I agree with you that you are not anonymous to Google. That is easy enough to deal with. Stop using their services.

The bigger question is whether or not Google anonymizes your data before sharing it. Just because the data is all there does not mean that it is being shared.

While Google might provide data along the lines of, "Within the last 30 minutes, 5000 people have averaged 35mph over this 0.1 mile stretch of road" ... They are not going to provide a detailed list of who those 5000 people are, the last time they bought gas, the brand of car they drive, or what they ordered for lunch to any random person who wants that information.

Are you certain that the data is not being anonymized? In the case of traffic data, it is trivial to do technically. Just write a function to replace the unique ID (cell phone number, ESN, IMSI, whatever) with a random primary key and retain the rest of the data (position, speed, time, etc.)

Maybe they are breaking it up into two buckets. One is used by Google Now for personal consumption (daily route suggestions). The other goes into the public consumption data (traffic reports).

I have an Evo 840 for my OS and I put my games on a RAID1 array built from 2, 1TB Western Digital black drives with 64MB of cache. The Windows pagefile and temp directory are on a second RAID1 array with older drives that have 32MB of cache.

I play a lot of Battlefield 4 and I am frequently one of the first players to join the map, even when I am playing on a server with others who have SSD drives.

When I am moving files around my system, I often get ~120MB/s read speed out of the RAID1 array.

While this is obviously not an apples to apples comparison, I am happy to be getting similar performance and more space for considerably less money per gigabyte. I am using the built-in Intel SATA RAID controller.

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Good job Tim!

As will .blows and every other domain that aligns with a negative connotation in the English language.

I wonder if the Farsi equivalent of .sucks will have the same problem.

Nor is it clear that anyone other than some classes of users who are forced by law or employer dictate to use a trusted system actually would do so. No or very restricted email, social networking, etc.

This is the environment that I work in. We use a combination of Citrix and VMware 'non-persistent disks' to provide a locked down environment that reverts to a clean, known good configuration every time a new session is established. We have to maintain that kind of environment because we work with sensitive data.

I think that the fact that banks and merchants appear to be unable to secure their transaction flows ...

I am not sure that this is accurate. In two of the more recent major breaches (Target and Home Depot) it was acknowledged that the internal security controls and systems management strategies (patches, etc.) were inadequate. That leads me to believe that it is not that they are "unable" to secure their networks, but that they simply refused to do so.

Between hardware layer access controls (think MAC white listing), firewall controls and PKI technologies, it is possible to secure a network and the data that traverses it. All of those controls are worthless if the data is being held in a 15 year old SQL database that has not been patched in 3 years with an admin who is browsing porn from the console.

It is going to get to the point where the only viable solution is a trusted sandbox. It will be something along the lines of a TPM chip to make sure that the OS image / boot loader has not been compromised, combined with a white listed set of applications and trusted content sources.

People are either going to give up computing freedom for security, or they are going to become desensitized to and accepting of the fact that their "private / personal data" is neither.

Right now I do not have a well formed goal in mind. My initial goal was to relieve the sciatic nerve pain. Then it was to learn kung fu. I have pretty much plateaued and am trying to get over the hump, but lack the motivation or goal to do so. Right now I am on auto-pilot, just training seven to eight hours a week and working to refine the techniques and skills that I have. Teaching a few classes a week helps too because I enjoy helping others, but I am definitely stuck in a rut with my own training.

Mine still flairs up from time to time, but only when I slack off and stop exercising. It is definitely manageable.

I tried the whole "rest and pain killers" routine and that just made it worse. I am fully convinced that the only way to deal with sciatic nerve pain is with exercise / stretching.

This is spot on and should be modded up.

Enter personal anecdote...

About fifteen years ago I was starting to struggle with sciatic nerve pain due to years spent driving a car with a heavy racing clutch in traffic, and a lack of exercise. I considered my options and decided to start practicing tai chi. I caught a bit of a break and found a legitimate sifu. After a couple years of tai chi, I started training kung fu as well. It has been over a decade and I train on a daily basis. I can eat whatever I want because I burn it off.

None the less, it is a struggle. Despite all of the benefits, there are plenty of days when I would rather go home after work and play video games instead of heading over to the temple to train or teach classes. I still have not overcome the "exercise sucks" mentality. Sure, the endorphins are great and being able to defend myself is great, and have a strong and healthy body is great... but it is still work for me, not fun.

The question was specifically how to deal with people who only offer criticism and do not contribute anything themselves.

Criticism is a part of development or any creative effort. Development is an iterative process and requires feedback and input from lots of people.

However the person who should leave the team is the person who does not have anything to offer. If someone's only "contribution" is to suggest how other people "should" be doing the work, that person is not really contributing.

There is an old Chinese saying that is tangentially related here. "The person who says it cannot be done should not bother the person who is doing it." Similarly, the person who says it should be done another way should either demonstrate that by doing it themselves, or STFU and leave the team alone.

Open Source is developed by and large by volunteers. While critical individuals are able to offer their criticisms, the people are doing the actual work are equally able to ignore them. Either a person is contributing code, contributing to the effort through things like documentation, wiki support, what ever... or a person is just a hanger on leeching off of the efforts of others. If that person is the worst kind of hanger on; the topping from the bottom, back seat driving, wanting to be in control but lacking the talent to do things themselves type of hanger on... well then fuck them.

If a person is living an area of the world that lacks the bandwidth to view online videos, are they really the kind of person who will be accessing content about how to build and deploy multi-tier applications into a IaaS stack?

Thank you for the laugh.

While this might not be the most subtle way of handling things, it could be quite effective to repeat the same question every time they are critical. "What have you contributed?"

Just ignore their arguments and ask them what they have contributed. Over and over and over again.

They will either go away, stop posting so much, contribute, or perhaps realize that the whole point of the movement is to contribute actual code and functionality.

On the Internet, ignore them. In real life, talk about them every time they open their mouth and complain. "Oh there goes Joe again, whining and NOT CONTRIBUTING." Then return to your regularly scheduled activities of doing things.

How do you deal with things like re-tests and conflicting priorities for remediation? For example, client wants vulnerabilities patched in one week but the next maintenance window is for two weeks.

We are in the same situation and we have data centers spread around the globe to deal with data privacy and jurisdictional considerations.