Yes, because doing something along the lines of "apt-get install kde-full" is such an onerous task that I couldn't even think of using an OS that would force me to do that. :P

Some people see everything in life as being politics, and Slashdot has enough of a population that there will always be a few such people showing up to post on every article/topic, so, yes, every story has to be a political trollfest.

Myself, I find it sad that this one person is being singled out for discussion while 1799 equally worthy human beings are being ignored and forgotten because they weren't "in tech."

Ah. I get it. You're not allowed to notice how Apple is ripping everyone off unless you buy Apple products and have yourself been ripped off.

Fuck you fanbois.

The EU is holding Google to task on competition issues. They've done the same to Microsoft in the past.

Every company doing business with Canadians is required to follow Canada's CANSPAM permission-collection process for sending business emails.

Google had to bend over on European privacy laws.

Companies are required to obey the law where their customers are. No amount of whining and bleating by "cloud providers" from the US or elsewhere is going to change that.

Hell, even the USG is demanding that Microsoft services hosted in Ireland be subject to US law for US customers.

And so it should be. It is the responsibility of a corporation to obey the law in the consumer market and in it's home/server nation.

I mean, seriously, are you trying to tell me that CloudFlare should be exempt from following UK law when servicing UK customers?

Give your head a serious fucking shake, man. The only companies even trying to fight that regimen any more are piracy sites and smaller American companies that claim they have a "moral obligation" to "fight for freedom" or that it's "too expensive" to meet the needs of their customer's legal systems. If it's too damned "expensive" to service a market legally, then you have NO business expecting to serve those customers at all.

Bullshit. When you do business in a country, you are bound by their laws.

Open your fucking eyes -- every nation on this fucking planet is insisting on that except the god damned united jackboots of 'murika.

Sad to say, but my Ubuntu 14.04.2 box crashes on X-Server issues at least once a week, while my Windows 7 laptop only gets rebooted for the monthly Tuesday updates. That didn't used to be the case, but times, they have changed.

Gee, I didn't know you had to own something in order to test drive it in order to decide whether you like it, or to hear from friends and relatives about their experience with their devices.

Shame on me. Not spending thousands upon thousands of dollars buying each and every device so I can test it out personally.

:P :P :P

Heh. Actually, I hate all smart phones equally. I have absolutely no desire for a digital leash and tracking system. If I'm not home, leave a message. Rather than looking up restaurants on a phone, I decide where I'm going to eat before I leave the house and (shock of shocks!) look up directions on how to get there before I start travelling.

For someone who has no computer at home, I can understand the appeal of combining phone/internet/music player/camera rather than buying separate devices, but if you've already got those devices, there isn't much benefit to a "smart" phone.

Gee, even if you pay a complement to Apple about their marketing campaign you get modded down by the fanbois... :P :P :P *LMAO*

Android has always been the superior technology. Why else do you think it has more global market share than Apple could ever dream about?

Apple's products are fanboi toys that put style over substance, brand recognition over quality, and which rely on artificially inflated prices to maintain the illusion of being "better quality."

There is nothing about any Apple product I have ever seen that justifies the price. It's just one big, grand fleecing of a gullible public by the best marketing campaign known to mankind.

As a citizen of the world and not the US, it disturbs me greatly that US companies insist on providing services that are illegal to other countries without performing the due-diligence of geo-blocking nations that have deemed those services illegal, forcing them to sweep up multiple domains through crude IP blocking approaches.

If you wouldn't be allowed to run a business/service from within a nation, why should you be allowed to do so by simply hosting it somewhere else? Your "service" is an illegal immigrant working without proper paperwork or meeting visa requirements, or even the basic tenets of legality in the customer nation.

But, hey, why should I expect an American to understand that they DO NOT RULE THE WORLD!?!?!?!

WTF are you on about?

CloudFlare should be blocking access to the services based on the querying IP range, the same way that other sites perform GeoBlocking. It is the responsiblity of ANY company to comply with the law where they are servicing a customer base. Just because CloudFlare isn't a UK company doesn't mean it isn't to subject to UK law when servicing clients from that part of the world.

And if the service in question is deemed illegal, they have to be dropped or blocked. Seeing as CloudFlare appears too god damned lazy to bother with geo-blocking, they should be dropping the customer providing the service.

Period.

Only the fucking Americans think their law applies to the whole world.

Oh, I know Facebook bought them out. Which leaves me wondering *why* someone would try to "pump" the stock.

I mean, seriously, what's the point of crying out "it could still happen!" when everyone is saying it's unlikely at best?

*shrug* Maybe the analyst is a hard-core gamer with a bad case of wishful thinking.

Kind of like the "Duke Nuke'em Forever" fans were. :P

They could always provide server-side blocking so that the ISPs in the restricting country (UK in this case) couldn't access the blocked service.

The only reason broad and far-reaching service blocks are happening is that CloudFlare refuses to co-operate with the UK on the issue, forcing them to do the blocking at the ISP level.

Or are you saying that one should be free to provide illegal services to a nation over their own objections purely for one's own profit and convenience?

Cloud providers are not at the sole behest of the hosting nation's laws -- they have to consider where the customers of those services are as well. ONLY AMERICANS THINK OTHERWISE.