“On August 1st I set out from Seattle to hitchhike accross the USA to New York City. This is my story in 3 minutes of pictures. Thanks to everyone who picked me up.”
If you want to place blame for tarmac delays, bad airline customer service, and nickel & diming fees -- look no further than how you yourself purchase plane tickets. As consumers, we choose to purchase services based on any number of criteria that are important to us. In return, suppliers of these services cater their strategies to try to meet our needs and win that business.
If we purchase things as a commodity, it will get sold as a commodity. Plain and simple.
When government takes over the responsibility from citizens, the citizens can’t develop their own values anymore.
ANALYSIS — In 2007, when the Android OS was still vaporware, Google made a gutsy $4.6 billion bet on mobile net neutrality. While they never had to pay out the money, that all-in move forced the FCC to license wireless spectrum with binding rules that finally force the wireless carrier that wins a spectrum auction to let Americans use whatever handsets, services and apps they wanted to connect to it.
Verizon, which eventually outbid Google, howled with outrage and filed a lawsuit against those rules, which Google rightly derided as an “attempt to prevent consumers from having any choice of innovative services.”
Fast-forward to 2010.
Since Google's CEO has proclaimed the future of the web is no anonymity, does that make it a fact? If we keep hearing that privacy is dead and long buried, how long before we accept that anonymity is an anti-social behavior and a crime?
Security expert Bruce Schneier suggests that we protect our privacy if we are thinking about it, but we give up our privacy when we are not thinking about it.
Schneier wrote, "Here's the problem: The very companies whose CEOs eulogize privacy make their money by controlling vast amounts of their users' information. Whether through targeted advertising, cross-selling or simply convincing their users to spend more time on their site and sign up their friends, more information shared in more ways, more publicly means more profits. This means these companies are motivated to continually ratchet down the privacy of their services, while at the same time pronouncing privacy erosions as inevitable and giving users the illusion of control."
The loss of anonymity will endanger privacy. It's unsettling to think "governments will demand" an end to anonymous identities. Even if Schmidt is Google's CEO, his message of anonymity as a dangerous thing is highly controversial. Google is in the business of mining and monetizing data, so isn't that a conflict of interest? Look how much Google knows about you now.
Bruce Schneier put it eloquently, "If we believe privacy is a social good, something necessary for democracy, liberty and human dignity, then we can't rely on market forces to maintain it."
Last week, Spiegel ran a photo gallery, "Russia in Flames", and an article recapping German press pointing the finger at Putin's "overcentralization of power" being to blame for the disaster. This week, Putin responded as only Putin can.
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung writes:
"Russian Prime Minister Vladmir Putin has been presenting himself as the country's top fire fighter and rebuilder. He is traveling to the areas most affected by the fires, shaking fire fighters by the hand, trudging through the burned-out forests, speaking with victims and encouraging volunteers."
"Yet, in the eyes of many critics the natural disaster has laid bare the weaknesses of a system that Putin established during his eight years as president. He curtailed the regions' autonomy, and built a pyramid of power, in which responsibility was always delegated upwards. The measure by which the governors and regional leaders were to be judged was not efficiency but loyalty -- those who displayed enough of this quality were given the freedom to pursue their own private business affairs and did not have to fear an opposition or a critical press, because their freedoms had been increasingly curtailed by Putin."
The photo gallery wasn't any kinder.
The country's forest service has also been all but dismantled. The 70,000 forest rangers who might have been registered the fires and even been able to put them out, had all been let go.
With a strong Kremlin, and the world's strongest strongman leader, who needs 70,000 forest rangers? RIA Novosti reports how two wildfires were put out:
Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin on Tuesday took part in extinguishing forest fires in Ryazan Province on board an amphibious firefighting airplane.
The Russian head of government was the co-pilot for half an hour aboard a Be-200 plane scooping up water from the nearby Oka River and dumping it on raging forest fires some 200 kilometers southeast of Moscow.
He dumped approximately 12 tons of water on each of two fires, extinguishing both completely.
We know George Bush was a pilot because we saw him in a flight suit. We know Putin is a pilot because he doesn't let us forget:
Putin puts out two wildfires in central Russia
America's citizens ask "What can he really do?" as the President gets flown over a disaster on the way back from vacation, or walks the beach with local response. In Russia, the boss does it himself.
On the other hand, maybe Putin should tend his political fires — perhaps to his chagrin, the Russian press concludes:
Putin's stunt comes as polls show waning public support for Russia's president and prime minister.
Respected Russian sociologist Leonty Byzov told Vedomosti business daily Putin and Medvedev's ratings could drop to 40% in the next six months. He said there was a growing fatigue surrounding Putin's popularity and that if the government's poor response to the wildfire crisis is taken into account, the two leaders' ratings would decrease dramatically.
Or, he could play sports. That always works.
viaFinally, statistical proof that iPhone users aren't just getting fucked by Apple:
The chart pretty much speaks for itself; I'll just say that the numbers for all three brands are for 30 year-olds, so it's not a matter of older, more experienced people preferring one phone to another. We found this data as part of our general camera-efficacy analysis: we crossed all kinds of user behaviors with the camera models and found we had data on the number of sexual partners for 9,785 people with smart phones. We dropped what we found into Excel, and voila. Here's the plot by age:
The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.
