It totally agree, @eric3579. Who can be trusted? It's harder to know every day.

My take....
Jones is right about the science, false negatives imply you've never been exposed when you have been, so people believe they cannot transmit the virus when they may in fact be infectious, which can lead to reckless nondistancing behavior and infections because they assume they're "safe"... also even a good (not false) positive antibody test does not mean they have meaningful immunity nor does it mean they aren't infectious as this woman claims. It only means you've developed some detectable antibodies to the virus. Period. Both misconceptions are big concerns. "Which is bigger?" seems like a silly fight.

The problem is, no matter what the test says, people think it means they're safe to be around. A negative test...."I never had it so I can't spread it, gimme a kiss"...a positive test..."I had it but beat it so I'm now immune and can't spread it, gimme a kiss". Neither is correct.

I had the chicken pox twice. If a chicken pox antibody test existed, I would have tested positive after the first round and assumed I couldn't get it or transmit it afterwards, but that would have been wrong even though the results weren't a false positive. Instead, because people suck, my parents and teachers just assumed I was "safe" and sent me to school sick and may have caused an outbreak.

Both of her claims here rely on most people completely misunderstanding what the results really mean, and people completely ignoring the possibility of false results. Sadly that's proper to assume.

Interesting how she puts it, she says Jones wasn't asked to fudge any data, just maybe present it in a way that made Florida's public covid numbers look better in the run up to the election....or another way to say that is she was asked to fudge the data....if I recall she claimed she was instructed to hide large numbers of cases in categories not included in the public presentations with the intent to create a false perception of a major downturn in cases under the "open up and unmask" plan.

Wasn't the "private data" she's accused of handing to the press the unadulterated anonymous covid numbers....not really private as it's public data collected by the government for public health reasons... and not personal data as she implied. That's what I recall the charge being....maybe there's more.

The rest is unverifiable and /or personal tabloid stuff....like did they point the gun at her kids or just menace them with the guns, did she get pregnant with her student, etc. Not germane to her claims about Florida's verified misrepresentations, and inappropriate attacks against the messenger instead of the message, imo. Distasteful to me, but besides the point.

No worries, I wasn't calling you out on it, just curious to be honest.

I know it's not a popular opinion but I'm of the mindset that crime statistics should be more thoroughly collected and made public via an open data initiative. I guess the question is what would be done with the statistics? Do black communities have more incidents of violent theft? Are pedophiles more likely to be white? Do police really shoot more unarmed black people than white? Does it happen more at night or during the day? Are the offending officers always white? How long have they been in the job (is inexperience an issue, etc)?

I guess the real question is that, while knowing this information would allow us to make more informed statements about police shootings and violent crime in general, would it really help us address the core problems like social and financial inequity, education, cultural differences, etc?

Obviously data collection would need to be standardized and the presentation of it anonymized, with geographic areas generalized so as not to impact things like property values, etc.

Slashdot had a post about an upcoming (about 1 year out) phone that can run pretty standard Linux distros. I took interest because I'm very annoyed about how UNconfigurable android is.

I have a Samsung Galaxy S2, very old by now, but hardware wise it still works fine. Software wise, it is shit. Android apps are massively bloated compared to when the phone was new, so the "system" partition of the phone is too small to install anything other than like 1-2 apps. From what I can tell, rooting might not help because there are still standard partitioning requirements? I dunno. Anyway, it is a big mess compared to a desktop, where I can partition things any way I want (which works great if you know what you are doing).

Anyway, I don't want to shill for Purism, the company that will be making the phone in the Slashdot article (for one thing, the phone is still a year or so away from final production), but they seem to be doing things right. They DO have some laptops on the market now, which apparently include a relevant feature mentioned in the write-up about their upcoming phone: hardware kill switches for the microphone, camera, and WiFi/Bluetooth.

If you read the ToS (hah! as if) for things like Facebook's app or the phones / OS themselves, you might see that you are "agreeing" to this kind of data collectionspying. If that sets the bar for "good" behavior, imagine what the bad guys (NSA, other agencies, state actors, unscrupulous advertisers, malware producers, etc.) can and will do. That's why any software solution is dubious. That's why electrical tape over your webcam is better than assuming that the record light is trustworthy. That's why a hardware kill switch is a good feature if you're concerned about this (like me).

Here's links to:
an article about the hardware kill switches in Purism's laptops, and
an article about their upcoming phone the Librem 5

I don't own any of their hardware. I don't like paid shills. That being said, I'm interested in what they are doing.

It broke down along party lines with each party voting for its own measure and against the opposition's. To be honest all the proposals were shit and didn't deserve to be passed, so yea for democracy actually working. Passing knee jerk legislation in the wake of a tragedy is how we got the TSA, Guantanamo, and massive NSA data collection.

The fact the gun lobby won't let the CDC do it's job and collect data on gun violence just shows how insane political right is.

Then the right is blaming ISIS... the idiot pledged allegiance to ISIS and Hezbollah, even though they are enemies of each other. He clearly just had an issue with gays, and was using faith as an excuse. Most of the mass shootings in the US aren't done by Muslims in an act of terrorism, they are done by crazy people who have unfiltered access to guns.

I'd be fine if we don't close the gun show loophole or don't ban people from buying assault weapons, for now, so long as we first at least let the CDC get back to doing its job and collect data on gun violence. Then explore it in a few years of data collection to see what measures would be helpful. The fact the right refuses to let that happen must tell you that they know what the data will show, that some loopholes need closed.

And yes, if you are on the federal no flight list (and I haven't seen that this shooter was on such a list, just investigated twice), then you should certainly be delayed in getting a gun. That should be a huge red flag. You should then be told why you were denied and then have a right to argue for the right to own a gun and/or get off the no flight list. It should be a clear process to make such an application, and shouldn't require a lawyer. But odds are that most people on the no fly list aren't there for search history, or library records, but most are on the no fly list undoubtedly for far better reasons.

I'll fight to retain the right for most Americans to own a gun. Both a hand gun for personal home defense, and hunting rifles and the like. However if you are in a situation that requires an AR-15 to defend yourself, you are way over your head.... and don't give me some bull shit about protecting yourself from the government, remember how well having even more powerful weapons and training did for the people in Waco. Where do people who argue that those should be sold without restriction want to draw the line (and to be clear, I'm not arguing against the right to own one necessarily, but I am against buying it without restrictions, for a smaller wait time than it would take to buy a handgun)? Do we let people buy a bazooka? A surface to air missile launcher? A nuclear bomb? Where do you draw the line on putting restrictions, or at least a wait time on weapons of mass harm?

@newtboy

so i finally got my point across?
thank god!
it only took me a novella.
jesus christ,you would think me being a poet would equate to a more economical verbiage.

man do i fail.

so yeah,we are arguing two separate points.
you are arguing this specific turdnugget and i am arguing the broader implications of abuse in the future.

i still stand by my stance that i do not think this turdnugget should have lost his job.i think there could have been a much better way to have handled this situation,but as you stated (and i agree) the company was within their rights to fire him.

if i was his boss,i would have used this situation to educate,because lets be honest..this man is pretty fucking ignorant.

he even admits to not knowing any black people and had only been exposed to 9,in his entire life,and then he proceeds to vomit the most repugnant,racial shit.

ignorance is curable.
stupid is not.

but it is not the companies job to cure this neanderthal of his ignorance,but i suspect losing his job will only exacerbate an already instilled racism.

so lost opportunity and ultimately:fail.

i also think we are becoming far to comfortable and complicit in our ever-increasingly surveilled,data mined and personal data collected state.

which i am just repeating my main point,but it does concern me.

I highly doubt your car can be impounded for driving with an expired registration , even in PA. That is very nearly the least significant traffic violation there is. Of course, the police lie about that sort of thing all the time, which is probably the case here.

Even though people hate them, this is actually one of the reasons I'm all for automated traffic policing devices such as speed cams, stoplight cams and even more advanced devices as technology allows (with proper care for privacy in data collection). In the US, for instance, everybody knows you can generally drive up to 9 miles an hour over the speed limit without worry. This should not be the case. The police let this happen because if everybody is always technically speeding because that's just what's done, they can justifiably pull over and hassle whoever whenever they want to (read: minorities).

Wow, how baked are you @MrFisk?

The point you made was about Public figures and their privacy.

Regardless of how their privacy came to be violated..

(Anthony Weiner mistakenly? linked his pics on is public twitter originially. Hah.)

the result is the same:

People flocking to oogle their naked/scantily-clad bodies in photos that were meant to be private.

Isn't that the issue?


And then the rest of your comment about how..

..even private citizens should expect less privacy because of illegal data collection by the NSA..

(not unlike the illegal seizure by the Fappening hacker effectively)

Yet somehow that's okay because.. they didn't publicly share those photos.. O_o? really?

..wtf dude.. @_@

Of course, suggest a formal Data Protection Law like in Europe and everybody loses their shit (see the arguments between Europeans and Americans over the Google data privacy fiasco).

It is legal for bankrupt/insolvent companies to sell their database, but it must be to a similar company who will keep the data intact, use it for exactly the reasons the customer was told by the original company in the first place, and the customer needs to be informed of who now owns their data and also they have the right to have it deleted.

Was the data collected just so that a warranty can be honoured? Then the new company better take on the warranty or they have no rights to the data. They want to use it for marketing? Then the customer should have consented to this first.

I'm sorry mate, but i'm going to have to refute a bunch of this. And i hope i can do it without coming across as religious in my approach.

"Your "facts" are nothing but easily manipulated simulations based on theories," Excerpt from your full quote below.

-- The facts and science are not in contention and they are not "easily manipulated simulations". What we have are conclusions made by studious people based on data collected by electronic instruments world wide. The data is statistically analysed to find trends and patterns and then those trends and patterns are separately analysed to see how likely they are. When hundreds of those studies are done, consensus is formed and that is how humans come to all the theories that you adhere to every day; such as gravity, conservation of energy and momentum, etc. We then construct simulations that adhere to those theories and pass different parameters into the simulation to see what the results would be in a certain amount of time. Those parameters are the things you can change, a typical parameter might be the fractional amount of greenhouse gases per cubic metre or something like that, change in volume of polar ice per day perhaps. Thousands of studies analyse thousands of different parameter values and conclusions are drawn from the whole. That is why so many scientists now believe in climate change - because over thousands of scientific studies, the conclusions have pointed overwhelmingly and convincingly to bad news for humans.

I can't dispute your accusation that they are "based on theories". I have yet to meet a person that preferred to have their facts based on anything other than theories. A theory is a collection of ideas relating to a certain topic that are based on independent principles. The alternative is to pin words to a dartboard and throw blindfolded to construct facts. Or perhaps have a floor covered with words and let sacred chickens run round shitting our facts out for us. I'd prefer to use independent principles and the best logic we have available to us.

Please read this bit in particular
Scientists are not tricking or fooling anyone, there is no money in it for a scientist. If they try to lie, they are ridiculed by the rest of the scientists. If you spend 3 years at any decent university doing any science then you will discover that the scientific method is pretty sacred to scientists because it's the only way the field progresses.

BUT BUT BUT politicians get hold of the studies and lie to you about what they mean or how best to solve the problems they illuminate. They want your money, and they manipulate the science to get your money. They can do that because most people are not scientists, and need someone to explain it to them. So my advice is that you do not choose politicians to do that job, but instead use independent adherents to the scientific method who choose to dedicate their lives to scientific study - like Neil de Grasse Tyson who speaks as a scientist... and if he did not, his reputation within the scientific community would be in tatters, and other budding scientists like myself (and others) in this community would be highlighting just how full of shit he is.

So, are scientists lying to us, or are politicians lying to us? What seems more likely?

I'm not all for the Common Core because I've decided that teaching is an imperfect duty ( http://www.uark.edu/campus-resources/rlee/intrau04/oh/k-perf.html ).

What I mean is, the flexibility required of the duty of teaching makes it so hard nosed data collection is never going to accurately reflect the quality of the teaching being done. Therefore, the standardized testing that goes hand in hand with the common core should be abolished.

I have a student right now who can't stop his limbs from going numb and needs to constantly leave class because of some scary combination of ADHD meds and energy drinks he took. I've spoken with mom and the nurse, given him assignments, but beyond that there's not much I can do to reach out to this student. It is not fair or right that my pay be tied to a student(s) in a bizarre situation beyond my control.

And yes, I could be a teacher from pop culture films that follows him home and just mentors this kid, but this student is not alone. I've got literally 150 students all with unique problems and baggage. I get them for 5 hours a week (when they are actually there) and they spend the other 163 hours of the week doing who knows what.

THAT SAID

This video, however, has obvious motives besides just abolishing the common core. Sex education SHOULD be a part of the curriculum and states that adopt sex education tend to have the lowest incidents of teen pregnancies. Mississippi teaches their sex ed classes by passing around peppermint patties (yes, really: http://articles.latimes.com/2014/apr/02/nation/la-na-ms-teen-pregnancy-20140403 ) and, not surprisingly, has the highest incidents of teen pregnancy.

Get it through your fucking skull, religious nuts. Teaching sex ed PREVENTS kids from having sex, not the other way around.

Common core is certainly not something positive that's happened in the education system in the past year, but I'd still take it over what some jesus cheerleaders want to replace it with.

really need more details about this... When they had brand new devices, does that mean they were un-patched for known security holes? Or are all these exploits the Russians use unknown, and there are currently no patches, such that a completely patched/updated device is still vulnerable?

Any WiFi captive-portal "login" page could inject known browser exploits into the html - If you use your own MyFi (personal hotspot), and are willing to pay huge for roaming international data, then this form of attack isn't possible.

And the coffee shop owner probably doesn't know that their wireless access point is serving up malicious code. It was either hacked by who they bought it from, or whoever installed it, or by some hacker who went to the shop. But shame on the airport's IT security - if they have official WiFi that was also hacked. (but the criminals might have set up their own wireless and called it "Free Airport WiFi")

Every OS on every device (not just Windows) has security holes, Mac OS X included. The hole gets exploited to allow running some piece of software that the user didn't intend, and that software (malware/virus) collects user data and uploads it back to the criminals servers on the network (these 'data collection' servers are also usually attacked/compromised computers, so they can't be traced directly back to the criminals).

My advice to tourists would be to bring a "dumb" phone for voice calls. (keep bluetooth turned off though) Then you'll remember how great it was to only charge it once a week

i have been loving your commentary pertaining to the NSA data collection.
i have been fumbling for the right words to express how i see and feel about this whole situation and i fear my ideas are just falling into a giant vat of incomprehensibility.

you and a few others are speaking so much clearer than i.
good work my friend.

@Yogi
well said my friend.

ya know.
i was talking with @VoodooV on another thread concerning this topic.
he was of the opinion that this is all about perspective and to look at the bigger picture.

now i actually agree with that, but i think the perspective is on how we approach this subject.

@Yogi and i are not coming from some alex jones 'new world order" premise but rather a historical one.
we do not trust our government because our government has proven over and over they do not deserve our trust.

and as @Yogi alluded to,the list of abuses of power by the US government is massive and extensive.

remember in 2006 when it become public that the telecoms had call system rerouters in data collection?those small rooms?
and remember how the bush administration push forward to give the telecoms retroactive immunity to avoid any civil suits?

my main point is that whenever a government gains a new power or authority they WILL use it.since 9/11 and the "war on terror" (which is just a war on ideology) our government has broadened its power and authority ten fold and it HAS USED that power.

this is not opinion.this is fact.

guess it all comes down to trust.
do you trust this government to obey the law?
i dont because they go out of their way to be creative little monkeys to circumvent the law,or redefine it to suit their purposes.

i know i am going off on a rant here,so let me end with this:
historically empires in their last stages have always become concentrated centers of power and certain criteria have always become evident.
1.the over-reach of empires always culminate with an extreme disparity between rich and poor.
2.they become incredibly militarized.
3.infrastructure and commerce begin to break down.
4.nationalism reaches fever pitch.(see:tea party)
5.those in power (the governing class) tend to become more corrupt and less idealistic and begin to pick the remnants of empire for their own enrichment.hastening the demise of empire.
6.the ruling class becomes extremely paranoid and begins to focus its attention on its own citizens.seeing enemies everywhere.
7.power seeks only to further its own power and it becomes a cycle of cannibalism.

by my statements here i am in no way disregarding or dismissing some of the great achievements that have been won by this country.but those milestones were ALWAYS because of the people and not ONE was ever implemented by a benevolent government.

so while i trust the people i,in no way,trust my government.
because they have proven they do not deserve my trust.

Unfounded assertion.

This is a move to increase search traffic by making Google more convenient to use on the go, then they can make an additional fortune off the same sort of data collection they do now.

When Android was just a rumor called "Google Phone", the tinfoil hats were saying you'd have to listen to a 30 second ad before making a call, or that your calls would have commercial breaks. My guess is, 4 years after Glass finally launches, you'll look just as silly as they do.