You are the ultimate communist (socialist, fascist...it's all the same).

Just read history, and you'll see why what you just said is problematic.

Watch them take away the liberties of those you disagree with. When the time comes that they take away your liberties, there'll be no one left to defend you.

Go to a country that does what you just said. There's plenty of them. Let me know how that works out for you.

Yeah, but he doesn't realize how fun it is to kill someone. Take out that possibility and you take away some fun. I can see adding consequences to killing someone (or even taking it out of some games), but to say it should NEVER happen in any game is silly.

Oh dear.. well, we couldnt have THAT, could we? we couldnt vote for ANYTHING that "the Christian Right" wants, now could we?

I hear that those right wing nutjobs are against rape. The NERVE of those people! We clearly have to fight against Christian Morality Bigots, and legalize that sort of thing.

What? they're against theft too???

DONT DENY ME MY RIGHT TO "pursue happiness" by by personal choice of acquisition style, you bible bashing nutjobs!

Sounds to me like the fines only apply if the data is actually compromised. The obvious answer would be: Don't let that data get compromised!

No, the problem is that you're asked (by a live human being) to participate in research to learn Thing A, in this case, why your tribe has a high incidence of a debilitating disease, and given a form which says they're allowed to use whatever you give them to research thing A, things B-Z, other things AA-zqf, and any other research purpose.

Been there, done that, with cord blood donation. Am I willing to donate cord blood which will otherwise just be thrown away but might help someone? Of course. Give me the consent form. No lie, the last line of the long form explaining what they were going to do with it was "or any other research purpose." In other words, the whole form should have read "Can we have your umbilical cord blood to do anything we want with?" Well, no, you can't. I didn't sign.

Sadly, this kind of crap will NEVER stop unless people start objecting to it, and objection takes the form of no. This isn't hard. Draft a narrowly focused consent form that lets you do your research, not any random research you or anyone else thinks up later, AND respects the rights of your subjects. Don't ask them to sign a blank biological check.

Except that KKK is not Christian any more than I am the King of England. Just because I say I am, doesn't make it so.

And I suppose that's really the distinction. If you asked people, "does the copier right now have a copy of that page you just copied?" that might not be surprised by that, but "does the copier right now have a copy of that page you copied last year?" they would be, and the difference comes down to how much storage and whether or not you have persistent storage.

Your statement is an example of "security through obscurity" or "hiding in plain sight". That model of security was already disproved long ago. And, by "long ago", I'm referring to thousands of years, not weeks. It not only predates the invention of the photocopier, it predates the invention of paper. It probably even predates the concept of walking upright.

Hiding important things in an ocean of unimportant things means that someone can still get at the important things if they try hard enough, or are aware enough to look. The chances of discovery are directly proportional to the amount of knowledge the attacker has about how the data is hidden and roughly inversely proportional to the amount of "chaff" data you put out there to hide the "wheat".

And with the "try hard enough" being "extract the contents of the drive and show me thumbnails of everything on it", or even "extract the contents and OCR the whole lot and search for words like CONFIDENTIAL, SSN, and PAY TO THE ORDER OF" (all of which would be a couple of minutes' work for a 12-year-old child these days), you're not going to be able to obscure things all that well.

What is data worth these days? If you could buy, say, 10 of these $300 printers, you're out $3,000. If each one yields 100 pages for a total yield of 1000 pages, you're paying $3 a page. 99% of the images are likely going to be company picnic memos. Until you get the 10 pages that contain the company payroll data, or something someone will pay good money for. And if it doesn't work out, you rebuild the photocopier and resell it, or even rent it to a company you know has lots of juicy data going through and make sure the sale includes a routine maintenance agreement so you can swap drives out every few weeks.

Of course, if you know where your used photocopiers are coming from, they could yield a much higher return. Did your local hospital just make a big deal of donating photocopiers to a local charity? Go in to the charity with a nicer model of photocopier and offer to swap them out. With a little creative thinking, you could get photocopiers that are more likely to have good salable information in them.

This isn't the biggest security hole ever, it's not even the biggest security hole this month, but it is pretty scary.

Same thing applies to meetings actually. If you're doing things properly the meeting will have an agenda and will be minuted; these things should be filled away somewhere and can certainly be subpoenaed.

It all comes down to the process you're following and your record-keeping practices, but in general anything important that's decided should be recorded somewhere to guard against people forgetting or disagreeing.