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.)

In the 1997/1998 timeframe, the difference was that the submissions were pretty good, so rubberstamping worked OK. There were still frequent omissions and inaccuracies, but this was further handled by the commentary being exceedingly high quality. Frequently someone working on the technology, project, or software, would chime in with clarification and because comment counts were low the signal would get through the noise.

So no, the "editors" really were never that, but the system worked decently when it was a smaller user base of more knowledgable players. Then as the slide towards uselessness and hostile users began, accounts, scoring, moderation, metamoderation, and so on were all instituted, but there's really no overcoming ignorance in volume.

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.

Wow, this apologia is +5 insightful. I guess this shows how the Slashdot mass falls on this issue.

Now you really sound racist.

There is cultural shift over time in what terms are considered appropriate. This particular shift occurred about 45 years ago.

Oh, the entire culture was obsessed with torture and killing. Do you realize how racist this sounds?

However, this is really a barn-door closing operation. They have committed an enormous breach of trust. This is the start of a many year climb to become acceptable to purchase again.

Waterfox has already embedded malware in its downloads by choice. Steer clear.

I would countersuggest 1999.