Comment Re:Real Names? (Score 1) 93
Password: hedgehog, no doubt.
Password: hedgehog, no doubt.
Would you like your food data shared with your insurance company? How about your weight? Your BMI went above 22 this month. Not good, lower it or else. Your running? You didn't meet your jogging goals for the week. That's it, we're raising your health care premiums. That's a lot of beer you're drinking, and you put a lot of miles on your car, so it looks like we'll have to cancel your auto policy because statistically you're likely a drunk driver.
If you say "OK, share my data", it can go a lot of places you may not intend.
The problem wasn't that the results weren't reproducible from the data, the problem was any data reproduced the results; even random noise reproduced the results.
Given the cost of using the court system it simply isn't worth suing for small ammounts of money. Small claims court helps to an extent but for most people it still won't be worth if the value of the damage is less than a few hundred dollars (and if you value your time and are well paid quite possiblly not even then).
Sometimes a company can do a small ammount of damage to a lot of people. If a company with a million customers screws each of them out of $10 then they have dishonestly gained $10 million. That is clearly a sum where it is worth going to the expense of using proper court procedures to consider the case but only if all the damage can be considered at once in one court case. Hence the reason for class actions.
Having said that while I like the principle of class action lawsuits I don't agree with the practice of paying victims damages by using vouchers which will encourage them to go back to the company that screwed them rather than something that can easilly be spent anywhere.
I don't trust any device that insists on reporting to 'the cloud' rather than to a machine of my choosing. Even if it says it only reports to the machine of my choosing, I don't really trust that it doesn't also report to 'the cloud'.
The cloud has no legitimate need to know. That's why my 'smart tv' is a laptop loaded with Linux connected to a not so smart TV.
The trouble with these things is that they want to "phone home" too much. For energy conservation, Nest talks to a Nest, Inc. server and tells it too much. The info it needs (outside temp, power grid load status) is freely available from read-only web sites. (Given a ZIP code, the National Weather Service site will return info in XML.) But no, it has to talk to the "cloud" and give out personal information. That's totally unnecessary.
Top Ten Things Overheard At The ANSI C Draft Committee Meetings: (5) All right, who's the wiseguy who stuck this trigraph stuff in here?