sedev

Get over yourself - and more importantly, stop putting barriers between customers and your bank account. Virtually everything that you'd do to make a site progressively enhance with JavaScript, is something that'll make the site more robust and tolerant to unexpected visitors and their environments. It's a bad idea to reject those visitors just because you didn't expect them.

Of course, the possibility remains open that Apple simply implemented something similar in-house.

Actually I think there's definitely room for argument there. Apple may be be interested, sure - but unlike Google, they don't have an imperative to collect and sell that information. Google and Apple, for the millionth time, have different business models. Apple takes money from people who buy its devices and software. Google takes money from advertisers. Both are focused on getting the people who give them money, to give them more money. So while Apple certainly could collect and sell this information, they actually have a choice. If Google didn't collect and sell this information, someone interested in a minority-shareholder lawsuit could argue that they were leaving money on the table and doing a disservice to their shareholder.

Apple is one of the most profitable companies in the world right now, and on top of that a company whose corporate culture rejects stuff like Carrier IQ. Google is in a position where they could conceivably be sued for not implementing something like this, and is a company whose corporate culture prizes data, data, data and endless analysis.

It is 100% plausible that one of these companies would implement a Carrier IQ style of rootkit, and the other would not.

Edit: Closest thing I can find to an answer, is what Carrier IQ is hiring for [1]. They're not hiring for serious iOS experience at the moment - instead, what they put in boldface for the software engineer position amounts to deep knowledge of Android internals. That is not conclusive, but it's evidence about what they do.

[1]: http://www.carrieriq.com/company/careers.htm

... with all the security/privacy problems that go with that, and then some.

My reactions to broken-without-JS sites spring from security, privacy, usability, and accessibility concerns. "Sites that completely break without JS" is a category that strongly correlates with "sites that have major issues in at least one of those four categories."

Then try browsing Hacker News, Gmail, or some PG essays on your DS. The DS is an interesting device and I love it to pieces, but comparing it to an iPad, a Win8 device, or a Courier tablet, is very, very tenuous.

See also: http://craphound.com/spamsolutions.txt

Paul Thurott's track record when it comes to making predictions about the iPad is terrible. There's simply no reason to take him seriously, and perhaps we should really be criticizing Gruber for the tech blogging equivalent of being a prominent biologist stooping to debating creationists.

So - no, that's not the way Apple would do it, and while it's certainly a Good Thing for developers, it's not unreasonable to argue that compared to the pre-release iPads, the developer-preview Win8 tablets and software are not 'real.' Many, many things about both the hardware and the software can be expected to change. They're still being formed, and it'd be very premature to make predictions about the final user-facing experience at this point.

Wait, what?

The decision makes a very, very sad statement about the court's understanding of the issues at hand.

Friedman has something of a grasp of that part, but he's a tremendous cretin, and doesn't get the very important point that acquiring wealth fast by the deeply problematic routes above, is far easier than making wealth. The ability to make wealth is problematic to people who currently hold a tremendous amount of concentrated wealth, and they are trying to stamp it out. They're humans in the grip of a cognitive bias, unable (modulo a few folks like Warren Buffett and George Soros) to comprehend that more real wealth benefits everyone. They've also generally abandoned real wealth and gone into ephemeral financial instruments, with a retrograde result - we're on our way back to the disastrous situation where you can safely assume that anyone with wealth acquired it by immoral means.

Since I come from this point of view, I find that the critiques of Friedman also slightly miss the point - you're going to need to destroy a lot of what we currently think of as 'wealth' if you want anything remotely resembling social justice, and naturally the people who hold that false wealth will resist this. I am fine with that because I believe we're back to the point where there's a de facto inherited aristocracy and that the old problems of wealth and power have not at all gone away no matter how much we enjoy the symbols and pageant of representational democracy.

The list also, though, makes an underlying claim of "I am good enough at what I do that I can play by these rules, which are atypical of American workplace culture." If that claim is not a valid one, this list would probably indicate someone deeply problematic to work with.

Unfortunately I doubt we're going to see RMS on a Segway.

But you go ahead and ask James Madison what he thinks about LulzSec.