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Comment Re:Yeah, I'm so excited (Score 1) 209

"Safety" here means that code cannot break out of the sandbox

That's one heck of a claim. You do realize that, right? How long do you think until we get a 0-day that breaks out of NaCl sandbox? At this point it's probably not worth the trouble since NaCl is not even slightly close to being popular. But once and if it gets popular I say it will take something on the order of a few months for an exploit to show up.

Comment Charter definitelly does something like that (Score 3, Informative) 243

I'm on Charter and I've most definitely been randomly redirected to Charter's internal search page for no good reason. The last example of this I definitely remember is when I tried to visit www.gimp.org and instead I was sent to Charter's search page. Charter's search then displayed www.gimp.org as one of the search results. When I clicked on the search result I was sent to www.gimp.org without any further issues. This tells me there is no technical difficulty at all, it's just a corrupt tactic being used by Charter to try to milk their customers (as if they need even more profits, as being being a one of the companies in a duopoly is just not good enough for them).

Fuck everything about this practice.

Comment Re:Though High, Not Even Close to LinkedIn Hype (Score 1) 93

Remember, some folks estimate that Farmville alone is now worth more than EA [slashdot.org].

I'm pretty sure this is simply the worth of all the outstanding shares added up. If I am correct, that's a worthless indicator. Try comparing revenue or profit instead of net worth. Stock prices are meaningless. If one company makes 1 bil in profit and another makes 1 cent in profit and the 1 cent company is hyped and has a 60 trillion net worth, what does that mean? It means the stock market is crazy. It doesn't mean the 1 cent company is actually better than 1 bil one.

Comment Re:Alternate browsers available? for how long? (Score 1) 218

What makes you (and far too many nerds here) think otherwise?

Apple has proven by its actions that it has no commitment to freedom. Apple changed its App market policies often, and done so for the better only when responding to immense public pressure and doing damage control. I think Apple's track record speaks for itself.

Comment Re:The article is kind of pathetic (Score 1) 171

You know what? I think I'll take a photo of my cellphone's innards, photoshop conveniently spy-sounding labels into the photo, bring my cellphone to a university professor who will testify that my device has a microphone, a crystal, an antenna and a processor that definitely has the potential to turn it into spying device then write an article about it.

Except everything you are saying here is not nearly as absurd and ridiculous as you hope it would be.

The USA is engaged in warrantless spying to such an extent, that it's not even something targeted, but rather, it's a data mining operation of the highest order. And yes, cell phone data is mined, you can be sure of it. So yes, your cell phone is in all likelihood spying on you as we speak. It's spying on you for the benefit of the government and also for the benefit of the corporations.

Read this and think again about your cell phone:

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/05/23/110523fa_fact_mayer

Comment Re:I wonder if the hackers would stop.. (Score 4, Insightful) 452

Forget about shoulds and look at reality. I'm talking about responsibility and how it works.

For example, I think that the water should be dry, and when I step into it, I am not responsible for getting wet on the account of my "should" thinking. Does it work like that in reality? No, it does not.

Ask yourself: can customer behavior patterns influence the direction of Sony as a corporation? For example, can a boycott influence Sony's attitude at the executive levels? I think the answer is that a real boycott does have such an ability. So to the extent customers have the ability to influence corporate behaviors, the customers become responsible for exercising that ability with due diligence.

At the same time, does Sony need to wait to get boycotted in order to improve their behavior? Of course not. What does this mean? It means Sony holds a primary proximate responsibility for their own behaviors. Sony executives have more influence over what Sony does than do all the Sony customers put together. At the same time, the amount of influence the Sony customers have is not zero.

So this is a correct and balanced way to understand responsibility. Responsibility is always commensurate with the power you have to influence something. The more power, the more responsibility you have. And our or your power can get as low as epsilon, but never absolute 0. So we always have some responsibility for everything, however tiny it may be.

So it's not "all like this" or "all like that." The reality is somewhere between what you're talking about and what your opponent is talking about. I would say Sony has about 70% responsibility to govern its own behaviors in a moral way and all the customers put together have about 30%, roughly. You can even see it as a 50/50 split, but you have to remember that the customer side of the 50 is shared out among all the customers, while the Sony side is concentrated in the hands of the very few powerful executives.

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