It is my understanding that by default if someone adds you to their circle, they are merely subscribing to whatever you post as "public", i.e. for the entire internet. If you don't add them back to a circle of your own and keep posting only to a restricted circle (say "friends") then they don't get to see your posts.

If for some reason you feel obliged to add them back to your circle (maybe to not offend them or whatever), you can always make a circle called "random people" and never include that circle in anything you post.

Or did I misunderstand your concern?

Hear! Hear! I wish I had modpoints.

Belated* Happy Birthday, America!

I am in Europe and missed it by a few hours. Sorry.

I personally believe that individuals should be entitled to hold moral values (whether I agree with them or not), and be able to act accordingly (of course, within the constraints of law, etc). In general I would even extend this principle to groups of people, but corporations should be treated as an exception to this "right" imho. One simple reason is the sheer clout they hold over our lives in this day and age. You start treating them like agencies that deserve the same rights as people and you run the risk of ending up with a society where the interest of corporations is supreme simply because they have much more clout that individuals do.

Of course I realize that US courts have usually held the right of a company to do business mostly as they please, but I think it is in general a bad idea. I will stick to my vision of the society I want to live in: let people decide what is moral for them; let elected representatives decide what should be illegal; and let corporations stick to doing business and not chose a "moral side" and force them to stick to the "legal side". Either what wikileaks did was illegal in which case the government/s could get a court order to make VISA and Mastercard to block donations to wikileaks, or it was not illegal in which case the government/s could just suck it up, or try rallying people's support to outlaw wikileaks.

Sure, if I opened a bar and posted a sign saying "Black people not allowed", everyone who is enraged should just stfu and go to a different bar instead. Right?

OP did not suggest in any way that what VISA and Mastercard did was wrong because they did it to wikileaks. It makes a lot of sense to me to expect (maybe even require) companies not to pick moral sides. Let the people choose whether they want to donate to wikileaks, and let the court decide whether wikileaks should be allowed to receive donations.

I was talking about the debian logo with the story. Apologies for not putting the tag. You must be a hit at parties too.

The Debian users are going to be pissed..

Are you just trolling? In case you are not:

Just because a company says that all they do is compute the stationary distribution from this matrix, one should not just take their word and relax. ( (sorry, but the buzzword that you used it not immediately relevant here.)

I love Google and I hope they come out clean, but you comment was unnecessary. It is not going to be an investigation into the soundness of mathematics.

Umm, actually some of those things are classified under YRO. Things that are not just don't fall into the scope of "news for nerds". You wouldn't debate OP if slashdot's tagline were "News for the color blind" just because color blind people care about their freedom too, would you?

Nothing personal, but what the fuck are you on about? I even tried skipping the main page hoping to see a story that you might have had in mind when you were typing that rant.

Apparently so do you, grandpa ;-)

'sell it (to target audience) as being.."

Is it possible that a widespread use of such antennas will lower the average temperature since it is tuned to mid range infra-red? They can sell it being super eco friendly :-)

Woohoo!

Indian government tried to enforce family planning once in seventies and the people had such strong aversions that even now the government is having tough time convincing people that family planning is a good idea. (1.2 billion and counting rather fast).

Now why am I talking about population of India in a post about digital newsstands?

Because it explains my theory for what is happening.

See, the print media was freaking out about going out of business thanks to digital media. So what did they do? They brainwashed the bigshots at print media companies (remember, they still were major players then) to go all India on people about why digital media was better.

So the bosses start something like "show me your tits!" campaign on reader data. They couldn't do anything else because to successfully install a suicide button in their companies they had to pick an idea that could be explained as well-meaning. With "show me your tits!" campaign they could say, "We wanted to check for breast cancer!"

But what it actually does is freak out the people (user data being the proverbial tits) and they think that digital media is some sort of information pervert.

Explanation to share-holders: "We just wanted a better advertisement targeting."
Check.

Installation of suicide button.
Check.

And that, my friends, is what it is - a conspiracy that will ensure that digital media will always be a weak sibling to print media. And even slashdot was suckered into just propagating the suicide button.

You can't trust anything out there!
I mean here.. the internet, actually.