This is maybe not quite so much of a tinfoil-hat post as the title might make it seem, but any data published by any party which uses that data to support their argument has to be seen in the light that the data is a supporting argument for their point of view.
Whether it is a scientist/politician/manager/slashdot poster tweaking their selection criteria to give more favourable results or just wholesale making up statistics by pulling them out of a dark hole, we are all human and we are all going to be tempted. Citation and open availability of the complete dataset for peer/independent review is the only way to avoid it.
And yes, I am sure that my post would benefit from some citations to confirm the described human behaviour. But as 95% of /. users will not read the comment and 90% of those that do will not click on the citation links, and 100% of the people involved in writing the comment are too damned lazy to go and find the citations and link them, someone else can write the [citation needed] comment below.

Not sure would say Intel has a monopoly, but there is a huge capital cost involved in adopting each new generation of fabrication facilities, to the point where there are very few companies that can take a seat at that table - that is the reason why most chip design companies outsource their fabrication requirements to one of the companies with the desired/required technical facilities.

Two main reasons - One of the conditions of getting a half-decent severance package will be that you have to train the outsourced labor to a standard satisfactory to the remaining management; secondly, one of the unwritten but impossible to avoid/prove conditions of getting a good reference from the employer will be training the replacement.
So... refuse to play nice with the managers screwing you over like this? No problem, you're fired immediately and you will get no reference from the employer (or even worse, an "off-the-record" conversation between your old manager and a potential new employer saying that they were happy to get rid of you because you are not a team player, have a bad attendance/disciplinary record, poor standards, racist views, take regular holidays in the MIddle East, and take regular breaks every hour or so to pray to Allah.

For the small minority who have enough money in the bank to get them through a lean year, or who get head-hunted, it is deeply satisfying to play the clown for a week while "training" the new hire then walking into the manager's office and taking a crap on his expensive chair. For the vast majority, though, who have the kind of personal finances that most members of the consumer society have, that severance package is badly needed and should just about cover the basics.

Very true... but outside of the article title, the article makes no distinction or breakdown between mass transit and personal transit, while alluding in the text to cars and other small/personal transport options - the Mike Orcutt article mentions vehicle sales, trucks, SUVs and cars, thus giving the impression that the increase is down to the American vehicle owner. Maybe the paper it references, written by John DeCicco, has a bit more of an objective viewpoint, but this particular paper is not yet linked from Prof. DeCicco's page on the MIT Faculty so it is impossible to say for sure.
Having said that, much of the language of his other linked papers specifically references "cars" and seems to point to an assumption that private transport is a greater contributory problem than mass transport so I would not hold my breath waiting for a balanced view on the relative impacts of mass- versus private-transport solutions.

So, an elected official is either approached by an AT&T/Comcast lobby group or approaches them, and she then allows that lobby group to submit legislative proposals to the council in her name because (paraphrasing somewhat) "she was too busy doing other stuff to make time to do it herself".
You know, I recall a few British and European politicians doing that over the last 15-20 years. One example, the "Cash for Questions" scandal in the 1990's... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It was labelled Corruption, and resulted in the end of a few political careers.

I am all in favour of using a cheaper option that is equally as effective as its more expensive alternative - that is simply an expression of one of the bases of most Capitalist economic models, after all - that an existing incumbent in the market can be challenged by a new competitor providing the same or similar service at a lower cost. I also happen to love home-built and self-built solutions to many problems. But I mostly apply that passion when making furniture and tinkering with my car or the innards of my computers.
The reservation that I have with that approach around medicines and pharnaceuticals though, is the dosage, effectiveness of the delivery and consistency of the product. A case in point - Sanofi's Auvi-Q (the main EipPen alternative) which was withdrawn by Sanofi in 2015 because of concerns about its ability to deliver the correct amount of epinephrine. These pens are designed to be used without medical training, so someone with the skill required to recognise an under- or overdose may not be present. Heathkit solutions are great, IF they deliver a consistent (and correct) dose of the medicine, and IF the medicine contains a consistent (and correct) dose of the active ingredients. Without that reliability that the mechanism is going to work and deliver the correct dose, it is difficult to put trust in that solution, especially for for a parent or guardian whose child may have such an extreme allergic reaction that their health or life will be in danger without proper care.
For sure, this is a pretty blatant (in my opinion) example of price-gouging by Mylan. Trying to blame it on the US Healthcare system is weak, but they have been given a pretty clear monopoly in schools thanks to their political lobbying efforts and now they are extracting the maximum value possible from the situation - another example of capitalist economics at work - setting the cost of a product/service at a level the market can bear and that the seller is happy with, rather than the cost the market would like to pay.

I would applaud any serious attempt by any company to contribute to the Open Source community, both in terms of active contributors and also the open-sourcing of projects (particularly widely-used ones, such as the .Net Framework).

However, purely focussing on the number of contributors is potentially misleading for a number of reasons.
For example, a contributor who posts a single one-line update fixing a spelling mistake is still a contributor, and in the total that contributor carries as much weight as a contributor who has pushed out thousands of high quality updates across several/many projects.
Also, the quality of the contributions is important - on one level all contributions are welcome as they are an effort to help. But contributions which require subsequent additional contributions to resolve issues they have introduced are less desireable than the actual fix. I would assume that programmers working for MS and the other big contributing companies are more competent and therefore less likely to introduce problems than a part-time coder working from home, but that is a potentially dangerous assumption. Either way the quality of the contribution would be important, while also being hard to measure and quantify on a site-wide basis.
However, my biggest feeling for the misleading factor of the total contributors number is the range of projects on which those contributions are seen - if MS's 16k+ contributors all contribute solely to the open-sourced MS products, then (purely in my opinion) that somewhat devalues those contributions - they are still useful, welcome and gratefully accepted because the projects they are contributing to are themselves useful, but I feel they do less to improve the overall ecosystem of the Open Source community than the contributors putting time into projects from a range of different sources.

Start playing at 18:00 (6PM) on Friday, leave the computer switched on and the game loaded, finish playing at 20:00 (8PM) on Sunday. 50 hours.
Bonus points if you mainline coffee, and give up at 06:00 on Monday morning just before leaving for work/school, because then you clocked up 60 hours... if 50 hours is theft then 60 must be close to murder.

Mainly for failing to perform any checks to see if the party filing the DMCA notice actually has the authority (i.e. copyright ownership) to be able to enforce the notice.
However, such checks would go a long way toward invalidating the defense used by media companies who abuse the DMCA provisions when faced with such patently absurd filings - that they filed this specific request in error as a result of a failure of an automated reporting system, and that nobody at the media company making the filing was aware that the filing was incorrect. In the meantime, sanctions related to the number of DMCA notices received against content uploaded by specific accounts remains triggered even when many/most of the notices are shown to be bogus/in error, meaning that there is no incentive for the media companies to change and there are no satisfactory mechanisms in place for small uploaders to recover their content/challenge the behaviour.

The C-level executives in any large company are disconnected from the customers who buy/use their products, being concerned with the "high level" views. But for most of those companies, they know that they have some competitors in the marketplace and will lose market share to those competitors if they fail to deliver.
In the case of domestic US ISPs, decades of almost completely unregulated consolidation have put pretty much the whole country in a situation where each geographical area has a single large incumbent ISP (read, monopoly) and many have managed to get legislators in those areas to enact laws that effectively ban or put unfeasibly large hurdles in the way of competition starting up (for reference, see the "fun" that Google has gone through when trying to build out their fiber service in various cities).
In a typical capitalist model of an economy, when the large incumbent enterprise is unable or unwilling to provide customers with the service they want, a smaller competitor can come in and provide that service - whether it is lower cost, higher speed, no/higher data cap, or monthly bills hand-delivered by Playboy Bunnies. However, that model assumes that the economic barriers to starting to offer that service are low and that there are no legal blocks protecting the incumbent - in the case of domestic ISPs, there are both - because most of the cables, backbone to door, are owned by those incumbents, a competitor either has to buy from those incumbents thus limiting their ability to compete (because the incumbent can say "no" or set the pricing to be prohibitive, or set data caps on the competitor), or the competitor has to build out their own network of cables (resulting in a high capital cost - a significant barrier to market entry - and running up against many of those legislative blocks that state or city legislators have put in place).

So the ISPs can be pretty comfortable - they know that complaints are on the rise, and that they are more unpopular now than they have been for years, but they also know that their customers have little or no choice than to keep on giving them money.

Sorry, but forcing idiot politicians to show the electorate how good a job they are doing would basically put them in a continuous election/campaigning cycle (because that is effectively their job performance review, and the Congress/Senate campaign cycle lasts for at least 6-9 months as it is), meaning that they would do even less useful work than they do now.
The fact that you are right about the attention span of voters being too short to remember anything that has not happened in the last week (not sure if I am being too generous there, sometimes I think it is much shorter than that) does not mean that the election/performance review cycle should be shortened, it means that the electorate actually need to put some effort into considering who to vote for.
Too hard? Then the electorate are too lazy/stupid/incompetent, and they get the candidate they deserve. Remember, these politicians are supposed to be the best representatives of the people in their constituency. So if the electorate are lazy, then the politician has to be only slightly less lazy.
Remember, when being chased by zombies or cannibals, you do not have to be faster than the zombies or cannibals, you just have to be faster than the dumb schmuck next to you, so that they catch him, and you get away. On in the case of politicians, they only have to be slightly better than the other guy, who has to be only slightly better than anyone else.

Yes, the technical analysis and implementation of security fixes/updates for hardware and software within a company is a set of IT tasks, but the task of budgeting for that is/should be a finance task, with oversight from C-level legal representation.
If the CEO doesn't know how to handle it, that is fine - as long as he/she understands that they are the ones who will ultimately be left holding the can for a data breach, they will have the incentive to get somebody in place who does know how to handle it - the role of the CEO is to be the figurehead and "big picture" source, not subject-matter expert in all areas.
So the CEO needs to think "this is an IT problem, but I will be carrying the can for a problem, so I need to talk to the head of IT and see what they need to help me save my job", and work from there.

BackBlaze might have their own alternative reasons, but in my case ... Because whether you are using RAID, the Reed-Solomon setup that BackBlaze are using, or no distributed data system at all, it is easier/quicker to recover data directly from a drive that is showing signs of failure than it is to restore from a backup or recover from a RAID parity check.
Yes, it means that I am removing drives from my arrays that still have useful life in them, but they get repurposed - I am quite frequently asked by friends and family for a drive they can use as a one-time transport mechanism for music, photos, videos, documents, pretty much anything, and I go to great pains to point out that the drive is potentially failing. If the data size is "only" a few GB/10's of GB, then I usually have a USB drive or 3 lying around that they can use. But I also have a few external drive caddies that I can drop an old drive into, and which is either preferable or taken as a second copy, because the USB can get lost very easily, while a 1/2 kilo drive is less "lose-able".

Purely for personal phones, another option that might work is to get a premium rate telephone number linked to your landline, and use that number on your correspondence/website/profile details (I assume that friends and people you actually want to call you have your mobile number, and never call the landline). After a month or two, the telemarketers will get an updated phone list from whatever source they use, and unless their systems are setup to prevent calls to premium rate numbers, they will start calling you... at which point the goal would be to keep them on the line as long as possible. I am not saying it would make enough money for it to be worth your time and effort, but that is entirely your choice.

Having spent a large part of my life living in Devon (a very rural part of the United Kingdom, lots of farms, tiny villages, small roads/lanes - often not wide enough for 1 car in each direction, except at specific "passing places" - with high hedges to the side limiting both long range visibility of the road ahead and the run-off/avoidance options for traffic coming in the opposite direction), I can say that driving on a road with no central line marking, which is also narrow and with limited visibility, does tend to lead to either slower speeds (the careful drivers) or much higher speeds (the drivers who fantasize about being a rally driver, and who assume nothing will be coming the other way).
Take away the line down the middle of the road, and the road feels narrower, at least to me. But there may also be an assumption that the road is a (very wide) one-way street, so the result would be that drivers move to the middle of the road. That would make life interesting if you come around the corner on such a road, and see a car driving in the middle of the road. Maybe I am not giving my fellow drivers enough credit, but when my father taught me to drive, he always reminded me "assume every other driver on the road is an incompetent idiot with no control over their vehicle"... sadly I have seen a lot of evidence that backed up his statement.
Another element came when driving the E10 highway in northern Norway and Sweden with my girlfriend (very competent driver, in a landscape that was sometimes the typical alpine "wall of rock on one side, sheer drop down the other"). She was perfectly happy and capable of driving when there was a line in the middle of the road, even with large semi-artic trucks coming in the opposite direction at 80+km/h (50+mph), but as soon as the lines disappeared because the road narrowed a bit, or there was a stretch of newly resurfaced road with no markings, she was very uncomfortable and wanted me to drive, because the road then felt restrictively narrow, especially with the trucks driving on it (there was space for the truck plus our car, but not a huge margin for error in car positioning).