Would all these criticisms disappear if the request had come from the Federal Trade Commission? Somehow I suspect that the government-hating contingent on Slashdot would make the same arguments about any requests by a Federal agency.
I don't trust app developers or anyone else whose profits derive from using my personal information. That's why I don't have accounts on Facebook or Twitter.
A friend of mine who is a composer and musician told me he once had someone ask him to autograph a CD full of pirated copies of my friend's works. Now THAT takes chutzpah!
They sit in their 1990s era thinking because despite everything which is changed, and everything which is conspiring against them from the modern age piracy front they are making money.
Not to mention that they have a direct line to the Congress and the Executive Branch.
Like you, I kept wondering why this surprised anyone. It's not like ward bosses and precinct captains didn't know everything about everyone in their neighborhoods. I suspect their information on each voter was a lot more detailed than you could get from the Facebook or Google profiles, too. I'm also sure they didn't spend much time in 1890 trying to get people to the polls who weren't likely to vote, or to vote their way, either.
Let's take the author's three points in order. First, he worries about data breaches, a reasonable concern, of course, but no different than our concerns about credit-rating agencies or any of the numerous other large organizations that maintain profiles on nearly every American. I'm all in favor of strict regulations, and more importantly substantial penalties, to enforce more care in the protection of our personal information. Let's make rules that apply to Experian and political organizations alike.
Second, he argues that privacy encourages anonymous freedom of speech, a claim that probably most of us would agree with. But what institution has provided a better outlet for anonymous speech than the Internet itself? What better examples for the power of speech, both self-identified and anonymous, can we point to besides this week's Komen fiasco and the revolt against SOPA/PIPA? I don't think peoples' reactions to these events would have been diluted had the commentators been more aware of privacy issues.
Third, he talks about "informational asymmetries" that give additional power to wealthier candidates and groups. He points in particular to the Iowa Democratic Party requiring candidates to pay $100K for access to its database in 2008. I wonder how much it would have cost each campaign to assemble the same information on its own. I'm going to guess that the cost could easily have been more than $100K.
So, when all was said and done, the author proposed no specific policies or legislation to address these supposed threats to the integrity of our political system. I'm sure it looks good on his resume that he has an article in the Stanford Law Review, but honestly, this article says nothing we don't already know, and proposes no solutions to address the issues he raises.
Actually most characters like Mario are covered by trade marks, which have an entirely different body of law applied to them than copyright law. For instance, trademarks don't expire like copyrights do. (Yes, yes, Sonny Bono, etc.) Also the standards for proving infringement are different. Here's a quick summary: http://brandgeek.net/trademark-copyright/
I'm curious whether you have an Exchange server, and whether you were a Blackberry shop before?
I ask this because I've thought Microsoft's biggest opportunity would be to drive RIM out of the market by selling Windows Phone to existing Blackberry customers who have Exchange in place. The BB outage some weeks back should have hastened this transition. So I was puzzled by Randel's article where he seems to ignore the corporate market entirely to focus on the appeal, or lack thereof, to consumers.
For those of you working in corporate settings with Blackberry systems, do you see WinPhone 7 as a logical replacement?
I've read the first few pages of the report and intend to read the details about the three areas where the authors think Firefox is lacking -- sandboxing, plug-in security, and JIT hardening.
However I will point out the comparison applies only to versions of these browsers running on Windows 7. For Linux users, the comparisons might not be so important, though I'd obviously prefer a browser that employs technologies like sandboxing and enforces security on plug-ins.
If I switched to Chrome, how much privacy would I sacrifice to gain these security enhancements? I already use Google dozens of times a day, sometimes with a Google account. I use Ghostery to block most tracking cookies except for Google Analytics. I have some clients' sites subscribed to Analytics so I figure I should support the service myself. Would switching to Chrome provide Google additional information about me that it doesn't get now?
What about the state of plug-ins for Chrome? Along with Ghostery I use AdBlock Plus, ForecastFox and some download helpers. I won't switch browsers if it means abandoning the functionality available in Ghostery and AdBlock.
I could just use Konqueror or rekonq, but I've never preferred either of KDE's browsers to Firefox.
That assumes that search costs are zero. More choices increase the cost of acquiring sufficient information about each option to make a rational selection. These costs increase exponentially as the number of choices expands.
Colloquially I call this the "Chinese menu problem." It's quite common in supermarkets as well.
How long has it been since you used KDE? I've been running KDE desktops for over a decade; the current 4.x generation is really neither bloated nor clunky.
Most of the people who voice the "bloated and clunky" criticism of KDE often have little experience with contemporary releases.
I like the fact that I've avoided the entire GNOME3/Unity debacle and just keep getting the tasks I need accomplished on Kubuntu.
How does your IT staff deal with the constant security threat these commuting notebooks pose? Maybe they don't use Windows? Most clients I've spoken with report at least one, and usually multiple, malware infestations that resulted from an infected notebook being connected to the office LAN.
You'd think the rise of Cable TV would have changed this somewhat, as there could be more channels aimed at special interests, and not so much desire to achieve giant ratings (with only 3 networks, if you're not getting at least 33% of the audience, it looks bad, but with 100+ networks, expecting 50% of the audience at one time is obviously silly). But that hasn't worked out so well either:
One problem is that all the channels are bundled together. If we had a pay-per-channel system, even with advertising, it would provide better incentives for smaller market programming. If programmers charged a monthly subscription fee for some channels, it would allow the normal signalling process of the market to take place. As it stands now, I pay a monthly cable fee and can't indicate my preference for some types of programming over another.
I'll give you a different example from an actual office application. My client had a list of 50K email addresses. They wanted to remove duplicates, eliminate certain recipient domains, and do some other massaging of the entries. My friend began by reading the text file into Excel for this task, but a spreadsheet isn't the best method for filtering a text file. I wrote a single command using tools like grep and sed with pipes that did everything they wanted. It took me about five minutes to make sure I'd imposed all the required restrictions. I also alphabetized the list by domain to improve sendmail's performance in bundling multiple deliveries. What's more I could wrap the command in a bash script so the client could run "filter oldfile newfile" and get the file he needed.
The GUI metaphor for computing works well for a wide variety of tasks. It also empowers users who think more visually than textually. But like all tools, GUI interfaces have their limits. If that's someone's only concept of interacting with a computer, it limits the range of tasks they can perform.
My friend was hardly a computer novice. In fact his career began back at Digital where he was using CRT terminals on shared PDP-11's. By 2000 though, the GUI metaphor had so conquered our conception of how computers work that when presented with this task my friend reached immediately for well-known, but ill-suited GUI tools like Excel.
Registration with the Copyright Office is not required to copyright a creative work in the United States. Simply adding the usual "Copyright, 2011, Jennifer Author" is all that is needed (17 USC 401). If, however, you wish to bring suit for infringement, you are not entitled to statutory damages or attorneys' fees unless the work is registered (see 17 USC 412). Registered works must be deposited with the Library of Congress which encourages authors to share their works through this enormous public archive.
I recently had need to run some analyses on a survey taken for my college reunion and discovered PSPP. Before that I discovered gretl. For someone who hadn't run a regression or crosstab for some years now, and who wasn't about to buy an SPSS license just to run a few tables, I was delighted to find FOSS statistical packages.
Even more surprising is the absence of earlier versions of published articles that have been presented in conferences, distributed to peers, and the like. I keep expecting to find "working papers" versions of published articles on the websites of academics but rarely can find them. (I'm an ex-political-scientist, so my interests tend to that field or to related social sciences like economics. Perhaps it's different in the other sciences?)
I read TFA and kept waiting for some mention of spectrum utilization by Verizon and AT&T. Instead we see a list of smaller competitors as the "wrong hands" people. By implication if we could just drive these little guys out of the marketplace and let VZ and AT&T extend their oligopoly we'd all be better off? I think not.
The original allocation of cell phone spectrum in 1981 was done by market. In each market half the frequencies were assigned to the local wireline carrier, and the other half were licensed to other competitors. Nationwide coverage was arranged via roaming agreements, though consolidation of the non-wireline providers into larger entities moved the process forward considerably.
While your comment is meant to be humorous, the question of minors' First Amendment rights was a core aspect of the Supreme Court's recent decision striking down the California ban on violent video game sales to minors. For example, Scalia writes in footnote 3 of the decision (PDF):
JUSTICE THOMAS ignores the holding of Erznoznik, and denies that persons under 18 have any constitutional right to speak or be spoken to without their parents’ consent. He cites no case, state or federal, supporting this view, and to our knowledge there is none. Most of his dissent is devoted to the proposition that parents have traditionally had the power to control what their children hear and say. This is true enough. And it perhaps follows from this that the state has the power to enforce parental prohibitions — to require, for example, that the promoters of a rock concert exclude those minors whose parents have advised the promoters that their children are forbidden to attend. But it does not follow that the state has the power to prevent children from hearing or saying anything without their parents’ prior consent.
(In the 1975 Erznozick decision Scalia cites, the Court struck down a Jacksonville ordinance that banned drive-in movie theaters from showing films with naked breasts and buttocks. One argument was the protection of minors from such displays.)
I can see legal arguments being raised against anti-sexting laws based on this line of reasoning on the Court. There's now a pretty solid majority of First Amendment absolutists on the Court. It's not hard to imagine a law against teen sexting being struck down on the claim the both the sender and the receiver of such images have First Amendment rights.
I hate to reply to myself, but the situation is murkier still. First, Payne's name doesn't appear on the bill itself. Instead we see "Mr. TERRY (for himself and Mr. TOWNS) introduced the following bill; which was referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce." Weirder still is that neither of these Members appear on the OpenSecrets list of sponsors. Maybe they're having a database problem?
Lee Terry is a Nebraska Republican with a lot support from famed "socialist" Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway. Adolphus Towns is a NY Democrat.
One thing they have in common is hefty contributions from telcos; Qwest in Terry's case, and AT&T in Towns's.
Looking at Donald Payne's pattern of contribution shows his main sources of financial support are unions. Is the problem that the Longshoremen can no longer effectively recruit members who carry cell phones?
I don't see anyone associated with telemarketing on the list, though he did receive a small check from Verizon. Why is he the primary sponsor of this bill?
Boy people here have short memories. The most highly-publicized recent prosecution under this law was that of Lori Drew, the woman who impersonated a boy on MySpace to harass an acquaintance of her daughter. After the target committed suicide, Drew was indicated in 2008 by a Federal grand jury in California (where MySpace is located) and charged under the CFAA with one count of criminal conspiracy and three counts of violating the MySpace TOS.
Whatever legal standing terms-of-service might have, they should not have the force of law. Otherwise we're letting private entities determine what acts should be criminalized.
And it wasn't about getting mid-career people out and cutting 20 years off their expected jobs.
The program is aimed at a segment of U.S. and Canadian employees at least 50 years old who have a combined age plus years of service with Cisco totaling at least 60
It's always about getting rid of those of us over 50 who are just too expensive to keep on-board. I'm 61 with an impressive resume and can't get anyone to respond to my attempts to secure a new job. Firms don't attach any value to experience; they only look at the cost side. Replacing a 55-yo employee with 30 years of experience with a 25-year-old newcomer at half or less the salary and benefits is what passes for "human relations" in corporations these days.
My daughter's college now rents as well as sells many of its books for courses. My first reaction to this article was that it would be a great benefit to students (and their parents!) if you could rent a e-textbook from Amazon for the length of a semester. As you say, some books are worth purchasing even at the ridiculous prices now charged for textbooks. We bought her organic chemistry textbook for that reason. But there are lots of books that students will only need for at most a few months. Renting e-books makes a lot of sense for students, especially since the problems of wear and tear would be eliminated.
Slashdot Mirror
You've posted this same claim at least half-a-dozen times now. Enough, already.
Given that patents have a seventeen-year term, a patent from 1992 should have expired by now.
Would all these criticisms disappear if the request had come from the Federal Trade Commission? Somehow I suspect that the government-hating contingent on Slashdot would make the same arguments about any requests by a Federal agency.
I don't trust app developers or anyone else whose profits derive from using my personal information. That's why I don't have accounts on Facebook or Twitter.
A friend of mine who is a composer and musician told me he once had someone ask him to autograph a CD full of pirated copies of my friend's works. Now THAT takes chutzpah!
Not to mention that they have a direct line to the Congress and the Executive Branch.
Like you, I kept wondering why this surprised anyone. It's not like ward bosses and precinct captains didn't know everything about everyone in their neighborhoods. I suspect their information on each voter was a lot more detailed than you could get from the Facebook or Google profiles, too. I'm also sure they didn't spend much time in 1890 trying to get people to the polls who weren't likely to vote, or to vote their way, either.
Let's take the author's three points in order. First, he worries about data breaches, a reasonable concern, of course, but no different than our concerns about credit-rating agencies or any of the numerous other large organizations that maintain profiles on nearly every American. I'm all in favor of strict regulations, and more importantly substantial penalties, to enforce more care in the protection of our personal information. Let's make rules that apply to Experian and political organizations alike.
Second, he argues that privacy encourages anonymous freedom of speech, a claim that probably most of us would agree with. But what institution has provided a better outlet for anonymous speech than the Internet itself? What better examples for the power of speech, both self-identified and anonymous, can we point to besides this week's Komen fiasco and the revolt against SOPA/PIPA? I don't think peoples' reactions to these events would have been diluted had the commentators been more aware of privacy issues.
Third, he talks about "informational asymmetries" that give additional power to wealthier candidates and groups. He points in particular to the Iowa Democratic Party requiring candidates to pay $100K for access to its database in 2008. I wonder how much it would have cost each campaign to assemble the same information on its own. I'm going to guess that the cost could easily have been more than $100K.
So, when all was said and done, the author proposed no specific policies or legislation to address these supposed threats to the integrity of our political system. I'm sure it looks good on his resume that he has an article in the Stanford Law Review, but honestly, this article says nothing we don't already know, and proposes no solutions to address the issues he raises.
Actually most characters like Mario are covered by trade marks, which have an entirely different body of law applied to them than copyright law. For instance, trademarks don't expire like copyrights do. (Yes, yes, Sonny Bono, etc.) Also the standards for proving infringement are different. Here's a quick summary: http://brandgeek.net/trademark-copyright/
I'm curious whether you have an Exchange server, and whether you were a Blackberry shop before?
I ask this because I've thought Microsoft's biggest opportunity would be to drive RIM out of the market by selling Windows Phone to existing Blackberry customers who have Exchange in place. The BB outage some weeks back should have hastened this transition. So I was puzzled by Randel's article where he seems to ignore the corporate market entirely to focus on the appeal, or lack thereof, to consumers.
For those of you working in corporate settings with Blackberry systems, do you see WinPhone 7 as a logical replacement?
I've read the first few pages of the report and intend to read the details about the three areas where the authors think Firefox is lacking -- sandboxing, plug-in security, and JIT hardening.
However I will point out the comparison applies only to versions of these browsers running on Windows 7. For Linux users, the comparisons might not be so important, though I'd obviously prefer a browser that employs technologies like sandboxing and enforces security on plug-ins.
If I switched to Chrome, how much privacy would I sacrifice to gain these security enhancements? I already use Google dozens of times a day, sometimes with a Google account. I use Ghostery to block most tracking cookies except for Google Analytics. I have some clients' sites subscribed to Analytics so I figure I should support the service myself. Would switching to Chrome provide Google additional information about me that it doesn't get now?
What about the state of plug-ins for Chrome? Along with Ghostery I use AdBlock Plus, ForecastFox and some download helpers. I won't switch browsers if it means abandoning the functionality available in Ghostery and AdBlock.
I could just use Konqueror or rekonq, but I've never preferred either of KDE's browsers to Firefox.
First, there can never be "too many" choices.
That assumes that search costs are zero. More choices increase the cost of acquiring sufficient information about each option to make a rational selection. These costs increase exponentially as the number of choices expands.
Colloquially I call this the "Chinese menu problem." It's quite common in supermarkets as well.
IMHO KDE is too bloated and clunky
How long has it been since you used KDE? I've been running KDE desktops for over a decade; the current 4.x generation is really neither bloated nor clunky.
Most of the people who voice the "bloated and clunky" criticism of KDE often have little experience with contemporary releases.
I like the fact that I've avoided the entire GNOME3/Unity debacle and just keep getting the tasks I need accomplished on Kubuntu.
How does your IT staff deal with the constant security threat these commuting notebooks pose? Maybe they don't use Windows? Most clients I've spoken with report at least one, and usually multiple, malware infestations that resulted from an infected notebook being connected to the office LAN.
One problem is that all the channels are bundled together. If we had a pay-per-channel system, even with advertising, it would provide better incentives for smaller market programming. If programmers charged a monthly subscription fee for some channels, it would allow the normal signalling process of the market to take place. As it stands now, I pay a monthly cable fee and can't indicate my preference for some types of programming over another.
I'll give you a different example from an actual office application. My client had a list of 50K email addresses. They wanted to remove duplicates, eliminate certain recipient domains, and do some other massaging of the entries. My friend began by reading the text file into Excel for this task, but a spreadsheet isn't the best method for filtering a text file. I wrote a single command using tools like grep and sed with pipes that did everything they wanted. It took me about five minutes to make sure I'd imposed all the required restrictions. I also alphabetized the list by domain to improve sendmail's performance in bundling multiple deliveries. What's more I could wrap the command in a bash script so the client could run "filter oldfile newfile" and get the file he needed.
The GUI metaphor for computing works well for a wide variety of tasks. It also empowers users who think more visually than textually. But like all tools, GUI interfaces have their limits. If that's someone's only concept of interacting with a computer, it limits the range of tasks they can perform.
My friend was hardly a computer novice. In fact his career began back at Digital where he was using CRT terminals on shared PDP-11's. By 2000 though, the GUI metaphor had so conquered our conception of how computers work that when presented with this task my friend reached immediately for well-known, but ill-suited GUI tools like Excel.
Registration with the Copyright Office is not required to copyright a creative work in the United States. Simply adding the usual "Copyright, 2011, Jennifer Author" is all that is needed (17 USC 401). If, however, you wish to bring suit for infringement, you are not entitled to statutory damages or attorneys' fees unless the work is registered (see 17 USC 412). Registered works must be deposited with the Library of Congress which encourages authors to share their works through this enormous public archive.
I recently had need to run some analyses on a survey taken for my college reunion and discovered PSPP. Before that I discovered gretl. For someone who hadn't run a regression or crosstab for some years now, and who wasn't about to buy an SPSS license just to run a few tables, I was delighted to find FOSS statistical packages.
Even more surprising is the absence of earlier versions of published articles that have been presented in conferences, distributed to peers, and the like. I keep expecting to find "working papers" versions of published articles on the websites of academics but rarely can find them. (I'm an ex-political-scientist, so my interests tend to that field or to related social sciences like economics. Perhaps it's different in the other sciences?)
I read TFA and kept waiting for some mention of spectrum utilization by Verizon and AT&T. Instead we see a list of smaller competitors as the "wrong hands" people. By implication if we could just drive these little guys out of the marketplace and let VZ and AT&T extend their oligopoly we'd all be better off? I think not.
The original allocation of cell phone spectrum in 1981 was done by market. In each market half the frequencies were assigned to the local wireline carrier, and the other half were licensed to other competitors. Nationwide coverage was arranged via roaming agreements, though consolidation of the non-wireline providers into larger entities moved the process forward considerably.
While your comment is meant to be humorous, the question of minors' First Amendment rights was a core aspect of the Supreme Court's recent decision striking down the California ban on violent video game sales to minors. For example, Scalia writes in footnote 3 of the decision (PDF):
(In the 1975 Erznozick decision Scalia cites, the Court struck down a Jacksonville ordinance that banned drive-in movie theaters from showing films with naked breasts and buttocks. One argument was the protection of minors from such displays.)
I can see legal arguments being raised against anti-sexting laws based on this line of reasoning on the Court. There's now a pretty solid majority of First Amendment absolutists on the Court. It's not hard to imagine a law against teen sexting being struck down on the claim the both the sender and the receiver of such images have First Amendment rights.
I hate to reply to myself, but the situation is murkier still. First, Payne's name doesn't appear on the bill itself. Instead we see "Mr. TERRY (for himself and Mr. TOWNS) introduced the following bill; which
was referred to the Committee on Energy and Commerce." Weirder still is that neither of these Members appear on the OpenSecrets list of sponsors. Maybe they're having a database problem?
Lee Terry is a Nebraska Republican with a lot support from famed "socialist" Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway. Adolphus Towns is a NY Democrat.
One thing they have in common is hefty contributions from telcos; Qwest in Terry's case, and AT&T in Towns's.
Looking at Donald Payne's pattern of contribution shows his main sources of financial support are unions. Is the problem that the Longshoremen can no longer effectively recruit members who carry cell phones?
I don't see anyone associated with telemarketing on the list, though he did receive a small check from Verizon. Why is he the primary sponsor of this bill?
http://www.opensecrets.org/politicians/contrib.php?cycle=2012&cid=N00000716&type=I&newmem=N
Boy people here have short memories. The most highly-publicized recent prosecution under this law was that of Lori Drew, the woman who impersonated a boy on MySpace to harass an acquaintance of her daughter. After the target committed suicide, Drew was indicated in 2008 by a Federal grand jury in California (where MySpace is located) and charged under the CFAA with one count of criminal conspiracy and three counts of violating the MySpace TOS.
Whatever legal standing terms-of-service might have, they should not have the force of law. Otherwise we're letting private entities determine what acts should be criminalized.
It's always about getting rid of those of us over 50 who are just too expensive to keep on-board. I'm 61 with an impressive resume and can't get anyone to respond to my attempts to secure a new job. Firms don't attach any value to experience; they only look at the cost side. Replacing a 55-yo employee with 30 years of experience with a 25-year-old newcomer at half or less the salary and benefits is what passes for "human relations" in corporations these days.
My daughter's college now rents as well as sells many of its books for courses. My first reaction to this article was that it would be a great benefit to students (and their parents!) if you could rent a e-textbook from Amazon for the length of a semester. As you say, some books are worth purchasing even at the ridiculous prices now charged for textbooks. We bought her organic chemistry textbook for that reason. But there are lots of books that students will only need for at most a few months. Renting e-books makes a lot of sense for students, especially since the problems of wear and tear would be eliminated.