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Average elementary teacher salary is $59,000 , the average starting salary is $38k. Heritage numbers are suspect at best. NY teachers make 75k but thats the highest average salary in the nation. http://www.businessinsider.com...

With Trump making noises about putting tariffs on Chinese imports and adding to the cooling off of Chinese growth, support for North Korea may have come up on the bargaining table.

There is also the matter of the collapse of the nuclear test facility with unknown repercussions within N Korea.

It didn't seem clear that appeasement through saber rattling was going to work with Trump. With peaceful overtures comes a way to ease sanctions and dependence on Chinese support.

While I generally agree with your premises, and that consumer "trust" in MS is low, I think you are giving the general populace FAR too much credit.

Litmus Test / Proof: Look at the number of people who have actually stopped using FecesBook after the scandal. Only 10%?

People are generally apathetic towards computers. They have become complacent. They don't know, and don't care, about software, hardware, privacy, security. e.g. Even in 2018 you STILL read about some dumb-asses that stores their passwords in plain text!

The problem is that Office and Exchange have their tentacles in the corporate world. While LibreOffice is good, people STILL need to exchange documents. PHB (Pointed-Haired-Bosses) "need" shared Calendars. There is just too much momentum and inertia in the entire MS ecosystem.

If people were smart they would:

* Set a date, say 5 years in the future,
* Make a game plan towards transitioning to free alternatives, and
* Ditch the proprietary MicroShift once and for all.

Unfortunately, that requires work, time, money, knowledge, commitment, and coordination. There are far too many other higher priority problems that need to handled. People generally aren't interested in the long term -- especially when the short term of switching provides almost no benefit, and doing nothing doesn't make things worse.

People don't know how to look at the bigger picture, and agree about what action to take. It is partially why we have Government regulations -- because people, for the most part, aren't self-disciplined.

In other news: MicroShaft has become IBM. Boring but Safe.

Ironically, 33% of Azure runs on Linux. Heck, you can even get Azure Linux certification

Even MS uses open source when it helps their bottom line. LOL.

All this article is missing, is the some reference to magically superior AI, that is going to obsolete all jobs (which, ironically, would fit perfectly - as distributing AI/automation benefits as a UBA is exactly what the author is looking for...) - just to complete the hype-laden tropes that the article is riding upon.

You don't build a new economy, by doing what the tech oligarchs exploiting everyone in todays economy, say you should do. There's a fucking reason things are the way they are, today - and a reason why these people are in the position they are, today - and benevolence plus desiring equality for all, isn't one of those reasons...

Ask yourselves: Why the fuck are these people so desperate to make us believe, that there can't be enough jobs for us all? This goes back well over a century guys, it's not new...

The way you control the workforce, the population at large, is by creating an artificial scarcity of jobs. You create a scarcity in the very means that people require in order to survive, then you have complete fucking control over them.

The UBI doesn't solve this. It masks the problem.

The way this problem is solved is by ensuring that enough jobs are always provided. It's the principal no.1 goal of economics. It's also a problem that has been completely solved long ago, yet is subject to a constant political tug of war that spans decades and generations, where the required solutions go in and out of the realm of political acceptability, in and out of the Overton Window.

The best present-day formulation of the solution, is the Job Guarantee policy - like the New Deal on steroids - it prefers that the private sector provides all the jobs required (and actually pumps-up the private sector until it does provide enough jobs), but while the private sector fails to provide enough jobs, the Job Guarantee program itself will provide the jobs, putting people to work in temporary public employment and training, e.g. on infrastructure projects and such.

I went to Google a link to the Job Guarantee description just now - a policy I've advocated for half a decade, with little success online - and I just see now that Bernie Sanders has catapulted it into the mainstream:
http://uk.businessinsider.com/...

That assumes that the author isn't a "friend" of Facebook, reading the headlines of his recent submissions about Facebook (mostly positive) and Google (overwhelming negative), I don't think it's going out on a limb to suggest that.

Vis: http://www.businessinsider.com...

Here's more proof: iOS continues to lose market share and even in the US, all iOS devices now number about the same as just Samsung, one of multiple Android players. Was that from the headphone jack, or the general slide in iOS quality overall? I tend to think it's both, given the headphone market is continuing to explode and Apple basically locked themselves out of a vast majority of it.

So where's your proof?

The problem with that figure is that includes ALL Samsung phones; not just those that compete head-to-head against Apple's models. When you start breaking it out by model, an entirely different picture emerges, with Apple holding the first AND second place, in terms of units sold, with a low-end Samsung phone in third place (and no other Samsung models in the top 5) :

https://www.bbva.com/en/top-se...

In fact, it is really hard to figure out exactly what Samsung is selling significant numbers of, with THIRTY ONE NEW models of Samsung phones INTRODUCED in 2016 alone! But I bet my bottom dollar that the vast majority of 2017's UNIT sales figures for Samsung are actually cheap-shit "giveaway" phones. :

http://www.businessinsider.com...

Samsung is still selling phones with a 5 MP back camera and 4 GB of storage, FFS!

https://www.gsmarena.com/samsu...

Or how about this beauty? Released in 2014 (!!!) and Still available! 2 MP main camera, 4 GB. Looks like it came straight from 1999:

https://www.gsmarena.com/samsu...

You may laugh: But every one of those phones counts as Samsung's UNIT Sales:

https://www.gsmarena.com/samsu...

And, although Apple's unit sales were down 1.3% year-over-year in 2017, Samsung's unit sales were down a whopping 4% in the same time period. Plus, despite the somewhat lower-than-expected sales of the iPhone X, Apple bested Samsung in unit sales in Q4 of 2017.

https://www.idc.com/promo/smar...

But we can go back and forth with statistics all night long. Both companies are doing quite well, and neither has any real signs of drying up and blowing away any time soon. Can we just agree that's the REAL answer to all this?

Here's more proof: iOS continues to lose market share and even in the US, all iOS devices now number about the same as just Samsung, one of multiple Android players. Was that from the headphone jack, or the general slide in iOS quality overall? I tend to think it's both, given the headphone market is continuing to explode and Apple basically locked themselves out of a vast majority of it.

So where's your proof?

The problem with that figure is that includes ALL Samsung phones; not just those that compete head-to-head against Apple's models. When you start breaking it out by model, an entirely different picture emerges, with Apple holding the first AND second place, in terms of units sold, with a low-end Samsung phone in third place (and no other Samsung models in the top 5) :

https://www.bbva.com/en/top-se...

In fact, it is really hard to figure out exactly what Samsung is selling significant numbers of, with THIRTY ONE NEW models of Samsung phones INTRODUCED in 2016 alone! But I bet my bottom dollar that the vast majority of 2017's UNIT sales figures for Samsung are actually cheap-shit "giveaway" phones. :

http://www.businessinsider.com...

Samsung is still selling phones with a 5 MP back camera and 4 GB of storage, FFS!

https://www.gsmarena.com/samsu...

Or how about this beauty? Released in 2014 (!!!) and Still available! 2 MP main camera, 4 GB. Looks like it came straight from 1999:

https://www.gsmarena.com/samsu...

You may laugh: But every one of those phones counts as Samsung's UNIT Sales:

https://www.gsmarena.com/samsu...

And, although Apple's unit sales were down 1.3% year-over-year in 2017, Samsung's unit sales were down a whopping 4% in the same time period. Plus, despite the somewhat lower-than-expected sales of the iPhone X, Apple bested Samsung in unit sales in Q4 of 2017.

https://www.idc.com/promo/smar...

But we can go back and forth with statistics all night long. Both companies are doing quite well, and neither has any real signs of drying up and blowing away any time soon. Can we just agree that's the REAL answer to all this?

It was reported last year and recently that national Buddhists use Facebook as a channel to post things that help to incite violence towards minority Muslims called the Rohingya in Burma. A monk called Wirathu was banned, by the government, from public preaching, and that included Facebook.

More information:
A War of Words Puts Facebook at the Center of Myanmar’s Rohingya Crisis
Rohingya crisis: How we got here
U.N. Fact Finders Say Facebook Played a 'Determining' Role in Violence Against the Rohingya
Myanmar: UN blames Facebook for spreading hatred of Rohingya
Is Facebook playing a part in the Rohingya genocide?
The Facebook official who oversees the news feed says his team loses sleep over the site's alleged role in violence in Myanmar

>last places on the Internet where they can speak openly

Says the guy who's clearly never tried to express an opinion on reddit that strongly contradicted the prevailing groupthink.

The entire point (or at least the practical end result) of the karma system is to algorithmically suppress non-conformist thinking so that unpopular opinions are efficiently removed from the sight of anyone who doesn't go out of their way to find them. Overt censorship is redundant and unnecessary, allowing reddit to claim to be pro-free speech. And that's not even touching on the phenomenon of users (or major media outlets) exploiting the lack of anonymity to dig through a wrongthinker's history to find identifying information to threaten them with.

Compare this to 4chan and its offshoots, where everything posted is listed strictly chronologically and anonymously, and (for the most part) nothing is ever removed unless it's illegal or violates one of the random, non-ideological rules (i.e. No Ponies). If the mob wants to attack you, they have no options other than to argue your points or simply call you names.

So where's your proof?

(and I'm not - entirely - trying to be an ass) Have *any* of Kurzweil's predictions (that weren't pretty obvious) ever been right?

I looked through http://www.businessinsider.com... and frankly, nothing he predicted there was right except "we'll all be connected to the internet".
That would have been a savvy prediction...before 2000 when he made it.

The political divide is not so much the "flyover states" but urban versus rural, see a 2016 map progressively modified from strictly geographical state red/blue dichotomy through EV vote size, into counties, then population, then finally the continum of red through purple to blue.

It doesn't matter what state you're in the rural areas are generally more right-wing than the more populated areas. As farm sizes continue to increase rural areas continue to empty. With less people--particularly young people--goods and services of all kinds also diminish. Farmers keep getting older, now with a median age of almost 60. They're under intense financial pressures (land rich and cash poor), utterly dependent on farm subsidies and federal crop insurance (and increasingly Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare) while desperately clinging to a self-image of rugged individualism. Add in change in racial demographics--an aging white population whose kids have left for better opportunities while the field and slaughterhouse workers are increasingly hispanic. A lot of rural people feel under seige from every angle and no matter the state they're right-wing.

In other words, the more you are a value to a company the more they will pay you in salary and benefits. Vacation leave is nothing more than additional pay and in most companies is negotiable. If you are working as a burger flipper your salary is not that high and the extra benefits are the same.

CEOs sit in each other's compensation committee or otherwise signal to other executives that they will approve excessive pay in return for reciprocal arrangements. For example Steve Ballmer was an epic failure of a CEO. He wasted countless billions of dollars. Remember the Zune?

Forbes reported that Microsoft shareholders had a negative total return of nearly 17.6%, with the stock down 36%, according to data from FactSet, from the day Ballmer took over as CEO in January 2000 until he retired.

At his retirement he was worth $17.2 billion.

CEOs don't receive pay cuts when they fail and indeed often receive eight figure salaries and it's one of the well known paradoxes of labor economics. People should in fact be paid up to the margin product of their labor. In fact they are not. Lowly retail workers for example have more than doubled their productivity since 1973. However their real wages have declined. Measured by their contribution to GDP they should be paid much more than they are currently paid. But Amazon and other retailers are able to distort the labor market.

Remember the recent stories about their workers peeing in a bottle and working in prison-like conditions? That would not occur at full employment if the law and other social constraints weren't heavily tilted in the favor of corporations and CEOs.

Sometimes people have leverage to demand very high pay. However for very highly compensated individuals (> $2 million a year in wages + bonus + stock etc) that may not reflect their true economic value. They sometimes can distort the labor market to their advantage. It's well known in labor economics that physicians are overpaid because the supply of residencies in the USA is capped by Congress. Conversely the high salaries paid to developers right now does reflect their economic value and the market is not distorted because you don't need a license to program.

It's comforting to think everyone has the lot they deserve, unfortunately such a notion is patently false.

In other words, the more you are a value to a company the more they will pay you in salary and benefits. Vacation leave is nothing more than additional pay and in most companies is negotiable. If you are working as a burger flipper your salary is not that high and the extra benefits are the same.

CEOs sit in each other's compensation committee or otherwise signal to other executives that they will approve excessive pay in return for reciprocal arrangements. For example Steve Ballmer was an epic failure of a CEO. He wasted countless billions of dollars. Remember the Zune?

Forbes reported that Microsoft shareholders had a negative total return of nearly 17.6%, with the stock down 36%, according to data from FactSet, from the day Ballmer took over as CEO in January 2000 until he retired.

At his retirement he was worth $17.2 billion.

CEOs don't receive pay cuts when they fail and indeed often receive eight figure salaries and it's one of the well known paradoxes of labor economics. People should in fact be paid up to the margin product of their labor. In fact they are not. Lowly retail workers for example have more than doubled their productivity since 1973. However their real wages have declined. Measured by their contribution to GDP they should be paid much more than they are currently paid. But Amazon and other retailers are able to distort the labor market.

Remember the recent stories about their workers peeing in a bottle and working in prison-like conditions? That would not occur at full employment if the law and other social constraints weren't heavily tilted in the favor of corporations and CEOs.

Sometimes people have leverage to demand very high pay. However for very highly compensated individuals (> $2 million a year in wages + bonus + stock etc) that may not reflect their true economic value. They sometimes can distort the labor market to their advantage. It's well known in labor economics that physicians are overpaid because the supply of residencies in the USA is capped by Congress. Conversely the high salaries paid to developers right now does reflect their economic value and the market is not distorted because you don't need a license to program.

It's comforting to think everyone has the lot they deserve, unfortunately such a notion is patently false.

Per Capita debt levels for US States are much lower than Puerto Rico's $172BN or $50K per capita::

The five states at the center of the snowball with the highest debt per capita are Massachusetts ($11,000), Connecticut ($9,200), Rhode Island ($8,900), Alaska ($8,200), and New Jersey ($7,400).

Source: Here's how much state debt rests on your shoulders

The difference isn't "shipping charges" as a result of the century-old Jones Act.

Nah, they'll just build out municipal broadband that's ten times as fast for half the price.

Yeah, because all of the earlier governmental undertaking proved so superior to private enterprises. To wit:

• Public schools, which cost 4 times more today than in the 60ies
• Public roads, which suck by all accounts, particularly in California
• Public transit, which sucks by all all accounts
• And last, but the most germane to the topic, the glorious Municipal WiFi — which sucked so bad, it got abolished by most, who attempted it

Yeah, let's build even more success on that glorious track-record — all the while letting the governments know even more about our online behavior and policing any misbehavior not as ToS-violations, but as civil infractions. What can possibly go wrong?

Netflix's number of movies has gone down by thousands of titles since 2010 — but its TV catalog size has soared

In 2010, Netflix had 530 TV shows and 6,755 movies, according to Flixable. Today, the number of TV shows has nearly tripled, to 1,569, and the number of movies offered has decreased to 4,010.

Additionally and anecdotally, Netflix has lost almost all the Martial Arts movies I've previously watched, or had planned to watch.

I agree with the frustration. I've used the Taiwanese health care system, and their $(1/6) health care was equivalent anecdotally (realistically, we could move in that direction, not copy). Lol, vaccines facepalm. Fox is creating a nation of 45% idiocracy pushers, and calmly repeating scientific findings has got us absolutely nowhere. What are we supposed to do?

I do relate to DCFusor. In Europe, I'm a conservative. In America, I'm acrimonious because I think the risk of stopping or changing the freaking ocean currents might be dangerous.

That might be true if the US had the best healthcare. It doesn't

Since when is $12.5 billion in initial sales and $4 billion a year not a profit?

When it's just one slot on the roulette wheel, and most of the other slots involve risk bleeding out the wazoo (development failure, competitive risk, lawsuits, monstrous capital-investment cycles involving Nervous Nelly moneybags).

No-one writes position papers on risk-free, certain-profit outcomes, because they're too busy scraping $100 bills off the sidewalk.

Let's briefly consider the curious case of Michael Burry.

Though he suffered an investor revolt (where some investors worried the logic was wrong and withdrew their investment in Scion Capital's hedge fund) before his predictions came true, Burry earned a personal profit of $100 million and a profit for his remaining investors of more than $700 million.

Here's the story of one of the heroes of 'The Big Short'

At the same time, Burry began to tell his investors of the enormous risks to the system. His investors were mostly institutions that did not want to hear his theory. Their other investments were all built upon the concept of a sound system with no subprime mortgage risk. Investors began to get nervous and demand their money back.

Unfortunately, it was too late as Burry had already gotten into several long-term, illiquid bets against the market using derivatives to bet the price of mortgages would fall. If he got out of the trades, he would suffer a huge loss — so Burry simply refused the investors' requests.

The film depicts lawsuits against Burry originating from the same people who later walked away with the $700 million, who could have easily scuppered the whole position, if Burry hadn't been such a prudent ass.

There are two main drivers of (apparently) obscene profit: rent and risk.

Often rent is the solution to risk.

That's basically the founding model of the modern corporation. Bankruptcy functions as a hard cap (in most circumstances) on investor liability. Many corporations have engaged in risky bets with enormous upsides and downsides, from which they later walked away (just the failed half of their portfolio), lobbing the majority of the downside to the government (aka you and me), which then faces a billion-dollar cleanup project.

The built-in rent of limited liability makes many business models viable that would not otherwise get off the ground.

It's actually a legitimate question whether a little bit structural rent greases the skids and makes the world go round.

Rational ignorance

Rational ignorance is refraining from acquiring knowledge when the cost of educating oneself on an issue exceeds the potential benefit that the knowledge would provide.

Milton Friedman was big on this (he used to go after the sugar subsidy on this foundation):

Sugar Subsidies, America's Least Efficient Corporate Welfare Program

Washington is once again massively screwing up the American sugar market. Because American farmers cannot compete with foreign sugar growers, the federal government has maintained an array of sugar import quotas and/or tariffs for most of the last 200 years.

As a game-theoretic principle, rational apathy has wide application.

For one, it's really hard to see how a purely libertarian free market deals with the chlorofluorocarbon problem, where the downside is so diffuse (and distal), that no-one at all has a local incentive to begin the (costly) proce

Actually, what he's doing is relying on UPS's fake analysis that they have been peddling to try to trick congress into forcing the USPS to increase their rates so that they can charge more too. But, as with everything President Buttercup, its just a convenient pretext for his butthurt. In this case its over factual press coverage of his actions. Remember, this is the guy who brags that he likes to "hit back 10x harder."

This is true, but Google Maps also puts a lot of their own money into it. They employ at least 10,000 people in their maps division alone!

http://www.businessinsider.com...

NATO benefits the US in a large way. Having a global military is what allows US corporations to profit, by doing things like propping up friendly dictators in areas where we need the natural resources, or need to maintain trade routes, or where they can oppose our adversaries. We're not children. Do you think the US has military bases all over the world, in the name of truth and justice for all? Of course not. It's for profit.

The Middle East is the most obvious example. We get out of Iraq. We stop supporting Israel. Friendly oil nations are overrun with fundamentalists. America is held hostage by oil prices. Our economy tanks. It happened in the 70s it can happen again.

There's also the thinking that maintaining some amount of stability with small conflicts is better than world war. The US was hands off of europe prior to WW1. Then WW2. We know what happened there. Ever since then we've maintained a presence in europe.

Whether we should continue down the road of a globally dominant military is a question, but just make sure you are deciding based on facts and the advice of people like economists and military generals. Trump is a failed business person,
http://www.businessinsider.com...

and a draft dodger.
https://www.nytimes.com/2016/0...

Do you trust him to direct your military and economy?

So far it hasn't been too bad!? Here's a piece by Madeline Albright, not an alarmist: "Fascism poses a more serious threat now than at any time since the end of World War II." Anne Frank's stepsister, in a January essay to mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day, accused Trump of "acting like another Hitler." Ex-Mexican President Fox: Donald Trump reminds me of Hitler. Yale history professor: Here's why it's useful to compare Trump's actions to Hitler's. Even comedian Louis CK says 'Insane bigot' Donald Trump 'is Hitler'.

These are all sane, levelheaded people and you're saying it's not too bad? Who's in a better position to know, you or them?

Russia can lose 300+ people and go on like nothing happened. America would pull out after losing fewer than that... To prevent the mission from failing due to public opinion turning American generals want to keep losses to absolute minimums — and that's why they want machines to do the fighting.

They already did http://www.businessinsider.com...

A captive repair model is a moral hazard and always has been. The king is dead. Welcome to your new Detroit.

The Surprising Source Of Car Dealers' Profits

If you've ever had to take your car into the dealer for a new gear box, you're unlikely to be surprised by this: Using data from the publicly traded dealership groups, Forbes' Jim Henry has discovered that the most profitable part of a dealer's business is its service and parts department.

For the Penske Automotive Group ... the gross margin for service and parts was 57 percent, vs. just 8 percent for new-vehicle sales.

Of course, Apple's profit margins for new phone sales is closer to 57 percent than 8 percent.

We could hypothesize that Apple skews to laudanum on both sides, or we could hypothesize that Apple takes more on one side, and hence less at the other (really?), or we could form a trust relationship with a third party mechanic, and not think about this at all.

If only.

All streams lead to Bezos

There were MANY social media sites BEFORE and AFTER facebook.

Social Media Timeline

Mark has/had an arrogant attitude towards his users:

Shortly after Mark launched The Facebook in his dorm room:

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

Zuck: Just ask.

Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

Zuck: People just submitted it.

Zuck: I don't know why.

Zuck: They "trust me"

Zuck: Dumb fucks.

Government ordered cyber offensives designed to change the leadership of a country are an act of war.

Espionage and covert activities are a normal part of government relations. Saying Russian ads on Facebook are an "act of war" is absurd.

This is a red herring. Espionage might be a side effect of the present situation, given that some efforts were made to use secure russian communications to keep the US intelligence community from knowing what was being communicated between Russia and the Trump White house Source: http://www.businessinsider.com... But it isn't legal, and those caught are punished.

But yeah - saying Russian ads on Facebook are the source of the concept of "Acts of war", and that we dumbass 'Murricans are only thinking of that as an act of war is bullshit. It discards everything else, and is worthy of a paranoid's conspiracy theory frame of mind. Cherry picking what supports one's argument and discarding the rest.

But let's get onto Acts of war. That is the wrong term. What everyone is looking for is Casus belli, not specifically acts of war . There is a relationship, but not a direct tit for tat. A Casus belli can be just about anything. The Bush II administration declared a Casus belli on Iraq for non-compliance with the cease fire in the 1990-91 war. Lame, but an example. WW1 started with the Assassination of Archduke Ferdinand of Austria and was a Casus belli. No direct attack happened.

Actual Acts of war are incidents like the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. No questioning that. A few have been manufactured, like the Gulf of Tonkin false flag operation. But still, there is a difference between the two, and Russia and a company in England didn't physically attack the US. Now since physical acts of war preceded the internet - there might be additions to Acts of war given that we and other countries have been stupid enough to put things like the power grid on the internet.

But let's dig a little deeper.

So now we get to the hacking of both the Republican and Democrat servers, but the systematic release of only the Democrat party information. https://www.snopes.com/news/20... Interestingly a Republican from Texas also broke this, then retracted it a few moments later - which in some cases indicates the veracity of the original statement. https://www.mediaite.com/onlin... But that's pretty interesting - I wonder why the Republican data wasn't presented? And if people think that the DNC's marginalization of Bernie Sanders was bad, they conveniently forget how actively Republicans worked to destroy moderate Republicans in order to replace them with ideologically pure candidates.

So we have a really sketchy attempt to use Russian crypto equipment, selective hacked data disclosure, and an unfolding story of Russian money coming into NRA dark campaign campaign funds for the politicians they own, and more. Facebook is a blip on the screen, but disturbing on the whole because in some of the other countries it was involved in more violent activities.

Regardless, the whole Facebook issue is that Cambridge Analytica was caught once, supposedly deleted the data, didn't, then used it and more data again, and as it turns out, are a really slimey organization. https://www.youtube.com/watch?... The shock of the whole thing was that it finally proved beyond doubt that Facebook is directly involved in the Cambridge Analytica malfeasance. That they will sell your data to organizations that are pathological in nature. That some people were naive enough to not think thair data would be used in such a fashion was hammered home.

Hence the Russians getting so annoyed when the US wants to put one of its hackers on trial.

In our comments section, this was attributed to a speech before Congress in 1836. That certainly is not the origin of the quote, unless it went unnoticed for almost 100 years.

The first recorded appearance of this quote dates to 1928, almost 90 years after it was supposedly uttered, when it was published in a pamphlet "Andrew Jackson and the Bank of the United States: An interesting bit of history concerning 'Old Hickory,'" by Stan Henkles.

Henkles, a Philadelphia auctioneer and collector of Americana, is probably most famous for republishing a prayer book that was supposedly hand-written by George Washington. According to Henkles, he found the book in a trunk owned by a Washington descendant, Lawrence Washington. Despite the fact that Lawrence Washington told Henkles that the book had earlier been rejected by the Smithsonian Institute as inauthentic, Henkles sold the original manuscript to a New York collector for $1,250. He also published a facsmile edition that claimed it had been authored by the first president at the age of 20.

Was the essential phone really first? Says it was available for preorder August 2017, just a month before iphone X came out, and even this article says they knew months in advance Apple was adding a notch so android was copying Apple before Apple was even released http://www.businessinsider.com...

This isn't the first time android copied apple's design based on rumors and rushed to market first. Rumors said the iPhone 6 would have a full sapphire display, so some android manufacturers rushed phones to market with sapphire displays https://bgr.com/2015/01/13/sma...

Isn't Tim Cook the CEO of the same company that intentionally throttled down the performance of nearly every older version of their phone, without being transparent and telling their users or giving them a way to opt out, with the obvious result that customers would get rid of their perfectly good existing phones and replace them unnecessarily with new $850 replacements? I think so.

Seriously, how freaking stupid can companies be to think that the "cloud" is the answer? I genuinely don't get it.

Pretty easy.

Even here in Europe, where the internet has massively cheaper than what you pay in the states, I still have only a 400mb DL and 20mb UL. Faster isnt even available where I live.

1Gb bidirectional here. We have 3 gigabit options in Nashville (Google, AT&T and Comcast) and I pay $70 a month.

The "RICHEST MAN TO EVER LIVE" was actually African (I kid you not!) http://www.businessinsider.com...

http://www.businessinsider.com/well-these-new-zuckerberg-ims-wont-help-facebooks-privacy-problems-2010-5

Shortly after Mark launched The Facebook in his dorm room:

Zuck: Yeah so if you ever need info about anyone at Harvard

Zuck: Just ask.

Zuck: I have over 4,000 emails, pictures, addresses, SNS

[Redacted Friend's Name]: What? How'd you manage that one?

Zuck: People just submitted it.

Zuck: I don't know why.

Zuck: They "trust me"

Zuck: Dumb fucks.

Amazon is just Sears-on-your-iPad.

Continuing that point, Sears was a great retailer for a *long* time, but they failed to innovate and keep up with the changing landscape. I'm not sure their purchases of Kmart and Lands' End and sale of the Craftsman brand did them any favors in the long run. More recently Sears is basically owned and operated by a bunch of hedge fund people who seem intent on chopping it up, selling things off and picking the carcass clean.

Sears has a bigger problem than plunging sales
Sears workers describe decay in failing stores

Amazon is just Sears-on-your-iPad.

Continuing that point, Sears was a great retailer for a *long* time, but they failed to innovate and keep up with the changing landscape. I'm not sure their purchases of Kmart and Lands' End and sale of the Craftsman brand did them any favors in the long run. More recently Sears is basically owned and operated by a bunch of hedge fund people who seem intent on chopping it up, selling things off and picking the carcass clean.

Sears has a bigger problem than plunging sales
Sears workers describe decay in failing stores

There's a simple plan where Assange could easily move outside the embassy.

1) Create a fake Twitter account and post a really mean tweet followed by an announcement you'll be holding a parade just outside London - this will draw the entire London police force and most of the military to strike down the tweeter before he can tweet again, enabling Assange to walk out of the embassy unchallenged.

2) Embed himself in management for an under-age rape gang, as they are immune from policing in the UK and presumably he could make a good living there.

Of course, once free if I were him I'd stay away from park benches and BMW's given how much he has entered pretty much every government.

The UK Parliament are "dumb fucks" anyway.

Let's say you have 4 times as many users on Android tablets as on iPad, but the average iOS user actually spent nine times as much on "bookings" (paid apps and IAPs) as the average Android user in 2015. This would mean your iOS revenue is likely to be double your Android revenue, which to some developers justifies making an app iOS-exclusive in order not to have to spend time=money working around deficiencies in the multi-platform middleware.

Ghostery I
    don't know if Ghostery still sells data: Ghostery
    sells data it collects. (Business Insider, Jun 18, 2013) Ghostery web site. See the article, Ghostery
    is Acquired by Cliqz! (Feb 15, 2017)

I am very happy with Ghostery, use it in all of my browsers. I also use their browser on my Android phone, mainly to stop any additional data consumption. To the best of my understanding you can opt out of their data collection.

I would also recommend ShareMeNot.. I don't use Facebook and do not want them (and others) tracking me.

Add-ons Links
Firefox, WaterFox, and Pale Moon Browsers

For security: Get add-ons only from the Mozilla.org add-on web pages.

Visit those links with Firefox. Visiting with the latest version of Pale Moon (27.8.2) shows an error: """This add-on requires a newer version of Firefox (at least version 52.0). You are using Firefox 27.9."
Pale moon add-ons

Adblock Latitude For Pale Moon browser only. Blocks display of ads. "Adblock Latitude is a direct fork of Adblock Plus made specifically for the Pale Moon browser."

BetterPrivacy Removed by the author. Deletes Local Shared Objects, LSOs. LSOs are files placed on your computer by the Adobe Systems Flash plug-in. Use of Adobe Flash allows web sites to track you, permanently even though your browser is configured to delete the files known as "Cookies" after each re-starting of your operating system.

CanvasBiocker Prevents websites from using the Javascript <canvas> API to fingerprint them.

Classic Theme Restorer Quoting 3 paragraphs:

"This add-on will stop working when Firefox 57 arrives in November 2017."

"This add-on will stop working when Firefox 57 arrives in November 2017 and Mozilla drops support for XUL / XPCOM / legacy add-ons. It should still work on Firefox 52 ESR until ESR moves to Firefox 59 ESR in 2018 (~Q2)".

"There is no 'please port it' or 'please add support for it' this time, because the entire add-on eco system changes and the technology behind this kind of add-on gets dropped without replacement."

Cookies Manager+

Disconnect Updates to Pale Moon browser don't install.

Facebook Blocker Prevents Facebook from following you everywhere there are Facebook "Like" buttons.

Firebug "Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page..." Firebug development page.

FlashStopper Stops video autoplay and shows a preview thumbnail. On Sept. 9, 2017 does not work with YouTube because it prevents reading comments; there is a working version in the development branch.

Ghostery I don't know if Ghostery still sells data: Ghostery sells data it collects. (Business Insider, Jun 18, 2013) Ghostery web site. See the article, Ghostery is Acquired by Cliqz! (Feb 15, 2017)

HTTPS Everywhere Doesn't install in Pale Moon. Encrypts traffic by using HTTPS encryption rather than HTTP wherever web sites accept HTTPS. See How to Protect You

Here's fb propaganda.

Here's an employee's take

When the truth is that they work for an advertising company that pimp's out their user's data to anyone who pays them. The "tech" they're developing is just new ways to scam users out of their information.

facebook employees are like the whores who think they are the fiancé of the guy "giving" them money and gifts.

If google did this

How cute. Google already does. Only without the housing - they have homeless employees that live on campus.

Facebook at least wants to give the illusion that their employees are free to go as far as 100 ft to home. Actually, Google does have its own housing project but they seem to not be that interested.

Yet no mention of the required backpack http://www.businessinsider.com...

How much did Magic Leap pay you to publish this?
Magic Leap Sucks it Colleagues and staff dry.

https://www.geekwire.com/2018/...

http://www.businessinsider.com...

https://variety.com/2016/digit...

https://www.theverge.com/2017/...

http://money.cnn.com/2017/02/1...

Promising to spend their tax dollars on free college education instead of stupid wars in the Middle East worked out so great for Bernie, didn't it?

FTFW. Bernie is still the most popular elected politician in the country -- a fact even Fox News agrees with.

... Reptilians Rule the World ...

Have you seen photos of our World Leaders and Corporate Overlords? Many of them probably keep really young spouses hostage so they can leech youth from them while they sleep.

Of course, like all reptiles, they love their sunshine.