Orwell's portrayal of cameras in homes was simply one of many, many totalitarian ideas he wove into the story. A large number of them exist today (the most obvious examples being pacification of the "proles" by means of 24-hour media, and constant war with vague enemies about vague things). To say that we won't have his version of society until we have that one thing is pretty odd. That's like saying we won't have Christmas until somebody gets drunk.

I'm a huge Apple fan, but even I think this stuff with the "i" branding is just stupid and faintly embarrassing. Every Apple product has a fraeking "i" before it's otherwise utterly unimaginative name? "iCloud" - FFS.

http://thepiratebay.org/search/born%20this%20way/0/7/100

The same goes for "allegedly" - allegedly.

I've used Fail2ban in the past:

http://www.fail2ban.org/wiki/index.php/Main_Page

I've often wanted to have a CLUI that works with my GUI. Imagine I'm in Photoshop, mousing or tablet-ing away, and I have a layer on my canvass. Rather than trying to remember where in the menu structure a bunch of commands are in order to manipulate that layer, I just bring up my CLUI and type something like "resize 50%, flip, gamma -20" Or how about in Word: "Find foo replace bar, insert header from page 2-", and so on?

Why are we forced to find commands in mouse-driven menu bars (of worse, "ribbons" and whatnot) when they could be available any time in the app you are using?

I believe the recipient of your slappage would be Christian Giordano:

http://design.canonical.com/2011/03/introducing-overlay-scrollbars-in-unity/

At least, this quote would seem to be culprit:

"Other platforms optimized for touch input like Android and iOS are already using a light-weight solution visible only while dragging the content."

So that's your question answered I think.

(oh dear replying to my own post...) .. of course, if you were talking open source, then that would be another matter :-)

"No one seems to ask: why are we funding X different packages that do 80% of the same things, but none of them well?"

When I think about this, I'd rather have that than one single package, if only for the reason that without competition, I'd not be able to know if it was doing anything well or not.

Pragmatism here says plurality is probably better than some kind of Stalinist central control.

TFA has no evidence what-so-evar to back up its claim that people don't trust mobile apps any more or less than they do any other type of app (hell, even freakin' MS Office asks if you want to supply "anonymous data" to Redmond). Well, unless they're saying that "prominent lawmakers" == consumers.

This is just some random journo opinion. You'd have thought it would have maybe fired up Surveymonkey or something for some attempt at a citation.

In most (all?) jurisdictions, it's contract, not copyright, that says what the producer does with the work. You can pretend you own the work all you want, but if the contract you signed with the publisher, university, company, whatever, says you don't, then you don't.

If we really want to make a difference, reverse that relationship: make copyright trump contract and you're cooking with gas.

"Any apparatus capable of receiving live TV programmes needs to be licensed"

Sigh. No, the policy you quote does not say that. It says no licence is needed if the "occupier has declared that there is no television receiving equipment being used at the address to receive live broadcasts".

I don't know exactly why I get this impression, but was the guy on the sofa wearing the worst fake tan in all of human history?