In any unmoderated discussion the loudest and most insistent voices win. This has been true since democracy started - "politic" meaning roughly in the original Greek "To shout down"

Would be awesome if it were true: The modern word 'political' derives from the Greek politikos, 'of, or pertaining to, the polis'. (The Greek term polis will be translated here as 'city-state'. It is also translated as 'city' or 'polis', or simply anglicized as 'polis'. City-states like Athens and Sparta were relatively small and cohesive units, in which political, religious, and cultural concerns were intertwined. The extent of their similarity to modern nation-states is controversial.)

When I was a young awkward geek with very specific interests, I would have absolutely LOVED there to be women around with those same interests... Yet today we see guys trying to scare the women away. What the hell changed?

Nothing but the volume. I loved geeky women back then, and some geeky men were hostile. Now, I still like geeky women, and some geeky men are still hostile.

Nothing has changed, except the amplification of the extremists on both sides. The extremists on both sides want to drive a wedge to consolidate their base, just like the Republicans and Democrats. They use kernels of truth wrapped in emotionalist rhetoric to do it.

Black people aren't gangbangers. Muslims aren't terrorists. White men aren't aryan supremecists. Women aren't hyperemotional basket cases.

And male geeks aren't misogynists.

When you pick a bad characteristic of a subset of a group and label the whole group with it, that is prejudicial sterotyping. Doing so does not help feminism or technology.

Men aren't trying to scare women away from gaming, assholes are.

Research by Prof. Giovanni Vigna of the University of California leads him to believe that the malware of the future will come in a friendly form, be genuinely useful and may not reveal its intentions for a protracted period of time.

Some of it will even turn the American public library system into an infectious host. Adobe Digital Editions 4 scans your hard drive and sends some of the data it finds, in the clear, back to Adobe.

a search of foreign property known to contain criminal evidence, for which a warrant was not necessary.

The reason we require you to get a warrant is to distinguish between the two meanings of "known to contain":

1. I can reasonably demonstrate the probability that this server contains.
2. I have a gut feeling that this server contains.

The problem is not that the actual Silk Road server got hacked, which is what the FBI is arguing. The problem is servers that do not contain criminal evidence getting hacked based gut feelings. That is why we require a warrant. We don't want our government hacking into servers on a whim and without a record, regardless of where those servers are physically located.

Personal data harvesting for contextual ads and content should be a beautiful thing. They do it privately and securely, and it's all automated so that no human being actually learns anything about you.

Leaving the "privately and securely" bit to other commenters who will roundly correct you, I'm sure.

I've done personalized targeting of ads, and it is not necessarily a beautiful thing. The problem is a mismatch in the objectives of the advertiser, the objectives of the consumer, and the GDP maximizing outcome.

The GDP maximizing outcome is the thing that maximizes the total satisfaction of wants for the entire society. In theory, that should match the objective of the consumer. In practice, it does not, because the consumer is rarely perfectly informed or perfectly rational. Flaws at this level result in reduced consumer satisfaction, which result in reduced economic activity, and lackluster GDP growth in the long run.

In advertising, these flaws can be either explicitly or implicitly induced. The explicit way is the world of Edward Bernays and the world of PR; a fascinating subject in its own right. The advertisement targeting mismatch is about how success is measured and iterated into the targeting algorithm.

The personalized advertiser's objective is generally either to maximize revenue or earnings during the run of the ad campaign. This results in short-run oriented behavior which can be significantly mismatched with maximal satisfaction -- not necessarily intentionally, but because the system has no regard for satisfaction. Consumer satisfaction doesn't go into the algorithm explicitly and since campaign success can be most easily measured in the relative short run (did this impression result in a sale during the 30 day window that the customer is considered "owned" by this ad campaign), long run satisfaction cannot even show up implicitly. Most notably, impulse purchasing is strongly favored by the most profitable ad personalization strategies.

Ad personalization is good for short term revenue or earnings (or whatever is being measured), but it is not very good for long run GDP. From a strict economic standpoint, algorithmic targeting optimizes for flashy, shoddy products.

I know, because I did it.

the Open Source community is full of a#@&oles, and I probably more than most others am one of their most favourite targets.

So he's a troll who specializes in trolling trolls. Why are we feeding him?

Do Not Feed The Trolls

The government hasn't shown that there is any actual harm caused by the model that folks like Comcast intend to use

Yes, we have. We have tested it with telegraph, and telephone, and physical carriage. Your insistence that we haven't only shows that you have not studied the history of common carrier.

Living On a Carbon Budget: The End of Recreation As We Know It?

Oh my god! Whatever will we do?!? We'll have to come up with some way to allocate scarce resouces based on competing wants! If only there were a science that studies economic activity to gain an understanding of the processes that govern the production, distribution and consumption of goods and services in an economy. If we had that, then it would imply we already have an enormous, global system for handling this exact problem.

Not that it doesn't need tweeking, and we need to internalize the cost of carbon emissions, but this isn't just a solved problem; it is one of the most intensely studied and tested fields of sociopolitical theory that there is. And it doesn't mean we banned recreation. As it turns out, some recreation is actually good for the system, because it increases productivity.

And can we produce five times as much energy? Ummm, yeah. Real easy. There is a shitload of energy falling out of the clear blue sky at all times. If we have the resources, we can grab more of it. So that completes the whole "productivity" loop back to increasing production of energy.

it has an obligation to show that such control is the least burdensome method of achieving a compelling state interest. And - frankly - it's not.

Yes, it is. See common carrier. It has been tested empirically for more than a century including physical carriage networks. The empirical testing has shown that when carriers are prohibited from discriminatory behavior, the resulting increase in competition among merchants and manufacturers who use the carriage networks results in greater overall economic expansion. It is why FedEx is not permitted to negotiate preferred carrier status with one manufacturer to inhibit shipments made by a competing manufacturer.

Anyone else think this is simply an attempt to let the issue calm down and be forgotten by the public?

I'd toss in that they're probably negotiating the sequence of events; they have to kill net neutrality soon as well. And, expect the announcements to be timed for minimal coverage, so Friday afternoon. They might even hold the net neutrality announcement to the Wednesday before Thanksgiving.

What do you expect?

Informed consent; a condition not satisfied by something buried in dozens of pages of legal boilerplate. "We're watching everything you do" is not something that falls into reasonable expectation, even for an early test program. Requiring consent as a condition of use may be fine; failing to place a large, explicit notice on screen is utterly disrespectful to the user and an unconscionable violation of the most basic security practices.

I'll also add that our Director of Events is fairly convinced a new Marriott property in Washington, DC is doing this right now.

Has your Director of Events considered not doing business with Marriott, or at least putting them on the "only if nothing else is available" list?

Democrats: The New GOP.

Hey, come on, now. That's not fair. The old GOP was not nearly as militaristic and bankster owned as the current Democrats.

I'd feel better if some smart people from the CDC or WHO or USAMRIID were trying to figure out what us different this time.

Good post and all, but on this specific point: Go ahead and feel better. All three are. The people there with the right expertise are probably working extensive overtime, owing both to the vigor of their superiors and their own intense desire to beat this thing. We know they are; we intentionally imported two victims early on, so we could get more data to work with.

the term "collection" as redefined by Executive Order 12333 to allow basically every information dragnet, provided no-one looks at it. "Collection" is now defined as "collection plus action." ... This leads to the question of aging off collected data/communications:

No it does not. Do not go gentle into that good night. There is no reason whatsoever for us to accept the giant leap into unconstitutional territory and debate the fine points left to us, settling for scraps of liberty from dictators who have derived no just power from the consent of the governed. Rage against this machine until you die or it does.