It sounds like you believe the sole purpose of prison is revenge against the offender. I don't want to live in a society where that's the purpose of justice.
I hope you don't live in the US, because if you do, then you have not been paying attention for at least the last 30 years. The politicians have turned the penal system into something almost entirely punative because of the "tough on crime" meme. Rehabilitation is practically non-existant.
This is the perfect example of what is wrong with the US system. This does not belong as a law. There is no harm to people. It tramples on free speech.
But someone found it annoying. And now we have another law. More costs. Less freedom. And no real gain.
The public's airwaves, the public's rules. Don't like it? Don't use public resources to distribute your speech.
People are so scared of technology being used to track everyone, and rightfully so.
But can' technology ALSO be used to UN-track people?
Remember how the DMCA does not make it illegal to "crack" DRM - only to give anyone a tool that would enable them to crack DRM. That's what they will do with untracking tools. Technically you will have the ability to roll your own untracking tools, but you won't be able to legally share those tools for collective improvement or any other reason. Bitcoin is freaking ripe for federal intervention (i.e. making it illegal to use bitcoins for payment).
on the outside of an envelope (or any part of a post card) has ever actually been private? Certainly not I, even before I knew enough to care about privacy.
You are overloading the term "private" - no one thought it was a secret, but only the crazies thought that the information on every single envelope was permanently recorded in a database. Crazy is the new normal.
This is one of the burdens pioneering women have placed on them: people are always second-guessing them, wondering whether they got their position on the merits or if are being given special treatment because they are women. Minorities often get a similar response ("oh s/he only got the job because of affirmative action"). Hence the saying "you've got to be at least twice as good as anyone else to be accepted as equal".
In this case, it is worse. There was an article a couple of months ago that said they had a bunch of female candidates to choose from and they (a) delibertely picked a woman and (b) her looks were part of the criteria (no scars).
Sure, there's transparency. There's total transparency. Everything you enter into your GMail account is property of Google. Everything you enter into your Facebook account is property of Facebook.
I think you just proved my point.
A hell of a lot of more than that is collected about you. Every page with a facebook like button on it reports back to facebook that you browsed there. Same thing with all of those web pages that use googleapis.com - pages that you have no idea are ratting you out to google. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. Go install Ghostery to get a feel of just how much your online life is being spied on by companies you've never even heard of.
Well would you and everyones' brother be willing to pay $5 a month to use Facebook?
You missed the point of my post. This is not about paying cash versus paying with personal information. This is about properly valuing personal information.
When you sign up for these services, you're already tendering your personal information. The agreement is "you let me use this service, and I'll provide you with X information." Yes, it isn't an explicit agreement, but we all know how this works now.
You missed the point of the article. We are selling it now, but the market is ridiculously primitive. It is all take-it-or-leave-it, no options for negotiation and basically no transparency. For all intents and purposes we've replaced cash with personal information as the currency of online services.
But where everybody pretty much knows the value of a dollar, few, if any, people have much of a grip on the value of their personal information. We know what it is, but we have no idea of what it can be used for in the hands of the people we trade it to. So essentially we are writing blank checks to pay for things like facebook and google.
A man was thrown to the ground and severely injured, so he sued the TSA, and the TSA refused to turn-over the videos because of "national security". The man was forced to drop the case since the evidence was being withheld.
What is this man's name? I would like to add the citation to my list of TSA bullshit.
I'm pretty sure you are not talking about John Corbett since he was not assaulted and has not dropped his case.
Excellent non-rebuttal dude. Hand-waving that taxes are wealth transfers doesn't address any of my points because exactly the same argument could be used to rationalize any distribution of taxation, such as taking all of your entire income to pay for 911 services. After all taxes are just taking money from some people to pay for services for other people, no other criteria necessary.
If you're in an "at-will state" you can get the rug pulled out at any time,
All states, at least in the United States, are "at-will." I suspect you are confusing "at-will" with contractual job protections like those enforced by some unions (not to be confused with right-to-work either).
As an IT guy, I wouldn't consider for a second walking out with data that's not mine. What the hell is wrong with the rest of you?
The summary, at least, says it is not "IT guys" it is IT management that has ethical problems here. Not too surprising given that full-blown psycopathy is 4x more common in senior managers than in the general population. Since psycopathy is really a continuum with only the really extreme types qualifying for the label, you don't have to be a full-fledged pyscopath to rationalze walking out with stolen data either.
...paid for by taxes and fees. how else are you going to pay for public services?
Yes, how else are public services paid for? What possible point could you hope to make by assuming total ignorance on my part?
...for example, paid through a $1/month surcharge on cell phone lines?
$12 per handset per year is nearly $4 billion per year just for the cell-network part of the 911 infrastructure... that is ridiculously over-priced. Furthermore, it is a public service, not a service specific to phone owners. 911 works on cell phones without subscriptions, it works on every phone, it is ubiquituious. As long as the service is ubiquitous then payment needs to come from everybody as a general tax.
and my phone company just tacked on an extra $1/month for 911 service
Those greedy bastards!
911 is a public service. Charging for it is akin to the police billing the victims of crime when they respond to a call.
Personally I think 911 is over-rated, particularly all of the geo-location stuff that was mandated for cell-phones and VOIP in order to enable 911 calls to automatically report locations (which has apprently turned out to be too unreliable for emergency services, but good enough for the FBI and local police departments to track people). But as long as 911 is something society in general has decided is a good thing, then society in general needs to pay for it.
The good news is the Apple girls would be multi touch enabled, the bad news is only one "button" to play with even if the world standard has always been to ship with two. And they'd be shiny, very shiny.
And, you would definitely not have access to root them either.
However, that will not/should not come to pass because if you allow advertisers to have that kind of information, they will exploit it and sell it (and by sell, I mean retain the information and sell a copy to anyone who wants it) until hundreds of companies you've never heard of know more about you than your wife/doctor/therapist/bartender/etc.
That applies in equal measure to selective breeding, except that there are many more potentially harmful pathways which may be affected by it.
I see no way to support that claim. When GMO programs do things like insert genes from fish into tomatoes or bacteria into corn or even daffodils into rice there is simply no equivalent in the world of selective breeding.
Yes, this means that passengers, people on trains, etc. won't be able to use their smartphones. Gee, what a tragedy. A few hours of inconvenience is so awful to give up in return for reduced road carnage.
Except it won't work like that. People will just hack it. The market for work-arounds will be a thousand times larger than for jailbreaks because so many more people will be inconvenienced.
Trying to disable distracting functionality is doomed to failure because it is yet another attempt to fight human nature which is always, always a losing proposition and usually very expensive to boot. If the goal is to reduce accidents (rather than moralize) then we need solutions that channel human nature instead of pushing back on it.
We should be looking for tech that helps people do what they want to do, but do it more safely. For example - Heads-Up displays or text-to-speech for reading text messages and steering-wheel controls (chording keyboards perhaps), speech recognition or even eye-tracking HUD keyboards for composing messages. Maybe have the system watch the driver's eyes and if they leave the road for too long the car itself reacts with an audio cue or even a literal poke in the ass to remind the driver to look in front of them.
No option is going to be 100% effective, but we make risk-reward trade-offs all the time, driving itself is inherently risky but as a society we've decided that we really like to travel about at high rates of speed so we accept those risks in exchange for the benefits. Communicating while driving is similar, all around the globe people are dealing with the exact same issue of tech-distracted driving, so it is pretty clearly something that lots and lots of people want to do regardless of culture. So trying to simply forbid it, either legally or technically, is only going to result in lots of tax dollars spent on half-assed enforcement and lots of private dollars spent on circumventing technical restrictions.
It isn't like we did selective breeding thousands of years ago and then stopped and have been testing the results ever since. It is a continual process, where each new cultivar has exactly the same potential for problems as any other,
Rolling it out is also a continuous process. Compare that to round-up ready corn which went from the lab to practically 100% of the crop in like a decade.
(in GMO, we know what is added, if not where, in selective breeding, we know neither).
In GMO we don't necessarily have a clue about the systemic effects of the changes. So we take a couple of genes that have a primary effect of increasing pesticide resistence, but what we don't notice is that in the original organism harmful secondary effects were repressed by the existence of other genes, genes we didn't splice into the new organism. At best GMO is neutral for predicting unintended side-effects.
Slashdot Mirror
It sounds like you believe the sole purpose of prison is revenge against the offender. I don't want to live in a society where that's the purpose of justice.
I hope you don't live in the US, because if you do, then you have not been paying attention for at least the last 30 years. The politicians have turned the penal system into something almost entirely punative because of the "tough on crime" meme. Rehabilitation is practically non-existant.
This exact same line of reasoning has been used to support the notion that there are certain words you can never say on television.
Yep and those laws are pretty well established.
I'd prefer a system that didn't reserve airwaves for big spenders making the airwaves more democratic, but until that happens, here we are.
This is the perfect example of what is wrong with the US system. This does not belong as a law. There is no harm to people. It tramples on free speech.
But someone found it annoying. And now we have another law. More costs. Less freedom. And no real gain.
The public's airwaves, the public's rules.
Don't like it? Don't use public resources to distribute your speech.
Its hard to say "Microsoft" (insert picture of Bill Gates/Balmer)" and "sexy" in the same breath, much less sell it to the masses.
But you can say MS and sexchange in the same breath and sell it to the masses, try it -- "MS Exchange."
People are so scared of technology being used to track everyone, and rightfully so.
But can' technology ALSO be used to UN-track people?
Remember how the DMCA does not make it illegal to "crack" DRM - only to give anyone a tool that would enable them to crack DRM. That's what they will do with untracking tools. Technically you will have the ability to roll your own untracking tools, but you won't be able to legally share those tools for collective improvement or any other reason. Bitcoin is freaking ripe for federal intervention (i.e. making it illegal to use bitcoins for payment).
We have a party line now on Slashdot? that's news to me :-).
It's true that I'm no expert, so I aped what I read somewhere else.
You almost certainly read it in the article I linked to, the article from China Daily, you know the one operated by the communist party.
Conclusion: forget what I said about the scars opening in space.
Forget what I said about teeth. Oh wait, I never said anything about teeth in the first place.
on the outside of an envelope (or any part of a post card) has ever actually been private? Certainly not I, even before I knew enough to care about privacy.
You are overloading the term "private" - no one thought it was a secret, but only the crazies thought that the information on every single envelope was permanently recorded in a database. Crazy is the new normal.
Indeed, I thought that was obvious and find it odd that fritsd got modded to +5 for just repeating the party line.
This is one of the burdens pioneering women have placed on them: people are always second-guessing them, wondering whether they got their position on the merits or if are being given special treatment because they are women. Minorities often get a similar response ("oh s/he only got the job because of affirmative action"). Hence the saying "you've got to be at least twice as good as anyone else to be accepted as equal".
In this case, it is worse. There was an article a couple of months ago that said they had a bunch of female candidates to choose from and they (a) delibertely picked a woman and (b) her looks were part of the criteria (no scars).
Sure, there's transparency. There's total transparency. Everything you enter into your GMail account is property of Google. Everything you enter into your Facebook account is property of Facebook.
I think you just proved my point.
A hell of a lot of more than that is collected about you. Every page with a facebook like button on it reports back to facebook that you browsed there. Same thing with all of those web pages that use googleapis.com - pages that you have no idea are ratting you out to google. And that is just the tip of the iceberg. Go install Ghostery to get a feel of just how much your online life is being spied on by companies you've never even heard of.
Well would you and everyones' brother be willing to pay $5 a month to use Facebook?
You missed the point of my post. This is not about paying cash versus paying with personal information. This is about properly valuing personal information.
When you sign up for these services, you're already tendering your personal information. The agreement is "you let me use this service, and I'll provide you with X information." Yes, it isn't an explicit agreement, but we all know how this works now.
You missed the point of the article. We are selling it now, but the market is ridiculously primitive. It is all take-it-or-leave-it, no options for negotiation and basically no transparency. For all intents and purposes we've replaced cash with personal information as the currency of online services.
But where everybody pretty much knows the value of a dollar, few, if any, people have much of a grip on the value of their personal information. We know what it is, but we have no idea of what it can be used for in the hands of the people we trade it to. So essentially we are writing blank checks to pay for things like facebook and google.
The only real answer is to stop having vital systems programmed by idiots connected to the internet.
Disconnect idiots from internet before starting critical system software development -- Check!
A man was thrown to the ground and severely injured, so he sued the TSA, and the TSA refused to turn-over the videos because of "national security". The man was forced to drop the case since the evidence was being withheld.
What is this man's name? I would like to add the citation to my list of TSA bullshit.
I'm pretty sure you are not talking about John Corbett since he was not assaulted and has not dropped his case.
Excellent non-rebuttal dude. Hand-waving that taxes are wealth transfers doesn't address any of my points because exactly the same argument could be used to rationalize any distribution of taxation, such as taking all of your entire income to pay for 911 services. After all taxes are just taking money from some people to pay for services for other people, no other criteria necessary.
If you're in an "at-will state" you can get the rug pulled out at any time,
All states, at least in the United States, are "at-will." I suspect you are confusing "at-will" with contractual job protections like those enforced by some unions (not to be confused with right-to-work either).
As an IT guy, I wouldn't consider for a second walking out with data that's not mine. What the hell is wrong with the rest of you?
The summary, at least, says it is not "IT guys" it is IT management that has ethical problems here. Not too surprising given that full-blown psycopathy is 4x more common in senior managers than in the general population. Since psycopathy is really a continuum with only the really extreme types qualifying for the label, you don't have to be a full-fledged pyscopath to rationalze walking out with stolen data either.
...paid for by taxes and fees. how else are you going to pay for public services?
Yes, how else are public services paid for? What possible point could you hope to make by assuming total ignorance on my part?
...for example, paid through a $1/month surcharge on cell phone lines?
$12 per handset per year is nearly $4 billion per year just for the cell-network part of the 911 infrastructure... that is ridiculously over-priced. Furthermore, it is a public service, not a service specific to phone owners. 911 works on cell phones without subscriptions, it works on every phone, it is ubiquituious. As long as the service is ubiquitous then payment needs to come from everybody as a general tax.
and my phone company just tacked on an extra $1/month for 911 service
Those greedy bastards!
911 is a public service. Charging for it is akin to the police billing the victims of crime when they respond to a call.
Personally I think 911 is over-rated, particularly all of the geo-location stuff that was mandated for cell-phones and VOIP in order to enable 911 calls to automatically report locations (which has apprently turned out to be too unreliable for emergency services, but good enough for the FBI and local police departments to track people). But as long as 911 is something society in general has decided is a good thing, then society in general needs to pay for it.
Comcast is implementing usage-based tiered billing.
It is now in Comcast's best interest for customers to pirate, because it means they get more money.
Two related points:
1) Unfortunately Comcast's incremental pricing is at least 5x too high - 50GB/$10.
2) We'll see if Comcast really likes pirates if they blow off their pending six strikes agreement with the MAFIAA.
The good news is the Apple girls would be multi touch enabled, the bad news is only one "button" to play with even if the world standard has always been to ship with two. And they'd be shiny, very shiny.
And, you would definitely not have access to root them either.
However, that will not/should not come to pass because if you allow advertisers to have that kind of information, they will exploit it and sell it (and by sell, I mean retain the information and sell a copy to anyone who wants it) until hundreds of companies you've never heard of know more about you than your wife/doctor/therapist/bartender/etc.
Sounds like you have not installed ghostery.
That applies in equal measure to selective breeding, except that there are many more potentially harmful pathways which may be affected by it.
I see no way to support that claim. When GMO programs do things like insert genes from fish into tomatoes or bacteria into corn or even daffodils into rice there is simply no equivalent in the world of selective breeding.
Yes, this means that passengers, people on trains, etc. won't be able to use their smartphones. Gee, what a tragedy. A few hours of inconvenience is so awful to give up in return for reduced road carnage.
Except it won't work like that. People will just hack it. The market for work-arounds will be a thousand times larger than for jailbreaks because so many more people will be inconvenienced.
Trying to disable distracting functionality is doomed to failure because it is yet another attempt to fight human nature which is always, always a losing proposition and usually very expensive to boot. If the goal is to reduce accidents (rather than moralize) then we need solutions that channel human nature instead of pushing back on it.
We should be looking for tech that helps people do what they want to do, but do it more safely. For example - Heads-Up displays or text-to-speech for reading text messages and steering-wheel controls (chording keyboards perhaps), speech recognition or even eye-tracking HUD keyboards for composing messages. Maybe have the system watch the driver's eyes and if they leave the road for too long the car itself reacts with an audio cue or even a literal poke in the ass to remind the driver to look in front of them.
No option is going to be 100% effective, but we make risk-reward trade-offs all the time, driving itself is inherently risky but as a society we've decided that we really like to travel about at high rates of speed so we accept those risks in exchange for the benefits. Communicating while driving is similar, all around the globe people are dealing with the exact same issue of tech-distracted driving, so it is pretty clearly something that lots and lots of people want to do regardless of culture. So trying to simply forbid it, either legally or technically, is only going to result in lots of tax dollars spent on half-assed enforcement and lots of private dollars spent on circumventing technical restrictions.
It isn't like we did selective breeding thousands of years ago and then stopped and have been testing the results ever since. It is a continual process, where each new cultivar has exactly the same potential for problems as any other,
Rolling it out is also a continuous process. Compare that to round-up ready corn which went from the lab to practically 100% of the crop in like a decade.
(in GMO, we know what is added, if not where, in selective breeding, we know neither).
In GMO we don't necessarily have a clue about the systemic effects of the changes. So we take a couple of genes that have a primary effect of increasing pesticide resistence, but what we don't notice is that in the original organism harmful secondary effects were repressed by the existence of other genes, genes we didn't splice into the new organism. At best GMO is neutral for predicting unintended side-effects.