I am reminded of a time in the distant past, when I used AOL for DOS when they charged per minute and dialup POPs were 14400bps. It took me forever to figure out why I couldn't connect faster than 2400 baud. Turns out that AOL's POPs were only 14400 in major metro areas; I was not in one, so my POP was 2400 baud.
And then, on each connection, I was "downloading new art" for five minutes. When I finally put all the pieces together (no thanks to the existing AOL support), I canceled immediately.
People are much smarter these days. When someone sees an advertisement, they know that the merchant selling the product is paying the media service to deliver the ad, whether it's TV, newspaper, billboard, radio, internet, whatever. There will be a lot of "Hey, WTF?" being shouted by Verizon mobile internet users.
In the first part, provoking someone to break the law, in the US it is also illegal to entice someone to break the law, provided they wouldn't have broken said law under normal circumstances. So - going up to a random house and offering to sell them a bag of weed, then arresting them when they buy it - that's illegal. Going up to a specific house, one where drug activity has been reported and observed, offering to sell them a bag of weed, then arresting them when they buy it - that's legal.
This is an interesting situation, considering that the offenders caught would be random people, not specific people. However, hunting laws and seasons are strict enough, well-publicized and well-known. Hunters know which deer are okay to shoot and which are not, as well as when and where.
The last part, about the hunter claiming he/she knew it was a decoy - in that case they might get out of the poaching charge, but would be liable for a property damage charge. I'd imagine that there's a special statute covering intentional property damage of state-owned wildlife decoys which would make the fine for that offense the same as (or more than) the fine for poaching.
So wrong. Electric, gas and hardwire local phone companies are public utilities, and regulated as such, because they are monopolies condoned by government. The reason that they are condoned is because it would be completely inefficient to have duplicate infrastructures, which is what a competing company would have to implement. Furthermore, there is no way for a competing company to enter the same market as a public utility, because of the insane cost of building that infrastructure.
Oil companies are more like public utilities, in that society would founder without them. However, there is competition in that market; I can buy my gasoline from Shell or BP or Thornton's or anywhere I like. Hence, oil companies are not regulated as public utilities.
IANAL, but I have worked in IT for a company during a time when it was under subpoena.
The summary mentions companies "involved in federal litigation." If you are not involved in federal litigation (you're not being charged with a crime or sued or under subpoena), then you can do anything you like. The moment you become involved in federal litigation, you cannot destroy any electronic data, as it is discoverable by the court.
The fact that this is a new official rule shouldn't frighten anyone - this has been the case all along. The official rule just clarifies the rules as they apply to electronic documentation. The rules were written for paper and voicemail at best, not email, IM, backup tapes, etc etc.
Net effect: no change. If your small company came under investigation last year, you would still be subject to the same spirit of the law regarding data retention as you would be if your company came under investigation today.
"Electronic mail message" means an electronic message or computer file that is transmitted between two or more telecommunications devices; computers; computer networks, regardless of whether the network is a local, regional, or global network; or electronic devices capable of receiving electronic messages, regardless of whether the message is converted to hardcopy format after receipt, viewed upon transmission, or stored for later retrieval.
I'm wondering now, what else could be classified as an "electronic mail message" based on that definition. My presumption is that "electronic message" means digital as opposed to analog.
HDTV? Digital cable TV? Text messaging? VoIP telephone calls? Cell phone calls?
IANAL, but my sense is that email, and other forms of communication via "the tubes," are not subject to the same kind of laws regarding their privacy as telephone and postal mail. i.e., You can't open someone else's mail or listen to their phone calls without their permission unless you have a warrant from the courts, but you can demand that ISPs and mailhosts allow you to look at their email - "electronic messages" - without a warrant.
As more of our communication becomes digital in nature, I'm concerned that the already eroding privacy rights are going to be further eroded by laws that were written badly today being applied in bad faith tomorrow.
Though their use is "mandatory", people with mediocre spelling don't use them in the internet.
I don't have mediocre English spelling, and I would use the correct accented characters in English words like "naive" - except I don't know how to type those characters. Like many people, I know how to type the characters that are on the keyboard. Additionally, because there's no need for me to type characters outside the ones printed on the keys on my keyboard to make the internets come down my tubes, I have no incentive to learn how to type any differently than I already do.
It's not necessarily a matter of spelling ability.
In a practical situation, however, most mobile phone and voice-recognition users would agree that having to speak into your phone isn't always ideal or even possible.
Maybe you shouldn't be using a phone then. So long as the primary purpose of a device is two-way audio communications, it's going to (or should) be designed to do that best. Now, even though I am a Fat American(tm), I know that a lot of the world uses text messaging more than anything else. So - shouldn't there instead be a text-messaging device that's also a phone, instead of a phone that's also a text messaging device?
But unlike the car, where you can buy a new one, it's a pain in the ass to buy a new company image.
And while you're busy working to rebuild your company image, you're unable to spend as much time on generating revenue, and your stock price is falling.
That'll make sure the execs and board members get it, too.
I ride a bus to the train station to commute to work. On these buses are little screens broadcasting "TransitTV." One of the bits I saw last night -- let me re-emphasize that: last night -- was this:
Don't you hate all those downloaded files on your desktop? Make a folder on your desktop called "Downloads," and save all your files there! Now, just because you're downloaded an application doesn't mean it's installed - you have to open the "Downloads" folder and double click.
Seriously. Apparently, there are some people left in the world who need this information, and they might be on my bus. They are not going to be running Linux ever.
No, the US legal system has criminal and civil courts as well. Remember OJ Simpson? He was found not guilty at the criminal trial, and required to pay damages of some large amount at the civil trial. The main difference is that criminal cases must be proved "beyond a reasonable doubt." Civil cases are decided on a "preponderance of evidence," which is much less stringent a requirement.
"And what's the point of the Yes/No confirmation if the user is in the habit of clicking Yes without thinking about it?"
It's CYA. If there was no yes/no dialog after something like "Do you really want to format your hard drive?" you can bet that the number of end users accidentally formatting their hard drive would skyrocket, and that there would be some attempt at a class action lawsuit against the developer of the (not free-as-in-beer) OS for malpractice or some such thing. If you have seen this dialog box eight million times before, you're likely to blast right through it, and that's fine, provided you are performing an operation that you are intimately familiar with. Otherwise, you're just being careless. That yes/no dialog puts the responsibility on you, the end user, and removes it (to some degree) from the developer of the system.
Aren't situations like this like a dream come true for journalists?
You'd think they would be. The problem here is twofold:
1. There is no journalistic integrity left in America. It's about money. Ratings get money. Sensationalism, extremism, violence, tits and ass get ratings. Journalistic integrity does not.
2. The White House press corps has to play nice with the White House. If you're a journalist, and you manage to get an interview with someone high up in the administration, and you ask them real hard questions and then follow up with proof that the answer they just gave you is A) contradictory to what they said last week and/or B) a boldfaced lie, you will never get to talk to anyone in the administration ever again. When you're paying bills with the salary you make as a journalist, you've got no incentive to jeopardize that by making your interviewees uncomfortable.
You just haven't found anything worth caring about yet. Wait till you find out that all of the people who are at the same level in the org chart as you are make $20K more a year than you, and they all come to you all the time to get things done because none of them know what they're doing. Or that the person reporting to you makes $30K more. Or that the company subsidizes the CEO's political fundraisers (worse if it's for a political party you strongly oppose).
If your polish level is 50%, you haven't polished enough. This is a problem that a lot of FOSS has. The comment I was replying to was intimating that additional polish would "make less seem more" - in other words, add fluff. I'm thinking Vista and OSX eye candy with that.
Whenever you conduct a poll, and that's what Alexa is doing, you are always excluding data from those who do not respond to polls (for whatever reason). It's an inherent flaw in polling.
First thing I thought just reading the title: "No, techies must become governments." It's clear at this point that the rank and file US politicians can't or won't get up to speed on how things actually work in the electronic age. Sure, they'll pass out of office and off this mortal coil, hopefully to be replaced by people who are at least a little more in the know.
Who am I kidding? For the most part, leaders of any stripe in the US - political, financial, military, other - come from the economic aristocracy. I have rubbed elbows with the upper crust enough to know that as one rises in socioeconomic status, one does less and less for one's self, instead choosing to flex the power that comes from being higher in the caste system to get other people to do the work for you. Yes, that means turning on and using the computer as well. Who needs knowledge, understanding and empathy when you've got power?
Based on that, it would seem futile to think that the existing system of government, in the US and worldwide, can adapt to an information age. Putting the knowledgeable in power would tend to making them neglect their knowledge. The closest we could hope would be to have semi-powerful, semi-knowledgeable advisors to the real leadership - but as you've described, even that has seemed to fail.
No, I think eventually large governments with very powerful leaders will erode, being replaced by small local governments who organize into cooperatives maybe. Which then organize into states and nations. And we do it all over again.
How are our kids going to be prepared to be soldiers as adults if we're preventing them from attacking one another during play? They'll grow up to be French or something.
My sister-in-law is a special needs teacher, works with kids who are actually autistic. Autistic kids are markedly different than other kids; autism is a serious disability.
On the other hand, symptoms of autism range on a pretty wide scale. I have to wonder if the study meant to reference Asperger's Syndrome, which is kind of like "autism lite." ADD is to ADHD as Asperger's is to autism.
I can see unmoderated television watching by toddlers who are already autistic or have Asperger's as contributing to their discomfort and behavioral problems, which would probably be followed by a greater number of diagnoses, which someone might construe as "TV causes autism." Correlation is not causation.
Clearly, you have the lead on me regarding logical notation, but I'm glad I made sense.
But there must be a C, even if there is neverending argument about what C is. Without C, society is amoral, and snuff films and kiddie porn are okay. I'm saying there is a C, and that those are two things that are on the other side of it. Things like women's breasts are arguable. And I think that good people having honest discussions about what's less than or greater than C is a good thing.
I know, the decision here is whether something is saleable or not, and if it's legal it should be saleable. So extend my thoughts to whether something should be legal or not.
"It's nice to see that a judge is actually comparing this to the other media that we're exposed to out here in the real world."
I'm not so sure. Such an argument seems to imply that if the violence were worse than what you'd see on TV, there would be some grounds to have this game forcibly prevented from sales. So while I do agree with the judge's statement, I find it a very dangerous thing to be including such a statement in defense of the game from a legal standpoint.
I know we're talking law here, so logic may have nothing to do with it, but --
Just because you make the claim that A does not reach the badness of B, so A is permissable does not mean that if A surpassed the badness of B it would not be permissable. B in this discussion is not a defined limit of badness, it is a real-world example of a level of badness which is permissable - while the actual limit may be higher, or very much higher. The point is that it's not lower.
If there were a strictly defined badness limit - say, C - then there would be no reason to reference B at all.
Slashdot Mirror
I am reminded of a time in the distant past, when I used AOL for DOS when they charged per minute and dialup POPs were 14400bps. It took me forever to figure out why I couldn't connect faster than 2400 baud. Turns out that AOL's POPs were only 14400 in major metro areas; I was not in one, so my POP was 2400 baud.
And then, on each connection, I was "downloading new art" for five minutes. When I finally put all the pieces together (no thanks to the existing AOL support), I canceled immediately.
People are much smarter these days. When someone sees an advertisement, they know that the merchant selling the product is paying the media service to deliver the ad, whether it's TV, newspaper, billboard, radio, internet, whatever. There will be a lot of "Hey, WTF?" being shouted by Verizon mobile internet users.
IANAL
In the first part, provoking someone to break the law, in the US it is also illegal to entice someone to break the law, provided they wouldn't have broken said law under normal circumstances. So - going up to a random house and offering to sell them a bag of weed, then arresting them when they buy it - that's illegal. Going up to a specific house, one where drug activity has been reported and observed, offering to sell them a bag of weed, then arresting them when they buy it - that's legal.
This is an interesting situation, considering that the offenders caught would be random people, not specific people. However, hunting laws and seasons are strict enough, well-publicized and well-known. Hunters know which deer are okay to shoot and which are not, as well as when and where.
The last part, about the hunter claiming he/she knew it was a decoy - in that case they might get out of the poaching charge, but would be liable for a property damage charge. I'd imagine that there's a special statute covering intentional property damage of state-owned wildlife decoys which would make the fine for that offense the same as (or more than) the fine for poaching.
So wrong. Electric, gas and hardwire local phone companies are public utilities, and regulated as such, because they are monopolies condoned by government. The reason that they are condoned is because it would be completely inefficient to have duplicate infrastructures, which is what a competing company would have to implement. Furthermore, there is no way for a competing company to enter the same market as a public utility, because of the insane cost of building that infrastructure.
Oil companies are more like public utilities, in that society would founder without them. However, there is competition in that market; I can buy my gasoline from Shell or BP or Thornton's or anywhere I like. Hence, oil companies are not regulated as public utilities.
IANAL, but I have worked in IT for a company during a time when it was under subpoena.
The summary mentions companies "involved in federal litigation." If you are not involved in federal litigation (you're not being charged with a crime or sued or under subpoena), then you can do anything you like. The moment you become involved in federal litigation, you cannot destroy any electronic data, as it is discoverable by the court.
The fact that this is a new official rule shouldn't frighten anyone - this has been the case all along. The official rule just clarifies the rules as they apply to electronic documentation. The rules were written for paper and voicemail at best, not email, IM, backup tapes, etc etc.
Net effect: no change. If your small company came under investigation last year, you would still be subject to the same spirit of the law regarding data retention as you would be if your company came under investigation today.
Ontic evil.
I know you've got to be smacking yourself about that one, but I'll read it as extremely funny intended sarcasm.
I'm wondering now, what else could be classified as an "electronic mail message" based on that definition. My presumption is that "electronic message" means digital as opposed to analog.
HDTV?
Digital cable TV?
Text messaging?
VoIP telephone calls?
Cell phone calls?
IANAL, but my sense is that email, and other forms of communication via "the tubes," are not subject to the same kind of laws regarding their privacy as telephone and postal mail. i.e., You can't open someone else's mail or listen to their phone calls without their permission unless you have a warrant from the courts, but you can demand that ISPs and mailhosts allow you to look at their email - "electronic messages" - without a warrant.
As more of our communication becomes digital in nature, I'm concerned that the already eroding privacy rights are going to be further eroded by laws that were written badly today being applied in bad faith tomorrow.
I don't have mediocre English spelling, and I would use the correct accented characters in English words like "naive" - except I don't know how to type those characters. Like many people, I know how to type the characters that are on the keyboard. Additionally, because there's no need for me to type characters outside the ones printed on the keys on my keyboard to make the internets come down my tubes, I have no incentive to learn how to type any differently than I already do.
It's not necessarily a matter of spelling ability.
Maybe you shouldn't be using a phone then. So long as the primary purpose of a device is two-way audio communications, it's going to (or should) be designed to do that best. Now, even though I am a Fat American(tm), I know that a lot of the world uses text messaging more than anything else. So - shouldn't there instead be a text-messaging device that's also a phone, instead of a phone that's also a text messaging device?
And while you're busy working to rebuild your company image, you're unable to spend as much time on generating revenue, and your stock price is falling.
That'll make sure the execs and board members get it, too.
Seriously. Apparently, there are some people left in the world who need this information, and they might be on my bus. They are not going to be running Linux ever.
IANAL.
No, the US legal system has criminal and civil courts as well. Remember OJ Simpson? He was found not guilty at the criminal trial, and required to pay damages of some large amount at the civil trial. The main difference is that criminal cases must be proved "beyond a reasonable doubt." Civil cases are decided on a "preponderance of evidence," which is much less stringent a requirement.
It's CYA. If there was no yes/no dialog after something like "Do you really want to format your hard drive?" you can bet that the number of end users accidentally formatting their hard drive would skyrocket, and that there would be some attempt at a class action lawsuit against the developer of the (not free-as-in-beer) OS for malpractice or some such thing. If you have seen this dialog box eight million times before, you're likely to blast right through it, and that's fine, provided you are performing an operation that you are intimately familiar with. Otherwise, you're just being careless. That yes/no dialog puts the responsibility on you, the end user, and removes it (to some degree) from the developer of the system.
You'd think they would be. The problem here is twofold:
1. There is no journalistic integrity left in America. It's about money. Ratings get money. Sensationalism, extremism, violence, tits and ass get ratings. Journalistic integrity does not.
2. The White House press corps has to play nice with the White House. If you're a journalist, and you manage to get an interview with someone high up in the administration, and you ask them real hard questions and then follow up with proof that the answer they just gave you is A) contradictory to what they said last week and/or B) a boldfaced lie, you will never get to talk to anyone in the administration ever again. When you're paying bills with the salary you make as a journalist, you've got no incentive to jeopardize that by making your interviewees uncomfortable.
And 6.6.6.255 is the loudspeaker on the pole in the middle of hell.
You just haven't found anything worth caring about yet. Wait till you find out that all of the people who are at the same level in the org chart as you are make $20K more a year than you, and they all come to you all the time to get things done because none of them know what they're doing. Or that the person reporting to you makes $30K more. Or that the company subsidizes the CEO's political fundraisers (worse if it's for a political party you strongly oppose).
Keep looking, you'll find something.
If your polish level is 50%, you haven't polished enough. This is a problem that a lot of FOSS has. The comment I was replying to was intimating that additional polish would "make less seem more" - in other words, add fluff. I'm thinking Vista and OSX eye candy with that.
If that's true, wouldn't it make more sense to spend effort on making actual "more"? Then, instead of just seeming "more," it'll be more.
Whenever you conduct a poll, and that's what Alexa is doing, you are always excluding data from those who do not respond to polls (for whatever reason). It's an inherent flaw in polling.
First thing I thought just reading the title: "No, techies must become governments." It's clear at this point that the rank and file US politicians can't or won't get up to speed on how things actually work in the electronic age. Sure, they'll pass out of office and off this mortal coil, hopefully to be replaced by people who are at least a little more in the know.
Who am I kidding? For the most part, leaders of any stripe in the US - political, financial, military, other - come from the economic aristocracy. I have rubbed elbows with the upper crust enough to know that as one rises in socioeconomic status, one does less and less for one's self, instead choosing to flex the power that comes from being higher in the caste system to get other people to do the work for you. Yes, that means turning on and using the computer as well. Who needs knowledge, understanding and empathy when you've got power?
Based on that, it would seem futile to think that the existing system of government, in the US and worldwide, can adapt to an information age. Putting the knowledgeable in power would tend to making them neglect their knowledge. The closest we could hope would be to have semi-powerful, semi-knowledgeable advisors to the real leadership - but as you've described, even that has seemed to fail.
No, I think eventually large governments with very powerful leaders will erode, being replaced by small local governments who organize into cooperatives maybe. Which then organize into states and nations. And we do it all over again.
How are our kids going to be prepared to be soldiers as adults if we're preventing them from attacking one another during play? They'll grow up to be French or something.
You forgot Redundant.
My sister-in-law is a special needs teacher, works with kids who are actually autistic. Autistic kids are markedly different than other kids; autism is a serious disability.
On the other hand, symptoms of autism range on a pretty wide scale. I have to wonder if the study meant to reference Asperger's Syndrome, which is kind of like "autism lite." ADD is to ADHD as Asperger's is to autism.
I can see unmoderated television watching by toddlers who are already autistic or have Asperger's as contributing to their discomfort and behavioral problems, which would probably be followed by a greater number of diagnoses, which someone might construe as "TV causes autism." Correlation is not causation.
Clearly, you have the lead on me regarding logical notation, but I'm glad I made sense.
But there must be a C, even if there is neverending argument about what C is. Without C, society is amoral, and snuff films and kiddie porn are okay. I'm saying there is a C, and that those are two things that are on the other side of it. Things like women's breasts are arguable. And I think that good people having honest discussions about what's less than or greater than C is a good thing.
I know, the decision here is whether something is saleable or not, and if it's legal it should be saleable. So extend my thoughts to whether something should be legal or not.
I know we're talking law here, so logic may have nothing to do with it, but --
Just because you make the claim that A does not reach the badness of B, so A is permissable does not mean that if A surpassed the badness of B it would not be permissable. B in this discussion is not a defined limit of badness, it is a real-world example of a level of badness which is permissable - while the actual limit may be higher, or very much higher. The point is that it's not lower.
If there were a strictly defined badness limit - say, C - then there would be no reason to reference B at all.