Obscure laws can be enforced if anyone wants to. The state doesn't enforce the rights belonging to the state (like the archery requirement and some stupid prohibitions), but if there is an obscure law that says that some people owe *me* money, then I can go to court and there is no way that the court can ignore the old, obscure law.
Case in point - there is an old, obscure law which states that owners of certain plots of land (that were associated with the church in ~1200's) are required to pay for repairs of left wing of that church; which resulted in one church finding it, and asking a homeowner who recently bought a family home to pay for its repairs an amount of ~200.000 pounds, and after some litigation the homeowner was forced to pay around half a million pounds - including the opponent's legal costs and some additional fancy repairs that the church did afterwards; pretty much bankrupting the guy in process.
If you simply cut down a forest and do nothing, it's not 'destroyed' - it's harvested, it regrows in a reasonable time if the land is not used agriculturally (or for grazing animals), at least in areas where I live. Heck, I've seen cases where a small family farmer passes away and all his sons live in the city and ignore the farm for 5-10 years, and it results in a pine forest over where their fields used to be. Using forests for fuel, lumber and pulp is renewable; even replanting is optional but it usually tends to be done since increases the logging value as you choose the species, get better spread of the trees so that they grow larger and more uniform, and ensure a bit quicker regrowth.
So loss of forests happens only when you use the land for something - farming, grazing, strip-mining or suburban 'villages'.
Tropical regions are a bit different, as far as I understand, if rainforests are cut down, then the naturally regrowing forest has much less diversity and carbon density than before. But there (say, Brazil) they are typically cut down as they have better uses for the land under the forests. They might need less new farmland (=less forest removal) if their existing farmland wasn't eroding so quickly, but that's an issue for the farmland management.
You seem to be more correct than my initial opinion - I went to the statistics (http://faostat.fao.org/site/377/DesktopDefault.aspx?PageID=377#ancor) and it appears that the agricultural land use stopped growing at ~1995, and has been stable for the last 15 years.
Trees aren't replanted just because people don't bother - trees are cleared to claim land and to use that land to feed the growing population. So planting more trees is not an option unless you are politically ready to limit food production, and the global warming doesn't seem urgent enough yet.
(Of course, the largest increase driver is that more and more people can afford to buy meat, so much of the increased output is used to feed tasty animals - but it's still agriculture for our food chain)
Is the customer satisfied with how his logo is displayed to common users in electronic devices like TV or internet? Even for most non-tech companies the majority of customers would interact electronically nowadays, they wouldn't see that much of your paper documents or newspaper ads, but would see quite a lot of your TV/online ads (B2C) and electronic communications in B2B - so if the logo looks poor there, then it's a weakness of the logo that can be changed only by moving to a different logo.
Read TFA or even the summary - while people love personalized news, according to TFA most don't like or want to do the customization themselves - so system where you can customize/select/configure news types as you describe is inconvenient, but only a system that guesses your preferences automagically based on your clicks, behavior, whatever is seen as desirable.
And I entirely agree with the professor. I have strong preferences for various news types, but I can't be bothered to manually customize even the slashdot article categories.
In processing such requests, IT service is not the primary expense - the request validity and rights to publish data have to be vetted by lawyers, and 85/h sounds quite reasonable.
True, but it essentially turns it into essentially a service price issue. If/when banks in USA start considering it as important to competition, they will offer it for free, but AFAIK it (and internet banking features in general) aren't considered as important as elsewhere. I have a feeling that in many countries in Europe or SE-Asia it wouldn't be a concern, as everyone offers it free of charge.
It makes economic sense as well (and I have spent some years in banking IT) - my full financial history, including all monies received, all bills paid and all card purchases is an order of magnitude smaller than my gmail archive even when counting number of entries, not their size; so it's not that expensive to get a database for fast querying to get full account history - if the bank wants to do it.
I'd actually guess that even the bank mentioned in the original question actually has the capability, but it's deliberately not offered, since they would lose some $$ in fee revenue if they provided the unlimited history online.
Banking account history is the basic proof about what/how much the bank owes to him; if they can't provide the history, then they have no claims that the balance is correct.
They may and do charge fees for older history though - but banks are mandated to keep, store and provide accurate info for quite a long time; practices vary between countries, but 5-7 years would be the minimum, if not simply the total life of the account (which might be, say, a 40 year mortgage).
You are forced to join unions and pay money to them even if you don't like what they are doing - otherwise you aren't allowed to work due to union agreements that essentially enforce a monopoly for the workforce.
You also can't start a competing union with a premise of making more effective agreements (i.e., scrapping seniority requirements for promotion which hamper talented youngsters) and charging less of worker's salaries in union fees - since the old union would force the employer to choose between only them and only you, and you can't replace an entire company worth of workforce overnight; where there are multiple competing unions, it's only due to historic basis, they are consolidating much more than the employer megacorps.
So much for your freedom to organize yourself freely. If you dislike policies that favor the old union guys (pay increases limited to seniority, instead of job quality; unqualified coworkers not pulling their weight, where nobody can get rid of them, etc), then well, you can suck it up, there is nowhere you can go. If you are stuck with a few corrupt or simply lazy guys at the union top, then you are *really* stuck with them and not much you can do, but keep paying them.
If you have a bad boss, you can switch to a different job or branch; If you dislike employer policies, you can switch employers - it's a huge pain in the ass, but switching your industry to get to a different union is not so easy - so you just keep paying part of your salary as a tax to guys you hate and policies you don't accept. (well, some similarities to the government there).
It's not an illegal copy, as all copyright laws and treaties allow making copies for court purposes without needing permission from the author. And in any case, it would be perfectly possible for these governments to pass a special law about usage of such data, stating whatever usage rules they like.
On the day when the law comes into force, the companies should just turn off the towers within the limited areas for 30 minutes during a peak time, along with appropriate publication in local media before that.
Then the citizens can decide if their representatives are representing well, and the (currently) silent majority is welcome to lynch the activist group that achieved this.
Who cares about the individual wealth? When power is measured, then the nice houses, cars and electronics owned by american suburbians and clay huts 'owned' by chinese countryside rice farmers are completely irrelevant, what matters is the cash used by the country or the elite for strategic means of control.
China cash piles are used to buy strategic assets like mineral mines in Africa. USA private millionaire cash piles would move away to switzerland or anywhere else as soon as any trouble starts, and still will be used for consumption.
And if my son shares his ice cream cone with his brother, isn't revenue being 'stolen', since I would have brought a second one if they didn't want to share?
Lost sales is not an argument; until copyrights were introduced, it was exactly as you say - authors of music, book, plays, etc did usually get paid only for the first copy - by whoever had ordered the work, and it wasn't theft, they got a free market price (of course, in these conditions the market price was much lower than nowadays, where the work comes with an artificial 100 year monopoly on it)
The article point isn't about some finishing things that aren't yet done or bugs that aren't yet fixed, but of fundamental structural flaws since the start.
You can't add security as the next feature to a product in a late stage, if your foundations are wrong, then it's comparable to throwing most of the code out and re-creating it with proper security architecture.
Deliberate denial of service to your customers is completely unacceptable in any case. I am not a lawyer, but if I would be, then my prime goal would be to figure out every little way how such stupid, inexcusable acts can be financially or even criminally punished according to the rules of the land.
Sure, desktop-based filters are redundant as long as you personally can guarantee that your personal computer, any of computers used by your family and any of computers used by your workplace connect 100% only to approved servers using these good server-based solutions, and don't ever go on to wild, wild intarweb which might include deliberately malicious servers.
POW camps were used for centuries, but for more than a hundred years the civilized world, including USA, has signed a commitment that they will run any and all POW camps only according to the rules laid out in the Geneva conventions - so if it is a POW camp, it must abide by certain rules, which were not followed in this case.
They are all landlocked neighbouring countries; the practicalities of telecommunications business - laying long, expensive stretches of cable - are overriding here. There are fiber optics cables running even between Isrel and Arab countries despite their wars...
My bet is that most home users won't even be able to name a single niche app that isn't available through the web and needs to be installed - since they don't know how to install stuff even if it only requires to click 'Yes' three times. It is quite a biased bet in any case, but I am not aware of any resource that would show some real, hard numbers for this.
I'm quite interested in real statistics - I know, understand and expect that many people in Slashdot, just like me, need the gaming features to work. But I have an expectation that the huge multitude of casual users might have entirely different proportions, and they are not well represented here.
He had access to the private stuff legally only as far as it's used for proper work purposes. As soon as you use it to say, look up data of your girlfriend, it's unauthorized access and in any country with privacy laws (at least all EU) it is prosecutable. For example, if he had dug into private data of a celebrity and given it to yellow press, that would surely result in criminal charges.
The penalties are naturally not the same as for murder, but they would involve financial penalties and in aggravated cases up to a year in jail - quite comparable to petty theft, which it is in some sense.
Slashdot Mirror
Do you honestly feel that the annoyance of putting in/taking out contact lenses is even comparable to just putting on a set of glasses?
The disease looks like one that will kill him by the age of 25-30 in any case.
Obscure laws can be enforced if anyone wants to. The state doesn't enforce the rights belonging to the state (like the archery requirement and some stupid prohibitions), but if there is an obscure law that says that some people owe *me* money, then I can go to court and there is no way that the court can ignore the old, obscure law.
Case in point - there is an old, obscure law which states that owners of certain plots of land (that were associated with the church in ~1200's) are required to pay for repairs of left wing of that church; which resulted in one church finding it, and asking a homeowner who recently bought a family home to pay for its repairs an amount of ~200.000 pounds, and after some litigation the homeowner was forced to pay around half a million pounds - including the opponent's legal costs and some additional fancy repairs that the church did afterwards; pretty much bankrupting the guy in process.
If you simply cut down a forest and do nothing, it's not 'destroyed' - it's harvested, it regrows in a reasonable time if the land is not used agriculturally (or for grazing animals), at least in areas where I live. Heck, I've seen cases where a small family farmer passes away and all his sons live in the city and ignore the farm for 5-10 years, and it results in a pine forest over where their fields used to be. Using forests for fuel, lumber and pulp is renewable; even replanting is optional but it usually tends to be done since increases the logging value as you choose the species, get better spread of the trees so that they grow larger and more uniform, and ensure a bit quicker regrowth.
So loss of forests happens only when you use the land for something - farming, grazing, strip-mining or suburban 'villages'.
Tropical regions are a bit different, as far as I understand, if rainforests are cut down, then the naturally regrowing forest has much less diversity and carbon density than before. But there (say, Brazil) they are typically cut down as they have better uses for the land under the forests. They might need less new farmland (=less forest removal) if their existing farmland wasn't eroding so quickly, but that's an issue for the farmland management.
You seem to be more correct than my initial opinion - I went to the statistics (http://faostat.fao.org/site/377/DesktopDefault.aspx?PageID=377#ancor) and it appears that the agricultural land use stopped growing at ~1995, and has been stable for the last 15 years.
Trees aren't replanted just because people don't bother - trees are cleared to claim land and to use that land to feed the growing population.
So planting more trees is not an option unless you are politically ready to limit food production, and the global warming doesn't seem urgent enough yet.
(Of course, the largest increase driver is that more and more people can afford to buy meat, so much of the increased output is used to feed tasty animals - but it's still agriculture for our food chain)
Is the customer satisfied with how his logo is displayed to common users in electronic devices like TV or internet? Even for most non-tech companies the majority of customers would interact electronically nowadays, they wouldn't see that much of your paper documents or newspaper ads, but would see quite a lot of your TV/online ads (B2C) and electronic communications in B2B - so if the logo looks poor there, then it's a weakness of the logo that can be changed only by moving to a different logo.
Read TFA or even the summary - while people love personalized news, according to TFA most don't like or want to do the customization themselves - so system where you can customize/select/configure news types as you describe is inconvenient, but only a system that guesses your preferences automagically based on your clicks, behavior, whatever is seen as desirable.
And I entirely agree with the professor. I have strong preferences for various news types, but I can't be bothered to manually customize even the slashdot article categories.
Don't think solicitor, think paralegal corporate drone.
In processing such requests, IT service is not the primary expense - the request validity and rights to publish data have to be vetted by lawyers, and 85/h sounds quite reasonable.
True, but it essentially turns it into essentially a service price issue.
If/when banks in USA start considering it as important to competition, they will offer it for free, but AFAIK it (and internet banking features in general) aren't considered as important as elsewhere. I have a feeling that in many countries in Europe or SE-Asia it wouldn't be a concern, as everyone offers it free of charge.
It makes economic sense as well (and I have spent some years in banking IT) - my full financial history, including all monies received, all bills paid and all card purchases is an order of magnitude smaller than my gmail archive even when counting number of entries, not their size; so it's not that expensive to get a database for fast querying to get full account history - if the bank wants to do it.
I'd actually guess that even the bank mentioned in the original question actually has the capability, but it's deliberately not offered, since they would lose some $$ in fee revenue if they provided the unlimited history online.
Banking account history is the basic proof about what/how much the bank owes to him; if they can't provide the history, then they have no claims that the balance is correct.
They may and do charge fees for older history though - but banks are mandated to keep, store and provide accurate info for quite a long time; practices vary between countries, but 5-7 years would be the minimum, if not simply the total life of the account (which might be, say, a 40 year mortgage).
You are forced to join unions and pay money to them even if you don't like what they are doing - otherwise you aren't allowed to work due to union agreements that essentially enforce a monopoly for the workforce.
You also can't start a competing union with a premise of making more effective agreements (i.e., scrapping seniority requirements for promotion which hamper talented youngsters) and charging less of worker's salaries in union fees - since the old union would force the employer to choose between only them and only you, and you can't replace an entire company worth of workforce overnight; where there are multiple competing unions, it's only due to historic basis, they are consolidating much more than the employer megacorps.
So much for your freedom to organize yourself freely. If you dislike policies that favor the old union guys (pay increases limited to seniority, instead of job quality; unqualified coworkers not pulling their weight, where nobody can get rid of them, etc), then well, you can suck it up, there is nowhere you can go. If you are stuck with a few corrupt or simply lazy guys at the union top, then you are *really* stuck with them and not much you can do, but keep paying them.
If you have a bad boss, you can switch to a different job or branch; If you dislike employer policies, you can switch employers - it's a huge pain in the ass, but switching your industry to get to a different union is not so easy - so you just keep paying part of your salary as a tax to guys you hate and policies you don't accept. (well, some similarities to the government there).
It's not an illegal copy, as all copyright laws and treaties allow making copies for court purposes without needing permission from the author.
And in any case, it would be perfectly possible for these governments to pass a special law about usage of such data, stating whatever usage rules they like.
On the day when the law comes into force, the companies should just turn off the towers within the limited areas for 30 minutes during a peak time, along with appropriate publication in local media before that.
Then the citizens can decide if their representatives are representing well, and the (currently) silent majority is welcome to lynch the activist group that achieved this.
Who cares about the individual wealth? When power is measured, then the nice houses, cars and electronics owned by american suburbians and clay huts 'owned' by chinese countryside rice farmers are completely irrelevant, what matters is the cash used by the country or the elite for strategic means of control.
China cash piles are used to buy strategic assets like mineral mines in Africa. USA private millionaire cash piles would move away to switzerland or anywhere else as soon as any trouble starts, and still will be used for consumption.
And if my son shares his ice cream cone with his brother, isn't revenue being 'stolen', since I would have brought a second one if they didn't want to share?
Lost sales is not an argument; until copyrights were introduced, it was exactly as you say - authors of music, book, plays, etc did usually get paid only for the first copy - by whoever had ordered the work, and it wasn't theft, they got a free market price (of course, in these conditions the market price was much lower than nowadays, where the work comes with an artificial 100 year monopoly on it)
The article point isn't about some finishing things that aren't yet done or bugs that aren't yet fixed, but of fundamental structural flaws since the start.
You can't add security as the next feature to a product in a late stage, if your foundations are wrong, then it's comparable to throwing most of the code out and re-creating it with proper security architecture.
mod parent insightful.
Deliberate denial of service to your customers is completely unacceptable in any case. I am not a lawyer, but if I would be, then my prime goal would be to figure out every little way how such stupid, inexcusable acts can be financially or even criminally punished according to the rules of the land.
Sure, desktop-based filters are redundant as long as you personally can guarantee that your personal computer, any of computers used by your family and any of computers used by your workplace connect 100% only to approved servers using these good server-based solutions, and don't ever go on to wild, wild intarweb which might include deliberately malicious servers.
POW camps were used for centuries, but for more than a hundred years the civilized world, including USA, has signed a commitment that they will run any and all POW camps only according to the rules laid out in the Geneva conventions - so if it is a POW camp, it must abide by certain rules, which were not followed in this case.
mod parent up.
They are all landlocked neighbouring countries; the practicalities of telecommunications business - laying long, expensive stretches of cable - are overriding here. There are fiber optics cables running even between Isrel and Arab countries despite their wars...
My bet is that most home users won't even be able to name a single niche app that isn't available through the web and needs to be installed - since they don't know how to install stuff even if it only requires to click 'Yes' three times.
It is quite a biased bet in any case, but I am not aware of any resource that would show some real, hard numbers for this.
I'm quite interested in real statistics - I know, understand and expect that many people in Slashdot, just like me, need the gaming features to work. But I have an expectation that the huge multitude of casual users might have entirely different proportions, and they are not well represented here.
He had access to the private stuff legally only as far as it's used for proper work purposes. As soon as you use it to say, look up data of your girlfriend, it's unauthorized access and in any country with privacy laws (at least all EU) it is prosecutable. For example, if he had dug into private data of a celebrity and given it to yellow press, that would surely result in criminal charges.
The penalties are naturally not the same as for murder, but they would involve financial penalties and in aggravated cases up to a year in jail - quite comparable to petty theft, which it is in some sense.