In the spirit of fairness, I did note that Carmack was coming out of the monster closet by leaving Id. It's almost certainly for the best that he's going somewhere where he can do more focus on tech. It's been quite a while since Id's engine prowess has been enough to carry their comparatively limited progress in game design. Doesn't make the original Doom and Quake any less classic; but even as early as Quake III arena vs. UT(No location-based damage vs. has a sniper rifle) things were getting a trifle awkward. I'll be very interested to see what he does with Oculus; but a mastery of games as an engaging storytelling medium probably won't be it.
'Secure' isn't really something where you can just boil it into a number between 1 and 100 and call it a day. If you are worried about attackers sniffing the wire, a plugin that enforces SSL use is a major advantage. If you are worried about being hit with a zero day by the guy on the other end of the wire, it's entirely irrelevant.
In some, but not all, cases it will also rewrite any http links within the site itself, which is a much more useful feature. People certainly do forget when typing URLs; but manually checking, copying, pasting, and editing links within a page would be a huge pain in the ass.
Now, as for why a site operator would have non-ssl links to parts of their site on parts of their site accessed over ssl, that's a question for when I'm feeling less rageful.
Third thing that was a constant at id: Carmack's ego.
At least he never promised to make everybody his bitch and then released Daikatana. That event alone pretty much sheltered all the lesser hubris of the classic shooter era...
My experience has been...less pleasant... that the salesguys promised; but somebody kitting out a whitish-collar sweatshop would probably be accessing a terminal server with these (I think both RDP and Citrix are available, not sure about VMware).
It would be nice to have something I could use to write up blog posts and the like, without having to resort to touchscreen keyboards or breaking out the 5 lb, 17" powerhouse I use for *real* work.
If prior ChromeOS-things are a guide (and I haven't heard anything about Google changing this) the firmware defaults to cryptographically verifying the image on boot, and has a few bits and pieces designed to make reflashing a trashed or compromised boot volume over the internet or from USB trivial.
However, either out of niceness or to avoid an arms race with jailbreakers, all ChromeOS-thing firmware has either a physical switch or a key-combo you press on startup that disables all verification and lets you boot whatever amuses you. I don't know if you can permanently force the system into unverified mode from unverified mode, or whether you have to do this on every boot; but this is a deliberately allowed option.
As for how easy it is, the Exynos 5 based ARM Chromebooks take a bit of fiddling; because Samsung's togetherness with OEMs is slightly better than with the mainline kernel; but the Intel Chrome-things are just boring basic Intel systems. Since they are built to run the Linux that lives under ChromeOS, you won't find any parts that Just Don't Work; but I wouldn't necessarily expect Google to care about firmware blobs, or even binary drivers if they behave well and the silicon price is low enough.
Short answer: Yes; but might be slightly more hassle than a very cooperative Wintel model (though a whole hell of a lot less hassle than one of the nightmare systems).
Upon actually bothering to read the summary (I figured it was a new, low-end Chromebook), I now see that it's not a laptop, but looks more like a set-top box.
So, new question... would it make a cost-effective Scrypt-based cryptocurrency miner?
If memory serves, Scrypt crunching is still markedly faster on GPUs than CPUs, so this is probably a poor bet. It probably has a miniPCIe slot for the wireless, so you could theoretically pull a single lane off with a suitable adapter(and theoretically even put multiple GPUs on it, with a PCIe switch and extraordinary luck with the firmware); but that would be a fairly painful exercise for mediocre results compared to just buying whatever motherboard/CPU combo with lots of PCIe slots is cheapest and a few PCIe 1x ribbon-cable risers.
I imagine that the problem with an all-in-one (aside from being harder to hit impulse-buy pricepoints) is that if you want to go all in one, you either have to bury yourself in incrementally different SKUs, or make potentially alienating decisions about what monitor sizes your customers will want, both today and until you refresh the product.
That isn't trivial at the best of times, budgets and priorities vary (though easier for Apple, since they can eliminate the approximately-mini-tower competition by simply not building anything except all-in-ones between the mini and the Pro); but it's probably particularly touchy for ChromeOS: Users who want simplicity might well be willing to spend plenty for a nice wall of pixels (or be old people and need the giant text), while users who are cheapskates or kitting out a thin-client toildrome at minimum cost want 17 inch TN panel shit, and are only refraining from reusing last year's monitors because people kept messing with the extra cabling.
Given ChromeOS' somewhat weird demographics, I wouldn't want to be roped into choosing a screen size.
The Slashdot freeloaders are probably quickly to approve the idea, but let's think it from the opposite perspective. You are now Nolan Bushnell or Trip Hawkins, and have the responsibility of running a successful business. Would games being moved PD just like that be bad for the business and brand protection of a video game company? I challenge you try to convince me wrong with a calm and well-reasoned opinion.
You beg the question: If the question were 'what is good for the business and brand protection of a video game company', the answer would be 'the right to do whatever it wants forever and ever and also a big fat subsidy.'
The question is 'what is a good implementation of what copyright law is supposed to do?'
Well, let's see... "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". There we go. That is the sole criterion governing congress's power to establish copyright laws.
Unless the binary mentioned is different from the various others in the directory, it's firmware that the driver needs to load onto the card on startup (which has been the case for Radeons for some time now) rather than a binary driver component that runs on within the host OS.
Distribution will be a hassle, as always; but it's not architecturally much different from just adding a chunk of flash to the card and storing the firmware there instead.
I wonder what they plan to do about all the neat stuff that we excrete through the kidneys? Stock urine is harmless enough, if distasteful; but the list of drugs and other interesting substances that are either directly excreted, or have metabolites that are, isn't a short one. Probably not something you'd want bioaccumulating...
I think that you are talking about slightly different things: Apple has the reputation (they don't tend to show prototypes; but as best people have been able to tell it's deserved) for exhaustive pre-release testing of various design permutations. When they release something, it's already been tried in a zillion variants, and they aren't sending it out as a 'trial balloon' to see if the market likes it (occasionally they fuck up and have to backtrack, as with that iteration of the iPod shuffle that eliminated all input on the device in favor of controls in the headphones; but they don't like doing that).
However, they also have the reputation, also fairly well deserved(if, in fairness, probably partially because of their willingness to discard last year's design in favor of something new, rather than just spec bumping it and changing the plastics color), for inadequate testing of details of mechanical, materials, and sometimes board design considerations that become evident once a larger number of units hit the real world. iPod Nanos that scratch like crazy, palm rests that yellow surprisingly swiftly on contact with human skin and gross user-goo, that sort of thing.
When Apple releases a new product, the design has almost certainly been exhaustively tested against other possible configurations; but (partially because of their obsessive secrecy, partially because this sort of testing is just hard without a very large test population), it is quite common for Rev. A to have some sort of nasty weakness show up in the weeks or months following release, usually caused by a material properties or design detail that wasn't evident at a prototype scale.
Aside from the legitimacy of the source, it is probably worth asking whether the 'source' is actually revealing anything. As you say, those are pretty much the methods by which rechargeable watches are recharged, omitting only physical contacts, which are somewhat inelegant, hard to keep clean, and not very 'Apple'.
It's quite possible that the source is correct; but you hardly need insider information to hypothesize that 'If Apple is making a watch, they'll test today's common methods for recharging watches'.
It's a pretty big part of what MS does. Measured as a percentage of GSP (the state-level version of GDP), Mississippi is the 4th-largest net recipient of transfers from other states, which equal about 20% of the state's economy. The only three larger are South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida (a whopping 50% of Florida's economy consists of net transfers).
Eh, it's not particularly abnormal for 'developing' nations to depend heavily on foreign aid and diaspora remittances...
I'd say it has less to do with any change in user tastes and more to do with the apparent move from a situation where the present state of interfaces is bad; but improving (which, fairly obviously, creates enthusiasm for new stuff) to a situation where most of the improvements have been mined out; but there are still UI designers around, so they've just been changing random things in some horrible mockery of genetic drift.
When version N+1 was probably an improvement, getting motivated to go poke it until it works was easier. Now version N+1 may have some cool new feature; but it'll probably have 8 regressions, the pointless removal of something you liked, and probably tentacles. Why bother?
I'm not entirely sure how my comment ended up being interpreted as a compliment to the DEA. Selective application of overbroad laws is about the most corrosive form of arbitrary power that can still be dressed up to look like rule of law. Being an enthusiastic user is not a virtue; but it can be an effective strategy.
If the Analog act were enforced consistently, it would almost certainly be taken away, whether through legislation that removes it or litigation that modifies its interpretation to the point of irrelevance. People don't like having their toys taken away. So they don't do that. Nothing virtuous about it, just the pragmatic cunning that keeps you from making more enemies than you can handle.
I have no respect for the FAA (not the one for airplanes, I'm not an expert on them but they seem to do a decent job); but given that it has been in force since 1986, I suspect that the DEA and friends know the value of discretion and selective application of the law. If they started going after respectable companies in the chemical industry and other established industries, they'd probably have some nontrivial lobbying firepower on their asses (for an example of how this works, watch what happens when OSHA tries to timidly consider updating the Permissible Exposure Limit for some chemicals. Let's just say that there's a reason why they still use the original ones they set in 1971 and have not managed an update, despite additional epidemiological and toxicological research obviously being done since that time, and new chemicals introduced. That is what it looks like when you fuck with somebody who matters' chemicals.)
Unless somebody unbelievably stupid gets their hands on the levers, very selective application, more or less only to whatever we are moral-panicking about the damn kids doing these days, is the rule.
I hardly suspect drug companies of goodwill toward men, as a rule; but there are a couple of factors that probably make legal blugeoning tricky at best and useless at worst (for any compound with a history in medicine that isn't told purely as a 'horror stories from the old days' anecdote).
If you shove something to Schedule I, nobody inside the law gets to make a penny on it (barring possible tiny-batch stuff for the occasional research project that somehow fills out all the paperwork the DEA throws at them). If something remains Schedule II or lower, access gets substantially more difficult for people too poor to have a doctor write them a prescription; and less convenient for everyone; but the barriers to entry, and prices, of off-patent generics, especially common and relatively simple ones, are low, and as long as the assorted bottom feeders don't really piss off the FDA through shoddy manufacturing practices or outright falsification of test data, you can't schedule drugs differently by brand. Even for the company with the original brand name, logo, and coloration, margins suffer; but anybody who isn't actually losing money at least gets to move product.
Further, if it remains at Schedule II or lower, mostly-law-abiding drug companies can sometimes get a cut (probably at lower margins than they would really prefer; but above zero, and check out that volume!) of the action that would otherwise go to dealers of chemically similar Schedule I compounds. Perhaps most notably, Purdue Pharma(and, amazingly, even a few of their individual executives!) actually ran into a nasty little bit of legal trouble for their effort to downplay the addictiveness and abuse rates of Oxycontin in an effort to continue selling as much of the stuff as possible. Especially in the heyday of the Florida pill-mill scene, the legality of Oxycontin and some other all-fancy-and-medical opiates allowed the legal players to take a sizeable bite of a market that would otherwise be left to heroin pushers.
I do suspect that they'd prefer people stop self-medicating with booze and weed, and face their problems like healthy, functional, adults, with the prescription drugs recommended by TV commercials, preferably choosing patented or name-brand formulations wherever possible; but as a more general strategy, I'm not sure that prohibition, as currently implemented, offers enough flexibility to be a truly good tool for profit maximization.
While technical proficiency is a necessary feature, and doesn't really have any substitutes, I suspect that any attempt to extend meaningful privacy protection beyond paranoic geeks, recreational cypherpunks, and reasonably smart pedophiles who want to stay on the outside, will depend heavily on human-interface and psychology research in addition to technical prowess.
People underestimate how potent aggregated privacy compromises are, and they are (even when trying to cover their tracks) pretty easy to 'snow' under technical detail until they just stop struggling.
The app should allow blocking of certain apps access to gps or whatever system they are trying to access. If my dictionary app is accessing my gps then allow me to block that app from using it.
You probably want lying rather than blocking... The arms race between you and the hostile dev is over pretty quickly if you block (plus, naive applications that just assume they have the permissions they requested on install will probably crash right, left, and center, which is their fault; but your problem). Lying, by contrast, is unlikely to be 100% bulletproof against a good data-miner; but 'well-formed and plausible' is certainly much, much, harder to notice and respond to with certainty than being blocked is.
Not only that, you get bailouts and get to bitch about the moral hazard of any aid to people who aren't you on the finance-fluffer TV networks. How's that for a sweet gig?
Slashdot Mirror
In the spirit of fairness, I did note that Carmack was coming out of the monster closet by leaving Id. It's almost certainly for the best that he's going somewhere where he can do more focus on tech. It's been quite a while since Id's engine prowess has been enough to carry their comparatively limited progress in game design. Doesn't make the original Doom and Quake any less classic; but even as early as Quake III arena vs. UT(No location-based damage vs. has a sniper rifle) things were getting a trifle awkward. I'll be very interested to see what he does with Oculus; but a mastery of games as an engaging storytelling medium probably won't be it.
'Secure' isn't really something where you can just boil it into a number between 1 and 100 and call it a day. If you are worried about attackers sniffing the wire, a plugin that enforces SSL use is a major advantage. If you are worried about being hit with a zero day by the guy on the other end of the wire, it's entirely irrelevant.
In some, but not all, cases it will also rewrite any http links within the site itself, which is a much more useful feature. People certainly do forget when typing URLs; but manually checking, copying, pasting, and editing links within a page would be a huge pain in the ass.
Now, as for why a site operator would have non-ssl links to parts of their site on parts of their site accessed over ssl, that's a question for when I'm feeling less rageful.
Would it be fair to describe leaving Id as 'coming out of the monster closet'? Or have they done something worthwhile recently?
Third thing that was a constant at id: Carmack's ego.
At least he never promised to make everybody his bitch and then released Daikatana. That event alone pretty much sheltered all the lesser hubris of the classic shooter era...
I can't wait until Google starts going downhill, and all these little spy boxes get thrown away.
Why so wasteful? With a coreboot port these things would be damn nice little computers. Not for gaming or workstation tasks; but perfectly pleasant.
My experience has been...less pleasant... that the salesguys promised; but somebody kitting out a whitish-collar sweatshop would probably be accessing a terminal server with these (I think both RDP and Citrix are available, not sure about VMware).
Can you put Linux on the thing?
It would be nice to have something I could use to write up blog posts and the like, without having to resort to touchscreen keyboards or breaking out the 5 lb, 17" powerhouse I use for *real* work.
If prior ChromeOS-things are a guide (and I haven't heard anything about Google changing this) the firmware defaults to cryptographically verifying the image on boot, and has a few bits and pieces designed to make reflashing a trashed or compromised boot volume over the internet or from USB trivial.
However, either out of niceness or to avoid an arms race with jailbreakers, all ChromeOS-thing firmware has either a physical switch or a key-combo you press on startup that disables all verification and lets you boot whatever amuses you. I don't know if you can permanently force the system into unverified mode from unverified mode, or whether you have to do this on every boot; but this is a deliberately allowed option.
As for how easy it is, the Exynos 5 based ARM Chromebooks take a bit of fiddling; because Samsung's togetherness with OEMs is slightly better than with the mainline kernel; but the Intel Chrome-things are just boring basic Intel systems. Since they are built to run the Linux that lives under ChromeOS, you won't find any parts that Just Don't Work; but I wouldn't necessarily expect Google to care about firmware blobs, or even binary drivers if they behave well and the silicon price is low enough.
Short answer: Yes; but might be slightly more hassle than a very cooperative Wintel model (though a whole hell of a lot less hassle than one of the nightmare systems).
Upon actually bothering to read the summary (I figured it was a new, low-end Chromebook), I now see that it's not a laptop, but looks more like a set-top box.
So, new question... would it make a cost-effective Scrypt-based cryptocurrency miner?
If memory serves, Scrypt crunching is still markedly faster on GPUs than CPUs, so this is probably a poor bet. It probably has a miniPCIe slot for the wireless, so you could theoretically pull a single lane off with a suitable adapter(and theoretically even put multiple GPUs on it, with a PCIe switch and extraordinary luck with the firmware); but that would be a fairly painful exercise for mediocre results compared to just buying whatever motherboard/CPU combo with lots of PCIe slots is cheapest and a few PCIe 1x ribbon-cable risers.
I imagine that the problem with an all-in-one (aside from being harder to hit impulse-buy pricepoints) is that if you want to go all in one, you either have to bury yourself in incrementally different SKUs, or make potentially alienating decisions about what monitor sizes your customers will want, both today and until you refresh the product.
That isn't trivial at the best of times, budgets and priorities vary (though easier for Apple, since they can eliminate the approximately-mini-tower competition by simply not building anything except all-in-ones between the mini and the Pro); but it's probably particularly touchy for ChromeOS: Users who want simplicity might well be willing to spend plenty for a nice wall of pixels (or be old people and need the giant text), while users who are cheapskates or kitting out a thin-client toildrome at minimum cost want 17 inch TN panel shit, and are only refraining from reusing last year's monitors because people kept messing with the extra cabling.
Given ChromeOS' somewhat weird demographics, I wouldn't want to be roped into choosing a screen size.
The Slashdot freeloaders are probably quickly to approve the idea, but let's think it from the opposite perspective. You are now Nolan Bushnell or Trip Hawkins, and have the responsibility of running a successful business. Would games being moved PD just like that be bad for the business and brand protection of a video game company? I challenge you try to convince me wrong with a calm and well-reasoned opinion.
You beg the question: If the question were 'what is good for the business and brand protection of a video game company', the answer would be 'the right to do whatever it wants forever and ever and also a big fat subsidy.'
The question is 'what is a good implementation of what copyright law is supposed to do?'
Well, let's see... "To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries". There we go. That is the sole criterion governing congress's power to establish copyright laws.
Unless the binary mentioned is different from the various others in the directory, it's firmware that the driver needs to load onto the card on startup (which has been the case for Radeons for some time now) rather than a binary driver component that runs on within the host OS.
Distribution will be a hassle, as always; but it's not architecturally much different from just adding a chunk of flash to the card and storing the firmware there instead.
I wonder what they plan to do about all the neat stuff that we excrete through the kidneys? Stock urine is harmless enough, if distasteful; but the list of drugs and other interesting substances that are either directly excreted, or have metabolites that are, isn't a short one. Probably not something you'd want bioaccumulating...
I think that you are talking about slightly different things: Apple has the reputation (they don't tend to show prototypes; but as best people have been able to tell it's deserved) for exhaustive pre-release testing of various design permutations. When they release something, it's already been tried in a zillion variants, and they aren't sending it out as a 'trial balloon' to see if the market likes it (occasionally they fuck up and have to backtrack, as with that iteration of the iPod shuffle that eliminated all input on the device in favor of controls in the headphones; but they don't like doing that).
However, they also have the reputation, also fairly well deserved(if, in fairness, probably partially because of their willingness to discard last year's design in favor of something new, rather than just spec bumping it and changing the plastics color), for inadequate testing of details of mechanical, materials, and sometimes board design considerations that become evident once a larger number of units hit the real world. iPod Nanos that scratch like crazy, palm rests that yellow surprisingly swiftly on contact with human skin and gross user-goo, that sort of thing.
When Apple releases a new product, the design has almost certainly been exhaustively tested against other possible configurations; but (partially because of their obsessive secrecy, partially because this sort of testing is just hard without a very large test population), it is quite common for Rev. A to have some sort of nasty weakness show up in the weeks or months following release, usually caused by a material properties or design detail that wasn't evident at a prototype scale.
Aside from the legitimacy of the source, it is probably worth asking whether the 'source' is actually revealing anything. As you say, those are pretty much the methods by which rechargeable watches are recharged, omitting only physical contacts, which are somewhat inelegant, hard to keep clean, and not very 'Apple'.
It's quite possible that the source is correct; but you hardly need insider information to hypothesize that 'If Apple is making a watch, they'll test today's common methods for recharging watches'.
Why did the rest of the senate go along with this? And what about the house?
They'll need his vote when a project in their state comes up...
It's a pretty big part of what MS does. Measured as a percentage of GSP (the state-level version of GDP), Mississippi is the 4th-largest net recipient of transfers from other states, which equal about 20% of the state's economy. The only three larger are South Carolina, Louisiana, and Florida (a whopping 50% of Florida's economy consists of net transfers).
Eh, it's not particularly abnormal for 'developing' nations to depend heavily on foreign aid and diaspora remittances...
I'd say it has less to do with any change in user tastes and more to do with the apparent move from a situation where the present state of interfaces is bad; but improving (which, fairly obviously, creates enthusiasm for new stuff) to a situation where most of the improvements have been mined out; but there are still UI designers around, so they've just been changing random things in some horrible mockery of genetic drift.
When version N+1 was probably an improvement, getting motivated to go poke it until it works was easier. Now version N+1 may have some cool new feature; but it'll probably have 8 regressions, the pointless removal of something you liked, and probably tentacles. Why bother?
I'm not entirely sure how my comment ended up being interpreted as a compliment to the DEA. Selective application of overbroad laws is about the most corrosive form of arbitrary power that can still be dressed up to look like rule of law. Being an enthusiastic user is not a virtue; but it can be an effective strategy.
If the Analog act were enforced consistently, it would almost certainly be taken away, whether through legislation that removes it or litigation that modifies its interpretation to the point of irrelevance. People don't like having their toys taken away. So they don't do that. Nothing virtuous about it, just the pragmatic cunning that keeps you from making more enemies than you can handle.
I have no respect for the FAA (not the one for airplanes, I'm not an expert on them but they seem to do a decent job); but given that it has been in force since 1986, I suspect that the DEA and friends know the value of discretion and selective application of the law. If they started going after respectable companies in the chemical industry and other established industries, they'd probably have some nontrivial lobbying firepower on their asses (for an example of how this works, watch what happens when OSHA tries to timidly consider updating the Permissible Exposure Limit for some chemicals. Let's just say that there's a reason why they still use the original ones they set in 1971 and have not managed an update, despite additional epidemiological and toxicological research obviously being done since that time, and new chemicals introduced. That is what it looks like when you fuck with somebody who matters' chemicals.)
Unless somebody unbelievably stupid gets their hands on the levers, very selective application, more or less only to whatever we are moral-panicking about the damn kids doing these days, is the rule.
I hardly suspect drug companies of goodwill toward men, as a rule; but there are a couple of factors that probably make legal blugeoning tricky at best and useless at worst (for any compound with a history in medicine that isn't told purely as a 'horror stories from the old days' anecdote).
If you shove something to Schedule I, nobody inside the law gets to make a penny on it (barring possible tiny-batch stuff for the occasional research project that somehow fills out all the paperwork the DEA throws at them). If something remains Schedule II or lower, access gets substantially more difficult for people too poor to have a doctor write them a prescription; and less convenient for everyone; but the barriers to entry, and prices, of off-patent generics, especially common and relatively simple ones, are low, and as long as the assorted bottom feeders don't really piss off the FDA through shoddy manufacturing practices or outright falsification of test data, you can't schedule drugs differently by brand. Even for the company with the original brand name, logo, and coloration, margins suffer; but anybody who isn't actually losing money at least gets to move product.
Further, if it remains at Schedule II or lower, mostly-law-abiding drug companies can sometimes get a cut (probably at lower margins than they would really prefer; but above zero, and check out that volume!) of the action that would otherwise go to dealers of chemically similar Schedule I compounds. Perhaps most notably, Purdue Pharma(and, amazingly, even a few of their individual executives!) actually ran into a nasty little bit of legal trouble for their effort to downplay the addictiveness and abuse rates of Oxycontin in an effort to continue selling as much of the stuff as possible. Especially in the heyday of the Florida pill-mill scene, the legality of Oxycontin and some other all-fancy-and-medical opiates allowed the legal players to take a sizeable bite of a market that would otherwise be left to heroin pushers.
I do suspect that they'd prefer people stop self-medicating with booze and weed, and face their problems like healthy, functional, adults, with the prescription drugs recommended by TV commercials, preferably choosing patented or name-brand formulations wherever possible; but as a more general strategy, I'm not sure that prohibition, as currently implemented, offers enough flexibility to be a truly good tool for profit maximization.
While technical proficiency is a necessary feature, and doesn't really have any substitutes, I suspect that any attempt to extend meaningful privacy protection beyond paranoic geeks, recreational cypherpunks, and reasonably smart pedophiles who want to stay on the outside, will depend heavily on human-interface and psychology research in addition to technical prowess.
People underestimate how potent aggregated privacy compromises are, and they are (even when trying to cover their tracks) pretty easy to 'snow' under technical detail until they just stop struggling.
The app should allow blocking of certain apps access to gps or whatever system they are trying to access. If my dictionary app is accessing my gps then allow me to block that app from using it.
You probably want lying rather than blocking... The arms race between you and the hostile dev is over pretty quickly if you block (plus, naive applications that just assume they have the permissions they requested on install will probably crash right, left, and center, which is their fault; but your problem). Lying, by contrast, is unlikely to be 100% bulletproof against a good data-miner; but 'well-formed and plausible' is certainly much, much, harder to notice and respond to with certainty than being blocked is.
I assume that she's planning to reach a buggy, half-assed, and embarrassingly purple antitrust settlement with the EU a few months from now...
Not only that, you get bailouts and get to bitch about the moral hazard of any aid to people who aren't you on the finance-fluffer TV networks. How's that for a sweet gig?