The article seems to suggest that they save money by getting developers to do the work, with the aim of winning a prize, that would otherwise still have had to be done but would have been done by expensive contractors. In that case it's the opposite of a waste of money, you're saving money in the public purse that can be used elsewhere, to help those less privileged who wouldn't benefit directly from this initiative.
From (one of) TFAs (I hate these summaries with no one clear article just a bunch of links):
The first edition of Apps for Democracy yielded 47 web, iPhone and Facebook apps in 30 days - a $2,300,000 value to the city at a cost of $50,000
If that's true, then even if the poorer communities can't benefit directly from the contest, they can certainly benefit indirectly from the fact that there's $2,250,000 more in the pot to spend on other services. I'd also like to point out that I'm a smart phone user who is disenfranchised, and I thought this sounded like quite a nice idea. Of course, it would be good if they could broaden the scope of the projects so they could be used as teaching aids in schools, etc and not just on smart phones, but either way it seems they're getting something for nothing and getting a few otherwise disinterested people to take a look at what they're up to, I fail to see the bad.
Well apparently the latest scheme being trialled in the UK is to pay the overweight to lose weight, maybe get them to exercise hooked up to a generator, pay them a fee for doing so and sell the electricity back into the national grid to fund the project...
I thought I remembered a quote about achieving even 50% efficiency being a pipe dream at this point, but actually it's not easy to find solid efficiency figures for wind turbines (I can't remember when or where I heard the quote so hopefully things have moved on since then, plus I guess so much depends on location, season, etc making it hard to give definitive figures, but it would be nice to at least know, when running in optimal conditions, what the conversion rate was like). My favourite quote from Answers.com: "A. They are very efficient and they also can be nonefficient" - brilliant.
That might be true if the app store was a cash cow: it isn't.
The app store isn't a cash cow? That's odd, because the way they mention it on every single iPhone/iPod/iPad advert I've seen in the last few years, I almost suspected for a while that it was a major selling point for their hardware, and as such it was in their best interests to limit this as much as possible only to their own platforms. How naive I have been!
Do you not see how, by saying "not all browsers offer this support" and then, when the user clicks a link, prompting them with a "you need to download Safari to view this" type message might give the impression that your browser is one of the ones that doesn't offer support, even when that's not necessarily the case? And in that case, don't you think it's a tad misleading and biased in favour of Safari being the one true standards compliant browser? I'm happy for Apple to spread the word about HTML5 and even about how great Safari is at supporting it (and it really is!) but I draw the line at them giving the false impression that it's the only browser that's great at supporting it.
The site can't break standards because there isn't a standard to break yet for HTML5/CSS3. All it really is just Apple showing what they think the standard should look like. However, it doesn't seem to stop Apple from claiming that their version is the "standard".
Sounds like what Microsoft is constantly accused of here. I've never understood why Apple always gets a pass.
It's because Apple are the plucky, counter-culture underdog to Microsoft's corporate might. Oh, wait...
Then it's this part that is probably causing issue:
The demos below show how the latest version of Apple’s Safari web browser, new Macs, and new Apple mobile devices all support the capabilities of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. Not all browsers offer this support. But soon other modern browsers will take advantage of these same web standards — and the amazing things they enable web designers to do.
By physically disabling certain browsers from even attempting to show the demo, the indication is that those brosers don't offer any level of support, when in many cases (particularly Chrome) the browsers do support those features. This just comes across as a shallow marketing attempt to suggest Safari is the only browser capable of supporting HTML5/CSS features at the moment, they could at least state that they've physically disabled other browsers in case the demos cause issues (and then perhaps provide a link to try them anyway), but just suggesting your browser may or may not offer HTML5 support then putting a popup message to download Safari when you try to view them is sending a pretty clear message which has nothing to do with standards or Safari's support of them and everything to do with wanting to increase market share (and of course they're perfectly entitled to do that, but just don't come here and defend it as being something other than marketing, that duck won't quack).
Are you saying they're unable to argue the merits of pro-HTML5, anti-Flash without skewing the facts? HTML5 stands on its own merits, it doesn't need Apple trying to hide the fact that other browsers can handle HTML5 pretty well (maybe not as well as Webkit, but still usable) and in fact that sounds counter-productive to me (since the average user who loves their current browser will be put off the HTML5 trail having been told it only works with Safari).
Actually, while they allow non-standard proprietary extensions to be brought in via the back door, for good or bad, vendor extensions are valid according to the standards, although their use is discouraged. Pretty ridiculous as they allow for non-standard behaviour to be introduced while still allowing the page to pass a technical validation, they were added primarly because browser vendors wanted to add new functionality from CSS3/HTML5 etc without causing sites to fail validation to combat the fact that the W3C moves at a glacial pace. A good intention, but we all know what the road to hell is paved with...
Fair enough if it's meant to be a showcase of Safari's abilities rather than HTML5's features, but it does still seem that, unless they explicitly point it out, they are artificially hobbling some other capable browsers in order to make Safari appear better. At the very least they should have the option to "see how these tests run in your current browser" for comparison purposes.
I wouldn't usually be this pedantic, but since you specifically used the term "HTML5 is definitely a standard", I have to point out (emphasis mine):
HTML5 is currently being developed as the next major revision of HTML (HyperText Markup Language), the core markup language of the World Wide Web. HTML5 is the proposed next standard for HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0 and DOM Level 2 HTML.
In fact HTML5 is currently a bunch of proposals - okay some are a lot firmer than others, but theoretically none of them are yet "definite" standards, any of them could be pulled or modified before HTML5 is a finalised standard - to that end, Safari, Chrome, Opera and Firefox all have varying degrees of HTML5 support, but it's difficult for any of them to give a full implementation of a standard that doesn't technically exist.
Furthermore it appears (from the comments above about the tests working in Chrome when you fudge the user agent string, admittedly I haven't tested this myself) that Apple are skewing the results to make it appear their browser is the only one capable of supporting the latest HTML5 developments. If that's intentional then that certainly isn't very sporting on Apple's part and definitely isn't what I'd expect from a corporation who claim to be trying to drive forward standards for the web.
We know it's slow and painful, that doesn't mean the best option is to just not have it! There are a lot of instances where you need it, some people are unfortunate enough to need to access it as part of their job, slow and painful as it may be. When the web was new, downloading images took forever, but we didn't ban images, we demanded faster connections. Now flash is slow, we shouldn't ban flash, we should ask for adobe to make flash better, while at the same time encouraging those critical services that rely on flash with no alternative to consider how they can make their service more universally accessible - hopefully in time we'd end up with either a nice lightweight, fast mobile flash (the worst case) or all sites having a non-flash alternative solution (best case) but at least w'd be able to do everything we need to in the meantime. Removing a broken service when there is no alternative is rarely a good idea. There's nothing stopping Apple from adding flash as an option, even if they make you jump through hoops to enable it and tick all kinds of EULA about how rubbish it is and how it'll ruin the iPhone experience, just to make it abundantly clear that it's not their hardware but the third party plugin that's the issue.
You do understand that this story was actually about Kindle, right? You understand that, come the revolution or the end times or whatever you're talking about, there'd be no need to go round up all the book hoarders or burn the libraries if we were all using Kindles, because one trip to Amazon's HQ and a flick of a virtual switch later every single copy of every book ever purchased could instantly be deleted via the wonder of DRM? I'm sorry, but in this scenario my money's on the book hoarders to preserve some information for future generations. And as for the comment about the cheap books, considering they have zero production or distribution costs, I'd say ebooks are currently anything but cheap, even discounting the price of the Kindle. The fact that they're also selling works that are in the public domain and could be provided free of charge (or for a very small fee to recoup the transcription costs) for the benefit of humanity, I won't comment on.
Economical? I can almost always find a real world version of a book cheaper (sometimes considerably cheaper, especially if you bring used bookstores into the equation) than the ebook version, even though the ebook has virtually zero production and distribution costs in comparison. To me, ebooks are the opposite of an economically accessible format, and that's before you even discount the pricey reader and the fact that you lose the intrinsic value that a physical book maintains (i.e. there will always be some resale or trade-in value, which reduces the initial outlay still further), or the possibility that you might have your entire back catalogue wiped due to DRM constraints that give control of your purchased items to someone else.
I think you're spot on - making books incredibly cheap so that people could give them to children without having to worry if they got destroyed definitely seems to be the goal, here, possibly with the secondary goal that it's easier for little fingers to manipulate than pages. TFA's assumption that, because Potter was experimenting with a different format, she would automatically embrace digital readers seems a bit of a stretch to say the least. Maybe she'd be one of the people who think digital readers are an abomination and should never replace paper, I could just as easily infer that from the fact that her experiment wasn't with printing on alternative materials (and my inference would be just as unfounded as TFA's).
But when you hand over the diary, the government is going to leaf through it page by page to hunt for crimes I committed. The just thing to do would be to destroy the copy and suck up the punishment. And if you don't want to do the latter, destroy it before making a fuss, and either keeping it quiet for as long as possible, or hope that you can blame the destruction on routine maintenance or lack of knowledge that the data was evidence, or whatever you hope will fly. Of course, you should have never copied the diary to begin with, but having copied it, it's your duty to destroy it before anyone else can get his dirty paws on it. And always remember: legal isn't the same as just.
What if, instead of copying the whole diary, he just copied a few random letters from each page and then hid them amongst the diaries of several hundred thousand other people, and didn't actually identify you other than to write down the name of the street the diary came from. Would you still be paranoid about the government getting their dirty paws on it? Because that's more akin to what happened here (apart from the original intent, I don't even believe Google intended to copy your data, and that must factor in at least a little in whether you think they should suck up the punishment or not).
At most they captured a random 20 second burst of your unencrypted, publicly shared data as their car drove past (and another commenter pointed out that, as they constantly switched channels, it was more likely 0.2 seconds continuous data). Unless they were incredibly lucky to capture you expressing your identity, there's nothing to tie this to you personally. They can tie it to an SSID, but they're non-unique, and if anyone claimed that was enough by itself to identify you in court, a competent lawyer would tear them to shreds. They then buried that tiny piece of meaningless data amongst 600GB of other data. Now, let's assume they do what you say and refuse to hand that data over to the government - assuming the data is as useless as it would appear, they'll be slapped with a huge fine for an honest mistake that resulted in no harm to anyone. Is that your idea of just? What if they refuse to hand over the data, suck up the punishment, and set a precedent for a more underhand company to park a van outside your house for a week recording your data. Would you be glad that you'd told your government you were happier for this data to be in the hands of companies and to just hand out a punishment but leave them with the data?
And always remember: righteous indignation isn't the same as right.
Exactly - if they seriously wanted to capture and use this data, they'd park the streetview car outside your house long enough to capture all kinds of interesting data, they wouldn't just drive up the street and hope that the 20 seconds that they were connected to your WiFi just happened to be the moneyshot. Even assuming there'd be some useful data amongst the 600GB collected, it would be so expensive to wade through all the crap to get it, what would be the point, so they could show people in your neighbourhood a slightly more relevant ad?
What an idiotic comment. How about the people who support the one major party that wants less government interference or regulation of corporations? Seriousl, what does politics have to do with this beyond the very tenuous? Disclaimer: I'm a Brit and all our parties are exactly the same as each other (apart from the colour of their manifestos) so I don't have an ulterior motive, just think it's a silly connection to make.
I can't imagine either of them want to use the data for evil. If Google wanted to* they'd have been a lot more clever about how they collected and hid it from audit scrutiny, and if the government wanted to, as GP said, they'd do it themselves and I doubt, if they were doing so, that they'd bring the issue to everyone's attention by dragging Google over hot coals about it, because I'm betting a fair few people who didn't know about securing their WiFi before will now be looking into it.
*And really, how could they? They're too public to reasonably be able to pass this on without being found out, and they can't identify your requests once they've passed through your ISP anyway so they can't even use it to target you with ads, maybe they could use it to say "people in this region of the country enjoy products X, Y and Z", but that's hardly a massive concern.
Play for time while the slaves furiously make copies.
How high is the loon quotient today, is it a full moon or something? Seriously, this has been going on for a while now, how long do you think it takes, or how many slaves are required to back up 600GB of data? I've copied more than that over my crappy home equipment in a few hours. Far more likely they were delaying while their legal team verified the actual legal position on handing over this data.
The big screwup is announcing they collected the data before destroying it, allowing governments to get their paws on it. And we all know the governments will never destroy it. Collecting the data was bad, but insignificant compared to this.
Yeah, it sickens me to think maybe they snooped half an AC comment I was downloading from/. on the day they drove past and that that's now out there, in a massive, massive sea of similarly "important" information just waiting for those evil governments to pay someone a small fortune to trawl through the data and... well, not trace it back to me, because there'd be absolutely nothing personally identifying, but to at least read it and... erm... someone help me see the evil here?
The chances of there being anything even remotely useful in this snapshot of data collected is miniscule. Wasteful as governments are, I'm sure even they can find better uses for their money right now than paying someone to trawl through hundreds of gigs of completely random, meaningless data which have an almost infinitely small chance of providing them with both a) something they can use against an individual and b) some way of identifying that individual.
Slashdot Mirror
Contests are just a way of getting lots of people to work on a problem and then only paying the best.
That sounds kind of cool, unless you're happy with your tax dollars being spent on the below average?
The article seems to suggest that they save money by getting developers to do the work, with the aim of winning a prize, that would otherwise still have had to be done but would have been done by expensive contractors. In that case it's the opposite of a waste of money, you're saving money in the public purse that can be used elsewhere, to help those less privileged who wouldn't benefit directly from this initiative.
From (one of) TFAs (I hate these summaries with no one clear article just a bunch of links):
The first edition of Apps for Democracy yielded 47 web, iPhone and Facebook apps in 30 days - a $2,300,000 value to the city at a cost of $50,000
If that's true, then even if the poorer communities can't benefit directly from the contest, they can certainly benefit indirectly from the fact that there's $2,250,000 more in the pot to spend on other services. I'd also like to point out that I'm a smart phone user who is disenfranchised, and I thought this sounded like quite a nice idea. Of course, it would be good if they could broaden the scope of the projects so they could be used as teaching aids in schools, etc and not just on smart phones, but either way it seems they're getting something for nothing and getting a few otherwise disinterested people to take a look at what they're up to, I fail to see the bad.
Well apparently the latest scheme being trialled in the UK is to pay the overweight to lose weight, maybe get them to exercise hooked up to a generator, pay them a fee for doing so and sell the electricity back into the national grid to fund the project...
I thought I remembered a quote about achieving even 50% efficiency being a pipe dream at this point, but actually it's not easy to find solid efficiency figures for wind turbines (I can't remember when or where I heard the quote so hopefully things have moved on since then, plus I guess so much depends on location, season, etc making it hard to give definitive figures, but it would be nice to at least know, when running in optimal conditions, what the conversion rate was like). My favourite quote from Answers.com: "A. They are very efficient and they also can be nonefficient" - brilliant.
That might be true if the app store was a cash cow: it isn't.
The app store isn't a cash cow? That's odd, because the way they mention it on every single iPhone/iPod/iPad advert I've seen in the last few years, I almost suspected for a while that it was a major selling point for their hardware, and as such it was in their best interests to limit this as much as possible only to their own platforms. How naive I have been!
Do you not see how, by saying "not all browsers offer this support" and then, when the user clicks a link, prompting them with a "you need to download Safari to view this" type message might give the impression that your browser is one of the ones that doesn't offer support, even when that's not necessarily the case? And in that case, don't you think it's a tad misleading and biased in favour of Safari being the one true standards compliant browser? I'm happy for Apple to spread the word about HTML5 and even about how great Safari is at supporting it (and it really is!) but I draw the line at them giving the false impression that it's the only browser that's great at supporting it.
Sounds like what Microsoft is constantly accused of here. I've never understood why Apple always gets a pass.
It's because Apple are the plucky, counter-culture underdog to Microsoft's corporate might. Oh, wait...
Then it's this part that is probably causing issue:
The demos below show how the latest version of Apple’s Safari web browser, new Macs, and new Apple mobile devices all support the capabilities of HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript. Not all browsers offer this support. But soon other modern browsers will take advantage of these same web standards — and the amazing things they enable web designers to do.
By physically disabling certain browsers from even attempting to show the demo, the indication is that those brosers don't offer any level of support, when in many cases (particularly Chrome) the browsers do support those features. This just comes across as a shallow marketing attempt to suggest Safari is the only browser capable of supporting HTML5/CSS features at the moment, they could at least state that they've physically disabled other browsers in case the demos cause issues (and then perhaps provide a link to try them anyway), but just suggesting your browser may or may not offer HTML5 support then putting a popup message to download Safari when you try to view them is sending a pretty clear message which has nothing to do with standards or Safari's support of them and everything to do with wanting to increase market share (and of course they're perfectly entitled to do that, but just don't come here and defend it as being something other than marketing, that duck won't quack).
Are you saying they're unable to argue the merits of pro-HTML5, anti-Flash without skewing the facts? HTML5 stands on its own merits, it doesn't need Apple trying to hide the fact that other browsers can handle HTML5 pretty well (maybe not as well as Webkit, but still usable) and in fact that sounds counter-productive to me (since the average user who loves their current browser will be put off the HTML5 trail having been told it only works with Safari).
Woosh. Vendor prefixes are all good and well, but they're *not standard*.
They shouldn't be, but unfortunately, by the very definition that they're in the standards, they are standard.
Actually, while they allow non-standard proprietary extensions to be brought in via the back door, for good or bad, vendor extensions are valid according to the standards, although their use is discouraged. Pretty ridiculous as they allow for non-standard behaviour to be introduced while still allowing the page to pass a technical validation, they were added primarly because browser vendors wanted to add new functionality from CSS3/HTML5 etc without causing sites to fail validation to combat the fact that the W3C moves at a glacial pace. A good intention, but we all know what the road to hell is paved with...
Fair enough if it's meant to be a showcase of Safari's abilities rather than HTML5's features, but it does still seem that, unless they explicitly point it out, they are artificially hobbling some other capable browsers in order to make Safari appear better. At the very least they should have the option to "see how these tests run in your current browser" for comparison purposes.
I wouldn't usually be this pedantic, but since you specifically used the term "HTML5 is definitely a standard", I have to point out (emphasis mine):
HTML5 is currently being developed as the next major revision of HTML (HyperText Markup Language), the core markup language of the World Wide Web. HTML5 is the proposed next standard for HTML 4.01, XHTML 1.0 and DOM Level 2 HTML.
In fact HTML5 is currently a bunch of proposals - okay some are a lot firmer than others, but theoretically none of them are yet "definite" standards, any of them could be pulled or modified before HTML5 is a finalised standard - to that end, Safari, Chrome, Opera and Firefox all have varying degrees of HTML5 support, but it's difficult for any of them to give a full implementation of a standard that doesn't technically exist.
Furthermore it appears (from the comments above about the tests working in Chrome when you fudge the user agent string, admittedly I haven't tested this myself) that Apple are skewing the results to make it appear their browser is the only one capable of supporting the latest HTML5 developments. If that's intentional then that certainly isn't very sporting on Apple's part and definitely isn't what I'd expect from a corporation who claim to be trying to drive forward standards for the web.
We know it's slow and painful, that doesn't mean the best option is to just not have it! There are a lot of instances where you need it, some people are unfortunate enough to need to access it as part of their job, slow and painful as it may be. When the web was new, downloading images took forever, but we didn't ban images, we demanded faster connections. Now flash is slow, we shouldn't ban flash, we should ask for adobe to make flash better, while at the same time encouraging those critical services that rely on flash with no alternative to consider how they can make their service more universally accessible - hopefully in time we'd end up with either a nice lightweight, fast mobile flash (the worst case) or all sites having a non-flash alternative solution (best case) but at least w'd be able to do everything we need to in the meantime. Removing a broken service when there is no alternative is rarely a good idea. There's nothing stopping Apple from adding flash as an option, even if they make you jump through hoops to enable it and tick all kinds of EULA about how rubbish it is and how it'll ruin the iPhone experience, just to make it abundantly clear that it's not their hardware but the third party plugin that's the issue.
You do understand that this story was actually about Kindle, right? You understand that, come the revolution or the end times or whatever you're talking about, there'd be no need to go round up all the book hoarders or burn the libraries if we were all using Kindles, because one trip to Amazon's HQ and a flick of a virtual switch later every single copy of every book ever purchased could instantly be deleted via the wonder of DRM? I'm sorry, but in this scenario my money's on the book hoarders to preserve some information for future generations. And as for the comment about the cheap books, considering they have zero production or distribution costs, I'd say ebooks are currently anything but cheap, even discounting the price of the Kindle. The fact that they're also selling works that are in the public domain and could be provided free of charge (or for a very small fee to recoup the transcription costs) for the benefit of humanity, I won't comment on.
Economical? I can almost always find a real world version of a book cheaper (sometimes considerably cheaper, especially if you bring used bookstores into the equation) than the ebook version, even though the ebook has virtually zero production and distribution costs in comparison. To me, ebooks are the opposite of an economically accessible format, and that's before you even discount the pricey reader and the fact that you lose the intrinsic value that a physical book maintains (i.e. there will always be some resale or trade-in value, which reduces the initial outlay still further), or the possibility that you might have your entire back catalogue wiped due to DRM constraints that give control of your purchased items to someone else.
I think you're spot on - making books incredibly cheap so that people could give them to children without having to worry if they got destroyed definitely seems to be the goal, here, possibly with the secondary goal that it's easier for little fingers to manipulate than pages. TFA's assumption that, because Potter was experimenting with a different format, she would automatically embrace digital readers seems a bit of a stretch to say the least. Maybe she'd be one of the people who think digital readers are an abomination and should never replace paper, I could just as easily infer that from the fact that her experiment wasn't with printing on alternative materials (and my inference would be just as unfounded as TFA's).
But when you hand over the diary, the government is going to leaf through it page by page to hunt for crimes I committed. The just thing to do would be to destroy the copy and suck up the punishment. And if you don't want to do the latter, destroy it before making a fuss, and either keeping it quiet for as long as possible, or hope that you can blame the destruction on routine maintenance or lack of knowledge that the data was evidence, or whatever you hope will fly. Of course, you should have never copied the diary to begin with, but having copied it, it's your duty to destroy it before anyone else can get his dirty paws on it. And always remember: legal isn't the same as just.
What if, instead of copying the whole diary, he just copied a few random letters from each page and then hid them amongst the diaries of several hundred thousand other people, and didn't actually identify you other than to write down the name of the street the diary came from. Would you still be paranoid about the government getting their dirty paws on it? Because that's more akin to what happened here (apart from the original intent, I don't even believe Google intended to copy your data, and that must factor in at least a little in whether you think they should suck up the punishment or not).
At most they captured a random 20 second burst of your unencrypted, publicly shared data as their car drove past (and another commenter pointed out that, as they constantly switched channels, it was more likely 0.2 seconds continuous data). Unless they were incredibly lucky to capture you expressing your identity, there's nothing to tie this to you personally. They can tie it to an SSID, but they're non-unique, and if anyone claimed that was enough by itself to identify you in court, a competent lawyer would tear them to shreds. They then buried that tiny piece of meaningless data amongst 600GB of other data. Now, let's assume they do what you say and refuse to hand that data over to the government - assuming the data is as useless as it would appear, they'll be slapped with a huge fine for an honest mistake that resulted in no harm to anyone. Is that your idea of just? What if they refuse to hand over the data, suck up the punishment, and set a precedent for a more underhand company to park a van outside your house for a week recording your data. Would you be glad that you'd told your government you were happier for this data to be in the hands of companies and to just hand out a punishment but leave them with the data?
And always remember: righteous indignation isn't the same as right.
Exactly - if they seriously wanted to capture and use this data, they'd park the streetview car outside your house long enough to capture all kinds of interesting data, they wouldn't just drive up the street and hope that the 20 seconds that they were connected to your WiFi just happened to be the moneyshot. Even assuming there'd be some useful data amongst the 600GB collected, it would be so expensive to wade through all the crap to get it, what would be the point, so they could show people in your neighbourhood a slightly more relevant ad?
What an idiotic comment. How about the people who support the one major party that wants less government interference or regulation of corporations? Seriousl, what does politics have to do with this beyond the very tenuous? Disclaimer: I'm a Brit and all our parties are exactly the same as each other (apart from the colour of their manifestos) so I don't have an ulterior motive, just think it's a silly connection to make.
I can't imagine either of them want to use the data for evil. If Google wanted to* they'd have been a lot more clever about how they collected and hid it from audit scrutiny, and if the government wanted to, as GP said, they'd do it themselves and I doubt, if they were doing so, that they'd bring the issue to everyone's attention by dragging Google over hot coals about it, because I'm betting a fair few people who didn't know about securing their WiFi before will now be looking into it.
*And really, how could they? They're too public to reasonably be able to pass this on without being found out, and they can't identify your requests once they've passed through your ISP anyway so they can't even use it to target you with ads, maybe they could use it to say "people in this region of the country enjoy products X, Y and Z", but that's hardly a massive concern.
Play for time while the slaves furiously make copies.
How high is the loon quotient today, is it a full moon or something? Seriously, this has been going on for a while now, how long do you think it takes, or how many slaves are required to back up 600GB of data? I've copied more than that over my crappy home equipment in a few hours. Far more likely they were delaying while their legal team verified the actual legal position on handing over this data.
The big screwup is announcing they collected the data before destroying it, allowing governments to get their paws on it. And we all know the governments will never destroy it. Collecting the data was bad, but insignificant compared to this.
Yeah, it sickens me to think maybe they snooped half an AC comment I was downloading from /. on the day they drove past and that that's now out there, in a massive, massive sea of similarly "important" information just waiting for those evil governments to pay someone a small fortune to trawl through the data and... well, not trace it back to me, because there'd be absolutely nothing personally identifying, but to at least read it and... erm... someone help me see the evil here?
The chances of there being anything even remotely useful in this snapshot of data collected is miniscule. Wasteful as governments are, I'm sure even they can find better uses for their money right now than paying someone to trawl through hundreds of gigs of completely random, meaningless data which have an almost infinitely small chance of providing them with both a) something they can use against an individual and b) some way of identifying that individual.