Okay, you mentioned 'different drive', so I'll ask here. Since I installed this update, Windows 10 has refused to allow apps run from a remote drive to open sockets. The same app, when copied to the C: drive works fine. A simple example is PuTty.
I'm sure this is some new security feature - but I need to disable it, since a win32 app I work on lives on a LAN drive (so, y'know, it gets backed up). I can build it there, but I can run it or debug it from there. I can run it if I copy it to my C: drive. There has to be a way to flag a LAN folder as 'trusted' in order to bypass this, but i can't find it.
The problem with these things - and the entire new generation of AI devices is that they're not AI. They're little Turing tests that 'act' like they're intelligent (if you ask them the right questions posed the right way) with no actual intelligence whatsoever. There's going to have to be a quantum leap (and probably a whole new approach) in order to build truly intelligent machines, and in the meantime, we need to stop referring to digital assistants, self-driving cars and the like as such. It's misleading - possibly intentionally. Face it, nobody would trust a hopped up Roomba to drive them around town, but Tesla is already putting those things on the streets. With Google, Uber and a host of others plotting the same.
It's always been a partisan issue - but the various options for blocking partisan nominations made sure that only relatively moderate nominees would survive the partisan process. But when Obama got in, the Republicans started blocking every judicial nominee Obama sent up - until yes, the Democrats removed some of the blocking mechanisms. And yes, people said at the time "be careful what you ask for - you won't be in the majority forever". But seriously, what were they supposed to do, when the Republicans wouldn't allow any nominees through. And then came Merrick Garland, who would've almost certainly passed muster as a moderate SCOTUS nominee - except that the Republicans refused to even grant him a hearing, much less a vote that would've almost certainly approved him.
So yes, Democrats changed the rules - and then made up for lost time. But they didn't want to. I didn't say it wasn't 'smart' of Republicans to do this. Only that it threw out all notions of propriety and respect for the institution of the Senate. And they were only able to do it because their voters only care about winning in any way possible. And their donors, well...
Now, I do agree that Chuck Shumer makes my skin crawl every time he opens his mouth - and it will be a sad day if he's made majority leader. But, then again, the only person less palatable than Shumer is Mitch McConnel, so there.
SCOTUS isn't supposed to interpret a law as written if it's unconstitutional. Now maybe this law would pass constitutional muster, but
"the virtues Congress originally saw in arbitration, its speed and simplicity and inexpensiveness, would be shorn away and arbitration would wind up looking like the litigation it was meant to displace."
doesn't say anything about any constitutional issues I can see. It's all about resolving issues quickly and cheaply - and usually favorably for the employer. Who's making policy from the bench again...?
Ummm. American courts presided over by Republican appointees, you mean. As has been pointed out before, Trump may be putting on a big freak show out front, but the Congress is remaking the courts quite 'effectively' behind the scenes. Somehow they managed to obstruct Obama's nominees so effectively that not only did they leave a huge backlog of slots to fill, they so frustrated the Democrats that the Dems knocked down some of the means of obstruction they could've used to stop it. Of course, the Republicans have knocked down the rest of those means since they took over, so it might not have helped for the Democrats to have held out on this or that 'nuclear option'.
Amazing what you can get done when you have no respect for norms - or Democracy itself, and an effective and well-funded propaganda engine covering your tracks.
Which begs the question - why are physical DVD rentals so much more profitable? Wasn't streaming supposed to eliminate all the overhead of maintaining warehouses and inventory - and paying postal fees. What's gonna happen post net neutrality when Netflix's costs go up?
I imagine at the moment all the streaming profits are going into production of home-grown content. And that's not a bad thing - unless it's temporary until all the competition dies off. We seem to be looking at another bait and switch monopoly building process. Nobody wants to have separate streaming subscriptions for Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and whatever other service has that one show you really want to see - but if they all have exclusive content, how's that going to play out. For what it's worth, I watched "The Handmaid's Tale" on DVDs rented from DVD.com. So, other than one or two top-tier content providers, DVD's may hang around as the only place to get that odd program without having to take out yet another subscription.
So, where are the customers for movies available on DVD only going? If the market for DVD sales and rentals dries up, maybe the studios will have to lower their streaming royalty demands - or just lose the home market altogether.
Well, there's no evidence that they didn't either - except statements by Trump himself (hardly believable), and an 'investigation' by Republicans in Congress that intentionally endeavored not to find collusion - and itself colluded with the Trump administration to gin up phony conspiracies about Obama 'wiretaps', etc.
So, we don't yet know whether there was collusion with the Russians to 'fix' the election. We do know that there was awareness in the Trump camp of Russian intentions to do just that. And maybe Mueller knows more. I guess we'll find out - assuming Mueller gets to finish his job.
Airplanes don't have to deal with a constant stream of nearby obstacles. So, while it may be appropriate to have an autopilot system in which the pilot needs to remain attentive - their attention is rarely required, and they will almost always be given ample time to get back into the game and avoid a disaster. That is simply not true in a car. So, yeah, it's misleadingly named.
And regardless, the problem with any self-driving technology is that legal liability only comes into effect when it fails. And those failures have been spectacular enough to render the systems legal and public relations nightmares. No number of prevented accidents will ever make up for that, because they're simply not in the legal and public relations mix.
The elephant in the room is that these systems are being designed for the likes of Uber and UPS. To provide labor-free transportation businesses. Any system that requires an attentive driver with the ability to intervene in a split second nullifies that use case. And hubristic nerds driving their 100K trophies shouldn't get a pass when their toys crash into things. There is no point to 'driverless' cars until true artificial intelligence allows them to be driven by robots that understand what they're doing - not just robots armed with detailed maps attempting to play a video game they have no understanding of.
Well, they're supposed to be pyramid shaped - until they collapse, I suppose. And yes, because the relative number of contributors and beneficiaries fluctuates, there may be times when it resembles a Ponzi scheme. But, y'know, full faith and credit of the US should smooth out the variations. Unless you think life expectancy is going to keep rising forever (hint - it's not).
It's not a Ponzi scheme at all. It's a pay-as-you-go system, with the simple exception that the first generation got a free ride, since they hadn't been paying to begin with. Yes, when you have a big generation like the baby boomers living off of the payments of a smaller generation, it puts stress on the system. But then again, when the baby boomers die off, you'll have that smaller generation supported by the payments of the bigger Millenials group. So, there are times when surpluses accumulate and other times where the system has to run a deficit. That doesn't make it a Ponzi scheme.
Of course, the surpluses were saved as IOU's - which are little different than had the government sold T-bills to cover its deficits rather than used the SS surplus. And sure, the government shouldn't have been running deficits in good times and bad. But, y'know, in good times Republicans say their tax cuts are "your money", regardless of the IOU's. And in bad times, everybody thinks deficits are necessary (and they're right).
But in any case, nobody's going to 'take a loss' - i.e., the benefits will be paid (3rd rail, and all that). Oh, sure, the Club for Growth will scream bloody murder, but still...
Even the Roberts Supreme Court didn't say free speech included anonymous campaign speech. It's the Republican congress, who thinks they will always win in a money race, that refused to require more disclosure. And nobody thought free speech included Russian trolls pulling for Trump, but pretending to be Black Lives Matter activists explaining why targeted BLM fans on Facebook should stay home instead of voting for Hillary Clinton. The same Hillary Clinton who, along with Bernie Sanders, campaigned on overturning Citizens United to tamp down on that stupid money == speech, corporations == people nonsense.
1) Well, they never made their products available on linux before - so once upon a time, the plan to supplant Unix/Linux on the back end was enough of a motivation to not make those products available. Granted, that's changed somewhat - but I won't concede it's changed completely.
2) Linux Subsystem for Windows doesn't support a GUI - or am I wrong? If I'm right, then it is no substitute even for a Chromebook, let alone Windows.
They don't care about desktop as a growth opportunity any more - even to leverage as a way to get into mobile. But they do care about its continued existence - if only as a cash cow (though, again, I wouldn't discount the possibility of long-range plans to get back into mobile via the desktop monopoly). Since many linux developers were starting to migrate to Macintosh laptops as their primary desktop platform, LSW made sense to stem that trend. Sure, mock me for conflating that trend with a perceived 'threat' of a Linux desktop - but it's really the same dynamic. The need to work in a portable linux environment was making Windows a less desirable choice for a small but influential segment of the market that was using Macs or, yes, Linux laptops to do their work. And that segment happens to be most influential in a segment that they most definely do care about as a market - namely, the cloud-based back end.
Well, okay. But they sure don't like that developers like to use linux-based tools. They'd still prefer them to use Microsoft tools - enough so that they're releasing linux-based versions of some of those tools. They're not doing that because they love linux. They're doing it because if they don't, they will become more irrelevant on the back end than they already are. It's all well and good that Azure supports linux, but for the most part businesses that choose Azure do it because they still have some Windows Server specific workloads that they want to move to the cloud.
"If you can't beat 'em, join 'em". I guess if they ultimately become a cloud-only linux business and end up competing head-to-head with Amazon on price, that's a good thing. But that can't be their objective.
And it's kind of silly to say that "The Desktop isn't even a market they're interested in any more". It still provides a huge chunk of their revenue. Any company would want to preserve that as long as they can.
Yes, I get that the issue at hand is the government forcing Apple to unlock phones - or provide access to the contents of the device's storage. But the OP was implying that a government back door would expose you to garden-variety hackers. Either the public cares about the government being able to get a working subpoena for your phone data or it doesn't. And it's worth debating what level of access the government's ultimately going to get.
Most people are okay with the FISA court granting permission to get in, and if that's going to happen, then let's try to make sure that it happens in a way that only lets them in with a FISA warrant. But let's not gin up unfounded fears about having your bank account be at the mercy of hackers if the government gets its way. That's not true.
But Google is just as bad but not as obvious as is any other social media. You are the product.
I don't know what you mean by 'not as obvious', but no Google is not just as bad. And it just confuses the issue to insist that they are. The problem with Facebook isn't that they have your info - it's the way they use it. Including sharing it with 3rd parties, sharing stuff they told you only your friends could ever see, and allowing 3rd parties to target you directly based on the info they got from Facebook.
Google has your info and uses it to run their business. Which is plenty intrusive, but still consists of showing you advertisements that they think you'll click on. That's a devil's bargain that you might not like, but it's not what Facebook does - which is to use your info any damn way they can think of as well as selling it to others. It's possible to use Google's search service in incognito mode and not give them any personal info - and they can still make money off of you in that mode. Of course, once you sign on to Gmail, you're in the matrix. But at least it's possible. Facebook doesn't have the luxury of a business model that can exist without your info - but that doesn't mean they couldn't run a successful business without compromising it. They just choose not to.
The endgame is to marginalize desktop Linux as much as possible. This WSL thing is not desktop linux at all - it's a way to make sure linux back-end developers run Windows on their desktops instead of using desktop linux as the only way to bring their development environment with them.
And maybe, just maybe, that's enough for today's Microsoft. Sure, they'd love to lock down the hardware farther - and they may well try to do it. But they don't need to. Back-end Linux is no longer a threat to them - if only because they've already lost that battle. These days they'd rather you pay them to run Linux for you on their Azure cloud than worry about the fact that you're not using Windows for back-end development. But anything that marginalizes the Windows desktop stands a chance of harming the cash cow that makes the rest of their business work. So, Chromebooks are definitely a threat. Android, again, was a threat up until the moment that Microsoft conceded they'd lost that battle too. The biggest difference between today's Microsoft and Ballmer's is that they're capable of admitting loss and have figured out how to thrive anyway.
Do you really think strong encryption keeps your phone from being 'hacked'. All it does - and all it's supposed to do - is keep someone in possession of your phone from reading its contents without unlocking it. But once you've unlocked your phone and the OS is running, any malware you've got on it has no problem reading all your data, stealing your bank account, etc.
Now I'm not saying that it's not a good thing to have your phone encrypted - and strongly so. But let's not pretend that law enforcement - or even bad government actors - are the same thing as your everyday fraudsters that are able to steal your info just fine with the best encryption Apple can provide. Encryption does not protect your from OS bugs and malware that you installed and granted access to your device.
You're basically right. This amounts to a very elegant way to have a swappable battery for your phone - and not much more. If the price were right, that might be a great feature. In fact, if they were to bundle a single battery mod with their phones and emphasize that you can get a spare for a few bucks, they might have done well.
The rest of the mods are niche items. And the elegant implementation is part of the problem. Who's going to pay a serious amount of money for a modular speaker or camera or projector that depends on newer generations of the phone maintaining exactly the same physical size and shape? Either Motorola's going to limit themselves in order to keep old mods relevant - or nobody's going to buy the mods. It's not planned obsolescence exactly - but it's also not a formula for massive adoption. But with cheap battery mods for a specific model, they could've been on to something.
It's kind of amazing how some SlashDotters, who would normally be inclined to love technological solutions like solar or wind power (and even take naturally to solving their challenges), still come out against them, and presumably in favor of continued reliance on fossil fuels. It's almost as if some tribal anti-government (or at least anti Democratic Party) prejudice is steering them away from these technologies.
If those types embrace any technological fix (at least they do acknowledge that some kind of fix is needed) to climate change, they tend to push for increased use of nuclear power. While there's certainly some interesting technology there, the challenges are well known. And certainly an anti-government bias ought to apply to nuclear, which was developed with enormous government backing. But politically induced blindness is indeed selective.
Now here's where I'll be accused of politically induced blindness for my demonization of fossil fuels. But hey, nobody said it would be cheap or easy to wean ourselves from carbon-based energy. Just necessary. And with the endgame involving a free, non-polluting resource, tons of jobs and a weakening of corrupt petro-states around the world, it sure beats an endgame of isolating nuclear waste for centuries while continuing to mine the stuff...
Well, it seems the race to the bottom as far as corporate tax rates goes is on - like it or not. Of course, that leaves personal income taxes to make up the difference, and to me, as long as you capture the revenue you need somewhere, it doesn't much matter where (other than fairness considerations). Personally, I'd like to see progressive tax rates that apply to all income. If you want to 'encourage' investment by people who wouldn't invest otherwise, then okay, allow some amount of capital gains and dividends to get modestly preferential treatment. But over that limit, you can pretty much assume that capital gains and dividends are that individual's primary source of income - and should be taxed like anybody else's income. And then there's the estate tax - the easiest way to 'keep it fair' for the next generation is to make them work for it. This idea of rich kids just living off of the dynasty is just un-American. Plus - we need the money. So a bottom-line 'you can't take it with you' tax removes a lot of distortion and political wrangling from the tax system. It's going to get taxed anyway. Live it up while you can, and get your kids a good education...
Slashdot Mirror
meant to say "I can't run it or debug it from there"
Okay, you mentioned 'different drive', so I'll ask here. Since I installed this update, Windows 10 has refused to allow apps run from a remote drive to open sockets. The same app, when copied to the C: drive works fine. A simple example is PuTty.
I'm sure this is some new security feature - but I need to disable it, since a win32 app I work on lives on a LAN drive (so, y'know, it gets backed up). I can build it there, but I can run it or debug it from there. I can run it if I copy it to my C: drive. There has to be a way to flag a LAN folder as 'trusted' in order to bypass this, but i can't find it.
The problem with these things - and the entire new generation of AI devices is that they're not AI. They're little Turing tests that 'act' like they're intelligent (if you ask them the right questions posed the right way) with no actual intelligence whatsoever. There's going to have to be a quantum leap (and probably a whole new approach) in order to build truly intelligent machines, and in the meantime, we need to stop referring to digital assistants, self-driving cars and the like as such. It's misleading - possibly intentionally. Face it, nobody would trust a hopped up Roomba to drive them around town, but Tesla is already putting those things on the streets. With Google, Uber and a host of others plotting the same.
And I'll bet you've been winning friends left and right as a snotty prig your entire life.
It's always been a partisan issue - but the various options for blocking partisan nominations made sure that only relatively moderate nominees would survive the partisan process. But when Obama got in, the Republicans started blocking every judicial nominee Obama sent up - until yes, the Democrats removed some of the blocking mechanisms. And yes, people said at the time "be careful what you ask for - you won't be in the majority forever". But seriously, what were they supposed to do, when the Republicans wouldn't allow any nominees through. And then came Merrick Garland, who would've almost certainly passed muster as a moderate SCOTUS nominee - except that the Republicans refused to even grant him a hearing, much less a vote that would've almost certainly approved him.
So yes, Democrats changed the rules - and then made up for lost time. But they didn't want to. I didn't say it wasn't 'smart' of Republicans to do this. Only that it threw out all notions of propriety and respect for the institution of the Senate. And they were only able to do it because their voters only care about winning in any way possible. And their donors, well...
Now, I do agree that Chuck Shumer makes my skin crawl every time he opens his mouth - and it will be a sad day if he's made majority leader. But, then again, the only person less palatable than Shumer is Mitch McConnel, so there.
SCOTUS isn't supposed to interpret a law as written if it's unconstitutional. Now maybe this law would pass constitutional muster, but
"the virtues Congress originally saw in arbitration, its speed and simplicity and inexpensiveness, would be shorn away and arbitration would wind up looking like the litigation it was meant to displace."
doesn't say anything about any constitutional issues I can see. It's all about resolving issues quickly and cheaply - and usually favorably for the employer. Who's making policy from the bench again...?
Ummm. American courts presided over by Republican appointees, you mean. As has been pointed out before, Trump may be putting on a big freak show out front, but the Congress is remaking the courts quite 'effectively' behind the scenes. Somehow they managed to obstruct Obama's nominees so effectively that not only did they leave a huge backlog of slots to fill, they so frustrated the Democrats that the Dems knocked down some of the means of obstruction they could've used to stop it. Of course, the Republicans have knocked down the rest of those means since they took over, so it might not have helped for the Democrats to have held out on this or that 'nuclear option'.
Amazing what you can get done when you have no respect for norms - or Democracy itself, and an effective and well-funded propaganda engine covering your tracks.
Which begs the question - why are physical DVD rentals so much more profitable? Wasn't streaming supposed to eliminate all the overhead of maintaining warehouses and inventory - and paying postal fees. What's gonna happen post net neutrality when Netflix's costs go up?
I imagine at the moment all the streaming profits are going into production of home-grown content. And that's not a bad thing - unless it's temporary until all the competition dies off. We seem to be looking at another bait and switch monopoly building process. Nobody wants to have separate streaming subscriptions for Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, and whatever other service has that one show you really want to see - but if they all have exclusive content, how's that going to play out. For what it's worth, I watched "The Handmaid's Tale" on DVDs rented from DVD.com. So, other than one or two top-tier content providers, DVD's may hang around as the only place to get that odd program without having to take out yet another subscription.
So, where are the customers for movies available on DVD only going? If the market for DVD sales and rentals dries up, maybe the studios will have to lower their streaming royalty demands - or just lose the home market altogether.
Well, there's no evidence that they didn't either - except statements by Trump himself (hardly believable), and an 'investigation' by Republicans in Congress that intentionally endeavored not to find collusion - and itself colluded with the Trump administration to gin up phony conspiracies about Obama 'wiretaps', etc.
So, we don't yet know whether there was collusion with the Russians to 'fix' the election. We do know that there was awareness in the Trump camp of Russian intentions to do just that. And maybe Mueller knows more. I guess we'll find out - assuming Mueller gets to finish his job.
Airplanes don't have to deal with a constant stream of nearby obstacles. So, while it may be appropriate to have an autopilot system in which the pilot needs to remain attentive - their attention is rarely required, and they will almost always be given ample time to get back into the game and avoid a disaster. That is simply not true in a car. So, yeah, it's misleadingly named.
And regardless, the problem with any self-driving technology is that legal liability only comes into effect when it fails. And those failures have been spectacular enough to render the systems legal and public relations nightmares. No number of prevented accidents will ever make up for that, because they're simply not in the legal and public relations mix.
The elephant in the room is that these systems are being designed for the likes of Uber and UPS. To provide labor-free transportation businesses. Any system that requires an attentive driver with the ability to intervene in a split second nullifies that use case. And hubristic nerds driving their 100K trophies shouldn't get a pass when their toys crash into things. There is no point to 'driverless' cars until true artificial intelligence allows them to be driven by robots that understand what they're doing - not just robots armed with detailed maps attempting to play a video game they have no understanding of.
Well, they're supposed to be pyramid shaped - until they collapse, I suppose. And yes, because the relative number of contributors and beneficiaries fluctuates, there may be times when it resembles a Ponzi scheme. But, y'know, full faith and credit of the US should smooth out the variations. Unless you think life expectancy is going to keep rising forever (hint - it's not).
It's not a Ponzi scheme at all. It's a pay-as-you-go system, with the simple exception that the first generation got a free ride, since they hadn't been paying to begin with. Yes, when you have a big generation like the baby boomers living off of the payments of a smaller generation, it puts stress on the system. But then again, when the baby boomers die off, you'll have that smaller generation supported by the payments of the bigger Millenials group. So, there are times when surpluses accumulate and other times where the system has to run a deficit. That doesn't make it a Ponzi scheme.
Of course, the surpluses were saved as IOU's - which are little different than had the government sold T-bills to cover its deficits rather than used the SS surplus. And sure, the government shouldn't have been running deficits in good times and bad. But, y'know, in good times Republicans say their tax cuts are "your money", regardless of the IOU's. And in bad times, everybody thinks deficits are necessary (and they're right).
But in any case, nobody's going to 'take a loss' - i.e., the benefits will be paid (3rd rail, and all that). Oh, sure, the Club for Growth will scream bloody murder, but still...
Even the Roberts Supreme Court didn't say free speech included anonymous campaign speech. It's the Republican congress, who thinks they will always win in a money race, that refused to require more disclosure. And nobody thought free speech included Russian trolls pulling for Trump, but pretending to be Black Lives Matter activists explaining why targeted BLM fans on Facebook should stay home instead of voting for Hillary Clinton. The same Hillary Clinton who, along with Bernie Sanders, campaigned on overturning Citizens United to tamp down on that stupid money == speech, corporations == people nonsense.
1) Well, they never made their products available on linux before - so once upon a time, the plan to supplant Unix/Linux on the back end was enough of a motivation to not make those products available. Granted, that's changed somewhat - but I won't concede it's changed completely.
2) Linux Subsystem for Windows doesn't support a GUI - or am I wrong? If I'm right, then it is no substitute even for a Chromebook, let alone Windows.
They don't care about desktop as a growth opportunity any more - even to leverage as a way to get into mobile. But they do care about its continued existence - if only as a cash cow (though, again, I wouldn't discount the possibility of long-range plans to get back into mobile via the desktop monopoly). Since many linux developers were starting to migrate to Macintosh laptops as their primary desktop platform, LSW made sense to stem that trend. Sure, mock me for conflating that trend with a perceived 'threat' of a Linux desktop - but it's really the same dynamic. The need to work in a portable linux environment was making Windows a less desirable choice for a small but influential segment of the market that was using Macs or, yes, Linux laptops to do their work. And that segment happens to be most influential in a segment that they most definely do care about as a market - namely, the cloud-based back end.
Well, okay. But they sure don't like that developers like to use linux-based tools. They'd still prefer them to use Microsoft tools - enough so that they're releasing linux-based versions of some of those tools. They're not doing that because they love linux. They're doing it because if they don't, they will become more irrelevant on the back end than they already are. It's all well and good that Azure supports linux, but for the most part businesses that choose Azure do it because they still have some Windows Server specific workloads that they want to move to the cloud.
"If you can't beat 'em, join 'em". I guess if they ultimately become a cloud-only linux business and end up competing head-to-head with Amazon on price, that's a good thing. But that can't be their objective.
And it's kind of silly to say that "The Desktop isn't even a market they're interested in any more". It still provides a huge chunk of their revenue. Any company would want to preserve that as long as they can.
Yes, I get that the issue at hand is the government forcing Apple to unlock phones - or provide access to the contents of the device's storage. But the OP was implying that a government back door would expose you to garden-variety hackers. Either the public cares about the government being able to get a working subpoena for your phone data or it doesn't. And it's worth debating what level of access the government's ultimately going to get.
Most people are okay with the FISA court granting permission to get in, and if that's going to happen, then let's try to make sure that it happens in a way that only lets them in with a FISA warrant. But let's not gin up unfounded fears about having your bank account be at the mercy of hackers if the government gets its way. That's not true.
But Google is just as bad but not as obvious as is any other social media. You are the product.
I don't know what you mean by 'not as obvious', but no Google is not just as bad. And it just confuses the issue to insist that they are. The problem with Facebook isn't that they have your info - it's the way they use it. Including sharing it with 3rd parties, sharing stuff they told you only your friends could ever see, and allowing 3rd parties to target you directly based on the info they got from Facebook.
Google has your info and uses it to run their business. Which is plenty intrusive, but still consists of showing you advertisements that they think you'll click on. That's a devil's bargain that you might not like, but it's not what Facebook does - which is to use your info any damn way they can think of as well as selling it to others. It's possible to use Google's search service in incognito mode and not give them any personal info - and they can still make money off of you in that mode. Of course, once you sign on to Gmail, you're in the matrix. But at least it's possible. Facebook doesn't have the luxury of a business model that can exist without your info - but that doesn't mean they couldn't run a successful business without compromising it. They just choose not to.
The endgame is to marginalize desktop Linux as much as possible. This WSL thing is not desktop linux at all - it's a way to make sure linux back-end developers run Windows on their desktops instead of using desktop linux as the only way to bring their development environment with them.
And maybe, just maybe, that's enough for today's Microsoft. Sure, they'd love to lock down the hardware farther - and they may well try to do it. But they don't need to. Back-end Linux is no longer a threat to them - if only because they've already lost that battle. These days they'd rather you pay them to run Linux for you on their Azure cloud than worry about the fact that you're not using Windows for back-end development. But anything that marginalizes the Windows desktop stands a chance of harming the cash cow that makes the rest of their business work. So, Chromebooks are definitely a threat. Android, again, was a threat up until the moment that Microsoft conceded they'd lost that battle too. The biggest difference between today's Microsoft and Ballmer's is that they're capable of admitting loss and have figured out how to thrive anyway.
Do you really think strong encryption keeps your phone from being 'hacked'. All it does - and all it's supposed to do - is keep someone in possession of your phone from reading its contents without unlocking it. But once you've unlocked your phone and the OS is running, any malware you've got on it has no problem reading all your data, stealing your bank account, etc.
Now I'm not saying that it's not a good thing to have your phone encrypted - and strongly so. But let's not pretend that law enforcement - or even bad government actors - are the same thing as your everyday fraudsters that are able to steal your info just fine with the best encryption Apple can provide. Encryption does not protect your from OS bugs and malware that you installed and granted access to your device.
The HD vinyl process involves converting audio digitally to a 3D topographic map.
So this new vinyl process ends up being digital anyway. So what advantage is possible? There's some DAC involved in producing the sound either way.
You're basically right. This amounts to a very elegant way to have a swappable battery for your phone - and not much more. If the price were right, that might be a great feature. In fact, if they were to bundle a single battery mod with their phones and emphasize that you can get a spare for a few bucks, they might have done well.
The rest of the mods are niche items. And the elegant implementation is part of the problem. Who's going to pay a serious amount of money for a modular speaker or camera or projector that depends on newer generations of the phone maintaining exactly the same physical size and shape? Either Motorola's going to limit themselves in order to keep old mods relevant - or nobody's going to buy the mods. It's not planned obsolescence exactly - but it's also not a formula for massive adoption. But with cheap battery mods for a specific model, they could've been on to something.
Saying as how Firefox has more or less cloned Chrome's UI in recent years, either you don't work in IT, or you're not paying attention.
It's kind of amazing how some SlashDotters, who would normally be inclined to love technological solutions like solar or wind power (and even take naturally to solving their challenges), still come out against them, and presumably in favor of continued reliance on fossil fuels. It's almost as if some tribal anti-government (or at least anti Democratic Party) prejudice is steering them away from these technologies.
If those types embrace any technological fix (at least they do acknowledge that some kind of fix is needed) to climate change, they tend to push for increased use of nuclear power. While there's certainly some interesting technology there, the challenges are well known. And certainly an anti-government bias ought to apply to nuclear, which was developed with enormous government backing. But politically induced blindness is indeed selective.
Now here's where I'll be accused of politically induced blindness for my demonization of fossil fuels. But hey, nobody said it would be cheap or easy to wean ourselves from carbon-based energy. Just necessary. And with the endgame involving a free, non-polluting resource, tons of jobs and a weakening of corrupt petro-states around the world, it sure beats an endgame of isolating nuclear waste for centuries while continuing to mine the stuff...
Well, it seems the race to the bottom as far as corporate tax rates goes is on - like it or not. Of course, that leaves personal income taxes to make up the difference, and to me, as long as you capture the revenue you need somewhere, it doesn't much matter where (other than fairness considerations). Personally, I'd like to see progressive tax rates that apply to all income. If you want to 'encourage' investment by people who wouldn't invest otherwise, then okay, allow some amount of capital gains and dividends to get modestly preferential treatment. But over that limit, you can pretty much assume that capital gains and dividends are that individual's primary source of income - and should be taxed like anybody else's income. And then there's the estate tax - the easiest way to 'keep it fair' for the next generation is to make them work for it. This idea of rich kids just living off of the dynasty is just un-American. Plus - we need the money. So a bottom-line 'you can't take it with you' tax removes a lot of distortion and political wrangling from the tax system. It's going to get taxed anyway. Live it up while you can, and get your kids a good education...