In order for the 'masses' to truely benefit from a diverse yet quality experience, they do need to perform some sort of quality control. Think about your local book store, they pick and choose the material they stock to appeal to the widest audience, if that means not stocking (largely) freely available information, it is really just their business decision to make.
However, if you went into your local book store and specifically asked for a published book they don't stock, they would order it in for you. Amazon, on the other hand, are actually refusing to publish some content. Maybe they need to separate the publishing and selling business - i.e. allow anything to be published, but don't necessarilly include it in search results (so, for example, it could still be linked from the author's website)
Worse than that, scammers were creating print-on-demand paperbacks of Wikipedia articles and selling them.
What's wrong with that? The CreativeCommons licence that Wikipedia uses allows exactly this, if people want a hard copy of some information instead of having to view it online then why shouldn't they be allowed to?
what's needed is jailtime for the execs...it's the only way to get them to take things seriously...
Jails are expensive and ineffective and should therefore primarilly be used to prevent dangerous criminals from endangering members of the public. There are far better ways of dealing with crime than just locking everyone up.
a fine on the company is merely seen as the cost of doing business and comes out of the customers pockets in the long run...
Only if the fine is proportionally small compared to the company's profits. A sensible way of fining a company may be to exponentially increase the fine each time they are found to be breaking the law (the record of past infractions could be tied to the personnel on the board rather than the company itself to prevent a new "clean" company being formed every so often). It gives them a few outs for genuine mistakes, but persistent law-breaking would soon become unaffordable.
The difference between Google and other companies is that
1. Most companies don't claim to be interested in collecting data. You effectively have to trust them to delete the information when they no longer need it for billing and accounting. Google does save the data, and you have to trust them not to do anything evil with the data. The difference is that you have to trust the telephone company (ugh) for a short time, while you have to trust Google until its demise.
I think you're naieve if you trust the telephone company not to keep your data forever. Just because they don't actively claim to want to collect data doesn't mean they aren't interested in doing it. For example, BT's internet arm never publicly said they were interested in collecting lots of data about their customers before they trialled Phorm without their customers' consent. So why should I believe BT's telco arm is uninterested in collecting data about me just because they've never publicly said they are?
Similarly, if you use a loyalty card in the supermarket, they are collecting data about you for purposes beyond billing, and there is no reason to believe they are going to delete it any time soon. Hell, even if you don't use a loyalty card, they are probably still profiling you, using your credit card number as identification.
2. Google provides lots of different services, and can combine the data. There can be a "synergy" effect, where small pieces of data are not useful to anyone, but if you have lots of pieces you get a detailed picture, and with good algorithms, a deeper knowledge of the person in question.
As I said, if you don't like Google collecting data on you, you are free to not use their services. Sure, they will still be able to collect some statistics on your browsing habits by means of adsense, analytics, etc. But that really is no different to buying a loaf of bread from the baker, and the baker helping their neighbouring shops by telling them "this customer buys bread from me on tuesdays and thursdays".
If you want to use services provided by a company, you have to be happy to pay what the service provider is charging. For some service providers, there is a direct financial cost; for Google they are costing you some of your privacy. In either case, no one is forcing you to buy these services, you are free to go ahead and not buy services that have a cost that you are not willing to pay.
The government already has the power to use force on people, but only on people who break the law. Having more data just increases the likelihood of them being able to prove that you broke a law.
The "good" part of this argument only really applies if you fully trust the current and all future governments. For example, imagine how much worse off the jews would have been when the Nazis came to power in Germany, had the government had this kind of detailed information about their citizens.
The significant difference between government data collection and private data collection is that the government uses the force of law to enforce collection. For example, Google says they analyse emails to collect information about Gmail users, and I am free to decide I don't want to pay that cost and use a different service provider for my email; whereas the government can mandate that *all* email service providers must allow them to collect information and this takes away my choice - I cannot just avoid the ones that are collecting information because they are all required to do this.
My concern is that there is a similar scenario where Google can use their data in a way that I don't agree with, but I can't think of such a scenario.
It is a valid concern, and you have to option to avoid using Google's services (hell, you could set your web browser to never request any objects from google's domains if you were that paranoid).
The one based on them censoring Wikipedia for showing an album cover?
IIRC, that filter is maintained by a private company.
The UK government loves to outsource - when it inevitably goes wrong, they can just say 'wasn't us!'
The IWF list is a privately maintained list of censored sites which is voluntarilly(*) used by ISPs and content filtering companies. They are funded by donations(+) from these companies.
(*) "Voluntarilly" means "often forcibly required by the government". For example, until BECTA was dissolved, companies wanting to sell content filtering systems to schools were required to use the IWF list. (+) By "donations", I mean companies are required to "donate" somewhere from £1000 - £40000 per year if they want access to the IWF list (which contains about 100 URIs). For comparison, commercial URI lists for filtering run to millions of categorised URLs for a fraction of this price.
Besides the above issues, there is no oversight as to what the IWF does - they are the sole decision makers in whether a site gets blocked or not.
Frankly, if they were serious about stopping kiddy-porn they would provide a free-to-use API through which anyone could quickly query whether a URI is on the list rather than mandating that anyone with an interest in filtering this content must pay them thousands of pounds for the privalidge. As far as I can see, the whole thing is an exercise in corruption.
Actually, as anyone working in IT in the UK can attest, we have very strict rules on what you can do with people's data.
There are indeed very strict rules. But what good are rules if they are not enforced?
As an example, an organisation I dealt with illegally sold my personal data to numerous "partners" (they asked me if I agreed to have my data passed to "partner companies", I declined, they did it anyway). A complaint has been filed with the ICO, and the ICO's response has been to write to the company in question telling them they shouldn't do that. That's it - the ICO are not interested in doing anything to enforce the data protection law except write sternly worded letters to people.
Meanwhile, whilst the original company has now stopped selling off my data, the companies they sold it to have sold it. And the ones they sold it to have sold it. There is no way for me to prevent that (now widespread) data being distributed further. Futhermore, these third party companies aren't even guilty of doing anything wrong since as far as they knew, I had agreed to have this data distributed (since thats what the first company told them).
What is needed is 2 things: 1. Rules forbidding the sale of any personal data between companies. 2. Actual enforcement of those rules and punishment for breaking them.
I am much happier with the likes of Google having my data than other companies - although Google may have a lot of my data, they don't sell it, so I pretty much know where it is, and if I don't like it I can cease using Google's services and make a formal request for them to destroy my personal data (which they are required to comply with under EU law). Most other companies that I have to deal with (e.g. my insurance company, etc.) are happy to sell the data on to other people, who will further sell it on and there's no longer any way for me to know who actually has this data any more. I *always* tick the "don't sell my data" box whenever I fill in a form, and yet my personal data is out there being bought and sold because a few companies have broken the law and ignored my preference. There is largely no way to know which companies have done this.
First of all - Google collects data about my VOIP calls? I don't think so.
on Google Volce (not technically VoIP) and Google chat sure.
Well, duhh, yes - the service provider you're buying a service from knows you're buying that service. If you don't want google to know about it, use a different service provider (but then that service provider knows...). This is no different from how its always been, whether on the internet or not - the telco knows when you made a phone call through their network, the baker knows when you bought a loaf of bread from him.
They also sync your contacts for android
Only if you tell them to... You can happilly use an Android device without asking Google to sync your contacts if you want to.
not sure about the call history
Google only gets your call history if you ask them to back up all your data. Again, you don't have to use this functionality (personally, I back up my phone nightly using rsync over my wifi network, so I don't bother using Google's backup stuff).
I'll give you that one. They have DNS and email, but it's all optional.
So, just like all the stuff you said above - they provide some services, its up to you whether you use those services and if you do they are going to know something about you in the same way as anyone else providing those services would.
For email, they aren't saving anything more than any other webmail provider.
Google _do_ analyse your email content to target advertising at you, which is more than many other webmail providers (although I imagine the likes of yahoo and hotmail do the same these days).
Even then, they don't collect data they don't care about.
When they care about *logging wireless packets* from their Streetview cars, we can conclude that they care about almost all data
I would say that Google's attitude seems to be "lets collect as much data as we can, we might find a neat way of analysing it in the future". There are, of course, good and bad things about that. Afterall, people use Google's services precisely because they work really well, and a lot of that is down to Google figuring out how to analyse your data in new and useful ways (useful to *you* as well as them).
That said, I don't really see the big deal with the whole wireless logging thing. They caught some packets that were broadcast in the clear into a public space for anyone with a receiver to see. If people didn't want their network traffic to be seen by others they had ample opportunity to encrypt it *using the standard functionality of their router*. And even so, the streetview car is moving at speed, it won't capture more than a few packets so they're going to be hard pushed to get anything particularly scary from the data. The whole thing strikes me like someone standing in their front window naked and then complaining that someone who drove past caught a glimpse of them - if you don't like it you should've drawn the curtains.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but would not under normal circumstances a cell only "register" with one tower at a time? That being the case, would not the records only store that one tower for retrospective recall? That being the case, you don't have triangulation anymore. You have a radius only.
You are wrong(ish). CDMA and UMTS do soft-handovers, which means your phone may be talking to several base stations at once. GSM does hard-handovers, which means your phone is talking to only one base station at once. However, I note that many GSM phones are aware of all the nearby base stations rather than just the one they are connected to (and this can usually be queried by software) and I've not read the standards deeply enough to know if that data gets fed back to the base station(s).
In any case, whilst the base stations will know what sector you're in, that isn't very accurate for triangulation. More accurate is trilateration, and I believe you can get down to a pretty accurate location by trilaterating the signals from multiple towers.
In fact, we don't need to look further than "Unity / Gnome 3" to find what's WRONG with Linux Desktop
What *is* wrong with it? I've found Gnome 3 to be about the best desktop environment I've ever used on any OS... Sure, there are niggles that are wrong with it (which notably seem to be the bits where the devs have obviously been smoking from Apple's crack pipe) but for the most part it seems pretty good to me...
Somewhere in a US-unfriendly place for sure. But likely that US-unfriendly place won't be the most free country in the world and may want to shut you down for whatever reason
There are plenty of countries that aren't that friendly with the US that allow more freedom than the "Land of the Free", just involves careful choices.
When I first heard of "HTML5" I thought: Thank Fuck Almighty! They're finally going to start over and do shit right, but no, they're not. HTML5 is just taking the exact same cluster of fucks to even more dizzying degrees.
XHTML was a pretty good step in the right direction. Enforced well-formed ness is a good thing (although IMHO browsers should've had a built in "please try to fix this page" function that the user could manually run over a broken page), genericsising tags is sensible (if you're going to embed a rectangular object then it makes sense to have a single <object> tag to do it for all content, for example - no need to produce a whole new revision of the language just because someone has invented a new type of embeddable content).
Unfortunately, the "industry" (Nokia, Microsoft, etc) were not interested in a major overhaul, and essentially wanted a quick bodge, so they came up with HTML 5 and more or less forced the W3C to adopt it. All the good stuff that HTML 5 brings, could have easilly been added to XHTML in a more generic way, but the industry weren't interested so we're left with the almighty clusterfuck known as HTML 5.
It seems that this tactic has some interesting consequences. The DOJ can seize the website, take it offline and make it unavailable to users. Thus removing all revenue streams. In the mean time, they wait. After a significant amount of time passes they go and "unsieze" the websites which now have lost revenue and users.
Seems to me like a use of the courts as a tool that they were not intended. What sort of remediation can the site owners take on the DOJ?
I've been saying this for a long time - if you're hosting something, doing it outside the US is a good plan. If you can host it somewhere that's US-hostile, even better (so long as the US doesn't bomb the datacentre).
Bitcoin itself is not a ponzi scheme and that's obvious to anyone with a dictionary. A ponzi scheme is a scheme where "investors" are paid from deposits from new investors. Obviously such a scheme must always grow in order to make payments and that means it is guaranteed to eventually collapse.
It isn't a ponzi scheme, but it does resemble one in some ways:
With a ponzi scheme, the early investors make great returns due to the influx of later investors. The returns gradually diminish as time goes on because the money from new investors has to be spread more thinly, the early investors get to cash out before the whole thing collapses.
With bitcoin, early investors get a lot of bitcoins (as they are easy to produce at the start). Later investors don't get so many, and as more and more investors enter the scheme, the currency gets spread more thinly and therefore each bitcoin gains value. The early investors still have their big stack of bitcoins, which now have considerably more value than when they started due to the increasing scarcity of bitcoins amoungst the later investors. The scheme may or may not eventually collapse, but either way the early investors are left with huge gains and the ability to cash out before anything bad happens.
As nobody sane would invest in something that explicitly advertised itself as a ponzi, such schemes always involve secrecy and obfuscation.
I'm not sure that's necessarilly true. Ponzi schemes *do* make a lot of money for the early investors, so it would be reasonably sane to enter such a scheme if the scheme is very new, then cash-out before it goes tits-up. Without some inside knowledge about the scheme, it would be pretty risky though because you don't know whether you are going to be an early investor or a late investor (who will lose all their money).
Bitcoin, being a currency, is not an investment
Currencies are frequently used as investments. Anything that fluctuates in value can be used as an investment (shares, currencies, properties, etc) - with all these things, the trick is to buy when it has a low value and sell when it has a high value. This is probably even more reason to invest in bitcoin, since the increasing scarcity of the coins is likley to gradually drive the value up (assuming the currency doesn't fall into disuse).
The fact that real work is done with lots of text, and text goes from top to bottom far more frequently then scales off endlessly to the right?
When you get to a vaguely reasonable size of screen, text *doesn't* generally just go from top to bottom - it is usually arranged into many blocks, such as overlapping windows. Reading lines of text that stretch all the way from one side of a 21" monitor to the other is *hard*, even on a 4:3 screen, and this is exactly why broadsheet newspapers arrange text into columns.
Personally, for most of my work I find large wide screen monitors are nicer to work with than large 4:3 monitors.
With a widescreen monitor, you can also get 2 A4 pages side by side, but if you need to deal with strict top-to-bottom text then you can always rotate it to portrait orientation, in which case high aspect ratio screens are certainly much better than the old square ones.
We have these stupidly huge 16:9 monitors today that can't even display one page of a PDF without scrolling and yet 2/3 of the screen is sitting empty. It's a terrible aspect ratio for computers.
IANAL. But I've been corrected on this issue by someone who is, and who happened to be my boss at the time.
If you're talking about the UK (my version of "over here") most of the stuff to do with refunds and longer-term fitness for purpose only apply to individual consumers.
The Sale of Goods Act requires the retailer (*not* the manufacturer) to warrant a product for its "reasonable" life expectancy to be free of manufacturing and design defects and fit for purpose. Within the first 6 months the burden of proof is upon the retailer (if they don't want to refund/fix then within the first 6 months they have to prove that there was no defect or that its "reasonable" life expectancy has been exceeded). After the first 6 months the burden of proof is upon the consumer (you prove that there was a defect and that it is within its life expectancy).
No one sane expects a lock to be completely secure, but this sounds like gross negligence (sticking what is effectively a JTAG port on the outside of the door - that isn't an obscure mistake, anyone involved with security who looked at the design and thought it was ok to make a programming port accessible to the outside with no kind of hardware or software security and didn't spot a problem is incompetent), which would fall into the "not fit for purpose" category. And since this defect was clearly there at the of manufacture, rather than having developed over months/years of use, the case looks quite winnable.
I have often wondered how this applies to software... I think someone once informed me that software was explicitly excluded from the act, although I haven't checked myself. This seems a bit wrong - defects in software are easier to fix than defects in hardware (at least, on a large scale), so it seems more reasonable to ensure they are fixed rather than giving software vendors a free pass.
so far as I know, no-one's ever tried to use "the law" to resist paying for ongoing maintenance fees on computer hardware, or at least nobody's succeeded in such a venture. And again - IANAL.
Maintenance fees usually get you something over and above the law. For example, it might get you an no-questions-asked same-day engineer callout to replace whatever hardware has failed, rather than requiring you to prove that a failure was caused by a defect (possibly involving the courts). Yes, without a maintenance contract, you could probably get that failed motherboard replaced by the retailer, but would it be done immediately and without any hassle, or would you be left without a server for weeks? (This isn't just a case of the vendor being difficult when there is no maintenance contract in place - the vendor may genuinely believe that the problem wasnt caused by a defect, but having a maintenance contract is likley to make them sweing the benefit of doubt in your favour).
it's looking like 3 is the way to go. They have a £10 pay as you go plan that comes with 500MB of data.
I think Three is still one of the better PAYG deals, but its a shame they cut the plan down a bit a while back. When I switched to Three PAYG they did 150MB of "free" data every time you top up (minimum 5 pound) which expired after 90 days, free on-network calls, and a 5 pound bundle that gave you 2GB for a month. By the time my fiancée switched to Three they had cut the "free" 150MB so it expires after 30 days, no more free calls and the 5 pound bundle is now only 500MB. For a while, they kept me on my original terms, but a few months ago cut my "free" 150MB expiry down to 45 days.
One thing to watch out for is that Three claim they will SMS you when your bundle is about to run out, bun in reality this almost never happens and if you're not paying attention you drop onto their expensive per-megabyte charges. I can recommend the My3 Droid android widget (70 pence) for keeping an eye on this.
This is a myth that embarrassingly seems to have started with Top Gear, a show not exactly known for it's fair and balanced take on EVs.
A typical battery pack will be guaranteed for around 8 years. That doesn't mean it will be dead after 8 years.
I will wait and see if that proves accurate. I've seen similar claims for other LiIon powered technologies which have not come to pass.
300 miles at 70MPH (ideal conditions) will take over 4 hours to drive. If you don't take a 30 minute break after 4 hours you are an idiot.
I usually swap with my partner rather than taking a break - when you have a 13 hour drive you tend not to want to waste a lot of time stopping. Your 30 minute break only gets you half capacity too, so you've got a further 30 minute break every 2 hours thereafter.
I'm not trying to take anything away from their accomplishments, but for me I don't think they are there yet.
Electric: 0.09 euro/kWh, or about 0.025 euro/MJ Gasoline: 1.5 euro/liter, or about 0.047 euro/MJ
In other words, the energy for electric costs half that of gasoline, and that's still excluding the much higher efficiency of the electric car. Per driven kilometer, it is even more extreme.
If you don't like electric for it's limited range and slow charging times, sure. But despite the expensive batteries, it's getting damn close to the gsaoline cars.
You apparently didn't read the parent's post properly, where the comparison was the total cost of ownership, not just the fuel cost.
Hell, Europe is "closer" to the oil-producing countries and we're still paying £1.30 / 1.30 Euro a LITRE which is 6 $USD for a US gallon.
Yep, and the UK government keeps telling the oil industry to slash prices because they are "harming the economy". The oil industry tells them to go to hell each time, and you know what - I don't blame them since 64% of the petrol price is tax and the government still keeps increasing the tax. It *is* harming the economy, but if the government is serious about doing something about that they should be cutting the tax instead of expecting the oil industry to take the hit all by themselves.
and public transport prices will still be as ridiculous as they are now.
Part of the problem here is that public transport get taxed on their fuel just like the public. Every time the government says "we need to raise fuel tax to encourage more people onto public transport", they increase the tax that public transport pay for their fuel as well, so all the bus fares go up to cover it. If taxes are going to be as high as they are at the moment, we need them to be used in investing in infrastructure (that means giving public transport a break instead of taxing them heavilly, maintaining the pothole riddled roads, improving the rail infrastructure, etc.).
The british train prices are beyond belief - if you book 2 weeks in advance you can get a good deal, but if you book within a week of travelling then things get much more hit and miss. If you have to make a last minute decision to go somewhere then forget about using the train. I frequently take a late night train which costs £14.50 each way if I book 1-2 weeks in advance (commically the first class tickets for *the same train* are £175 a pop); meanwhile if I leave it to a day or 2 before travelling, the ticket will cost me £80 each way. I can do the *round trip* for £55 in the car (and it takes almost half the time), so unless I'm in a position to plan a couple of weeks in advance it doesn't make any sense to take the train. The rising prices would all make some sense if the train capacity was very limited, but these are late night trains which are practically empty - by offering tickets at these unrealistic prices, they just ensure that it is emptier, even though they still have to pay the fixed costs of actually running the service.
And before anyone says that I'm comparing apples and oranges since I haven't considered the cost of owning a car in the above prices: no, I haven't considered the cost of owning a car because the public transport is so bad that I (and most other people) have to have a car anyway, so it is legitimate to just compare the fuel cost of running your existing car against the cost of taking public transport.
It's not going to be "Oh, wow, I have to go out and spend tens of thousands on a new car with a new fuel, the money for which I'll have "saved" before it ends up as scrap metal."
My take on this is that not only are electric cars still pretty expensive, but the batteries wear out and will be expensive to replace. If I buy a brand new petrol car, it will still be running in 15 years time and it'll still be running in 150,000 - 200,000 miles, probably without having had significant repair work done on it. Can the same be said for an electric car? I doubt it.
Then there's the range - yes, 300 miles is a reasonable range, but there are times that I do journeys longer than that and I can't just spend 2 minutes at a petrol station refuelling an electric car. For this reason alone, I'm not convinced that the current form of electric cars are going to replace petrol ones for the majority of the population. Driving into the fuel station and having the entire battery pack replaced with a fully charged one would give you the equivalent "recharge rate" of a petrol car (and with the batteries essentially just "on loan", the cost of replacing them when they w
Actually it is. the number of Android car stereos are exploding on the market. Why pay extortion to microsoft for the inferior windows CE when you can use the free android version of Linux.
I tend not to like electronics in my car that explode...
Just so the Americans understand: the Daily Mail is the equivalent of Fox News (possibly worse, if such a thing is possible). Considering it to be a legitimate news source is quite laughable, they exist to sell papers, and they do this quite well by getting their readers riled up over every little fabricated non-story they run...
Slashdot Mirror
In order for the 'masses' to truely benefit from a diverse yet quality experience, they do need to perform some sort of quality control. Think about your local book store, they pick and choose the material they stock to appeal to the widest audience, if that means not stocking (largely) freely available information, it is really just their business decision to make.
However, if you went into your local book store and specifically asked for a published book they don't stock, they would order it in for you. Amazon, on the other hand, are actually refusing to publish some content. Maybe they need to separate the publishing and selling business - i.e. allow anything to be published, but don't necessarilly include it in search results (so, for example, it could still be linked from the author's website)
Why should public domain content be given preferential treatment over permissively licensed content?
Worse than that, scammers were creating print-on-demand paperbacks of Wikipedia articles and selling them.
What's wrong with that? The CreativeCommons licence that Wikipedia uses allows exactly this, if people want a hard copy of some information instead of having to view it online then why shouldn't they be allowed to?
what's needed is jailtime for the execs...it's the only way to get them to take things seriously...
Jails are expensive and ineffective and should therefore primarilly be used to prevent dangerous criminals from endangering members of the public. There are far better ways of dealing with crime than just locking everyone up.
a fine on the company is merely seen as the cost of doing business and comes out of the customers pockets in the long run...
Only if the fine is proportionally small compared to the company's profits. A sensible way of fining a company may be to exponentially increase the fine each time they are found to be breaking the law (the record of past infractions could be tied to the personnel on the board rather than the company itself to prevent a new "clean" company being formed every so often). It gives them a few outs for genuine mistakes, but persistent law-breaking would soon become unaffordable.
The difference between Google and other companies is that
1. Most companies don't claim to be interested in collecting data. You effectively have to trust them to delete the information when they no longer need it for billing and accounting. Google does save the data, and you have to trust them not to do anything evil with the data. The difference is that you have to trust the telephone company (ugh) for a short time, while you have to trust Google until its demise.
I think you're naieve if you trust the telephone company not to keep your data forever. Just because they don't actively claim to want to collect data doesn't mean they aren't interested in doing it. For example, BT's internet arm never publicly said they were interested in collecting lots of data about their customers before they trialled Phorm without their customers' consent. So why should I believe BT's telco arm is uninterested in collecting data about me just because they've never publicly said they are?
Similarly, if you use a loyalty card in the supermarket, they are collecting data about you for purposes beyond billing, and there is no reason to believe they are going to delete it any time soon. Hell, even if you don't use a loyalty card, they are probably still profiling you, using your credit card number as identification.
2. Google provides lots of different services, and can combine the data. There can be a "synergy" effect, where small pieces of data are not useful to anyone, but if you have lots of pieces you get a detailed picture, and with good algorithms, a deeper knowledge of the person in question.
As I said, if you don't like Google collecting data on you, you are free to not use their services. Sure, they will still be able to collect some statistics on your browsing habits by means of adsense, analytics, etc. But that really is no different to buying a loaf of bread from the baker, and the baker helping their neighbouring shops by telling them "this customer buys bread from me on tuesdays and thursdays".
If you want to use services provided by a company, you have to be happy to pay what the service provider is charging. For some service providers, there is a direct financial cost; for Google they are costing you some of your privacy. In either case, no one is forcing you to buy these services, you are free to go ahead and not buy services that have a cost that you are not willing to pay.
The government already has the power to use force on people, but only on people who break the law. Having more data just increases the likelihood of them being able to prove that you broke a law.
The "good" part of this argument only really applies if you fully trust the current and all future governments. For example, imagine how much worse off the jews would have been when the Nazis came to power in Germany, had the government had this kind of detailed information about their citizens.
The significant difference between government data collection and private data collection is that the government uses the force of law to enforce collection. For example, Google says they analyse emails to collect information about Gmail users, and I am free to decide I don't want to pay that cost and use a different service provider for my email; whereas the government can mandate that *all* email service providers must allow them to collect information and this takes away my choice - I cannot just avoid the ones that are collecting information because they are all required to do this.
My concern is that there is a similar scenario where Google can use their data in a way that I don't agree with, but I can't think of such a scenario.
It is a valid concern, and you have to option to avoid using Google's services (hell, you could set your web browser to never request any objects from google's domains if you were that paranoid).
Absolutely agree that the wi
The one based on them censoring Wikipedia for showing an album cover?
IIRC, that filter is maintained by a private company.
The UK government loves to outsource - when it inevitably goes wrong, they can just say 'wasn't us!'
The IWF list is a privately maintained list of censored sites which is voluntarilly(*) used by ISPs and content filtering companies. They are funded by donations(+) from these companies.
(*) "Voluntarilly" means "often forcibly required by the government". For example, until BECTA was dissolved, companies wanting to sell content filtering systems to schools were required to use the IWF list.
(+) By "donations", I mean companies are required to "donate" somewhere from £1000 - £40000 per year if they want access to the IWF list (which contains about 100 URIs). For comparison, commercial URI lists for filtering run to millions of categorised URLs for a fraction of this price.
Besides the above issues, there is no oversight as to what the IWF does - they are the sole decision makers in whether a site gets blocked or not.
Frankly, if they were serious about stopping kiddy-porn they would provide a free-to-use API through which anyone could quickly query whether a URI is on the list rather than mandating that anyone with an interest in filtering this content must pay them thousands of pounds for the privalidge. As far as I can see, the whole thing is an exercise in corruption.
Actually, as anyone working in IT in the UK can attest, we have very strict rules on what you can do with people's data.
There are indeed very strict rules. But what good are rules if they are not enforced?
As an example, an organisation I dealt with illegally sold my personal data to numerous "partners" (they asked me if I agreed to have my data passed to "partner companies", I declined, they did it anyway). A complaint has been filed with the ICO, and the ICO's response has been to write to the company in question telling them they shouldn't do that. That's it - the ICO are not interested in doing anything to enforce the data protection law except write sternly worded letters to people.
Meanwhile, whilst the original company has now stopped selling off my data, the companies they sold it to have sold it. And the ones they sold it to have sold it. There is no way for me to prevent that (now widespread) data being distributed further. Futhermore, these third party companies aren't even guilty of doing anything wrong since as far as they knew, I had agreed to have this data distributed (since thats what the first company told them).
What is needed is 2 things:
1. Rules forbidding the sale of any personal data between companies.
2. Actual enforcement of those rules and punishment for breaking them.
I am much happier with the likes of Google having my data than other companies - although Google may have a lot of my data, they don't sell it, so I pretty much know where it is, and if I don't like it I can cease using Google's services and make a formal request for them to destroy my personal data (which they are required to comply with under EU law). Most other companies that I have to deal with (e.g. my insurance company, etc.) are happy to sell the data on to other people, who will further sell it on and there's no longer any way for me to know who actually has this data any more. I *always* tick the "don't sell my data" box whenever I fill in a form, and yet my personal data is out there being bought and sold because a few companies have broken the law and ignored my preference. There is largely no way to know which companies have done this.
First of all - Google collects data about my VOIP calls? I don't think so.
on Google Volce (not technically VoIP) and Google chat sure.
Well, duhh, yes - the service provider you're buying a service from knows you're buying that service. If you don't want google to know about it, use a different service provider (but then that service provider knows...). This is no different from how its always been, whether on the internet or not - the telco knows when you made a phone call through their network, the baker knows when you bought a loaf of bread from him.
They also sync your contacts for android
Only if you tell them to... You can happilly use an Android device without asking Google to sync your contacts if you want to.
not sure about the call history
Google only gets your call history if you ask them to back up all your data. Again, you don't have to use this functionality (personally, I back up my phone nightly using rsync over my wifi network, so I don't bother using Google's backup stuff).
I'll give you that one. They have DNS and email, but it's all optional.
So, just like all the stuff you said above - they provide some services, its up to you whether you use those services and if you do they are going to know something about you in the same way as anyone else providing those services would.
For email, they aren't saving anything more than any other webmail provider.
Google _do_ analyse your email content to target advertising at you, which is more than many other webmail providers (although I imagine the likes of yahoo and hotmail do the same these days).
Even then, they don't collect data they don't care about.
When they care about *logging wireless packets* from their Streetview cars, we can conclude that they care about almost all data
I would say that Google's attitude seems to be "lets collect as much data as we can, we might find a neat way of analysing it in the future". There are, of course, good and bad things about that. Afterall, people use Google's services precisely because they work really well, and a lot of that is down to Google figuring out how to analyse your data in new and useful ways (useful to *you* as well as them).
That said, I don't really see the big deal with the whole wireless logging thing. They caught some packets that were broadcast in the clear into a public space for anyone with a receiver to see. If people didn't want their network traffic to be seen by others they had ample opportunity to encrypt it *using the standard functionality of their router*. And even so, the streetview car is moving at speed, it won't capture more than a few packets so they're going to be hard pushed to get anything particularly scary from the data. The whole thing strikes me like someone standing in their front window naked and then complaining that someone who drove past caught a glimpse of them - if you don't like it you should've drawn the curtains.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but would not under normal circumstances a cell only "register" with one tower at a time? That being the case, would not the records only store that one tower for retrospective recall? That being the case, you don't have triangulation anymore. You have a radius only.
You are wrong(ish). CDMA and UMTS do soft-handovers, which means your phone may be talking to several base stations at once. GSM does hard-handovers, which means your phone is talking to only one base station at once. However, I note that many GSM phones are aware of all the nearby base stations rather than just the one they are connected to (and this can usually be queried by software) and I've not read the standards deeply enough to know if that data gets fed back to the base station(s).
In any case, whilst the base stations will know what sector you're in, that isn't very accurate for triangulation. More accurate is trilateration, and I believe you can get down to a pretty accurate location by trilaterating the signals from multiple towers.
In fact, we don't need to look further than "Unity / Gnome 3" to find what's WRONG with Linux Desktop
What *is* wrong with it? I've found Gnome 3 to be about the best desktop environment I've ever used on any OS... Sure, there are niggles that are wrong with it (which notably seem to be the bits where the devs have obviously been smoking from Apple's crack pipe) but for the most part it seems pretty good to me...
Somewhere in a US-unfriendly place for sure. But likely that US-unfriendly place won't be the most free country in the world and may want to shut you down for whatever reason
There are plenty of countries that aren't that friendly with the US that allow more freedom than the "Land of the Free", just involves careful choices.
Only if you're stupid enough to register under an american TLD or with an american registrar.
When I first heard of "HTML5" I thought: Thank Fuck Almighty! They're finally going to start over and do shit right, but no, they're not. HTML5 is just taking the exact same cluster of fucks to even more dizzying degrees.
XHTML was a pretty good step in the right direction. Enforced well-formed ness is a good thing (although IMHO browsers should've had a built in "please try to fix this page" function that the user could manually run over a broken page), genericsising tags is sensible (if you're going to embed a rectangular object then it makes sense to have a single <object> tag to do it for all content, for example - no need to produce a whole new revision of the language just because someone has invented a new type of embeddable content).
Unfortunately, the "industry" (Nokia, Microsoft, etc) were not interested in a major overhaul, and essentially wanted a quick bodge, so they came up with HTML 5 and more or less forced the W3C to adopt it. All the good stuff that HTML 5 brings, could have easilly been added to XHTML in a more generic way, but the industry weren't interested so we're left with the almighty clusterfuck known as HTML 5.
It seems that this tactic has some interesting consequences. The DOJ can seize the website, take it offline and make it unavailable to users. Thus removing all revenue streams. In the mean time, they wait. After a significant amount of time passes they go and "unsieze" the websites which now have lost revenue and users.
Seems to me like a use of the courts as a tool that they were not intended. What sort of remediation can the site owners take on the DOJ?
I've been saying this for a long time - if you're hosting something, doing it outside the US is a good plan. If you can host it somewhere that's US-hostile, even better (so long as the US doesn't bomb the datacentre).
Providing a SIP address for the emergency services would probably be a good start though.
Bitcoin itself is not a ponzi scheme and that's obvious to anyone with a dictionary. A ponzi scheme is a scheme where "investors" are paid from deposits from new investors. Obviously such a scheme must always grow in order to make payments and that means it is guaranteed to eventually collapse.
It isn't a ponzi scheme, but it does resemble one in some ways:
With a ponzi scheme, the early investors make great returns due to the influx of later investors. The returns gradually diminish as time goes on because the money from new investors has to be spread more thinly, the early investors get to cash out before the whole thing collapses.
With bitcoin, early investors get a lot of bitcoins (as they are easy to produce at the start). Later investors don't get so many, and as more and more investors enter the scheme, the currency gets spread more thinly and therefore each bitcoin gains value. The early investors still have their big stack of bitcoins, which now have considerably more value than when they started due to the increasing scarcity of bitcoins amoungst the later investors. The scheme may or may not eventually collapse, but either way the early investors are left with huge gains and the ability to cash out before anything bad happens.
As nobody sane would invest in something that explicitly advertised itself as a ponzi, such schemes always involve secrecy and obfuscation.
I'm not sure that's necessarilly true. Ponzi schemes *do* make a lot of money for the early investors, so it would be reasonably sane to enter such a scheme if the scheme is very new, then cash-out before it goes tits-up. Without some inside knowledge about the scheme, it would be pretty risky though because you don't know whether you are going to be an early investor or a late investor (who will lose all their money).
Bitcoin, being a currency, is not an investment
Currencies are frequently used as investments. Anything that fluctuates in value can be used as an investment (shares, currencies, properties, etc) - with all these things, the trick is to buy when it has a low value and sell when it has a high value. This is probably even more reason to invest in bitcoin, since the increasing scarcity of the coins is likley to gradually drive the value up (assuming the currency doesn't fall into disuse).
The fact that real work is done with lots of text, and text goes from top to bottom far more frequently then scales off endlessly to the right?
When you get to a vaguely reasonable size of screen, text *doesn't* generally just go from top to bottom - it is usually arranged into many blocks, such as overlapping windows. Reading lines of text that stretch all the way from one side of a 21" monitor to the other is *hard*, even on a 4:3 screen, and this is exactly why broadsheet newspapers arrange text into columns.
Personally, for most of my work I find large wide screen monitors are nicer to work with than large 4:3 monitors.
With a widescreen monitor, you can also get 2 A4 pages side by side, but if you need to deal with strict top-to-bottom text then you can always rotate it to portrait orientation, in which case high aspect ratio screens are certainly much better than the old square ones.
We have these stupidly huge 16:9 monitors today that can't even display one page of a PDF without scrolling and yet 2/3 of the screen is sitting empty. It's a terrible aspect ratio for computers.
IANAL. But I've been corrected on this issue by someone who is, and who happened to be my boss at the time.
If you're talking about the UK (my version of "over here") most of the stuff to do with refunds and longer-term fitness for purpose only apply to individual consumers.
The Sale of Goods Act requires the retailer (*not* the manufacturer) to warrant a product for its "reasonable" life expectancy to be free of manufacturing and design defects and fit for purpose. Within the first 6 months the burden of proof is upon the retailer (if they don't want to refund/fix then within the first 6 months they have to prove that there was no defect or that its "reasonable" life expectancy has been exceeded). After the first 6 months the burden of proof is upon the consumer (you prove that there was a defect and that it is within its life expectancy).
No one sane expects a lock to be completely secure, but this sounds like gross negligence (sticking what is effectively a JTAG port on the outside of the door - that isn't an obscure mistake, anyone involved with security who looked at the design and thought it was ok to make a programming port accessible to the outside with no kind of hardware or software security and didn't spot a problem is incompetent), which would fall into the "not fit for purpose" category. And since this defect was clearly there at the of manufacture, rather than having developed over months/years of use, the case looks quite winnable.
I have often wondered how this applies to software... I think someone once informed me that software was explicitly excluded from the act, although I haven't checked myself. This seems a bit wrong - defects in software are easier to fix than defects in hardware (at least, on a large scale), so it seems more reasonable to ensure they are fixed rather than giving software vendors a free pass.
so far as I know, no-one's ever tried to use "the law" to resist paying for ongoing maintenance fees on computer hardware, or at least nobody's succeeded in such a venture. And again - IANAL.
Maintenance fees usually get you something over and above the law. For example, it might get you an no-questions-asked same-day engineer callout to replace whatever hardware has failed, rather than requiring you to prove that a failure was caused by a defect (possibly involving the courts). Yes, without a maintenance contract, you could probably get that failed motherboard replaced by the retailer, but would it be done immediately and without any hassle, or would you be left without a server for weeks? (This isn't just a case of the vendor being difficult when there is no maintenance contract in place - the vendor may genuinely believe that the problem wasnt caused by a defect, but having a maintenance contract is likley to make them sweing the benefit of doubt in your favour).
it's looking like 3 is the way to go. They have a £10 pay as you go plan that comes with 500MB of data.
I think Three is still one of the better PAYG deals, but its a shame they cut the plan down a bit a while back. When I switched to Three PAYG they did 150MB of "free" data every time you top up (minimum 5 pound) which expired after 90 days, free on-network calls, and a 5 pound bundle that gave you 2GB for a month. By the time my fiancée switched to Three they had cut the "free" 150MB so it expires after 30 days, no more free calls and the 5 pound bundle is now only 500MB. For a while, they kept me on my original terms, but a few months ago cut my "free" 150MB expiry down to 45 days.
One thing to watch out for is that Three claim they will SMS you when your bundle is about to run out, bun in reality this almost never happens and if you're not paying attention you drop onto their expensive per-megabyte charges. I can recommend the My3 Droid android widget (70 pence) for keeping an eye on this.
This is a myth that embarrassingly seems to have started with Top Gear, a show not exactly known for it's fair and balanced take on EVs.
A typical battery pack will be guaranteed for around 8 years. That doesn't mean it will be dead after 8 years.
I will wait and see if that proves accurate. I've seen similar claims for other LiIon powered technologies which have not come to pass.
300 miles at 70MPH (ideal conditions) will take over 4 hours to drive. If you don't take a 30 minute break after 4 hours you are an idiot.
I usually swap with my partner rather than taking a break - when you have a 13 hour drive you tend not to want to waste a lot of time stopping. Your 30 minute break only gets you half capacity too, so you've got a further 30 minute break every 2 hours thereafter.
I'm not trying to take anything away from their accomplishments, but for me I don't think they are there yet.
You apparently did not do the actual maths.
Electric: 0.09 euro/kWh, or about 0.025 euro/MJ
Gasoline: 1.5 euro/liter, or about 0.047 euro/MJ
In other words, the energy for electric costs half that of gasoline, and that's still excluding the much higher efficiency of the electric car. Per driven kilometer, it is even more extreme.
If you don't like electric for it's limited range and slow charging times, sure. But despite the expensive batteries, it's getting damn close to the gsaoline cars.
You apparently didn't read the parent's post properly, where the comparison was the total cost of ownership, not just the fuel cost.
Hell, Europe is "closer" to the oil-producing countries and we're still paying £1.30 / 1.30 Euro a LITRE which is 6 $USD for a US gallon.
Yep, and the UK government keeps telling the oil industry to slash prices because they are "harming the economy". The oil industry tells them to go to hell each time, and you know what - I don't blame them since 64% of the petrol price is tax and the government still keeps increasing the tax. It *is* harming the economy, but if the government is serious about doing something about that they should be cutting the tax instead of expecting the oil industry to take the hit all by themselves.
and public transport prices will still be as ridiculous as they are now.
Part of the problem here is that public transport get taxed on their fuel just like the public. Every time the government says "we need to raise fuel tax to encourage more people onto public transport", they increase the tax that public transport pay for their fuel as well, so all the bus fares go up to cover it. If taxes are going to be as high as they are at the moment, we need them to be used in investing in infrastructure (that means giving public transport a break instead of taxing them heavilly, maintaining the pothole riddled roads, improving the rail infrastructure, etc.).
The british train prices are beyond belief - if you book 2 weeks in advance you can get a good deal, but if you book within a week of travelling then things get much more hit and miss. If you have to make a last minute decision to go somewhere then forget about using the train. I frequently take a late night train which costs £14.50 each way if I book 1-2 weeks in advance (commically the first class tickets for *the same train* are £175 a pop); meanwhile if I leave it to a day or 2 before travelling, the ticket will cost me £80 each way. I can do the *round trip* for £55 in the car (and it takes almost half the time), so unless I'm in a position to plan a couple of weeks in advance it doesn't make any sense to take the train. The rising prices would all make some sense if the train capacity was very limited, but these are late night trains which are practically empty - by offering tickets at these unrealistic prices, they just ensure that it is emptier, even though they still have to pay the fixed costs of actually running the service.
And before anyone says that I'm comparing apples and oranges since I haven't considered the cost of owning a car in the above prices: no, I haven't considered the cost of owning a car because the public transport is so bad that I (and most other people) have to have a car anyway, so it is legitimate to just compare the fuel cost of running your existing car against the cost of taking public transport.
It's not going to be "Oh, wow, I have to go out and spend tens of thousands on a new car with a new fuel, the money for which I'll have "saved" before it ends up as scrap metal."
My take on this is that not only are electric cars still pretty expensive, but the batteries wear out and will be expensive to replace. If I buy a brand new petrol car, it will still be running in 15 years time and it'll still be running in 150,000 - 200,000 miles, probably without having had significant repair work done on it. Can the same be said for an electric car? I doubt it.
Then there's the range - yes, 300 miles is a reasonable range, but there are times that I do journeys longer than that and I can't just spend 2 minutes at a petrol station refuelling an electric car. For this reason alone, I'm not convinced that the current form of electric cars are going to replace petrol ones for the majority of the population. Driving into the fuel station and having the entire battery pack replaced with a fully charged one would give you the equivalent "recharge rate" of a petrol car (and with the batteries essentially just "on loan", the cost of replacing them when they w
Actually it is. the number of Android car stereos are exploding on the market. Why pay extortion to microsoft for the inferior windows CE when you can use the free android version of Linux.
I tend not to like electronics in my car that explode...
The bit that you're missing is that the GP's "evidence" was from the daily mail - it may as well have been from The Onion for all the truth in it...
Just so the Americans understand: the Daily Mail is the equivalent of Fox News (possibly worse, if such a thing is possible). Considering it to be a legitimate news source is quite laughable, they exist to sell papers, and they do this quite well by getting their readers riled up over every little fabricated non-story they run...