... Jack Frost nipping at your nose.

I hate it when people say this. At the risk of feeding a troll...

You might be doing nothing wrong and still have plenty to hide from some people. I don't consider going on vacation wrong but I don't broadcast to the internet that my house will be vacant.

What if you don't support the controlling political party? You might value some anonymity.

Sure if the government, and all the individuals within it that have access to that data, are always perfectly honorable you might never have a problem. Does this seem like a likely situation for you to stake your life or wellbeing on?

Giving that much power to the government is just begging one power hungry corrupt individual to abuse it to gain more power.

+1 for the pun.

" I think Google is way too engineering-driven"

Which is exactly why, as an engineer, I always prefer Google products. This announcement has a cool factor that makes me interested even though it is just another voice recognition gimmick like Siri.

And how do you determine that you don't like a game? Pirate it before buying?

I see your point and agree that either way it would have been more accurate.

It is possible that I may have been reacting to a perceived elitist attitude that it is obvious you don't have. I apologize.

You are making a semantic argument that only makes sense to someone in the marines.

Soldier is a generic term that refers to someone in an army (army here is in the general meaning and not the US Army branch of the military). Marine would be a subset of that. Someone in the marines could be very accurately called a soldier. The only reason someone would object to conflating the terms would be if they were in the US marines and were overly sensitive to the rivalry with the US army.

To use your analogy it's more like a programmer getting offended at being called an IT worker because he is NOT JUST A DBA!

I suppose you could make an argument that since the marines are simply a branch of the navy he should have been called a sailor but that is a bit of a stretch.

Excellent post. Even though I don't necessarily agree with you I appreciate the well thought out perspective.

One criticism: I am tired of hearing the argument used "Car insurance is mandatory in the USA." It is most certainly NOT mandatory. First of all- only liability insurance is mandatory. There is no parallel with health insurance.
Secondly a person doesn't have to drive a car and could live quite legally with no car insurance.

I recommend T-Mobile's prepaid phones.

I use their pay by the minute plan and put $100 on it. The calls are $.10 a minute and don't expire for a year. Even then you can put $5.00 on before the year is out to keep it from expiring.

I use all of 10 minutes a month or so and this is by far the most economical arrangement I have found.

That makes sense to me.

Thanks for the clarification.

While I respect your opinion and enjoy your comments- I disagree with this one.

Honesty is not a two way street for me. I try to be honest in my interactions regardless of the behavior of others.

Or as I would think of it- why would I give a crooked employer the satisfaction of tainting my character?

I don't see anywhere in the GP post where he mentions the law or the fear of punishment from it.

I hope I'm wrong but your post seems to be implying that limited term copyright is somehow dishonest.
This is exactly the misconception that the GP post was trying to correct. He is saying that authors cannot own words and that as a society we have granted them something they don't naturally deserve- a temporary monopoly on that expression of human thought.
You seem to be implying that putting pen to paper means that authors naturally and for all time own that portion of humanity and that anyone who thinks otherwise is dishonest. This point of view (while promoted heavily by media corporations in recent history) is not historically accurate and would undoubtedly harm the whole of human art more than it would help the enriched author's descendants (or publishers).

Pointing out the temporary nature or history of that very-unnatural monopoly by no means implies dishonest intent.

If I misunderstood your post I sincerely apologize.

Not trying to be confrontational but I don't understand your comment and hoped you could explain further.

I took your comment to mean that even though there were better formats available, MP3 became standard because it was open.

My confusion is thus-
1-when MP3 first started being widely used (I started using it extensively in 1997) it was competing with WAV files. There were no better formats.
2- MP3s are only 'open' in the sense that they don't have embedded DRM. It is still a proprietary format with license fees attached.

It's ok. The grandparent was speaking sarcastically and referring the the ./ groupthink on the subject.

Either way- the discussion about Flash on Linux with Adobe as the villain is not unlike Flash on the iPhone with Apple as the villain.
In both cases a corporation is leveraging a proprietary platform to the detriment of some customers.

It doesn't really matter that Flash is terrible and useless- it isn't Apple's place to tell me what I can or can't do with *my* phone. I may be an outlier but I won't be a customer as long as Apple behaves like they maintain some sort of ownership over their customer's possessions.

This is some guys blog and even the comments point out that he is wrong and it isn't reproducible.

But- I suppose nonsense posts still get the Google haters and Google apologists such as myself to view the ads.
Well done Slashdot!