Opt-out is a pathetic concession. Most people don't even know they're being tracked and of those only a small fraction would bother to opt out. I would not be surprised that even with the option 99% of people are still tracked. It's probably why Verizon did it - a sop to those complaining without materially affecting their bottom line.

This is the sort of thing that should be covered by privacy law. This would be the case in Europe where data protection laws would require explicit consent and services would have to be opt-in, not opt-out.

It's FAR harder to block a magnet link. When you click a magnet link it doesn't resolve to an HTTP request - instead your bittorrent client launches (or you paste the link into it) and it does a distributed hash table lookup to find the content. This can be encrypted so the ISP isn't in a position to block it even if they were to sniff your traffic.

They can't even block the site which provided you with the link because there are so many trivial ways to hide it - e.g. writing it as an image, or inserting it client side with some JS, or just encrypting it in an HTTP connect.

Given how popular a search app would be, it's likely that bittorrent clients would integrate with one. e.g. you paste a magnet, check the "web application" box, and perhaps the "keep updated" box and hit download. When the app downloads, the client hosts it through a http port so you can see it from a browser. Magnets are hashes so how the app is kept up to date is certainly an issue and also how it does its search, but neither is an insurmountable one.

The Pirate Bay could reside on the end of a magnet link. It could be a web app that you download and which has distributed search function as a backend. Why exactly does it even need to be a domain that ISPs can block in the first place?

Well they should if they don't want to be on the receiving end of massive fines. It's not like their cab service where they're fighting cities and towns.

Europe has strong and clear-cut data protection laws that require explicit consent and limit the data that may be kept on a person to that needed. If Uber sell or aggregate data without good cause in the EU they'll be digging their own grave.

By which you mean it behaves in a relatively straightforward, least surprising way.

Starwood are a predominantly US chain but they and Uber had better be damned careful not to share info in the EU. It's not illegal for companies in the EU to do it, but they must obtain explicit consent and even then there are limits on the data they can share or aggregate and rules on how the data is managed.

No, and not for reasons for privacy either. They're simply holding onto it because it's more valuable for them to do so - for similar reasons that casinos and supermarket loyalty schemes might - to mine and profit from the information, layer services on top of it and deny that info to competitors.

I remember a few years back attending a conference presentation from some university types trying to convince my company the future of the web was semantic and RDF. I found it hard to take seriously because a) RDF really sucks to read or write, b) it's a pain in the ass to imbue content with semantic information, c) it's largely irrelevant since web engines do a better job anyway.

If someone produce an uber simple semantic language - just plain text - that could be tossed into a page or link and utilised with some popular js library then maybe it might gain traction, particularly if it was a micro dsl for highly specific jobs (e.g. stock quotes). Or if an organisation maintained an enormous repository of documents that had to be categorized and linked in a way for people find them. But beyond that, forget it. And you might as well be pissing into the wind to think anyone would willingly use RDF.

Stop eating so much and exercise more. And at a societal level stop normalizing obesity.

Do they have a "pleasure" model?

The only way they could do it would be to watermark the image or video stream in some fashion so that even if it were muxed with audio or edited that the watermark might survive in the content. Then they could potentially scan videos in some random fashion and flag up any that contain the free licence for review.

It's still incredibly time consuming and potentially people might notice the watermark and generate a lot of bad publicity. I suspect Pixar would just hope that users would pay for the commercial licence if they were making enough money to be able to afford one. $500 isn't a huge amount.

3% does not translate to the number of people who will use your app. And porting an app to another platform is a NON-TRIVIAL task. Even if an app is written with a cross-platform tool (e.g. Cordova, Unity etc.) and relatively small it must still be tested, packaged, signed, uploaded and approved on the other platform and supported. This is a time sink and unless it pays off in terms of revenue it simply isn't worth it.

Which is great if you use Windows 10 and only Windows 10. Not so great if you want to target other versions of Windows, or other operating systems. Sadly, the lowest common denominator for that kind of work is HTML+CSS with some kind of wrapper such as Cordova.

Microsoft is their own worst enemy. They're trying to break into mobile apps and this is now their THIRD set of APIs for doing it. This amount of churn is extremely annoying and frustrating for devs. At least when Google produces new Android APIs they tend to be incremental and where necessary they'll even backport them.

I guess you'd just have to hope that Pixar don't have the time to minutely analyse every single crappy CGI video on YouTube to see if any are produced with their free version and are in violation their licence. Chances are that anybody capable of producing a vid worth watching of commercial value wouldn't be using the free tool in the first place.

I didn't say how the questions were asked. With an electronic voting machine there is no reason they couldn't be presented via audio, or braille, and/or text in a range of languages.