Reddit knows what's best for us. Let it rise and save us from ourselves.
Here's a little hint: Reddit doesn't give a fuck what is best for anybody except Reddit.
If popular opinion was that they should allow all sorts of crap because it's good for free speech, they'd do that.
Reddit is simply reflecting that they get the bad PR and don't want that because it interferes with their business interests.
They're not saving us from ourselves, they're saving themselves from their users and distancing themselves from behavior they don't want to be associated with.
Not invented by Microsoft, not advancing Microsoft market share.
Microsoft took a player out of the market, got their IP and patents, and then spat out the rest.
Microsoft didn't care about a successful Nokia. Microsoft cared about advancing the business interests of Microsoft.
Improve Symbian or move to Android? Microsoft was never going to do that.
As soon as Elon Musk was in, there was only one outcome -- extinguish anything not Microsoft, pillage what was valuable. Musk went into Nokia 100% committed to remaking Nokia into a part of Microsoft, which means he was never going to look out for the interests of Nokia in any objective sense.
Sadly, the lines are being redrawn... as we pass laws making ISPs and carriers responsible for policing copyright, child porn, terrorism (infidelity, tax evasion, sedition) we create a world in which instead of being merely a conduit, entities are responsible for the crap their users access or do.
Industry is being coopted as an enforcement arm of governments, who in turn have been coopted as the enforcement arm for corporate interests.
And the more this happens, the more people will say "you can say anything you want, but not here".
But as long as the stuff people do on the internet can legally affect other entities (even if it's just to comply with a subpoena), this notion that other people will provide you a platform to voice your crazy is now quaint and antiquated.
Free speech means the government can't outlaw what you say. It does not mean, and never has, that someone else is responsible for providing you with the platform.
And when you're talking about a corporation who has to keep their shareholders happy, providing a forum for people to make unpopular statements isn't going to work if it negatively impacts their reputation/legal standing.
Censorship has now been outsourced, and has to be weighed against corporate interests.
Threats to rape people, racist rants, or posting underage photos... well, not so much.
In the same way you can't go on private property in the real world and demand unlimited free speech, you also can't do it on the internet.
Yeah, the gutting of Nokia in terms of phones is pretty complete.
Microsoft has succeeded in knocking them out of the market, getting their IP, and sending them on their way.
I still can't decide if this was a brilliant strategy by Microsoft which worked, or a completely inept attempt to expand their competencies in cell phones.
Either way, Nokia and its shareholders seem to have gotten royally screwed in the process.
Love 'em or hate 'em, Apple is selling real products which have been disruptive to existing stuff, and for which people are paying money.
Microsoft seems to be perennially playing catch up, releasing unpopular products, and sticking to the bad stereotype of "I'm a PC/I'm a Mac" in which we're all writing spreadsheets and Power Point slides but otherwise utterly failing to "innovate" a damned thing -- other than copycat products nobody is buying.
Apple at least got to be the richest company by selling stuff. That you don't like it or think that's meaningless is an issue you'll need to deal with yourself. Maybe you can console yourself at your Windows Phone users group or something.
But Apple has produced more of substance in the last years than Microsoft. They just haven't targeted it to hardcore nerds or people for whom software is political.
But somehow I know people from VPs of tech companies, to guys who install fireplaces, to little old grandmothers who are Apple households using things like phones, tablets, Apple TV, and computers -- and all being quite happy about it. And having it all seamlessly work together.
Which tells me you're out of touch with the reality that actual people are spending actual money for the stuff you claim has no substance. Meanwhile, Microsoft is failing to compete on many of those fronts.
Sorry, but these days it's Microsoft who is all glitz and no substance, churning out copies of other people's products, and failing to make people say "oooh, I need one".
So, in the same way a roller coaster at the bottom of the Marianas Trench would be novel and have no competition... debating how effective the hyper loop would be on Mars is kind of pointless.
We've never put a human on Mars. Let's not start planning the transportation grid.
Sorry, this is someone doing their post-doc work on science fiction, so I'm afraid I fail to see the point.
Nobody says the people who wish to express different values can't do it. Reddit is just saying it's not their job to provide the platform for it.
By all means, start your bigoted trolls and crazy people website. I'm sure it will be very popular.
Do you think Reddit somehow has a responsibility to provide a venue for such things?
It is your right to be as bigoted and offensive as you choose to be. It isn't your right to have someone provide you the platform, or to have it be free from consequences.
The last few years it seems like decades of "because we say so" is catching up with Microsoft.
Their "innovation" seems to be at an all time low, and most of the new and shiny stuff they're putting out seems to fall flat, and the stuff they're putting out which copies what other people have done aren't very popular.
I wonder if Microsoft hasn't lost the plot entirely, and now they're a big lumbering entity flailing around to try to stay relevant, while mostly failing to write stuff people care about.
Office has mostly plateaued, yes, people will keep using it, but there's not a lot of new functionality anybody needs.
Quite honestly, their strategy to make everything look like mobile is complete garbage for a desktop computer. You have to turn off most of their "innovations" to end up with a usable desktop.
If they are pinning their hopes on all of us becoming completely involved in all of their ecosystem, they will probably discover not enough of us care, or are willing to go that route.
It just feels like Microsoft no longer has any real clue about how to remain relevant in a lot of segments. I can pretty much say I don't foresee their vision of the future being something I give a damn about.
And when I see shit like "we're going to share your wifi password" I think "wow, you have no clue about security and think you own the systems" -- basically nobody with a Microsoft product will ever get any access to any wifi I control.
Sorry Microsoft, but you've become a dinosaur selling us spreadsheets and Power Point. Meanwhile the rest of the world is actually trying to make new and interesting stuff.
Do you really think a bunch of guys in dark suits didn't show up and basically threaten them with jail time?
As paranoid as is sounds, these days I think it is entirely plausible that a national security letter or somesuch was used to say "if you tell anybody about this, we will put you in a deep dark hole... whether it's for the rest of your life or marking the end of it is your choice".
This technology will never see the light of day, unless it's used by some three letter agency full of fascists.
Welcome to modern reality. Where all that crazy shit from the 80s is now true.
Which in no way changes that both the Flash and Java plugins are horrible, flaky, insecure, and deprecated.
As I said, you pretty much have to keep one browser for all the shit you shouldn't trust, and one for the rest.
But don't be surprised when the horrible, flaky, insecure and deprecated plugins demonstrate why they're all those things.
When your company sticks you with garbage, you're stuck with garbage. It sucks, but the solution isn't for everybody else to try to make Flash and Java suck less when used on web pages.
Mozilla are protecting most of their users. Your IT department can protect you.
If Flash is going to be on it's 38th exploit of the month, I applaud Mozilla disabling it. Because it really always has been a pile of shit, and has always been insecure beyond belief.
It's one of the 3 browsers I keep open all the time.
I don't give a damn about any of their new features. But it's the one which is set to not run any javascript ever or accept cookies and has the most locked down settings.
A lot of people seem to complain about how tragic it would be if people could no longer access games.
Me, I'm of the opinion Flash has been a terrible security/privacy nightmare as long as it has existed and don't install it on my machines.
Flash is long overdue to be killed off.
Being the source of at least one security exploit every month for the last 15 years tells me it's a Steaming Heap of Innovative Technology, and always has been.
"Greece" is not a unitary person here -- the governments changed over time. You can't blame the debt on the current government (which didn't contract for it).
It doesn't matter if the current government contracted for it. It exists.
Imagine you're a corporation (which in a lot of ways governments are kind of like). Now, imagine you get a new CEO who wants to get out of existing contracts because he didn't contract for them and doesn't want to pay them.
Too damned bad. You don't get to go "waaah, we can't afford this so we want a do-over".
I conclude Germany is destroying Greece to ensure that Spain and Italy toe the line from now on.
Here's an alternate explanation: If Germany starts forgiving debts for everybody, then the Germans are paying for someone else's prosperity, and asking Germans to pay for that is like a mugging, but on a large scale and in slow motion. That would be completely irresponsible to German taxpayers who work hard and don't get to retire early.
If the EU is going to devolve into state-level welfare, that will drag down the wealthy countries, and screw up everybody.
All this talk about "destroying" or "humiliating" Greece comes down to "no, this is reality, and you can't hide from reality by using our money to do it".
Greece has policies it can't pay for. They're expecting someone else to do it for them. Now, for the 3rd or 4th time.
At what point do you stop throwing good money after bad? You can't just keep dumping money into Greece, changing nothing, and hoping to get different outcomes.
Well, do you think Greece was going to successfully vote for other countries to give them money? Because that was never gonna work.
The problem is Greece's current government came in on the claims they could renegotiate terms with little leverage because they said so. They they had a referendum to say how much they all agreed that other people should give them more money. Then they got told that their vote didn't really change anything.
What's happening now is those other people are pointing out that the vote by the Greeks was pretty much symbolic at best, delusional at worst. Because voting to have someone else give you money is pretty meaningless to that someone else.
Me, I think this is a problem with the whole concept of globalization and open markets in the first place... you can't pretend that wages, skills, and goods are interchangeable on a global scale without accounting for the relative differences between countries. Which is why they had separate currencies with separate values in the first place.
You can't just slap a common currency on that many countries, leave them to manage their own money completely separately, and then somehow magically assume the price of goods will be uniform across those countries.
When this was happening a lot of people said it would never work.
Honestly, this is like "voting" that the bank, instead of foreclosing on your mortgage should reduce the mortgage, give you lower payments, and give you money to pay your bills.
This has nothing to do with democracy, and everything to do with the fact that once you're bankrupt, you can't pretend like voting it away changes anything. You're still bankrupt, and if your creditors don't want to give you more money, your temper tantrum doesn't mean a damned thing.
Pretending like Greece had the leverage to change the terms to suit them is the failure here.
This is like loaning money to someone who says they can't afford their bills, having them run out and buy a new TV, and then they want to borrow some more money because they can't pay their bills.
In this case, Germany has said it's not getting stuck holding the bag. And I don't really blame them, otherwise the EU becomes a way to move money from wealthy nations to poorer ones.
Worse than that (which is already pretty bad) is by the time they take out management expenses (remember, some of this is essentially for profit) a very small amount of donated money even goes to that.
Many of these campaigns seem to be more about getting goodwill with being seen to care about cancer, but not actually focused on doing anything. And then all that happens in the for-profit or for PR places are competing for donations which could actually be doing something.
I've seen a lot of stories where huge sums of money go to various breast cancer campaigns, but that it's mostly about selling shirts and connecting your brand with caring, even if you do nothing concrete.
It just seems like the whole "awareness" campaign has become a cynical industry which does nothing at all for the people it purports to be helping.
While your concerns are certainly valid... this post is about a programming language, not something you buy off the shelf.
If you the ELIoT programs that you write to have security, IMPLEMENT IT.
You know what? Anybody trying to make the programming language for the IoT who spends zero time on security and privacy... well, they're idiots.
It basically says "were going to solve the fun problems but we don't give a shit about the elephant in the room".
If the IoT isn't build from the ground up to have privacy and security, then it's going to be garbage from the onset.
Saying "if you want security then write it yourself" is a lazy and moronic evasion of the problem. Design it properly and it can be something good. Fail to design for the real things it needs to be able to do, and it's just a hodge podge of crap.
If the language which is supposed to be super awesome for IoT ignores these things, then it's not worth a damn for any real applications.
We see countless consumer products which absolutely suck at security. Obviously we can't rely on corporations to give a damn or be qualified to do it. In which case if the platform doesn't have this built in, the platform is crap.
But, it's IoT, and largely a marketing term. Which means it already is crap.
No, the market will decide what is best for itself, like it always does.
What we want doesn't count for a damned thing, and never has.
Like every other market, the invisible hand is handcuffed to what the big players tell it to do. And further cutting regulations only ensures that happens faster.
The "market" is a fucking lie and a con-game... it has never existed as claimed, and never will. Because this perfect market assumes people won't be lying, cheating bastards who game the system for their own ends.
The assumption of perfect information by honest players is a complete fiction.
Well, if you are staking all of your navigational needs on the free service by Google, then you're possibly asking for a lot.
There are also options to avoid toll roads, highways, and ferries. Hell, they're checkboxes, not exactly difficult to use. You certainly don't have to hunt for the tolls to work around, and it gives you more than one alternative.
My dedicated GPS unit allows me to do many of these things, doesn't rely on me having a data plan or a smartphone.
If the complaint is that the free web-based service doesn't provide every feature you can think of... maybe you are spoiled and expect too damned much from something free?
But don't go from saying "yarg, these options don't exist" (when they do) to "yarg, these options aren't flexible enough".
If you're just going to keep finding bullshit to complain about and changing what you're complaining about.
Google is offering a "good enough" service. If you want better... well, pony up for a dedicated device with these options.
What next, it doesn't give proper directions for your flying car?
The problems with this include that is data collected without our consent, which we can't opt out of, which creates massive privacy implications, and which law enforcement will happily demand.
Once stuff like this is collected, the inevitable scope creep ensues.
As a general rule, people like you who say "well, I don't mind if it's for insurance" have spent zero thought on how much potential this has for abuse.
It's not like we can choose to not own cars to avoid this. But if car makers expect to treat this data as "theirs" to be monetized, there needs to be legal safeguards on it.
Not this horseshit notion that if you don't want to be tracked you should live in a cave.
This week it's monetization by assholes, then it's insurance, then it's law enforcement, then it's your wife's divorce lawyer.
This is just turning us unto the ever expanding surveillance society. Only instead of being exclusively in the hands of the thought police and big brother, this is now in partnership with private industry to make money and constantly spy on us.
Fuck that. This is a terrible idea, and there needs to be mechanisms by which people say "I don't want that", and not simply some EULA which says "by continuing to use your $30K car you consent to us having access to all your data".
Bunch of greedy bastards. I bought the car. It's mine. I should be the one deciding what of my information it's giving to you.
This is just more of a bullshit trend where "ownership" means we get fucked over by our possessions so some asshole can maximize executive bonuses.
This has to stop.
This isn't some technical wonderland, this is just more of the dystopin future where law enforcement and corporate profits touch on every single aspect of our lives.
Slashdot Mirror
Here's a little hint: Reddit doesn't give a fuck what is best for anybody except Reddit.
If popular opinion was that they should allow all sorts of crap because it's good for free speech, they'd do that.
Reddit is simply reflecting that they get the bad PR and don't want that because it interferes with their business interests.
They're not saving us from ourselves, they're saving themselves from their users and distancing themselves from behavior they don't want to be associated with.
Not invented by Microsoft, not advancing Microsoft market share.
Microsoft took a player out of the market, got their IP and patents, and then spat out the rest.
Microsoft didn't care about a successful Nokia. Microsoft cared about advancing the business interests of Microsoft.
Improve Symbian or move to Android? Microsoft was never going to do that.
As soon as Elon Musk was in, there was only one outcome -- extinguish anything not Microsoft, pillage what was valuable. Musk went into Nokia 100% committed to remaking Nokia into a part of Microsoft, which means he was never going to look out for the interests of Nokia in any objective sense.
That was never the plan.
Sadly, the lines are being redrawn ... as we pass laws making ISPs and carriers responsible for policing copyright, child porn, terrorism (infidelity, tax evasion, sedition) we create a world in which instead of being merely a conduit, entities are responsible for the crap their users access or do.
Industry is being coopted as an enforcement arm of governments, who in turn have been coopted as the enforcement arm for corporate interests.
And the more this happens, the more people will say "you can say anything you want, but not here".
But as long as the stuff people do on the internet can legally affect other entities (even if it's just to comply with a subpoena), this notion that other people will provide you a platform to voice your crazy is now quaint and antiquated.
Free speech means the government can't outlaw what you say. It does not mean, and never has, that someone else is responsible for providing you with the platform.
And when you're talking about a corporation who has to keep their shareholders happy, providing a forum for people to make unpopular statements isn't going to work if it negatively impacts their reputation/legal standing.
Censorship has now been outsourced, and has to be weighed against corporate interests.
Threats to rape people, racist rants, or posting underage photos ... well, not so much.
In the same way you can't go on private property in the real world and demand unlimited free speech, you also can't do it on the internet.
Yeah, the gutting of Nokia in terms of phones is pretty complete.
Microsoft has succeeded in knocking them out of the market, getting their IP, and sending them on their way.
I still can't decide if this was a brilliant strategy by Microsoft which worked, or a completely inept attempt to expand their competencies in cell phones.
Either way, Nokia and its shareholders seem to have gotten royally screwed in the process.
Love 'em or hate 'em, Apple is selling real products which have been disruptive to existing stuff, and for which people are paying money.
Microsoft seems to be perennially playing catch up, releasing unpopular products, and sticking to the bad stereotype of "I'm a PC/I'm a Mac" in which we're all writing spreadsheets and Power Point slides but otherwise utterly failing to "innovate" a damned thing -- other than copycat products nobody is buying.
Apple at least got to be the richest company by selling stuff. That you don't like it or think that's meaningless is an issue you'll need to deal with yourself. Maybe you can console yourself at your Windows Phone users group or something.
But Apple has produced more of substance in the last years than Microsoft. They just haven't targeted it to hardcore nerds or people for whom software is political.
But somehow I know people from VPs of tech companies, to guys who install fireplaces, to little old grandmothers who are Apple households using things like phones, tablets, Apple TV, and computers -- and all being quite happy about it. And having it all seamlessly work together.
Which tells me you're out of touch with the reality that actual people are spending actual money for the stuff you claim has no substance. Meanwhile, Microsoft is failing to compete on many of those fronts.
Sorry, but these days it's Microsoft who is all glitz and no substance, churning out copies of other people's products, and failing to make people say "oooh, I need one".
There's also no passengers either.
So, in the same way a roller coaster at the bottom of the Marianas Trench would be novel and have no competition ... debating how effective the hyper loop would be on Mars is kind of pointless.
We've never put a human on Mars. Let's not start planning the transportation grid.
Sorry, this is someone doing their post-doc work on science fiction, so I'm afraid I fail to see the point.
Nobody says the people who wish to express different values can't do it. Reddit is just saying it's not their job to provide the platform for it.
By all means, start your bigoted trolls and crazy people website. I'm sure it will be very popular.
Do you think Reddit somehow has a responsibility to provide a venue for such things?
It is your right to be as bigoted and offensive as you choose to be. It isn't your right to have someone provide you the platform, or to have it be free from consequences.
The last few years it seems like decades of "because we say so" is catching up with Microsoft.
Their "innovation" seems to be at an all time low, and most of the new and shiny stuff they're putting out seems to fall flat, and the stuff they're putting out which copies what other people have done aren't very popular.
I wonder if Microsoft hasn't lost the plot entirely, and now they're a big lumbering entity flailing around to try to stay relevant, while mostly failing to write stuff people care about.
Office has mostly plateaued, yes, people will keep using it, but there's not a lot of new functionality anybody needs.
Quite honestly, their strategy to make everything look like mobile is complete garbage for a desktop computer. You have to turn off most of their "innovations" to end up with a usable desktop.
If they are pinning their hopes on all of us becoming completely involved in all of their ecosystem, they will probably discover not enough of us care, or are willing to go that route.
It just feels like Microsoft no longer has any real clue about how to remain relevant in a lot of segments. I can pretty much say I don't foresee their vision of the future being something I give a damn about.
And when I see shit like "we're going to share your wifi password" I think "wow, you have no clue about security and think you own the systems" -- basically nobody with a Microsoft product will ever get any access to any wifi I control.
Sorry Microsoft, but you've become a dinosaur selling us spreadsheets and Power Point. Meanwhile the rest of the world is actually trying to make new and interesting stuff.
Of course it wasn't.
Do you really think a bunch of guys in dark suits didn't show up and basically threaten them with jail time?
As paranoid as is sounds, these days I think it is entirely plausible that a national security letter or somesuch was used to say "if you tell anybody about this, we will put you in a deep dark hole ... whether it's for the rest of your life or marking the end of it is your choice".
This technology will never see the light of day, unless it's used by some three letter agency full of fascists.
Welcome to modern reality. Where all that crazy shit from the 80s is now true.
Which in no way changes that both the Flash and Java plugins are horrible, flaky, insecure, and deprecated.
As I said, you pretty much have to keep one browser for all the shit you shouldn't trust, and one for the rest.
But don't be surprised when the horrible, flaky, insecure and deprecated plugins demonstrate why they're all those things.
When your company sticks you with garbage, you're stuck with garbage. It sucks, but the solution isn't for everybody else to try to make Flash and Java suck less when used on web pages.
Mozilla are protecting most of their users. Your IT department can protect you.
If Flash is going to be on it's 38th exploit of the month, I applaud Mozilla disabling it. Because it really always has been a pile of shit, and has always been insecure beyond belief.
Wait, what?
So, you want a browser which doesn't disable crapware when it become so broken as to be dangerous. But you also want a browser which doesn't suck?
You're joking, right?
If you're on Windows, essentially you keep IE around to run the shit you wouldn't enable in any other context but you need for work.
For me, IE is the browser of last resort, or the one I exclusively use for work stuff.
AFAIK, IE is happy to keep letting every insecure piece of crap keep running.
I've essentially got four browsers configured for different purposes.
It's one of the 3 browsers I keep open all the time.
I don't give a damn about any of their new features. But it's the one which is set to not run any javascript ever or accept cookies and has the most locked down settings.
It's my "I don't trust you" browser.
You got modded funny, but I tend to agree.
If the crap that Flash does is part of the HTML 5 spec, I really do worry we won't be able to block it quite so readily.
In which case the browsers become even less secure. That will be a bad thing.
Depends on your definition of "useful".
A lot of people seem to complain about how tragic it would be if people could no longer access games.
Me, I'm of the opinion Flash has been a terrible security/privacy nightmare as long as it has existed and don't install it on my machines.
Flash is long overdue to be killed off.
Being the source of at least one security exploit every month for the last 15 years tells me it's a Steaming Heap of Innovative Technology, and always has been.
Does the software in cars fall under any particular standard for quality? Like actual engineering standards?
Or do we really have auto makers doing little better than people making apps for phones?
It just seems like if it controls any part of a car it should really be required to be subjected to much more rigorous verification.
Judging by the timestamps, I'd say around 9 minutes. ;-)
It doesn't matter if the current government contracted for it. It exists.
Imagine you're a corporation (which in a lot of ways governments are kind of like). Now, imagine you get a new CEO who wants to get out of existing contracts because he didn't contract for them and doesn't want to pay them.
Too damned bad. You don't get to go "waaah, we can't afford this so we want a do-over".
Here's an alternate explanation: If Germany starts forgiving debts for everybody, then the Germans are paying for someone else's prosperity, and asking Germans to pay for that is like a mugging, but on a large scale and in slow motion. That would be completely irresponsible to German taxpayers who work hard and don't get to retire early.
If the EU is going to devolve into state-level welfare, that will drag down the wealthy countries, and screw up everybody.
All this talk about "destroying" or "humiliating" Greece comes down to "no, this is reality, and you can't hide from reality by using our money to do it".
Greece has policies it can't pay for. They're expecting someone else to do it for them. Now, for the 3rd or 4th time.
At what point do you stop throwing good money after bad? You can't just keep dumping money into Greece, changing nothing, and hoping to get different outcomes.
Well, do you think Greece was going to successfully vote for other countries to give them money? Because that was never gonna work.
The problem is Greece's current government came in on the claims they could renegotiate terms with little leverage because they said so. They they had a referendum to say how much they all agreed that other people should give them more money. Then they got told that their vote didn't really change anything.
What's happening now is those other people are pointing out that the vote by the Greeks was pretty much symbolic at best, delusional at worst. Because voting to have someone else give you money is pretty meaningless to that someone else.
Me, I think this is a problem with the whole concept of globalization and open markets in the first place ... you can't pretend that wages, skills, and goods are interchangeable on a global scale without accounting for the relative differences between countries. Which is why they had separate currencies with separate values in the first place.
You can't just slap a common currency on that many countries, leave them to manage their own money completely separately, and then somehow magically assume the price of goods will be uniform across those countries.
When this was happening a lot of people said it would never work.
Honestly, this is like "voting" that the bank, instead of foreclosing on your mortgage should reduce the mortgage, give you lower payments, and give you money to pay your bills.
This has nothing to do with democracy, and everything to do with the fact that once you're bankrupt, you can't pretend like voting it away changes anything. You're still bankrupt, and if your creditors don't want to give you more money, your temper tantrum doesn't mean a damned thing.
Pretending like Greece had the leverage to change the terms to suit them is the failure here.
This is like loaning money to someone who says they can't afford their bills, having them run out and buy a new TV, and then they want to borrow some more money because they can't pay their bills.
In this case, Germany has said it's not getting stuck holding the bag. And I don't really blame them, otherwise the EU becomes a way to move money from wealthy nations to poorer ones.
Worse than that (which is already pretty bad) is by the time they take out management expenses (remember, some of this is essentially for profit) a very small amount of donated money even goes to that.
Many of these campaigns seem to be more about getting goodwill with being seen to care about cancer, but not actually focused on doing anything. And then all that happens in the for-profit or for PR places are competing for donations which could actually be doing something.
I've seen a lot of stories where huge sums of money go to various breast cancer campaigns, but that it's mostly about selling shirts and connecting your brand with caring, even if you do nothing concrete.
It just seems like the whole "awareness" campaign has become a cynical industry which does nothing at all for the people it purports to be helping.
LOL, yes, your sarcasm was readily apparent ... as was the need to elaborate on it as a nugget of truth.
You know what? Anybody trying to make the programming language for the IoT who spends zero time on security and privacy ... well, they're idiots.
It basically says "were going to solve the fun problems but we don't give a shit about the elephant in the room".
If the IoT isn't build from the ground up to have privacy and security, then it's going to be garbage from the onset.
Saying "if you want security then write it yourself" is a lazy and moronic evasion of the problem. Design it properly and it can be something good. Fail to design for the real things it needs to be able to do, and it's just a hodge podge of crap.
If the language which is supposed to be super awesome for IoT ignores these things, then it's not worth a damn for any real applications.
We see countless consumer products which absolutely suck at security. Obviously we can't rely on corporations to give a damn or be qualified to do it. In which case if the platform doesn't have this built in, the platform is crap.
But, it's IoT, and largely a marketing term. Which means it already is crap.
No, the market will decide what is best for itself, like it always does.
What we want doesn't count for a damned thing, and never has.
Like every other market, the invisible hand is handcuffed to what the big players tell it to do. And further cutting regulations only ensures that happens faster.
The "market" is a fucking lie and a con-game ... it has never existed as claimed, and never will. Because this perfect market assumes people won't be lying, cheating bastards who game the system for their own ends.
The assumption of perfect information by honest players is a complete fiction.
Well, if you are staking all of your navigational needs on the free service by Google, then you're possibly asking for a lot.
There are also options to avoid toll roads, highways, and ferries. Hell, they're checkboxes, not exactly difficult to use. You certainly don't have to hunt for the tolls to work around, and it gives you more than one alternative.
My dedicated GPS unit allows me to do many of these things, doesn't rely on me having a data plan or a smartphone.
If the complaint is that the free web-based service doesn't provide every feature you can think of ... maybe you are spoiled and expect too damned much from something free?
But don't go from saying "yarg, these options don't exist" (when they do) to "yarg, these options aren't flexible enough".
If you're just going to keep finding bullshit to complain about and changing what you're complaining about.
Google is offering a "good enough" service. If you want better ... well, pony up for a dedicated device with these options.
What next, it doesn't give proper directions for your flying car?
The problems with this include that is data collected without our consent, which we can't opt out of, which creates massive privacy implications, and which law enforcement will happily demand.
Once stuff like this is collected, the inevitable scope creep ensues.
As a general rule, people like you who say "well, I don't mind if it's for insurance" have spent zero thought on how much potential this has for abuse.
It's not like we can choose to not own cars to avoid this. But if car makers expect to treat this data as "theirs" to be monetized, there needs to be legal safeguards on it.
Not this horseshit notion that if you don't want to be tracked you should live in a cave.
This week it's monetization by assholes, then it's insurance, then it's law enforcement, then it's your wife's divorce lawyer.
This is just turning us unto the ever expanding surveillance society. Only instead of being exclusively in the hands of the thought police and big brother, this is now in partnership with private industry to make money and constantly spy on us.
Fuck that. This is a terrible idea, and there needs to be mechanisms by which people say "I don't want that", and not simply some EULA which says "by continuing to use your $30K car you consent to us having access to all your data".
Bunch of greedy bastards. I bought the car. It's mine. I should be the one deciding what of my information it's giving to you.
This is just more of a bullshit trend where "ownership" means we get fucked over by our possessions so some asshole can maximize executive bonuses.
This has to stop.
This isn't some technical wonderland, this is just more of the dystopin future where law enforcement and corporate profits touch on every single aspect of our lives.