It creates some technical problems that companies will have to solve if they want to store personal information - yes, it complicates things.
But this is one of the issues where "it's complicated" is not an excuse. Legally, no one would care if some old backup contains the data still, as long as the company is not using the data in any way and is properly destroying the data before, say, selling old computers/hard-drives. If you do have to restore an old backup - then you either have a way to clear my data again, or you include the expected penalties/fines in your risk cost of having to restore old backups.
Much of the problem is about non-public information.
If I give Amazon my full name for credit card invoicing and my address for shipping, it doesn't mean that I have 'PUT IT ON THE BLEEPING INTERNET'.
And it doesn't mean that I am giving them permission to keep this info forever, and giving them permission to sell this information to everybody else - despite any legalese that they have written in their T I don't intend to give them such a permission.
Privacy is a fundamental human right recognized in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the International Convenant on Civil and Political Rights and in many other international and regional treaties. It is one of 'first principles' together with other basic freedoms. It is included in constitutions of many countries - in the newer constitutions it tends to be more explicit, and USA is a notable absence; but even there the issues like unreasonable searches and privacy of your home are covered.
Some classical citations from earlier centuries:
In 1765, British Lord Camden, striking down a warrant to enter a house and seize papers wrote, "We can safely say there is no law in this country to justify the defendants in what they have done; if there was, it would destroy all the comforts of society, for papers are often the dearest property any man can have."
Parliamentarian William Pitt wrote, "The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the force of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow though it; the storms may enter; the rain may enter -- but the King of England cannot enter; all his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement."
In 1890, American lawyers Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis wrote a seminal piece on the right to privacy as a tort action describing privacy as "the right to be left alone."
However, in practice specific and detailed rights such as the right to privacy of personal data come from "we the people" agreeing that we want it and getting it passed as law - which EU has done a bit further than other countries. In this sense it's simply more like a business regulation, forcing businesses to keep a socially acceptable code of conduct.
It's not enough to rely on simply publishing the policies and customers choosing which service to use.
It does not protect the consumer data from the first 'incident' when the company chooses to change their policies and sell everything to advertisers; or for example when company is sold/merged with another provider, which gets the data - there need to be strong legal teeth that prevent the company from ever abusing my data if I gave them this data 10 years ago when they were well-behaved.
As the article says - the cause of the problem is advertising.
If the user wants to watch flash videos in youtube, it drains the battery just as much as watching downloaded videos on the video playe of his choice.
But if the user doesn't want the "content", then the system shouldn't spend valuable, scarce resources (such as battery life) on them - the solution is not disabling flash, the solution is to ship computers with AdBlock preinstalled and preconfigured. The computer vendors can and should do that, to improve the value of their product to consumers.
I assume that the commander has seen court martial for his stupidity?
Countries and militaries have their own official maps which they should use, and if he relies on google, then it's his neck on the line.
For a related anecdote - in USSR times *all* the civilian maps were deliberately distorting data, especially in the border areas. I still have the maps and had relatives living there - pretty much all of the sea-side roads in maps were completely wrong, but the same in all maps. Only the military topographical maps showed the true structure - now they're declassified and often used for outdoors activities due to their high resolution and quality, despite being 20 years old now (well, the forest usually doesn't change that fast).
We don't even need to match the quality of retina - even a hugely restricted sight, say a 50x50 black/white pixel sensor would be a life-changing experience to blind people, if that was available for mass-production and they could actually afford it.
Well, most projects don't work; any worldwide project management statistics state that a vast majority of projects didn't meet the expected project goals or got extreme cost and/or time overruns.
My eyes wander, and it's even a bit physically painful when they try to focus where they can't. That's a very serious negative factor for what's supposed to be a fun experience.
I don't see a particular reason to look *only* where the director wants me to look - I'm a visual memory person, I can switch my 'target' very quickly and do it multiple times per second, i'd look at one guy talking, at the other, then at their hand movement/body language, then at the facial expressions of the third guy who's listening but at the moment is in the background a bit, then back at the lip movement of the talking guy. I generally don't focus on only one thing excluding others, except maybe the emotional peak or turning point of the movie; I focus on the main target and also on the secondary characters, the environment, the details, the background - why can't I do that? I'm used to do that in real life and 2d movies. 3d technology also allows it, but some control-freak has decided that he'll just show *one* point that can be looked at on a frigging 50-foot screen?
I feel that they will unintentionally push the 3d-thang over the edge where most new PC's would be sold as 3d-capable, and then it's back to business/piracy as usual forever. Porn industry would only accelerate that, they would definitely be able to use the new tech, sell the new content, etc.
Mod parent up - the illustration movie explains everything within a few seconds and it does seem quite unique, unlike the cited historical examples of different engine structures.
Are they harder to pirate in general or just for now wile 3d is still launching? None of the movie-downloaders that I know are watching camera-recorded stuff due to it's poor quality, they all wait for a dvd-rip or bluray-rip.
So when 3d gets popular, as the consumer electronics industry (with 10x the size, money and power of the content industry) wants, then the content will be distributed on shiny round platters for the home 3d tv's that are being pushed right now with a huge advertising poster right next to my house, and anyone who wants a pirated copy will get it.
The big money in 3d is for the consumer hardware. Noone cares about the imaginary profits of filmmakers if they see a way how to put together a fancy box in china for 30 $ and sell it to you for 495 $; and the electronics arm of the huge multinational companies can put a lot of weight on their content producing branches if they need to.
Well, maybe the problem is that they are still shooting 3d movies in the same way as they used to shoot 2d movies - with the wide aperture to get the out of focus effect, but they should NOT do it anymore - my eyes will get the depth perception and tips where to focus from the 3d-effect, thank you very much, and you can leave the backgrounds sharp enough so that they are actually nice to catch a glimpse as well.
I really don't care. I have no interest in bypassing paywalls and if the content won't show due to my adblocker - well, in that case I'll just go elsewhere or click on google cached copy.
I got the entitlement by the site owner publishing the site in public.
Your argument is built on the implied supposition that if the published content includes a link to an advertising banner, you have some sort of right to control if the banner is looked at or shown on the user's screen. Care to explain how you became the recipient of such an entitlement?
Your claim about manufacturers getting punished is false.
There have been multiple incidents where a manufacturer has distributed infected devices, many of these cases reported and discussed here on slashdot. For example, driver cd's with viruses, hard drives with root-kits on them already, infected usb flash drives, pre-infected home wireless routers and even the classical story of Sony audio cd's with rootkits. No significant effect has resulted, definitely no manufacturer went out of business.
It sounds like something that's hard to do for an individual PC but trivial to do for millions of PC's - random guy in some factory in China, Indonesia, or Taiwan modifies the rom image that is put on some cheap device - say, some ethernet or sound chip that goes on generic motherboards, and voila - it's done.
And nobody would know if that was done for some intelligence agency or simply to sell a botnet for cash..
Nukes would definitely still be used for tactical purposes in any large-scale military conflict (which hasn't happened for quite a long time). NATO vs Russia, Russia vs China, China vs USA, India vs Pakistan, China vs India - if any of these pairs got into full-scale conflict, then definitely any tight grouping of 100.000+ soldiers+armor should fear a nuclear warhead, and such groupings would be inevitable.
Of course it is so - but since I live far from the equatorial parts, for me the global warming has a potential to be a net benefit.
In fact, given this data, I wouldn't be surprised if the large and economically strong northern countries would deliberately continue the global warming trends, since it would benefit them a tiny bit, and greatly harm their future global competitors such as China, India, Brazil and all the SE Asian countries - which would clearly dominate the world soon otherwise.
You can't sue the company for not being profitable, but you definitely can sue the boardmembers if they deliberately reduce the company profitability for their own personal goals (if you can prove this). It doesn't matter if this is done by doing unfairly beneficial deals to the majority shareholders (thus effectively robbing the minority shareholders of their x %) or by stating a "sacred mission" above the corporate charter and refusing to monetize it's most valuable asset.
Articles of incorporation of pretty much any corporation state that it's out for profit, and the wishes of the stockholders matter only in the belief how to generate the most profit.
If their articles don't say that 'sacred purpose above profit', then it's not legally allowed to be so.
Some organizations - say, charities or religious advocacy groups - do have their goals listed differently, but this is not the case, and any shareholder has the right to demand to run the company as a profit maximiser, or the board members may easily be personally financially liable to him due to deliberately cheating their duties as according to the articles of incorporation.
If the executives and/or the majority shareholders don't run the company with "due diligence" exploiting it's profit possibilities, then minority shareholders certainly have rights to hold them accountable and financially liable.
If the 60% holder wants to run the company as a religious charity, then *HE* has to buy the rest of the shares.
During the warmest parts of the cold war, if this became known to the opponent's spies, it would likely destroy the world.
At that time, for USSR simply knowing that it has a unique chance to do a first strike without fear of retaliation would be enough to press the red button right then and right there.
By far the greatest problem and cost is getting stuff out of earth's gravity well. So if we need stuff X in outer space for whatever use, if the machinery for making X weighs less than X itself, then it would be more cost-efficient to build X from moon's materials. If you need two tons of water for drinking/agriculture/whatever, then it's cheaper to launch a complex multimillion dollar robot weighting 1.5 tons that can mine 2 tons of water instead of simply launching the water.
If we want a small rover on Mars or anywhere else, then it's efficient to just build it here and launch it. If we want a facility on Mars or a starship, then it's efficient to build as much of it as possible from stuff mined outside the earth.
Slashdot Mirror
It creates some technical problems that companies will have to solve if they want to store personal information - yes, it complicates things.
But this is one of the issues where "it's complicated" is not an excuse. Legally, no one would care if some old backup contains the data still, as long as the company is not using the data in any way and is properly destroying the data before, say, selling old computers/hard-drives. If you do have to restore an old backup - then you either have a way to clear my data again, or you include the expected penalties/fines in your risk cost of having to restore old backups.
Much of the problem is about non-public information.
If I give Amazon my full name for credit card invoicing and my address for shipping, it doesn't mean that I have 'PUT IT ON THE BLEEPING INTERNET'.
And it doesn't mean that I am giving them permission to keep this info forever, and giving them permission to sell this information to everybody else - despite any legalese that they have written in their T I don't intend to give them such a permission.
Privacy is a fundamental human right recognized in the UN Declaration of Human Rights, the International Convenant on Civil and Political Rights and in many other international and regional treaties. It is one of 'first principles' together with other basic freedoms. It is included in constitutions of many countries - in the newer constitutions it tends to be more explicit, and USA is a notable absence; but even there the issues like unreasonable searches and privacy of your home are covered.
Some classical citations from earlier centuries:
In 1765, British Lord Camden, striking down a warrant to enter a house and seize papers wrote, "We can safely say there is no law in this country to justify the defendants in what they have done; if there was, it would destroy all the comforts of society, for papers are often the dearest property any man can have."
Parliamentarian William Pitt wrote, "The poorest man may in his cottage bid defiance to all the force of the Crown. It may be frail; its roof may shake; the wind may blow though it; the storms may enter; the rain may enter -- but the King of England cannot enter; all his forces dare not cross the threshold of the ruined tenement."
In 1890, American lawyers Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis wrote a seminal piece on the right to privacy as a tort action describing privacy as "the right to be left alone."
However, in practice specific and detailed rights such as the right to privacy of personal data come from "we the people" agreeing that we want it and getting it passed as law - which EU has done a bit further than other countries. In this sense it's simply more like a business regulation, forcing businesses to keep a socially acceptable code of conduct.
It's not enough to rely on simply publishing the policies and customers choosing which service to use.
It does not protect the consumer data from the first 'incident' when the company chooses to change their policies and sell everything to advertisers; or for example when company is sold/merged with another provider, which gets the data - there need to be strong legal teeth that prevent the company from ever abusing my data if I gave them this data 10 years ago when they were well-behaved.
As the article says - the cause of the problem is advertising.
If the user wants to watch flash videos in youtube, it drains the battery just as much as watching downloaded videos on the video playe of his choice.
But if the user doesn't want the "content", then the system shouldn't spend valuable, scarce resources (such as battery life) on them - the solution is not disabling flash, the solution is to ship computers with AdBlock preinstalled and preconfigured. The computer vendors can and should do that, to improve the value of their product to consumers.
I assume that the commander has seen court martial for his stupidity?
Countries and militaries have their own official maps which they should use, and if he relies on google, then it's his neck on the line.
For a related anecdote - in USSR times *all* the civilian maps were deliberately distorting data, especially in the border areas. I still have the maps and had relatives living there - pretty much all of the sea-side roads in maps were completely wrong, but the same in all maps. Only the military topographical maps showed the true structure - now they're declassified and often used for outdoors activities due to their high resolution and quality, despite being 20 years old now (well, the forest usually doesn't change that fast).
We don't even need to match the quality of retina - even a hugely restricted sight, say a 50x50 black/white pixel sensor would be a life-changing experience to blind people, if that was available for mass-production and they could actually afford it.
Well, most projects don't work; any worldwide project management statistics state that a vast majority of projects didn't meet the expected project goals or got extreme cost and/or time overruns.
My eyes wander, and it's even a bit physically painful when they try to focus where they can't. That's a very serious negative factor for what's supposed to be a fun experience.
I don't see a particular reason to look *only* where the director wants me to look - I'm a visual memory person, I can switch my 'target' very quickly and do it multiple times per second, i'd look at one guy talking, at the other, then at their hand movement/body language, then at the facial expressions of the third guy who's listening but at the moment is in the background a bit, then back at the lip movement of the talking guy. I generally don't focus on only one thing excluding others, except maybe the emotional peak or turning point of the movie; I focus on the main target and also on the secondary characters, the environment, the details, the background - why can't I do that? I'm used to do that in real life and 2d movies. 3d technology also allows it, but some control-freak has decided that he'll just show *one* point that can be looked at on a frigging 50-foot screen?
I feel that they will unintentionally push the 3d-thang over the edge where most new PC's would be sold as 3d-capable, and then it's back to business/piracy as usual forever.
Porn industry would only accelerate that, they would definitely be able to use the new tech, sell the new content, etc.
Mod parent up - the illustration movie explains everything within a few seconds and it does seem quite unique, unlike the cited historical examples of different engine structures.
Are they harder to pirate in general or just for now wile 3d is still launching?
None of the movie-downloaders that I know are watching camera-recorded stuff due to it's poor quality, they all wait for a dvd-rip or bluray-rip.
So when 3d gets popular, as the consumer electronics industry (with 10x the size, money and power of the content industry) wants, then the content will be distributed on shiny round platters for the home 3d tv's that are being pushed right now with a huge advertising poster right next to my house, and anyone who wants a pirated copy will get it.
The big money in 3d is for the consumer hardware. Noone cares about the imaginary profits of filmmakers if they see a way how to put together a fancy box in china for 30 $ and sell it to you for 495 $; and the electronics arm of the huge multinational companies can put a lot of weight on their content producing branches if they need to.
Well, maybe the problem is that they are still shooting 3d movies in the same way as they used to shoot 2d movies - with the wide aperture to get the out of focus effect, but they should NOT do it anymore - my eyes will get the depth perception and tips where to focus from the 3d-effect, thank you very much, and you can leave the backgrounds sharp enough so that they are actually nice to catch a glimpse as well.
I really don't care. I have no interest in bypassing paywalls and if the content won't show due to my adblocker - well, in that case I'll just go elsewhere or click on google cached copy.
I got the entitlement by the site owner publishing the site in public.
Your argument is built on the implied supposition that if the published content includes a link to an advertising banner, you have some sort of right to control if the banner is looked at or shown on the user's screen. Care to explain how you became the recipient of such an entitlement?
Your claim about manufacturers getting punished is false.
There have been multiple incidents where a manufacturer has distributed infected devices, many of these cases reported and discussed here on slashdot. For example, driver cd's with viruses, hard drives with root-kits on them already, infected usb flash drives, pre-infected home wireless routers and even the classical story of Sony audio cd's with rootkits. No significant effect has resulted, definitely no manufacturer went out of business.
Ergo, the mountain climber is no hero, as he throws himself into mortal danger only for the benefit of his ego.
It sounds like something that's hard to do for an individual PC but trivial to do for millions of PC's - random guy in some factory in China, Indonesia, or Taiwan modifies the rom image that is put on some cheap device - say, some ethernet or sound chip that goes on generic motherboards, and voila - it's done.
And nobody would know if that was done for some intelligence agency or simply to sell a botnet for cash..
Nukes would definitely still be used for tactical purposes in any large-scale military conflict (which hasn't happened for quite a long time). NATO vs Russia, Russia vs China, China vs USA, India vs Pakistan, China vs India - if any of these pairs got into full-scale conflict, then definitely any tight grouping of 100.000+ soldiers+armor should fear a nuclear warhead, and such groupings would be inevitable.
Of course it is so - but since I live far from the equatorial parts, for me the global warming has a potential to be a net benefit.
In fact, given this data, I wouldn't be surprised if the large and economically strong northern countries would deliberately continue the global warming trends, since it would benefit them a tiny bit, and greatly harm their future global competitors such as China, India, Brazil and all the SE Asian countries - which would clearly dominate the world soon otherwise.
You can't sue the company for not being profitable, but you definitely can sue the boardmembers if they deliberately reduce the company profitability for their own personal goals (if you can prove this). It doesn't matter if this is done by doing unfairly beneficial deals to the majority shareholders (thus effectively robbing the minority shareholders of their x %) or by stating a "sacred mission" above the corporate charter and refusing to monetize it's most valuable asset.
Articles of incorporation of pretty much any corporation state that it's out for profit, and the wishes of the stockholders matter only in the belief how to generate the most profit.
If their articles don't say that 'sacred purpose above profit', then it's not legally allowed to be so.
Some organizations - say, charities or religious advocacy groups - do have their goals listed differently, but this is not the case, and any shareholder has the right to demand to run the company as a profit maximiser, or the board members may easily be personally financially liable to him due to deliberately cheating their duties as according to the articles of incorporation.
If the executives and/or the majority shareholders don't run the company with "due diligence" exploiting it's profit possibilities, then minority shareholders certainly have rights to hold them accountable and financially liable.
If the 60% holder wants to run the company as a religious charity, then *HE* has to buy the rest of the shares.
During the warmest parts of the cold war, if this became known to the opponent's spies, it would likely destroy the world.
At that time, for USSR simply knowing that it has a unique chance to do a first strike without fear of retaliation would be enough to press the red button right then and right there.
By far the greatest problem and cost is getting stuff out of earth's gravity well. So if we need stuff X in outer space for whatever use, if the machinery for making X weighs less than X itself, then it would be more cost-efficient to build X from moon's materials. If you need two tons of water for drinking/agriculture/whatever, then it's cheaper to launch a complex multimillion dollar robot weighting 1.5 tons that can mine 2 tons of water instead of simply launching the water.
If we want a small rover on Mars or anywhere else, then it's efficient to just build it here and launch it.
If we want a facility on Mars or a starship, then it's efficient to build as much of it as possible from stuff mined outside the earth.