You only need a small percentage of your companies to succeed, and even then, you only need them to succeed within the constraints of delivering a great exit, not actually standing alone as a viable, well-managed company.
The other N% of your mini-startups can fall on their face, and you're still doing fine.
This is not evidence for anything other than what works best for you; throwing kids in the deep end and having enough of them survive that you can ignore N% that drown.
Your position is not great advice for the majority that will drown.
We willingly participated in building a massive anti-consumer corporate surveillance state, called it "analytics", and then are surprised when the government jumps onboard.
> what was the excuse for voting for him again in 2012?
Romney. Unfortunately.
> One day they bitch about invasion of privacy the next day they want the same people to have every bit of control over their health care.
In one instance we have the institution of a massive surveillance state, with always-on data gathering of "meta-data" across the internet and phone calls, and seemingly secret-if-any limitations on how that data is used.
"Trust us", they say.
In the other, we have difficult-to-abuse sharing of medical data, subject to transparency, protected by extremely strong HIPAA laws.
Anyone who tries to talk that actually knows anything worth talking about. I assumed that was an obvious implication of the parent poster's statement, but I guess not.
If I read an inflammatory and disturbingly arrogant comment, in which personal opinions are presented as facts, and contrarianism is practiced as an artform, there's a near 100% chance tptacek wrote it.
You seem to need it more. Let me help: "n. an adherent of fascism or similar right-wing authoritarian".
Sounds about right.
Mussolini said: "Fascism, sitting on the right, could also have sat on the mountain of the center ... These words in any case do not have a fixed and unchanged meaning: they do have a variable subject to location, time and spirit. We don't give a damn about these empty terminologies and we despise those who are terrorized by these words"
Quoting Robert Paxton's "The Anatomy of Fascism": facism is "... a form of political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline, humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing and external expansion."
McCarthy was obsessed with "The Red Menace", and was willing to abandon just about any ethical or legal constraint to both cleanse the United States, and to spread his idea of Americanism.
He enlisted industry, traditional elites, and whatever political support he could find his obsessive pursuit of cleansing the US of communism (and homosexuality).
What's especially scary is that you write off his wholesale destruction of careers and lives as an ethically justified approach to the problems of the Cold War (and his problems with homosexuality), despite the tactics baring a striking similarity to the CCCP's enforcement of party politics through social, commercial, and direct governmental intimidation.
We're lucky that McCarthy was never truly unleashed on the Red Menace; your implied support of him and his tactics is abhorrent.
The 'back door' system support isn't as complicated as you make it out to be. Centralized administrative access to user data must exist for support, maintenance, and legal purposes, and it will be implemented throughout the organization without anyone batting an eye.
In addition, internal analytics systems will have reason to tap into data streams/events, as will content-based advertising systems.
All of these things are often designed to provide general interfaces; locking them down is done through generic privilege levels and access controls. The people managing those access controls are few, and may not even know the true purpose for the controls they've authorized. Indeed, someone could requisition the insertion of a content analysis system that was fed user data, appeared to be a legitimate deployment, and yet was actually a core service used to push data to the government.
Or their marching orders are to provide live data collection on specific government-identified suspects, rather than live data collection on all users.
In which case, they could claim to be lawfully complying with information requests that are "not as broad", even if the system as designed makes it as easy for the NSA as hitting a "monitor this person" button.
It also wouldn't take vast systemic corporate knowledge. All centralized systems have centralized administrative control that allow for in-depth view and analysis of user accounts and data, and most large-scale systems have relatively powerful and easy-to-use tooling (especially to support customer service, sales, etc).
Complete access to those systems is generally restricted due to the likelihood for abuse, but there remain valid internal management reasons for such access.
Adding to those systems to allow the NSA unfettered (or barely fettered) access could be done without having to alert the entire organization that their internal management systems, which they built knowingly, and have no reason to distrust, have been subverted to allow for on-demand government spying.
Most people never review source code, and they certainly don't disassemble and review all the binaries. 'Many eyes' is a security fallacy in cases like this.
> You are so incredibly misinformed. An address book cannot simply be mined. Those are extended permissions and access requires explicit opt in from the user at the OS level before the OS exposes any of that information.
It used to be possible without requiring opt-in. What I've seen in some applications has been piggy-backing permissions -- that is, wait until you have a legitimate reason to request access to the user's address book, location, etc, and then also send that information to your analytics service.
> Furthermore, do you have any data on how much battery, or bandwidth heap uses? No? Ok, please spare the FUD.
Sure I do. They're uploading every 15 seconds, which keeps the WWAN and/or WiFi links up all the time. That can shave at least 25% off of battery runtime (exact numbers aren't easy, given that there are a lot of other factors at play. The basic battery device recommendation is simply: let unused hardware be powered down whenever you can).
There are very limited CPU and battery resources on a mobile device, and it's ridiculous to waste them without asking, specially if you're planning on pushing a massive torrent of mostly-useless data.
> It goes without saying that the user has to be made aware that certain data is collected. I wonder, have you ever heard of a privacy policy?
Ah, right. Put it in the huge document that no user ever reads (because it's huge and unreadable), and that excuses everything.
This is the same argument that sleazy people make in favor of opt-out mailing list spam.
> I agree this is also a good way to ask for permission. Does Apple do this in iOS?
Yep, just once.
> I don't agree that "this user pressed this button at this time" quite fits into the same category of privacy though.
You're going to consume the user's resources by sending that information, and most users don't really want you to (for obvious reasons), so it seems most ethical to ask first.
The other N% of your mini-startups can fall on their face, and you're still doing fine.
This is not evidence for anything other than what works best for you; throwing kids in the deep end and having enough of them survive that you can ignore N% that drown.
Your position is not great advice for the majority that will drown.