I'm not talking about glasses uploading automatically. I'm talking about them using remote storage on Google servers for anything that they shoot, which is already an option on Android, and will surely be even more important on Glass, even more so if we suppose that the glasses won't have the computing power and storage capacity required for realtime image processing which is going to be an important application for that kind of device.

A dorky headpiece that could soon be worn by millions of people, continuously taking billions of high resolution photos and video clips with precise date/time/gps locations, and sending all of that data to a single commercial entity whose business is to harvest and process personal data, with a track record of privacy stumbles, an extremely high computational capacity and already knowing lots of details about millions of persons including faces, names, email and street address, whole phone books, geographic locations.

Fire your lawyers then. In Italy you can fire people you no longer need, it's called "justified objective reason", and it applies in cases of crisis, downsizing, restructuring, or ceased utility of the job position in general.

Where the hell did I say that? I didn't even qualify the fact as a “problem”, that's just how those things are designed to work. And why should BWR designs be “bad”? They’ve been used successfully for decades.

We’ll be able to discuss that when molten salt reactors exist on the market.

It depends on the design. The turbines of BWRs do become radioactive and must be properly disposed of.

I'm not against GMOs per se: the hand of man has been improving the unkind nature since the dawn of the times. I know that much of the fruit we have been eating for centuries is "genetically engineered" somehow, that lemons don't grow from lemon seeds.
However, saying that Europe needs genetically engineered crops is hyperbolic at best.

I frequently hear tales of GMOs saving the world and whatnot. But when I ask for a scientific measurement of their effect, all I get is studies - often sponsored by GMO proposers themselves - showing that, in developed countries (as Europe is), they can lead to modest increments in yeld (in the order of magnitude of 10% over ten years), and sometimes they don't (e.g. in Australia).

I can't talk about what happens in the vasty plains of Germany, but here on the terraced slopes of southern Europe tons of fruits are left to rot on the branches because picking them up would cost more than you'd earn by selling them (also because of the european subsidies which transfer money to latifondists no matter what they do with their land), and still no hungry mobs are plundering those fields. We can't compete with China on growing cheaper rice, no matter what seeds we use. What we can do is to promote our centuries-old cultivars, and the traditional foods based on them, and sell them for a premium because they don't taste like shit.

You'll forgive my diffidence, but in the latest years, every single time we've been told to drop a time-honoured habit of us in order to copy some other country's recipe for success, it ended up in grief and hunger (this one scientifically measured) for us. Timeo multinationals et dona ferentes.

Do you mean that AAPL is really worth more than Belgium?

First of all, we can make a distinction between security fixes and software upgrades in general. The former don't usually require new drivers.

Then, as I said, none of the reasons you exposed are technical. You've just described the state of the things as it is now, because of disinterest, laziness or intention to control: for example, Google forking stuff instead of working with upstream, manufacturers likewise maintaining their own buggy kernels with secret sauce and leaving them to bitrot as soon as their new SOCs are out, carriers ignoring patches already provided by Google and the manufactureres because they couldn't care less, or delaying them for years just to apply their customizations to the new firmware.

Carriers are public concessionaries. Ask them to provide the customers with secure phones or, if they're not able to, to leave the public spectrum to someone else who claims to be, and see how the supposedly technical reasons vanish quickly all over the chain from carriers up to Google.

By the way, Linux on ARM has flattened device tree support. Discovering devices is the last of the problems now.

Current smartphones are computers and Google / manufacturers / carriers should enable them to be patched or upgraded as one would expect of a computer. There is no strictly technical reason if things don't work this way already - only disinterest, laziness or desire to control. If regulation can push the three to behave, to me it'd be welcome.

However, I wouldn't know exactly what the practical terms of such regulation could be. They certainly can't force manufacturers to support obsolete hardware forever. Perhaps they could prescribe a minimum timespan of guaranteed security fixes.

Truth?

Who cares about his motivation? He's done a right thing and now he risks his life, as if he lived in Iran.

And what's the difference? They're words of the very same kind that we use to hear when, say, trade agreements put blue collars to compete against slaves in developing countries, effectively forcing them to accept the same working conditions or, more realistically, lose their jobs.

I do believe that competition is good and that its absence leads to disaster. However, after competition has done its thing, people must be able to find a job allowing them to live with dignity: if that doesn't happen, then something's wrong. In the case of skilled workers, “dignity” includes getting back what they've spent to build their competences.

What I wanted to deprecate with my post is the attitude of people who happen to be more or less shielded from the ugly head of competition and then shrug, or even pontificate, in front of the misfortune of those who don't share the same privilege.

Usually, when I read /., I find a lot of people praising unbounded capitalism, the invisible hand, criticising unions because they've destroyed Detroit / they keep bad teachers from being fired / they forced Apple to resort to sweatshops in China.

But when it's turn for the invisible hand to slap the kind of people who usually post here, the comments have a much different tone and the proposals push in another direction.

How did that Google guy say? Perhaps we'd better start running, for the robots have already started.

When we talk about the company's "privacy efforts", we're talking about them fighting privacy?

Encryption standards are being specifically excluded by the EME proposers because they're not in their interest. It's not a first step, it's a final one. Read for yourself W3C's plublic html mailing list archives to hear directly from the protagonists who wants to do what.