The annoying habit of using the term "property". As if it's the same as a house, book or car. Everybody knows it isn't. For some purposes, it may be convenient to treat it the same, but there is fundamental difference between ordinary property, and "IP".
The problem with the term "property" is not the choice of word, but the confusion of what it applies to. As I wrote in another posting, the property here is not the written novel, but the rights to that novel. That right may be inherited or sold just like a house or a car.
If you reject the idea of calling abstract possessions "property", how about the money in your bank account, isn't that "property" either? Note that you don't own the account; that belongs to the bank and will remain with them also after you have withdrawn all your money from it. The legal ability to withdraw money from an account is a right, recognized by the bank and any government authorities involved. You can transfer money from your account to that of someone else without ever converting it into cash, since that money is your property.
Everybody knows that a publishing right is different from a house, but how does that exclude the publishing right from being treated as property? A business enterprise is also fundamentally different from a house, as is an airplane, but yet business enterprises and airplanes have "owners" and are thus "property". Why not the publishing rights? I think you need to make a more convincing argument, or explain in other ways why you find the terminology problematic.
Intellectual property surrounds us in nearly everything we do. [...] we are surrounded by the fruits of human creativity and invention.
To me, that's WIPO newspeak in action, again trying to equate a fairly recent legal construct (intellectual property) with a fundamental aspect of intelligent life (human creativity and invention). Intellectual property has been around for hundreds of years, human creativity for hundreds of thousands of years. Without intellectual property law, there is no intellectual property. Are the lawmakers trying to take credit for human creativity itself?
Even if intellectual property law applies to pretty much any creative work today, the property is not identical to the work. Intellectual property is a right under the law, a right that can be established or destroyed, defended or lost, inherited or sold. The work is an abstract entity that can be created, enjoyed, disliked, debated, plagiarized or forgotten, but not inherited or sold in the normal sense of those words. The work is always tied to its creator, while the right may belong to someone else.
Intellectual property is not created by the author or artist, but by the law. Saying that we are surrounded by intellectual property just because some legislature has defined who owns the rights to that painting on the wall is a bit like saying we are surrounded by emission control just because industries are legally prohibited from polluting the air we breathe. It's a true statement, but pointless and not very exciting. When they tweak that into saying that we breathe emission control, they are lying.
From my calculations an 820 pound brick of solid copper is only 12 inches by 12 inches by 18 inches.
That's 2,592 (or 36 * 72) cubic inches, but the edges may just as well be something like 0.1 m by 0.4 m by 0.9 m. Shouldn't every comet have one of those?
For example, rigorous semantic information attached to every DMOZ record would allow the DMOZ community to suspend or flag all information related to the Turkish government, in protest of the current situation.
So in order to punish the Turkish government for prohibiting ODP editors from disseminating information about the PKK, you advocate prohibiting ODP editors from disseminating information about the Turkish government? Who is really being punished most here?
The problem with reciprocal measures, even when applied with restraint, is that they can be used to justify each other. It's an eye for an eye, and eventually the whole world goes blind.
With enough open (as in speech) organizations touching enough people in the world, both major and minor misbehavior by governments around the would could be brought to light in this way.
The ODP is hardly that influential, and most organizations don't even have any web pages about Turkey to modify in the first place. I'm convinced the Internet can be used both to shed light on political oppression around the world and to affect the actions of governments, but I'm equally convinced that self-censorship or spamdexing is not the way to do it.
If you want to do something, block Turkish networks from accessing your website (and make sure to inform the user why). Don't try to block everybody else from accessing Turkish websites.
I was an ODP editor during the first half of 2000, but dropped it due to lack of time.
they probably should have followed the UK way and set the domain to be.co.au - at least that way, if the.au isn't there, the URL just won't work.
Well, it theoretically just might land them on some Colombian website instead, but as the.CO ccTLD is far from as popular as is.COM, I suppose the URL most likely wouldn't work anyway.
I can however assure you that they are NOT correct, as I know that the giant creator-wombat created the world out of a can of spam and some duct tape, with people, rocks, birds, the thoughts in your head, absolutely everything intact only 5 minutes ago. Go on, try to disprove it.
Well, in fact the world won't be created until next year, and what we experience here is a mere computer simulation of ourselves and our future "past" as we are about to enter "recorded" history in preparation for that major event. The Editors are being extremely careful not to reveal Themselves to their creation this time, so much that they won't even touch explicit references to Them that have come about by means of the simulation.
We have no way of knowing how advanced any putative aliens might be, so we should scan all frequencies that we think might carry a signal.
Given that a laser beam is a lot more focused than a regular radio beam, they really need to be aiming for us in order for us to see them. What is the size of that beam? If 1/10 of an arc second, that's one chance in 16 billion that the Earth is within the beam if aimed at a random direction in their sky.
I think I learned about that phenomenon (the circumstellar ring) already before 1987, maybe in a book I read in the 1970's, but I'm not sure. As I remember it, the approximate distance to the nova (perhaps not necessarily a supernova) was already known, and a deliberate attempt to calculate the speed of the observed "debris" led the researchers to the conclusion that they were merely timing pure light.
The analysis of the SN 1987a circumstellar ring suggests that the observers were already familiar with the phenomenon and used it to calculate the distance of SN 1987a. Wouldn't the phenomenon have been observed before 1987? I don't recall reading many astronomy books since the early 1980's.
Would it be possible to determine its age (and thus its distance) by observing the expansion of the shell over a period of say, a few decades, and extrapolate from that? Maybe the observation method doesn't allow for sufficiently accurate measurements of the positions of the outermost gamma ray sources, or there are natural fluctuations in their appearance rendering the calculations meaningless?
I recall reading about visible-light observation of what was first thought to be debris from another supernova explosion, but when calculations showed that the debris would be moving at the speed of light, it was concluded that what was observed was the light of the explosion being reflected off interstellar matter. The astronomers involved remarked that they were actually watching light travel across the sky! I guess that beats watching paint dry by several orders of magnitude...
The article doesn't state how distant that supernova is/was, only that it happened 1,000 years ago. Does that mean the supernova explosion was observable from Earth 1,000 years ago (saying nothing about its distance), or that the explosion actually happened 1,000 years ago (putting it at a distance of 1,000 lightyears)?
In either case, if the shell of debris has now travelled half a degree of angular separation from the original point of explosion (uniformly in all directions), I suppose that debris will eventually reach Earth when the shell has achieved an angular diameter of 180 degrees (if it has been expanding for 1,000 years, it would arrive here some 113,592 years from now). Hopefully the debris will then be diluted enough not to hit any sensitive parts of our solar system... Will that debris still be emitting gamma rays?
I find that mentioning of "Sweden" a most unwelcome distinction, and I advise you not to take travel advice from that lethal loonie.
I consider the report on press freedom from Reporters sans frontières a lot more authoritative on the subject of freedom (even if it only talks about the press), and I still can't figure out why Sweden ranked 11, alongside Estonia and Germany, below all the other Nordic countries. I don't mind that listing; we probably deserve it, but it would be nice to know what is wrong so that we can fix it.
However, what was aired yesterday was a collective insult against human civilization, and if CNN gave me mod points I'd mod that tape -4711, Troll.
I think those theories are seldom actually wrong, but they may have been simplified to the point that they are easily misinterpreted or misapplied. I remember around 1980, when one of the Voyager probes sent back stunning images of Saturn's rings, and scientists tried to understand the strange strokes, swirls and whatever phenomena they saw in those images. One newspaper went as far as saying that Saturn's rings defied the laws of physics, which therefore had to be rewritten!
Already Isaac Newton understood that a gravitational system with more than two bodies involved could not be fully described analytically. Calculating the positions of the nine major planets and their natural satellites is complex enough. Before Voyager, we had never seen a gravitational system with a trillion closely interacting bodies. Physicists weren't amazed by the Voyager images because the theory of gravity was wrong (it of course wasn't), but because they couldn't predict what such a complex system would look like. A layman (in particular a journalist) may perceive that amazement as an admission of error in science, when in fact it's only a leap forward.
Then again, in some cases new discoveries do invalidate earlier scientific theories, but hardly those theories the general public knows about. Cosmic string theory and such isn't that mature yet.
Thanks, that makes sense. I'm not familiar with how mass spectrometers work, and I couldn't figure out what that Y axis unit really was (Da/z, now I can read it).
Also, the interesting thing about Titan is that the cloud cover which should be methane seems to be composed of something else, altogether. Particles such as ethane and even polystyrene have been suggested as possible cloud particles.
Among the recent images provided by NASA is a graph showing data from the ion and neutral mass spectrometer as Cassini sniffed Titan's upper atmosphere (far away from the cloud at the southern pole, if I understand it correctly). Some compounds have been identified by mass and labelled, such as hydrogen (2 Da), methane (16 Da) and nitrogen (28 Da).
However, I wonder what that unlabelled band at 7 Da (between hydrogen and methane) represents. What molecule could possibly have a mass of 7? I haven't taken a chemistry class since 1980, so please help me decode this. Are we seeing lithium ions or something?
As for the speculation that the clouds contain some "organic goo", didn't someone long ago suggest that the moon was made of cheese..?
"Yelp! will not share email addresses with third parties" they claim.
Interestingly, sharing email addresses with a third party (them) is exactly what every Yelp! user will be required to do for this system to work. Obviously this policy of non-disclosure isn't motivated by any concern for the privacy of the individuals behind those addresses. More likely, they are concerned about their investment in a proprietary social networking database. "Tell us who your friends are, and we will profit from it."
Besides, I actually care more about how much e-mail I get, than how many get to see my e-mail address. Yelp! seems bent on sending me e-mail without disclosing my address to others, as if that would make me any happier?
Maybe I should obtain an e-mail address long enough to be covered by copyright and prohibit people from sharing it with services like Yelp! without my explicit permission. A service like this could work on a strict opt-in basis, but then it might not be as easy to market. Without opt-in, Yelp! will quickly find their mail servers blacklisted.
Legal and moral responsibility are two different things. I agree that buyers of magazines cannot be held legally responsible for what the magazine editors are encouraged to do. Morally however, they contribute to the deeds of the editors (or other individuals employed by the magazine) in much the same way as those who buy stuff from spammers contribute to spamming.
As for the actual cause of the accident, I also agree that the driver was ultimately responsible, though I doubt the crash would have happened if there had been no paparazzi photographers around that night. I can avoid that question and ask whether millions of fans actually wanted the photographers to chase Lady Di and her company on motorbikes. They probably didn't, yet they sort of paid for it in advance.
A few spammers annoy a large number of spam victims, and a large number of fans annoy a few celebrities. Whether there are additional individuals involved may matter from a legal point of view, but hardly from a moral one. It's not like I can eliminate the annoyance of spam by having my butler screen my e-mail for me; I'd merely be transferring the annoyance to my butler.
Worse or not, it's a very good analogy, except that it's a little difficult to visualize someone being enslaved for life once every year... If we translate it into regular work hours, the spammers have effectively forced something like a million people to keep reading and/or deleting all the junk mail for no pay. Some slave labour camp, that!
And, your ISP staff claims they can't do much about it; they just run the engines and communication lines that keep sending new users to the spam mines, and are thus simply following orders...
Along a similar line of thought, if ten million people around the world each pay a nickel to see their favorite celebrity in some tabloid paper, that may accumulate to a bounty big enough to send paparazzi photographers chasing said celebrity on motorbikes, perhaps killing her in the process... Then tell who isn't guilty?
Is this a start of a new legal trend where economic damage has precedence over human life?
Look at the scale of the thing. A rapist targets a single victim, whereas a spammer targets a million victims. If you could take one million junk mail messages and divert them to a single recipient who is forced to either read or delete them all manually in no longer than a minute, it would more or less kill that person, cartoon-style (we are talking 10,000 key presses per second here).
Another calculation: If it takes one second for the recipient to detect and delete each junk mail message (no automatic filtering involved), and some 20 billion junk mail messages are distributed on the Internet every day, that means spammers consume 20 billion seconds of unpaid human labour, or about ten human lifetimes, per day. That makes a total of 3,000 human lives destroyed per year. How many people are killed by terrorism each year?
Sometimes, translating human life into economic terms actually makes it look more valuable, not less.
1. Have you ever gone over the speed limit in a car? Do you want to be monitored 24/7 so if you do, the government can simply issue you a remote fine?
Good question, but it's a bad idea to enact legislation that can't be enforced without intrusive monitoring. As long as you catch a sufficient amount of violators to deter from future violations, it's fine. However, when detection of the violation depends on pure luck and people figure out they are likely to get away with it, you have to either change the law or increase monitoring to maintain some level of fairness.
3. Why is it that it's ok to have citizens watched 24/7, yet you can't see the footage and for some reason, no politicians seem to be surveilled?
When privacy of individuals is brought up, those who advocate surveillance cameras in public spaces usually claim that only a select few, trustable individuals will ever be able to watch the footage. I think that's a poor excuse. If the camera covers a public space, provide the footage to a video screen nearby, I'd say. They could even make live as well as archived footage available over the Internet, so that anybody can see exactly what they are monitoring. That would put the surveillance agencies at a disadvantage compared to any visiting tourist with a camcorder who may still take footage that only a select few, trustable individuals will ever be able to watch, but I think the tourists deserve that advantage.
4. Why shouldn't the insurance companies know about your entire medical, driving and social records, all the time, so they can dynamically adjust your risk status and increase payments as necessary?
That's actually a rather poor argument. If you know something specific about your medical condition or driving habits that your insurance company doesn't, and you use that knowledge to your advantage when negotiating an insurance, you aren't playing fair. The proper time to obtain a health insurance is before you are diagnosed with cancer, not after you learn about your condition but before you tell your insurance company. This doesn't really have a lot to do with monitoring.
6. Shouldn't the politicians be doing your bidding, not ruling you?
That's not an argument against surveillance. If those who favor increased surveillance vote for politicians who favor the same, they hardly feel that they are being "ruled". If a majority thinks that you should be ruled, the politicians are supposed to do the bidding of the majority and rule you, or they won't be reelected (in an ideal world, of course).
Does it matter whether my ISP retains logs of e-mail traffic for other purposes than billing, or retains copies of every e-mail sent? It sure does, at least to my ISP, but also to me.
The end result includes lots of tickets being issued, of course. More importantly, the cop who routinely spends his day stopping people just as routinely is given opportunities to arrest individuals for crimes not mentioned in the motor vehicle code.
I fail to see where you are going with this analogy. Law enforcement agents may always be suspected of acting without proper cause; no news here. The issue we are discussing is whether the consultation document suggests retaining copies of all e-mail sent. In my opinion, it does not. Even if it did, and operators were to implement constant monitoring of all communications, it would hardly enable law enforcement to harass random Internet users any more than they can today. Rather, they would drown themselves in useless data.
The authorities may already be monitoring my e-mail, illegally, without me knowing it. Having the right to privacy doesn't mean a lot to me without the ability to detect and prosecute violations of said right. I find more comfort in blending in with the crowd, than in formal rights.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with the term "property" is not the choice of word, but the confusion of what it applies to. As I wrote in another posting, the property here is not the written novel, but the rights to that novel. That right may be inherited or sold just like a house or a car.
If you reject the idea of calling abstract possessions "property", how about the money in your bank account, isn't that "property" either? Note that you don't own the account; that belongs to the bank and will remain with them also after you have withdrawn all your money from it. The legal ability to withdraw money from an account is a right, recognized by the bank and any government authorities involved. You can transfer money from your account to that of someone else without ever converting it into cash, since that money is your property.
Everybody knows that a publishing right is different from a house, but how does that exclude the publishing right from being treated as property? A business enterprise is also fundamentally different from a house, as is an airplane, but yet business enterprises and airplanes have "owners" and are thus "property". Why not the publishing rights? I think you need to make a more convincing argument, or explain in other ways why you find the terminology problematic.
To me, that's WIPO newspeak in action, again trying to equate a fairly recent legal construct (intellectual property) with a fundamental aspect of intelligent life (human creativity and invention). Intellectual property has been around for hundreds of years, human creativity for hundreds of thousands of years. Without intellectual property law, there is no intellectual property. Are the lawmakers trying to take credit for human creativity itself?
Even if intellectual property law applies to pretty much any creative work today, the property is not identical to the work. Intellectual property is a right under the law, a right that can be established or destroyed, defended or lost, inherited or sold. The work is an abstract entity that can be created, enjoyed, disliked, debated, plagiarized or forgotten, but not inherited or sold in the normal sense of those words. The work is always tied to its creator, while the right may belong to someone else.
Intellectual property is not created by the author or artist, but by the law. Saying that we are surrounded by intellectual property just because some legislature has defined who owns the rights to that painting on the wall is a bit like saying we are surrounded by emission control just because industries are legally prohibited from polluting the air we breathe. It's a true statement, but pointless and not very exciting. When they tweak that into saying that we breathe emission control, they are lying.
That's 2,592 (or 36 * 72) cubic inches, but the edges may just as well be something like 0.1 m by 0.4 m by 0.9 m. Shouldn't every comet have one of those?
So in order to punish the Turkish government for prohibiting ODP editors from disseminating information about the PKK, you advocate prohibiting ODP editors from disseminating information about the Turkish government? Who is really being punished most here?
The problem with reciprocal measures, even when applied with restraint, is that they can be used to justify each other. It's an eye for an eye, and eventually the whole world goes blind.
The ODP is hardly that influential, and most organizations don't even have any web pages about Turkey to modify in the first place. I'm convinced the Internet can be used both to shed light on political oppression around the world and to affect the actions of governments, but I'm equally convinced that self-censorship or spamdexing is not the way to do it.
If you want to do something, block Turkish networks from accessing your website (and make sure to inform the user why). Don't try to block everybody else from accessing Turkish websites.
I was an ODP editor during the first half of 2000, but dropped it due to lack of time.
Well, it theoretically just might land them on some Colombian website instead, but as the .CO ccTLD is far from as popular as is .COM, I suppose the URL most likely wouldn't work anyway.
Well, in fact the world won't be created until next year, and what we experience here is a mere computer simulation of ourselves and our future "past" as we are about to enter "recorded" history in preparation for that major event. The Editors are being extremely careful not to reveal Themselves to their creation this time, so much that they won't even touch explicit references to Them that have come about by means of the simulation.
Given that a laser beam is a lot more focused than a regular radio beam, they really need to be aiming for us in order for us to see them. What is the size of that beam? If 1/10 of an arc second, that's one chance in 16 billion that the Earth is within the beam if aimed at a random direction in their sky.
What do you think is the purpose of all that junk e-mail that has been bouncing between mail servers for the past few years?
I think I learned about that phenomenon (the circumstellar ring) already before 1987, maybe in a book I read in the 1970's, but I'm not sure. As I remember it, the approximate distance to the nova (perhaps not necessarily a supernova) was already known, and a deliberate attempt to calculate the speed of the observed "debris" led the researchers to the conclusion that they were merely timing pure light.
The analysis of the SN 1987a circumstellar ring suggests that the observers were already familiar with the phenomenon and used it to calculate the distance of SN 1987a. Wouldn't the phenomenon have been observed before 1987? I don't recall reading many astronomy books since the early 1980's.
Would it be possible to determine its age (and thus its distance) by observing the expansion of the shell over a period of say, a few decades, and extrapolate from that? Maybe the observation method doesn't allow for sufficiently accurate measurements of the positions of the outermost gamma ray sources, or there are natural fluctuations in their appearance rendering the calculations meaningless?
I recall reading about visible-light observation of what was first thought to be debris from another supernova explosion, but when calculations showed that the debris would be moving at the speed of light, it was concluded that what was observed was the light of the explosion being reflected off interstellar matter. The astronomers involved remarked that they were actually watching light travel across the sky! I guess that beats watching paint dry by several orders of magnitude...
The article doesn't state how distant that supernova is/was, only that it happened 1,000 years ago. Does that mean the supernova explosion was observable from Earth 1,000 years ago (saying nothing about its distance), or that the explosion actually happened 1,000 years ago (putting it at a distance of 1,000 lightyears)?
In either case, if the shell of debris has now travelled half a degree of angular separation from the original point of explosion (uniformly in all directions), I suppose that debris will eventually reach Earth when the shell has achieved an angular diameter of 180 degrees (if it has been expanding for 1,000 years, it would arrive here some 113,592 years from now). Hopefully the debris will then be diluted enough not to hit any sensitive parts of our solar system... Will that debris still be emitting gamma rays?
I find that mentioning of "Sweden" a most unwelcome distinction, and I advise you not to take travel advice from that lethal loonie.
I consider the report on press freedom from Reporters sans frontières a lot more authoritative on the subject of freedom (even if it only talks about the press), and I still can't figure out why Sweden ranked 11, alongside Estonia and Germany, below all the other Nordic countries. I don't mind that listing; we probably deserve it, but it would be nice to know what is wrong so that we can fix it.
However, what was aired yesterday was a collective insult against human civilization, and if CNN gave me mod points I'd mod that tape -4711, Troll.
I think those theories are seldom actually wrong, but they may have been simplified to the point that they are easily misinterpreted or misapplied. I remember around 1980, when one of the Voyager probes sent back stunning images of Saturn's rings, and scientists tried to understand the strange strokes, swirls and whatever phenomena they saw in those images. One newspaper went as far as saying that Saturn's rings defied the laws of physics, which therefore had to be rewritten!
Already Isaac Newton understood that a gravitational system with more than two bodies involved could not be fully described analytically. Calculating the positions of the nine major planets and their natural satellites is complex enough. Before Voyager, we had never seen a gravitational system with a trillion closely interacting bodies. Physicists weren't amazed by the Voyager images because the theory of gravity was wrong (it of course wasn't), but because they couldn't predict what such a complex system would look like. A layman (in particular a journalist) may perceive that amazement as an admission of error in science, when in fact it's only a leap forward.
Then again, in some cases new discoveries do invalidate earlier scientific theories, but hardly those theories the general public knows about. Cosmic string theory and such isn't that mature yet.
Thanks, that makes sense. I'm not familiar with how mass spectrometers work, and I couldn't figure out what that Y axis unit really was (Da/z, now I can read it).
Among the recent images provided by NASA is a graph showing data from the ion and neutral mass spectrometer as Cassini sniffed Titan's upper atmosphere (far away from the cloud at the southern pole, if I understand it correctly). Some compounds have been identified by mass and labelled, such as hydrogen (2 Da), methane (16 Da) and nitrogen (28 Da).
However, I wonder what that unlabelled band at 7 Da (between hydrogen and methane) represents. What molecule could possibly have a mass of 7? I haven't taken a chemistry class since 1980, so please help me decode this. Are we seeing lithium ions or something?
As for the speculation that the clouds contain some "organic goo", didn't someone long ago suggest that the moon was made of cheese..?
"Yelp! will not share email addresses with third parties" they claim.
Interestingly, sharing email addresses with a third party (them) is exactly what every Yelp! user will be required to do for this system to work. Obviously this policy of non-disclosure isn't motivated by any concern for the privacy of the individuals behind those addresses. More likely, they are concerned about their investment in a proprietary social networking database. "Tell us who your friends are, and we will profit from it."
Besides, I actually care more about how much e-mail I get, than how many get to see my e-mail address. Yelp! seems bent on sending me e-mail without disclosing my address to others, as if that would make me any happier?
Maybe I should obtain an e-mail address long enough to be covered by copyright and prohibit people from sharing it with services like Yelp! without my explicit permission. A service like this could work on a strict opt-in basis, but then it might not be as easy to market. Without opt-in, Yelp! will quickly find their mail servers blacklisted.
Plus, I wonder what that small building on the Moon looks like in the radio spectrum, for it to be a meaningful object when comparing resolutions...
Maybe if the building has wi-fi or electrical wiring of some kind?
Legal and moral responsibility are two different things. I agree that buyers of magazines cannot be held legally responsible for what the magazine editors are encouraged to do. Morally however, they contribute to the deeds of the editors (or other individuals employed by the magazine) in much the same way as those who buy stuff from spammers contribute to spamming.
As for the actual cause of the accident, I also agree that the driver was ultimately responsible, though I doubt the crash would have happened if there had been no paparazzi photographers around that night. I can avoid that question and ask whether millions of fans actually wanted the photographers to chase Lady Di and her company on motorbikes. They probably didn't, yet they sort of paid for it in advance.
A few spammers annoy a large number of spam victims, and a large number of fans annoy a few celebrities. Whether there are additional individuals involved may matter from a legal point of view, but hardly from a moral one. It's not like I can eliminate the annoyance of spam by having my butler screen my e-mail for me; I'd merely be transferring the annoyance to my butler.
Worse or not, it's a very good analogy, except that it's a little difficult to visualize someone being enslaved for life once every year... If we translate it into regular work hours, the spammers have effectively forced something like a million people to keep reading and/or deleting all the junk mail for no pay. Some slave labour camp, that!
And, your ISP staff claims they can't do much about it; they just run the engines and communication lines that keep sending new users to the spam mines, and are thus simply following orders...
Along a similar line of thought, if ten million people around the world each pay a nickel to see their favorite celebrity in some tabloid paper, that may accumulate to a bounty big enough to send paparazzi photographers chasing said celebrity on motorbikes, perhaps killing her in the process... Then tell who isn't guilty?
Look at the scale of the thing. A rapist targets a single victim, whereas a spammer targets a million victims. If you could take one million junk mail messages and divert them to a single recipient who is forced to either read or delete them all manually in no longer than a minute, it would more or less kill that person, cartoon-style (we are talking 10,000 key presses per second here).
Another calculation: If it takes one second for the recipient to detect and delete each junk mail message (no automatic filtering involved), and some 20 billion junk mail messages are distributed on the Internet every day, that means spammers consume 20 billion seconds of unpaid human labour, or about ten human lifetimes, per day. That makes a total of 3,000 human lives destroyed per year. How many people are killed by terrorism each year?
Sometimes, translating human life into economic terms actually makes it look more valuable, not less.
Rocks? Don't you mean mail order catalogs?
Good question, but it's a bad idea to enact legislation that can't be enforced without intrusive monitoring. As long as you catch a sufficient amount of violators to deter from future violations, it's fine. However, when detection of the violation depends on pure luck and people figure out they are likely to get away with it, you have to either change the law or increase monitoring to maintain some level of fairness.
When privacy of individuals is brought up, those who advocate surveillance cameras in public spaces usually claim that only a select few, trustable individuals will ever be able to watch the footage. I think that's a poor excuse. If the camera covers a public space, provide the footage to a video screen nearby, I'd say. They could even make live as well as archived footage available over the Internet, so that anybody can see exactly what they are monitoring. That would put the surveillance agencies at a disadvantage compared to any visiting tourist with a camcorder who may still take footage that only a select few, trustable individuals will ever be able to watch, but I think the tourists deserve that advantage.
That's actually a rather poor argument. If you know something specific about your medical condition or driving habits that your insurance company doesn't, and you use that knowledge to your advantage when negotiating an insurance, you aren't playing fair. The proper time to obtain a health insurance is before you are diagnosed with cancer, not after you learn about your condition but before you tell your insurance company. This doesn't really have a lot to do with monitoring.
That's not an argument against surveillance. If those who favor increased surveillance vote for politicians who favor the same, they hardly feel that they are being "ruled". If a majority thinks that you should be ruled, the politicians are supposed to do the bidding of the majority and rule you, or they won't be reelected (in an ideal world, of course).
I'm not sure, but I think you are referring to what I mentioned in an earlier post of mine. Funny you should bring it up; it was quite long ago... :)
Does it matter whether my ISP retains logs of e-mail traffic for other purposes than billing, or retains copies of every e-mail sent? It sure does, at least to my ISP, but also to me.
I fail to see where you are going with this analogy. Law enforcement agents may always be suspected of acting without proper cause; no news here. The issue we are discussing is whether the consultation document suggests retaining copies of all e-mail sent. In my opinion, it does not. Even if it did, and operators were to implement constant monitoring of all communications, it would hardly enable law enforcement to harass random Internet users any more than they can today. Rather, they would drown themselves in useless data.
The authorities may already be monitoring my e-mail, illegally, without me knowing it. Having the right to privacy doesn't mean a lot to me without the ability to detect and prosecute violations of said right. I find more comfort in blending in with the crowd, than in formal rights.