I think you misunderstand modern marketing techniques, of which she is a famously notable expert.

It is our duty as technical experts to counterract that, to not tell lies. Which leads to awkward situations where a client's social learning is confronted with fact-based expertise. Requiring tact, patience, and some teaching skills if you want a better informed client. Same as when you go to a patent attorney, doctor, mechanic, accountant, or other expert after reading Slashdot discussions about their field.

In the US, there are more than 500 000 new businesses started every year (sole proprieters, limited partnerships, and such). Want to opt out of all the new businesses? Prepare to wind your way through 1300+ opt out forms and procedures every day of the year for the rest of your life. Then there are the 2/3rds of a million corporations that have been around longer than a year. In your free time you can opt out of those; at 1000/day it should only take 2 years with a few weekends off.

Requiring people to opt out is demonstrably insane.

Yeah. Though with repetitive exposure to the opposite, it's weird how easily that fact is forgotten by non-lawyers.

Fix the IP system? Politicians, advertising, many corporations, and now you are actively confusing the public by grouping the 3 terms into "intellectual property." Of which there is no such thing. Owning ideas is impossible, outside of fiction and courtrooms.

Just to expand a little on your excellent post: before a test, pointing out a student's group (e.g. gender, skin shade) in a negative way makes them perform measurably worse. The general term for this is stereotype threat. Creating a bigoted grade standard not only defines bigotry, it creates schools that manufacture evidence for the bigotry. This is an insidious feedback loop. The military-style training of the No Child Left Behind laws is awful, but this Virginia waiver is not an improvement.

Hold up there big thinker! I read where Apple sued Samsung and won, and then Samsung raised prices to Apple. Now you're saying the two aren't necessarily related? That there is more to decision-making than just two actions which media jumped all over? This is not how I prefer my predigested news, but thanks for trying to educate me.

When I make a mistake as an individual, I have to make up the difference, pay fines that are sometimes way more than the difference, get charged higher interest rates for a few years, and watch my credit score plummet. When a business makes a mistake, they pay the difference. Yet another way in which businesses aren't just legal individuals, they're better than real people.

Your comment represents well the very point you are criticizing. Talking about the GOP and Bush and politicizing the report, instead of the report's content, i.e. the wealthy getting increasingly richer off the poor. It's weird how you can't see this.

News of document removal comes on Friday, so fewer readers? Check.

People gossiping about removal of document instead of contents? Check.

People blaming republicans, conservatives, FOX News, and general unfairness instead of the rich? Check.

Advertising to elect a president and support staff who will lower taxes the most on the richest real-life gamers the world has ever known? Work in progress, though even a Democrat is a success; so check.

People calling and writing their elected representatives? Not enough to overcome the lobbyists, though that shows occasional signs of change.

Ummm you do know that corporations compare, among many other items, the costs of these 4 things:

1) The costs of doing a workman-like, regulations-following, job of cleaning up.

2) The costs of cleaning up well enough to avoid prosecution.

3) The fines for not cleaning up. Including lobbying, legal fees, and the odds of being prosecuted for not cleaning up.

4) The costs of letting the local buffer corporation go bankrupt while the public pays for clean up.

Not really IP theft because there is no such thing. Ideas are not property. Instead it's a business method based on a lawful falsehood. Let the public pay the costs of developing new ideas, including in universities. A private business then pays for fictional but legal "ownership" of the idea. Then the private business make the profits. In a fair world, the business would give profits back to the public via taxes. In the US part of the world, businesses spend some of the profits on lobbying for reduced taxes.

This sounds plausible, except Microsoft will not fail so much as change, though perhaps with far less profit. Somewhat like Apple, Windows 8 looks like the largest desktop O/S is moving toward the computer as appliance. This suggests two things:

1) A trend to very slowly reduce the popularity of general purpose computers, shifting people to limited-task devices.
2) Year of the Linux desktop jokes aside, we really could be headed toward Linux/BSD as the main traditional desktop O/S. Not because of advertising or popularity, but because it's the only one.

The money and corporate power will be in the appliances. Independent power will be enhanced by individuals with traditional computers. There is no need for this generation to stock up on motherboards, but long-term thinking makes one wonder if that time will come.

Exactly. Typically, XP Service Pack 2 (SP2) was the last usable update for 1 gigabyte machines. SP3 is as reliable as it is bulky, and uses the hard drive as memory a lot unless you have 1.5 gigs or more.

Yes it's a good option to have, but parsing it is difficult. If I don't want ad tracking, I must turn it off, but "on" turns ad tracking off, right? How confusing! While programmers are used to thinking in negatives, mixed with yes/no and true/false, that is not the norm. Compare:

[yes] [no] Allow ad tracking
[off] [on] Limit ad tracking

Both are logical and equivalent, but the first is far easier to comprehend and mark according to your preference. Apple, and other corporate software, likely does this intentionally. Of the small percentage of people who will find this setting, even fewer will mark it correctly. Result? Far more monitoring while getting kudos for providing the option. And that is how marketing experts earn their money.

Curious how opting out is so difficult when opting in is effortless. This seems to me as bordering on self help; and would be done better by sending out a form that required users to choose to give up their rights to a fair trial.