Translation: Another loser blaming everyone else for his inadequacies.

While I find his preaching about the moral rightness of what he does, and our duty to endure whatever shit he wishes to shove in our faces to be deeply obnoxious; it would not entirely surprise me if this little experiment by the carriers ends up going...badly.

Ad-blocking at the client end('client end' includes routers, filtering appliances, etc. under user control, if the applicable network is large or geeky enough) is simply the right of the individual to run the software of their choice on their hardware, to best serve their interests, in action. Running a public HTTP server doesn't give you some special right to dictate how the output is formatted for display.

Ad-blocking at the carrier level, though, gets risky fast. Whenever an ISP starts deviating from 'dumb pipe' operation, you have to start worrying about whose interests are going to win out, and how dramatically. Especially risky if (as is the case with quite a few cellular companies and ISPs) they also have a side interest in advertising, consumer analytics, a media arm, or other properties that could benefit from a little traffic meddling. We've already seen some of the more obscure WISPs provide 'ad blocking', then inject their own ads over the originals, worst of both worlds.

Ad blocking is well and good(and, frankly, until the advertisers can clean up the ghastly security situation, they have no justification for whining. Ads are easily the most dangerous part of most parts of the web you'd admit to visiting in polite company); but anything that gives ISPs more control over traffic is to be watched with considerable concern. You don't think that a plan to stick it to google is going to stop at blocking google's ads, do you? Not when they could use their privileged position on the wire to achieve the same tracking and advertising that google actually has to offer attractive services to achieve...

Yes, instead you create an inflexible currency system based on assigning arbitrary value to a physical commodity.

Outside of its industrial uses, gold has no more intrinsic value than a lump of dog shit. I mean, why not peg your currency to Renaissance paintings?

Since value is relative, then being the best currency means being the best currency, even with the shortcomings.

So far as I understand it the US has carried debt uninterrupted since the Civil War (maybe even before). Even in times of war and national emergency (including a few self-inflicted ones like the Tea Party trying to go kamikaze), the US Government has demonstrated its will to honor its debts and back the US dollar. It may be overvalued by some standards, but in general, I think the US dollar remains, and likely will remain for decades to come, the most important currency in the world. It really has no competitor.

No shit. The one thing bit coin seems very good at is enabling black market exchanges and corruption. We all know how Silk Road was such a warrior against criminal and corrupt activities!

Apparently a helluva lot of Argentinians DO NOT agree with you, and just as importantly, or perhaps moreso, international markets do not agree with you.

Your economy and government are being horribly managed, and you're suffering for it. Quit blaming the rest of the world for your domestic problems.

Argentina, like most Latin American countries, would do well to toss the Presidential system. The US, by and large, has lucked out, in no small part to what Bagehot referred to as Americans' "genius for politics". But in other societies, where the legislative and judicial branches have remained stunted as compared to the US Congress, SCOTUS and the Federal Courts, all the Presidential system does is deliver near-dictatorial powers into the hands of the President. The checks and balances may exist on paper in countries like Argentina, but the reality is that legislative assemblies and courts become little more than rubber stamps.

A parliamentary system like the Westminster system would, I think, work far better. The titular head of state of a parliamentary state does hold some potent reserve powers, but is restricted from using them in all but the most extreme circumstances. The "effective" government, that is the governing Executive, only survives so long as the legislative assembly retains confidence in it, and ministers are normally chosen from among members of the legislature, and thus, at least in a nominal way, remain equals to every other person sitting in the legislature. In a parliamentary system, the titular head of state represents a sort of negative power; in that he or she deprives the effective executive of absolute control of reserve powers and prerogatives.

But is it really overvalued? Debt is only part of the equation. When the statement "the dollar is backed by the US Government", that means the whole thing; Executive (including the Federal Reserve, military, and so forth), the courts, and of course Congress, not to mention the collective will of the citizens of the United States. When you look at the greenback in that light, it's hard to imagine a currency in modern times as well backed.

Indeed. I fail to see what the difference between $1 electronically stored in a bank account or being transferred between two banks is measurably any better than a one dollar bill.

A unit of currency, whether digital or physical, is issued by a country's central bank and backed by the country's government. If Argentina burned all its physical currency tomorrow, everything would still be denominated in Argentinian pesos, whose value, by and large, would still be determined by the same mechanisms. I suppose certain aspects of physical currency, like counterfeiting and hoarding, might be eliminated, but it certainly wouldn't prevent monetary crises.

This article seems to have a rather odd view of what modern currencies are.

This, absolutely this. In order to force someone to turn over information, I have to have a valid subpoena issued by a court with jurisdiction. The fact that they just punted this to "you figure it out" means Google is given arbitrary discretion on how they can fulfil this, and the recourse to disagreeing is to take them to court and sue them again.

If you're going to give someone a right enforced by the government, then you should provide the necessary process to issue a "strike-records decree"...

BTW, Google still tells employees not to talk about this stuff in public, because Google has to so carefully watch its steps. (Disclaimer, I used to be a Google employee this year)

The problem is also the consent decree that says "anything that Google says, it has to actually be doing"... which can end up really nitpicky if lawyers want to be... and "my various governments" are all looking to catch Google for something, anything... so, they are being a bit nitpicky...

Seeing two researchers explaining an experiment, and the first thing you care to say about it is some variation of "nice tits" suggests a misogynist.

And when your special antivaxxer school suffers a measles or whooping cough outbreak, you can shout "YAY FOR FREEDOM!!!"

My impression is that Apple's industrial design people believe cables, physical buttons, and anything that requires a hole in the shell of the product to be intrinsically filthy and sinful.

The mac mini, which has among the fewest integrated peripherals of any current Apple product, wantonly incites users to plug their filthy cables into the various ports cut into the perfection of the aluminium body. The iMac, by contrast, can be used in relative purity(with bluetooth peripherals) marred only by a power cable that is discretely hidden as such a shame should be.

I strongly suspect that you are right, your reasoning is certainly sound; but I'd assume that if they have a percentage for NSI phones, they should have percentages for other categories, and it's only fair to take action based on actual data, when you can.

That's what I meant about 'barely concealed desire to kill the mac mini'. Time was when Apple considered the mini to be a strategically valuable product, both for replacing the emac as a school computer lab staple and for converting former PC user households. Not coincidentally, that's the time when they were actually pretty aggressively priced, unless you counted best-buy shelf crap that managed to be massively larger and still noisier.

Now, they'd really prefer that schools sling ipads and households either buy imacs(or, in either case, just go with laptops). Their tepid updates, uncompetitive pricing, and frankly painful lower end configurations reflect this. They haven't yet gotten to the point where they can kill them off; but they sure don't care much.