No, it is popular because, despite a good many flaws, it remains the best cross platform solution we have.

"The real problem we are having is not the loss of privacy per se, it's the abuse of private information. Most people are fine letting Onstar know their current location. We are not fine with Onstar telling anyone that information - not the police, not our wife, not our boss. "

It sounds more like the real problem is that people are so stupid they do not realize that you cannot have your cake and eat it too. If Onstar has the information, others will be able to obtain it, whether by hook or crook.

If you want your privacy you must defend it consistently, not only when it is convenient and inexpensive to do so.

It's good, and coming soon.

By that, I meant your example is good, not the emerging reality it presents.

While your comment sounds like over-the-top sarcasm, keep in mind the time when you go to the dentist and your dental insurance company refuses to pay their portion of the bill because you have not been brushing your teeth properly....

It's good, and coming soon.

Not too much further down the road: When your average time spent brushing suddenly falls and the 7:00 PM brushings stop altogether, the analytic engine interprets this as having broken up; so it starts sending you ads for Haagen Dazs and cookies, because it knows you are vulnerable. You succumb to temptation, which creates a credit record, and your health insurance company ups your rates for the diabetes risk.

It's not just about responding to weaknesses, it is also about preying on them.

It doesn't happen very often anymore, but for many years I kept hearing people say things like, "The story of Bill Gates shows what's so great about our country. The guy started out poor, he had absolutely nothing, but he was pretty much the best programmer in the world. Using nothing but his programming skills, he managed to become the richest guy in the world. It's a great success story."

Yeah, Bill Gates got rich by being a brilliant programmer, and Steve Jobs got rich by being a really nice guy. Meanwhile, Ballmer just skated by on his good looks, social graces, and beautiful head of hair.

Oh, poor baby.

I'm wondering about the idea of having a group of friends who swap their cell devices. You'd have to change a lot of your comm, but if you use the cellular system just for bandwidth, you don't really care about your cellular identity except for you phone number. If you can migrate your friends to contacting you via internet comm, you don't need to have the same cellular identity from one day to the next.

Toss in dynamic proxying through SSH, and you aren't exposing your comm fingerprint to your cell provider. Use OwnCloud to swap in your files and contacts (a bit of data overhead there, maybe keep most of your heavy content data on a separate device that tethers to whatever cell phone you happen to be carrying).

They'd still be able to analyze your tracking footprint to figure out who held which phone at which time, but it would make surveillance more expensive.

"You're a bit too literal."

And you are a bit too soft-headed, at least on this issue.

"Noise pollution," "heat pollution," and "light pollution" also involve an excess of something that naturally occurs in the environment.

And all three are BS terms. Marketing terms, where they verbally associate item X with item Y even though it does not belong, simply because they believe it will provoke the emotional response they want. THIS is real pollution - of the language. This fits in the same bucket with the 'wars' on 'drugs' and 'terror'- it's language being used to prevent, not to facilitate, accurate thinking and accurate communication.

This is where effective manipulation of the population starts, and this is where it needs to be rejected.

Excessive noise, excessive heat, and excessive light are perfectly accurate terms. The 'pollution' variants are inaccurate, marketing terms, chosen to provoke an emotional response in a desired direction. Lies, to speak plainly.

"So it's a bit naïve to claim that just because something naturally occurs in the environment, an excess won't be bad for society (and shouldn't be controlled)."

It would be, except I made no such claim. Go back, re-read my post, as many times as you want. It simply does not say that.

This is how bad you (and it's not to pick on you personally, this is a general pattern today) have had your own head loused up at this point with marketing-inspired BS that you automatically read that claim into what I said, and responded to it, even though I did NOT say it and did not even imply it in any way.

I simply pointed out that CO2 is not a pollutant. And then moved on to my main point. And both the replies I get ignore the main point entirely and respond, not to what I actually wrote, but to some sort of pre-programmed straw-man image of what I *must* believe, no matter that it is completely inaccurate.

"First, what gives with the goofy webpages that try to scroll like pages of a book?"

It's not really a webpage. 'Designers' have never liked the web and love to break it - this is the result. 884 lines of idiocy, full of 'favicons' and malicious attempts to direct my browser to Facebook! of all things, but no actual webpage, not even a fallback apology when viewed with a sane browser, nothing but a title and a blank page.

But to answer your question, what gives? Cranial rectosis. It's an epidemic, and obviously it's hitting google pretty hard right now too.

I'm not saying I think they know it now, or are intentionally moving in this direction, but consider the market forces involved: Is this, Netflix's similar effort, and ISP throttling, ultimately just foreplay to getting in bed together? They have the potential to really harm each other, and that has to get through to them eventually.

Seems to me, barring common carrier or another path to true net neutrality, both sides have more to gain by colluding than by fighting. If big content and big ISPs work together, they could create a barrier to independent ISPs and content.

Often but not always ---

The truth is that the cemetery association will have the final say here --- and it won't give an inch until DC and their lawyers sign off on this. Probably not even then.

"Oxygen isn't a pollutant either, unless you breath too much of it. Similarly for nitrogen."

How much you breath has absolutely nothing to do with it. Oxygen, Nitrogen, and CO2 are the natural components of the atmosphere, not pollutants.

"Here's a clue, have a sense of proportion. Pump enough CO2 into the atmosphere, big surprise, the atmosphere heats up. Don't want to believe it is problem? Please, don't. However, you cannot ignore the CO2 acidifying the oceans and taking out coral reefs and shell fish. Don't think that's a problem? The ocean is the base of the food chain. Surely, you care about that, eh? Nah? Okay, please go back to sleep."

This does not appear to be relevant to anything I posted, indeed, you appear to behaving quite the conversation with an imaginary friend there.

Thank goodness, too, otherwise I'd confuse Superman with Supperman.

I feel totally protected.

Even if they used it now, I'm not sure they'd sue. It would make them look pretty crappy. As it is, they got a request to use their logo on a statue of a murdered child, and they were like, "Eh... we'd rather not." It's really not that hard to understand why DC wouldn't want to be strongly linked to child abuse and murder in such a potentially long-lasting medium, given the choice. How much trouble they'd go through to stop it, though, is another issue.

Part of the question, I'd imagine, is whether they're denying the use of the logo via copyright protection or trademark protection. I'm not sure it makes sense for them to claim trademark protection here, but if so, there are some legal requirements for them to protect their trademark, so they might need to at least send a cease and desist letter. I'm not a lawyer, but that's my understanding.

I was on a business trip once going from Lima, Peru, to Arica in Chile on a 727 when the pilot announced that the navigation system in the plane was basically dead. Instead of freaking out, he lowered the altitude and he visually followed the Iquitos river and other landmarks, piloting the plane the old fashion way, taking us to the destination safely. In a windowless cockpit that would have been a non-starter. I for one, want to keep an "analog backup" as an option. Thank you.