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A compromise with the GOP? The hell it was. Not even ONE member of the GOP in the House or Senate voted for this, not even one. This whole thing was 100% the Democrats doing. Republicans wanted NOTHING to do with this.

Except for the amendments they approved.

But hey, you know what? They had 6 years to do anything else. But all they did was scream repeal, but then what?

Remember the "You are going to have to pass it to find out what's in it" thing from Ole Nancy P at the time? Why did she say that?

Yeah, we remember the narrative, as what she was actually saying was that the GOP was lying so much about it, that the average person had no idea what was in it. Some people still confuse the ACA and Obamacare as if they were separate things.

Because the Republicans where just a few hours away from being able to actually having enough votes to stop the ACA with the election of a republican in the Special election for Ted Kennedy's Senate seat who was to be sworn in. There was not even time to READ the bill before everybody had to vote.

March 10was the speech, months after th Senate had passed their bill, leaving the House to confirm it in two weeks.

Democrats had to pass this sight unseen, which is what their leaders asked and what they did.

Nope. There was plenty of scrutiny and debate.

Many are no longer in office because of this.

Nope. Try gerrymandering.

I consider the ACA to be the start of the long decline of democrats power who have been losing more and more power as they tried to cling to this ACA mess... Obama killed your party, it's power, it's credibility with all this mess and until you realize it, you will be the opposing party, the party of "no" and nothing else.

Well, that's what worked for the GOP, isn't it? Except you know, losing the popular vote.

Ouchies. Three Presidential losses of the popular vote in a row, and not too well in 2010, guess you ought to reconsider which party is dying.

The problem here is that the federal government just doesn't have much control over many of these regulation, as they are mostly down to state and local regulations. At the federal level, then, implementing these policies as Pai describes isn't just about removing regulations: it's about increased regulations of the states, something that Republicans have been historically against, and which may open the way for court challenges.

I also worry that he explicitly mentions private industry, but doesn't appear to care about the deployment of public broadband (an effort which has begun in many communities, but is often stymied by state laws implemented as a result of telecom lobbying).

My big worry here is that these claims are a smokescreen. He doesn't actually want to regulate states more strongly. He wants to remove federal regulations related to the Internet, such as the 2015 net neutrality rules. For some of the things that Pai has opposed, see here. If he follows previous patterns, his effort will decrease competition, increase prices, and not make the slightest dent in broadband speeds.

It does not record everything that is said all the time. It does listen all the time for keyword recognition, and Amazon (along with Google) store recordings that you can go in and delete, but most people don't. Wired has a pretty decent write-up. Can I prove that Echo doesn't record all speech, even when not activated? I've looked and don't see any outbound traffic when it's not activated. I suppose it could be recording stuff surreptitiously, and sneaking out the compressed voice data it's been recording all day during the brief times it is activated, but that compression would have to be really good.

Unless you do all your browsing with Tor, and use something like Lavabit for your email, if you do any commerce online, plenty of people know lots about you. Yah, Amazon knows I like to set timers, and I like to ask for the weather and news. It knows that I skip music tracks on Spotify, along with my schizophrenic taste in music. These are the least of my privacy challenges.

Oh, and my stove, it has one timer at a time, which is limiting when you are dealing with a major meal.

If [San Francisco] allowed more new housing to be built, along with improving public transportation to accommodate greater demand, these problems would diminish.

I believe the problem can be summed up succinctly:

Many people in San Francisco don't want any new buildings; they say the existing buildings are part of the charm of SF and they worry about sprawl. Some of them even have the idea that building new stuff causes housing costs to go up due to "gentrification".

Many people in San Francisco don't want the cost of housing to go up; they decry the trends where only wealthy people (many of them young technical workers at hot companies like Google) can live in SF, and they complain that the city would be more interesting with more starving artists, poets, musicians, etc. (And many hate the private bus systems offered by companies like Google.)

Take both of the above together, and the people of San Francisco are never going to be happy. Not allowing more building capacity means prices will go up, prices going up means that artists and poets can't afford to live in the city. Protesting against the "Google Buses" does nothing to help any problems and just annoys people.

Wired claims that Assange revealed his endgame some years ago.

Want to Know Julian Assange’s Endgame? He Told You a Decade Ago

Essentially, he believes that even though our system of government is based on an adversarial relationship between political parties, between defense lawyers and prosecutors; between plaintiffs and respondents, among candidacies of opposing viewpoints, participants (or in his parlance, co-conspirators), should not be allowed the privilege of discussing and formulating strategy out of earshot.

The uranium-weaponization machinery in Iran was only more "mission critical" than a city's civilian power grid. And yet, Israelis/Americans managed to infect it anyway.

It is entirely possible to update from a local source.

From where would that local source obtain the files? The answer is: from the outside.

Whether you are connected to that outside via wires or sneakernet is not even relevant — all such connections are corruptible... A human being may be harder to corrupt, but not impossible. A dedicated adversary — and Russia certainly is one such — can do it.

Go AIs weren't expected to beat humans for another 10 years though - if that. In 2014 the top programs could only sometimes beat professional-level humans, even with a four-stone handicap, and Grand Masters were a different level, let alone beating the world best. Monte Carlo tree searches make it possible, but they need a good evaluator to guide the simulations. If your simulations aren't good enough then your statistical samples aren't representative, and the best pre-programmed Go evaluator heuristics just weren't in the same league.

AlphaGo's evaluator is what sets it apart, not more searches. It uses layered neural networks, trained against millions of human moves then against each other, to greatly improve their guided simulations, which make it possible to use Monte Carlo searches much more effectively. It was this improved evaluator that enabled AlphaGo to be the first program to beat a professional player (Fan Hui) without a handicap, despite evaluating thousands of times fewer positions than Deep Blue did against Kasparov.

Since 99% of the cost of providing service is the trenching, this will make the market far more competitive.

Citation, please...

Imagine how competitive the package delivery business would be if FedEx, UPS, and USPS each had to build their own network of roads?

Kinda hard to imagine... But I don't think, the conclusion you are trying to project is all that obvious. At any rate, there is a LOT more to package delivery, than roads. There is nothing else to ISP beyond running and maintaining cables (and routers), so your analogy is not valid.

A single network of publicly owned roads fixes that problem, and allows competition to thrive.

The real hurdle to ISP-propagation is the local governments' corruption and ineptitude. Giving them more power will only make things worse.

Ah, the classical "I have nothing to hide" fallacy.

I'm glad you expanded your post because I don't really get what that image is saying. Maybe it's too US-centric for my understanding.

Trump's political positions are mostly a magic 8-ball and it was certainly too early to place him squarely on any political spectrum before the election. He frequently flips his stated positions on a whim. I think we can only judge him by his actions, so we'll have to see what he does when he's finished assembling what appears to be a corporatocratic government. He's putting a fox in every henhouse. I think he could be assembling easily the most fiscally right-wing government in living memory.

To argue that he's fiscally further left than Hillary requires a lot of cherry-picking and optimism, especially now that we've seen some of his actions.

One thing he doesn't waver on is a general tendency toward extreme authoritarianism and extreme social backwardness. I shouldn't have to elaborate on his history of racism and his many socially backward proposals. He's chosen Mike Pence, a leading proponent of "pray the gay away" programs and "Jim Queer" laws, as his VP. He's chosen Steve Bannon and Jeff Sessions for his cabinet. He's far to the right of Hillary on most social issues.

And so are you, which might explain why you're OK with Trump, but not why you'd have any interest in Hillary or Bernie or why you call yourself a liberal while calling the left regressive over wacko fringe college politics, using "SJW," the modern general-purpose descendant of "n****r-lover," (side note: Slashdot now triggers the lameness filter if you use the N-word even once) and otherwise spewing what looks like standard alt-right rhetoric. It's bizarre.

Democrats have a problem, sure, obviously, but I'm not too interested in discussing that. We probably agree on most things there.

BTW, the alt-right at the time was indeed broadly a white nationalist movement. It was a hodgepodge of different factions led by a core of neo-nazis. The factions have since split up. I hate to link to Breitbart, but I think this article gives a good overview of the state of things at the time, straight from the horse's mouth. Its only mistake in analyzing the movement is that like many centipedes did, it mistook the neo-nazis for unfortunate hangers-on rather than the the people pulling the strings behind the scenes.

The whole quote is

"If I were running Apple, I would milk the Macintosh for all it's worth -- and get busy on the next great thing. The PC wars are over. Done. Microsoft won a long time ago."
-- Fortune, Feb. 19, 1996

Jobs said that before he came back to Apple. His opinion was that Microsoft had beaten Apple, and that fighting MS would be hopeless. (Of course when he came back to Apple, he had a different opinion.)

But that's not the case now. Apple winning desktop and laptop market share by putting out high-quality hw and sw is clearly possible. The problem is that for some reason Tim Cook isn't interested in putting out best-in-class hw and sw. Matter of fact in many cases, the hw is worse, and the sw has been dumbed down, from 5 years ago.

The FBI trusted contractors :)
FBI Says the Democratic Party Wouldn’t Let Agents See the Hacked Email Servers (01.05.17)
https://www.wired.com/2017/01/...
"... that neither the FBI nor any other intelligence agency ever did an independent assessment of the organization’s breached servers. Instead, they alleged, the FBI relied exclusively on information from private digital forensics company... "'

Forget the Health Care industry. Ransomware authors should really be targeting Amazon.

I know corporations love automation, because, as they say, "Robots never need to eat, sleep, or pee". But they're putting all their eggs into one digital basket. If someone figures out how to take that system hostage...well, in Amazon's case, doing the math, it works out to be about four million dollars for every minute of downtime. A ransomware author could easily demand ten million dollars, and they'd get it.

This is the future. No more passwords, no more checkout steps, everything one-click, but that's OK because they already know everything about you from your browser cookies. Of course you won't be allowed to hide these from them or not be social enough on the network. And Trump in power.

Among git-specific terminology there's also forking someone's repository. Watch out where you say that, you might get fired over it.

I'm sure the Russian government recruits computer talent in the many ways listed in the article. I would suspect the U.S. government does much the same.

The fake part comes in: Why publish this piece now? Why not, say, during the massive OPM breach?

Simple: Publishing it during the OPM breach would have harmed Obama, whom the New York Times and it's employees almost universally adore, while publishing it now helps prop up the false narrative that the Russians were behind the DNC leaks, not a disgruntled Democratic Party insider, and thus supposedly harms President-elect Donald Trump, whom the New York Times and it's employees almost universally loath.

Remember, among the revelations to come out just after the election were how the Times abandoned objectivity to go after Trump and how the entire newsroom is dedicated to driving a predetermined narrative rather than carrying out an objective search for truth.

This story was published because it fits an (unproven and probably false) narrative that Russia "hacked the election" because it theoretically harms Trump.

Further reading here and here.

These changes will help ensure that order and decorum are preserved in the House of Representatives so lawmakers can do the people's work," a spokeswoman for Ryan said

That's rich. In case you'd forgotten, the incident that caused this is when The House went into recess rather than work on more legislation, and the minority party thought they ought to stay and get more work done. The current Congress ended up being the 3rd least productive in history (being edged out for worst only by the previous two).

So the FIFY here is "These changes will help ensure order and decorum are preserved in the House of Representatives' home districts so lawmakers can continue to not do the people's work".

"Ok, everybody who was *sic*effected*sic* by this raise your hands! Anybody?"

Short memory eh? A DDoS attack took down multiple services around oct ( https://www.wired.com/2016/10/... ). That one personally affected me as one of our dns providers went down, causing customers headaches for a day or two.

So yes, ddos attacks do *affect* people, in the real world, right now. And they are scary and newsworthy when they occur.

The end result should be that companies are law bound and forced to support IoT devices for ~15 years from the date of manufacture of the device. It should be no different than an auto recall where you receive a letter in the mail. You think companies do that out of their own good will? no, they were forced to by law. Why were they forced by law to do that? Because people became enraged and the media hyped up that rage so that laws were passed. The media publicizing these events is completely 100% necessary, if our goal is secure devices and an educated populace. I don't see any other way to combat these new IoT botnets, do you? Your solution of "just ignore them" is fanciful. Doesn't work with any sort of crime, so it won't work for botnets. You defend yourself, which in this case means educating manufacturers and your fellow man about a clear and present danger.

I just read this in my hardcopy and found it online for anyone to read on Wired web site.

Do police regularly request cellular phone companies to provide recordings of ambient audio recorded by cellphones? In this example, the police DO treat an Echo differently from a cell phone, and the DO expect it to have stored audio that might aid their investigation, because unlike a cell phone, the echo records everything when active.

Law enforcement treats the objects differently, so seems perfectly rational for consumers to notice the difference.

How would you know what the police do with cell phones? Law enforcement even hides whether or not they use a stingray at all, and there is very little information about what the devices are and what they are capable of - maybe they really can remotely turn on your phone's microphone and record what you're saying? And all of these secrecy comes not just with the Justice Department's blessing, but at the outright request of the Justice department.

...The documents also discuss the possibility of flashing a phone’s firmware “so that you can intercept conversations using a suspect’s cell phone as a bug...

https://www.wired.com/2015/10/...

This case sounds like some news outlet updated a 2015 article on a bombing that happened in 2015 and Facebook whoopsied and thought it was a new story. Much like the United Airlines stock crash caused by Google detecting an updated six-year-old story as "news". Except back then we blamed Google for fucking up their algorithm, while today Facebook can do no wrong and can bear no responsibility, and therefore this problem must have been caused by Fake News (TM).

They have opened everything up except for the hardware decoders and HDCP, neither of which they own. They have anounced they are keeping the proprietary codebase up until the FOSS driver has feature parity then it'll be replaced. As it is now you can choose to go FOSS and have a couple of features not ready for prime time or the proprietary drivers, which again is 1 more choice than Nvidia gives you.

But I'm sorry but the fact that you as a FOSS user doesn't know about it? Just shows how shitty the community is and how its not worth spending any money supporting them! I mean here you have one of the biggest chip companies on the planet just handing you everything you wanted...what did the community bleat over and over? What were their words? Oh yeah "If you'll just give us the code and docs we'll support ourselves" well you got what you wished for, hell more than you wished for as AMD actually put money where their mouth was and gave Mantle to the OpenGL group strings free, paid for several devs that work on GCC, and paid the salaries of several devs to help get the FOSS drivers up to snuff...what did it get them? NOTHING.

Because "free as in freedom" don't mean shit to the majority of the community, all they give a shit about is "free as in beer". Want proof simply see how many in that article or any other article that has squat to do with graphics say "Linux herp derp Nvidia" when Nvidia has been so openly hostile to FOSS that Linus Torvalds gave them the finger...did that stop Linux users from buying Nvidia? Did AMD bending over backwards for them get them more sales? Nope which is why companies won't support Linux, because the community doesn't return the favor.

BTW mark my words, in 5 years we'll see Linux desktops going down every year in a steady curve going ever down...why? You can have windows 10 for free now, so all those "free as in beer" users can have Windows without paying shit and as they have shown with Nvidia they don't care about whether something is proprietary or not, all they care about is not having to spend shit on software.

WikiLeaks did not start out editing content.

In the beginning:

1.) WikiLeaks was a depository, only. They stated, clearly, that they had no way of knowing who had left leaks on their doorstep, and they had no way of tracing material back to the source.

Additionally, WikiLeaks assured the courts that they, themselves, were not hackers.

This was true, and it kept them out of court because they could prove they could not comply with requests to reveal its sources.

2.) WikiLeaks never published material. They gave stuff to the press (I listed in a previous post) so the material could be vetted and poured over for redaction to protect the innocent.

This, too, kept them out of court because they could correctly point out that they were not the press (the press, listed above, was hounded ... but that comes with the territory).

--

Assange and WikiLeaks asserted that Assange was simply the spokesperson and was in no other way an active participant in WikiLeaks. This kept him out of court.

Manning released material to WikiLeaks, but he had already exposed himself as the source after communicating with, and trying to impress, a real hacker who played ball with the US government.

Realizing the US wanted his ass, Assange began claiming that HE was an editor.

His theory is that if he's ever extradited to the US, he will have 1st amendment protections.

--

WikiLeaks fell off the radar a couple of years ago and donations crapped out.

That explains the recent change in tactics where WikiLeaks abandoned 1.) and 2.) above.

Now it's a media whore and useless as tits on a boar.

Also, there are probably even other choices that aren't a den of centipedes.

(But if you're concerned about Twitter's policies against hate speech, by all means self-segregate yourself onto Gab.)

The next big hit will be the trucking industry. Everyone thinks Google's self driving cars are pretty cute, right? Fewer accidents, vision impaired people can get to the grocery store, your car can drive your drunk ass home from the bar safely? All good, right?

Two things about that. First thing, they want this for the trucking industry. Don't tell me they're not working on it because they absolutely are. First article, second article.

Second thing. Truck driver is the most popular profession today. First article, second article.

The USA is set to lose 3.5 million jobs, just as soon as we get this tech ironed out. And it doesn't matter who the president is. Trump, Hillary, Vermin Supreme - it'll happen no matter what. It has nothing to do with politics, NAFTA, any of it. It's progress, it's capitalism, and it's going to happen.

People need to look a little farther afield than simple manufacturing to see how automation will affect the economy.

... stick your pint glass at its base ...

There are plastic pint cups with a magnetic valve in the base. It means the cup fills faster, from the bottom, with less foam. That would seem a suitable mechanism for a vending machine, faster delivery, a purpose-built cup means easier policing of customers plus, no magnet means no beer.

... and they've had it for 60 years ...

Because buying the same thing you bought last week is a bad thing? If people wanted to buy a different (flavoured) beer every week, these breweries wouldn't have lasted 60 years. Now, with micro-brews, with some breweries selling over 100 different recipes, people can buy a different (flavoured) beer cooked by a tradesman. Why buy a beer made from a recipe written by 100 teenagers? (In most countries, 19 year-olds can drink.) 'Too many cooks spoil the broth' is an accurate adage in this case.

Seemingly lost in the hyperbolic arguments above is that fake news websites phishing for clicks and ad revenue are a very real thing and if you haven't heard then you're just not paying attention... here's Fox News talking about it: http://video.foxnews.com/v/521... The original Slate article focuses heavily on the more controversial 3rd-party fact-checking so many arguing about, but this Wired article on Facebook's policy has a slightly different emphasis. https://www.wired.com/2016/12/... Most noteably Wired gives more details in how Facebook says they will check the source domains of articles to see if they are traceable to fake or spoofed websites and ultimately attempt to deincentivize fake news creators by hitting them in their ad revenue/pocketbooks. Facebook is trying to reduce the effect of fraudsters who are well documented by left and right leaning news sources. Rational people would keep the argument focused there.

It's disheartening to read the hyperbole, misdirection, and insults through this discussion on both sides. I've been less impressed with the contributions to Slashdot over the last year and this discussion is a new low for me.

> You can't have it both ways.

That's only if you are unaware that the NSA has two mandates:

(1) Spy
(2) Protect

Most of us who complain about the NSA believe that they have over-emphasized (1) at the expense of (2).
We've all heard about how the NSA hordes zero-days to enable their ability to spy which leaves everyone vulnerable to anyone else who also has those zero-days. That became explicitly clear with the Shadow Brokers fiasco.

I am happy to support the NSA in their mandate to protect. But as long as they follow a policy of keeping the US weak because it helps them spy, then they don't deserve the support of americans.

So uber will just say they can not find trained workers to drive for them and they need temporary immigrant labour and they pay the lobbyists to pay the politician to get the laws they want to cripple the wage claims of their workers, it's the bullshit American way.

Or, they could simply remove the driver from the equation and go with self-driving cars - but they'd never do that, would they?

Netflix's shrinking catalog may have a correlation in the shrinking growth in its subscriber base. It may not matter much to its remaining subscribers, but it very well could matter to people choosing not to sign up, or to people like me that dropped the service.

For anyone still wondering why the snooper charter is a very very bad idea... and this is only a single problem out of a huge list.
Here's what to expect:

https://www.wired.com/2013/09/...
http://animalnewyork.com/2014/...
http://www.kiro7.com/news/inve...
http://www.nbcnewyork.com/news...
http://wncn.com/2016/02/10/nc-...
https://psmag.com/when-your-st...

https://www.techdirt.com/artic...

Most of these are coming directly from security agencies and the police itself, but what do people think will happen once ISPs and multiple governmental agencies are able to log content from Internet users? Be prepared folks. It's not about only about you doing bad and questionable things. It's specially about all the people with access to your private lives willing to ruin it or turn it into a profitable business.

We have, you're just ignorant.

You are forgetting criminals. If there is no cash, and every transaction is traced, it becomes much more difficult to run a criminal activity.

As a famous Swede said:

I challenge anyone to come up with reasons to keep cash that outweigh the enormous benefits of getting rid of it. Imagine the worldwide suffering because of crime, from drug dealing to bicycle theft. Crime that requires cash. The Swedish krona is a small currency, used only in Sweden. This is the ideal place to start the biggest crime-preventing scheme ever. We could and should be the first cashless society in the world.—Björn Ulvaeus

It seems that Korea may beat Sweden to being the first cashless society.

Salmon also exhibit religious euphoria

Or something like that.

Partisan gerrymandering in too many states leads to a district based award being biased itself. If anything, it would make even biased scenarios occur, as states could award disproportionately due to that, so a candidate with say, 40% of a state's vote could take 80% of its electoral college votes. All due to imaginary lines on a map.

Looking at it geographically alone you can see problems, if you were to compare partisan bias you would get worse results.

No, if you don't want Winner-Take-All, which is fair, instead of districts, go with proportional awards, it is less imbalanced. You will need to correct for the Wyoming problem though.

Luckily that won't take a Constitutional Amendment. Congress can pass a law. Straight up.

They could do it Monday, and State Legislatures act on Tuesday. Done.

I'm sorry to be the bearer of bad news, but vehicles with such vulnerabilities have already been compromised on public roads in at least one controversial demonstration. This is not a hypothetical threat. Vehicles vulnerable to this sort of attack are on the roads today, yet so far governments their regulators either don't understand the dangers or don't seem to be willing to act on them.

Call me when I can buy a lightweight headset that paints the image on my retina with a frikkin laser beam.

They're working on it.

According to Forbes, they're already building the factory lines. Also at Wired, MIT tech review,
Wearable.com, Techcrunch and The Verge.

Linus Torvalds advanced things a little.

Criminal litigation or civil lawsuits alone don't solve the problem. There are lots of criminals looking to capitalize on short-term opportunity, then close up shop before Lady Justice brings the pain. We need regulators who can actively sniff out fraudulent activity.

Otherwise, any fly-by-night company looking to make a quick profit will be happy to sell counterfeit Copper Clad Aluminum data cables, which can easily catch and spread fire, or cheap batteries that are also more fire prone, or toys with lead paint, or counterfeit medicines, and so on. It's like the snake oil salesmen of yore...by the time the townsmen realize they were sold an empty promise, the salesman has already packed the wagon and moved onto the next town.

Lawsuits only work on the Walmarts, business who aren't going away anytime soon.

You did this before I did, but it ain't no lie.

This.

In fact, Lifelock CEO Davis was the victim of identity theft in 2007 when a thief used his widely advertised Social Security number to obtain a $500 loan in Davis’ name.

"CIA Chief: We’ll Spy on You Through Your Dishwasher"
https://www.wired.com/2012/03/...
and the UK having its Investigatory Powers Act 2016https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Investigatory_Powers_Act_2016 with equipment interference.
With so many mil and gov groups now interested in the IoT what can any firewall be ready for?
Be able to look for alterations, strange pushed updates not from the user, developer?
Re 'That means somehow getting a signing cert onto the device that all of the IoT things trust." would be good for GUI clicked update requests.

Automation makes no business sense unless it contributes to the bottom line. Meaning it should be better, cheaper, or faster than existing human labour (preferably all three). If the total amount of (wage paying) man hours per unit of output isn't lower than without automation, it's not competitive. In all three cases it will mean a net reduction in human labour in a particular niche plus support jobs (insofar as they are billed through to the work they're replacing),.

In the past there were always new investment opportunities (new things to do; often new natural resources to exploit) that would absorb that labour, and offer a return on investment. In other words: it would drive up our collective wealth to more than pay for those new jobs.

For better or worse I don't quite see where the next big economic expansion is to come from (and if I did I wouldn't be telling you until I had secured a slice of the pie). I fear it may be absent.

Unfortunately some of the biggest niches in US labour market are in manual work: manufacturing things, mining, driving trucks, warehousing, janitorial work, and the service industry.

Ever read about the time when so much employment was in farming jobs? Mostly gone. Automated. Jobs absorbed by industry.

Manufacturing jobs are shifting. Some offshore. Some to automation. As far as I know, the bulk of shop floor manufacturing jobs (just look at the automobile industry) are assembly-type jobs (i.e. not skilled machining). Which can be automated as pick and place robots become more affordable and more capable.

Warehousing: same thing. Jobs being automated. Just ask Amazon. Easier to run 24/7 and no more restroom breaks.

Driving trucks seems on its way to being automated too. According to this site http://www.alltrucking.com/faq... there are about 3.5 mln. truck drivers in the US. What if we can eliminate just the easiest 10% of those? See e.g. https://www.theguardian.com/te... and http://www.latimes.com/project... and https://www.wired.com/2015/05/... and here http://www.bloomberg.com/news/... . Any ideas where about 350k former truck drivers will find employment? That's a lot of low-skilled jobs to offset by generating new demand. In fact, it's about 2% of the labour force (see http://www.bls.gov/cps/cpsaat0... ).

I believe that mr. Trump's recent win is mostly because whole groups of US citizens are facing the problem that what they have to offer (their labour) is no longer in demand. It can be (and often has been or is being) replaced by automation, different products, even cheaper competition offshore, or illegal immigrants. That should at least tell us that people are feeling the squeeze.

To continue a bit with mr. Trump: his promises seem to hinge on three economic pillars: erecting trade barriers, exploiting the commons for commercial gain (as in exchanging environmental protection statutes for operating profit), and injecting a trillion

Really? That isn't what Bruce Schneier thinks.

Bruce Schneier: China and Russia Almost Definitely Have the Snowden Docs

Do countries like China and Russia have copies of the Snowden documents? I believe the answer is certainly yes . . .

Bruce then tries to create wiggle room for Snowden - it's not his fault! But it is. Even if we assume that Snowden isn't dirty, a defector, those documents wouldn't have been anywhere nearly as vulnerable had he not taken them and distributed multiple copies to journalists and others.

The Snowden Operation: Assessing the Damage

If you can't accept that possibility I don't think you are being intellectually honest. The Snowden cache of documents is one of the great prizes of all time for intelligence agencies. How can you not believe they have expected considerable resources to get their hands on a copy?

Did you not notice the changes that both Russia and China made to their computer intelligence and cyberwar infrastructure after those documents got loose?

Hi AC, the US seems to want it both ways.
"CIA Chief: We’ll Spy on You Through Your Dishwasher" (03.15.12)
https://www.wired.com/2012/03/...
"All those new online devices are a treasure trove of data if you’re a “person of interest” to the spy community."
All global AV brands have to do is scan with every common pw/usernames and see what fails. Get users to create their own long pw and unique usernames.
Or make the gateway to the internet hide or mask what the user is running.

Did you see them speak russian while they were "hacking" emails?

https://www.wired.com/2016/07/...
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the...

I've only been waiting thirteen years for this to happen.

In the past few years, lab-grown diamonds have become indistinguishable from natural diamonds to the naked eye...

This looks suspiciously like a story I read in Wired magazine 13 years ago. Lab grown diamonds have been indistinguishable from natural diamonds for a long time now. The price of diamond should be a lot lower than it is, even without the competition from artificial diamonds, but De Beers has been allowed to abuse their monopoly position to stockpile the output of their mines and control the flow into the market to maintain artificial scarcity, and threaten not to supply jewellers who work with artificial diamonds.

While there seems to be info suggesting these things won't harm you physically, nor is it easy to crank them up to the point they would... they are still just a major part of security theater, as multiple ways have been found to sneak contraband past them: https://www.wired.com/2014/08/...

Did you add in the price for Apple's touch screen and digitizer? No? Oh, right - they don't have one.

Do you really think that Apple, as one of the leaders in touchscreen technology, hasn't experimented extensively with a touchscreen iMac?

There are fundamental problems with the concept when it comes to desktop and laptop use. Believe me, we wish it wasn't true, but our repeated and lengthy testing has clearly shown that it is.

That's why Apple makes both purpose-built Touch-Driven Tablets and Smartphones, with a purpose-built Touch-based OS, and mouse and trackpad-driven Desktop and Laptop computers, with a more conventional, non-touch-based OS.

But if you really want to add touch to an iMac, you can easily do so for only $200.