"Richard Falken"  wrote


| >   No. Only in your role as consumer. No one is expected
| > to understand car mechanics. Nor is a home owner expected
|
| Car mechanics are included in the driving license exam.
|

  ?? I don't know where you live. I had to drive around
the block with a cop in the passenger seat, and correctly
answer 7 of 10 questions like, "What does a hexagon
shaped sign indicate?"

| There is a lot of _bad stuff_ being placed in regulated products.
Regulation is
| not a substitute for education. I sell vitamins
| and mineral supplements that are law compliant, but if you are not aware
of
| your personal circumpstances you can  make a mess
| of yourself consuming them. It is your responsibility to known if you have
| blood pressure problems or kidney issues and which
| stuff can affect you negatively. You don't need to be a vitamin expert,
you
| need the common sense pointers.

   That's a great example. You should understand what you're
taking, but regulations can at least specify the purity of the
content and ban toxic substances. Though I've read that
all bets are off when you buy herbal blends. So what do we
do about that? Herbs are hard to control that way. Still,
that's no reason to just give up on all regulation.

|
| Your argument is that the average consumer of IT is not a technical expert
and
| must be protected via regulation. Let's assume
| for a moment that the only way to use certain technology safely is by
having a
| minimum of proficency with it. What your
| argument looks like is: "The average consumer of $technology does not meet
the
| minimum level of proficency for safe use,
| therefore we must let a regulatory organism protect them."
|
| This is exactly like saying: "The average consumer of cars does not meet
the
| minimum level of proficency for safe use,
| therefore we must let a regulatory organism protect them." My opinion is
that
| if somebody is not able to drive a car safely, he
| should not be driving a car. He should be hiring somebody who knows how to
| drive a car or he should learn how to drive.
|

   That's twisting the topic in various ways. My argument is
that there needs to be more regulation about what's legal
for commercial entities in terms of privacy, mickey mouse
licensing, and so on. You shouldn't be able to sell snake oil
and you shouldn't be able to spy on people who have a
reasonable expectation of privacy. It should be illegal for you
to sell a history of your customers' vitamin usage. In the
past that wasn't an issue, but with computerization it's become
an issue.

  The question of whether someone is authorized to use a device
is different. Are you going to require a license to operate a
TV or cellphone? In a car you might put others at risk. Not
knowing that your browser or TV are spying on you is hardly
a public risk.

| I think that treating consumers as retards and demmanding them to be
pupetted
| by a third party is troublesome. For one, it
| gives power to the third party doing the pupetteeing, which is most likely
not
| a trustworthy agent.

  I think you're taking too much an engineer's point of
view. What about gardening? Cooking? You want
people to be forced to have the kind of expertise you
have, but that's a very abstruse kind of expertise. You're
looking at it as a techie. If that makes sense then why
can't a florist refuse to sell you a rose bush unless you
can show that you know how to take care of it? That
gets silly very quickly.

  I'm not saying anything about the customer in this
discussion. I'm just saying you shouldn't be allowed
to sell vitamin C pills made out of chalk. That's all.
The customers' ignorance should not be exploitable.

| And by the way, I do a lot of my own home repairs and grow a lot of my own
| food, and need no comittee to tell me sodas suck.
| Besides, I think I should be taking offense because you seem to imply that
if
| you use Unix-like systems you are a junk-food
| sucker with no life experience out of that.
|

  :) Not necessarily. But there is a notable correlation.
I remember seeing a photo of a Google conference table
one time -- sodas in front of all and a bowl of candy
bars in the middle. The Big Bang TV show works because
there's a lot of truth in it. A high percentage of engineer types
have a hard time with basic life.

    I once knew an Apple
engineer who wired his own wall light by running lamp
cord from the back of an outlet. Unsafe. Illegal. But he
figured he was a brilliant egineer, so he knew what he
was doing. He also had a tantrum about caulking his
pedestal sink. He was afraid the bowl would fall off the
pedestal if it were not caulked! There was no reasoning
with him. He was too brilliant for that.
   The same man told me his dream was to have
a cellphone that would tell him what to do, so he wouldn't
have to decide. And now he has his dream.

  I actually had an experience of what I'm talking about
just an hour ago. The woman I live with emailed something
about a NYT article on how creepy facial recognition is
becoming:

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/03/18/magazine/facial-recognition-clea
rview-ai.html

  The link was odd. It wasn't a full URL. It was clipped,
followed by a base-64 string, but with no "?". I ran
the base-64 through my converter. It turned out she
had forwarded an email from NYT. If I'd clicked the link
it would have sent them her userID and email address,
then sent me on to the article. I've seen similar links that
have peoples' name and home address encoded. The average
person has no chance of realizing this is happening, nor
of understanding how to recognize it. The trouble is that
the ease and scale of this tracking has become a problem
with computerization.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05