> And was there a breach of a the Terms of Service by companies taking all this data and using it for non-academic purposes? Yes there was.
There's a legal concept of 'waiver' meaning that even if something is prohibited in a contract, but the parties don't enforce that part, then that part is later not enforceable. Facebook was fully aware of this behavior, chose not to enforce the ToS, and therefore it waived that clause. Therefore no breach.
This is fun to watch. The most evil company I can think of is being exposed for its core purpose. Are people going to realize what a monster Facebook is?
No, Americans will continue to give zero fucks. A few more people will be outraged, but business as usual will continue. Maybe Facebook will claim they "fixed" the problem that created this "breach" (as it's being called), but nothing will change
>"No, Americans will continue to give zero fucks."
You realize theres 2 billion people on FB but only 330 million people in the US right? That's many more people than just Americans giving "zero fucks."
Not if you believe that there is a 1-to-1 relationship between Facebook accounts and real, living humans.
I find it more likely that Facebook is completely unwilling to admit that many of its accounts are not genuine representations of a real, living person.
When millions of Americans get their news from Facebook, it's doubtful that many current users will find out what is happening. It is certainly similar to the Fox News effect.
The news feed of a Hacker News frequenter is very atypical. You likely have more friends in the tech industry, and thus you're likely to see posts on this story.
Your comment calls into question the anecdotal evidence used to dismiss a claim made with no evidence whatsoever.
I have a similar anecdote, but mine does not match the mitigating circumstance you ventured.
Regardless, even a less-than-credible personal account clears the bar of required evidence to dismiss the above claim, since that requirement is currently zero.
I downvoted you due to the doublethink of providing an out for good pharma companies to exist, while calling all firearms companies evil. I can see having a problem with IMI or other state funded companies that are a part of a Nation's greater military industrial complex, but on what grounds do you consider Glock or Remington evil?
A pretty obvious distinction is that pharma companies make tools for saving lives, while consumer gun companies make tools for taking lives.
(And yes, I'm aware of the theory that consumer guns are for taking lives in self defense. But in 2012, there were 33,563 gun deaths in the US, only 259 of which were justifiable homicides, so it's at least reasonable to think think that whatever the intent of gun companies, it's not working out like one might hope.)
The main reason for the second amendment is deterring authoritarianism. It works, regardless of force proportion. Occupying Afghanistan was a pain that was ultimately not worthwhile for anyone who tried it.
Regarding self-defense, there is also a benefit in deterrence - look at relative crime rates in the most heavily armed per-capita states.
> The main reason for the second amendment is deterring authoritarianism. It works, regardless of force proportion.
No. It's delusion. In doubt, feds will fuck you over and shoot your corpse when they're done. There is no such thing as stopping the police, short of welding yourself shut in a tank, but you're bound to run out of gas, air or food/water. Or being blown up with an RPG, if you do enough damage.
The only thing that works as a deterrence to authoritarianism is masses - but you really need MASSES, as in hundreds of thousands of people, not a couple hundred neckbeards with guns. Hell, G20 Hamburg was in the upper 5-digit range of protesters with a decent amount of experienced and willing rioters and it got royally screwed. I don't nearly see any protest coming near that range of numbers soon... except, maybe and hopefully, if Trump decides to be a totally ignorant idiot and fires Mueller.
The case for deterring authoritarianism is not G20 protests, it's
(a) groups like Deacons for Defence (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deacons_for_Defense_and_Justic...) where the presence of weapons serves as a deterrence, or if you want to turn to more grim times,
(b) events like Warsaw Ghetto Uprising (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warsaw_Ghetto_Uprising)
where the concentration of weapons counts for forcing an oppressor to suffer casualties instead of just rolling over the unarmed opposition. That is what the quote you are responding to alludes to.
Finally, weapons also serve as deterrent for the out-of-control forces, e.g.
(c) 1992 Los Angeles Riots (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1992_Los_Angeles_riots) when the government is not acting directly or indirectly against a group but is simply not acting at all during critical time
All of these has happened before, and all of these will happen again, during our lifetime.
Comparing guns per capita on a small sampling, the top 5 most violent states per one survey are Louisiana (gun ownership: #11), Alaska (gun ownership: #1), Tennessee (gun ownership: #15), Delaware (gun ownership: #51), and Nevada (gun ownership: #16). All over the place, at least so far. Maybe a small bias towards "more guns=more violence per capita", but with such a huge outlier with Delaware, that makes me imagine that the overall data is pretty noisy.
My impression is that there is a much stronger indicator of guns-per-capita: population density. The top 5 guns per capita states are: Alaska (population density: #50), Arkansas (population density: #40), Idaho (population density: #44), West Virginia (population density: #29), Wyoming (population density: #49). Again, somewhat messy, but there seems like a strong bias towards more rural areas.
This makes sense to me. In America, a driving force for many people with guns is less pure self defense and more sport and recreation. Of which the opportunities are quite a bit more readily available in rural areas.
Cars kill people in accidents[1]. Guns are used for this on purpose. By your logic, we should also ban food because it feeds the people using the cars and the guns.
Guns can still be used in the military, nobody ever argued that (vis-a-vis to you comment about Hitler & the russians). And btw, about those russians, they found new ways (tools invented by the americans) to screw with the world, didn't they? How are guns defending us now?
[1] in recent years, terrorists have been using cars to kill people too, but not the same extent.
They manufacture weapons. It's pretty much the most black and white fit for an evil company that can exist. That seems incredibly obvious to the point that I sincerely doubt you had to ask.
1. Cars kill a lot more people than guns. Every year. And while cars can be useful a lot of the driving is more ir less meaningless.
2. While guns might be used for evil they are also used for good: there is no doubt in my mind that our big neighbour to the east (I'm Norwegian) would have invaded a number of European countries during the 50-ies, 60-ies and 70-ies if those countries hadn't been prepared to defend themselves.
Not to detract from what you say (it was interesting, I originally thought cars were much more dangerous in USA as well and I was very wrong) but from what I can see in 2017 cars were back on top.
> Ah yes, expanding my world view that we should encourage school shootings. ... If only we were all so enlightened as Americans
That's not what I said at all (I even offered non-evil usages that occur daily, globally). Twisting words will get you nowhere here on HN (and in fact earns you a flag). Not to mention a dash of xenophobia to go with it doesn't do you any favors.
I won't engage with someone who twists words and groups entire populations together under false pretenses. I'll simply tell you what other users have here:
I don’t think we have fully enough information yet, but if a political campaign is using analytics to clearly advertise their campaign, fine, that’s being straightforward.
If a political campaign is posting in ways that do not clearly label it as a political campaign, and is lying to people viewing the data it is paying to show, would you agree that’s kind of a different situation?
There’s not enough information yet I think to claim what was shown, but if political campaigns are not labeling their ads clearly, that is in violation of a variety of state - and some federal - laws.
> Facebook was surprised we were able to suck out the whole social graph, but they didn’t stop us once they realized that was what we were doing.
> They came to office in the days following election recruiting & were very candid that they allowed us to do things they wouldn’t have allowed someone else to do because they were on our side.
I do adhere to the view that wrong is wrong even when others do it, but I'd like a better look into the big data fantasy of the past decade, and that includes a deeper look into the times when this social/data/analytics/targeting bonanza seemed sweet because the teams who were more adept at it were not associated with people or institutions one abhors.
Whataboutism taints conversations when it's an excuse; other kinds of excuses also shut down conversations that should be had.
More plainly, the CA approach to starting the graph was nauseatingly scammy, but how many friends of Obama supporters (and perhaps Clinton - the API changed before the campaign, but maybe some data persisted with the DNC) were aware that their data was being processed by political parties?
Interesting how whataboutism became a common use term recently -- when people started pointing out hypocrisy, suddenly we care about whataboutism?
Hypocrisy is what I care about and there's enough of it to repave the entire Interstate system. When someone criticized Obama or Democrats, the first words in response was some variation of "Bush..." Blame Bush was a competitive sport. Whatabout that?
In its original incarnation it was not so bad. If one criticizes the Russian government for their low-level corruption and it responds with "but you are lynching negroes", that is basically irrelevant and does not invalidate the criticism and one can categorize the response as whataboutism to disregard it.
But it is disingenuous to use it to disregard others who point out hypocrisy. If you want others not to use a useful strategy, you can't use it yourself and then whine when they respond in kind, telling them they should stop without making any assurances that you yourself will. It's like telling someone they should only fight with fists while you're wearing brass knuckles.
Say targeted advertising is like a nuke. If you complain when your enemy drops a nuke on you, but not when you drop a nuke on them, your problem is obviously not with nukes, just with your enemies dropping them on you.
This whole media campaign against Facebook is aimed to prevent something like Trump 2016 from ever happening again by denying the people who [i]shouldn't win[/i] modern tools. It has nothing to do with privacy.
Sure do. This kind of double speak is rampant. One that bubbles to the top of my head is that when some people were targeted for anti-HRC messages(I think specifically it was Haitian Americans on the gulf coast), then that was labeled as "voter suppression", but targeting likely voters for Trump and spreading negative information about him, say the access Hollywood tapes, is "informing the voters"
The bias there is largely do to the differences in behaviors and histories of the parties involved. It's one thing for a charity group to run a donation center, and a wholly different thing for a life-long con artist to do it.
If I wanted to say that, I would have. The situation today is very different from when Obama campaigned. For one, the FBI & CIA didn't announce that Russians interfered during Obama's campaign. So it's really no mystery that people are paying attention to what the Trump campaign is doing.
And that's ignoring the fact that Cambridge Analytica was apparently breaking laws.
Either way, it is ok for the media to 'influence people'. If you're going to be vague, then we may as well say that is their whole reason for being. And if I wanted them to advocate one message over another, what difference is it to you? That's politics.
There’s a difference between implying that a racial/ethnic group will get hassled or deported, etc due to their race and saying that Trump said douchey things in an interview.
Voter suppression is a term of art that means something. Democrats generally don’t engage in it because more people voting usually translates to more people voting democrat.
Bit of a difference between "he said <this>" vs "news" stories about Clinton conspiring to keep drug prices high. The source for the latter was an email where someone rejected the idea of negotiating american prices so as to avoid derailing ongoing negotiations into drug pricing in Africa.
It's also not news when it's some story about a town in <state> adopting Sharia law. At least the drug pricing thing is halfway true in some convoluted form.
> In some European cities (Munich?) autonomous trains often have "drivers" who do nothing because that preferred to fighting the union.
Many cities with autonomous trains indeed have drivers. But they don't do nothing, they sit there for emergencies and to set the go signal when leaving the station. In Austria for instance that's not because of unions but because the job of the driver is at this point considered important. For fully autonomous operation you need extra security features on the track which were not employed (fully sealed off track in stations, better emergency corridors, more reliable remote door controls etc.).
Where fully automated trains are in operation there are never any drivers.
> For fully autonomous operation you need extra security features on the track which were not employed (fully sealed off track in stations, better emergency corridors, more reliable remote door controls etc.).
FWIW Lyon's Line D is fully automated (GOA4) and doesn't use enclosed track. It may have changed since but it used to not even have turnstiles, you could walk up to the track without any pause.
The only incident I can remember is a drunk who literally fell on a train from one of the elevated passages over the track.
Union culture can be significant though. From my understanding, in the US I'd expect a union to refuse any form of automation indefinitely; in other countries, they might accept it if the redundant staff are provided training for another job with good employment prospects.
Union culture is as antagonistic in France as in the US (for the same reasons that corporations are antagonistic) and it not only has multiple GOA4 metro systems running right now across the country[0], Paris is actually converting existing lines to full automation.
All of Germany (which has a much more cooperative union culture) has two GOA4 lines both in Nuremberg, meanwhile Copenhagen Metro (in highly unionised Denmark) was created fully automated back in 2002.
I see no evidence that unions have anything to do with it.
[0] quite literally: Lille, Toulouse, Lyon, Rennes, Paris
I'd be surprised if the unions representing the train drivers in France were just all "ok, cool, automate away and fire the drivers when you're done". Did they require that drivers be employed in other positions, or receive some sort of training for different jobs?
Unions in the US are annoyingly different: most (at least those that I'm even passingly familiar with) seem to have one major goal: keeping the status quo (with regular pay and benefits increases for its members, of course). They generally do not go for "hey, we're going to eliminate your jobs, but we'll compensate you in such a way that you'll continue to be gainfully employed elsewhere".
> I'd be surprised if the unions representing the train drivers in France were just all "ok, cool, automate away and fire the drivers when you're done". Did they require that drivers be employed in other positions, or receive some sort of training for different jobs?
Often that topic does not even come up because companies are not firing people to begin with like they do in the US. They just transition into a new role (for instance they could become light rail drivers in the same network where automation is not yet achievable).
Interesting. Is there that much slack in employment to cover that? I mean, if you automate a transit line, presumably you're displacing dozens of now-former train operators. It would surprise me if they always have productive, useful jobs to move people to in these situations.
