Hehe. In Peru I kid you not one day I had the Austin Powers scene play out. I was dodging tik tiks in the street climbing over walls and dashing through shops to escape the mob of girls chasing me.
I finally was able to double back and hide in my hotel. It's a dangerous world out there!
And maybe burglars are using google maps to plan their escape route! Oh My!
Maybe they're using google docs to plan their capers!
Maybe they count their loot using google spreadsheet!
The information contained within street view is so far out of date by the time anyone has ever seen an image it makes it useless for "casing out a joint". Maybe that family moved and a new family with a rotweiler moved in! Not to mention if criminals find this information really usefull they could just steal two handicams pointed out each way in a car full of laundry and drive by once a month. Shazam! You have google street view and nobody bothered writing down your license plate number. Or if they did that's extremely circumstantial evidence.
We have a neighborhood watch program in my neighborhood and we're very vigilant. We're also on street view. I don't think it has had ANY affect on our crime. Why? Because we know where the crime originates from: two streets away.
This idea that culture is to be remain stagnant and locked is naive, foolish and quite honestly incredibly insulting to culture.
Let's take the native american/western european collision. It was the arrogance of the Europeans that the two cultures couldn't learn anything from one another that prevented them from learning from the other culture. The Native Americans, despite being viewed as backwards and childish once it became convenient to commit genocide, were eager to adopt the technologies and some of the cultural institutions of the Europeans because they thought they were 'useful'. If we hadn't attempted to wipe out the Native Americans or been so arrogant as to presume that their culture was incompatible with our own I think we would have a fascinating blend.
Yes you need to be sensitive to local traditions and views. But that doesn't mean that you freeze a society in time. Japan's culture evolved out of the realities it faced. Now they are being faced with a new challenge and one thing history has proven time and time again is that ignoring the problem and pretending it'll just go away is never the solution.
Modern, compact, high quality cameras have destroyed our expectations of any public act not being recorded and published. That's a fact. Japan even is the country is in many ways responsible for that change in the world. Now the consequences of that technology are starting to materialize and if Japan wants to retain their privacy cultures then they have to change the technology and prohibit photography and publishing in residential areas except by people who live within that block. Otherwise some other company will fill Google's place. Some private Japanese citizen who wants to provide street view maps and accept the criticism in exchange for money will simply step in instead.
It only takes one person to take Google's place and in a country of millions you can't expect someone won't do it.
Ban cameras in public spaces or accept the consequences of progress. This is the pandora's box of imaging technology. What happens when we all have microscopic cameras embedded in our retinas retaining all of our lives? Do we have GPS black out our cameras then? What if I want to publish my memories? It's untennable. It's unrealistic to expect the law to be able to cover it and it's impossible to enforce. Welcome to the Now.
And who gave you the right to decide how each country and culture should think? You might not agree with the Japanese view - tough luck, just don't choose to live there. But you have not got the right to tell others that they are wrong simply because it is not in accord with your own personal view or it isn't the view adopted by your own country.
I'm not judging their belief. I completely agree with it. It should be taboo to snoop on your neighbors and stare at them. All that I'm saying is that Google is not the problem--the problem is the Japanese people are about to come to terms with REALITY. The reality is that people who want to snoop on them can do so legally and without being discovered.
They have been living on the assumption that that is not true. They are now discovering that that is wrong.
My exact phrase was "Expectation of Privacy". The reasonable expectation of privacy is that you can do something with knowledge of who knows about it. I can legally control who is in my apartment at any given time. Therefore anything I do inside my apartment has a reasonable expectation of privacy since my actions reflect what I know can be seen while inside my apartment. If I am naked in front of an open window on a busy street it might be taboo for people to look at me but I also have to realzie that my reasonable expectation of privacy has been expanded to the public domain.
Before the invention of cameras your reasonable expectation of privacy while in a public space was the people you could see. Therefore in the case of alleyways you had a reasonable expectation of privacy extending to people who happened to walk by and if a flock of insensitive german tourists can running through with cameras you could react and hide yourself before more than 2 or 3 saw you.
Cameras--not google obliterated that expectation of privacy. People have to become aware of what was true before Google Street View. They had already lost that privacy.
So I'm not being critical of the Japanese Culture. I'm being critical of those who say that this is a new problem and a problem limited to Google. This is a case where a cultural expectation and reality are out of sync.
This is like people complaining that security exploits known by hackers should be kept hidden. The only people who are kept out of the dark by not making commonly known security exploits public are the people who need to know they're at risk.
You're suggesting I don't care about Japanese privacy concerns but do care about American.
I would have thought my final sentence about hanging out my window to be seen by the google van would have been sufficient information for you to reach the conclusion that I am not one of those people who think "privacy in public is all important".
If I have a lurid little affair that I don't want ANYBODY to see. I do it in a place where NOBODY can get to without breaking a law or me discovering their presence. There is nothing stopping a law abiding citizen from walking down a japanese alleyway and looking at me having an affair in my back yard except possible shame... but that shame would be nothing compared to the shame felt by the person having been discovered.
The invention of the cell phone cameras already destroyed the Japanese expectation to privacy.
I don't pirate games any more because I have sufficient disposable income to simply buy bad games without any fear. However there were two driving motivations when I was younger and had very little disposable income:
1) What if the game sucks and I don't get my $50 worth out of it. 2) I can't afford the 10 games that are on the Lan Party circuit. And except for many counter strike and team fortress those 10 games could cycle pretty quickly from month to month. I definitely can't afford the 40 odd games that come up during play at LAN parties.
There was a third minor force and that would be: 3) My mom doesn't approve of this game so I don't want to have physical evidence of its existance (ala Half Life) or a lot of questions to be asked about it.
The real problem then becomes laziness and fufillment. By the time I've determined that it's a game that's got staying power or quality I've already got it installed. I've already played it and I while I feel like it would be worth my money I already have it.
So what's my solution? Sliding pay amounts. I am willing to pay $25 for practically any 'feature length' game and $5 for any 'arcade' game. Turn games into Nagware:
1) Let the consumer give a game a 'pre-purchase' value. Let's say it's $10 for a teenager or someone who isn't sure this is the genre for them. Then set a limit at which you will not be nagged. Say $40. Let the people who purchased it continue using it but inconvenience them for 20-30 seconds every time the game starts. Not enough to convince them to crack it. Just enough to be naggy.
Now you've solved the big 2 problems all at once.
1) those who want to try but often forget are given an opportunity to contribute to the game's income. 2) those who are afraid of losing money on a bad game are able to manage their risk.
and 3) you've also increased your pool of income. I would spend $10 on crysis just to play with it every now and then but I'm not going to spend $50 on it. That's $10 more than the developer would make on me. On the other hand I might actually come to like it after tinkering and get addicted and decide that yes that nagging little window that just asks for my username and password for an impulse buy will simply authorize the game.
You HAVE to make games impulse purchases to kill piracy. Impulse purchases have two factors:
1) It's so easy to do you could practically do it accidentally. 2) The price has to be so low you have no expectation of return.
Music purchases now have met criteria #1 but not #2. I'm thinking for music piracy the cost has to come down to a quarter. Nobody will think twice about a quarter even for crap and they'll be so crazed with buying "free" stuff that their quarterly expenses will far outstrip their previous purchasing power.
But how do you know where the Katmachi block is? Randomly driving around?
The problem I see with an octree style navigational system for normal human beings is it makes it relatively impossible to know where you need to go. I can often know that I simply need to drive north until I hit "10th street" and then head south on it until I hit "B Ave" turn left and then my address will be #1234.
With only a subdivision I can't 'cross' my target destination.
No wonder GPS devices in Japan are so much better than ours with cool 3D street views!
Or am I completely missing the 'technique' for navigating? It's been 15 years since I was last in Japan and I wasn't a driver then.
The notion of what is taboo is generally applied to actions, not people or things. In this case, the action would be 1) viewing things considered private by this society and 2) publishing these things and making them extremely searchable.
Yes but: #1 Only applies to the act of loading the webpage and looking at the photo not the camera snapping a photo automaticaly. So as I said in this society using street view just for shits and giggles would STILL be taboo. #2 Is not a 'traditional' taboo. If it's taboo at all it's a new taboo. Making something searchable is not inherently taboo. Publishing something is not inherently taboo. You can't say "Street view maps are an ancient taboo ingrained in a society" when the action "publishing a photo of your house" only extremely recently became a possibility. Some people view homosexuality taboo--should google news refuse to index stories related to gay marriage?
Google is providing legal data to people looking for it. I for one do not want Google deciding which legal data should and should not show up when searched for by an intelligent and moral creature. It's not Google's job to dictate to me what is and is not moral.
Interestingly enough the counter action would be for the identity of everybody who was reported as "Suspicious" to be known. So what the Japanese really want in this case is the ability to strip the privacy of anybody who they 'suspect' is planning an illegal activity.
The only difference between a Google viewer and a On The Street Viewer is the ability of the person being viewed to potentially know the identities of the viewer and thereby shame them if they feel the viewer is acting immorally.
I have blonde hair and blue eyes. Every time I have visited China I have been practically assaulted by Japanese tourists. They not only photo me. They try and touch my hair and start posing in front of me etc etc etc. Needless to say this was unappreciated.
My aunt lives in Hawaii and japanese tourists are amazed by the size of her feet. She's been lieing on the beach and had Japanese tourists come up and lay down right next to her and have their pictures taken by their family with their feet right next to hers for comparison.
It's been my conclusion that any view of privacy on the part of the Japanese is strictly limited to the island of Japan. Which I've never had a problem with from a priacy standpoint--just a personal intrusion. I don't care if I'm in a photo. I do care that I'm being prevented from going about my business by someone standing in my way trying to pose in front of me. Or touching me. They can touch my blonde hair photos on the internet all they want as long as I don't have to be there while you do it.
Well I guess that's the root of the argument isn't it.
Is Google responsible for how you use their technology?
Is BitTorrent responsible for piracy? It sure does make piracy convenient!
Street view has a legitimate use and an insensitive and privacy invasive use. Which it becomes is not a property of the photo but of the viewer.
If there were a real-world means of preventing someone from seeing something which google was circumventing then YES google would be violating privacy. Google is simply refusing to pass judgement on a user's legal request for information. Google is not in the business of determining what is and is not "sensitive". Maybe looking at porn is taboo or even 'sinful' but that's not Google's responsibility that's yours.
Every webpage and blog on the internet can contain extrmely private information about my life. Maybe there is a Blog by someone I know detailing my every unfavorable action. It's not Google's responsibility to not index that. If the information is legal then it should be indexed without any bias or prejudice on Google's part.
Are you honestly suggesting that Google should be censoring content it indexes based on "morality" and not legality? Maybe it shouldn't index wiccan webpages. Wicca is tabboo. Christian Moms might not expect their children to learn more about wicca.
TFA says that someone taking pictures would be taken to the police station for "Questioning". In other words you would be harassed and if you weren't plotting an actual crime let go without a charge. What the Japanese people are about to discover is that their expectation of privacy was ALREADY too high. They were thinking anybody who was insensitive and snooping would be discovered. This was a false sense of security. It was already trivial to take photos of a place you thought was private... legally... and without being noticed.
What should be suprising and shocking isn't that Google is doing it. But that if Google is doing it anby who is sufficiently motivated could do it.
I agree with you but it's sort of like the old saying "A lock keeps an honest man honest" which I completely disagree with.
An honest man does not steal something regardless if it's unlocked. A lock simply stops a dishonest men who thinks they can get away without being caught. Google maps streetview simply let's insensitive people get away with their insensitivity without as high of risk of their insensitivity being discovered.
Google isn't providing an image that couldn't be serendipitously and legally aquired by a regular citizen for their own personal gratification. TFA lists one of the threats to privacy is criminals "casing out your house". That could just as easily be done with a quick drive by. Most "casing" involves multiple trips. Observations over time to find patterns and weaknesses. A single driveby provides insufficient information.
If the existance of photos is illegal then tinted passenger windows provide an equally useful screen behind which to spy with impunity.
Taking a picture inside my bathroom however is physically impossible for a stranger to do. If on the other hand strangers were walking through my bathroom every day then it would be as easy for them to sneak a peek while walking through my bathroom as going online and sneeking a peek. They could be rigged with cameras which I don't know about. If a road ran through my bathroom then every single car could have a secret camera in it. People could be planting tiny cell phone video cameras in dumpsters across from my bathroom. TFA was very specific in its accusation that it was bad because people could look without being discovered. But looking without anyone 'finding you out' is possible without the assistance of google. It requires intent for the peeping tom to rotate the camera to the side and look out the side of the window. If I were there in person it requires intent for me to look to the side.
This is a human use question not a technological one. Those who have a right to look to the side of the road... should look at side of the road pictures. Those who do not have a reason to look along the side of the road--who are upstanding and considerate individuals should not look at those pictures.
If the people at Google were reviewing the images then yes it would be 'run by people'. But I imagine the process is almost completely automated by this point. The invasion of privacy is to look at someone's house. Not the camera capturing the image.
It's a question of ethics. A camera cannot commit an immoral act. Only a photographer can. Google's web crawler cannot be charged with child pornography possession if it simply indexes a page containing child pornography. Google's street view is nothing more than an automated tool which captures data.
It only becomes a question of morality when someone chooses to view those images. Morality can only be tied into intent. If you view child pornography on accident then you have not commited an immoral act. If you intend to view child pornography and you view it then you've committed an immoral act.
I don't know that what google is doing is taboo seeing as they are a technology in this case not a person.
If it's taboo to spy on your neighbors then don't use Google's street view. Or at the very least keep the view centered on the road.
You can't claim "the photo made you look". It's like child pornography. The fact that it exists does not force you to go download it. If you find it impolite to look at people's houses... don't look at people's houses. I'm going to let those who find the images offensive in on a little secret: nothing is stopping some insensitive smeghead from just driving down your street and staring at your house.
My view on all this? The Googmobile drove past work this last week and I hung out the window and waved.
What's really outrageous is that you're too stupid to understand that you just need to choose a random radio button. Any Radio Button. To get the exact same programming.
Or that you could even select the "Over the Air" option.
That's funny I thought it was the personal profiles instead of sporting events which caused NBC's ratings to plummet.
ABC used to run the olympic coverage as if it was a spectacular sporting event... and guess what... they got way better ratings. NBC took over had sob stories every 3 seconds. Skipped FINALS for some sports in order to show figure skaters practicing and warming up... and then was shocked and amazed to see that their ratings plummeted.
NBC and their soft focus, diffusion, melodrama, lifetime shit has ruined the olympics and they've payed the price in viewership. They need to start actually covering the olypmics instead of the cheesy hallmark bumpers.
Coincidence? I think yes. They're both failing to catch on for the exact same reason but DRM has nothing to do with it.
HD-DVD had dramatically less DRM than BluRay. It was less strict in every measureable way. All of the HD-DVDs I'm buying now are relabeled international disks being redistributed around the world to clear inventory. It just proves that the only thing "Region" locked was the display type and shipping address. HD-DVDs also didn't break on newer players because the standard changed in mid release. And yet despite all of that it had lower adoption rates than Blu-Ray... and neither can really be called a success.
The two are failing to catch on because people aren't seeing any reason to upgrade but they are seeing costs (Bluray:Cost, Windows:New Bugs).
I use Vista and XP and I haven't seen any difference in DRM between the two. If you stripped DRM from Blu-Rays... adoption rates would probably stay completely stagnant. Those who don't have Blu-Ray (or HD-DVD) yet aren't waiting for the format to be "portable"... these are the people who don't have devices besides a TV and DVD player *to move* the video to. The people who DO have Blu-Ray or HD-DVD players actually are the early adoption/cutting edge types who do want to move their movies to a hard drive or portable player or video game system.
People are happy with what they have. They're happy with their DVDs and they're happy with their XP computers. The market is saturated with satisfied customers. That is the problem. Not some ideological design of the software which a very small number of customers understand exist.
Then again I've used a "business" windows laptop before. And after all the Cisco crap has been installed, it's been buttoned down to the most extremely limited margins of usability and 10 levels of anti-virus have been installed plus it's running Windows 2k with IE4 it's horrible. I would say the home windows experience is infinitely better than the IT managed windows experience. And I would say that most people's loathing of windows often stems from horrible horrible horrible work machines.
1) XP was dramatically improved by code ported from Vista development (SP2, Windows Search, Windows Media Center, etc etc...) 2) Businessess are ALWAYS slow to upgrade. I have friends who work at fortune 500 companies who were JUST allowed to install Windows XP from Windows 2000.
If Microsoft hadn't backported a lot of their code for the good of XP users then Vista would have been a tremendously greater shift than it has been. Microsoft could have just said "too bad upgrade" but instead they actually minimized the reasons for people to upgrade in order to keep existing customers happy.
Windows XP isn't the Windows XP that shipped originally... it's a quasi-Vista.
Or you find yourself alone in a scary place and you team up. You start a militia and you maintain peace about yourself at the point of a well fueled missile barge.
If it's dangerous to wander out into the dangerous bits... form your own gang to survive. Soon your gang becomes a colony and then a fleet and then a nation... and suddently the dangerous bits are just home.
So in summary:
- Show the user what it is they can do.
- List properties as adjectives and actions as verbs. (This is a fundamental that is broken more than any other.) "OK is not a verb. "Yes" is not a verb.
- Show the user what will happen before they do it in real time so that they can decide if that's actually what they want.
and
- Help the user by showing them what the next logical step would be if there is one.
It's not rocket science. If every developer could figure out a way to balance those three needs usability would vastly improve.
BTW while we're talking about usability. This is 2008 it's about fucking time for Slashdot to implement some RTF editing functionality. I mean honstly. Typing in HTML? What is this the dark ages? IF I want a new line.. WHY DO I HAVE TO TYPE IN BR?/rant
EXACTLY! I can learn a programming language and write a program that does precisely what I want it to do. But that takes a vast investment of time to have a tool which does instantly what I need done. Perfect for people like programmers who might do one thing over and over and over and over... but not so hot for someone who just wants to do something once every 3 months.
The bane of the command line program is this: ">"
I sit there and stare at the little arrow. I want to copy a file. But all I can see is ">" What does ">" mean? Maybe I should type in what I want to do "CopyFile"... "command unknown". Great... well I'm out of ideas. Yes the interface might be faster... if you don't have to open a MAN file every 10 minutes because you forgot if it was cpyfile or copyfile or cpyfle or copy_file or copy-file or... whatever. The point is. Command lines are like code. They will do exactly what you want them to do once you know the magic incantantation with the right pronunciation. But if you know what you want to do but have never used the software before you're SOL. This is why I love node based tools. When I'm learning a new programming language I have no idea what classes and functions exist. I might even know the exact tool I need "I need to find the position in a string where "hello" is found". But translating that into a class name is a game witchcraft and endless help document scimming until you happen to find an arbitrary function name which does it.
GUIs show me my choices. Yes they show me my choices every single time. But I like to know what it is I can do. A BAD gui doesn't show me my opportunities. It buries it in a menu which is as bad as burying it in a command line command somewhere. But even a GUI is better than a command line while learning because when you finally do find the command you want to do... you can act on it instantly! No closing the MAN file reciting "'copyfile 'filename' -f -s-t-u #silent *underhanded" in your head hoping you don't forget it before you type it in.
Again many developer tools can operate on command line because the functionality barely changes from version to version. In all of the software I use every release adds hundreds of new features I need to learn and I need real time feedback on changes I make... I can't wait to execute a command to see if it's right.
Take SQL as a perfect example of a command line tool. SQL has barely changed in its command structure in 15 years. Of course you're super fast at writing complex SQL scripts that deliver exactly the information you need! You've been practicing those exact same commands for 15 years! What if SQL radically changed every few months? And what if instead of only a few dozen commands chained together it was 10,000 tools and settings in a single application? You cany very quickly get to the point in most software where it is simply impossible to use it as a command line tool and expect a user to use it without a MAN file permanantly open next to it.
I've spent 3 years learning MaxScript for instance for 3DsMax. Which is its command line toolset. It can take me a week to create a script which I can do in 20 seconds using the GUI. Once I write the script it might take an artist half a second but even I completely forget the name of a function I wrote earlier in the morning "What was it again? GetObjectIDFromDatabase or was it getObjectfromDatabase... what was the order of the function calls again? What was the name of that function which... I wrote it myself! And I still have to refer to my own help file to remember what the name of 90% of my commands are. It's unreasonable to expect someone to remember the command names and possible flags for 200 functions... and that's a primitive script. And even if I did expect someone to memorize all 200 commands... they would just have to memorize another 200 the next month when another tool is added to the toolset... and another 200 the next month after that... and another 200 the month after that.
American Heritage Dictionairy: [quote]predate (pr-dt') tr.v., -dated, -dating, -dates. To mark or designate with a date earlier than the actual one: predated the check. To precede in time; antedate.[/quote]
Yes but somewhere between my cell phone records, my credit card purchases, my ATM withdrawls, my debit charges, message posts from forums, instant message logs, visibility by friends and family etc etc etc... it becomes VERY easy to track my every movement.
I probably have an alleby if even a weak one for every 15 minutes of my life (ignoring sleep) and even then my cell phone could possibly be used as evidence if they believed it was actually with me.
Honestly what I care about more than the government knowing where I am... is a second, third, fourth and fifth set of data which corroborates where I was. If the government has my license plate supposedly on third and madison but I have a credit card purchase, gas purchases and an ATM withdrawl in another city it becomes more difficult to frame me.
I'm not at all concerned about getting framed... but in a police state where people are being held without proof or evidence you're already WELLL past the point where them knowing where I am is a concern. If I'm going to get a fair trial then the more shop security cameras, cell phone tracking etc etc that is independent of the government the better.
It becomes an arms race. The more things tracking me the more things a big brother government has to forge. If they STILL forge 4 stores, 3 credit card purchases and a cell phone log then it doesn't matter if they ACTUALLY caught you on a government at all... they can just make shit up. This is why I'm so unconcered about government privacy. If I get arrested for being critical of the government... I've got much bigger issues than being 'caught'.
Slashdot Mirror
Hehe. In Peru I kid you not one day I had the Austin Powers scene play out. I was dodging tik tiks in the street climbing over walls and dashing through shops to escape the mob of girls chasing me.
I finally was able to double back and hide in my hotel. It's a dangerous world out there!
Then change order fulfillment servers.
Paypal is instantaneous even for credit cards.
It's absurd to expect more than a 30 second completion time on a credit card transaction in today's world.
And maybe burglars are using google maps to plan their escape route! Oh My!
Maybe they're using google docs to plan their capers!
Maybe they count their loot using google spreadsheet!
The information contained within street view is so far out of date by the time anyone has ever seen an image it makes it useless for "casing out a joint". Maybe that family moved and a new family with a rotweiler moved in! Not to mention if criminals find this information really usefull they could just steal two handicams pointed out each way in a car full of laundry and drive by once a month. Shazam! You have google street view and nobody bothered writing down your license plate number. Or if they did that's extremely circumstantial evidence.
We have a neighborhood watch program in my neighborhood and we're very vigilant. We're also on street view. I don't think it has had ANY affect on our crime. Why? Because we know where the crime originates from: two streets away.
Culture is not sacrosant. It never has been.
This idea that culture is to be remain stagnant and locked is naive, foolish and quite honestly incredibly insulting to culture.
Let's take the native american/western european collision. It was the arrogance of the Europeans that the two cultures couldn't learn anything from one another that prevented them from learning from the other culture. The Native Americans, despite being viewed as backwards and childish once it became convenient to commit genocide, were eager to adopt the technologies and some of the cultural institutions of the Europeans because they thought they were 'useful'. If we hadn't attempted to wipe out the Native Americans or been so arrogant as to presume that their culture was incompatible with our own I think we would have a fascinating blend.
Yes you need to be sensitive to local traditions and views. But that doesn't mean that you freeze a society in time. Japan's culture evolved out of the realities it faced. Now they are being faced with a new challenge and one thing history has proven time and time again is that ignoring the problem and pretending it'll just go away is never the solution.
Modern, compact, high quality cameras have destroyed our expectations of any public act not being recorded and published. That's a fact. Japan even is the country is in many ways responsible for that change in the world. Now the consequences of that technology are starting to materialize and if Japan wants to retain their privacy cultures then they have to change the technology and prohibit photography and publishing in residential areas except by people who live within that block. Otherwise some other company will fill Google's place. Some private Japanese citizen who wants to provide street view maps and accept the criticism in exchange for money will simply step in instead.
It only takes one person to take Google's place and in a country of millions you can't expect someone won't do it.
Ban cameras in public spaces or accept the consequences of progress. This is the pandora's box of imaging technology. What happens when we all have microscopic cameras embedded in our retinas retaining all of our lives? Do we have GPS black out our cameras then? What if I want to publish my memories? It's untennable. It's unrealistic to expect the law to be able to cover it and it's impossible to enforce. Welcome to the Now.
And who gave you the right to decide how each country and culture should think? You might not agree with the Japanese view - tough luck, just don't choose to live there. But you have not got the right to tell others that they are wrong simply because it is not in accord with your own personal view or it isn't the view adopted by your own country.
I'm not judging their belief. I completely agree with it. It should be taboo to snoop on your neighbors and stare at them. All that I'm saying is that Google is not the problem--the problem is the Japanese people are about to come to terms with REALITY. The reality is that people who want to snoop on them can do so legally and without being discovered.
They have been living on the assumption that that is not true. They are now discovering that that is wrong.
My exact phrase was "Expectation of Privacy". The reasonable expectation of privacy is that you can do something with knowledge of who knows about it. I can legally control who is in my apartment at any given time. Therefore anything I do inside my apartment has a reasonable expectation of privacy since my actions reflect what I know can be seen while inside my apartment. If I am naked in front of an open window on a busy street it might be taboo for people to look at me but I also have to realzie that my reasonable expectation of privacy has been expanded to the public domain.
Before the invention of cameras your reasonable expectation of privacy while in a public space was the people you could see. Therefore in the case of alleyways you had a reasonable expectation of privacy extending to people who happened to walk by and if a flock of insensitive german tourists can running through with cameras you could react and hide yourself before more than 2 or 3 saw you.
Cameras--not google obliterated that expectation of privacy. People have to become aware of what was true before Google Street View. They had already lost that privacy.
So I'm not being critical of the Japanese Culture. I'm being critical of those who say that this is a new problem and a problem limited to Google. This is a case where a cultural expectation and reality are out of sync.
This is like people complaining that security exploits known by hackers should be kept hidden. The only people who are kept out of the dark by not making commonly known security exploits public are the people who need to know they're at risk.
You're suggesting I don't care about Japanese privacy concerns but do care about American.
I would have thought my final sentence about hanging out my window to be seen by the google van would have been sufficient information for you to reach the conclusion that I am not one of those people who think "privacy in public is all important".
If I have a lurid little affair that I don't want ANYBODY to see. I do it in a place where NOBODY can get to without breaking a law or me discovering their presence. There is nothing stopping a law abiding citizen from walking down a japanese alleyway and looking at me having an affair in my back yard except possible shame... but that shame would be nothing compared to the shame felt by the person having been discovered.
The invention of the cell phone cameras already destroyed the Japanese expectation to privacy.
I think this is the real problem.
I don't pirate games any more because I have sufficient disposable income to simply buy bad games without any fear. However there were two driving motivations when I was younger and had very little disposable income:
1) What if the game sucks and I don't get my $50 worth out of it.
2) I can't afford the 10 games that are on the Lan Party circuit. And except for many counter strike and team fortress those 10 games could cycle pretty quickly from month to month. I definitely can't afford the 40 odd games that come up during play at LAN parties.
There was a third minor force and that would be:
3) My mom doesn't approve of this game so I don't want to have physical evidence of its existance (ala Half Life) or a lot of questions to be asked about it.
The real problem then becomes laziness and fufillment. By the time I've determined that it's a game that's got staying power or quality I've already got it installed. I've already played it and I while I feel like it would be worth my money I already have it.
So what's my solution? Sliding pay amounts. I am willing to pay $25 for practically any 'feature length' game and $5 for any 'arcade' game. Turn games into Nagware:
1) Let the consumer give a game a 'pre-purchase' value. Let's say it's $10 for a teenager or someone who isn't sure this is the genre for them. Then set a limit at which you will not be nagged. Say $40. Let the people who purchased it continue using it but inconvenience them for 20-30 seconds every time the game starts. Not enough to convince them to crack it. Just enough to be naggy.
Now you've solved the big 2 problems all at once.
1) those who want to try but often forget are given an opportunity to contribute to the game's income.
2) those who are afraid of losing money on a bad game are able to manage their risk.
and
3) you've also increased your pool of income. I would spend $10 on crysis just to play with it every now and then but I'm not going to spend $50 on it. That's $10 more than the developer would make on me. On the other hand I might actually come to like it after tinkering and get addicted and decide that yes that nagging little window that just asks for my username and password for an impulse buy will simply authorize the game.
You HAVE to make games impulse purchases to kill piracy. Impulse purchases have two factors:
1) It's so easy to do you could practically do it accidentally.
2) The price has to be so low you have no expectation of return.
Music purchases now have met criteria #1 but not #2. I'm thinking for music piracy the cost has to come down to a quarter. Nobody will think twice about a quarter even for crap and they'll be so crazed with buying "free" stuff that their quarterly expenses will far outstrip their previous purchasing power.
But how do you know where the Katmachi block is? Randomly driving around?
The problem I see with an octree style navigational system for normal human beings is it makes it relatively impossible to know where you need to go. I can often know that I simply need to drive north until I hit "10th street" and then head south on it until I hit "B Ave" turn left and then my address will be #1234.
With only a subdivision I can't 'cross' my target destination.
No wonder GPS devices in Japan are so much better than ours with cool 3D street views!
Or am I completely missing the 'technique' for navigating? It's been 15 years since I was last in Japan and I wasn't a driver then.
The notion of what is taboo is generally applied to actions, not people or things. In this case, the action would be 1) viewing things considered private by this society and 2) publishing these things and making them extremely searchable.
Yes but:
#1 Only applies to the act of loading the webpage and looking at the photo not the camera snapping a photo automaticaly. So as I said in this society using street view just for shits and giggles would STILL be taboo.
#2 Is not a 'traditional' taboo. If it's taboo at all it's a new taboo. Making something searchable is not inherently taboo. Publishing something is not inherently taboo. You can't say "Street view maps are an ancient taboo ingrained in a society" when the action "publishing a photo of your house" only extremely recently became a possibility. Some people view homosexuality taboo--should google news refuse to index stories related to gay marriage?
Google is providing legal data to people looking for it. I for one do not want Google deciding which legal data should and should not show up when searched for by an intelligent and moral creature. It's not Google's job to dictate to me what is and is not moral.
Interestingly enough the counter action would be for the identity of everybody who was reported as "Suspicious" to be known. So what the Japanese really want in this case is the ability to strip the privacy of anybody who they 'suspect' is planning an illegal activity.
The only difference between a Google viewer and a On The Street Viewer is the ability of the person being viewed to potentially know the identities of the viewer and thereby shame them if they feel the viewer is acting immorally.
I have blonde hair and blue eyes. Every time I have visited China I have been practically assaulted by Japanese tourists. They not only photo me. They try and touch my hair and start posing in front of me etc etc etc. Needless to say this was unappreciated.
My aunt lives in Hawaii and japanese tourists are amazed by the size of her feet. She's been lieing on the beach and had Japanese tourists come up and lay down right next to her and have their pictures taken by their family with their feet right next to hers for comparison.
It's been my conclusion that any view of privacy on the part of the Japanese is strictly limited to the island of Japan. Which I've never had a problem with from a priacy standpoint--just a personal intrusion. I don't care if I'm in a photo. I do care that I'm being prevented from going about my business by someone standing in my way trying to pose in front of me. Or touching me. They can touch my blonde hair photos on the internet all they want as long as I don't have to be there while you do it.
Well I guess that's the root of the argument isn't it.
Is Google responsible for how you use their technology?
Is BitTorrent responsible for piracy? It sure does make piracy convenient!
Street view has a legitimate use and an insensitive and privacy invasive use. Which it becomes is not a property of the photo but of the viewer.
If there were a real-world means of preventing someone from seeing something which google was circumventing then YES google would be violating privacy. Google is simply refusing to pass judgement on a user's legal request for information. Google is not in the business of determining what is and is not "sensitive". Maybe looking at porn is taboo or even 'sinful' but that's not Google's responsibility that's yours.
Every webpage and blog on the internet can contain extrmely private information about my life. Maybe there is a Blog by someone I know detailing my every unfavorable action. It's not Google's responsibility to not index that. If the information is legal then it should be indexed without any bias or prejudice on Google's part.
Are you honestly suggesting that Google should be censoring content it indexes based on "morality" and not legality? Maybe it shouldn't index wiccan webpages. Wicca is tabboo. Christian Moms might not expect their children to learn more about wicca.
TFA says that someone taking pictures would be taken to the police station for "Questioning". In other words you would be harassed and if you weren't plotting an actual crime let go without a charge. What the Japanese people are about to discover is that their expectation of privacy was ALREADY too high. They were thinking anybody who was insensitive and snooping would be discovered. This was a false sense of security. It was already trivial to take photos of a place you thought was private... legally... and without being noticed.
What should be suprising and shocking isn't that Google is doing it. But that if Google is doing it anby who is sufficiently motivated could do it.
I agree with you but it's sort of like the old saying "A lock keeps an honest man honest" which I completely disagree with.
An honest man does not steal something regardless if it's unlocked. A lock simply stops a dishonest men who thinks they can get away without being caught. Google maps streetview simply let's insensitive people get away with their insensitivity without as high of risk of their insensitivity being discovered.
Google isn't providing an image that couldn't be serendipitously and legally aquired by a regular citizen for their own personal gratification. TFA lists one of the threats to privacy is criminals "casing out your house". That could just as easily be done with a quick drive by. Most "casing" involves multiple trips. Observations over time to find patterns and weaknesses. A single driveby provides insufficient information.
If the existance of photos is illegal then tinted passenger windows provide an equally useful screen behind which to spy with impunity.
Taking a picture inside my bathroom however is physically impossible for a stranger to do. If on the other hand strangers were walking through my bathroom every day then it would be as easy for them to sneak a peek while walking through my bathroom as going online and sneeking a peek. They could be rigged with cameras which I don't know about. If a road ran through my bathroom then every single car could have a secret camera in it. People could be planting tiny cell phone video cameras in dumpsters across from my bathroom. TFA was very specific in its accusation that it was bad because people could look without being discovered. But looking without anyone 'finding you out' is possible without the assistance of google. It requires intent for the peeping tom to rotate the camera to the side and look out the side of the window. If I were there in person it requires intent for me to look to the side.
This is a human use question not a technological one. Those who have a right to look to the side of the road... should look at side of the road pictures. Those who do not have a reason to look along the side of the road--who are upstanding and considerate individuals should not look at those pictures.
If the people at Google were reviewing the images then yes it would be 'run by people'. But I imagine the process is almost completely automated by this point. The invasion of privacy is to look at someone's house. Not the camera capturing the image.
It's a question of ethics. A camera cannot commit an immoral act. Only a photographer can. Google's web crawler cannot be charged with child pornography possession if it simply indexes a page containing child pornography. Google's street view is nothing more than an automated tool which captures data.
It only becomes a question of morality when someone chooses to view those images. Morality can only be tied into intent. If you view child pornography on accident then you have not commited an immoral act. If you intend to view child pornography and you view it then you've committed an immoral act.
I don't know that what google is doing is taboo seeing as they are a technology in this case not a person.
If it's taboo to spy on your neighbors then don't use Google's street view. Or at the very least keep the view centered on the road.
You can't claim "the photo made you look". It's like child pornography. The fact that it exists does not force you to go download it. If you find it impolite to look at people's houses... don't look at people's houses. I'm going to let those who find the images offensive in on a little secret: nothing is stopping some insensitive smeghead from just driving down your street and staring at your house.
My view on all this? The Googmobile drove past work this last week and I hung out the window and waved.
What's really outrageous is that you're too stupid to understand that you just need to choose a random radio button. Any Radio Button. To get the exact same programming.
Or that you could even select the "Over the Air" option.
That's funny I thought it was the personal profiles instead of sporting events which caused NBC's ratings to plummet.
ABC used to run the olympic coverage as if it was a spectacular sporting event... and guess what... they got way better ratings. NBC took over had sob stories every 3 seconds. Skipped FINALS for some sports in order to show figure skaters practicing and warming up... and then was shocked and amazed to see that their ratings plummeted.
NBC and their soft focus, diffusion, melodrama, lifetime shit has ruined the olympics and they've payed the price in viewership. They need to start actually covering the olypmics instead of the cheesy hallmark bumpers.
Coincidence? I think yes. They're both failing to catch on for the exact same reason but DRM has nothing to do with it.
HD-DVD had dramatically less DRM than BluRay. It was less strict in every measureable way. All of the HD-DVDs I'm buying now are relabeled international disks being redistributed around the world to clear inventory. It just proves that the only thing "Region" locked was the display type and shipping address. HD-DVDs also didn't break on newer players because the standard changed in mid release. And yet despite all of that it had lower adoption rates than Blu-Ray... and neither can really be called a success.
The two are failing to catch on because people aren't seeing any reason to upgrade but they are seeing costs (Bluray:Cost, Windows:New Bugs).
I use Vista and XP and I haven't seen any difference in DRM between the two. If you stripped DRM from Blu-Rays... adoption rates would probably stay completely stagnant. Those who don't have Blu-Ray (or HD-DVD) yet aren't waiting for the format to be "portable"... these are the people who don't have devices besides a TV and DVD player *to move* the video to. The people who DO have Blu-Ray or HD-DVD players actually are the early adoption/cutting edge types who do want to move their movies to a hard drive or portable player or video game system.
People are happy with what they have. They're happy with their DVDs and they're happy with their XP computers. The market is saturated with satisfied customers. That is the problem. Not some ideological design of the software which a very small number of customers understand exist.
Then again I've used a "business" windows laptop before. And after all the Cisco crap has been installed, it's been buttoned down to the most extremely limited margins of usability and 10 levels of anti-virus have been installed plus it's running Windows 2k with IE4 it's horrible. I would say the home windows experience is infinitely better than the IT managed windows experience. And I would say that most people's loathing of windows often stems from horrible horrible horrible work machines.
Yes but two things:
1) XP was dramatically improved by code ported from Vista development (SP2, Windows Search, Windows Media Center, etc etc...)
2) Businessess are ALWAYS slow to upgrade. I have friends who work at fortune 500 companies who were JUST allowed to install Windows XP from Windows 2000.
If Microsoft hadn't backported a lot of their code for the good of XP users then Vista would have been a tremendously greater shift than it has been. Microsoft could have just said "too bad upgrade" but instead they actually minimized the reasons for people to upgrade in order to keep existing customers happy.
Windows XP isn't the Windows XP that shipped originally... it's a quasi-Vista.
Or you find yourself alone in a scary place and you team up. You start a militia and you maintain peace about yourself at the point of a well fueled missile barge.
If it's dangerous to wander out into the dangerous bits... form your own gang to survive. Soon your gang becomes a colony and then a fleet and then a nation... and suddently the dangerous bits are just home.
So in summary: - Show the user what it is they can do.
/rant
- List properties as adjectives and actions as verbs. (This is a fundamental that is broken more than any other.) "OK is not a verb. "Yes" is not a verb.
- Show the user what will happen before they do it in real time so that they can decide if that's actually what they want.
and - Help the user by showing them what the next logical step would be if there is one.
It's not rocket science. If every developer could figure out a way to balance those three needs usability would vastly improve.
BTW while we're talking about usability. This is 2008 it's about fucking time for Slashdot to implement some RTF editing functionality. I mean honstly. Typing in HTML? What is this the dark ages? IF I want a new line.. WHY DO I HAVE TO TYPE IN BR?
EXACTLY! I can learn a programming language and write a program that does precisely what I want it to do. But that takes a vast investment of time to have a tool which does instantly what I need done. Perfect for people like programmers who might do one thing over and over and over and over... but not so hot for someone who just wants to do something once every 3 months.
The bane of the command line program is this: ">"
I sit there and stare at the little arrow. I want to copy a file. But all I can see is ">" What does ">" mean? Maybe I should type in what I want to do "CopyFile"... "command unknown". Great... well I'm out of ideas. Yes the interface might be faster... if you don't have to open a MAN file every 10 minutes because you forgot if it was cpyfile or copyfile or cpyfle or copy_file or copy-file or... whatever. The point is. Command lines are like code. They will do exactly what you want them to do once you know the magic incantantation with the right pronunciation. But if you know what you want to do but have never used the software before you're SOL. This is why I love node based tools. When I'm learning a new programming language I have no idea what classes and functions exist. I might even know the exact tool I need "I need to find the position in a string where "hello" is found". But translating that into a class name is a game witchcraft and endless help document scimming until you happen to find an arbitrary function name which does it.
GUIs show me my choices. Yes they show me my choices every single time. But I like to know what it is I can do. A BAD gui doesn't show me my opportunities. It buries it in a menu which is as bad as burying it in a command line command somewhere. But even a GUI is better than a command line while learning because when you finally do find the command you want to do... you can act on it instantly! No closing the MAN file reciting "'copyfile 'filename' -f -s-t-u #silent *underhanded" in your head hoping you don't forget it before you type it in.
Again many developer tools can operate on command line because the functionality barely changes from version to version. In all of the software I use every release adds hundreds of new features I need to learn and I need real time feedback on changes I make... I can't wait to execute a command to see if it's right.
Take SQL as a perfect example of a command line tool. SQL has barely changed in its command structure in 15 years. Of course you're super fast at writing complex SQL scripts that deliver exactly the information you need! You've been practicing those exact same commands for 15 years! What if SQL radically changed every few months? And what if instead of only a few dozen commands chained together it was 10,000 tools and settings in a single application? You cany very quickly get to the point in most software where it is simply impossible to use it as a command line tool and expect a user to use it without a MAN file permanantly open next to it.
I've spent 3 years learning MaxScript for instance for 3DsMax. Which is its command line toolset. It can take me a week to create a script which I can do in 20 seconds using the GUI. Once I write the script it might take an artist half a second but even I completely forget the name of a function I wrote earlier in the morning "What was it again? GetObjectIDFromDatabase or was it getObjectfromDatabase... what was the order of the function calls again? What was the name of that function which... I wrote it myself! And I still have to refer to my own help file to remember what the name of 90% of my commands are. It's unreasonable to expect someone to remember the command names and possible flags for 200 functions... and that's a primitive script. And even if I did expect someone to memorize all 200 commands... they would just have to memorize another 200 the next month when another tool is added to the toolset... and another 200 the next month after that... and another 200 the month after that.
American Heritage Dictionairy:
[quote]predate (pr-dt')
tr.v., -dated, -dating, -dates.
To mark or designate with a date earlier than the actual one: predated the check.
To precede in time; antedate.[/quote]
Yes but somewhere between my cell phone records, my credit card purchases, my ATM withdrawls, my debit charges, message posts from forums, instant message logs, visibility by friends and family etc etc etc... it becomes VERY easy to track my every movement.
I probably have an alleby if even a weak one for every 15 minutes of my life (ignoring sleep) and even then my cell phone could possibly be used as evidence if they believed it was actually with me.
Honestly what I care about more than the government knowing where I am... is a second, third, fourth and fifth set of data which corroborates where I was. If the government has my license plate supposedly on third and madison but I have a credit card purchase, gas purchases and an ATM withdrawl in another city it becomes more difficult to frame me.
I'm not at all concerned about getting framed... but in a police state where people are being held without proof or evidence you're already WELLL past the point where them knowing where I am is a concern. If I'm going to get a fair trial then the more shop security cameras, cell phone tracking etc etc that is independent of the government the better.
It becomes an arms race. The more things tracking me the more things a big brother government has to forge. If they STILL forge 4 stores, 3 credit card purchases and a cell phone log then it doesn't matter if they ACTUALLY caught you on a government at all... they can just make shit up. This is why I'm so unconcered about government privacy. If I get arrested for being critical of the government... I've got much bigger issues than being 'caught'.