Or getting married, having children, owning or renting a house or any other thing society requires for living in its world.

ftfy

Having a house, a baby, a spouse, Social Security, or any other form of government interaction. It is all public record and "in the Database" as you put it.

Another fun thing - make some accounts with variations of your name, close but not exact, then post the passwords in forums and let random people take them where you want. Remember, you're not interested in reputation - you're interested in bad data.

Yea, that is one way to quickly become a blonde, bald, hermaphrodite with serious mental illness bent on world domination. That should trigger the DHS watchlist developers scouring the net for their next target.

To add insult to injury, the power companies in my state are 100% private companies. So here we go bailing out private companies using tax payer money to fix a problem cause by their short sightedness. This again is a failure of capitalism or should I say another success of private industry externalizing the risk and privatizing the profits. I say fuck 'em. Let them use their profits to fix this problem they created.

And there is a very high cost to having a Walmart in your town. Low wages, no or poor health benefits shifting the costs to the taxpayer along with the massive tax incentives they receive that other local businesses can't get drive local businesses out of business. Whole towns have been decimated economically by a Walmart moving in. And when they become the only employer a town has, that town will always be at the mercy of Walmart.

Might I suggest the following for you:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jazb24Q2s94

No, it is unspecified because they left the award amount up to the court. It happens on every suit I have seen. "We ask for relief as the court deems equitable."

It is a moot point in my state at least since teachers aren't salaried. So this whole salaried vs non-salaried argument is not going to be an issue in my state should they follow suit.

Nobody has answered the main thrust of my post though...

Where is the incentive to come up with new ideas and material when those ideas and material are going to be taken from you without compensation above what you would have gotten anyway? That is a question that remains whether the person is salaried or not.

I can see a K-12 school system asking teachers to assign copyrights to creative works that are relevant to their jobs, but not to things that are irrelevant. A 2nd grade teacher who does art work that isn't related to teaching 2nd graders shouldn't have to quit her job to keep the copyrights on her paintings. On the other hand, it is reasonable to tell new-hire or renewing-contract teacher who creates worksheets for use in the classroom that things she creates in the future will belong to the district.

And just how is that promoting anything school related off the clock? Many teachers spend hours off the clock developing innovative ways to teach their subjects. Often times their work load is such that they can't possibly complete their tasks without the extra hours. I see silly things like this rule stifling creative thinking more than promoting it.

1) While that is a legit concern, I don't see how it's a "privacy" violation. It's not you, so how is your privacy being affected? Also, you can remove auto-tags. Not to mention, accidental tags (or maliciously/jokingly incorrect tags) were possible years before, with or without auto-tagging.

Privacy may be incorrect but reputation certainly isn't given that potential employers are increasingly using the damned thing for evaluation purposes. And you can only remove the tags IF you have an account and are aware of the tag.

2) The issue of auto-tagging has literally nothing to do with using your photo for commercial purposes.

It has everything to do with commercial purposes. You are forgetting that FB is nothing more than a data warehouse that they use to aggregate then sell to advertisers. If tagging allows them to combine you with someone else that is valuable data whether you are on FB or not.

3) + 4): I don't see how these concerns are even about Facebook, let alone auto-tagging (to which they're not even tangentially related). Does it also upset you that people can publish your name or photos in a blog without your permission? I never opted in to Google but searching me by name turns up all sorts of things about me that I didn't explicitly approve. Why is this not an outrage?

It is an outrage and Google does provide a means of "removing" yourself from their searches unlike FB. Once you are tagged, bagged on FB there is no way to get unassociated from their data aggregation. Everything from your political views to favorite color is evaluated, cataloged and stored forever for later re-evaluation for its potential to make FB money. That, after all, is why they exist.

Exactly. And that is just what I got on all my land-lines. Imagine that a *GASP* wired phone!

And I'm still reeling from the news about the Tour de France...

I know this is way off topic and I will try and bring it back on in the end... No promises though...lol

It always amuses me the kerfuffle raised when sports athletes get caught using performance enhancing drugs yet people don't say shit about beauty pageant contestants who have had cosmetic surgery just to win those titles.

It all comes down to "follow the money". It is the same with this C/Net / CBS / Dish story. Follow the money. To CBS Dish is cutting off a revenue stream it sees as essential. Dish is seen by them as cheating the system just as much as Lance did. Dish OTOH doesn't see ads as essential since their service is subscription based. So much like Lance, they don't think they did anything wrong.

How's that for trying to bring it back?

And you want to tell me why again ISPs can't cut off botnet infected machines and warn the customers to clean their crap before allowing them back on the net? If ISPs really cared so much about their networks as they claim they do (the reason they give for usage caps and throttling) then you would think they would want to rid themselves of useless and destructive network chatter such as infected machines. You can't tell me they can't detect a machine sending thousands of page requests a second. You can't tell me they can't detect the command and control server connections.

"Sorry honey, but we waste way too much money on a useless, obsolete service that no one but fraudsters ever uses. In a local emergency, our cell phones have a better chance of working than the land line; and in a wide-scale emergency, you can't use the land-line from the car as we flee the coming Tsunami."

And either never get laid again or more accurately have you cell phone die on you because the power is out and will be out for days. That is assuming no cell tower damage and that the tower has a backup generator and enough gas for the whole event. Many found out both during Hurricane Sandy and the Duratio before that that cell service is very, very spotty at best in times of disaster. Major land-lines are down too but in my experience, they are far less fickle than the cell service in my area.

The problem is the law. There are so many loopholes in it you could drive a Mac truck through them. For example, the whole "if we did business with you before we can contact you again" part. There is no definition of "doing business" and it can include things like they sent you snail-mail spam. It also exempts the most annoying which are the political robocalls. In short, the law itself is contributing to the problem.

And from a user's point of view the interface IS the product.