Who knew Pichai would emulate Zuckerberg/Cambridge Analytica so readily? I hope the new Alphabet "board" is called Whitewash. You know we're serious when we demand no admission of guilt/malfeasance/evil. Along with the $50M/year for 10 years, justice is well done... As in fully cooked and burnt.

New AVG Privacy Policy -- "We collect non-personal data to make money from our free offerings so we can keep them free, including: Advertising ID associated with your device; Browsing and search history, including meta data; Internet service provider or mobile network you use to connect to our products, and Information regarding other applications you may have on your device and how they are used."

It's not personal. We don't identify you by name, we just follow you around and record every single thing you do, when you do it, where you do it, and if you've a webcam attached, we'll film you while you do it, then sell it to any and everyone who pays.

In other words, we're providing you a "free", self-defending keylogger.

TL;DR: Think PASCAL for critical and wildly complex life-support systems; operating in the Internet age.

Having spent the last 10 years working in healthcare, I cannot overemphasize the ever growing cataclysm-to-be built upon MUMPS. One might then associate MUMPS the language with Mumps the disease (sans vaccine).

Worldwide, most major Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems are fundamentally based on MUMPS. Since the language largely predates all modern programming and system design principles like logic-data abstraction, imagine the mess created when various clinical applications (i.e. apps for pediatrics vs. oncology vs. pharmacy vs. radiology vs. geriatrics vs. etc.) are independently created and loosely cobbled together into a complex system - duplicative data representation and non-deterministic 'macro' processes/procedures are woefully common.

As cited in the Wikipedia MUMPS page, MUMPS is foundational to the largest EHRs (ref. Top 10 [US] EHR vendors by overall market share. In my opinion, this isn't so much because MUMPS is superior in anyway but because there really is 40+ years of codebase out there; much of it still in use today. Consider the US Indian Health Service (IHS) as example. For FY2014, IHS spent a total of $98M for IT. Although recognizing its own RPMS is hopelessly flawed, the agency estimates a capital investment >$150M and 15+ years to transition to newer technology. All the while, they must maintain and operate the current RPMS for ongoing healthcare delivery. Suffice to say and for the foreseeable future, IHS is hopelessly bound to the incumbent RPMS.

Meanwhile, "extensions" to MUMPS continue to proliferate. Since MUMPS heralds from the days of text-only dumb terminals, there is no in-language accommodation for graphical user interfaces and the common controls associated with event driven systems. This has led to many language extensions created for presentation 'wrapping' the underlying MUMPS output. And since MUMPS precedes modern design principles, newly minted programmers, admins and integrators must learn everything "from scratch" and, most often, in defiance/conflict of tenets they have been taught. Tenets and principles developed in response to hard lessons learned over the last 40 years of widespread IT experiences. These issues are exacerbated because those with the greatest experience are largely retired (or soon to be) and there are no significant opportunities for educating younger professionals except through other than "real life" - using live/production systems and actual persons' medical information.

Conspicuously, Kim Jong-un offers no claim on how his Snake Oil affects vascular diseases leading to stroke (Kim Il-sung's demise) or cardiac arrest (Kim Jong-il's killer). If North Koreans (and the world) are lucky, he won't find a cure for those ailments.

And do they go well with my tin-foil hat?

Wow... Posted from mobile. Thumbs are poor typing instruments.

We all should know basic maths, but should developers be expected to know PKI? 10 or even 5 years ago, no. But today, Google and the like are pushing for the entire Interwebs to be secured; primarily with PKI and X.509 types certificates. Pay a bit more, expect a but more. As demand grows, the 'general knowledge' will too.

While this may be an intellectually interesting story, I hardly think we need to consider a 100 year old defunct cartel. I'm far more worried about modern cartels, consider those in the title and there are many other besides - investment banks, teacher federations, De Beers... We need only glance outside our own personal bubbles to recognize massive manipulation starting with advantageous legislation perpetuating inefficient business models and see consumers are exploited from all directions by cartels.

Actually, as the name implies, the Library of Congress (LoC) IS part of the legislative branch, and is responsible for granting and sustaining copyright - a body of law appropos for the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) to affect.

I see, /. executes... ARG! I swear, my address bar says "slashdot.org" but my eyes read "digg.com". What should I believe, the address bar or my lying eyes???

A quick comparison shows similar subscription plans cost the same regardless of iPhone or similar capability Android is bought. If Apple charges such premium of the carriers, shouldn't the rest of us realize reduced subscription cost??? What IS the value-proposition the carriers add beyond "dumb pipes"?

No. Nor do I remember Woodstock, hoop skirts, the Kennedy assassinations or the moon shot. The implication being I grew up with computers after punch cards but before mice and once foreign cars became common. Maybe the downfall of Detroit could be traced back to the malformed son of Ford?

In (most of) the US, it's stupid to call it "Standard Time" when it only lasts 4 months of the year. We should rename it Daylight Squandered Time. This time-change contrivance is, at best, anachronistic and should be put down. I'll argue the 12 vs. 24 hour clock another day. While we're enlightening ourselves, the US should move off Standard "Imperial" Units as well. Of course, the more I think about this, maybe we in the US ought to learn what the word "standard" means in the first place. SI Units would be welcome.

"... dollar crash." and "... cheap holiday to Disneyland"? All the commodities you'd consume on that trip (fuel, food, energy) are Dollar based in the market. Many non-US Dollar currencies are nonetheless, pegged to the Dollar (Chinese Renminbi) and many that aren't hold outsized reserves of US Treasury instruments/currency. Many markets consist of large proportion of US participation and depend on trade with the US.

Then there're all the problems in the Euro Zone (Greece, Ireland, Portugal, Spain, etc.). Japan is still recovering from the earthquake & tsunami. The rest of the Americas are interdependent with the US. And, as said above, China pegs to the dollar, holds huge quantities of US reserves and trades more directly with the US than most other economies are valued at.

But you may still get your desire, the Deal is not yet approved in the US Congress. Just because Congressional "leadership" has agreed doesn't necessarily mean the rest of Congress will fall in line. All it takes is one Senator to filibuster and we'll blow past the 2 Aug deadline...