"Uh... Sometimes people agrees with you... Not every reply has to be a refutation."
I know. I was not being snide... I was just trying to figure out what her point was. Because it was worded in a way that made it seem she was arguing with me, but her actual words seemed to agree. So... I asked.
"As for byproducts I hope you realise that the heat energy from thorium fuel in LFTRs and even the Indian MOX PWRs actually comes from fissioning U-233 and that fission process results in the same isotopes that are produced in a regular U-235-fuelled PWR, if in slightly different percentages."
Yes, but again that is PWRs. There have been claims that the products are far easier to deal with in MSRs, but it's still all pretty theoretical.
We'll know more later. Still, there is great promise in the technology, even if (as I stated earlier) it isn't quite here yet.
"Hello, OnStar? Someone here is getting uppity about their "civil rights"; Can you please turn on the microphone and GPS tracking, lock the doors, turn off the engine, while we sit here and listen to their futile screams? Sure, I'll hold."
This isn't a refutation of my comment. On the contrary, it reinforces it. Many people did not understand just how much access OnStar had to information about, and control of, their vehicles. And when they found out, there was a backlash. Do you see it being hyped much today? I don't.
"And I think, for anyone who regularly reads slashdot, and perhaps those set to attend DEFCON later where they'll discuss a remote wireless exploit that can, say, cause any car produced in the last five years to self-destruct with the driver inside of it, will find it totally unsurprising that technology not being ready for prime time is hardly an impediment to the rapid adoption of such technology. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go cloud my coffee maker, and then install my NSA-approved listening devices in all the rooms of my house, which they've cleverly labelled "Smoke Detectors"."
Again, you're only reinforcing my point. So I don't get what you're trying to say here. "Bend over and like it?" Is that the message you're trying to convey? Because I really don't know.
"For example the highly radioactive molten-salt fuel has to circulate at about 700 deg C though piping, pumps and heat exchangers..."
Piping and heat exchangers yes. Pumps, not necessarily. Pure-convective designs are under test.
"Most steel alloys lose half their strength at those sorts of temperatures and if a joint goes bad then you can expect a disaster in the containment or worse still in the steam generating plant."
This is a cost problem, not a technology problem. We already know how to do it, and it has been done on small scales. Also, see below about the piping.
The fuel stream has to be continually reprocessed to remove fission products that would poison the reaction by absorbing neutrons, not something the 1960s experimental molten-salt test reactor ever attempted to do.
True but the the main culprit is tritium, which is a commercially viable byproduct. And the half-life is only 12.5 years. Compare that with Chernobyl.
"These reprocessing stacks will be highly radioactive for centuries or even millenia"
Huh? What byproducts are we talking about here, with half-lives that long? I've never heard this objection to a modern molten-salt design.
The last thing I wanted to say was about the piping: just recently (this last year, if I recall but I could be remembering inaccurately) it was discovered that over time, PWR piping was subject to unexpected spalling and embrittling. Presumably from neutron absorption. As far as I know the scientific community has not accepted any explanations as definitive. Regardless, that makes the piping for molten-salt reactors less of a problem, relatively speaking, than previously thought.
Addendum: and please don't start in on me with "It's the Internet, stupid!" Because it's not.
Yes, the volume of letters has dropped significantly. Nobody denies that. All the while junk mail has been proliferating.
If they really want to balance the Post Office's books, all they have to do is stop subsidizing junk mail. They complain that "they need the cash flow" from junk mail but they admit that they cannot handle the load under their current budget. When they argue this way, they are neglecting to account for the fact that if they stop delivering subsidized junk mail, their costs will go way down, too. And those cost savings will be larger in proportion to the volume, because it's subsidized mail.
Get them back in the business of doing what they are supposed to do: deliver letters from place to place, for a fee. No matter how big the Internet gets, there will always be a need for physical papers to be sent.
"We do not have a culture of safety surrounding the use of motor vehicles, and without it, things like this will only wind up having motorists smash the little boxes to pieces the moment they try to keep someone from "cutting them off" while their car tries a "I'm sorry, I can't let you do that, Dave."
Well, I definitely disagree with you there... but I do agree that it's nowhere near the kind that (necessarily) surrounds airplanes.
I don't particularly have a problem with this, except for 2 things:
[A] It had better not turn into a universal tracking system. Yes, I know that is a logical extension but the answer is NO. No GUIDs. No identity or location tracking. Realtime only. Anything else is fraught with too many real dangers to freedom.
[B] It is going to be a while before this is done in any kind of universal way. Because what will happen is exactly what happened with automobile "computers" in the first place: accidents will happen when vehicles try to prevent accidents, and the vehicles will be blamed. (And in some cases, probably correctly.) Then there will be a backlash and the idea will be tossed out for a few years. Then the technology will improve and it will slowly creep back in to common use.
I don't necessarily have a problem with that, as long as [A] is observed. My biggest problem is with these pushes to implement technology that simply isn't ready for prime time, like they did with NFC. (Broken before it was even widely available. The only useful feature I see for it now is passing VCards between cell phones. I have NFC and I've never even turned it on... and I may never do so.)
True, the Indian proposal is still a PWR, with all the inherent flaws that come with it.
I am aware that there are still some (mainly cost) obstacles to building molten-salt thorium reactors; however nearly everyone says that once done, they will be safer and far more fuel-efficient, with much less long-half-life waste.
"What if you have the Radar (or camera) on the drone, and the drone relays the footage (and or speed information) to the police officer that has the joystick for the drone."
Nope. Doesn't work. This has been all over the courts. THE OFFICER issuing the ticket has to "observe" the infraction directly. They have stretched the meaning of "directly" to mean he can look at his own radar gun, but they've never been able to get speed cameras of any kind through the courts.
As I clearly stated, the thorium reactor that the U.S. built was experimental. It wasn't designed to commercially generate electricity, it was designed to run experiments on.
Even so, it did a very good job of proving the concept.
"As for the proposed Indian thorium reactors they are basically standard PWRs and heavy-water BWRs fuelled with a mixture of thorium, medium-enriched uranium and plutonium derived from conventional low-enriched uranium nuclear reactors of the sort in operation around the world today."
"No reason your web-browser cannot embed an entire Linux subsystem within it to run sandboxed stuffs."
The fact that it is possible is not at all the same as "no reason not to." It would be relatively huge; it would present a gigantic mass of vulnerabilities that would need constant fixing (as opposed to mainly just http and javascript); and it would be slow (compared to just JIT-compiled JavaScript).
So yeah. There are LOTS of reasons. No reason it "cannot", as you say. But lots of reasons it should not.
"Only if we're talking about the mobile version. The desktop version does not have a 'make available offline' function. Neither does the web version. It wouldn't really make sense."
I meant about the general way it functions. He/she was railing against the fact that it has to go through a central server. In fact that was GP's main point. And it makes no difference which version you are using, in that respect.
"Well, I've been annoyed with the way the mobile versions work too (which is why I use DropSync)..."
Again, not addressing the central issue, which was that almost all these services make use of a central server. And no, it's not necessary, strictly speaking. There are ways around it.
"ust because it's built in DOES NOT mean (on Android) that you can't replace it seamlessly with another product."
Let's see:
Google Play = Amazon's Android App Store.
Both are built-in "system apps" on my phone, and you have to root the phone to get rid of either one. That's called "lock-in". It doesn't mean you CAN'T replace it, it only means they TRY to keep you from doing it.
"Google Maps = A plethora of other mapping software (Garmin and TomTom have offline mapping applications on the play store, I think)"
Again... Google Maps is a "system app" on my phone, and it is intimately tied to location services. While you can use a different maps app, location services still make use of Google Maps, and again you can't turn that off without rooting your phone. That's called "lock-in".
"Gtalk/G+ = any number of messaging services"
That much is true, and at least in that case, you can easily replace it with something else.
"Browser = Firefox (not just a wrapper)..."
That much is true, too, and I use Firefox as my default browser. I only use Chrome when a site misbehaves with Firefox. (Which has almost always been the fault of the site builders, not Firefox.)
So your score is 2/5, if you count the app stores as 2.
"What are you talking about?
Google Drive works just like Dropbox or probably pretty much every other syncing service out there (except for Bittorrent Sync, which has a proper Android app out now)."
Two observations:
(1) GP's description is pretty accurate. And
(2) The fact that almost all of them work that way doesn't mean it's good.
"How can you be expected to obey the speed limit?"
In a neighboring state, they have a long-standing law that says the policeman who catches you at a traffic infraction is the one who must issue you the ticket.
Some years ago, they tried painting lines across the highways and timing cars from the planes. Then they'd radio to a car nearby who would pull over speeders and issue them a ticket. Before long, some enterprising speeder pointed out to the courts that the tickets were not legally issued, because the officer observing the speeding was not the one issuing the ticket. They had to stop the practice statewide.
Then they tried timing from an airplane and radioing ahead to a car equipped with radar. The officer would attempt to radar the offending vehicle and then the same officer would issue the ticket. What they did not account for is that drivers saw the lines and would slow down; by the time they went by the radar they were again doing the speed limit.
So much for traffic drones. At least in that state. It is now widely known that aerial "speed traps" are illegal.
This is also causing them big problems with red light cameras, and they are almost certainly going to have to stop that, too. Because the person doing the "catching" is not even a police officer, but an employee of a private company. (An officer then rubber-stamped the citation.) That runs afoul not only of the aforementioned law, but also potentially other laws, as it requires a private party, not an officer at all, to determine if an infraction might have taken place. And they don't want to pay an officer to review every single photo, because one of the major reasons for having the damned things in the first place was to avoid having to hire more officers.
There have been at least 2 thorium reactors that have already been built and successfully run. One was a research reactor in the U.S., which was in operation (on and off) for years. I have forgotten where the other was.
India is currently in the process of building a thorium-based electricity generating plant.
Seriously, if the U.S. doesn't jump on this soon, we'll be left in the dust when it comes to clean energy. I have no idea why we haven't yet, unless it has been due to lobbying by the energy companies who want to expand their current cash-cow plants.
" Collectively a decision was made to make JavaScript and Perl widely available on those platforms. On the server, they eventually moved away from Perl; but the original decision to keep C out of our hands remained intact."
But those decisions were not made randomly; they were made for reasons.
"The initial excuse of "they'll run wild and consume resources and/or access some forbidden APIs" was never really valid for a properly run *NIX system, and is even less valid now."
That's because a "properly run *NIX system" is not what everybody has, and probably won't be what everybody has for the foreseeable future. The internet is not exclusive to Techies. And it would be a disaster if it were.
Kind of. What you actually end up with is "the lowest common denominator"... a language that does everything, but with none of the advantages other languages are known for.
That's why you never see survivalists and electricians both using Swiss Army Knives as their primary tools.
Repeat what I stated in another post: the total numbers are up, but the market share is WAY down. Android phones now outsell iPhones, which means Apple's SHARE of the smartphone market is now continuously shrinking.
"Fewer than half of businesses with retirement liabilities pre-fund, so thanks for the falsehood..."
It's not a "falsehood". And where do you get the notion that only "half" of companies pre-fund? What are you using for a definition of "pre-funding"?
The fact remains that the Post Office was creating a huge black money hole by NOT funding retirement at all, and leaving it merely as a future government obligation. Even if it was just a USPS obligation, and not government, it was a projected bill that they had no hope of meeting. They were forced to pre-fund as a direct reaction to their former failure to plan for the future. This is historical fact.
"Also, calling the post office a monopoly is seriously myopic, especially when you go on to mention the private companies that directly compete with a so-called monopoly."
You say I was spouting falsehoods, then you call USPS not a monopoly? I daresay I know more of its history than you do. And here is a bit of history for you: IT IS AGAINST FEDERAL LAW FOR A PRIVATE SERVICE TO COMPETE WITH THE US POST OFFICE FOR CARRYING LETTERS, AND HAS BEEN SINCE THE MID-1800S. Period. Spend a couple of minutes on Google and look it the fuck up.
Other companies do compete in specific services that the Post Office does not (or historically did not) offer. THAT IS A DIFFERENT MATTER. If you offer a service someone else doesn't, that's not competing.
"You can keep all your privacy invading products to yourself Sundar. My next phone is going to be either a Jolla or a FirefoxOS device. I got tired of the whole Google+-ification of every Google product."
It has gotten rather depressing. I was leaning toward Android because it was more open than the Apple ecosystem (and demonstrably, Apple's "walled garden" has driven many people away from iPhone).
Android's attempts at "lock-in" come at a time when it is increasingly STUPID for Google to be doing it. People are really, really, tired of the corporate control, tracking, and surveillance both corporate and government.
If Firefox OS were further along, I would be very tempted. But only if there is decent hardware to run it on. I am pretty sad that Motorola was picked up by Google. I don't want to see that Googlified either.
"More likely a case of somebody lying to get around a FOIA request, for which there will be consequences. All government agencies have very strict regulations concerning record keeping and FOIA, with jail time possible for anyone who fails to abide by those regulations."
Agreed. It's either BS, or (literally criminal) incompetence. Based on what we have been told so far, I would have to guess BS.
Slashdot Mirror
"Uh... Sometimes people agrees with you... Not every reply has to be a refutation."
I know. I was not being snide... I was just trying to figure out what her point was. Because it was worded in a way that made it seem she was arguing with me, but her actual words seemed to agree. So... I asked.
"As for byproducts I hope you realise that the heat energy from thorium fuel in LFTRs and even the Indian MOX PWRs actually comes from fissioning U-233 and that fission process results in the same isotopes that are produced in a regular U-235-fuelled PWR, if in slightly different percentages."
Yes, but again that is PWRs. There have been claims that the products are far easier to deal with in MSRs, but it's still all pretty theoretical.
We'll know more later. Still, there is great promise in the technology, even if (as I stated earlier) it isn't quite here yet.
"Hello, OnStar? Someone here is getting uppity about their "civil rights"; Can you please turn on the microphone and GPS tracking, lock the doors, turn off the engine, while we sit here and listen to their futile screams? Sure, I'll hold."
This isn't a refutation of my comment. On the contrary, it reinforces it. Many people did not understand just how much access OnStar had to information about, and control of, their vehicles. And when they found out, there was a backlash. Do you see it being hyped much today? I don't.
"And I think, for anyone who regularly reads slashdot, and perhaps those set to attend DEFCON later where they'll discuss a remote wireless exploit that can, say, cause any car produced in the last five years to self-destruct with the driver inside of it, will find it totally unsurprising that technology not being ready for prime time is hardly an impediment to the rapid adoption of such technology. Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go cloud my coffee maker, and then install my NSA-approved listening devices in all the rooms of my house, which they've cleverly labelled "Smoke Detectors"."
Again, you're only reinforcing my point. So I don't get what you're trying to say here. "Bend over and like it?" Is that the message you're trying to convey? Because I really don't know.
"For example the highly radioactive molten-salt fuel has to circulate at about 700 deg C though piping, pumps and heat exchangers..."
Piping and heat exchangers yes. Pumps, not necessarily. Pure-convective designs are under test.
"Most steel alloys lose half their strength at those sorts of temperatures and if a joint goes bad then you can expect a disaster in the containment or worse still in the steam generating plant."
This is a cost problem, not a technology problem. We already know how to do it, and it has been done on small scales. Also, see below about the piping.
The fuel stream has to be continually reprocessed to remove fission products that would poison the reaction by absorbing neutrons, not something the 1960s experimental molten-salt test reactor ever attempted to do.
True but the the main culprit is tritium, which is a commercially viable byproduct. And the half-life is only 12.5 years. Compare that with Chernobyl.
"These reprocessing stacks will be highly radioactive for centuries or even millenia"
Huh? What byproducts are we talking about here, with half-lives that long? I've never heard this objection to a modern molten-salt design.
The last thing I wanted to say was about the piping: just recently (this last year, if I recall but I could be remembering inaccurately) it was discovered that over time, PWR piping was subject to unexpected spalling and embrittling. Presumably from neutron absorption. As far as I know the scientific community has not accepted any explanations as definitive. Regardless, that makes the piping for molten-salt reactors less of a problem, relatively speaking, than previously thought.
Addendum: and please don't start in on me with "It's the Internet, stupid!" Because it's not.
Yes, the volume of letters has dropped significantly. Nobody denies that. All the while junk mail has been proliferating.
If they really want to balance the Post Office's books, all they have to do is stop subsidizing junk mail. They complain that "they need the cash flow" from junk mail but they admit that they cannot handle the load under their current budget. When they argue this way, they are neglecting to account for the fact that if they stop delivering subsidized junk mail, their costs will go way down, too. And those cost savings will be larger in proportion to the volume, because it's subsidized mail.
Get them back in the business of doing what they are supposed to do: deliver letters from place to place, for a fee. No matter how big the Internet gets, there will always be a need for physical papers to be sent.
"We have been doing this for new homes in San Antonio for the past 5-10 years. My house was built in 1993 and it's like this."
Sure, but that's San Antonio. It can be a VERY BIG problem where it snows regularly.
Don't you find it a bit strange how a service that was good, reliable, and very affordable for centuries is suddenly too expensive to do?
I call bullshit.
"We do not have a culture of safety surrounding the use of motor vehicles, and without it, things like this will only wind up having motorists smash the little boxes to pieces the moment they try to keep someone from "cutting them off" while their car tries a "I'm sorry, I can't let you do that, Dave."
Well, I definitely disagree with you there... but I do agree that it's nowhere near the kind that (necessarily) surrounds airplanes.
I don't particularly have a problem with this, except for 2 things:
[A] It had better not turn into a universal tracking system. Yes, I know that is a logical extension but the answer is NO. No GUIDs. No identity or location tracking. Realtime only. Anything else is fraught with too many real dangers to freedom.
[B] It is going to be a while before this is done in any kind of universal way. Because what will happen is exactly what happened with automobile "computers" in the first place: accidents will happen when vehicles try to prevent accidents, and the vehicles will be blamed. (And in some cases, probably correctly.) Then there will be a backlash and the idea will be tossed out for a few years. Then the technology will improve and it will slowly creep back in to common use.
I don't necessarily have a problem with that, as long as [A] is observed. My biggest problem is with these pushes to implement technology that simply isn't ready for prime time, like they did with NFC. (Broken before it was even widely available. The only useful feature I see for it now is passing VCards between cell phones. I have NFC and I've never even turned it on... and I may never do so.)
True, the Indian proposal is still a PWR, with all the inherent flaws that come with it.
I am aware that there are still some (mainly cost) obstacles to building molten-salt thorium reactors; however nearly everyone says that once done, they will be safer and far more fuel-efficient, with much less long-half-life waste.
"What if you have the Radar (or camera) on the drone, and the drone relays the footage (and or speed information) to the police officer that has the joystick for the drone."
Nope. Doesn't work. This has been all over the courts. THE OFFICER issuing the ticket has to "observe" the infraction directly. They have stretched the meaning of "directly" to mean he can look at his own radar gun, but they've never been able to get speed cameras of any kind through the courts.
Clarification: by "primary" I mean as a significant part of their nuclear energy strategy.
Even so, it did a very good job of proving the concept.
"As for the proposed Indian thorium reactors they are basically standard PWRs and heavy-water BWRs fuelled with a mixture of thorium, medium-enriched uranium and plutonium derived from conventional low-enriched uranium nuclear reactors of the sort in operation around the world today."
I didn't try to claim it was a molten-salt reactor. It still makes use of the thorium energy cycle and is demonstrably safer than current designs.
Further, they have been planning to use thorium as a primary fuel since the 1950s.
"No reason your web-browser cannot embed an entire Linux subsystem within it to run sandboxed stuffs."
The fact that it is possible is not at all the same as "no reason not to." It would be relatively huge; it would present a gigantic mass of vulnerabilities that would need constant fixing (as opposed to mainly just http and javascript); and it would be slow (compared to just JIT-compiled JavaScript).
So yeah. There are LOTS of reasons. No reason it "cannot", as you say. But lots of reasons it should not.
"Only if we're talking about the mobile version. The desktop version does not have a 'make available offline' function. Neither does the web version. It wouldn't really make sense."
I meant about the general way it functions. He/she was railing against the fact that it has to go through a central server. In fact that was GP's main point. And it makes no difference which version you are using, in that respect.
"Well, I've been annoyed with the way the mobile versions work too (which is why I use DropSync)..."
Again, not addressing the central issue, which was that almost all these services make use of a central server. And no, it's not necessary, strictly speaking. There are ways around it.
"ust because it's built in DOES NOT mean (on Android) that you can't replace it seamlessly with another product."
Let's see:
Google Play = Amazon's Android App Store.
Both are built-in "system apps" on my phone, and you have to root the phone to get rid of either one. That's called "lock-in". It doesn't mean you CAN'T replace it, it only means they TRY to keep you from doing it.
"Google Maps = A plethora of other mapping software (Garmin and TomTom have offline mapping applications on the play store, I think)"
Again... Google Maps is a "system app" on my phone, and it is intimately tied to location services. While you can use a different maps app, location services still make use of Google Maps, and again you can't turn that off without rooting your phone. That's called "lock-in".
"Gtalk/G+ = any number of messaging services"
That much is true, and at least in that case, you can easily replace it with something else.
"Browser = Firefox (not just a wrapper)..."
That much is true, too, and I use Firefox as my default browser. I only use Chrome when a site misbehaves with Firefox. (Which has almost always been the fault of the site builders, not Firefox.)
So your score is 2/5, if you count the app stores as 2.
"What are you talking about? Google Drive works just like Dropbox or probably pretty much every other syncing service out there (except for Bittorrent Sync, which has a proper Android app out now)."
Two observations:
(1) GP's description is pretty accurate. And
(2) The fact that almost all of them work that way doesn't mean it's good.
"How can you be expected to obey the speed limit?"
In a neighboring state, they have a long-standing law that says the policeman who catches you at a traffic infraction is the one who must issue you the ticket.
Some years ago, they tried painting lines across the highways and timing cars from the planes. Then they'd radio to a car nearby who would pull over speeders and issue them a ticket. Before long, some enterprising speeder pointed out to the courts that the tickets were not legally issued, because the officer observing the speeding was not the one issuing the ticket. They had to stop the practice statewide.
Then they tried timing from an airplane and radioing ahead to a car equipped with radar. The officer would attempt to radar the offending vehicle and then the same officer would issue the ticket. What they did not account for is that drivers saw the lines and would slow down; by the time they went by the radar they were again doing the speed limit.
So much for traffic drones. At least in that state. It is now widely known that aerial "speed traps" are illegal.
This is also causing them big problems with red light cameras, and they are almost certainly going to have to stop that, too. Because the person doing the "catching" is not even a police officer, but an employee of a private company. (An officer then rubber-stamped the citation.) That runs afoul not only of the aforementioned law, but also potentially other laws, as it requires a private party, not an officer at all, to determine if an infraction might have taken place. And they don't want to pay an officer to review every single photo, because one of the major reasons for having the damned things in the first place was to avoid having to hire more officers.
There have been at least 2 thorium reactors that have already been built and successfully run. One was a research reactor in the U.S., which was in operation (on and off) for years. I have forgotten where the other was.
India is currently in the process of building a thorium-based electricity generating plant.
Seriously, if the U.S. doesn't jump on this soon, we'll be left in the dust when it comes to clean energy. I have no idea why we haven't yet, unless it has been due to lobbying by the energy companies who want to expand their current cash-cow plants.
" Collectively a decision was made to make JavaScript and Perl widely available on those platforms. On the server, they eventually moved away from Perl; but the original decision to keep C out of our hands remained intact."
But those decisions were not made randomly; they were made for reasons.
"The initial excuse of "they'll run wild and consume resources and/or access some forbidden APIs" was never really valid for a properly run *NIX system, and is even less valid now."
That's because a "properly run *NIX system" is not what everybody has, and probably won't be what everybody has for the foreseeable future. The internet is not exclusive to Techies. And it would be a disaster if it were.
That's called "using C"...
Kind of. What you actually end up with is "the lowest common denominator"... a language that does everything, but with none of the advantages other languages are known for.
That's why you never see survivalists and electricians both using Swiss Army Knives as their primary tools.
Repeat what I stated in another post: the total numbers are up, but the market share is WAY down. Android phones now outsell iPhones, which means Apple's SHARE of the smartphone market is now continuously shrinking.
"Fewer than half of businesses with retirement liabilities pre-fund, so thanks for the falsehood..."
It's not a "falsehood". And where do you get the notion that only "half" of companies pre-fund? What are you using for a definition of "pre-funding"?
The fact remains that the Post Office was creating a huge black money hole by NOT funding retirement at all, and leaving it merely as a future government obligation. Even if it was just a USPS obligation, and not government, it was a projected bill that they had no hope of meeting. They were forced to pre-fund as a direct reaction to their former failure to plan for the future. This is historical fact.
"Also, calling the post office a monopoly is seriously myopic, especially when you go on to mention the private companies that directly compete with a so-called monopoly."
You say I was spouting falsehoods, then you call USPS not a monopoly? I daresay I know more of its history than you do. And here is a bit of history for you: IT IS AGAINST FEDERAL LAW FOR A PRIVATE SERVICE TO COMPETE WITH THE US POST OFFICE FOR CARRYING LETTERS, AND HAS BEEN SINCE THE MID-1800S. Period. Spend a couple of minutes on Google and look it the fuck up.
Other companies do compete in specific services that the Post Office does not (or historically did not) offer. THAT IS A DIFFERENT MATTER. If you offer a service someone else doesn't, that's not competing.
USPS is a quasi-government agency. *IT* subsidizes junk mail. (If you want proof, all you have to do is look at their bulk rates.)
That makes junk mail government-subsidized. Q.E.D.
"You can keep all your privacy invading products to yourself Sundar. My next phone is going to be either a Jolla or a FirefoxOS device. I got tired of the whole Google+-ification of every Google product."
It has gotten rather depressing. I was leaning toward Android because it was more open than the Apple ecosystem (and demonstrably, Apple's "walled garden" has driven many people away from iPhone).
Android's attempts at "lock-in" come at a time when it is increasingly STUPID for Google to be doing it. People are really, really, tired of the corporate control, tracking, and surveillance both corporate and government.
If Firefox OS were further along, I would be very tempted. But only if there is decent hardware to run it on. I am pretty sad that Motorola was picked up by Google. I don't want to see that Googlified either.
Uh... pardon me, but I have no idea what the Unknown Lamer is talking about. My copy of Adobe Reader does search and highlighting JUST FINE.
"More likely a case of somebody lying to get around a FOIA request, for which there will be consequences. All government agencies have very strict regulations concerning record keeping and FOIA, with jail time possible for anyone who fails to abide by those regulations."
Agreed. It's either BS, or (literally criminal) incompetence. Based on what we have been told so far, I would have to guess BS.