Thanks for sharing.

TL;DR: TL;DR

They were kind enough to put that "Read below to see what Bennett has to say" phrase before the fold, so at least I knew what I was getting into when I clicked the link in my RSS feed. I'm glad they're finally putting a warning label on his posts, since I'm tired of being ambushed by the "Bennett bait-and-switch", when we discover that there's an article where there's supposed to be a summary.

The appeal of Slashdot is its comments. Let Slashdot do what it does best: provide a quick summary, leave room for people to express their own thoughts, and provide a link to the article for people interested in reading more. Hosting the entirety of Bennett's post here subverts the comments by sucking all of the air out of the room and ensuring that whatever issue he's discussing will be ignored in favor of complaining about his post being here, as should be evident from every long-form Bennett post in the last few months.

If his goal is to communicate to us, then he really needs to consider his audience and rethink the methods he's employing. Maybe try speaking to us in the format we come here for?

So very true (to both of your posts).

Anyway, the gist of my original post was to simply point out reasons why we needed to conduct properly controlled experiments. As you're getting at, and as I very much so agree, theory doesn't always work out in practice how we expect, hence why it's important to put our theories to the test. Unfortunately, I overstated some ideas in my attempt to convey my point.

Which is all to say, thank you for taking the time to question me on my overstatements, since that's exactly the sort of correction I welcome.

Oh, I have no answers to those questions, since this isn't my field, just something I've read about. It seems that your thesis has also been supported by the fact that one of the nurses for the original patient has now been confirmed to have contracted Ebola as well.

These are independent researchers, not Kickstarter itself, and as the summary says, they'd be spamming you via Twitter. The simple fix is to remove your Twitter handle from your Kickstarter profile, that way they don't have a way to engage in an activity with you that they'd verbalize by using marketing speak buzzwords.

If you're suggesting that they would have picked up on some physiological false positive response on my part, I seriously doubt it, given that there were plenty of other questions that they were able to rephrase to the point where I was able to answer them without a shadow of doubt, and they repeat the questions over and over again in order to try and deal with any random outliers.

If you're suggesting that they would produce a "false positive" in response to anyone my age answering that question, that seems like a baseless assumption predicated on a preconceived notion. Moreover, wouldn't they have done that with drugs too? Yet I told them—truthfully—that I have never had any illicit drugs (well, technically, I got them to add a caveat on that one too, since I've had prescription drugs without a prescription, but it was only ever for valid medicinal use, such as the time some med student friends tossed me a few prescription-strength antihistamines when I discovered, upon breaking out in hives while at their house, that I was apparently allergic to their cats).

Ebola is by no means the only viral hemorrhagic fevers (VHFs), and while the US may not have much experience in dealing with Ebola specifically, we do have a handful of other VHFs that are endemic in domestic rodent populations that act as carriers. Those VHFs (e.g. Hantavirus) lead to several human infections each year, yet you never really hear about them in the news, nor has there ever been a big scare regarding them, despite the fact that they've been around for decades or longer.

It's an anecdote, to be sure, and there are other differences between something like Hantavirus and Ebola that make Ebola more threatening, but there's ample evidence of the fact that America deals with VHFs already (although we clearly came up short in this latest instance). And as far as viruses go, Ebola is remarkably easy to contain, given that it isn't airborne and that infected individuals aren't contagious until they're presenting symptoms, so even if protocol isn't followed, it's relatively straightforward to get things back under control.

You'll note that I never broached the topic of legality. Whether it's illegal or not is an entirely separate issue. The simple fact is, based on every test I've found that provides an ethical basis for whistleblowing, what Manning did was not morally permissible, nor was it morally obligatory. I'm fine with what Snowden did—illegal or not—because he went through it in a manner that appears to have been of the highest ethical caliber. Not so with Manning. No so with how Wikileaks handled Manning and his leaks. Good may still come out of them, but the way those leaks were handled was not ethical.

So, 8 million blocks, and 100,000 creations means 80 blocks per creation. If Minecraft is anything to go by, that'd be the equivalent of about a 5x5 house that was 4 blocks tall...and had no roof. I suppose that's a "creation", but if that's all they're averaging, they're not doing so hot. Pretty much everyone I've ever seen play Minecraft manages to do better than that in the first few minutes, and by the end of their first sitting, they've usually expanded on it substantially.

Oh, and it should go without saying that I do not work there, otherwise I obviously wouldn't be discussing any of this. The job I found as a hold-me-over position until I was done with the CIA application process actually ended up blowing me completely out of the water, so when the CIA asked me to move forward with the application process, I let them know I had found something else and was no longer interested.

And keep in mind that all of this was well before Snowden's revelations.

In fact, for the writing sample I submitted with my application, I was in the middle of a crunch time with my graduate research, so I took 20 minutes and knocked out a quick ethical analysis on the topic of Wikileaks and Bradley Manning, because the two of them were in the news around that time and I figured I may as well publicize my controversial stances early in the process so that we didn't waste each other's time. My stance in the essay was more or less that I didn't believe Manning or Wikileaks had conducted themselves in an ethical manner in their activities related to one another, but that I absolutely supported properly conducted whistleblowing (including some of the earlier stuff Wikileaks had done) and the need for people to step forward when the government inevitably gets out of line, as well as the need for organizations like Wikileaks to enable those people to do so.

Imagine my surprise when a few months later I sat down for an interview with my would-be boss during the three-day session up in D.C., only to discover that not only had they read through my entire essay...not only had they highlighted it and kept it at their desk because they were excited to discuss it with me...not only did they agree with it and think it was incredibly well-reasoned...but I had actually been tagged for the position they were offering me (a position that was quite a bit better than what I had applied for) largely on the basis of that throwaway essay I had penned while pressed for time.

Strange, but true.

I applied to the CIA when I was looking at finishing grad school about 4 years back. As with the FBI, one of the things they mentioned was illegal downloading, of which I had done quite a bit while in college. I mean, we're talking hundreds of films, thousands of TV episodes, thousands of audio tracks, both foreign and domestic for all of those, from any number of decades, genres, and budget sizes.

I was upfront with them about it during a pre-screening interview held at my school's campus. I actually brought it up with them and asked if it'd be a problem. They indicated it wouldn't be, and formally invited me to fill out a proper application with them so that they could advance me through the process.

I answered truthfully regarding it on the application and any subsequent questionnaires that I had to fill out. I never got any word back regarding that specifically, but their response was to ask me to fly up to Washington D.C. for a three-day session with them, which I did.

I provided exacting details regarding my illegal downloading to the polygraph examiner at my polygraph session, as well as to anyone else who asked about it. I let them know the quantity, nature of the content, and how recently I had engaged in it. I passed the polygraph with flying colors and was told I didn't even need to come in for the second session they had scheduled since they were confident I told the truth about everything (and I had...in excruciating detail, in fact, just because I knew, being the pedant that I am, that if I left out any little detail, I really would be considering myself to be lying; as an aside, one of the other applicants I was hanging out with lied to them about the recency of his drug use and got caught in his lie).

And how did they respond to all of this? They asked me when it would be convenient to move on to the final stage of the application process (a thorough background check...which I'm confident I would have easily passed), since the folks I'd be working with were excited about bringing me onboard and wanted to keep things moving. Which is to say, the fact that I had downloaded loads of files illegally in the past clearly wasn't a problem. They let me know that it'd need to stop and that it would come up again in the every-five-years polygraph everyone working there submits to, but otherwise, they made it clear to me, both explicitly through their words and implicitly through their deeds that they really didn't have a problem with me having engaged in it at a relatively large scale in the past.

P.S. Just to state what I hope is obvious: an actual polygraph session is NOTHING like what is shown on TV (the room was well-lit, there wasn't an angry detective yelling at me, beads of sweat were not pouring from my brow, and no one was pounding on any desks). I don't want to get into a load of details, but suffice it to say, the environment was heavily controlled to eliminate external stimuli, the questions and their meanings along with the terms and their definitions were all explained in detail to me in advance, I was able to voice any misgivings I had about them to the examiner (in fact, we spent 2.5 hours of the 4 hours doing just that, since my inherent pedantry meant that I had all sorts of ideas like "well, technically I've compromised government systems when I lent a friend my password at our state university" or "I can't rule out the possibility that I unknowingly supported terrorists through a front that they're maintaining", which led to a lot of the questions getting rephrased to be prefixed by "insofar as you know" or "besides what you have disclosed here"), and the questions were all read to me over and over and over again in even, metered tones that were about as un-aggressive as you can imagine.

I'm not an Australian, so I may be misunderstanding some of the terminology involved, but it's my understanding that they actually do owe him that information, based on National Privacy Principle 6 (NPP 6) from Australia's Privacy Act of 1988.

Here's a quick summary over the relevant NPP:

Which is to say, unlike in the US, the data actually may be owed to the customer in this case if the customer makes a request for it. The organization may not provide the information, but they have an obligation to have a very good reason for having done so, else they should have provided the data.

Again, I may be misunderstanding things or unaware of later changes to the law, but I'll share what little I know in the hope that someone more knowledgeable can correct me if I'm off-base.

You have that completely backwards. Cherry MX Reds have a linear actuation (i.e. no tactile bump, no click, just a smooth press) that requires very little force, which makes sense, since they're aimed at the gaming market where being able to double-tap keys is important. They're probably the quietest keys in the entire Cherry MX line. The only sound they may even possibly be making is a banging that would occur if you're bottoming out with each key press, and you shouldn't be doing that unless you've picked up bad habits from years of using spongy, rubber dome keyboards. If you are bottoming out while typing, look into getting "landing pads", which are little pieces of foam that go around the switches and help to muffle the sound a bit.

In contrast, Cherry MX Blues (which are aimed primarily at typists) have a higher actuation force, along with a tactile and audible click. They're one of the loudest in the entire line of Cherry MX switches (if not the loudest), on par with the ones you'd hear in the Model M. If you want something a bit quieter while keeping the tactile sensation, get Cherry MX Browns, which go for more of a tactile bump instead of a click, meaning it's quite a bit quieter but still has most of the tactility. Again, you shouldn't be bottoming out while typing with mechanical keyboards (the biggest advantage of having the tactile feedback is so that you know when you've pressed a key and can move on, hence why the more tactile ones are aimed at typists), but if you are, landing pads will help with the racket you'd be making, though the goal should be to get to the point where you're not bottoming out any longer.

There are some other ones as well, such as Greens, Clears, Whites, Blacks, and Grays. They vary in terms of actuation force necessary, what sort of tactile sensation they provide, and where the release point is located in relation to the actuation point. But the Reds are most certainly one of the quietest, while the Blues are most certainly one of the loudest.

...that's what treaties are for. I haven't checked yet, but who wants to bet that a few treaties were likely breached in this case?

Oh, I'm with you. I was merely responding to the OP by pointing out that even if he doesn't subscribe to the idea that we should treat people well, there are economic reasons for doing so.