Well, I don't necessarily separate tracking for LEO purposes (and by extension, government agencies from top to bottom) and privatized tracking for "marketing" when I think of how we should proceed with privacy laws. More importantly, it's hard to apply the "spirit" of the law when there was never really a precedent for which the laws could have even begun to apply.

If you limit the scope of your privacy arguments to Constitutional protections, you may find at one point in the next 10-20 years your employer may know every bit of your shopping, browsing, buying, and daily habits at the request of a "background check". We're not too far off from this reality, credit bureaus are already using the credit reports of your Facebook connections to adjust your credit score.

So yes, LEO may be prevented from listening to your conversation--but every person in your HR organization knows exactly the type of person you are and can build a personality profile on you, and keep track of that. And if you think "privacy settings" on Facebook mean jack shit, I've got a mean boat in the desert to sell you.

I know a lot of people whom like to put on their tinfoil hats and cry about government surveillance at every chance, but the reality is that we have never actually defined what is or isn't private in the digital age. The Internet is an amazingly complicated set of patents, protocols, technologies, and developments over the past 30-40 years of computing.

All of this is boiling over to what exactly is considered "YOUR" information in the digital age? Nobody seems to be asking this question. What information on your digital phone device belongs to you? And what information can the company/provider share with whomever they want?

Tracking your IMEI, Wifi MAC Address, and other tools is considered part of the network operations. The providers routinely keep logs of all of this information and use it to track you for a whole host of reasons. It's correlated across the organizations that control the hot spots. Companies do this all of the time, in perhaps significantly more intrusive ways than LEO using their "stingray" system, which no doubt is something that is a targeted-type application. Whereas the LEO will utilize these systems to target specific groups, events, or behaviors--marketing companies will track you and your device until the end of time. And, at the behest of a warrant, will provide as much information on your whereabouts, shopping habits, and intimate information as quickly as they can.

I didn't "hyper mile" or any of the other weird tricks that some hybrid users use. I made liberal use of cruise control except on the 10-15% mountain grades in Quebec. I maintained roughly about 65-70mph over the speed limit on all US highway driving, with 100-110km/h in Quebec.<br><br>You have to learn NOT to lead foot your car, not tailgate, and just cruise. Ease into your stops, and try to limit the stark contrasts in speed. Don't tailgate the next guy, slam your breaks until you're at 0-5, then floor it to 60 to do it again.

For what it's worth, Ford quotes 47/47 for the MPG, and I achieved 46.1 driving through mountain terrain in the northeast Appalachian and Laurentian Mountain ranges. Feel free to debate all you wish.

They are a bit pricey, yes; HOWEVER, my Fusion Hybrid works out pretty well in hills without issues. Granted, hills tend to reduce the hybrid benefit going up them--but that's beside the point.<br><br>Let me give you some numbers.<br><br>I drove from Baltimore, Maryland to Quebec City, Canada last month. Not only did I drive it to Quebec City, but I drove it up into the mountains of "Parc National des Grand-Jardins" in Charlevoix, Quebec. This mountain drive took us up into the clouds and down again, with 10% grades or more. This drive also took me through the Adirondack Mountains on I-87. While the bulk of the drive was done on highway, I made a couple of hour pitstop in Jersey City, NJ; and it was mine and my buddy's commuter around Quebec City when we needed it to go to the movie theater, etc.<br><br>All in all, the 1600 mile or so round trip drive achieved 46.1 MPG. Note: I didn't reset the trip timer until I was somewhere on Route 1 in Pennsylvania (I avoided 95 for the first portion of the trip until just past Philadelphia).<br><br>http://i.imgur.com/Vv7Y8Lf.jpg is a picture of the trip stats.

There is no credible evidence that early vaccinations cause issues with children. That's a bunch of horse shit.

There are many reasons the flu vaccine "doesn't work", for the most part, because it's only around 80% effective to begin with. They also target specific strains that they think will be the most common in a given region. They do not target every strain of the flu out there.

So yes, 80% effective, only targeting key specific seasonal strains they think will cause the most havoc.

But, at the end of the day, it's a gamble. Do you want to take your life or the lives of loved ones at such risk? I don't get a flu vaccine, in part because I haven't had the flu in a long, long time (Colds and I, however, have problems). Also because I'm not around little kids or super elderly folks, and don't work in a hospital/doctor's office, etc. But it's a choice I make. If I were to get the flu more often, I'd probably get vaccinated.

Ugh, I'm with you on this one. I'm allergic as well, and I have respiratory issues as-is. Just found out I'm allergic to codeine, too, this week...(I've taken it before, never had issues, but I took it this week and it did quite a number on my stomach. The next day I had been talking to my mother and said I was taking codeine and she said "You need to watch that, your aunt and uncle can't take it as it gave them severe stomach issues."

Thanks mom...

The good news is the modern desire to 'web all the things' with stuff like ROR, PHP, Tomcat, etc; you can generally find in the code where something is an issue without having to necessarily trace system calls. You don't have quite that luxury on compiled applications. Though occasionally you could run into issues with the interpreted languages that just don't compile properly and cause problems--then you're back to the same problem...

For what it's worth, even if you do have access to dive into the code/kernel memory to find what the problem is, you must first know how to read what you're looking at. A lot of good this stuff does for you if you have no idea how it works in the first place. That's not a uniquely Windows problem, though; because very little in the Linux Admin world over the years strictly enforces that you should know this stuff. The technical information on it out there is about as good as the Technet articles on Windows that tell you how to appropriately identify system bottlenecks (Disk Queue Length, etc.).

I believe dtrace was added not too long ago and seems to be the goto solution for most Linux admins I know, but I've not personally used it to seek out issues.

This person knows what's up.

The issue with #6 is that users almost invariably never accept an answer here. And a lot of the time it may be something you can't adequately explain, which is something they don't like even more. Especially if you know the problem wasn't the result of something you did.

I'm willing to bet that Western Europe and Canada numbers are actually pretty accurate. Same with the US numbers. The only places that might underreport are likely to be Russia and 3rd world countries.

The bigger question you need to ask is why is the US so far behind its first world brethren?

The reality is that US History courses don't do enough to explain what it was like to live in the 1800s and the kinds of shit people had to put up with.

http://www.continuetolearn.uiowa.edu/laborctr/child_labor/about/us_history.html

It's easy to look at that on paper and say "well that wasn't very long!", but there was a period of 68 years between the first state law limiting child working days to 10 hours and the push for national reform. Most of the people on slashdot have not been around for 68 years...At 68 years, some of your friends have already died after working in factories for most of their lives, and you are on the edge of your death bed.

Oh, it was also Unions that made this happen.

There's far more involved with labor situations in the early industrial era.

None of the things the person mentioned above are "rights". You don't have a "right" to use the taxi, train, or other public transportation systems. You do have a "right" to not vaccinate your kids, but schools have no "right" to accept your kids.

if you want to home school your kids and drive them everywhere and take care of them--then do that. But the rest of society should not suffer because of your decisions.