So what? That doesn't mean it isn't desirable to make the playing field more even.
Just like it's desirable to eliminate the laws that bar us from videotaping the police but allow them to have videocameras in their cars it is desirable to make things more even in terms of access to video taken in public.
Well, may be so, however, I still won't tolerate you coming to my home, to my gym, to my office, to my restaurant, to my pub, etc. wearing a camera. You can choose to loose your privacy somewhere else.
That is exactly the right way to look at it. You maintain privacy by keeping certain areas of your life private, i.e., you don't share that information with the public. Things you do on a public street aren't private no matter how difficult it may have been to identify you before. Things you do in private can be kept private by insisting that people don't record and replay information.
If you look at the context he is clearing saying "If you have something you don't want people to know about you shouldn't be posting it publicly on the internet in the first place." That seems like reasonable sound advice to me.
And what is the alternative. Do you make it illegal for shopowners and ATM providers to have cameras? Do you ban hi-res cameras? If not then all that information is out there and available to someone (the government) all this does is also make it available to the average citizen.
Ahh, but products like google glass level the playing field in exactly the way you are worried about. By making whatever anyone sees in public be publicly available by default you undermine all the anti-filming laws that protect the police over the average citizen. If grandma is going to accidentally upload the video of the police beating she walked past simply by default there is little that government agents can do to discourage citizens from sharing information that increases accountability.
As the article notes the only other option is to leave the government with all the surveillance data without any increased privacy. Between ATM cameras, security cameras, high-res drones and the like (all of which is available to government agents) there isn't any information left for you to hide. The only question is whether citizens should have similar access.
It's not just the internet that is a surveillance state. It is everything, or at least soon will be.
Despite what people think the problem is not tracking, cookies and the like. They just make the loss of your `privacy' easier but it was inevitable. The real problem is intelligent algorithms that are able to mine data and reach conclusions about you. Even if every single tracking product online was eliminated companies would easily find a way to correlate your activity. Measure the time between mouseclicks or your typing patterns and note the IP it is from. Now take that information and correlate it with information from other companies.
The existence of gait-tracking algorithms is a perfect example of what is going on. It's not that we are losing privacy, i.e., information that we literally kept private. Rather, it is that information we unworriedly disclose in public (be it our gait or the time at which we type in various characters to a website) turns out to provide far more information to a sufficiently intelligent algorithm than we ever expected. Soon enough our walks and choices in the physical world will be tracked just as thoroughly.
The genie can't be put back in the bottle. Are choices are to either eliminate free speech and regulate the ability of individuals to freely share information they observe in public or on their websites, pretend the problem doesn't exist by banning anyone from revealing the results of their intelligent data mining relegating this information to powerful corporations and governments or accepting the facts and modifying society to live with this problem. Societies with limited space have done this for hundreds of years and they grow to be tolerant of the little idiosyncrasies they inevitably see in their neighbor's lives.
As much as people seem to clamor for various forms of privacy protection the data shows they only care about it when prompted with questions. People are readily willing to give up privacy for small rewards and don't want to bother with the various protective measures already in place. There is nothing any law can do to really enforce data privacy when consumers don't find that privacy valuable enough to vote with their feet or use existing privacy controls.
There are really two types of `privacy' (often it's more about public but not readily discovered information) violations possible.
1) Security breeches by hackers or data theft by employees.
2) The sharing of personal data with institutions/people the user would object to viewing that information.
There is little regulation (perhaps government supported security information/response/prosecution centers could help) of companies can do about hackers or data theft. Sure, you can fine companies for data breeches and force publication but this creates an unfortunate incentive for companies not to discover security breeches. A well designed law would impose increased penalties for breeches exposed by outside agencies, e.g., law enforcement but even this law would create incorrect incentives for the current executives whose interests are still likely to reduce spending on discovering breeches in the hope that the bad news won't come on their watch.
Besides, I'm highly skeptical that poor security would be remedied by even larger financial incentives.
It's not even clear if such remedies are even desirable. A better law would simply demand appropriate compensation for people harmed by leaked credit cards and the like and leave it up to the companies (and consumers) what level of security is appropriate. Sure, we would be much safer if we replaced credit cards with fancy cryptographic two factor authentication but the costs in convenience and money would far far exceed the costs of making people whole from credit card theft.
This leaves the 2nd issue. The problem here is that the difference between desirable functionality and privacy violations here depends on the user's preferences. Does the user value getting to see free TV episodes more than the cost of having their viewing history shared with advertisers? What about discounts on medical products for similar sharing?
Sure, the law can require all sorts of consent and legal hoops to jump through but as long as people view actually making these calls as too burdensome to warrant real thought/action all you end up with is annoying privacy policies and click through agreements no one reads.
While popular with voters who think they care about privacy as long as they aren't willing to seriously consider it in their consumer choices (evaluating for themselves how seriously a company is committed to protecting their information from inappropriate revelation) such laws are likely to impose more burdensome regulatory costs than benefits to the consumer.
I appreciate the correction but it's not quite what I was trying to say. I realize I was very unclear since reading what I wrote it sounds like I'm just saying there is no hardware/API separation which is not what I meant. I know cell phones don't have software radios and have separate chips for their cellular radios.
My claim was that the firmware on the cellular radio doesn't incorporate any seperate cryptographic signature verification thus allowing any OS level code to modify said firmware or execute commands that might cause unwanted interference (but I take you to be saying the later doesn't occur).
Anyway I could well be wrong here but I'm curious about the answer so figured I would respond and ask someone who knew more.
Well depending on how the WiFi is setup that may or may not matter.
There is some excuse for this differential treatment.
On PCs there is a well defined BIOS/EFI interface that makes it difficult to cause hardware havok. Moreover, if you muck with low level interfaces and do something wrong you just ruin your computer.
Unfortunately, as I understand it phones/tablets don't have a nice seperation between the OS and the code which manages the cellular and wifi radios. Since the device manufacturers wish to enable new radio transmission patterns (or international support) via updates that run at OS level this means that installing an unapproved OS could potentially cause unwanted interference. Practically this probably isn't a big deal but if the hardware vendors don't at least try to lock out alternative OSs they may be subject to legal action (failing to ensure that the intended functionality of the device doesn't cause harmful interference).
Of course the right answer is to either create a level below the OS protected by cryptographic signatures on the updates or to clarify the law regarding consumer software that changes the behavior of the radio to create harmful interference. However, given the lackluster demand for this feature it's probably cheaper just to lock the device down. There is also a concern about enabling tethering since sadly requiring people to pay proportional to bandwidth used turns out to be highly unpopular.
Realistically I doubt the device manufacturers care if you don't use their OS. Unlike jailbreaking which is attractive to many people this will only appeal to the really hard core geeks (and even they may dual boot and buy from the walled garden anyway). Maybe someone can do everyone a favor and define a nice secure layer below the OS so it's easy for the companies to enable dual boot without issues.
You sue the agency. This is how the overbroad application of wetlands regulation beyond the 'navigable waters of the USA' was overturned.
Generally agencies get a great deal of deference in creation and application of their regulation but whether that extends to interpratation of the underlying authorizing act is less clear. In other words you have no chance in court challenging a DEA ruling that crystalized iodine is a meth precursor no matter what the facts provided the law gives them the power to enumerate precursors by regulation. If they are genuinely overstepping the power granted by the law rather than making unwise determinations it's more feasible.
Yah but not one of particular use to terrorists as Iodine tri-whatever is too unstable to make a useful explosive. You start making large batches and it will go off randomly while drying or large parts may fail to detonate.
It's much less of a public safety threat than a gun. The expected harm caused by a man with a pistol far exceeds that of a bomber with this stuff.
How long do you think it will be before some people start using these as a way to exchange child porn or some idiot thinks it would be funny to upload kiddie porn on all the USB sticks and the cops come in and shut the thing down?
Alright, so despite doing a bit of reading on wikipedia I'm still pretty puzzled about exactly how container formats can work. Setting aside fancy features like user menus and things like chaptering it seems to me the primary purpose of a container format is to do two things.
1) Define a format to multiplex many different data streams, e.g., allow packets in the audio stream, video stream, subtitle data to be interleaved so the right data can be available when needed (putting all the video stream first then the audio stream would be a bad idea).
2) Provide synchronization information to let arbitrary video, audio, and subtitle formats coordinate their display.
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Now 1 seems relatively straightforward. What confuses me is part 2. I mean if we were encoding video as a simple list of pictures and audio in pcm this would seem straightforward. Each packet encoding a video frame gets tagged with the frame number and each audio packet gets tagged with the frame number it should be played with.
However, how does this work given the fact that to display frame 10034 the video codec may need to use information from frame 10000 and similarly with the audio codec. So if I want to jump to frame 10034 the player needs to know to look back at the info for frame 10000. I mean I can think of various ways this might be done but they all would seem to require particular knowledge about how the individual streams work.
Could someone explain how these work or give me a pointer to a good explanation?
Thanks
No, that's not true. Version 2 can simply define a new bit to indicate whether it's version 2 or later.
The real problem with this optimization is it's effect on later versions.
Say one eventually moves to version 12 and each version along the way defines it's own flag. That mean's you've used 12 bits and some very nasty decoding logic to indicate you are a version 12 format when you could have just reserved that one byte and used a case statement.
I mean the annoyance and difficulties created by using a next version flag (and the poor scaling behavior with higher version numbers) is a high price to pay to save a couple bytes in a multimedia codec.
This (unfortunately) reminds me of the ontological argument and similar examples of bad reasoning that manage to avoid being laughed out of the room because they dress themselves in a false shroud of logical rigor.
One version of the ontological argument procedes by defining god to be the being which has the maximal amount of good qualities and continues from there. Now there are other problems with this argument but the giant gaping fallacy is that this simply isn't what people mean by god, a point that wouldn't be lost on anyone if you stripped off all the pretense of extreme rigor and just said, "Hey, something has to be the best thing."
I'm a big fan of using logic to demonstrate that our convential views are incoherent. Indeed, many of the issues mentioned here beg for such a treatment but disguising your hidden assumptions by pointless trapings of rigor (and I'm mathematical logician so I like rigor) gives those of us who actually want to reason about these situations a bad name and enlightens no one.
Grr...I mean just consider the free trade example. It sounds as if he is delibrately trying to slip past the reader that our goal is not to maximize the net inflow of 'dollars' to the US not to mention the existance of inefficent equilibriums. I mean I think nearly every protectionist sympathizer I've ever heard is being a total moron but you don't do anyone any favors by failing to mention that increased utility from trade may require transfer payments to compensate for the disparate impacts of trade. Maybe you oppose these on other grounds but if so you need to state the case. Ohh and BTW given the extremely strong evidence that many Chinese are eager to the point of breaking the law to get these 'sweatshop' jobs maybe the reviewer should try harder to believe that other things being equal they leave an individual better off on balance for taking the job. Perhaps by contemplating how much subsistance farming without modern medicine or convienences sucks.
And the god arguments repeat the same problems. Yes, it's interesting that adults treat religious beliefs differently than other beliefs but saying they don't believe in god doesn't accomplish anything. It just redescribes the situation confusingly. People still let their faith influence their attitudes on many policy questions (which they often also treat differently than beliefs about things they can affect). The ESP bit is even dumber. ESP, like most words, doesn't have a stipulative definition but rather is understood by something like prototype resembelance. It's like the word table, you know some things count and others (a bed) don't and evaluate weird new examples (three legged 2 foot radius stool) by their similarity. Besides, no one cares if 'ESP' exists, people care if people can read minds, remote view etc.. whatever you want to call it.
The only half-decent argument listed is the bit about free will. A better statement would be something like this:
Free will doesn't mean unpredictable/random. A person who heroicly rushes back into a burning building to save a trapped dog is exercising free will in that choice if anyone is even if they would make the same choice everytime you (exactly) replayed the situation. Indeed, if you rewound time and gave it another go and they acted differently that feels less like exercising free will. If free will makes sense then choices I make because of my charachter (how I see myself) surely count and not just choices which we might as well have left up to a coin toss. In other words it seems that what makes a choice free is that I get to select the outcome without outside dictation of the answer.
In other words for a choice to be free it must be possible for me to have acted differently, i.e., if I were inclined to select a different option then I could have done so. It doesn't require the absurd criterion that a free choice must be something that *I* don't determine, e.g., by being the sort of person who will race into burning houses. So now if we take the step of identifying ourselves with our brains we see there is no conflict. Had we wanted to make a different choice we would have had a different brain and hence would have acted differently. The key point is that determinism is really saying that *you*, embodied in a brain, in conjunction with the enviornment dictates the outcome while free will is saying that you make the choice. The only trouble arises because we aren't used to thinking of ourselves as brains so we imagine sortof floating outside the physical realm in which case if the physical world dictated the outcome we (not being part of that world) would have no choice in the matter. So once you are cool with yourself as a brain no problem.
Today is a good day for information-gathering. Read someone else's mail file.
