I think it is hilariously ironic that Feinstein was the victim of the very same surveillance state that she so vigorously and enthusiastically helped to create and maintain.

I honestly don't see where she has any room to bitch, without being a hypocrite of the first order.

I saw this in college with the women who took CS seriously feeling like they had to work twice as hard because half of the girls were getting by, in their minds by "flipping their skirts and smiling the guys" to get them to do their work for them.

How would this even work? Most Engineering degrees are based principally on examinations. You can't smile your way out of solving a differential equation on paper.

Nor do we have any reason to think it won't.

I was just raising the question. It is a bit strange that they didn't mention the write speed at all, since it's one of the most important metrics for high-volume media.

That's pretty hilarious. *I* wasn't treating it mathematically at all, I was just stating a fact. Generally speaking, there is no way to prove that someone hasn't broken your trust. But you can prove that they have.

But YOU were certainly treating it like a mathematics exercise!

The older you have become, the more exceptions you have encountered which shatter common stereotypes. By the time you hit 70-80 years of age, the whole of humanity probably seems like am unweighted random behaviour generator.

The relevant Quote:

The latter part of a wise man's life is taken up in curing the follies, prejudices, and false opinions he had contracted in the former.

-- Jonathan Swift

I'm confident most of us can name at least one "superior" who held critical decision making powers in an organization who would print off their emails to read them rather than reading them on the monitor. Why are these people not being publicly shamed?

The joke is on you cyber-man. These guys print off the emails to make sure they have a hardcopy for everything they're read so that all their bases and asses are covered when its hits the fan. Those who rey on soft copies will be left flapping in the breeze at the first hard disc failure.

Haha. :)

I retract the above statement. At least in regard to this particular topic. The blog post does link more than just that one story into a theme. Still, I would not have brought it up unless I'd seen that kind of thing quite a bit on Slashdot lately.

I concede this. So I will amend my original comment. Here is my revised version:

"Polygraphs do not work well enough to be taken seriously as indicators of truth. The government knows this, so instead it uses them as instruments of intimidation."

I agree that is a more accurate statement. Satisfied?

Those were only a few sources. You can find a great many studies if you spend a few minutes with a search engine. The upshot is: there is very little evidence that it is actually the polygraph, and not the polygraph examiner, doing the "lie detection". And that means they are not very damned good at it.

I included 3 links -- and I could include far more if I wanted to -- in a comment to someone else in this thread. Feel free to follow them and read.

You could also find a lot of information on it yourself with a couple of minutes on Google.

Why did we get a comment containing a link to a blog post about a news article elsewhere on the internet?

I mean, holy crap, Slashdot, can't you even bother to give us a link to the actual article anymore? We have to go on a link-to-a-link goose chase?

You bring up another problem. Bandwidth.

What good does it do to have 1TB optical disks, if the write speed is only 350kB/sec? It would take more than a month of steady writing to fill up a disk.

It will probably be faster than that, but who knows? I checked TFA, and it says absolutely nothing about bandwidth, either read or write.

It wouldn't matter if it was. Time after time, we have seen problems arise... not because of "online technology", but because of human failure. Failure of the people you're supposed to trust at "the other end".

PEOPLE at these organizations have repeatedly failed in areas of organizational ability, reliability, and trustworthiness.

Unless and until we have the technology that can replace human trustworthiness (or lack thereof), "cloud" storage will not be ready for prime time. Even if you make it snoop-proof, who's to say it will still exist a week from now?

You can't prove reliability and trustworthiness, you can only prove its opposite. And they have. Many many times now.

(1) Password managers. One strong password, infinite storage. Maybe one for work and one for home.

(2) DropBox. One file, infinite number of distributed copies. Also available to sync on your mobile device of choice :-)

(3) Discipline. Every password is in the vault, no exceptions. Every change is updated and synced to DB.

Problem Solved.

There is also a lot of evidence that they don't. Or rather: it may be "significantly more than chance", but not enough more to be really useful.

Quote from the first sentence of that first link:

And from the second:

And from the conclusion of the third:

An average of over 19% false positive rate (government's own figures), and as high as 75%, means the polygraph is effectively useless as a lie detector for any serious purposes. That's a HUGE false positive rate. It simply isn't a basis for punishing someone when there is an almost 20% chance on average that the results are false. And that's just false positives... there are false negatives too.

I repeat: the government knows this, and uses it more as an instrument of intimidation, in order to try to wring confessions out of people, than anything else. Many ex-government-polygraphers -- and subjects of polygraph exams, for that matter -- have told the same story.