Well, if the local farmers cannot compete with the pricing of the imported stuff, then they go out of business and eventually all of the local money gets spent outside of the community on imported food. If there is insufficient local production of something for export, eventually all of the local money is gone, then everyone locally is screwed.

I"m not saying this type of thing is guaranteed to happen, but sometimes when the buggy whip makers go out of business, the knock on effects are wider than one might think.

OK, perhaps not a "warrant" but surely the US has some sort of "production order" where the court says "give us the records you have" http://www.justice.gc.ca/eng/c... ? Perhaps they don't, or maybe that is only in civil cases during discovery.

Logging capabilities may be ubiquitous, but logs that would be useful in a criminal case, much less so. In any case, nothing currently on the market poses this "privacy danger".

I reiterate, the present framework is sufficient in my mind.

Sure, that is an extreme position. Nobody is mandating such a thing, and there is nothing currently even available that could work in this manner, and there is no reason I can see to expect that any prosthetics would ever require such position logging.

In short I don't see the need for new legislation absent something that actually exists that might be a problem. Mandating everyone wear tracking devices is something we can fight when it seems likely to be introduced. Having a medical need for something doesn't feel at all like governmental mandating in my mind, and unless significant number of people end up with such medical devices, I see no need to address the hypothetical shortcomings that the current warrant framework has in place.

I am not convinced that mandating an encryption password for such a hypothetical device would give any real protection beyond that offered by the warrant system - once they get a warrant for the password, it seems like you are screwed anyway. If the logs are so vital to the operation of the device, there are going to be ways of getting at them that do not depend on a security system that the user can forget or misplace, and if they are not vital to the operation, then the security minded will remove or turn off that feature or the maker would not put it in in the first place.

There are limits. Those are defined by the constitution, and include the warrant system as further defined by the courts. Yes, some of these technologies give interesting edge cases, but I don't think any of them require fundamental changes to the legal framework.

As you stated, the reason the limitations on police powers of investigation are there is to prevent overreaching and false convictions. Retrieving physical evidence after a properly executed warrant doesn't seem like an issue to me, and I have absolutely no fear that anyone is going to be able to read people's minds in anything like the lifetime of my great-grandchildren.

You are choosing poor examples. The various constitutional amendments are designed to prevent abuses that harm people, except in the type of harm that is defined as putting the guilty in jail. We don't compel self-incrimination because it leads to abuses that harm many innocent people, and is not particularly effective at catching the guilty. If you want to argue against you are going to have to show that your hypothetical database and the described police procedure has much greater societal harm than this one.

A better reason for limiting these types of databases is the problem of false positives. If you database is large enough, even with 99.99 percent accuracy (a failure rate of 0.01%) we would have lots of innocent people being flagged in these types of searches. This type of thing already happens for fingerprint analysis, and while genetic comparisons should in principle allow us to confidently pick out any individual in the world (except for clones I suppose), in practice DNA evidence is only comparing a very tiny part of the DNA, and errors in application which can never all be eliminated, so it will never be perfectly accurate.

Compelling people to tell your their password in my mind is a problem - there are lots of ways that an innocent person could be harmed by that. Compelling people to give up their implanted devices with a proper warrant is not as big of a problem in my mind. If warrants are being issued for individuals without good "probable cause", that is a problem. If extracting the evidence is onerous or dangerous or painful, then there should be a higher barrier to getting the warrant. If there are increased expectations of privacy for example lawyers or times spent at home, then perhaps there need to be guidelines on how the implant data is analyzed, but all of these types of issues are currently considered under the existing frameworks.

My thesis is that cyborgs do have the same right to privacy as anyone else, and that no new laws need be drafted specifically for people with implants. To motivate any such laws, I think we need to demonstrate that the current practice has negative consequences to society or innocent individuals. Making it easier to catch criminals is not, by itself, a reason to reject a new practice.

One of my clients has an iPhone with a flaky button. He had an Apple Store person turn on a software button called "Assistive Touch" which is part of the standard iOS software. It might be useful in your situation too. Here are some instructions:

http://osxdaily.com/2012/07/02...

Yep. I wouldn't be happy, but then again I wouldn't be happy if they searched my home and found the bodies, but I would submit.

With a warrant, you can be compelled to give blood and tissue samples, and with a warrant they can search your phone or your camera, so I don't see why it should be any different with implanted devices - either treat them like non-implanted devices (get a warrant) or like parts of your body (get a warrant). When they get to the point of reading minds and playing back memories (I say at least a hundred years), then maybe we will have some difficult issues.

Why not? The non-incrimination stuff is just so that we don't give incentives to the police to beat the snot out of you to get a forced confession from an innocent person, it is not because we think there is something "unfair" about it. Boo hoo if your medical device recorded you killing the little old lady down the street and it turned you in. Now, if there was some significant chance of the medical device giving false testimony, we might need to do something different, but there is no reason on the face of it to treat implanted medical devices or any other piece of potential evidence different depending on whether or not it is required or life-saving or not.

If fear of incrimination ended up being a deterrent to behaviour that we as a society think is important, we might carve out some legal exclusions like we do for doctors, lawyers, and priests, so maybe in the future your lawyer-bot or shrink-bot might not be subject to a warrant, but I doubt anyone would care about the pace-maker. It seems so much more likely to prove your innocence than guilt.

Then again, with so many laws against things that "everyone" does in terms of drugs, music piracy, jaywalking, etc. maybe you could get widespread support to making your implanted recorders protected information.

That isn't a reduced right of privacy, the RIGHT is identical - information is subject to a properly obtained warrant. People's situations are certainly different, so the consequences of being a suspect are different for people who are subject to being recorded by various devices, both internally or externally. If you wear your Google Glasses or carry a GPS tracker (ie. cell phone) or have medical devices that record logs of some sort, those devices could serve to incriminate or exculpate (great word, eh?) you whereas someone without those types of devices would obviously not be incriminated or exculpated by them. I guess it would suck to be a eye-implant thief, but on the average, I would imagine that since the vast majority of people, in the vast majority of cases, are innocent of the crimes they are suspects of, such implants would tend to provide proof of innocence more often than mistaken evidence of guilt. I will admit little sympathy for cases where true evidence of guilt is obtained through proper search warrants - that's how it should work.

it is the same right to privacy that anyone has who uses a device that records that type of information.

Good points.

If they have been distributing the "proprietary code being illegally included" and they are the owners of the "proprietary code being illegally included", then it would seem as though it is no longer "proprietary code being illegally included" but now is "(L)GPLed code being distributed by the copyright holder". Thus anyone who forks the project after the point the company acquired to derivative should have a complete, clean GPL version to work with as everyone with any claim to any part of the code has explicitly distributed it with a GPL license attached.

If they (Mojang) have been releasing versions of Bukkit under the GPL containing the decompiled Minecraft server code, then doesn't that mean that the decompiled Minecraft server code has been released under the GPL?

Or the third option, they release the decompiled Minecraft server code used in Bukkit under the GPL. Since you just said that they have been releasing versions of Bukkit under the GPL, isn't that what they are doing?

If Mojang has been releasing versions of Bukkit under the GPL, what part of Bukkit is not in compliance with the GPL? Do the latest releases have text that says "This is GPL code, except for lines xxx through yyy which were decompiled from Minecraft server code and are not GPLed" or is the tarball accompanied by the standard GPL license text? If the latter, then all the code in the tarball is GPLed - if we trust that Mojang has not added any non-GPLed software that they themselves do not own. The software that they do have copyright claims on, they have released to the GPL by the act of including it in the tarball with a GPL sticker on the outside.

None of this requires them to release the original non-decompiled-recompiled Minecraft server code, as long as the source code being distributed is the stuff used to make any binaries they are distributing, the GPL terms are being met.

If they want to continue to release Bukkitt under a non-GPL license, then yes, they would need to rewrite the GPL portions that they do not own or that they cannot acquire from the copyright holders.

If Mojang has distributed a bunch of source code (the latest Bukkit project version) with a GPL license on it, I don't see what it matters if some of that source code might have originally been the result of a decompile of the Minecraft server code. Yes, that decompile might have been against the license of the code (copyrighted by Mojang) in the past, but if Mojang is now distributing the project themselves, they certainly have a right to release source code that is a derivative of their copyrighted work. And the GPL certainly does not require that one release earlier versions of the source code, so the original Minecraft server code need not be released under the GPL. In this case it does not seem as though Wolfe has much to complain about - with Mojang distributing all of the Bukkit project under the GPL, anyone should be able to take that code and fork it and do with it whatever one might do with GPL software. I will admit that this does seem unlikely - unless the decompiled portion of the Minecraft server code inside the Bukkit project was a minor fraction of the entire Minecraft server code, I doubt Mojang would distribute even a derivative version under the GPL.

Alternatively, if Mojang has not distributed this Bukkit project under a GPL license, then it would seem that anyone else trying to distribute it would be in violation of the GPL, since it sounds like at least part of the Bukkit project (the decompiled/recompiled Minecraft server code) is not GPL. Thus Wolfe has every right to object to the distribution of his GPL code inside the Bukkit project.

Thanks for explaining - that was the type of thing I thought you were getting at.

Well, I suspect that if you keep good records, you'll soon find that you aren't winning as much as you think you are, but hey, small risk and a bit of enjoyment when you do (as you often will) take home the extra $20. Keeping accurate records will do either of two things - show you are actually winning against the odds, or demonstrated that you in fact are not. But if you are already happy with your understanding of the situation why bother? Obviously any losses that you might actually be taking clearly are not so great that they negatively impact your financial situation, so finding out about them is probably only going to decrease your happiness anyway.

On four spins, the odds of loosing each time are one out of sixteen, and if you do run the whole four bets and lose you are out $20 + $40 + $80 + $160 = $300 (or twice that if you started at $40). If you have really won $3200 net while using this stopping at four loosing bets in a row you really do seem to be leading a charmed life.

I wonder if any casino published lists of roulette results so one could check to see if in fact the colour that comes up after a long run of one colour is still 50/50 or not (OK, 50/52 with the green guys included). Here is a million spins: http://rouletteforum.cc/index....

Anyhow, I'm not going to analyze it.

Wikipedia talks about this type of progressive system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Oh my goodness - you would think I could divide by 10 correctly, eh? I guess not.

So if we model 80 extra wins over losses, if that is within 4 standard deviations of the expected value of zero extra wins, that make the standard deviation around 20, and the variance 400 and the number of total bets around 1600, which at least is starting to be more reasonable. A (very) few people (one out of about 16,000) who make 1600 bets will win 80 times more than they lose.

So, what exactly is your activity? Explain it to me like I am stupid, cause I probably am, and I don't know what a chase bet is or anything like that. Are you waiting for a run of one colour and then betting $40, or is it more complicated than that?