Afraid not. MacRumors debunked this "news" before it was ever posted to Slashdot, but the real news story is likely to be of more interest to long-time Slashdot readers, since it's actually something decently nerdy.
I'll let others with more expertise in the subject go into the details, but the cliff notes version is that Apple is patenting a means for depositing material during the photolithography process used to fabricate computer chips. Not as exciting to the general public as a vaping device, but certainly more worthy of Slashdot's front page.
Both companies pay dividends. They started paying dividends again in 2012 and have been paying them quarterly ever since. They even raised their dividend rates in the last year and have maintained their stock repurchase program, which together account for the largest capital return program in history (last I checked, the plan was to return $250B in capital to investors by the end of 2018).
Which isn't to say anything bad about Microsoft. They've been paying dividends the entire time, so kudos to them for doing great this entire time. I'm merely pointing out that you have your information about Apple VERY wrong.
$500B USD in 2016 ~= $359B USD in 2000 $550B USD in 2000 ~= $766B USD in 2016
So, basically, they're at about 72% of the value they were at in the early 2000s. To be fair, they were a behemoth at the time, so that's still quite a feat, but it does go to show how far they've fallen.
Reviews have started showing up on the 5K page, so either people were slow to get the news that they could review it, or Apple was slow to have a human click the "Not Spam" button for each of them.
Given the fact that he's from the telecom industry [...]
Don't forget that the last FCC chairman was from the telecom industry too. We all thought he was in their pocket, but he turned out to be pretty decent in the end, responding to public outcry over some of his policies that would have hobbled net neutrality by backing away from them and, eventually, even helping to push through a number of initiatives that strengthened net neutrality. I have to admit, I pegged Wheeler wrong.
Which isn't to say that I expect the same of Pai, given that he routinely voted contrary to Wheeler, but one can hope. After all, it's easy to earn political capital by voting along a party line you disagree with when you already know your party's side is going to lose, but it's a lot harder to keep voting that way when your vote will make all the difference. Now that he's in charge, it's possible he may vote quite differently.
The software company I work for redeemed their Amazon credit card rewards for Echos this last year, giving each of us a Dot. Here's how it's gone for us so far...
My wife's uses for the Echo Dot: - Bluetooth speaker for phone - Pandora radio - Weather - Kitchen timers
My uses for the Echo Dot: - Entertain my wife
Right now, they're little more than novelties for most people, honestly, but as smart homes become more common, I suspect Alexa et al. may find a niche. I don't understand the people who think voice will replace physically manipulating objects in your environment for everyday activities (e.g. I have absolutely zero desire to deal with a voice assistant to turn on the lights when I enter a room, when, instead, I can just flip the switch as I enter). That said, I can't count the number of times I'd have loved to have smart lights/outlets/switches available so that I wouldn't have to get out of bed to turn the lights off throughout the house. So there's definitely a place for them to provide a minor but meaningful improvement to our quality of life.
I thought they were selectively removing reviews, but they just disabled reviews and made the (low) star rating disappear completely just for that monitor.
Except that they didn't. The article was retracted and The Next Web has issued a formal apology for their erroneous reporting.
The actual problem wasn't that Apple disabled the section in order to censor reviews; it was that they forgot to enable the section in the first place. Cached copies of the page show that the section was never enabled at all. It looks like someone at Apple simply forgot to press the button to enable ratings and reviews on the monitor. From there, a redditor used the opportunity to bend the truth quite a bit by claiming that Apple had disabled the section to hide bad reviews, despite the fact that they have a history of letting bad reviews stand, as you pointed out. The blogs love salacious news, so they posted it without doing proper vetting, and now they're all having to post retractions.
That's irrelevant. If it's fixed then in a few years the reviews will be disregarded as something which has been resolved, in the meantime they deserve to suffer for putting such a thing in production.
The article was retracted even before it was posted to Slashdot's front page, so we're talking about a hypothetical case that never happened in the first place. The redditor falsely claimed that Apple disabled the Ratings & Reviews section of the page in response to bad reviews. A slew of sites then reported on that claim without doing any verification, other than noting that the Ratings & Reviews section was indeed missing from the page.
Unfortunately for them, cached copies of the page confirm that the redditor was lying about Apple disabling the section, since the Ratings & Reviews section was never enabled to begin with. As such, there never were any reviews--good or bad--for Apple to censor. To be sure, the product was shipping so the section should have been enabled, but this appears to have been a case of someone at Apple forgetting to press the button to turn on the reviews section for the page, rather than something sinister. The section is now showing up on the page.
TFA has been retracted and an apology has been put at the top of the page due to the erroneous reporting. Shockingly, the redditor got it wrong and the Internet-at-large didn't bother doing the slightest bit of verification before posting their clickbait headlines about a company being evil.
MacRumors has some additional reporting on what actually happened, but the gist of it is that no reviews at all were being posted for the 5K display until earlier today. In fact, the Ratings & Reviews section of the page was entirely disabled for that page until earlier today, presumably because someone forgot to activate the section after the product went on sale. Cached copies of the page confirm that that's been the case since the page went live last year, so the notion that Apple deleted bad reviews is demonstrably false, given that there never was a way to submit reviews--good or bad--in the first place.
Anyway, the inability to submit a review was already fixed by the time Slashdot posted this story, but, no doubt, people will be talking about the fictional bad reviews that Apple censored for months to come, simply because a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.
They've posted the details about how they make money, which basically boil down to two things: 1) They show clearly-identified ads (unless you disable ads in your settings) at the top of some search results. The only information they send is your search term, that way they can get relevant ads. They never send anything identifying or that would allow Bing/Yahoo (the source of the ads) to target you specifically.
2) They modify eBay and Amazon links to make them affiliate links, just like you'd see on review sites or pretty much anywhere else. I.e. The URL is modified to indicate that you're coming from DDG, so they get a commission if you end up buying anything.
For them, that's enough to keep the lights on, though I doubt they're bringing money in hand-over-fist, since the majority of their current users are likely savvy ones who've disabled or blocked the ads, I'd imagine. They're probably hopeful that they can attract a more mainstream crowd with time, since those users are more likely to see ads.
You're very welcome. I like to think that Slashdot is one of the few places where we can still find posts like these, so inasmuch as I can contribute to that ideal, I like to do so.
That's a loophole worth considering, to be sure, but I don't think it's actually a concern in practice, given that their Information Shared section lists the data they share (i.e. nothing) and the conditions under which they share it (i.e. only when there's a court order). Suffice to say, if they were sharing info in the manner you described, they'd be obligated to disclose it there.
I'm afraid I don't know the expenses off the top of my head. I looked them up around a year ago and realized it'd be untenable to pursue as a career in my town (not that I was planning to; I was just curious about the value proposition), since you'd have to be working crazy hours just to break even on your costs. Other than that, I saw mention in some of the articles I linked of the expenses being far higher than Uber had advertised, which obviously would push the bottom-line down, though I admittedly didn't look into the specifics.
Yeah, that $90,000/year income was the one they overstated by $29,000 (i.e. the median in New York was actually $61,000/year, rather than the $90,000/year they claimed). And that's before expenses, I believe, so it goes down from there by quite a bit, given that they misled drivers with regard to the expenses too.
Uber's own ad campaigns bend over backwards to emphasize that this is supposed to be a side gig to make some extra money.
Uber was just this week fined $20M by the FTC for doing the exact opposite of what you're saying, so pardon me if I don't believe anything you've just said. They were overstating median incomes by as much as $29,000/year, advertising unlimited mileage for leases that didn't actually have unlimited mileage, and advertising that their leases were lower-cost than their competitors (which wasn't true in the least). The FTC found that in some markets, only around 10% of the drivers were making as much as the "median" incomes that Uber was advertising.
So while I do generally agree that the world doesn't owe anyone anything, I'll add the caveat that companies are obligated to not make fraudulent claims, which is exactly what Uber is being fined for having done.
uMatrix shows that 100% of the resources being loaded in a DuckDuckGo search are first-party. There are no external scripts, tracking cookies, or other cross-site references of any sort. The first-party cookies they set are opt-in, entirely optional, and contain no identifiable information. The affiliate stuff is just the Amazon and eBay affiliate programs that anyone can sign up for (i.e. they add parameters to Amazon and eBay URLs to identify DDG as the referrer, that way they get a kickback, but it can't be tied back to you or your search).
Their privacy policy is written in plain English and--particularly in the three sections about information (not) collected and shared--makes it abundantly clear that they go out of their way to avoid collecting anything remotely related to you in the first place, that way they never have to face people being concerned about the retention loopholes you're talking about. They even offer tips for how you can help prevent information leakage and point out some ways that you may leak information if you choose to disable the protections they've put in place by default.
I get the cynical attitude, but at least look into things a bit before you wantonly smear one of the few companies that's actually trying to do right by their users when it comes to privacy.
No, they're selling your attention without selling your information. As they make abundantly clear in their privacy policy (that's written in refreshingly plain English by the site's founder himself, no less), they modify links to some product pages to make them into affiliate links (i.e. they get a kickback for referring you to product pages at Amazon and eBay).
Their Information Shared section is a quick read. After they explain that they don't share any info, but that you might inadvertently leak search terms to the sites you click on if you purposefully disable protections DDG enables by default, they then have this great snippet that demonstrates the sort of mindset they follow:
Also, like anyone else, we will comply with court ordered legal requests. However, in our case, we don't expect any because there is nothing useful to give them since we don't collect any personal information.
Moreover, you can disable advertising for DuckDuckGo if you want (it's a setting you can toggle). Oh, and all of those settings I'm talking about? They only ever exist client-side and aren't linked to an account or identity in any way. You either pass them in as a set or URL parameters or as a cookie that contains no identifiable information. In fact, in a quick check of the site via uMatrix (with ads disabled), it shows that 100% of the resources served are first-party, so there isn't a single external Javascript or tracking cookie being set by sleazy advertisers or people outside their control.
If you're still concerned, here are the details about how they make money, which make it abundantly clear (again, in plain English) how they make money without selling their users' information.
Honestly, if you want to complain about DDG, the biggest issue remains the quality of their results. They finally got "good enough" for me, so I switched to them about a year ago and haven't regretted it, and they've only been getting better since then (e.g. they'll oftentimes have the top-rated StackOverflow answer displayed as a pull-out at the top of the search results), but there's still room for improvement (e.g. longer search terms produce noisy results for me). That said, the fact that they offer bangs makes it drop-dead simple to deal with those situations (i.e. add "!g" to your search to Google it instead). Plus, the fact that I can set them as my default search engine in Chrome/iOS/etc. means that no matter where I am, I can just use the bangs for Amazon (!a), Wikipedia (!w), Google Maps (!gm), Rotten Tomatoes (!rt), or whatever else to immediately jump to the results at those sites, rather than having to first navigate to them.
It's a great site that's continually getting better, and I would strongly encourage others to give it a shot or try it again if it's been awhile since the last time they tried it.
Which is probably why he said "during the GWB administration", given that it was still in office in 2008.
Though, honestly, I doubt either administration had anything to do with any of this stuff. This is corporate fraud, plain and simple, and that happens under every administration.
A) Entrapment only applies to the police, not to private citizens.
B) Leaving items in plain view where they can be stolen is not entrapment. E.g. Bait cars. You have to actively encourage or incite someone to engage in illegal behavior that they wouldn't have otherwise for it to be entrapment.
C) Clearly you don't know the law as well as you thought.
The BBC is a UK organisation, it will communicate using UK English.
Which is why I said...
I have no problem with the BBC using "lorry" in place "tractor trailer", given that the BBC serves a primarily British audience.
It makes sense for the BBC to use "lorry", given their audience. It makes sense for Slashdot to use whatever the original terminology was, given it's international audience. After all, the choice of those terms will impact how the story is understood. In my case, the fact that "lorry" was used here actually caused me to question whether this was a British report regarding the accident, or if it was perhaps a different accident I was unaware of that had taken place in the UK.
1) We're talking about a dialect that spans the British isles as a whole, rather than being unique to England. The only thing offensive here (other than your butchery of the language; see: "We speak English you all speak something else...") is your willful exclusion of the other countries in Great Britain.
2) While I might allow that it could be offensive in some contexts (e.g. if I was in England and was making a point of overemphasizing the word "British" for no reason other than to be rude), the notion that it could be considered offensive in the context of an international audience discussing the differences between dialects is utterly absurd, given that those are the widely-accepted terms. If you find it offensive, I'll kindly suggest that you get over yourself.
I'll grant that it may be grating, in much the same way that any quirk of a different dialect will strike you as odd. I find it grating that my wife uses the word "coke" to refer to everything from Sprite to root beer. I find it grating when I have to rack my brain to remember the meanings of distinctly British idioms, such as "waiting for the penny to drop" or "throwing his toys out of the pram". I find everything about Cockney and Cajun dialects grating. But to suggest that any of those are offensive? Come on.
Well, except for the "coke" thing. I think we can all agree that's inexcusable.
In the pre-YouTube days, Red vs. Blue was available for free, but the only official point of distribution was the website for the guys that made it, and they limited which episodes were available at any given time so as to prevent people from killing their bandwidth by binge watching. Quite a few people thought they'd do the guys a favor and re-host the videos on their own sites or via P2P networks. After all, the guys were clearly having trouble bearing the cost of hosting videos that they were letting people watch for free, so taking some of the load off of them would be doing them a favor, right?
The guys made it clear that they didn't want that done.
Fast forward a few years, and those guys have built a media empire around the success of that and their subsequent video series. Their piddly operation has exploded to include dozens (hundreds?) of employees across the nation. They sell those episodes on DVD and Blu-ray, stream the episodes on YouTube and Netflix, sell shirts and other merchandise for them, and on and on. While it wouldn't have looked much like piracy to distribute those videos in the early days, given that they were already available for free and there were no obvious plans to monetize the videos, they understood that controlling distribution then would give them opportunities for monetizing the videos later, so even though they didn't have anything at the time, they still insisted on controlling distribution.
Likewise, old videos that may seem abandoned may actually be about to get a remastered re-release or whatnot that the pirated copy would undercut. And old video games? I can't count the number of times that older games have gotten the "remastered in HD" treatment or have been repackaged for modern platforms when a new entry in the series comes out. As such, how are we to say when "there's no possible loss to anyone"?
I find it hilarious that the people who brought us the word "y'all" will tell the people of England that they are speaking English wrong.
"Y'all" has an immediately evident meaning and does a great job at making the second-person plural explicit, so while I may not use it and certainly wouldn't espouse its use in formal writing, it's hardly an egregious sin against the English language.
Moreover, those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. British English has plenty of its own quirks to cite, whether we're talking about genericized brands (e.g. Brevilles and Hoovers), weird dialects (e.g. Cockney), or odd pronunciations (e.g. pronouncing the "h" in "herb" and dropping the "h" from "hotel", even though the French words they each came from did the exact opposite). Of course, we could cite similar quirks in American English (e.g. Kleenexes and Band-Aids, Cajun dialect, and all of the Americanized spellings we can attribute to Noah Webster of Merriam-Webster fame), but that's exactly the point: they're both screwed up, so let's give the one-upping each other a rest.
As for "lorry", I have no problem with the BBC using "lorry" in place "tractor trailer", given that the BBC serves a primarily British audience. But Slashdot serves an international audience of decently educated people who are familiar with both British and American English, so it makes sense to use the original terminology wherever possible. In this particular case, the coverage is for a report authored by the US government, so using the term "tractor trailer" would make far more sense.
This whole approach to me reeks to substance dualism; the human brain is a computer, a very advanced one at that, but it's just a computer. there is no 'soul' that somehow makes the human brain the only thing that's capable of intelligent operations.
I'd suggest that it has less to do with dualism and more to do with general intelligence vs. domain intelligence. Most of these AIs have decent domain intelligence, but very poor or nonexistent general intelligence. It's hard for most people to think of an autonomous car as being "intelligent" when it has no means at its disposal for answering trivial questions such as, "Can an alligator run the hundred-meter hurdle?".
When people today dismiss AIs as being "mere programs", what they're really doing is dismissing AIs on account of their lack of general intelligence. They're calling attention to the fact that AIs are only as intelligent as they've been programmed to be, rather than making an argument about dualism. In fact, most people I've talked to have no problem calling AIs "intelligent", so long as you add the caveat that the AI's intelligence is limited to a very narrow domain.
That said, the day that we have a decent, general domain artificial intelligence is the day that I think a lot of these "it's a program, so it can't be intelligent" arguments will start to become about dualism (or possibly will be about the distinction between weak and strong intelligence). Right now, those arguments are merely standing in as proxies for "it's only as intelligent as it's been programmed to be", i.e. it only understands some things, but one day that may not be the case. I believe you're just thinking ahead a bit, since we're not there yet.
Fine with corruption? Hardly. Samsung has a long history of engaging in bribing government officials and getting caught. I talked about some of this a few months back when news came out that federal agents had raided Samsung Group to collect evidence of these crimes that they're now charging them with. To say the least, their corruption spans multiple generations and is wide-ranging enough to include everything from "mild" issues of business ethics like nepotism to more serious issues of government corruption that have the potential to topple the head of the country.
I recall an article a few years ago that did some investigative work into the people they were bribing at the time. It was able to tie their bribes to people engaging in everything from illegal drug trafficking to sex slaves. And I believe it was the same article that talked about how Samsung would also spy on reporters who were invited to media events, bugging their hotels and doing other things of that sort in order to ensure favorable reviews of their products. Some files apparently leaked that showed they were listening in and trying to collect dirt on the reporters, just in case the reviews didn't meet their satisfaction.
Slashdot Mirror
iOdor is going to be released.
Afraid not. MacRumors debunked this "news" before it was ever posted to Slashdot, but the real news story is likely to be of more interest to long-time Slashdot readers, since it's actually something decently nerdy.
I'll let others with more expertise in the subject go into the details, but the cliff notes version is that Apple is patenting a means for depositing material during the photolithography process used to fabricate computer chips. Not as exciting to the general public as a vaping device, but certainly more worthy of Slashdot's front page.
Both companies pay dividends. They started paying dividends again in 2012 and have been paying them quarterly ever since. They even raised their dividend rates in the last year and have maintained their stock repurchase program, which together account for the largest capital return program in history (last I checked, the plan was to return $250B in capital to investors by the end of 2018).
Which isn't to say anything bad about Microsoft. They've been paying dividends the entire time, so kudos to them for doing great this entire time. I'm merely pointing out that you have your information about Apple VERY wrong.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics inflation calculator (that's based on the consumer price index):
$500B USD in 2016 ~= $359B USD in 2000
$550B USD in 2000 ~= $766B USD in 2016
So, basically, they're at about 72% of the value they were at in the early 2000s. To be fair, they were a behemoth at the time, so that's still quite a feat, but it does go to show how far they've fallen.
Reviews have started showing up on the 5K page, so either people were slow to get the news that they could review it, or Apple was slow to have a human click the "Not Spam" button for each of them.
Given the fact that he's from the telecom industry [...]
Don't forget that the last FCC chairman was from the telecom industry too. We all thought he was in their pocket, but he turned out to be pretty decent in the end, responding to public outcry over some of his policies that would have hobbled net neutrality by backing away from them and, eventually, even helping to push through a number of initiatives that strengthened net neutrality. I have to admit, I pegged Wheeler wrong.
Which isn't to say that I expect the same of Pai, given that he routinely voted contrary to Wheeler, but one can hope. After all, it's easy to earn political capital by voting along a party line you disagree with when you already know your party's side is going to lose, but it's a lot harder to keep voting that way when your vote will make all the difference. Now that he's in charge, it's possible he may vote quite differently.
Only time will tell.
The software company I work for redeemed their Amazon credit card rewards for Echos this last year, giving each of us a Dot. Here's how it's gone for us so far...
My wife's uses for the Echo Dot:
- Bluetooth speaker for phone
- Pandora radio
- Weather
- Kitchen timers
My uses for the Echo Dot:
- Entertain my wife
Right now, they're little more than novelties for most people, honestly, but as smart homes become more common, I suspect Alexa et al. may find a niche. I don't understand the people who think voice will replace physically manipulating objects in your environment for everyday activities (e.g. I have absolutely zero desire to deal with a voice assistant to turn on the lights when I enter a room, when, instead, I can just flip the switch as I enter). That said, I can't count the number of times I'd have loved to have smart lights/outlets/switches available so that I wouldn't have to get out of bed to turn the lights off throughout the house. So there's definitely a place for them to provide a minor but meaningful improvement to our quality of life.
I thought they were selectively removing reviews, but they just disabled reviews and made the (low) star rating disappear completely just for that monitor.
Except that they didn't. The article was retracted and The Next Web has issued a formal apology for their erroneous reporting.
The actual problem wasn't that Apple disabled the section in order to censor reviews; it was that they forgot to enable the section in the first place. Cached copies of the page show that the section was never enabled at all. It looks like someone at Apple simply forgot to press the button to enable ratings and reviews on the monitor. From there, a redditor used the opportunity to bend the truth quite a bit by claiming that Apple had disabled the section to hide bad reviews, despite the fact that they have a history of letting bad reviews stand, as you pointed out. The blogs love salacious news, so they posted it without doing proper vetting, and now they're all having to post retractions.
Yay for the Internet.
That's irrelevant. If it's fixed then in a few years the reviews will be disregarded as something which has been resolved, in the meantime they deserve to suffer for putting such a thing in production.
The article was retracted even before it was posted to Slashdot's front page, so we're talking about a hypothetical case that never happened in the first place. The redditor falsely claimed that Apple disabled the Ratings & Reviews section of the page in response to bad reviews. A slew of sites then reported on that claim without doing any verification, other than noting that the Ratings & Reviews section was indeed missing from the page.
Unfortunately for them, cached copies of the page confirm that the redditor was lying about Apple disabling the section, since the Ratings & Reviews section was never enabled to begin with. As such, there never were any reviews--good or bad--for Apple to censor. To be sure, the product was shipping so the section should have been enabled, but this appears to have been a case of someone at Apple forgetting to press the button to turn on the reviews section for the page, rather than something sinister. The section is now showing up on the page.
TFA has been retracted and an apology has been put at the top of the page due to the erroneous reporting. Shockingly, the redditor got it wrong and the Internet-at-large didn't bother doing the slightest bit of verification before posting their clickbait headlines about a company being evil.
MacRumors has some additional reporting on what actually happened, but the gist of it is that no reviews at all were being posted for the 5K display until earlier today. In fact, the Ratings & Reviews section of the page was entirely disabled for that page until earlier today, presumably because someone forgot to activate the section after the product went on sale. Cached copies of the page confirm that that's been the case since the page went live last year, so the notion that Apple deleted bad reviews is demonstrably false, given that there never was a way to submit reviews--good or bad--in the first place.
Anyway, the inability to submit a review was already fixed by the time Slashdot posted this story, but, no doubt, people will be talking about the fictional bad reviews that Apple censored for months to come, simply because a lie can travel halfway around the world while the truth is still putting on its shoes.
They've posted the details about how they make money, which basically boil down to two things:
1) They show clearly-identified ads (unless you disable ads in your settings) at the top of some search results. The only information they send is your search term, that way they can get relevant ads. They never send anything identifying or that would allow Bing/Yahoo (the source of the ads) to target you specifically.
2) They modify eBay and Amazon links to make them affiliate links, just like you'd see on review sites or pretty much anywhere else. I.e. The URL is modified to indicate that you're coming from DDG, so they get a commission if you end up buying anything.
For them, that's enough to keep the lights on, though I doubt they're bringing money in hand-over-fist, since the majority of their current users are likely savvy ones who've disabled or blocked the ads, I'd imagine. They're probably hopeful that they can attract a more mainstream crowd with time, since those users are more likely to see ads.
You're very welcome. I like to think that Slashdot is one of the few places where we can still find posts like these, so inasmuch as I can contribute to that ideal, I like to do so.
That's a loophole worth considering, to be sure, but I don't think it's actually a concern in practice, given that their Information Shared section lists the data they share (i.e. nothing) and the conditions under which they share it (i.e. only when there's a court order). Suffice to say, if they were sharing info in the manner you described, they'd be obligated to disclose it there.
I'm afraid I don't know the expenses off the top of my head. I looked them up around a year ago and realized it'd be untenable to pursue as a career in my town (not that I was planning to; I was just curious about the value proposition), since you'd have to be working crazy hours just to break even on your costs. Other than that, I saw mention in some of the articles I linked of the expenses being far higher than Uber had advertised, which obviously would push the bottom-line down, though I admittedly didn't look into the specifics.
Yeah, that $90,000/year income was the one they overstated by $29,000 (i.e. the median in New York was actually $61,000/year, rather than the $90,000/year they claimed). And that's before expenses, I believe, so it goes down from there by quite a bit, given that they misled drivers with regard to the expenses too.
Uber's own ad campaigns bend over backwards to emphasize that this is supposed to be a side gig to make some extra money.
Uber was just this week fined $20M by the FTC for doing the exact opposite of what you're saying, so pardon me if I don't believe anything you've just said. They were overstating median incomes by as much as $29,000/year, advertising unlimited mileage for leases that didn't actually have unlimited mileage, and advertising that their leases were lower-cost than their competitors (which wasn't true in the least). The FTC found that in some markets, only around 10% of the drivers were making as much as the "median" incomes that Uber was advertising.
So while I do generally agree that the world doesn't owe anyone anything, I'll add the caveat that companies are obligated to not make fraudulent claims, which is exactly what Uber is being fined for having done.
uMatrix shows that 100% of the resources being loaded in a DuckDuckGo search are first-party. There are no external scripts, tracking cookies, or other cross-site references of any sort. The first-party cookies they set are opt-in, entirely optional, and contain no identifiable information. The affiliate stuff is just the Amazon and eBay affiliate programs that anyone can sign up for (i.e. they add parameters to Amazon and eBay URLs to identify DDG as the referrer, that way they get a kickback, but it can't be tied back to you or your search).
Their privacy policy is written in plain English and--particularly in the three sections about information (not) collected and shared--makes it abundantly clear that they go out of their way to avoid collecting anything remotely related to you in the first place, that way they never have to face people being concerned about the retention loopholes you're talking about. They even offer tips for how you can help prevent information leakage and point out some ways that you may leak information if you choose to disable the protections they've put in place by default.
I get the cynical attitude, but at least look into things a bit before you wantonly smear one of the few companies that's actually trying to do right by their users when it comes to privacy.
No, they're selling your attention without selling your information. As they make abundantly clear in their privacy policy (that's written in refreshingly plain English by the site's founder himself, no less), they modify links to some product pages to make them into affiliate links (i.e. they get a kickback for referring you to product pages at Amazon and eBay).
Their Information Shared section is a quick read. After they explain that they don't share any info, but that you might inadvertently leak search terms to the sites you click on if you purposefully disable protections DDG enables by default, they then have this great snippet that demonstrates the sort of mindset they follow:
Also, like anyone else, we will comply with court ordered legal requests. However, in our case, we don't expect any because there is nothing useful to give them since we don't collect any personal information.
Moreover, you can disable advertising for DuckDuckGo if you want (it's a setting you can toggle). Oh, and all of those settings I'm talking about? They only ever exist client-side and aren't linked to an account or identity in any way. You either pass them in as a set or URL parameters or as a cookie that contains no identifiable information. In fact, in a quick check of the site via uMatrix (with ads disabled), it shows that 100% of the resources served are first-party, so there isn't a single external Javascript or tracking cookie being set by sleazy advertisers or people outside their control.
If you're still concerned, here are the details about how they make money, which make it abundantly clear (again, in plain English) how they make money without selling their users' information.
Honestly, if you want to complain about DDG, the biggest issue remains the quality of their results. They finally got "good enough" for me, so I switched to them about a year ago and haven't regretted it, and they've only been getting better since then (e.g. they'll oftentimes have the top-rated StackOverflow answer displayed as a pull-out at the top of the search results), but there's still room for improvement (e.g. longer search terms produce noisy results for me). That said, the fact that they offer bangs makes it drop-dead simple to deal with those situations (i.e. add "!g" to your search to Google it instead). Plus, the fact that I can set them as my default search engine in Chrome/iOS/etc. means that no matter where I am, I can just use the bangs for Amazon (!a), Wikipedia (!w), Google Maps (!gm), Rotten Tomatoes (!rt), or whatever else to immediately jump to the results at those sites, rather than having to first navigate to them.
It's a great site that's continually getting better, and I would strongly encourage others to give it a shot or try it again if it's been awhile since the last time they tried it.
Which is probably why he said "during the GWB administration", given that it was still in office in 2008.
Though, honestly, I doubt either administration had anything to do with any of this stuff. This is corporate fraud, plain and simple, and that happens under every administration.
A) Entrapment only applies to the police, not to private citizens.
B) Leaving items in plain view where they can be stolen is not entrapment. E.g. Bait cars. You have to actively encourage or incite someone to engage in illegal behavior that they wouldn't have otherwise for it to be entrapment.
C) Clearly you don't know the law as well as you thought.
The BBC is a UK organisation, it will communicate using UK English.
Which is why I said...
I have no problem with the BBC using "lorry" in place "tractor trailer", given that the BBC serves a primarily British audience.
It makes sense for the BBC to use "lorry", given their audience. It makes sense for Slashdot to use whatever the original terminology was, given it's international audience. After all, the choice of those terms will impact how the story is understood. In my case, the fact that "lorry" was used here actually caused me to question whether this was a British report regarding the accident, or if it was perhaps a different accident I was unaware of that had taken place in the UK.
1) We're talking about a dialect that spans the British isles as a whole, rather than being unique to England. The only thing offensive here (other than your butchery of the language; see: "We speak English you all speak something else...") is your willful exclusion of the other countries in Great Britain.
2) While I might allow that it could be offensive in some contexts (e.g. if I was in England and was making a point of overemphasizing the word "British" for no reason other than to be rude), the notion that it could be considered offensive in the context of an international audience discussing the differences between dialects is utterly absurd, given that those are the widely-accepted terms. If you find it offensive, I'll kindly suggest that you get over yourself.
I'll grant that it may be grating, in much the same way that any quirk of a different dialect will strike you as odd. I find it grating that my wife uses the word "coke" to refer to everything from Sprite to root beer. I find it grating when I have to rack my brain to remember the meanings of distinctly British idioms, such as "waiting for the penny to drop" or "throwing his toys out of the pram". I find everything about Cockney and Cajun dialects grating. But to suggest that any of those are offensive? Come on.
Well, except for the "coke" thing. I think we can all agree that's inexcusable.
In the pre-YouTube days, Red vs. Blue was available for free, but the only official point of distribution was the website for the guys that made it, and they limited which episodes were available at any given time so as to prevent people from killing their bandwidth by binge watching. Quite a few people thought they'd do the guys a favor and re-host the videos on their own sites or via P2P networks. After all, the guys were clearly having trouble bearing the cost of hosting videos that they were letting people watch for free, so taking some of the load off of them would be doing them a favor, right?
The guys made it clear that they didn't want that done.
Fast forward a few years, and those guys have built a media empire around the success of that and their subsequent video series. Their piddly operation has exploded to include dozens (hundreds?) of employees across the nation. They sell those episodes on DVD and Blu-ray, stream the episodes on YouTube and Netflix, sell shirts and other merchandise for them, and on and on. While it wouldn't have looked much like piracy to distribute those videos in the early days, given that they were already available for free and there were no obvious plans to monetize the videos, they understood that controlling distribution then would give them opportunities for monetizing the videos later, so even though they didn't have anything at the time, they still insisted on controlling distribution.
Likewise, old videos that may seem abandoned may actually be about to get a remastered re-release or whatnot that the pirated copy would undercut. And old video games? I can't count the number of times that older games have gotten the "remastered in HD" treatment or have been repackaged for modern platforms when a new entry in the series comes out. As such, how are we to say when "there's no possible loss to anyone"?
I find it hilarious that the people who brought us the word "y'all" will tell the people of England that they are speaking English wrong.
"Y'all" has an immediately evident meaning and does a great job at making the second-person plural explicit, so while I may not use it and certainly wouldn't espouse its use in formal writing, it's hardly an egregious sin against the English language.
Moreover, those who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones. British English has plenty of its own quirks to cite, whether we're talking about genericized brands (e.g. Brevilles and Hoovers), weird dialects (e.g. Cockney), or odd pronunciations (e.g. pronouncing the "h" in "herb" and dropping the "h" from "hotel", even though the French words they each came from did the exact opposite). Of course, we could cite similar quirks in American English (e.g. Kleenexes and Band-Aids, Cajun dialect, and all of the Americanized spellings we can attribute to Noah Webster of Merriam-Webster fame), but that's exactly the point: they're both screwed up, so let's give the one-upping each other a rest.
As for "lorry", I have no problem with the BBC using "lorry" in place "tractor trailer", given that the BBC serves a primarily British audience. But Slashdot serves an international audience of decently educated people who are familiar with both British and American English, so it makes sense to use the original terminology wherever possible. In this particular case, the coverage is for a report authored by the US government, so using the term "tractor trailer" would make far more sense.
This whole approach to me reeks to substance dualism; the human brain is a computer, a very advanced one at that, but it's just a computer. there is no 'soul' that somehow makes the human brain the only thing that's capable of intelligent operations.
I'd suggest that it has less to do with dualism and more to do with general intelligence vs. domain intelligence. Most of these AIs have decent domain intelligence, but very poor or nonexistent general intelligence. It's hard for most people to think of an autonomous car as being "intelligent" when it has no means at its disposal for answering trivial questions such as, "Can an alligator run the hundred-meter hurdle?".
When people today dismiss AIs as being "mere programs", what they're really doing is dismissing AIs on account of their lack of general intelligence. They're calling attention to the fact that AIs are only as intelligent as they've been programmed to be, rather than making an argument about dualism. In fact, most people I've talked to have no problem calling AIs "intelligent", so long as you add the caveat that the AI's intelligence is limited to a very narrow domain.
That said, the day that we have a decent, general domain artificial intelligence is the day that I think a lot of these "it's a program, so it can't be intelligent" arguments will start to become about dualism (or possibly will be about the distinction between weak and strong intelligence). Right now, those arguments are merely standing in as proxies for "it's only as intelligent as it's been programmed to be", i.e. it only understands some things, but one day that may not be the case. I believe you're just thinking ahead a bit, since we're not there yet.
Fine with corruption? Hardly. Samsung has a long history of engaging in bribing government officials and getting caught. I talked about some of this a few months back when news came out that federal agents had raided Samsung Group to collect evidence of these crimes that they're now charging them with. To say the least, their corruption spans multiple generations and is wide-ranging enough to include everything from "mild" issues of business ethics like nepotism to more serious issues of government corruption that have the potential to topple the head of the country.
I recall an article a few years ago that did some investigative work into the people they were bribing at the time. It was able to tie their bribes to people engaging in everything from illegal drug trafficking to sex slaves. And I believe it was the same article that talked about how Samsung would also spy on reporters who were invited to media events, bugging their hotels and doing other things of that sort in order to ensure favorable reviews of their products. Some files apparently leaked that showed they were listening in and trying to collect dirt on the reporters, just in case the reviews didn't meet their satisfaction.