Everyone always got disks sent out right away as long as they had movies on their list.

Nope. I had Netflix around that time. I sent movies back immediately, and could see when they were received. The turnaround time mailing to me started taking longer than the return trip - noticeably so that I paid attention to the shipped/received status and timing.

I dropped Netflix because it was obviously throttling. A queue of 100-120 movies all the time, of all types - blockbuster, indie, documentary, popular, unpopular - there is no way that they didn't have at least one to send me. But the timing data did it for me. Suspicious, but I didn't keep the data anywhere other than my head.

It's a failing business with a broken business model, and nothing will change that.

It's a government service that is required to be self-funded and independent. There is no business model. The board of directors is really just Congress, which makes it unique enough that it doesn't qualify as a business.

They exchange legal tender for goods and services and have accounting and HR departments, I assume, but you can't think of it like a business. More specifically, you can't fix the business model - getting mail from anyone to anyone while being constrained from raising prices is not a business model.

I'd feel much better about believing you if your source material wasn't well known for being, shall we say, exaggerated at times?

While there is no solid answer, you are arguing the wrong thing. Maximum age is not the same as "people not living as long". Lots of people died in their 30s, 40s, and 50s, making the few who lived to the natural old age death were few and far between.

Here is an article which is attacking a Live Science article, and hopefully you can make the distinction. It argues your point, more or less. Evaluating both articles should prove enlightening.

The statement still stands - people didn't live as long. If you like, take a hypothetical population of 100 people, assign the life expectancy to each member of the group, and see when they die. Count the number of years lived, and you have fewer total years in the lower life expectancy group - despite similar maximum ages.

I will say that it wasn't so much pressure to breed - that is probably overstatement. But the accepted age of motherhood certainly was younger when lifespan was shorter.

I did find a similar discussion that aired 6 months ago with Shankar Vedantam. Fear vs. dread, but not as well presented.

And another I should have mentioned is Peter Sandman on how outrage drives hazard perception. Outrage at being attacked makes it seem much more of a hazard - not more likely, nor more risky. And outrage will drive spending. So everyone focuses on what outrages them, rather than just what will statistically harm them.

David Ropeik was on that communist tree hugging NPR a few weeks ago discussing why people are terrible at calculating risks.*

My memory of it was that people weigh two things. One, how likely it is. Two, how scary it is. The result is an internal risk evaluation which has largely nothing to do with statistics.

A terrorist attack is very scary because it is, to the victims, random and completely unpredictable. It could happen to you, unlike the homicides that happen in your town because they almost always happen for a reason. I am not likely to be killed by gangs, nor hunting accidents. But I am just as likely as anyone else to be in a terrorist attack.

That's not exactly true, but it *feels* true because we are weighing non-data evidence (emotion). Shark attack. School shootings. These are all less dangerous than traffic or cancer, but they are feared far more.

And the sad thing is, more money will be spent on preventing unpreventable things, and less on preventable things, because of this faulty risk calculation.

Now, you can continue your argument that statistics should drive public policy. But you will hopefully understand why you are not getting your point across to the average person.

--
* (Pretty sure it was him - I would like to find his bit again because he spoke clearly and concisely about some fairly complicated stuff - mainly irrationality of the average person)

I voted for Obama specifically to send the message that the first election win was not a fluke - that people really did prefer a black man and a doofus (Biden) over the other party's offerings.

I did not vote for a third party because even if everyone who wanted a third party voted third party, there are not enough votes to get that third party elected. Especially because there isn't just one third party. To have a viable third party, we all need to agree who that party is, and then be convinced that we won't accidentally vote for the worst candidate via the Nader effect.

When you put together a viable third party ticket without viable fourth and fifth parties, on whom enough of the discontented can agree, and still loses, you can puke.

Libertarian Party - on the ballot in 48 states and D.C., 1.2 million votes = 1%. Short of 400,000 registered members. For a 3-way split, you would need to sway 39 million other people to support it - which means roughly 67 million supporters, with 58% turnout.

Doing the math, it is much more likely to be a spoiler vote. I don't see getting 67 million people to change their party affiliation. Let's change that to just the voters, so 39 million people. How many of those would vote for a third party if they were guaranteed not to be a spoiler vote? I think half is very generous, so you're still at convincing 20 million people. It's just not going to happen in time for the next election unless something super serious happens.

And conveniently, Snowden is that huge thing that could change peoples' outlooks on the government and the parties. Just as conveniently, this will all be forgotten in time for the next campaign - again, unless the Libertarian party takes huge gambles on public sentiment, and wins.

Green party got less than half of the Libertarians despite getting on the ballot in 36 states. It's even more unlikely to be a contender, and more likely to spoil the third party vote.

The kernel itself is relatively solid, but there are problems.

Interactive services can expose system-level access to users - a design flaw shich should not be allowed. I remember vaguely a hack from the logon of Windows NT which let you use the context menu, then somehow involving 'print' and/or 'help', you could get explorer.exe open without logging in. That was a flaw with the Win32 implementation, but it had to somehow allow user-level access to MSGINA and the kernel system for authentication and security - a good design would have allowed for this. This is Windows NT or 2000, ignoring XP and beyond.

I also remember when Vista moved graphics processing into user mode, so that the usual BSOD from graphics drivers famous in XP would simply be an abnormal termination. Reading suggests this was reversed in 7 because of the slowness this added. If graphics - fundamentally the way the OS communicates with the user, since the command-line is supposed to be a second resort - has to be so close to the metal it can't be in user space without slowing it down, this is not good.

At this point I should say that maybe a command-line interface, under the hood, may be secure. But if the intent is to provide a windowing environment, and the method of doing so is not secure, maybe the kernel has exceeded its usefulness. I should also say that a lot of uninformed people parrot the idea that the kernel is well designed, siply because it flies in the face of all the Microsoft hate. The original nerd hipster, who likes something - or believes that something can be good - even if the masses hate it. Or just because the masses hate it.

I have personally used a Shatter attack to expose passwords masked by asterisks. There is a single byte in the window definition that says "replace every character with this one because this is a password box". If it is not filled in, the text box is normal. If it is filled in, it's a password box. Most apps that display a password set the password style (by default filling that byte with an asterisk) and put the password up. Easy to recover.

If different processes, which should be kept separate from other processes, are vulnerable in this fashion, then either the kernel is wrong or the user layer on top of the kernel is not able to maintain the segragation - in effect the user layer is a vulnerability to the kernel.

Just looking at Vista, and its failure due to UAC and similar security fixes, the fundamental kernel was vulnerable to a number of serious issues - not necessarily with the kernel, but because of its implementation. Having to force an abomination like UAC on programmers so that they would respect security guidelines of least privilage, shows that they did not properly restrict its operation from the beginning - not a flaw in the kernel, but in the overall design. Configured properly, Windows would not run programs, in some cases at all. Configured improperly, it would.

The overhead of creating a fork() in Windows is ridiculous. As a Windows hacker, I found fork() abhorrent - until someone pointed out the difference in overhead.

There are many things wrong with Windows. It is fundamentally sound, but there are a good number of other flaws I won't bore you with, that would probably be more convincing but less headline-tastic. The original conception was a good idea, and it has just gotten worse from there. Perhaps it got worse as knowledgeable people left, and as of 2003 it has stopped getting worse.

In the past, Grassley and other lawmakers have taken issue with ARCâ(TM)s use of money, including whether it improperly housed aircraft owned by Google at NASA facilities

We have a witch hunt from someone who hates spending money on communist, tree-hugging garbage like space exploration, when it could be spent in his home district helping him stay elected.

Given the facts, it's actually much worse than it seems. And, if there genuinely was misuse of funds, an investigation that costs more than the original expenditure is not a waste. Genuine misuse can exclude the recipient from further grants, saving far more than the amount in question. Setting a threshold on the maximum amount to spend gives people an incentive to request amounts less than that, and misuse it.

In this case, I'm fairly certain we can label Grassley the jackass who cried wolf, and cut him off from questioning anything the ARC, or all of NASA, ever does. After all, it should work both ways.

You chose a quote that people who know nothing of poetry other than random quotes would quote, for the smug feeling of knowing something they think is obscure, or even arcane. And in the process contributed nothing. While out of context it may seem to be a prescient summary of the inevitable heat death of the universe, it is actually much more mundane.

Given its popularity, would he write the same words again? No. I've only seen copypasta *from* wikipedia, not the original quote, but I have heard approximations from sources before there was an internet.

One reason is that while the association of the H-bomb is irrelevant to it, it would today come to everyone's mind. Another is that he is not sure the world will end with either. People whose houses were bombed have told him they don't remember hearing anything

Eliot may be less disapproving of a quote in this context, but it still hardly seems appropriate. Refresh your memory if you wish.

You are reading "voluntary" as in deciding what to give out, and what not to give out. That is clear by your involuntary examples : "incoming caller ID, location information"

Petitioner had the choice between talking to someone directly, or over a third party telephone system. When he used that system, he provided information. Not volunteered information - but he opted in to the system, and through that voluntary choice he gave information to a third party.

When you use a cell phone, even though you might not be volunteering your location, caller ID information, keystrokes, or anything else, you are providing it to a third party by opting in - voluntarily.

The conversation itself is off limits for entirely different reasons involving the reasonable expectation of privacy. If you want your phone provider to be able to locate you, they have to know your location, and if you want the phone to work they need some ID to connect to your phone number. While you may expect privacy, you don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy due to opting in to the service.

That's the difference between matching words and reading comprehension.

In addition to AC above (#44344303) you are completely misunderstanding Smith v Maryland. Paste any part into a search engine and find it yourself, and read it. Specifically the part about involuntary information, and most definitely related to caller ID and location information:

"First, it is doubtful that telephone users in general have any expectation of privacy regarding the numbers they dial, since they typically know that they must convey phone numbers to the telephone company and that the company has facilities for recording this information and does in fact record it for various legitimate business purposes. And petitioner did not demonstrate an expectation of privacy merely by using his home phone rather than some other phone, since his conduct, although perhaps calculated to keep the contents of his conversation private, was not calculated to preserve the privacy of the number he dialed.

Second, even if petitioner did harbor some subjective expectation of privacy, this expectation was not one that society is prepared to recognize as "reasonable." When petitioner voluntarily conveyed numerical information to the phone company and "exposed" that information to its equipment in the normal course of business, he assumed the risk that the company would reveal the information [442 U.S. 735, 736] to the police, cf. United States v. Miller, 425 U.S. 435 . Pp. 741-746.

Good luck with those critical thinking skills, you're on the right track, but sadly not there quite yet.

You wouldn't trust a crackpot like that with your property, why should you place trust when that crackpot is the government?

I can't think of any society, ever, that has an election and/or nomination process for strangers at your door. And few wouldn't allow you to simply say "no", close and lock the door, and call the police (the real government).

Governments do have some accountability and traceability, while a stranger does not. Governments have some semblance of provenance, even if you disagree with its origin, while a stranger does not.

Besides being completely wrong, it shows how little the government thinks of property rights. The information belongs to your phone providers/Facebook/etc, it's their hard drives, you need a narrowly-scoped warrant to compel them to hand over that information, end of discussion.

Wow, you really believe that your opinion is the law, don't you?

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated,

The real comparison here isn't with Facebook, although if your friends connect with HTTP instead of HTTPS it might as well be. Instead of a third party, HTTP shares this information with fourth and fifth parties. It is not your fiber, not your backbone, not your router, not your internet. The internet is not your person, your house, nor your papers.

Your house may be your castle, but once you do business outside of it, you are no longer protected by your walls. If you insist on lumping data you generate into the "effects" part of the amendment, you have a really long fight ahead of you.

Again, your opinion, right or wrong, does not make any sense given the interpretation of the Constitution and its Amendments that we have inherited from case law, before and after its framing. Effects has long stood for personal property, and the infrastructure of the internet is not your personal property.

Once you give information to a third party, it is no longer secret except by client/attorney privilege or spousal privilege. Telling me to tell your wife something is very much not the same as telling her directly, or writing her a letter, or engraving it in stone and placing it in her personal handbag.

Imagine for a moment that you actually are a terrorist, here in a sleeper cell, waiting for direction.

Now imagine that you are the NSA, FBI, or CIA, or other government office. You suspect the terrorist, but don't know for certain if they will act. Do you trust them? Do you add their notations to their file?

A citizen then, a domestic terrorist like McVeigh or the folks in Waco. Still being monitored, but allowed the right to annotate your own file. What good does it do?

Do you think it would stop someone from acting if law enforcement simply said "we're watching you"? Or would they take to more traditionally preserved rights such as letters in sealed envelopes, or encryption?

What if you, now as the terrorist, could ask if the government was on to you and you could see your file? No annotations because you opt not to, but you could report back that you are either being watched, or that you appear to be free of surveillance?

Having considered that, what do you think the likelihood is of:

1) Seeing your whole file
2) Seeing anything at all, even if it is a bluff/lie
3) Having your feedback considered in any seriousness other than an addition to your file

?

Do you think that your comment "I know my good friend Sakhbir is a known terrorist, but I only hang out with him because he's a great wingman" will be taken into any account?

I thought with "reciprocity" you were going to ask for information about the government's programs. Instead, you want to give them even more information about yourself. I doubt you thought this through, nor did the 3 or hopefully more people who modded you interesting.

Allow me to paraphrase aaaaaaargh! (1150173)

Have canceled my FB account a long time ago, but still can't opt out of giving the government information.

I'm fairly certain that was the tenor of the post. You can't opt out of the government completely - unless you travel on private roads only, and purchase goods and services which did not travel on government roads, and did not get farm subsidies. Nearly impossible.

So here is how the two posts read together -

• aaaaaaargh! : Giving info to Facebook is voluntary, that's the difference
• Teckla : You have to vote and contact your elected officials for government to work, and if you don't then secret spying programs are your fault
• Everyone: WTF?

Easy answer is not to respond.

The question is a false premise. It's not the same people giving info to Facebook but not wanting the government to have it. A small group of privacy advocates are arguing on behalf of those who don't understand what giving information away can do.

Lots of people have no problem with government - if they want to read my shopping lists, or listen to me talk to my wife or kids about whatever, let them.

The question is only valid for a small subset of people - and I say first you would have to find them, and then ask them.

Plus, we are not "giving information to Facebook" - we are giving it to our friends, and the fact that Facebook has to have the data is transparent, and largely not understood. I think that explains it much better.

The question was poorly formulated because it was supposed to be a rhetorical "gotcha" that made you think - well when you say it like that, the government can have whatever it wants to have. And so many people fell into the trap of considering it a real question that deserves an answer.