This is the ridiculously effective, self-informing privatized new STASI.

The investors will get money from payments by the worlds rich power-elites (the worlds poor power-elites can't afford it), requesting whatever information they find pertinent to their particular cause.

For now, it's mostly targeted marketing for corporations and the odd aiding in arrests here and there by goverments.

Soon it will be spiraling down into the corporate fascist dystopia, where the rulers of the world will use Facebook to find you and get you out of their way if their algorithms deam you are likely to be a nuisance in the future.

unless...

http://freedomboxfoundation.org/

Maybe. But another thing about being outside of normality, like being poor, ethnic minority, alcoholic or something like that, is that you know normal, because everyone knows normal, but you'd also know of the other thing and could contrast that with the normal and thereby maybe say insightful things about the normal as well as the the other.

But being normal, you'd only know normal, and wouldn't perhaps see it that well, even, since you'd be the norm, you'd feel you were just normal, that you don't have a culture (which you would have, just that it was the mainstream that was all around you, so you couldn't even see it clearly, like there is for example the ... normal and then there's the "ethnic").

I don't know... I think they should do whatever. Anything that would make me think its real monty python. Their age shouldn't prevent them from portraying young characters, just as their sex shouldn't prevent them from playing men, women or hermaphrodites.

From the short python sketch(es?) long after python that I've seen them (or part of them) do for tv-specials or somesuch, I'm a bit nervous about this. Maybe they cobbled something together hastily and/or their hearts weren't into it, but that/those sketch(es) looked to me like old men trying to plagiarise their former selves through unoriginal python boilerplate. It was like it was lacking soul or fire, like the old stuff was art and this wasn't.

It seemed like they had become more assimilated into boring normalcy. I have a theory. I think they may have stopped smoking hashish.

I really hope they can prove me wrong.

RTFS! I skimmed through the summary and I'm under the impression that they would be intergrating their knowledge about you from their different services better.

Better for them, to better be able to manipulate you more efficiently.

They're like Hari Seldon, but more about the individual and (probably) more about making you do stuff they'd like you to do (such as purchasing more of one product or another) than about figuring out where we're all headed. And they're in it to exploit you, unlike Hari Seldon. They are pretty much not like Hari Seldon, but in the same kind of field anyway, figuring you out.

I may be wrong, though. Maybe I glanced at the summary too fleetingly and misunderstood something. I don't know what exact words the summary displayed. We may never know....

And also, it is a battle for the eyeballs. Leaks released more dramaturgically get more eyeballs. Not trying to play the media at all would be detrimental to the cause of openness.

Just as hypocritical as it would be for a superhero protector of innocents with an agenda to end oppression and violence to punch a supervillain.

In other words: Maybe.

But sometimes you can't bring milk and cookies to an information-battle against global power elites, maybe.

I'm not saying the humans making up the corporation are soulless suits themselves. I'm saying the aggregate result, the more abstract corporation, is not heroic or evil, and that there is not much room for individualistic humanitarianism to guide the actions of the publicly traded corporation.

I wasn't counting Wikipedia as a corporation.

I don't believe I spoke in absolutes, so I didn't say I think Wired did or didn't do anything "purely for business reasons". In general, though, publicly traded corporations will act for their bottom line (which may include standing up for human rights or handing out candy or whatever) and the more efficient a large organization is, I'd say that the less likely it is to do anything without having its bottom line (in the short or longer term) as first priority. That is its purpose.

eh... so my point, which I forgot to mention, is that the corporate machines whose actions in this case are aligned (thankfully) with our goals are in it for their bottom line, while anonymous and common people of the internet are fo' rizzle shizzle McNizzle, or whatever them young'uns call it nowadays.

I'm no stranger to or opponent of hyperbole used figuratively to illustrate a point and, in fact, I think I often fail to get my message across when using it.

But I suspect you are saying "heroics of Wikipedia, Wired, Google, et all" with a straight face...

Not that it isn't unexpectedly great what they've all done, but for the corporations of the lot, I'm sure the impact on the bottom line is carefully thought through.

Serendipitously, the actions of these are at the moment aligned with what is right for everyone.

Publicly traded corporations are not heroic, nor good or evil.

In general (as in this case) they will say and do whatever social darwinism will have their intestines percolate to the top and out of their PR-mouth.

>Imagine a candy bar in orbit around a star. Now break that candy bar in half. Are the pieces going to fall into the sun suddenly?

I take it that is either a rhetorical question or a potato.

And continuing on the meta-train, I should like to bring up the associations taking place in my brain upon reading the headline.

I doubt that many people would have taken "boil" metaphorically if the headline didn't point out it was literally boiling.

I mean, what would it entail for a planet to be boiling figuratively instead of literally?

Wouldn't that imply there was intelligent life on the planet, outraged because of the heat and drought or some other nasty thing their star might have wreaked upon them, presumably?

In that case, I think the news of there being an intelligent civilization out there would be the big news, not that they'd be pissed off about the weather. Or have I missed something?

>Admittedly, I have a hard time seeing it as a freedom issue, as these are just tech gadgets at the end of the day. I'd rather it was framed as an inconvenience argument, not a freedom one.

No, at the end of the day, these are general purpose computers, crippled to look like "just tech gadgets".

Even if it would turn out that it is legal for MS to do this, it is wrong. That may come off as subjective, and depending on what weight one assigns to what right and what freedom of whom, one might come up with another answer.

It boils down to chipping away a little freedom of many end users in the face of a lot for one mighty corporation that will want to control and milk the consumers to their detriment, making computing suck a bit more for everyone.

Which side are you on?
 

>I dont care if there are Half a billion of you, I DONT WANT YOUR FUCKING GOLD.

I understand your frustration, but really, don't blame the relatively poor chinese people working for some boss/owner exploiting that market opportunity.

The fault is in the system.

Ah, yes, there is that, of course. Good point. All the other contributors are within their rights to not go along with a licence change or to remain unreachable in the future.

So, if it is looking like one gets lots of contributors, one should take a look at what they want, lest they'd be "locked in" to the GPL.

Going less restrictive at that point might attract and/or repel contributors. Not an easy choice, perhaps, but going BSD-like from the start won't offer that choice at all.

So the original point still stands.