Do a web search for unconscious bias.

Google has been doing a bunch of research on this lately.

What do you mean it isn't stored? How do we know that?

Sorry, I might not have been clear.

I don't know if its being stored, I agree that it shouldn't be.

But so many people in this thread seem to imply it is impossible to filter a stream of information without storing the entire stream. This is very disingenuous, and is about as true as saying that it's impossible to have cops camping out for a guy with a specific license plate because they'll have to look at every car, and so they'll have to memorise all of them.

This obviously depends on the selectors, but we're talking about online filtering here, guys. Its possible to imagine a situation where not every single piece of data is stored.

Well, at the very least the data resides in memory and the CPU cache. We could discuss whether that constitutes "storage" but I do think it's significantly different than the personal memory of a police officer. A more appropriate analogy might be a traffic camera looking for the specific license plate.

EDIT: Note that the purported benefits of these collections programs (according to many of the slides) is that the selectors can be determined after the fact. So they must be keeping data somewhere.

Well, I see it as a more potential problem if the cops don't know the license plate number they need up front so they record every single one they see. Then this data is stored until someone can go looking through them to find the plate they actually need. The question is what happens to the complete list at this point?

Which, interestingly enough, the process of recording and storing license plate numbers for various uses is already in play. Both by private and public agencies.

Depending on the person I'm talking to, I have two approaches.

1. Do you trust the government that will be in place 20 years from now? Most of those people are now teenagers. 2. We don't know what law changes may happen in the future. The data gathered can make you look like someone who will break one of those laws. Ex post facto (protection for someone who broke a law before it was in effect) has been overturned by the Supreme Court in specific cases in the past.

Public health issues like vaccination aren't like other issues. Vaccination decisions aren't made in a bubble where only you suffer if you get sick or become a carrier.

There will always be a certain portion of the populace that cannot receive a specific vaccination because of allergies or a weakened immune system that cannot handle it.

The whooping cough epidemics that have been sweeping through anti-vaccination areas in recent years are an example of how a decision that you make for your kids can result in other people dying.

You're not really involved in the security community, are you.

I wonder who would be deserving, then?

Don't get so caught up in worrying about the future. Even if you do everything exactly right, things will change down the road.

Just be sure to write lots and lots of tests. You'll thank me later :)

I have two friends who didn't have last names until they moved to the US and were forced to make some up.

I have a rather long name, and always get irritated about tiny signature boxes.

How about when you end up with a truncated last name? At this point I have to maintain a list with comments on what my last name actually ended up being in the system for each website. Especially when I have to enter my name in for password retrieval.

I at one point had a name that was extremely long. Because it was in two pieces rather than four, it was usually misspelled rather than truncated.

I don't have a terribly long name, but I still end up signing some doodle that is made up of initials.

At any point before the firing, she had the power to put a halt to a lot of this. She could have gone on Twitter and her blog and posted, "I'm so sorry this has happened. The person in question has apologized. I would like to request that Play Haven rehire him, and institute a policy to avoid incidents like this in the future."

Everything so far has been about punishment/vindictiveness. Nobody is interested in trying to address the problem, move forward, and make the world a better place. I don't see how the outcome could have been worse. Everyone handled this badly except PyCon itself, yet PyCon is who will be remembered as the problem.