Depends on how you define metadata. Nowadays the line between privacy, metadata and your last name, habits, shopping, etc seems to be a single "SELECT" line involving one or two tables.

The information is obviously a valuable law enforcement tool. Just like phone records, like wiretapping (under a judge auth.).
At least my perception, way before snowden and all the latest leaks, was that this was actually happening. This is just a confirmation.

Would be great if, as in wiretapping, this would be supervised by justice, and used only in criminal investigations. Sound naive ...i know

Economy is in a much better shape now. Top 10 NASDAQ companies are producing tons goods and giving 1000's of jobs to the people.
Thanks god society is eager to buy those "likes" thingies that boost the economy. And what about those "character" things? 1 is not enough, everybody wants 140 of 'em!

Not that unpopular. I strongly agree on this one.

Hail King Salmon!

Android mod world (modded roms, cyanogen forks, custom kernels, etc) has tons of examples like this. People who distributes compiled kernels and refuses to share their patches because that way they would "loose" their "exclusive l33t" kernel, since some other modder/coder may "steal" their job (which is basically some minor editing or patch merging on top of a real kernel...samsung kernel for example...plus 10 lines of code to make something happen).

typo: "Eastern Congo IS NOT the only..."

"Conflict Minerals", it's a whole misleading concept. The Conflict is human, those minerals can be found at Eastern Congo, and are available in many other places.

Eastern Congo is the only available source, nor the most important or #1 producer of any of the so called "Conflict Minerals".

It's sad when political agenda mixes up in EVERYTHING. This is clearly -IMHO- of another NGO acting in the publicity area against companies who do not follow or play along their agenda.

my 2 cents

The other half was trying to Imagine a Beowulf cluster of that...

... back then nobody bragged about the ID number...

Inventing things against the clock has an extra "bonus" in my ranking.

I once achieved this on web traffic for a large corporation back in the days where internet @ work was "new" and pr0n was the main "misuse" in working hours.

I proposed to do it as ethical as it could be done, so we agreed about obfuscating domains, the idea was to educate users that were "new" to internet, so the administrator would only get notice about a "violation of terms". (using regex for the usual++ pr0n and other stuff related terms).

There was no actual "snoop", no logging, just a hint on who to talk to "use internet wisely and stop fooling around in working hours".

If i had a request like the one in this "Ask Slashdot" i would just tell the guy it can't be done, or at least, i wouldn't do it since it's not ethical at all.

if you cross the Atlantic, your Joules will turn into ergs

Same maps that were altered/changed/wasted by google's IP range "contributors"?

The marketplace haven't really changed, it's the same marketplace but now there's a new player offering things for free for some years, wiping out some competitors or pushing them away from the marketplace. And now....when their product it's a heavyweight champion...well...now they start to charge. That's unfair.

The fairness of including someone else's information in their product it's another story.

I'm a big supporter of the idea that information and knowledge should be free. But if that "freedom" has a price for the people who made that information, then it's no longer free. If the people who makes the information disappears, then the whole model has no sustainability. It's just a shortcut for google to make some quick money.
I don't see google funding automated mapping projects. Are they? 'Cos they will need it soon.

I found myself a more specialized line of work, some line of work google won't move into. High precision mapping won't be the case for google maps in the next 10 years. Unless my work starts appearing for free on google maps.... get my point?