I'm not an expert, but there is some part of your brain that specifically interprets faces. Maybe the information reached that part of the brain, but couldn't be processed beyond that.

Probably because, although you might think of Slashdot as a bastion of intellectuals and scientists, it's really a pop-culture news aggregation with nerd-centric marketing. Most people just want a summary, and don't want to read the actual paper.

And honestly, I'm in the camp that doesn't necessarily want to read the paper. I do recognize that there's a problem with journalists oversimplifying and mischaracterizing scientific ideas, but scientific papers are often written with the idea that you're versed in the particulars of the field being studied. I'd generally prefer to get the layman's explanation, and then dig into it more if I want to.

It seems like the best approach might be to include links to both the lay press summary and the actual papers.

Yeah, I was thinking about that. Like... I bet somewhere in that span of time, someone must have noticed this bundle and asked, "So what is this?" and someone else looked at a text book and said, "Oh, it must not be anything, really. It's not in the book. If it were anything important, it would be in the book." I wonder how many times that happened, and the people involved just moved along and forgot about the whole thing.

Now a doctor may correct me, and give good reasons why this wouldn't be noticeable in most circumstances. However, I like the idea of something like this being discovered as a lesson about how science historically works sometimes. Everyone has an idealized notion of science that it's just constant progress, and that things are all already known and analyzed, and the only things left to discover are very hard questions like, "what is the smallest fundamental particle, and how big a particle accelerator do we need to observe it?"

But you know, science moves forward through the effort of people, and people aren't perfect. Sometimes something gets lost. Sometimes something important gets disregarded. Sometimes science moves forward because someone isn't afraid of looking stupid, is willing to admit what he doesn't know, and says, "Hey, what is this?"

Well I meant something specific there, in that there are hacking schemes that consist of setting up public wifi specifically to capture unencrypted traffic. Just for example, if your local coffeeshop has a wifi network called "Coffee WiFi", then I can basically go sit in the coffeeshop with a mobile hotspot and my wifi and create a network with the same name. If I really want to be thorough, I might be able to locate their wireless device and pull the plug, and set the password on my network to be the same as theirs.

With a pretty simple setup, I can capture all the data coming through, but still pass the traffic through to the real sites on the Internet while storing all unencrypted traffic for any information that I might be interested in, as long as it's not using SSL. It's a pretty simple MITM (man-in-the-middle) attack.

Of course, it's possible to have a MITM attack anywhere, but it tends to be substantially more difficult elsewhere. Public WiFi is potentially very easy.

This actually seems pretty nice, especially if you're out-and-about and your cell phone dies (or if you don't have one, for whatever reason). I know I take my cell phone for granted, and it's scary how useless I can become if I don't have access to the Internet.

It does make me wonder, though, who is providing this gigabit Ethernet? It's a bit shocking how crappy the Internet in NYC can be, and I've seen businesses that are still stuck on DSL because they can't get FIOS, cable, or anything better than DSL without paying something like $1000/month. Maybe if they're stringing gigabit Ethernet throughout the city, they could go ahead and build the Infrastructure out so normal people could have decent Internet.

If you're using SSL, then the only thing that can be ascertained is which sites you visited, but not what you did on those sites or even what pages you viewed. I would advise being careful about any private information over the Internet without SSL anyway. If that's not satisfying, set up a VPN tunnel back to your home Internet connection, or pay for a VPN service, and then they can snoop all day and only know that you had an encrypted channel to some VPN endpoint. VPN is a good idea whenever using a public Internet service, since not all sites are encrypted and you don't really know who you're connecting to.

So assuming what you're saying is right, it seems like Facebook will run into a completely different problem: they're fighting over a failing market. If nobody wants to use LinkedIn, then who's going to use Facebook's version of LinkedIn?

I think that's the goal here. The content owners have had a sweet deal for years, making money from a lot of different angles. They got people to pay for cable, pay for HBO/Showtime, got them to buy DVDs, and got money from advertisments packed into each of these distribution channels (plus cross-promotional marketing and all kinds of other silliness). Now, after decades of figuring out every little spot they can pull money from, the market changes, and people's expectations change. At this point, people really want (and kind of expect) to be able to get all of their media from streaming, whenever and wherever they like. It totally screws up the business models for the content owners, and it destroys the business models for all the other distribution channels.

So these businesses have been getting clever on how to fight back. One of the methods is to hamper the Internet's ability to function as a distribution medium. They're in league with the ISPs, and both are working together to prevent anything resembling real competition in that market. Meanwhile, they've dragged their feet in providing real broadband internet, and they've fought against net neutrality, and they've choked the distribution points that would allow digital media from being reliable (e.g. the Netflix/Verizon kerfuffle).

One of the other pieces of their strategy is to prevent any company from being able to provide anything resembling a "complete library" of TV shows or movies. Each media company splits their library. They give some things to Netflix, some things to Hulu, some things to Amazon, some things to Crackle... etc. They might provide most of the same content to both Netflix and Amazon, for example, but they make sure to provide each with exclusive content, so that if you want to be able to watch whatever you want to watch, you need to pay for both. So while having a "decently sized library" will cost you $9/month, getting "something close to a complete library" will cost $100/month (or whatever the number is) because you have to sign up for several different services. And then, even then, they'll hold back some high-demand content (e.g. Game of Thrones) so that you still need to get cable and premium services to watch what you want to watch. This serves two basic functions: (a) It makes cord-cutting more frustrating, since you can't rely on any set of services to have all the content you want; and (b) it milks extra money from consumers.

And don't think for a second that it's accidental. All this stuff is part of a coherent strategy on the part of a cartel that includes the media companies who own/produce the content and the ISPs and cable companies that distribute it.

However, with the "exclusive content" stuff specifically, there is an additional contributing factor. A lot of the people who rise to positions of power in many companies are from marketing and sales. Marketing people need to justify their existence, which means that they have to come up with clever ideas and special promotions, and bla bla bla. Some of this stuff is clever. Some of it is even kind of nice for consumers. However, for the lazy marketing person, the easiest thing to do these days seems to be to develop a cross-promotional deal of some kind, or exclusive rights for some distribution channel. A lot of times, these deals are stupid and a waste of time. They don't necessarily lead to an increase in sales for anyone, but nobody cares because it's just the stuff that marketing people do, and marketing people run the world. But then also, things like "exclusive rights" can be leverage for getting other concessions, e.g. "We'll give you exclusive rights to this big hit movie, but in return, you agree to..." whatever.

There may be some way to actually clear up the whole situation, and that's probably going to be the best solution. It will probably also be free.

However, failing that, one solution comes to mind which is pretty obvious and very likely to solve your problem. Unfortunately, it's not free, but if you're running a business, it may be of benefit.

The suggestion is: get a smart-host. Essentially, it's a service where you route your email through an email provider first, and then they send it out. You can also set your MX records to direct incoming traffic to the smart-host, which can serve the purpose of a backup MX record (in case your server goes offline). Also, they'll often do spam filtering on their end, which means a lot of spam (and the associated traffic) never gets to your network. Sometimes they'll even offer email archiving, if you're interested in that.

Of course, if you're going to go with a smart host, it raises the question: does it make more sense to just go with a fully hosted solution? Office 365 and Google Apps are both pretty compelling solutions. I assume you're not interested in that, though, since you seem to want to keep your email onsite.

Believe me, I understand the problem, but I would suggest that the problem might not be quite where you think it is.

For example, someone who is a competent manager might have developed a process for sorting out issues that are beyond their technical expertise. They might choose someone from among the techies to serve as an adviser, or choose a technical lead who is capable of making those decisions, and delegating those decisions outright. They could round up the senior techs and have them vote on it.

Or honestly, they could ask you to present your arguments, and judge based on the information that they can gather from people who understand it better. I've had plenty of bosses do this pretty successfully. They see that there's a technical disagreement, and they ask each side to explain what the consequences are. When you reframe the question from, "Which technical decision is better?" to "What are the consequences to our business of one technical decision vs. another?" then you don't need to be a technical genius to make the decision. You just need to understand your business needs.

And if it turns into a popularity contest, then that's a failure of management, and not technical incompetence.

Yes, and this is why we bother to study things. If you could go back in time a few hundred years, you'd find that already "everybody knows" how the world works, more or less, and they'd be wrong about a lot of it.

In fact, I don't even think this is necessarily what I'd expect. Yes, of course your boss's competence would have some relationship with your job satisfaction, but this goes much farther: "your boss's technical competence is the single strongest predictor of workers' well-being"

That's quite a statement. I haven't read the whole thing yet, but I'm not sure I buy it. There are multiple things about this statement that give me pause. For one thing, there's the issue of it being a predictor for your total well-being, and not just job satisfaction. I can see how that could be, since our jobs are such a huge part of most of our lives, but it's still a bit surprising. Second, that it's the strongest predictor, which means that if you search through all kinds of things in a person's life-- marriage, family, education level, wealth, body fat percentage, serotonin levels-- you can best predict a person's total well-being by looking at their boss. That's quite a claim. Finally, it stands out that they're indicating the problem is "technical" competence. I'm not even sure what that means, but I suspect the implication is something like, "General competence as a worker or a manager aren't an indicator. It's an issue of technical competence in your particular field."

Further, one of my immediate questions when reading this was, "Is it that having an incompetent boss makes you unhappy, or that being unhappy makes you more likely to rate your boss as incompetent?" I read enough of the paper to see that they anticipated this and attempted to rule out the latter possibility.

Yeah, it's hard to see this as anything other than a threat, that if the government doesn't do what AT&T wants, they might just take their ball and go home. I can see how someone would think this is fair, in the sense that businesses can't make good decisions without knowing what "the rules" are, but at the same time, you can only take that so far.

It seems like businesses and rich people are constantly pulling this act. "I'm afraid that if you tax me at all, I'll just have to pull all my money and business out of the country and operate someplace where they don't have taxes." or "Well, we can't have laws barring us from acting immorally and unethically. If we can't be completely unfettered, then we can't get anything done and our business will fail!" At some point, I think we just have to say, "Sorry, but we can't just let you do whatever you want with no boundaries. The reality is, we all operate within constraints, and we all have to cope with an uncertain future. If you can't operate with fair and honest business practices within a framework that allows our society to grow in a healthy direction, then we'll find someone else to fill your shoes." I mean, really, AT&T doesn't see the benefit in growing and upgrading their network? Fine, let's rip their network out and replace it with public infrastructure. I suspect that if those were the options, AT&T would find that it could manage to upgrade their network while operating within the principles of net neutrality.

Yeah, but that's kind of an empty explanation. I think it only raises the question, how is the decision made about which behavior is "not black enough" and why do people care? I suspect that there's an understanding bundled into the whole thing that "You're trying to emulate a group that will not truly accept you and that you can never really become a part of, and whenever someone from our group tries to emulate that group anyway, it's just another humiliation for our group."

I can't claim to really know, but it seems to me that there's something like that going on. I think that if more black people perceived a way to engage in "white people stuff" on their own terms, without sacrificing their identity or humiliating themselves, the aversion would be diminished.