Watson agrees with humans in 73% to 96% of the cases. But who is right when it disagrees, the human doctor or Watson?
There are plenty of cancers where there is a philosophical difference in how to approach it surgically and there are questions that make a particular study less applicable in a given circumstance. For example, I know of a stomach cancer case where one doctor advocated strongly for open surgery to excise the tumor and repair the stomach and perform a radical lymphadonectomy followed by chemo and another surgeon who advocated strongly for chemo followed by endoscopic surgery and a more limited lymphadonectomy. There was technically not enough evidence to determine that one course was definitely right or wrong in the given situation compared to the other, so it comes down to a combination of your best guess based on the limited data and which doctor the patient trusts more to do a good surgery.
But there are also lots of decisions where there's a pretty clear choice.
And there are lots of decisions where there is a pretty clear choice, but the doctors make a different choice because they are less familiar with another surgery. And some choices are a function of when you are trained. I knew an amazing orthopedic surgeon in NY who was trained in a different era than modern surgeons and was much more conservative about surgery in the last few decades of his practice than everyone trained more recently. Sometimes there is a reason for that (I know old docs who just had much more training than new ones, and there are operations that it is VERY hard to find someone good enough to do reliably these days) and sometimes they're just used to the standards of a different era.
Putin's saying this is explicit meddling in US domestic affairs, intended to further undermine American confidence in its electoral system. It is a comment intended to make people doubt the legitimacy of their elected government, a doubt which weakens the country.
Donald Trump is the legitimately elected President. He lacks a popular mandate but is still the legitimate president until he is removed, he resigns, he dies, or his term ends.
Yes, by all means, let's do more to secure voting from electronic attack and to recognize fake news and help people learn the difference. Let's do more to reform our electoral system so that it functions more intelligently and is better representative of the will of the people. But don't let transparent propaganda efforts distract you into undermining your own government.
"Free speech" does not protect things like defamation of character, slander, libel, or inciting violence.
In the United States, free speech does not protect defamation, whether that defamation is slander or libel (two types of defamation).
Inciting violence is actually somewhat protected so long as it is not actually likely to occur. The government can ban "incitement to imminent lawless action that is likely to occur" without violating the First Amendment, at least under 1969 Supreme Court precedent that is good law today.
However, there are a LOT of ins and outs to the law of free speech in the United States. It would take a few hundred pages to start writing it up, because there are a large number of interrelated rules that have evolved in different legal cases over the last century.
You should obviously consult an attorney if you are in a position where any of this matters seriously to your situation.
This is puzzling. One day we are told 95% of indian engineers cannot code, and the other day India has huge number of highly skilled hackers.
There is a Supreme Court Case where the court said traffic stops must be dangerous because a large number of police officers are injured every year while performing traffic stops. But the logic is bad. Without knowing how many total traffic stops there are you cannot really look at the risk of performing one.
Similarly, even if 95% of engineers cannot code, they can still have more good engineers if there are enough of them--or can have more decent engineers working on this particular set of problems.
It's also worth pointing out that (1) there are a lot of great Indian engineers who are not in India, (2) the 95% number you are pointing to was done by a company with an incentive to skew it one way, and (3) the people finding the bugs may not be a great match for the ideal job candidate but still have basic hacking skills.
See how weird it is when someone says that doing illegal things is okay because reasons?
Just... weird.:)
:)
I'm not saying it's okay to be breaking the law, just that the law is stupid if it prohibits the practice under certain conditions, and that if they are using it infrequently, the cost per use and tax burden are probably ridiculous. The law is sometimes stupid. When it is stupid, it should be changed.
126 people since 2012 means they're not using it. I'm more offended at the tax burden than at the intrusion into civil liberties. I'm not a big fan of big brother surveillance, but if you have a legally obtained image of someone who commits a crime of violence, you should be able to run it against DMV photos, for example.
If you call a bank for help with random consumer matter X, on average they are wrong about how their own system works maybe 30-60% of the time.
The only "higher standard of convenience" in the last few years is the ability to easily deposit checks via the average phone. Which is only useful for the few cases where people still send you checks.
Yes and no. Uber does not have a monopoly, and people can comparison shop to Lyft or even a taxi or public transit.
If and when they get caught charging more based on phone battery life, then they should be hanged. Until then, remember that price discrimination on its face isn't actually irrational.
People have different utility functions. A ride is worth more to one person than to another. And the fact that Uber is not a monopoly means that customers can comparison shop, at least for now. (This will become more of a problem as price-fixing algorithms converge to best).
The moral problem arises when there is so much discretion that people start using it to discriminate based on things that our morals say it is not okay to discriminate based on--such as race or religion. Similarly, a problem arises if an algorithm accidentally starts doing that.
For example, if the algorithm charges people more when they are trying to go to church, there could be an issue...
Good. If you ever actually study human rights, you'll discover it's terrible in a way you can hardly conceptualize. Doing what we can to reduce problems like state-sanctioned torture, the modern-day slave trade, the kidnapping and elimination of those who speak out against tyrants, the use of rape as a weapon of war, the genocides we see today, and many other very basic problems should be a core priority of the United Nations. It is an effort that people and businesses and political parties of all stripes should stand behind.
You can choose to shout "SJWs" or "hate of anything microsoft related" or everything else we expect to see on slashdot threads like this. But this is a good thing.
So what do you think of the particular ethics rules that CloudFlare is citing in this case ? Do you agree that it's a good rule ? That there should be a distinction between the attorney and the client ? It seems to make sense to me that a lawyer should not buy a stake in his client's case - for various reasons. Some types of trade should, rightly, be restricted - just like it shouldn't be legal for me to be allowed to take out fire insurance on your house, it would create too great an incentive for me to burn your house down.
But then, you're the lawyer so I'm interested in your views. If you think this particular rule is bad, I would love to know why you think so, and how you would imagine it could be improved ?
The specific ethics rule varies by state.
It already happens as a practical matter--lawyers in many fields can take cases on contingency. If a law firm is making 33% of the amount that a plaintiff recovers, it is almost indistinguishable from purchasing the claim outright. Either way you are incentivizing the law firm in the same way, the only difference is that actually purchasing the claim will make the law firm able to recover more, which makes smaller cases worth fighting, which in turn forces companies to internalize the negative externalities of their economic activities.
If you prevent that from happening through both contingency and claim purchasing, you basically start requiring a person to be able to pay out-of-pocket, which will hurt access to justice even more than it is hurting right now. Lawsuits are expensive.
The one thing I would put in is a procedural safeguard that people have to be represented by counsel when they sell their claim to a lawyer--and maybe even that the person still keeps at least some small interest in their claim. Both rules would be to help limit the risk of someone being taken advantage of by an attorney. I would also need to think through how it should interact with health insurance.
What makes you so sure it's legal? Cloudflare is arguing that it's not, and the odds are they've got better lawyers than you. Both Righthaven and Prenda did get into trouble on this point.
Actually, If the summary is accurate, Cloudflare is saying it is unethical, not illegal. Which means the lawyers may be sanctioned or may be disbarred and prevented from practicing law, not that they will be criminally sanctioned.
I would need to review more than the summary to be sure. However, a lot of the ethics rules like the one Cloudfare is identifying (as opposed to some of the more important ones, like the ones preventing conflicts of interest) are antiquated rules that primarily make problems for people. They actually prevent people from getting justice because they make it harder for people who need to sue (e.g. because they were hurt by a powerful corporation) to find financing for it, to get money to cover how they were harmed, and to incentivize the corporation to improve its behavior.
Just because alleged patent trolls are doing something bad doesn't mean that the rules they get attacked with make sense.
Law is overregulated in some ways (a lot of the ethics rules should be improved) and underregulated in others (you run into a lot of real jerks who never get so much as a warning from the bar).
I'd much rather reduce security, reinforce the cockpit door, and take a 1 in 10 million chance of someone blowing up a plane, even if I am on it. DHS has gone too far on the pendulum between convenience and security. By the way, this is also a great way to kill tourism dollars.
It's also not like the exploit/vulnerability hasn't been around for decades.
A moratorium might make sense if they have incredibly specific intelligence, but that's about it.
Every story in the world has bias; some of the stories have implicit falsity; and some stories have explicit falsity.
Bias is not a reason to limit the dissemination of a story. Implicit Falsity sometimes might be. Explicit falsity is. Highly likely falsity is at least a reason to flag it for the reader. For example, when "vaccines cause autism" claims appear on Facebook, someone should not see the claim without a flag that the story is almost certainly false.
I'm not claiming the line drawing is easy, but it would be irresponsible to take no action. Because epidemics start that way.
I know it doesn't account for all of it, but I've lost many female co-workers to motherhood and their decision to stay at home with their children.
"The most common reason they gave for their departures was workplace mistreatment."
Motherhood is one factor, but I hesitate to go there first because there is still such a problem with harassment in tech. Still, a company can make the job easier for working mothers in a couple of ways (e.g. good maternity leave policy, providing good day care, providing a place and break time for recent mothers to express milk even if they are not covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act, etc...).
That's kind of the point of TFA. Your nephew could have just been trying to break into the wifi to see if he could, or to show off. It is unlikely he would have been motivated by the "profit" of unfiltered Internet access.
Now, I'm not saying he did or would, just that his unlimited data doesn't really mean anything in this context.
What's more, there should be nothing wrong with a kid trying to hack WiFi to see if he can, provided he's not hacking something like grades or financial transactions or private counseling files. High School kids do stuff; criminalizing them for it is dumb. In a great high school, you would even have it set up so kids would feel comfortable talking to teachers about it.
I've never quite understood why Microsoft wants to go to a monthly subscription service for non-enterprise (Volume Licensing) end users.
I haven't read up on their official positions, but there are a couple of obvious answers. Because it makes more people willing to buy their products and computers that include their products. Because it lets them get a direct revenue stream from consumers of sold machines. There are hundreds of millions of people who find it much easier to pay a small amount every month than to pay a larger amount up front, even if the up front amount is only a hundred bucks. It also probably reduces their taxes and makes their quarterly figures more reliable by normalizing their income.
It's not charity, just business. Understand what you buy when you buy it and what's behind the scenes.
For example, there is a line in the summary that says, "In addition, on Wednesday, the company also announced that it would be changing its name to "Axon" to reflect the company's flagship body camera product[,]" In reality, they're a business and are concerned about their brand, and (1) tasers have high brand risk because of viral videos and (2) the term "taser" has arguably become a generic term for stun gun, so it may be that they will lose a trademark fight in court over their major brand if anyone challenges them.
There's nothing wrong with them doing that--it makes good business sense--but it would be a bit naive to take the company's statement at face value without understanding its implications.
I remember hearing that warming in the polar regions will eventually cause a salinity shift that will trigger changes to how the ocean and air currents transmit heat, which will trigger an ice age. That normally takes a bit of time (historically at least a century, IIRC), so I expect us to enter an ice age if we fail to come up with some large scale geoengineering within the next century or so. In the meantime, things are going to be a bit rocky.
However, I could be wrong and I'm happy to have experts weigh in. We could call them scientists and they could study data, and then we could use their conclusions to make policy decisions.
Judges are better about coupon settlements today because of how absurd it used to get. The Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 made some useful changes. It certainly still isn't perfect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Class actions are useful because they are fundamentally the only way companies get forced to behave in the interest of large groups of consumers who would never bother to sue individually. There are definitely drawbacks in that they rarely substantially help those past consumers, but sometimes they do drive change within a company and drive better practices within a company--either directly as part of a settlement agreement, or just because of the risk of a class action lawsuit. It's not a perfect system, notably because of the high costs of the lawsuits, but it's probably better than not having it. (To determine that for sure you would obviously need to analyze a great deal of data about distributed harms and lawsuit and settlement costs).
I'm glad to see positive response across the board, from Apple, Samsung, and I'm sure others. Especially Apple and Samsung, though, as I have many devices from both of them in my home.
Keep an eye out for updates on "Unlocked" Phones that have switched networks. For some insane reason phones are marketed as "unlocked" when they can be used on another carrier's network, but *the security updates don't work* if you use them on the other network. These should probably be considered unmarketable and therefore not unlocked--and there should be a convenient way to pull signed security updates from the manufacturer instead of the carrier. Samsung and Apple issuing patches doesn't help if Verizon and AT&T fail to talk to each other enough for users on both networks to get the security updates, regardless of who originally installed a given phone's O/S.
Depends on the company/team. I for one would not care if one of my devs was a literal Silent Hill monster as long as it wrote good code with proper unit tests.
Be careful of IP rights and assignments. The Due Process clause has not been explicitly extended to literal Silent Hill monsters yet and I do not believe there has been litigation in any jurisdiction establishing their right to be treated as persons for purposes of the takings clause or to sign legal documents as they might need to do when applying for a patent or assigning one to your company. That being said, state laws vary considerably and monsters have greater rights in some states than they do in others.
I've had border guards not be sure if I was really me when I was driving a rental car across the border. Drug traffickers will sometimes use rental cars and my driver ID happened not to match the location where I had rented the car. I'm not offended by the fact that they double-checked it was me. With this guy, they verified his story with his employer and asked him a question or two. Sure, it wasn't perfect, but there are much bigger things to worry about. And we don't know the circumstances from CBP's POV. (Did he match a pattern of people claiming to be software engineers from nigeria who turned out to be here for criminal purposes, for example? I don't know, and neither does he.)
Clearly, however, he should have been treated respectfully and with an "I apologize for the delay but we needed to verify your identity. I hope you have a wonderful time." They need to maintain authority, but it's also important to keep the country welcoming.
Slashdot Mirror
Watson agrees with humans in 73% to 96% of the cases. But who is right when it disagrees, the human doctor or Watson?
There are plenty of cancers where there is a philosophical difference in how to approach it surgically and there are questions that make a particular study less applicable in a given circumstance. For example, I know of a stomach cancer case where one doctor advocated strongly for open surgery to excise the tumor and repair the stomach and perform a radical lymphadonectomy followed by chemo and another surgeon who advocated strongly for chemo followed by endoscopic surgery and a more limited lymphadonectomy. There was technically not enough evidence to determine that one course was definitely right or wrong in the given situation compared to the other, so it comes down to a combination of your best guess based on the limited data and which doctor the patient trusts more to do a good surgery.
But there are also lots of decisions where there's a pretty clear choice.
And there are lots of decisions where there is a pretty clear choice, but the doctors make a different choice because they are less familiar with another surgery. And some choices are a function of when you are trained. I knew an amazing orthopedic surgeon in NY who was trained in a different era than modern surgeons and was much more conservative about surgery in the last few decades of his practice than everyone trained more recently. Sometimes there is a reason for that (I know old docs who just had much more training than new ones, and there are operations that it is VERY hard to find someone good enough to do reliably these days) and sometimes they're just used to the standards of a different era.
Putin's saying this is explicit meddling in US domestic affairs, intended to further undermine American confidence in its electoral system. It is a comment intended to make people doubt the legitimacy of their elected government, a doubt which weakens the country.
Donald Trump is the legitimately elected President. He lacks a popular mandate but is still the legitimate president until he is removed, he resigns, he dies, or his term ends.
Yes, by all means, let's do more to secure voting from electronic attack and to recognize fake news and help people learn the difference. Let's do more to reform our electoral system so that it functions more intelligently and is better representative of the will of the people. But don't let transparent propaganda efforts distract you into undermining your own government.
"Free speech" does not protect things like defamation of character, slander, libel, or inciting violence.
In the United States, free speech does not protect defamation, whether that defamation is slander or libel (two types of defamation).
Inciting violence is actually somewhat protected so long as it is not actually likely to occur. The government can ban "incitement to imminent lawless action that is likely to occur" without violating the First Amendment, at least under 1969 Supreme Court precedent that is good law today.
However, there are a LOT of ins and outs to the law of free speech in the United States. It would take a few hundred pages to start writing it up, because there are a large number of interrelated rules that have evolved in different legal cases over the last century.
You should obviously consult an attorney if you are in a position where any of this matters seriously to your situation.
This is puzzling. One day we are told 95% of indian engineers cannot code, and the other day India has huge number of highly skilled hackers.
There is a Supreme Court Case where the court said traffic stops must be dangerous because a large number of police officers are injured every year while performing traffic stops. But the logic is bad. Without knowing how many total traffic stops there are you cannot really look at the risk of performing one.
Similarly, even if 95% of engineers cannot code, they can still have more good engineers if there are enough of them--or can have more decent engineers working on this particular set of problems.
It's also worth pointing out that (1) there are a lot of great Indian engineers who are not in India, (2) the 95% number you are pointing to was done by a company with an incentive to skew it one way, and (3) the people finding the bugs may not be a great match for the ideal job candidate but still have basic hacking skills.
We should be able to run over lawyers, too.
See how weird it is when someone says that doing illegal things is okay because reasons?
Just... weird. :)
:)
I'm not saying it's okay to be breaking the law, just that the law is stupid if it prohibits the practice under certain conditions, and that if they are using it infrequently, the cost per use and tax burden are probably ridiculous. The law is sometimes stupid. When it is stupid, it should be changed.
So basically, they're not using it.
126 people since 2012 means they're not using it. I'm more offended at the tax burden than at the intrusion into civil liberties. I'm not a big fan of big brother surveillance, but if you have a legally obtained image of someone who commits a crime of violence, you should be able to run it against DMV photos, for example.
If you call a bank for help with random consumer matter X, on average they are wrong about how their own system works maybe 30-60% of the time.
The only "higher standard of convenience" in the last few years is the ability to easily deposit checks via the average phone. Which is only useful for the few cases where people still send you checks.
"...How much you got!?"
(I think they call this a shake down)
Yes and no. Uber does not have a monopoly, and people can comparison shop to Lyft or even a taxi or public transit.
If and when they get caught charging more based on phone battery life, then they should be hanged. Until then, remember that price discrimination on its face isn't actually irrational.
People have different utility functions. A ride is worth more to one person than to another. And the fact that Uber is not a monopoly means that customers can comparison shop, at least for now. (This will become more of a problem as price-fixing algorithms converge to best).
The moral problem arises when there is so much discretion that people start using it to discriminate based on things that our morals say it is not okay to discriminate based on--such as race or religion. Similarly, a problem arises if an algorithm accidentally starts doing that.
For example, if the algorithm charges people more when they are trying to go to church, there could be an issue...
Good. If you ever actually study human rights, you'll discover it's terrible in a way you can hardly conceptualize. Doing what we can to reduce problems like state-sanctioned torture, the modern-day slave trade, the kidnapping and elimination of those who speak out against tyrants, the use of rape as a weapon of war, the genocides we see today, and many other very basic problems should be a core priority of the United Nations. It is an effort that people and businesses and political parties of all stripes should stand behind.
You can choose to shout "SJWs" or "hate of anything microsoft related" or everything else we expect to see on slashdot threads like this. But this is a good thing.
So what do you think of the particular ethics rules that CloudFlare is citing in this case ? Do you agree that it's a good rule ? That there should be a distinction between the attorney and the client ? It seems to make sense to me that a lawyer should not buy a stake in his client's case - for various reasons.
Some types of trade should, rightly, be restricted - just like it shouldn't be legal for me to be allowed to take out fire insurance on your house, it would create too great an incentive for me to burn your house down.
But then, you're the lawyer so I'm interested in your views. If you think this particular rule is bad, I would love to know why you think so, and how you would imagine it could be improved ?
The specific ethics rule varies by state.
It already happens as a practical matter--lawyers in many fields can take cases on contingency. If a law firm is making 33% of the amount that a plaintiff recovers, it is almost indistinguishable from purchasing the claim outright. Either way you are incentivizing the law firm in the same way, the only difference is that actually purchasing the claim will make the law firm able to recover more, which makes smaller cases worth fighting, which in turn forces companies to internalize the negative externalities of their economic activities.
If you prevent that from happening through both contingency and claim purchasing, you basically start requiring a person to be able to pay out-of-pocket, which will hurt access to justice even more than it is hurting right now. Lawsuits are expensive.
The one thing I would put in is a procedural safeguard that people have to be represented by counsel when they sell their claim to a lawyer--and maybe even that the person still keeps at least some small interest in their claim. Both rules would be to help limit the risk of someone being taken advantage of by an attorney. I would also need to think through how it should interact with health insurance.
What makes you so sure it's legal? Cloudflare is arguing that it's not, and the odds are they've got better lawyers than you. Both Righthaven and Prenda did get into trouble on this point.
Actually, If the summary is accurate, Cloudflare is saying it is unethical, not illegal. Which means the lawyers may be sanctioned or may be disbarred and prevented from practicing law, not that they will be criminally sanctioned.
I would need to review more than the summary to be sure. However, a lot of the ethics rules like the one Cloudfare is identifying (as opposed to some of the more important ones, like the ones preventing conflicts of interest) are antiquated rules that primarily make problems for people. They actually prevent people from getting justice because they make it harder for people who need to sue (e.g. because they were hurt by a powerful corporation) to find financing for it, to get money to cover how they were harmed, and to incentivize the corporation to improve its behavior.
Just because alleged patent trolls are doing something bad doesn't mean that the rules they get attacked with make sense.
Law is overregulated in some ways (a lot of the ethics rules should be improved) and underregulated in others (you run into a lot of real jerks who never get so much as a warning from the bar).
Take a guess which three-letter agency I work for — and pray that I don't pay you a visit.
Not cool, however called for. Oh! Unless you're with the Government Printing Office. :)
This is just stupid.
I'd much rather reduce security, reinforce the cockpit door, and take a 1 in 10 million chance of someone blowing up a plane, even if I am on it. DHS has gone too far on the pendulum between convenience and security. By the way, this is also a great way to kill tourism dollars.
It's also not like the exploit/vulnerability hasn't been around for decades.
A moratorium might make sense if they have incredibly specific intelligence, but that's about it.
Every story in the world has bias; some of the stories have implicit falsity; and some stories have explicit falsity.
Bias is not a reason to limit the dissemination of a story. Implicit Falsity sometimes might be. Explicit falsity is. Highly likely falsity is at least a reason to flag it for the reader. For example, when "vaccines cause autism" claims appear on Facebook, someone should not see the claim without a flag that the story is almost certainly false.
I'm not claiming the line drawing is easy, but it would be irresponsible to take no action. Because epidemics start that way.
I know it doesn't account for all of it, but I've lost many female co-workers to motherhood and their decision to stay at home with their children.
"The most common reason they gave for their departures was workplace mistreatment."
Motherhood is one factor, but I hesitate to go there first because there is still such a problem with harassment in tech. Still, a company can make the job easier for working mothers in a couple of ways (e.g. good maternity leave policy, providing good day care, providing a place and break time for recent mothers to express milk even if they are not covered by the Fair Labor Standards Act, etc...).
They charge you for owning a router that connects to it? Isn't having a router and plugging stuff into it kind of the point of having the service?
That's like the phone company charging you rent if you rent a phone, and charging you rent if you plug your own phone in.
That's kind of the point of TFA. Your nephew could have just been trying to break into the wifi to see if he could, or to show off. It is unlikely he would have been motivated by the "profit" of unfiltered Internet access.
Now, I'm not saying he did or would, just that his unlimited data doesn't really mean anything in this context.
What's more, there should be nothing wrong with a kid trying to hack WiFi to see if he can, provided he's not hacking something like grades or financial transactions or private counseling files. High School kids do stuff; criminalizing them for it is dumb. In a great high school, you would even have it set up so kids would feel comfortable talking to teachers about it.
I've never quite understood why Microsoft wants to go to a monthly subscription service for non-enterprise (Volume Licensing) end users.
I haven't read up on their official positions, but there are a couple of obvious answers. Because it makes more people willing to buy their products and computers that include their products. Because it lets them get a direct revenue stream from consumers of sold machines. There are hundreds of millions of people who find it much easier to pay a small amount every month than to pay a larger amount up front, even if the up front amount is only a hundred bucks. It also probably reduces their taxes and makes their quarterly figures more reliable by normalizing their income.
It's not charity, just business. Understand what you buy when you buy it and what's behind the scenes.
For example, there is a line in the summary that says, "In addition, on Wednesday, the company also announced that it would be changing its name to "Axon" to reflect the company's flagship body camera product[,]" In reality, they're a business and are concerned about their brand, and (1) tasers have high brand risk because of viral videos and (2) the term "taser" has arguably become a generic term for stun gun, so it may be that they will lose a trademark fight in court over their major brand if anyone challenges them.
There's nothing wrong with them doing that--it makes good business sense--but it would be a bit naive to take the company's statement at face value without understanding its implications.
I remember hearing that warming in the polar regions will eventually cause a salinity shift that will trigger changes to how the ocean and air currents transmit heat, which will trigger an ice age. That normally takes a bit of time (historically at least a century, IIRC), so I expect us to enter an ice age if we fail to come up with some large scale geoengineering within the next century or so. In the meantime, things are going to be a bit rocky.
However, I could be wrong and I'm happy to have experts weigh in. We could call them scientists and they could study data, and then we could use their conclusions to make policy decisions.
Judges are better about coupon settlements today because of how absurd it used to get. The Class Action Fairness Act of 2005 made some useful changes. It certainly still isn't perfect. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Class actions are useful because they are fundamentally the only way companies get forced to behave in the interest of large groups of consumers who would never bother to sue individually. There are definitely drawbacks in that they rarely substantially help those past consumers, but sometimes they do drive change within a company and drive better practices within a company--either directly as part of a settlement agreement, or just because of the risk of a class action lawsuit. It's not a perfect system, notably because of the high costs of the lawsuits, but it's probably better than not having it. (To determine that for sure you would obviously need to analyze a great deal of data about distributed harms and lawsuit and settlement costs).
I'm glad to see positive response across the board, from Apple, Samsung, and I'm sure others. Especially Apple and Samsung, though, as I have many devices from both of them in my home.
Keep an eye out for updates on "Unlocked" Phones that have switched networks. For some insane reason phones are marketed as "unlocked" when they can be used on another carrier's network, but *the security updates don't work* if you use them on the other network. These should probably be considered unmarketable and therefore not unlocked--and there should be a convenient way to pull signed security updates from the manufacturer instead of the carrier. Samsung and Apple issuing patches doesn't help if Verizon and AT&T fail to talk to each other enough for users on both networks to get the security updates, regardless of who originally installed a given phone's O/S.
Depends on the company/team. I for one would not care if one of my devs was a literal Silent Hill monster as long as it wrote good code with proper unit tests.
Be careful of IP rights and assignments. The Due Process clause has not been explicitly extended to literal Silent Hill monsters yet and I do not believe there has been litigation in any jurisdiction establishing their right to be treated as persons for purposes of the takings clause or to sign legal documents as they might need to do when applying for a patent or assigning one to your company. That being said, state laws vary considerably and monsters have greater rights in some states than they do in others.
I've had border guards not be sure if I was really me when I was driving a rental car across the border. Drug traffickers will sometimes use rental cars and my driver ID happened not to match the location where I had rented the car. I'm not offended by the fact that they double-checked it was me. With this guy, they verified his story with his employer and asked him a question or two. Sure, it wasn't perfect, but there are much bigger things to worry about. And we don't know the circumstances from CBP's POV. (Did he match a pattern of people claiming to be software engineers from nigeria who turned out to be here for criminal purposes, for example? I don't know, and neither does he.)
Clearly, however, he should have been treated respectfully and with an "I apologize for the delay but we needed to verify your identity. I hope you have a wonderful time." They need to maintain authority, but it's also important to keep the country welcoming.
A fingerprint is a fact. And normally facts are not protected.
The Manner of protecting a fact can be protected. For example, police may not arrest someone merely in order to get their fingerprint.
Similarly, the right against self-incrimination can protect you against having to disclose facts which tend to incriminate you.
These don't mean you'll always win an argument, but there is no simple rule that facts are not protected.