Are/Were companies doing this because it's cheaper than running a background check?

Additionally, sharing your Facebook password is against the TOS (Section 4, subsection 8). You can tell an employer/prospective employer that you will reveal your credentials if they assume the legal responsibility for breaching the contract.

That should get them off your back. Whether you get hired/fired, that's an entirely different matter.

Read the full text of the law here

At least they cited the bill number. I hate it when news outlets don't tell you the bill and have to go searching for it.

What if you release your copyright? For example, in your post you write, "The author of this advert has released all content within this page to the public domain. In case this is not legally possible, the creator grants anyone the right to use this work for any purpose, without any conditions, unless such conditions are required by law."

Sure, CL would have a license, but the license would be worthless. Since most cases, copyrighting, "Hey I need a roommate" is pointless, I see no bad side for retaining your rights.

Can someone with more lawyer points provide insight?

Your humor notwithstanding, in some jurisdictions, it's not considered shoplifting until the suspect leaves the premises. Trapping them could be considered unlawful detainment.

However, in some jurisdictions, a store owner may hold a person who is suspected to have shoplifted. I believe the words are "reasonable suspicion" or some other legal term. They can't hold the person indefinitely though. Usually it's enough time for the police to arrive.

This actually could be a good thing. Right now, the public mentality is that gun owner = nut job. Unless Congress is willing to criminalize owning a 3D printer, it might actually force people think about the current state of laws and actually make sensible gun laws.

Although this may seem hard for conservatives to believe, there is such a thing as a government program that does its job well...

Yes, this is very true. However, these tend to be the exception and not the rule.

The VA works well because the customers are limited. The US Coast Guard does a great job because their mission scope is small (compared to the other service branches). But when the government gets into anything that has a wide scope, that's when things get inefficient.

My parents own a carry-out restaurant. They are forced by competition to accept EBT (food stamps). It strikes them as odd that people who pay for their food in food stamps usually drive really nice cars (e.g. BMWs, Cadies). Could be that the cars belong to a rich relative but it still strikes them as weird. Could be that they got great deals on the cars. But they can't help but wonder how many of these people would still require food stamps if they sold their car.

They hate having to accept food stamps because it's a nightmare to manage. But they have to because if they don't, they would lose a lot of business to their competitors. My parents often wonder if the government audits the people who get food stamps as often as companies do. Their sense is that they don't. I believe they're right since it's easier and more politically palpable to audit a company than it is to audit a poor person.

Too many people online think that "anonymous" = "license to be a complete fuckwad".

So much +1.

I'm actually surprised people still comment on youtube. I hypothesize that an adblock plus element filter on the comments section would increase the quality of youtube.

Time to test it out...

For those that want to join me, here's the adblock element block code:

youtube.com##div#comments-view

It's not so much whether something is worse but whether something is more profitable.

As far as know, there aren't easy ways to get these rare elements out of electronics. The ways are expensive per device. It suffers the same problem as recycling did back in the 80's. The technology wasn't there to automate it.

I imagine that it's much simpler and easier (thus more profitable) to find the raw materials in the earth and then mine them. That technology is around now. But actually reclaiming the metals from existing devices that are getting tinier and tinier, meaning the amount of raw materials used it smaller.

I'm not a scientist or geologist or whatever, so please feel free to correct my ignorance.

My civics may be a bit rusty but my understanding of executive orders is that they are used to further describe legislation that has been passed (i.e. laws) and outlines what federal officers (in the broad sense, not LEOs) are to do to execute the law.

From just the summary, this doesn't seem like this is the case. This seems like a sweeping "I want the ability to do this but not willing to pass it through congress."

Can anyone with more civics experience clarify this? Don't get me wrong: both sides have done this. But want to know how things "should" be.

Their use of SEO not-withstanding, judging articles by the number of comments generated is kind of like judging the performance of a car engine based on how load the stereo gets.

Controversial topics will get many more comments than topics about boring stuff. Hell, comments with horrible grammer andd skeling mystakes will get more comments than the actual story.

And yes, I realize the irony of posting this in the comments section of Slashdot. ;-)

I didn't mod your post but I can see why someone would have flagged it troll. It's a bit snarky. ;-)

However, your point is still valid and came to post this exact point: will you have a choice to not accept these "ultraviolet rays"? As much as we would like to, we don't control what our cells do. And there is a lot of good that this technology can do. How long until this becomes weaponized and used not only to cure, but also to control?

I will admit, however, there is some time before this debate absolutely needs to happen, This doesn't mean that it shouldn't happen now. If all it takes is ultraviolet radiation to program the cells, all it takes is some paranoid politician or evil genius to just pump people full of insulin to make them have a coma.

A quick primer on entrapment:

If you are trolling Drug Dealer Drive for drugs and you happen to ask a undercover agent for drugs, you are guilty.

If a undercover agent posing as a drug dealer comes to you out of the blue and says that you need to buy his drugs so that he can help his sweet grandmother beat cancer, that's entrapment.

The difference is that in the first example, you were already out with the intention of doing something illegal. The second example you were approached by LEO and convinced to do something you normally wouldn't do.

IANAL and I'm sure each jurisdiction has it's own definition of entrapment but this is the jist.

+1 Interesting

This is a great start. The only problem with this is that these "laws" must be programmed. This means that bugs can be introduced, weaknesses exploited, etc.

Unfortunately, computers do *EXACTLY* what they are told. Machines are programmed by imperfect and fallible humans. Machines are not greedy; people are greedy. The reason why our machines do all of the things the OP hates is because someone is making a buck.

The "Laws of Robotics" is not realistically feasible at this point in time. Because if the "robot" fails to do this, who is responsible? The robot or the programmer? That's why the Law of Robotics is a great literary tool, but not possible...yet.

Don't get me wrong! I can't wait to see commercials for "The iPhone 12: 3 laws safe and ready to read your thoughts!" But I'm not holding my breath.

If I had to guess, the OP doesn't want to go to the cloud because, hell, why should he?

The current state of affairs is that the data center owns the data ("possession is 9/10ths of the law"). Latency and bandwidth is also an issue. Everything is currently on-site. Trading latency and bandwidth for uptime may not be necessary nor desirable.

Additionally, when it's hosted by someone else, you live under their rules. Rules that are subject to change and not necessarily to your liking. Having the hardware/software on-site where you control it has a lot of pros and few cons. Though, without more information, I can only speculate.

I understand Mozilla's argument. But I don't agree with it.

DNT has two tracks: Either a small majority of users will enable it and it will be honored by all web sites (highly unlikely) or a large majority of users will enable it and web sites will continue to operate as it currently does. In both scenarios, the end user is relying on a third party to honor a wish.

When it comes down to the almighty dollar, companies have absolutely no incentive to actually comply with DNT. Unless DNT comes with the punishment of fines and can be collected by Joe Sixpack, it will be useless.

If DNT isn't implementable, maybe having a banner that says, "Hey, welcome to my site! By the way, I track what you're doing and sell it to third parties. If you continue on my site, you consent to this." If websites were required to disclose this, then it would be up to the user to either continue on the web site or move on.

Yes, "privacy policies" do this but in legalese and is often obfuscated. I want it so clear that there is no confusion as to what the site records.