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Comment Re:MORE BLOAT! (Score 1) 81

Tell that to Apple who have bundled far more stuff with OS X (not so much on the driver front, thanks to building their own hardware) than Microsoft ever has with Windows - even before they were forced to remove parts - and whose users are quite happy that it includes everything and the kitchen sink.

You may never use iMovie, for example, but there it is, included with your Mac, whether you like it or not.

For those who much prefer a lean OS, there's always Arch.

Comment Re:Okay (Score 1) 74

I think we're getting way out of context here. OP's issue was indeed just a 2 minute thing, and any potential power-mad editor reverting entirely hypothetical. Even if the OP feels that hypothesis to be sound, then OP shouldn't refer to wikipedia in the first place - or at least not complain about not finding certain information there.

Comment Re:Okay (Score 1) 74

I'm not disputing that - I haven't had it happen, but I've read the stories.

I just feel that it's strange for some people to say they won't contribute to wikipedia - because they fear somebody else with an agenda will just revert their edits.. on any subject.. all the time.. with nobody backing them up despite facts - and at the same time complain about lack of certain information on wikipedia. At the point where they won't contribute, themselves, they should have written off wikipedia as a source of information entirely; unless they think they're special and everybody else's contributions are free of such tyranny.

Comment Re:Okay (Score 1) 74

I thought I'd pop onto Wikipedia

Wikipedia, got it.

why OMIT this information in the History section of your own product's page

Well, it's not 'their' page. Doesn't wikipedia even discourage companies from editing pages about themselves or their products?

Which brings us to...

Now, it's not a deep secret, I can google and find stuff from that kind of era discussing it

...and you haven't edited the article to add the information you sought because...why?

That aside - yeah, by now there's quite a few competing products already on the market with various levels of success...and without the facebook involvement.

Comment Re:So? (Score 1) 310

Can't mod you up, but just wanted to say thanks for sharing some of the finer points of this.

I suspected that this is something that's common, and only rarely prosecuted in the way it appears to be done in this case. There's probably more specific reasons for the case, or they know it won't go anywhere and just want to push this to the forefront of some people's attention.
Like I said, though - I'm not a lawyer :)

Comment Re:So? (Score 5, Informative) 310

I'm far from a lawyer, but:

As long as you place trades on the book that you're willing to fill

The 'willing to fill' part might be key - as he had no intentions of filling the orders that led to the mini-panic, using them solely to affect the price for personal gain.

Defendant willfully and knowingly, having devised and
intending to devise a scheme and artifice to defraud, and for
obtaining money and property by means of false and
fraudulent pretenses, representations, and promises
, did
transmit and cause to be transmitted by means of wire
communication in interstate and foreign commerce,
writings, signs, signals, pictures, and sounds for the
purpose of executing such scheme and artifice.

Comment Re:How many sites actually honor DNT? (Score 1, Insightful) 64

But instead, Microsoft set it automatically in their browsers, prompting most websites to ignore it, since it no longer meant anything.

It never meant anything anyway, but that as an aside...

No, Microsoft did not 'automatically' set it. Though that may depend on one's definition of 'automatic'.

Does an installer 'automatically' install adware, if you miss unchecking the option "Install Slowbar for Chrome"?
If yes - you have a point.

If no - then there wasn't anything automatic about it. Enabling Do Not Track in IE was one of the settings explicitly listed in the Express Settings screen, and users could certainly choose the Customize option to disable it.
http://core0.staticworld.net/i...

The W3C, after Yahoo's complaints, decided to clarify that it should be the user's choice.

Of course the next question then becomes whether opt-out still implies a user choice just as much as opt-in would be.
I.e. did the user actually read that line, did they actually understand what it meant, and did they consciously decide to continue with the Express Install with said understanding in mind? If yes, then the user made the choice.
If no, then it could be argued that Microsoft had made the choice for the user.

But even if that is the case - is that a bad thing? To draw a parallel - almost every browser now blocks pop-ups. By default. Without even asking the user if they want this behavior. Do you honestly think that if there were an X-Do-Not-Popup header, sites would honor this setting - and we would now not be subjected to pseudo-popups (content inserted into the DOM and drawn on the center of the browser client window)? And do you blame browser makes for making the choice for the users regardless?

Maybe Microsoft did deliberately sabotage it - but I welcome their sabotage as it merely accelerated the natural process.

Comment Re:How many sites actually honor DNT? (Score 2) 64

DNT was DOA.

What site in their right mind would actually honor - and I mean fully, including through any third party content (and yes by that I mean ads) or 'accidental' methods via supercookies / sharing of information at the backend of several sites within one's control - something that's merely a 'request' by a user (regardless of whether they were semi-automatically opting into making that request) and has no legal stick behind it?

If anything, Microsoft making it the default in Windows' installation express settings just exposed exactly this issue when sites started saying they would ignore the setting "because Internet Explorer". That was always a completely transparent bullcrap excuse.

Just have a look at what countries with strong 'cookie' laws have going on. Are there some sites that do disable the tracking cookies while leaving cookies for functionality up? Sure, of course they exist. And for every single one of them, there's dozens that will throw a banner in your face suggesting that you have a choice: allow the tracking cookies, or piss off.

Some might say "so piss off and go to another site" - except there often is no such other site, and most people given the choice between being able to consume and not being able to consume at the expense of intangible tracking will happily be tracked so the sites never feel it in their bottom line either.

This is the sort of thing that I would expect to happen with DNT as well: A banner with something like "You currently have DNT enabled - to access the rest of this article, please disable DNT or click here to allow our servers to store information about your visit this once.", which eventually gets old and users disable DNT.

And yes, that sort of thing is facilitated in the DNT spec: http://www.w3.org/TR/tracking-...

DNT was never going to get anywhere particularly useful for end-users while adding a layer of headache on the server side. Browsers' default behavior and browser extensions have done far more to inform users of the issues of ads and tracking and how to mitigate those issues.

Comment Re:Homeowner should be able to run his own cable (Score 3, Informative) 536

Having googled around to find his address ( I was hoping to find out the antenna location for the microwave internet provider, to see who's blocking the signal ), I can tell you that he chose a house smack dab in the middle of nowhere.

The photo makes it look like a run of the mill driveway to a house, but really it's a small paved area that leads into the woods (which surround the house on all sides - I'd be surprised if line-of-sight solutions actually worked because there is no line of sight to anything but trees), exits lord knows where onto a single-vehicle-wide apparent dirt road that finally exits onto a double-lane road that is still only a secondary road.

Run own cable? Where to? There's certainly other businesses well within 2500 feet - I wonder if they have internet. Or his neighbors (as others have mentioned). But certainly any remotely densely populated area is more than 'a few blocks' away, not to mention that you'd probably have to lay it all weird (no straight line through the woods for you) if the county has any say in it.

Hopefully some of the people who contacted him can hook him up, 'cos the end-run he's been given is deplorable, regardless of the choice of location.

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