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.

Yes. That doesn't matter - the point still stands. If you take only countries where that isn't the case, you still can't draw a definite line showing that high gun crime is directly linked to gun ownership by the populace - and that still doesn't address the fact that gun deaths in the US are extremely low - low enough that gun death can't even be considered a leading cause of death in the US. Not remotely.

Meant to include the link for accidental deaths for the stats above: http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/fastats/acc-inj.htm

That link also contains data about traffic deaths - 11.2 per 100,000. Still much higher than gun deaths. So cars are far deadlier than guns.

Your data doesn't pan out, boss. Check this out: http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/datablog/2012/jul/22/gun-homicides-ownership-world-list Sort that chart by "Rank by rate of ownership" and you'll see a problem. The US has a relatively high murder rate (compared to 1st-world countries) by firearms, and the US is #1 in gun ownership. But the problem is that Switzerland, Finland, Serbia, and Cyprus are ranked 3, 4, 5 and 6 in gun ownership - and they have very low homicide rates by firearm. The problem that data presents to you argument is that it undeniably demonstrates that gun ownership does not directly affect the murder rate. If it did, you would expect a gradual and more-or-less parallel drop in the murder rate as the gun ownership rates drop as well. But that just isn't the case.

The other interesting point this data makes is the fact that the murder rate by firearms (rate per 100,000 population) is not very high in 1st-world countries. In the US, where the rate is relatively high, less that 3 people are killed each year per 100,000. Cancer, on the other hand, causes 178.7 deaths per 100,000 people in the US ( http://seer.cancer.gov/statfacts/html/all.html ) each year. Accidents or inintentional injuries: 38.4 per 100,000 per year.

I'm not purporting to know what the cause of incidents like Newtown and Aurora is; that's beyond my abilities. But what I can say, based on hard data, is that gun ownership is not a direct cause of gun deaths, and gun deaths in the US are not high enough to warrant this kind of fanatical attention. You want to really cut down on senseless violence? Go after cancer and the other big terminal killers. Guns just aren't that big of a problem.

Every business has a phone. Failing that, most folks in the rural US will be happy to make a call for you (on their landline) if you ask nicely and don't look and smell like a bum. Hitch-hiking is a lost art, but in a real pinch even that might work. If you're not in the rural US (meaning you're in the urban US; I don't know how this works elsewhere), you're near a business, and it's gonna have a phone.

Again I ask, how do you think people pre-1995 did this? Just sat in their cars and starved to death?