Having a monopoly is not illegal. Using a monopoly in one area to unfairly distort the market in other areas is illegal. Microsoft's monopoly on the desktop (in the past, don't start with me about right now) was legal. Using that monopoly to give away a product and drive Netscape out of business was not. Google's monopoly on search is legal. Google does not have a monopoly on phone software.

With all that said, if Google gives away wireless, the way they make money back would be interesting. It might be legal if it's something that Verizon or Sprint could also do (data mining user behavior and selling SMS ads based on user behavior, for example). On the other hand, if google pays for it by simply taking money from their search ads & intentionally losing money on free wireless, that would probably be illegal.

Seriously? Think of this from sweden's point of view: The US has not requested him, but Sweden has no idea what the US will do in the future, and does have treaty obligations with the US. Does anybody really expect Sweden to say "yeah, fuck all our treaties with America, we'll protect a guy we think raped a couple of our citizens." Really?

Agreed. I encourage folks to tag this story as "troll" or "badsummary", in the hopes of at least giving people a warning that this summary of full of shit.

I pity your editor.

My personal rants against Unity:
  1) I hate the concept of tearing an application's menus out of the application's windows and putting them on the top bar. I find that very counter-intuitive and confusing. The really frustrating part about that feature is that you can turn it off, but only for the entire box. If I'm sharing a system with a girlfriend/spouse, etc, we now have to agree on how this system does that, rather than being able to do it individually according to our tastes.
  2) Unity seems to assume that all applications will run full-screen, even when I don't want them to. It has a very frustrating feature where any app that launches at greater than (I think) 80% screen size will auto-maximize. I don't want that. I want the windows of an application to stay the size I made them last time, even if that is 85% of the screen real estate. Unity doesn't allow that...it forces full-screen above a certain size, and I couldn't find a way to turn that off.
  3) its performance on multi-screen setups is just weird. The dock auto-minimizing in the middle of the two screens is simply broken...but that's really just a bug that highlights a bigger problem: you can't change the dock's location. It's on the left side of the "primary" screen. Period.

These three together point me to an attitude from Unity that runs counter to what I feel linux is about (choice & control). The cognitive dissonance of that feeling from Unity makes me want to uninstall it as fast as I can. Having the dock (or any other setting) have a *default* of what the Ubuntu team feels works best is fine. Making those settings *mandatory* does nothing but piss me off & makes me want to abandon Unity.

...and they're vulnerable to being hacked (and don't think for a minute that cell phone malware doesn't exist). That's my point.

When my microwave reads email, IMs, and browses the web, I'll update it's OS pretty damn regularly.

(Honey, the popcorn's been hacked again!)

Large group of people stubbornly refuses to act in uniform manner. Film at 11.

It's tied to *a* google account. It doesn't have to be tied to your pre-existing Gmail account, though. When they ask for your gmail account, lie, and make another.

Well, that's an interesting question: how much business *does* a company actually lose by being embarrassed in an event like this? Companies keep getting hacked (Citigroup, Sony, TJmaxx, RSA), but they don't seem to be going out of business because of it, or even taking that much of a financial hit...so I'm beginning to suspect that there isn't that much impact after all.

So, if there's no real financial impact aside from PR and cleanup, why should they bother being secure?

In its defence, this is exactly what the movie jedi did also, so calling it a "jedi bot" is an accurate description.

Just because your customers are morons, that doesn't make fraud okay.