It is unlawful to refuse a person a glass of water.
It is illegal to smoke cigarettes within 15 feet of a public place unless you have a Class 12 liqueur license in Mesa
An ordinance prohibits the wearing of suspenders in Nogales.
Women may not wear pants in Tucson.
If you know you're sick and yet you enter Arizona anyway, wouldn't that technically be a violation of subsection A, paragraph 2 of this statute? Better not sneeze if you look "touristy".
Littering (including spitting on the ground, for example, according to this.)
Where I work my developers, my fellow QE, and I all have private offices along basically the same hallway, so it's easy to call for someone to stop by if I have a question or to go walk a few steps if that doesn't work. At the same time, we have conference rooms on the same floor (in our case, on the same hallway as our offices) so when we need to hold a team meeting, we don't have far to go. It works pretty well.
Of course, the list of things that are easier and better than getting lawyers involved is quite long, but that's beside the point.
If these researchers had thought that using the data for other purposes would have some benefit, they could have explained why and asked the donors (or the tribe leadership) for permission. In the worst case, the donors or the tribe say no; in the best case you convince them to let you do what you want.
One reason is because no matter how we may try to break it we can never imagine the utterly creative stupidity that a user will cast upon our software.
That's one factor; but another larger factor is that there are often several orders of magnitude more users of your software than there are testers. Even if the testers were able to come up with all the "utterly creative stupidity" as the users, there wouldn't be enough hours in the day for them to test all those cases.
Your response to those other forms (well, except for your tax forms, I guess) is not required by law. The letter I got alerting me that in about a week I'd receive a form that I was required by law to fill out and return, the bold text on the front of the envelope that contained the actual census form, the postcard-style reminder I received a couple of days after I'd mailed the damn thing back, and the television commercials that have been airing since January all reminded me that YOUR RESPONSE IS REQUIRED BY LAW. How much of the GAO-estimated $11 billion cost of the census would you guess was wasted^H^H^H^H^H^Hspent on those additional reminders? Would it have been more cost-effective to send out a second request (or even a Census Bureau representative) to the locations where a census form was sent but not returned a month after the original mailing?
The only way I can think of removing your information is to edit your profile with random information that makes sense but is generic.
"The only winning move is not to play."
Alternately, if you REALLY want to get them to remove your information quickly, include information copyrighted by the C* of Scientology [replace the wildcard with whatever you feel is appropriate] in your profile, and send the C* a link to it.
"We know that 1 of these 300 people probably committed this crime.
... or one of the 6500 people who are NOT U.S. citizens who also match that sample. Remember there are approximately 6.8 billion people in the world today. Or are you going to collect these DNA samples... er "signatures", sorry I misspoke... from everyone who enters the country?
Now, that said, I agree that there is huge potential for a tool like this to be misused and abused, and I don't like the idea of "the government" tracking people in this manner. But to claim that a 1 in a million sensitivity makes the tool entirely useless to law enforcement isn't much of a compelling argument against it.
Oh, I agree that the sensitivity doesn't make it entirely useless... but the fact that police would come to depend upon this tool, and likely become lazy, does concern me greatly. Suppose the police had a computer that was able to automatically solve a crime correctly (one million - 1) times out of one million cases. How much would that one innocent person who was falsely accused have to argue to get the police to examine the case more closely (unless it's blatantly obvious they couldn't have committed the crime)?
As I said, I agree with your conclusion - the whole system would be fraught with potential for misuse and abuse, it could generate false leads, and I wouldn't trust the government to keep the data secure and not collect "extra" data, without significant, transparent oversight. But arguing that law enforcement could only use it "sometimes" just isn't a compelling argument when the times it would be used would be splashed all over the headlines.
She won't, for one very good reason -- the safety of her friends and family.
IANAL, but wouldn't PJ need to reveal her name on the court papers that initiated the suit against O'Gara? Even were that not the case, O'Gara's lawyers would stop at nothing to force her to reveal her identity (demanding the right to question her on the witness stand would probably be easiest, but I'm sure there are other tricks they'd try if that didn't work.) Given the level of ethics demonstrated by O'Gara, McBride, and others involved in this case I think that would lead to serious danger for PJ.
I'm not a physicist, but what I got from the article (+ some background for those who have forgotten/never took nuclear physics:)
* Atoms are made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Atomic nuclei contain just protons and neutrons.
* Protons and neutrons themselves are made up of smaller particles called quarks.
* In regular matter the protons and neutrons are made up of two different types of quarks, called up and down quarks.
* Two up quarks + one down make up a proton, one up + two down give you a neutron.
* If you replace some or all of the up or down quarks with a different type of quark (up -> strange, down -> charm I believe) then you get a new type of subatomic particle. If you think of the periodic table as being a building, the regular periodic table makes up the ground floor, while atoms using these strange/charm subatomic particles would live on higher floors.
* If you replace all the up and down quarks with antiup and antidown quarks, you get a new type of subatomic particle (the antiproton or antineutron.) They live in the other wing of the periodic building.
* This article reports that researchers have found particles where both the quarks have been replaced by antiquarks and some or all of those antiup/antidown quarks have been replaced by an antistrange quark. These are in the basement of the periodic building, the first particles discovered there.
Telling a user that you're stupid isn't such a good idea either... I would simply say something like "No, of course not. But I deal with users who have varying levels of familiarity with computers, and so I've learned to pace my instructions so that even novice users can easily follow them. Would you prefer me to speed up a bit?" That way you're neither telling the user that they're stupid nor saying that you are, you're "blaming" the "problem" on some other (potentially non-existent) person.
Absolutely. Asking the right questions the right way is key. For example, rather than asking if anything is on the screen (a yes/no question, doesn't require as much thought), you ask "What does the screen show right now?" (which actually requires some thought.)
If AFACT wins, then wouldn't it be too risky, from a legal perspective, to run an ISP without a large staff of employees screening every single user's activities to make sure they're not infringing someone's copyright? Sounds to me like AFACT winning would be an even larger threat to Australia's digital economy (no ISPs or ISPs charging an arm + a leg + either the other hand or other foot == no digital economy) than AFACT losing.
That's why one person sets up a business like that and offers, for a very small fee, to act as "agent" of any business that needs to satisfy the letter of the law. "Yes, my name is Steve, which of these 1000 companies whose logos are here on the wall are you here to visit?" Even a small fee, multiplied a thousand times, could pay for a reasonable lifestyle for the agent.
While I think there is a bit of merit to this, it certainly doesn't hurt to have more eyes possible - especially when you don't have to pay for them.
Sure it can -- if those additional eyes report mostly "non-bugs" (items they think are bugs but that are not in fact bugs, but result from user error/failure to read or understand what the behavior is supposed to be/etc.) then investigating and closing those false positives can take time away from investigating and fixing the actual bugs reported by others.
Especially given the high risk of flying in the past decade we should be glad to IMPROVE airport security...
Citation needed. Taking a look at Wikipedia's article on air safety, we find:
The fatal incident rate has declined steadily ever since, and, since 1997 the number of fatal air accidents has been no more than 1 for every 2,000,000,000 person-miles flown (e.g., 100 people flying a plane for 1,000 miles (1,600 km) counts as 100,000 person-miles, making it comparable with methods of transportation with different numbers of passengers, such as one person driving a car for 100,000 miles (160,000 km), which is also 100,000 person-miles), making it one of the safest modes of transportation, as measured by distance traveled.
and the article gives statistics comparing different modes of transportation.
Slashdot Mirror
I may be biased, but I prefer this article by numerical analyst and mathematician Cleve Moler.
IANAL, but a few examples of things "which will hang" someone (aka allow the police to stop them) in Arizona:
Where I work my developers, my fellow QE, and I all have private offices along basically the same hallway, so it's easy to call for someone to stop by if I have a question or to go walk a few steps if that doesn't work. At the same time, we have conference rooms on the same floor (in our case, on the same hallway as our offices) so when we need to hold a team meeting, we don't have far to go. It works pretty well.
So call it "Surveying the individual contributors to gather requirements and recommendations for incorporation into the seating paradigm."
Now if you excuse me, I need to go wash my hands, as all of a sudden they feel soiled.
While "It's easier to ask forgiveness than it is to get permission.", getting permission is easier (and IMO better) than getting lawyers involved.
Of course, the list of things that are easier and better than getting lawyers involved is quite long, but that's beside the point.
If these researchers had thought that using the data for other purposes would have some benefit, they could have explained why and asked the donors (or the tribe leadership) for permission. In the worst case, the donors or the tribe say no; in the best case you convince them to let you do what you want.
That's one factor; but another larger factor is that there are often several orders of magnitude more users of your software than there are testers. Even if the testers were able to come up with all the "utterly creative stupidity" as the users, there wouldn't be enough hours in the day for them to test all those cases.
Well, there's ensuring your online purchases are secure, deciding how many people you need to survey to get a good sense of how the population at large would respond to that same survey, determining relative "importance" of webpages on the Internet, or simulating how a biological system involving a predator and its prey will evolve over time, to name a few.
Your response to those other forms (well, except for your tax forms, I guess) is not required by law. The letter I got alerting me that in about a week I'd receive a form that I was required by law to fill out and return, the bold text on the front of the envelope that contained the actual census form, the postcard-style reminder I received a couple of days after I'd mailed the damn thing back, and the television commercials that have been airing since January all reminded me that YOUR RESPONSE IS REQUIRED BY LAW. How much of the GAO-estimated $11 billion cost of the census would you guess was wasted^H^H^H^H^H^Hspent on those additional reminders? Would it have been more cost-effective to send out a second request (or even a Census Bureau representative) to the locations where a census form was sent but not returned a month after the original mailing?
The nice folks from Area 51 ... er, I mean the Census Bureau will be by shortly to ask you for clarification on your answers.
We'll forgive you ... just bring one of the other Aussies that we know out of retirement and send him along to "keep an eye" on the two of them.
"The only winning move is not to play."
Alternately, if you REALLY want to get them to remove your information quickly, include information copyrighted by the C* of Scientology [replace the wildcard with whatever you feel is appropriate] in your profile, and send the C* a link to it.
Oh, I agree that the sensitivity doesn't make it entirely useless ... but the fact that police would come to depend upon this tool, and likely become lazy, does concern me greatly. Suppose the police had a computer that was able to automatically solve a crime correctly (one million - 1) times out of one million cases. How much would that one innocent person who was falsely accused have to argue to get the police to examine the case more closely (unless it's blatantly obvious they couldn't have committed the crime)?
Unless it was used like National Security Letters have been.
She won't, for one very good reason -- the safety of her friends and family.
IANAL, but wouldn't PJ need to reveal her name on the court papers that initiated the suit against O'Gara? Even were that not the case, O'Gara's lawyers would stop at nothing to force her to reveal her identity (demanding the right to question her on the witness stand would probably be easiest, but I'm sure there are other tricks they'd try if that didn't work.) Given the level of ethics demonstrated by O'Gara, McBride, and others involved in this case I think that would lead to serious danger for PJ.
It's not exactly a Master of Magic sequel, but Fall From Heaven 2 has wizards, spells, interdimensional portals, and fantastic creatures.
I'm not a physicist, but what I got from the article (+ some background for those who have forgotten/never took nuclear physics:)
* Atoms are made up of protons, neutrons, and electrons. Atomic nuclei contain just protons and neutrons.
* Protons and neutrons themselves are made up of smaller particles called quarks.
* In regular matter the protons and neutrons are made up of two different types of quarks, called up and down quarks.
* Two up quarks + one down make up a proton, one up + two down give you a neutron.
* If you replace some or all of the up or down quarks with a different type of quark (up -> strange, down -> charm I believe) then you get a new type of subatomic particle. If you think of the periodic table as being a building, the regular periodic table makes up the ground floor, while atoms using these strange/charm subatomic particles would live on higher floors.
* If you replace all the up and down quarks with antiup and antidown quarks, you get a new type of subatomic particle (the antiproton or antineutron.) They live in the other wing of the periodic building.
* This article reports that researchers have found particles where both the quarks have been replaced by antiquarks and some or all of those antiup/antidown quarks have been replaced by an antistrange quark. These are in the basement of the periodic building, the first particles discovered there.
Telling a user that you're stupid isn't such a good idea either ... I would simply say something like "No, of course not. But I deal with users who have varying levels of familiarity with computers, and so I've learned to pace my instructions so that even novice users can easily follow them. Would you prefer me to speed up a bit?" That way you're neither telling the user that they're stupid nor saying that you are, you're "blaming" the "problem" on some other (potentially non-existent) person.
Absolutely. Asking the right questions the right way is key. For example, rather than asking if anything is on the screen (a yes/no question, doesn't require as much thought), you ask "What does the screen show right now?" (which actually requires some thought.)
Then it sounds like we have another country that should be on this list.
If AFACT wins, then wouldn't it be too risky, from a legal perspective, to run an ISP without a large staff of employees screening every single user's activities to make sure they're not infringing someone's copyright? Sounds to me like AFACT winning would be an even larger threat to Australia's digital economy (no ISPs or ISPs charging an arm + a leg + either the other hand or other foot == no digital economy) than AFACT losing.
That's why one person sets up a business like that and offers, for a very small fee, to act as "agent" of any business that needs to satisfy the letter of the law. "Yes, my name is Steve, which of these 1000 companies whose logos are here on the wall are you here to visit?" Even a small fee, multiplied a thousand times, could pay for a reasonable lifestyle for the agent.
So basically that eBay showroom would be a flea market or yard sale?
Sure it can -- if those additional eyes report mostly "non-bugs" (items they think are bugs but that are not in fact bugs, but result from user error/failure to read or understand what the behavior is supposed to be/etc.) then investigating and closing those false positives can take time away from investigating and fixing the actual bugs reported by others.
Take your pick.
The rules say that already having reproduced doesn't automatically disqualify you.
Citation needed. Taking a look at Wikipedia's article on air safety, we find:
and the article gives statistics comparing different modes of transportation.