You don't seriously expect businesses to be fined in a way that actually hurt them, do you?

That could impact profits and executive bonuses, and we can't have that.

Nearly all technology starts out this way

With Bennet Haselton???

I hope not.

Betzig came up with his Nobel-winning microscope (PALM) when he'd grown frustrated with the limitations of other microscope technologies. The so-called lattice light-sheet microscopy that he describes in Thursday's paper was the result of his eventual boredom with PALM.

*sigh* And some of us have yet to get bored with "pull my finger".

Well, what are the bounds of this before it becomes illegal?

OK, you're a frequent customer, and I'm willing to give you a discount. Sure, fine.

Now, imagine someone charges you 10% more because you're not white. That's obviously going to be pretty illegal, one would think.

If the mechanism for this, or the fact that it's even happening isn't transparent, then it's fairly arbitrary.

>> And if it's under RAID I'd need at least 4x as much disk?

No, I'll stay 2x.

Depends on your level of mirroring, doesn't it?

I know people who do storage for a living, and some places use the RAID x+y where you have levels of RAID giving mirroring, combined with striping and parity to get additional redundancy. I those situations, the amount of raw space you need is at least 2x the amount of usable space you want to end up with.

And, a lot of those places replicate the entire storage to another instance as the redundant backup/failover/DR.

Sure, great ... and those of us in the real world who manage 10s or 100s (or in some cases 1000s) of terabytes?

We're talking an entirely different price point and quantity.

I seriously doubt people with NetApp servers and other large storage could even consider keeping 50% of their disk space empty just to make it slightly faster.

My user account on my personal machine has over 1TB of stuff in it, which gets mirrored to two other drives. That adds up after a while when you're staying under 50%.

So I'd be looking to double or triple that number.

And, from the very little I know about RAID 5 ... if you only have 3 drives in it, you're not really getting a whole lot of added security, are you?

Given a spherical cow of uniform density...

With perfect conductivity, and with no mass ...

If you have a server, and you are not using Unix, you should not be in charge of a server.

Wow, that is quite possibly one of the stupidest things I've seen in a while.

"Yarg! All servers must run teh unix, because all software runs teh unix, and if it doesn't run teh unix it must be crap".

Do people actually put you in charge of servers? For real?

I'm no Microsoft fanboi, but it simply is not possible to run all software a large organization needs on unix.

And believing otherwise is the sign of someone who either doesn't work for a large organization, or has been relegated so far into the corner as to be out of touch with reality.

Hmmm ... if the goal is to keep all of my disks under 50% to maximize performance ... don't I effectively need twice as much disk? And if it's under RAID I'd need at least 4x as much disk?

Which kind of defeats the purpose of both having cheaper disk, as well as having monitoring to let me know when it's filling.

Sorry, but who has the luxury of buying twice as much disk so we can keep them all under 50%??

What you say might get you a performance boost, but otherwise it doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

I understand that a lot of people are cynical about privacy issues, but at least try to base you comments on facts and not mere speculation.

You must be new here. :-P

Nobody reads TFA ... everybody jumps to their own wild speculation and paranoia. Hilarity ensues.

Do I come down heavily on the tin-foil hat/privacy/conspiracy theory end of the spectrum??? Absolutely.

Does that make me wrong? Less often than I'd prefer, actually. It gets a little depressing.

The world continuously reinforces my cynicism by making crazy sounding things come true and become commonplace. This way just saves time.

It is up to the stockholders to use this information to decide whether the corporation's board of directors needs to be replaced, or the company be dissolved, etc.

So, all I need is to control enough of a voting majority, and I can override this wonderful abstract principle with a wave of my hand?

Because, nobody has ever abused a voting majority in a corporation to do whatever they please.

So, Facebook quietly buys all the shares, and then says "nah, we're not doing that any more, tough" ... and then what is the recourse? Absolutely nothing.

The concept is too new to say whether it will actually work, but the theory looks sound.

Which is kind of my point ... it works in theory, but we don't yet know about if it works in reality.

You can naively assume/hope it will work, but that's not the same as knowing it will.

To me, it's an empty, unenforceable promise which comes down to "if I have more money than you, I can do anything I want to".

I suspect that a company that builds it reputation on "we wont sell your stuff", and attracts customers based primarily on that mission statement, would lose said customers if it pulled a 180

The problem is if you go bankrupt, or get bought in a hostile takeover (or just simply by assholes like Facebook because they want to) ... they don't care about the reputation you've built up.

They care about all of that juicy data which can be monetized.

And these promises may or may not be legally binding on whoever buys it next, which makes them pretty worthless as promises go.

So, when I see something which makes them legally binding, transferable, and with penalties with some actual teeth, I will believe it. So far, I've yet to see that.

I see references to a vague framework, and assertions that it can't be changed, but anything more significant than that which survives changes in ownership and bankruptcy? Not so much.

So, in the "Trust But Verify" spectrum of things ... so far there's no verify, so there is no trust.

OH GOD! A potential loophole identified by an uneducated internect detective, with a specialty in needlessly skeptical speculation, quick run to the straightforwardly malicious alternatives!!!

I'm not the one making the assertion that just because the company makes this empty promise it's legally binding.

I'm questioning when someone says "oh, it's legally binding and iron clad" -- which I think is completely unsupported statement based on the fact that numerous companies haven't lived up to similar promises. We've all seen this kind of thing be proven false on numerous occasions, so claiming otherwise needs some proof. So far, none has been offered -- and when someone is making claims about how safe your personal data is, the onus is on them to prove it.

My god slashdot neckbeards are the worst kind of nerd.

Awww, thanks, that's the sweetest thing anybody has said to me all week. I almost never get called a neckbeard anymore.

My airline knows I'm there. TSA knows I'm there.

But Cisco and anybody doing marketing? Not likely.

So, if you were in line and someone came up and said "we're doing this mandatory customer survey, we just need you to fill out this form" you'd think it was OK if a TSA agent was standing there to ensure you filled it out? This is about the equivalent for most people.

This crosses the line from me being in a place I need to be, and a private company having access to information they didn't have otherwise. Nobody from Cisco would have previously been in the loop, and except for this special case of a cell phone, there is no way they'd ever know -- it's not like the TSA makes a habit of letting marketers know this shit.

This is why I won't have a cell phone with a data plan, and don't leave wifi on.

But people don't have much of a choice but to be in the security line. Do you think this would be different from putting cameras and other trackers in the bathroom? Because I don't.

Except for official purposes required by law, I think we should have a reasonable expectation of privacy in places like this. It's not like the other people in line with you have any real way of knowing and transmitting your identity.

the privacy implications are a bit unsettling

A bit????

No, the privacy implications of this are downright creepy. Because the most unsettling thing is governments and corporations feel they have a right to this information.

And, it's not like you can opt out .. unless you simply don't fly.

And, then what does Cisco et al do with this information? Oh, right, sell it for profit.

Assholes.