You know there are professions that have been in use for ages that require you to use your arms all day. Blacksmithing, weaving, farming, manufacturing, etc, etc. You would learn to do it, just as you have learned not to do it.
Those professions generally require the full range of arm motion - not holding them more-or-less straight out and moving them in a limited range. This is a considerable difference.
Besides, if it was laid down on the desk, it would be like... writing, you know, that people have done for ages. Maybe we could get some Franciscan Monks to teach us how to hold a pen for 8 hours. Yeesh.
Again, using a touchscreen interface to a computer isn't much like this. When writing (western style), your arm moves left-to-right in a smooth movement. When working with a (flat on the desk) touch screen you are constantly lifting and repositioning your arm.
In reality, both situations are worse (from an ergonomices viewpoint) than the current. For virtually all users, the mouse is in the same plane as the keyboard, meaning the mouse can be acessed with a simple motion of the arm. (You do lose some time moving to and from the mouse, granted.) It will be much more fatiguing to constantly lift your arms from a keyboard to the screen above it. As far as reaching past a keyboard to reaching a horizonatal screen beyond it? That's going to be extremely fatiguing as it involves both arm and upper body movement.
Long before TV--in 15th- and 16th- century Italy, and possibly two millennia ago--women were dying their hair blond.
And... ? Was it a fad / fashion? I don't remember seeing many representations of that in the art from that period.
Primarily because women depicted in that art were almost overwhelmingly married upper class women, and most of what remained were upper class women of various marital statuses. You might note that this is a subset of all women. (Interestingly enough - the Virgin Mary is frequently depicted as a blonde in that era.)
Women's desire to look like Barbie--young with small waist, large breasts, long blond hair, and blue eyes--is a direct, realistic, and sensible response to the desire of men to mate with women who look like her. There is evolutionary logic behind each of these features.
Sure there is. You might want to look at what was actually painted back then. In particular, Peter Paul Rubens who was painting at that time.
Actually the women that were painted back then varied wildy in what they looked like. Thin, fat, tall, short, etc... etc... all represented. (Think real hard: Do you think Rubens' name would have come down through history if he was painting what everyone else painted? There's a reason why his name was attached to a particular body style.)
I was preparing to format a hard drive returned to us by someone. Found some truly disgusting JPGs in a folder named 'Family Photos". The country where this occurred makes it a crime not to report child pornography, so I was stuck in a tough situation. I had to decide whether our ethical standards concerning the customer's privacy had precedence, or the criminal code.
I went home and thought about it for two hours, then decided that my moral responsibility trumped my ethical duties. I turned the hard drive in to the police.
Huh? The moment you looked in the folder - you proved you had neither morals or ethics. You turned him in in an attempt to make yourself feel better and to make up for your failure.
That decision ended up costing me my job, and ultimately made it impossible for me to stay in that community. The person implicated was well-known and widely respected. I stuck to my guns, and stood by my decision, but eventually had to leave, because people no longer trusted me.
You prove yourself untrustworthy by snooping - and then you blame the community for treating you as untrustworthy?
Try actually reading what you quote - it helps you avoid comparing apples to oranges;
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) says more than 40% of bootlegged films in the US are secretly taped in New York cinemas.
Canadian theatres were the source for nearly 50 per cent of illegal camcords across the globe
The two claims are not incompatible.
So, in essence, they claim that New York and Canada account for 90% of the problem... These numbers sound totally made up to me.
A person who take two different numbers, and then makes up numbers of his own... Well, let's just say that people who live in glass houses should be careful of the trajectory of the stones they are throwing.
I don't know why but my favorite Arthur C. Clarke novel would have to be Childhood's End.... possibly the reason why I haven't seen this adapted into a movie is it's not fit for public consumption (or something that can doom a film in the states, Christian acceptance).
Or it could be simply that the story won't translate well into film.
Among other things - it's really two or three connected stories told serially within one set of covers. This is the same problem that haunted Dune for decades (for example). Another problem is that Sir Arthur simply won't leave Sri Lanka, which renders collaboration difficult. Yet another problem is that 'popular' (film) sci-fi has tended for decades towards 'space opera' and lightweight sophmoric 'philosophy/morals' and steered away from deep issues and complex tales. (LOTR could safely (partially) ignore the issue of complexity because that series has what Sir Arthur lacks, a large and vocal fanbase.)
And the issue of fanbase may be the real key - for whatever reason, among the Masters of SF, Sir Arthur remains largely obscure. He's known for 2001, but many fen know little more than that. He simply isn't read very much. (This may be because his main output over the last twenty years has been a series of simply wretched collaborations.)
How can you prove something is secure if you can't see the source code?
You can't.
How can you prove something is secure if you can see the source code?
You can't.
That's the dilemma that open source advocates don't want to think too hard about, if they are even aware it exists. A program that is 'provably secure' is like a program that is 'provably correct', barring a few trivial examples - there simply isn't any such animal.
Keeping your code closed allows security vulnerabilities to exist for much longer than they would if they could be scrutinized by the public at large.
On the other hand - keeping your code open makes it easier for both black and white hats to find the vulnerabilties in the code. On the gripping hand, keeping it open is no certain guarantee that holes will be fixed where it matters - which isn't on Sourceforge, but is out in the real world where the software is installed and running.
Open Source isn't a panacea and it isn't without its faults and problems. (Some unique, some shared with closed source.) Open Source emphatically isn't a magic wand - you can't simply wave it and watch your problems melt away.
I think nasa should make it standard mission procedure to plan several possible missions for each probe they send.
You can't really do that - as you don't know what kind of shape the probe will be in at the end of it's primary mission. That being said, it's been NASA's tacit policy for years to run their probes until they drop if at all possible.
If that's the case, we're already on it, since people can already be committed and kept in a mental institution if they are mentally unsound.
Yes, I am quite aware of the practice - and that current practice is quite different from the proposed practice. Currently, you can only be involuntarily committed if (more or less, the exact standards vary) you are an immediate danger to yourself or those around you, or you are unable to care for yourself _and_ lack someone to care for you. All in all, much more specific than your omnibus "mentally unsound".
You do know that the government is already allowed to decide who is a criminal, right?
Not in the US, and I suspect not in the UK. Here in the US, one becomes a criminal upon conviction - and that requires a jury unless the suspect (the criminal-to-be) explicitly waives his right to trial.
I'm going to get moderated to all hell for this, but I don't care: After arguing in three or four threads in the last few weeks about how "it's not just the US" doing things like this, I'd just like to say a few words: I TOLD YOU SO.
Indeed. If this article concerned a similiar law proposed in the US, we'd be treated to pages of highly moderated anti-Bush and anti-Christian rants... Where are you know all you Slashdotters who insist that Europe is so much better, freer, and more mature than the US?
The honest truth is that images NOT ONCE ever "for this stuff to trigger an unbalanced mind." One of the main problems that prudes have is that any fair study of this disgusting filth shows that people that view it are LESS likely to commit crimes, whether violent or not.
Do you have a cite for that? Or are you just blowing smoke? (Given the fact that serial killers, especially the sexual ones, frequently retain souvenirs to remind themselves of their crimes and to provide further sexual incitement would seem to mitigate against your claim.)
This is in dinstinct difference from peopel that view kiddie porn, who are in fact more likely to commit crimes.
you'd have to answer every nutjob (and potential competitor trying to shoot you down) with time on their hands or an axe to grind
No as described, there would be six months for information to be passed to the patent office, and after that six month period the patent office would be able to make a decision based on evidence from interested parties, any nutjobs with an axe to grind would have to find a valid reason for the patent not to be granted, which if they did, would invalidate the patent application.
No, as described - the nutjob merely has to submit a comment. Which the Patent Office must take time to read and respond do (even if such a response is internal and amounts to "this comment is from a nutjob" or "this comment is not from an interested party").
As for it being like a planning application, I guess it is a little; a planning application where there are a strict set of guidelines and factual information available for decision making. That is opposed to what I understand of the planning process where anyone with any objection gets a voice, and that objection has merit simply for having been made.
If you don't have a system that treats every objection (before evaluation) with equal merit, you have a system that's broken right from implementation. It will be impossible to define 'interested parties' in a way that is both equitable and functional. (And free from creative misinterpretation.) In the end, you create a complex new process that doesn't actually accomplish anything.
it would be appropriate if someone pointed out that they were using the idea being patented 10 years earlier, and that it was something common to the industry in which it applied.
Actually - niether would be an appropriate reason to deny a patent. Not unless you change a long standing principle of the law that requires the subject of the patent to both a) widely known and b) described in print. It is to the IT industries detriment that they rarely do "b" - and the current problem with IT and patents spring directly from that lack, not from a gaping fault in patent law.
A simple solution would be to require all patents to be made public in full for a period (say 6 months) prior to acceptance, this would allow any interested parties to object to them *before* they are enforceable.
That's an insane solution - granting patents would then become like trying to get permits and plans approved for a major development or construction project, you'd have to answer every nutjob (and potential competitor trying to shoot you down) with time on their hands or an axe to grind. Progress would slow to a halt. (If you don't intend for the objections to be required to be acted on/responded to prior to granting enforceability then your 'solution' doesn't actually 'solve' anything.)
It would have to be very well organized and categorized, and people would have to actively watch what companies are doing, and preemptively writing long discussions about "obvious solutions" to potential problems.
Which still might not work. If 'obvious solution x' is blogged on (say) July 5th, 2007, but the company applying for the patent can show they were working on the solutin on (say) July 4th, 2007 - it's not clearly prior art.
So, if the satellite was so worthless that it will have no effect on weather forecasting, why did we bother supporting it?
It's very useful - just not for the purpose Bill Proenza claimed it was. (A claim now shown to be suspect.) The satellite is actually designed (and mostly used) for studying storms beyond the reach of the Hurricane Hunter aircraft, and serves that purpose admirably.
Reading the article, I find that they are critical of the report he used with only 19 samples. The satellite hasn't existed long, and major storms are -not- that common. How the hell was he supposed to get more data?
It's a valid criticism - no matter how you slice it, 19 samples is a _very_ small number. Small enough that drawing valid conclusions is _very_ difficult. What scientists are supposed to do in that sitation is draw tenative conclusions and announce them to the community for further study. What they are not supposed to do is announce positive conclusions without qualification. However, announcing positive results is exactly what he did - he treated suppositions as facts without any firm foundations for those facts. This is wrong.
I can't see in any way, shape or form how this was his -fault-
Nobody held a gun to his head and threatened him that if he failed to make claims that were scientifically shaky there would be Dire Consequences. Nobody forced him to make exaggerated claims.
Does that matter a whit? Nope.
It doesn't matter to you that (assuming you are a US taxpayer) a scientist in your employ seems to have made false representations?
Socialized healthcare at a stroke allows you to remove huge layers of management and cost from the system. You still go to hospital, but less people get paid along the way - and as all those salaries/adverts etc are ultimately coming out of your pocket...
That's just the thing - socialized medicine doesn't remove all of those layers. While the advertisements and marketing goes away - the (private) insurance company people are merely transformed in the (public) bureaucracy. The paperwork doesn't go away - just the forms change. The decisionmaking over what care you get when doesn't go away - just the entity that writes the paychecks of the decisionmakers changes.
It simply costs less to run - consider every single person/advert in the chain between you signing up with healthcare, going to hospital and coming back after an operation.
It gets cheaper because the goverment can now force you to use cheaper generics. And because the goverment limits who gets what treatment and when. And because the goverment can mandate the salary paid to health care workers...
It always utterly astonishes me that Slashdot - home of the most stalwart dyed-in-the-wool get-the-goverment-out-of-my-life crowd I know of... Rolls over and begs the goverment to come in and take control of this aspect of their lives.
"Don't you feel like you're being ripped off paying for the health care of jobless people when you're busting a gut earning a living?"
Most unemployed people are not lazy bums who don't want to work. They are people with psychological problems who feel being outcast from society, and don't belong anywhere.
Do you have a cite for that? Or are you disguising opinion as fact? Or are you just slinging (largely meaningless) buzzwords about? (The remainder of your message strongly makes me suspect it's one of the latter two.)
So why the moderation as 'troll'? I just get tired of the technogeek porn in these articles. ("oohh baby, what a Big UPS, and your cooling towers... so smooth and sexy!")
Articles like TFA always love to point out these systems - and they sound impressive to someone whose only experience is the desktop PC or small datacenter... But the reality is, they aren't anything rare or special. if you have the money you can order one of those huge UPS's just about as casually as you can pick its smaller brethern off the shelf at Fry's. Big cooling towers are standard HVAC installations, unlike the liquid cooled PC which is (currently) unusual and limited to ubergeek crowd.
From TFA: They also had two dedicated UPS boxes which stood six feet tall, three feet wide and 12 feet deep.
*Yawn*. Only impressive to the slashgeek with no real experience with heavy iron (I.E most of them.) When I was in the Navy and serving at a training center - we had also had two UPS's this size. For each trainer/lab. And we had four labs.
Just in the Weapons Training end of the building.
Cooling and power conditioning for the training facility was in a seperate 15k sq ft building. Getting to the building from the facility was cool though - you wnet down into the basement, then down a ladder to a tunnel that ran the length of the building. Off that tunnel was another tunnel that ran out under the back parking lot to the support building. We used to joke about building a sniper range in one of the tunnels - they were that long.
Americans take their privacy seriously? Since when as the average yank done that?
Sure you have some folk who do, but considering the supermarket "loyalty cards" (and it isn't just in the US of course), the various voting things (e.g. who's the hottest "singer"?), using plastic cards to pay for everything and so on...
Meh, I'm sure you get my point, which is that only some people (around the world), take their privacy as seriously as you seem to think.
No, it's just that the average American doesn't go into screaming hissy fits over every 'leak' of 'personal information'. He feels (rightly) that it doesn't really matter if he leaves a paper trail - he doesn't have anything to hide. He (again rightly) doesn't care whether $MEGA_CORP knows his preference in breakfast cereal.
He's also been desensitized by a decade of self-serving 'privacy advocates' whose only argument in favor of extreme privacy is that one should be in favor of extreme privacy, no supporting arguments needed. (Not to mention the tinfoil hat crowd the privacy advocates have openly wooed to their side - their argument is even worse; "Look, $DICTATOR made $GROUP register with $GOVERMENT_BODY! If $MEGA_CORP knows your breakfeast cereal preferences, you could be next in the [re-education camps|prison|gas chambers]!".)
Americans take their privacy too seriously to ignore this if this becomes public.
Either you're not American or you don't pay attention to the news. Most Americans have been FUD'ded into ignoring privacy concerns.
And most of the FUD hasn't come from Microsoft or Big Corporate Interests... It's come from privacy advocates who have been screaming "the sky is falling, the sky is falling" for a decade now over dammed near everything. Those advocates don't realize that Joe Sixpack doesn't care if the latest video games phone home and register themselves, or if $Mega_Corp knows his preferences in salad dressing. Ol' Joe does care about his bills and banking - but the privacy advocates have treated all 'privacy violations' with the same shrill cries of Doooooooooooom! for so long, ol' Joe has been desensitized.
Why DOESN'T 7-11 become Kwik-E mart? Nationwide? It would turn the gazillions of shows that will be on independent TV stations and YouTube for the next 30 years into walking, talking, joking advertisements for a nationwide, popular chain! And, it would turn a nationwide chain of convenience stores into a real-life, living, touch-it advertisement for one of the most popular TV show franchises ever!
7-11 is a nationally known brand it it's own right.
Rebranding places the fate of the chain in other peoples hands.
Within the show, the Kwik-E Mart is rarely shown in a positive light.
The Simpsons may be on of the most popular shows ever - but it is already visibly in decline. It's impact on popular culture is vastly diminished from what it was ten years ago.
Slashdot Mirror
Those professions generally require the full range of arm motion - not holding them more-or-less straight out and moving them in a limited range. This is a considerable difference.
Again, using a touchscreen interface to a computer isn't much like this. When writing (western style), your arm moves left-to-right in a smooth movement. When working with a (flat on the desk) touch screen you are constantly lifting and repositioning your arm.
In reality, both situations are worse (from an ergonomices viewpoint) than the current. For virtually all users, the mouse is in the same plane as the keyboard, meaning the mouse can be acessed with a simple motion of the arm. (You do lose some time moving to and from the mouse, granted.) It will be much more fatiguing to constantly lift your arms from a keyboard to the screen above it. As far as reaching past a keyboard to reaching a horizonatal screen beyond it? That's going to be extremely fatiguing as it involves both arm and upper body movement.
Primarily because women depicted in that art were almost overwhelmingly married upper class women, and most of what remained were upper class women of various marital statuses. You might note that this is a subset of all women. (Interestingly enough - the Virgin Mary is frequently depicted as a blonde in that era.)
Actually the women that were painted back then varied wildy in what they looked like. Thin, fat, tall, short, etc... etc... all represented. (Think real hard: Do you think Rubens' name would have come down through history if he was painting what everyone else painted? There's a reason why his name was attached to a particular body style.)
Yet somehow - this is the fault of the display, rather than the person who designed the language?
Odds are the artist doesn't own the rights to the songs in the first place - thus asking him is really pointless without ascertaining that first.
Huh? The moment you looked in the folder - you proved you had neither morals or ethics. You turned him in in an attempt to make yourself feel better and to make up for your failure.
You prove yourself untrustworthy by snooping - and then you blame the community for treating you as untrustworthy?
The Motion Picture Association of America (MPAA) says more than 40% of bootlegged films in the US are secretly taped in New York cinemas.
Canadian theatres were the source for nearly 50 per cent of illegal camcords across the globe
The two claims are not incompatible.
A person who take two different numbers, and then makes up numbers of his own... Well, let's just say that people who live in glass houses should be careful of the trajectory of the stones they are throwing.
Or it could be simply that the story won't translate well into film.
Among other things - it's really two or three connected stories told serially within one set of covers. This is the same problem that haunted Dune for decades (for example). Another problem is that Sir Arthur simply won't leave Sri Lanka, which renders collaboration difficult. Yet another problem is that 'popular' (film) sci-fi has tended for decades towards 'space opera' and lightweight sophmoric 'philosophy/morals' and steered away from deep issues and complex tales. (LOTR could safely (partially) ignore the issue of complexity because that series has what Sir Arthur lacks, a large and vocal fanbase.)
And the issue of fanbase may be the real key - for whatever reason, among the Masters of SF, Sir Arthur remains largely obscure. He's known for 2001, but many fen know little more than that. He simply isn't read very much. (This may be because his main output over the last twenty years has been a series of simply wretched collaborations.)
How can you prove something is secure if you can see the source code?
You can't.
That's the dilemma that open source advocates don't want to think too hard about, if they are even aware it exists. A program that is 'provably secure' is like a program that is 'provably correct', barring a few trivial examples - there simply isn't any such animal.
On the other hand - keeping your code open makes it easier for both black and white hats to find the vulnerabilties in the code. On the gripping hand, keeping it open is no certain guarantee that holes will be fixed where it matters - which isn't on Sourceforge, but is out in the real world where the software is installed and running.
Open Source isn't a panacea and it isn't without its faults and problems. (Some unique, some shared with closed source.) Open Source emphatically isn't a magic wand - you can't simply wave it and watch your problems melt away.
You can't really do that - as you don't know what kind of shape the probe will be in at the end of it's primary mission. That being said, it's been NASA's tacit policy for years to run their probes until they drop if at all possible.
Yes, I am quite aware of the practice - and that current practice is quite different from the proposed practice. Currently, you can only be involuntarily committed if (more or less, the exact standards vary) you are an immediate danger to yourself or those around you, or you are unable to care for yourself _and_ lack someone to care for you. All in all, much more specific than your omnibus "mentally unsound".
Not in the US, and I suspect not in the UK. Here in the US, one becomes a criminal upon conviction - and that requires a jury unless the suspect (the criminal-to-be) explicitly waives his right to trial.
Indeed. If this article concerned a similiar law proposed in the US, we'd be treated to pages of highly moderated anti-Bush and anti-Christian rants... Where are you know all you Slashdotters who insist that Europe is so much better, freer, and more mature than the US?
Do you have a cite for that? Or are you just blowing smoke? (Given the fact that serial killers, especially the sexual ones, frequently retain souvenirs to remind themselves of their crimes and to provide further sexual incitement would seem to mitigate against your claim.)
Again, do you have a cite for that?
Yes, it's a _very_ slippery slope to have the Goverment start defining who is and who is not "unbalanced". You really, really don't want to go there.
No, as described - the nutjob merely has to submit a comment. Which the Patent Office must take time to read and respond do (even if such a response is internal and amounts to "this comment is from a nutjob" or "this comment is not from an interested party").
If you don't have a system that treats every objection (before evaluation) with equal merit, you have a system that's broken right from implementation. It will be impossible to define 'interested parties' in a way that is both equitable and functional. (And free from creative misinterpretation.) In the end, you create a complex new process that doesn't actually accomplish anything.
Actually - niether would be an appropriate reason to deny a patent. Not unless you change a long standing principle of the law that requires the subject of the patent to both a) widely known and b) described in print. It is to the IT industries detriment that they rarely do "b" - and the current problem with IT and patents spring directly from that lack, not from a gaping fault in patent law.
That's an insane solution - granting patents would then become like trying to get permits and plans approved for a major development or construction project, you'd have to answer every nutjob (and potential competitor trying to shoot you down) with time on their hands or an axe to grind. Progress would slow to a halt. (If you don't intend for the objections to be required to be acted on/responded to prior to granting enforceability then your 'solution' doesn't actually 'solve' anything.)
Which still might not work. If 'obvious solution x' is blogged on (say) July 5th, 2007, but the company applying for the patent can show they were working on the solutin on (say) July 4th, 2007 - it's not clearly prior art.
It's very useful - just not for the purpose Bill Proenza claimed it was. (A claim now shown to be suspect.) The satellite is actually designed (and mostly used) for studying storms beyond the reach of the Hurricane Hunter aircraft, and serves that purpose admirably.
It's a valid criticism - no matter how you slice it, 19 samples is a _very_ small number. Small enough that drawing valid conclusions is _very_ difficult. What scientists are supposed to do in that sitation is draw tenative conclusions and announce them to the community for further study. What they are not supposed to do is announce positive conclusions without qualification. However, announcing positive results is exactly what he did - he treated suppositions as facts without any firm foundations for those facts. This is wrong.
Nobody held a gun to his head and threatened him that if he failed to make claims that were scientifically shaky there would be Dire Consequences. Nobody forced him to make exaggerated claims.
It doesn't matter to you that (assuming you are a US taxpayer) a scientist in your employ seems to have made false representations?
That's just the thing - socialized medicine doesn't remove all of those layers. While the advertisements and marketing goes away - the (private) insurance company people are merely transformed in the (public) bureaucracy. The paperwork doesn't go away - just the forms change. The decisionmaking over what care you get when doesn't go away - just the entity that writes the paychecks of the decisionmakers changes.
It gets cheaper because the goverment can now force you to use cheaper generics. And because the goverment limits who gets what treatment and when. And because the goverment can mandate the salary paid to health care workers...
It always utterly astonishes me that Slashdot - home of the most stalwart dyed-in-the-wool get-the-goverment-out-of-my-life crowd I know of... Rolls over and begs the goverment to come in and take control of this aspect of their lives.
Do you have a cite for that? Or are you disguising opinion as fact? Or are you just slinging (largely meaningless) buzzwords about? (The remainder of your message strongly makes me suspect it's one of the latter two.)
Exactly the kind of meaningless tinfoil hat rhetoric which I was describing.
So why the moderation as 'troll'? I just get tired of the technogeek porn in these articles. ("oohh baby, what a Big UPS, and your cooling towers... so smooth and sexy!")
Articles like TFA always love to point out these systems - and they sound impressive to someone whose only experience is the desktop PC or small datacenter... But the reality is, they aren't anything rare or special. if you have the money you can order one of those huge UPS's just about as casually as you can pick its smaller brethern off the shelf at Fry's. Big cooling towers are standard HVAC installations, unlike the liquid cooled PC which is (currently) unusual and limited to ubergeek crowd.
From TFA: They also had two dedicated UPS boxes which stood six feet tall, three feet wide and 12 feet deep.
*Yawn*. Only impressive to the slashgeek with no real experience with heavy iron (I.E most of them.) When I was in the Navy and serving at a training center - we had also had two UPS's this size. For each trainer/lab. And we had four labs.
Just in the Weapons Training end of the building.
Cooling and power conditioning for the training facility was in a seperate 15k sq ft building. Getting to the building from the facility was cool though - you wnet down into the basement, then down a ladder to a tunnel that ran the length of the building. Off that tunnel was another tunnel that ran out under the back parking lot to the support building. We used to joke about building a sniper range in one of the tunnels - they were that long.
No, it's just that the average American doesn't go into screaming hissy fits over every 'leak' of 'personal information'. He feels (rightly) that it doesn't really matter if he leaves a paper trail - he doesn't have anything to hide. He (again rightly) doesn't care whether $MEGA_CORP knows his preference in breakfast cereal.
He's also been desensitized by a decade of self-serving 'privacy advocates' whose only argument in favor of extreme privacy is that one should be in favor of extreme privacy, no supporting arguments needed. (Not to mention the tinfoil hat crowd the privacy advocates have openly wooed to their side - their argument is even worse; "Look, $DICTATOR made $GROUP register with $GOVERMENT_BODY! If $MEGA_CORP knows your breakfeast cereal preferences, you could be next in the [re-education camps|prison|gas chambers]!".)
And most of the FUD hasn't come from Microsoft or Big Corporate Interests... It's come from privacy advocates who have been screaming "the sky is falling, the sky is falling" for a decade now over dammed near everything. Those advocates don't realize that Joe Sixpack doesn't care if the latest video games phone home and register themselves, or if $Mega_Corp knows his preferences in salad dressing. Ol' Joe does care about his bills and banking - but the privacy advocates have treated all 'privacy violations' with the same shrill cries of Doooooooooooom! for so long, ol' Joe has been desensitized.