for the owners to go on vacation when all they have to is make the computer give them a list of homes that appear to already be on vacation.
I'd be pretty surprised if the expected cost of this extremely unlikely hypothetical robbery makes smart meters not worthwhile.
The problem with your math is that the only thing you are accounting for as a cost is something I thought of in 10 seconds.
Give the criminals a couple of years to think about the system and you can be sure that there will be a lot more exploits.
Nevermind the fact that deliberately ceding control of yet more private information to the state is yet another encroachment of big brother.
The difference is that all of your examples are under the control of the potential victim.
They chose to put it on facebook.
They chose to 'leave a note on the door' instead of directly telling 'the milkman' (lol! at that bs)
They chose to not have a neighbor pick up their mail.
Why is it that guys like you claim the whole counter-terrorism thing
Uh, you've got your wires crossed, this is about efficient electric meters, ain't no counter-terrorism under discussion here.
Which should be a big fucking clue to you that there is a common principle that transcends specific justifications.
I would think that the use of electricity usage data should play out the same way, but who knows!
I knows!
Granting warrants for excessive electricity use is routine in the USA.
Here's one from 2004: http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/0330044pot1.html
Here's one from 2009: http://hamptonroads.com/node/510056
Personally - I really don't care what kind of dodgy information they could gleen from a smart meter. I only really care about the fact that power could (or will here in Oz) cost more.
Or that nobody has been home for a couple of days so you are probably on vacation and your home would be a good target for robbery! Yeah, that's worth saving a few bucks a month on electricity.
So I'm curious how a city wide effort would work and what its results are.
Look at London - the effect appears to be that only a very small subset of crimes are affected, and those are primarily moved to 'blind-spots' between cameras. All the other sorts of crime continues on business as usual. Some will say that this happens because the criminals know that 99.99% of the time no-one is watching the cameras anyway. But, to me at least, that just seems like one more step down the slipperly slope. The same people were the ones saying that just having cameras would be a pancea itself - ultimately they will get to the point of arguing that the only way a bunch of cameras can make a significant difference is if we implement an extremely authoritarian regime to back them up and if that's the case they might as well just come clean and say big brother is the end game instead of boiling our frog.
Seriously, though, other than the fact that it's the Evil Empire's search, I think this is mostly good. Competition breeds better products.
The one thing msnbing kicks google's ass at is their mapping. Google's only got a straight 'overhead' view - bing's got perspective shots (they call then 'bird's eye'), usually from all four points on the compass. 99% of the time it is way more useful than google's plain old 'satellite' view.
(That is, you buy a product through a bing search, and you get a certain amount of money returned to you)
Which means they are giving away all kinds of personal information to microsoft in return, right?
(I honestly don't know, I'm on fatwallet everyday, but I never do the things that require trading my privacy for a discount/rebate, not even fatwallet's own fatcash(?) thing).
You've confused efficiency with convenience.
A good developer will attend to function first and form second. Part of function is efficiency.
A bad developer barely even understands the concept of efficiency and function is frequently their last priority - just barely enough of a requirement to justify the site in the first place.
Look at slashdot for fuck's sake - you can't even metamod without javascript.
Like we need fucking javascript to click a fucking radio button for good/bad/no-rating?
Depends if the 'employee' is a contractor or not.
Is a teacher an employee or a contractor?
Are their benefits provided by the union, or by the employer?
Do they have to renew their employment contract each year?
The typical answers to those questions suggest that they are contractors.
Oh, and by the way, given the outcome of the world of warcraft glider bot case, even your set of machinations of modifying the software for the user probably aren't enough to overcome the fundamental stupidity of the law in this area.
All these machinations ignore the fundamental stupidity of the court.
The court wants us to believe that bits from one source are different from identical bits from another source.
This is the same principle that took out mp3.com and it was just as irrational then as it is now, if not more so. It is an example of the process of applying previously existing legal principles from one domain to another domain being taken too far. Digital bits are different enough from pieces of paper and other methods of fixing copyright material to physical objects that simply treating them the same way just creates excessive costs that do nothing but support an excessively convoluted and archaic legal system. The legal system should be there to support people and their businesses, not the other way around.
You (and many others in this discussion) seem to be deliberately sidestepping the the main point: creating a derivative work and then selling multiple copies of it without the copyright holder's permission is the point.
You seem to be misunderstanding the point of the referenced tile case. Go read it. The defendant was NOT MAKING MULTIPLE COPIES. They were buying individual pictures, cutting them out and affixing them to tiles. Capiche?
I'm surprised that at this point the discussion no comment pointing out the similarities with Open Source Software has been modded up to a 3 or higher.
Some of these teachers are making money on these lesson plans, while others only want credit but don't have a good mechanism to attribute credit (one teacher mentioned in the article says one of her lesson plans that she gave away was so popular it made it to another school district but had no attribution). This stuff might as well be open source software programs for young minds, the parallels are so close.
While the profit motive is all fine and good and, from the tone of the article, is being met by multiple websites rooted in the old copyright-based fee-for-distribution model, what the rest of the teachers need is a "sourceforge for teachers." A set of tools to easily enable the creation, modification and distribution of lesson plans for free with the option of significant collaborative participation.
The rampant out-of-control population increases are all in "developing" countries full of brown people, a very inconvenient truth that you will never hear during the eugenics debate.
While what you write is technically true, it is exceptionally misleading. Someone I once knew liked to call statements like that "hate facts."
The fact is that the "countries full of brown people" are approaching the point of population stabilization far more rapidly than the first world did. It took the US roughly 150 years to do it, it took south korea roughly 30 years to do it and the other countries still in he process will get there even faster if current trends continue.
I fail to see how this raises any questions too. The schools pay the teachers, the lesson plans belong to the school.
Unless the employment contract explicitly transfers ownership of creative works to the employer then the lesson plans legally do not belong to the school. In the world of copyrights and contracts this stuff is cut and dry, the default in all cases - including software development - is for ownership to rest with the creator, full stop.
First sale will allow you to resell a copyrighted work that you have purchased; if, however, it's been modified enough to constitute a derivative work, you'll run afoul of copyright law.
So, if you do not add sufficient new creativity to the original work, then you are home free. But if you do add something new, then you are screwed.
Which is totally against the intent of copyright in the first place - to promote the progress of science and the useful arts.
This isn't a problem with Obama, it's a problem with the TSA and their culture of secrecy.
Sure sounds like it. The spokesperson essentially admitted that they would disclose it in response to a FOIA request and Obama's order essentially says that if it would be released under FOIA, then just release it now and skip the song-and-dance. The TSA complains that it is unfairly maligned, but insisting on the song-and-dance like that is exactly the kind of BS that makes people lose any faith or confidence in the agency that they might have had.
Who has the time to do a clean - professional-looking - edit of every episode of Law & Order?
I find that doing the edit for an hour long show takes roughly 10 minutes or less. If I do the part of setting the cut points while I am watching another show, then that's effectively zero time spent. Given that there are roughly 20 minutes of commercials in an hour long show, it works out to a significant net time savings and at the end of the process, I have a clean, professional looking edit of every episode of tv that I've watched, just ready to share with friends or rewatch a few years later. That's especially nice for shows that are unlikely to ever make it to bluray like sitcoms.
Rather than filtering per se, I think they would be better off limiting the amount of data that any one user can consume over a period of time. Something like 10MB/hour would probably do it. Most users are only going to browse the web and read email, as long as they stay away from the likes of youtube they should be fine. But 10MB/hour would be prohibitively slow for even just one super-compressed 600MB movie. Unless the guy is an employee in the court house. In which case, he's probably violating at least one condition of employment.