> If I run a website, I'm not allowed to control or limit what comments and content other people put on it?

Of course you are, but only if you actually want to. If the government tells you to control it or else they'll drag you through audits/courts/etc until you do then that's a problem.

Granted, said government in this case is the Chinese, so I'm not surprised the case was thrown out but I can understand why it was brought.

Sure content providers may not always know what's going on, but they are most certainly not so out of touch as to think that ripping steams is a real concern. Well, maybe in so far as an end user tool to save the stream might be a threat, but realistically DVD and BR are easily rippable and better quality so I doubt the concern is that great.

Ridiculously high is right.... 11 nines uptime works out to be less than a millisecond per year. At that level if you're going to need to specify allowable ping times.

In reality, Google only offers 99.9% per month (99% for "reduced availability", I'm not sure what these prices are for) and the value of the guarantee is pathetic: they credit (not even refund) you a maximum of half your bill that month if availability is =95%. They could be down a full day and only knock 25% of you bill next month. That can barely be considered an SLA.

Also, given that consumer internet is 100% (to be generous!) you're basically guaranteed better uptime in the common case (accessing your data at home) storing it locally. If you're hosting via, say, ownCloud for use by your phone then, sure, Google Drive may have better uptime.

Anyways, given the premium over a hard drive as the parent pointed out, you just buy (and power) two and run as RAID0. You could even buy a spare or two which could be used as a backup until one of the primaries failed.

Agreed.

Regardless of whether or not 20TB is hording / excessive / inefficient, what it almost certainly is is replaceable. Let's face it, you aren't CERN, most of you data is probably media that you can reacquire with relative ease. It's not being stored because it's irreplaceable it's being stored because it's convenient. A RAID isn't too bad, but add in managing backups and where has that convenience gone? If it costs $10+/month to backup your ripped/downloaded movies, why not just sign up for Netflix?

Just make a list of all the replaceable data (e.g. videos you have the original disc for) you have and then buy an external hard disk / Blurays to back up the rest. If you lose your RAID, well, it'll be annoying to rebuild, but you built it once... (Besides, I doubt you could restore 20TB over residential internet less time!)

Temporarily disabling cell towers is completely different from permanently disabling phones. In one case a phone will work the next day or in the next town or as a music player. In the other, you're out a couple hundred bucks and all the data you had on it.

YouTube doesn't block videos in the US containing copyrighted music. Instead, it adds ads to the video and a little "buy it on iTunes" (or whatever) link. I'd presume that some of the ad dollars are kicked back to the MPAA or other relevant racket organization in addition to the free advertising 'buy' link as payment use of the music.

Given that apparently Grooveshark pulled out of Germany because of GEMA's fees, I imagine that YouTube is encountering the same issue: GEMA wants too much money per view than YouTube can afford to pay. (About 25 cents/view, I gather.)

Would you rather they say "YouTube can't afford to pay GEMA for"? It still doesn't make GEMA look good. Honestly, I think that makes GEMA look even worse. After all, if you do take "grant" to mean "for free", people can still think that it's reasonable (if annoying) for GEMA to not give YouTube their music. Saying "can't afford" makes GEMA look like, frankly, the extortionists they are.

The problem GEMA has, in reality, is that people like YouTube and don't like them and other IP barons. And even worse for them, YouTube seems to have come up with some form of agreement with nearly all the rest of their counterparts. Thus, in a case of YouTube vs GEMA, GEMA will always look bad because that's the bias people are starting with. Even if you just say "YouTube couldn't come to an agreement with GEMA" what's the reaction? "GEMA sucks; why can't they work something out."

> The constitution says that we have the right to own and possess guns

No actually, it doesn't. Rather, it says:
"... the right of the people to keep and bear arms shall not be infringed."

It's a subtle but very important difference. Basically, the constitution says what the government can't do, rather than what the people can. So instead of saying the people can have guns as you claim, it says the government can not stop people from having them. Preventing people from buying, selling, etc. guns would certainly infringe on the people's right to keep and bear arms, so isn't allowed.

Your argument would be akin to saying that the government could imprison you for speech, because being in prison doesn't really limit your ability to speak freely. Or that no police search is unreasonable because it's always reasonable for the police to make sure that you aren't committing any crimes. Or... etc. If your goal is work around the law you can almost always do it while still paying some amount of lip service to it, which is why courts and judges exist.

> Google is most likely saying that they haven't figured out a GOOD way to prevent apps from just exploding when a permission that they expect to have is denied.

That is (or at least was) their excuse with regards to not allowing permission controls. However it was bullshit then and it's even more bullshit now. Not all phones/tablet have GPS and even if they do it can be off. SD cards be be ejected (time was when that was the only bulk storage), tablets don't have phone modules, etc. There are probably a very small number of things guaranteed to be available, your contacts being maybe the only one. I'd hazard that the danger for the model as they had it was that an app might write something to the fake dataset and expect it to be there on the next read. Solvable as this all is, but they aren't trying.

Anyways, it was poorly conceived and poorly implemented and I don't mind it being gone. It ignored app permissions so that it would be active even for apps that requested nothing and made it difficult to identify apps that were actually problematic. More frustrating, it was targeted only at privacy and not security, which I'd think was just as much a concern.

> Personally it doesn't make much sense for an end-user to retroactively deny permissions.

You're assuming a perfect free market where there are infinite apps and you can find one that does exactly what you need and doesn't require any excess permissions. In reality, however, there aren't that many options. Sometimes there's only one: social games, bank, etc and that app requires more permissions than you want to give. Certainly you can go without, but why am I forced to let your app do whatever it wants on my device? Yeah, it's your copyrighted app, but it's not like I'm agreeing to install a GPS in my tablet, turn it on and ensure I have signal. So why can't I simply deny access to the GPS?

Honestly, the ability to revoke permissions would be great for developers too. There is (was?) a unit conversion app out there with two versions. One had currency conversion and needed an internet connection to determine the current rate. The other lacked the currency conversion and the internet permission. If users could revoke permissions or developers could set them as optional it would have made the second version unnecessary. A great deal of apps suffer the same issue. Most permissions are intended to be little niceties: a store wants GPS to find the nearest but could use zip code, an app wants contacts to auto complete but could just fire up the builtin contacts app. So on and so forth. Forcing permissions to be all or nothing forces develops to choose between adding features and appearing like a front for the NSA.

Would you describe it as rolling on the floor howling with laughter?

I liked that the editorializing on the "British" vs "American" pronunciation proclaiming that it should, of course, be pronounced in an "English" manner.

> Human society is not ready to grant intelligent animals sentient or human status.

It's the intelligent animals that aren't ready for "human status" and sentience has nothing to do with it. The natural order of things one of 'strongest makes the rules' and that's true regardless of sentience. Humans, however, decided that constantly struggling for dominance wasn't a very efficient way of doing things and figured that if everyone played nice life could be better. The agreement to 'play nice' is human society and things like rights and freedoms are the benefits to joining in. Humans are still free to opt out and follow the natural order, but as it turns out all of the other humans together are pretty strong and more than capable of exerting dominance, usually by putting the offender in a cage.

In other words, society isn't about sentience or intelligence, it's about agreeing to a social contract. That contract puts restrictions on you beyond the natural order (e.g. you can't just beat someone up because they are weaker than you) but also gives you benefits too (e.g. people stronger than you aren't allow to beat you up). If a human doesn't (criminals) or can't (children) sign up we generally throw it in a cage or keep it as a 'pet' (usually respectively). The same is true for nonhumans, the only real difference is that society is opt-out for humans and (theoretically) opt-in for them.

This wasn't opting it; it was a farce. It's a bunch of humans trying to force some animals into an agreement with the full understanding that the animals don't understand it and will never even try to honor it. The goal basically being to change their label from 'animal' to 'criminal' (I don't think they're even trying for any stage in between) in hopes that the latter will provide some benefit that the former doesn't. If a nonhuman is willing and able to enter into the human social contract, then I honestly think there will be a place for it. Sure there will be xenophobes as there always are, but I think society as a whole would view it as an interesting and worthwhile experiment. Until that time, however, if you want animals to be treated better make that case not some nonsense personhood case.

No, he posted the full text of their response, the relevant part being:

"The advice we have been given is that unfortunately as you accepted the Terms and Conditions on your TV, your concerns would be best directed to the retailer. We understand you feel you should have been made aware of these T's and C's at the point of sale, and for obvious reasons LG are unable to pass comment on their actions."

What they're actually saying is that he agreed to the terms and conditions somehow, and it's the retailer's fault that he wasn't aware what they were / that he agreed to them. So really it's just a fancy way of saying 'our asses are covered beyond what legal action you can afford so go away'.

All well and good except for this:
"Law enforcement requests sometimes require us to preserve Snaps for a time, like when law enforcement is determining whether to issue a search warrant for Snaps"

Which pretty clearly indicates that they will log snaps for the purposes of sharing with the authorities provided the authorities have a warrant when they come to collect the data. I'd say that quite exactly is "preemptively gather[ing] information for the police", though I suppose that depends on how you're defining preemptive (i.e. before the request vs before the court order).

Now, maybe these days that's what passes for good. Often times things are logged and preserved by default, and even handed over without a warrant. However, to make an analogy, this would be like allowing a agent of the police to record your phone or copy your mail with the data being held in escrow until the warrant is signed. I expect that this comes about from the idea that the information is being copied and deleted rather than transferred as something like a letter would be. That probably opens them to valid-enough charge of destruction of evidence if they don't comply with a simple request to retain the data pending a warrant. I'd be curious if that would stick (and very concerned if it did) but regardless it's certainly a nice bit of coercion.

It's really quite bizarre. Nevermind 2 pints is a quart or 4 cups, both of which would carry more intuitive meaning than "2 pints", but they opt to provide an analogy for that when most people have no idea what a cubic foot looks like. I think it's more a comment of how reporting is going to hell than the education system. (After all, there's no evidence that the populace actually needed that 'helpful' comparison.)

Here's a thought, writers, maybe instead of a crap analogy just convert it to something useful. Google and I took less than a minute to establish that 2pint/ft^3 is:

1/2 cup per gallon
(Or a bowl of ramen per two mulch bags worth of Martian soil.)

These days they have ISO 13485. It's a lot like ISO 9001, but drops the more marketing continual improvement and customer feedback and adds additional requirement for creation of requirements, something more-or-less non existent in 9001.

So theoretically, 13485 would require you to recognize risks (e.g. fuzzing) and add mitigation (e.g. not crashing) to your requirements, which would then be tested and all the in a similar matter to 9001. I'd say that as a result it's about as good as can really be expected. The only real other steps would be for the FDA to bring in experts to verify the considered risks and possibly verify the testing, which starts to become unrealistic.

For completeness it's worth mentioning that when it comes to diagnostic software (I believe this started in the last couple years) they also require clinical trials to verify effectiveness somewhat like they do for medicine. Therefore if you write an application that, say, helps determine if someone is concussed (the case which started diagnostic software, IIRC) then you actually have to collect data for concussed and non-concussed people (verified by traditional means) and prove that it can provide a meaningful diagnosis.

The important fine print omitted by the summary (and very nearly the article; way to push the important information to the last third ya damn flamebaiters masquerading as journalists) is that they targeting apps

Now, we'll have to see how it plays out, to be sure. Certainly I think that their interest in targeting apps that interface with medial devices is a little disconcerting because it would make, say, a free/cheap pulse monitor simply impossible. However, they generally allow anything with sufficient (and reasonable) disclaimers (e.g. for research purposes only) so I'm not too concerned yet.

So while I loathe nanny state type policies and don't like everything that the FDA does, I view stuff like this to actually be rather important. Basically, think of it as a proactive enforcement of truth in advertising (vs reactive which requires a lawsuit). If I say my app diagnoses X, the FDA wants to make sure it actually does that. Coupled with the ability for the developer to avoid that by saying 'this is not approved to actually do anything' it makes for a valuable tool for consumer choice.