At no point is surveillance involuntary on the parts of our clients, or their clients. Also, our main clients are not insurance companies, and this is generally true of most of the telematics industry. And with the exception of insurance on utility vehicles, there are still ethical, legal, and practical limits to deploying for all the clients of a whole insurance company.

This LoJack thing is advertisement. Relax.

"You can cry into your Cheerios"
"so don't get upset"
"Man up and get going."
"stop crying about competition"

Sorry kiddo, I remain unprovoked. But I do want to point out a few misconceptions you seem to be operating under.

First of all, you seem to be under the mistaken impression that I am concerned about our competition. No, by pointing out that we have competitors, I'm saying that there were many such businesses before (and besides) LoJack. LoJack's technology and business model is nothing new, which begs the question of why LoJack (and only LoJack) is suddenly being mentioned. In any other world it would be called spam.

Second, you are peddling the same old tired fallacy about capitalism, that optimal competition yields optimal results. In other words, "better product beats worse product, so make a better product and you'll beat them!". That's horseshit, and you know it. Such systems don't work because competitors can't agree to follow the rules of the framework in which they operate. Perfect example: a company manages to get free advertising on a very popular tech website that ostensibly has certain guidelines against advertising in posts.

Third, we're well within our rights to complain about advertising in Slashdot submissions. We're following the guidelines, and others aren't.

And...ah yes. The "life isn't fair" excuse. The excuse that the intellectually lazy (or personally invested, as case may be) use to rationalize the nonsensical aspects of modern society. Have fun when someone bends or breaks rules/guidelines to get an advantage on you, and don't come here to complain about it.

I co-founded a company that does this, and we have a number of competitors in the same space. Tons of people and companies do this.

Do we get free Slashdot advertising too? No? Stop posting this shit and start posting news.

By that definition, all behavioral disorders are selection biases.

There are a set of concrete neurological and genetic characteristics that constitute psychopathy.

We've reached a sort of socioeconomic metastability wherein large corporations receive little penalty owing to the difficulty required to sue/prosecute them. Too big to fail, but also too big to require obedience to any form of morality.

Terahertz circuitry exists, it's just stupidly expensive to produce and cool, and plus performance isn't just about clock speed. Pipelining and memory access speed play into it a great deal.

This is a good point...the legal protections on American companies are in fact *stronger* than they would be for foreign companies.

Linus Torvalds was born in 1969. The Linux Kernel project began in 1991. He was not 15.

I'm not typically prone to suggesting conspiracies, but we've already seen cartel-like behavior from establishment car manufacturers and dealers as they lobby states to ban direct-from-manufacturer car sales. Considering the bizarre timeline (3 in a couple months, all of a sudden?), the tolerances and safety features surrounding the batteries, and the publicity that all of the victims milked with copious amounts of photos and interviews, could this be an illicit attempt to get Tesla banned?

I actually didn't see any romantic overtones with Petra that didn't occur in the book. Rather it's that Orson Scott Card is very bad at portraying platonic love in a way that doesn't look creepy in our society. It's similar to how Frodo and Sam would look completely homosexual if that relationship was put directly into the movie without any sort of translation.

Petra was meant to be Valentine away from Valentine, a mother or sister figure, I think. That's how it came across in the books and that's how it came across (but a bit too directly, as I said) in the movie. Just my opinion.

You are confusing private contracts with government charters- the two don't necessarily relate. A private entity can give your data to whoever they want so long as you agree to it by accepting the ToS (provided they include the permission in the fine print). It's not wiretapping. You're giving the private entity free reign, and the private entity is giving the government free reign. Yes, it's legal. Yes, it's constitutional (according to current judicial precedent). The Constitution does not ban your ISP from tattling on you to the government as long as you agree to allow them by accepting their ToS. The Constitution only pertains to scenarios where the government wants to search someone or their possessions directly. If you give your possessions over to someone, and you sign a contract with them saying they can give it to the government, then it's not illegal for the government to take it.

I'm obviously not defending this, but this is just the current legal reality. Current common law precedent and overly-permissive DoJ civil law interpretation have conspired to allow this sort of loophole.

Exactly. As much as I love hating on Oracle, the blame lies on the Android Java team for not merging in those updates.

Speaking of that, has anyone presented a solution? I'm an app developer among other things, and I don't want my apps using old ciphers over important network infrastructure.

The provider almost certainly has a clause in their ToS/Contract specifying that they may turn over records for law enforcement purposes. I am going to guess that legally speaking, Basaaly Moalin does not have a leg to stand on.

The state security apparatus views third-party services as a way to circumvent pesky legal red tape like warrants. We need more companies that actually fight gag orders and warrantless data requests.

a rooted Android phone with some sort of toddler app mode or custom ROM.

That's just a way of dodging responsibility for your words and actions. You can offend somebody if you mean offense, and you meant offense. Internet pseudo-anonymity doesn't change the fact that you were acting like an asshole to someone whose motivations you have no idea about (FYI: far from fanboy). Get off your high horse.

Despite my previous response, you still haven't told me how exactly I was being a fanboy. There is precedent for silly passive aggressive swipes against Linus Torvalds on Slashdot...remember the Sarah Sharp incident? And how she and others turned it into Big Bad Aggressive Male Developer vs the Feminist Civility Superheroes despite claiming that it wasn't a "gender issue"? It doesn't take being a fanboy to be frustrated by that sort of politicized nonsense.

The irrelevant inclusion of Torvalds falling to 101st definitely seemed to be on the same lines. It's like mentioning that the ever-controversial Rasmus Lerdorf isn't contributing as much to PHP development in an offhand way that isn't at all relevant to the actual issue of PHP development. Why else would it be said?