DNA has also been used to clear individuals as well. In the case of the criminal justice system, many individuals (with criminal records) are cleared already due to DNA samples on hand not matching a particular case.
It is very good that DNA can be used to help clear innocent people accused of being criminals. However, if the police already has a DNA sample from the crime scene and a person is accused of being the criminal, and such person can always give their DNA to the police for testing. A database of DNA samples for helping clearing innocents is not needed at all, I think. You have the DNA sample from the crime scene, you have the accused person in front of you, what else do you need? How could a database help?
Unfortunately a criminal can very easily hide their DNA by injecting foreign blood into their circulatory system. It has been done, according to Wikipedia.
Wikipedia says:
Dr. John Schneeberger of Canada raped one of his sedated patients in 1992 and left semen on her underwear. Police drew Schneeberger's blood and compared its DNA against the crime scene semen DNA on three occasions, never showing a match. It turned out that he had surgically inserted a Penrose drain into his arm and filled it with foreign blood and anticoagulants.
This means that criminals have a way to bypass DNA checks and hide their identity. It's harder than making a fake ID card, but it's still relatively easy. Therefore, a national universal DNA database would not help to catch the smartest (and probably most dangerous) of the criminals. It could help to catch a few stupid or clueless criminals, but these are not too dangerous compared to the smarter ones.
Therefore DNA evidence is not the final answer to whether a person is guilty. It can contribute to an investigation, but no one must base a decision solely on DNA identification. With this in mind, the ROI of a massive universal national DNA database may be much lower than this judge thinks.
According to the article, the idea originated not from the telecommuter but from his boss, Glenn Paulley, who has a PhD in CS (his dissertation was on query optimisation). However, the article suggests that the idea was further refined by another employee, Ian McHardy, who I think is a database programmer. The article says that Dr Paullie (the boss) thought of installing a webcam under a blimp after seeing a TV ad for a remote control toy blimp, and McHardy (the other employee) suggested using a robot instead. McHardy then spent some time research telepresence and other projects, eg a project about robots allowing hospitalised students to attend classes. What I would like to know is whether these are the people who had the original idea of using a robot for helping telecommuters communicate with other office employees. The telecommuter will speak at UoWaterloo on 15 October. Perhaps I could send my telepresence robot there and ask him, but I'm not sure whether the robot will survive a body search by the security at the airport after it passes the metal detector. Maybe one day the standard security officer's training will include instructions on how to bodysearch a robot without disconnecting any wires!
A robot with a screen and speakers is not very different than a real human (you can guess how I see humans and how much I value social contact, can't you?) and in fact sometimes you may prefer to interact with the robot rather than the actual person (especially if your coworkers are dull). Perhaps robots like this will encourage companies to send all dull people out of office and let their robots at the office, or (preferably) send the nerds at their homes. Either way will increase productivity, as mixing nerds and dull people in the same group is not a way to work harmoniously:
NerdieMary: Yesterday was a very productive day for me!
DullieGeorge: Let me guess... you went to the stadium?
NerdieMary: No, I compiled the Linux kernel on my old C64 and turned it into a mail server!
DullieGeorge: Oh, you mean your basketball team won?
NerdieMary: No, no! I talk about the computers!
DullieGeorge: Oh nerdie nerd, you always talk about computers. Your life has become computeroonic. Every food you eat has to have the word 'computer' in its title!
NerdieMary: Shut up, you dullie duck! If there were no computers you wouldn't have a job in this company now!
DullieGeorge: But I never wanted to be a level-1 helpdesk technician. I always wanted to be... a lumberjack! Computers are so dull, dull, dull, dull, dull!
NerdieMary: Oh my 64bitness! You are so dull! Can't stand working with you anymore! I'll quit! I'll become a cat confuser!
Be wary when an organisation calls itself religious or anything similar. They may just be a club of individuals with common interests unrelated to religion and use the religion label as a means to not pay taxes, collect donations, and mask their real activities. For example, a very rich person may wish to network with other rich people and influence the society in ways that are good for them. If they write down some fiction and found a religion based on it, they can mask their activities quite easily. In many religious organisations, there are some members who know its true goals and form the inner circle, and lots of members who are in the external circle and think that the organisation is truly religious. The same holds true for other kinds of organisations, eg philosophical, spiritual, or even hobbyist and charity organisations. In fact any organisation, even a government or official religion, can be designed in such a way to hide into itself an inner circle of individuals who use it for their own purposes. Some possible secret purposes of these inner clubs may be the creation or control of more wealth, the control of sensitive industries, political goals, nationalistic goals, terrorism, espionage, and other. A terrorist may found a charitable organisation to collect money for buying firearms, while the donors think the money will go to the poor. A politician may found a golf club while in fact it is used as a means to organise a coup-d-etat. Secret inner circles may even form in already existing organisations that were founded for legitimate purposes; for example, a civil rights organisation may be true to its charter and be a good destination for your donations until agents from an enemy entity (eg a government) infiltrate in it and create a secret circle with not so ethical purposes. If an organisation counts in its members people who have positions in industry, government, or are very rich or famous, chances are that there is something about their organisation that they don't want you to know. Not that I'm suggesting that every secret inner circle has unethical goals, or that I have any specific organisation in mind. It is just a possibility that you have to think about whenever you are asked to join a group or donate some money. Just let your mind be open and think about anything you may consider suspicious or strange in an organisation.
GNU/Linux is your friend. The local French Institute here has implemented an Internet cafe with Ubuntu Linux, properly customised to only allow the user to open Firefox. It works perfectly. No real need for contstant virus scanning etc. You can choose any GNU/Linux distro (I recommend Debian) and customise it quickly to make it look like a kiosk OS. Easy, quick, secure, safe, and FREE.
The idea is nice and I think the problem is really prevalent. I have seen large portions of source code, much of it commercial, containing not one or two but hundreds of spelling mistakes. I also believe the problem must be more prevalent in closed source and in small businesses than open source and Free software. Another thing is that developers from countries with non-English languages often mix English with their first language in code, making it hard to maintain by other nationalities.
The problem is that most people are dumb. If people were smart, they would keep to their principles as much as possible and get organised through the Internet and share information on employers requiring RFID transplants, then all of them would agree to never buy anything from them. However, only a handful of people out of every billion have actually any discernable trace of intelligence in their head, so they fail to get organised with other like-minded people. It's very easy to attack 6 billion ants one by one, but if they organise as a group they can defend with great effectiveness. This is the most intelligent way to solve supply and demand problems. Unfortunately people are too stupid to do that, so they rely on a government composed of (presumably) more knowledgeable officers thinking instead of them.
I am generally against government regulation in every tiny detail of our lives and commerce, and I believe people should gain the ability to self-organise spontaneously without help from governments and leaders, but I think that in this issue, and considering the state of reality, I gladly agree with legislation prohibiting RFID implants at the workplace. After all, high-security workplaces operated well for many years before the advent of RFID, and I think they can continue operating just as well in the future without implants. The potential of misuse is just too great, and is no real need for RFID at all.
I find it interesting that the Apocalypse contains passages that cause Atheists and Christians to agree on something. I personally believe that this specific passage refers to government control, ie it is a call for Christians to be against unreasonable and extensive controls by the government. This is not surprising, considering that Christians were unwelcome in the Roman Empire, just like Atheists still are in many modern states.
If every single employer in any field started requiring RFID implants, then any sane person out there would be reasonable in feeling that they were being treated as cattle by the society as a whole.
Capitalism will quickly filter out any irresponsible companies.
Capitalism will quickly filter out any irresponsible companies as long as the people comprising the society have at least half a brain. Unfortunately, most people seem to possess less than that, and allow companies like MS (Windows monopoly) or Sony (rootkit, batteries) to profit. The free market can work, but the people that form the market are dumb, therefore they get exactly what they deserve.
Here in Greece the majority of the businesses are still on DOS. Some of them on real DOS, others on DOS programs running under (guess what) Win95 or 98. There are also many informatics companies, some in the stock market as well, with their primary products being available for both DOS and Win.
The best thing that could happen to Opera would be an open source or Free software version. The lack of an open source Opera is exactly what keeps Opera so low in the browser popularity charts. Kudos to Opera for creating a great desktop and mobile browser, and I have to admit that I am amazed at the quality of their software given the fact that they chose the closed source model, but I think their days in business are numbered unless they learn how to make a profit while letting the code be free, preferably under the GPL. It *is* possible to give away the source and still manage to run a profitable business.
- I demand to search your bags to verify that you have not stolen anything.
- You refuse and proceed to leave.
- I explain that that my house is big, and I didn't monitor you very well to verify that you didn't take my valuable stuff. So I again ask to search you bag.
- You refuse and leave.
What it the proper action here?
The proper action is, of course, to ensure that you can monitor your house well. It is your responsibility to monitor your belongings. It is not your right to make the life of innocent people difficult just because they happen to carry a bag. A person may be in a hurry for extremely serious business or personal reasons and not want to wait to have their bags searched, or they may not want you to know what personal items they carry (eg they may have a pornographic magazine in there and not want you to see it). Just because someone does not let you search their bags does not mean they are shoplifters.
Just because a percentage of the population is prone to theft does not mean that a business has any right to treat all of its customers like criminals and make their life difficult.
There is a great way to help businesses remember that treating you like a criminal is not their right: Stop giving them your money. Shop only at places where you are being treated as a respectable customer.
I think big shops in areas of high population density tend to treat their customers like potential criminals more than small shops in suburban areas. It may be a bit hard to find a shop that treats you respectably in a big city dominated by big businesses. It's usually in low population density areas and away from the downtown where you can find small, often independently owned shops. There you are usually greeted by name and treated right, so why not buy from them?
Employees are not owned by their employers. If being employed means surrendering the sovereignty of your body to an employer by accepting an implant then this equates employees with cattle or sheep that are being tagged for identification before slaughter.
Lots of people don't need a phone surgically implanted in their ears, nor the $40/mo.
Here in Europe most people who want a mobile phone but not the bill settle with a card service where you have the phone and a SIM card, and you buy credit either by visiting a kiosk near your home or by calling and charging your credit card, or via Web banking. Not sure whether this kind of service exists in the US.
I am in Europe and one of my landlines is ISDN, which features an automated stream from my provider displaying the current time and date on both of my two ISDN terminals's screen continuously. In addition, I also have access to a voice time service. I make good use of both services every day, primarily the stream service, as I have found it much better to use the ISDN terminals as clocks instead of having dedicated clocks and remembering to change the DST settings or synchronise the time. The ISDN time stream automatically synchronises whenever I make a call, so I don't have to worry about DST. The voice service has also been proved useful as well in various ocassions, especially when out of my home office, although my mobile phone has a similar GSM time stream. I certainly wouldn't like to see phone time services going away, as they are useful for making sure what the correct and official time is.
The problem with these kinds of forms and background checks is that they assume that you know all this information. There are no "I don't remember/don't know" fields, eg you may have never known a father or mother, so it's impossible to properly fill out the form without letting some required fields blank or customising it a bit. Even to fill out the information you can know, you need to spend precious time from your life to find all the tiny details asked. A person may agree to undergo a background check, but may be unable to provide some information. What if the investigators assume that you just tried to lie or hide something? These forms are really a filter against people who either don't fit the usual profile for reasons outside their control or just forget too easily.
Hello Mr Griffin. It is a privilege to employ these exceptional engineers, not a right. If you make their lives difficult, they will leave.
Employees are not sheep to be slaughtered. They are stakeholders of your organisation and you have to take their views into account when you draw new policies.
Slashdot Mirror
It is very good that DNA can be used to help clear innocent people accused of being criminals. However, if the police already has a DNA sample from the crime scene and a person is accused of being the criminal, and such person can always give their DNA to the police for testing. A database of DNA samples for helping clearing innocents is not needed at all, I think. You have the DNA sample from the crime scene, you have the accused person in front of you, what else do you need? How could a database help?
Unfortunately a criminal can very easily hide their DNA by injecting foreign blood into their circulatory system. It has been done, according to Wikipedia.
Wikipedia says: Dr. John Schneeberger of Canada raped one of his sedated patients in 1992 and left semen on her underwear. Police drew Schneeberger's blood and compared its DNA against the crime scene semen DNA on three occasions, never showing a match. It turned out that he had surgically inserted a Penrose drain into his arm and filled it with foreign blood and anticoagulants.
This means that criminals have a way to bypass DNA checks and hide their identity. It's harder than making a fake ID card, but it's still relatively easy. Therefore, a national universal DNA database would not help to catch the smartest (and probably most dangerous) of the criminals. It could help to catch a few stupid or clueless criminals, but these are not too dangerous compared to the smarter ones.
Therefore DNA evidence is not the final answer to whether a person is guilty. It can contribute to an investigation, but no one must base a decision solely on DNA identification. With this in mind, the ROI of a massive universal national DNA database may be much lower than this judge thinks.
According to the article, the idea originated not from the telecommuter but from his boss, Glenn Paulley, who has a PhD in CS (his dissertation was on query optimisation). However, the article suggests that the idea was further refined by another employee, Ian McHardy, who I think is a database programmer. The article says that Dr Paullie (the boss) thought of installing a webcam under a blimp after seeing a TV ad for a remote control toy blimp, and McHardy (the other employee) suggested using a robot instead. McHardy then spent some time research telepresence and other projects, eg a project about robots allowing hospitalised students to attend classes. What I would like to know is whether these are the people who had the original idea of using a robot for helping telecommuters communicate with other office employees. The telecommuter will speak at UoWaterloo on 15 October. Perhaps I could send my telepresence robot there and ask him, but I'm not sure whether the robot will survive a body search by the security at the airport after it passes the metal detector. Maybe one day the standard security officer's training will include instructions on how to bodysearch a robot without disconnecting any wires!
A touch-screen... and a force-feedback joystick on the other side? Or better, a force-feedback chair?
A robot with a screen and speakers is not very different than a real human (you can guess how I see humans and how much I value social contact, can't you?) and in fact sometimes you may prefer to interact with the robot rather than the actual person (especially if your coworkers are dull). Perhaps robots like this will encourage companies to send all dull people out of office and let their robots at the office, or (preferably) send the nerds at their homes. Either way will increase productivity, as mixing nerds and dull people in the same group is not a way to work harmoniously:
Be wary when an organisation calls itself religious or anything similar. They may just be a club of individuals with common interests unrelated to religion and use the religion label as a means to not pay taxes, collect donations, and mask their real activities. For example, a very rich person may wish to network with other rich people and influence the society in ways that are good for them. If they write down some fiction and found a religion based on it, they can mask their activities quite easily. In many religious organisations, there are some members who know its true goals and form the inner circle, and lots of members who are in the external circle and think that the organisation is truly religious. The same holds true for other kinds of organisations, eg philosophical, spiritual, or even hobbyist and charity organisations. In fact any organisation, even a government or official religion, can be designed in such a way to hide into itself an inner circle of individuals who use it for their own purposes. Some possible secret purposes of these inner clubs may be the creation or control of more wealth, the control of sensitive industries, political goals, nationalistic goals, terrorism, espionage, and other. A terrorist may found a charitable organisation to collect money for buying firearms, while the donors think the money will go to the poor. A politician may found a golf club while in fact it is used as a means to organise a coup-d-etat. Secret inner circles may even form in already existing organisations that were founded for legitimate purposes; for example, a civil rights organisation may be true to its charter and be a good destination for your donations until agents from an enemy entity (eg a government) infiltrate in it and create a secret circle with not so ethical purposes. If an organisation counts in its members people who have positions in industry, government, or are very rich or famous, chances are that there is something about their organisation that they don't want you to know. Not that I'm suggesting that every secret inner circle has unethical goals, or that I have any specific organisation in mind. It is just a possibility that you have to think about whenever you are asked to join a group or donate some money. Just let your mind be open and think about anything you may consider suspicious or strange in an organisation.
GNU/Linux is your friend. The local French Institute here has implemented an Internet cafe with Ubuntu Linux, properly customised to only allow the user to open Firefox. It works perfectly. No real need for contstant virus scanning etc. You can choose any GNU/Linux distro (I recommend Debian) and customise it quickly to make it look like a kiosk OS. Easy, quick, secure, safe, and FREE.
The idea is nice and I think the problem is really prevalent. I have seen large portions of source code, much of it commercial, containing not one or two but hundreds of spelling mistakes. I also believe the problem must be more prevalent in closed source and in small businesses than open source and Free software. Another thing is that developers from countries with non-English languages often mix English with their first language in code, making it hard to maintain by other nationalities.
He dosn't only want to spellcheck software interface messages etc, he also wants to spellcheck function names containing natural language.
The problem is that most people are dumb. If people were smart, they would keep to their principles as much as possible and get organised through the Internet and share information on employers requiring RFID transplants, then all of them would agree to never buy anything from them. However, only a handful of people out of every billion have actually any discernable trace of intelligence in their head, so they fail to get organised with other like-minded people. It's very easy to attack 6 billion ants one by one, but if they organise as a group they can defend with great effectiveness. This is the most intelligent way to solve supply and demand problems. Unfortunately people are too stupid to do that, so they rely on a government composed of (presumably) more knowledgeable officers thinking instead of them.
I am generally against government regulation in every tiny detail of our lives and commerce, and I believe people should gain the ability to self-organise spontaneously without help from governments and leaders, but I think that in this issue, and considering the state of reality, I gladly agree with legislation prohibiting RFID implants at the workplace. After all, high-security workplaces operated well for many years before the advent of RFID, and I think they can continue operating just as well in the future without implants. The potential of misuse is just too great, and is no real need for RFID at all.
How long until a tyrannical fascist government requires any newborn baby to be implanted with RFID or similar technology?
I find it interesting that the Apocalypse contains passages that cause Atheists and Christians to agree on something. I personally believe that this specific passage refers to government control, ie it is a call for Christians to be against unreasonable and extensive controls by the government. This is not surprising, considering that Christians were unwelcome in the Roman Empire, just like Atheists still are in many modern states.
If every single employer in any field started requiring RFID implants, then any sane person out there would be reasonable in feeling that they were being treated as cattle by the society as a whole.
Capitalism will quickly filter out any irresponsible companies as long as the people comprising the society have at least half a brain. Unfortunately, most people seem to possess less than that, and allow companies like MS (Windows monopoly) or Sony (rootkit, batteries) to profit. The free market can work, but the people that form the market are dumb, therefore they get exactly what they deserve.
Here in Greece the majority of the businesses are still on DOS. Some of them on real DOS, others on DOS programs running under (guess what) Win95 or 98. There are also many informatics companies, some in the stock market as well, with their primary products being available for both DOS and Win.
The best thing that could happen to Opera would be an open source or Free software version. The lack of an open source Opera is exactly what keeps Opera so low in the browser popularity charts. Kudos to Opera for creating a great desktop and mobile browser, and I have to admit that I am amazed at the quality of their software given the fact that they chose the closed source model, but I think their days in business are numbered unless they learn how to make a profit while letting the code be free, preferably under the GPL. It *is* possible to give away the source and still manage to run a profitable business.
The proper action is, of course, to ensure that you can monitor your house well. It is your responsibility to monitor your belongings. It is not your right to make the life of innocent people difficult just because they happen to carry a bag. A person may be in a hurry for extremely serious business or personal reasons and not want to wait to have their bags searched, or they may not want you to know what personal items they carry (eg they may have a pornographic magazine in there and not want you to see it). Just because someone does not let you search their bags does not mean they are shoplifters.
Just because a percentage of the population is prone to theft does not mean that a business has any right to treat all of its customers like criminals and make their life difficult.
There is a great way to help businesses remember that treating you like a criminal is not their right: Stop giving them your money. Shop only at places where you are being treated as a respectable customer.
I think big shops in areas of high population density tend to treat their customers like potential criminals more than small shops in suburban areas. It may be a bit hard to find a shop that treats you respectably in a big city dominated by big businesses. It's usually in low population density areas and away from the downtown where you can find small, often independently owned shops. There you are usually greeted by name and treated right, so why not buy from them?
Employees are not owned by their employers. If being employed means surrendering the sovereignty of your body to an employer by accepting an implant then this equates employees with cattle or sheep that are being tagged for identification before slaughter.
Here in Europe most people who want a mobile phone but not the bill settle with a card service where you have the phone and a SIM card, and you buy credit either by visiting a kiosk near your home or by calling and charging your credit card, or via Web banking. Not sure whether this kind of service exists in the US.
I am in Europe and one of my landlines is ISDN, which features an automated stream from my provider displaying the current time and date on both of my two ISDN terminals's screen continuously. In addition, I also have access to a voice time service. I make good use of both services every day, primarily the stream service, as I have found it much better to use the ISDN terminals as clocks instead of having dedicated clocks and remembering to change the DST settings or synchronise the time. The ISDN time stream automatically synchronises whenever I make a call, so I don't have to worry about DST. The voice service has also been proved useful as well in various ocassions, especially when out of my home office, although my mobile phone has a similar GSM time stream. I certainly wouldn't like to see phone time services going away, as they are useful for making sure what the correct and official time is.
The summary doesn't state that this baby runs Ubuntu Linux.
The problem with these kinds of forms and background checks is that they assume that you know all this information. There are no "I don't remember/don't know" fields, eg you may have never known a father or mother, so it's impossible to properly fill out the form without letting some required fields blank or customising it a bit. Even to fill out the information you can know, you need to spend precious time from your life to find all the tiny details asked. A person may agree to undergo a background check, but may be unable to provide some information. What if the investigators assume that you just tried to lie or hide something? These forms are really a filter against people who either don't fit the usual profile for reasons outside their control or just forget too easily.
oh well, it was of course Tribune, not Tribute. I made a typo.
Hello Mr Griffin. It is a privilege to employ these exceptional engineers, not a right. If you make their lives difficult, they will leave.
Employees are not sheep to be slaughtered. They are stakeholders of your organisation and you have to take their views into account when you draw new policies.