I was the IT manager of a hospital. The HIPAA rules apply. You can't repeat what you hear and you can't read what you weren't supposed to see. Seriously, learn to not even focus your eyes on private information. However, there is nothing wrong with using what you hear to help you make decisions about what you should do, such as leaving a business that is in financial trouble or setting aside some server space for that expansion someone is planning but didn't think to consult with IT about.

you go to where the volcano is if you want to study it as safely as possible.

I agree. I like tools but I prefer them to fully expose what they are doing and why. I don't want my tools to hide the complexity, just reduce the tedious redundancy of implementing that complexity.

Slashdot reminds me of just how ignorant and yet unjustifiably arrogant and egotistical most tech nerds are. It sickens me to see so many people without the slightest degree of empathy or ability to understand that their limited experience is not (can not) be the be-all-end-all of reality.

There are a large variety of vision problems. Many make it difficult to change focus quickly or at all. How something as basic as this can escape so many people would be funny if it weren't so indicative of a general trend of horrible education and willful ignorance.

I know. If it weren't for idiots and trolls then /. wouldn't be /.. But if your traditions suck, then maybe you should really try to ditch them.

It is incorrect to conflate "socialism" and Soviet era "communism," which was really a dictatorship.

Every time you drive on a public road you are practicing socialism. By this summary's logic, all drivers would be cheaters.

Finally, how can one fault former "communism" victims for this tendancy? If you grew up in a culture where lying and cheating were the only way to survive, I'm sure you would pick up some bad habits too.

...is often used as a bullying tactic. The bully acts as if the victim is so much like a woman or like a gay man (often just because of the victim's size or build) that the bully just "can't resist" making advances toward the victim. These "advances" are often made loudly and publicly, with great fanfair, thus to emasculate the victim.

Because companies are regularly sued simply for not having something in thier policy. This applies to EPA, OSHA, and other regulations, in addition to sexual harrassment. You, are correct, redundancy is a bit of a waste of time and paper. However, if a company does not have a policy against X, then the law assumes they allow it (or at least do nothing to prevent it).

It is a false assumption that "people have no motivation to lie in a confidential study." People could lie to make themselves feel better. People lie to themselves all the time. Repeating that lie in an "official study" will definitely cement that false belief more firmly in thier head. Several studies have shown this. Some people could give false answers in a study, especially one of this nature, because they believe others will not be brave enough to come forward. So the respondant fudges the truth to, in their thinking, skew the results further toward what they think the "real" results should be. In other words, they ruin the survey by trying to "fix" it. Still other people may lie just to screw up the results, just for the hell of it. Yes, even young women.

Finally, there are many women who do not understand what sexual harrassment really is. These women tell dirty jokes, then get upset when the man laughing the loudest is not attractive to them. Women who act flirty and touchy one day, then the next day complain about that same man being flirty and touchy back. Many women believe that sexual harrassment is absolutely ANYTHING that makes them feel uncomfortable in ANY way. But this is too subjective. That is why "harassment" is defined as a continuing pattern of behavior that continues even AFTER someone has been asked to stop. Remember, this pattern must be either one person doing lots of things, or lots of things being done to one specific person or group by another specific group. A "pattern," in this context, is NOT establshed by a survey that shows lots of different disconnected people feeling uncomfortable about what happened in a lot of different, disconnected, situations. Many social researchers conflate these two definitions of "pattern" in order to gain more sympathy for their cause. This is called, "the fallacy of equivication."

This false belief in the sanctity of confidential surveys has got to stop if the "soft sciences" ever hope to gain the respect of "real scientists." There are means to control for various forms of false reporting but it requires designing your study very carefully from the beginning; A lot more than just using follow up interviews (Who is going to say, "Yeah, I lied in that study my professor required me to participate in for part of my grade"?).

This study was a great start. But all it really shows is that there is something that needs to be investigated further. Not to say that steps shouldn't be taken to aleviate the problem, if and where it exists. Just that you can't claim to have anything more than a vague grasp of the problem without a better study.