Yes actually it does make it acceptable because the people doing the experiment knew that it was very very unlikely to cause anyone serious injury. When an psychological experiment amounts to no more than making people aware their buddies had a shitty day at work by their own account, I don't think it actually rises to the level of requiring consent.

Humans conduct experiments all the time; its how any self aware being interacts with the world around them. It just on a small scale so nobody cares, I bet plenty of sales professionals have at leas t informally experimented around if asking about peoples kids, helps them close deals. If every little experiment no matter how benign really requires informed consent then all anyone will have time to do ever again is sue each other over if their actions constituted an experiment or not.

Advertising is not always identified. How often have you gotten a letter, that is designed to look like an insurance invoice or bank check. Many look official enough I have spend at least 20 seconds deciding if its something I really need to act upon. All kinds of advertisers take out full page ads and do their damnedest to disguise them as articles in print magazines and news papers.

Sure there is always some fine print somewhere that says "advertisement" but then I would argue facebooks EULA qualifies as fine print.

Also facebook was not altering the messages or their presentation, they were filtering them. Just like they always filter what goes in your news feed, some of the filter criteria you control in the user preferences much of it you do not; all they did is change the filter criteria which users never had full control over. I think its a little crazy to get up in arms about about that.

Finally advertisers do borrow what people say to promote products. They quote celebrities and other people all the time, and they don't need to make any payment or get consent for that either as long as they keep it a direct quote; even when they use it well out of context.

That is kinda my reaction as well. It seems this issue people have here is that facebook sought to manipulate peoples emotional state. The thing is that is exactly what just about every advertiser does all the time.

Home Security System ads: clearly designed to make you feel vulnerable and threatened.

Cosmetic surgery ads: clearly designed to make you feel inadequate.

Beer ads: very often designed to make you feel less accepted, you need their product to be preceived as cool, ditto for clothing, and personal care products

Political ads: feelings of security and family (at least if you pick their candidate)

This list goes on...

It might not have the same rigor as the academic world but they absolutely do focus group this stuff and find out how people 'feel' the marketers have researched what words, phrases, and imagery can best evoke these feelings. If what facebook did is illegal or even just unethical than so is pretty much everything the modern advertising industry has been up to for the past 70 years.

I am sure many people would actually agree with that, but I don't see why its suddenly so shocking and deserving of attention just because facespace does it.

Why seems like a perfectly reasonable name to me, given what the group does and where they operate.

I am not an expert by any means but my understanding of the last organization to use that name is they rarely if ever put someone on a train or other railway conveyance at all let alone one that went underground. If anything they should have called themselves "The Discrete Walk North". Which I admit does not have the same ring to it, but is at least better in terms of descriptiveness. I guess it just shows you how this country really always been about marketing.

That is the sort of thinking that has gotten us into so much trouble in the first place. Honestly basic physics says there is no free lunch. With the exception of solar ( which isn't a renewable ) you are pulling energy out of something. I am sure if we put up enough turbines we can and will impact atmospheric conditions.

Just because something is plentiful does not make wastefulness a good idea.

I think you need to read each situation. You are correct there is no reason to be dick to someone who is just doing their job and isn't in a position to effect policy.

That said you also need to be able to take charge of the situation and look out for your interests. If you find yourself uncomfortable its a good idea to have those phrases rehearsed and ready to use in your mind.

Officers need to recognize two things:

1) They are not entitled to your time any more than anyone else is unless they have a specific reason for accosting you and that most people probably don't want to be interrupted for more than a momentary exchange of pleasantries without some reason. They should not take offense at a citizen asserting their right and desire to move along.

2) We have a system of law that is no so complex most people out walking around don't know if they are breaking some law or not. Most "good people" are not causing any real trouble even if they are violating some dusty statute about not feeding the ducks when the moon was full on the previous Tuesday. They also are not looking for any trouble and an LEO represents the potential for lots of it, in their lives. Its not the LEOs fault and its not theirs, but LEOs need to understand this is another reason why at least while they are on duty the public is going to be rather nervous around them and will want to keep their interactions brief and pro forma.

Joe -is a great editor (he/it) all the features I typically need for small and medium sized software projects.

^^THIS^^ but to take it a step farther the real solution to the illegal immigration problem is to take away the incentive.

We should do away with all the quotas and pretty much all the requirements. Lets let people show up tell us where they plan to live; agree to drop the federal government a post card with their new address when they relocate and after two years without any felony convictions call them citizens.

Lets let anyone already here step forward and start their two year probation period too.

After we do that we could then pretty safely conclude anyone who still remains here or enters illegally really is the sort of ne'er do well that should deported and permanently denied re-entry.

I don't buy it. Possibly for other industries sure but not for software developers. It isn't as if software development has huge capital requirements. You don't need a bunch of software firms around you to get a job developing software. The vast vast majority of developers work in firms outside the software industry. Every large retail corporation for example is going to have developers on staff, but exactly none of them will have their own aluminum smelting team. Anyone who needs software can stand up a software team just about anywhere anytime.

If we were talking about metallurgists you'd have a point but most programmers I don't think size of local industry is their main obstacle to employment nor do I think the availability of workers is a driver for the size of the industry.

So you are saying that anyone can just park a largish airborne platform over top of important important government facilities but I still have to get pat down at the airport to fly commercial.

That just shows to go you how pointless all this security theater really is! I mean fill the cockpit with potassium perchlorate and just let the balloon go once you are over the target.

It can't really still be that easy can it? Not that we have exactly solved the truck bomb problem, but you can't get an unauthorized vehicle especially close to most sensitive targets anymore.

Because I think the direct election of Senators has turned it into a rather stupid popularity contest where incumbents who control vast amounts of money and have long list of corporate sponsors hold office for decades.

When the Senate is supposed to be appointed by the state governments to give them a voice. Its supposed to check federal power and protect States rights. Cooperative federalism is destroying the fundamental structure of how this country was designed to operate and its only possible because the 17th amendment killed state power.

Also its harder to buy off a plurality of state legislators who have a much higher turnover rate to keep 'your guy' in federal office.

The problem is until we are willing to essentially throw everything out, baby bath water and all, we can't really fix it.

Take the C argument. The issue is really again one of input validation, buffer over flows happen ultimately because of of problems with input validation. Yes a language that enforces bounds checking everywhere and takes memory management out of the hands of the programer solves the specific problem of the buffer overflow; it does not make it much more secure though in the grand scheme of things.

There have been plenty of exploits and injects in software written in Java, perl, Python, Ruby, BASIC, etc. It almost always comes down to input validation, and that is because input validation is *HARD* for any non trivial range of allowed inputs.

Then start mixing other technologies and it gets even more fun. So your C program is on a system using UTF-8, how big a buffer do you need to handle data from the database server with a VARCHAR(128) field? What character encoding is it using? What else writes data to that field what character encoding do those things use?

I see this written often and I still gota ask, "What does it matter where they were?" Even a stopped clock is right twice a day.

Honestly there should be no such thing as a SWAT team at all. The police are supposed be a safety force.

If a situation really requires "Special Weapons and Tactics" than I would argue its not merely a criminal enterprise anymore but a rebellion. Its not a job for police at all its a job for the Governors Office and the State Militia (National Guard).

There needs to some serious accountability, and management by real professionals not Barny Fife playing with the fun new toys he got from his Homeland Security grant.

The trouble is this is more or less a shell company created by these governments to place them outside the law and that should not work. You can't just create an extra legal entity to shield yourself for having to follow the legal regulations that apply to you.

We just had a SCOTUS ruling the other day that said you can't hire a proxy gun buyer to acquire weapons for you (say because you can't pass the background check) and then convey them to you in a private sale. They court basically held that when someone fills out the form and says they are purchasing a gun for their own use than that must be their intent at the time they sign the form.

Sure in that case it does not do much someone can still stand on the sidewalk outside the gun dealer and offer to by a weapon someone just purchased from them right then and there, and that was the dissents argument, but its really not the point.