"and thus I stilll don't see how they demonstrate that France needs UK's money to go on."
I never said this, I'm not claiming France is subsidised by the UK, I simply made the point that if someone is worried about UK rebate, then they should be even more concerned about French farming subsidies and that the UK most certainly does pay it's fair share, arguably more so than other members, rebate or not.
"The UK ratified the Lisbon treaty quickly because, unlike Ireland, they did not hold a referendum. Is your opinion that such a referendum would have passed, when only 22% of British people have a fully positive view of the EU?"
Not at all, your concern seemed to be that the UK is a hindrance to the EU, I was merely making the point that our government recognises the importance of it and is much less a hindrance than many other EU governments. It seemed odd to attack the UK over this, when there are much bigger offenders in the EU.
The problem is that in the UK we're an inherently pessimistic set of people, we like to bitch and moan, but when it comes to people tend to realise that well, maybe, actually, it's not that bad after all.
Of course the right wingers thrive on this, they feed on it, really the BNP are just tha Nazis by a different name, UKIP are just the BNP in nicer suits and with bigger houses, and frankly the right wing Tories are just a set of UKIPers who prefer the power of being in an electable party of their actual principles to jump to UKIP.
But don't assume that because the far right plays on Britain's pessimistic attitude that when it comes to, when Brits realise that without European Union membership jobs will go as companies leave Britain to mainland Europe, Scotland will have every justification to split from the UK and ironically join the EU, somewhat isolating us on our own island, the economy will weaken as skilled people leave the UK decreasing benefits and making the country poorer, and the chavs will have less easy travel to Southern Spain on their alcohol fuelled holidays, that the British people wont stop and think well hang on, maybe the EU is actually kind of a good thing. If we do ever have a referendum, and the UK opts to leave the EU, I'll be leaving the UK behind despite having lived here all my life, if not only because it'll be fucked as a nation, but I genuinely don't think it'll ever come to that.
As an aside, I don't know where that 22% figure comes from in the eurobarometer survey, it seems odd that it'd be so much drastically lower than polls commissioned by eurosceptics at a time of hyped up euroscepticism in the UK. Perhaps this simply demonstrates my point that when people in the UK are really pushed on the subject they do begin to recognise the benefits of it and drop the pessimism.
Besides, on a more positive note most Eurosceptics I've met in my life tend to be the much older generations 60+. Not to worry, they'll be dead soon:)
No, that's simply FUD, the amount we're cutting isn't even close to the reduction we'd see in tax receipts. Whilst a slowing down may blunt the speed of deficit reduction ever so slightly, it's not going to prevent reduction or make the deficit worse. Getting the balance between growth and reduction is tough, but again, as much as I would like Osborne to fuck right off once things are sorted, he seems to have a working balance right now.
"Who told you that an austerity just causes you to 'lose a few years'? It is going to lower the base of growth, and quite significantly and for a quite a long time."
The fundamental point is that economic growth for a developed economy like ours is determined massively more prominently by what's going on in the rest of the world than minor disagreements internally. You'll only lose a few years because we're not growing now, when the rest of the economy picks up across the globe then things will pick up for us too. Those countries trying to grow right now during the recession look impressive, but they'll be no better off than us when global growth picks up because we'll then start to grow at pretty much the same rate but they'll have massive deficits and lose any benefits of their growth on the much greater interest they'll be losing paying those debts.
Unemployment again makes great headlines, but at 8.1% in the UK, that's still better than the 9% in the US, 9.6% in France, 8.3% in Italy, and of course, far better than the 20% in Spain. It's of course not as good as Germany's 6.5%, but then Germany is a stronger economy than us all round anyway - they can concentrate on growth because they don't have the debt risk we have. Fundamentally then this demonstrates that growth now at the expense of deficit reduction as has been the US path for example doesn't mean lower unemployment rates anyway, so the assertion that this deficit reduction is going to put us at a significant unemployment disadvantage is false - despite our austerity measures we're still doing better on unemployment than nearly everywhere else. Frankly it's also not the skilled workers that tend to suffer longer term unemployment anyway, so there's really no noticable risk of skills loss from it.
There's no point having 1% growth and maintaining a massive deficit, when we can instead settle for 0.5% growth and eliminate our deficit.
I don't like the Tories, but they're fiscally more sane than Labour who had it's hands over it's ears regarding the deficit and even now who's party members are harping on about how we should spend some more, increase the deficit for the sake of growth.
Our austerity measures aren't pleasant, but they're the sensible thing to do and they've taken us off the risk list and put us in a position of being one of the most promising economies to get behind in the short to medium term. It may take slightly longer to get back to healthy growth this way, but at least there'll be no real risk of going bankrupt if we follow through with it, which is kind of more important. Losing a year or two of 2 - 3% levels of growth over the next 20 years or so is much less of a big deal than running the risk of defaulting which would result in 10 - 20 years of lost growth and serious strife instead.
To give you an analogy, imagine you have a mortgage of £100,000 against your house and you have to make repayments every month or lose it. Imagine you work in an industry where you make £25k disposable income each year but there's a 40% chance of being made redundant. Would you rather just pay off your mortgage and secure your house seeing your wage go up 1%, 2%, 2%, 3% respectively each year over the next 4 years, or would you rather spend it on things that you can survive without but get a pay increase of 2%, 2%, 3%, 4% over the next 4 years but have the odds stacked against you being made redundant, seeing no pay at all come in as a result, losing your house, having to declare yourself bankrupt, and basically start your life all over again with a black mark against your ability to get a new mortgage even 5 years down the road?
For some arbitrary definition of violent crime yes. We have a lower murder rate, lower levels of rape and so forth however which is arguably what matters more in terms of violent crime. I'd much rather put up with a slightly higher chance of being punched at the pub on a Friday night by a drunk if it means a drastically lower chance of just outright being shot dead next time I do my weekly shopping on a Saturday afternoon. Of course, avoiding both would be nice and I can't say either have affected me yet, but it illustrates the point.
I covered debt to GDP elsewhere, it's meaningless by itself, and the riots? are you kidding me? Britain has one set of riots over a few days for the first time in god knows how many decades and that's something that stands out? Countries like Spain, Greece, France and so forth have riots of that scale on a seemingly annual basis. France for example:
Yeah, I don't think Britain's riot situation is too much to worry about right now to be honest, if Britain can be criticised for having some kind of problem, it's sure as hell not riots.
Britain has a lot of faults, but fundamentally my point was simply that compared to other nations, there's certainly not any more, and in many cases an awful lot less to worry about here. Pulling random faults out the hat proves what exactly? That Britain is a somehow worse country in general than many others? No, it doesn't.
Which doesn't really matter when we have an actual plan to solve the problem that we've been following for a year now, unlike countries like the US and the Eurozone nations who are still actually trying to figure out what to do.
The bond markets don't care about the fact the problem is their, they care about the fact we're solving it. It's the nations that aren't tackling it that scare the shit out of them, that's why things are so bad for Greece and Italy right now - because they're still only just now trying to get austerity measures passed.
Taking 2009 figures doesn't exactly help your case in this respect either, part the reason Britain has such a strong AAA status is because since that period, particularly with a new government, we've been tackling the problem pretty well.
Another reason is of course that not being in the eurozone means we have the flexibility needed to deal with a crisis, something Greece and Italy do not.
But regardless, well done on posting some arbitrary out of date figures that prove nothing in relation to the current situation and demonstrate that you actually have no idea what the fuck you are on about all the same I guess. Finding out of date figures that tell maybe 1/20th the total story in determining credit rating status doesn't really demonstrate anything. Credit rating takes into account far more numerous factors as varied as political competence, variation of industry, and strength of currency in dealing with financial issues at hand and it is this combination of factors that places the UK in such a firm position with it's AAA rating.
It took a while to find the figures you cite, but I found them here. You've mistakenly, or dishonestly misrepresented them, they are not net contribution figures:
Whilst the article is about net contribution it actually avoids the question and those specific figures merely state the amount paid in, not the net amount once returns are received. Once this is taken into account France's contribution drops drastically. Whilst France has improved it's net contribution in recent years you can see the disparity here from back in 2007 under net contribution:
"The problem with the UK in the EU is not economic, it's their political dissent every time that an EU treaty is to be made. Which stems from the fact that probably, most of the UK population is against the EU."
I'm not sure what you mean here, most countries in the EU have a degree of euroscepticism, but the UK ratified the Lisbon treaty with far less hassle than many other countries that outright voted against it in it's original form. Do you not remember Ireland having to run the referendum on it twice because they said no the first time?
Whilst recent polls have shown 49% support leaving the EU and only 40% definitely staying in I don't think come a referendum we would leave, because these polls were commissioned against a background of Euroscepticism - UKIP and far right wing Tories stoking things up against the background of the Euro appearing on the verge of collapse. I think the fact they could still only muster 49% to leave in self interest commissioned polls against that background is quite telling. That's ignoring the fact any referendum would be backed by a campaign pointing out all the Tory/UKIP FUD and how it's actually about bringing back things like employment law so the average Joe can be forced to work more than 48hours in a week benefiting corporations and not the average citizen. Really, less than half against the background of potential Euro collapse and a massive one sided FUD offensive that's been led up to by a year or two long FUD offensive? that's pretty weak.
"I'd rather take an EU that is 10% poorer but that works, instead of one that never acts because every decision is shot down by the crossed vetoes of the member states."
And you think the UK is a stalling point here? really? You only have to look at the painfully slow inaction over the Euro to see the UK is far from Europe's worst offender in acting with haste, and Eastern European and Mediterranean nations bickering over past rivalries be it Cyprus blocking Turkey's entry, or the ex-Yugoslav nations blocking each other.
If I've learnt anything over the years it's that alternating opinions blocking legislation is almost always a good thing. When legislation is rammed through without care for minority opinions it's rarely good legislation, and when it's passed because everyone agrees it's generally good.
I'd like to see decreases euro-scepticism in our country and I think it'll come with time, but I think the UK being in the EU is far better for both the UK and the EU. It's mutually beneficial for everyone.
Well look on the bright side, they fixed the antenna in the 4S so at least it doesn't fail to work when you're holding it wrong.
In all seriousness though, what happens when I try and use Siri on a train going through a tunnel that's long and so takes a minute or to? does it just wait until we're out the tunnel and then respond or does it kick up an error if there's no data connection?
Like the poster above I didn't realise Siri sent everything to be processed server side, that is kind of a big weakness.
I actually can't help but think these folks were run by geniuses.
Policies such as banning farm vehicles from public roads between the hours of 7am and 9am and 4pm and 6pm. One of the best policies ever IMO. No more tractors fucking up the commute home or making thousands of people late for work!
Yeah, it's horrendous, how dare the UK be one of the few countries in the EU capable of balancing it's books making it one of perhaps 2 or 3 economies in Europe whose AAA rating is perfectly safe.
The UK for all it's faults at very least hasn't got anything as bad as France's HADOPI yet, hasn't had anywhere near as bad web blocking orders as in Ireland or the Netherlands, and doesn't at least have as close to the amount of censorship as Germany. Oh, and Sweden is basically a wholly owned subsidiary of the RIAA now. We don't have laws against headscarfs and stuff either which is something. Even outside Europe now that Harper is in in Canada I think the UK is doing fairly well, we're certainly in a much better place than we were under Brown's authoritarian rule 2 years ago.
I suppose you can still hold a grudge over the UK for Iraq, but we haven't been there for a few years now, we're still in Afghanistan, like the rest of Europe. I suppose you can complain about our big brother state but really the reason we have a reputation in that respect is precisely because our population actually stands up and shouts about how unhappy we are with it, which is surely better than most other European states where it's at least as bad but just blindly accepted without much dissent. It's thanks to the fact we do have organisations like Liberty that these things are exposed for what they are attempts at but most the worst stuff our last government proposed that generated all said stories is dead now, the ID card database is gone, many CCTV programmes have been cut/scaled back, libel laws are being reformed. There's still a long way to go of course, but then, find me a country where there isn't.
Gordon Brown gave up part of the rebate a few years ago, we still put far more in than we get out even with the rebate and always have. Europe does not by any measure pay for the UK, France's farming subsidies are the elephant in the room in this respect if anything.
The UK very much makes a loss in terms of pure money pumped into the EU vs. money returned via EU initiatives by a longshot, the benefit we get out (as is the case for others that put in more than they get out, like Germany) is easier access to the European markets so it comes back and pays for itself in terms of improved trade and better bargaining terms with the rest of the world as the EU can speak as one entity on many topics.
Personally I think it's worth it, but if EU nations want rid of us then have fun trying to fill the funding shortfall that's used to help the poorer Eurozone economies improve like Romania, Slovenia, Hungary, Lithuania etc. I'm sure Germany will be more than happy to spend even more money financing the rest of Europe and France will enjoy being forced to give up it's farming subsidies.
No really, the UK is a backbone economy for the EU, like both France and Germany are. The EU would be massively weaker and poorer without it.
It's not that simple everywhere, certainly if for example the person was in the UK then no crime gang over here would touch an offer from a cartel. Doing so would up them from being investigated by a run of the mill police unit to having resources from the likes of MI5 put onto them which is not the kind of attention they want to attract. They may send someone over either of their own or pay someone from another European gang, but that makes it international and risks pulling MI6 resources into the game.
It's a similar story elsewhere, they may be strong at home but to start drawing the attention of foreign intelligence and security services?
These groups only have so many resources - even spilling it over into the US and killing a few American bloggers would probably be enough for the US to open the door to predator drone strikes on Mexican soil against the cartels.
This isn't to say they wont, but there's a risk that they'll have to calculate carefully, sure pissing off Britain might not matter, but if the bloggers are distributed? a hit in Britain, a hit in Russia, one in China, one in Germany, one in the US, France, Canada? That's some heat the cartels would rapidly find themselves unable to deal with and any organisation within those countries doing work for them would rapidly find itself under a lot more pressure, pressure it probably would not want.
"So you'll have to forgive me as I break ranks with other musicians who have placated piracy advocates. We're just being polite because our reputations require it. I've done over 100,000 miles of touring, I've seen members of hit bands looking for odds jobs because their back catalog doesn't sell, I've seen the empty floors at Sony's NYC offices, I know excellent producers that are hopelessly in debt, and I know musicians that kick the shit out of current pop stars but can't get 1/10th the record deal they could have in the 80's."
Wow, it's almost as if musicians are prone to the effects of recession just like pretty much ever other job in existence. That's unthinkable! It's like, they might have to retrain or something, or do a job that wasn't their first choice of career. How can this be possible!
"your advocacy of piracy directly prevents me from doing what I love and providing for other talented musicians."
Right, and your inability to contribute anything useful to the economy that people actually want to pay for directly prevents me from paying lower taxes as I have to subsidise the police, fire, roads, and other infrastructure which you make use of but do not contribute enough into the tax system to pay for.
Welcome to reality, please, get a proper fucking job you bum, the world doesn't owe you shit.
I think it's a combination of this sort of thing being bullshit too:
"Of the six million customers who can get fiber broadband from BT, Britain's biggest ISP, only 300,000 have done so"
I'm pretty sure what they mean is "Of the six million customers who would get fiber broadband from BT, Britain's biggest ISP, if BT actually connected their exchanges to the fibre enabled cabinets only 300,000 actually have been able to".
Really, BT advertise like crazy about how many exchanges they're enabling, how 2/3rds of the country will be done by 2015 or whatever but it's all just bollocks to make themselves look good, it's all a cash in on the governments "investing in infrastructure to improve our economic situation" rubbish to make themselves look like the great saviour from the recession. This coupled with the fact there's a £5bn pot of money waiting for distribution and if BT can make itself look good it may win it over Fujitsu who is also fighting for the pot so it can then give it's directors pay rises from that pot.
The reality is that whilst yes they're enabling exchanges like wildfire, they're not actually doing a very good job of enabling cabinets for fibre to the cabinet. Worse, those they do enable tend to be inner city deprived areas where houses are crammed in together because they tend to be closer to the exchanges and hence are cheaper to enable. It's a false economy though, because these are the very people who simply cannot afford to pay for more expensive broadband even if they did want to use it.
The further you move out into suburbia the less penetration you have of fibre but the more people that would likely be able to and would want to afford it (because they could also afford the likes of IPTV services that make use of it).
There are a few spots which are an exception of course, BT has done a few special trials and FTTH installations for certain areas, though again mostly as a PR move, but for the most part BT isn't doing fibre rollouts with the intention of uptake - it's not clear that BT's backbone even with the 21cn upgrade has any hope of catering to the increased pressure the increased bandwidth usage of large scale fibre uptake would put on it anyway as that in itself was a late running, over budget, under performing farce which is in part why the UK has so much capping and throttling - BT just haven't invested in a capable backbone and the irony is that in the last few years relative to the pace of technology growth and usage the cost per gb of bandwidth from BT has actually gone up. The gap has widened between the relative cost of bandwidth in the UK and other countries - ISPs face a much greater squeeze on their margins because of this here and throttling/capping is their response to that.
"However, some voices and some writing can't be salvaged."
But does it matter?
Last time I heard the likes of Cee-Lo Green and Nicki Minge or whatever the fuck she thinks she's called on the radio I did actually wonder if I'd tuned into a show about cat torture.
More than anything it seems to be about who you know, not what your talent is in the music industry.
But I'm not even sure we can blame the music industry, you look at shows like X-Factor and the people that win fade into oblivion pretty quickly. Matt Cardell or whatever he's called who won it in the UK last year was shit, and I said he was shit each time my girlfriend had the show on, lo and behold, the guy's barely been heard of since he won it. Despite laws saying they have to be valid, I'm not sure X-Factor's voting system isn't rigged though, so I suppose it could be the music industry pulling strings there too.
But one things for sure autotune or not, if the music industry wants to pay you to be a star for whatever reason they'll do it either way, whether you're talented or not, and whether anyone actually gives a fuck about you or not. If it doesn't work out they'll just ditch you and replace you with generic non-artist #75646322 next week one way or another.
Flash will still have a big userbase even if it does become largely completely abolished from the public internet. It's got a massive userbase in terms of corporate and eduation sector clients related to e-Learning, whether it's for corporate data protection policy training, or science curriculum for schools. This doesn't mean it's secure indefinitely of course but it'll take a long long time to phase this stuff out, if not only because companies will be loathe to spend time and money retraining their staff when what they have already just works for them. Over time use of Flash even in these environments will of course fade, and Adobe will have little reason to carry it on, but then industries change, I think it's naive to assume you'll have control of an industry like this indefinetely. I don't even think Microsoft's OS dominance is secure with the rise of mobile and Microsoft being so late to the mobile part, I suspect in 10 years time there'll be a lot less Microsoft and a lot more Android in the world. I think adapting to change is important, and if they think they can pull of producing the best HTML5 authoring tools on the market which as a result become the industry standard like Photoshop has then it may well be that they do have as much influence on the web as they have now.
Well it's not sold as many across all time obviously as Samsung was a bit late to the race with a true competitor, but they're now shifting more Galaxy S2 than Apple is iPhones currently.
Apple only sold 17mill, not 20mill last quarter, according to their own financial results. Samsung sold just short of 28mill so over 10 million more, of these the vast majority were Galaxy S2s as it's far and away their best selling smartphone. The quarter before that (Q2) Apple beat them by about 1mill units over the Galaxy/Galaxy S2, so the gap was already closing at that point.
Shifting 4 million units on release isn't that impressive when punters have been waiting since July for an upgrade, that's quite a backlog to fulfil. The real test is if the momentum now keeps up.
There's good reason why investors were unimpressed with Apple's last set of results and shares actually dropped.
As the other guy pointed out to you, the problem is Adobe makes absolutely no money from the Flash plugin, and maintaining that on an ever increasing amount of platforms is getting prohibitively expensive for them.
Their money is made in selling tools, and if mobile plugin development is beginning to cost them more than the tools bring in there is little reason to continue the tools.
I'm not sure the downfall of Flash is too big a deal for Adobe, frankly I imagine they make much more money from Photoshop, Premier, Illustrator and Acrobat than they do selling the Flash development tools.
Note also of course that they haven't given up on Flash on the desktop, they've only given up on Flash on mobile devices.
Realistically they just seem to be cutting away the areas of Flash that are costing a lot to develop, and bringing nothing back in return, and it may be that Flash on the desktop suffers in an increasingly mobile world, but does it matter when the profits from the Flash developer IDE just aren't that great anyway and they have little other monetisation of it? Marketshare isn't too useful if you're not making a penny from each installed Flash plugin.
I don't have time to prat around getting things working in Linux or spending money buying new hardware because the driver support is shit, so driver failings in Linux are a big issue.
But it's also the software - partly games, but partly other software, many (but by no means all) FOSS alternatives of Windows software are just second rate, and frankly I can't be arsed to put up with the quirks of second rate software, I'd rather pay the money and get something that does the job and let's me be productive without any hassle.
I think you missed the point, I'm not saying I like the EULA or say anyone should accept it, I'm pointing out that it's no different to any other EULA. The linked article seems to imply it's some ultra-nasty new EULA that we've never seen anything like before. That's completely false, it looks just like any other EULA.
I agree all EULA's like this are unacceptable, but that it's pretty fucking hypocritical to single this one out when the poster has probably accepted many other similar EULAs in the past, and more importantly, when the very site he's posted it on does exactly what he's complaining about even without a EULA.
I'm not commenting on whether they will or wont sell you're data on, I'm just saying that the EULA in question doesn't give them any more or any less legitimacy in selling it on than any other similar EULA bundled with most other games on the market nowadays.
We know other countries have tried, like Syria, but thus far failed, but the vast majority of other countries simply couldn't afford a nuclear program, let alone succesfully follow one through unnoticed by the rest of the world. Potentially some of the ex-soviet states could have hidden arsenals but I don't think that would be possible as Russia is a key member of the NPT so would likely admit to that and force decommissioning of those arms in those countries as happened with the Ukraine. Certainly if as he said, 15 other countries than Israel had nuclear programs then basically there'd be no point having the NPT anymore and neither the US nor Russia would be willing to reduce armament under it as the whole of the middle east would basically be nuclear capable.
Besides, he said he only had secret clearance not top secret so wouldn't be privy to that sort of information anyway, and frankly people who really are security cleared at this level aren't so insecure as to need to flaunt it on the internet. They'd never clear someone that emotionally weak with so much vulnerability to for example, people like Anna Chapman, in the first place.
Any lower level stuff he might have had access to if cleared for secret level access is frankly actually much more mudane and boring, for example you may have access at this level if you were producing or repackaging some training materials for the military and whilst you could tell people what you were doing the secret part would be the contents of those materials. This one example, but as I say, it's really not that exciting.
"Although this is not politically correct to say, the fewer humans there are the better off the rest of the biosphere will be."
This hit me like a wrecking ball when I saw population growth illustrated relating to the world population supposedly hitting 7bn.
Human population was fairly static for about 12,000 years at something like 0.2bn people, then in the last 200 - 300 years as we've had massive advances in medicine and technology it's shot up to 7bn. It's grown from 2bn to 7bn simply in my grandfather's lifetime.
This put another aspect on climate change and general pressure on nature by humanity for me, I think it's unrealistic to believe that such a massive increase in human population in such a short time can have no impact on our planet.
I hate to defend EA but that article sounds like a complete load of paranoid bollocks.
What EA say is:
"EA may also use this information combined with personal information for marketing purposes and to improve our products and services."
What the article says is:
"Now, many companies collect hardware and peripheral data along with the installed version of the OS for a customer, but to actually say that a userâ(TM)s personal information can be used for marketing is a little bit much."
Sorry what? EA hasn't said anything about extracting personal information from your computer or anything, they've just said they may combined the technical information (i.e. your hardware specs) with personal information for directed marketing. Now, I don't like this but this is nothing new, this is what Valve do too. Certainly on the evil scale I don't even think it's any worse than tracking cookies on the internet using my habits to personalise advertising too me yet people let that happen day in day out without a flinch.
That article seems to sell this EULA as some evil new thing, that's absolutely horrendous and terrible, but it looks to me like every other software EULA I've seen in the last few years - there's certainly nothing in there that you haven't accepted if you've played many other games in the last decade.
The article even quotes this bit:
"âoeEA will never share your personal information with third parties without your consent. We may, however, share anonymous, non-personal, aggregated and/or public information with third parties."
Which they then turn into this:
"The hitch here is that by clicking on the âoeI agreeâ check box you are giving your consent."
Sorry, no, you're agreeing to the EULA, not giving your consent to pass on your data to a 3rd party.
Again I hate to defend EA, by that URL is pure 100% paranoid FUD. It's like the person that wrote it has just figured out that EULAs contain some bad shit or something - well duh, yeah, they have, for a long long time.
But hey, they got their page hits now I guess, that's all that matters. Oh, and just ignore the tailored banner ads powered by tracking cookies and benefiting from the on page Facebook and Twitter integration that link in your personal details with your page visit and ad views, none of which you were even warned about in an EULA before you visited the page will you?
Slashdot Mirror
"and thus I stilll don't see how they demonstrate that France needs UK's money to go on."
I never said this, I'm not claiming France is subsidised by the UK, I simply made the point that if someone is worried about UK rebate, then they should be even more concerned about French farming subsidies and that the UK most certainly does pay it's fair share, arguably more so than other members, rebate or not.
"The UK ratified the Lisbon treaty quickly because, unlike Ireland, they did not hold a referendum. Is your opinion that such a referendum would have passed, when only 22% of British people have a fully positive view of the EU?"
Not at all, your concern seemed to be that the UK is a hindrance to the EU, I was merely making the point that our government recognises the importance of it and is much less a hindrance than many other EU governments. It seemed odd to attack the UK over this, when there are much bigger offenders in the EU.
The problem is that in the UK we're an inherently pessimistic set of people, we like to bitch and moan, but when it comes to people tend to realise that well, maybe, actually, it's not that bad after all.
Of course the right wingers thrive on this, they feed on it, really the BNP are just tha Nazis by a different name, UKIP are just the BNP in nicer suits and with bigger houses, and frankly the right wing Tories are just a set of UKIPers who prefer the power of being in an electable party of their actual principles to jump to UKIP.
But don't assume that because the far right plays on Britain's pessimistic attitude that when it comes to, when Brits realise that without European Union membership jobs will go as companies leave Britain to mainland Europe, Scotland will have every justification to split from the UK and ironically join the EU, somewhat isolating us on our own island, the economy will weaken as skilled people leave the UK decreasing benefits and making the country poorer, and the chavs will have less easy travel to Southern Spain on their alcohol fuelled holidays, that the British people wont stop and think well hang on, maybe the EU is actually kind of a good thing. If we do ever have a referendum, and the UK opts to leave the EU, I'll be leaving the UK behind despite having lived here all my life, if not only because it'll be fucked as a nation, but I genuinely don't think it'll ever come to that.
As an aside, I don't know where that 22% figure comes from in the eurobarometer survey, it seems odd that it'd be so much drastically lower than polls commissioned by eurosceptics at a time of hyped up euroscepticism in the UK. Perhaps this simply demonstrates my point that when people in the UK are really pushed on the subject they do begin to recognise the benefits of it and drop the pessimism.
Besides, on a more positive note most Eurosceptics I've met in my life tend to be the much older generations 60+. Not to worry, they'll be dead soon :)
No, that's simply FUD, the amount we're cutting isn't even close to the reduction we'd see in tax receipts. Whilst a slowing down may blunt the speed of deficit reduction ever so slightly, it's not going to prevent reduction or make the deficit worse. Getting the balance between growth and reduction is tough, but again, as much as I would like Osborne to fuck right off once things are sorted, he seems to have a working balance right now.
"Who told you that an austerity just causes you to 'lose a few years'? It is going to lower the base of growth, and quite significantly and for a quite a long time."
The fundamental point is that economic growth for a developed economy like ours is determined massively more prominently by what's going on in the rest of the world than minor disagreements internally. You'll only lose a few years because we're not growing now, when the rest of the economy picks up across the globe then things will pick up for us too. Those countries trying to grow right now during the recession look impressive, but they'll be no better off than us when global growth picks up because we'll then start to grow at pretty much the same rate but they'll have massive deficits and lose any benefits of their growth on the much greater interest they'll be losing paying those debts.
Unemployment again makes great headlines, but at 8.1% in the UK, that's still better than the 9% in the US, 9.6% in France, 8.3% in Italy, and of course, far better than the 20% in Spain. It's of course not as good as Germany's 6.5%, but then Germany is a stronger economy than us all round anyway - they can concentrate on growth because they don't have the debt risk we have. Fundamentally then this demonstrates that growth now at the expense of deficit reduction as has been the US path for example doesn't mean lower unemployment rates anyway, so the assertion that this deficit reduction is going to put us at a significant unemployment disadvantage is false - despite our austerity measures we're still doing better on unemployment than nearly everywhere else. Frankly it's also not the skilled workers that tend to suffer longer term unemployment anyway, so there's really no noticable risk of skills loss from it.
Yes, but it's taken an axe to our deficit.
There's no point having 1% growth and maintaining a massive deficit, when we can instead settle for 0.5% growth and eliminate our deficit.
I don't like the Tories, but they're fiscally more sane than Labour who had it's hands over it's ears regarding the deficit and even now who's party members are harping on about how we should spend some more, increase the deficit for the sake of growth.
Our austerity measures aren't pleasant, but they're the sensible thing to do and they've taken us off the risk list and put us in a position of being one of the most promising economies to get behind in the short to medium term. It may take slightly longer to get back to healthy growth this way, but at least there'll be no real risk of going bankrupt if we follow through with it, which is kind of more important. Losing a year or two of 2 - 3% levels of growth over the next 20 years or so is much less of a big deal than running the risk of defaulting which would result in 10 - 20 years of lost growth and serious strife instead.
To give you an analogy, imagine you have a mortgage of £100,000 against your house and you have to make repayments every month or lose it. Imagine you work in an industry where you make £25k disposable income each year but there's a 40% chance of being made redundant. Would you rather just pay off your mortgage and secure your house seeing your wage go up 1%, 2%, 2%, 3% respectively each year over the next 4 years, or would you rather spend it on things that you can survive without but get a pay increase of 2%, 2%, 3%, 4% over the next 4 years but have the odds stacked against you being made redundant, seeing no pay at all come in as a result, losing your house, having to declare yourself bankrupt, and basically start your life all over again with a black mark against your ability to get a new mortgage even 5 years down the road?
For some arbitrary definition of violent crime yes. We have a lower murder rate, lower levels of rape and so forth however which is arguably what matters more in terms of violent crime. I'd much rather put up with a slightly higher chance of being punched at the pub on a Friday night by a drunk if it means a drastically lower chance of just outright being shot dead next time I do my weekly shopping on a Saturday afternoon. Of course, avoiding both would be nice and I can't say either have affected me yet, but it illustrates the point.
I covered debt to GDP elsewhere, it's meaningless by itself, and the riots? are you kidding me? Britain has one set of riots over a few days for the first time in god knows how many decades and that's something that stands out? Countries like Spain, Greece, France and so forth have riots of that scale on a seemingly annual basis. France for example:
2005: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/4413964.stm
2009: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/July_2009_French_riots
2010: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1322441/France-riots-Demonstrations-pension-reforms-continue-ninth-day.html
Yeah, I don't think Britain's riot situation is too much to worry about right now to be honest, if Britain can be criticised for having some kind of problem, it's sure as hell not riots.
Britain has a lot of faults, but fundamentally my point was simply that compared to other nations, there's certainly not any more, and in many cases an awful lot less to worry about here. Pulling random faults out the hat proves what exactly? That Britain is a somehow worse country in general than many others? No, it doesn't.
Which doesn't really matter when we have an actual plan to solve the problem that we've been following for a year now, unlike countries like the US and the Eurozone nations who are still actually trying to figure out what to do.
The bond markets don't care about the fact the problem is their, they care about the fact we're solving it. It's the nations that aren't tackling it that scare the shit out of them, that's why things are so bad for Greece and Italy right now - because they're still only just now trying to get austerity measures passed.
Taking 2009 figures doesn't exactly help your case in this respect either, part the reason Britain has such a strong AAA status is because since that period, particularly with a new government, we've been tackling the problem pretty well.
Another reason is of course that not being in the eurozone means we have the flexibility needed to deal with a crisis, something Greece and Italy do not.
But regardless, well done on posting some arbitrary out of date figures that prove nothing in relation to the current situation and demonstrate that you actually have no idea what the fuck you are on about all the same I guess. Finding out of date figures that tell maybe 1/20th the total story in determining credit rating status doesn't really demonstrate anything. Credit rating takes into account far more numerous factors as varied as political competence, variation of industry, and strength of currency in dealing with financial issues at hand and it is this combination of factors that places the UK in such a firm position with it's AAA rating.
It took a while to find the figures you cite, but I found them here. You've mistakenly, or dishonestly misrepresented them, they are not net contribution figures:
http://www.europarl.europa.eu/en/headlines/content/20080605FCS31027/5/html/What-about-the-Net-Contributors%E2%80%9D
Whilst the article is about net contribution it actually avoids the question and those specific figures merely state the amount paid in, not the net amount once returns are received. Once this is taken into account France's contribution drops drastically. Whilst France has improved it's net contribution in recent years you can see the disparity here from back in 2007 under net contribution:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/europe/8036097.stm#start
Or the cold hard historical figures for every year between 1999 - 2007 here if you prefer:
http://www.eu-oplysningen.dk/euo_en/spsv/all/79/
"The problem with the UK in the EU is not economic, it's their political dissent every time that an EU treaty is to be made. Which stems from the fact that probably, most of the UK population is against the EU."
I'm not sure what you mean here, most countries in the EU have a degree of euroscepticism, but the UK ratified the Lisbon treaty with far less hassle than many other countries that outright voted against it in it's original form. Do you not remember Ireland having to run the referendum on it twice because they said no the first time?
Whilst recent polls have shown 49% support leaving the EU and only 40% definitely staying in I don't think come a referendum we would leave, because these polls were commissioned against a background of Euroscepticism - UKIP and far right wing Tories stoking things up against the background of the Euro appearing on the verge of collapse. I think the fact they could still only muster 49% to leave in self interest commissioned polls against that background is quite telling. That's ignoring the fact any referendum would be backed by a campaign pointing out all the Tory/UKIP FUD and how it's actually about bringing back things like employment law so the average Joe can be forced to work more than 48hours in a week benefiting corporations and not the average citizen. Really, less than half against the background of potential Euro collapse and a massive one sided FUD offensive that's been led up to by a year or two long FUD offensive? that's pretty weak.
"I'd rather take an EU that is 10% poorer but that works, instead of one that never acts because every decision is shot down by the crossed vetoes of the member states."
And you think the UK is a stalling point here? really? You only have to look at the painfully slow inaction over the Euro to see the UK is far from Europe's worst offender in acting with haste, and Eastern European and Mediterranean nations bickering over past rivalries be it Cyprus blocking Turkey's entry, or the ex-Yugoslav nations blocking each other.
If I've learnt anything over the years it's that alternating opinions blocking legislation is almost always a good thing. When legislation is rammed through without care for minority opinions it's rarely good legislation, and when it's passed because everyone agrees it's generally good.
I'd like to see decreases euro-scepticism in our country and I think it'll come with time, but I think the UK being in the EU is far better for both the UK and the EU. It's mutually beneficial for everyone.
Well look on the bright side, they fixed the antenna in the 4S so at least it doesn't fail to work when you're holding it wrong.
In all seriousness though, what happens when I try and use Siri on a train going through a tunnel that's long and so takes a minute or to? does it just wait until we're out the tunnel and then respond or does it kick up an error if there's no data connection?
Like the poster above I didn't realise Siri sent everything to be processed server side, that is kind of a big weakness.
Or until Sony or whoever it is behind the DRM in question just gets hacked and the master key for the whole scheme leaked.
"The Monster Raving Looney Party"
I actually can't help but think these folks were run by geniuses.
Policies such as banning farm vehicles from public roads between the hours of 7am and 9am and 4pm and 6pm. One of the best policies ever IMO. No more tractors fucking up the commute home or making thousands of people late for work!
Yeah, it's horrendous, how dare the UK be one of the few countries in the EU capable of balancing it's books making it one of perhaps 2 or 3 economies in Europe whose AAA rating is perfectly safe.
The UK for all it's faults at very least hasn't got anything as bad as France's HADOPI yet, hasn't had anywhere near as bad web blocking orders as in Ireland or the Netherlands, and doesn't at least have as close to the amount of censorship as Germany. Oh, and Sweden is basically a wholly owned subsidiary of the RIAA now. We don't have laws against headscarfs and stuff either which is something. Even outside Europe now that Harper is in in Canada I think the UK is doing fairly well, we're certainly in a much better place than we were under Brown's authoritarian rule 2 years ago.
I suppose you can still hold a grudge over the UK for Iraq, but we haven't been there for a few years now, we're still in Afghanistan, like the rest of Europe. I suppose you can complain about our big brother state but really the reason we have a reputation in that respect is precisely because our population actually stands up and shouts about how unhappy we are with it, which is surely better than most other European states where it's at least as bad but just blindly accepted without much dissent. It's thanks to the fact we do have organisations like Liberty that these things are exposed for what they are attempts at but most the worst stuff our last government proposed that generated all said stories is dead now, the ID card database is gone, many CCTV programmes have been cut/scaled back, libel laws are being reformed. There's still a long way to go of course, but then, find me a country where there isn't.
Gordon Brown gave up part of the rebate a few years ago, we still put far more in than we get out even with the rebate and always have. Europe does not by any measure pay for the UK, France's farming subsidies are the elephant in the room in this respect if anything.
The UK very much makes a loss in terms of pure money pumped into the EU vs. money returned via EU initiatives by a longshot, the benefit we get out (as is the case for others that put in more than they get out, like Germany) is easier access to the European markets so it comes back and pays for itself in terms of improved trade and better bargaining terms with the rest of the world as the EU can speak as one entity on many topics.
Personally I think it's worth it, but if EU nations want rid of us then have fun trying to fill the funding shortfall that's used to help the poorer Eurozone economies improve like Romania, Slovenia, Hungary, Lithuania etc. I'm sure Germany will be more than happy to spend even more money financing the rest of Europe and France will enjoy being forced to give up it's farming subsidies.
No really, the UK is a backbone economy for the EU, like both France and Germany are. The EU would be massively weaker and poorer without it.
It's a slippery subject for sure.
It's not that simple everywhere, certainly if for example the person was in the UK then no crime gang over here would touch an offer from a cartel. Doing so would up them from being investigated by a run of the mill police unit to having resources from the likes of MI5 put onto them which is not the kind of attention they want to attract. They may send someone over either of their own or pay someone from another European gang, but that makes it international and risks pulling MI6 resources into the game.
It's a similar story elsewhere, they may be strong at home but to start drawing the attention of foreign intelligence and security services?
These groups only have so many resources - even spilling it over into the US and killing a few American bloggers would probably be enough for the US to open the door to predator drone strikes on Mexican soil against the cartels.
This isn't to say they wont, but there's a risk that they'll have to calculate carefully, sure pissing off Britain might not matter, but if the bloggers are distributed? a hit in Britain, a hit in Russia, one in China, one in Germany, one in the US, France, Canada? That's some heat the cartels would rapidly find themselves unable to deal with and any organisation within those countries doing work for them would rapidly find itself under a lot more pressure, pressure it probably would not want.
"So you'll have to forgive me as I break ranks with other musicians who have placated piracy advocates. We're just being polite because our reputations require it. I've done over 100,000 miles of touring, I've seen members of hit bands looking for odds jobs because their back catalog doesn't sell, I've seen the empty floors at Sony's NYC offices, I know excellent producers that are hopelessly in debt, and I know musicians that kick the shit out of current pop stars but can't get 1/10th the record deal they could have in the 80's."
Wow, it's almost as if musicians are prone to the effects of recession just like pretty much ever other job in existence. That's unthinkable! It's like, they might have to retrain or something, or do a job that wasn't their first choice of career. How can this be possible!
"your advocacy of piracy directly prevents me from doing what I love and providing for other talented musicians."
Right, and your inability to contribute anything useful to the economy that people actually want to pay for directly prevents me from paying lower taxes as I have to subsidise the police, fire, roads, and other infrastructure which you make use of but do not contribute enough into the tax system to pay for.
Welcome to reality, please, get a proper fucking job you bum, the world doesn't owe you shit.
I think it's a combination of this sort of thing being bullshit too:
"Of the six million customers who can get fiber broadband from BT, Britain's biggest ISP, only 300,000 have done so"
I'm pretty sure what they mean is "Of the six million customers who would get fiber broadband from BT, Britain's biggest ISP, if BT actually connected their exchanges to the fibre enabled cabinets only 300,000 actually have been able to".
Really, BT advertise like crazy about how many exchanges they're enabling, how 2/3rds of the country will be done by 2015 or whatever but it's all just bollocks to make themselves look good, it's all a cash in on the governments "investing in infrastructure to improve our economic situation" rubbish to make themselves look like the great saviour from the recession. This coupled with the fact there's a £5bn pot of money waiting for distribution and if BT can make itself look good it may win it over Fujitsu who is also fighting for the pot so it can then give it's directors pay rises from that pot.
The reality is that whilst yes they're enabling exchanges like wildfire, they're not actually doing a very good job of enabling cabinets for fibre to the cabinet. Worse, those they do enable tend to be inner city deprived areas where houses are crammed in together because they tend to be closer to the exchanges and hence are cheaper to enable. It's a false economy though, because these are the very people who simply cannot afford to pay for more expensive broadband even if they did want to use it.
The further you move out into suburbia the less penetration you have of fibre but the more people that would likely be able to and would want to afford it (because they could also afford the likes of IPTV services that make use of it).
There are a few spots which are an exception of course, BT has done a few special trials and FTTH installations for certain areas, though again mostly as a PR move, but for the most part BT isn't doing fibre rollouts with the intention of uptake - it's not clear that BT's backbone even with the 21cn upgrade has any hope of catering to the increased pressure the increased bandwidth usage of large scale fibre uptake would put on it anyway as that in itself was a late running, over budget, under performing farce which is in part why the UK has so much capping and throttling - BT just haven't invested in a capable backbone and the irony is that in the last few years relative to the pace of technology growth and usage the cost per gb of bandwidth from BT has actually gone up. The gap has widened between the relative cost of bandwidth in the UK and other countries - ISPs face a much greater squeeze on their margins because of this here and throttling/capping is their response to that.
"However, some voices and some writing can't be salvaged."
But does it matter?
Last time I heard the likes of Cee-Lo Green and Nicki Minge or whatever the fuck she thinks she's called on the radio I did actually wonder if I'd tuned into a show about cat torture.
More than anything it seems to be about who you know, not what your talent is in the music industry.
But I'm not even sure we can blame the music industry, you look at shows like X-Factor and the people that win fade into oblivion pretty quickly. Matt Cardell or whatever he's called who won it in the UK last year was shit, and I said he was shit each time my girlfriend had the show on, lo and behold, the guy's barely been heard of since he won it. Despite laws saying they have to be valid, I'm not sure X-Factor's voting system isn't rigged though, so I suppose it could be the music industry pulling strings there too.
But one things for sure autotune or not, if the music industry wants to pay you to be a star for whatever reason they'll do it either way, whether you're talented or not, and whether anyone actually gives a fuck about you or not. If it doesn't work out they'll just ditch you and replace you with generic non-artist #75646322 next week one way or another.
Agreed, the focus on him is entirely media-driven and always has been.
Flash will still have a big userbase even if it does become largely completely abolished from the public internet. It's got a massive userbase in terms of corporate and eduation sector clients related to e-Learning, whether it's for corporate data protection policy training, or science curriculum for schools. This doesn't mean it's secure indefinitely of course but it'll take a long long time to phase this stuff out, if not only because companies will be loathe to spend time and money retraining their staff when what they have already just works for them. Over time use of Flash even in these environments will of course fade, and Adobe will have little reason to carry it on, but then industries change, I think it's naive to assume you'll have control of an industry like this indefinetely. I don't even think Microsoft's OS dominance is secure with the rise of mobile and Microsoft being so late to the mobile part, I suspect in 10 years time there'll be a lot less Microsoft and a lot more Android in the world. I think adapting to change is important, and if they think they can pull of producing the best HTML5 authoring tools on the market which as a result become the industry standard like Photoshop has then it may well be that they do have as much influence on the web as they have now.
Well it's not sold as many across all time obviously as Samsung was a bit late to the race with a true competitor, but they're now shifting more Galaxy S2 than Apple is iPhones currently.
Apple only sold 17mill, not 20mill last quarter, according to their own financial results. Samsung sold just short of 28mill so over 10 million more, of these the vast majority were Galaxy S2s as it's far and away their best selling smartphone. The quarter before that (Q2) Apple beat them by about 1mill units over the Galaxy/Galaxy S2, so the gap was already closing at that point.
Shifting 4 million units on release isn't that impressive when punters have been waiting since July for an upgrade, that's quite a backlog to fulfil. The real test is if the momentum now keeps up.
There's good reason why investors were unimpressed with Apple's last set of results and shares actually dropped.
As the other guy pointed out to you, the problem is Adobe makes absolutely no money from the Flash plugin, and maintaining that on an ever increasing amount of platforms is getting prohibitively expensive for them.
Their money is made in selling tools, and if mobile plugin development is beginning to cost them more than the tools bring in there is little reason to continue the tools.
I'm not sure the downfall of Flash is too big a deal for Adobe, frankly I imagine they make much more money from Photoshop, Premier, Illustrator and Acrobat than they do selling the Flash development tools.
Note also of course that they haven't given up on Flash on the desktop, they've only given up on Flash on mobile devices.
Realistically they just seem to be cutting away the areas of Flash that are costing a lot to develop, and bringing nothing back in return, and it may be that Flash on the desktop suffers in an increasingly mobile world, but does it matter when the profits from the Flash developer IDE just aren't that great anyway and they have little other monetisation of it? Marketshare isn't too useful if you're not making a penny from each installed Flash plugin.
Exactly the same for me.
I don't have time to prat around getting things working in Linux or spending money buying new hardware because the driver support is shit, so driver failings in Linux are a big issue.
But it's also the software - partly games, but partly other software, many (but by no means all) FOSS alternatives of Windows software are just second rate, and frankly I can't be arsed to put up with the quirks of second rate software, I'd rather pay the money and get something that does the job and let's me be productive without any hassle.
I think you missed the point, I'm not saying I like the EULA or say anyone should accept it, I'm pointing out that it's no different to any other EULA. The linked article seems to imply it's some ultra-nasty new EULA that we've never seen anything like before. That's completely false, it looks just like any other EULA.
I agree all EULA's like this are unacceptable, but that it's pretty fucking hypocritical to single this one out when the poster has probably accepted many other similar EULAs in the past, and more importantly, when the very site he's posted it on does exactly what he's complaining about even without a EULA.
I'm not commenting on whether they will or wont sell you're data on, I'm just saying that the EULA in question doesn't give them any more or any less legitimacy in selling it on than any other similar EULA bundled with most other games on the market nowadays.
We know other countries have tried, like Syria, but thus far failed, but the vast majority of other countries simply couldn't afford a nuclear program, let alone succesfully follow one through unnoticed by the rest of the world. Potentially some of the ex-soviet states could have hidden arsenals but I don't think that would be possible as Russia is a key member of the NPT so would likely admit to that and force decommissioning of those arms in those countries as happened with the Ukraine. Certainly if as he said, 15 other countries than Israel had nuclear programs then basically there'd be no point having the NPT anymore and neither the US nor Russia would be willing to reduce armament under it as the whole of the middle east would basically be nuclear capable.
Besides, he said he only had secret clearance not top secret so wouldn't be privy to that sort of information anyway, and frankly people who really are security cleared at this level aren't so insecure as to need to flaunt it on the internet. They'd never clear someone that emotionally weak with so much vulnerability to for example, people like Anna Chapman, in the first place.
Any lower level stuff he might have had access to if cleared for secret level access is frankly actually much more mudane and boring, for example you may have access at this level if you were producing or repackaging some training materials for the military and whilst you could tell people what you were doing the secret part would be the contents of those materials. This one example, but as I say, it's really not that exciting.
So yeah, he's full of shit.
"Although this is not politically correct to say, the fewer humans there are the better off the rest of the biosphere will be."
This hit me like a wrecking ball when I saw population growth illustrated relating to the world population supposedly hitting 7bn.
Human population was fairly static for about 12,000 years at something like 0.2bn people, then in the last 200 - 300 years as we've had massive advances in medicine and technology it's shot up to 7bn. It's grown from 2bn to 7bn simply in my grandfather's lifetime.
This put another aspect on climate change and general pressure on nature by humanity for me, I think it's unrealistic to believe that such a massive increase in human population in such a short time can have no impact on our planet.
I hate to defend EA but that article sounds like a complete load of paranoid bollocks.
What EA say is:
"EA may also use this information combined with personal information for marketing purposes and to improve our products and services."
What the article says is:
"Now, many companies collect hardware and peripheral data along with the installed version of the OS for a customer, but to actually say that a userâ(TM)s personal information can be used for marketing is a little bit much."
Sorry what? EA hasn't said anything about extracting personal information from your computer or anything, they've just said they may combined the technical information (i.e. your hardware specs) with personal information for directed marketing. Now, I don't like this but this is nothing new, this is what Valve do too. Certainly on the evil scale I don't even think it's any worse than tracking cookies on the internet using my habits to personalise advertising too me yet people let that happen day in day out without a flinch.
That article seems to sell this EULA as some evil new thing, that's absolutely horrendous and terrible, but it looks to me like every other software EULA I've seen in the last few years - there's certainly nothing in there that you haven't accepted if you've played many other games in the last decade.
The article even quotes this bit:
"âoeEA will never share your personal information with third parties without your consent. We may, however, share anonymous, non-personal, aggregated and/or public information with third parties."
Which they then turn into this:
"The hitch here is that by clicking on the âoeI agreeâ check box you are giving your consent."
Sorry, no, you're agreeing to the EULA, not giving your consent to pass on your data to a 3rd party.
Again I hate to defend EA, by that URL is pure 100% paranoid FUD. It's like the person that wrote it has just figured out that EULAs contain some bad shit or something - well duh, yeah, they have, for a long long time.
But hey, they got their page hits now I guess, that's all that matters. Oh, and just ignore the tailored banner ads powered by tracking cookies and benefiting from the on page Facebook and Twitter integration that link in your personal details with your page visit and ad views, none of which you were even warned about in an EULA before you visited the page will you?