Few people indeed gather paper riches merely for the sake of giggling behind closed curtains over their bank balances.
Given how much more money the elites have compared to the costs of even the most opulent lifestyle, this is what the elites are doing. Sure, they have obscenely expensive toys to show off, but the vast majority of their wealth is just bank balances.
buying off the peasants becomes more and more affordable for the have-alls
While true, an increasing number of the elites are becoming more and more resentful of providing for the "peasants."
And the elites have been successful in making the police, who are also peasants, afraid of the rest of the peasants. It's increasingly more likely the peasants will kill each other.
People here say "what happens when the elite no longer need the little people" but they're thinking small. What happens when the machines no longer need the elite people?
We haven't even reached the first scenario yet
Actually, we have. The majority of "little people" - including me* - work in jobs to either produce products or provide services for other little people. While the elite collect the profits of the sales of these products and services, they profit more from providing financial services to each other.
5 years ago, we had a politician lamenting that other politicians lacked the guts to let the little people "wither and die" - https://www.upi.com/Top_News/U... . While no politician might be (publicly) saying that now, we have increasing numbers of politicians working to undermine the services that help the little people.
What happens when the most disadvantage people "wither and die"? Fewer little people are needed to produce products and services for little people. It's a downward spiral for the little people.
Even though my daughter is very very likely to keep herself useful to the elites, she has decided it would be irresponsible for her to have children of her own.
---
* I work for a company that makes products for the little people. My job title is "Lead Product Development Engineer". (Of course, I am looking for a new job with a company that makes "toys" for the elites.)
Back in the BBS days, the non-academic online world largely rested on the shoulders of dedicated sysops who ran their portals as labors of love.... Most of all, you knew that if they could no longer sustain the board, it would likely close down.
A former co-worker of mine (old then me) used to run a BBS. In it's hay-day, it was a member of UUNET, ProNet and FidoNet, including functioning as a gateway between those 3 networks. He started it when his employer replaced their AT&T 3B2-300 with an AT&T 3B2-400. Not wanting to keep the machine, they let him take the 3B2-300. Later, he got the 3B2-400 when they replaced that with a 3B5. He networked the 2 together for load sharing. At time, he had 8 phone lines with 8 modems for his BBS. Since the machines ran Unix, he had to write his own BBS software. He also wrote implementations of the ProNet and FidoNet node-to-node protocols, as well as message conversion libraries.
Usage of the BBS peaked in about 1992. In 1995, he dropped down to 6 modems, dropping more over time. When he finally shut it down in 2000, it was down to just 1 modem and 2 regular users. In 1993, and several later times, he considered taking the BBS live on the Internet, but the cost was prohibitive. He did, once, have it set up at a "retro computing" exhibit run by a local science fiction convention. He hasn't powered up the hardware since then, though he still has it all.
For whatever reason, LibreOffice doesn't have any email/calendar component.
There are open source clients for MS's Exchange Web Services protocol, however, our IT department has EWS disabled, so I've never had a reason to use EWS with one of those clients.
Side note: Most of our IT tech people have both Linux and Windows PCs on their desks. They would love to enable EWS. The policy to disable it comes from the CIO (who is an MBA with, by his own admission, very little technical experience).
My daughter's highschool used (still uses, I think) Chromebooks and Google Docs. When she went to university, we got her the laptop of her choice. She installed Linux and LibreOffice. Has had no problems turning in assignments written using LibreOffice.
For example, just three years ago, I was working on a really important presentation in Impress for hours.... I gave up, launched PowerPoint, and had the presentation done in an hour flat.
I strongly dislike both PowerPoint and Impress. They both put way too much "power" in the hands of clueless users while hamstringing experts. A former manager of one of my co-workers once said "You can put all kinds of poop in to PowerPoint."
Sometimes slideshows are the right thing. I don't doubt that your presentation was appropriate for a slideshow. Just that there are far too many that were "Hey, I'll make a slideshow 'cause I can" crap.
In a corporate environment, Microsoft Office is still a requirement.
At least where I work, nearly all the technical people are using LibreOffice - many of us are using it on Linux, though we all have "office PCs" for access to corporate email and several "business apps" we are forced to use.
Anyway, the MS Office users in the company don't seem to notice. And any compatibility issues they do encounter are no worse than what they encounter in documents from customers and suppliers, who use different versions of MS Office, some as old as 2007. MS Office inter-version is often poor. We usually hear more complaints about outside documents than ones from the tech staff.
Many printers are directly connected to a WiFi or LAN. Many printers targeted to the small office and home use markets rely on either OEM or third party servers to allow your mobile devices to use your printer.
How many people are knowledgeable enough to block their printer's access to the Internet? How many even think of that? And, how many are actually willing to deny their mobile devices the ability to print to their printer?
On the other hand, many cameras for small office and home use are WiFi connected. And, like the printers, also rely on OEM or third party servers to allow users to view the video on their mobile devices. Even if the camera chip is separate from the rest of the electronics, it could still exfiltrate data other than the expected video stream.
What data could a camera chip get that you might not want sent? In many low end cameras, the only lens is the lens built in to the package of the camera chip. If that lens doesn't block infrared light, the chip could send out a second video stream showing what it sees in infrared.
Also, think about that webcam sitting on your monitor or built in to your laptop - does the built in lens cover block infrared light? Even if the cover distorts the image, there are algorithms to correct for that. And, often, the distortion isn't enough to make the uncorrected stream useless.
The API (actually APIs, there are many) is a list of function/method names and types, and their parameter names and types.
Oracle's claims are that copying the text describing the API is copyrighted and copying the description is not protected by fair use.
Allegedly, Google distributed copies of the API description with the Android development kit.
I suppose one possible alternative Google could have used was have their development kit installer automatically download and run the Java development kit installer.
Allowing any third party direct access to call/sms/etc data on the phone is a security risk. We have enough privacy risk in our lives, we don't need government mandated apps that dig even deeper into our data and activities.
This point I agree with. While I can see where this app actually has a reason to access contacts and calls, I still would not trust it.
the internet now allows any moron to say whatever they want for almost nothing. There is no need to spend billions to get your ideas across.
The Internet is lots of small, self-selected audiences. If you want to get your message to the large numbers of people required to have even a whisper of influence on voter opinion, you have to either buy air time, buy ad space or buy control of editorial decision making.
but the reality is that the kinds of rape that can easily be prosecuted are getting rarer and rarer
Where I live, there has been an increasing rate of successful rape prosecutions based on the claim "I was drunk" by the victim - despite the fact that there was no way for the prosecutor to prove* the victim was drunk (or otherwise intoxicated) at the time of the alleged rape.
Of course, part of the problem is that most people can't afford to pay for a good enough defense attorney.
---
* In theory, a blood test within a few hours could prove if the victim was drunk at the time.
If I sleep during the day, light doesn't bother me. In fact, I sleep best during the day. At night, though, I need near complete darkness to sleep.
Unfortunately, I need to interact with people who sleep at night. (Actual family and friends. Otherwise, telecommute-work for my employer's office in Australia.)
One simple to setup option would be Fossil's builtin issue tracking. A singles executable to download and "install". Web-based UI and the issue tracker is very configurable. http://fossil-scm.org/
For access outside your home/office LAN, you will need to use stunnel or configure your Internet-facing webserver to forward HTTP to your Fossil server.
My concern is that the publishers and "music catalog owners" will get an overwhelmingly large share of the money
Speaking as an artist, I can tell you that the publishers do get a huge share of at least the compulsory license royalties, This is because, by law, compulsory royalties are collected by organizations operated by the publisher associations. Besides the publishers' "cuts", these organizations also take a percentage as a processing fee and require artists to pay "annual membership dues". Any royalties intended for artists who don't pay said dues are kept by the organizations.
Another thing to consider is that parents are not allowed to let even teens be unsupervised. And because, in most families, both parents have to work, the easiest thing for parents to do is give their teens screens to keep them entertained.
When I was a teen, I road my bicycle to/from school, the library and other places. I was allowed to go shopping with no adult supervision. as long as I called my parents to let them know where I was going, I was allowed to roam anywhere I could reasonably walk or ride my bicycle.
If I had wanted, I could have spent all my time in front of my computer screen. Instead, I chose other options. Options that aren't available to today's teens.
polygyny leaves the unmarried men at a significant disadvantage
I don't disagree. I will, however, share the perspective of a pair of friends of mine - 2 women who share a man: "We decided to share rather than compete after years of dating and only finding one man worth staying with. The pool of available men who are even worth dating is dismal. We're very happy sharing the one we did find."
"Last mile" service to homes (and businesses) should be no different for Internet access than it is for telephone access. Without Title II, AT&T, for example, could charge extra for its customers to place or receive telephone calls to or from, for example, Verizon. Or AT&T could even only allow calls between AT&T customers, which would require businesses to be customers of both AT&T and Verizon (and, probably several other phone companies).
Likewise, without Title II (or other law), Comcast, for example, could charge its customers extra to access services provided by customers of other ISPs. Or require those services to be Comcast customers.
Also, note that Comcast owns NBC and Universal Studios, so is not just an Internet Service Provider. It is also a content provider. Therefore, it has a vested interest in promoting content from NBC and Universal and demoting content from other content providers.
Humans evolved from omnivores. Meat, eggs and milk provide a much more concentrated nutrition than a pure vegan diet can. My vegan friends eat 2 to 3 times the volume of food I eat. (And I don't eat a lot of meat; usually 60 to 90 grams per meal.)
The problem started with government, removing that problem solves net neutrality at the source, the freedom of the customer to choose the vendor they want, not the one the local Municipality choose 35-50 years ago.
I agree. Unfortunately, that problem is not easy to correct. Technically, the cable monopoly in my area expired 20+ years ago. Still only one cable company. And since the cable company is the main ISP, here, it's also an Internet monopoly. (Yes, the phone company is also an ISP, but only offers 20% of what the cable company does. Satellite is also available, but is very unreliable.)
The main 2 reasons there isn't another cable company are cost and lack of will on the part of the local utility board (that controls access to the utility poles) to defy the wishes of the current cable company. We sued the board to attempt to force them to do so, but the judge ruled that the board had not violated any law or rule. The board is appointed, so we can't vote them out. And Internet service is only one of many, many issues the elected officials deal with, so gets "lost in the noise".
Yes, some of us regularly remind our local officials. We even ran a petition drive. The board responded "There aren't any pending applications." And the officials replaced a few of the board members - with other people from the same pool as the ones that were replaced.
We are now looking into wireless mesh networking. Our biggest problem with that is finding home owners or businesses in the right places who are willing to host our equipment for connecting to the Internet.
Slashdot Mirror
but it takes religion to make a good man do evil things
Then add Christians to the list of "good men doing evil":
and more.
I was born and raised Christian. Long ago, I disavowed Christianity out of shame for the evil done by Christians.
Few people indeed gather paper riches merely for the sake of giggling behind closed curtains over their bank balances.
Given how much more money the elites have compared to the costs of even the most opulent lifestyle, this is what the elites are doing. Sure, they have obscenely expensive toys to show off, but the vast majority of their wealth is just bank balances.
buying off the peasants becomes more and more affordable for the have-alls
While true, an increasing number of the elites are becoming more and more resentful of providing for the "peasants."
And the elites have been successful in making the police, who are also peasants, afraid of the rest of the peasants. It's increasingly more likely the peasants will kill each other.
People here say "what happens when the elite no longer need the little people" but they're thinking small. What happens when the machines no longer need the elite people?
We haven't even reached the first scenario yet
Actually, we have. The majority of "little people" - including me* - work in jobs to either produce products or provide services for other little people. While the elite collect the profits of the sales of these products and services, they profit more from providing financial services to each other.
5 years ago, we had a politician lamenting that other politicians lacked the guts to let the little people "wither and die" - https://www.upi.com/Top_News/U... . While no politician might be (publicly) saying that now, we have increasing numbers of politicians working to undermine the services that help the little people.
What happens when the most disadvantage people "wither and die"? Fewer little people are needed to produce products and services for little people. It's a downward spiral for the little people.
Even though my daughter is very very likely to keep herself useful to the elites, she has decided it would be irresponsible for her to have children of her own.
---
* I work for a company that makes products for the little people. My job title is "Lead Product Development Engineer". (Of course, I am looking for a new job with a company that makes "toys" for the elites.)
Back in the BBS days, the non-academic online world largely rested on the shoulders of dedicated sysops who ran their portals as labors of love. ... Most of all, you knew that if they could no longer sustain the board, it would likely close down.
A former co-worker of mine (old then me) used to run a BBS. In it's hay-day, it was a member of UUNET, ProNet and FidoNet, including functioning as a gateway between those 3 networks. He started it when his employer replaced their AT&T 3B2-300 with an AT&T 3B2-400. Not wanting to keep the machine, they let him take the 3B2-300. Later, he got the 3B2-400 when they replaced that with a 3B5. He networked the 2 together for load sharing. At time, he had 8 phone lines with 8 modems for his BBS. Since the machines ran Unix, he had to write his own BBS software. He also wrote implementations of the ProNet and FidoNet node-to-node protocols, as well as message conversion libraries.
Usage of the BBS peaked in about 1992. In 1995, he dropped down to 6 modems, dropping more over time. When he finally shut it down in 2000, it was down to just 1 modem and 2 regular users. In 1993, and several later times, he considered taking the BBS live on the Internet, but the cost was prohibitive. He did, once, have it set up at a "retro computing" exhibit run by a local science fiction convention. He hasn't powered up the hardware since then, though he still has it all.
For whatever reason, LibreOffice doesn't have any email/calendar component.
There are open source clients for MS's Exchange Web Services protocol, however, our IT department has EWS disabled, so I've never had a reason to use EWS with one of those clients.
Side note: Most of our IT tech people have both Linux and Windows PCs on their desks. They would love to enable EWS. The policy to disable it comes from the CIO (who is an MBA with, by his own admission, very little technical experience).
My daughter's highschool used (still uses, I think) Chromebooks and Google Docs. When she went to university, we got her the laptop of her choice. She installed Linux and LibreOffice. Has had no problems turning in assignments written using LibreOffice.
For example, just three years ago, I was working on a really important presentation in Impress for hours. ... I gave up, launched PowerPoint, and had the presentation done in an hour flat.
I strongly dislike both PowerPoint and Impress. They both put way too much "power" in the hands of clueless users while hamstringing experts. A former manager of one of my co-workers once said "You can put all kinds of poop in to PowerPoint."
Sometimes slideshows are the right thing. I don't doubt that your presentation was appropriate for a slideshow. Just that there are far too many that were "Hey, I'll make a slideshow 'cause I can" crap.
In a corporate environment, Microsoft Office is still a requirement.
At least where I work, nearly all the technical people are using LibreOffice - many of us are using it on Linux, though we all have "office PCs" for access to corporate email and several "business apps" we are forced to use.
Anyway, the MS Office users in the company don't seem to notice. And any compatibility issues they do encounter are no worse than what they encounter in documents from customers and suppliers, who use different versions of MS Office, some as old as 2007. MS Office inter-version is often poor. We usually hear more complaints about outside documents than ones from the tech staff.
Many printers are directly connected to a WiFi or LAN. Many printers targeted to the small office and home use markets rely on either OEM or third party servers to allow your mobile devices to use your printer.
How many people are knowledgeable enough to block their printer's access to the Internet? How many even think of that? And, how many are actually willing to deny their mobile devices the ability to print to their printer?
On the other hand, many cameras for small office and home use are WiFi connected. And, like the printers, also rely on OEM or third party servers to allow users to view the video on their mobile devices. Even if the camera chip is separate from the rest of the electronics, it could still exfiltrate data other than the expected video stream.
What data could a camera chip get that you might not want sent? In many low end cameras, the only lens is the lens built in to the package of the camera chip. If that lens doesn't block infrared light, the chip could send out a second video stream showing what it sees in infrared.
Also, think about that webcam sitting on your monitor or built in to your laptop - does the built in lens cover block infrared light? Even if the cover distorts the image, there are algorithms to correct for that. And, often, the distortion isn't enough to make the uncorrected stream useless.
Original Java is a programming API
Java is a programming language
The API (actually APIs, there are many) is a list of function/method names and types, and their parameter names and types.
Oracle's claims are that copying the text describing the API is copyrighted and copying the description is not protected by fair use.
Allegedly, Google distributed copies of the API description with the Android development kit.
I suppose one possible alternative Google could have used was have their development kit installer automatically download and run the Java development kit installer.
Allowing any third party direct access to call/sms/etc data on the phone is a security risk. We have enough privacy risk in our lives, we don't need government mandated apps that dig even deeper into our data and activities.
This point I agree with. While I can see where this app actually has a reason to access contacts and calls, I still would not trust it.
the internet now allows any moron to say whatever they want for almost nothing. There is no need to spend billions to get your ideas across.
The Internet is lots of small, self-selected audiences. If you want to get your message to the large numbers of people required to have even a whisper of influence on voter opinion, you have to either buy air time, buy ad space or buy control of editorial decision making.
but the reality is that the kinds of rape that can easily be prosecuted are getting rarer and rarer
Where I live, there has been an increasing rate of successful rape prosecutions based on the claim "I was drunk" by the victim - despite the fact that there was no way for the prosecutor to prove* the victim was drunk (or otherwise intoxicated) at the time of the alleged rape.
Of course, part of the problem is that most people can't afford to pay for a good enough defense attorney.
---
* In theory, a blood test within a few hours could prove if the victim was drunk at the time.
If I sleep during the day, light doesn't bother me. In fact, I sleep best during the day. At night, though, I need near complete darkness to sleep.
Unfortunately, I need to interact with people who sleep at night. (Actual family and friends. Otherwise, telecommute-work for my employer's office in Australia.)
One simple to setup option would be Fossil's builtin issue tracking. A singles executable to download and "install". Web-based UI and the issue tracker is very configurable. http://fossil-scm.org/
For access outside your home/office LAN, you will need to use stunnel or configure your Internet-facing webserver to forward HTTP to your Fossil server.
My concern is that the publishers and "music catalog owners" will get an overwhelmingly large share of the money
Speaking as an artist, I can tell you that the publishers do get a huge share of at least the compulsory license royalties, This is because, by law, compulsory royalties are collected by organizations operated by the publisher associations. Besides the publishers' "cuts", these organizations also take a percentage as a processing fee and require artists to pay "annual membership dues". Any royalties intended for artists who don't pay said dues are kept by the organizations.
Another thing to consider is that parents are not allowed to let even teens be unsupervised. And because, in most families, both parents have to work, the easiest thing for parents to do is give their teens screens to keep them entertained.
When I was a teen, I road my bicycle to/from school, the library and other places. I was allowed to go shopping with no adult supervision. as long as I called my parents to let them know where I was going, I was allowed to roam anywhere I could reasonably walk or ride my bicycle.
If I had wanted, I could have spent all my time in front of my computer screen. Instead, I chose other options. Options that aren't available to today's teens.
How else is the UK going to broaden its tax base? More migrants of low status working to support the rich parasites.
Apparently, the anti-immigration Republicans haven't thought about this.
polygyny leaves the unmarried men at a significant disadvantage
I don't disagree. I will, however, share the perspective of a pair of friends of mine - 2 women who share a man: "We decided to share rather than compete after years of dating and only finding one man worth staying with. The pool of available men who are even worth dating is dismal. We're very happy sharing the one we did find."
Absent new law that grants the FCC the appropriate powers, Title II classification is what gave the FCC the power to mandate net neutrality.
As for why net neutrality is important, one only needs to look at the situation in Portugal: https://twitter.com/RoKhanna/s...
"Last mile" service to homes (and businesses) should be no different for Internet access than it is for telephone access. Without Title II, AT&T, for example, could charge extra for its customers to place or receive telephone calls to or from, for example, Verizon. Or AT&T could even only allow calls between AT&T customers, which would require businesses to be customers of both AT&T and Verizon (and, probably several other phone companies).
Likewise, without Title II (or other law), Comcast, for example, could charge its customers extra to access services provided by customers of other ISPs. Or require those services to be Comcast customers.
Also, note that Comcast owns NBC and Universal Studios, so is not just an Internet Service Provider. It is also a content provider. Therefore, it has a vested interest in promoting content from NBC and Universal and demoting content from other content providers.
Humans evolved from omnivores. Meat, eggs and milk provide a much more concentrated nutrition than a pure vegan diet can. My vegan friends eat 2 to 3 times the volume of food I eat. (And I don't eat a lot of meat; usually 60 to 90 grams per meal.)
Or even make it a "Martian Sputnik" beeping at us on its way and from Martian orbit.
The problem started with government, removing that problem solves net neutrality at the source, the freedom of the customer to choose the vendor they want, not the one the local Municipality choose 35-50 years ago.
I agree. Unfortunately, that problem is not easy to correct. Technically, the cable monopoly in my area expired 20+ years ago. Still only one cable company. And since the cable company is the main ISP, here, it's also an Internet monopoly. (Yes, the phone company is also an ISP, but only offers 20% of what the cable company does. Satellite is also available, but is very unreliable.)
The main 2 reasons there isn't another cable company are cost and lack of will on the part of the local utility board (that controls access to the utility poles) to defy the wishes of the current cable company. We sued the board to attempt to force them to do so, but the judge ruled that the board had not violated any law or rule. The board is appointed, so we can't vote them out. And Internet service is only one of many, many issues the elected officials deal with, so gets "lost in the noise".
Yes, some of us regularly remind our local officials. We even ran a petition drive. The board responded "There aren't any pending applications." And the officials replaced a few of the board members - with other people from the same pool as the ones that were replaced.
We are now looking into wireless mesh networking. Our biggest problem with that is finding home owners or businesses in the right places who are willing to host our equipment for connecting to the Internet.
Ummmm.... no. Are they going to put the company âoeAppleâ in jail
Order Tim Cook, the CEO, to jail for contempt of court.
I very much doubt the judge will, but doing so would send a clear message that jail time also applies to the rich and powerful.
Employers have always tried to persuade me from leaving when I found a better job.
In the past, that was true. But now, if an employer can get forewarning, they can prepare for your departure by lessening their dependence on you.