There are leaks and there are leaks. Trump will leak when it's convenient for him to leak - or when he just can't control his impulse to brag about what he knows. But the only leaks he really cares about are the ones from inside the White House, apparently from staffers that can't believe the sheer stupidity of this Administration and feel the country has a need to know.
Manning and Snowden are a whole other leaky ball of wax. They obviously believed the country had a need to know the stuff they were leaking, and they weren't members of the Administration or even the agencies they were working for. They may have done us a service - and they may also have done some real damage. But what they've pointed out more than anything else is that it's practically impossible to use modern digital technology and reliably maintain the levels of secrecy that the government seems to want to maintain...
Seriously, why does China feel the need to censor this? Aren't they all in with technology - this isn't some religion coming up from below to overrun the great Communist State.
I agree that prioritizing traffic based on sheer amount of data is a different form of Net Neutrality violation than doing it based on content. But both cases are bad.
Controlling access based on content is self-explanatory - pure censorship.
Controlling access based on quantity of data makes sense financially, I suppose. But that's best handled by charging the end-user a higher price based on their usage. That way, they decide what they download - not the ISP. And Netflix has the same 'barrier to entry' as YouTube, some new startup - or Comcast's own content.
Now, if low enough data caps had been in place when Netflix streaming took off, it may never have happened. And apparently, ISP's do have enough available bandwidth to support a really high cap. So the only reak issue I see is that Comcast's own video on demand offerings are essentially the same thing as Netflix streaming - except they're not technically coming over the internet, and so may not be covered even by Net Neutrality rules. That's a hole that may or may not need to be plugged - depending on whether you think cable TV companies should be allowed to cordon off some bandwidth for VOD - which after all used to be a function of cable TV. Ideally, VOD should compete on price - not bandwidth. It could be a low-cost addon to your cable package, leaving you free to decide whether to forego a Netflix subscription in favor of a VOD option that costs less...
A quick Google search turned up this article from 2015 stating that the internet at the time was 6 percent of the us economy. I don't know if that number's right, and even if so, the percentage is probably higher now. But my point is that, without Net Neutrality, it would be nowhere near as big. In fact, it might not have beaten out the likes of Compuserve and MSN, which had pretty much zero effect on the overall economy.
So to the extent that the Internet is a major engine of the growth Republicans always seem to point to as their magic bullet to justify any and all of their policies - they have just blindly asserted that "we've had all the innovation we need, thank you - it's time for the toll collectors to cash in".
Well, maybe the answer is to stop pretending that companies can - or should - 'take care' of their employees any more. A good start would be to adopt universal health and unemployment insurance, so that companies aren't dragged down by a government expectation that they will provide those things - when their foreign competitors can rely on their governments to provide them. Of course that ignores your bit about loyal employees - which are certainly worth something...
Still, if you're 'pro business' in this country you're also expected to be 'anti government'. The two don't add up. The best way to have a strong middle class is to have good, well-paying jobs and secure benefits. And the best way to have healthy companies is to have a strong middle class to buy their products. But in this country at this time, we have the worst of both. And a weak middle class produces a viscous circle of need for government safety net programs to deal with the carnage.
No. What I'm saying is that you can't just say because Trump won, that the majority of people want what he's doing. The popular vote surely reflects the desires of the majority better than the Electoral College result does in cases where the results differ.
In any case, I'm not trying to manufacture a mandate. The election was close enough that neither party has a mandate. So my complaint is with folks like the original poster equating a squeak it out win as a mandate. After all, the original post I was responding to said "USA elected Trump. USA wants this to happen". USA doesn't even know what Net Neutrality is - let alone wants it killed. In fact, if you asked them "Do you want Netflix to cost more so your ISP can make more money?", I think an overwhelming majority, based on common sense alone, would say no.
Of course, you're buying into the too, too convenient argument that the company is sure to go belly up without reducing their labor costs. Obviously, even when true, this can only be true on a case by case basis. It's not as if the only thing that makes companies succeed is how cheaply they can operate - and in fact it's not a sure thing that paring labor costs to a minimum translates into operating as cheaply as possible. Besides, good experienced workers contribute value to the company that surely factors into the company's success.
Noone's saying Trump wasn't elected. Just that the majority USA voters don't want his bullshit. After all, that's what was being implied by "USA want's this to happen". Sure, Trump is in a position to make this happen - thanks to the Electoral College and any number of other factors. That does not mean USA (i.e. the majority of American citizens) want him to.
And what the hell does 'Running up the score in California' mean. You could just as easily say "Running up the score in a bunch of over-represented low population states". But again, we're talking about what the people want - not what the screwy Electoral system produced.
Assuming this new Windows 10s thing is going to be a consumer device, and may end up selling lots of units, Apple kind of needs to support it. I don't suppose they need to do more than package up their Win32 code - doubt they'd do a complete rewrite.
Maybe Apple sees this as a way to hurt Google. Chromebooks can't run iTunes, 10s Chromebook competitors will. Do you even need iTunes to deal with an iPhone these days. The one pain in the ass of my 'everything on Linux' lifestyle is dealing with an old iPod mini that I still use to listen to podcasts. There are Linjux tools to get podcasts onto it, but they're not very reliable - and the opposite of user-friendly. Not that iTunes is so user-friendly either, but it does work...
Hillary won the nomination by a big margin without the superdelegates, who surely would've gone with Bernie had he won the rest - just like they did with Obama in 2008. Yes, they helped create an aura of inevitability early on. But they weren't decisive in terms of the delegate count. Bernie might have won - but you're saying this in the light of hindsight about Hillary's ultimate loss in the general. He certainly came nowhere near close to winning the nomination (not even as close as Clinton did in 2008).
But the fact that you're still re-litigating this is the problem we're discussing. Even if it were true, it would not change the fact that Trump is a disaster. Are you happier with Trump than you would've been with Hillary? If so, you had no real stake in any of the progressive positions Bernie stood for - or you don't know what your stake was. Number one among them was winning control of the Supreme Court so that money could ultimately be taken out of politics - or at least unmasked and rendered less useful.
Hopefully by 12,000 AD we'll have figure out to use the energy from the sun without producing toxic waste - or mining toxic materials - or paying for those mined materials. At best, Nuclear should be a stopgap on the way there. And short term, converting coal plants to natural gas seems to provide more bang for the buck more safely.
That's exactly the point, though. The insoluble problem with Nuclear Power isn't outdated reactor designs - it's the tons of highly radioactive waste products that need to be stored for decades in systems that are themselves complex and subject to failure.
And those improved reactors we've yet to see in practice will still keep churning out the stuff.
Yes, you're right. But enough Progressives voted for Jill Stein to have brought about the shitstorm that is President Donald Trump - all else being equal. Those Stein voters might have cared about Hillary's private email server (though it's hard to imagine why, since there was very little there there). They definitely cared about the DNC favoring Hillary over Bernie, which, yep, they did. But Bernie got over it (mostly because he realizes he wouldn't have won the nomination even if the DNC hadn't favored Hillary), but those purists didn't get over it. Ultimately those Pure Progressive voters voted against Hillary because they didn't like her personally - and most of them thought she'd win anyway. It's as simple as that. Big mistake that they have a lot of trouble owning up to.
Instead of Hillary (who, the bullshit goes, "never saw a war she didn't like"), they got Donald the MOAB dropper. Instead of Hillary the "pawn of Wall Street", they got Goldman Sachs in the White House. And Gorsuch. And Trumpcare. And huge tax cuts for the rich on deck. And the dismantling of the EPA. And on and on...
So, Putin, Facebook bots (on Putin's payroll), Comey, Stein and her 'pure progressive' voters, and for good measure, an Electoral College slanted toward low population states. It took a lot to bring her down. Yes, maybe because Trump was so bad that she should've won despite all that. But it took a lot, nonetheless.
I don't know about Yates, but in the cases of Bharara and Comey, he pretty much implied that he was going to keep them on. In any case, all three were fired very abruptly very soon after new information about the investigation of Trump Administration ties to Russia came to light.
Yep. I don't care if Windows succeeds or not. What I do care about is whether general purpose PC hardware remains available. I assume these Windows 10s boxes are 'secure boot' only, and you can't just replace windows 10s with Linux or set up to dual boot Windows 10s and Linux. Maybe if you shell out the 50 bucks they also make it so you can disable secure boot - but still, should I have to pay a Microsoft tax just to be able to set up a dual boot?
It's hard to say whether the point of this 10s thing is to head of the Chromebook threat or to replace Windows OS revenue with Windows Store revenue - on the assumption that the days of paying for a PC operating system are numbered. But what's pretty certain is that Win32 apps are not going to be rewritten to be new-fangled Windows-only apps - and that's a good thing. Because to the extent they're rewritten, they will be rewritten as web apps that will work on any device. So it would stink if the 'best value' laptop and desktop devices became Windows only - even if they'd run Linux nicely.
So, assuming this is the existing Win32 version of Office repackaged to live in the app store, can we also assume it's the X86 version? Or are they providing tools to build native ARM versions of Win32 apps. Are all 10 S devices required to use Intel processors?
Well, a better test would be "Anyone who voted for Trump and thought he was going to raise the price of Netflix and prevent the introduction of new streaming services, please raise your hand".
Do you really need to turn this into a rant about a 'liberal wasteland...'. San Francisco is expensive because people want to live there. Period. Democratic controlled governments have nothing to do with it other than either
1. contributing to the desirability of the places - whether you care to believe that or not. or
2. being elected by the people who chose to live there for some other reason - which is more or less the same thing.
Now it's quite possible that the residents of San Francisco and New York are deluded about how desirable those cities are. And maybe they'd all be happier in the sun belt - though I doubt it.
To the extent that you're even asking the question, the answer doesn't matter - use whichever you like. The closer Ubuntu is to Fedora (and other distros as well) in terms of the big underlying stuff, the easier it is to target all of those distros for 3rd party apps, and that's what matters. There still aren't many 3rd party Linux apps, and the race seems to be on between having decent 3rd party support - and not needing it, because 'all you need is a web browser'. But still, there's that occasional need...
Other than Chrome, I use exactly one 3rd party app on my Mint KDE system - a Cisco VPN client provided by my job - without which I wouldn't be able to work from home via Linux. This thing was built for Ubuntu, circa 2014, and it still works with the latest Mint distro - which is a good thing, since I doubt I'd be able to get the company to provide me with an upgrade to it.
Well, okay. But it sounds like you could figure out how to do the same thing via a remote desktop session. So it boils down to whether Wayland improves things enough for the millions of everyday users to make it worth making users like you figure out another way to do that thing you occasionally do. I don't know enough about Wayland to know that it really will improve things - though I've read reports that it makes the desktop 'feel' smoother. If it makes it easier to get drivers for the latest video cards with fewer bugs, though, I'm all for it.
X remoting was always a good-sounding idea that was implemented in a way that made it not much more efficient in practice than VNC-type remoting. I use remote desktop on my Linux box at home when I need to access my office Windows system from home. I run local stuff on one virtual desktop and RDP on another. The RDP desktop is pretty awful - but useable enough, I guess (since I use it). It'd be better if 'grab all keys' actually grabbed all the keys. But somehow I don't think remoting via X Windows would be any less awful...
Slashdot Mirror
Oh, STFU already.
There are leaks and there are leaks. Trump will leak when it's convenient for him to leak - or when he just can't control his impulse to brag about what he knows. But the only leaks he really cares about are the ones from inside the White House, apparently from staffers that can't believe the sheer stupidity of this Administration and feel the country has a need to know.
Manning and Snowden are a whole other leaky ball of wax. They obviously believed the country had a need to know the stuff they were leaking, and they weren't members of the Administration or even the agencies they were working for. They may have done us a service - and they may also have done some real damage. But what they've pointed out more than anything else is that it's practically impossible to use modern digital technology and reliably maintain the levels of secrecy that the government seems to want to maintain...
Seriously, why does China feel the need to censor this? Aren't they all in with technology - this isn't some religion coming up from below to overrun the great Communist State.
Is this why every sales clerk these days asks for an email address whenever you buy something with a credit card?
I agree that prioritizing traffic based on sheer amount of data is a different form of Net Neutrality violation than doing it based on content. But both cases are bad.
Controlling access based on content is self-explanatory - pure censorship.
Controlling access based on quantity of data makes sense financially, I suppose. But that's best handled by charging the end-user a higher price based on their usage. That way, they decide what they download - not the ISP. And Netflix has the same 'barrier to entry' as YouTube, some new startup - or Comcast's own content.
Now, if low enough data caps had been in place when Netflix streaming took off, it may never have happened. And apparently, ISP's do have enough available bandwidth to support a really high cap. So the only reak issue I see is that Comcast's own video on demand offerings are essentially the same thing as Netflix streaming - except they're not technically coming over the internet, and so may not be covered even by Net Neutrality rules. That's a hole that may or may not need to be plugged - depending on whether you think cable TV companies should be allowed to cordon off some bandwidth for VOD - which after all used to be a function of cable TV. Ideally, VOD should compete on price - not bandwidth. It could be a low-cost addon to your cable package, leaving you free to decide whether to forego a Netflix subscription in favor of a VOD option that costs less...
I voted for a wall, and all I got were a few ISP monopolies that are free to sell my browsing history. Good job, folks!
A quick Google search turned up this article from 2015 stating that the internet at the time was 6 percent of the us economy. I don't know if that number's right, and even if so, the percentage is probably higher now. But my point is that, without Net Neutrality, it would be nowhere near as big. In fact, it might not have beaten out the likes of Compuserve and MSN, which had pretty much zero effect on the overall economy.
So to the extent that the Internet is a major engine of the growth Republicans always seem to point to as their magic bullet to justify any and all of their policies - they have just blindly asserted that "we've had all the innovation we need, thank you - it's time for the toll collectors to cash in".
https://www.usnews.com/news/bl...
Well, maybe the answer is to stop pretending that companies can - or should - 'take care' of their employees any more. A good start would be to adopt universal health and unemployment insurance, so that companies aren't dragged down by a government expectation that they will provide those things - when their foreign competitors can rely on their governments to provide them. Of course that ignores your bit about loyal employees - which are certainly worth something...
Still, if you're 'pro business' in this country you're also expected to be 'anti government'. The two don't add up. The best way to have a strong middle class is to have good, well-paying jobs and secure benefits. And the best way to have healthy companies is to have a strong middle class to buy their products. But in this country at this time, we have the worst of both. And a weak middle class produces a viscous circle of need for government safety net programs to deal with the carnage.
No. What I'm saying is that you can't just say because Trump won, that the majority of people want what he's doing. The popular vote surely reflects the desires of the majority better than the Electoral College result does in cases where the results differ.
In any case, I'm not trying to manufacture a mandate. The election was close enough that neither party has a mandate. So my complaint is with folks like the original poster equating a squeak it out win as a mandate. After all, the original post I was responding to said "USA elected Trump. USA wants this to happen". USA doesn't even know what Net Neutrality is - let alone wants it killed. In fact, if you asked them "Do you want Netflix to cost more so your ISP can make more money?", I think an overwhelming majority, based on common sense alone, would say no.
Of course, you're buying into the too, too convenient argument that the company is sure to go belly up without reducing their labor costs. Obviously, even when true, this can only be true on a case by case basis. It's not as if the only thing that makes companies succeed is how cheaply they can operate - and in fact it's not a sure thing that paring labor costs to a minimum translates into operating as cheaply as possible. Besides, good experienced workers contribute value to the company that surely factors into the company's success.
Noone's saying Trump wasn't elected. Just that the majority USA voters don't want his bullshit. After all, that's what was being implied by "USA want's this to happen". Sure, Trump is in a position to make this happen - thanks to the Electoral College and any number of other factors. That does not mean USA (i.e. the majority of American citizens) want him to.
And what the hell does 'Running up the score in California' mean. You could just as easily say "Running up the score in a bunch of over-represented low population states". But again, we're talking about what the people want - not what the screwy Electoral system produced.
Assuming this new Windows 10s thing is going to be a consumer device, and may end up selling lots of units, Apple kind of needs to support it. I don't suppose they need to do more than package up their Win32 code - doubt they'd do a complete rewrite.
Maybe Apple sees this as a way to hurt Google. Chromebooks can't run iTunes, 10s Chromebook competitors will. Do you even need iTunes to deal with an iPhone these days. The one pain in the ass of my 'everything on Linux' lifestyle is dealing with an old iPod mini that I still use to listen to podcasts. There are Linjux tools to get podcasts onto it, but they're not very reliable - and the opposite of user-friendly. Not that iTunes is so user-friendly either, but it does work...
Hillary won the nomination by a big margin without the superdelegates, who surely would've gone with Bernie had he won the rest - just like they did with Obama in 2008. Yes, they helped create an aura of inevitability early on. But they weren't decisive in terms of the delegate count. Bernie might have won - but you're saying this in the light of hindsight about Hillary's ultimate loss in the general. He certainly came nowhere near close to winning the nomination (not even as close as Clinton did in 2008).
But the fact that you're still re-litigating this is the problem we're discussing. Even if it were true, it would not change the fact that Trump is a disaster. Are you happier with Trump than you would've been with Hillary? If so, you had no real stake in any of the progressive positions Bernie stood for - or you don't know what your stake was. Number one among them was winning control of the Supreme Court so that money could ultimately be taken out of politics - or at least unmasked and rendered less useful.
Hopefully by 12,000 AD we'll have figure out to use the energy from the sun without producing toxic waste - or mining toxic materials - or paying for those mined materials. At best, Nuclear should be a stopgap on the way there. And short term, converting coal plants to natural gas seems to provide more bang for the buck more safely.
That's exactly the point, though. The insoluble problem with Nuclear Power isn't outdated reactor designs - it's the tons of highly radioactive waste products that need to be stored for decades in systems that are themselves complex and subject to failure.
And those improved reactors we've yet to see in practice will still keep churning out the stuff.
An NYT bestselling hit job - based on innuendo and very little, y'know, evidence.
I don't know how real the evidence is, and don't particularly care to know anymore, either.
Well, then why are you bothering to comment on it, moron?
Yes, you're right. But enough Progressives voted for Jill Stein to have brought about the shitstorm that is President Donald Trump - all else being equal. Those Stein voters might have cared about Hillary's private email server (though it's hard to imagine why, since there was very little there there). They definitely cared about the DNC favoring Hillary over Bernie, which, yep, they did. But Bernie got over it (mostly because he realizes he wouldn't have won the nomination even if the DNC hadn't favored Hillary), but those purists didn't get over it. Ultimately those Pure Progressive voters voted against Hillary because they didn't like her personally - and most of them thought she'd win anyway. It's as simple as that. Big mistake that they have a lot of trouble owning up to.
Instead of Hillary (who, the bullshit goes, "never saw a war she didn't like"), they got Donald the MOAB dropper. Instead of Hillary the "pawn of Wall Street", they got Goldman Sachs in the White House. And Gorsuch. And Trumpcare. And huge tax cuts for the rich on deck. And the dismantling of the EPA. And on and on...
So, Putin, Facebook bots (on Putin's payroll), Comey, Stein and her 'pure progressive' voters, and for good measure, an Electoral College slanted toward low population states. It took a lot to bring her down. Yes, maybe because Trump was so bad that she should've won despite all that. But it took a lot, nonetheless.
I don't know about Yates, but in the cases of Bharara and Comey, he pretty much implied that he was going to keep them on. In any case, all three were fired very abruptly very soon after new information about the investigation of Trump Administration ties to Russia came to light.
Yep. I don't care if Windows succeeds or not. What I do care about is whether general purpose PC hardware remains available. I assume these Windows 10s boxes are 'secure boot' only, and you can't just replace windows 10s with Linux or set up to dual boot Windows 10s and Linux. Maybe if you shell out the 50 bucks they also make it so you can disable secure boot - but still, should I have to pay a Microsoft tax just to be able to set up a dual boot?
It's hard to say whether the point of this 10s thing is to head of the Chromebook threat or to replace Windows OS revenue with Windows Store revenue - on the assumption that the days of paying for a PC operating system are numbered. But what's pretty certain is that Win32 apps are not going to be rewritten to be new-fangled Windows-only apps - and that's a good thing. Because to the extent they're rewritten, they will be rewritten as web apps that will work on any device. So it would stink if the 'best value' laptop and desktop devices became Windows only - even if they'd run Linux nicely.
So, assuming this is the existing Win32 version of Office repackaged to live in the app store, can we also assume it's the X86 version? Or are they providing tools to build native ARM versions of Win32 apps. Are all 10 S devices required to use Intel processors?
Well, a better test would be "Anyone who voted for Trump and thought he was going to raise the price of Netflix and prevent the introduction of new streaming services, please raise your hand".
Do you really need to turn this into a rant about a 'liberal wasteland...'. San Francisco is expensive because people want to live there. Period. Democratic controlled governments have nothing to do with it other than either
1. contributing to the desirability of the places - whether you care to believe that or not.
or
2. being elected by the people who chose to live there for some other reason - which is more or less the same thing.
Now it's quite possible that the residents of San Francisco and New York are deluded about how desirable those cities are. And maybe they'd all be happier in the sun belt - though I doubt it.
To the extent that you're even asking the question, the answer doesn't matter - use whichever you like. The closer Ubuntu is to Fedora (and other distros as well) in terms of the big underlying stuff, the easier it is to target all of those distros for 3rd party apps, and that's what matters. There still aren't many 3rd party Linux apps, and the race seems to be on between having decent 3rd party support - and not needing it, because 'all you need is a web browser'. But still, there's that occasional need...
Other than Chrome, I use exactly one 3rd party app on my Mint KDE system - a Cisco VPN client provided by my job - without which I wouldn't be able to work from home via Linux. This thing was built for Ubuntu, circa 2014, and it still works with the latest Mint distro - which is a good thing, since I doubt I'd be able to get the company to provide me with an upgrade to it.
Well, okay. But it sounds like you could figure out how to do the same thing via a remote desktop session. So it boils down to whether Wayland improves things enough for the millions of everyday users to make it worth making users like you figure out another way to do that thing you occasionally do. I don't know enough about Wayland to know that it really will improve things - though I've read reports that it makes the desktop 'feel' smoother. If it makes it easier to get drivers for the latest video cards with fewer bugs, though, I'm all for it.
X remoting was always a good-sounding idea that was implemented in a way that made it not much more efficient in practice than VNC-type remoting. I use remote desktop on my Linux box at home when I need to access my office Windows system from home. I run local stuff on one virtual desktop and RDP on another. The RDP desktop is pretty awful - but useable enough, I guess (since I use it). It'd be better if 'grab all keys' actually grabbed all the keys. But somehow I don't think remoting via X Windows would be any less awful...
A conventional heated clothes dryer is the first step in bedbug eradication. Guess you can just trash the clothes...