It's a tight race in douche-baggery between Oracle and Apple, but I think Apple has the upper hand in useless patents.

It's especially amazing since Apple is constantly trying to put them out of business.

I'd quite easily pay them a subscription fee to get updates. I'm back on a Nexus device, but I miss a lot of the CM features. It really is quite amazing.

That is quite dick-ish. Maybe they really are copying Apple.

Their research is there to support the Canadian people that pay their salaries. It should be used for the people, not against them.

Harper seems to have erased your links. The bastard.

Hardware is cheap specifically because it stopped being from IBM in the 80's.

It's not the hardware, despite the ridiculous costs. It's for the 'MIPS' charges on their mainframes.

Very true. Stelvin closures, Plastic corks, glass stoppers, all superior. The really amazing part if all the labour that goes into each real cork. Cut, cleaned, bleached, sorted, the re-sorted, much of it by hand. It's actually amazing that they're so cheap. It really sucks when a bad $0.30 cork ruins a 60$ bottle of wine.

What exactly is evil about not having a public API for Google+? Did they promise one or something?

Every ISP I've ever used has had a "no servers" clause in their TOS. They also don't tend to enforce it, as I generally run SSH, etc. From what I can see, Google is no different other than having what looks like a well funded FUD campaign targeted at them. It's good to keep an eye on them, but I think they get a lot more abuse and a lot less praise than they deserve, compared to pretty much everybody else at least.

With reading TFA, I'm assume their fiber business is being referred to and their blocking 'Servers', which most other ISPs do. If that's the objection, it seems that that rule is only so a subscriber with an unlimited bandwidth plan does not run their own ISP on their connection. It seems quite fair, although there are probably a few other ways to enforce that than the more general ban, which I understand they do not enforce (also like most other ISPs).

I've rarely seen Google approach evil other than some of the push with Google Plus, which I think is at least bordering on it, like embedding 'join Google Plus' function in a YouTube 'play' button.

It's not race, it's culture, and it can be changed. First, people need to stop thinking it's about race and understand that some cultures have very damaging elements to them.

There are people working on 'revocable' biometrics for exactly the reason he's citing here. IBM and a few other have been working on it for some of their fingerprint, face, and iris devices. You can probably dig up some details with a few searches. It is a valid concern, although if the hashes truly do not leave the device, I'm not sure it's a concern here.

Love your sig, by the way. I'd also add "buggy", in that it frequently doesn't behave as intended.