criminal:

n
1. (Law) a person charged with and convicted of crime
2. a person who commits crimes for a living

Until he's charged and convicted, he's not a criminal.

I think both stats could be right: people are buying them, and then wiping them to install something useful. It's not the chromebook that's failing...it's chromeOS that people don't want.

Thirded...installing chrUbuntu takes it from a google-leashed mostly-useless toy into a really reasonable, cheap minilaptop. I'm quite happy with mine...as long as it's running linux, not chromeOS.

That list is just companies that trade in financial information (credit scores, loan companies, etc). Notice that google doesn't show up in that list at all, but google *definitely* has information about me (whether I like it or not). So, your list is woefully incomplete. I suspect the full list of companies that collect personal information doesn't exist. That's kinda my point. Is the tacit expectation of this law that people will have to find out (somehow...) which companies *might* have information on them, and then blanket-mail all of them demanding to see their info? That isn't as big a step forward as one might think.

Interesting side problem: how do you know which corporations have data about you? The big companies like Google are known, but there's alot of other data brokers around...how can I demand data from a company I don't know about?

...Added complexity for the lose.

That's the entire point: adding another layer of complexity makes troubleshooting and management harder and more likely to fail in new and surprising ways. Making that new layer different (multicast DNS rather than unicast) does not solve the problem, it just moves it somewhere else. This is not better.

I have no problem with servers *using* multcast DNS, dynamic DNS, etc. I have a problem with *relying* on DNS as the only way to connect to a server. DNS fails. So does multicast DNS, and dynamic DNS. In each of those cases I should still be able to connect to my servers.

One good reason why *servers* shouldn't be using DynamicDNS? I'll give you two.

First scenario: your server isn't responding. How do you tell the difference between a failure of the server itself and a Dynamic DNS registration failure? If you don't know it's IPv6 address, how can you tell if its fine, just not registering in DNS properly? Heck, if it's not registering properly, how do you find it at all?

Or, more fun: the server reboots & ends up with a different dynamic IPv6 address....even if it registers the new address to its name properly, clients don't always honor DNS cache times, and will keep trying the old address for a while. You've now created an outage for no good reason.

If you said that desktops don't need static DNS, I'd agree with you completely. But making server infrastructure totally reliant on a middle layer is asking for trouble...things'll work fine until you have a problem & need to troubleshoot. Then your reliance on an external system will bite you in the ass.

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!)