I don't agree if you look at it on a system level. There you can assign a motive.
Example: TV news censorship. There might not be an individual reporter deciding to suppress certain news, but the system is setup, so certain news "sell" and certain news don't make it. If this benefits a group that doesn't want some of the news reported (and finances TV stations), than I don't think one should simply describe this as "lucky coincidence".
Basically, a group can act as if there were a single person with a motive behind it, even if all of the group members just act without their intentions being clear to themselves. In these cases I would say that the group has a motive. The motive is an (emerging) property of the group.
Surely this is still a question of result rather than cause? No matter how strange or unlikely the results I don't see that you can do more than infer that there is a strong possibility that there is a particular reason for it. Saying that the fact that news is censored shows that there is a deliberate bias is, I think, too strong; if it were established that there was deliberate censorship and that the censorship was biased then the statement would be true - but then it would beg the question.
The idea that a group can have an emergent motive is quite tempting. But I think that this is at least in part because many groups do, in fact, have a guiding purpose, so the idea seems to hold; few would disagree if you tried to say that a company is motivated by increasing its profit margin. But these cases are an illusion, since they do not show any emergent motive, only a reason that motivated the group's inception. When you apply the idea more widely the results are less acceptable: America is motivated by a desire to increase the divide between the rich and the poor; the EU is motivated by a desire to create more bureaucracy; Walmart is motivated by a desire to bankrupt small shopkeepers. In each case the group exists in a way that makes the outcome a certainty - it "act[s] as if there were a single person with a motive behind it" - but to say that it is therefore acting with a desire to cause that outcome is to advocate a definition of the word "motive" that requires no actual intent.
Whether something is down to incompetence, evil or conspiracy is a question of motive. Whether something is discriminatory is a question of result. Someone can discriminate because they are prejudiced, but they can also discriminate through a mistake if they don't realise that something will indirectly create a barrier to entry for a certain group. Equally, in this case the UI error could be a mistake or it could be a matter of evil or conspiracy, but the result of an action can't affect the motive for it.
The fact that the average age of diagnosis is 70 does not support the assertion that "50% [...] get lung cancer well under the age of 70", for two reasons. First it only shows that 50% of those diagnosed are under 70, not "well under". Second it confuses the ideas of "getting" lung cancer with being diagnosed - and this is critical when discussing why there were lower rates of diagnosis in the past. 100 years ago it was very difficult to diagnose lung cancer - more often than not, apparently, it was simply labelled "consumption" - and there was no real incentive to diagnose it more specifically since effective treatments didn't appear until the late 20th century.
I don't think you need to look for anything quite so complex to see why lung cancer was barely ever diagnosed 100 years ago. In 1910, a White US male who made it to 30 would live on average to about 65. According to the WHO, average age, today, for people to be diagnosed with lung cancer is 70. Take into account too that diagnostic science was much less advanced and it's hardly surprising that most doctors would never find a case of lung cancer.
More and more newspapers are moving to paywall model, though. With the Conservatives keen to scale back the BBC's free online presence BBC News may well become either much more limited or only available to UK licence-payers. If things continue at this rate then every reputable news source will soon be restricting its online content. If that comes to pass then I think people will pay.
Taking the point about free lawyers first, I don't know the rules in the US but in general you aren't guaranteed legal aid in civil cases.
In general, I'm not sure that you're right to call this a crappy deal. The students had to make a decision based on the knowledge that: -They would probably win - but there's always a chance that the school district would be able to disclaim liability or contest the case. -If they did win, there's no guarantee on the damages that would be awarded. I don't know much about the tort of "invasion of seclusion" - it doesn't exist over here - but it may be that the school could claim that there was no permanent harm done, which would limit the damages. -Whatever happens they would be liable for a bill for their lawyers that could run to several hundred thousand dollars.
Choosing the contingency fee arrangement meant that they didn't have to worry about the eventuality where they end up going bankrupt if the case fails. It's also worth noting that the amount that they settled for will have been influenced by the arrangement - part of the additional cost will have been paid for by an increase in the settlement.
Finally, to respond to your implication that they were "suckers" and were taken advantage of - that's almost certainly not the case. The lawyer is obliged to explain all the implications of the arrangement to the client and explain their options. If they were anything less than scrupulously honest the client could complain and start disciplinary proceedings.
Negligence is, at least in the UK, almost entirely a common law cause of action. It has been developed over the course of several centuries by the courts - that is, by lawyers and by judges, themselves lawyers.
There are some lawyers who seek nothing but self-enrichment at whatever cost. They are, in my opinion, a relatively small minority. There are also lawyers whose contribution in advancing the rights of the people and protecting the disadvantaged has been inestimable; the very principle, for example, that the Government has only those powers given to it by law, was created by a court. It is not by any means the only example.
They could easily have hired a lawyer that wouldn't have taken as much; in fact, the very same lawyers would probably have accepted a lower cut. The difference is that this was governed by a conditional fee arrangement - what's often called "no win, no fee". If they had lost the lawyers would have been out a large amount of money.
These arrangements are entirely voluntary for the people suing; the idea is to allow people who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford the legal representation to pursue a claim. For it to be worth the lawyers' time it needs to pay more on success than a normal case.
I'm not sure that that's true. I'm a law student and the solicitors that I know do a lot of work for free - both in the IT worker sense of giving friends small pieces of advice and by doing pro bono work for disadvantaged people.
It's true that an IT worker might offer to do some actual work, such as reinstalling software or cleaning viruses off a computer, as a favour for a friend, but there isn't really any comparable work for a lawyer. First, any mistake you make could cost an incredible amount of money for both the friend and you; second, even fairly simple tasks, such as preparing a will, can take a long time because of the formalities involved.
bullshit. you have no recourse if you asked a lawyer in a bar about legal advice, act on said advice and get burned by it.
just like you have no recourse if you ask a car mechanic about a funny noise at your local coffee shop, only to find out the it was something else entirely.
In fact you may well have a legal recourse in both of those situations. If you ask someone for advice on a subject in which they are considered an expert - for example, for a lawyer, the law - then they can be liable in negligence if they give advice (simplifying quite a bit): -That falls below the standard that could reasonably be expected of somebody in their position -In a situation where a reasonable person would foresee that the advice would be relied on.
Surely what he's proposing is getting a vehicle that fits your needs? If you spend 50 weeks of the year using your car to commute, to drive to the shops and to drive your kids to sports practice, and 2 weeks of the year driving long distances for a holiday, doesn't it fit your needs better to have a car that will make 95% of your driving cheaper, more environmentally friendly and less prone to breakdowns, and then rent a vehicle for the occasional long-distance journey?
Thank you for your advice. Since I don't believe I can interest you in a support contract for my jump and run game, I'm going to plaster it with ads as an alternative source of income.
And many of the same people that claim that the reason for piracy is that the prices are too high will then download the hacked, ad-free version. Because the problem isn't anything to do with the software - the software is both desirable and desired. The problem is that once people have grown accustomed to the idea that they can get an unlimited amount of digital content for free, without the inconvenience of advertisements and without any real probability of legal consequences, it is almost impossible to get them to start paying again.
What I'm not sure about, is whether private citizens have any legal recourse for compensation also- can the people whose details were leaked now sue the company for this? If they were not the ones who downloaded the materials can they sue under defamation laws or similar? I know if I was on those lists I'd certainly be exploring my options to give them a taste of their own tactics.
Under the Data Protection Act, data subjects (as they are rather unappealingly known) can claim damages from a company that does not process their data in accordance with the act. The firm here would appear to be rather egregiously in violation of the act, so damages will almost certainly be available. Even if they weren't, I suspect that an action for negligence would also succeed, on the grounds that the company did not take the steps that would be reasonable to avoid this information being released.
The more difficult question will be the damages. There are no grounds for exemplary or punitive damages here, so the only damages available will be compensatory, meaning that the claimant must show a loss that would be reasonably forseeable by someone releasing this information - damage to reputation would seem the obvious possibility. Given that there has been no widespread publication of the list (it has not, for example, been republished in newspapers), that, given its length, individuals are unlikely to come to any particular personal attention as a result of it, and that most people on the list will not trade based on a reputation that would be damaged by this list I don't think the damages will be particularly high. In an effort to restrain the figures that will be thrown around by Slashdotters I would point out that Elton John, a figure much more famous than most people on this list and whose reputation is important to his success, was awarded £25,000 for damage to his reputation following a much more damaging article. Unless people begin to be singled out and suffer harassment because of the list I cannot see how they could suffer damage beyond perhaps distress from the possibility of future harassment.
Of course I should add the standard disclaimer that you should never take legal advice from people on the internet. If you figure on the list the person best able to advise you is your solicitor.
In a common law system (like the US or UK) you have a division between binding precedents and persuasive precedents, the latter being, I think, what you're referring to. At least over here (in the UK), though, County Courts aren't either; the judges have little or no legal training and don't give much reason for their decisions, and the decisions aren't reported in the law reports, which means they would have no real authority anyway. Other than where the case is particularly odd no-one will normally even hear about them, and a lawyer trying to cite one in court would get a funny look. As one of my lecturers likes to say, the lower courts have massive importance for the country as a whole, but no importance at all for the law.
There was no real legal issue to be resolved in this case, and the issue of the camera should never have made it to court - the police lawyers should have advised them that they had no chance at all. If there had been any legal issue the judge would almost certainly have put it to a higher court.
Are you sure of this? I don't know much about the US court system, but in the UK county courts do not create a precedent. Even if that's not the case in the US, given that this was apparently heard by only one judge I would be very surprised if it created a precedent that would bind other county court judges.
What would be more likely to stop them from doing it again would be the availability of punitive damages for abuses of power by public servants - i.e. a civil remedy rather than a decision in a criminal case.
From watching the video, it looks like the vehicle had flashing lights to indicate it was a police car and was accompanied by a marked car, which stopped behind the motorcyclist. At one point he looks behind him at the uniformed cops who are standing outside their marked car, so I'm not sure he can really claim that he didn't believe the people stopping him were real police.
Is there a video around that has the complete audio? The only videos I can find have the audio removed until just after the cop gets out of the car, which seems very suspicious.
I doubt I'm the only person who can confidently say that many of the hours I spent in lectures or seminars at university were worth much more than an hour of individual study, either because of what they learned or because they made the individual study that followed more productive. Slashdot has always played host to the idea that only stupid people need to go to university, smart people can learn on their own, but I think that a smart person should be able to appreciate the value of learning from real experts.
Some employers are demanding a bachelor's degree for help desk positions; that's arbitrary.
Surely it's just a sensible take on their position?
There are a lot of people with degrees - enough that they can be certain of filling the positions without looking outside of that group. Unemployment among the young is high, meaning that college graduates will work for low wages. Therefore if the skills you learn during a degree have any bearing at all on the job - and for a helpdesk role they do, even if they aren't as vital as in some other jobs - the employer may as well take people with degrees. The biggest loss for them will probably be that the more educated workers will be looking to change jobs soon, and given the turnover in helpdesk positions that doesn't create any extra trouble.
It's worth bearing in mind that the market is very different now compared to ten years ago. One result of so many people having degrees is that companies are able to take for granted that they can hire someone with a degree, which can make their selection process easier and save on training. The result is that it is more difficult to find a skilled job without a degree than it has been in the past.
Materials that have been distributed to third parties are prima facie not subject to an expectation of privacy since the respondent no longer has control over their distribution.
Except that, unlike a physical object that is relinquished to another, a person's Facebook profile remains under that person's control.
Sorry, I perhaps should have explained the point more fully. An example often given is that of a letter: you prima facie have no right to privacy regarding the contents of a letter since you have placed the information in someone else's control, and that person might choose to divulge it. The situation here is analogous: by putting the photographs or information on her Facebook profile the woman accepted that any one of her Facebook friends might then distribute them, which suggests that she did not consider the material she was posting to be private.
The most important elements of this decision seem to me to be:
-The public portion of the respondent's FB profile shows her smiling outside her house, which would appear to contradict her claim that she has lost all enjoyment in life and cannot leave the house -It is likely based on this that further relevant evidence is contained in the private section of her FB account -It would be against the interests of justice to allow a respondent to hide relevant evidence behind self-administered privacy settings
Regarding the privacy issues: -Both a subjective and an objective expectation of privacy are required under NY law -Materials that have been distributed to third parties are prima facie not subject to an expectation of privacy since the respondent no longer has control over their distribution.
This seems reasonable to me, and on the facts of this case - the woman is alleged to be committing fraud and is attempting to suppress the discovery of further evidence - the outcome would appear to be just.
I keep hearing a lot of this sort of comment - the devs of diaspora are inept. The devs are out of their league. Etc etc etc.
You know, I don't see anyone else building anything like it. Linus was out of his depth building Linux, and SMTP, HTML, and NCSA Mosaic were certainly created by people completely out of their depth. Most of those people had degrees, and should have known to build security in from the start, right?
You guys have a better product? Let's see it. Until then, stop acting like children.
There are two issues here that I don't believe are related. One is the project; it is, as you say, largely unique, and there is no "better" option in development. The second is the team that is developing the system, who are, according to the article author, "manifestly out of [their] depth" in attempting to develop this themselves. I don't think that it is reasonable to attempt to imply anything from one of these statements to the other; the project, in its abstract form, may be both noble and laudable, but that has no bearing on whether or not the team can actually complete it.
To illustrate this I offer an analogy. Let's say that, struck by the inequality in the world and the suffering of children, I come up with a fantastic plan to build a revolutionary orphanage that will house disadvantaged children in comfort and provide for their education. No-one could argue with the merit of this in abstract. But when I arrive in Kabul with a trowel and saw it would be imprudent and irresponsible to allow me to build the structure myself and encourage the orphans to live there since, despite the merits of the idea, I lack the basic knowledge and expertise to follow the plan through. It is the same here: the idea of creating an open, secure and privacy-aware social network is commendable, but that does not - unfortunately - change the fact that the team currently engaged in its creation do not have the expertise to bring it into existence.
This is where the author's claim is rather worrying. His claim in the article (unfortunately rather lost in this attempt at a summary) is that the team completely lacks the necessary expertise and experience to build secure web apps, and has no chance of finding that experience through the open source model before their timetabled release.
I suppose it largely just boils down to what has often been apparent: an awful lot of volunteer coders have had no education in computer programming or security. While this is not always an issue, attempting to substitute enthusiasm for ability fails rather catastrophically when, as here, the task becomes difficult.
As has been pointed out a few times in response to other posts, the article author isn't saying that the software should be bug-free but isn't; he claims that the team working on it "is manifestly out of its depth with regards to web application security" and that the OSS model, which has not succeeded in supplying that expertise so far, cannot possibly supply it before the timetabled release. His point is that these bugs are important less because of their severity than because they are symptomatic of a team that is attempting to substitute enthusiasm for expertise. This accords exactly with what you say: security is not just an on/off switch, and from what he is saying Diaspora is fundamentally insecure.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't agree if you look at it on a system level. There you can assign a motive.
Example: TV news censorship. There might not be an individual reporter deciding to suppress certain news, but the system is setup, so certain news "sell" and certain news don't make it. If this benefits a group that doesn't want some of the news reported (and finances TV stations), than I don't think one should simply describe this as "lucky coincidence".
Basically, a group can act as if there were a single person with a motive behind it, even if all of the group members just act without their intentions being clear to themselves. In these cases I would say that the group has a motive. The motive is an (emerging) property of the group.
Surely this is still a question of result rather than cause? No matter how strange or unlikely the results I don't see that you can do more than infer that there is a strong possibility that there is a particular reason for it. Saying that the fact that news is censored shows that there is a deliberate bias is, I think, too strong; if it were established that there was deliberate censorship and that the censorship was biased then the statement would be true - but then it would beg the question.
The idea that a group can have an emergent motive is quite tempting. But I think that this is at least in part because many groups do, in fact, have a guiding purpose, so the idea seems to hold; few would disagree if you tried to say that a company is motivated by increasing its profit margin. But these cases are an illusion, since they do not show any emergent motive, only a reason that motivated the group's inception. When you apply the idea more widely the results are less acceptable: America is motivated by a desire to increase the divide between the rich and the poor; the EU is motivated by a desire to create more bureaucracy; Walmart is motivated by a desire to bankrupt small shopkeepers. In each case the group exists in a way that makes the outcome a certainty - it "act[s] as if there were a single person with a motive behind it" - but to say that it is therefore acting with a desire to cause that outcome is to advocate a definition of the word "motive" that requires no actual intent.
Whether something is down to incompetence, evil or conspiracy is a question of motive. Whether something is discriminatory is a question of result. Someone can discriminate because they are prejudiced, but they can also discriminate through a mistake if they don't realise that something will indirectly create a barrier to entry for a certain group. Equally, in this case the UI error could be a mistake or it could be a matter of evil or conspiracy, but the result of an action can't affect the motive for it.
The fact that the average age of diagnosis is 70 does not support the assertion that "50% [...] get lung cancer well under the age of 70", for two reasons. First it only shows that 50% of those diagnosed are under 70, not "well under". Second it confuses the ideas of "getting" lung cancer with being diagnosed - and this is critical when discussing why there were lower rates of diagnosis in the past. 100 years ago it was very difficult to diagnose lung cancer - more often than not, apparently, it was simply labelled "consumption" - and there was no real incentive to diagnose it more specifically since effective treatments didn't appear until the late 20th century.
I don't think you need to look for anything quite so complex to see why lung cancer was barely ever diagnosed 100 years ago.
In 1910, a White US male who made it to 30 would live on average to about 65. According to the WHO, average age, today, for people to be diagnosed with lung cancer is 70. Take into account too that diagnostic science was much less advanced and it's hardly surprising that most doctors would never find a case of lung cancer.
More and more newspapers are moving to paywall model, though. With the Conservatives keen to scale back the BBC's free online presence BBC News may well become either much more limited or only available to UK licence-payers. If things continue at this rate then every reputable news source will soon be restricting its online content. If that comes to pass then I think people will pay.
Taking the point about free lawyers first, I don't know the rules in the US but in general you aren't guaranteed legal aid in civil cases.
In general, I'm not sure that you're right to call this a crappy deal. The students had to make a decision based on the knowledge that:
-They would probably win - but there's always a chance that the school district would be able to disclaim liability or contest the case.
-If they did win, there's no guarantee on the damages that would be awarded. I don't know much about the tort of "invasion of seclusion" - it doesn't exist over here - but it may be that the school could claim that there was no permanent harm done, which would limit the damages.
-Whatever happens they would be liable for a bill for their lawyers that could run to several hundred thousand dollars.
Choosing the contingency fee arrangement meant that they didn't have to worry about the eventuality where they end up going bankrupt if the case fails. It's also worth noting that the amount that they settled for will have been influenced by the arrangement - part of the additional cost will have been paid for by an increase in the settlement.
Finally, to respond to your implication that they were "suckers" and were taken advantage of - that's almost certainly not the case. The lawyer is obliged to explain all the implications of the arrangement to the client and explain their options. If they were anything less than scrupulously honest the client could complain and start disciplinary proceedings.
You would think wrong.
Negligence is, at least in the UK, almost entirely a common law cause of action. It has been developed over the course of several centuries by the courts - that is, by lawyers and by judges, themselves lawyers.
There are some lawyers who seek nothing but self-enrichment at whatever cost. They are, in my opinion, a relatively small minority. There are also lawyers whose contribution in advancing the rights of the people and protecting the disadvantaged has been inestimable; the very principle, for example, that the Government has only those powers given to it by law, was created by a court. It is not by any means the only example.
They could easily have hired a lawyer that wouldn't have taken as much; in fact, the very same lawyers would probably have accepted a lower cut. The difference is that this was governed by a conditional fee arrangement - what's often called "no win, no fee". If they had lost the lawyers would have been out a large amount of money.
These arrangements are entirely voluntary for the people suing; the idea is to allow people who otherwise wouldn't be able to afford the legal representation to pursue a claim. For it to be worth the lawyers' time it needs to pay more on success than a normal case.
I'm not sure that that's true. I'm a law student and the solicitors that I know do a lot of work for free - both in the IT worker sense of giving friends small pieces of advice and by doing pro bono work for disadvantaged people.
It's true that an IT worker might offer to do some actual work, such as reinstalling software or cleaning viruses off a computer, as a favour for a friend, but there isn't really any comparable work for a lawyer. First, any mistake you make could cost an incredible amount of money for both the friend and you; second, even fairly simple tasks, such as preparing a will, can take a long time because of the formalities involved.
bullshit. you have no recourse if you asked a lawyer in a bar about legal advice, act on said advice and get burned by it.
just like you have no recourse if you ask a car mechanic about a funny noise at your local coffee shop, only to find out the it was something else entirely.
In fact you may well have a legal recourse in both of those situations. If you ask someone for advice on a subject in which they are considered an expert - for example, for a lawyer, the law - then they can be liable in negligence if they give advice (simplifying quite a bit):
-That falls below the standard that could reasonably be expected of somebody in their position
-In a situation where a reasonable person would foresee that the advice would be relied on.
Surely what he's proposing is getting a vehicle that fits your needs? If you spend 50 weeks of the year using your car to commute, to drive to the shops and to drive your kids to sports practice, and 2 weeks of the year driving long distances for a holiday, doesn't it fit your needs better to have a car that will make 95% of your driving cheaper, more environmentally friendly and less prone to breakdowns, and then rent a vehicle for the occasional long-distance journey?
Thank you for your advice. Since I don't believe I can interest you in a support contract for my jump and run game, I'm going to plaster it with ads as an alternative source of income.
And many of the same people that claim that the reason for piracy is that the prices are too high will then download the hacked, ad-free version. Because the problem isn't anything to do with the software - the software is both desirable and desired. The problem is that once people have grown accustomed to the idea that they can get an unlimited amount of digital content for free, without the inconvenience of advertisements and without any real probability of legal consequences, it is almost impossible to get them to start paying again.
What I'm not sure about, is whether private citizens have any legal recourse for compensation also- can the people whose details were leaked now sue the company for this? If they were not the ones who downloaded the materials can they sue under defamation laws or similar? I know if I was on those lists I'd certainly be exploring my options to give them a taste of their own tactics.
Under the Data Protection Act, data subjects (as they are rather unappealingly known) can claim damages from a company that does not process their data in accordance with the act. The firm here would appear to be rather egregiously in violation of the act, so damages will almost certainly be available. Even if they weren't, I suspect that an action for negligence would also succeed, on the grounds that the company did not take the steps that would be reasonable to avoid this information being released.
The more difficult question will be the damages. There are no grounds for exemplary or punitive damages here, so the only damages available will be compensatory, meaning that the claimant must show a loss that would be reasonably forseeable by someone releasing this information - damage to reputation would seem the obvious possibility. Given that there has been no widespread publication of the list (it has not, for example, been republished in newspapers), that, given its length, individuals are unlikely to come to any particular personal attention as a result of it, and that most people on the list will not trade based on a reputation that would be damaged by this list I don't think the damages will be particularly high. In an effort to restrain the figures that will be thrown around by Slashdotters I would point out that Elton John, a figure much more famous than most people on this list and whose reputation is important to his success, was awarded £25,000 for damage to his reputation following a much more damaging article. Unless people begin to be singled out and suffer harassment because of the list I cannot see how they could suffer damage beyond perhaps distress from the possibility of future harassment.
Of course I should add the standard disclaimer that you should never take legal advice from people on the internet. If you figure on the list the person best able to advise you is your solicitor.
In a common law system (like the US or UK) you have a division between binding precedents and persuasive precedents, the latter being, I think, what you're referring to. At least over here (in the UK), though, County Courts aren't either; the judges have little or no legal training and don't give much reason for their decisions, and the decisions aren't reported in the law reports, which means they would have no real authority anyway. Other than where the case is particularly odd no-one will normally even hear about them, and a lawyer trying to cite one in court would get a funny look. As one of my lecturers likes to say, the lower courts have massive importance for the country as a whole, but no importance at all for the law.
There was no real legal issue to be resolved in this case, and the issue of the camera should never have made it to court - the police lawyers should have advised them that they had no chance at all. If there had been any legal issue the judge would almost certainly have put it to a higher court.
Are you sure of this? I don't know much about the US court system, but in the UK county courts do not create a precedent. Even if that's not the case in the US, given that this was apparently heard by only one judge I would be very surprised if it created a precedent that would bind other county court judges.
What would be more likely to stop them from doing it again would be the availability of punitive damages for abuses of power by public servants - i.e. a civil remedy rather than a decision in a criminal case.
From watching the video, it looks like the vehicle had flashing lights to indicate it was a police car and was accompanied by a marked car, which stopped behind the motorcyclist. At one point he looks behind him at the uniformed cops who are standing outside their marked car, so I'm not sure he can really claim that he didn't believe the people stopping him were real police.
Is there a video around that has the complete audio? The only videos I can find have the audio removed until just after the cop gets out of the car, which seems very suspicious.
I doubt I'm the only person who can confidently say that many of the hours I spent in lectures or seminars at university were worth much more than an hour of individual study, either because of what they learned or because they made the individual study that followed more productive. Slashdot has always played host to the idea that only stupid people need to go to university, smart people can learn on their own, but I think that a smart person should be able to appreciate the value of learning from real experts.
Some employers are demanding a bachelor's degree for help desk positions; that's arbitrary.
Surely it's just a sensible take on their position?
There are a lot of people with degrees - enough that they can be certain of filling the positions without looking outside of that group. Unemployment among the young is high, meaning that college graduates will work for low wages. Therefore if the skills you learn during a degree have any bearing at all on the job - and for a helpdesk role they do, even if they aren't as vital as in some other jobs - the employer may as well take people with degrees. The biggest loss for them will probably be that the more educated workers will be looking to change jobs soon, and given the turnover in helpdesk positions that doesn't create any extra trouble.
It's worth bearing in mind that the market is very different now compared to ten years ago. One result of so many people having degrees is that companies are able to take for granted that they can hire someone with a degree, which can make their selection process easier and save on training. The result is that it is more difficult to find a skilled job without a degree than it has been in the past.
Except that, unlike a physical object that is relinquished to another, a person's Facebook profile remains under that person's control.
Sorry, I perhaps should have explained the point more fully. An example often given is that of a letter: you prima facie have no right to privacy regarding the contents of a letter since you have placed the information in someone else's control, and that person might choose to divulge it. The situation here is analogous: by putting the photographs or information on her Facebook profile the woman accepted that any one of her Facebook friends might then distribute them, which suggests that she did not consider the material she was posting to be private.
I'm not sure I can agree with you.
The most important elements of this decision seem to me to be:
-The public portion of the respondent's FB profile shows her smiling outside her house, which would appear to contradict her claim that she has lost all enjoyment in life and cannot leave the house
-It is likely based on this that further relevant evidence is contained in the private section of her FB account
-It would be against the interests of justice to allow a respondent to hide relevant evidence behind self-administered privacy settings
Regarding the privacy issues:
-Both a subjective and an objective expectation of privacy are required under NY law
-Materials that have been distributed to third parties are prima facie not subject to an expectation of privacy since the respondent no longer has control over their distribution.
This seems reasonable to me, and on the facts of this case - the woman is alleged to be committing fraud and is attempting to suppress the discovery of further evidence - the outcome would appear to be just.
I keep hearing a lot of this sort of comment - the devs of diaspora are inept. The devs are out of their league. Etc etc etc.
You know, I don't see anyone else building anything like it. Linus was out of his depth building Linux, and SMTP, HTML, and NCSA Mosaic were certainly created by people completely out of their depth. Most of those people had degrees, and should have known to build security in from the start, right?
You guys have a better product? Let's see it. Until then, stop acting like children.
There are two issues here that I don't believe are related. One is the project; it is, as you say, largely unique, and there is no "better" option in development. The second is the team that is developing the system, who are, according to the article author, "manifestly out of [their] depth" in attempting to develop this themselves. I don't think that it is reasonable to attempt to imply anything from one of these statements to the other; the project, in its abstract form, may be both noble and laudable, but that has no bearing on whether or not the team can actually complete it.
To illustrate this I offer an analogy. Let's say that, struck by the inequality in the world and the suffering of children, I come up with a fantastic plan to build a revolutionary orphanage that will house disadvantaged children in comfort and provide for their education. No-one could argue with the merit of this in abstract. But when I arrive in Kabul with a trowel and saw it would be imprudent and irresponsible to allow me to build the structure myself and encourage the orphans to live there since, despite the merits of the idea, I lack the basic knowledge and expertise to follow the plan through. It is the same here: the idea of creating an open, secure and privacy-aware social network is commendable, but that does not - unfortunately - change the fact that the team currently engaged in its creation do not have the expertise to bring it into existence.
This is where the author's claim is rather worrying. His claim in the article (unfortunately rather lost in this attempt at a summary) is that the team completely lacks the necessary expertise and experience to build secure web apps, and has no chance of finding that experience through the open source model before their timetabled release.
I suppose it largely just boils down to what has often been apparent: an awful lot of volunteer coders have had no education in computer programming or security. While this is not always an issue, attempting to substitute enthusiasm for ability fails rather catastrophically when, as here, the task becomes difficult.
As has been pointed out a few times in response to other posts, the article author isn't saying that the software should be bug-free but isn't; he claims that the team working on it "is manifestly out of its depth with regards to web application security" and that the OSS model, which has not succeeded in supplying that expertise so far, cannot possibly supply it before the timetabled release. His point is that these bugs are important less because of their severity than because they are symptomatic of a team that is attempting to substitute enthusiasm for expertise. This accords exactly with what you say: security is not just an on/off switch, and from what he is saying Diaspora is fundamentally insecure.