The report, from regulator Ofcom, didn't bother to judge if the filters actually work, however.

Because they don't know, and don't care if they work.

This is just another "oh god, we have to protect teh children" things, and there wasn't evidence to make the choice, so they're sure as heck not collecting evidence as to how well it works. This is purely a "we have to do something" kind of response.

Most of us know these things simply do not work, and end up blocking stuff they shouldn't, and missing stuff.

That most people have no interest in being baby sat by a state sponsored filter comes as no surprise.

But, hey, when you're still considered subjects to an archaic monarchy, that's what you get.

Citation needed.

Enron. Bernie Madoff. Asset Backed Paper Commodities. High Frequency Theft.

According to TFA, it does indeed. But far less than Socialism.

Meh. I read the paper as for this specific group of people, coming from a system which was pretty much flawed and unfair, people have decided that "fuck it, why play by the rules" is a perfectly good strategy.

I don't believe that socialism (or capitalism) inherently create more cheating.

I simply believe that once people believe the system is unfair, or the penalty of being a dick is sufficiently small, why bother playing by the rules?

Humans are greedy, self absorbed, and selfish. And any system which favors one set of people over another will lead to people deciding if the system isn't fair, why play by the rules?

It must always be referred to as the SHIELD Tablet.

I vote for El SHIELD.

Marvel's Androids of SHIELD?

Graphite. Is there anything it can't do?

Breast implants?

Targeted ads are a good thing

So says you.

I don't give a shit about someone's ads, targeted or not. I'm not interested in them, and I will block them at every chance I get, as well as the ability to collect enough information to target me.

You want to let them give you targeted ads, fine, no problem. That's your choice.

I trust neither regulators to get this right (because so far their ability to regulate anything technology related is abysmal), nor do I trust the corporations to not try to ignore it.

If they don't have your data, they can't misuse it.

You and I have different versions of the meaning of "problem".

Page don't load because cloudfront is blocked?

No problem, because I don't care.

I have yet to find a single site I need or can't live without that requires it.

If I have nothing to hide, then what reason do you have to spy on me as if I do? With altruism off the table (I am innocent, remember), the only explanation left is malice.

The corollary to "if you have nothing to hide you have nothing to fear" is that everybody has something to hide.

And the people who spy on you are certainly not willing to give you the benefit of the doubt, and they care not a whit about your presumed innocence.

NSA Guy 1: Hey, there's that one guy that shows up as a black hole on the Internet.

Oh, I very much doubt I'm anywhere near as successful as that.

NSA Guy 1: Yeah, he usually doesn't post his slashdot privacy rants until after browsing those "furry" sites for a half hour or so.

Only on weekends or when the wife is out of town.

Seriously though, it's your privacy. Nobody else is gonna protect it for you.

From experience; I would be willing to bet that ANYONE living with scarcity threatening day to day living is willing to cheat, lie, con, finagle and it can get so bad that you steal, mug, burgle,injure and could possibly kill, dependent on circumstances.

And, really, the same thing happens on Wall Street.

Capitalism leads to cheating and malfeasance just as well.

The difference is the rich feel entitled to it, and some people think it's the natural order of things.

Lucky bastards.

But being able to selectively disable it and block certain sites definitely helps.

You don't need to run the scripts for each of the 15 or so trackers in every page, just the ones which actually are needed.

Admittedly, in a few cases, they've made it more or less impossible to do anything unless you allow the 3rd parties.

In that case, the back button works just fine.

And this is why my browsers have as many privacy extensions as I can find.

AddThis is definitely one of the sites which are blocked.

If you let your browser load all of this crap, you are more or less asking for this garbage.

I don't care about your business model, I'm simply not going to allow your crap to load.

Economics is actually very much a science! They make empirical studies of the world, and test them to see if they hold up.

No, they make wooly models about how they believe the economy works, perform math which has terrible assumptions and overly huge margins of error, and pass it off as objective fact.

How you interpret economics is dependent on how you want to believe economics works. It is not an objective science in any sense of the word.

And it never has been.

Increasingly, some economists are starting to understand that a lot of their base assumptions are simply wrong.

Economics is a coarse model of human behavior with a zillion simplifying (and axiomatic) assumptions built into it.

I'm going with "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear".

Which isn't so much a paranoid delusion, as it is a prevalent sentiment.