And what happens next week, when the health insurance people jump on the bandwagon? Shall we also not worry about not being able to get healthcare at affordable prices because a disproportionate number of our Facebook friends smoke/drink/sleep around/enjoy high risk sports? After all, you could just die instead of getting treatment, right?

The fact is, modern society often works on the assumption that people can get credit under reasonable conditions. If you want to take a principled stand that credit is unnecessary then you should advocate prohibiting giving credit on commercial terms at all. Of course, if you do it to everyone equally then you'll have to accept the resulting economic collapse as your nation's house prices drop by 75% overnight and a large, useful, skilled section of the labour market becomes mostly unemployable.

Or we could do the sensible thing, by allowing commercial credit arrangements but regulating them to prevent lenders from abusing their disproportionate power such that some borrowers suffer unfairly. As with any other essential industry that gets regulated, the price of playing the game becomes having to play by fair rules.

If we had just "dealt with it" every time those with power abused their position, black people would still be slaves, women would still not have the vote, children would still be down in the mines, and manual labourers would still barely earn enough wages to live while working crazy hours under conditions that would seriously damage their health.

We have a long way to go, even in the first world, in terms of respecting each other as human beings. We aren't going to get much further if we adopt your attitude every time essential services that make society work start taking advantage of asymmetric power relationships with the ultimate goal of making more money no matter what.

Sure you can, as long as you promise to convert it back again perfectly before you commit, so anyone looking at the diffs later doesn't have to wade through 657 whitespace-related changes to spot the one line where you changes some behaviour.

Languages with syntactic whitespace are vulnerable to misrepresentation, but in practice 99% of that misrepresentation happens under exactly one condition: the code is being presented on a web page by someone who either doesn't know basic HTML or uses a crappy CMS that doesn't render proper HTML.

Ironically, that's actually one of my biggest concerns about using Python. IME, the included batteries aren't very good, once you get past the first few parts of the library reference that everyone uses all the time. A lot of the later parts -- things like file and directory manipulation, data formats and compression tools, process control, networking, even some of the date/time functionality -- have elements that are horribly slow, platform-dependent, or simply too bug-ridden to trust in production.

It's unfortunate that package management in Python is such a mess, mostly for historical reasons. There's quite a bit of good stuff on PyPI these days, and if we were starting over, I think we'd do better to limit the standard library to a much smaller set of essential foundations, and to promote the best libraries from outside sources via the standardised package repository and tools.

I don't really want to get into the politics here, but objectively, any private cloud solution where you're storing data and communicating only inside your own network and you can run independent tools to monitor/control data coming in/out is naturally more easily secured than a public cloud solution. As you point out, vendors in the latter case can and do allow data monitoring without your consent, and it's not as if that problem is unique either to Microsoft as a vendor or to security services in the US. If you really are a big enough business that commercial espionage via this route is a credible threat, basically no-one outside your network is a trustworthy vendor in the sense you're talking about.

I'm not sure what any of that had to do with this thread. We're talking about a potential commercial strategy for Microsoft. As a matter of fact, MS have the dominant desktop OS, a substantial portfolio of server OS and back office products that includes all of the essential server applications, and well-established sales channels into most businesses. How does this not make them the best-placed company in the world to promote a private cloud model?

In the sense of having a product or two that are aimed at that market? Sure. In the sense of spending some marketing budget on it? Probably. In the sense of throwing the weight of an 800lb industry gorilla solidly behind it with the goal of shifting the entire market? Not even close.

My take is that with the right person at the helm, private cloud could be Microsoft's iPhone/iPad. It's a big enough potential market to move an entire industry, it's certainly not a new idea and some companies have dipped their toes in the water, but no-one has really done it well yet. I think Microsoft are uniquely well-positioned to attack that market, just as a lot of the hype about external cloud is giving way to some harsh realities, and as the mobile device market is starting to settle down now that much of the market that wants a smartphone or tablet already has one.

Unfortunately for them, a significant number of senior leadership figures at Microsoft who might have been credible candidates have instead left the company in recent years. Conspiracy theories notwithstanding, that limits the talent pool from in-house.

It will be interesting to see whether they can attract someone good from outside. Big tech firms don't seem to have a great track record in that respect lately, though perhaps that perception is partly because we hear about the spectacular failures at places like HP but modest success stories go mostly unreported.

Either way, MS still has an effective monopoly on desktops, a significant presence in business server rooms, a substantial war chest, and a lot of smart people. Someone with a better vision for how to use those assets than "It's like Apple but for people who didn't buy Apple yet" might do well there.

I've suggested previously, even before the post-Snowden cloud/privacy concerns, that Microsoft could be in a very strong position if they swam across the current a little and promoted private clouds. It looks like a much more natural fit for their portfolio and expertise, it plays on competitors' weaknesses, and it plays to their strengths as an established provider on both client and server ends for business. It even gives them a potential way into the mobile market, via consumer-friendly devices with integral BYOD features for those who also want to use them for business but don't want to hand over the root password to corporate sysadmins. Any takers? :-)

Again, I acknowledge that your point is justified and anything simulated is potentially different to reality.

However, for most people in most contexts, good simulations have proven to be reasonably accurate approximations of reality, even in high stress environments such as training airline pilots. They're also the best approximation we've got right now, unless you consider it ethical to test an activity for real when the theory you're testing is that the activity is dangerous.

Given we have hard data showing that a disproportionate number of actual accidents involve mobile device usage, and the consistency of the results from studies that would support a causal relationship, I still maintain that it's reasonable to assume most people can not, in fact, multitask effectively without degrading their driving performance.

I meant my previous post as a figurative "you" referring to your hypothetical distracted driver, rather than "you, personally". Sorry if that wasn't clear.

Sure, and the double-blind point you made is also fair. That said, I've seen multiple studies that did not take the format you mentioned where it's some sort of unusual/challenging course.

For example, the most obvious one I can recall watched people driving a simulator set to represent realistic conditions (i.e., not dramatic, sudden hazards everywhere) and at times the testers would start talking casually with the subject. They monitored general car control and reactions, monitoring things like distance from the vehicle in front, position within the lane, and behaviour approaching lights and reaction time if they started to change.

The results were very obvious correlations between behaviours like drifting too close, drifting out of lane or tendency to go through yellow/red lights, and holding a conversation. In other words, driver behaviour that is well known to increase the risk of having an accident increased during conversation times.

They might also have done some of the sudden panic reaction stuff later, but the interesting part for me was the degradation of basic car control.

The problem is that when you're distracted by a remote conversation, you don't realise that the situation is getting precarious, and therefore you also don't start to compensate, until significantly later than you otherwise would.

As a point of interest, statistically it seems to be about 96-98% can't. It depends on which study you look at. Of the more activity-specific ones I've read, the incidence of people whose driving performance was not significantly impaired while simultaneously carrying on a conversation with a remote party has been around 2-4%.

Some of the studies suggested that the same subjects also tend to exhibit their extraordinary ability to perform multiple simultaneous activities effectively in other contexts. Curiously, so far there seems little evidence of correlation between this ability and other factors we might expect to be relevant, such as other measures of intelligence.

If anyone here is a real psychologist with experience of the field, please feel free to chime in with more concrete data, as the above is just based on some personal research as an interested observer.

If you actually had lawyers in your family, and you had learned anything from them, you would know better than to claim things like "those are real numbers for a simple copyright case" without citing that case properly. You would also know that patents and copyright are completely different legal areas, and that "simple patent case" is pretty much an oxymoron.

Another thing that's easy is claiming your personal views are facts while not giving anything verifiable to back them up, but that also doesn't make a very convincing argument.

If your $275/hour lawyer can't resolve a simple copyright case without spending a year of near full-time work on it, your lawyer isn't worth $275/hour. The essential facts in the case are unlikely to be disputed, so the result is likely to depend on two fundamental questions of law, at least in the US: roughly speaking, can they escape via fair use, and can they escape via the DMCA safe harbor provisions? Even if you litigated it all the way, you should still be done in no more than a few hours of court time + preparation. The situation would be similar in Europe, e.g., considering fair dealing and the EUCD in the UK.

Obviously that might still not be worthwhile if you're talking about a minor case of infringement with little demonstrable actual damage, little expectation of other forms of damages, and a legal system where you wind up paying your own fees even if you win. That's why measures like the DMCA and EUCD provide for lighter weight takedown actions, and put anyone who counters at greater and more explicit risk if they choose to dispute the takedown and litigation follows.

But as you say, tough talk is easy. So is posting random numbers on Slashdot, but it doesn't make a very convincing argument.

(IANAL, if you get legal advice on the Internet you're crazy, etc.)