The real price for Ballmer's first (P)OS is yet to be applied. Will he be trusted to produce another OS or application, as the latest version of M$ Office ain't fairing much better.
Money spent is what this is all about. Just more money to be spent upon a department that seems to be nothing but a fiscal vacuum that produces no results. The only real definitive action of the Department of Homeland Security is the demonstration of how 'NOT' to privatise and run a major disaster situation, 'Browny, you're doing a heck of a job'.
So all it seems to be doing is to find new and inventive ways of feeding the US public's tax dollars into the bloated profits of politically favoured corporations. Apart from of course it's efforts in ensuring those people who do not publicly favour the current US administration are subject to invasive and humiliating travel restrictions.
So the focus should be on a more highly skilled, trained and professional, police force, rather than pointless money sucking gadgets and poorly paid low IQ thugs in uniform.
Technically that is not correct as the operating system on the apple is not 'bundled' as in separately sourced and a forced customer acquisition, it is part of the apple computer. Just as M$ sells computers with their (P)OS in an even more crippled state in some regions. Bundling is the forced purchase of the additional separate product.
So technically it would not be bundling for a computer to be sold with any of the popular Linux distributions pre-installed as they are free, and the customer has not been 'forced' to purchase them in order to buy the hardware of their choice.
The simplest solution is of course for governments to create their own default Linux distribution (which of course could be based upon any major distribution) and use that with in all government run departments and institutions, for major savings not only for the government but also for the national economy. They could also make it freely available to the public, cost effective standardisation, which private industry would also immediately pick up due to the obvious savings and standardisation benefits.
You forget that the Russian government has access to the windows source code, so they might simply know exactly how bad, buugy and insecure it really is. Now in the counter intelligence game if you are going to produce and release a bunch of windows virus it would make sense, that as much as possible of your own computer infrastructure was not running windows. You can't produce patches to secure yourself from your own viruses otherwise the other side would also pick them up.
Now, more seriously, given a big push to Linux in education means that Russian tech industry will have a significant competitive advantage as Linux becomes the dominant operating system, whether in servers, on the desktop, or embedded in appliances. Russia is likely to make a big push in the software and hardware markets over the next decade as they work to achieve technological independence from China and India and technolgical parity with the EU and the US, very serious stuff indeed.
The NSA was also meant to specifically target foreign signals intelligence and is already implicated in US warrant less domestic wire taping. Hmm, securing domestic government and private networks, I suppose against everybody except themselves, built in warrant less wire taping, after all how else can you secure a network but by monitoring all the data flowing across it, they wont peek, promise;).
The real meaning of freedom and liberty - every freedom or liberty that you blithely give up your grandchildren will pay a bloody price to recover, the same bloody price you grand parents paid to gain and retain your freedom and liberty in the first place.
It is also how the whole legal system has been politically corrupted. The courts are not there to convict criminals, the courts are there so that the government and law enforcement have to prove the legal validity of their accusations to the public, that they are in fact upholding the law and not wilfully abusing the power given them. They are there because people with power can not always be trusted to do the right thing, as this case has self evidently displayed.
As for the prosecutor in this case in protecting the city, she has harmed the law and abused the courts, a contemptible abuse of the system. Using legal fees and the extended duration court system as a peremptory and coercive penalty, a remarkable lack of respect for the law combined with a compete absence of moral integrity.
Perhaps I could point out the most obvious security problem with Vista, WGA and DRM. What do works and viruses do, they deny you access to complete you work upon your computer, whether they delete your data, prevent you booting up, or just produce 'reduced functionality'.
When WGA and (FU)DRM fail, they do exactly the same thing. So have the failed since Vista came out, the answer is yes, so Vista has a serious security flaw, the program itself. So now M$ is now a new kind of security laughing stock with built in virus features.
When it comes to the customer's computers security, reliability and stability, M$ had better learn that piracy is it's fucking problem and not the customers who have bought and paid for the software.
Now that you have brought up time, it is time to point out the crux of the problem. Geeks are notoriously impatient, time counts, in choosing which attitude is appropriate for the female type your are meeting, do you take an 10 to 20 minutes to understand every women you meet (who then immediately think you want to have sex with them and are trying to pick them up, just like the idiot jock straps, with the all resulting possible harassment issues) or do you just go for the split second law of averages safe sexist, they are all just blonde airheads with inflato boobies attitude and mentally cut them off.
Hey, it is safe, it is quick and works well enough. Whilst of course it is completely unfair to the female geek in question, the real change is required in the whole of society, in the majority expectations, not in the minority geek/nerd sector who just adjust their behaviour to provide the simplest, least amount of wasted thought, minimalist social response. Playing all the cranky, short hair, crested, rock throwing, monkey social etiquette games gets really monotonous and boring after a while, especially when a lot of them are empty, shallow, repetitious, nonsense (all mostly based on 'buy this crap now' mass media marketing).
Google is the #1 company that has been fighting against 'FREE' government intrusion into search, personal group profiling, personal online gaming psychological behaviour and profiling, personal communication patterns and contacts, and now of course personal documents produced online. Google is a marketing company and spends it life putting a spin on everything especially itself, at a price of course and to generate a profit.
Why shouldn't google be allowed to charge the government market rates for your privacy, they rent it out to all other private companies for 'targeted' marketing, why shouldn't they be entitled to charge the government for targeted anal-ising, what right does the government have to demand your privacy that google owns, that google has bought and paid for with the free(sic) services it provides, for 'FREE', how obscene, how anti the US god of profit.
So Yahoo and MSN were foolishly patriotic and gave away what they should have charged for, there's two corporate boards that should be subject to review by their profits first, last and everything in between, shareholders.
Who knows, just like M$, perhaps google should be broken up, so that the private for profit collation of your and your families personal life, and the resulting wild interpretations that it could generate are also broken up and distributed and subject of course to your personal review and correction.
Google have every incentive to create the 'illusion' that they can be trusted, that they are honest, that they do not steal, cheat or lie. However they have absolutely no incentive to not actually do those things, if doing them will generate a profit and they don't get caught, well at least not too often for their marketing team to be able to buff up the tarnishing when ever it needs to;).
If you really want to poison their data base, the whole idea is to get as many 'other' people in it as possible for as many false reasons as possible and then let cross referencing really crap out the database. You certainly don't want to draw attention to yourself, be invisible, remain blandly nothing or post on/. and guarantee you will be subject to further review, a more detailed probing (it's that open exchange of information with foreigners that gets you into real trouble).
As for buying 'good' books on credit card, only if you can return them the next day, after all you certainly wouldn't want to reward those junk writers in any way, shape or form.
Really, if it all becomes such of an, in your face, make adjustments to your public behaviour hassle, just emigrate to a more 'free' country, have fun and publicly annoy the crap out of your ex-persecutors from a safer 'probe free' distance.
It was a thinner market back then, with less quality games to draw consumer attention. This article comes of more as a fluff marketing piece to keep Halo and the xbox in the news, in the public mind space as yet another boring marketing exercise.
Halo has only a fraction of the game identity that Doom, Quake or even Half Life had or even non FPS like Starcraft or Command and conquer, and where are they now.
All it really has is a ton of M$ marketing B$, any bit of crap journalism is good as the game nears it's release date, what ever happened to the good old dishonest it's already sold out marketing campaign, oh that's right.
Of course the major change in the new patent system is intended to fix that, patent first, bugger the actual inventor and favour the lawyer. Companies will be trolling every forum, and hunting through every open source program etc. searching for patentable ideas that they will simply steal and then sue the original inventor to stop them using their own idea. Hey, the patentor legally stole the idea, so what right should the inventor have to their own idea in a world of corporate greed, lawyers and corrupt politicians, none apparently.
A bright new era in industrial espionage in a patent first system, researchers can now be valid targets for crime syndicates, what multi million dollar ideas do they have wallowing around in their heads that their company has not yet patented but is about to and that can be extracted by US Government approved harsh interrogation techniques. Corporate security takes on a whole new dimension with mobile human safes carrying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of ideas that can be quite readily picked or if absolutely necessary bought.
Patent first is some really dangerous stuff, especially in a society where the celebration of greed is the prime motivator in the mass media, corporate and political space. Now the US Government can run the CIA and the NSA at a profit (especially considering the number of private for profit contractors they employ). Now if your a foreign or even local multinational industrialist, do you really want them monitoring your valuable research communications, phone calls, email, WAN - all encrypted, all of the time and debugging your desktops takes on a whole new significance. With China now declaring a big push for patents, how will those autocrats tackle a patent first system, where even a simple dissenting opinion leads to harsh interrogation techniques and extended jail terms, do you want you really want your researchers holidaying in China, where they might say the wrong thing.
The important thing about disparaging terms is always going to be context, while terms like geek or nerds could be used whilst paying a compliment or as a shared term, it should definitely not be used when attempting an apology, then it does come off as a rather pathetic hidden insult.
For me, geeks are just nerds who fight back rather than run away, in its original context it's meant as a disparaging term, however, any term targeted at those of higher intellect can be readily de-fanged just by willingly the term as an accepted identifier, consider us older geeks/nerds and the change of acceptance of the term that we collectively forced.
Of course for this particular writer, who cares, apology no apology, he is just another failed blogvertiser who as discredited their opinion, and with a rather inflated ego to boot, a real carry on about how 'signifcant' his apology is.
Now if he is really sincere in his apology he should apologise to the investors who got burnt by what looks like nothing more than a pump and dump scheme by SCO management (and a marketing scheme by M$), investors who could have based their investment choice in SCO as a result of reading and being foolish enough to believe his article, which it turns out was nothing but a part of SCO marketing scheme to inflate the share price (ignorance is no excuse for those that claim expertise).
What would the world be with out punctuation. The first case you give cannot work with out a judiciously placed comma. This is of course what the legal battle will be all about, legal obfuscation, delaying tactics and the source and depth of funds for an extended legal tussle. It will hardly be a legal battle because of course all the code can be attributed and the code contributors can join in the case indirectly to support the GPL, a foregone loss by the cancer lawyer.
Then of course there is the negative image being generated for a consumer product, and also the FUD that can result because people will wonder why they don't want to release the code, what is hidden in there;).
Well that US Senator should be called out on his attitude, he is now an accessory after the fact. Any politician has to ensure the law is upheld in their presence, and especially in their public presence. One also wonders how afraid that politician has become, does he fear he and his family will be targeted by law enforcement, or does he fear that he will not be protected in the future.
I think a lot of people have lost sight of what a law enforcement officers role is. It definitely is not to control people, it is up to people to control themselves, when they fail to do so, then the law enforcement officers arrest only those people who have lost control using minimum force. They do not punish, torture or inflict unnecessary bodily harm.
When law enforcement officers start punishing, torturing or inflicting unnecessary bodily harm, they are no longer upholding the law, they are breaking and should be prosecuted. I have seen footage of law enforcement officers spraying pepper spray into the eyes of protesters who were sitting down and obstructing the flow of traffic, the officers were committing acts of torture, they had turned themselves into judge, jury and executioner, they were flagrantly breaking the law, the only thing the officers were entitled to do, or legally allowed to do, was arrest people they believed to be breaking the law. Who then could have their day in court for a judge to determine the applicable punishment.
That more law enforcement officers have not be subject to prosecution for flagrant public abuses of the law stinks of corruption of the system and the creation of a class of people who are above the law.
Fortunately for any beam weapon there is always a reflective surface, a concave shield could be created to reflect the beam back at the animals using it.
You know, you know, now why not look at them added together and not as singled out items own their own. A family of four combined use for a start, and you of course completely left out video voip, so B$, B$$ and B$$$ to you.
Can you even add, now, duh, what is 20 movies, plus the audio, plus streaming TV, plus browsing the net, plus email, plus video VOIP. So you are well and truly full of it. Don't look at yesterday, try going beyond your lies and start planning for tomorrow.
Apparently shared USB hard drives are now the most popular medium. They are shared amongst friends, who all add content, from other friends who get content from other friends etc. and they only remove 'er' shared content upon mutual agreement (once everyone has got it to their own personal data storage), size of drives generally around 300 gig, so now, it is sort of sneaker mesh networking, it's cheaper and quicker than P2P or torrenting it off the internet;)}.
Now it really depends what laws the googlites would actually consider weaker. It seems the google loves the Chinese governments pirvacy and censorship laws (as in reality they go hand in hand). Perhaps google wants to provide us with the harshest and most strict privacy laws, of Communist (corporate fascist) China ie. you have none, everything you do or see or even attempt to see will be recorded and used to generate profits for google, for targeted marketing and of course for the only people google is willing to sell you data to (generally they only rent out your privacy to other private companies for marketing purposes) government agencies. You think google sued to protect you data from prying by that government agency, they just didn't want to give it away for 'FREE', googles loyalty is to it's profits just like any other major multinational corporation.
I think you completely underestimate the cost of clean up. That is the real problem, corporations walk away with enormous profits after actively corrupting elected officials so that they can pollute to the greedy little hearts content and poison whole families, profits at the cost of other peoples health and lives.
Clean up cost can be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, removing polluted soil and ground water is far, far more difficult and expensive than stated, you have to find a safe place to dump the contaminated material, and you have to safely transport it there and then there is the sheer volume of contaminated material. Of course not to forget, as you seem to have, there is curing the people, if possible, from the harm the pollution has caused, the huge costs involved in that.
Corporate executives that profit by these actions should be tried for the crimes they have committed, murder, manslaughter and aggravated assault. Confiscation of assets and life time imprisonment for crimes against humanity (chemical warfare), for some reason when it is done to generate profits and not to conduct war, it becomes, somehow, corruptly acceptable in the eyes of mass media, politicians and of course lobbyists but of course everything is acceptable to a lobbyist as long as there is profit in it for them.
Oh those, who set out to lie and deceive, exactly how much hi-def video is covered by 100meg. How large is a typical game demo. How large is a typical game that can now quite readily be purchased on line. There are also numerous live TV streams and lets and vid calls and conference calls. How times that by four for a typical family.
Makes you misdirection and their lies stand out for what they really are, just a collusive attempt by the major players to ramp up prices. They are feeling out the market, testing what they can get away with, seeing if any member of the telecom cartel will break. Next will come the insults targeted at consumers, only pirates and leeches need more than 100 gig, only thieves, hackers and terrorists could ever use 100 gig.
The typical family watching legal video streams, making vid calls, transferring family videos between friends, buying games online, doing work from home, and they could, shock, horror, even individually be doing more that one thing at a time on line, now ain't that just amazing.
Of course the telecoms and their spruikers will tell every lie in the book, arrange for a whole bunch of rubbery statistics, get all the junk consultants to start spreading junk reports, pay their mass media advertisers to spread the spin far and wide, as well as of course flooding forums.
Thanks to the current administration and it's corrupt practices, the telecoms will be looking forward to bringing you yesterdays internet, tomorrow, complete with low download, restricted access and inflated prices.
Mod troll, troll, if you are not paying for a new (P)OS what exactly the hell are you paying for, bug fixes, getting defects repaired, a slick coat of paint over underlying crap. Basically paying for advertising, M$ profit margins, and things no other industry would get away with or that the majority of reputable and honest business people would consider lacking in anything even remotely resembling integrity.
Imagine paying to find faults, that cost you lost work and exacerbated system administration costs, only to get sold the fixes for those faults. It suspiciously looks like M$ introduce bugs on purpose so that you will buy the next support pack 'er' upgrade 'er' version (it's actually completely new software we wrote it all from scratch, really we did);).
Only problem of course for that fanciful scenario, is heat would cause plastic deformation and not weaken the plastic to allow brittle fracture unlike of cause exposure to excessive sunlight. Now of course the heat might cause problems for the lcd transistor and I could pretty well guarantee, that dead transistors due to heat would occur well before exposure to heat would cause brittle weakness in plastic, not that exposure to heat does not cause some types plastic to become brittle but generally speaking that just about right before things go up in flames, or specifically the plastic used in laptop cases does go up in flames.
So I can only assume you are being completely serious in ignorance.
Being in the UK there is bound to be a consumer affairs department to which the complaint can be forwarded, for remedial action, I know of the ones for South Australia and for Australia. These government departments are very useful as they will handle any prosecution, so not only will your laptop likely be repaired, but other people in similar situation could also get legal rectification and very likely the retailer could get stuck with penalties well in excess of the cost of repairs.
What about the other million or so other terrorists that the government has monitored, why haven't they been arrested, what are all those lazy, donut eating, lard butt, homeland security agents doing. A million terrorists, they monitored them, they 'knew' they were guilty, why aren't all those nasty untrustworthy worthy Americans who communicate with foreigners on there way to a well deserved Cuban holiday, what is the government doing to keep us safe.
As for applying human rights to foreigners, we all know they are sub-human and not deserving of constitutional protections, indefinite arrest until they confess, torture and definitely, positively guilty until proven innocent(which they will never do because they have no constitutional right to their day in court 'queue', maniacal presidential cackle - mwa-ha-ha). Tell me something, exactly how would you 'prove' you are not a foreigner with out access to the courts, or a lawyer, because we all know terrorists carry fake documents and they lie.
Slashdot Mirror
The real price for Ballmer's first (P)OS is yet to be applied. Will he be trusted to produce another OS or application, as the latest version of M$ Office ain't fairing much better.
So all it seems to be doing is to find new and inventive ways of feeding the US public's tax dollars into the bloated profits of politically favoured corporations. Apart from of course it's efforts in ensuring those people who do not publicly favour the current US administration are subject to invasive and humiliating travel restrictions.
So the focus should be on a more highly skilled, trained and professional, police force, rather than pointless money sucking gadgets and poorly paid low IQ thugs in uniform.
So technically it would not be bundling for a computer to be sold with any of the popular Linux distributions pre-installed as they are free, and the customer has not been 'forced' to purchase them in order to buy the hardware of their choice.
The simplest solution is of course for governments to create their own default Linux distribution (which of course could be based upon any major distribution) and use that with in all government run departments and institutions, for major savings not only for the government but also for the national economy. They could also make it freely available to the public, cost effective standardisation, which private industry would also immediately pick up due to the obvious savings and standardisation benefits.
Now, more seriously, given a big push to Linux in education means that Russian tech industry will have a significant competitive advantage as Linux becomes the dominant operating system, whether in servers, on the desktop, or embedded in appliances. Russia is likely to make a big push in the software and hardware markets over the next decade as they work to achieve technological independence from China and India and technolgical parity with the EU and the US, very serious stuff indeed.
The NSA was also meant to specifically target foreign signals intelligence and is already implicated in US warrant less domestic wire taping. Hmm, securing domestic government and private networks, I suppose against everybody except themselves, built in warrant less wire taping, after all how else can you secure a network but by monitoring all the data flowing across it, they wont peek, promise ;).
It is also how the whole legal system has been politically corrupted. The courts are not there to convict criminals, the courts are there so that the government and law enforcement have to prove the legal validity of their accusations to the public, that they are in fact upholding the law and not wilfully abusing the power given them. They are there because people with power can not always be trusted to do the right thing, as this case has self evidently displayed.
As for the prosecutor in this case in protecting the city, she has harmed the law and abused the courts, a contemptible abuse of the system. Using legal fees and the extended duration court system as a peremptory and coercive penalty, a remarkable lack of respect for the law combined with a compete absence of moral integrity.
When WGA and (FU)DRM fail, they do exactly the same thing. So have the failed since Vista came out, the answer is yes, so Vista has a serious security flaw, the program itself. So now M$ is now a new kind of security laughing stock with built in virus features.
When it comes to the customer's computers security, reliability and stability, M$ had better learn that piracy is it's fucking problem and not the customers who have bought and paid for the software.
Hey, it is safe, it is quick and works well enough. Whilst of course it is completely unfair to the female geek in question, the real change is required in the whole of society, in the majority expectations, not in the minority geek/nerd sector who just adjust their behaviour to provide the simplest, least amount of wasted thought, minimalist social response. Playing all the cranky, short hair, crested, rock throwing, monkey social etiquette games gets really monotonous and boring after a while, especially when a lot of them are empty, shallow, repetitious, nonsense (all mostly based on 'buy this crap now' mass media marketing).
Why shouldn't google be allowed to charge the government market rates for your privacy, they rent it out to all other private companies for 'targeted' marketing, why shouldn't they be entitled to charge the government for targeted anal-ising, what right does the government have to demand your privacy that google owns, that google has bought and paid for with the free(sic) services it provides, for 'FREE', how obscene, how anti the US god of profit.
So Yahoo and MSN were foolishly patriotic and gave away what they should have charged for, there's two corporate boards that should be subject to review by their profits first, last and everything in between, shareholders.
Who knows, just like M$, perhaps google should be broken up, so that the private for profit collation of your and your families personal life, and the resulting wild interpretations that it could generate are also broken up and distributed and subject of course to your personal review and correction.
Google have every incentive to create the 'illusion' that they can be trusted, that they are honest, that they do not steal, cheat or lie. However they have absolutely no incentive to not actually do those things, if doing them will generate a profit and they don't get caught, well at least not too often for their marketing team to be able to buff up the tarnishing when ever it needs to ;).
As for buying 'good' books on credit card, only if you can return them the next day, after all you certainly wouldn't want to reward those junk writers in any way, shape or form.
Really, if it all becomes such of an, in your face, make adjustments to your public behaviour hassle, just emigrate to a more 'free' country, have fun and publicly annoy the crap out of your ex-persecutors from a safer 'probe free' distance.
Halo has only a fraction of the game identity that Doom, Quake or even Half Life had or even non FPS like Starcraft or Command and conquer, and where are they now.
All it really has is a ton of M$ marketing B$, any bit of crap journalism is good as the game nears it's release date, what ever happened to the good old dishonest it's already sold out marketing campaign, oh that's right.
A bright new era in industrial espionage in a patent first system, researchers can now be valid targets for crime syndicates, what multi million dollar ideas do they have wallowing around in their heads that their company has not yet patented but is about to and that can be extracted by US Government approved harsh interrogation techniques. Corporate security takes on a whole new dimension with mobile human safes carrying hundreds of millions of dollars worth of ideas that can be quite readily picked or if absolutely necessary bought.
Patent first is some really dangerous stuff, especially in a society where the celebration of greed is the prime motivator in the mass media, corporate and political space. Now the US Government can run the CIA and the NSA at a profit (especially considering the number of private for profit contractors they employ). Now if your a foreign or even local multinational industrialist, do you really want them monitoring your valuable research communications, phone calls, email, WAN - all encrypted, all of the time and debugging your desktops takes on a whole new significance. With China now declaring a big push for patents, how will those autocrats tackle a patent first system, where even a simple dissenting opinion leads to harsh interrogation techniques and extended jail terms, do you want you really want your researchers holidaying in China, where they might say the wrong thing.
For me, geeks are just nerds who fight back rather than run away, in its original context it's meant as a disparaging term, however, any term targeted at those of higher intellect can be readily de-fanged just by willingly the term as an accepted identifier, consider us older geeks/nerds and the change of acceptance of the term that we collectively forced.
Of course for this particular writer, who cares, apology no apology, he is just another failed blogvertiser who as discredited their opinion, and with a rather inflated ego to boot, a real carry on about how 'signifcant' his apology is.
Now if he is really sincere in his apology he should apologise to the investors who got burnt by what looks like nothing more than a pump and dump scheme by SCO management (and a marketing scheme by M$), investors who could have based their investment choice in SCO as a result of reading and being foolish enough to believe his article, which it turns out was nothing but a part of SCO marketing scheme to inflate the share price (ignorance is no excuse for those that claim expertise).
Then of course there is the negative image being generated for a consumer product, and also the FUD that can result because people will wonder why they don't want to release the code, what is hidden in there ;).
Well that US Senator should be called out on his attitude, he is now an accessory after the fact. Any politician has to ensure the law is upheld in their presence, and especially in their public presence. One also wonders how afraid that politician has become, does he fear he and his family will be targeted by law enforcement, or does he fear that he will not be protected in the future.
When law enforcement officers start punishing, torturing or inflicting unnecessary bodily harm, they are no longer upholding the law, they are breaking and should be prosecuted. I have seen footage of law enforcement officers spraying pepper spray into the eyes of protesters who were sitting down and obstructing the flow of traffic, the officers were committing acts of torture, they had turned themselves into judge, jury and executioner, they were flagrantly breaking the law, the only thing the officers were entitled to do, or legally allowed to do, was arrest people they believed to be breaking the law. Who then could have their day in court for a judge to determine the applicable punishment.
That more law enforcement officers have not be subject to prosecution for flagrant public abuses of the law stinks of corruption of the system and the creation of a class of people who are above the law.
Fortunately for any beam weapon there is always a reflective surface, a concave shield could be created to reflect the beam back at the animals using it.
You have children, does that not by definition make you one, or has the plumber been paying calls on your household for defective pipe.
Can you even add, now, duh, what is 20 movies, plus the audio, plus streaming TV, plus browsing the net, plus email, plus video VOIP. So you are well and truly full of it. Don't look at yesterday, try going beyond your lies and start planning for tomorrow.
Apparently shared USB hard drives are now the most popular medium. They are shared amongst friends, who all add content, from other friends who get content from other friends etc. and they only remove 'er' shared content upon mutual agreement (once everyone has got it to their own personal data storage), size of drives generally around 300 gig, so now, it is sort of sneaker mesh networking, it's cheaper and quicker than P2P or torrenting it off the internet ;)}.
Now it really depends what laws the googlites would actually consider weaker. It seems the google loves the Chinese governments pirvacy and censorship laws (as in reality they go hand in hand). Perhaps google wants to provide us with the harshest and most strict privacy laws, of Communist (corporate fascist) China ie. you have none, everything you do or see or even attempt to see will be recorded and used to generate profits for google, for targeted marketing and of course for the only people google is willing to sell you data to (generally they only rent out your privacy to other private companies for marketing purposes) government agencies. You think google sued to protect you data from prying by that government agency, they just didn't want to give it away for 'FREE', googles loyalty is to it's profits just like any other major multinational corporation.
Clean up cost can be in the hundreds of millions of dollars, removing polluted soil and ground water is far, far more difficult and expensive than stated, you have to find a safe place to dump the contaminated material, and you have to safely transport it there and then there is the sheer volume of contaminated material. Of course not to forget, as you seem to have, there is curing the people, if possible, from the harm the pollution has caused, the huge costs involved in that.
Corporate executives that profit by these actions should be tried for the crimes they have committed, murder, manslaughter and aggravated assault. Confiscation of assets and life time imprisonment for crimes against humanity (chemical warfare), for some reason when it is done to generate profits and not to conduct war, it becomes, somehow, corruptly acceptable in the eyes of mass media, politicians and of course lobbyists but of course everything is acceptable to a lobbyist as long as there is profit in it for them.
Makes you misdirection and their lies stand out for what they really are, just a collusive attempt by the major players to ramp up prices. They are feeling out the market, testing what they can get away with, seeing if any member of the telecom cartel will break. Next will come the insults targeted at consumers, only pirates and leeches need more than 100 gig, only thieves, hackers and terrorists could ever use 100 gig.
The typical family watching legal video streams, making vid calls, transferring family videos between friends, buying games online, doing work from home, and they could, shock, horror, even individually be doing more that one thing at a time on line, now ain't that just amazing.
Of course the telecoms and their spruikers will tell every lie in the book, arrange for a whole bunch of rubbery statistics, get all the junk consultants to start spreading junk reports, pay their mass media advertisers to spread the spin far and wide, as well as of course flooding forums.
Thanks to the current administration and it's corrupt practices, the telecoms will be looking forward to bringing you yesterdays internet, tomorrow, complete with low download, restricted access and inflated prices.
Imagine paying to find faults, that cost you lost work and exacerbated system administration costs, only to get sold the fixes for those faults. It suspiciously looks like M$ introduce bugs on purpose so that you will buy the next support pack 'er' upgrade 'er' version (it's actually completely new software we wrote it all from scratch, really we did) ;).
So I can only assume you are being completely serious in ignorance.
Being in the UK there is bound to be a consumer affairs department to which the complaint can be forwarded, for remedial action, I know of the ones for South Australia and for Australia. These government departments are very useful as they will handle any prosecution, so not only will your laptop likely be repaired, but other people in similar situation could also get legal rectification and very likely the retailer could get stuck with penalties well in excess of the cost of repairs.
As for applying human rights to foreigners, we all know they are sub-human and not deserving of constitutional protections, indefinite arrest until they confess, torture and definitely, positively guilty until proven innocent(which they will never do because they have no constitutional right to their day in court 'queue', maniacal presidential cackle - mwa-ha-ha). Tell me something, exactly how would you 'prove' you are not a foreigner with out access to the courts, or a lawyer, because we all know terrorists carry fake documents and they lie.