If the primary use for these really is to help find the car in an event of an accident then why are there penalties in place for circumventing the tracking. Shouldn't this be as politically controversial as forcing me to buy health insurance?
No, the primary purpose of these is to determine the events that lead up to an accident. The penalty is because the only people with an economic incentive to remove the boxes are the ones likely to cause accidents.
Seriously? This statement is synonymous with, "If you have nothing to hide, then you should have nothing to fear." I expect this fallacy from politicians but I'm pretty surprised to hear it from you.
I've noticed you seem to dedicate a lot of time to denouncing privacy and civil liberties issues on HN lately, but that statement is absurd.
I care about real privacy and civil liberties issues. Compared to drug dog probable cause searches, this is a tinfoil hat concern. My guess is that many of the people denouncing EDRs the loudest have EDRs in their cars and didn't even know about it.
If you feel like I spend a lot of time shouting down civil liberties issues, consider that maybe that has less to do with me --- a liberal ACLU supporter and donor --- and more to do with the tenor of civil liberties discussions on HN.
... I mean, if you care enough to consider why I'm on the other side of this issue. If you just want to yell at me, that's fine too. (Really, it's fine; I'm not being snide).
Well the point was to call out that offensive fallacy, not to berate your own views. To be honest though, I feel like you are the guy referred to in the top post, in every thread on (what I and many others, including the EFF consider) real privacy and civil liberties issues.
I also don't understand why you keep using "they can already do this" as an argument against those who are opposed to these issues. The fact that many people are unknowingly already equipped with EDRs is completely irrelevant. Or that companies already share breach data. Your logic is such that if X is already doing Y, being opposed to X is an invalid position. What?
I don't think you can call anything a tinfoil hat concern without understanding every individual's reasons for being opposed to something.
I don't want someone logging everything I do and everywhere I go, and not being in control of that data (yes I own a cell phone; see previous). Why? The same reason many people want the right to own a gun.[1] "Because fuck you, that's why." The fact that I have nothing to hide, to me, is all the more reason I deserve to be left alone.
[1] I personally don't actually believe society is better off with guns. I think the "protection" argument is equivalent to what tinfoil hats say. But it doesn't matter what I think. That's what it means to be a civil libertarian. I don't care what your voter registration says or who you donate to, if you don't understand this, you are not a civil libertarian.
"Hacker News comment threads: where people apply 'works on my machine' to social problems."
It would have been helpful if you had read the legislation we're commenting on before forming an opinion about me based on my position on that legislation.
It occurred to me that this could be used as a dominance/brainwashing technique. Break a person's believe in his own free will and humanity and they will have little reasons to oppose you, the creator.
People's sense of "self" can't be taken away, it is something we develop the moment we realize our thoughts are private and others can't give us what we want unless we ask for it. Children learn to lie very early; even when their language skills aren't sufficient, they learn to fake disappointment & force themselves to cry to get what they want.
IMO, even under prolonged captivity & complete dominance, humans only submit to subjugation, but they never lose their sense of Self.
Higher-level indoctrination is even less plausible. Nearly all religious groups & cults have the human at their center. People have to willfully submit to hypnosis.
Going back to the development of self, I think another thing that makes it possible is the position of our eyes. We can only see in < 180 degrees, our eyes open & shut, and we happen to fall asleep. If the human subject was allowed free movement, the captor would want us to respond to commands .. we would need to be called .. differentiated amongst ourselves. Human Unit 1 is different from Human Unit 2. The captor calls the subject, and the subject chooses to respond, somehow. In the presence of punishment, the subject decides to carry out assigned duties to avoid punishment, or to gain reward: self-interest. Self.
they feel that they are somewhat detached from their physical selves... sort of like an observer, watchingyourself go through theday. its an odd sensation.
on another not to parent posters..... whether or not our sense of self is ongoing and inbreakable is certainly not decided or anywhere near scientific fact(yeah yeah, science only disproves, you know what i mean)...
all we can say is that we feel as if we have this continuity..... and that it apprars as if others feel the same way. memory is not like tape.... your sense of timing and events changes constantly, and what you perceive to be your unbroken, continuous sense of self and its memories is, in fact, almost universally incorrect on all kindsof things as it changes over time.... butyou (and i) will feel everything is in order. it is likely constantly teconstructed ad a survival trait.
Also look at surgical anaesthesia.... some theories on this, and subjectively i can see it, while you are under, you arent asleep...... you, your sense of self is gone, totally shut down. no dreams. no sense of how much time had passed when you wake........ not like a regular sleep whenyou at least havesome idea. it always feels like instant teleportation from the surgical suite to the recovery room, even if many hours have passed. then there arethepeople who just never come back.
we are far away from understnding consciousness... which is cool. weve batelyscratched the surface.
were just nowrealizing the brain has far more plasticity than we thought a few years ago.... its still a hugemystery.
now take general anaesthesia...... during surgeries i can recall, i was simply gone. that time was simply time i didnt exist.
I don't think it is as much about Self in objective sense of word as much about Self in subjective sense of word. Even if you know you exist, it doesn't prove anything else apart from the fact that you exist. Now you could be made of flesh or silicon, or you could be just an idea existing in someone else's mind.
From personal experience, we have a team of programmers all from the same group working in an isolated area. At some point a secretary for some unrelated manager was seated among us at it became a huge destruction. By the nature of here work, she was constantly talking on the phone of having her phone ring.
What bothers me is that in most news coverage the set up veers further off as "copyright owners" vs "internet giants". This sets the tone that only large Internet business are protesting SOPA because they make money from pirating in some way. It completely overlooks the fact that the backlash is largely driven by average informed users.
I am surprised this has not been done by anti-SOPA activists. This would be using the tools Internet has created to save it shows well it's reach. This I think is the easiest way an individual can get attention of the regular public, after he is done talking to his friends.
I don't think companies are of the hook here, especially large ones who control large segments of their industry. It might be hard for them sometimes to change what consumers want, but at the same time they often are the ones resisting change. Often times change in market preferences means that the company has to do extra work and spend extra money to adjust and offer new products. Sometimes they see that it would be cheaper to disrupt the change instead. Marketing and lobbying, as others have pointed out, are tools they use for that purpose.
Interesting to see that UPS stand out from the crowd. They chose that color because it looks professional and dignified, but I'm sure there is some benefit from not looking like the rest of the blue corporations.
Most of us nowadays are well aware that you shouldn't post any information on FB that you don't want to be shared with broad range of people. We now know how flippant FB is about privacy.
However that was not the case when we just started using it years ago. Back than, many people saw FB posts as something private shareable only with a tight circle of friends. Now these old posts will be coming back into the light for all to see.
