That's why the US has the fifth amendment (and why a right against self-incrimination is a good idea in general).

Please elaborate on how this is a good thing, because I'm really confused about it. To me it sounds like, the police finally found a way to identify a murderer, but then this 5th amendment thingy comes in and it gets thrown out on a technicality. What's good about that?

I've read the Wikipedia entry about the self-incrimination aspect of it, to prevent confessions obtained under torture for example. But that's a far cry from what we have in this case.

People still use Symbian?!

Yes. The latest Asha line of models from Nokia is quite good. They've put good build quality and decent features into ~100 EUR devices. They've also mixed in features from other kinds of phones, such as QWERTY physical keyboards and Exchange support from business phones, or touch screens and Youtube video playback from smartphones. The screen resolutions are crappy, but it's suprising how well a small package of features can satisfy a casual user. And the S40 app support is also suprisingly solid.

To give you an example, I've asked a friend who has an Asha 302, here's what they do with it off the top of my head: web browsing with Opera Mini (mostly feed/news reading, checking forecast, Googling or Wikipedia); Exchange sync (email, calendar, contacts) for work; email support for popular providers (Yahoo, Google) as well as custom accounts (including stuff like secure IMAP etc.); Google Maps, Skype, Facebook, Shazam, YouTube; data-texting with Skype, Viber or WhatsApp; snapping pics and video (crappy quality, but bearable); music player and FM radio; apparently there's also MobiPocket (ebook reader) available for S40. She also has some obscure little S40 games she's been carrying around for years from phone to phone.

And of course it's 90% about talking and texting on the phone, all the above is only the other 10%. I guess that's what makes the difference. Some people want the phone to be just a phone, mostly.

If it's feasible to make money on a video game with a free engine and proprietary data, then why aren't there more popular video games built on engines that have been free from day one?

Not sure what you're asking, the first part of this question is completely disconnected from the second. And they both completely disregard what I've said above.

It doesn't matter if the code or the data is open or not. What matters is whether the hardware will cooperate to let you reverse engineer it.

As for Hollywood and game companies, they're not exactly poster children for moving with the times and waking up to the realities of technology.

Ah, but we should also point out that closed software on open hardware does little to achieve the above restrictions or protection of data. As long as the user has access to the underlaying machine they can still access the raw form of the program and the data. It's harder than having clear-text source code and unobfuscated data, sure, but it's doable.

The only environment in which closed-source code works is putting it on locked-down hardware, a "black box" of sorts with no external clue as to what's going on inside. You can sell such boxes to users (game consoles, media players) or you can keep them at your place and just rent the use of them remotely (web servers).

(if you're selling individual units to the users) and create a "black box" of sorts with no external clue as to how it works; or putting it on hardware you own and control fully, and just open the interface to the user (Web servers) -- which is pretty much the same as the previous, except you also keep the black box and just sell the use of it.

But if the code is always in a locked-down black box I don't see that it even matters anymore if it's "open" or "close".

Source code being open or close is not really the point, it's about whether the hardware is open or closed.

The only reason I can see for hating Metro (besides the "walled garden" thing, which is a MAJOR turn-off)[...]

I'm very curious: do you see Linux as a walled garden as well?

Serious question, no trolling. I get the impression you're a long time Windows user and I'm a mainly Linux user nowadays, for years now. Technically, Linux distros also use "app stores" (they just call them package repositories). The one major difference would be that on Linux you can always add another "app store" quite easily.

So, back to the question: would this make a casual user of Linux also see it as a "walled garden"? Conversely, if Microsoft allowed you to add other app stores, would you stop feeling walled? Are there other factors contributing to this?

While Unity 2D may have been dropped, Ubuntu Precise (which is as you probably know a LTS) offers the "Gnome Classic (no effects)" option, which uses Metacity and no Compiz (install gnome-session-fallback). There are some small differences from older "pure" Gnome 2 (and there are plenty of tutorials on the web describing how to close the gap) but I haven't found anything critical, overall it's close enough to the Gnome 2 experience.

I suppose it depends how you look at it. Facebook has done work that advanced the state of certain technologies, such as NoSQL, high availability, global distributed services. It put social networks on the map more than ever before, and has raised awareness of online privacy. Facebook may be evil, but I'd say it was a necessary evil.

You're right, but how difficult do you think it is to "prove" marriage? Marriage licenses in the US can be very casual, basically they're just a piece of paper. If a woman shows up with such a (forged) piece of paper and a random priest swearing "yeah, I married you two back in '67 in Vegas, I remember you were drunk as shit", you're screwed.

There's practically no way you can prove they're lying, and the US law recognizes this as a legal marriage, without the requirement that it was recorded in an official registry. Whereas in other countries (most of Europe), no marriage is valid without it being recorded in the centralized national registry. Licenses are just pieces of paper, they can be lost or reissued, but the record in the registry is either there or it isn't.

In countries which implement ID cards, just knowing a person's unique ID number doesn't help a bad guy. In fact we freely give out those numbers when shopping when we need an invoice for accounting purposes, at the doctor's, for civil registry purposes (recording of marriages, children etc.), at the bank and so on. The number is just a convenient method of tracking a person in the records.

But don't confuse the number with [i]proving your identity[/i]: you have to present the card in person (it's a picture ID card); people are protective of their ID card; the cards have safety elements which make forgery very hard; there are automated verification machines (used mostly by banks and country border routine checks) which scan a card and respond back within seconds if it's valid.

So yes, identity theft is practically unheard of in Europe, in the sense it's used in the US. For example, in order to get a loan you have to show up at a bank and request it in person, physically sign a contract and wait (days) to be checked out. An impersonator would have to (a) forge an ID card; (b) forge your signature on a contract; (c) hope no word of this gets back to the actual person during the check-up period. And even if they manage all this, the laws are such that once it's proven it wasn't you, you're completely off the hook.

Phonebooks were generally only easily available in the area you lived in and not accessable by Vlad in Minsk who wants to collect as much data as he can on you to impersonate you to a bank. Not only that , but once data is on a computer a lot of things can be automated.

So if I get this right, your solution to the fact that the US has a major identity theft problem is "would everybody be so kind and ignore it", or perhaps "bad guys, please don't use computers"? I'm afraid it may not work very well.

I'm not even sure what's with the American paranoia against unique ID cards. It's not like not having them grants you any anonimity. If anybody (including your .gov) wants to find stuff out about you, they do. You already have unique social numbers, so all the worse parts of being uniquely identifiable in a centralized database are already happening. You're just missing out on all the good parts, such as limiting identity theft, or a comprehensive civil registry. I mean, it's ridiculous that in the US you can't really prove you've never been married.

You probably don't remember this, but when you first started using the Facebook application on your phone you had to confirm your phone number. You probably got a text with a code you had to enter or something like that.

You can remove the number, as you noticed, but I'd be really skeptical whether they actually remove it. I suspect they don't, since it's a great way of tracking people across multiple accounts. As you experienced yourself, people often forget that they made Facebook aware of their personal phone number at some point in time.

Consider for example the case of someone who becomes more privacy-aware, closes their initial FB account then later opens another when where he is more guarded about who he friends and what he publishes. And he thinks he's leaving less of an online footprint... when in reality I bet FB is tying it all in with his previous account.

that's when I started to feel maybe it's time for some civil disobedience.

Alright, but remember that civil disobedience also means you accept the punishment if you're caught, in order to make a stand and expose an unfair law.

If you break the law but expect to go unpunished then it's not civil disobedience, it's just freeloading.

In additions, drivers are always held responsible in accidents invoolving bicycles.

No, they aren't. The strict liability law you are referring to is about civil liability, not criminal liability. The police will determine who is at fault and will fine/prosecute whoever it was, including the cyclist. The strict liability is mainly about insurance; there is indeed a default assumption there that the driver is at fault, but only until the driver can prove (usually with the help of the Police) that it was not his/her fault.

Do not rely on this law to protect you be an asshole cyclist because it will NOT help.

You haven't understood what "fault" means. It's called "strict liability". A lot of people (even Dutch) assume that it's some kind of very powerful law that protects cyclists. They are wrong.

1. It's not a criminal liability, only civil liability. It's mainly for insurance ie. the driver is cut access to insurance coverage when they hit a cyclist until they prove they couldn't have prevented it. It has nothing to do with legal prosecution.

2. Even if it was about criminal liability, it's debatable whether it would be a deterrent to driving dangerously. There are punishments in place for all kinds of activities, they haven't eliminated those activities.

Read more here.

Proper instructions are key to making roads safe.

There are no special instructions for drivers in Copenhagen or Amsterdam. The big secret is: physical separation of bike routes. The bike lanes are spacious and always very well delimited from both car traffic and pedestrian traffic. Mixing of bike traffic and car or pedestrian traffic is reduced as much as possible. Where they intersect there are of course traffic lights. That's all. The rest follows naturally; drivers, cyclists and pedestrians all do their own thing on their own dedicated lanes.