Posts by Drew V.

> Personally I would never get into a private submarine.

Me neither.

Before crowdfunding, we used to have another term for "risky crowdfunded projects". I believe we used to call them "public funding which require public oversight". (The taxpayers are also a kind of "crowd", after all).

"so if you don't like Thatcherism you must hate all the modern political parties."

The way they all operate now? Yes, of course I do, and I am hardly alone in that, judging by the number of people who don't vote.

Those are the parties of a highly dysfunctional, corrupted and anachronistic system, and they are all part of the problem to a greater or less degree.

Otherwise I agree with you, though, in the sense that there are other additional reasons for why things are the way they are. And it didn't literally begin with Thatcher, no, but she sure did more than anyone else to make the problem worse.

Re: Overly simplistic view of the world hooo

Right. Also, if every private company in the world were able (or allowed) to do what Apple does, then most nation-states would simply collapse.

This is all happening on the backs of the many companies and citizens who do make fair and responsible contributions to the state, without which, it's "Mad Max to the Thunderdome", trying to beat a lizard to death with your bricked iPad for dinner, and banging the metal backs of two iPods Classic together to start a fire.

Re: The problem is an outgrowth of censorship itself

Obviously I was taking auto completion as a sign of things yet to come, and speculating on future developments. Feel free to disagree.

Re: Yawn..

He was also convicted in 1994, when he pled guilty to 25 charges of hacking.

But if he can't run for office, surely they can follow the Swedish Pirate Party's example: start your own party, act as its president while letting other members be elected to the legislature.

Change has to start somewhere

While it is obvious that the real target should be the industry as a whole - HP, Dell, IBM, Cisco, etc. (or indeed, to go with an even more holistic approach, perhaps the target should be our entire economic relationship with totalitarian-capitalist countries like China), there is a certain activist logic in attacking Apple first.

It is hard to put one's finger on it exactly - although you have enumerated some of the possible reasons already - but it may be that the best target for this sort of activism is companies who CLAIM to be better than the rest, when in reality they are only every so slightly above the industry standard.

In other words, those companies who have built their business around an image of excellence, superiority, lifestyle choice, a holistic approach to marketing and presentation. When they implicitly promise the "whole package" - as in, "everything is better with us" - then there is a genuine discomfort felt when one finds out that the "whole package" does not include things like better labor standards or a morally conscious approach to outsourcing, etc. And again, in this those companies are merely living down to the industry's standards - which should be the real target over the long term - but with these companies the disconnect grates more, thus creating a gap into which consumer/activist resistance is able to emerge.

In that sense, Apple has turned itself into the vanguard of a whole industry's hypocrisy. It's only logical that it comes under attack first.

Yup, the stock market is like the film Rain Man

Mental patients going to the casino, that is.

"D-d-d-d-d-d-definitely Apple. Defnitely Apple."

Re: Benefits of being informed

Your view of government is ridiculously oversimplified. The state is vastly more complex than a single private company: it has competing agencies, and at all times there are multiple interest groups trying to compromise on formulating policy. The judiciary can be at odds with the legislative branch over any given issue. Law enforcement agencies may disregard civil rights, but this in no way precludes other government agencies from having an excellent record on e.g. privacy matters and anti-trust regulation. Most importantly the state is subject to the will of the people through the ballot box - in a way that no private company is - which has to count for something.

Certainly, the British state, as a particular example, is generally obsessed with surveillance and ranks lower than any country in Europe on the privacy index. But this is not a valid excuse to let anyone else off the hook.

And however much you may want to oversimplify things, lumping the issues of censorship and foreign policy in developing countries together with issue with privacy and the regulation of internet companies does not clarify anything, it just muddies the waters.

If you do choose to reduce the government to this caricature of yours, then you should realize that Google and Facebook actually contribute to making it worse. Because by storing as much information on people as they are, they make that information potentially accessible to the government. By gathering and storing so much personal information in the interest of profit, Google and Facebook also create the risk of this unprecedentedly complete and complex database on private lives being used for (even more) nefarious purposes by someone else.

When Google was operating in China, they gave the Chinese state all the information on dissidents that the Chinese asked for. Doing business in that market was more important to Google than safeguarding the individual lives of customers from the totalitarian regime.

Re: Might I suggest...

You have a point, but I would say that this is a separate issue.

I agree with you that most advertising is empirically useless to consumers, if not actively misleading and fallacious. But that isn't enough reason to object to its existence (in the same way that smoking is bad for our health but so far no one has outlawed it completely).

The issue is at hand is not advertising itself but the digital data gathering and profile building that supposedly enables "targeted advertising" and which plainly violates the spirit if not the letter of privacy regulations as we have gradually constructed them in our societies.

Tempting, but I am still going to wait for the all-Ubuntu phone (if and when it arrives). No Android for me, not even to piggy-back on.

Not to mention Ghostery, User Agent Swticher, GoogleSharing, TrackMeNot and OptimizeGoogle...

One problem I have with posthumous knighthoods is that it assumes they would have accepted it. Not everyone buys into that aristocratic old bollocks.

The list of people who have refused a knighthood while alive AND who by many accounts were closet homosexuals includes T.E. Lawrence and E.M. Forster.

Boffins who have refused to be knighted include Michael Faraday, Stephen Hawking, and the Nobel prize winner Paul Dirac.

Ah yes, "scorched earth captalism". A Wall Street specialty indeed.

"If it decides to use this data fairly aggressively, then there is a near-certainty that legislators are going to retaliate and very aggressively enforce their citizens' right to privacy whether the citizens want it or not."

I like how you're implying that when FB starts to use data very aggressively, people themselves are just going let that happen and bend over for FB. You think people are just sheep, don't you?

Caution advised: low opinion of humanity.

Yes, it's not just about whether it is free or not, judged independently from the specific context. Freetards getting in a huff about that part are missing the point. You have to look at the company's entire strategy and how it changed through time.

Good point, but the backups aren't necessarily placed in "write-once", difficult to access storage. In fact, I would expect profiling companies to try and get around any superficial DP rules by using the backups in a more active way (a legal loophole that would have to be addressed in the legislation).

But it's certainly true that the proposed legislation is going to clash with the two-year data retention rule. That contradiction is going to have to be sorted out first.

Yes, Goat Jam, it's as David says. Myself, I was mainly referring to the growing practice of adding sugars (and alternatives such as aspartame) to some commercial lagers and the like when the brewing process is almost completed and all the fermentation has already happened.

The main reason for this is because demographically, our tastes are gravitating towards sweeter drinks. More women and young people drink beer, for one, and these groups generally don't like too much bitterness and sourness. It fits the general strategy of the big brewing companies, and there are probably other motives involved, like covering up slight inadequacies of the recipe used.

It's similar to how the amount of sugar used in ketchup has gradually increased over the decades.

I was warned about three add-ons becoming incompatible. I took the plunge anyway, and to my surprise, all three are enabled and working perfectly.

I can't speak for everyone but it would seem that the updater was excessively cautious this time...or maybe this is in some way part of the changes? Beats me.

This is not the same as manufacturing issue, you know. You can't easily move chocolate plantations somewhere else, they need a certain climate and tradition. Meaning that either the kid or his parents will be getting that job in any case, regardless of whether wages are high or low, simply because those plantations need workers and the locals are the only potential source of labour.

So the case for trying to improve working conditions in that sector, if necessary by paying more for our own chocolate, becomes much stronger.

You have used your email address to register on a website that was using Google Apps or cooperating with Google in some other way...

At this airport, does security frisk the rich in order to relieve them of their cash and jewelry?

If so then I am all for that, actually.