They may be, but I fear that doesn't make them that much better... By the way, German law is continually being changed towards less restrictions for the police, towards police getting more protection against citizens, instead of better protecting citizens against unlawfully acting police, while the latter has more and more become normality in Germany (as about everywhere else). And government and politics – even the moderate German left – reliably come to their defence and tend to antagonize criticism and cover even the most blatant police misbehaviour.
Because in all probability they will, as always, get away with it, while innocent citizens will perhaps even be prosecuted, instead of being properly compensated.
Reports in the German press made it very clear that those raids very probably were illegal, not the activities of the attacked group. Police even said the group hadn't been under suspicion in the first place, they allegedly were raided because they were thought to have evidence in a case against someone else.
And the group was using RiseUp as a platform for transferring funds only because one of the NGOs they were helping to collect money for uses only that as a payment option. There were and are no hints of "money laundering" whatsoever. On the contrary, groups like the one that was attacked here typically rather belong to circles which strongly oppose and help fight corruption and money laundering.
Nonsense, police abusing their power, with or without orders from above, is a perfectly normal police behaviour in capitalist states. They never needed help from people standing in whatever relation to one of the former so-called socialist states which sported their own brand of secret police back in the times.
This being 2018, I could very easily imagine governments demanding something like that, but perhaps as the culprit wasn't the worker but the company it would rather be fair that the company would have to repay him so that his net wages, after paying that tax bill, would equal what he had earned being self-employed?
Actually, I'm still thinking about buying a used, maximally equipped Surface Pro 2, because even today I cannot find a similarly potent device of the same size (10.8") and weight anywhere at all, let alone one that is fully Linux compatible, which has been reported to be true for the Pro 2.
Now the Microsoft forum's closing wouldn't be a tragic loss for my use case, but of course Microsoft's behavior is preposterous notwithstanding.
You just don't get it. Marketing a smartphone as the most SECURE Android phone in the world is verging on fraud if SECURITY updates stop a few weeks after they sell it to you. What I did read, and what they wrote in their update policy for that matter, is completely irrelevant in that aspect.
And then there was the expensive BlackBerry PRIV which they advertised with the same claim – and which was not only denied the upgrade to Android 7 everybody had reason to expect, no, they also stopped delivering security updates not long after you still could buy a new one.
You've got your Twitter, your Facebook, your work Slack, your email, FaceTimes incoming from family members
What?
Except for e-mail: no, not one of them. And none of their alternatives either. None at all. And I'm really happy about it, and I don't plan to change anything about it. Yes, I work in IT.
And no, I don't use the telephone much, either.
On the other hand, in some countries including mine – as others already have reported here – the telephone is still functional, as telephone spammers are being reliably persecuted and fined. The few spammers which still come through, disguising themselves as opinion research institutes or some such or perhaps actually being one, who knows, can easily be blocked in the phone system...
To sell boring "all-screen" phones under the Lenovo label?
While laying off a significant part especially of the Moto Z related staff, effectively slowing down, if not stopping, the Moto Mods idea?
As of now, it isn't even clear whether we'll still get the Keyboard Mod delivered that was already officially adopted by Motorola, before the layoffs started.
Lenovo should have adapted the Mods concept for their own phones, too, instead.
Sorry for replying this late. Just in case you find back here, too:
My impression is (not from own experience, though, but from what I read) that Nextcloud has become quite mature these days. As I haven't made the comparison myself, I cannot really say whether I'm actually using anything that's not available (or not available freely) in ownCloud. One significant difference is that all Nextcloud components are freely available under GNU AGPLv3. Here's a rather detailed comparison from last year.
Nextcloud cannot quite be used as a "drop-in replacement", but there's a migration tool that supports ownCloud 8.2 to 10.
What I found a bit demanding was the bare metal setup which requires a (nearly) untouched, freshly installed server Linux, in my case Ubuntu Server (while there are other installation paths I have no experience with).
And what I believe it to mean is that many people nowadays are frequently using several different cloud services, sometimes at the same time. Which I believe is true, too. (Yes, 'cloud' is just a hip name for something that was not really new when the term was coined, but I guess we simply have to go along with it now.)
That said, I've organized my personal cloud usage via my own server running Nextcloud, which performs the task of synchronizing with all the other cloud storage services I still sometimes use, be it for easier usage on Android or for offering access to others without them hitting my DSL upstream bandwith, so I don't really need my desktop Linux to deal with it.
Then again, that server runs Ubuntu server. (Not because I am or ever was convinced it is the best choice, but because it was a well documented and well supported option back when I started to move most of my computers to Linux and I just didn't want to research even further.)
This isn't even about biases. It is about data, and about the fact that those who develop and train the AI often have to resort to white males to train it with, because that's what is predominantly to be found in those fields.
Funny how reliably antifeminists make fools of themselves in these discussions.
So, fine, you seem to be capable enough to copy and paste a sentence, but did you even read it?
Hint: not to describe how an effectively racist and sexist situation comes to happen is racist and sexist, that situation is. And no-one even called those responsible for it racist or sexist.
Seems your problem is on the bottom of the "I have no problem with the sexist and racist part" statement.
"New technology" is what keeps more and more people from being able to sustain themselves economically
[...] What do you think has pulled 100's of millions of people out of poverty and squalor worldwide over the last few decades? [...]
Even if we'd answer that question to your ideological satisfaction, it is meaningless unless we don't ask at least one second question – why are there, depending on the measurement method, still between 1,2 and 1,6 billions of poor people, with zero chance for most of them to ever get out of it, in times of a formerly unknown abundance of the objective prerequisites for world-wide well-being, namely resources, productivity and workforce, and some calculations say the Earth could easily feed even twice its current inhabitants, if resources were allocated for people and their needs, not for profit?
"New technology" is what keeps more and more people from being able to sustain themselves economically, because in most parts of the so-called first world the continuous increase of productivity continually also reduces the amount of work needed to produce goods, while a full-time job is still going to be needed (and is not even always sufficient) for the foreseeable future to be able to pay rent and buy food.
The problem is, that neither the universal basic income nor the idea of universal basic assets deals with the fact that slowly, but steadily money becomes dysfunctional in the process.
Publicly owned infrastructure is and has, to varying degrees, always been (necessary) part of functional capitalist nations. In communism the idea was to make the whole industry publicly owned. (Not a bad idea in itself, either, but not sufficient to make a society a nice place to live in, nor to really call a society communist.)
More honest at least than all those others who keep up the scam by pretending that cryptocurrencies and blockchains had a real value. (There may be some applications of the "blockchain" concept which aren't completely stupid, but even then the most interesting question is whether conventional, proven technologies wouldn't serve the purpose just as well.)
"Investor" is just a euphemism for a stupidly rich person who lives off others producing something valuable, making him even more stupidly rich just by waiting and making no big mistakes.
"Crypto currency" is a scheme of some people who weren't stupidly rich before to become stupidly rich in the process, without anyone producing anything of real value at all.
"Investors" investing in "crypto currency" getting scammed do indeed get what they deserve and what sooner or later will happen to virtually all investments in crypto currencies. They should even be thankful if it went quick this time. Although there's not much hope the intelligence-greed-coefficient of those who invested in the discussed case might let them learn something from it.
I won't pay one cent for an amount of 'precision' on those parts of a car which would be in perfect order with ten or twenty times less 'precision'. If Musk doesn't want me to sell a sensible car with high investments in engineering and manufacturing only where it counts, making it unnecessarily expensive, there are still other manufacturers (even if Tesla does have a certain lead right now).
let alone one that is without substance insofar as its value isn't backed by a profitable industry which is the only thing that can induce real value into a currency
Not true, the USD is backed by debt and the threat of violence, for instance.
Which does not give it it's value, its purchasing power. If there was not at least a halfway functional industry that successfully transforms goods and raw material into more expensive goods, so that money invested in the currency area has a plausible chance of coming back as more money, it wouldn't have the purchasing power.
Only a profitable industry? False. Only the gub'mnt tax-collecting gunbarrel can validate a "monies" [...]
If there wasn't a profitable industry that would charge the currency with value, your money wouldn't buy your bread, regardless of what the goverment does or doesn't do. After all, both the value of a currency and the amount of money floating around depend on how good the chances are for someone who invests money in the currency area to get more money back. (There are more aspects and details to it, but at its core, it's as simple as that.)
Bitcoin's value is in the kostenlos nature of the services and transaction network; it has far lower transaction cost, carry cost, etc... than does the USD.
That's not 'value' in the economic sense of being a reliable exchange equivalent for goods. A currency gets real and reliable purchasing power only if there's an underlying industry that successfully fulfills its only purpose, transforming money in more money through investing labor in commodities and base products, producing end-products which are worth more than the sum of what was needed to produce it.
Bitcoin itself can only exist because 1. there are such real currencies with real value it can technically be exchanged to, and 2. because there are enough gamblers who speculate on there being enough gamblers believing in Bitcoin's value.
As for the USD [...]
See above.
Getting rid of money is the wrong idea. Do you really think having no money would be better?
I guess in the long run, it will be the only option if humanity wants to survive. Because even real currencies are sowly losing their real value, too, because, with technological progress, less and less labor is needed to produce the goods that have to be produced. What, in a naive way, sounds "good", slowly bereaves the economic system from its capability to feed its populations. (And because alternative currencies, whether Bitcoin or regional currencies or something else, are no solution of that problem.)
People what, barter? [...]
How about people simply deciding together, with democratic means, firstly, what they want to own and consume, and secondly, also what they want to produce?
Or are you a zeitgeister/venusprojecter/digitalcommie? Human wants and needs are infinite and resources are finite. This means that there will forever be inequity [...]
What I am is completely irrelevant. What you are, too. But what you're writing is just the old dogma out of the capitalists' prayer book, based solely on pseudo-religious belief, not on fact.
But introducing yet another kind of money, let alone one that is without substance insofar as its value isn't backed by a profitable industry which is the only thing that can induce real value into a currency, and even one that is devoid of every safety that conventional banks are bound to offer by law, would not really be the way to go.
And to get rid of money, we'd need to get rid of capitalism in the first place.
Slashdot Mirror
They may be, but I fear that doesn't make them that much better... By the way, German law is continually being changed towards less restrictions for the police, towards police getting more protection against citizens, instead of better protecting citizens against unlawfully acting police, while the latter has more and more become normality in Germany (as about everywhere else). And government and politics – even the moderate German left – reliably come to their defence and tend to antagonize criticism and cover even the most blatant police misbehaviour.
Because in all probability they will, as always, get away with it, while innocent citizens will perhaps even be prosecuted, instead of being properly compensated.
Reports in the German press made it very clear that those raids very probably were illegal, not the activities of the attacked group. Police even said the group hadn't been under suspicion in the first place, they allegedly were raided because they were thought to have evidence in a case against someone else.
And the group was using RiseUp as a platform for transferring funds only because one of the NGOs they were helping to collect money for uses only that as a payment option. There were and are no hints of "money laundering" whatsoever. On the contrary, groups like the one that was attacked here typically rather belong to circles which strongly oppose and help fight corruption and money laundering.
Nonsense, police abusing their power, with or without orders from above, is a perfectly normal police behaviour in capitalist states. They never needed help from people standing in whatever relation to one of the former so-called socialist states which sported their own brand of secret police back in the times.
That (to not publish personal registration information anymore) is what DENIC does since May, and I guess it's really a good thing.
This being 2018, I could very easily imagine governments demanding something like that, but perhaps as the culprit wasn't the worker but the company it would rather be fair that the company would have to repay him so that his net wages, after paying that tax bill, would equal what he had earned being self-employed?
Actually, I'm still thinking about buying a used, maximally equipped Surface Pro 2, because even today I cannot find a similarly potent device of the same size (10.8") and weight anywhere at all, let alone one that is fully Linux compatible, which has been reported to be true for the Pro 2.
Now the Microsoft forum's closing wouldn't be a tragic loss for my use case, but of course Microsoft's behavior is preposterous notwithstanding.
You just don't get it. Marketing a smartphone as the most SECURE Android phone in the world is verging on fraud if SECURITY updates stop a few weeks after they sell it to you. What I did read, and what they wrote in their update policy for that matter, is completely irrelevant in that aspect.
Right.
And then there was the expensive BlackBerry PRIV which they advertised with the same claim – and which was not only denied the upgrade to Android 7 everybody had reason to expect, no, they also stopped delivering security updates not long after you still could buy a new one.
What?
Except for e-mail: no, not one of them. And none of their alternatives either. None at all. And I'm really happy about it, and I don't plan to change anything about it. Yes, I work in IT.
And no, I don't use the telephone much, either.
On the other hand, in some countries including mine – as others already have reported here – the telephone is still functional, as telephone spammers are being reliably persecuted and fined. The few spammers which still come through, disguising themselves as opinion research institutes or some such or perhaps actually being one, who knows, can easily be blocked in the phone system...
To sell boring "all-screen" phones under the Lenovo label?
While laying off a significant part especially of the Moto Z related staff, effectively slowing down, if not stopping, the Moto Mods idea?
As of now, it isn't even clear whether we'll still get the Keyboard Mod delivered that was already officially adopted by Motorola, before the layoffs started.
Lenovo should have adapted the Mods concept for their own phones, too, instead.
Sorry for replying this late. Just in case you find back here, too:
My impression is (not from own experience, though, but from what I read) that Nextcloud has become quite mature these days. As I haven't made the comparison myself, I cannot really say whether I'm actually using anything that's not available (or not available freely) in ownCloud. One significant difference is that all Nextcloud components are freely available under GNU AGPLv3. Here's a rather detailed comparison from last year.
Nextcloud cannot quite be used as a "drop-in replacement", but there's a migration tool that supports ownCloud 8.2 to 10.
What I found a bit demanding was the bare metal setup which requires a (nearly) untouched, freshly installed server Linux, in my case Ubuntu Server (while there are other installation paths I have no experience with).
And what I believe it to mean is that many people nowadays are frequently using several different cloud services, sometimes at the same time. Which I believe is true, too. (Yes, 'cloud' is just a hip name for something that was not really new when the term was coined, but I guess we simply have to go along with it now.)
That said, I've organized my personal cloud usage via my own server running Nextcloud, which performs the task of synchronizing with all the other cloud storage services I still sometimes use, be it for easier usage on Android or for offering access to others without them hitting my DSL upstream bandwith, so I don't really need my desktop Linux to deal with it.
Then again, that server runs Ubuntu server. (Not because I am or ever was convinced it is the best choice, but because it was a well documented and well supported option back when I started to move most of my computers to Linux and I just didn't want to research even further.)
This is not something that can be done with static images for which existing datasets could be used.
This isn't even about biases. It is about data, and about the fact that those who develop and train the AI often have to resort to white males to train it with, because that's what is predominantly to be found in those fields.
Funny how reliably antifeminists make fools of themselves in these discussions.
So, fine, you seem to be capable enough to copy and paste a sentence, but did you even read it?
Hint: not to describe how an effectively racist and sexist situation comes to happen is racist and sexist, that situation is. And no-one even called those responsible for it racist or sexist.
Seems your problem is on the bottom of the "I have no problem with the sexist and racist part" statement.
"New technology" is what keeps more and more people from being able to sustain themselves economically
[...] What do you think has pulled 100's of millions of people out of poverty and squalor worldwide over the last few decades? [...]
Even if we'd answer that question to your ideological satisfaction, it is meaningless unless we don't ask at least one second question – why are there, depending on the measurement method, still between 1,2 and 1,6 billions of poor people, with zero chance for most of them to ever get out of it, in times of a formerly unknown abundance of the objective prerequisites for world-wide well-being, namely resources, productivity and workforce, and some calculations say the Earth could easily feed even twice its current inhabitants, if resources were allocated for people and their needs, not for profit?
"New technology" is what keeps more and more people from being able to sustain themselves economically, because in most parts of the so-called first world the continuous increase of productivity continually also reduces the amount of work needed to produce goods, while a full-time job is still going to be needed (and is not even always sufficient) for the foreseeable future to be able to pay rent and buy food.
The problem is, that neither the universal basic income nor the idea of universal basic assets deals with the fact that slowly, but steadily money becomes dysfunctional in the process.
Publicly owned infrastructure is and has, to varying degrees, always been (necessary) part of functional capitalist nations. In communism the idea was to make the whole industry publicly owned. (Not a bad idea in itself, either, but not sufficient to make a society a nice place to live in, nor to really call a society communist.)
More honest at least than all those others who keep up the scam by pretending that cryptocurrencies and blockchains had a real value. (There may be some applications of the "blockchain" concept which aren't completely stupid, but even then the most interesting question is whether conventional, proven technologies wouldn't serve the purpose just as well.)
"Investor" is just a euphemism for a stupidly rich person who lives off others producing something valuable, making him even more stupidly rich just by waiting and making no big mistakes.
"Crypto currency" is a scheme of some people who weren't stupidly rich before to become stupidly rich in the process, without anyone producing anything of real value at all.
"Investors" investing in "crypto currency" getting scammed do indeed get what they deserve and what sooner or later will happen to virtually all investments in crypto currencies. They should even be thankful if it went quick this time. Although there's not much hope the intelligence-greed-coefficient of those who invested in the discussed case might let them learn something from it.
I won't pay one cent for an amount of 'precision' on those parts of a car which would be in perfect order with ten or twenty times less 'precision'. If Musk doesn't want me to sell a sensible car with high investments in engineering and manufacturing only where it counts, making it unnecessarily expensive, there are still other manufacturers (even if Tesla does have a certain lead right now).
let alone one that is without substance insofar as its value isn't backed by a profitable industry which is the only thing that can induce real value into a currency
Not true, the USD is backed by debt and the threat of violence, for instance.
Which does not give it it's value, its purchasing power. If there was not at least a halfway functional industry that successfully transforms goods and raw material into more expensive goods, so that money invested in the currency area has a plausible chance of coming back as more money, it wouldn't have the purchasing power.
Only a profitable industry? False. Only the gub'mnt tax-collecting gunbarrel can validate a "monies" [...]
If there wasn't a profitable industry that would charge the currency with value, your money wouldn't buy your bread, regardless of what the goverment does or doesn't do. After all, both the value of a currency and the amount of money floating around depend on how good the chances are for someone who invests money in the currency area to get more money back. (There are more aspects and details to it, but at its core, it's as simple as that.)
Bitcoin's value is in the kostenlos nature of the services and transaction network; it has far lower transaction cost, carry cost, etc... than does the USD.
That's not 'value' in the economic sense of being a reliable exchange equivalent for goods. A currency gets real and reliable purchasing power only if there's an underlying industry that successfully fulfills its only purpose, transforming money in more money through investing labor in commodities and base products, producing end-products which are worth more than the sum of what was needed to produce it.
Bitcoin itself can only exist because 1. there are such real currencies with real value it can technically be exchanged to, and 2. because there are enough gamblers who speculate on there being enough gamblers believing in Bitcoin's value.
As for the USD [...]
See above.
Getting rid of money is the wrong idea. Do you really think having no money would be better?
I guess in the long run, it will be the only option if humanity wants to survive. Because even real currencies are sowly losing their real value, too, because, with technological progress, less and less labor is needed to produce the goods that have to be produced. What, in a naive way, sounds "good", slowly bereaves the economic system from its capability to feed its populations. (And because alternative currencies, whether Bitcoin or regional currencies or something else, are no solution of that problem.)
People what, barter? [...]
How about people simply deciding together, with democratic means, firstly, what they want to own and consume, and secondly, also what they want to produce?
Or are you a zeitgeister/venusprojecter/digitalcommie? Human wants and needs are infinite and resources are finite. This means that there will forever be inequity [...]
What I am is completely irrelevant. What you are, too. But what you're writing is just the old dogma out of the capitalists' prayer book, based solely on pseudo-religious belief, not on fact.
But introducing yet another kind of money, let alone one that is without substance insofar as its value isn't backed by a profitable industry which is the only thing that can induce real value into a currency, and even one that is devoid of every safety that conventional banks are bound to offer by law, would not really be the way to go.
And to get rid of money, we'd need to get rid of capitalism in the first place.