FTFY.

Haven't you heard? Shiny is out, flat is in. Shiny is so old school ugly skeuomorphism bro. The new flatness is like, clean and modern. Like some wise old designer dude said, "A design is good once you've taken everything away; it's perfect." So true man, like less is more and stuff!

It's not ugly! It's modern and elegant!

You know, unlike all those other UI designs that were modern and elegant. They're all old and busted now. UI design has more to do with fashion trends than any sort of objective basis in usability.

Doesn't matter if they sell personal data or not, they're still going to use it to try and best position their ad delivery services. The only benefit you can get from Google is relevant ad placement. Oh boy, what a gift to humanity that is!

China doesn't need to control things on the device level, they control the entirety of the Chinese internet. So I guess you could say that China is more efficient at controlling free speech, while the US struggles to keep pace. I'm sure the NSA would love to have the absolute power that the Chinese government has over the Chinese internet, it would make catching "terrorists" so much easier, especially if they didn't have to deal with Congress trying to take away their toys every now and again.

But your zx81 wasn't a "modern self-hosting ad platform" which "delivers relevant ads to consumers based on their consumption patterns, derived from the shit loads of data we gobbled up from our other shitty platforms"

The Internet of Things is nothing more than an obvious ploy to stick more ads onto more eyeballs. If Google has taught us anything, it's that they will stop at nothing to embiggen their capacity to deliver advertisements while shutting down services that fail to deliver the appropriate number of users. Consumer benefit is an afterthought, eyeballs are paramount.

Let's not forget that so far the existing IoT-type devices have considered security an afterthought, and we can easily imagine a future where your son pisses off some shithead on Call of Duty 54 who then hacks your oven to catch on fire. I look forward to the glorious future where we have to worry each and every day whether some far away hacker is going to make our lives miserable because our appliance vendor considered security a useless afterthought.

I can't fucking wait.

The device IS the spyware. That's the whole point of the IoT fad. Reading your GMail isn't enough, they want to know every last possible detail about your day to day existence. All to provide "useful services" of course, nothing to do with leveraging their ad platform, that would be nonsense.

The biggest problem with the "Internet of Things" is that it doesn't have any real use cases other than collecting more data to feed the voracious apatite of advertisement companies. Add to that the ever decreasing cost of display technology and you've got a wide open space of possible ad sales. Get your foot in the door on this IoT thing and you can sell advertisers on how many ad impressions they'll get on refrigerators, coffee makers, toasters, and any other common kitchen appliance they feel like slapping a SoC and LCD display on.

I'm sure there are legitimate use cases for these network connected household devices, but don't fool yourself: Silicon Valley is full of fly-by-night scumbags who would jump at the opportunity to sell ad space and intrude on consumers personal space in every way possible.

They need all that CPU power to run their ad platform. What, you didn't think you'd get an internet connected toaster without advertisements did you?

"This toast has been brought to you by Preparation-H, soothing your asshole since 1926. If you've got a pain in your ass, try Preparation-H!"

That's easy. How closely does the source match with your own preconceived notions on the topic at hand? The closer it does so, the truer it is.

While that may be true in general, you seem to be making the unwarranted assumption that MSNBC is necessarily telling the truth. It's far more likely that both Fox and MSNBC are telling the truth about some bits, and lies about others and so "splitting the difference," or trying to take the most true(ish?) bits from each source would lead one closer to a balanced understanding of the topic at hand.

Don't fool yourself, both sides are full of shit, it's just different colors of shit.

You say that as if Hillary is the only possible Democratic candidate who could beat Jeb Bush. If anything, she's got less of a chance than some other candidate with less baggage and skeletons in the closet.

It's only mid-2016 and I'm already sick of this idea that Hillary is the inevitable candidate, let alone a shoe in for victory.

So you're saying (to paraphrase Dazed and Confused):

Gee, I wonder if you didn't start out a racist douche bag even before your glorious fiscally conservative transformation, because your dog-whistle bullshit (rioters, muggers, rapists, murders, ratchets) isn't fooling anybody.