Curious if you were aware of how your GPS statistics might be affecting your automobile insurance rates year after year.

Oh, you have factual proof they are not manipulated by aggregating data from various sources?

Curious if you were aware of how your medical insurance rates might be affected based on where you travel. Or what food you buy.

Oh, you have factual proof they are not manipulated by aggregating data from various sources?

I could go on here, but hopefully you see my point. The reality is you have no damn idea just how much your life is actually affected by corporations aggregating and sharing data like this.

None of us do.

Absolutely correct. The only way you would get those involved to back off completely is if you threatened them with incarceration.

Not even fines would deter them, since fines are usually so laughingly small they're worth paying basically every time.

What is wrong about your comparisons to Nixon is the fact that you think Obama is suddenly right.

He's not. It's just that the American People don't give a shit anymore.

And I mean that.

And as a result, you have a government that gets more and more arrogant and in-your-face with every passing day, as if to say "Yeah, we broke the law. What the fuck are you gonna do about it? You're just a voter, until we decide to label you a terrorist for speaking out."

It's funny we sit here and talk about the environment and what are we doing to secure the planet and natural resources for future generations as you spitball about future generations literally being sabotaged by the younger generation.

I only have one thing to say to that. Better fucking hope the youth of today discovers immortality.. Funny how they've have forgotten they will get old one day too, and get screwed over by their own policies.

I'm certainly not saying the current system is perfect, but shortsightedness and greedy thinking like this will likely make it worse.

Sorry, but with ALL of the ties to an individual (billing, address, Google, Apple, etc.) that your personal cell phone has (also known as the exclusive device Waze runs on), you're not going to convince me for one second that any data streaming from my cell phone is "anonymous".

No fucking way.

If more people realized this, we would call out these "aggregated" and "metadata" justifications for what they are; complete and total bullshit.

I wonder how those elderly will feel as their Social Security and Medicare programs are stripped clean in order to pay for that police state they champion so much...

This isn't just about information. Cost is a huge factor too, and perhaps felt a hell of a lot more with the younger generation who is still paying the full brunt of those "terror" taxes.

Perhaps what you should be struggling more with is the fact that Snowden revelations haven't done a damn thing to hinder the abuses of our own government.

It's practically funny how you struggle with the fact that Snowden broke the law, and yet you find exactly ZERO laws broken on the government side.

Perhaps the standing question for every demographic as we try and paint a "Like" button on Snowden himself is, what if Snowden never happened?

Seems no one wants to think about how much worse this could have gotten. Unfortunately, apathy will ensure the inevitable, since I'm surprised the pollsters found enough people who still give a shit about this at all to form any opinion.

You sure we shouldn't be suggesting that companies use Kickstarter in order to avoid layoffs?

We've seen some pretty insane shut-up-and-take-my-money ventures, like the one where man is hungry and needs 10 bucks to make potato salad. What does Kickstarter net him for potato salad? $55,000.

...to change the definition of "own".

If you the consumer currently control your screen today, then tomorrow you won't own the screen.

They will, and they'll advertise what they damn well please.

And you will accept this behavior with a smile on your face because you paid only $99 instead of $999 for that screen.

Curious if you had written that last part some years ago, and if you still feel you're going down that road today.

Thanks for sharing that. Interesting and scary.

And for the skeptics here, rewind 75 years ago to all of your beloved sports fields. They were once covered with players that did NOT enhance themselves.

It's not so impossible to see that same mentality take over the workplace. And sadly for the same damn reason. To "win".

When the Adderal-ehanced cubemate of yours gets promoted and becomes your supervisor, you might care. That's the problem with this kind of bullshit becoming valued into the workplace.

When that Adderal-enhanced worker who's been up awake 27 hours straight working on that huge project finally tries to drive home and falls asleep behind the wheel, killing 3 people in a head-on collision...well, you know where I'm going with this...

Yes. Along with your car that came with all those fancy in-dash electronic systems standard that are now obsolete.

Along with your DVD and Blu-Ray players. They're all so "smart" these days too.

Yes, because they're the only vendor in the game...Riiiight.

Good luck narrowing down the manufacturer to blame when IoT takes over. You think obsolescence is bad now..

Do you recall the last time you saw a "dumb" DVD or Blu-Ray player for sale that did not have "those" features?

Yeah, me neither. Seems they outlawed them.

TVs aren't far behind either, and soon neither will cars. What was a $20,000 base model that had these things called "options" has now become the $30,000 "base" model with all this in-dash/online crap standard.

After all, shouldn't everyone need to upgrade their new car/TV/appliance as often as your smartphone due to obsolescence?

Vendors think so.

And yet one quality standard of mine is the old mantra that if it is not broken, don't fix it, which runs in direct conflict against the idea of vendors pushing automated updates, especially to devices that can and will destroy the LAN and WAN connections.

I'm wondering where this conversation would be if TFA was titled "D-Link new automated update service pushes out patch, bricks 100,000 routers at once."

Basic standards of quality would be assuming the vendor is more than willing to support that 2-year old router you "just bought" by keeping people on staff to monitor it for hardware or software vulnerabilities...you know, instead of saying Fuck you Very Much by simply telling you to go buy more of their product by getting a newer (supported) version.

For the average $99 consumer router, which support path do YOU think vendors are more likely to take? Or more to the point, how much are you willing to spend on a new (well-supported) router/firewall? $300? Is $400 too much to ask for the device that protects ALL of your other computing devices? Oddly enough, almost every single consumer thinks so. Even the ones standing in line to pre-order a $500 smartwatch.