Therefore, an emergency is declared to exist, and this act being immediately necessary for the preservation of the public peace, health, and safety shall become effective on: (1) The date of its approval by the Governor."
Who knows what all those nerds who would be studying CS will do now. We must do something before they alight from their parent's basements and on to the streets armed with Magic.
From what I'm reading, most of the problems isn't with the bitcoins, it is with the people who say if you give us bitcoins we'll give you money and keep giving you money. I don't think I've heard of bitcoins being stolen from someone's own wallet.
This adage proves the maxim that a sucker is born every minute. So someone promises you annual rates of return of 200 to 300% and you believe them. As my econ prof said, "The first thing you do when you find a $100 bill is ask Why me?" Anyone who could legitimately make that rate of return wouldn't need to find random suckers but quietly amassing their own fortune.
If you had gotten Bitcoins very early, ten dollars could have made you a multimillionaire.
On paper. the problem is liquidity, i.e. where could you walk in with multimillions of Bitcoins and get dollars immediately in return, like you can with other currencies such as Euros, Pound Sterling, Yen, etc.
For 10K they are going to build a drone that can navigate, on its own, the Pacific ocean, avoiding storms, accounting for winds, rough air, birds, etc and have enough fuel to fly 5,500 miles non-stop. Lets say the can do 20 mph, at that speed it's an 11.5 day trip. Even at a Predator speed of 135 mph it's still a 2 day trip. They may want to give it a try but the probability of success is zero. Of course, they could fly to South Korea and launch it from there, I'm sure the RSK wouldn't mind that. Then again, there's always the Aleutians...
Firefighting at sea can involve a lot of tight spaces and areas such as fuel transfer spaces where sending in a robit would be preferable to sending in a fire team. The team can follow the robot if needed but the robot has the advantage of being able to stay for rxtenesed periods; pesky things like running out of air in an OBA doesn't bother it.
I still can replace the brakepads and discs. Change the oil and things like that. But that's about it. Currently I have a problem with the alarm going at random moments if I lock it. And it is impossible to do a proper debugging. I finally found a unofficial source to get the repair manual so I can look at it but I will have by trial and error, bypassing one censor at the time.
When all the electronics starts to break down I fear it will be expensive in man hours.
Roger that, but even simple pull and replace jobs can get complicated. MB, for a few model years, had an SBS system that would activate the brakes if the door was opened; which was fine normally but a bit of a problem if you had the brake pads out. BMW requires reseting the computer when a new battery is installed to avoid overcharging it; they only overcharging that occurs when it is rest is the $100 the dealer charges to plug in their computer and rest the control module. Even then, the dealer is paying beaucoup bucks for the test equipment and technician time so $100 really isn't unreasonable except that BMW could have programmed in a rest sequence for the car like they do for oil changes so a dealer trip isn't necessary except to but the battery. Surprisingly, a dealer battery is not much more expensive than an aftermarket one and has the proper vent setup.
While this is undoubtedly true for the engines, for the rest of the machine it may or not be valid. But TFA misses one enormous issue - legal liability.
Good point. Farm equipment, like most industrial equipment, is getting more and more complex. Tractors now drive themselves as the follow a master tractor around a farm. As a result, it becomes necessary to make sure the control systems perform exactly as designed and not let people make changes for whatever reasons because they don't know what will happen.
And totally failed to have a competitive advantage. Everything they changed to was something someone else was already doing, and they didn't make a sufficiently serious effort at it to do it well. If they were going to have only employees who knew how to sell cellphones, they should have just ditched all that other stuff completely or moved it to online-only and just been a cellphone store. But they were a crappy cellphone store, because they didn't focus on that. Nor, in fact, did they ever focus on anything ever again. Hey, look, a squirrel! Bankruptcy.
Exactly. It reeked of desperation where management was trying to find anything, something, that would work. As a result, they went into a death spiral and never recovered. The real sad part is the lower level managers and employees will be out of a job while senior management no doubt gets paid to stick through the bankruptcy sale and move son to other high paying jobs because what happened "wasn't their fault."
and eliminated Radio Shack's advantage. Building, and repairing, electronics from components used to be common enough so that RS could build a good business being the local component supplier. Add to that staff knowledgeable about electronics and you had a nice niche market. As electronics moved from the ability to build at the component level (anyone remember Heathkit?) RS started to lose its customer base. Someone with a reasonable amount of skill could learn to solder a resistor on a circuit board but soldering microchips and ICs required a whole different level of skill and equipment; as a result building electronic equipment became more plug and play rater than etch and solder. Once their core market began to decline they needed to move in other directions, which put them in competition with the growing big box stores (electronics such as stereos) selling name brands at cheap prices and computer manufactures selling IBM clones and Apple. Add in the cheap electronic toys at Christmas and now you have a mix of items, none of which proved profitable enough, or compelling enough to bring in customers, to make a go at it. They wound up being a little bit of everything but not enough of one thing to survive when competing with better stocked stores with more choices in each market they were trying to reach.
While management has a large amount of the blame for RS dying, the shifting marketplace and changing consumer really sealed their fate no matter what management did.
The idea of Amazon buying their stores was intriguing as it helps deal with one of their logistics problems; namely how can we reduce the cost of shipping to homes? Given their foray into predictive purchasing that could stock stores based on anticipated demand and eliminate the cost of shipping door to door. The question would be is running stores cheaper than shipping? My guess is no unless it generates enough additional sales to cover the costs and meet the desired profit margins.
That's always been the case; digital only mad it easier for crappy photographers to take crappy pictures. Beyond mash the button, which has also been around a long time, the have no concept of composition nor lighting. As a result, their photos are washed out, lack contrast or details, have things "growing" out of heads, etc; but at least they are cheap.
I have a firstnamelastname@gmail email address (you can see it above this post), and I get a *lot* of correspondence for other me's out there - bank details, divorce proceedings, legal proceedings, a long running internal discussion surrounding someones cock up in the Republican Party in the US, internal memos for several political parties around the globe.
Same here. I usually reply with a "wrong person, please verify the email address" and get a thanks in reply. No legal threats, which would get a nice FU response from my lawyer, but I did have some idiot IT admin insist, repeatedly, the address was correct and that they would continue to send me the emails. He did't seem to understand that ignoring periods in email addresses complied with the RFC no matter what he thought. I said OK, but be advised that I make no assurance as to the privacy of the information and consider anything sent to me to be mine free to use as I see fit. Given it was a private school I figured sooner or later the parent would figure out what was happening when they didn't get important emails from the school and straighten out the situation. Sure enough, the emails eventually stopped. On my end I simply sent them to junk mail marked as spam as I had no real interest in reading conversations intended as private.
I also wound up on a political email list and after several nice polite requests to be dropped I started flame wars by pointing out every inaccuracy in the right wing rants that constituted the list. I figured if they ignored my nice requests they wanted an alternative opinion and I was happy to supply it. It was a bit like shooting fish in a barrel since they clearly were relative newbies and never had been seriously trolled, been involved in USENET flame wars, read ALT.FOLKLORE.URBAN, or in general realized this Internet Thing reached people beyond their political slant. Eventually the list owner banned me and stopped sending me the emails, ending the fun.
People generally want to work at a company that does interesting things and lets them use their talents in ways they find rewarding; but they also expect to be rewarded for their work. Too often the "vision thing" is corp speak for "We want someone who will give his life to us at below market rates..."
There is no excuse for this kind of idiocy. When something is obviously not a threat to then treat it like one shows that the principal is an idiot. She should have confiscated the ring and told the kid to go back to class and behave. Actually a teacher should have handled it. How it ever got to the level it did is mind boggling. I know this kind of behavior goes on all the time because kids are kids. Most teachers and principals would have handled this without all the fuss, this time it was an idiot. Unfortunately you can't filter them all out, sometimes a few get through. They should fire her immediately and replace her with someone with some sense.
Most teacher I know often handle this in class but once it gets noticed outside of class there is no longer a option of using common sense. If one kid gets a hand slap and another a more serious punishment then the school is open to a lawsuit; and if the kid escalates into more serious actions then the school and teacher are in trouble as well. Yes, this is a stupid case and I wish we didn't have these dumb zero tolerance positions but we do. It's easier on the administration of a school and politicians get to say they are taking a tough stance on XYZ and as a result stupid outcomes happen. Welcome to the new reality where judgement is bad and having punishments fit the circumstances is a distant memory.
I love people who take pot shots and don't know what the fuck they're talking about. All school districts are taking tougher stances on punishment and more and more districts across the country are adopting zero tolerance policies. Is it draconian? yes, but when you have inattentive parents who don't take the time to explain right from wrong or turn a blind eye to the kids' activities this is what you get. This is clearly one that the schools administration could deal with but their hands are probably tied by district policy. Schools need to get back to the job of teaching and inspiring our youth, not being extensions of a detention system. That means that parents, you know the ones that actually bring these kids into the world, need to get involved with their kids and start by doing some teaching at home.
While I agree wholeheartedly with what you say there is another reason for such policies:
By mandating certain actions the school's administration is not required to make judgement calls that could be second guessed by the district or the courts. This way, they can fall back on the "district policy" argument to protect themselves. Before someone Goodwin's this thread with the "I was just following orders" argument with the current willingness of many parents to sue at the drop of a hat zero tolerance is a better defense than judgement call.
Yes, it leads to stupid results and is really a bad idea but until parents step up we'll see more and more of this.
I wonder what % is non-US downloaders who want to keep up on their favorite shows that have not yet reached their location? I have friends who have US/UK iTunes accounts to buy their favorite shows before they are released where they live. Does that hurt their viewership in locations where the show is reached later? Maybe, since some percentage will not watch it again but I'd bet quite a few do as well.
its to be expected. Sitting through 20 minutes of mandatory trailer before my bluray starts actually playing the movie i paid for is nothing short of a war crime.
Yup. I rip mine to mkv before watching. With a quick conversion it is also available on my AppleTV so I don't need to dig for the disk to watch it; plus all my disks and iTunes content is available in one spot and across multiple devices.
I have since added a corollary: I do not do IT projects unless you pay me enough to retire on.
Here you lost me. Why were you even in this business if you didn't love the challenge? Don't take other peoples' bad data personally. Take it as an opportunity.
I get enough work doing other things so IT work is something I can avoid unless it is lucrative enough. Most of my IT projects started out doing something differently then getting roped into staying on when they discovered I could actually deliver results. I've learned to so NO when asked to stay.
its the Legion of Lawyers (TM) that stand ready to crush anyone that does something they don't like. Getting hit by their lawyers makes taking a hit in the game feel like you're playing a sandlot game of touch.
They're also protecting the revenue they get from official sponsors. If everyone starts using Super Bowl in their adds then paying big bucks to be an official sponsor is less valuable as your message gets lost in the crowd.
As for the product placement in shows and movies; it's not so much "we'll get sued" as "they aren't paying us for a placement so screw them. We'll use their product but cover up the label." Though sometimes they miss one. Big Bang Theory obscures the Apple on the back of their Macs but missed one on the front on a Mac in the background in a recent episode.
And then dates, can nobody ever get dates right. A favourite is that round one of the system will only record the day of a transaction but later they expand their collection to the hour and minute but now the old dates are all at noon or something. So when you try to find the usage pattern of users there will be this massive spike at noon and a scattering of transactions in the rest of the day. Try and run that through a Bayesian analysis.
Data quality has been an issue with every project I've worked on involving data analysis or integration into a new system. One project was combining two employee databases for a merged company, where they decided to use SSNs as the key for unique records since it was a US company. Unfortunately for them, foreign employees on temporary jobs in the US often had 999-99-9999 or 123-45-6789 as SSNs, with the occasional real one thrown in. Then their were duplicate valid SSNs for employees that worked for both companies at various times in their career. That project, as with all others, confirmed my 2-2-10 law of data cleanup:
Data cleanup will take twice as long, cost twice as much, and you will lose at least 10% of your data when you decide to finally give up scrubbing the data.
I have since added a corollary:
I do not do IT projects unless you pay me enough to retire on.
"Big Data" is like sex in high school. Nobody really knows for sure how to do it properly, but everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone says they're doing it, too.
Well, OK, but this is slashdot. Are you sure your audience will get this analogy? Can you try to rework this into a car analogy instead?
"Big Data" is like sex in a car while in high school. Nobody really knows for sure how to do it properly, but everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone says they're doing it, too.
There was a reason DoD was concerned about this sort of monitoring many decades ago. Electronics were shielded to prevent EM tradition form being used to deduce what was being done.
Slashdot Mirror
So someone promises you annual rates of return of 200 to 300% and you believe them.
Bitcoin, of course, very specifically goes out of their way to indicate that there is no such promise.
True. Bitcoin was just the new shiny in an old scam.
Who knows what all those nerds who would be studying CS will do now. We must do something before they alight from their parent's basements and on to the streets armed with Magic.
From what I'm reading, most of the problems isn't with the bitcoins, it is with the people who say if you give us bitcoins we'll give you money and keep giving you money. I don't think I've heard of bitcoins being stolen from someone's own wallet.
This adage proves the maxim that a sucker is born every minute. So someone promises you annual rates of return of 200 to 300% and you believe them. As my econ prof said, "The first thing you do when you find a $100 bill is ask Why me?" Anyone who could legitimately make that rate of return wouldn't need to find random suckers but quietly amassing their own fortune.
If you had gotten Bitcoins very early, ten dollars could have made you a multimillionaire.
On paper. the problem is liquidity, i.e. where could you walk in with multimillions of Bitcoins and get dollars immediately in return, like you can with other currencies such as Euros, Pound Sterling, Yen, etc.
As someone else here pointed out, Guam is even closer to NK than the Aleutians (and, probably, much easier to get to).
True, but it's still 3400 miles from Guam (and 2800 from Adak in the Aleutians) one way and they plan a round trip...
For 10K they are going to build a drone that can navigate, on its own, the Pacific ocean, avoiding storms, accounting for winds, rough air, birds, etc and have enough fuel to fly 5,500 miles non-stop. Lets say the can do 20 mph, at that speed it's an 11.5 day trip. Even at a Predator speed of 135 mph it's still a 2 day trip. They may want to give it a try but the probability of success is zero. Of course, they could fly to South Korea and launch it from there, I'm sure the RSK wouldn't mind that. Then again, there's always the Aleutians...
Firefighting at sea can involve a lot of tight spaces and areas such as fuel transfer spaces where sending in a robit would be preferable to sending in a fire team. The team can follow the robot if needed but the robot has the advantage of being able to stay for rxtenesed periods; pesky things like running out of air in an OBA doesn't bother it.
I still can replace the brakepads and discs. Change the oil and things like that. But that's about it. Currently I have a problem with the alarm going at random moments if I lock it. And it is impossible to do a proper debugging. I finally found a unofficial source to get the repair manual so I can look at it but I will have by trial and error, bypassing one censor at the time.
When all the electronics starts to break down I fear it will be expensive in man hours.
Roger that, but even simple pull and replace jobs can get complicated. MB, for a few model years, had an SBS system that would activate the brakes if the door was opened; which was fine normally but a bit of a problem if you had the brake pads out. BMW requires reseting the computer when a new battery is installed to avoid overcharging it; they only overcharging that occurs when it is rest is the $100 the dealer charges to plug in their computer and rest the control module. Even then, the dealer is paying beaucoup bucks for the test equipment and technician time so $100 really isn't unreasonable except that BMW could have programmed in a rest sequence for the car like they do for oil changes so a dealer trip isn't necessary except to but the battery. Surprisingly, a dealer battery is not much more expensive than an aftermarket one and has the proper vent setup.
While this is undoubtedly true for the engines, for the rest of the machine it may or not be valid. But TFA misses one enormous issue - legal liability.
Good point. Farm equipment, like most industrial equipment, is getting more and more complex. Tractors now drive themselves as the follow a master tractor around a farm. As a result, it becomes necessary to make sure the control systems perform exactly as designed and not let people make changes for whatever reasons because they don't know what will happen.
And totally failed to have a competitive advantage. Everything they changed to was something someone else was already doing, and they didn't make a sufficiently serious effort at it to do it well. If they were going to have only employees who knew how to sell cellphones, they should have just ditched all that other stuff completely or moved it to online-only and just been a cellphone store. But they were a crappy cellphone store, because they didn't focus on that. Nor, in fact, did they ever focus on anything ever again. Hey, look, a squirrel! Bankruptcy.
Exactly. It reeked of desperation where management was trying to find anything, something, that would work. As a result, they went into a death spiral and never recovered. The real sad part is the lower level managers and employees will be out of a job while senior management no doubt gets paid to stick through the bankruptcy sale and move son to other high paying jobs because what happened "wasn't their fault."
and eliminated Radio Shack's advantage. Building, and repairing, electronics from components used to be common enough so that RS could build a good business being the local component supplier. Add to that staff knowledgeable about electronics and you had a nice niche market. As electronics moved from the ability to build at the component level (anyone remember Heathkit?) RS started to lose its customer base. Someone with a reasonable amount of skill could learn to solder a resistor on a circuit board but soldering microchips and ICs required a whole different level of skill and equipment; as a result building electronic equipment became more plug and play rater than etch and solder. Once their core market began to decline they needed to move in other directions, which put them in competition with the growing big box stores (electronics such as stereos) selling name brands at cheap prices and computer manufactures selling IBM clones and Apple. Add in the cheap electronic toys at Christmas and now you have a mix of items, none of which proved profitable enough, or compelling enough to bring in customers, to make a go at it. They wound up being a little bit of everything but not enough of one thing to survive when competing with better stocked stores with more choices in each market they were trying to reach.
While management has a large amount of the blame for RS dying, the shifting marketplace and changing consumer really sealed their fate no matter what management did.
The idea of Amazon buying their stores was intriguing as it helps deal with one of their logistics problems; namely how can we reduce the cost of shipping to homes? Given their foray into predictive purchasing that could stock stores based on anticipated demand and eliminate the cost of shipping door to door. The question would be is running stores cheaper than shipping? My guess is no unless it generates enough additional sales to cover the costs and meet the desired profit margins.
Most people don't understand photography.
That's always been the case; digital only mad it easier for crappy photographers to take crappy pictures. Beyond mash the button, which has also been around a long time, the have no concept of composition nor lighting. As a result, their photos are washed out, lack contrast or details, have things "growing" out of heads, etc; but at least they are cheap.
undoing all his edits.
I have a firstnamelastname@gmail email address (you can see it above this post), and I get a *lot* of correspondence for other me's out there - bank details, divorce proceedings, legal proceedings, a long running internal discussion surrounding someones cock up in the Republican Party in the US, internal memos for several political parties around the globe.
Same here. I usually reply with a "wrong person, please verify the email address" and get a thanks in reply. No legal threats, which would get a nice FU response from my lawyer, but I did have some idiot IT admin insist, repeatedly, the address was correct and that they would continue to send me the emails. He did't seem to understand that ignoring periods in email addresses complied with the RFC no matter what he thought. I said OK, but be advised that I make no assurance as to the privacy of the information and consider anything sent to me to be mine free to use as I see fit. Given it was a private school I figured sooner or later the parent would figure out what was happening when they didn't get important emails from the school and straighten out the situation. Sure enough, the emails eventually stopped. On my end I simply sent them to junk mail marked as spam as I had no real interest in reading conversations intended as private.
I also wound up on a political email list and after several nice polite requests to be dropped I started flame wars by pointing out every inaccuracy in the right wing rants that constituted the list. I figured if they ignored my nice requests they wanted an alternative opinion and I was happy to supply it. It was a bit like shooting fish in a barrel since they clearly were relative newbies and never had been seriously trolled, been involved in USENET flame wars, read ALT.FOLKLORE.URBAN, or in general realized this Internet Thing reached people beyond their political slant. Eventually the list owner banned me and stopped sending me the emails, ending the fun.
People generally want to work at a company that does interesting things and lets them use their talents in ways they find rewarding; but they also expect to be rewarded for their work. Too often the "vision thing" is corp speak for "We want someone who will give his life to us at below market rates..."
There is no excuse for this kind of idiocy. When something is obviously not a threat to then treat it like one shows that the principal is an idiot. She should have confiscated the ring and told the kid to go back to class and behave. Actually a teacher should have handled it. How it ever got to the level it did is mind boggling. I know this kind of behavior goes on all the time because kids are kids. Most teachers and principals would have handled this without all the fuss, this time it was an idiot. Unfortunately you can't filter them all out, sometimes a few get through. They should fire her immediately and replace her with someone with some sense.
Most teacher I know often handle this in class but once it gets noticed outside of class there is no longer a option of using common sense. If one kid gets a hand slap and another a more serious punishment then the school is open to a lawsuit; and if the kid escalates into more serious actions then the school and teacher are in trouble as well. Yes, this is a stupid case and I wish we didn't have these dumb zero tolerance positions but we do. It's easier on the administration of a school and politicians get to say they are taking a tough stance on XYZ and as a result stupid outcomes happen. Welcome to the new reality where judgement is bad and having punishments fit the circumstances is a distant memory.
I love people who take pot shots and don't know what the fuck they're talking about. All school districts are taking tougher stances on punishment and more and more districts across the country are adopting zero tolerance policies. Is it draconian? yes, but when you have inattentive parents who don't take the time to explain right from wrong or turn a blind eye to the kids' activities this is what you get. This is clearly one that the schools administration could deal with but their hands are probably tied by district policy. Schools need to get back to the job of teaching and inspiring our youth, not being extensions of a detention system. That means that parents, you know the ones that actually bring these kids into the world, need to get involved with their kids and start by doing some teaching at home.
While I agree wholeheartedly with what you say there is another reason for such policies:
By mandating certain actions the school's administration is not required to make judgement calls that could be second guessed by the district or the courts. This way, they can fall back on the "district policy" argument to protect themselves. Before someone Goodwin's this thread with the "I was just following orders" argument with the current willingness of many parents to sue at the drop of a hat zero tolerance is a better defense than judgement call.
Yes, it leads to stupid results and is really a bad idea but until parents step up we'll see more and more of this.
I wonder what % is non-US downloaders who want to keep up on their favorite shows that have not yet reached their location? I have friends who have US/UK iTunes accounts to buy their favorite shows before they are released where they live. Does that hurt their viewership in locations where the show is reached later? Maybe, since some percentage will not watch it again but I'd bet quite a few do as well.
plenty of movies
its to be expected. Sitting through 20 minutes of mandatory trailer before my bluray starts actually playing the movie i paid for is nothing short of a war crime.
Yup. I rip mine to mkv before watching. With a quick conversion it is also available on my AppleTV so I don't need to dig for the disk to watch it; plus all my disks and iTunes content is available in one spot and across multiple devices.
I have since added a corollary: I do not do IT projects unless you pay me enough to retire on.
Here you lost me. Why were you even in this business if you didn't love the challenge? Don't take other peoples' bad data personally. Take it as an opportunity.
I get enough work doing other things so IT work is something I can avoid unless it is lucrative enough. Most of my IT projects started out doing something differently then getting roped into staying on when they discovered I could actually deliver results. I've learned to so NO when asked to stay.
its the Legion of Lawyers (TM) that stand ready to crush anyone that does something they don't like. Getting hit by their lawyers makes taking a hit in the game feel like you're playing a sandlot game of touch.
They're also protecting the revenue they get from official sponsors. If everyone starts using Super Bowl in their adds then paying big bucks to be an official sponsor is less valuable as your message gets lost in the crowd.
As for the product placement in shows and movies; it's not so much "we'll get sued" as "they aren't paying us for a placement so screw them. We'll use their product but cover up the label." Though sometimes they miss one. Big Bang Theory obscures the Apple on the back of their Macs but missed one on the front on a Mac in the background in a recent episode.
And then dates, can nobody ever get dates right. A favourite is that round one of the system will only record the day of a transaction but later they expand their collection to the hour and minute but now the old dates are all at noon or something. So when you try to find the usage pattern of users there will be this massive spike at noon and a scattering of transactions in the rest of the day. Try and run that through a Bayesian analysis.
Data quality has been an issue with every project I've worked on involving data analysis or integration into a new system. One project was combining two employee databases for a merged company, where they decided to use SSNs as the key for unique records since it was a US company. Unfortunately for them, foreign employees on temporary jobs in the US often had 999-99-9999 or 123-45-6789 as SSNs, with the occasional real one thrown in. Then their were duplicate valid SSNs for employees that worked for both companies at various times in their career. That project, as with all others, confirmed my 2-2-10 law of data cleanup:
Data cleanup will take twice as long, cost twice as much, and you will lose at least 10% of your data when you decide to finally give up scrubbing the data.
I have since added a corollary:
I do not do IT projects unless you pay me enough to retire on.
Find a rusty railroad spike. Shove it through your eyeball over and over again. That's what IBM products are like.
Buy a very expensive rusty railroad spike. Shove it through your eyeball over and over again. That's what IBM products are like.
There, fixed it for you.
"Big Data" is like sex in high school. Nobody really knows for sure how to do it properly, but everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone says they're doing it, too.
Well, OK, but this is slashdot. Are you sure your audience will get this analogy? Can you try to rework this into a car analogy instead?
"Big Data" is like sex in a car while in high school. Nobody really knows for sure how to do it properly, but everyone thinks everyone else is doing it, so everyone says they're doing it, too.
There was a reason DoD was concerned about this sort of monitoring many decades ago. Electronics were shielded to prevent EM tradition form being used to deduce what was being done.