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Comment Re:But has it increased by 25%? (Score 1) 317

If 50% of the accidents are caused by men, does that mean men shouldn't be allowed to drive? There are standards in the scientific community for how to do valid prospective and retrospective studies. You can then measure whether using or not using something actually increases (or not) your probability of experiencing the undesirable event.
Politics

Submission + - DHS Admits Knowledge Of Infected Technology (fastcompany.com)

smitty777 writes: Deputy Undersecretary Schaffer of the DHS National Protection and Programs Directorate confessed to being aware of foreign technology that had been imported with spyware, malware, and other security risks. According to the article, "More worryingly, the hearing specifically mentioned hardware components as possibly being compromised--which raises the questions of whether, perhaps, something as innocuous as Flash memory or embedded RFID chips could be used by interested foreign parties."

These hearings were held on July 7th to "examine the nature and extent of the current threat to America's infrastructure.

Facebook

Submission + - Facebook trapped in MySQL 'fate worse than death' (gigaom.com) 1

wasimkadak writes: According to database pioneer Michael Stonebraker, Facebook is operating a huge, complex MySQL implementation equivalent to “a fate worse than death,” and the only way out is “bite the bullet and rewrite everything.”

Not that it’s necessarily Facebook’s fault, though. Stonebraker says the social network’s predicament is all too common among web startups that start small and grow to epic proportions.

Comment Re:This is research? (Score 1) 81

Very few studies of software as it is and as it runs.

Try http://www.research.ibm.com/people/n/nickmitchell/publications/lcsd2005.pdf to a paper called "Diary of a Datum" and http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1297046 to another paper called "The causes of bloat, the limits of health". Both describe studies of large running applications in situ.

Full disclosure - I work for IBM Research and these papers were by folks in my department.

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