DaFranker

Any data on any seized smartphones. Where could a seized smartphone, obtained completely legally, come from?

Well, for starters, let's say you've got a robbery ring of people snatching iPhones in public places. Police track them, raid their meeting point, and proclaim this glorious bust with 67 arrests related to the nefarious criminal snatcher ring. What happens to the phones present onsite during the raid? Seized.

So they now have 300 seized smartphones, acquired legally. What do you think they do with them? Open 'em up, check the data, put it on the Fusion, of course! I mean, it's intelligence on the kinds of data criminals keep with them, so it's fair game, right? (Hint: Nope. But some police officers really do think this way.)

What's more... maybe some of these phones were already "cleaned out" by the snatcher ring, and maybe some weren't. Time for a subpoena to the phone carriers to know which phones belonged to whom! And, well, while we're at it, it might be useful to know if any of these phones actually belonged to some of the snatchers themselves, maybe it'll lead us to their contacts and to more of their affiliates. This is still criminal activity intelligence, right? So let's also get all the phone records and contacts and calling history for all the previous numbers and owners of all of these phones.

See how quickly this stuff escalates? And how easy it is for any officer or investigator to get carried away and justify it to anyone who asks?

(Note: I'm not saying this happened. It's a thought experiment.)

> deals only with the phone records of people actually under investigation.

Hint: It doesn't.

Regarding the edit: Yes, but...

(On the topic of "passive", always-on License Plate Reader data collection that is archived without looking at it "in case it's useful later"):

> On these facts I conclude that the need for such data has not been "clearly established in advance," so as to conform to the applicable principle of information practice. [12] Its future value to any investigation of criminal activity is wholly speculative. Therefore, with no exemption applicable to it, the collection of LPR data in the passive manner does not comport with the Data Act's strictures and prohibitions, and may not lawfully be done. [13]

To absorb this back into the whole phone records thing, here's the keypoints I gather from that:

1. Need to target specific data that is as constrained as possible given prior knowledge. E.g. If you already know someone spoke on the phone about a crime at X date and never spoke of it at any other date, you are only allowed to obtain and use the records of that date.

2. Need to be able to show reasonable belief _before collection_ that the collected data will be useful for an investigation and/or for intelligence on criminal activity. Knowing that a criminal uses a phone is not sufficient cause to collect phone records - it must be demonstrable before collection that those particular phone records might contain information useful for identifying criminal activity or for ongoing investigations.

3. Data that is mass-collected for purposes of finding a specific information (e.g. searching for a license plate by processing every car that passes through X intersection) may be kept and shared only until the target information is located and the objectives met.

4. Every data collection must have a specific purpose and clear boundaries. Collecting records "to find people who issue death threats"? NOT OKAY. Collecting records "to find this particular issuance of a death threat"? OKAY. In other, techier words, there must be a deliverable. If the goal of a data collection is open-ended, or could take decades, then you must have a specific warrant associated to that data collection, and the data must be discarded once the warrant expires and/or the investigation concludes.

This is pretty much my reading of it given cursory scanning of an abstract of the GDCDPA, prior knowledge on legal interpretations for "criminal intelligence information" (an extremely important phrase), and the A.G. advisory linked in parent.

IANAL. Also I haven't read Virginia's code of law.

However, in most american states, "obtained legally" != "legal to archive" != "legal to look at whenever you want" != "legal to share" != "legal to use for any purpose other than that which it was originally obtained for".

Which means, while the gathering of the data may have been done legally, the archival and preservation of the data beyond their original purpose may be itself illegal, let alone sharing it, looking at it for reasons unrelated to the original cause, and using it for other purposes.

Thanks.

Some of these aren't properties exclusive to redirection sites... but I'll readily admit they're very much standard features there, while mostly not too common elsewhere.

Edge case 1: You're the first to send them a message! Edge case 2: They just deleted everything in their inbox. Edge case 3: They have a particularly polarizing outlier property (e.g.: a very intense fetish for something most people would find disgusting). Edge case 4: Some quirk (or maybe even a bug!) of OKCupid's matching algorithm is pushing that user far far down in most people's priority / match % lists. Edge case 5: OKCupid's matching algorithms are functioning well, but the person is just that peculiar of an outlier in that algorithm that there's just very few active users who are going to be matched well with them.

Just off the top of my head. And then consider that, by the context, they probably meant anyone who hasn't had a new message in a while. Yeah.

TL;DR: Lots of good reasons.

Counterbalancing point: It doesn't seem to me as if the ratio of good / average / bad ideas on the website is significantly different than on other platforms / offline / "elsewhere".

Inverted Y (vertical axis, i.e. up/down view) is a very popular setting for simulation games and FPS games on PC. It's popular enough that games with >100k players will get bad press and >20 forum complaints (even when the forum is hard to find!) over it, and many more than this will simply not play/buy the game.

In other genres / types of games, especially where you don't control exclusively one character / vehicle from a fixed first/third person viewpoint, it is drastically less common.

It's been there for a while. I've been typing "timer 15 min" in my Chrome quicksearch for well over a year, according to my browsing history. They just never really did much fanfare about it - this came around the time where Wolfram|alpha was an online sensation because of its smart parsing, IIRC.

Curious about why. I'd understand a social stigma against ad-based redirection services, but does that translate into a frown against all shorteners somehow? Or is there some other cause?

Those seem like two somewhat distinct regions of definitionspace. But yes, they sound about right for what I usually mean by "open-ended". X-Com would be mostly an example of the latter, while a sandboxy game like Minecraft would primarily identify with the former.

But at this point I think it's more convenient to ditch "open-ended" and find other words to associate less confusingly with those notions. "sandboxy", above, is my first candidate. I have no good ideas for the other kind at the moment.

Ah, context. I used "X-Com" in a deliberate typographical attempt to exclude "XCOM" from the conversation.

> This applies to any single player game. The discussion was about FPS and RTS.

Yeah, fair point.

> The rest you wrote makes sense, I agree.

Yay! Same here.

I could show my priors and show the bayesian inference on them as explanation of why I feel I have the context to make the "bold" claim that someone who is likely to do worse than random is not acting on beneficial information. But then that'd be too scientific, wouldn't it?

That's a good point.

Perhaps the author never heard of them (in which case: I want a rock like that!), or more likely, didn't play them and did not want to speak from hearsay, or even more likely, simply didn't afford a thought to them while in the middle of their rant-typing-spree.

I'd grant them that Bioshock shares many of the elements that are praised about System Shock 2. Bioshock Infinite sounds like a great example of sequel gone wrong on the aspects the article's author dislikes.

> I raise my children based on my own judgments of what's best for them. And I use my own God-given intelligence and experience to form those judgments.

So you refuse to acknowledge that you might be lacking in knowledge and experience in some critical aspects of your childrens' education. And/or you refuse to accept that the conclusions you reach with your limited knowledge, alone, one single human out of billions, might be erroneous and cause harm to your children. And/or you refuse to accept that there might be others out there with more knowledge and experience than you on certain topics. And/or you think God will make everything okay just because you have faith, and the fact that people get raped and killed every day despite their faith does not sway you.

I think that, right there, is the source of your problems.

I pity your children for having you for a parent. For having someone like you be in control of their lives.

I'm not sure what you're driving at. Are you saying that Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite are like System Shock 2? Or are you saying that they're prime targets and reference examples for examining what's going wrong?

> I disagree that there can't be a measure of skill across different games. You can just look at the probability of a top X% player winning against a top Y% player.

Solitaire.

You can't measure my probability of winning against you. This metric sucks.

In a more general way, while in many cases for perhaps a broad range of people stressfulness will correlate, to some nonlinear degree, with the correlation between their choice of action and their odds of achieving a goal (see what I did there, with the second-degree function and everything), the fact that this very (stress-to-skillness) correlation varies in formula from person to person leads me to believe that it's a symptom of a different variable being more meaningful.

What I'm saying isn't that stress doesn't indicate anything, but rather that it's not a very appropriate yardstick to measure things like fun and player engagement when the correlation between stress and skill-dependence varies so much from person to person.

For me, for example, time pressure and assiduousness-related pressures (remembering to always do X when Y or always do Z every time K) will far eclipse any notion of skill-dependency and impact-on-success as far as how stressful I feel is concerned. Give me a game of Chess, and I'll be rather unstressed, despite the high skill-dependency. Put a timer, and my stress level shoots up exponentially, despite skill-dependency remaining more or less unchanged (since the time limit applies to my opponent as well, and doesn't really change the ratio between my choices and my odds of victory).

Alright, what specific qualifications are we talking about then? If this is about branching story paths with different endings, then let's use those words, rather than put the word "open-ended" there that may or may not accidentally blur the difference between those and other things I'd call "open-ended".

Your analysis of the last paragraph of the article seems pretty spot on. Kudos!

But I'm nitpicky; the distinguishing feature of games isn't interactivity, otherwise every fun activity with interactivity would be a game, and I'm not sure conversations are normally included when we speak of "games" in this way. Games have rules, and often some kind of goal, and other things. The Art of Game Design (a book by Jesse Schell) kind of roughly approximates it by describing games as a kind of activity involving problem-solving and fun. If I'm not taking actions specifically chosen towards achieving a result ("problem-solving"), then I don't feel like I'm playing a game, even if there's some interactivity.

So I'd say that the key towards quality game experiences lies more in the region of providing options to the player (actions they can take) that have an effect on the game world (resulting conversation, successful quicktime scene, dead goblin, shiny new sword, whatever!) where which option is taken lands the player in a different distance from various desirable goals ("solution" being what the player did to get there).

But there's still a lot of fuzzyness, and it's still very hard to even judge what parts of what games are quality experiences for who and when, and especially why. You have it completely right that we can't just say it's "real sandbox simulation, autonomous agents and language-capable AI", and that lasting choices aren't the One True Way.

I think you're restricting your thinking to a certain type of games and a certain subtype of story.

X-Com games are a common example of "open" games. The "story line" is single, of course, so if you're only talking about story they're very linear. However, how you get through is much more up to you. It doesn't force you down the right side of the bunker and require you to throw a grenade inside before you can proceed in the story; X-Com puts aliens in the world, and gives you some tools and options to fight them, and whenever something particular happens, story also happens (for a simple example: you lose all your forces and bases, the aliens take over the world! Game Over)

The desire to make games that are open is clearly not "inherently flawed"; Risk is a very open-ended game, yet I've never heard of anyone complaining that the way it divides the story into branching paths just boils it down to choosing the best two or three storylines.

Yes, this. It's hard to make arguments about quality of experience when every step of the way there's many uncertain variables and your best evidence comes from personal experience (that most likely wasn't shared by the person you're trying to convince).

> And as you say, the form in which this experience is irrelevant. What matters is the quality of the experience.

This eclipses and outweighs what I would have to say.

I think the author of the article, in those terms, was saying that the experiences created by recent games are often, and more and more, far inferior in quality; I've followed the correct sequence of buttons, I am rewarded with a scene of my character doing awesome things. If done well, I might even feel a tidbit of attachment and of feeling that this was the result of my success. But it's not the experience of being a super-spy in a high-tech facility. It's the experience of seeing a super-spy do stuff after I complete my homework, and I will have more homework to do so the super-spy can go on to do awesome things.

The problem is that these lower-quality experiences still sell better, often because they abuse certain hacks or dopamine bypasses of the human brain, without necessarily reaching all the way through to what makes an experience fun and pleasurable for the player.

Of course, to make such an argument successfully, you first have to convince people that humans do not always act optimally rationally, and then that humans do have such "hacks" and twists that control what they want and do (which in turn requires an audience to be convinced that brains control actions, not "the soul" or some other immaterial entity). Think that's a high bar? It's not even the start.

>If a game is not stressful that usually is just another way of saying that there is little skill involved.

For some definitions of "stress" and, most particularly, of "skill".

I take rather great pride in my GMing skills when playing a tabletop RPG game, but if there's any amount of "stress¹" involved in the same sense that there is stress¹ when I play RTS games, then I'm definitely doing something wrong. Of course there's "stress²", but that's the tension and uncertainty in the events of the game I run, or the uncertainty relating to my players and what their reactions are going to be.

So "skill" here can't be used as a scalar measure, and there's definitely no single one measure of "skill" across different game genres. Declaring a linear correlation between "skill" and "stress" seems rather premature and, IMO, detrimental to the discussion.

>The problem is about losing yourself to a video game for months on end, even having it take over the other parts of your life when you're not playing it.

I could use a script for this, and a variable. Here, let me try:

>The problem is about losing yourself to a job for months on end, even having it take over the other parts of your life when you're not doing it.

> The problem is about losing yourself to military training for months on end, even having it take over the other parts of your life when you're not doing it.

> The problem is about losing yourself to a scientific research project for months on end, even having it take over the other parts of your life when you're not working on it.

> The problem is about losing yourself to [INSERT MANY OTHER PERFECTLY HEALTHY THINGS] for months on end, even having it take over the other parts of your life when you're not [INSERT ACTIVIVTY VERB] it.

The root of the problem is that you single-mindedly see "video games" as something unhealthy to focus on, without any evidence that it even is unhealthy at all!

Where have you heard that video games are unhealthy? Was there any research done? Did you perform long-term experiments? How large was the sample size? What control groups were there?

In short, YOU KNOW NOTHING, and are doing this based entirely on your general impression that video games taking over one's life is more unhealthy than having something else (like school, or work, or surviving in the jungle, or building a tree house) occupy your thoughts.

Let's not. That's stupid too. Not as stupid as wilfully doing something to one's own children that has a chance to negatively affect their future without even bothering to question oneself, but still pretty stupid.

It's also worth mentioning that in the event that, upon first seeing c1, c2 hails c1 and receives no response, good AI logic will have c2 treat c1 as an unknown and begin running probabilistic predictions against c1.

For a possible example: If there are potential bends in the road coming up, one of those predictions will warn c2's main logic, and then c2 might decide to pre-emptively slow down to give itself leeway to brake if c1 does decide to change lanes. Likewise, if c1 is similarly programmed, it might make a more cautious tentative to shift lanes, but give itself time and space to maneuver back in case c2 doesn't slow down. And again, the same kind of logic can happen between c2 and c3, or c3 could have the same prediction as c2 against c1 or even against both c1 and c2 in the case where none of them can talk to eachother.

So not all is lost, and in cases where reliable communication and acknowledgements cannot be obtained, AI cars would (if they're well programmed) adjust their current logic/driving so that they have the mechanical leeway to adjust to various scenarios.

For a very well programmed AI present in all cars (but without common knowledge of this), each car would consider the physics and pick the optimal way to drive while keeping enough margin of error to react and avoid collisions (or being the cause of collisions! avoiding two cars only to make one of them bump into a third one is no good!). In the vast majority of actually-existing situations, I suspect this would still be faster and much safer than human drivers (given the above assumption of good AI).

Ah. Perhaps if there were actual, studied, reported instances of adults who suffered in life because of a childhood obsession, this point would make more sense.

It seems that your entire decision to ban Minecraft stems from your impression that they're "too obsessed" with it and that they shouldn't be spending so much time on something that they are clearly passionate about (studies and research show that passion generates the best workers and innovators!)...

I'm guessing this means arguments about how "The Hobbit" has actually changed the life of a lot of people (people who made money from it, people who spent time reading it, people who spent time making a movie, people who spent money on that movie, people who made money from the movie, etc. etc. etc.) or even improved it in some less-measurable way (used in a literature course, philosophical discussion based on the book, inspiration from the story of the book for doing something else in real life or to spark a real life discussion, etc.) will have no meaning for you, since all of this is obsession with Imagination and it's not the Real World.

I mean, my day job consists 100% of putting the right numbers in the right places in a completely virtual system that is entirely meaningless in the real world, that I cannot interact with and cannot use. These numbers don't do anything, they don't change anything, and they certainly won't build a treehouse I can go hide in when my parents get overbearing and obsessively controlling.

However... my day job consists of managing an entire Enterprise Resource Planning system, and the numbers I put in the right place are the resources of this company. The right numbers mean that people looking at them later on will get the right parts at the right time, and build things faster, and eventually clients will have their product on time and at best quality. The wrong numbers... well, 2+ year late deliveries and 2-million-dollar penalties are called "getting off easy" here.

So you see, your idea of what is imagination and useless, and what is "real world" and practical, definitely isn't relevant to the problem. The real question here is: Comparing between a childhood with minecraft, and a childhood without minecraft, which childhood will produce the more happy and productive and overall enriched humans later? And that's not a question about what you, as a parent, consider to be Real World™ or Imagination™. It's a question about what skills and what abilities and what methods of thinking the children will grow up with, and how they will apply and be able to use those abilities later in life.

Definitely. I just re-read my post and it's obvious I let my thoughts wander way too much for a TL;DR.