Right. That's why they keep bringing it back again and again until it passes. All those phone calls really got their attention.

Oh, sure, that'll work. Those nice senators are always SO ready to listen to people's phone calls. I'm sure they just sit around all day hoping that someone will call them and tell them what to do, because they just get so much pleasure out of serving the people. I mean, they just put so MUCH importance on the will of the people. Guess that's why their approval rating is so gosh-darn high.

Neither do I, IMHO the state doesn't really have any business forcing the owner to do anything. The idea was to make a point; there's no way the state would agree to independent oversight of their inspection practices since they don't give a flying #*&$ about safety; it's about revenue.

Here's a proposal for a minor change in the legislation. If this law is all about protecting the consu--I mean citizen, and limiting abuses of the inspectors, providing an accurate record, etc, then instead of the inspectors wearing a recording device, how about requiring those being inspected to wear them instead? Same results, right? Surely the state inspectors won't have ANY problem whatsoever being recorded doing their jobs - if everything's so above board, then they have nothing to fear.

Meaningless posturing. The UN is utterly powerless against the NSA and its whims. This resolution carries about as much weight as a post on Slashdot critisizing it.

No argument with any of that, and great points re: NSA's deceit and the fact if Snowden could make off with such a database, it was likely child's play for most governments with an interest in it. However, expecting Apple to actually follow through with installing privacy controls like what you've described is probably the height of foolish optimism. I'm perfectly comfortable taking the matter into my own hands, hence the destruction or careful blocking of the camera.

I'm not an electronics engineer, but I dunno. That seems a little harsh on apple; the camera and led could have different power sources for any one of many innocuous reasons. That said, if you're paranoid (like me), a nail and jeweler's hammer will make quick work of the camera, and then power sources don't matter much. If you don't want to damage it permanently, some electrical tape works great too.

That's more or less where I was going with that line of thought - even if not truly a "hostile environment," at least enough that finding people to take the job is pretty difficult - or perhaps enough that the postal service doesn't think it's funny that they're delivering mountains of mail to Mr and Mrs C*********g F*******s at a couple hundred different addresses.

And that's why we use a VPN/some-other-obfuscation-tool. While you're at it, unsubscribe a few (hundred) other random addresses. Impossible to prove it was you, and you have the added bonus of knowing you further hurt their intrusive marketing campaign.

So just visit their website and lie about everything. Make the information offensive, even, or obviously false (all except the address, I guess, which they have to have). 99% of the mail I get is junk mail anyway, so much so that I rarely look at it and just use automatically it for fire starter, animal bedding, etc.

Never give up privacy, even under duress. When this kind of thing happens, meet them on a level playing field and corrupt their database with junk info.

Yep, don't care. They lost me 2 years ago and short of their entire executive team kissing my bare ass on national TV, there's no way in hell I'm ever going back. Doing business with them was exactly like being raped.

No, I seriously doubt the government is going to give up tax revenue. The merchant is still going to pay 13 cents on that .99 purchase. The merchant will lose 2c. Or, as is more likely, they'll raise their prices accordingly; if they charge $1.01 for it, it'll get rounded up to $1.15.

This. This is exactly why 99% of code written under corporate auspices sucks major ass. Try getting a Director/VP/C-suite to understand why unmaintainable, shitty code sucks and hurts the business. Believe me, I've tried. Maybe 1 in 100 understands. The rest have the same response: "we met the ship date, it works. So what? And by the way, since you can't understand that, you're not an asset to the business. So don't bring me this crap again."

I don't know the answer to that particular debacle, myself - such that I usually just shut up about it and tell the devs working for me that, "yes, you can write shitty code. It will get you a pat on the back from management and a slap in the face by the guys you have to work with every day. Your choice."

Not necessarily; having managed a few dev teams I actually appreciated it when someone would come to me with issues like this (privately, non-confrontationally, without a lot of arrogance, etc - any of those things would probably just make me ignore you). Management isn't telepathic; they can't see every single problem like magic.

That said, if your manager a) doesn't have at least enough understanding of coding best practice to know why the stuff you're bringing him is bad, b) is an arrogant asshole himself, or c) is one of those types that believes the ladder to success is built from the heads of underlings, then yeah - STFU. And start job-hunting.

Yeah, I'm not sure I like this actually. All this really does it put data caps in the hands of the government - doesn't mean they're going away. I'd rather not have them at all, but if they're going to happen I'd rather the providers control them than the FCC.