There's no way I am going to start an "Internet adventure", meaning searching for news/stuff that require visiting sites that I have never visited before, without a full set of FF4 portable, AdBlock, Noscript, Ghostery Autopager, YetAnotherSmoothScrolling, Stylish and Hyperwords. This for me is the minimal gear for a safe and effective quest. As long as I can't do this with any other browser, FF remains my only choice.
Needless to say, for all daily uses involving well-known safe sites, I don't need all that armour and I often use lightweight browsers like K-Meleon portable with its brilliant Privacy/Proxy/Agent settings accessible on the menu, or the chrome-based SRWare Iron portable.
When the MemShrink team succeeds to tame memory use, it will work only for a clean FF. The addition of the above plugins will still make it a beast. So I will SFTU and wisely suffer the consequences of my choice.
Regarding MemShrink, I think the decision was made by realizing that we are experiencing the age of netbooks and tablets. On these devices with meager hardware capabilities and limited RAM, competitive snappiness requires either more memory usage, which leads to more disk I/O, or more CPU usage, which both reduce battery autonomy. Currently, Chrome-based browsers seem to be more adaptable to these device platforms. MemShrink might provide some solutions allowing to temporarily survive the competition, but my bet is that soon Mozilla will be forced to consider a new codebase, written from scratch and specifically targeting these devices and possibly mobile phones too.
Any image is a choice and any choice is an intended harm to the other pictures that did not get posted.
Example: A small local newspaper has a tech column and regularly features pictures and reviews of Windows-based products while ignoring totally the Apple universe, because the editor is an MS fanboi, or because he gets paid under the table to do so. This certainly "causes harm" to Apple and the Windows-based product photos "have absolutely no other purpose whatsoever at all".
I check my iPhone and I see no checkpoints along my way so I'm heading to my destination. However, a checkpoint exists and I get busted.
I then sue the author of the app for damages caused by his false information. The author of the app says "You can't sue me because I have included a disclaimer that I don't guarantee the accuracy of the data included". I then make a press release that says "Apple sold me an app that cost me my driver's license and my job and tens of thousands of dollars because I missed an important business meeting".
All that Apple does is to protect their brand name, because the app in question was purchased via their app store and therefore it's their name that would be involved in news headlines and not the poor developer's.
I have to ask, what's the precise meaning of "endorsement" and "advertising"? Who advertises whom in this case?
When a (smaller) news company is "endorsing" a 1000x bigger company like Facebook, I 'd think that the small company attempts to exploit the Facebook brand to gain followers/brand recognition/prestige/share value. In addition, Facebook in principle could ask money from the small company, because in effect it's Facebook that advertises them and not the other way around.
Facebook currently does not need any more publicity, but it still would be very interesting if someone cared to investigate quantitatively how much the TV and the press contributed to Facebook's rise.
I have no citation but I'd claim that non-exposed breasts are even more memorable, especially when they belong to a crush of yours or a celebrity you worship.
Nice insights, but you got only the minor part of my 'gist".
My main point was that 'social networks' are the punishment for all of us, guilty and non-guilty, prisoners and "free" citizens. The lines are irrevocably blurred. For a recent example, just google 'Weinergate'.
Could we please pass a bill so that all sorts of prisoners maintain Facebook redemption pages, tweet Gospel verses every day and recite the books of the Bible on YouTube?
I am confident that the thoughtful, kind, compassionate and caring comments of several thousand (if not million) followers would be much more beneficial to them than the lame standard rehabilitation activities. (It goes without saying that the convicts would be required to read all comments and reply to each and every one individually).
The difference between outsiders and insiders is that outsiders are doing it voluntarily and with great enthousiasm.
It's weird that most of you were born and raised in christian countries, but few seem to get it.
All western religion is anchored on the concept of guilt. Any stimulus that might cause 'improper' thoughts is called a temptation (facilitating a phantasy of acting on one's thoughts) and therefore it becomes sinful/immoral/illegal not because it actually promotes the commitment of 'bad' acts, but because it will inevitably lead to guilt. Don't forget that "guilty" is the lowest possible existential status of a human person, representing both the biblical Fall of Man and the eponymous verdict in a court of law.
It doesn't matter whether a stimulus comes from photos, pixels or lines/words on paper - if it has the potential to 'offend' i.e. cause feelings of guilt, either intentionally or unintentionally, it is going eventually to be classified as sinful, immoral and illegal. No use bitching at these written or unwritten laws, they originated millenia ago. On the other hand, killing (but not murder) is not only OK and highly appreciated, it even becomes mandatory, especially when killing infidels or enemies at war. Therefore, trying to be clever by pinpointing contradictions or double talk between game violence and game sexuality won't save you in court.
Eastern culture is not based on the concept of guilt and therefore has no moral or legal problems depicting all sorts of 'indecent' (according to the western point of view) materials, a fact causing major headaches to import regulators of literature, animations, films, TV shows and computer games.
I think most of your comments apply to any country, not just Italy. In my country seismologists are regularly gagged by the government and endless heated debates take place on the media after major earthquakes. The main conspiracy theory is that seismologists are obliged to regularly submit their 'predictions' to the govt in sealed envelopes but at the same time they aren't allowed to make any public disclosures.
No government would ever risk the political and financial costs of a false positive, while at the same time they surely can't afford the financial costs of a true positive. It's a dead end that unavoidably leads to double think and double speak.
IANAL, but I think that the seismologists are the least guilty in Italy's case, since they were probably just obeying orders.
I'll tell you how it affects you (and no tabloid would ever write it explicitly) - the zombie apocalypse is here and now: Facebook feeds on brains and therefore is the legal and proper way of performing both self-lobotomy and cannibalism. Zuck just provides a subconscious metaphor: He chooses and kills gently the animals he feeds on in the same way we choose and chew our followers' brains.
Although you are an empiricist, you missed the most important step. If there's no money/power incentive, the experiment is not going to take place. This means that Step 1 has to be amended:
Step 1. Formulate a hypothesis that has a potential for money/profit and find business partners
How is anybody going to attempt reproducing the results when the samples are so scarce they are handed only to "4-5 colleagues"?
Any lab in the world could refute the existence of bacteria on Moon or Mars rocks/meteorites if they could lay their hands on any. Since they can't, all we can do is ponder on the (hidden or not hidden) agendas that cause such scarcity.
Same story since the dawn of shamanism and the dark arts: a vicious circle of secrecy, scarcity, knowledge, money and power which are necessary but not sufficient for locating any traces of truth. And to link to a previous/. article today, such truths are most probably related to national security so I'd better discipline myself and shut up.
Because (naming just a few that I can think of now):
a) it is the ultimate global recycling project - "your junk is my treasure" b) saves citizens worldwide billions of dollars by offering second-hand stuff at dirt cheap prizes and new stuff without middle-men taxes c) creates thousands of e-commerce related jobs worldwide for even untrained merchants in underdeveloped countries d) saves the environment from tons of e-waste (used computers, peripherals, gadgets etc) that would otherwise end up in Asian and African landfills e) similarly, saves the environment from tons of plastics (think vinyl records, CDs, DVDs, packaging materials etc) and other materials f) serves the scientific community and promotes research by providing cheap laboratory equipment g) saves millions of trees (used books, manuals, textbooks and all sorts of printed materials) etc etc.
What does Wikipedia offer to humanity beyond non-authoritative encyclopedic and trivia information?
"The Internet is the great equalizer." Schultz told Ars. This is the single most insightful sentence from TFA and most comments, and restates the #1 most general law of entropy degradation in the internet age.
You'd think that the same scam approach could apply to any other product. However, did any appliance manufacturer require you to sign any similar form after buying their TV, their fridge or their computer? No, because these giants know about it and they just don't care. Have you ever spent weeks or months researching and reading reviews before making up your mind which computer monitor to buy? Well, I have. Big companies don't care what reviews say, because for every knowledgeable client that says "this is crap" there will be another one saying "it's dirt cheap and good enough for the job".
Doctors and other private entrepreneurs however, pressured by the fact that they'll have only tens or a few hundred of steady clientele, are easily illusioned they can avoid the low tail of the review spectrum. In fact, they can't: As the number of reviews grows, for every outlier bad review there will be equally outlier raving reviews, the result being a gaussian distribution of ratings. It's called the law of large numbers. Good doctors are going to have negative reviews and not-so-good doctors are going to have reviewers paid to get their ratings up. Both will result in three and a half stars, the end of publicly available quality assessments (and the end of reviewing sites). Doctors and dentists should better take a pragmatic approach and accept the age-old facts of life: haters will hate, fans will fanboi, but a customer's person-to-person recommendation is worth more than ten thousand Facebook followers or one million tweets.
However, I can easily imagine a not-so-remote future where purchasing anything would require you to sign some kind of agreement to "do no evil" (TM). With societies as large as 300+ million (e.g. the US), laws cannot be expected to be enforced effectively, therefore the trend is to have everybody sign some kind of private contract that might eventually (together with some lobbying) become more binding than existing laws. It's cheap, it's effective copyright theater, and at present seems lawful.
The overarching theme is "any purchase must become a legal agreement". We can see signs of it already: your Apple mobile phone contract or tablet EULA may already have such clauses (thou shalt not jailbreak). Signing for a free email account may have such clauses (thou shalt not post abusive stuff). Using cloud services may have such clauses. Even buying a book or a music album might involve, in addition to DRM, a contract with similar restrictions (thou shalt not pirate). Etc. etc. ad nauseam.
Because the Internet is the great equalizer and your money is ours, so is your opinion and your existence in general.
Obligatory reference to Procol Harum's song "As strong as Samson" (Exotic Birds & Fruit, 1974)
Psychiatrists and lawyers...destroying mankind Drivin' 'em crazy...and stealing 'em blind Bankers and brokers...ruling the world Storing the silver...and hoarding the gold Ain't no use in preachers preaching When they don't know what they're preaching Weakest man, be strong as Samson When you're being held to ransom
Without detailed information about which antivirus/firewall/antitrojan these boxes were running (if they did) and whether UAC was disabled or not, these statistics are just a measure of the (non-) efficacy of said antivirus/firewall/antitrojan programs and not a measure of the efficacy of MSRT.
In addition, a properly firewalled PC won't let MSRT phone home. Mine attempted to do that for the first time ever yesterday (on port 443) and was promptly blocked, therefore I assume that data gathering is still going on.
Could we please have some information on what precisely is MSRT logging?
A person studying Theater, Film and Media is indeed the most qualified to talk, because the concept is older than written history and perhaps older than the concept of mask itself:
1. In Ancient Greek Theater, especially Tragedy (also in classical theater of other cultures), Anonymous is personified on stage by the Chorus, representing a very elaborate hybrid of the author's opinion and the Public Opinion. The chorus wore masks, to make the distinction between a person and a collective explicit.
2. In Film, although actors are eponymous, the person depicted on the screen is Anonymous, playing a role that is still eponymous. Naive theories of Film claim that this is done to offer each spectator the opportunity to identify with or distance themselves from the role and the person via empathy. Proper theories try to uncover and elaborate the 'psychanalytics' through which the spectator himself loses his own identity, being torn between the person and the role, the lights and the shadows on the silver screen.
3. The Media, as originally conceived by the concept of the newspaper, attempted to reinstate the concept of the chorus by publishing heavyweight unsigned "editorial" pieces, which expressed the paper's opinions in first-plural anonymous terms: "what should we do? who are we to believe? should we condemn them or not?".
Unfortunately, these days, Theater (who is the actor, who is the agent and who is the victim), Film (who is watching whom) and Media (what is real and what is not) serve the you-know-who (a famous expression to depict the not-so-anonymous) to exercise power, control, oppression and distortion of reality.
Personally, I prefer to remain a Nobody (Outis in ancient Greek), best defined by Oedipus when he said: “Cyclops, you asked what I am called, and promised me a gift, so I shall tell you what my name is. I am Nobody. Nobody is what I’m known as by my father, mother, friends and all.”
When the name is revealed, mystery, and Life itself, simply vanish in thin ashes.
Very interesting list, especially the last entry, which raises the question: Why does an Investigator need to be licensed and Google/Facebook need not?
The latter also collect information about citizens, their whereabouts, their browsing habits, their marital status, their ex-marital relationships, they even collect (decent or indecent) pictures of their family and friends. This data is also validly used to fire employees in the private and public sector, and most important than all, also counts as legit evidence in courts. Is it because a "Licensed Investigator" is not supposed to sell his findings to other interested parties? Or is it because a "machine" (a computer farm) is not considered by the law as having the potential of breaching personal rights?
Slashdot Mirror
There's no way I am going to start an "Internet adventure", meaning searching for news/stuff that require visiting sites that I have never visited before, without a full set of FF4 portable, AdBlock, Noscript, Ghostery Autopager, YetAnotherSmoothScrolling, Stylish and Hyperwords. This for me is the minimal gear for a safe and effective quest. As long as I can't do this with any other browser, FF remains my only choice.
Needless to say, for all daily uses involving well-known safe sites, I don't need all that armour and I often use lightweight browsers like K-Meleon portable with its brilliant Privacy/Proxy/Agent settings accessible on the menu, or the chrome-based SRWare Iron portable.
When the MemShrink team succeeds to tame memory use, it will work only for a clean FF. The addition of the above plugins will still make it a beast. So I will SFTU and wisely suffer the consequences of my choice.
Regarding MemShrink, I think the decision was made by realizing that we are experiencing the age of netbooks and tablets. On these devices with meager hardware capabilities and limited RAM, competitive snappiness requires either more memory usage, which leads to more disk I/O, or more CPU usage, which both reduce battery autonomy. Currently, Chrome-based browsers seem to be more adaptable to these device platforms. MemShrink might provide some solutions allowing to temporarily survive the competition, but my bet is that soon Mozilla will be forced to consider a new codebase, written from scratch and specifically targeting these devices and possibly mobile phones too.
This was my thought too.. I'd certainly miss pics and trailers from gory zombie movies on IMDB.
Very informative, I didn't know that Jesus was black, not aryan and fully dressed on the cross.
Any image is a choice and any choice is an intended harm to the other pictures that did not get posted.
Example: A small local newspaper has a tech column and regularly features pictures and reviews of Windows-based products while ignoring totally the Apple universe, because the editor is an MS fanboi, or because he gets paid under the table to do so. This certainly "causes harm" to Apple and the Windows-based product photos "have absolutely no other purpose whatsoever at all".
Can Apple sue?
Hypothetical #2:
I check my iPhone and I see no checkpoints along my way so I'm heading to my destination. However, a checkpoint exists and I get busted.
I then sue the author of the app for damages caused by his false information. The author of the app says "You can't sue me because I have included a disclaimer that I don't guarantee the accuracy of the data included". I then make a press release that says "Apple sold me an app that cost me my driver's license and my job and tens of thousands of dollars because I missed an important business meeting".
All that Apple does is to protect their brand name, because the app in question was purchased via their app store and therefore it's their name that would be involved in news headlines and not the poor developer's.
I see no hypocrisy in either corporatism, or religion; it's a mutual contract: "I will endorse/pay you and you will protect me".
This contract implicitly reads "I will also try to proselytize others provided you kill my enemies".
The above two rules are a very concise and complete short history of the human race.
I have to ask, what's the precise meaning of "endorsement" and "advertising"? Who advertises whom in this case?
When a (smaller) news company is "endorsing" a 1000x bigger company like Facebook, I 'd think that the small company attempts to exploit the Facebook brand to gain followers/brand recognition/prestige/share value. In addition, Facebook in principle could ask money from the small company, because in effect it's Facebook that advertises them and not the other way around.
Facebook currently does not need any more publicity, but it still would be very interesting if someone cared to investigate quantitatively how much the TV and the press contributed to Facebook's rise.
I have no citation but I'd claim that non-exposed breasts are even more memorable, especially when they belong to a crush of yours or a celebrity you worship.
Nice insights, but you got only the minor part of my 'gist".
My main point was that 'social networks' are the punishment for all of us, guilty and non-guilty, prisoners and "free" citizens. The lines are irrevocably blurred. For a recent example, just google 'Weinergate'.
Could we please pass a bill so that all sorts of prisoners maintain Facebook redemption pages, tweet Gospel verses every day and recite the books of the Bible on YouTube?
I am confident that the thoughtful, kind, compassionate and caring comments of several thousand (if not million) followers would be much more beneficial to them than the lame standard rehabilitation activities. (It goes without saying that the convicts would be required to read all comments and reply to each and every one individually).
The difference between outsiders and insiders is that outsiders are doing it voluntarily and with great enthousiasm.
Lending my pal a fiver becoming a criminal offense? Buying and handing him a beer? Lending him my car to make a business trip?
Regarding the latter, lending our cars to family and friends would surely cause a loss of billions of dollars to the automobile industry.
+1. Just one more word would make the summary quite acceptable: "to stop the alleged loss of billions"...
It's weird that most of you were born and raised in christian countries, but few seem to get it.
All western religion is anchored on the concept of guilt. Any stimulus that might cause 'improper' thoughts is called a temptation (facilitating a phantasy of acting on one's thoughts) and therefore it becomes sinful/immoral/illegal not because it actually promotes the commitment of 'bad' acts, but because it will inevitably lead to guilt. Don't forget that "guilty" is the lowest possible existential status of a human person, representing both the biblical Fall of Man and the eponymous verdict in a court of law.
It doesn't matter whether a stimulus comes from photos, pixels or lines/words on paper - if it has the potential to 'offend' i.e. cause feelings of guilt, either intentionally or unintentionally, it is going eventually to be classified as sinful, immoral and illegal. No use bitching at these written or unwritten laws, they originated millenia ago. On the other hand, killing (but not murder) is not only OK and highly appreciated, it even becomes mandatory, especially when killing infidels or enemies at war. Therefore, trying to be clever by pinpointing contradictions or double talk between game violence and game sexuality won't save you in court.
Eastern culture is not based on the concept of guilt and therefore has no moral or legal problems depicting all sorts of 'indecent' (according to the western point of view) materials, a fact causing major headaches to import regulators of literature, animations, films, TV shows and computer games.
I think most of your comments apply to any country, not just Italy. In my country seismologists are regularly gagged by the government and endless heated debates take place on the media after major earthquakes. The main conspiracy theory is that seismologists are obliged to regularly submit their 'predictions' to the govt in sealed envelopes but at the same time they aren't allowed to make any public disclosures.
No government would ever risk the political and financial costs of a false positive, while at the same time they surely can't afford the financial costs of a true positive. It's a dead end that unavoidably leads to double think and double speak.
IANAL, but I think that the seismologists are the least guilty in Italy's case, since they were probably just obeying orders.
I'll tell you how it affects you (and no tabloid would ever write it explicitly) - the zombie apocalypse is here and now: Facebook feeds on brains and therefore is the legal and proper way of performing both self-lobotomy and cannibalism. Zuck just provides a subconscious metaphor: He chooses and kills gently the animals he feeds on in the same way we choose and chew our followers' brains.
Although you are an empiricist, you missed the most important step. If there's no money/power incentive, the experiment is not going to take place. This means that Step 1 has to be amended:
Step 1. Formulate a hypothesis that has a potential for money/profit and find business partners
How is anybody going to attempt reproducing the results when the samples are so scarce they are handed only to "4-5 colleagues"?
Any lab in the world could refute the existence of bacteria on Moon or Mars rocks/meteorites if they could lay their hands on any. Since they can't, all we can do is ponder on the (hidden or not hidden) agendas that cause such scarcity.
Same story since the dawn of shamanism and the dark arts: a vicious circle of secrecy, scarcity, knowledge, money and power which are necessary but not sufficient for locating any traces of truth. And to link to a previous /. article today, such truths are most probably related to national security so I'd better discipline myself and shut up.
Because (naming just a few that I can think of now):
a) it is the ultimate global recycling project - "your junk is my treasure"
b) saves citizens worldwide billions of dollars by offering second-hand stuff at dirt cheap prizes and new stuff without middle-men taxes
c) creates thousands of e-commerce related jobs worldwide for even untrained merchants in underdeveloped countries
d) saves the environment from tons of e-waste (used computers, peripherals, gadgets etc) that would otherwise end up in Asian and African landfills
e) similarly, saves the environment from tons of plastics (think vinyl records, CDs, DVDs, packaging materials etc) and other materials
f) serves the scientific community and promotes research by providing cheap laboratory equipment
g) saves millions of trees (used books, manuals, textbooks and all sorts of printed materials)
etc etc.
What does Wikipedia offer to humanity beyond non-authoritative encyclopedic and trivia information?
I'm glad you realized this proposal is so life-threatening that it cannot possibly be posted eponymously.
"The Internet is the great equalizer." Schultz told Ars. This is the single most insightful sentence from TFA and most comments, and restates the #1 most general law of entropy degradation in the internet age.
You'd think that the same scam approach could apply to any other product. However, did any appliance manufacturer require you to sign any similar form after buying their TV, their fridge or their computer? No, because these giants know about it and they just don't care. Have you ever spent weeks or months researching and reading reviews before making up your mind which computer monitor to buy? Well, I have. Big companies don't care what reviews say, because for every knowledgeable client that says "this is crap" there will be another one saying "it's dirt cheap and good enough for the job".
Doctors and other private entrepreneurs however, pressured by the fact that they'll have only tens or a few hundred of steady clientele, are easily illusioned they can avoid the low tail of the review spectrum. In fact, they can't: As the number of reviews grows, for every outlier bad review there will be equally outlier raving reviews, the result being a gaussian distribution of ratings. It's called the law of large numbers. Good doctors are going to have negative reviews and not-so-good doctors are going to have reviewers paid to get their ratings up. Both will result in three and a half stars, the end of publicly available quality assessments (and the end of reviewing sites). Doctors and dentists should better take a pragmatic approach and accept the age-old facts of life: haters will hate, fans will fanboi, but a customer's person-to-person recommendation is worth more than ten thousand Facebook followers or one million tweets.
However, I can easily imagine a not-so-remote future where purchasing anything would require you to sign some kind of agreement to "do no evil" (TM). With societies as large as 300+ million (e.g. the US), laws cannot be expected to be enforced effectively, therefore the trend is to have everybody sign some kind of private contract that might eventually (together with some lobbying) become more binding than existing laws. It's cheap, it's effective copyright theater, and at present seems lawful.
The overarching theme is "any purchase must become a legal agreement". We can see signs of it already: your Apple mobile phone contract or tablet EULA may already have such clauses (thou shalt not jailbreak). Signing for a free email account may have such clauses (thou shalt not post abusive stuff). Using cloud services may have such clauses. Even buying a book or a music album might involve, in addition to DRM, a contract with similar restrictions (thou shalt not pirate). Etc. etc. ad nauseam.
Because the Internet is the great equalizer and your money is ours, so is your opinion and your existence in general.
Obligatory reference to Procol Harum's song "As strong as Samson" (Exotic Birds & Fruit, 1974)
Psychiatrists and lawyers...destroying mankind
Drivin' 'em crazy...and stealing 'em blind
Bankers and brokers...ruling the world
Storing the silver...and hoarding the gold
Ain't no use in preachers preaching
When they don't know what they're preaching
Weakest man, be strong as Samson
When you're being held to ransom
Posting as an AC shows you have a good understanding of the internet and an even better understanding of the universe.
Rest assured we all constantly wonder for the rest of our lives and doubts surely are eating us away - it's called the human condition.
Without detailed information about which antivirus/firewall/antitrojan these boxes were running (if they did) and whether UAC was disabled or not, these statistics are just a measure of the (non-) efficacy of said antivirus/firewall/antitrojan programs and not a measure of the efficacy of MSRT.
In addition, a properly firewalled PC won't let MSRT phone home. Mine attempted to do that for the first time ever yesterday (on port 443) and was promptly blocked, therefore I assume that data gathering is still going on.
Could we please have some information on what precisely is MSRT logging?
A person studying Theater, Film and Media is indeed the most qualified to talk, because the concept is older than written history and perhaps older than the concept of mask itself:
1. In Ancient Greek Theater, especially Tragedy (also in classical theater of other cultures), Anonymous is personified on stage by the Chorus, representing a very elaborate hybrid of the author's opinion and the Public Opinion. The chorus wore masks, to make the distinction between a person and a collective explicit.
2. In Film, although actors are eponymous, the person depicted on the screen is Anonymous, playing a role that is still eponymous. Naive theories of Film claim that this is done to offer each spectator the opportunity to identify with or distance themselves from the role and the person via empathy. Proper theories try to uncover and elaborate the 'psychanalytics' through which the spectator himself loses his own identity, being torn between the person and the role, the lights and the shadows on the silver screen.
3. The Media, as originally conceived by the concept of the newspaper, attempted to reinstate the concept of the chorus by publishing heavyweight unsigned "editorial" pieces, which expressed the paper's opinions in first-plural anonymous terms: "what should we do? who are we to believe? should we condemn them or not?".
Unfortunately, these days, Theater (who is the actor, who is the agent and who is the victim), Film (who is watching whom) and Media (what is real and what is not) serve the you-know-who (a famous expression to depict the not-so-anonymous) to exercise power, control, oppression and distortion of reality.
Personally, I prefer to remain a Nobody (Outis in ancient Greek), best defined by Oedipus when he said: “Cyclops, you asked what I am called, and promised me a gift, so I shall tell you what my name is. I am Nobody. Nobody is what I’m known as by my father, mother, friends and all.”
When the name is revealed, mystery, and Life itself, simply vanish in thin ashes.
Apple needs no more advertisement, the East was won many decades ago.
Very interesting list, especially the last entry, which raises the question: Why does an Investigator need to be licensed and Google/Facebook need not?
The latter also collect information about citizens, their whereabouts, their browsing habits, their marital status, their ex-marital relationships, they even collect (decent or indecent) pictures of their family and friends. This data is also validly used to fire employees in the private and public sector, and most important than all, also counts as legit evidence in courts. Is it because a "Licensed Investigator" is not supposed to sell his findings to other interested parties? Or is it because a "machine" (a computer farm) is not considered by the law as having the potential of breaching personal rights?