Ben 's Techdirt Comments

Latest Comments (336)

• On the post: 100 Million Pennies For Your Thoughts? DEA Hands MuckRock A $1.4 Million Estimate For Responsive Documents

  

  Ben ( profile ), 09 Feb, 2015 @ 09:50am

  Can someone FOIA the estimate?

  I wonder how much they would say it would cost to get all documents (and calculations) related to that $1.4 million estimate.

• On the post: Germany's Spies Store 11 Billion Pieces Of Phone Metadata A Year — And Pass On 6 Billion To The NSA

  

  Ben ( profile ), 04 Feb, 2015 @ 06:17am

  Math?

  Using the numbers provided:
  
  220 million/day x 365 days = 80 billion / year
  500 million/month x 12 months = 6 billion / year
  
  where does the 11 billion from the title come from?

• On the post: Wichita Police Respond To Request For Shooting Incident Details With A Handful Of Fully-Redacted Pages

  

  Ben ( profile ), 30 Jan, 2015 @ 09:41pm

  Re:

  Officer: "He reached for his waistband, so I protected myself and shot him."
  
  Supervisor: "Sounds justified to me."
  
  --- so where does your "not moving your hands down" come into this? All you can hope for is video evidence of the incident ... but we've already experienced DA's ignoring video evidence.

• On the post: Boston City Employees Barred From Hating On Olympics; Mayor Says Free Speech Still Intact

  

  Ben ( profile ), 22 Jan, 2015 @ 06:39pm

  Re: Two points

  I think the distinction is between people speaking as employees of Boston vs speaking as individuals.
  
  This restricts the Boston Police Commissioner from saying that hosting the Olympics would be a disaster, but William B. Evans (who happens to be the current commissioner) could express that opinion; I guess it would depend on HOW he expressed his opinion.
  
  I think a Boston Olympics would be a disaster; I don't work for Boston or the state, but I just live in the area. There is no way to do it "on the cheap" and it will leave behind so many white elephants that Boston will be saddled with (or should that be howdah'd with...) that it will ruin the city's financials for the long term.

• On the post: UK Bill: Nursery Staff Must Let Us Know When Toddlers Are At Risk For Becoming Terrorists

  

  Ben ( profile ), 08 Jan, 2015 @ 12:13pm

  Prevent what?

  ... bolster its Prevent anti-terrorism plan.

  So, why are they against terrorists?

• On the post: As Time Warner Cable Defends Merger Plans, It Keeps Gouging Customers With Obnoxious New Sneaky Fees

  

  Ben ( profile ), 30 Dec, 2014 @ 04:02pm

  fractions!

  The company said the charges only represent a fraction of what it pays to programmers

  2/100 may be a fraction, but so is 100/2; guess which one they would choose.

• On the post: Cleveland Police Union Rep: Citizens Think They Understand The Law? Ridiculous!

  

  Ben ( profile ), 17 Dec, 2014 @ 11:17am

  Re:

  I'm sorry to say that the Supreme Court has decided that "ignorance of the law" (by police!) is excusable.

• On the post: DOJ Releases Report On Cleveland Police Department Investigation And It's Bad News All The Way Down

  

  Ben ( profile ), 08 Dec, 2014 @ 05:05pm

  CDP? CPD? GDP?

  I presume the TLA's are all referring to the same organization, but I was starting to wonder what "CDP officers" and "GDP officers" were. I see that CDP is Cleveland Division of Police, but was the GDP reference (in the first paragraph "highlighted") a typo?
  
  Tim: if the report is referring to them as CDP, I think you should have stuck with that rather than throwing in "CPD."
  
  ... but I think just referring to them as "Police Out On Patrol Emergency Responders" (POOPERs) might have been more appropriate.

• On the post: DailyDirt: In The Long Run, We're All Dead

  

  Ben ( profile ), 20 Nov, 2014 @ 08:02am

  Re: Re: What are the odds?

  I don't think I've heard of anyone actually dying due to an asteroid. No one on the International Space Station has died, right? If the person was on Earth, they would have been killed by either a meteor (or meteorite after it killed them...; thank you They Might Be Giants!).
  
  If there are 7 Billion people on the planet, and the odds are roughly 70 million to one, shouldn't that mean roughly 100 people have died from asteroid/meteor/meteorite/space debris?

• On the post: Techdirt's Response To Roca Labs' Demand For A Retraction

  

  Ben ( profile ), 10 Oct, 2014 @ 04:08pm

  Re: Re: I looked,

  Obviously that can't be the article. The fourth paragraph of the demand letter clearly begins:
  
       In your September 22, 2104 article
  
  ... and Techdirt would not have filed that in a link to https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20140922/etc.
  
  Give Mike a little credit for indexing the articles correctly.

• On the post: Australian AG Insists New Anti-Terror Law Only Allows What It Allows; Refuses To Say What It Allows

  

  Ben ( profile ), 25 Sep, 2014 @ 11:51am

  Re: 51st, maybe?

  They'd never be allowed/invited because they have an (actually working) assault weapons ban.

• On the post: Justice Dept. Official: We Could Get Lois Lerner's Emails From Backups, But It's Too Hard So Naaaaaah

  

  Ben ( profile ), 27 Aug, 2014 @ 07:20am

  Re: Oh, the stories I could tell you about backups

  Which is why:

  And if the backup system isn't working, then fire everyone everywhere because this kind of thing is no joke.

  Having "backup" just to check a box that says "yes we backup our systems" means nothing if the process isn't tested. Disaster Recovery is a level above basic backup, but for critical systems (and can you reasonably claim that the IRS isn't critical?) it has to be taken seriously. Fire the IT department; if they can't do it in-house, outsource it; there are companies that do this for a living.

• On the post: EasyDNS Tries To Balance Bogus Requests To Take Down Legit Foreign Online Pharmacies Against Truly Rogue Pharmacies

  

  Ben ( profile ), 26 Aug, 2014 @ 10:50am

  Police?

  While some people complained about EasyDNS's new police

  Police? I believe you meant Policy.

• On the post: Military Prefers To Keep Its Head In The Sand: Bans All Employees From Visiting The Intercept

  

  Ben ( profile ), 22 Aug, 2014 @ 07:37am

  Any website?

  Please do not go to any website entitled “The Intercept” for it may very well contain classified material.

  So, if I set the title of my web page(s) to be "The Intercept", the military would not be allowed to visit it? Does this apply to the military in cyber command? If so, cool! Now I know how to avoid inspection by the military :-)

• On the post: Administration Proudly Announces That If Your 'We The People' Petition Aligns With Its Priorities, Something Might Actually Happen

  

  Ben ( profile ), 19 Aug, 2014 @ 08:23am

  Folks?

  Folks here at the White House [...]

  One could wish those are the same "folks" from the "Some folks were tortured" admission; they certainly need to have some "Enhanced Legislative Techniques" used on them.

• On the post: Amazon To Hachette And Authors: Here, Let Us Explain Basic Price Elasticity To You

  

  Ben ( profile ), 30 Jul, 2014 @ 10:16am

  Re:

  Basic economics:
  
  Fixed costs>: if you make one copy or 100,000 what remains fixed? In the case of "books" in general, that's editing, formatting, artwork, etc.
  
  Marginal costs: how much does it cost to make (and deliver) one more? For a physical book, the cost of paper, ink, physically printing, and then distribution. For ebooks? $0 (or close enough not to matter).
  
  Your example would imply a fixed cost of $500,000 for producing the book. Good luck in that universe because it isn't this one.

• On the post: Amazon To Hachette And Authors: Here, Let Us Explain Basic Price Elasticity To You

  

  Ben ( profile ), 30 Jul, 2014 @ 10:03am

  Re: Re: Don't assume authors are idiots

  No it doesn't. Amazon's argument is not friendship, it's that their business model will make both Amazon and the authors more money.

  Almost. It says that the business model at $9.99 books generates 1.74 times as much total revenue than $14.99 books. After Amazon's take, how much of that gets to authors is up to the publishers, in this case Hachette. The step of the money getting to the authors is much less transparent than one would hope. Hachette could, for example, say that at $14.99 the authors will get paid at one rate, but at $9.99 they'd get paid at a different rate.

• On the post: CIA Tells FOIA Requester That He Needs To Know Everything About The Emails He's Requesting Before He Can Request Them

  

  Ben ( profile ), 29 Jul, 2014 @ 09:02am

  Re:

  Wouldn't that be paper memo's? email is too technical for them.
  
  No wonder they want FOIA requests to be done on paper.

• On the post: Latest Survey Shows People Across The Political Spectrum Are Skeptical Of Government Surveillance

  

  Ben ( profile ), 07 Jul, 2014 @ 02:41pm

  Re: Re: Re: Given these numbers

  No, an oxymoron.

• On the post: Latest Survey Shows People Across The Political Spectrum Are Skeptical Of Government Surveillance

  

  Ben ( profile ), 07 Jul, 2014 @ 02:40pm

  Self-identified?

  Were the leanings of the individuals self-identified ("Do you consider yourself a steadfast conservative?") or did they ferret that result from a spectrum of other questions (maybe starting with which party do they most identify with and maybe ending with questions on gun control and birth control -- or maybe both: "Do you believe in guns as a form of birth control?")?
  
  I have no clue what some of those labels mean (having never heard of them before) and if there weren't nicely colored dots next to them to indicate what political bent they indicate, I wouldn't have known. Asking "Do you consider yourself a 'Young Outsider'?" would have left me stumped as to who that was supposed to be.

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