I understand the legal principles that got us here, but it is still fairly amazing to think about how one of our biggest information vulnerabilities as a society comes from this weird game where it's wrong for the government to create or store these monitoring dossiers, but very right for the government to demand private businesses make them so they can sit around pending subpoena.

Years and years of marketing about security and privacy, only to get clowned by a dev team of like 8 people at Beeper reverse-engineering their bread & butter.

I guess they're "fixing" it quickly.

More funny than surprising, really.

Talking isn't *necessarily* proportionate to language acquisition: my mother-in-law once attested that my husband was extremely quiet until he blurted out a complete sentence (asking about some stranger on the beach) when he was 5. But even if we suppose it were:

"Because the study couldn't capture parents' silent phone use, including reading emails, texting or quietly scrolling through websites or social media, Brushe said they might have underestimated how much screen usage is affecting children."

If the researchers had been able to detect those other minutes of screen time not collected, but the children's language behavior *is* reliably collected, wouldn't that make language loss per minute of screen time go down, not up?

There also seems to be a presumption that screen time is a 1:1 replacement for child conversation, which would probably not be true across all households. (If parents were perfect like that, we wouldn't need this study to begin with.)

Please read up on the Central Park Five, or just about any lynching in the South: rushes to judgement are hardly limited to liberals worrying about lacrosse players in the past decade.

At its best, our legal system is supposed to protect the rights of the accused — falsely or otherwise —with due process to ensure justice happens. The court of public opinion can try to infect a court of law with its biases, but the reverse is not something I'll hold my breath for.

Have funds Hastert didn't transfer to the blackmailer been impounded?

The tax evasion charge was primarily innovative because of jurisdiction. What the mob did was, behaviorally, little different from modern-day regulatory capture.

The federal officials charged with enforcing (federal) tax lawwere removed from — and thus more immune to— the culture of corruption that allowed the shake downs assaults to go unchecked by local governmental officials. You can say the local DA "should" have not been enfeebled by greed as much as a socialist can say everyone "should" not go hungry.

Most political ideologies eventually play victim to the weakness of human nature.

Then rail on about the obscene laws around civil forfeiture (as John Oliver has done) rather than these rather mundane-on-their-own reporting requirements.

And perhaps when such assessments of worthiness become as exact a science as you presume them to be, such nonsense can be done away with. My experience with getting jobs in tech — and my hearing of interviews in other fields of employment — suggest at best a loose relationship between most interviewing techniques and many skills actually relevant to completing projects in a corporate environment.

The folks that run these companies are bright people, and they're more than able to decide if it furthers their interests to (publicly, at least) go on about diversity in their employee statistics. Corporations may be legal persons, but they themselves are not capable of feeling guilt.

And you of course remain free to found your own company devoid of such considerations.

As there is in search.

Consumers' money? I don't recall spending money to use a search engine.

As a society its reasonable proposition that we would want our search engines to be competing on simply being the best search engine, without risk of it quietly subverting its integrety to push any other agenda / product / viewpoint / etc. Unbundling them from commercial interests would be a part of that goal.

That presumes much about what a "search engine" is, actually. If I query Bing with [how tall is Kim Jong Un], and it flat out tells me, rather than pointing me to Wikipedia or whatever, am I harmed? Is Wikipedia?

Most of the complaints the EU competition office is fielding are from other purveyors of information â" commercial information â" on the Internet, and most of what's at issue regards consumers attempting to conduct commercial activity. If you ask for the lowest-cost flight from London to Istanbul, what should the "best search engine" tell you?

I'm thus still at a loss as to what this "behaviour you don't want from google" is, precisely.

Another anecdote: my copays are going way up, though my deductibles are staying stable and my employer is incentivizing me to switch to a high-deductible plan (with a generous HSA contribution to offset.) Basically, some well-paid professionals who had a lot of income by way of cushy health coverage are going to see some of that slip away as the new regulations ("Cadillac Tax") essentially close that loophole.

If you were used to being well-paid via colonoscopies, yeah this change sucks. If you've been at all concerned with healthcare inflation (via Medicare) destroying the federal budget in your lifetime, then it seems an okay tradeoff.

My English teacher taught me how to interpret both literal definitions (denotation) as well as those containing subtext (connotation).

"Abnormal" has a negative connotation — its usage typically implies something is different *and shouldn't be.* Consider an abnormal growth in your chest, for instance.

If one wishes to neutrally or positively highlight something a few standard deviations away from the mean, there are plenty of more appropriate English words for that, cf. "rare", "unusual", "exceptional", "extraordinary."

English, as a language, is great (and challenging for non-native speakers) because its million-plus words allow people to say a lot with subtlety.

Hit me back when you find Mensa documentation welcoming folks to their abnormal membership.

In most parts of the US, a basketball program paid to have more white players would be called a private school. Nothing wrong with those...

I for one could also imagine myriad other ways to pump money into schools that would advance my goals better, but clearly my goals, and yours, and perhaps those of society do not line up perfectly with those of Ye Giant Company at issue here.

Women are of course different from men in ways perceivable by corporations who do hiring. The justification could be as simple as helping stoke a larger female share of STEM candidates, so the company can be as or more discriminating in hiring for talent while maintaining diversity goals that help avoid Github-like workplace cultures (and the resulting productivity hiccups they create). There's really no need to pin programmes like this on the hat of misguided liberalism.