3,461 karma · joined July 19, 2013
Because then they would also have to care about the thousands of other VM's that may run all kinds of stuff that is illegal somewhere, questionable, politically, socially, culturally or commercially sensitive etcetera.
No ISP can afford to be proactive about this. They cannot afford to care. Or even know.
The local investment and startup scenes vary wildly across Europe. Not to mention the wildly different states of the various economies.
I'm not being pretentious, but when I look at the stuff I buy (and I'm as materialistic as the next person, slightly obsessed with 'design', and attached to a brand like Apple), none of it I've seen in ads.
Advertising uniformly has the effect of pissing me off and can even turn me off brands. And I'm not a unique snowflake, my wife is exactly the same.
I honestly cannot fathom why any intelligent human being would be influenced by something as unsubtle and obvious as advertising.
The manipulative nature of artificial team building exercises is an insult to the intelligence of any smart person with an analytical mind.
"My profile didn’t break any rules" "They’re cut off to access to their communities"
It is not your fucking profile. They are not your fucking communities. It has a Facebook logo on top of it, you are publishing for Facebook on behalf of Facebook so that Facebook can profit from it. You are working for Facebook and paying for the privilege with your privacy. It's Facebook's profile about you, and Facebook decides what happens to it.
It all belongs to Facebook because you gave it to them. Just stop fucking doing it.
I'm all in favor of tight government regulation when it comes to consumer protection, privacy and corporations abusing their power, but this kind of idiotic whining about what people do to themselves completely voluntarily just pisses me off.
People deserve to protected against the insidious way in which Facebook c.s. violate people's privacy rights. I understand that people have no idea how and how much info Facebook collects about them, and how much harm that can do.
But if your communication and social life depend on Facebook you're just an idiot who deserves to be made fun of rather than taken seriously and getting portrayed as a victim by the NYT. Being lazy and stupid doesn't make you a victim, no matter how idiotic Facebook's rules are.
There's basically one simple law that the US should copy: if you hit a weaker road user, be it a cyclist, pedestrian or anything else, with your car, you are completely liable unless there's proven utterly reckless behavior by the other party.
Somewhere in the two six-storey buildings of a tv broadcaster. Additional fun: the system was running spam-filtering software that relayed all incoming mail and was failing. Still ping-able though. And since nobody had any passwords, I needed physical access to get in.
Finally found the likely suspect in a small, locked 19" cabinet. No keys... Only time I needed a hammer and a screwdriver to restart a daemon.
Clear, accessible, no weasel words, no lawyer-speak, to the point and with a human touch to round it of.
Millions of Germans that honestly believed they wouldn't be spied on anymore once they were part of the "free" West.
If you don't own your data, you don't have any privacy.
Yes, that is very hard to properly regulate, leaves a lot of fair use grey areas and with the rapid pace of technologies leads to hastily created regulation like the "cookie-law" or the right-to-be-forgotten. (Although in both cases the industry deliberately made a circus of the implementation, and especially the latter is now backfiring hard on Google.)
But the bottom line is, if the law doesn't recognize your fundamental ownership of your data, you have no privacy and you never will, no matter what other forms of legislation and self-regulation get implemented in the areas of collecting and using that data.
The US is one of the few Western democracies that doesn't recognize this fundamental aspect of privacy, and in the information age, that makes any form of privacy regulation a complete joke.
Step one should be to put the individual in control of their data at any time. If people are not informed about what happens to their data if and when it happens and are not in a position to stop it, they've already lost their privacy.
Privacy should not be a faux "right" like copyright, something you can just sign away for someone else to exploit. It's a fundamental civil right, and without it we have no freedom.
Drug dealers provide something of value and personally I think we would be way better off if drugs were legalized. So we're going to call our local drugs-gangs "disruptive startups" now?
90% procent of the time these companies are simply breaking privacy, consumer protection and labor laws for one reason and one reason only: greed. So occasionally they may stumble upon a law that actually needs reform. Even a broken clock is right twice per day.
That doesn't make me okay with OK with breaking the law as a business strategy, especially since most of the time it isn't the Comcasts of this world that suffer the consequences, but individual workers and consumers.
This Robin Hood worship is pathetic. These startups are not making the world a better place.
Oh, wait, we're trying to protect our freedom. US tech companies are on a rampage attempting to destroy civil rights, consumer rights and labor rights in Europe. Often openly breaking laws that aren't outdated and in need of "disruption", but very much explicitly exist to prevent what these companies are trying to do.
This insanity has got to end at some point. Imagine if a foreign companies started liquor stores across the US that sold alcohol to under 21 year olds, flaunting US law, claiming to be innovative and disruptive, and accusing the US of just trying to protect it's internal market.
We've been pretty fucking tolerant of this shit so far, acknowledging that some things may be up for debate. Regulators have mostly limited themselves to diplomatically urging companies to adjust their practices.
But it's getting ridiculous. Especially Uber has demonstrated that US companies have absolutely no scruples anymore about launching businesses that openly and deliberately break local laws. This isn't business, it's organized crime.
I don't believe it's coincidental that the delivery service worked in the least densely populated part of Europe.
Also a reminder that the term "visionary" is very relative to your horizon.
Education does not equal talent. It doesn't in the West (hence, local shortage of good developers), and the same applies to the rest of the world.
The fact that the problem of the corrupt concentration of capital is real doesn't mean the lack of talent is artificial.
£50k in London may be doable for 20-somethings living in a shared apartment, but for the rest of us it's a fucking insult.
After digging a bit deeper into the actual numbers (when for fuck sake are they going stop grouping everyone who touches a computer under the heading "IT"?), it's mostly "developers, developers, developers".
Also, reactions on most forums are "fuck you, pay us". All perks, generational differences and cultural changes aside, this is mostly a money problem. I see so many people in jobs that where there is considerably less demand and require a lot less effort to keep skills and knowledge current earn a lot more money than developers.
Why are, with some localized exceptions like SV, developers still being paid considerably less than all reports suggest their market value is?
Also, outside of the US Amazon has just barely started to expand beyond books. In most countries online retailers are bracing themselves for the moment Amazon starts eating their lunch.
Unless Bezos suddenly has a change of heart, this growth strategy could go on for many, many years.
It's the same exploitation through evading labor and safety laws dozens of shady companies have done for decades.
If a transportation company exploits East-European truck drivers, or a building company exploits construction workers it's disgraceful, but because an American company does it by using a phone app it's suddenly cool and "disruptive"?
I'm glad that we have a level of protection in terms of privacy, consumer and worker rights.
Uber is not innovative. Uber is the same old scam all over again. But with an app.
Mass surveillance and the large scale violation of privacy is Google's core business model. I was assuming she was referring to that, and not any NSA-related conspiracy allegations. (And although this may be coincidental, Google recently announced they will be targeting children, circumventing the law by tempting parents into consenting.)
Something about history and being doomed to repeat it springs to mind.
Just remove having lunch as problem to be solved by people who have other things on their minds.
For the majority of readers here there is no news at the end of that link, just and advert for the WSJ's paywalled services. It's effectively spam for most of us.
However, the user interface of Calibre is one of the worst I've ever encountered. It looks and feels like a teenagers first attempt at creating a desktop software prototype back in 1995. (Having to go to the website to download and install every single new minor release also feels like something from a bygone era.)
I donate to Calibre because I need it to continue existing, but I have no love for it.