Because the Stylo probably never gets updates - and Google's big advantage is as the only Android vendor that reliably provides them on a timely basis.
Google doesn't need to compete with Blu Mobile. They get the advantage of all those Blu Mobile users anyway. They need a mid-ranger to enhance their brand. They're not Apple, and so they can't charge fanboi prices and expect to be a major player. But they don't need to be everywhere just to be viable as a brand. Competing with Blu would probably hurt their brand more than help it.
Me too. It works pretty well, and even has a dark mode. So I use it as my default browser.
But I am concerned about having yet another entity tracking my web browsing activity. I figure Google already does it one way or another. But is this Samsung browser tracking me at Samsung too? I assume it is - just because everybody seems to track everything they possibly can. But seriously, why would Samsung want this info - they're not in, and not planning to get into the online advertising business. That makes me think that their tracking might be worse than Google's, in that they would have no way to monetize my info but to sell it directly. Anybody know anything about Samsung and data privacy?
we're too large a country for that to work in the best interests of everyone.
...so instead we go with a system that has evolved to work in the best interests of the minority of citizens. Given that no system will work in the best interests of *everyone*, wouldn't it be better if it worked in the best interests of the majority who are currently underrepresented by virtue of living in populous States, as opposed to the minority in sparsely-populated ones?
It's not the Electoral College per se that's the problem. It's the fact that our states' boundaries form a de-facto gerrymander in favor of sparsely populated regions. That was less true back in the days of the 13 original states - and when rural concerns were not so diametrically opposed to (sub)urban ones. But it's on the verge of becoming untenable.today.
The Senate, of course, is wildly undemocratic - and maybe that's by design, but the Electoral College was never intended to be undemocratic - it was just a practical way of counting the vote in a low-tech time. You could say that it worked up until recently, because if nothing else, the popular and Electoral College results always used to pick the same President. But not any more, and it should be fixed. There's no practical reason to give states 2 extra electoral votes, based on their Senators. Of course, it's in the Constitution - but show me where the drafters intended the E.C. to be undemocratic...
Look, there's a chicken-and-egg thing going on here. I'm sure that back when electronic devices were made in the U.S.A., there were plenty of local custom screw manufacturers to support them - or else companies made do without custom screws. Now that the entire supply chain has moved offshore, it's going to be hard to move any of it back.
But maybe if Apple really wanted to have a "Made in the U.S.A." model, they might have reconsidered using some crazy custom screw in the first place. Sure, in mobile handsets, where every nanometer counts in squeezing stuff in, maybe a custom screw really matters. But on a desktop computer? Really? I'm guessing that even in the good old days when Apple built all of its stuff in the US, they didn't have a practical option to use custom parts for such trivial functions as are performed by a screw. It's a screw, folks. The only reason to customize it is to prevent access to whatever it's holding together without a special tool built for that screw. Make do, Apple. If you really want to build in the US, build what today's supply chain can support. And grow the supply chain - just like you did in China, where there were no custom screw factories either back in the day...
You don't have crazy man Steve Jobs to answer to any more, so you don't need to "keep changing the specs on short notice" to please him. Get your priorities straight and, if you decided that building in the US is the right thing, figure out what you need to do to make it happen.
Well, I guess it's possible that Microsoft no longer cares about making money off of SqlServer. Perhaps it's more important to their go-forward business model that developers target Azure and generate recurring hosting revenues without having to incur development costs for a database server. Think Edge/Chromium.
The business model for Edge is no longer 'make sure web apps keep you tied to Windows', it's now "we want to spy on you and feed you ads - either like Google or so Google can't". And while we're at it, our web apps can be cross platform like everybody else's that simply targets Chrome.
If they were to rebrand PostgreSQL on Azure as AzureSQL, they could switch their DB business model from "make sure your backend database code keeps you tied to in-house Windows servers" to "we want you to run your backend on our cloud - either like MySQL or so Oracle can't get your business".
Well, that link no longer works, so I guess they didn't want their discussions made public.
But folks, it may be time to move beyond ad blocking to an era of, yes, government regulation of anonymous data mining - both in terms of what can be mined, how long it can be retained, and what can be done with it. There has to be some kind of balance between ad-funded 'free' services and the complete forfeiture of your privacy - along with your right to not be victimized by fraudsters.
Ad blocking used to be about turning off annoying animations that ate up our bandwidth and drove us nuts in the process. We've all got enough bandwidth these days, and the most annoying distractions have been done away with. But targeted advertising, and the tracking to enable it has become much more sinister.
In any case, Ad-blockers and anti-tracking plug-ins are an imperfect solution, and potentially expose you to new and different trackers (since these add-ons need to track your activity in order to stop others from doing it, they're always going to be potential malware vectors themselves). Now, eliminating such workarounds before addressing the underlying problem is no solution at all. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be discussing solutions. And we can't let some arbitrary (okay, not completely arbitrary, but still..) anti-government stance blind us from the fact that sometimes, laws and law enforcement are more efficient than Rube Goldberg systems of using 'good' technology as a defense against 'bad' technology.
For the time being. There are fewer and fewer manufacturers that allow bootloader unlocking. If and when those vendors become marginalized to the point that their mobile device businesses are no longer sustainable, then the party's over. Maybe that won't happen, but didn't Huawei recently pull back on bootloader unlocks?
If data is like oil, Google and Facebook are like monopolies on oil drilling rigs. They've 'bought up' all the drilling rigs and rig manufacturers in the world, so that new rigs cannot be manufactured cost-effectively by anybody else. Now, competitors, go out there and drill for all that free, self-replenishing oil - if you can.
In any case, the Google shill is choosing her analogy selectively - presumably to fend off criticism of Google as a monopolist. But the real problem with data collection is data collection itself. The Google data collection services may be analogous to oil wells (subject to the caveat above), but the issue that really should be attracting the regulators is the Google Ad business - let's call that the power (profit) generation side of the extraction/exploitation analogy. To me, targeted advertising based on surveillance of personal data is more like a nuclear power plant than a solar one. It's dangerous stuff - potentially life ruining, and with a half-life that has yet to be determined (but may be practically infinite compared to the human lifespan). And it needs to be regulated appropriately to prevent its escape (intentional or otherwise) into the environment - where it'll do damage for years to come.
There's something like this on my new Netgear router. I have uPnP disabled on there, and when I went to connect my DVD player, it gave me a message to go to the router and press some button to allow it to connect. I forget what that security measure was called, but does it fit the bill?
Most people here seem to be commenting that the last few generations of iPhones were 'good enough', and nobody is willing to shell out $1000 dollars for a new one. I'll posit another issue. There are a ton of really great phones available in China that are not available in the U.S. Some of them are arguably better than iPhones outright - and all of them are significantly (if not drastically) cheaper.
All Apple has going for it these days is 1. Better software update track record. 2. U.S. carrier (lack of) support that essentially narrow the field to Apple vs Samsung. 3. Continued U.S. perception that 'your phone is bundled with your service - and you just get a new one 'for free' every two years.
Yes, you could also make the case that Apple's phones are the best 'all around' devicies. I.e. they perform well in all areas, whereas with any given Android phone, you have a tradeoff between excellent performance in some areas and lousy performance in others (most notably software updates). But the Chinese market is different. And maybe the home grown stuff is good enough now. If nothing else, I doubt that everyone in China already has a good enough older iPhone - and the market is saturated. The market may just be moving in a different direction...
That may be technically true, but I think the original poster was mainly referring to off-the-shelf desktop computers, which come with only the Microsoft keys - and for which typical (and even fairly technical) desktop Linux users need to deal with a Microsoft-sanctioned shim to get a working installation (or disable encryption altogether - if the BIOS in question allows that).
I guess the bottom line question is - if an MS Surface does not allow you to install Linux on it, should we be wary of other boxes starting to use its UEFI implementation?
The court jumped head first into a purely political issue rather than allowing voters and legislatures decide it through the political process.
Well, if you think requiring someone to carry a pregnancy to term because some people's religions insist that a fertilized egg is deserving of personhood is a 'purely political issue', then I guess you have a point. You're wrong, but in your warped universe, you're at least consistent. If you don't think that, then you're just wrong.
And you seem to be conflating healthcare coverage with the obvious mess that is healthcare delivery. Your employer kindly shielded you from seeing much of that mess, and that's definitely a nice perk - for you, who happened to have such a good deal. For the rest of us, employer health insurance has come to look more and more like Obamacare at its worst. Or, put another way, Obamacare was a somewhat successful attempt to provide typical nickel and dime-ing employer-style health insurance for those whose employers wouldn't provide it.
And that sorry state is a function of BOTH the healthcare delivery and funding systems. It'd be nice to fix both so that the two don't constantly engage in whack-a-mole games to get around one another's money-grabs and the mountains of paperwork intended to reign them in.
Medicare is no panacea either, but since I've been on it, I haven't received a medical bill. Of course, I've had to pay through the nose for a combination of government premiums (no bargain, since I'm still working and make too much to pay the 'standard' rate) and a gap insurance policy to eliminate all the nonsense it would take to deal with the bits and pieces that aren't covered. Oh, and there's that pricey prescription drug plan that has paid out exactly 0 dollars this year.
Nice try. But, now that they've announced versions for Windows 7 and Mac, it's pretty obvious that, in addition to not wanting to spend development resources on a redundant browser engine, they're real goal is to get Edge telemetry onto non Windows 10 boxes. So if you want to get rid of spyware, you're gonna have to use vanilla Chromium.
I guess if desktop Linux were a factor, they'd be 'porting' it there too - but (much as they 'love' Linux these days) they're still not fond of the idea of desktop Linux as a viable competitor to Windows.
QT really needs a new sugar daddy. It was looking good when Nokia was a viable company and wanted to use QT as the basis for it's great new phone platform. If that had succeeded, QT might have ended up being truly free in all cases. I think it was Nokia that set it free on the desktop.
Maybe IBM, with its billions to spend on the likes of Red Hat, should buy Trolltech and finish the job of setting QT free. Unfortunately, nobody develops new apps for the desktop any more, so QT is less useful than it could've been if it had been free back when single-source Windows/Mac/Linux development was a panacea. And maybe the mobile version of QT could still be viable in that role for Android/iOS. But given the choice between C++ and Java, I'd take Java most days. Given the choice of something less crazy complex, though, I'd take that.
Don't be fooled by the claims of "record low" unemployment. It's a lie. Those low numbers are achieved by simply not counting millions of people.
You are being a bit myopic. While I agree that the headline unemployment number is a bit misleading, it only counts folks collecting unemployment compensation, there are OTHER numbers in the news releases that show a marked increase in employment and a decrease in the "labor participation rate". More people are actually working as a percentage of available workers. Also, the "record low" unemployment statements are technically accurate. It may not mean what some think, but it's a good sign regardless of what you may say.
That may be true, but as far as low employment triggering significant wage increases due to supply/demand mismatches, the 'missing' labor force remains a factor. As demand increases, supply can also increase until that pool is tapped out. So wages don't increase as much as the unemployment figure might suggest they would.
I also wonder how much of recent wage increases are reflecting state-by-state increases in the minimum wage. Are there enough minimum wage jobs that significant wage increases for them would show up in the overall wage rates? That would be a good thing - to the extent that it shows a significant minimum wage increase doesn't hurt the overall economy - but as an indicator of an improvement in middle class wages, not so much...
I would imagine that consensus breeds its own form of self-reinforcement. That doesn't make it wrong - it just makes it likely that when it is wrong, the evidence will be shocking, and possibly dismissed or actively fought. I guess that's baked into the scientific process of peer review to some extent.
Anyway, this article raises a question I've always wanted answered, so at the risk of inviting some of you to call me a moron, I'll ask it here...
In order to accept generally accepted scientific theories without any more than a lay-person's understanding of an over-simplified explanation (say, the kind offered in an article in the NYTimes Science Tuesday section), you have to assume some obvious questions that pop up have been dealt with and dismissed for good reason. So for example, when I hear the lay-person's explanation of carbon dating (that the relative abundance of radioactive isotopes in a sample indicates how long ago that carbon was incorporated from the atmosphere when the sample was a living organism), I always ask myself "doesn't that assume that the relative abundance of those isotopes in the atmosphere is constant - or at least, that scientists have some way of knowing how that ratio has changed over time?"
I guess all this talk about red-shift brought that up, because I've always had a similar question about red-shift as a measure of distance. Again, there's a buried assumption there that we know the rate of expansion of the universe - or at least if it's not constant, we know the rate of acceleration. Do we? And if we don't, is it just the accuracy of measurements like carbon dating and red-shift distance measurements that's thrown into question - not the concepts?
I actually kind of think Trump believes some of his populist rhetoric - he's just too stupid (and ultimately cares too little) to enact policies that will help.
At some level, Trump's politics boil down to "What's the point of being the biggest, strongest country in the world if we can't use that to get our way?". Not the subtlest of thinkers, that one. So he lashes out in a hundred different directions in response to a hundred different imagined slights - and it all adds up to letting the Republican congress do the bidding of their donors, while his clowning distracts attention from their cravenness. I don't think that's some kind of brilliant tactic - it's just a side-effect that McConnell (quite the canny psychopath) understands how to exploit. Doesn't hurt that those core Republican policies happen to work out nicely for, y'know, real estate developers (like the Kushners, since Trump is hardly a real estate guy any more).
Yep. You could argue that the left had as much of a stake in globalization as the right - but from a different perspective. I think, when pressed, Nick Kristof would admit that to some extent offshoring some jobs and raising the standard of living in poor parts of the world is a desirable thing. But the difference is that Democratic globalists acknowledge the potential for disruption and the need to use regulation to mitigate it. Whether their attempts at mitigation have been successful or not is an open question, but at least there's some moral basis for their support for the likes of NAFTA.
Republicans are so reflexively anti-government, that when they take the reins, it's all "do whatever you like". I don't have any statistics on the relative movement of jobs offshore under D and R administrations, but I'd be interested to see them. Meanwhile, you get low taxes as the blunt instrument answer to everything - when it answers very little.
Okay, if American businesses need a low tax environment in order to compete with similarly low tax foreign regimes - and we have no effective way of keeping them from moving offshore to avoid taxes (leaving aside that certain corporate fictions could probably be challenged), then maybe we need to fund our Government in other ways. There's not much difference between taxing money when it gets paid out to individuals rather than as it is earned by corporations, so okay - capital gains, receivers of dividends, inheritance (perhaps only upon actual sale of inherited assets). Whatever works. But if the Trump 'tax relief' bill is any indication, it's all "starve the beast" all the time. With a little vindictiveness thrown in for good measure (take that, blue state SALT deductions). There's no attempt at governance there - or effective policies. It's all "government is the problem" sloganeering. Well, sometimes government is the only solution - propaganda aside.
Nice recitation of the Republican apologist talking points. But ultimately, the history of slavery has little to do with the lingering effects of slavery in the 20th and 21st centuries - and whether you want to address them or simply change the subject...
Whether or not actual Democratic politicians changed parties in the South in response to the Republican Southern strategy, it's hard to argue that Democratic voters didn't change their voting habits and eventually their parties in response to subtle and not-so-subtle pandering to their racial fears and prejudices.
So let's restrict our discussion of racial issues to the relevant ones today. Which party is actively attempting to suppress the votes of Black citizens - rather than to court those votes, which is after all an option to them? Which party is still actively courting white nationalist vote - whether or not they actually support a white nationalist agenda.
The Republican party has long been the party of moneyed interests, which pushes its unpopular economic program with a combination of lies, phony think tank-devised 'theories' and appeals to 'conservative' social positions. The Democratic party has to some extent morphed into the 'party of minorities' - based on having lost a large chunk of the white vote to Republicans' pandering. But at least they've retained an economic policy that (in theory - some of the more 'centrist' ones are pretty beholden to moneyed interests, but hey, let's not go down the false equivalence rabbit hole) actually would be better for the working class white voters than what Republicans are implementing (not just peddling).
...that we know of. She may have deleted plenty of emails - and they may have been the personal kind (like the kind Hillary says she deleted) that did not have to be archived. And of course the issue of classified stuff on Hillary's server was a case of not-yet-classified stuff or mismarked stuff. All 'exception that proves the rule' cases - why else do you think Comey didn't think any sane person would indict her?
Unless you're a conspiracy theorist that thinks he was protecting her - and that October surprise letter about reopening the investigation was... well, what exactly? If anything, Comey was of the opinion that "there must be something there - and the earliest, deleted emails will prove it". He essentially said as much at his hearing before the Senate - all with zero evidence, mind you.
Correct. At the very least, Trump and Fox ought to admit that - oh, by the way, we were just kidding when we were running around with our hair on fire over Hillary's emails.
But hey, Trump still won't admit he was lying about Obama's birth certificate...
That might be true - and the same could be said for housing in desirable areas that dipped in value during the recession. But it doesn't negate the argument that overvalued assets either crash or stop growing at some point. If you apply simple maxims like "the stock market always outperforms other investments over time", or "real estate allows you to live rent-free while your home increases in value", you're fine - until you're not. These maxims are based on past performance, and we've never had a baby boom followed by a much smaller cohort. We may see some firsts in the coming decades. Of course, if you live long enough and stay invested...
Funny how some of the same people that make the argument for the stock market will be able to handle the retirement of the boomers will scream about how that same retirement is sure to bankrupt Social Security. Personally, I think it's all going to be a relative blip that tapers off as the boomers die. But try to get a "Social Security is doomed" type to address the death of the boomers and see how far that gets you...
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Because the Stylo probably never gets updates - and Google's big advantage is as the only Android vendor that reliably provides them on a timely basis.
Google doesn't need to compete with Blu Mobile. They get the advantage of all those Blu Mobile users anyway. They need a mid-ranger to enhance their brand. They're not Apple, and so they can't charge fanboi prices and expect to be a major player. But they don't need to be everywhere just to be viable as a brand. Competing with Blu would probably hurt their brand more than help it.
Me too. It works pretty well, and even has a dark mode. So I use it as my default browser.
But I am concerned about having yet another entity tracking my web browsing activity. I figure Google already does it one way or another. But is this Samsung browser tracking me at Samsung too? I assume it is - just because everybody seems to track everything they possibly can. But seriously, why would Samsung want this info - they're not in, and not planning to get into the online advertising business. That makes me think that their tracking might be worse than Google's, in that they would have no way to monetize my info but to sell it directly. Anybody know anything about Samsung and data privacy?
we're too large a country for that to work in the best interests of everyone.
...so instead we go with a system that has evolved to work in the best interests of the minority of citizens. Given that no system will work in the best interests of *everyone*, wouldn't it be better if it worked in the best interests of the majority who are currently underrepresented by virtue of living in populous States, as opposed to the minority in sparsely-populated ones?
It's not the Electoral College per se that's the problem. It's the fact that our states' boundaries form a de-facto gerrymander in favor of sparsely populated regions. That was less true back in the days of the 13 original states - and when rural concerns were not so diametrically opposed to (sub)urban ones. But it's on the verge of becoming untenable.today.
The Senate, of course, is wildly undemocratic - and maybe that's by design, but the Electoral College was never intended to be undemocratic - it was just a practical way of counting the vote in a low-tech time. You could say that it worked up until recently, because if nothing else, the popular and Electoral College results always used to pick the same President. But not any more, and it should be fixed. There's no practical reason to give states 2 extra electoral votes, based on their Senators. Of course, it's in the Constitution - but show me where the drafters intended the E.C. to be undemocratic...
Look, there's a chicken-and-egg thing going on here. I'm sure that back when electronic devices were made in the U.S.A., there were plenty of local custom screw manufacturers to support them - or else companies made do without custom screws. Now that the entire supply chain has moved offshore, it's going to be hard to move any of it back.
But maybe if Apple really wanted to have a "Made in the U.S.A." model, they might have reconsidered using some crazy custom screw in the first place. Sure, in mobile handsets, where every nanometer counts in squeezing stuff in, maybe a custom screw really matters. But on a desktop computer? Really? I'm guessing that even in the good old days when Apple built all of its stuff in the US, they didn't have a practical option to use custom parts for such trivial functions as are performed by a screw. It's a screw, folks. The only reason to customize it is to prevent access to whatever it's holding together without a special tool built for that screw. Make do, Apple. If you really want to build in the US, build what today's supply chain can support. And grow the supply chain - just like you did in China, where there were no custom screw factories either back in the day...
You don't have crazy man Steve Jobs to answer to any more, so you don't need to "keep changing the specs on short notice" to please him. Get your priorities straight and, if you decided that building in the US is the right thing, figure out what you need to do to make it happen.
Well, I guess it's possible that Microsoft no longer cares about making money off of SqlServer. Perhaps it's more important to their go-forward business model that developers target Azure and generate recurring hosting revenues without having to incur development costs for a database server. Think Edge/Chromium.
The business model for Edge is no longer 'make sure web apps keep you tied to Windows', it's now "we want to spy on you and feed you ads - either like Google or so Google can't". And while we're at it, our web apps can be cross platform like everybody else's that simply targets Chrome.
If they were to rebrand PostgreSQL on Azure as AzureSQL, they could switch their DB business model from "make sure your backend database code keeps you tied to in-house Windows servers" to "we want you to run your backend on our cloud - either like MySQL or so Oracle can't get your business".
Can the mythical Microsoft Linux be far behind?
Well, that link no longer works, so I guess they didn't want their discussions made public.
But folks, it may be time to move beyond ad blocking to an era of, yes, government regulation of anonymous data mining - both in terms of what can be mined, how long it can be retained, and what can be done with it. There has to be some kind of balance between ad-funded 'free' services and the complete forfeiture of your privacy - along with your right to not be victimized by fraudsters.
Ad blocking used to be about turning off annoying animations that ate up our bandwidth and drove us nuts in the process. We've all got enough bandwidth these days, and the most annoying distractions have been done away with. But targeted advertising, and the tracking to enable it has become much more sinister.
In any case, Ad-blockers and anti-tracking plug-ins are an imperfect solution, and potentially expose you to new and different trackers (since these add-ons need to track your activity in order to stop others from doing it, they're always going to be potential malware vectors themselves). Now, eliminating such workarounds before addressing the underlying problem is no solution at all. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't be discussing solutions. And we can't let some arbitrary (okay, not completely arbitrary, but still..) anti-government stance blind us from the fact that sometimes, laws and law enforcement are more efficient than Rube Goldberg systems of using 'good' technology as a defense against 'bad' technology.
For the time being. There are fewer and fewer manufacturers that allow bootloader unlocking. If and when those vendors become marginalized to the point that their mobile device businesses are no longer sustainable, then the party's over. Maybe that won't happen, but didn't Huawei recently pull back on bootloader unlocks?
If data is like oil, Google and Facebook are like monopolies on oil drilling rigs. They've 'bought up' all the drilling rigs and rig manufacturers in the world, so that new rigs cannot be manufactured cost-effectively by anybody else. Now, competitors, go out there and drill for all that free, self-replenishing oil - if you can.
In any case, the Google shill is choosing her analogy selectively - presumably to fend off criticism of Google as a monopolist. But the real problem with data collection is data collection itself. The Google data collection services may be analogous to oil wells (subject to the caveat above), but the issue that really should be attracting the regulators is the Google Ad business - let's call that the power (profit) generation side of the extraction/exploitation analogy. To me, targeted advertising based on surveillance of personal data is more like a nuclear power plant than a solar one. It's dangerous stuff - potentially life ruining, and with a half-life that has yet to be determined (but may be practically infinite compared to the human lifespan). And it needs to be regulated appropriately to prevent its escape (intentional or otherwise) into the environment - where it'll do damage for years to come.
There's something like this on my new Netgear router. I have uPnP disabled on there, and when I went to connect my DVD player, it gave me a message to go to the router and press some button to allow it to connect. I forget what that security measure was called, but does it fit the bill?
Most people here seem to be commenting that the last few generations of iPhones were 'good enough', and nobody is willing to shell out $1000 dollars for a new one. I'll posit another issue. There are a ton of really great phones available in China that are not available in the U.S. Some of them are arguably better than iPhones outright - and all of them are significantly (if not drastically) cheaper.
All Apple has going for it these days is
1. Better software update track record.
2. U.S. carrier (lack of) support that essentially narrow the field to Apple vs Samsung.
3. Continued U.S. perception that 'your phone is bundled with your service - and you just get a new one 'for free' every two years.
Yes, you could also make the case that Apple's phones are the best 'all around' devicies. I.e. they perform well in all areas, whereas with any given Android phone, you have a tradeoff between excellent performance in some areas and lousy performance in others (most notably software updates). But the Chinese market is different. And maybe the home grown stuff is good enough now. If nothing else, I doubt that everyone in China already has a good enough older iPhone - and the market is saturated. The market may just be moving in a different direction...
That may be technically true, but I think the original poster was mainly referring to off-the-shelf desktop computers, which come with only the Microsoft keys - and for which typical (and even fairly technical) desktop Linux users need to deal with a Microsoft-sanctioned shim to get a working installation (or disable encryption altogether - if the BIOS in question allows that).
I guess the bottom line question is - if an MS Surface does not allow you to install Linux on it, should we be wary of other boxes starting to use its UEFI implementation?
The court jumped head first into a purely political issue rather than allowing voters and legislatures decide it through the political process.
Well, if you think requiring someone to carry a pregnancy to term because some people's religions insist that a fertilized egg is deserving of personhood is a 'purely political issue', then I guess you have a point. You're wrong, but in your warped universe, you're at least consistent. If you don't think that, then you're just wrong.
It's almost as if you want to drive an SUV specifically because 'liberals' don't want you to. You big baby.
And you seem to be conflating healthcare coverage with the obvious mess that is healthcare delivery. Your employer kindly shielded you from seeing much of that mess, and that's definitely a nice perk - for you, who happened to have such a good deal. For the rest of us, employer health insurance has come to look more and more like Obamacare at its worst. Or, put another way, Obamacare was a somewhat successful attempt to provide typical nickel and dime-ing employer-style health insurance for those whose employers wouldn't provide it.
And that sorry state is a function of BOTH the healthcare delivery and funding systems. It'd be nice to fix both so that the two don't constantly engage in whack-a-mole games to get around one another's money-grabs and the mountains of paperwork intended to reign them in.
Medicare is no panacea either, but since I've been on it, I haven't received a medical bill. Of course, I've had to pay through the nose for a combination of government premiums (no bargain, since I'm still working and make too much to pay the 'standard' rate) and a gap insurance policy to eliminate all the nonsense it would take to deal with the bits and pieces that aren't covered. Oh, and there's that pricey prescription drug plan that has paid out exactly 0 dollars this year.
Nice try. But, now that they've announced versions for Windows 7 and Mac, it's pretty obvious that, in addition to not wanting to spend development resources on a redundant browser engine, they're real goal is to get Edge telemetry onto non Windows 10 boxes. So if you want to get rid of spyware, you're gonna have to use vanilla Chromium.
I guess if desktop Linux were a factor, they'd be 'porting' it there too - but (much as they 'love' Linux these days) they're still not fond of the idea of desktop Linux as a viable competitor to Windows.
QT really needs a new sugar daddy. It was looking good when Nokia was a viable company and wanted to use QT as the basis for it's great new phone platform. If that had succeeded, QT might have ended up being truly free in all cases. I think it was Nokia that set it free on the desktop.
Maybe IBM, with its billions to spend on the likes of Red Hat, should buy Trolltech and finish the job of setting QT free. Unfortunately, nobody develops new apps for the desktop any more, so QT is less useful than it could've been if it had been free back when single-source Windows/Mac/Linux development was a panacea. And maybe the mobile version of QT could still be viable in that role for Android/iOS. But given the choice between C++ and Java, I'd take Java most days. Given the choice of something less crazy complex, though, I'd take that.
Don't be fooled by the claims of "record low" unemployment. It's a lie. Those low numbers are achieved by simply not counting millions of people.
You are being a bit myopic. While I agree that the headline unemployment number is a bit misleading, it only counts folks collecting unemployment compensation, there are OTHER numbers in the news releases that show a marked increase in employment and a decrease in the "labor participation rate". More people are actually working as a percentage of available workers. Also, the "record low" unemployment statements are technically accurate. It may not mean what some think, but it's a good sign regardless of what you may say.
That may be true, but as far as low employment triggering significant wage increases due to supply/demand mismatches, the
'missing' labor force remains a factor. As demand increases, supply can also increase until that pool is tapped out. So wages don't increase as much as the unemployment figure might suggest they would.
I also wonder how much of recent wage increases are reflecting state-by-state increases in the minimum wage. Are there enough minimum wage jobs that significant wage increases for them would show up in the overall wage rates? That would be a good thing - to the extent that it shows a significant minimum wage increase doesn't hurt the overall economy - but as an indicator of an improvement in middle class wages, not so much...
I would imagine that consensus breeds its own form of self-reinforcement. That doesn't make it wrong - it just makes it likely that when it is wrong, the evidence will be shocking, and possibly dismissed or actively fought. I guess that's baked into the scientific process of peer review to some extent.
Anyway, this article raises a question I've always wanted answered, so at the risk of inviting some of you to call me a moron, I'll ask it here...
In order to accept generally accepted scientific theories without any more than a lay-person's understanding of an over-simplified explanation (say, the kind offered in an article in the NYTimes Science Tuesday section), you have to assume some obvious questions that pop up have been dealt with and dismissed for good reason. So for example, when I hear the lay-person's explanation of carbon dating (that the relative abundance of radioactive isotopes in a sample indicates how long ago that carbon was incorporated from the atmosphere when the sample was a living organism), I always ask myself "doesn't that assume that the relative abundance of those isotopes in the atmosphere is constant - or at least, that scientists have some way of knowing how that ratio has changed over time?"
I guess all this talk about red-shift brought that up, because I've always had a similar question about red-shift as a measure of distance. Again, there's a buried assumption there that we know the rate of expansion of the universe - or at least if it's not constant, we know the rate of acceleration. Do we? And if we don't, is it just the accuracy of measurements like carbon dating and red-shift distance measurements that's thrown into question - not the concepts?
I actually kind of think Trump believes some of his populist rhetoric - he's just too stupid (and ultimately cares too little) to enact policies that will help.
At some level, Trump's politics boil down to "What's the point of being the biggest, strongest country in the world if we can't use that to get our way?". Not the subtlest of thinkers, that one. So he lashes out in a hundred different directions in response to a hundred different imagined slights - and it all adds up to letting the Republican congress do the bidding of their donors, while his clowning distracts attention from their cravenness. I don't think that's some kind of brilliant tactic - it's just a side-effect that McConnell (quite the canny psychopath) understands how to exploit. Doesn't hurt that those core Republican policies happen to work out nicely for, y'know, real estate developers (like the Kushners, since Trump is hardly a real estate guy any more).
Yep. You could argue that the left had as much of a stake in globalization as the right - but from a different perspective. I think, when pressed, Nick Kristof would admit that to some extent offshoring some jobs and raising the standard of living in poor parts of the world is a desirable thing. But the difference is that Democratic globalists acknowledge the potential for disruption and the need to use regulation to mitigate it. Whether their attempts at mitigation have been successful or not is an open question, but at least there's some moral basis for their support for the likes of NAFTA.
Republicans are so reflexively anti-government, that when they take the reins, it's all "do whatever you like". I don't have any statistics on the relative movement of jobs offshore under D and R administrations, but I'd be interested to see them. Meanwhile, you get low taxes as the blunt instrument answer to everything - when it answers very little.
Okay, if American businesses need a low tax environment in order to compete with similarly low tax foreign regimes - and we have no effective way of keeping them from moving offshore to avoid taxes (leaving aside that certain corporate fictions could probably be challenged), then maybe we need to fund our Government in other ways. There's not much difference between taxing money when it gets paid out to individuals rather than as it is earned by corporations, so okay - capital gains, receivers of dividends, inheritance (perhaps only upon actual sale of inherited assets). Whatever works. But if the Trump 'tax relief' bill is any indication, it's all "starve the beast" all the time. With a little vindictiveness thrown in for good measure (take that, blue state SALT deductions). There's no attempt at governance there - or effective policies. It's all "government is the problem" sloganeering. Well, sometimes government is the only solution - propaganda aside.
Nice recitation of the Republican apologist talking points. But ultimately, the history of slavery has little to do with the lingering effects of slavery in the 20th and 21st centuries - and whether you want to address them or simply change the subject...
Whether or not actual Democratic politicians changed parties in the South in response to the Republican Southern strategy, it's hard to argue that Democratic voters didn't change their voting habits and eventually their parties in response to subtle and not-so-subtle pandering to their racial fears and prejudices.
So let's restrict our discussion of racial issues to the relevant ones today. Which party is actively attempting to suppress the votes of Black citizens - rather than to court those votes, which is after all an option to them? Which party is still actively courting white nationalist vote - whether or not they actually support a white nationalist agenda.
The Republican party has long been the party of moneyed interests, which pushes its unpopular economic program with a combination of lies, phony think tank-devised 'theories' and appeals to 'conservative' social positions. The Democratic party has to some extent morphed into the 'party of minorities' - based on having lost a large chunk of the white vote to Republicans' pandering. But at least they've retained an economic policy that (in theory - some of the more 'centrist' ones are pretty beholden to moneyed interests, but hey, let's not go down the false equivalence rabbit hole) actually would be better for the working class white voters than what Republicans are implementing (not just peddling).
...that we know of. She may have deleted plenty of emails - and they may have been the personal kind (like the kind Hillary says she deleted) that did not have to be archived. And of course the issue of classified stuff on Hillary's server was a case of not-yet-classified stuff or mismarked stuff. All 'exception that proves the rule' cases - why else do you think Comey didn't think any sane person would indict her?
Unless you're a conspiracy theorist that thinks he was protecting her - and that October surprise letter about reopening the investigation was... well, what exactly? If anything, Comey was of the opinion that "there must be something there - and the earliest, deleted emails will prove it". He essentially said as much at his hearing before the Senate - all with zero evidence, mind you.
Correct. At the very least, Trump and Fox ought to admit that - oh, by the way, we were just kidding when we were running around with our hair on fire over Hillary's emails.
But hey, Trump still won't admit he was lying about Obama's birth certificate...
That might be true - and the same could be said for housing in desirable areas that dipped in value during the recession. But it doesn't negate the argument that overvalued assets either crash or stop growing at some point. If you apply simple maxims like "the stock market always outperforms other investments over time", or "real estate allows you to live rent-free while your home increases in value", you're fine - until you're not. These maxims are based on past performance, and we've never had a baby boom followed by a much smaller cohort. We may see some firsts in the coming decades. Of course, if you live long enough and stay invested...
Funny how some of the same people that make the argument for the stock market will be able to handle the retirement of the boomers will scream about how that same retirement is sure to bankrupt Social Security. Personally, I think it's all going to be a relative blip that tapers off as the boomers die. But try to get a "Social Security is doomed" type to address the death of the boomers and see how far that gets you...
Not to mention that Apartment owners have pesky tenants they have to throw out on the street before they can gentrify...