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.

Since you keep talking about a "DRM standard" or even a "W3C controlled standard", you haven't read or understood what the EME specification is about. Please do that before commenting.

Sorry, but it's YOU who want to use DRM'd services who must not drag other people into paying the price of your DRM. And by paying the price I mean the added complexity which I will pay to develop, the computational overhead which I will pay with my energy bill, and above all, the platform lockdown which is necessary to support a minimally meaningful DRM subsystem which I will find in the devices I bought. Define all the standards you want, but don't put them into HTML.

Then as a realist you need to know that EME is nothing like that! EME does not specify a single standard, but rather an unified framework allowing binary-only plugins or incompatible binary-only browser implementations dictate what parts of HTML pages you're allowed to save on your PC, depending on who you are, what you're doing and what operating system you're running. In other words, it's just like the Flash plugin without the presentation layer. And unlike Flash, it won't be possible to implement it with open source code.

1) There is no standard for encryption. It's just the plugin scheme which is being standardized, so you WILL have competing standards. Hint: Adobe is one of the proponents of this standard.
2) DRM can't be implemented by open-source applications, and it can be implemented only weakly on open platforms, so content providers will still have the option to tell you "sorry, you can only watch our site on non-jailbroken iPhones or non-rooted Samsung-branded Android phones" - in a standard way.
3) We're not talking about defining a standard for DRM, we're talking about putting DRM in the standard that EVERYONE has to implement in order to talk "the Web". So everyone is burdened by this proposal.

There is no standardization of DRM going on. What is being standardized is just a plugin scheme, like the one allowing Flash to be embedded inside web browsers. Once hackers crack, say, Google's "SecurChrome browser", sites will be able switch to Adobe's "Bolt plugin" or Apple's "iLockedDown platform", or just require customers to upgrade to "SecurChrome 2.1 SP3" which will be using a new encryption method or will implement a new kind of surveillance.

The same thing could be said for the whole internet. Why put "art" on a separate plane? Everything that you can access on the internet has value. Books, news articles, scientific papers, software applications. Yet the internet has been developed to be open, and it was a success.

People who want closed communication channels can already build them, and the onus is on them to specifiy and maintain them outside the open web.

EME will not give "people that prefer to pay for exclusive non-corporate art a standard way to get that", because it doesn't specify a real encryption method. It's just a standard hook allowing portions of web pages to be decrypted by non-standard binary plugins. In fact, besides Google and Apple, it's being proposed by Adobe. They don't want us to get rid of flash, they want, respectively, one more reason to put "works only with Chrome" banners, a way to put the lockdown of flash into iPhones without having to implement the whole plugin, and a way to keep selling binary plugins without having the burden of having to maintain a presentation layer that with the advent of HTML5 has become less attractive.