That means there is a genuine case for legislation that helps protect consumers against such health and safety dangers.
I believe that is covered by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Unfortunately, they seem to have a hard time enforcing the law consistently at the level demanded by the law.
Another law to address a bad situation is almost always a bad idea. We don't enforce 80% (SWAG) of the laws that we have now. Why pile up more laws to not enforce.
I'd like to see a rule that Congress needs to allocate funding for enforcement of any new law that they pass. I'd like that for my state legislature, too. It might cut down on the number of useless laws that we have on the books, which only create opportunities for enterprising lawyers.
If the **AA were held as liable by the laws as I am....
If the **AA were held as liable by the laws as I am, then we would see some interesting lawsuits and charges.
RIAA would be jailed pending their soundproofing every venue for music, thus setting up a situation of entrapment for every citizen who passed by unknowingly.
MPAA fined for allowing drive-in movies.[I know, but there must be at least ONE somewhere out there that hasn't heard that they are extinct.]
Those annoying TV screens in cars would have to be removed or hidden from outside view. Daily fines accrue to MPAA until that is done.
Radio taken off the air as an enticement to violate the law.
Ditto TV.
Copyright enforcement is a two-way street. The **AA should be required to put in as much effort as I have to. Otherwise, the legal doctrines of laches and unclean hands enters the picture. If they haven't made reasonable efforts to enforce copyrights, and protect their Preciouussss IP, then why should we be bothered?
Note that I am not putting the artists in the place of the **AA. The artists are not in favor of these laws, and haven't been the ones writing or pushing for their passage. The artists seem to have more common sense.
A high school friend of mine ended up being a TV writer and producer. When we were rooming together in college, I was attending engineering school, and he was trying to pass the Liberal Arts remedial math course. He once said to me in frustration, "You're smart at math. You probably even know the pi of 9."
I should ask him what he thinks of SOPA/PIPA/ACTA. He used to use names of our friends in his shows for his characters. He tried to get mine in once or twice, but the editors just wouldn't buy a name like mine as being real. I wonder which way the studios would go on that little piece of copyright reuse?
This clip had a very effective use of silence at 2:06 ... right where he stopped, trying to figure out a word that rhymed with dump truck that he could sing out loud. He got his point across, I understood what he was saying, and I knew which word he didn't say. But he didn't have to smear up the airwaves with it.
It was even funny!
I say this not because I am a prude who doesn't like people to use anatomical words, but because I am a person who has struggled with keeping my language family-oriented from time to time. When people around me talk like that, my language eventually just goes to pot.
So it isn't really a matter of personal expression. It's a matter of what kind of community culture we generate with our actions. The people who are promoting SOPA are probably (mistakenly) thinking that what they are doing is just their own business. Their short-sightedness and self-centeredness is impacting us all.
The country that we generate is also a result of all the things that we do that nobody has ever found out about. It's easy to forget that in an urban culture, but it is very apparent in a rural culture, or even in an smaller urban neighborhood. TANSTAAFL.
It's the same with profanity. Next time, please keep in mind that I'm not real good at controlling my language, and give me a break, OK? Thanks!
That already do that. Not in total, but most of the media that has been recorded over the years is locked up and unavailable to the Average Bear [ (C) Yogi Bear ].
So a media blackout would just be more of the same. I wouldn't even notice. I gave up television over 15 years ago. What have I missed? I am finally catching up on my movies. Gandhi was great. I finally saw what happened to Spock after he died. I can hardly wait to see the rest of Deep Space Nine.
Yeah, a media blackout would be a non-event for me.
That comment is right on the money for me. Have you ever trolled through Amazon looking for one of your favorite old TV series?
I keep looking to see if I can get complete season series of the original Maverick TV series with James Garner. There is one DVD available that features three (3) episodes. That is it, complete and total. there used to be a season DVD, but it mysteriously disappeared.
Now if I was a "My Favorite Martian" fan, I could get everything. Now, I am a MFM fan, but it doesn't rank up there with James Garner in Maverick!
"My Mother the Car" also isn't available, and although I am a huge fan of that series (one year) and not ashamed of it, it is not nearly as heart-breaking as missing out on Maverick.
The question arises, of course, "Why?" Why aren't the studios cashing in on one of the most popular Westerns ever filmed? Could it be that Garner sued them for back royalties and won? That he exposed their greed and fraud and their lack of concern for the artist?
This is a nice, warm, fuzzy idea with very little scientific (or engineering) rigor behind it. It will not achieve what is intended.
Now, I am as much a geek as anyone, and love to play with massive amounts of data to do cross-correlations and time series and derive neat-o prediction schemes and link cause to effect..... But before I can do that, I really need to have accurate data. Otherwise, I might as well make up my own data. What this idea will generate is massive amounts of data that can't be correlated to the same axes.
If you want to compare data from several different sensors, then the sensors MUST be calibrated to a common standard. AND the relative accuracy of each sensor must be known.
Something that is almost always ignored by those outside of the instrumentation and control field is that each data point has two parts: a measurement and an accuracy: x +/- y. Without both pieces of the datum, it is worthless. It is only good enough to produce Congressional budgets.
So here is my analysis of this wishful thinking:
"In order to be useful, we need to ensure we can compare data relatively faithfully across multiple sensors."
True.
"This doesn’t need to be perfect, nor do they all need to be calibrated together, we simply need to ensure that they are “more or less” recording the same thing with similar levels of precision and consistency."
False. The author is using "perfect" in terms of "better than I need to play around with it", instead of its real (and unattainable) meaning of having no error. In fact, since there is no accuracy linked with each datum, it is assumed to be perfect.
When he says that the sensors need to be "more or less", then he is vaguely sensing that there needs to be an accuracy attached somewhere. See? Common sense is innate, just not being used here.
"Ultimately in a lot of instances we care about trended data rather than individual points so this isn’t a big problem so long as an individual sensor is relatively consistent and there isn’t ridiculous variation between sensors if they were put in the same conditions."
False. This is just pure wishful thinking. Without the accuracy data, you can only trend data from each sensor. You will not be able to do any meaningful trending between groups of sensors and their associated data. Without calibration results and sensor accuracy information, the data is not "apples to apples".
If you don't know what you are doing, then you come up with statements like these that will start people out on the primrose path. The whole exercise will be wasted effort, or worse, bad data bringing bad decisions, unless it follows standard (and boring) practice from past instrumentation lessons learned the hard way.
I would like to point out that the lessons learned the hard way usually involved massive destruction. When I worked in the instrumentation field around 1980, the petrochemical industry blew up a plant every year. Or was it two a year? And blow up doesn't mean localized damage in one part of the plant, it means a plant completely leveled. I remember one plastics company sending their design team to our Engineering Center after completely leveling their plant. They sent 25 people. We had talked them down from 75. They were extremely concerned that it not happen again.
Good decisions start with good data. Good data comes from good design. Good design takes into account how to correlate the data between different measurements. Talk to some of those who have made the mistakes already. It will save a lot of grief farther on down the road.
I read the comments, and there certainly is a lot of excitement out there!
However, simple projects are probably not going to create great new industries that will save our economy. Calling beer brewing biotech seems just a little like flim-flam to me. It just isn't that complex. I'm not a beer bewer, but I am a wine-maker, so I have some sense of how hard it is.
My problem with Biotech is that it is based on some potentially dangerous processes that have not been put through a PUBLIC review. Yes, genetic engineering has been FDA approved. If you look at the record, though, the FDA has not made public the research and testing that made the approval possible. It is claimed that the technology would be stolen if it were made public: the corporate assets need to be protected.
Excuse me if I object, but the Food and Drug Administration is there to protect the interests of the PUBLIC, not of the CORPORATION. If the FDA is willing to make public the studies that back up the claims that biotech is safe, then I am willing to take a look at it. There are only two public studies available that looked at the safety of genetic engineered food, and both showed that there were problems with human health, including inflammation of the stomach wall.
In addition, the normal FDA approval process was short-circuited for genetic engineered products. The main sticking point for me is that the patents claim that genetic engineered products are new and substantially different from existing products. The FDA applications, however, claim that the genetic engineered products are functionally equivalent to existing foods. Which is it? Either the patent application was lying, or the FDA application was lying. It can't be both true and false at the same time. I'm looking for some prison time for somebody here for lying to the government.
The FDA backed up the assertion that genetic engineered products are functionally equivalent to existing products, thus cutting short any requirement for more testing, removing any requirement to keep genetic engineered products isolated until safety could be proven. Isolated to me means not in your garage!!!!
I am not claiming any expertise that would let me tell you whether genetic engineering is safe or not. But, based on my industrial experience in applying FDA regulations for food, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals, I call foul on the FDA approvals of genetic engineering until full and proper FDA review has occurred in a public manner. The jury is still out. Let's not settle for the sham FDA approval and settle back into a false sense of security on these things. The public wants to know.
Re: Response to: Anonymous Coward on Dec 27th, 2011 @ 9:12am
Free speech doesn't mean that I am forced to listen to your drivel. In GoDaddy's case, I don't have to stick around to take their arrogance and self-centeredness. I'm hoping to be able to select a replacement by Thursday. There are some really interesting registrars out there, and I really should have switched along ago.
They can still talk, it's just that they aren't guaranteed an audience.
The debate about the difference between what CarrierIQ is capable of doing and what they are really doing is irrelevant. If the capability is there, and they haven't told me about it, then there is intent to use. It was intentionally designed, produced and distributed. Now it may be due to stupidity instead of malice. I truly believe that stupidity ought to be legal, and that stupid actions should be punished accordingly. It helps thin the herd.
On the issue of whether the monitoring ought to be there:
As a Data Center Manager, NOBODY had permission to monitor any system in my Data Center without express permission, which usually required someone local to connect a physical cable. If projects were not going according to plan, I had the power to tell them to back off to the original configuration, and DID exercise that power. It's my Data Center, not yours.
The same thing applies to my phone. Yes, it is subsidized over the course of the contract. That is a financing scheme, not an ownership plan. Nowhere in the contract does it say that I have to return the phone at the end of the contract.
As others have commented: I really get sick of large corporations getting away with things that an individual would get thrown in the pokey for. It's time to level the playing field.
On the post: Do The Differences Between Software Piracy And Media Piracy Matter?
Maybe we should enforce the laws we already have
I believe that is covered by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Unfortunately, they seem to have a hard time enforcing the law consistently at the level demanded by the law.
Another law to address a bad situation is almost always a bad idea. We don't enforce 80% (SWAG) of the laws that we have now. Why pile up more laws to not enforce.
I'd like to see a rule that Congress needs to allocate funding for enforcement of any new law that they pass. I'd like that for my state legislature, too. It might cut down on the number of useless laws that we have on the books, which only create opportunities for enterprising lawyers.
On the post: Romanian Prime Minister Admits He Has No Idea Why Romania Signed ACTA
If the **AA were held as liable by the laws as I am....
RIAA would be jailed pending their soundproofing every venue for music, thus setting up a situation of entrapment for every citizen who passed by unknowingly.
MPAA fined for allowing drive-in movies.[I know, but there must be at least ONE somewhere out there that hasn't heard that they are extinct.]
Those annoying TV screens in cars would have to be removed or hidden from outside view. Daily fines accrue to MPAA until that is done.
Radio taken off the air as an enticement to violate the law.
Ditto TV.
Copyright enforcement is a two-way street. The **AA should be required to put in as much effort as I have to. Otherwise, the legal doctrines of laches and unclean hands enters the picture. If they haven't made reasonable efforts to enforce copyrights, and protect their Preciouussss IP, then why should we be bothered?
Note that I am not putting the artists in the place of the **AA. The artists are not in favor of these laws, and haven't been the ones writing or pushing for their passage. The artists seem to have more common sense.
A high school friend of mine ended up being a TV writer and producer. When we were rooming together in college, I was attending engineering school, and he was trying to pass the Liberal Arts remedial math course. He once said to me in frustration, "You're smart at math. You probably even know the pi of 9."
I should ask him what he thinks of SOPA/PIPA/ACTA. He used to use names of our friends in his shows for his characters. He tried to get mine in once or twice, but the editors just wouldn't buy a name like mine as being real. I wonder which way the studios would go on that little piece of copyright reuse?
On the post: Anti-SOPA/PIPA Protest Songs
The Day the LOLcats Died
It was even funny!
I say this not because I am a prude who doesn't like people to use anatomical words, but because I am a person who has struggled with keeping my language family-oriented from time to time. When people around me talk like that, my language eventually just goes to pot.
So it isn't really a matter of personal expression. It's a matter of what kind of community culture we generate with our actions. The people who are promoting SOPA are probably (mistakenly) thinking that what they are doing is just their own business. Their short-sightedness and self-centeredness is impacting us all.
The country that we generate is also a result of all the things that we do that nobody has ever found out about. It's easy to forget that in an urban culture, but it is very apparent in a rural culture, or even in an smaller urban neighborhood. TANSTAAFL.
It's the same with profanity. Next time, please keep in mind that I'm not real good at controlling my language, and give me a break, OK? Thanks!
[Looking for asbestos underwear.]
On the post: Google To Use Home Page To Protest PIPA Tomorrow
Re: Media Industry blackout
So a media blackout would just be more of the same. I wouldn't even notice. I gave up television over 15 years ago. What have I missed? I am finally catching up on my movies. Gandhi was great. I finally saw what happened to Spock after he died. I can hardly wait to see the rest of Deep Space Nine.
Yeah, a media blackout would be a non-event for me.
On the post: Tim O'Reilly Explains Where The Federal Gov't Has Gone Wrong On SOPA/PIPA: Solving The Wrong Problem
Consumers ARE being underserved
I keep looking to see if I can get complete season series of the original Maverick TV series with James Garner. There is one DVD available that features three (3) episodes. That is it, complete and total. there used to be a season DVD, but it mysteriously disappeared.
Now if I was a "My Favorite Martian" fan, I could get everything. Now, I am a MFM fan, but it doesn't rank up there with James Garner in Maverick!
"My Mother the Car" also isn't available, and although I am a huge fan of that series (one year) and not ashamed of it, it is not nearly as heart-breaking as missing out on Maverick.
The question arises, of course, "Why?" Why aren't the studios cashing in on one of the most popular Westerns ever filmed? Could it be that Garner sued them for back royalties and won? That he exposed their greed and fraud and their lack of concern for the artist?
I wonder. Not!
On the post: Beyond The Internet Of Things Towards A Sensor Commons
Garbage in, garbage out
Now, I am as much a geek as anyone, and love to play with massive amounts of data to do cross-correlations and time series and derive neat-o prediction schemes and link cause to effect..... But before I can do that, I really need to have accurate data. Otherwise, I might as well make up my own data. What this idea will generate is massive amounts of data that can't be correlated to the same axes.
If you want to compare data from several different sensors, then the sensors MUST be calibrated to a common standard. AND the relative accuracy of each sensor must be known.
Something that is almost always ignored by those outside of the instrumentation and control field is that each data point has two parts: a measurement and an accuracy: x +/- y. Without both pieces of the datum, it is worthless. It is only good enough to produce Congressional budgets.
So here is my analysis of this wishful thinking:
"In order to be useful, we need to ensure we can compare data relatively faithfully across multiple sensors."
True.
"This doesn’t need to be perfect, nor do they all need to be calibrated together, we simply need to ensure that they are “more or less” recording the same thing with similar levels of precision and consistency."
False. The author is using "perfect" in terms of "better than I need to play around with it", instead of its real (and unattainable) meaning of having no error. In fact, since there is no accuracy linked with each datum, it is assumed to be perfect.
When he says that the sensors need to be "more or less", then he is vaguely sensing that there needs to be an accuracy attached somewhere. See? Common sense is innate, just not being used here.
"Ultimately in a lot of instances we care about trended data rather than individual points so this isn’t a big problem so long as an individual sensor is relatively consistent and there isn’t ridiculous variation between sensors if they were put in the same conditions."
False. This is just pure wishful thinking. Without the accuracy data, you can only trend data from each sensor. You will not be able to do any meaningful trending between groups of sensors and their associated data. Without calibration results and sensor accuracy information, the data is not "apples to apples".
If you don't know what you are doing, then you come up with statements like these that will start people out on the primrose path. The whole exercise will be wasted effort, or worse, bad data bringing bad decisions, unless it follows standard (and boring) practice from past instrumentation lessons learned the hard way.
I would like to point out that the lessons learned the hard way usually involved massive destruction. When I worked in the instrumentation field around 1980, the petrochemical industry blew up a plant every year. Or was it two a year? And blow up doesn't mean localized damage in one part of the plant, it means a plant completely leveled. I remember one plastics company sending their design team to our Engineering Center after completely leveling their plant. They sent 25 people. We had talked them down from 75. They were extremely concerned that it not happen again.
Good decisions start with good data. Good data comes from good design. Good design takes into account how to correlate the data between different measurements. Talk to some of those who have made the mistakes already. It will save a lot of grief farther on down the road.
artp
On the post: A Biotech Lab In Every Garage, Or In Every Library?
Biotech today usually means Genetic Engineering
However, simple projects are probably not going to create great new industries that will save our economy. Calling beer brewing biotech seems just a little like flim-flam to me. It just isn't that complex. I'm not a beer bewer, but I am a wine-maker, so I have some sense of how hard it is.
My problem with Biotech is that it is based on some potentially dangerous processes that have not been put through a PUBLIC review. Yes, genetic engineering has been FDA approved. If you look at the record, though, the FDA has not made public the research and testing that made the approval possible. It is claimed that the technology would be stolen if it were made public: the corporate assets need to be protected.
Excuse me if I object, but the Food and Drug Administration is there to protect the interests of the PUBLIC, not of the CORPORATION. If the FDA is willing to make public the studies that back up the claims that biotech is safe, then I am willing to take a look at it. There are only two public studies available that looked at the safety of genetic engineered food, and both showed that there were problems with human health, including inflammation of the stomach wall.
In addition, the normal FDA approval process was short-circuited for genetic engineered products. The main sticking point for me is that the patents claim that genetic engineered products are new and substantially different from existing products. The FDA applications, however, claim that the genetic engineered products are functionally equivalent to existing foods. Which is it? Either the patent application was lying, or the FDA application was lying. It can't be both true and false at the same time. I'm looking for some prison time for somebody here for lying to the government.
The FDA backed up the assertion that genetic engineered products are functionally equivalent to existing products, thus cutting short any requirement for more testing, removing any requirement to keep genetic engineered products isolated until safety could be proven. Isolated to me means not in your garage!!!!
I am not claiming any expertise that would let me tell you whether genetic engineering is safe or not. But, based on my industrial experience in applying FDA regulations for food, cosmetics and pharmaceuticals, I call foul on the FDA approvals of genetic engineering until full and proper FDA review has occurred in a public manner. The jury is still out. Let's not settle for the sham FDA approval and settle back into a false sense of security on these things. The public wants to know.
On the post: GoDaddy Says It Doesn't Support PIPA Either, As Domains Keep Transferring Away
Re: Response to: Anonymous Coward on Dec 27th, 2011 @ 9:12am
They can still talk, it's just that they aren't guaranteed an audience.
On the post: The Carrier IQ Saga (So Far) -- And Some Questions That Need Answers
Some of the questions are the wrong questions
On the issue of whether the monitoring ought to be there:
As a Data Center Manager, NOBODY had permission to monitor any system in my Data Center without express permission, which usually required someone local to connect a physical cable. If projects were not going according to plan, I had the power to tell them to back off to the original configuration, and DID exercise that power. It's my Data Center, not yours.
The same thing applies to my phone. Yes, it is subsidized over the course of the contract. That is a financing scheme, not an ownership plan. Nowhere in the contract does it say that I have to return the phone at the end of the contract.
As others have commented: I really get sick of large corporations getting away with things that an individual would get thrown in the pokey for. It's time to level the playing field.
Next >>