I can't even wrap my head around the idea of this currency... WHY DOES THIS EXIST? EVEN IN THEORY!
There can be no light without the dark. Asshattery like this is more than proof of (its own) concept. It shows us that there can be noble and benevolent cryptocurrencies that reward doing good stuff!
Imaging a CC that rewarded participating in SETI or protein folding or whatever.
Or take saving for retirement. There could be a CC that rewarded you for doing that. And it would end up giving you like $0.000003 in value for performing an action that will ultimately end up being more valuable (with compound interest) by a factor of 10^10. But what's important is that you got your FogeyCoin for making that deposit, ya know?
After both parties get hacked and all the dirt is on the table, it would be utterly shocking to find out they're only as corrupt as we suspect they are.
Sgt: Sir, we had a data breach!
Gen: Stolen passwords again?
Sgt: Worse! They've downloaded publicly available information!
Gen: Gah! What kind of depraved madmen would do such a thing!?
Sgt: We don't know, but we're suing them.
Gen: Oh. Good then. Carry on.
Second, it creates a skewed picture of people's responses. There's no objective definition of what's abusive and what isn't, and besides, I'm sure that certain levels of dislike cannot be expressed without tripping their filter.
Even the most socially unacceptable views can be expressed without being abusive. A poster who is really and truly a white supremacist could easily say, "Just being honest, I disapprove of Obama and it's because he is black." Fine. It's not going to win an NAACP award, but it wasn't abusive.
A poster could likewise say, "I just can't bring myself to vote for Hillary or any other woman." Okay. Evidencing misogyny but not abusive. It's really not that hard, even though the interwebz are flooded with needlessly venomous comments.
Now, should people be forced to hold back their views and say them "nicely" everywhere in society? Hell no, the 1st Amendment protects the noblest and the vilest speech alike.
But--more to your final argument--not only is Twitter under no obligation to be a platform for all such speech, they are also under no obligation to be a statistically valid barometer for national politics. If people are using "likes" on FB and Twitter instead of sound polling data (which itself is of dubious value), it's to their detriment.
The social media consensus was that Trump could never become the Republican nominee, but here we are. That might reflect the user base more than any systemic effort to slant the narrative. Similar echo chambers exist on every axis of the political spectrum, and people hear what they want to hear, to their detriment (if we consider "not properly understanding the reality of a situation" a detriment).
So believe in the hug-box or not. It's not up to Twitter to teach users, during a Q&A with the President, that some people are racists.
I fail to see how silencing the GNAA trolls during a Q&A session is cause for great hand wringing. It didn't say they filtered "conservative viewpoints" or "reasoned criticisms"... they said "abusive responses." And it's Twitter's 1st amendment right to allow abuse (within the confines of the law) or not on their platform.
Surprisingly on point AC1P. Bright colors. Big, readable signage that looks fun. Easily cleanable floors. Large interactive exhibits featuring tech they don't see at home--in general, computer screens, mobile phones, tablets, etc. are pretty passe. So super new or super old.
For anything of historical significance (mainframe & punch cards et al.), make sure they can't reach it. Not necessarily behind glass, but if kids can touch it you're guaranteed to find gum in your tape reel and half a tootsie pop caught in your card reader by hour 3.
Also works great for political ideas. Just put anything you don't like your people to read onto the blacklist. Iran, China and friends will love this.
My thoughts exactly. Even assuming that this was technically possible to implement, and achieving a universally desired goal, how long until "Things your computer prevents you from downloading" includes "revelatory leaked documents from $country intelligence" or "information about violent suppression of $protest" or "video of racist remarks made by $politician"
Even if it's "fixed" in a week (oops, we shouldn't have done that, sorry!) the damage to the public discourse is already done.
recognize the source of the increased payroll must be reduced dividends, since all other business operating expenses remain either constant or increase slightly
That may have been true in a different era, but increasingly (and specifically in the fast food industry GP was discussing), the source of an increase in wages would be:
Cost savings realized in automation + paying fewer employees more to work with/manage the robots.
Dividends don't have to go down, in fact they'll probably go up. And wages will go up too, but not enough to offset the lost jobs. This evolution might be hastened by minimum wage hikes, but MW is not fundamentally the cause. The cost of the machines keeps going down and down; for many fast food tasks, there will come a point at which it simply doesn't make financial sense to employ a human to do them at any meaningful wage, even if we slashed MW. This point isn't in some far off "Isaac Asimov" future, it's in the "before 2030" future.
Whoa angry guy, maybe you should read a book. The internet was created by an army of American computer scientists under the direct command of Al Gore. This elite cyber force also developed the Three Pillars of modern network theory, upon which the Internet is based:
1) The internet is not a big truck.
2) 640K ought to be enough for anybody.
3) The only winning move is not to play.
Pokemon Go has been such a success that it has already doubled Nintendo's stock price after launching just two weeks ago.
Well good luck maintaining that bubble, Nintendo, now that people can't openly play Pokemon Go in Saudi Arabia. Time to start shorting NTDOY and hoarding gold.
Whats worse is that the prize money is taxpayer funded.
What's even worse is our "Everybody gets a prize" culture. Nowadays you only have to be in the top 42% to get $750,000. And DARPA's even giving ribbons to the other 4 teams for participating!
I can't comment on the other variants of the S line, people seem to like them just fine. But stay the hell away from the Active.
I had a hellacious experience returning an S6 Active that responded to water in eerily similar fashion. Screen went berserk, weird banding, touch got wonky, water in the SIM cavity, etc. This is with shorter total immersion time (lifetime, not per diem) than the tests they ran in TFA, and at shallower depths, to boot.
The best part? They'll ask you to take out the little interior water indicator thing, and when it's red, they'll tell you they can't do shit for you because "water inside the device voids the warranty." YOU SOLD ME THIS FUCKING THING ON THE PROMISE THAT WATER WOULDN'T GET INSIDE THE DEVICE!
I'm surprised they've apparently failed to fixed the lackluster water resistance of their "water-resistant" phone, and continue to advertise it as... wait now I'm surprised that I was surprised by that.
1) The CFAA is extremely broad. It's so absurdly broad that we're probably all in violation of it right now. Sharing a password. "Hacking" a website by entering its url into your browser bar. Thinking a thought that's in violation of a EULA. This guy didn't hack a not-government server that sometimes didn't contain retroactively classifiable information, which if you balance out the negatives is roughly equivalent to exploding the Vice President's heart over wifi. Totally extraditable.
2) May I go on record against the use of the puerile "gubm[ei]nt" as an indicator of non-specific disdain for the(/all) government?
If you have relevant counter statistics about all the bad things that happen when ridesharing services are offered in a city, please share.
If you have any data about the anticipated crimes that would be prevented by fingerprinting RS drivers (and thus by definition, crimes that can't be committed by non-existent RS drivers), please share.
If you have evidence that the +7.5% statistic cited in TFA is inaccurate or misleading (for a hypothetical example, because the raw number went up but the per capita instances of drunk driving actually went down), please share.
I say none of this in an "I dare you" sort of way; I am honestly open to whatever actual data you can produce.
If by "everything else that would get worse," you mean, "I generally dislike Uber and Lyft, but I don't have any data to support the conclusion that they're a net harm rather than net benefit to society," well.... I'm sorry I don't have the time to research and substantiate your opinion for you.
Oh, fuck you. Standing up for justice doesn't make someone an asshole.
Hear, hear. Anything that can act as even a small safety valve against the overuse and abuse of the criminal <quote>justice</quote> system is a Good Thing(TM).
Other than catering to lobbyists for cash, there's nothing that govts enjoy more than "incidental" revenue. Literal "public safety" is somewhere near the bottom of the list, somewhere after "leaving things in better shape for my successor".
Ding ding ding.
Many, sometimes conflicting, truths can be simultaneous. For instance, drunk driving is at once dangerous, stupid, something we as a society should work towards preventing, a huge money-making turnstile for local government, over-broadly defined, etc etc.
I'm not one of those people that goes shouting "market solutions11!!!" at every problem, but rideshare services have done a pretty bangup job reducing drunk driving (both raw statistics-wise, and attitude-wise). The utilitarian pragmatist in me wants to weigh the harms of increased drunk driving against the harms Austin expected to prevent with the fingerprint regulation (even if the regulation itself is subjectively or even objectively reasonable). And then ask: Is it worth it?*,**
*Worth it in terms of measurable costs, not in terms of vindicating an amorphous, Brexit-style sense of "sovereignty" for the city of Austin.
**Worth it to society. We already know what it's worth to the local government: +7.5% revenue from drunk driving tickets and attendant programs and fees. The costs of increased drunk driving are not primarily nor directly borne by the government collecting the ticket revenue. So even with some additional crashes, injuries, and deaths, it's all "upside" for them. Plus police "busts" are up.
1) Apple does not have the power to send a SWAT team to do anything. Even with hundreds of billions in net worth, they are not a paramilitary force, and are not in the chain of command of any law enforcement organization that would have jurisdiction over that reporter's house. Apple asked law enforcement to investigate someone with photographic evidence of, and admitted $5000 payment for, an unreleased prototype device that they ought not to have. A judge issued a warrant (which may or may not have been overbroad, considering 1A protections for journalists), and law enforcement took that warrant and acted on it, effecting a judicially authorized search and seizure.
2) I vehemently disagree with the militarization of police departments nationwide, and the misuse SWAT forces. I can't state strongly enough that military equipment and tactics are far overused by police, and that this overuse in concert with a warzone/enemy combatant mentality is an existential threat to our free and democratic way of life.
That said, sending SWAT to investigate Jason Chen's house would seem to be unnecessary and over the top, when a few detectives would've sufficed. However:
a) I went back through a bunch of articles from that era and can't verify that SWAT was even present.
b) Let's assume SWAT was there. Because nobody answered the door (Chen wasn't home), the cops had to break the door down to perform their search. Leaving aside the necessity of breaking down doors in the first place (I suppose we could tell cops to just keep coming back again and again, and maybe someday be able to serve their warrant if the suspect isn't purposely staying away or staying silent when they come knocking), I presume it's common practice when forcibly entering a dwelling to have the right people and equipment for the job, meaning SWAT. People in their homes who are faced with a sudden and violent incursion are liable to shoot at you. So it makes sense to have the team with the body armor, battering ram, and breach training do the entry, rather than have Barney Fife and Ponch kick the door down and maybe get themselves and the inhabitant killed.**
If you have evidence that Apple illegally influenced or even encouraged the investigating REACT unit to use more force than was necessary, as a way of "scaring" Chen or other journalists, please provide. That would absolutely qualify as "asshattery", at a minimum...
3) I was specifically talking about abuse of the intellectual property system. Not that I would overlook if a company was using blood diamonds to fund terrorist activities in their illegal toxic waste dump. But what you're talking about is not misusing IP protections. It's investigating suspected theft of a physical item and related felonies. Police usually go and check those kinds of things out, even when the person returning the item says, "I bought it from a guy who found it in a bar, honest!"
tl;dr - Apple is certainly not above criticism, and has surely engaged in some IP shenanegans (instances of trademark enforcement overreach come to mind), but your example is inapt.
** Yes, SWAT has been known to kill people and their pets, which makes me furious. IIRC most of that stems from no-knock, middle of the night raids. I would be in favor of extreme limitations on those kinds of raids, reductions in the use of SWAT generally, and elimination of military equipment like M-79s and MRAPs. But I don't think there's any way to get around it: police will from time to time need to force entry into a building, and SWAT is the correct choice to do it.
Read their CEO's asinine post. I will never use a Comodo product. Asshats are one thing, but asshats who abuse the IP system and counter-blame the victims of their asshattery really grind my gears.
Consumers are not the same as citizens. Consumption is not the same as voting.
Functionally, they are. "Voting with your wallet" is, at least for resource-constrained people (i.e. the vast majority of us), just about the purest form of voting there is. And I would argue this not only in the abstract/ontological "what is voting?" sense, but also the more practical "what does voting achieve?" sense.
Especially for larger elections (let's take a US presidential for example), you almost certainly exert more political influence, in real terms, via the things you decide to purchase over a four year interval, than you exert by casting your one vote to influence the electoral college outcome in your one state.
Tackling it from the other end: As citizens we are absolutely "consumers" of political "products." The air quotes are probably unnecessary there. Politics has always more or less been marketing, though perhaps it hasn't always been as pervasive and unabashed.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't even wrap my head around the idea of this currency... WHY DOES THIS EXIST? EVEN IN THEORY!
There can be no light without the dark. Asshattery like this is more than proof of (its own) concept. It shows us that there can be noble and benevolent cryptocurrencies that reward doing good stuff!
Imaging a CC that rewarded participating in SETI or protein folding or whatever.
Or take saving for retirement. There could be a CC that rewarded you for doing that. And it would end up giving you like $0.000003 in value for performing an action that will ultimately end up being more valuable (with compound interest) by a factor of 10^10. But what's important is that you got your FogeyCoin for making that deposit, ya know?
After both parties get hacked and all the dirt is on the table, it would be utterly shocking to find out they're only as corrupt as we suspect they are.
Sgt: Sir, we had a data breach!
Gen: Stolen passwords again?
Sgt: Worse! They've downloaded publicly available information!
Gen: Gah! What kind of depraved madmen would do such a thing!?
Sgt: We don't know, but we're suing them.
Gen: Oh. Good then. Carry on.
Second, it creates a skewed picture of people's responses. There's no objective definition of what's abusive and what isn't, and besides, I'm sure that certain levels of dislike cannot be expressed without tripping their filter.
Even the most socially unacceptable views can be expressed without being abusive. A poster who is really and truly a white supremacist could easily say, "Just being honest, I disapprove of Obama and it's because he is black." Fine. It's not going to win an NAACP award, but it wasn't abusive.
A poster could likewise say, "I just can't bring myself to vote for Hillary or any other woman." Okay. Evidencing misogyny but not abusive. It's really not that hard, even though the interwebz are flooded with needlessly venomous comments.
Now, should people be forced to hold back their views and say them "nicely" everywhere in society? Hell no, the 1st Amendment protects the noblest and the vilest speech alike.
But--more to your final argument--not only is Twitter under no obligation to be a platform for all such speech, they are also under no obligation to be a statistically valid barometer for national politics. If people are using "likes" on FB and Twitter instead of sound polling data (which itself is of dubious value), it's to their detriment.
The social media consensus was that Trump could never become the Republican nominee, but here we are. That might reflect the user base more than any systemic effort to slant the narrative. Similar echo chambers exist on every axis of the political spectrum, and people hear what they want to hear, to their detriment (if we consider "not properly understanding the reality of a situation" a detriment).
So believe in the hug-box or not. It's not up to Twitter to teach users, during a Q&A with the President, that some people are racists.
I fail to see how silencing the GNAA trolls during a Q&A session is cause for great hand wringing. It didn't say they filtered "conservative viewpoints" or "reasoned criticisms"... they said "abusive responses." And it's Twitter's 1st amendment right to allow abuse (within the confines of the law) or not on their platform.
Fungible positions is not what H1B is for...
This.
And with lots of pastels and cartoon images.
Surprisingly on point AC1P. Bright colors. Big, readable signage that looks fun. Easily cleanable floors. Large interactive exhibits featuring tech they don't see at home--in general, computer screens, mobile phones, tablets, etc. are pretty passe. So super new or super old.
For anything of historical significance (mainframe & punch cards et al.), make sure they can't reach it. Not necessarily behind glass, but if kids can touch it you're guaranteed to find gum in your tape reel and half a tootsie pop caught in your card reader by hour 3.
Also works great for political ideas. Just put anything you don't like your people to read onto the blacklist. Iran, China and friends will love this.
My thoughts exactly. Even assuming that this was technically possible to implement, and achieving a universally desired goal, how long until "Things your computer prevents you from downloading" includes "revelatory leaked documents from $country intelligence" or "information about violent suppression of $protest" or "video of racist remarks made by $politician"
Even if it's "fixed" in a week (oops, we shouldn't have done that, sorry!) the damage to the public discourse is already done.
It is the things we do for free that make us moral actors.
I post on slashdot for free. I wonder what that makes me?
It should be ready for market once researchers scale it up to a commercially viable product.
See also: quantum computers, invisibility cloaking metamaterials, and fusion.
recognize the source of the increased payroll must be reduced dividends, since all other business operating expenses remain either constant or increase slightly
That may have been true in a different era, but increasingly (and specifically in the fast food industry GP was discussing), the source of an increase in wages would be:
Cost savings realized in automation + paying fewer employees more to work with/manage the robots.
Dividends don't have to go down, in fact they'll probably go up. And wages will go up too, but not enough to offset the lost jobs. This evolution might be hastened by minimum wage hikes, but MW is not fundamentally the cause. The cost of the machines keeps going down and down; for many fast food tasks, there will come a point at which it simply doesn't make financial sense to employ a human to do them at any meaningful wage, even if we slashed MW. This point isn't in some far off "Isaac Asimov" future, it's in the "before 2030" future.
Whoa angry guy, maybe you should read a book. The internet was created by an army of American computer scientists under the direct command of Al Gore. This elite cyber force also developed the Three Pillars of modern network theory, upon which the Internet is based:
1) The internet is not a big truck.
2) 640K ought to be enough for anybody.
3) The only winning move is not to play.
Pokemon Go has been such a success that it has already doubled Nintendo's stock price after launching just two weeks ago.
Well good luck maintaining that bubble, Nintendo, now that people can't openly play Pokemon Go in Saudi Arabia. Time to start shorting NTDOY and hoarding gold.
Whats worse is that the prize money is taxpayer funded.
What's even worse is our "Everybody gets a prize" culture. Nowadays you only have to be in the top 42% to get $750,000. And DARPA's even giving ribbons to the other 4 teams for participating!
EVERYBODY hates Jill Stein...
I doubt most people know enough about her to hate her. Maybe you were thinking of Ben Stein? Or Frankenstein?
I can't comment on the other variants of the S line, people seem to like them just fine. But stay the hell away from the Active.
I had a hellacious experience returning an S6 Active that responded to water in eerily similar fashion. Screen went berserk, weird banding, touch got wonky, water in the SIM cavity, etc. This is with shorter total immersion time (lifetime, not per diem) than the tests they ran in TFA, and at shallower depths, to boot.
The best part? They'll ask you to take out the little interior water indicator thing, and when it's red, they'll tell you they can't do shit for you because "water inside the device voids the warranty." YOU SOLD ME THIS FUCKING THING ON THE PROMISE THAT WATER WOULDN'T GET INSIDE THE DEVICE!
I'm surprised they've apparently failed to fixed the lackluster water resistance of their "water-resistant" phone, and continue to advertise it as... wait now I'm surprised that I was surprised by that.
1) The CFAA is extremely broad. It's so absurdly broad that we're probably all in violation of it right now. Sharing a password. "Hacking" a website by entering its url into your browser bar. Thinking a thought that's in violation of a EULA. This guy didn't hack a not-government server that sometimes didn't contain retroactively classifiable information, which if you balance out the negatives is roughly equivalent to exploding the Vice President's heart over wifi. Totally extraditable.
2) May I go on record against the use of the puerile "gubm[ei]nt" as an indicator of non-specific disdain for the(/all) government?
I... wow. I'd been moving in this direction anyway, without really being able to put a finger on it. Damned if you didn't just lay it out succinctly.
If you have relevant counter statistics about all the bad things that happen when ridesharing services are offered in a city, please share.
If you have any data about the anticipated crimes that would be prevented by fingerprinting RS drivers (and thus by definition, crimes that can't be committed by non-existent RS drivers), please share.
If you have evidence that the +7.5% statistic cited in TFA is inaccurate or misleading (for a hypothetical example, because the raw number went up but the per capita instances of drunk driving actually went down), please share.
I say none of this in an "I dare you" sort of way; I am honestly open to whatever actual data you can produce.
If by "everything else that would get worse," you mean, "I generally dislike Uber and Lyft, but I don't have any data to support the conclusion that they're a net harm rather than net benefit to society," well.... I'm sorry I don't have the time to research and substantiate your opinion for you.
advocates of nullification are generally assholes
Oh, fuck you. Standing up for justice doesn't make someone an asshole.
Hear, hear. Anything that can act as even a small safety valve against the overuse and abuse of the criminal <quote>justice</quote> system is a Good Thing(TM).
Other than catering to lobbyists for cash, there's nothing that govts enjoy more than "incidental" revenue. Literal "public safety" is somewhere near the bottom of the list, somewhere after "leaving things in better shape for my successor".
Ding ding ding.
Many, sometimes conflicting, truths can be simultaneous. For instance, drunk driving is at once dangerous, stupid, something we as a society should work towards preventing, a huge money-making turnstile for local government, over-broadly defined, etc etc.
I'm not one of those people that goes shouting "market solutions11!!!" at every problem, but rideshare services have done a pretty bangup job reducing drunk driving (both raw statistics-wise, and attitude-wise). The utilitarian pragmatist in me wants to weigh the harms of increased drunk driving against the harms Austin expected to prevent with the fingerprint regulation (even if the regulation itself is subjectively or even objectively reasonable). And then ask: Is it worth it?*,**
*Worth it in terms of measurable costs, not in terms of vindicating an amorphous, Brexit-style sense of "sovereignty" for the city of Austin.
**Worth it to society. We already know what it's worth to the local government: +7.5% revenue from drunk driving tickets and attendant programs and fees. The costs of increased drunk driving are not primarily nor directly borne by the government collecting the ticket revenue. So even with some additional crashes, injuries, and deaths, it's all "upside" for them. Plus police "busts" are up.
1) Apple does not have the power to send a SWAT team to do anything. Even with hundreds of billions in net worth, they are not a paramilitary force, and are not in the chain of command of any law enforcement organization that would have jurisdiction over that reporter's house. Apple asked law enforcement to investigate someone with photographic evidence of, and admitted $5000 payment for, an unreleased prototype device that they ought not to have. A judge issued a warrant (which may or may not have been overbroad, considering 1A protections for journalists), and law enforcement took that warrant and acted on it, effecting a judicially authorized search and seizure.
2) I vehemently disagree with the militarization of police departments nationwide, and the misuse SWAT forces. I can't state strongly enough that military equipment and tactics are far overused by police, and that this overuse in concert with a warzone/enemy combatant mentality is an existential threat to our free and democratic way of life.
That said, sending SWAT to investigate Jason Chen's house would seem to be unnecessary and over the top, when a few detectives would've sufficed. However:
a) I went back through a bunch of articles from that era and can't verify that SWAT was even present.
b) Let's assume SWAT was there. Because nobody answered the door (Chen wasn't home), the cops had to break the door down to perform their search. Leaving aside the necessity of breaking down doors in the first place (I suppose we could tell cops to just keep coming back again and again, and maybe someday be able to serve their warrant if the suspect isn't purposely staying away or staying silent when they come knocking), I presume it's common practice when forcibly entering a dwelling to have the right people and equipment for the job, meaning SWAT. People in their homes who are faced with a sudden and violent incursion are liable to shoot at you. So it makes sense to have the team with the body armor, battering ram, and breach training do the entry, rather than have Barney Fife and Ponch kick the door down and maybe get themselves and the inhabitant killed.**
If you have evidence that Apple illegally influenced or even encouraged the investigating REACT unit to use more force than was necessary, as a way of "scaring" Chen or other journalists, please provide. That would absolutely qualify as "asshattery", at a minimum...
3) I was specifically talking about abuse of the intellectual property system. Not that I would overlook if a company was using blood diamonds to fund terrorist activities in their illegal toxic waste dump. But what you're talking about is not misusing IP protections. It's investigating suspected theft of a physical item and related felonies. Police usually go and check those kinds of things out, even when the person returning the item says, "I bought it from a guy who found it in a bar, honest!"
tl;dr - Apple is certainly not above criticism, and has surely engaged in some IP shenanegans (instances of trademark enforcement overreach come to mind), but your example is inapt.
** Yes, SWAT has been known to kill people and their pets, which makes me furious. IIRC most of that stems from no-knock, middle of the night raids. I would be in favor of extreme limitations on those kinds of raids, reductions in the use of SWAT generally, and elimination of military equipment like M-79s and MRAPs. But I don't think there's any way to get around it: police will from time to time need to force entry into a building, and SWAT is the correct choice to do it.
Read their CEO's asinine post. I will never use a Comodo product. Asshats are one thing, but asshats who abuse the IP system and counter-blame the victims of their asshattery really grind my gears.
Consumers are not the same as citizens. Consumption is not the same as voting.
Functionally, they are. "Voting with your wallet" is, at least for resource-constrained people (i.e. the vast majority of us), just about the purest form of voting there is. And I would argue this not only in the abstract/ontological "what is voting?" sense, but also the more practical "what does voting achieve?" sense.
Especially for larger elections (let's take a US presidential for example), you almost certainly exert more political influence, in real terms, via the things you decide to purchase over a four year interval, than you exert by casting your one vote to influence the electoral college outcome in your one state.
Tackling it from the other end: As citizens we are absolutely "consumers" of political "products." The air quotes are probably unnecessary there. Politics has always more or less been marketing, though perhaps it hasn't always been as pervasive and unabashed.
And now, I'm picturing Linus Torvalds as the Swedish Chef. . .
"Hin-de-foo, dee leenux in dee ker-null. . . ."
Bork bork bork!