rapht

Exactly ; I had a similar experience sometime back when I was lent a 2010 Audi A4 for a few months, there was a quite natural control knob placed much like in the article's pics. It really is night and day compared to my brand new Peugeot where you have to look at the screen -and wait for the interface to update on each action- to do basically anything that is not taking a call / moving the volume / changing the track or station which you can do from the wheel.

On Android, this just had me 1. Settings > Security 2. Click on Location 3. Enhance location precision 4. Disable "Bluetooth Analysis" aka the use of BLE beacons

That's true... and that's why we should push for 2 things to happen when it is found that a business knowingly broke the law (or knew it was at risk of breaking and went on anyways) : - a "proportionate" fine should never be less than 100% of the profits derived from their behaviour - whoever authorized the company to go forward should be personally on the hook too

With all the talk about Google results not being satisfying anymore to a growing number of users, I'm surprised we haven't seen more sites pop up that would allow users to display the results of multiple search engines of their choosing either by mixing (eg all 1st results then all 2nd, etc) or by seeing them side by side... while stripping ads and cards and the like.

As Western countries are all slowly drifting towards what amounts to government-sanctionned censorship by ISPs - especially after the adoption by the EU Parliement of the copyright directive, but it's just one more step in the general movement towards controlling who can publish what on the web -, we need more initiatives that bypass those ISPs, which are currently in the Western world the only ones capable of enforcing censorship.

I'm no expert on this and the ways of achieving it, but as a citizen I feel more and more concerned about this - in particular as my (French) government seems eager to move in the not-right direction.

As some others have said, a well-thought-out article on the larger scale impacts of the Internet as a new medium of communication - just get past the intro.

In the end, it's interesting because it puts together a number of intuitions you may already have about the upcoming western social-democratic crisis stemming from the loss of authoritative sources of information.

What is missing is actually ideas about what system we should collectively aim for in order to restore trust in actual truths and distrust in actual falsehoods - because of course, you can't have a society without a shared framework for that.

I have seen Harari's "Sapiens" and Diamond's "Guns, Germs and Steel" in the comments.

Both are nice reads but Harari's book is shallow from multiple respects, and Diamond's book omits important counter-examples.

To me the book that made everything fall into place with respect to political history (and at some point, political philosophy) - and that I actually read before Harari and Diamond - was Francis Fukuyama's "The Origins of Political Order". An absolute must-read.

This - exactly

Antitrust strategy for the Internet era: a "copy-and-split" of the target into 2 companies: 1) these companies jointly own and can freely use all of the data accumulated and all of the tech developed to date (but as they jointly own it, they cannot sell/license it without the other's permission) 2) each company must choose a new name and cannot operate under the existing name 3) a few months of transitions are granted for each company to decide what their strategy will be 4) all physical assets get split evenly 5) each company get to pick 1 employee turn by turn until each has half of the workforce

And may they live a long, customer friendly life.

I absolutely second that.

And the problem is: the industry's interest is to lock you in on their cloud so that you end up paying a recurring fee of some sort, while the public's interest is clearly to be as free as possible from the manufacturer once you have purchased from them...

So until there is clear regulation about what you own, what you don't, and what your (preferably protective) rights really are when you purchase a device that relies on the manufacturer's cloud for operation, and even more generally, when you seem to own some thing but the manufacturer explains in the fine print that you only have a "license to use" that thing that limits what you can do with it ; until that, my friends, we're going to be at the mercy of manufacturers acting in their own interest, punto.

> From the Government.

Because we shouldn't be protected from business interests when they get too powerful?

Had one of those for a looong time when I was in middle/high school. My teachers especially loved how it emitted 2 strident beeps at each hour. And indeed, that was the most efficient watch I ever had.

I personally switched to the following policy a year or two ago to avoid all this crap: 1) NoScript extension filtering everything except the base domain => no third party scripts are allowed except when I explicitly allow them 2) Cookie Whitelist extension to allow cookies only from domains I choose, only when I need => no third party cookies allowed, ever 3) µBlock incase the webpage tries to load iframe ads 4) a unique email address per service (like amazon.[5 random chars]@mydomain.com) so if all else fail and your address gets in the hands of somebody who should not have it, you know where it came from and can expose them

Very good points in this post, but it seems to me that they are only valid if you look at a single line of products / services at a time.

When you put multiple products/services in one store, that is when your products get to be next to both competing and non-competing (non directly substituable) products, there are other consumer feelings to add like the sum of all things they're going to buy -- whether or not they have a budget, the sum of the things will either look "cheap" or "expensive". And who knows what they will buy next... if they come back at all.

Does anyone find it surprising that Europe seems to have comparatively more nodes/traffic flow than the US?

How wouldn't that be absolutely fine?

It's a wonder to me how no Verizon competitor has jumped at the opportunity to advertise this on a large scale with a message along the lines "it's evil, we don't do that".

If the users really care about this issue, that's what would happen on a functioning market anyway...

Why couldn't you be both visionary AND rent-seeker? I mean, isn't that the whole point of capitalism?

> "I believe I saw a study that recommended shorter, more frequent, vacations as the best way to recover from mental fatigue but I assume that there is a lot of opposing opinions on that matter."

As for myself, I find that I don't manage to totally disconnect from all things work until nearly a week of vacation, so even 9 full days (which is what you get when you take an entire week off) is kind of "not enough" because you only really enjoy that for 2 or 3 days.

From France :

We get 25 days by law, that's for employees who do the 35-hour workweek. Then people who do more than 35 hours (that is, people who don't follow the fixed 35-hour model) get more days depending on the sector / company.

I get a total of 38 days per year, so that's about 7 and a half weeks. (Yes that's a lot but has to be compared to my average 55-hour workweek.) I work at a large retail corporation.

I take 2 long breaks every year, 2 to 3 weeks each : - one in March/April where I like to travel far from the French winter, preferably in a sunny and warm tropical country - one in August/September, the destination depending on opportunities and remaining budget after the March break ;)

During these breaks, I do a lot of sightseeing (both scenic and cultural spots), days are generally busy but relaxed at the same time - what you don't see this time, you'll see next time. And I sleep a lot, too.

Other than these long breaks, I take a few days off around Christmas/New Year, and I use the remainder for some Mondays/Fridays off. That's when I visit family or just do the things I don't have time to do on regular week-ends.

(Edited for spelling)

And mine too ! Better become a software engineer, I guess...

What difference does it make ? It's just a mindset.

DST is obviously not the real issue.

The real issue is that people's habit have changed from what they were until a century ago : the advance of transportation has meant commuting times have extended, the advance of lighting has meant it was possible to spend more and more time awake after dark, etc.

The average time during people are awake is roughly 16 hours a day, and these 16 hours used to be aligned with 1pm being the middle of the day, meaning people would seldom go to bed after 9pm, and would usually get up around 5am.

This makes sense as daylight is well balanced between morning and afternoon. And you don't need daylight saving time !

Therefore the appropriate course of action is to set working hours to be not 9am to 5pm but 7am to 3pm, once and for all.

Looking at Twitter and at Google's first 50 results on Note 3, I can't help but wonder : is the marginal profit they expect from region-locking so high that it will pay for all the bad buzz?

At first sight, even though pricing differences exist between regions around the world, on this kind of products they are not that big, not to mention that that part of these price differences come from retailing alone...

So these differences must be big enough to justify alienating your early adopter userbase, thus endangering the whole adoption process, not to mention bad PR that will stick. When you try too hard to get every cent out of people and they start seeing it - and any locking of that kind screams "I'm going to get more juice out of this" - they generally don't like it.

I'm in full agreement with your demonstration, however, as to the case at hand, it appears to me that it's not really the point : the fact is that it should not be qualified as a "presale" and Paypal here is not a trade intermediary but a postman. If that's not the case, Paypal needs to explain how "crowdfunding", which depending on the viewpoint could be characterized either as a capital investment or as a donation and therefore in any case NOT a commercial transaction, intersects "presale" which definitely is a commercial transaction...

If someone is ready to finance the $68bn needed to build that high speed "train to nowhere" that doesn't answer a problem, I really don't understand how nobody would be willing to finance $6bn (or even $12bn to correct for the optimist view of the paper) needed to build an Hyperloop-like project which, even though it may not answer an immediate problem, would give the companies participating in it a considerable edge against the rest of the world on the variety of research/technology/know-how needed to build it. That alone might be enough to actually give value to the project.

I'm sorry, isn't that what's called "experience", which is about the only factor that differentiates an "old" person vs a "young" person when they are considered having identical theoretical knowledge ?

> And most of it that is not (like word processing) can be done by attaching a keyboard to a tablet. The office workers that actually need a workstation (like graphics designers, engineers and programmers) is only a small fraction of the workforce that uses a computer today

The fraction of worldwide workforce that sits in an office doing work that requires both a keyboard and a screen larger than 10" includes about any office-person whose actual output is not just talking...

I saw this and wrote to my MEP asking that the EU makes it mandatory for American companies providing services to European consumers to clearly and distinctively inform said consumers that their data may be handed to American authorities without notice or specific consent.

Also, I wonder what's going to happen when American companies hand data to the US Gov't in compliance with US law but in breach of privacy laws in the non-US territories they are operating in : large-scale breaches like this will not only earn them hefty sanctions, but could also lead to some courts shutting down their services altogether...

On your first point, as a non-expert in law and law history, I wonder to what extent these differences in trial procedure are rooted in the difference between common law and civil law.

To add to the examples, I'd say that France and Italy have procedures very similar to those described as the German system, and indeed all have a civil law system.

However, the link does not seem that obvious : the way trials are organized is not necessarily dependent on the way law is built.