So, who are those "patriots" in Silicon Valley supposedly willing to give him, again, the keys to all the personal information that they collect?

I can make a guess, by looking at the track record and the lobbying spending of the usual suspects, but still it would be more appropriate, in the name of transparency, to state explicitly whether the companies that we are entrusting with our personal information are a neutral third party or, instead, are patriots. So we can choose.

If you were using coreutils in your nightmare, you would actually have no problem:
(guys, don't do this at home, your rm implementation could differ)
# rm -rf /
rm: it is dangerous to operate recursively on '/'
rm: use --no-preserve-root to override this failsafe
# rm --version
rm (GNU coreutils) 8.23
You wouldn't enjoy such protection if you typed rm -rf /*, however.

Let's start outsourcing your jobs and see if you still have the same point of view.

Looks like my post failed catastrophically at communicating what my point of view is.

Seeing the slashdot crowd, which is pro-capitalism and laissez faire when it's the other people's source of income which is being put in jeopardy, suddendly start to scream in pain because of the fear of a modest reduction of their earnings, is priceless.

What did you say when shiny gadget manufacturer #1 announced that workers had better learn to "run against the robots"? And when shiny gadget manufacturer #2 exploited underage workers in dangerous sweatshops in China? I haven't read any comments about "unions turning the IT sector into another Detroit" on this page, but instead I now learn that government regulation is in "the true spirit of America, because it's againt slavery". If selling stuff in Spain but paying taxes to the British Virgin Islands is not only moraly acceptable, but even a duty, because it's in the interest of the investors, then why would hiring IT developers from abroad be any different?

Capitalism is about making money, and that's it. It's not a philosophy, it won't make your lives better by itself. And rightly so. It is a government's job to ensure that the interests of those making money proceed in harmony with the interests of a nation as a whole; to which extent is matter of debate. When the government turns out as an expression of those with the most money (bi-partisan agreements...) rather than the choice of informed voters, we'd better learn to love the "invisible hand" and wait for its positive effects on the economy to trickle down on us.

Change, however it happens, should make things easier. It's not the case for Windows 8 (and 8.1). I'll tell a random example: a friend of mine had her Internet Explorer links retargeted by an adware to point to an ugly search engine instead of her default home page. Fixing the desktop links was easy: right click / Properties. Fixing the Modern ones? Either it's impossible, or finding how it's done was too hard for me, so in the end I resorted to searching for .lnk files in desktop mode and change them from there. Now that made me feel old...

But Google continuously updates Google Play Services on my phone without me even noticing, let alone the carrier or the device manufacturer approve and test the changes.

In the same way, they could update the WebView as well (hadn't they put it into a read-only file system, digitally signed by the device manufacturer). It's a userspace component with no implications on the phone service or the radio baseband.

In fact, IIRC the WebView can be updated through the market in the newer versions of Android.

The very same things can be said about Islamist terror. Ignorant people are being maneuvered by virtual caliphs who wish to become actual ones. Every human conflict in history can be reduced to a matter of "us vs them", with a "flag" motivation covering the real, always political, one.

I can't speak to Islam, but what I do know is that Christians who use violence to spread their views can not be considered Christians.

The quran, too, prescribes tolerance towards Hebrew and Christians. And christian holy scriptures contain incitements to violence, too:

Howbeit of the cities of these peoples, that the LORD thy God giveth thee for an inheritance, thou shalt save alive nothing that breatheth, but thou shalt utterly destroy them: the Hittite, and the Amorite, the Canaanite, and the Perizzite, the Hivite, and the Jebusite; as the LORD thy God hath commanded thee; that they teach you not to do after all their abominations, which they have done unto their gods, and so ye sin against the LORD your God.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2...

The place was subject to armed surveillance but the terrorists managed to slaughter the cops, too. Your sarcasm is therefore out of place, and anyway, choosing such an occasion for an attempt at gun propaganda shows bad taste and lack of compassion. You're not doing a good service in your cause, IMHO.