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That chart is utterly misleading. There is no such thing as an EU-wide law. Most EU countries have much more extensive consumer protection.

The only real difference is that with AppleCare you can contact Apple directly instead of the seller. But as far as the rest is concerned, in most EU countries you have better warranty by law than what Apple tries to peddle as "service".

Although they are absolutely right, it should also be said that Apple is far from unique. Many electronics shops and manufactures have warranty policies and try to sell extra warranty whilst EU consumer laws already mandate minimal warranty standards. As a consumer you almost always have to explicitly assert your rights or you'll get screwed.

Apple has just made itself a high profile target with it's AppleCare Protection Plan, and it doesn't help that Apple is being systematically uncooperative when consumers claim their warranty rights.

Sometimes it takes a shock for people to reconsider their position, especially if what they're really doing is defending their own lack of action. Let's not run to judge the people who posted in that thread many months ago.

Personally, I gave up on participating in any kind of activism about 10 years ago, partly because I didn't feel we were getting anywhere and the next generation didn't seem to care. I feel pretty uncomfortable about that now.

Those waters were murky from the beginning. Always have been, always will be.

Also, "illegal" is not a constant, often arbitrary and usually serves only the interests of those that want to maintain the status quo.

If curiosity and creativity was constrained by what happens to be illegal at any given time, our society would look a lot different, and not for the better.

Not signing up for a service that wants significant OAuth access to my Twitter (or any other) account without giving me neither a reason nor an alternative.

If it wasn't for the conversation here on HN, I would have assumed the whole site was just a referral-scam. Not just a paywall, but a scam, since there is zero warning upfront until after you've subscribed.

And please, unless what you do is explicitly aimed at the US, treat all users as equal. We're not "international users", just list the options equally for everyone.

And people wonder why serious PHP developers (yes, those exist) avoid Smarty like the plague...

favicon is only forgotten by those that never check their logs.

(Which should be part of the checklist, check your friggin' logs instead of assuming you never miss anything.)

It is definitely optional: http://www.freenews.fr/spip.php?article12949 (even with my limited French I find the original text less confusing than google translate, ).

But yes, the fact that it's on by default is questionable.

However, most ISP-supplied consumer routers have firewall rules on by default, for very good reasons. Although I personally think this one should be opt-in, on by default is not necessarily evil in this particular use case.

Besides being a bit ham-fisted, there's nothing inherently wrong with an ISP offering filters against malicious content.

Also, with the user-accessible opt-out, it would even be legal under the Netherlands' much praised Net Neutrality law. Unlike most of these alarmist headlines, the ISP is not blocking anything.

Alarmist bullshit headline.

From what I can figure out, this ISP merely provides a modem/router with a built-in optional adblocker.

I don't see anything wrong with that in particular, especially in the context where virtually all display ads violate European privacy laws because of cross-site user tracking without explicit permission.

It's just one more additional security/privacy feature on a consumer router to help ordinary users protect themselves.

However, most clients will only agree to pay for building what they need after you've first built what the want.

Very few businesses are interested in getting paid once if they can get paid twice, so this pattern is perpetuated to the mutual benefit of everyone except the developers forced to spend 50% of their time building something they know won't work, and the other 50% rewriting it...

Great tip. I couldn't find it through D&B's own website (the search result found our companies but only tried to sell me shit), but apparently we have DUNS numbers without ever applying for it.

I stopped using Dzone ages ago. It has become a mixture of spam and dangerously stupid disinformation. It's being heavily gamed and the owners don't care.

At least those bother to acknowledge their customers, even if their response is wrong. At least it gives you a chance to fight back.

Google simply utterly ignores any kind of complaint. There is no worse way to treat people than to completely deny their existence.

I wonder if Google's malware warnings have ever been reviewed by lawyers. Because this entire feature smells like a lawsuit waiting to happen.

By describing the cultural differences within the US as "vastly different", you are basically just confirming the idea of Americans not understanding the depth of cultural diversity in Europe.

I'm very well aware of the significant differences between the Deep South and the West Coast etc, but those differences pale in comparison to the vast centuries old cultural differences you can find in Europe even between towns only a few dozen miles apart. Hell, the differences inside the US barely compare to regional differences within small European countries.

This is not a matter of ignorance. Even in well educated and well traveled Americans seem to be unable to really comprehend the depth of cultural differences outside the US.

Just to be sure I checked Amazon before writing my "pro piracy" rant elsewhere. It's a) not available in my country, and b) between any specific mp3 offering and telling me the usual "fuck of, you're from the wrong country", and no point does Amazon inform me about the nature and quality of the download, other than the mp3 format.

Yeah, I can infer the fact that it is non-DRM from the mp3 format, but other than that it's still shadier and less informative than the average piracy side.

Not to mention insulting and utterly useless to me and 16 million fellow countrymen in one of the richest Western nations, were, oh surprise, piracy rules.

And this once again is why I still prefer to "pirate" music.

Most "legal" services are either very vague about format, quality and DRM, not available in my country and/or have a limited collection.

The effort involved in buying something legally and DRM-free is just ridiculous, and the notion that I can trust pirates more to be honest, transparent and upfront about their offering really takes the cake.

Only in the copyright exploitation industry is the legal business more shady than the "criminals".

What's worse, were it gets specific on country and regulation, it still gets it wrong, seemingly deliberate.

It's a political anti-regulation rant. Nothing more.

So how did entrepreneurs like Sarkozy and Berlusconi ever get elected?

Get off it.

Entrepreneurs aren't worshiped like gods by default just for being entrepreneurs, that's all.

What strikes me about this article is the utter lack of understanding.

It is a highly subjective, very politicized and ideologically tainted description without any kind of understanding, and some of the attempts at interpretation of cultural and legal differences are either plain wrong or deliberately misrepresented.

It's an anti-European rant, nothing more. Here's a great gem for example:

"To work hard, to work long hours, is actually illegal in Europe."

Seriously.

Somewhat different context. The Netherlands has privatized the postal service ages ago. The interest in artificially propping up what remains of this relic beyond the current monopoly license on light weight letters is minimal.

Shouldn't the US Postal Service have died a long time ago?

It always amazes me how the US as self-proclaimed champions of the free market and technological progress still holds on to outdated, bureaucratic nationalized monopolies like the postal service.

In many countries this market has already been privatized a long time ago, and/or scaled down to the point where relics like post offices no longer exist.

I don't believe Google is any better.

The confrontational way Google treats countries that actually try to protect their citizens rights and privacy against Google's invasive practices has me believing more and more that Google is just opportunistically waging a "governments bad, Google good" PR war, rather than actually displaying any ethics.

BTW, Google is an advertising company for which the users are the product, not the client. They are in no way "beholden to its users". That would apply to Microsoft, but not to Google.

In the long run, I prefer Microsoft's often clumsy and transparent nastiness over Google that actually tries to make people believe it's a force for good.

When everything is idling, my Skype client in OSX is almost always on top. It just seems to steadily eat CPU, not all that much, but all the damn time. I've learned to shut it down when I need to preserve battery life.

What is so hard to believe about this?

Capitalism is not a force of nature. Countries have an enormous amount of legislation in place to ensure companies can do business, and invest huge amounts of money in services supporting the private sector (infrastructure, education, etc).

These companies wield a tremendous amount of social power, especially services like Facebook. There's nothing odd about holding these companies to certain standards and laws that ensure they can not negatively influence the civil society from which they profit so much. Being allowed to refuse service to the very people that enable your business to exist is a privilege, not a right, and it comes with restrictions.

This is quite normal in most countries outside the US.

The 800 pound gorilla Facebook and the average German teenage girl (to name just an example) aren't exactly equal consenting parties.

The law is there to protect individual citizens against the ruthless exploitation by major corporations like Facebook.

Especially when those corporations hold the key to either social isolation or abandoning your civil rights. The laws are there to prevent companies from abusing their power from effectively undermining individual people's rights and freedoms.

The scale of the problem isn't in itself an argument for doing or not doing something about. The emotional impact is most definitely an important factor, and not something that can simply be argued away with numbers.

Most people don't live in fear of cancer or lightning strikes, unless they find themselves in the middle of an asbestos filled building or right underneath a lightning storm.

The knowledge however that so many people around carry deadly firearms, and maybe more importantly, apparently feel they have a pressing reason to own firearms, is a daily reality for many. This fear is real, and it is not irrational.

This is not about the odds. It's about not having to live in fear. Even though the odds are wildly in their favor, most people very rationally prefer not to go swimming with sharks.

Not only is Shuttleworth's reference to McCarthyism extremely distasteful (and something he should be apologizing for), the bitter irony is that he's doing exactly what he accuses the free software fundamentalists of, to quote the man himself: "ranting and being a dick".

Throwing a near-Godwin into the debate is not exactly being mature an constructive.

Especially since he should be fully aware that it may be in the short term interest of FLOSS to be pragmatic, we need voices like RMS and the FSF to remain alert for the long term consequences, and dismissing such a voice as dangerous political extremists hurts everyone.

> I'm moving all of my machines and family/friend machines in the next few months to Win8

So you're pushing expensive closed systems on everyone around you, but you're thanking Google for the "forced motivation"?