Isn't at least part of the point that there were not huge trillion dollar assets in coastal cities 8000 years ago. And that the lack of 'runaway' warming back then has little bearing on the observed effects today and the science that suggest that lots of those coastal assets could be under water in a few decades.
Presumably you're making some kind of a point about permafrost methane release not being much of an issue - because it won't obliterate all life on Earth. Well, that's encouraging...
Isn't that basically like everything MS has always done? It's just that before they missed out on mobile, all their poor imitations came 'for free' with Windows, and eventually caught up more or less to their original sources - and so came to be thought of as good, and even sometimes 'innovative', while the originals faded to obscurity in the face of trying to compete with a now 'built in' Windows feature.
The EPA probably did have something to do with killing coal. Oh, sure, it took cheap natural gas to drive the last nail into the coffin, but you pretty much can't build new coal plants in this country - and existing ones have simply been expanding - for decades - based on an emmissions loophole for grandfathered plants.
But the death of coal is a good thing. Coal is the dirtiest fuel around. Mining employs way fewer workers than it used to - and destroys the environment way more than it used to. And yes, there are more potential jobs building wind and solar farms than mining coal. Hillary Clinton - inartful as always - tried to make these points, but got sound-bited down to 'coal is dead'. And now Trump's fossil fuel brigade will attempt to reverse the progress on renewables, but they're coming anyway. At some point there will be a revolution in battery (or some other storage) technology that will change everything.
And the parts of the TPP that were bad were the intellectual property bits - and the bit about letting multinational corporations bypass local rules. Trump gave no indication that he's opposed to those things. In fact, his 'winning is everything' ethic might actually favor them.
The parts of the TTP that were good - yes there were some, and that's where Hillary's 'gold standard' quote came from - had to do with environmental and labor standards that previous trade deals had not included or made enforceable. That plus the prospect of serving as a counterweight to China in the region. On those issues, Trump probably either doesn't care - or doesn't know enough to have an opinion.
You see, the problem is that alt-right types will take a statement like this one about South Africa - a majority black country - and use it to demonstrate 'reverse racism' in the U.S. - still a majority white country, and full of other minorities besides black people. There is no such thing as reverse racism in a country where the supposed racist minority is still suffering discrimination. Yes, I suppose there can be a form of 'compelled non-discrimination' - if only as a form of social pressure, which some whites will see as discrimination against them.
Affirmative Action is a whole other subject, and maybe it's not the best way to remedy the effects of past outright discrimination, but those effects are real - and if you've got a better idea, then out with it.
As far as white people needing a 'white identity they can be proud of'. How about an 'American identity that represents our national value of equal opportunity for all'. Using racial identity to shore up your personal pride is maybe a valid reaction to having been discriminated against because of your race to counter the narrative of racial inferiority that still infects this country. But it's downright silly to build an identity based on being white in America. What exactly is that identity - "we used to run this country - but now we're just as downtrodden as the rest of ya"? It's a big ole distraction / misdirection of anger towards the people who trod you down. Hint - it's not black people, it's the party who's nutcase candidate you just elected.
Except that Obama is perhaps the least corrupt individual to hold the Presidency since Jimmy Carter. Sure, he's a politician, and somewhat beholden to his donors - but in the scope of things, he's run a pretty clean administration. So in that light, using "Chicago-machine" to impugn him as corrupt? Why? Because he happened to come from Chicago? That won't fly. So I'm sticking with "Democrat" or 'Urban" or (dare I say it) "Black".
And I'm not one of those Democrats who's willing to chalk Trump's success up to racism. He certainly had the support of just about every racist you can find, but that doesn't make all of his swing supporters racists any more than Obama's coming from Chicago makes him corrupt. What it does make them is less uncomfortable associating themselves with racists and a politician (and party) who courted the racist vote than they are frightened and angry in general about the state their lives and the ability of the government to do anything that might make it better. I doubt they expect Trump to make it better either - they just want him to blow a few things up. Judging by his cabinet picks, they're likely to be disappointed even on that count. Maybe he'll keep them on board with a steady diet of tweeted conspiracy theories and personal insults...
Well, I assume you don't trust Trump to tell the truth - since it must be obvious even to you that he lies more or less constantly. So you trust him to be 'different', I suppose - with some kind of faith that 'different' in his case will turn out to be better. All very optimistic of you.
But have you considered that, for example, there was nothing stopping Trump from developing (or adopting) a coherent plan for, say, 'repealing and replacing Obamacare' sometime in the past 6 years. To me, the fact that he hasn't done so, and campaigned (and won) on a promise of 'something better', implies that he didn't have something better to offer - or he'd have offered it. There's no need to play political chess in pursuit of a popular policy, so let's assume his eventual 'something better' won't be better for enough voters for him to have presented it to them...
Yes, Obama is a politician - and a bit of a disappointment at that. 'Chicago-machine', I guess, carries a lot of specific negative meanings to you, but I'll assume it's is essentially code for 'Democrat' or 'urban' or something. But as far as 'trust' is concerned, Obama governed pretty much like he said he would - way to the right of where people (and the Nobel committee) 'hoped' he would, based, I guess, on their projections of what the first black President would do. But he was pretty trustworthy in the sense that he didn't misrepresent his policies much. Trump, on the other hand is claiming he's going to restore middle-class factory jobs by, what? Cutting taxes, mainly. Well, if you haven't figured out that 'tax cuts for the rich pay for themselves and help the middle class' is a lie by now, you're just not paying attention - or you've chosen sides and don't care about the truth.
Well, we're all about to see your assumptions and your faith tested. And I predict a continued rise in income inequality, with some various uglinesses on the side. If that happens, what will your reaction be?
The electoral college itself isn't the main problem. It's that the electoral college grants more weight to voters in low-population states. Even accepting that the Senate is a compromise to protect the interests of small states, that doesn't mean that in a national election for a single candidate, those small-state voters should get more votes than big state voters. The concentration of population in a few big states is a newish phenomenon, and it's begun to seriously undermine the principle of one person, one vote. Of course, we can't expect the beneficiaries of this distortion to work to end it...
The issue isn't necessarily the closeness of the results - though there'd be little point pursuing this if the states in question weren't close enough and involving enough electoral votes to make a difference. But what makes this recount reasonable is the way the polls were 'off' in such a consistent way leading up to the election - and even including exit polls on the day of the election. If all the polls showed Clinton winning, and all the cases where the results didn't match the exit polls were cases where Trump did better than the exit polls said he did, then it's worth finding out why, no?
After all, we've all talked on this site for years about how hackable our voting systems are, and the only possible red flag to indicate it would be discrepancies between exit polls and the official counts. So if this doesn't qualify, what would? Of course, it's possible that enough people were ashamed enough of their Trump votes to have lied to the pollsters. A bit frightening, but possible...
I'm willing to believe that something real was missed in all the polling - though I wouldn't put it past some of the actors in this election cycle to have tried tampering with the results either. Mostly, though, I think Republicans had less of an issue 'holding their noses' than Democrats did. Personally, I think the stink coming off the Trump campaign was way more noxious than anything about Clinton - and the thought of a wild-eyed Rudy Giuliani as Secretary of State is utterly nauseating. But that's just me...
Ultimately, I do think that the Comey letter on top of a closely-contested election was enough to do the trick of turning the election. Throw in voter suppression efforts and the systemic skew of the Electoral College toward small states, and Democrats needed a decisive win to get over the top. I'd also add the Wikileaks releases of DNC and Podesta emails, but at least that information was real, and though illegitimately gotten, added some real info into the mix. The Comey letter, however, was utterly inappropriate, and created an unnecessary, false impression of something significantly new at the last minute. Key word there is false. That info should not have been in the mix, and the FBI had no business putting it there.
I suppose you think Obama started the wiretapping program. He didn't. He didn't shut it down, either, but Bush still gets 'worst president ever' cred for that one.
And by "Mother of Lies", I'm guessing you mean Hillary Clinton. And I guess you're giving her sole credit for starting the Afghanistan and Iraq wars - which, yes, she voted to authorize if Hussein didn't let the inspectors in. It's a fine-ish point, indeed, but at worst hers was one of over a hundred votes that authorized the Bush Admin to go to war as a last resort, but the Bushes went to war as a first resort anyhow. Bush gets that prize too.
Benghazi? Well, she lobbied for our limited participation, so she gets some of the 'credit' there. Syria? Well, no. I think we're doing whatever it is (or isn't) that we're doing under the original Iraq authorization. In any case, we're not quite 'at war' there, and in any case, the Secretary of State does not have the power to go to war.
But I forgot. Hillary Clinton was all powerful - as long as she was running for President, and you wanted to blame her for everything wrong with the world. And now, I guess it's safe for you Obama haters to go back to blaming him for everything bad.
George W. Bush? Dick Cheney? George who...? Dick who...?
If they're planning to let you run arbitrary win32 exe's on ARM, why don't they just provide you with the tools to port your win32 exe instead of relying on X86 emulation? Or do they think their emulator works as a sandbox to mitigate the security issues in win32 code?
This. There's nothing wrong with providing a powerful new scripting language - for y'know, scripting. But there's also a need for a simple way to string a bunch of commands together in a file and execute them all. Why on earth would they remove that - or make people re-string the commands they've 'scripted' and used for years? Not all command-line users are using it for System Administration. They sysadmins can already find their way to powershell. Why inconvenience the rest of us - just to try to get bash programmers to think Windows has something as good or better. Because, face it, that's what's driving this.
Maybe, since they're trying to push Ximian as a cross-platform development environment - and because all iOS developers are currently developing on Mac's, they're moving VS to the Mac so that they can woo iOS devs over to Ximian without their having to have a second, Windows system.
This is certainly not about using VS to build Mac desktop apps.
The whole point of Xamarin is to hold out the prospect of cross-platform API's to get people not using Microsoft API's to switch to a Microsoft-specific API, that yes - for now - is kind of platform agnostic. Maybe that's okay-ish, but it'd have been a better solution had Microsoft not bought it. And it's not a desktop solution at all - it provides some decent mobile GUI stuff, but nothing to get WIN32 desktop developers to switch.
Cyanogenmod (I think?) used to have a very clever fix for this. An option to scramble the positions of the numbers on your lockscreen so that 'finger movement' patterns would be meaningless. That helps with prying eyes watching you enter your pin too.
But I'm running CM 13 on my phone, and it doesn't seem to have that option anymore.
In this day, lots of business will ask that documents be sent in PDF. And certainly, governments can get away with this.
Sure, there are plenty of businesses that have gone all in with MSOffice - or some other proprietary Windows-only app. But that stuff is legacy. That's not to say they can all switch desktop OS's any time soon, but that time is coming. And by that time the new OS may as often as not be Chrome - or Android. Or some other thin client system following a similar model. Even Microsoft knows this - if they're fans haven't accepted it yet.
Sure Google had knowledge of where Apple was going. But they didn't need any special access to know that Apple alone wouldn't control mobile. And the only other likely contender was Microsoft. The same Microsoft that was already trying to grab Google's business on the desktop. My point is that Android vs Apple was probably better for Apple than Windows vs Apple. There was going to be a cheap OEM smartphone OS one way or the other.
I'm not sure Google really wanted to screw Apple. They must've (smartly) realized that eventually Microsoft would come up with something good enough to compete with iOS, and once the OEMs standardized on that, MS could use their mobile OS to grab search away from Google. They'd have been happy for Apple to continue on using Google's applications - but Apple got pissed off and tried to 'hurt' Google by removing their apps from iOS. Apple would've been in the same (or a worse) competitive position had Microsoft succeeded, so I don't get what they were thinking. Sure, Google had bigger ambitions than were obvious at the time - but Apple's hubris and their sense that they're entitled to 'own' a whole category just because they got there first - despite their high-priced approach not serving the bulk of the market - is downright stupid.
Google, in establishing Chrome (and standards-based browsers in general) as a viable cross-platform 'platform' did more to save Apple's computer business than anything Apple ever did. Yes, it entails some new challenges, but it's better than competing with Microsoft's monopoly of yore.
Well, that was Microsoft's mother of all big mistakes. If they had made it easy to port existing WIN32 code to ARM prior to releasing the Surface RT, they might have had a hit on their hands. A crummy, legacy-encumbered hit, but a hit nonetheless. But they were too jealous of Apple's clean, secure-ish new OS implementation and 'app store' distribution model. So in typical me-too mode, they cloned the iPad instead of taking advantage of their legacy platform to make up for their late-to-market status.
...and by the way, the Continuum thing may also be too late to market. Once Android has the same desktop dockability, the only advantage of Continuum will be the ability to run legacy Windows apps. Not a small advantage, that - but the keyword is legacy. The market for people that want a pricey phone with crappy phone apps so they can dock it to use legacy X86 Windows apps is pretty small. And once most of those legacy Windows apps get Android - or web - replacements, that market is better served by just using existing laptops for the Windows apps. Why invest in docking stations just to run legacy windows apps from your phone?
The beauty of Continuum would've been if everyone were using it, and docking stations were pretty universally available. Sure, it would've been great to plug your phone into a dock at the airport, for example, and have a full desktop at your disposal. But who's going to invest in that docking infrastructure to serve the tiny population of Windows Phone users whose companies also invested in it to the point that they handed out Continuum-capable devices to their employees? For that to happen, you'd need a docking standard that works with iPhones, Android phones and, sure, I guess Windows Phones could support that too. And of course, you'd need decent iPhone and Android desktop apps to make that desirable. But by the time you've got all that in place, you're back at 'if an iPhone or Android - with the mobile apps I want - can do it, and Windows can, but doesn't have the mobile apps...
Microsoft didn't 'miss' the iPhone - since their basic business model had always been to sit back and copy whatever big new thing Apple (or anybody else, for that matter) came up with - and count on tie-ins to the desktop to make their copy succeed. What they missed was Android, which swooped in and stole the OEM market from them. By the time they were ready to move the app barrier to entry was too big. That said, Blackberry missed Android too - they failed from a leadership position.
They failed with their iPod clone too - but for a different reason. iPods were fairly cheap, and they tied your music collection to the Apple ecosystem. And iPods worked with Windows as well as anything else - i.e., they were cheap enough and limited enough in functionality that MS couldn't leverage Windows to out-compete Apple.
Which brings up another question. If HRC had used two email accounts, and Podesta or others of her confidantes outside of the government had communicated with her on the private one - not subject to FOIA requests - would that have been fine?
Because that's what I think she used the private email server for. Like she said, anything sent to her from inside the State Department was archived there and available for FOIA requests. But private stuff with personal acquaintances - even if potentially related to her work at State - was not (yes, there are gray areas). I'm sure her haters would not like that - and wouldn't accept her explanations in any case, but given that she could've accomplished what she wanted by carrying two devices, I'm inclined to believe her 'convenience' argument. Sure, she was trying to shield stuff from FOIA - but is that illegal if it's not official stuff?
If the 'two account' solution was legal, then she's guilty of stupidity, hubris - or both. But in any case, the 'classified documents' argument is mostly a red herring. Technically illegal - though without being properly marked (or even classified yet), another gray area). Still, if they'd been sent to or from her State Department account, nobody would've (or should've) batted an eye.
She shot herself in the foot by trivializing the issue and saying she was worried about Chelsea's wedding plans. She should've been honest and said, "I talk with and solicit advice from a large range of trusted friends outside of the Government, and I want them to be able to speak frankly". That was Cheney's defense in refusing to release minutes of his energy commission - which was official government business. Those minutes from those pre-9/11 sessions might well contain discussions of deposing Saddam Hussein from Iraq to get their oil back on the market, but apparently we the public don't have the right to know that...
Well, there *is* a difference between selling targeted ads based on the users' data vs selling the data - which Google still does not do. But I'll grant you this, the imperative of a public company is to keep the stock price growing - profit is almost beside the point, except as reflected in the stock price. That means that Google needs to constantly find new sources of revenue. I wish they'd get serious about building up their cloud hosting business and their corporate hosted application business. I doubt that their new Pixel hardware business is going to be a huge revenue generator.
In essence, Google needs a new business model to complement their old one. Otherwise, they've gone as far as they can with targeted advertising, and while I still don't think they're selling my info, I'd still prefer it to be stored anonymously than explicitly tied to my personal account - if only because of the threat of a data breach.
Ahhh. The non-swing state loophole. You're right about that, of course, but I'm addressing those Johnson/Stein supporters that don't do nuance. Even Ralph Nader came around in 2000 to saying that his supporters in swing states probably shouldn't vote for him. But it was too little, too late. And besides, I'd make the point that hyperbolically calling the two parties 'Coke and Pepsi' is just another example of the false equivalence disease that's affecting our political discourse.
Third parties can make whatever points they want - but if they really care about moving the needle in the right direction on issues they stand for, then muddying the waters with false equivalences hurts more than it helps. There's got to be a better way to make 3rd parties viable than to repeatedly serve as spoilers. Like doing the hard work of concentrating on down-ballot positions - and then changing the electoral laws state-by-state.
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Isn't at least part of the point that there were not huge trillion dollar assets in coastal cities 8000 years ago. And that the lack of 'runaway' warming back then has little bearing on the observed effects today and the science that suggest that lots of those coastal assets could be under water in a few decades.
Presumably you're making some kind of a point about permafrost methane release not being much of an issue - because it won't obliterate all life on Earth. Well, that's encouraging...
Isn't that basically like everything MS has always done? It's just that before they missed out on mobile, all their poor imitations came 'for free' with Windows, and eventually caught up more or less to their original sources - and so came to be thought of as good, and even sometimes 'innovative', while the originals faded to obscurity in the face of trying to compete with a now 'built in' Windows feature.
The EPA probably did have something to do with killing coal. Oh, sure, it took cheap natural gas to drive the last nail into the coffin, but you pretty much can't build new coal plants in this country - and existing ones have simply been expanding - for decades - based on an emmissions loophole for grandfathered plants.
But the death of coal is a good thing. Coal is the dirtiest fuel around. Mining employs way fewer workers than it used to - and destroys the environment way more than it used to. And yes, there are more potential jobs building wind and solar farms than mining coal. Hillary Clinton - inartful as always - tried to make these points, but got sound-bited down to 'coal is dead'. And now Trump's fossil fuel brigade will attempt to reverse the progress on renewables, but they're coming anyway. At some point there will be a revolution in battery (or some other storage) technology that will change everything.
And the parts of the TPP that were bad were the intellectual property bits - and the bit about letting multinational corporations bypass local rules. Trump gave no indication that he's opposed to those things. In fact, his 'winning is everything' ethic might actually favor them.
The parts of the TTP that were good - yes there were some, and that's where Hillary's 'gold standard' quote came from - had to do with environmental and labor standards that previous trade deals had not included or made enforceable. That plus the prospect of serving as a counterweight to China in the region. On those issues, Trump probably either doesn't care - or doesn't know enough to have an opinion.
You see, the problem is that alt-right types will take a statement like this one about South Africa - a majority black country - and use it to demonstrate 'reverse racism' in the U.S. - still a majority white country, and full of other minorities besides black people. There is no such thing as reverse racism in a country where the supposed racist minority is still suffering discrimination. Yes, I suppose there can be a form of 'compelled non-discrimination' - if only as a form of social pressure, which some whites will see as discrimination against them.
Affirmative Action is a whole other subject, and maybe it's not the best way to remedy the effects of past outright discrimination, but those effects are real - and if you've got a better idea, then out with it.
As far as white people needing a 'white identity they can be proud of'. How about an 'American identity that represents our national value of equal opportunity for all'. Using racial identity to shore up your personal pride is maybe a valid reaction to having been discriminated against because of your race to counter the narrative of racial inferiority that still infects this country. But it's downright silly to build an identity based on being white in America. What exactly is that identity - "we used to run this country - but now we're just as downtrodden as the rest of ya"? It's a big ole distraction / misdirection of anger towards the people who trod you down. Hint - it's not black people, it's the party who's nutcase candidate you just elected.
Except that Obama is perhaps the least corrupt individual to hold the Presidency since Jimmy Carter. Sure, he's a politician, and somewhat beholden to his donors - but in the scope of things, he's run a pretty clean administration. So in that light, using "Chicago-machine" to impugn him as corrupt? Why? Because he happened to come from Chicago? That won't fly. So I'm sticking with "Democrat" or 'Urban" or (dare I say it) "Black".
And I'm not one of those Democrats who's willing to chalk Trump's success up to racism. He certainly had the support of just about every racist you can find, but that doesn't make all of his swing supporters racists any more than Obama's coming from Chicago makes him corrupt. What it does make them is less uncomfortable associating themselves with racists and a politician (and party) who courted the racist vote than they are frightened and angry in general about the state their lives and the ability of the government to do anything that might make it better. I doubt they expect Trump to make it better either - they just want him to blow a few things up. Judging by his cabinet picks, they're likely to be disappointed even on that count. Maybe he'll keep them on board with a steady diet of tweeted conspiracy theories and personal insults...
He was a 'millionaire', not a 'billionaire'. Boy, a million bucks sure isn't what it used to be...
Well, I assume you don't trust Trump to tell the truth - since it must be obvious even to you that he lies more or less constantly. So you trust him to be 'different', I suppose - with some kind of faith that 'different' in his case will turn out to be better. All very optimistic of you.
But have you considered that, for example, there was nothing stopping Trump from developing (or adopting) a coherent plan for, say, 'repealing and replacing Obamacare' sometime in the past 6 years. To me, the fact that he hasn't done so, and campaigned (and won) on a promise of 'something better', implies that he didn't have something better to offer - or he'd have offered it. There's no need to play political chess in pursuit of a popular policy, so let's assume his eventual 'something better' won't be better for enough voters for him to have presented it to them...
Yes, Obama is a politician - and a bit of a disappointment at that. 'Chicago-machine', I guess, carries a lot of specific negative meanings to you, but I'll assume it's is essentially code for 'Democrat' or 'urban' or something. But as far as 'trust' is concerned, Obama governed pretty much like he said he would - way to the right of where people (and the Nobel committee) 'hoped' he would, based, I guess, on their projections of what the first black President would do. But he was pretty trustworthy in the sense that he didn't misrepresent his policies much. Trump, on the other hand is claiming he's going to restore middle-class factory jobs by, what? Cutting taxes, mainly. Well, if you haven't figured out that 'tax cuts for the rich pay for themselves and help the middle class' is a lie by now, you're just not paying attention - or you've chosen sides and don't care about the truth.
Well, we're all about to see your assumptions and your faith tested. And I predict a continued rise in income inequality, with some various uglinesses on the side. If that happens, what will your reaction be?
The electoral college itself isn't the main problem. It's that the electoral college grants more weight to voters in low-population states. Even accepting that the Senate is a compromise to protect the interests of small states, that doesn't mean that in a national election for a single candidate, those small-state voters should get more votes than big state voters. The concentration of population in a few big states is a newish phenomenon, and it's begun to seriously undermine the principle of one person, one vote. Of course, we can't expect the beneficiaries of this distortion to work to end it...
The issue isn't necessarily the closeness of the results - though there'd be little point pursuing this if the states in question weren't close enough and involving enough electoral votes to make a difference. But what makes this recount reasonable is the way the polls were 'off' in such a consistent way leading up to the election - and even including exit polls on the day of the election. If all the polls showed Clinton winning, and all the cases where the results didn't match the exit polls were cases where Trump did better than the exit polls said he did, then it's worth finding out why, no?
After all, we've all talked on this site for years about how hackable our voting systems are, and the only possible red flag to indicate it would be discrepancies between exit polls and the official counts. So if this doesn't qualify, what would? Of course, it's possible that enough people were ashamed enough of their Trump votes to have lied to the pollsters. A bit frightening, but possible...
I'm willing to believe that something real was missed in all the polling - though I wouldn't put it past some of the actors in this election cycle to have tried tampering with the results either. Mostly, though, I think Republicans had less of an issue 'holding their noses' than Democrats did. Personally, I think the stink coming off the Trump campaign was way more noxious than anything about Clinton - and the thought of a wild-eyed Rudy Giuliani as Secretary of State is utterly nauseating. But that's just me...
Ultimately, I do think that the Comey letter on top of a closely-contested election was enough to do the trick of turning the election. Throw in voter suppression efforts and the systemic skew of the Electoral College toward small states, and Democrats needed a decisive win to get over the top. I'd also add the Wikileaks releases of DNC and Podesta emails, but at least that information was real, and though illegitimately gotten, added some real info into the mix. The Comey letter, however, was utterly inappropriate, and created an unnecessary, false impression of something significantly new at the last minute. Key word there is false. That info should not have been in the mix, and the FBI had no business putting it there.
I suppose you think Obama started the wiretapping program. He didn't. He didn't shut it down, either, but Bush still gets 'worst president ever' cred for that one.
And by "Mother of Lies", I'm guessing you mean Hillary Clinton. And I guess you're giving her sole credit for starting the Afghanistan and Iraq wars - which, yes, she voted to authorize if Hussein didn't let the inspectors in. It's a fine-ish point, indeed, but at worst hers was one of over a hundred votes that authorized the Bush Admin to go to war as a last resort, but the Bushes went to war as a first resort anyhow. Bush gets that prize too.
Benghazi? Well, she lobbied for our limited participation, so she gets some of the 'credit' there.
Syria? Well, no. I think we're doing whatever it is (or isn't) that we're doing under the original Iraq authorization. In any case, we're not quite 'at war' there, and in any case, the Secretary of State does not have the power to go to war.
But I forgot. Hillary Clinton was all powerful - as long as she was running for President, and you wanted to blame her for everything wrong with the world. And now, I guess it's safe for you Obama haters to go back to blaming him for everything bad.
George W. Bush? Dick Cheney? George who...? Dick who...?
If they're planning to let you run arbitrary win32 exe's on ARM, why don't they just provide you with the tools to port your win32 exe instead of relying on X86 emulation? Or do they think their emulator works as a sandbox to mitigate the security issues in win32 code?
This. There's nothing wrong with providing a powerful new scripting language - for y'know, scripting. But there's also a need for a simple way to string a bunch of commands together in a file and execute them all. Why on earth would they remove that - or make people re-string the commands they've 'scripted' and used for years? Not all command-line users are using it for System Administration. They sysadmins can already find their way to powershell. Why inconvenience the rest of us - just to try to get bash programmers to think Windows has something as good or better. Because, face it, that's what's driving this.
Maybe, since they're trying to push Ximian as a cross-platform development environment - and because all iOS developers are currently developing on Mac's, they're moving VS to the Mac so that they can woo iOS devs over to Ximian without their having to have a second, Windows system.
This is certainly not about using VS to build Mac desktop apps.
The whole point of Xamarin is to hold out the prospect of cross-platform API's to get people not using Microsoft API's to switch to a Microsoft-specific API, that yes - for now - is kind of platform agnostic. Maybe that's okay-ish, but it'd have been a better solution had Microsoft not bought it. And it's not a desktop solution at all - it provides some decent mobile GUI stuff, but nothing to get WIN32 desktop developers to switch.
Cyanogenmod (I think?) used to have a very clever fix for this. An option to scramble the positions of the numbers on your lockscreen so that 'finger movement' patterns would be meaningless. That helps with prying eyes watching you enter your pin too.
But I'm running CM 13 on my phone, and it doesn't seem to have that option anymore.
In this day, lots of business will ask that documents be sent in PDF. And certainly, governments can get away with this.
Sure, there are plenty of businesses that have gone all in with MSOffice - or some other proprietary Windows-only app. But that stuff is legacy. That's not to say they can all switch desktop OS's any time soon, but that time is coming. And by that time the new OS may as often as not be Chrome - or Android. Or some other thin client system following a similar model. Even Microsoft knows this - if they're fans haven't accepted it yet.
Sure Google had knowledge of where Apple was going. But they didn't need any special access to know that Apple alone wouldn't control mobile. And the only other likely contender was Microsoft. The same Microsoft that was already trying to grab Google's business on the desktop. My point is that Android vs Apple was probably better for Apple than Windows vs Apple. There was going to be a cheap OEM smartphone OS one way or the other.
I'm not sure Google really wanted to screw Apple. They must've (smartly) realized that eventually Microsoft would come up with something good enough to compete with iOS, and once the OEMs standardized on that, MS could use their mobile OS to grab search away from Google. They'd have been happy for Apple to continue on using Google's applications - but Apple got pissed off and tried to 'hurt' Google by removing their apps from iOS. Apple would've been in the same (or a worse) competitive position had Microsoft succeeded, so I don't get what they were thinking. Sure, Google had bigger ambitions than were obvious at the time - but Apple's hubris and their sense that they're entitled to 'own' a whole category just because they got there first - despite their high-priced approach not serving the bulk of the market - is downright stupid.
Google, in establishing Chrome (and standards-based browsers in general) as a viable cross-platform 'platform' did more to save Apple's computer business than anything Apple ever did. Yes, it entails some new challenges, but it's better than competing with Microsoft's monopoly of yore.
Well, that was Microsoft's mother of all big mistakes. If they had made it easy to port existing WIN32 code to ARM prior to releasing the Surface RT, they might have had a hit on their hands. A crummy, legacy-encumbered hit, but a hit nonetheless. But they were too jealous of Apple's clean, secure-ish new OS implementation and 'app store' distribution model. So in typical me-too mode, they cloned the iPad instead of taking advantage of their legacy platform to make up for their late-to-market status.
...and by the way, the Continuum thing may also be too late to market. Once Android has the same desktop dockability, the only advantage of Continuum will be the ability to run legacy Windows apps. Not a small advantage, that - but the keyword is legacy. The market for people that want a pricey phone with crappy phone apps so they can dock it to use legacy X86 Windows apps is pretty small. And once most of those legacy Windows apps get Android - or web - replacements, that market is better served by just using existing laptops for the Windows apps. Why invest in docking stations just to run legacy windows apps from your phone?
The beauty of Continuum would've been if everyone were using it, and docking stations were pretty universally available. Sure, it would've been great to plug your phone into a dock at the airport, for example, and have a full desktop at your disposal. But who's going to invest in that docking infrastructure to serve the tiny population of Windows Phone users whose companies also invested in it to the point that they handed out Continuum-capable devices to their employees? For that to happen, you'd need a docking standard that works with iPhones, Android phones and, sure, I guess Windows Phones could support that too. And of course, you'd need decent iPhone and Android desktop apps to make that desirable. But by the time you've got all that in place, you're back at 'if an iPhone or Android - with the mobile apps I want - can do it, and Windows can, but doesn't have the mobile apps...
Microsoft didn't 'miss' the iPhone - since their basic business model had always been to sit back and copy whatever big new thing Apple (or anybody else, for that matter) came up with - and count on tie-ins to the desktop to make their copy succeed. What they missed was Android, which swooped in and stole the OEM market from them. By the time they were ready to move the app barrier to entry was too big. That said, Blackberry missed Android too - they failed from a leadership position.
They failed with their iPod clone too - but for a different reason. iPods were fairly cheap, and they tied your music collection to the Apple ecosystem. And iPods worked with Windows as well as anything else - i.e., they were cheap enough and limited enough in functionality that MS couldn't leverage Windows to out-compete Apple.
Which brings up another question. If HRC had used two email accounts, and Podesta or others of her confidantes outside of the government had communicated with her on the private one - not subject to FOIA requests - would that have been fine?
Because that's what I think she used the private email server for. Like she said, anything sent to her from inside the State Department was archived there and available for FOIA requests. But private stuff with personal acquaintances - even if potentially related to her work at State - was not (yes, there are gray areas). I'm sure her haters would not like that - and wouldn't accept her explanations in any case, but given that she could've accomplished what she wanted by carrying two devices, I'm inclined to believe her 'convenience' argument. Sure, she was trying to shield stuff from FOIA - but is that illegal if it's not official stuff?
If the 'two account' solution was legal, then she's guilty of stupidity, hubris - or both. But in any case, the 'classified documents' argument is mostly a red herring. Technically illegal - though without being properly marked (or even classified yet), another gray area). Still, if they'd been sent to or from her State Department account, nobody would've (or should've) batted an eye.
She shot herself in the foot by trivializing the issue and saying she was worried about Chelsea's wedding plans. She should've been honest and said, "I talk with and solicit advice from a large range of trusted friends outside of the Government, and I want them to be able to speak frankly". That was Cheney's defense in refusing to release minutes of his energy commission - which was official government business. Those minutes from those pre-9/11 sessions might well contain discussions of deposing Saddam Hussein from Iraq to get their oil back on the market, but apparently we the public don't have the right to know that...
Well, there *is* a difference between selling targeted ads based on the users' data vs selling the data - which Google still does not do. But I'll grant you this, the imperative of a public company is to keep the stock price growing - profit is almost beside the point, except as reflected in the stock price. That means that Google needs to constantly find new sources of revenue. I wish they'd get serious about building up their cloud hosting business and their corporate hosted application business. I doubt that their new Pixel hardware business is going to be a huge revenue generator.
In essence, Google needs a new business model to complement their old one. Otherwise, they've gone as far as they can with targeted advertising, and while I still don't think they're selling my info, I'd still prefer it to be stored anonymously than explicitly tied to my personal account - if only because of the threat of a data breach.
Ahhh. The non-swing state loophole. You're right about that, of course, but I'm addressing those Johnson/Stein supporters that don't do nuance. Even Ralph Nader came around in 2000 to saying that his supporters in swing states probably shouldn't vote for him. But it was too little, too late. And besides, I'd make the point that hyperbolically calling the two parties 'Coke and Pepsi' is just another example of the false equivalence disease that's affecting our political discourse.
Third parties can make whatever points they want - but if they really care about moving the needle in the right direction on issues they stand for, then muddying the waters with false equivalences hurts more than it helps. There's got to be a better way to make 3rd parties viable than to repeatedly serve as spoilers. Like doing the hard work of concentrating on down-ballot positions - and then changing the electoral laws state-by-state.