I don't know what "today's modern tasks" are that a 5+ year old desktop can't handle. I'm sure there's something you do that fits that description, but the rest of the world is pretty happily using their 5+ year old machines. Mine just turned 5, and it's running Linux Mint 18.1. Windows 7 is there, but I never use it, and certainly haven't felt a need for Windows 10. Maybe I'm missing out on something, but I doubt it.
Again. What percentage of casual home PC users does photo editing (beyond what they can do on their phones) and/or works on spreadsheets (beyond what they can do in Google Docs or Office 365)? Hint - probably less than 50% these days. And some of that 50% only uses their PC's for that - because they're already there.
If you're not inclined to believe this (based on your personal sampling), take my word for it - Microsoft knows it. And they're doing their damnedest to make sure there's a place for them in whatever develops. Of course, Microsoft's idea of "a place for them" is still 90% market share, so they definitely have their work cut out for them. But they are also starting from an enviable position.
The vast majority of PC and/or cellphone users is not made up of Computer Science students or power-gamers. Are you so insular that you don't get that?
Certainly if they intend to communicate fake news, they have plenty of ways. But it seems like the biggest problem is people spreading stuff via Facebook that they don't know is fake. Or that they click 'Like' on, because they think it's funny - and then all their friends see it and don't get that it's fake.
My point is for those of us who think fake news is a problem - and Facebook's solution isn't good enough - should communicate to Facebook that we think it's a problem, and will consider pulling back our use of their site. For once the "you're the product" dynamic actually gives us some power. So why not use it?
No. But isn't that the point. When you have marginally real 'news' organizations like Breitbart, and partially real ones like Fox laundering the fake news rantings of a circus clown like Levin into 'real' news, we have a problem.
In the past, The National Enquirer could blissfully print their space alien abduction stories, and nobody even considered that they were real. Facebook trolling fake news click-bait stories are probably not intended to be believed literally either - though they're harder to detect, and easy to emulate by those who intend to deceive. But Breitbart and Fox demand that we treat them as the real thing - though they uncritically disseminate this kind of crap, and rarely (if ever) retract stuff when proven wrong.
For what it's worth, Facebook could easily put a big crimp on it's fake news by vetting its news sources. Only publish stories from sources that adhere to some set of standards for truth and/or retractions. Why they don't eludes me. Other news aggregators surely do this. FB is making money off of fake news, and they'll keep doing it until their users protest. In fact lets start a "Day without Facebook" protest right now, shall we?
They have virtually no overlap in approximately the same sense as land lines and cellphones have no overlap.
For a long time most people kept their landlines (Windows PC's) and added a cellphone (iOS or Android). Then gradually, as they moved - or their old landline phones broke - or they changed cable providers - or kids got their own homes, they kept their cellphones and gave up the landlines. So, the comparison is pretty apt. Presumably at some point large swaths of the population won't buy a new PC when their old one dies - because they're doing most of their 'computing' on their phones of tablets. That's what Microsoft is up against. So far from 'not telling anyone anything', it's telling everyone that the OS that will for the most part supplant Windows - to the (significant) extent that it will be supplanted - will be Android. Unless Microsoft can pull off a miracle jack up Windows Phone market share to compete with Android and iOS.
Of course, businesses that are dependent on Windows apps will keep buying new Windows PC's. But new businesses (parallel = kids moving out of their parents' houses), may well opt for Chromebooks or Macs or 'anything that can run web apps'/.
Well, Microsoft is supposedly readying a Chromebook competetor - defined, I guess as a low-cost, stripped down laptop that can only run 'modern' apps. Replacing the Chrome browser (and its apps) with Edge and Android apps with Windows app store apps. I guess if 'app store apps' includes WIN32 stuff that's been made app store ready, they might have something that could sell. But if it's just a stripped down version of Windows, with all the complexity, but none of the 3rd part apps, it's not really a better deal than a Chromebook. I assume Microsoft won't charge OEM's for the OS - at first, at least. But still, will this thing be as easy to administer for schools and libraries as Chromebooks are? I kind of doubt it.
For a while the OP3 and the ZTE Axon 7 were neck-and-neck in terms of their flagshippiness. The A7 hardware is actually better (and cheaper than the OP3T), but ZTE has dropped the ball on unlocking the bootloader and working with 3rd party ROM developers. Of course, those promises still stand, and there's apparently a stable LineageOS ROM for the A7 that supposedly turns it into a real powerhouse. But the fancy stereo speakers still don't work right. C'mon, ZTE - you're this close to being what the readers of this thread want...
having the server was a 'conscious voluntary act', but that's not the act in question. The 'classified' emails (yes, mostly retroactively classified) were not put there by her - they were sent to her by others. Surely Comey didn't want to prosecute those others for sending them to their boss. And it certainly appears that nobody involved intended to send clearly classified stuff to anyone, much less to someone not cleared to see it.
Clinton's lies, such as they were, were legalistic attempts to avoid a perjury charge. Y'know, like the one that brought Flynn down - despite the fact that his phone calls to the Russian ambassador weren't illegal in and of themselves - as far as we know, anyway. A smart person called to testify to the FBI chooses their words very carefully - especially when they're testifying with regard to a highly politicized, trumped-up charge...
By 'top notch', I mean better than the offshore guys they replace you with. Plus having detailed knowledge of the product you work on that your offshore replacements will never have. I was personally the last man standing after an offshore operation (if that makes me 'top notchy' enough for you), and got to witness firsthand how awful it is - from a productivity point of view.
An as far as 'expecting a cycle every 4-6 years' goes - well, that's sweet that you think it's normal, but it's a relatively recent phenomenon. And it tells me that you haven't hit 50 yet. I sure hope you're planning for that 'cycle' when it happens - because you're likely to land on unemployment, or at least not someplace you'd like to have landed...
That may well be true, but the US - shitty schools notwithstanding - still has some of the best programmers in the world. So the problem isn't just schools.
Top notch US programmers (either educated here or immigrants) are losing their jobs to second-rate low-cost foreign competition. Not so much in companies that are actively developing software on tight schedules - that does not lend itself to offshoring. But in companies that are supporting older products that are not in heavy development, the short-sighted management approach to cost cutting is to offshore the jobs and hope to collect a golden parachute before the products die under the stress of poorly trained developers with no product-specific knowledge attempting to support them.
And while we're on the subject, whenever you hear a pundit say "it's automation that's taking away the jobs - not offshoring", you're either listening to a Republican making excuses for offshoring (okay, maybe a few Democrats do this too), or an opinionator who's been 'gotten to' by the various think tanks that are pushing that meme. It's not that automation hasn't enabled American factories to produce the same output with fewer employees. It's more that the only American factories that have stayed here are the ones that can produce the same output with fewer employees. The rest (i.e. the ones that can't benefit from automation yet) have left the US for low-cost labor - and still employ millions of Chinese, etc. workers. It's not that automation isn't going to eventually become the primary factor in job loss - but it's not the primary factor today.
Oops. I see that they have come out with a way to deploy win32 code to the app store - how did I miss that one? Not that I plan to use it yet - my win32 code runs on anything from XP to WINE, and I don't want to mess with that. But still - nice to know that I could, I suppose.
Not unless they provide a way to build app store-enabled apps from an existing win32 code base. It's taken a while, but they've realized that win32 code is their biggest ace in the hole. They're even talking about providing an X86 emulator for ARM-based Windows systems, which I assume is for win32-based X86 code. So if that stuff can be installed and upgraded via the app store, fine. Otherwise, no dice.
Why would you want to own a self-driving car if self-driving taxis make the experience of hailing one comparable? Unless you actually like driving (I do), looking for parking (I don't), taking the thing in for service and fill-ups (nobody does), and paying for insurance (anybody?).
They don't need to outlaw human drivers. If self-driving, hailable vehicles become widespread, far fewer people (vanishingly few?) will bother owning cars themselves - at least in locations well served by the Ubers. Why deal with expense, maintenence, insurance, parking, etc. once you can have a more convenient experience hailing a robot? Especially if competition brings the price of hailing a robot down.
And none of those 4000 people are involved in generating intellectual property - for which the Irish company collects the tax-free royalties. Nobody said Apple doesn't have a real office in Ireland - just that that office is being credited for revenues it didn't really produce. That's the game.
I think the greenhouse effect is a lot more straightforward - and well understood - than the effects of various foods on health. Even the 'massive scientific cockup' in the area of nutritional science validates the scientific method - in that if new evidence proves it wrong, that new evidence is accepted and added to the body of knowledge.
Nothing about the dynamics of climate change has been disproven. Yes, we don't know how fast it's happening and what the exact results will be, but to deny that it's happening is nonsense. There is such a thing as denialism. The most clear-cut cases are the ones where deep-pocketed interests have a stake in the denial - like the tobacco/lung cancer example. Certainly, corporate money pouring into unsuccessful attempts to counter scientific research would be a red flag, no?
The problem with considering that a problem for anyone but Microsoft is that the market for PC's has gravitated to those 'race to the bottom' cheap machines.
Except for those niche Alienware gamers, most people treat their PC's more or less like 'Chromebooks that can run MS Office when I need it'. That's why Microsoft is developing their new 'Cloud OS' thingy that essentially does the same thing. But the high-end PC has become a niche that most people don't need. And the vast market is spending their bucks on a new $800 iPhone or Samsung device every two years.
That assumes all those visas go to skilled workers not simply intended to work as go-betweens between American product designers and offshore cheap workers. That particular skill should be exempted from the H1B program entirely. Those are anti-workers - as opposite of an American workforce as you could imagine.
Solyndra was a bet that went bad. Among a bunch of other alternative energy bets that did a lot better, and on the whole, we're a lot farther along on the road to alternative energy cost parity than we would've been had none of those bets been made.
Cherry-picking Solyndra as an excuse to claim all Democratic investments are cronyism is kind of like holding up George Soros as an excuse to claim that this one rich guy is pulling all the strings on the left - when in fact, the right has Solyndras and Soroses by the score...
What was she 'getting away with' - dare I ask? You seem to assume there were incriminating documents that she 'destroyed' by hitting the 'delete' button on her email account. And yes, she had her IT guy use a tool to 'really delete' them. So what? There is zero evidence that there was anything 'immoral, deceitful, reprehensible or unconscionable' in those deleted emails - beyond your assumption that because she's Hillary Clinton, there has to be.
The fact that the obvious, fairly innocent, explanation makes a whole lot of sense doesn't even merit mention to you. But picture yourself with lots of political enemies just waiting for an excuse to subpoena your email account in search of potentially embarrassing stuff to use against you. You'd want the ability to hit Delete and have it matter too. Again, her deleting stuff from her personal server does not delete it from the State Department's records - if it was department business originating - or ending up - on department accounts. Is it possible that she was hiding something consequential? Sure. Is there any evidence of that? No. Evidence of opportunity is not evidence. That's why she wasn't prosecuted. And y'know what. She shouldn't even have been investigated, since the investigation was about Benghazi, and her role in it was well known. She lobbied for limited aid in toppling Quadaffi, and bad things happened afterward. Not illegal things. That's it.
By the way, the whole "[X] Derangement Syndrome" meme is another of those false equivalencies the right loves to trot out.
People upset about Bush lying us into war, declaring he had a mandate after losing the popular vote (and yes, barring some botched Broward County ballots, the Florida vote too), etc. are not 'deranged'. They're upset about something real.
People upset about Obama being elected president despite being black (or because of a bogus question about his place of birth) are deranged, in the sense that they are creating or latching on to falsehoods to justify their feelings. People that think Obamacare is a 'job-killing disaster' (despite a steady pace of job creation), but who think the Affordable Care Act is a good thing that we should keep are blindly parroting stuff they don't understand, and to the extent they have strong feelings about it, that can be reasonably called 'derangement' as well.
People upset about Trump are upset about a president who lies constantly, shows no sense of respect for the truth, and insists on punking the public and the media with outrageous statements rather than acting like a President. It's not 'deranged' to be upset about those things. If he starts acting like a responsible leader, this will likely quiet down. But he has shown no indication that he will.
There's no evidence that Clinton engaged in anything criminal either. Just because you want her behavior to be criminal doesn't make it so. It's been looked at and determined not to be.
And yes, there's plenty of evidence Trump did engage in criminal stuff. He settled the Trump University fraud case for $25 million, and still has plenty of other lawsuits pending.
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I don't know what "today's modern tasks" are that a 5+ year old desktop can't handle. I'm sure there's something you do that fits that description, but the rest of the world is pretty happily using their 5+ year old machines. Mine just turned 5, and it's running Linux Mint 18.1. Windows 7 is there, but I never use it, and certainly haven't felt a need for Windows 10. Maybe I'm missing out on something, but I doubt it.
Again. What percentage of casual home PC users does photo editing (beyond what they can do on their phones) and/or works on spreadsheets (beyond what they can do in Google Docs or Office 365)? Hint - probably less than 50% these days. And some of that 50% only uses their PC's for that - because they're already there.
If you're not inclined to believe this (based on your personal sampling), take my word for it - Microsoft knows it. And they're doing their damnedest to make sure there's a place for them in whatever develops. Of course, Microsoft's idea of "a place for them" is still 90% market share, so they definitely have their work cut out for them. But they are also starting from an enviable position.
The vast majority of PC and/or cellphone users is not made up of Computer Science students or power-gamers. Are you so insular that you don't get that?
Certainly if they intend to communicate fake news, they have plenty of ways. But it seems like the biggest problem is people spreading stuff via Facebook that they don't know is fake. Or that they click 'Like' on, because they think it's funny - and then all their friends see it and don't get that it's fake.
My point is for those of us who think fake news is a problem - and Facebook's solution isn't good enough - should communicate to Facebook that we think it's a problem, and will consider pulling back our use of their site. For once the "you're the product" dynamic actually gives us some power. So why not use it?
No. But isn't that the point. When you have marginally real 'news' organizations like Breitbart, and partially real ones like Fox laundering the fake news rantings of a circus clown like Levin into 'real' news, we have a problem.
In the past, The National Enquirer could blissfully print their space alien abduction stories, and nobody even considered that they were real. Facebook trolling fake news click-bait stories are probably not intended to be believed literally either - though they're harder to detect, and easy to emulate by those who intend to deceive. But Breitbart and Fox demand that we treat them as the real thing - though they uncritically disseminate this kind of crap, and rarely (if ever) retract stuff when proven wrong.
For what it's worth, Facebook could easily put a big crimp on it's fake news by vetting its news sources. Only publish stories from sources that adhere to some set of standards for truth and/or retractions. Why they don't eludes me. Other news aggregators surely do this. FB is making money off of fake news, and they'll keep doing it until their users protest. In fact lets start a "Day without Facebook" protest right now, shall we?
They have virtually no overlap in approximately the same sense as land lines and cellphones have no overlap.
For a long time most people kept their landlines (Windows PC's) and added a cellphone (iOS or Android). Then gradually, as they moved - or their old landline phones broke - or they changed cable providers - or kids got their own homes, they kept their cellphones and gave up the landlines. So, the comparison is pretty apt. Presumably at some point large swaths of the population won't buy a new PC when their old one dies - because they're doing most of their 'computing' on their phones of tablets. That's what Microsoft is up against. So far from 'not telling anyone anything', it's telling everyone that the OS that will for the most part supplant Windows - to the (significant) extent that it will be supplanted - will be Android. Unless Microsoft can pull off a miracle jack up Windows Phone market share to compete with Android and iOS.
Of course, businesses that are dependent on Windows apps will keep buying new Windows PC's. But new businesses (parallel = kids moving out of their parents' houses), may well opt for Chromebooks or Macs or 'anything that can run web apps'/.
Well, Microsoft is supposedly readying a Chromebook competetor - defined, I guess as a low-cost, stripped down laptop that can only run 'modern' apps. Replacing the Chrome browser (and its apps) with Edge and Android apps with Windows app store apps. I guess if 'app store apps' includes WIN32 stuff that's been made app store ready, they might have something that could sell. But if it's just a stripped down version of Windows, with all the complexity, but none of the 3rd part apps, it's not really a better deal than a Chromebook. I assume Microsoft won't charge OEM's for the OS - at first, at least. But still, will this thing be as easy to administer for schools and libraries as Chromebooks are? I kind of doubt it.
For a while the OP3 and the ZTE Axon 7 were neck-and-neck in terms of their flagshippiness. The A7 hardware is actually better (and cheaper than the OP3T), but ZTE has dropped the ball on unlocking the bootloader and working with 3rd party ROM developers. Of course, those promises still stand, and there's apparently a stable LineageOS ROM for the A7 that supposedly turns it into a real powerhouse. But the fancy stereo speakers still don't work right. C'mon, ZTE - you're this close to being what the readers of this thread want...
having the server was a 'conscious voluntary act', but that's not the act in question. The 'classified' emails (yes, mostly retroactively classified) were not put there by her - they were sent to her by others. Surely Comey didn't want to prosecute those others for sending them to their boss. And it certainly appears that nobody involved intended to send clearly classified stuff to anyone, much less to someone not cleared to see it.
Clinton's lies, such as they were, were legalistic attempts to avoid a perjury charge. Y'know, like the one that brought Flynn down - despite the fact that his phone calls to the Russian ambassador weren't illegal in and of themselves - as far as we know, anyway. A smart person called to testify to the FBI chooses their words very carefully - especially when they're testifying with regard to a highly politicized, trumped-up charge...
By 'top notch', I mean better than the offshore guys they replace you with. Plus having detailed knowledge of the product you work on that your offshore replacements will never have. I was personally the last man standing after an offshore operation (if that makes me 'top notchy' enough for you), and got to witness firsthand how awful it is - from a productivity point of view.
An as far as 'expecting a cycle every 4-6 years' goes - well, that's sweet that you think it's normal, but it's a relatively recent phenomenon. And it tells me that you haven't hit 50 yet. I sure hope you're planning for that 'cycle' when it happens - because you're likely to land on unemployment, or at least not someplace you'd like to have landed...
That may well be true, but the US - shitty schools notwithstanding - still has some of the best programmers in the world. So the problem isn't just schools.
Top notch US programmers (either educated here or immigrants) are losing their jobs to second-rate low-cost foreign competition. Not so much in companies that are actively developing software on tight schedules - that does not lend itself to offshoring. But in companies that are supporting older products that are not in heavy development, the short-sighted management approach to cost cutting is to offshore the jobs and hope to collect a golden parachute before the products die under the stress of poorly trained developers with no product-specific knowledge attempting to support them.
And while we're on the subject, whenever you hear a pundit say "it's automation that's taking away the jobs - not offshoring", you're either listening to a Republican making excuses for offshoring (okay, maybe a few Democrats do this too), or an opinionator who's been 'gotten to' by the various think tanks that are pushing that meme. It's not that automation hasn't enabled American factories to produce the same output with fewer employees. It's more that the only American factories that have stayed here are the ones that can produce the same output with fewer employees. The rest (i.e. the ones that can't benefit from automation yet) have left the US for low-cost labor - and still employ millions of Chinese, etc. workers. It's not that automation isn't going to eventually become the primary factor in job loss - but it's not the primary factor today.
Oops. I see that they have come out with a way to deploy win32 code to the app store - how did I miss that one? Not that I plan to use it yet - my win32 code runs on anything from XP to WINE, and I don't want to mess with that. But still - nice to know that I could, I suppose.
Not unless they provide a way to build app store-enabled apps from an existing win32 code base. It's taken a while, but they've realized that win32 code is their biggest ace in the hole. They're even talking about providing an X86 emulator for ARM-based Windows systems, which I assume is for win32-based X86 code. So if that stuff can be installed and upgraded via the app store, fine. Otherwise, no dice.
Why would you want to own a self-driving car if self-driving taxis make the experience of hailing one comparable? Unless you actually like driving (I do), looking for parking (I don't), taking the thing in for service and fill-ups (nobody does), and paying for insurance (anybody?).
They don't need to outlaw human drivers. If self-driving, hailable vehicles become widespread, far fewer people (vanishingly few?) will bother owning cars themselves - at least in locations well served by the Ubers. Why deal with expense, maintenence, insurance, parking, etc. once you can have a more convenient experience hailing a robot? Especially if competition brings the price of hailing a robot down.
And none of those 4000 people are involved in generating intellectual property - for which the Irish company collects the tax-free royalties. Nobody said Apple doesn't have a real office in Ireland - just that that office is being credited for revenues it didn't really produce. That's the game.
Except that some of the people who didn't like him voted for him anyway. Those folks are less likely to be forgiving.
I think the greenhouse effect is a lot more straightforward - and well understood - than the effects of various foods on health. Even the 'massive scientific cockup' in the area of nutritional science validates the scientific method - in that if new evidence proves it wrong, that new evidence is accepted and added to the body of knowledge.
Nothing about the dynamics of climate change has been disproven. Yes, we don't know how fast it's happening and what the exact results will be, but to deny that it's happening is nonsense. There is such a thing as denialism. The most clear-cut cases are the ones where deep-pocketed interests have a stake in the denial - like the tobacco/lung cancer example. Certainly, corporate money pouring into unsuccessful attempts to counter scientific research would be a red flag, no?
The problem with considering that a problem for anyone but Microsoft is that the market for PC's has gravitated to those 'race to the bottom' cheap machines.
Except for those niche Alienware gamers, most people treat their PC's more or less like 'Chromebooks that can run MS Office when I need it'. That's why Microsoft is developing their new 'Cloud OS' thingy that essentially does the same thing. But the high-end PC has become a niche that most people don't need. And the vast market is spending their bucks on a new $800 iPhone or Samsung device every two years.
That assumes all those visas go to skilled workers not simply intended to work as go-betweens between American product designers and offshore cheap workers. That particular skill should be exempted from the H1B program entirely. Those are anti-workers - as opposite of an American workforce as you could imagine.
Solyndra was a bet that went bad. Among a bunch of other alternative energy bets that did a lot better, and on the whole, we're a lot farther along on the road to alternative energy cost parity than we would've been had none of those bets been made.
Cherry-picking Solyndra as an excuse to claim all Democratic investments are cronyism is kind of like holding up George Soros as an excuse to claim that this one rich guy is pulling all the strings on the left - when in fact, the right has Solyndras and Soroses by the score...
You're right that settling a case does not imply guilt. Neither does not having a case brought in the first place. Do you not see that?
What was she 'getting away with' - dare I ask? You seem to assume there were incriminating documents that she 'destroyed' by hitting the 'delete' button on her email account. And yes, she had her IT guy use a tool to 'really delete' them. So what? There is zero evidence that there was anything 'immoral, deceitful, reprehensible or unconscionable' in those deleted emails - beyond your assumption that because she's Hillary Clinton, there has to be.
The fact that the obvious, fairly innocent, explanation makes a whole lot of sense doesn't even merit mention to you. But picture yourself with lots of political enemies just waiting for an excuse to subpoena your email account in search of potentially embarrassing stuff to use against you. You'd want the ability to hit Delete and have it matter too. Again, her deleting stuff from her personal server does not delete it from the State Department's records - if it was department business originating - or ending up - on department accounts. Is it possible that she was hiding something consequential? Sure. Is there any evidence of that? No. Evidence of opportunity is not evidence. That's why she wasn't prosecuted. And y'know what. She shouldn't even have been investigated, since the investigation was about Benghazi, and her role in it was well known. She lobbied for limited aid in toppling Quadaffi, and bad things happened afterward. Not illegal things. That's it.
By the way, the whole "[X] Derangement Syndrome" meme is another of those false equivalencies the right loves to trot out.
People upset about Bush lying us into war, declaring he had a mandate after losing the popular vote (and yes, barring some botched Broward County ballots, the Florida vote too), etc. are not 'deranged'. They're upset about something real.
People upset about Obama being elected president despite being black (or because of a bogus question about his place of birth) are deranged, in the sense that they are creating or latching on to falsehoods to justify their feelings. People that think Obamacare is a 'job-killing disaster' (despite a steady pace of job creation), but who think the Affordable Care Act is a good thing that we should keep are blindly parroting stuff they don't understand, and to the extent they have strong feelings about it, that can be reasonably called 'derangement' as well.
People upset about Trump are upset about a president who lies constantly, shows no sense of respect for the truth, and insists on punking the public and the media with outrageous statements rather than acting like a President. It's not 'deranged' to be upset about those things. If he starts acting like a responsible leader, this will likely quiet down. But he has shown no indication that he will.
There's no evidence that Clinton engaged in anything criminal either. Just because you want her behavior to be criminal doesn't make it so. It's been looked at and determined not to be.
And yes, there's plenty of evidence Trump did engage in criminal stuff. He settled the Trump University fraud case for $25 million, and still has plenty of other lawsuits pending.