Maybe you are applying to the wrong companies. My current company will not even accept Word-formatted resumes, and I have never had to submit a resume in Word format. Also, I have never found a recruiter that was useful, either when I was looking for a job or when I was trying to fill a position.
Far more useful than recruiters are professional contacts, alumni associations, and personal contacts.
Just to be picky, I'll point out that google doesn't actually make that information available.
Just to be picky, CNet doesn't actually make information on Schmidt "available", they just make it easier to get to it.
What Google and CNet have done is analogous: they make it easier to get to sensitive information that is already public and neither asked the people affected for permission. That's the point of the CNet article.
It sounds to me that you're saying here that because somebody is rich, then it's open season to publish any information about them you can get your hands on.
No, what I'm saying is that Schmidt chose a business model that made him billions of dollars but that also has implications for people's privacy. A portion of his wealth is due to that business model; that portion is what, in a sense, he has traded for being willing to be exposed in this way.
What is it exactly that Google is supposed to do? If you can show me I'm 100% behind you, but I haven't heard anything on this even remotely resembling a feasible course of action.
There are many things one can do about it, some involving Google some not. For example, if people are aware of what information may be available, they can take additional steps to protect themselves from identity theft. Or, at the other end of the spectrum, we can pass legislation making all web search opt-in only (pages only get indexed when a search provider has explicit permission) and imposing strong penalties for anybody publishing or linking to social security numbers or credit card numbers. Or, Google and other search providers can voluntarily remove pages containing credit card numbers, social security numbers, and other sensitive information from their index.
If you actually work through the example in the article in question, you'll see how difficult it would be to stop somebody from doing this without actually crippling the service.
I don't think that's actually true. But you have to keep in mind that we don't have any obligation to make Google's current business model or service work. The Internet has grown up largely without laws and regulations, and as society catches up regulating things and enforcing existing laws, some services will become infeasible.
The best way for Google to avoid that path is to pro-actively come up with technical measures to reduce privacy concerns about their service. But simply pretending that there is no problem will just annoy people, and ultimately, it's a democracy and we, the people, set the rules under which companies are permitted to operate.
I am a Linux/Unix admin professionaly and I recently went from OpenOffice back to MS-Office. [...] My CV kept causing everyone elses Word to crash, thats a cost I couldn't afford to pay as a jobseeker.
Professional Linux/UNIX admins would send their resume in PDF, ASCII, or HTML format. Furthermore, no company minimally concerned about security would open resumes sent to them in DOC format because of security concerns. And if a company insists on something they can open in Word, you can always send them RTF. To me, you sound like you are either making this up, or you are simply not very experienced.
Incidentally, Microsoft Word can crash even on opening Microsoft Word documents, depending on the versions involved. That's another reason not to use Word for resumes.
but if you track the functionality and UI changes that the companies have made over the past 6 months, this has clearly been a place where Google has been following Microsoft's lead.
The first version of start.com looks like Google has looked for years. Later versions look like what My Yahoo has offered for years. And start.com added drag-and-drop after seeing it on Google. I'm sorry, but where exactly does he think that Microsoft has been leading?
Would you mind if I shot you to prove that murder is wrong?
If murder were legal and I was an assassin by profession, that would be entirely appropriate on your part.
Instead of opening discussion about this, they chose to target Schmidt directly, and worse, personally.
That's the point CNet wanted to get across: CNet didn't ask Schmidt for permission, just like Google didn't ask me or you for permission to make our information more easily accessible. And just like CNet probably did slightly increase the risk to Schmidt's family, Google has increased the risk for you and me to be subject to identity theft, fraud, and worse.
Now, one can argue about whether the analogy really works. But it seems to me that, a priori, CNet's approach to drawing attention to the issue is justified. You, however, seem to have made up your mind already before the discussion has even started.
You can argue rich people deserve it just because they are rich. I don't buy it.
Don't try to turn this into some kind of class warfare. At issue is not that Schmidt is rich. You brought up a cost/benefit analysis, and I was responding to that. Since Schmidt's business model involves making personal information accessible in new formats, Schmidt is the natural choice to demonstrate potential problems with such a business model.
Did she benefit herself by endangering his family for a cheap publicity stunt? Yup.
CNet's actions and the actions of Google are analogous: both are legal, both are making published personal information available in a new format, both make some people very uncomfortable, and we can argue about the ethics of both of them. And that is enough justification for such a "publicity stunt", because drawing attention to potential problems like this is exactly what journalists are supposed to do.
Being a moral person means recognizing that your actions have consequences and weighing them appropriately.
I completely agree, and I think that's exactly what CNet has done. Unfortunately, Google's reaction suggests that they have not yet considered the consequences of their own actions as carefully.
Let's hope that this controversy will induce them to do so and maybe take some actions, because I think Google is generally a great company and is doing a lot of nice work. Automatically recognizing and removing pages containing sensitive personal information from their index is feasible and might be a solution.
So tell me, why is a population of 6.5 billion unsustainable?
Well, let's look at agricultural productivity. World grain production increased about 3-fold in the last 50 years, but that required a 50-fold increase in the amount of energy required per unit of food produced. It currently takes about 1600 liters of fossil fuel per year just to produce the food for a single American; storage and transport required a lot more additional fossil fuels, plus roads and other infrastructure. Fossil fuel alone is a limited resource and will become increasingly scarce.
Our use of irrigation is also unsustainable; agricultural productivity in many marginal areas was achieved through tapping into non-renewable groundwater reservoirs and creating unsustainable dams.
Fishing is another issue: a significant part of our growth has been sustained by a huge protein inventory we had inherited in the oceans, but that has not been used sustainably and it is running out.
Seems to me that the world used to be a lot messier back before we had a population in the billions, what with famine and disease in every corner of the earth, and that things have actually been getting more stable, not less, over the past few centuries
That's certainly not true in terms of absolute numbers, and it is probably not even true in terms of relative numbers, even during the entire historic period. But the historic period isn't even a good reference, because it is already characterized by many of the same problems that we have today: population growth, movements out of overpopulated areas into more marginal areas, displacement of native populations, etc. (It's common to think of ancient times as dismal, but many ancient peoples, in particular around the Mediterranean, clearly had a high quality of life and security.)
Sustainability requires using agricultural methods that don't have the energy and freshwater requirements of current techniques. Switching to sustainable agriculture will likely result in significant productivity losses and will make a lot of our currently arable land economically uninteresting. As a consequence, we'll have to limit agriculture to the most productive areas in the world and areas where freshwater is naturally abundant. And the food output from that kind of system simply cannot sustain 6.5 billion people. We'll be lucky if it can sustain 1 billion people.
Can you also explain why you think economic and political stability is impossible at current population levels?
Because when energy and water run out, there is going to be conflict. Much of the conflict in the Middle East is already about water and access to water. Access to oil is another source of conflict, and we are in the Middle East not just because of our SUVs but also because we need cheap oil for agriculture and for making good for our population.
CNet washed it's hands of providing any sort of reasonable answer and instead attempts to create a problem
The problem here is not that we all need to live in mortal fear that we get written up by CNET, the problem here is that identity thieves and other crooks can use Google(and other search engines) as a tool to cause harm to lots of people. And CNET didn't create that problem.
Thus, we ALL have great responsibility, INCLUDING CNet.
Yes, and so does Google. They could, for example, choose not to index pages containing some types of sensitive personal information. I'm not saying they should, but it's worth discussing, and CNET kicked off the discussion in what seems to me a fairly reasonable way.
It's not about whose "fault" it is. Google is a nice, innovative company that generally tries to do the right thing, within the constraints that the market imposes on them. Google just happens to sit at the center of issues surrounding privacy, copyright, and other issues that we, as a society, need to come to terms with, one way or another.
"I agree that there is an issue to be discussed here, but it's about personal responsibility and accountability. Not about a particular company."
You are right: it is not about a particular company; these issues come up for all search engines. But Google, being the biggest and most profitable one, is the obvious example for discussing them. And Schmidt is the obvious target to illustrate the point.
Google doesn't publish anything outside their own business related information
But Google greatly facilitates access to that information. You may personally have already decided for yourself that that kind of facilitation does not imply any responsibility on their part, but others have not made up their mind.
And Google does have control. Google could, for example, remove from their index pages likely to contain social security numbers, credit card numbers, and passwords, but they don't. Maybe they should.
Clearly, there's a public benefit to talking about this. There's also a specific cost borne by one person. How do we know the cost is offset by the benefit?
But that very principle makes Schmidt such an excellent choice. Unlike any person outside of Google, Schmidt has benefitted enormously from the way Google does business. Therefore, he is the most obvious person to pay the cost associated with this discussion about Google's business practices is Schmidt himself.
As yourself: would you accept being written up like that by CNET and other publications in return for a few billion dollars? I certainly would.
In the government/military such works, even having come from public sources, can be classified due to the sheer amount of critical information in them. This does not mean the sources are classified, merely that the sifted sorted analyzed information is.
Yes. So, we have two components here: first, Google enables access to private information in an unprecedented way, and, second, the journalist uses one person at Google as an example to illustrate that point.
Whether or not the journalist's specific illustration was out of line, the real discussion is about the first point: should we limit the kind of access to personal information that services like Google enable, and if so, how?
In different words, if you accept the principle that the government can justifiably limit access to compilations of public information, you should accept that it can justifiably limit access to tools that enable the automated compilation of such public information--tools like Google for example.
"Just because it's the founder of Google does not mean he is not a human being, and should not be treated as such."
You are quite right. But because he is also the CEO of one of a number of new companies that make large amounts of personal information available in an unprecedented way means that it is actually legitimate to use him as an example.
Both Google's and your reaction shows that you aren't quite comfortable yourself with that level of access to personal information.
"You don't think that similar information about you, or your family is available on the internet?"
Of course it is, and Google (among a few other companies) makes it accessible in a way that it wasn't before. That's the whole point of the story!
It has to do with reporting personal information about a person in a way that is objectionable to said person,
If ZDNet had reported on any other company or person, that would be a valid point. But in this case, the whole point of the story was to demonstrate that Google's product made unprecedented amounts of personal information available. Who should ZDNet rather have used to illustrate that point than a Google employee?
I say kudos to Google for standing up to asshole reporting.
It's not that simple. You may have already made up your mind that anything Google does is OK, but other people aren't convinced. Generally, I even like Google and their products, but I also think that this kind of reporting and the subsequent discussions are necessary. So far, Google's response has not been particularly reassuring.
They cannot provide irrefutable evidence, and therefore have no case.
No evidence is ever "irrefutable": you can always construct an argument that evidence was tampered with or made up out of thin air.
We're not discussing morals, we're discussing legality.
Quite right. And the legal system makes tradeoffs between standards of proof, severity of punishment, and importance of the law being broken. As a matter of public policy and legal principle, the standard for traffic tickets should be to presume a priori that photographic evidence introduced by the police is valid and has not been tampered with, unless there is specific evidence to suggest otherwise. And if there are indications that evidence has been tampered with by the police, then a thorough investigation needs to get to the bottom of that.
If you don't like traffic cameras, have them banned through the political process; you would have my full support for that. But playing games with the legal system hurts people more than it helps.
I think between GPL, LGPL, and BSD, we have pretty much all the bases covered in terms of different kinds open source license terms.
However, BSD alone is not enough to cover all the needs of open source software. I have made available code under all three licenses, depending on what objectives I had in mind. Just because you think that BSD works for your project doesn't mean that it works for all projects. People who pick the GPL generally do so deliberately and after a lot of thought, and the success of GPL-licensed projects shows that the model works well for some projects.
The whole legal system is based on the requirement to *prove* guilt.
Yes, and the photo does that.
They are unable to prove that the photo was legit - whats to say they *DIDN'T* photoshop it?
They said that they didn't Photoshop it; that's good enough.
Therefore, they have no proof of guilt.
Sure they do. "Proof" comes in lots of forms. We might not want to decide a murder case based on this sort of evidence ("beyond a reasonable doubt"), but for a traffic ticket, it seems OK.
More people need to do this... thing is most people just pay the fine because its less inconvenient to get someone to fight it.
Do you seriously believe that the image was manipulated in Photoshop? I don't think so.
If you insist on murder-case like evidence for traffic tickets, then either there won't be a lot of traffic tickets, resulting in more people killed and injured due to reckless driving, or the cost of police enforcement will go up greatly. That's a bad tradeoff.
I don't like the way these kinds of cameras are being used, but attacking the standard of evidence in order to fight them is a really bad idea.
Note, incidentally, that an MD5 checksum could have been just as easily attacked; who is to say that someone didn't hack into the camera and manipulated the image there? So, now you need physically secure cameras with extensive auditing and record keeping, multiple witnesses for accessing them, and then you could still argue that the whole police department might have colluded to give you a ticket.
I don't like automated cameras for speeding tickets--I think they are frequently being abused by police for raising revenue rather than sensible policy enforcement.
Having said that, throwing out evidence because it "only" uses an MD5 checksum is ridiculous. What is the attorney suggesting? That the police doctored the photo in Photoshop, specifically to implicate his client?
Your assertions are incorrect in many ways. But that's not even the point: you keep changing your story and your arguments.
My assertions remain:
current population levels are nowhere near sustainable and won't be sustainable using any foreseeable technology
growth has slowed, in part because of family planning, and in some populations due to disease and famine
You have provided no counter arguments and haven't even tried to disprove these points.
Your final statement, "Slowing our population growth rate--whether by fiat or by natural disaster--won't do anything to eliminate famine, disease, and resource depletion. Sorry to sound like such a company man, but really, only economic and political stability can do that." is correct but irrelevant. It's irrelevant because economic and political stability is unachievable at current population levels. It's also irrelevant because, indeed, slowing population growth won't do anything to eliminate famine, disease, or resource depletion, because the absolute population size is already far too large.
I use SuSE on some of my machines. It's probably the easiest to install and use of the various major Linux distributions. It has tons of hardware support, excellent auto-detection, and a good and intuitive installer.
It's not quite as flexible as some other Linux distributions, and command-line based maintenance can be a little harder at times. But, altogether, it is a good choice for people looking for a desktop experience similar to what they are getting from Windows or Macintosh. In fact, I think SuSE is a better choice than either: it comes with more software, it's more consistent, and it's just a better user experience.
SCO had to argue that the GPL was invalid because otherwise they would have no case at all. The reason is that SCO actually shipped the Linux kernel themselves, which meant that even if Linux had incorporated UNIX source code, SCO would have put it under the GPL by that action.
I think you'll find that "famine, malnutrition, drought, disease, conflict" has historically been much more widespread than it is presently, even in sub-Saharan Africa--and this despite our ever-increasing population.
As a species we only need one ship full of probably 13 people to continue; I could be wrong on the number needed but it's not too many.
And these "13 people", how are they going to sustain themselves? Where are they going to get food, water, shelter in space? Order it over the Internet? Even the most inhospitable spot on earth is paradise compared to space, the moon, or Mars.
And how are a "few thousand" going to produce the chips, plastics, alloys, ceramics, machines, electronics, chemicals, and food that a colony needs to sustain itself?
Nanotech and self-assembling/reproducing machinery would be an excellent boon here. As long as we have the required resources where we go to, and a way to make it, it can happen.
If that technology existed, we'd be using it on earth instead of fighting wars over oil and minerals. In fact, it doesn't exist and isn't even close to being realized. The only way we have of getting resources out of the soild is with huge machinery and large work crews.
Just like daytrips to the moon. We could have them right now - after all, the technology to get there and back was sufficiently advanced in the 60s to do it. There's just not the investment there any more.
Manned space travel is trivial in comparison with self-sustaining colonies in space or on other planets. We will likely have centuries of manned space travel throughout the solar system before colonies become self-sustaining.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe you are applying to the wrong companies. My current company will not even accept Word-formatted resumes, and I have never had to submit a resume in Word format. Also, I have never found a recruiter that was useful, either when I was looking for a job or when I was trying to fill a position.
Far more useful than recruiters are professional contacts, alumni associations, and personal contacts.
Just to be picky, I'll point out that google doesn't actually make that information available.
Just to be picky, CNet doesn't actually make information on Schmidt "available", they just make it easier to get to it.
What Google and CNet have done is analogous: they make it easier to get to sensitive information that is already public and neither asked the people affected for permission. That's the point of the CNet article.
It sounds to me that you're saying here that because somebody is rich, then it's open season to publish any information about them you can get your hands on.
No, what I'm saying is that Schmidt chose a business model that made him billions of dollars but that also has implications for people's privacy. A portion of his wealth is due to that business model; that portion is what, in a sense, he has traded for being willing to be exposed in this way.
What is it exactly that Google is supposed to do? If you can show me I'm 100% behind you, but I haven't heard anything on this even remotely resembling a feasible course of action.
There are many things one can do about it, some involving Google some not. For example, if people are aware of what information may be available, they can take additional steps to protect themselves from identity theft. Or, at the other end of the spectrum, we can pass legislation making all web search opt-in only (pages only get indexed when a search provider has explicit permission) and imposing strong penalties for anybody publishing or linking to social security numbers or credit card numbers. Or, Google and other search providers can voluntarily remove pages containing credit card numbers, social security numbers, and other sensitive information from their index.
If you actually work through the example in the article in question, you'll see how difficult it would be to stop somebody from doing this without actually crippling the service.
I don't think that's actually true. But you have to keep in mind that we don't have any obligation to make Google's current business model or service work. The Internet has grown up largely without laws and regulations, and as society catches up regulating things and enforcing existing laws, some services will become infeasible.
The best way for Google to avoid that path is to pro-actively come up with technical measures to reduce privacy concerns about their service. But simply pretending that there is no problem will just annoy people, and ultimately, it's a democracy and we, the people, set the rules under which companies are permitted to operate.
I am a Linux/Unix admin professionaly and I recently went from OpenOffice back to MS-Office. [...] My CV kept causing everyone elses Word to crash, thats a cost I couldn't afford to pay as a jobseeker.
Professional Linux/UNIX admins would send their resume in PDF, ASCII, or HTML format. Furthermore, no company minimally concerned about security would open resumes sent to them in DOC format because of security concerns. And if a company insists on something they can open in Word, you can always send them RTF. To me, you sound like you are either making this up, or you are simply not very experienced.
Incidentally, Microsoft Word can crash even on opening Microsoft Word documents, depending on the versions involved. That's another reason not to use Word for resumes.
but if you track the functionality and UI changes that the companies have made over the past 6 months, this has clearly been a place where Google has been following Microsoft's lead.
The first version of start.com looks like Google has looked for years. Later versions look like what My Yahoo has offered for years. And start.com added drag-and-drop after seeing it on Google. I'm sorry, but where exactly does he think that Microsoft has been leading?
Would you mind if I shot you to prove that murder is wrong?
If murder were legal and I was an assassin by profession, that would be entirely appropriate on your part.
Instead of opening discussion about this, they chose to target Schmidt directly, and worse, personally.
That's the point CNet wanted to get across: CNet didn't ask Schmidt for permission, just like Google didn't ask me or you for permission to make our information more easily accessible. And just like CNet probably did slightly increase the risk to Schmidt's family, Google has increased the risk for you and me to be subject to identity theft, fraud, and worse.
Now, one can argue about whether the analogy really works. But it seems to me that, a priori, CNet's approach to drawing attention to the issue is justified. You, however, seem to have made up your mind already before the discussion has even started.
You can argue rich people deserve it just because they are rich. I don't buy it.
Don't try to turn this into some kind of class warfare. At issue is not that Schmidt is rich. You brought up a cost/benefit analysis, and I was responding to that. Since Schmidt's business model involves making personal information accessible in new formats, Schmidt is the natural choice to demonstrate potential problems with such a business model.
Did she benefit herself by endangering his family for a cheap publicity stunt? Yup.
CNet's actions and the actions of Google are analogous: both are legal, both are making published personal information available in a new format, both make some people very uncomfortable, and we can argue about the ethics of both of them. And that is enough justification for such a "publicity stunt", because drawing attention to potential problems like this is exactly what journalists are supposed to do.
Being a moral person means recognizing that your actions have consequences and weighing them appropriately.
I completely agree, and I think that's exactly what CNet has done. Unfortunately, Google's reaction suggests that they have not yet considered the consequences of their own actions as carefully.
Let's hope that this controversy will induce them to do so and maybe take some actions, because I think Google is generally a great company and is doing a lot of nice work. Automatically recognizing and removing pages containing sensitive personal information from their index is feasible and might be a solution.
So tell me, why is a population of 6.5 billion unsustainable?
Well, let's look at agricultural productivity. World grain production increased about 3-fold in the last 50 years, but that required a 50-fold increase in the amount of energy required per unit of food produced. It currently takes about 1600 liters of fossil fuel per year just to produce the food for a single American; storage and transport required a lot more additional fossil fuels, plus roads and other infrastructure. Fossil fuel alone is a limited resource and will become increasingly scarce.
Our use of irrigation is also unsustainable; agricultural productivity in many marginal areas was achieved through tapping into non-renewable groundwater reservoirs and creating unsustainable dams.
Fishing is another issue: a significant part of our growth has been sustained by a huge protein inventory we had inherited in the oceans, but that has not been used sustainably and it is running out.
Seems to me that the world used to be a lot messier back before we had a population in the billions, what with famine and disease in every corner of the earth, and that things have actually been getting more stable, not less, over the past few centuries
That's certainly not true in terms of absolute numbers, and it is probably not even true in terms of relative numbers, even during the entire historic period. But the historic period isn't even a good reference, because it is already characterized by many of the same problems that we have today: population growth, movements out of overpopulated areas into more marginal areas, displacement of native populations, etc. (It's common to think of ancient times as dismal, but many ancient peoples, in particular around the Mediterranean, clearly had a high quality of life and security.)
Sustainability requires using agricultural methods that don't have the energy and freshwater requirements of current techniques. Switching to sustainable agriculture will likely result in significant productivity losses and will make a lot of our currently arable land economically uninteresting. As a consequence, we'll have to limit agriculture to the most productive areas in the world and areas where freshwater is naturally abundant. And the food output from that kind of system simply cannot sustain 6.5 billion people. We'll be lucky if it can sustain 1 billion people.
Can you also explain why you think economic and political stability is impossible at current population levels?
Because when energy and water run out, there is going to be conflict. Much of the conflict in the Middle East is already about water and access to water. Access to oil is another source of conflict, and we are in the Middle East not just because of our SUVs but also because we need cheap oil for agriculture and for making good for our population.
CNet washed it's hands of providing any sort of reasonable answer and instead attempts to create a problem
The problem here is not that we all need to live in mortal fear that we get written up by CNET, the problem here is that identity thieves and other crooks can use Google(and other search engines) as a tool to cause harm to lots of people. And CNET didn't create that problem.
Thus, we ALL have great responsibility, INCLUDING CNet.
Yes, and so does Google. They could, for example, choose not to index pages containing some types of sensitive personal information. I'm not saying they should, but it's worth discussing, and CNET kicked off the discussion in what seems to me a fairly reasonable way.
"How is this all Googles fault?"
It's not about whose "fault" it is. Google is a nice, innovative company that generally tries to do the right thing, within the constraints that the market imposes on them. Google just happens to sit at the center of issues surrounding privacy, copyright, and other issues that we, as a society, need to come to terms with, one way or another.
"I agree that there is an issue to be discussed here, but it's about personal responsibility and accountability. Not about a particular company."
You are right: it is not about a particular company; these issues come up for all search engines. But Google, being the biggest and most profitable one, is the obvious example for discussing them. And Schmidt is the obvious target to illustrate the point.
Google doesn't publish anything outside their own business related information
But Google greatly facilitates access to that information. You may personally have already decided for yourself that that kind of facilitation does not imply any responsibility on their part, but others have not made up their mind.
And Google does have control. Google could, for example, remove from their index pages likely to contain social security numbers, credit card numbers, and passwords, but they don't. Maybe they should.
Clearly, there's a public benefit to talking about this. There's also a specific cost borne by one person. How do we know the cost is offset by the benefit?
But that very principle makes Schmidt such an excellent choice. Unlike any person outside of Google, Schmidt has benefitted enormously from the way Google does business. Therefore, he is the most obvious person to pay the cost associated with this discussion about Google's business practices is Schmidt himself.
As yourself: would you accept being written up like that by CNET and other publications in return for a few billion dollars? I certainly would.
In the government/military such works, even having come from public sources, can be classified due to the sheer amount of critical information in them. This does not mean the sources are classified, merely that the sifted sorted analyzed information is.
Yes. So, we have two components here: first, Google enables access to private information in an unprecedented way, and, second, the journalist uses one person at Google as an example to illustrate that point.
Whether or not the journalist's specific illustration was out of line, the real discussion is about the first point: should we limit the kind of access to personal information that services like Google enable, and if so, how?
In different words, if you accept the principle that the government can justifiably limit access to compilations of public information, you should accept that it can justifiably limit access to tools that enable the automated compilation of such public information--tools like Google for example.
"Just because it's the founder of Google does not mean he is not a human being, and should not be treated as such."
You are quite right. But because he is also the CEO of one of a number of new companies that make large amounts of personal information available in an unprecedented way means that it is actually legitimate to use him as an example.
Both Google's and your reaction shows that you aren't quite comfortable yourself with that level of access to personal information.
"You don't think that similar information about you, or your family is available on the internet?"
Of course it is, and Google (among a few other companies) makes it accessible in a way that it wasn't before. That's the whole point of the story!
It has to do with reporting personal information about a person in a way that is objectionable to said person,
If ZDNet had reported on any other company or person, that would be a valid point. But in this case, the whole point of the story was to demonstrate that Google's product made unprecedented amounts of personal information available. Who should ZDNet rather have used to illustrate that point than a Google employee?
I say kudos to Google for standing up to asshole reporting.
It's not that simple. You may have already made up your mind that anything Google does is OK, but other people aren't convinced. Generally, I even like Google and their products, but I also think that this kind of reporting and the subsequent discussions are necessary. So far, Google's response has not been particularly reassuring.
They cannot provide irrefutable evidence, and therefore have no case.
No evidence is ever "irrefutable": you can always construct an argument that evidence was tampered with or made up out of thin air.
We're not discussing morals, we're discussing legality.
Quite right. And the legal system makes tradeoffs between standards of proof, severity of punishment, and importance of the law being broken. As a matter of public policy and legal principle, the standard for traffic tickets should be to presume a priori that photographic evidence introduced by the police is valid and has not been tampered with, unless there is specific evidence to suggest otherwise. And if there are indications that evidence has been tampered with by the police, then a thorough investigation needs to get to the bottom of that.
If you don't like traffic cameras, have them banned through the political process; you would have my full support for that. But playing games with the legal system hurts people more than it helps.
I think between GPL, LGPL, and BSD, we have pretty much all the bases covered in terms of different kinds open source license terms.
However, BSD alone is not enough to cover all the needs of open source software. I have made available code under all three licenses, depending on what objectives I had in mind. Just because you think that BSD works for your project doesn't mean that it works for all projects. People who pick the GPL generally do so deliberately and after a lot of thought, and the success of GPL-licensed projects shows that the model works well for some projects.
The whole legal system is based on the requirement to *prove* guilt.
Yes, and the photo does that.
They are unable to prove that the photo was legit - whats to say they *DIDN'T* photoshop it?
They said that they didn't Photoshop it; that's good enough.
Therefore, they have no proof of guilt.
Sure they do. "Proof" comes in lots of forms. We might not want to decide a murder case based on this sort of evidence ("beyond a reasonable doubt"), but for a traffic ticket, it seems OK.
More people need to do this... thing is most people just pay the fine because its less inconvenient to get someone to fight it.
Do you seriously believe that the image was manipulated in Photoshop? I don't think so.
If you insist on murder-case like evidence for traffic tickets, then either there won't be a lot of traffic tickets, resulting in more people killed and injured due to reckless driving, or the cost of police enforcement will go up greatly. That's a bad tradeoff.
I don't like the way these kinds of cameras are being used, but attacking the standard of evidence in order to fight them is a really bad idea.
Note, incidentally, that an MD5 checksum could have been just as easily attacked; who is to say that someone didn't hack into the camera and manipulated the image there? So, now you need physically secure cameras with extensive auditing and record keeping, multiple witnesses for accessing them, and then you could still argue that the whole police department might have colluded to give you a ticket.
I don't like automated cameras for speeding tickets--I think they are frequently being abused by police for raising revenue rather than sensible policy enforcement.
Having said that, throwing out evidence because it "only" uses an MD5 checksum is ridiculous. What is the attorney suggesting? That the police doctored the photo in Photoshop, specifically to implicate his client?
My assertions remain:
You have provided no counter arguments and haven't even tried to disprove these points.
Your final statement, "Slowing our population growth rate--whether by fiat or by natural disaster--won't do anything to eliminate famine, disease, and resource depletion. Sorry to sound like such a company man, but really, only economic and political stability can do that." is correct but irrelevant. It's irrelevant because economic and political stability is unachievable at current population levels. It's also irrelevant because, indeed, slowing population growth won't do anything to eliminate famine, disease, or resource depletion, because the absolute population size is already far too large.
I use SuSE on some of my machines. It's probably the easiest to install and use of the various major Linux distributions. It has tons of hardware support, excellent auto-detection, and a good and intuitive installer.
It's not quite as flexible as some other Linux distributions, and command-line based maintenance can be a little harder at times. But, altogether, it is a good choice for people looking for a desktop experience similar to what they are getting from Windows or Macintosh. In fact, I think SuSE is a better choice than either: it comes with more software, it's more consistent, and it's just a better user experience.
SCO had to argue that the GPL was invalid because otherwise they would have no case at all. The reason is that SCO actually shipped the Linux kernel themselves, which meant that even if Linux had incorporated UNIX source code, SCO would have put it under the GPL by that action.
I think you'll find that "famine, malnutrition, drought, disease, conflict" has historically been much more widespread than it is presently, even in sub-Saharan Africa--and this despite our ever-increasing population.
If only it were true, but it isn't.
As a species we only need one ship full of probably 13 people to continue; I could be wrong on the number needed but it's not too many.
And these "13 people", how are they going to sustain themselves? Where are they going to get food, water, shelter in space? Order it over the Internet? Even the most inhospitable spot on earth is paradise compared to space, the moon, or Mars.
A few thousand should more than suffice.
And how are a "few thousand" going to produce the chips, plastics, alloys, ceramics, machines, electronics, chemicals, and food that a colony needs to sustain itself?
Nanotech and self-assembling/reproducing machinery would be an excellent boon here. As long as we have the required resources where we go to, and a way to make it, it can happen.
If that technology existed, we'd be using it on earth instead of fighting wars over oil and minerals. In fact, it doesn't exist and isn't even close to being realized. The only way we have of getting resources out of the soild is with huge machinery and large work crews.
Just like daytrips to the moon. We could have them right now - after all, the technology to get there and back was sufficiently advanced in the 60s to do it. There's just not the investment there any more.
Manned space travel is trivial in comparison with self-sustaining colonies in space or on other planets. We will likely have centuries of manned space travel throughout the solar system before colonies become self-sustaining.