You're just plain wrong. European companies are fined just as much for this kind of thing.
Citation needed. Please show me a European company that's been subjected to as much scrutiny as, say, Microsoft. Or show me a European company that's been fined as much as Google has. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. We know about Microsoft and Google... but sadly, I don't think you'll find anyone who's heard of these amazingly large fines towards European IT companies. That might be because there aren't really any counterparts to Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc., in Europe. And maybe, just maybe, Europe would like to change that. Perhaps... with really big fines?
What I'm getting really tired of, is people who idiotically believe that a government won't act in its own economic best interests because that would go against whatever whack-ass worldview they have about their own country vis a vis all the other countries. I mean, it seems rather obvious, but nobody's national anthem is "We're Number Two!"
Reality check: Big companies are not the people the European governments are supposed to protect.
Correct! Big companies in Europe are the "people" the European governments are supposed to protect. -_-
So the governments are actually doing exactly what they should: Protect the rights of the citizens.
False. They're protecting their own economic interests. Google is an American company that pays little (if any) taxes to Europe. Europe's governments therefore have an incentive to try to lock Google out via cumbersome and expensive legislation to encourage a European competitor to emerge. But I love how you think there's a government out there who honestly cares about the "rights of the citizens". If only there were some historical document [the] illustrating how [declaration] often that [of] happens we [independence] could look at.
Indeed. It's interesting that a lot of Americans respond to stories like this mostly with "zomg taxes!"
Clearly you don't watch a lot of TV... because that's the only way you'd find this observation interesting. Mass media has conditioned them to react that way.
That says something about what you guys expect from government, methinks.
Our already low standards can always be revised downward. It's called aging. When you're in 5th grade, you think you got a pretty good idea about how the government works, and it seems like an alright system. By the time you graduate from college, you have this suspicion that the country is run by morons. When you hit your 30s... you're certain of it.
Not legal. When it comes to the question whether something "illegal" is done by a...
Thank you, Sir Armchair Lawyer, for that insightful commentary. I'm sure you're a far better expert on the topic than the legal departments of all these major companies. Consider that just the laws of the United States are so numerous, so complex, that nobody on this planet is capable of being fully versed in them, and in fact they cannot even be counted with any accuracy. Entire libraries exist for the sole purpose of collecting these laws. Now, multiply that problem by the number of countries we're talking about here... and you can quickly discern that there is no clear-cut "legal" or "not legal" to be had. Anywhere.
That's it. And before someone asks, yes, risk management is part of my job
You're sucking at it.
and these are essentially the considerations when it comes to laws. More and more often law changes get dumped on my desk rather than legal because we no longer avoid breaking the law by default, we check whether it pays to break it.
So what you're basically saying is that you're actively engaged in unethical business practices, and are maliciously and intentionally subverting the law on behalf of your employer. Where did you say you worked in "risk management" again?
You'd be surprised how often it does...
The only thing I'm surprised about... is how often people fail to utilize any critical thinking skills. But I have no empirical basis for this: Stupid people pretty much cram every nook and cranny on every internet forum. Perhaps it's some vestiges of youthful optimism that I haven't yet rid myself of...
The ad companies will cry foul and make websites give messages saying how the evil socialist EU regime is taking this website away.
Wrong, defined: You. The "ad companies" are not the people collecting thie data, they're not the ones whose servers are being hacked, aren't the ones with crappy internal security procedures, and are not collecting massive amounts of data on people's online habits and aggregating them into profiles. The "ad companies" are the consumers of this data, not the producers of it.
Since they are injecting Chrome with malware and adware through buying extensions and now circumventing adblock plus and making javascript fail to load if they detect blockers I would not put this past them.
Yes. It's every "ad company" that's doing this, not just a few rogue ones. Let's just throw the entire industry under the bus because of the actions of a few bad apples. Surely this reasoned response to the problem will provoke a long-term solution...
Marginalized people like Neo Nazis* aren't allowed to speak in countries like France and Germany, they know there a minority so voting won't work, and no way that they would be allowed on a Jury. With that in mind it's surprising that we haven't seen more violence out of people like them.
It's generally considered good form to revise one's assumptions when their predictive value has been lost. Or put another way: It's your understanding of these "marginalized people" that's faulty here.
*They're marginalized because they're horrid and nuts,
Ah yes, of course. It couldn't just be that you're a prejudiced asshole. It is, in fact, possible to be a minority that is not "horrid and nuts". See also: Every civil rights movement. Ever.
So wait... you're saying that when you look at what people are posting on the internet... you can tell what their opinions are on something? NO WAY!!!!! -_- How is this "predictive" by any definition? We've known for awhile that if you get a sample size of maybe 1-3% of a group... you can predict the distribution with a good degree of accuracy. There's nothing special about this slashvertisement.
- US Constitution with all 27 Amendments - 7,818 words. - EU Constitution: Nobody's really quite sure. It's approximately the size of a book at present, and nobody can really find a plain-text version on the internet... it's all been compressed into navigable websites, databases, and PDFs. --
The entire reason for the EU was to try to show that Europe could compete with America economically. Naturally, they don't want to compete fairly... hence ginormous fines and byzantine rules to guarantee their application on a regular basis. Free market? Screw that. We're Europeans!
Did you read the article at all? Because no you didn't.
Circular logic works because circular logic works because...
I'm just going to stop reading the rest of your post now... because if your opening lines are a combination of fail logic and being a condescending prick, the rest is probably even worse (looks down) Much. Worse.
if there were competitors, and not just vendors screaming free market when they adjust prices but then hold up monopoly contracts with the city/state when a community tries to come together and go their own way.
Although I agree capitalism has failed here, it's not the vendor's fault, but the government's. Those "monopoly contracts" were not the invention of the vendors, but rather our derptastic marblecake system of government that creates a byzantine legal clusterfuck getting any wires routed anywhere. You have to get approval from the municipality, then permits from the county, subject to the regulations of the state, and the services provided over those subject to further regulation by the federal government. There are entire law firms and support companies whose sole reason for existance is to help negotiate the clusterfuck to secure a contract... and it's not easy, because these contracts are usually exclusive -- often at the request of the municipalities. And since that's become the de facto way of doing business, businesses who don't in turn negotiate on the basis of exclusivity may find themselves with a massive investment that just went tits up. Remember when municipalities tried to roll out wifi in neighborhoods around the country? Recall that the overwhelming majority of those initiatives detonated on the launchpad.
It's a high risk market, with a high cost of entry, and neither of those have anything at all to do with the technology. After spending tens of millions getting the contracts setup, paying out legal fees, etc., then comes the hundreds of millions in funds to infrastructure... and the majority of the cost there is -- wait for it, administrative overhead. It's not like it's hard to dig a hole in the ground and drop some wire in it. But every city has their own way of doing things, and there's easements, environmental impact studies, right of ways, compensation to land owners, and the list goes on. And on. And on some more.
If that sounds like free market to you, well it isn't. It's pretty far removed from the concept. So when you bitch about the cable and telecos having a monopoly... don't forget to give a little love to your derptastic local governments' refusal to play nice and provide a streamlined administrative process and demands for non-exclusivity.
Sigh. You people with your myopic vision. If AMD consigned itself to your view of what it should do, it'll be dead in another 5-7 years. Let's take a look at what Intel offers: Higher performance. Lower energy consumption. Less heat. Smaller die size. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find anything AMD has in its favor from an engineering standpoint. So what does AMD have that's keeping it in business? Cost. AMD offers a lower price point for economy systems.
But that's not where the profit is. That's not what's going to take AMD into the mid-21st century. If AMD sticks to that line of thinking, it'll go the way of Cyrix... and for exactly the same reason. AMD can't invest in a new fab plant because its cash reserves are too low, whereas Intel's pile of gold just keeps growing.
The only way to swing AMD back into the mid and high-end market is parallelization -- multiple chips, embedding everything into everything, and cutting costs everywhere it can... because it can't shrink the CPU and it can't do a damn thing about energy consumption. Their only avenue of escape is a radical re-think of the chipset, integration, and anything it can to boost profits to make that leap forward in minaturization to catch up with Intel. And it will not be easy. Many market analysts have suggested AMD throw in the towel.
That's the position AMD has to play. Of course, your myopic view only sees an engineering problem to solve. You have absolutely no comprehension of the business considerations behind the move... which is probably why you insist they're missing the boat. They are trying to claw their way into the mid-range market and undercut Intel. This is one of the select few ways they're going to do it. Unfortunately, the cost of commodity components to get this Hindenburg off the ground isn't going down -- AMD's position is shrinking and if they don't leverage everything now, they're going to find themselves in an untenable market position and will simply fold, leaving Intel as the only major player left in the market.
It's pretty different from a standard caching operation.
Okay... and your argument for this is...
It's more like a massively parallel distributed caching operation where the act of caching something removes it from the original data source until it is uncached, and where latency is at least a day or two and cost is very high.
So it's the same predictive logic used for caching, except it takes longer, and it has a queue hung on the side. I don't call that "pretty different" from a structural standpoint. "Pretty different" for me would be the difference between a predictive caching algorithm and, say, TCP/IP flow control algorithms, which also try to be predictive, but have very different constraints.
Either way, this is neither an unusual, innovative, or in any way exceptional application of decades-old algorithms and information processing engineering. It should not be patentable, and that was my point... not quibbling over whether it's "slightly" different or "pretty" different... to qualify for a patent, it must be truly groundbreaking, not merely taking existing formulas and process and adapting it.
Nope they won't charge you, the article says the items are held at a local level waiting for a matching order to show up before it knows where/who to deliver to so the billing process isn't predictive, just the inventory/distribution/shipping is.
Yes, to the surprise of nobody, another badly written headline is a terrible summary. All distribution chains do this already -- What Amazon has patented is a particular set of data mining methods in the hope that it will result in a slight increase in efficiency in this process.
Of course, to anyone who's studied caching problems in CSci... this patent would be almost painfully obvious. It's the same thing we've been doing in computers since, erm... the 80286 days. But when you're a large company in America, the rules don't really apply to you.
He's a teen!!! The brain of a teen has been demonstrated time and time again to have an underdeveloped sense of risk.
Which begs the question... how is he hiding all that money from his parents? Surely they must know something is up. They should join him in jail... for a much longer time.
I love teenagers. Only they would ask $2,000 to sell software that, if he got caught, would net him decades in prison. He may be a good programmer, but he's an idiot businessman -- risk versus reward.
Future historians will look at the last 20 years as if the tape of our commercial activities had been erased.
Perhaps they'll just write that it was a time when capitalism had gone completely crazy -- a time when 99.9% of e-mails were spam, where over 1/3rd of television was advertising, where half of the content of a website was advertisement, where thousands of tons of printed advertisements were moved from mailboxes to dumpsters, and where retailers invaded our privacy with in-store tracking tools and built robots to determine our sex, race, and likely socioeconomic status in realtime, and then displayed different ads in storefronts...... And finally society said enough, and clubbed the cameras down from their poles and destroyed them, they put ad blocking on TVs and the internet, they demanded privacy from Congress, and after decades of culture being absorbed and destroyed by excessive marketing, not unlike some fat ogre eating everything in sight... finally, by god... they slew Goliath.
I said this last time... Consent doesn't mean the same thing for legislators and corporations as it does for you peons. Consent is, you used it, thought about it, looked at it... thanks to intellectual property, it's not dissimilar to rape. And I believe it was a Congressman who said... hey, if it's gonna happen, you might as well enjoy it. But you know, if the intellectual property is illegitimate, then the consumer has ways of shutting that whole thing down, right?
..that his end was still less unpleasant than his victim's.
Yes. It's totally ethical to cause pain and suffering to someone, so long as it's less than the pain and suffering they caused before. Also, medical experiments on prisoners is okay, because afterall they've been convicted of a crime, and the experiments would be less harmful than what they've done, so it's legit too.
There was another man who thought like this in history...
When you're only talking about first languages then more people speak Spanish than English but when you include second languages then English is more common. 500 million vs 750 million. One if four people speak at least a little English.
But number of native speakers, English is third. Sorry, but you're gonna have to accept that you're not Number One.
As opposed to an operating system created by an American corporation, which reeks of its own backdoor exploits for governmental spying.
As opposed to an operating system created by a [somewhere you don't live] corporation, which reeks of...
I think we're getting mired in our own nationalism instead of looking objectively at the facts. Mandarin and Spanish are both spoken more in the world than English. And China has billions of people. We only have millions. Why, exactly, doesn't it make sense for them to develop their own operating system? We're getting stuck on this circle-jerk about the NSA, privacy, etc., but the argument being made here is primarily economic, not political. And economically, it makes sense; The only question on my mind is... why did it take them so long to start?
I'm just tinfoil-hatting here, but do we know that wasn't its intended purpose?
Because of the pathetically few hits on honeypots indicated it managed to attempt two things: Bitcoin mining (lol; a couple million infections over a two month period earned him maybe $100), and click fraud... so basically he defrauded two institutions widely regarded as fraudulent in their own right. Woooo.... big achiever.
Slashdot Mirror
You're just plain wrong.
European companies are fined just as much for this kind of thing.
Citation needed. Please show me a European company that's been subjected to as much scrutiny as, say, Microsoft. Or show me a European company that's been fined as much as Google has. Extraordinary claims demand extraordinary evidence. We know about Microsoft and Google... but sadly, I don't think you'll find anyone who's heard of these amazingly large fines towards European IT companies. That might be because there aren't really any counterparts to Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc., in Europe. And maybe, just maybe, Europe would like to change that. Perhaps... with really big fines?
What I'm getting really tired of, is people who idiotically believe that a government won't act in its own economic best interests because that would go against whatever whack-ass worldview they have about their own country vis a vis all the other countries. I mean, it seems rather obvious, but nobody's national anthem is "We're Number Two!"
Reality check: Big companies are not the people the European governments are supposed to protect.
Correct! Big companies in Europe are the "people" the European governments are supposed to protect. -_-
So the governments are actually doing exactly what they should: Protect the rights of the citizens.
False. They're protecting their own economic interests. Google is an American company that pays little (if any) taxes to Europe. Europe's governments therefore have an incentive to try to lock Google out via cumbersome and expensive legislation to encourage a European competitor to emerge. But I love how you think there's a government out there who honestly cares about the "rights of the citizens". If only there were some historical document [the] illustrating how [declaration] often that [of] happens we [independence] could look at.
Indeed. It's interesting that a lot of Americans respond to stories like this mostly with "zomg taxes!"
Clearly you don't watch a lot of TV... because that's the only way you'd find this observation interesting. Mass media has conditioned them to react that way.
That says something about what you guys expect from government, methinks.
Our already low standards can always be revised downward. It's called aging. When you're in 5th grade, you think you got a pretty good idea about how the government works, and it seems like an alright system. By the time you graduate from college, you have this suspicion that the country is run by morons. When you hit your 30s... you're certain of it.
Not legal. When it comes to the question whether something "illegal" is done by a ...
Thank you, Sir Armchair Lawyer, for that insightful commentary. I'm sure you're a far better expert on the topic than the legal departments of all these major companies. Consider that just the laws of the United States are so numerous, so complex, that nobody on this planet is capable of being fully versed in them, and in fact they cannot even be counted with any accuracy. Entire libraries exist for the sole purpose of collecting these laws. Now, multiply that problem by the number of countries we're talking about here... and you can quickly discern that there is no clear-cut "legal" or "not legal" to be had. Anywhere.
That's it. And before someone asks, yes, risk management is part of my job
You're sucking at it.
and these are essentially the considerations when it comes to laws. More and more often law changes get dumped on my desk rather than legal because we no longer avoid breaking the law by default, we check whether it pays to break it.
So what you're basically saying is that you're actively engaged in unethical business practices, and are maliciously and intentionally subverting the law on behalf of your employer. Where did you say you worked in "risk management" again?
You'd be surprised how often it does...
The only thing I'm surprised about... is how often people fail to utilize any critical thinking skills. But I have no empirical basis for this: Stupid people pretty much cram every nook and cranny on every internet forum. Perhaps it's some vestiges of youthful optimism that I haven't yet rid myself of...
The ad companies will cry foul and make websites give messages saying how the evil socialist EU regime is taking this website away.
Wrong, defined: You. The "ad companies" are not the people collecting thie data, they're not the ones whose servers are being hacked, aren't the ones with crappy internal security procedures, and are not collecting massive amounts of data on people's online habits and aggregating them into profiles. The "ad companies" are the consumers of this data, not the producers of it.
Since they are injecting Chrome with malware and adware through buying extensions and now circumventing adblock plus and making javascript fail to load if they detect blockers I would not put this past them.
Yes. It's every "ad company" that's doing this, not just a few rogue ones. Let's just throw the entire industry under the bus because of the actions of a few bad apples. Surely this reasoned response to the problem will provoke a long-term solution...
Marginalized people like Neo Nazis* aren't allowed to speak in countries like France and Germany, they know there a minority so voting won't work, and no way that they would be allowed on a Jury. With that in mind it's surprising that we haven't seen more violence out of people like them.
It's generally considered good form to revise one's assumptions when their predictive value has been lost. Or put another way: It's your understanding of these "marginalized people" that's faulty here.
*They're marginalized because they're horrid and nuts,
Ah yes, of course. It couldn't just be that you're a prejudiced asshole. It is, in fact, possible to be a minority that is not "horrid and nuts". See also: Every civil rights movement. Ever.
There is nobody in the world as bad as the NSA.
East Germany calling from 1-800-BUL-SHIT.... it's for you.
So wait... you're saying that when you look at what people are posting on the internet... you can tell what their opinions are on something? NO WAY!!!!! -_- How is this "predictive" by any definition? We've known for awhile that if you get a sample size of maybe 1-3% of a group... you can predict the distribution with a good degree of accuracy. There's nothing special about this slashvertisement.
Each EU nation has its own constitution (if they have one, unlike Britain for example).
The EU constitution, also known as the Lisbon Treaty. Grow a brain.
Acually, the EU was a
- US Constitution with all 27 Amendments - 7,818 words.
- EU Constitution: Nobody's really quite sure. It's approximately the size of a book at present, and nobody can really find a plain-text version on the internet... it's all been compressed into navigable websites, databases, and PDFs.
--
There is nothing logical about the EU.
The EU is also responsible for...
The entire reason for the EU was to try to show that Europe could compete with America economically. Naturally, they don't want to compete fairly... hence ginormous fines and byzantine rules to guarantee their application on a regular basis. Free market? Screw that. We're Europeans!
Did you read the article at all? Because no you didn't.
Circular logic works because circular logic works because...
I'm just going to stop reading the rest of your post now... because if your opening lines are a combination of fail logic and being a condescending prick, the rest is probably even worse (looks down) Much. Worse.
if there were competitors, and not just vendors screaming free market when they adjust prices but then hold up monopoly contracts with the city/state when a community tries to come together and go their own way.
Although I agree capitalism has failed here, it's not the vendor's fault, but the government's. Those "monopoly contracts" were not the invention of the vendors, but rather our derptastic marblecake system of government that creates a byzantine legal clusterfuck getting any wires routed anywhere. You have to get approval from the municipality, then permits from the county, subject to the regulations of the state, and the services provided over those subject to further regulation by the federal government. There are entire law firms and support companies whose sole reason for existance is to help negotiate the clusterfuck to secure a contract... and it's not easy, because these contracts are usually exclusive -- often at the request of the municipalities. And since that's become the de facto way of doing business, businesses who don't in turn negotiate on the basis of exclusivity may find themselves with a massive investment that just went tits up. Remember when municipalities tried to roll out wifi in neighborhoods around the country? Recall that the overwhelming majority of those initiatives detonated on the launchpad.
It's a high risk market, with a high cost of entry, and neither of those have anything at all to do with the technology. After spending tens of millions getting the contracts setup, paying out legal fees, etc., then comes the hundreds of millions in funds to infrastructure... and the majority of the cost there is -- wait for it, administrative overhead. It's not like it's hard to dig a hole in the ground and drop some wire in it. But every city has their own way of doing things, and there's easements, environmental impact studies, right of ways, compensation to land owners, and the list goes on. And on. And on some more.
If that sounds like free market to you, well it isn't. It's pretty far removed from the concept. So when you bitch about the cable and telecos having a monopoly... don't forget to give a little love to your derptastic local governments' refusal to play nice and provide a streamlined administrative process and demands for non-exclusivity.
The whole point of AMD APUs is low cost gaming.
Sigh. You people with your myopic vision. If AMD consigned itself to your view of what it should do, it'll be dead in another 5-7 years. Let's take a look at what Intel offers: Higher performance. Lower energy consumption. Less heat. Smaller die size. In fact, you'd be hard pressed to find anything AMD has in its favor from an engineering standpoint. So what does AMD have that's keeping it in business? Cost. AMD offers a lower price point for economy systems.
But that's not where the profit is. That's not what's going to take AMD into the mid-21st century. If AMD sticks to that line of thinking, it'll go the way of Cyrix... and for exactly the same reason. AMD can't invest in a new fab plant because its cash reserves are too low, whereas Intel's pile of gold just keeps growing.
The only way to swing AMD back into the mid and high-end market is parallelization -- multiple chips, embedding everything into everything, and cutting costs everywhere it can... because it can't shrink the CPU and it can't do a damn thing about energy consumption. Their only avenue of escape is a radical re-think of the chipset, integration, and anything it can to boost profits to make that leap forward in minaturization to catch up with Intel. And it will not be easy. Many market analysts have suggested AMD throw in the towel.
That's the position AMD has to play. Of course, your myopic view only sees an engineering problem to solve. You have absolutely no comprehension of the business considerations behind the move... which is probably why you insist they're missing the boat. They are trying to claw their way into the mid-range market and undercut Intel. This is one of the select few ways they're going to do it. Unfortunately, the cost of commodity components to get this Hindenburg off the ground isn't going down -- AMD's position is shrinking and if they don't leverage everything now, they're going to find themselves in an untenable market position and will simply fold, leaving Intel as the only major player left in the market.
And if that happens... we're all fucked.
It's pretty different from a standard caching operation.
Okay... and your argument for this is...
It's more like a massively parallel distributed caching operation where the act of caching something removes it from the original data source until it is uncached, and where latency is at least a day or two and cost is very high.
So it's the same predictive logic used for caching, except it takes longer, and it has a queue hung on the side. I don't call that "pretty different" from a structural standpoint. "Pretty different" for me would be the difference between a predictive caching algorithm and, say, TCP/IP flow control algorithms, which also try to be predictive, but have very different constraints.
Either way, this is neither an unusual, innovative, or in any way exceptional application of decades-old algorithms and information processing engineering. It should not be patentable, and that was my point... not quibbling over whether it's "slightly" different or "pretty" different... to qualify for a patent, it must be truly groundbreaking, not merely taking existing formulas and process and adapting it.
Nope they won't charge you, the article says the items are held at a local level waiting for a matching order to show up before it knows where/who to deliver to so the billing process isn't predictive, just the inventory/distribution/shipping is.
Yes, to the surprise of nobody, another badly written headline is a terrible summary. All distribution chains do this already -- What Amazon has patented is a particular set of data mining methods in the hope that it will result in a slight increase in efficiency in this process.
Of course, to anyone who's studied caching problems in CSci... this patent would be almost painfully obvious. It's the same thing we've been doing in computers since, erm... the 80286 days. But when you're a large company in America, the rules don't really apply to you.
He's a teen!!! The brain of a teen has been demonstrated time and time again to have an underdeveloped sense of risk.
Which begs the question... how is he hiding all that money from his parents? Surely they must know something is up. They should join him in jail... for a much longer time.
I love teenagers. Only they would ask $2,000 to sell software that, if he got caught, would net him decades in prison. He may be a good programmer, but he's an idiot businessman -- risk versus reward.
Future historians will look at the last 20 years as if the tape of our commercial activities had been erased.
Perhaps they'll just write that it was a time when capitalism had gone completely crazy -- a time when 99.9% of e-mails were spam, where over 1/3rd of television was advertising, where half of the content of a website was advertisement, where thousands of tons of printed advertisements were moved from mailboxes to dumpsters, and where retailers invaded our privacy with in-store tracking tools and built robots to determine our sex, race, and likely socioeconomic status in realtime, and then displayed different ads in storefronts... ... And finally society said enough, and clubbed the cameras down from their poles and destroyed them, they put ad blocking on TVs and the internet, they demanded privacy from Congress, and after decades of culture being absorbed and destroyed by excessive marketing, not unlike some fat ogre eating everything in sight... finally, by god... they slew Goliath.
So long as you're hosting your ads off-site, or even on a local (ad.example.com) server, we'll be able to block them.
Obscured Javascript using document.write() will save us! -_-
I said this last time... Consent doesn't mean the same thing for legislators and corporations as it does for you peons. Consent is, you used it, thought about it, looked at it... thanks to intellectual property, it's not dissimilar to rape. And I believe it was a Congressman who said... hey, if it's gonna happen, you might as well enjoy it. But you know, if the intellectual property is illegitimate, then the consumer has ways of shutting that whole thing down, right?
..that his end was still less unpleasant than his victim's.
Yes. It's totally ethical to cause pain and suffering to someone, so long as it's less than the pain and suffering they caused before. Also, medical experiments on prisoners is okay, because afterall they've been convicted of a crime, and the experiments would be less harmful than what they've done, so it's legit too.
There was another man who thought like this in history...
When you're only talking about first languages then more people speak Spanish than English but when you include second languages then English is more common. 500 million vs 750 million. One if four people speak at least a little English.
But number of native speakers, English is third. Sorry, but you're gonna have to accept that you're not Number One.
As opposed to an operating system created by an American corporation, which reeks of its own backdoor exploits for governmental spying.
As opposed to an operating system created by a [somewhere you don't live] corporation, which reeks of...
I think we're getting mired in our own nationalism instead of looking objectively at the facts. Mandarin and Spanish are both spoken more in the world than English. And China has billions of people. We only have millions. Why, exactly, doesn't it make sense for them to develop their own operating system? We're getting stuck on this circle-jerk about the NSA, privacy, etc., but the argument being made here is primarily economic, not political. And economically, it makes sense; The only question on my mind is... why did it take them so long to start?
I'm just tinfoil-hatting here, but do we know that wasn't its intended purpose?
Because of the pathetically few hits on honeypots indicated it managed to attempt two things: Bitcoin mining (lol; a couple million infections over a two month period earned him maybe $100), and click fraud... so basically he defrauded two institutions widely regarded as fraudulent in their own right. Woooo.... big achiever.