Dedicated barcode scanners may still be required in places like high rack warehouses where the barcodes are too far away for a camera to reliably pick up. One such place I frequently pick up parts from uses gun-shaped laser scanners so that codes can be scanned from distances up to 10 meters away. Try doing that with your tablet/smart phone camera. Also hardware scanners, in my limited experience, locate and read the codes incredibly fast and reliably. The camera-driven apps I have so far played with on my Android phone take their time and often miss codes if they are recorded at larger angles. They sure have their uses, but in some commercial settings the drawbacks of the camera-driven solutions may well add up to a $ amount in additional work or time that justifies buying hardware scanners.

By the way, the German Max Planck Institute has found in a study (sorry, German only) that data retention does not help with fighting any serious crime - terrorism, homicide, armed robbery or, remarkably, child pornography. It would only be of (limited) use for "petty" crimes of online fraud and for civil cases, mostly in the field of copyright infringement. Not that that was not clear from the start, but it sure is nice to see it spelled out in very clear language by a highly regarded internationally recognised scientific institution.

Oh, you mean the very same EU Data Retention Directive that has been condemned by the EU's own data protection authority, slammed by legal experts and is currently under evaluation within the European Commission and which, after being found in violation of the European Convention on Human Rights in Romania and staggeringly overpowered in Germany, will probably be either restricted so severely it will not matter much anymore or, if enough political pressure can be built in time, completely taken back.

Yeah, looks like a winner to me to introduce into your country now.

Of all the people I have had to brief on new hardware or software those "high power folks" always were the ones who paid the least bit of attention. Well, of course, since whenever they forget which button to press they have a whole army of subordinates to call in and have them get it going for them. You probably could wire a whole fucking Christmas tree lighting to the system and they still would be hard-pressed to notice something happening when it is turned on.

You mean the Matrix movie. Too bad there never were any sequels made.

OSM and GMaps will only ever compete in certain areas of use. What makes OSM great is (for the time being) not its renderer(s) and certainly not its search but the free availability of the underlying data that allows uses way beyond a mere street map. What makes GMaps greats is certainly not the timeliness, accuracy and level of detail of their spatial data but the interconnection with any other information you can google. Which is exactly why I doubt that Google deliberately attacked OSM: People go to Google for the services, not for the map itself. OSM does no offer those services. So what would Google gain from a few minor vandalising edits?

Have you recently used Facebook's interface without any browser extensions to alter it (Social Fixer etc.)? Name one thing there that does not deserve to be hated. Facebook as a website sucks. Hard.

And Microsoft? They still have no half-way sensible package management, installing their current OSes over a network still makes even the most extreme SM session look like wellness and I hate those damned ribbons!

And Google? They are a privacy nightmare. Like any other large company. And most governments.

Is it so irrational? Look at Japan. People there believed in progress, in technology, with an almost religious fervour. Until a disaster laid bare not flaws in the science, mind you, but flaws in the humans profiting off it. The same goes for our European anti-GM sentiments: Do you in all seriousness trust the likes of Monsanto or BASF not to put cash over lives? No matter how sound the science behind GM is, there already are enough reasons to be very mindful of what food I buy. And all of them are down to some greedy fucks trying to skim off just a little bit more. I do not need another layer of adverse interests thrown into the mix.

Is that so? Now that makes me feel so much better about GM food! And here I was thinking they had some grand scheme to control all links in our food chain, all concisely orchestrated by some great mastermind. Instead they just randomly throw genes around and see what happens. Phew, what a relief!

Let me rephrase that as "Kill those who would kill you for invading their homes, establishing oppressive regimes and exploiting your country's resources." Who is defending themselves against whom here, exactly? Pick up a history book and read for yourself which two nations put the vast majority of weapons into the hands of those people the US is now remotely blasting the shit out of, and who trained them and essentially funded them for decades. Hint: It is the same two who on several occasions very nearly turned the whole world into an irradiated waste land over their big heads.

People around the world do not need all that much encouragement to resent and attack the USA and the rest of our Western countries; we have given them more than enough reasons.