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Yes, but not out of the goodness of their hearts, but because they have a completely different business model.

As someone else already succinctly put it: for Apple, users are customers, for Google they are the product (to be sold to advertisers).

But the difference goes further than that. I don't know if Apple actually cares about privacy or it's just a side-effect of their business model, but Google is blatantly politically anti-privacy, and seems to revel in provoking controversy by ignoring privacy protection laws.

Google Maps is just another example: the surreptitious way in which Google "asks permission" for exploiting location data has already come under fire as being in blatant violation with privacy laws in several countries. Google has been playing this game long enough to know exactly what they were doing.

Okay, I'll risk being "that guy" who starts about adblock, but I seriously tend to forget that there even is advertising on the web, let alone that it is still a source of revenue for anyone else but Google.

I've always considered it one of those walking dead business-models, like printed newspapers, and it regularly surprises me the practice is still alive and well. I would be terrified to let my business depend on it.

I abandoned Last.fm when shortly after the CBS takeover they did a 180 and became the mouthpiece of the record labels instead of a disruptive force.

I didn't mind so much that they had to compromise, but the classic recording industry PR-speak they used to justify it was just offensive. Shortly afterwards they pretty much stopped communicating and innovating altogether.

A shame, because for discovery I still haven't found anything better than Last.fm's combination of "scrobbling" and community.

RMS is usually correct. Annoying, offensive, unpragmatic, undiplomatic and confrontational, but in the end he's usually right in his basic analyses of the problem. Often well before anyone else even recognizes there is a problem.

Your attempt to frame this as "copyright vs tech industry" already gives me a bad taste in my mouth.

The copyright debate isn't about one industry against another, it's about an industry versus the rights of individual citizens.

Said person may have only been the catalyst. The reality is that company culture changes as it scales up, whether you bring in outsiders or not.

It's easy to blame a specific person, but in fact it is perfectly normal for some of "the best" people to leave because they no longer feel comfortable in the changing company.

Please note that this "anti-freedom crowd" is also heavily supported by the major telecom corporations from the US and Europe, and the predominantly American copyright lobby also likes to join in the fun.

Yes, Western corporations are siding with repressive regimes against their own people and government. I can't think of a better argument to eradicate corporatism.

I would say that an inability to communicate with other developers in the same terms (including in code, because I suspect your code may look very different from others) is a serious barrier to working in a team, no matter how brilliant and talented you may be.

There's no question you can do the job, but it's a big question if you can do the job together with other developers, or how much time and effort (not just from you, but your coworkers) it would take to get there.

I say this as both a hiring manager and a self taught developer. As the latter, the most important part of my development as a programmer was to learn to express myself (and my code) in common terms and patterns so I could work with others.

For me, IE is like landmines. Built as weapon to break the web rather than to do anything constructive, and then abandoned after the war to create more havoc for years.

Maybe MS should have given the new generations of IE a new name. Rebranding would probably have been cheaper and more effective than marketing campaigns trying to make IE respectable.

This isn't just a lack of interest in F1, it's an almost complete lack of modern motorsports in general.

Oddly enough, for a country where cars are sacred, the US has barely any capability to develop racing cars of any kind (NASCAR is low tech, Indycar, like most other US racing series, buys its cars from Europe), and there is little to no serious competition.

There are no modern racetracks (besides Austin), the facilities at ovals, even Indy, are cheap, low budget and utterly outdated compared to modern racetracks around the world.

There is very little competition outside the major series compared to the many dozens of competitive racing series around the world, and no way for talent to develop.

NASCAR's commercial success aside, the US is a third world country when it comes to racing.

I don't like this legislation, or any other legislation that increases copyright restrictions (especially in favor of clueless dinosaurs), but I also resent the hypocritical way in which Google pretends it's protesting this as a public service.

Google is only interested in what makes money for Google, and it has lost any credibility when it comes to looking out for the public's interest (or "do no evil" in general) a long time ago.

Their campaign should be called "Defend our profit margins", Google is no better than the publishers pushing in favor of this legislation, their interest just accidentally happen to coincide with ours.

As a citizen of the EU and a country with strong privacy protection, my privacy rights are protected by law, and neither Facebook's terms nor the fact that any other entity can collect certain information from Facebook negates that right.

The claims by Snopes are equally false: whatever Facebook terms a user may have accepted whenever, they are trumped by the law. You can't give up your civil rights with single click.

The great thing about soccer is that even having an actual soccer ball is not a necessity. Empty cans, ragged tennis balls, anything will do. This used to be perfectly fine in the first world country I grew up in, so although this is a great product, it doubt it will make as much of a difference as the author suggest. Kids will play soccer and enjoy it no matter what.

If they didn't tolerate it, they wouldn't have voting machines in the first place.

In many other countries these things are banned because people care.

The same applies to the rest of the world. However, the article seems to omit one important factor: career opportunities.

Cities with high salaries and high cost of living also offer plenty of opportunities in case the job doesn't work out, the company goes belly up etcerera. Anyone with desirable skills and a bit of a local network can get a new job there within a few weeks, if not days. In most places with a low cost of living however, things are very different.

Coming from Oracle, "Hello world" feels oddly menacing. Like they're planning another takeover.

Sexism aside, marketeers should know better by now than to market innovations to business executives. They are the last people to adopt new technology, and even if it does happen it often comes with a stigma that hinders wider adoption, because the product becomes associated with "the suits".

And if people in every field and every community felt that way gender issues would never get discussed, let alone dealt with.

Unless you truly believe that there are no issues, this attitude is just intellectual laziness. Whether it comes from a woman or not is irrelevant.

This isn't racism. This is bullying, using, amongst many other things, marginally racist remarks as a weapon. That kind of stuff is as much racism as tasteless jokes about wife-beating constitute actual domestic violence.

This is clearly a very disfunctional and unhealthy work environment, but with the aggressively paranoid reaction to it is equally unhealthy and most of all, fails to address the actual problem. After firing the "racists", this is likely to remain a toxic environment who's next "victim" could very well be a white heterosexual male who for some other reason forms an easy target.

It's not a stereotype, it's a very real an observation. I'm not a particularly "fast moving" cyclist (stereotype much?), I ride at a leisurely pace (Amsterdam, remember?), so I have plenty of time to observe what happens around me.

The accents are unmistakable as they apologize or otherwise verbally react whenever I have to brake hard and/or swerve to avoid them.

Why do people insist on pretending all of Europe is full of bike lanes? In most inner cities there often isn't room for bike lanes, or the lane is just a line on the asphalt.

I bike to work every day in Amsterdam, not a single bike lane on my route, I have to share the road with cars, trams, buses, trucks and scooters. The only traffic that actually poses a regular challenge because of their erratic movements and tendency to step into the road without looking are American tourists on foot...

Bike lines are convenient, but no more than that, and just as much of a red herring as helmets when it comes to safety. Safety in urban traffic is a people problem.

I like it. Especially because theoretically it can be mixed with other, conventional authentication schemes, so it can be made completely optional and used at will, just like sites currently mix password + several OAuth providers.

It's pretty much the ideal scheme for all those sites you don't visit regularly (and many of us, despite knowing better, use the same password for...).

Using only simple blogs to prove responsive design is unnecessary is like using only nails to prove that powertools are unnecessary and all you need is a hammer...

Same story here. Exactly the same date (14 September 2011), haven't heard anything since.

This whole flag-waving typical Techcrunch rant is based on the assumption that education only serves to feed the economy. Profit is all that matters.

So many of America's social problems can be traced back to a lack of a decent educational system, and if anything, this article inadvertently explains why. If someone really thinks economic dominance is enough to keep an empire from crumbling, I suggest some history lessons.

Seriously, "wobbing" is now becoming an internationally used term?

The word is derived from the acronym WOB, which stands for "Wet Openbaarheid Bestuur", a relatively recent Dutch law that obliges government institutes to make government documents available upon request. This law is systematically being sabotaged by all layers of government, to the point of intimidating people who dare to make such a request.

Seems to me like the author is very selectively shopping in non-US examples in order to just go on an anti public-transport rant.

In most places in Europe costs of mass transit projects are notorious for spiraling out of control, and unlike the Madrid example other Western countries tend to do exactly the opposite and usually spend a lot more money on prestigious design and architecture of public works than is common in the US.

And that's okay, because besides the notoriously crappy and corrupt management of these projects by government officials, the results are worth it.

I've been using computers since the 80's. I haven't used anti-virus software since the 90's. And yes, I have been using Windows until somewhere in the 00's, including Windows 95, which is about as vulnerable as it gets.

When I was using antivirus software, it never set off any alarms once. I still occasionally install and run antivirus software, it doesn't find anything, so I remove it again. I've sat in the middle of major virus outbreaks inside companies and not be affected.

I have no idea how people manage to get infected. Every time I read about some malware scare, I look at how it spreads and think to myself "but... why would you do that?".

In the 80s we had boot sector viruses that would bite you as soon as you inserted a disk, and disks where the only way of exchanging data. You couldn't protect against those without antivirus.

But today most malware seems self-inflicted, and only spreads through naivety, ignorance and laziness.

Sure, I could still get infected tomorrow. After 25 years of computing it's bound to happen to me at some point. But it will most likely be because I did something I shouldn't have, not because I don't have adequate anti-malware protection.

As a self-taught programmer who started in the '80s, I definitely missed a lot of foundation I had to pick up over the years. However, this was mostly on the architectural level. As far as the more technical stuff is concerned, I was lucky enough to start with C at a time where we still had to code a lot of stuff by hand which is now taken for granted.

But realistically, this knowledge is rarely needed in most modern day application-level programming. Many decent developers can not only get by, but produce great applications without it. It's mostly a matter of the right skills for the right job. And as always, just getting stuff done is the #1 skill.

Even though I'm a big Apple fanboy, I have to admit I avoid using Apple's desktop applications. The one exception is Mail.app, but even there I'm always eagerly looking for any possible alternative. iPhoto, Addressbook, iCal, none of those have ever appealed to me, and I've always use (mostly web-based) alternatives. And enough has already been said over the years over that piece of bloatware called iTunes.

So as far as I'm concerned, this isn't something new. IMO, with some rare exceptions, Apple has never been very good at application software.