Bill Gates welcomes you to his New World Order.

Seriously though, this is not just Bill Gate's money. It is other people's donations (to other charities) too. If Gates pushes for a project that costs a billion dollars and his foundation funds $700 million of it, then where does the other $300 million come from? That's other people's money. Of course, this is a simplified example. In reality, the way he influences the investment of world-wide government and charitable funds is much more subtle and varied. I'm not saying he does not do good. My point is that if he is not kept in check, then the harm could greatly outweigh the benefit. Look at the examples in the article.

No, that's one of the main issues raised by the article. You should go read it-- it's quite interesting. Gates uses his foundation's leverage to direct other charitable funds into projects that support his personal world view. Instead of being chosen by their public merits, the projects are determined by the influence of Gates, and those projects get money from more than just the Gates foundation.

That's interesting. I have not signed up for Google Plus, and I was not aware of the "real name" thing. However, it seems like you can still choose not to register for Google Plus and nothing much changes then. It's more an issue with Google Plus than Google's new unified policy.

Can someone explain exactly what changed in Google's user agreement that gives them some new horrible power that they (and pretty much every other online account holder) did not already give themselves? What can Google do now that they couldn't already? I've seen so much concern about Google's new policy but very little to explain why. I briefly looked over the new policy when it came out and did not see anything that unusual. Maybe there's some more information sharing across their services, but I don't think there was much stopping that even before.

While I'm open to the idea of the system taxing activities for the extra cost/burden those activities put on the system, sodas fall into a pretty big grey area. Should high-sugar fruit juices get taxed the same as soda? Many of those (even some that are real juice) are not much more than sugar water. What about high fat foods? If sodas incur extra tax, surely those should too. What about watching TV? Does that kind of sedentary activity cost society enough to justify an extra tax?

At least smoking is a severe and clear case of a high-risk activity. It's relatively easy to draw a line there. If we start taxing the "grey area", then we'd better have a clear statement of where we draw the line. Otherwise we'll just end up with a mess of invasive government policies and industries buying politicians to keep their products off the high-tax list.

.Net has plenty of potential to become a good cross-platform system. It's too bad Microsoft shows no interest in having it achieve that goal.

The difference with the other projects you mention is that they have already accepted that MS has no interest in them succeeding, and they have found ways to operate successfully under those conditions. I'm not sure that's possible with .Net. An ecosystem needs developers, and how many cross-platforn developers want to use a system controlled by a company that does not value cross-platform support. For the most part, developers targeting .Net won't bother making sure their code works on Mono, and developers wanting real cross-platform support will look elsewhere. This leaves Mono in a very tough position.

Note that none of this implies I agree with hduff. I'm ignoring his comment an carrying on a meaningful conversation instead.

Most of the links that come up are in the "technical" sections of the site (help, wiki, etc) where references to Linux are difficult to avoid. I clicked through the eleven main pages in ubuntu.com's top menu and did a page search for "linux" on each one. Two matches came up, one on the "devices" page and one on the "community" page. I'm not saying whether that is good or bad. It's just clear that Ubuntu does not reference Linux a lot in how it promotes itself.

http://www.phonescoop.com/articles/article.php?a=62&p=1095&g=1256&h=14868

This pic is from 2006. Notice the red and black slider/switch on the side of the phone.

Curious that you left out Apple. After all, they took an "unlock" slider, which already existed in physical form on mobile phones and other devices, and patented the idea of putting that "on screen". I'm not saying that other companies would not or have not applied for similar patents, but Apple has crowned itself the king of obvious patents with its aggressive pursuit of that one.

Crap! and my mod points just expired. Someone mod the parent up! I think people fail to realize that 50% of web development involves "hacking" web browsers just to get legitimate functions to work consistently. (Well, maybe less than 50% now that IE6 is finally getting less support.)

While it is possible that Google violated an agreement here, that has limited relation to this being an "exploit". The negative connotation and inaccuracy around the terminology is misleading.

P.S. When Slashdot said my mod points would expire 2012-03-17, I didn't know it meant before 6AM in the morning!

"Are you actually trying to say that no-one ever pirated a single song that they would have purchased had the pirated copy not been available?"
What possessed you to even suggest that? I know of no one who claims that. My point is that the relation between piracy and sales is much more complex. In some ways piracy can even increase sales by getting more exposure for the product.

"The truth is somewhere in between there, but it is impossible to tell exactly where."
That is what I am saying, but before we enter that gray area of discussion, we must accept that digital copying is a whole different beast from physically taking. Traditional concepts of physical theft do not apply, so we need to re-evaluate how to determine the degree of the crime and its damage.

"sites the TPB and file sharers should be denounced just as harshly as the media companies"
I'm pretty sure I did that. I wouldn't be quite as harsh on someone with a small number of pirated songs (like you would not put someone in prison for stealing a pack of gum), but I was very clear about my feelings on TPB.

It is true that the media companies have changed some policies... as they became so outmoded that it threatened their bottom line. However, their policy of using piracy as an excuse to exert undue control over the public remains firmly in tact...
http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/en/defend_our_freedom_to_share_or_why_sopa_is_a_bad_idea.html

Short answer... the media companies see you, me, and every other person as not just customers or pirates. They see us as potential competitors, and they want to make sure we never have a chance.

As I said, the money campaign makes an absurd equivalency between two things to bring attention to another absurd equivalency. It is not meant to prove anything but rather highlight the issue. (At least that is my take on it.)

"where exactly do they equate copying with physical taking anyway"
When they propose that acts of piracy equate to lost sales (and I'm sure I could find more literal examples when I have some time). While I do not condone piracy, there is no direct equivalency to lost sales, and any discussion of how to combat piracy needs to accept that.

I don't care much about semantics like the term "stealing" except when people try to use it to misrepresent an issue. I'm pretty sure the media companies are not using it like "stealing one's heart". Regardless, clear unbiased terminology (or a lack thereof) is not the biggest problem here.

The problem is that the media companies are not combating THEFT. They are combating COPYING. Copying in itself is not theft. Legitimate customers have good reasons to want to make copies, but the measures that media companies put in place to supposedly prevent piracy often hurt legitimate customers more than pirates. Pirates just break the copy protection and then end up with copies that are actually better than what PAYING CUSTOMERS get. As a paying customer, this is just about the biggest insult a company can lay upon me. Are they really trying to stop pirates or just trying to make my life more difficult? And it is not just a matter of "feeling" hurt. Real damage can result when companies use piracy as an excuse to push things like root-kit copy protection schemes, overly aggressive take-downs, and SOPA.

I'm no fan of places like pirate bay. It seems to me like the people running those sites are total scum and need to be put in jail for a long time. So let's focus our efforts on actually stopping thieves rather than treating everyone like criminals.

The two things are similar in that neither one deprives the original owner of their copy, but the point is not that media content and money are really the same. The point is that copying something and physically taking it are NOT the same. The MPAA and RIAA push the idea that the two are equivalent, but if that were true, then they would be very happy to have copies of our money. Very few people argue that copied media content has no value or that content producers should not be fairly compensated. The problem is that the media industry's insistence on equating "digital copying" to "physically taking" is a false premise that makes reasonable discourse on the topic nearly impossible. This campaign does a pretty good job of highlighting its absurdity.

Thank you. That is an even closer match than my Motorola example. Together they show a natural progression towards modern smartphones, not something spawned by Apple out of the aether.

A picture is worth a thousand words, but unfortunately there is no guarantee that those words are truthful.

Motorola had a very iPhone-like device (even with an app store) in 2006 before the iPhone was released...
http://www.quora.com/Why-was-Motorola-unable-to-capitalize-on-their-EZX-MotoMAGX-smartphone-platform-outside-of-China

Motorola hurt themselves with some bad decisions, but Apple did not single-handedly invent the modern smartphone. And I'm sure there are similar examples from other companies at the time. The fact that Apple executed better than their competitors has given them plenty of deserved success. It does not give them the right to hold a monopoly over the industry.