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User: cjc25

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  1. It's not beside the point on Ask Slashdot: Is There an Ethical Way Facebook Can Experiment With Their Users? · · Score: 5, Insightful

    (Of course, few stopped to think about how Facebook decided what to show people in the first place, but that's beside the point.)

    No, it's the entire point. Your stream, to the extent that it's "your" stream, is already manipulated in ways you're not told, based on what Facebook thinks you will find interesting, funny, or engaging enough to come back and see more ads. Experiments have to happen as part of Facebook's desire to expand, if only to see which manipulations mean more ads displayed. The only difference is that now the people who are interested in something closer to science than ad sales at Facebook won't tell us about their results. Are you happy?

  2. Re:Anonymity makes sense for special cases. on Pseudonyms Now Allowed On Google+ · · Score: 1

    +1

  3. Re:One person a bottleneck doesn't create... on Google Fiber: No Charge For Peering, No Fast Lanes · · Score: 1

    Right: TWC sold me "15 Mbps" and Netfix "X Tbps," not me "15 Mbps unless lots of people in your neighborhood are watching Netflix" and Netflix "X Tbps unless you happen to be sending to an individual neighborhood." It's totally plausible that the terms they gave me are very difficult to meet, but that sounds much more like their problem to solve than mine.

    If their defense is that they mislead me into thinking they're giving me more than they are ("up to 15 Mbps") I'm not going to be particularly sympathetic to their complaints about the cost of upgrades to handle load.

  4. Re:next for NoSQL on New PostgreSQL Guns For NoSQL Market · · Score: 2

    the SQL standard.

    That's cute

  5. Re:1 difference between most, including RH, and Ca on Why Do You Need License From Canonical To Create Derivatives? · · Score: 1

    The OP was not talking about trademark, but about copyright on the selection of packages in an argument analagous-ish to one that a mashup can be copyrighted separately from the underlying songs. It's odd and untested but not on it's face definitely wrong under current law, dickishness notwithstanding

  6. Re:And children of public school cheerleaders on How Good Are Charter Schools For the Public School System? · · Score: 1

    The money that goes to support private schools could instead have been taxed and spent on public schools.

    I'm pretty sure there's no deduction for a dependent's private school tuition. And while the US tax -> school structure has lots of problems which are fairly off topic, tax deductions wouldn't apply anyway.

  7. Re:Safety on Who Is Liable When a Self-Driving Car Crashes? · · Score: 1

    It's all or nothing. And if *all* the cars on the road aren't autonomous, then the non-autonomous ones are mostly a traffic hazard whose only advantage is clear liability.

    FTFY

  8. Re:FTFY on Ask Slashdot: Are We Older Experts Being Retired Too Early? · · Score: 1

    That's a pretty negative view of young SAs, not borne out by my experience. Are you sure you're not discriminating against them?

  9. Locality on 23% of IT Workers Spend Thanksgiving With Coworkers · · Score: 1

    The top of the list is probably an intersection of "cities people move to for work" and "cities which have recently developed IT industry," or places where IT workers are less likely to have extended family.

  10. Re:Search is Google's answer to everything. on The Case Against Gmail · · Score: 1

    Woah, interesting. As a counterexample ever since Windows search was introduced I always hit start and type the first several characters I'm interested in:

    [win]steam[enter]
    [win]chrome[enter]
    [win]kmymo[enter] (kmymoney)
    etc.

  11. Re:The Government got in its' Own Way on Why Can't Big Government Launch a Website? · · Score: 1

    Perhaps if, in order to become law, your idea must become so sabotaged that it is no longer decent, you should not pass it.

  12. Re:Comparison to Facebook a teensy bit misleading on Cost of Healthcare.gov: $634 Million — So Far · · Score: 1

    What makes you think Facebook's architecture doesn't have a similarly complex diagram? Also, it's been more or less admitted that the whole "Eligibility" box was not correctly implemented, which takes a lot of steps out of the chart.

    Interop is very difficult when you don't control both ends, you won't find cogent arguments against that, but defining bad interfaces is bad design, not some magical issue that only affects government work. If a bad design results in excess cost, most people would consider that a problem. Within the government, if they can't coordinate enough to redefine interfaces correctly, the issue is a dysfunctional organization.

    For interaction with the external insurance agencies, work was probably harder. Supporting disparate systems may have been unavoidable given deadlines. While the PHBs for this project may have said "this is how you get your plan listed on the exchange. If you don't work with our interface, tough." If so, good for them! I've heard too much about how hard it is to work with so many insurance companies to be optimistic about that, however.

    Intelligent software design is not optional in any service at scale. The fact that it's hard does not excuse doing it incorrectly at 6x the cost.

  13. Re:2000 Wyoming (or Montana, or Nebraska) citizens on Humans Choose Friends With Similar DNA · · Score: 5, Insightful

    I find this study to be extremely flawed, not to say elitist / racist.

    Yes, people who fit a stereotype of those I dislike like to have friends who are similar.

    If the study had been conducted with 2000 subjects from places with people like me, I'm sure the results would've been more comforting to me.

    FTFY

  14. Re: H1 Visa applicants are less expensive on US IT Worker Files Hiring Lawsuit Against Infosys, Class Action Proposed · · Score: 1

    Accounting especially is outsourced all the time. That's why there are the "Big Four" audit/accounting firms. You hire one to account for you and another to audit for you. And the money flows...

  15. Re:Not much of a defense on NSA Director Defends Surveillance To Unsympathetic Black Hat Crowd · · Score: 1

    This is seems like a permutation of the Butterfield fallacy

    Whichever attack you've decided was the "most visible" was so because it was missed.

    Fortunately this doesn't affect arguments regarding the proper scope of surveillance, but unfortunately it underscores that people are often oblivious to their assumptions. In your case, it's that you would have heard of stopped terrorist plots. I'll agree that it's plausible because of the temptation to brag about success, but far from certain.

  16. Re:Hilarious considering the Microsoft marketing on MS Handed NSA Access To Encrypted Chat & Email · · Score: 1

    That this is a legal question has escaped many of the newscasters, who as far as I can tell make the mistake of spewing that there's something special about USA citizenship. The executive branch's control over foreign policy gives it a lot of leeway regarding foreign non-USA citizens that it does not have over citizens or in many cases non-USA citizens within the country. Rest assured that your country (I would love to be educated on any exceptions) has similar allowances for its military's commander in chief.

  17. Re:Burying the lede on MS Handed NSA Access To Encrypted Chat & Email · · Score: 1

    Assuming that the NSA has obtained information on a US citizen unconstitutionally, they can't constitutionally use it in a court proceeding: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fruit_of_the_poisonous_tree. They'd have to go get a warrant based on entirely unrelated justifications in order to "rediscover" the evidence and make it maybe viable. It can get complicated (and lawyers love to argue).

    However, I am not aware of any way that one could "send them to prison" or force the government to stop collecting information on everyone because you think (without proof) that they've probably caught your stuff when they shouldn't have.

    IANAL, etc.

  18. Re:Does no one actually read the articles? on Google Glass Will Identify People By Clothing · · Score: 1

    If your friend tells you that, and you still ID them, they will:

    1. Change
    2. No longer be your friend.

  19. Re:Open network? on Free Wi-Fi: the Movement To Give Away Your Internet For the Good of Humanity · · Score: 1

    Semi-related question: does wiretapping law protect someone operating like you? That is to say, since presumably you don't notify everyone that you're running tcpdump to see their activity, and something as benign as recording the hostnames in DNS queries could be considered wiretapping, does the individual connecting to your network bear the responsibility of "assuming" you could do such a thing?

    I ask because I remember in college we were specifically told we could NOT use the internal network for "real world" traffic data, and that recording anything, either in promiscuous mode in a crowded lecture hall or even at a router behind the WAP would be illegal/unethical/both

  20. Re:Play on words on US DOJ Claims It Did Not Entrap Megaupload · · Score: 1

    This is unfortunately the most useful post on this rah-rah thread. Shame you're AC and I have no mod points.

  21. Re:Digital Divide on Google Wiring New York City's Chelsea For Free Wi-Fi · · Score: 1

    Practical reasons: Google's NYC office is a full block between 15th and 16th St and 8th and 9th Ave, in the north-east part of the coverage area. They probably are reusing some of the network infrastructure they built out already to support that office.

  22. Re:bug found, bug fixed, bug deal on All Ruby On Rails Versions Suffer SQL Injection Flaw · · Score: 1

    Model.where(some_field: 5) is not the same as Model.find_by_some_field(5). The #where method returns a lazily evaluated database request which functions more or less like an array. #find_by_... returns either the "first"* model to match or nil if no models match and is much more useful for one-liners

    * IIRC no ordering is guaranteed unless you have an #order portion in your model default scope

  23. Re:The purpose of the Internet... on Amazon EBS Failure Brings Down Reddit, Imgur, Others · · Score: 1

    Non sequitur

    The part of the internet that "was meant to be resilient to nuclear attacks" (if that's even true) would be the routing. If a nuclear strike hits the machine you're trying to talk to, redundancy among communication channels doesn't do anything. The endpoints went down, and so things failed.

  24. What is this even doing here? on Why Do So Many Liberals "Like" Mitt Romney On Facebook? · · Score: 1, Redundant

    So nobody is doing any clickjacking, there are plenty of legitimate reasons people who don't "like" Romney might capital-L "Like" Romney's feed, and Facebook's mobile interface is a little cluttered.

    This is not a story, this is a series of banal statements including "clickjacking," "Romney," and "Facebook" to drive traffic (and it unfortunately worked on me).

  25. Re:Used to be solved by class action on Verizon Bases $5 Fee To Not Publish Your Phone Number On 'Systems and IT' Costs · · Score: 1

    What would you file a suit for? No tort or crime was committed. This is a price change for a non-essential service which you don't need to purchase, and entirely legal.