The CDC is now saying that the transmission in TX was caused by a "breach of protocol", which is not surprising given that the barrior protocols are exacting and onerous.

I don't want to misattribute something to the CDC, but what I read was glaringly clear on this point.

What the unnamed party said, was, "there HAD to be a breach of protocol, because this person is infected. However, we haven't identified what the breach was yet"

Circular reference?

Any protocol that results in you dying if you make a single mistake in a very long list of mundane tasks is a poor protocol.

Organizations with operational excellence have basic things like written checklists and safety tags and other stuff. The USAF for instance has methods of managing risk and mitigating risk that can be carried out by people who aren't anywhere near as well educated as most American medical professionals.

I have no idea what tree you are barking up, but I'm not in it.

Your mechanic doesn't advertise that he is providing a free service. It is entirely clear to both parties what is changing hands.

In the case of FB, google, and most other online services that are free-to-use, you are absolutely the product, because the revenue model depends on selling data about you to 3rd parties. These services also don't make it abundantly clear that this is their business model. In fact, facebook in 2011 advertised that it would "always be free"

I actually raise bees, chickens, and sheep. I'm quite familiar with the sacrifices involved in keeping livestock. I also know why I'm putting my money and effort into keeping them alive.

They don't.

Yes.

Another adage seems appropriate.

If a for profit company is taking care of you for free, you aren't the customer.. you're the product.

You should feel like a pig on a farm....well fed and happy right until the end.

Google's business model has always been about analyzing your data and selling "you" to others.
They need your data.

Each person needs to decide for themselves if what they're getting (free web email?) is worth what they're "selling" to google and others..

btw, I started using facebook's ads manager earlier this week for a project. If you haven't looked at it before, you should. The amount of data facebook thinks it knows about people and that it is willing to let advertisers target is pretty interesting.

The NYT drove the car in circles in a parking lot to run down the battery, then lied about the range. Musk pulled the GPS data and PROVED they were lying.

http://www.teslamotors.com/blo...

Bingo.

I would modify your statement a bit though - because different people want different things out of cars. I know Prius and Leaf owners that are already sold on electric vehicles. Those vehicles are insufferable yawn-inducers, so I'll never be interested... but plenty of people already are.

However, the Teslas (so far) are clearly drivers cars made for discerning buyers by real enthusiasts. I've taken a model S on a test drive and it was really magnificent.

Here is a selection of my current crop of cars:
Audi A4 Quattro, 6MT
88 BMW M5, 5MT
87 BMW 325is, 5MT, gutted race car

I've been a driving instructor with the BMW Car Club of America. I've done countless track days on multiple race tracks. I love fast cars and I love pushing them hard.

The Tesla model S is awesome. I took it for a nice test drive. It is easy to drive around town, and it accelerates, turns, and stops very well. It is comfortable and quiet. The acceleration is instant. It will make you smile every time you hit the throttle. The regenerative harvesting is great; you rarely have to use the brakes, but if you want to, the brake pedal has a good feel and the car stops in a hurry.

At less than autobahn speeds, it is as fast as an M5. It handles very well for a large sedan. It is quieter than a Mercedes. With the Model D's, it will also have AWD, like the best Audis.

After a short drive, I would say that the car is clearly head and shoulders above the other luxury sedans it competes against.

The model S has two downsides: range and price. It's a great car for 350 days out of the year. The other 15 days, you may want to take medium to long road trips. Then you'll have some difficulties - for now.

However, even there, the difference between its luxury sedan competitors isn't night and day. All of those cars I mentioned require premium fuel, and that can be very hard to find when on longer trips, especially in the mid west. So in fact you need to plan your trips anyhow to make sure that compatible fuel will be available along your route.

Disclosure:

I work extensively with Microsoft customer usage data (although on Visual Studio, not Windows)

Odds are, unless you've been very intentional about ticking the checkboxes the right way, Microsoft is already collecting usage data from you -- for a variety of products. Never without your consent, of course.

The issues around anonymizing your data and removing PII are taken very seriously. It's damn frustrating, because I often look over the data for user 234209342349 and think, "I wish I could email this guy and ask why the hell he is doing that". But there is no way for me to recover PII for VS client customers.

For the Visual Studio products, a typical approach is that data that might have a PII impact is one-way hashed on your local machine, so that PII never goes over the wire and never gets to Microsoft to begin with.

You can use tools like filemon to see where VS dumps the usage data files it generates. I don't remember if these look like binary mess on disk or not, but they get written to disk, and then you can see them go over the wire some time later. You could of course use a packet sniffer to see the on-the-wire format, and if it differs from what is stored on disk.

The data we scrub in VS covers the obvious things -- account names or email addresses -- but also some more subtle things -- like file paths (because these could contain your username, or a company name, or anything else), and even thing like VS Project Type names (because Company Foo can create their own Project Type, and might put their company name in the Project Type Name)

So anyway, there's actually not much of a story here. I can't comment on the truth or accuracy of what MJF is saying. However, what she is saying is that, in effect, the latency between usage data being locally captured/calculated, and that data being sent to Microsoft (assuming the user has allowed usage data to be sent), is now much lower than it was in the past.

For VS, at least, I know what data we have available to us. I opt-in to all of the MS data collection stuff, because I see no evidence of it being used inappropriately, and, because I know that we use it to try and understand what users are doing and why they are doing it.

Opting into the data collection stuff effectively gives you "a vote" in how we do things in future releases.

Super short version:

Philosophy addresses questions of truth.

Science addresses questions of observation.

Sure, the regenerative braking probably reduces the wear on the brakes.

Point being, brake pads and rotors are normal replacement items. You should expect to replace them more than once in 12 years on a normal vehicle. I can wear down a set of pads in a weekend at the track. It depends a lot on how you drive.

I will agree that on the Tesla I test drove, I barely touched the brake pedal. The regen was turned up to maximum and that does a good job of slowing the car down if you are paying attention.

BMWs also tend to have static negative rear camber, and are RWD like the Tesla. But the wheels are smaller dia, which means the tires are more affordable.

I think over 12 years you will spend similar or more on Tesla model S brake and tire components as compared to an average BMW. I look forward to hearing from Model S owners 11 years from now...

Heck. At 12-years on a BMW, there are any number of wearbale parts that replacement may exceed car value (tires, brakes (you have to replace the rotors with the pads on a BMW), etc).

Not unless the car has been damaged.

BMWs have very high resale value. 12 year old BMWs are currently 2002 models. Very few model year 2002 BMWs can be found for under $5000 in _any_ condition.

In fact, if you do a quick search on autotrader.com for model year 2002 BMWs, you'll see that there are 1200 listings with an average asking price of $9700

I happen to be quite familiar with the running costs of old BMWs. The drive train of a BMW will easily last 12 years without substantial work. The exceptions would be the plastic cooling system components, and, on some models, premature VANOS failure. Sadly, on the newer N54 engines the HPFP is a disaster, but that is not the majority of used BMWs, and certainly not MY2002 cars.

Even paying dealer prices, to replace brakes, suspension rubber, tires, cooling system, etc, will not cost you $9000.

The brake rotors and pads are a few hundred dollars per corner, and you could replace them yourself in your own garage with a jack and hand tools.

FWIW, I really like Tesla. I look forward to a time when buying one of their cars makes sense for me.

However, your consideration of the repair costs of a 12 year old BMW is way off. Thus, my response.

Also, Brakes and Tires are functionally identical between a BMW and a Tesla, and, on the Model S, the Tesla replacement parts are probably more expensive (I haven't priced them to be certain), because the Tesla has very large low profile tires and very large brakes, especially compared to the "average" BMW (instead of their X5 trucks with big wheels, or their high performance M models with larger brakes)

So comparing a 12 year old BMW and a 12 year old Tesla, the wear and maintenance parts differences are the Tesla's battery vs. the BMW's conventional drivetrain. The latter requires coolant flushes, oil changes, transmission fluid changes, air filters, etc.

The one maintenance surprise that I learned about when chatting with a Tesla service technician was that on the model S, the A/C refrigerant is serviced regularly, because it is an integral component of the battery cooling system.

Yes, we only want rich women to be able to not get raped or murdered by the abusive people in their lives.

Good job asshole.

The appropriate product is called the "GunVault". It can be opened in a second or so, in the dark, entirely by touch.

They make them in different shapes and sizes for different mounting/storage situations.

Irrespective of what OPM might think of who she visited and why, the fact that she at minimum failed to disclose it during the interviews is a red flag.

It could be that she is getting a raw deal and she really had no nefarious intentions at any point in her life, and this was an honest mistake and a reasonable person could have thought it couldn't have been relevant and no dishonesty was involved.

Or, it could be that OPM has done their job correctly and has identified someone who is a future liability because of her past stupidity and her comfort in being dishonest about her past, associations, and politics.

The OPM is not the department of second chances and big hugs. They are charged with, for instance, trying to keep future Snowdens out of the US government.

(I think what Snowden did was a good thing, fwiw. That doesn't change OPMs job )

The point is that lying is worse. If they find out, not only did you break a federal law, but you lied about breaking a federal law when applying for a government job that asks a bunch of pretty serious questions and explains the possible penalties for dishonesty.

Also, other posters have mentioned that she visited some of these group members while they were in jail for murder. You neglect to mention that hey, you're kind of friends with a murderer when you're interviewing for a government job?

I did an OPM interview for a friend who was joining the USAF and listed me as a reference. They are serious. They need to be.

This lady hung out with some dipshits when she was younger. She probably hung out with them a bit too much. Then when she was older she tried to get a grown up adult type job that uncle sam was interested in. She either lied or neglected to mention her 2 or 3 standard deviations out of bounds youthful activities. OPM caught up with her on it and decided that she wasn't worth the risk.

It's their prerogative. They're not in the don't-hurt-your-feelings business. They're not in the "forgive-the-stupid-mistakes-of-youth" business. They're in the business of assessing possible problems with people.

A cop firing a gun is morally ambiguous. Sometimes its justified, sometimes it isn't.

Deciding when it is vs. isn't justified is the problem. Knowing that the gun was fired is usually pretty obvious.

Knowing the entirety of the situation when a cop fired is considerably more important than if the cop actually fired.

Pervasive, tamper proof cameras on officers and their vehicles, that police cannot withhold from the public without a pretty serious conversation with a judge. That's the starting point.

Let's see what problems remain after we've had that running for 5 years.