Nothing succeeds like a toothless budgie. Other birds flocked to the gene pool following the same example.

What about it? There's no point in using every combination of examples or we'd be here all day.

For the record though, I also think it's wrong to start yelling "get out of r country, terrorist muslamic scum!!!" to anyone who happens to follow the Islamic faith. That is another example of being a dick to someone, a religious person in this example, when they've not provoked you. And a few extremists do not represent provocation from an entire religious group.

This is the problem with "lists". I subscribe more to Wheaton's Law aka "Don't Be a Dick". Why not just not be a dick to anyone, including religious people?

As for my views on religion (as a non religious person), it may be a choice but if the individual doesn't force their beliefs on others then I see no reason to attack them without provocation.
Obviously it's different with the nutjob "God hates Fags" types who need to be told that they're being assholes and projecting their personal beliefs on other people (i.e. there's your provocation), but that's a vocal minority - most are just passively living by their personal rulebook and condemn the violent idiots like Westboro et al, and don't deserve a torrent of abuse for something they've not done.

I know patent trolls are scumbags, but that's ridiculous. you're really lumping them in with *politicians*?

I don't know, but pretty much everywhere else on the internet everyone is screaming "haha only 3 cores? Android has had octo core processors since 1973" - I suppose this is one small step towards shutting them up (though Apple haters will usually find something else 'superior' to be smug about)

My room is home to more ponies than the Shetlands, to be quite honest. It's getting out of hand. I just threw my wallet at Apple though, so the giant manchild within will have to sod off back down to the imaginary basement for a bit.

If your spouse is going to the lengths of covertly grabbing your phone, placing plastic over your screen, making sure you don't notice it, grabbing it again when you've used it, removing the plastic and taking it to a copier..
1) What an awesomely geeky spouse, where do I find one? Or do I just marry a copper?
2) You have much bigger problems to worry about than the security of your fingerprint scanner. But you might want to search for your divorce solicitors using Private Browsing on a throwaway pay-as-you-go phone and throw it into the canal afterwards. Just in case.

It should be perfectly fine for the average person protecting their credit card details from thieves and their porn from their partners.
People who go to these lengths would surely be either:
Really determined for some reason (in which case they'd probably social engineer it out of you or something)
People who'd just cut your finger off
The police (at which point they've already obtained your phone and fingerprint)
The NSA (who probably already have a backdoor)
Either way, it's more secure than your typical 4 digit PIN or pattern unlock.

If you need more than that, you'd probably use some tedious-to-type ultra secure battery horse staple thing anyway.

Especially if people complain loudly enough, they might even name the build after them
"Disgruntled Edition"

I'll use what I want to, thank you.

Similarly, whether you choose sides (or choose a tinfoil hat and avoid cloud services altogether) is up to you. That's how the world works you see, people make personal decisions, they don't usually take orders off people on the internet.

3 years ago I liked what Google were doing and disliked what Apple were doing so I switched to Google
Now, vice versa.
There's no brand loyalty here, but these happen to be the two biggest mobile OS manufacturers (sorry but Blackberry and Microsoft are irrelevant by comparison IMO) and in direct competition, so damn right I'll pick a side when one is doing something I like and the other is doing something I don't.

Whilst you do sound like a channer (no offence - Anonymous is what they call themselves, and your writing style reminds me of one I know, but they do sometimes pretend to "know things") I wish I could mod you up as this is exactly what I'm suspecting as well. I really don't think the corporations are necessarily all Evil Devils out to collude with the NSA and do all sorts of nasty things with the data of individuals.

They're successful financially but surely this doesn't automatically mean they have no conscience.

Call me gullible if you wish (given the PRISM leak it'd be fair) but I do actually relatively trust them, and believe that they were probably just as horrified to discover that the NSA had manipulated whoever they managed to manipulate (some engineers most likely) and tightened things up accordingly.
There's always this idea that the more successful a company is, the more Pure Evil they are and basically out to be as scummy as they possibly can. But short of the PRISM thing (which again I personally suspect was probably more a case of the NSA bullying some engineers than them colluding with C-levels) I've not seen much to suggest that Apple are actually evil and out to eat your children. I really can't help wondering if these levels of cynicism are all that good for your mental health - it sucks assuming that everyone is out to get you.

I don't outright 100% trust them of course because that would be silly, which is why I said "relatively". But the relativity between Apple and Google in terms of respecting privacy is a chasm of epic proportions, IMO. Google's C-levels say things like "privacy is dead" and "if you have something to hide you shouldn't be doing it".

There's a huge difference, and it actually IS a very good advantage for them to market - I've been deciding whether to switch back to iOS for my next tablet, and this statement has been enough to seal it.

Mine says: "Your browser fingerprint appears to be unique among the 4,310,202 tested so far."

Oh bugger indeed.

But seriously it's always been like that whenever I've tried it - even without the huge fingerprinting effect of the browser plugin reporting (I tried it with a completely fresh OS installation), in many cases just the combination of user agent and screen size - both reported in the HTTP headers - is unique. You might possibly blend in using some version of IE on Windows 7 on a 1024x768 or 1080p display, if you're lucky. There's been some discussion around making User-agent a bit less specific http://www.wilderssecurity.com...

Also quite interesting is that if you block as much as possible with something like noscript (which I found rather impractical to use, incidentally - CDNs are a genius idea when it comes to tracking people as it's easy to just get fed up of deciding whether you want each site to work properly and have the fonts required to display menus properly etc and just unblock all the CDNs - in the end I figured I might as well just remove noscript) then you're in a highly privacy conscious minority and therefore potentially even more unique. Sort of a black hole.

Or at least, English lagers..

I see, thanks for your input on it. I feel terribly ignorant and no doubt come across as such, but hey, better to learn and get ideas and inputs. Being of the internet sort I come across depressed folks quite a bit, and every little helps.
There's probably not a huge amount that someone like me can do, but want to help somehow.