To TRULY secure your assembly rights to make as much noise as you want, then you need to own enough land to create a secluded venue in the middle of a large-enough fenced-in area outside any HOA land-use restrictions or "planned"/zoned development area, that nobody outside the assembly will have be able to see or have a complaint about what is happening.
Not at all. For far less than that, you can rent any number of semi-public venues like stadium, concert halls, church basements, etc. for an evening during the slow season. Those areas are zoned for large numbers of people, have parking for large numbers of people, and comply with applicable fire codes already.
And just to clarify, my point about things being taught in school was not intended to imply that people learn solely at school, but rather to emphasize that skills are much easier to find in the job market if the majority of students come out of school with those skills. For skills that are almost never taught in school, the overwhelming majority of people with those skills will have gotten them while on the job, which means they already have jobs. Thus, if the applicant pool is going to grow, it will only grow significantly if lots of people have opportunities to gain those skills on the job. Otherwise, the pool will grow very, very slowly, if at all, and may even shrink if the rate of attrition exceeds the rate of people randomly choosing to learn that particular skill on their own.
If you have to sit in a classroom to learn something, rather than showing some initiative and ordering a book from Amazon and reading it, then why should I hire you? Because you say you are willing to learn despite evidence that you haven't learning anything?
What you're missing is that there are an infinite number of possible things to learn and each person has a finite amount of time in which to learn them. And there's a finite number of people in the CS field as a whole, and thus a finite subset of those people who will chose to learn that particular skill. Those people likely all have jobs. So as I said, at that point, you have two options: A. pay enough above market rates to steal somebody from some other company or B. hire somebody without that particular skill and let your new hire learn while doing.
The things I'm saying match what the news outlets were saying while the ACA was being designed. Read that second paragraph again. The whole reason the ACA is a train wreck is because of concessions the Democrats made to the Republicans. This is all well-established fact. Anyone arguing against those facts need only spend two minutes doing a Google search of historical news articles to find out that their opinion is based on pure fantasy and lies.
One of us is spouting revisionist history, but it's not me. You've been lied to. Now go back to Fox News or Breitbart or whoever fed you that disinformation and tell them, "Stop with the fake news already."
I'm suddenly reminded of a conversation I had in which a product was described as containing Chihuahua cheese, and I snarkily asked how one milks a chihuahua.
There are a couple of problems with using those numbers as-is.
First, merely having a job (workforce participation) tells you nothing about whether you are underemployed, whereas unemployment takes that into account.
Second, workforce participation tells you nothing about how many people were forced into retiring earlier than originally planned, but concluded that they wouldn't be able to find work, so they didn't bother. The question isn't whether anyone over 65 is working, but rather whether the number of people over 65 who are working has decreased, and whether that decrease was caused by a lack of opportunity to keep working or by having so much money that they didn't feel the need to keep working.
But if you don't have enough initiative to learn OpenCL or Verilog for a job that requires those skills, then why should hire someone that needs to be spoon fed by a babysitter?
Because most schools don't teach either of those subjects, much less both of them. OpenCL is an extremely niche skill in and of itself, and Verilog is typically only taught in a CE or EE program, which are a lot less common than CS programs. When you're hiring for a niche of a niche and most of the people have to learn those skills on the job, how can you reasonably expect to be able to hire people with those skills? If people have both of those skills, they probably already work at a GPU manufacturer, and most of those folks aren't looking for jobs.
The more rare your requirements are, the more it is going to cost you, and unfortunately, too many companies aren't willing to pay those costs. So the choices are A. underpay and let the person learn the specific skillset on the job, or B. pay through the nose.
You mean the 200+ amendments that were sponsored or co-sponsored by Republicans that were included in the final bill? Since the Democrats had enough votes to pass the AHA, the Republicans voted "no" and ate their cake too.
Forget the amendments. The entire design was a compromise to win Republican votes. The Democrats wanted to set up a single payer system, and the Republicans nearly ruptured an aneurysm, so they walked it back to a design that the Republicans said they would be willing to vote for, and then they still didn't.
The Republican party are amazingly skilled manipulators. The Democrats compromise, allowing the Republicans to trick them into adding flaws into bills, and then the Republicans turn around and use the flaws that they introduced to help them attack "the Democrats' bills" so that once they gain enough power, they can put in something entirely different without having to compromise. It's utterly disgusting.
To be fair, the Democrats attempt this sort of manipulation, too, but they're nowhere near as good at it.
I viewed the total eclipse using unfiltered Orion 70x15 binoculars on a pantograph mount. I saw everything. The planet mercury, solar prominences, etc. I definitely recommend binoculars.
Just be sure to stop looking through them well in advance of totality ending. Otherwise, with the magnification, it'll likely burn a hole right through the back of your head.:-D
But seriously, I ended up with some hard plastic lenses that got recalled, but in spite of that, they were plenty dark enough—way darker than the arc welding mask that I seem to recall using at the annular eclipse thirty-ish years ago (which was still dark enough to do the job).
The previous version of the OS won't boot from APFS. So instead of being able to surgically excise enough of the OS to let you reinstall the previous OS (IIRC, this minimally amounts to turning off system integrity protection, booting from an external drive or recovery partition, and 'rm'ing a handful of files, but I usually nuke all of/System plus about a dozen files at the root level), you have to:
have a full backup from before you upgraded
wipe your entire hard drive
reinstall the OS
reboot from your backup
And worse, because it modifies the filesystem, you can't even take the shortcut of dd'ing it to a new disk to make up for not having a proper backup ahead of time. Your previous filesystem metadata is *gone*, so the only thing you can do if you don't have a backup is dd to a new disk, run Carbon Copy Cloner ($), and likely reinstall all your apps because the copy protection files have different inode numbers (well, the HFS+ synthetic equivalent of an inode number).
So instead of taking all of three minutes not including the install time and posing essentially zero risk to the user's data, a filesystem-replacing downgrade takes the better part of a day and leaves you with your backup as the only copy of your data during the entire period. Instead of being a low-risk downgrade that I would do without giving it a second thought, it's a downgrade that I would strongly advise against attempting even by the most technically adept people.
Apple should have waited a full release after the filesystem was *bootable* before even *considering* upgrading existing volumes. They should, however, set up *new* volumes with the new filesystem. But migrating existing disks the moment you consider it to be robust enough for a root volume is just plain insane. This makes me think that I should skip the next OS X release entirely and wait for the following major version. It's way too risky a change to not be under the user's control.
The forced upgrade was terrifying enough on iOS where, on average, the only thing of value is a handful of photos that haven't been copied to your computer or iCloud yet, where app developers aren't doing their own crazy copy protection schemes, and where I trust the backups to be complete. (For example, I can tell you horror stories of users losing all their photos because of Time Machine not backing up bundles that are open and Apple's software stupidly storing everything in an opaque library bundle for no good reason.) IMO, forcing upgrades on OS X so soon is, frankly, nuts...
...and completely unnecessary, too. I'm sure, being Apple, that the upgrade process happens silently in the background, similar to the way encryption happens, in which case there's nothing preventing them from adding a single button to Disk Utility that says "Upgrade volume to APFS" and asking the user whether to upgrade during the installation process.
First off, medical research is in no way a "zero-sum game". Finding an effective treatment for one form of cancer is a good thing. It's a net plus. It in no way detracts from the knowledge we have about other diseases. The progress we have made in this area could very well lead to treatments for all kinds of different illnesses.
At this point, it is largely a zero-sum game. Every dollar spent on research in one area is a dollar that can't be spent in another area. One disease's gains represent another disease's losses. The exceptions are the additional knowledge of general techniques for doing gene splicing and other similar areas, but that sort of research is sufficiently independent of what disease you're trying to cure that I doubt it is even typically done by the same organizations.
The progress we have made in this area could very well lead to treatments for all kinds of different illnesses.
In general, I would agree, but unfortunately, when you're talking about genetic modifications to human cells, as I understand it, the treatment tends to be highly specific to a single person, forget a single disease. So apart from the basic gene splicing techniques themselves (which are, I think, fairly well understood at this point), these studies basically just teach us whether you can cure a specific strain of a specific cancer in a specific person. If you're going to do an experimental treatment, if you're going to gain roughly the same knowledge either way, it seems like it would make more sense to try it on a strain of cancer that has a 90% chance of killing the person in the next year rather than a 2% chance. That's all I'm saying.
I don't disagree. Clearly, chemo is a terrible way to cure disease. It's the modern medical equivalent of leeches. But if you're going to spend X dollars finding a cure for something, do you want to pick a disease that makes up 25% of childhood cancer deaths and dropping rapidly (leukemia) or a disease that has caused a consistent 30% of childhood cancer deaths for decades (brain cancer) with minimal progress? Do you want to be one of hundreds of companies in a crowded field for a disease that kills only 10% of the people who get it (and dropping) or the one company that promises possible salvation for a disease that kills 90% of the people who get it?
Let's put this in perspective. ALL already had treatments that put 98% of affected children into remission within a couple of months, with 8% of those eventually relapsing. So 90% are completely cured with existing therapies. There are other cancers where the numbers are an order of magnitude worse. I'm puzzled why the focus seems to be on diseases that medical science has already very nearly cured, rather than the ones that kill most of the people who get them.
Also, is this actually measurably better than existing treatments? If existing treatments fail to produce remission in 2% and allow a relapse in another 8%, you'd expect only about 20% of the patients to be in that 2% group that weren't helped by chemo. So a remission rate of only 83% is probably not statistically significantly different from what they would have gotten if they had used the current generation of chemo, and doesn't necessarily indicate any benefit for people who did not respond to chemo. So this could very well be a no-op, all at a tremendous cost that insurance won't cover (because it is experimental).
I'm not saying that the research isn't valuable, because it is, but in the zero-sum game of medical research, seeing the first approved cell-based cancer treatment be for a disease that is already all but cured just seems bafflingly backwards. I would have expected the first treatments to be for things like pancreatic cancer or mesothelioma or, if you want a childhood cancer with a high case fatality rate, perhaps neuroblastoma. Brain cancers kill significantly more kids than leukemia, despite being much less common.
Ah, and this is the big lie: "There are no trustworthy sources of news." This is a fabrication of the right-wing since Nixon. If you can just convince enough people that there are no facts, there is no truth, and that they should just believe what makes them feel good, you can get them to do just about anything.
There's a big difference between saying that there are very few (if any) sources of news that don't pick and choose facts in ways that bias public perception and saying that "there are no facts". As someone who chose communications (broadcasting) as my second major in undergrad, I lament the decline in the quality of journalism. It's really, really obvious how far things have fallen, at least from my perspective, and I thought that long before the "fake news" claims began—like a decade before, and maybe longer.
My view is that if you don't get your news from multiple sources—both left-biased and right-biased—you are likely uninformed, and even if you do, you might be uninformed.:-)
I'm not sure that you can reach that conclusion from their data for the latest generation. The STD4000s were definitely hot garbage and the HGST 4TB were fantastic. But none of those drives are still on the market.
With an average of less than two months' use per drive, the current Seagate drives showed a 1.55% failure rate over three months, or a 6.2% expected annual failure rate, assuming all else is equal. With an average of five days' use per drive, the current HGST drives showed a 0% failure rate over three months, or a 0% expected annual failure rate. To be fair, the HGST cluster isn't nearly big enough and hasn't run nearly long enough for those numbers to be statistically signifiant yet. That said, in the times I've looked at their stats, no Seagate drive has ever done much better than about a 5% expected annual failure rate, and no HGST drive has ever exceeded one percent. So it isn't conclusive, but it is strongly suggestive.
It's not just the bias, and it isn't the lack of publishing the analysis. It's the lack of actually doing the analysis and fact checking. It's the interviews where the interviewees say things that require a complete lack of understanding of the facts of the issue they're talking about, and then the interviewers don't appear to even know enough about the issues to point out how utterly absurd the things they're saying are.
It's really bad when some of the most respected names in journalism here are comedians. They seem to be the only journalists with enough ability to think on their feet to ask the tough questions.
I'm not sure if the problem is that the journalists are clueless, that they don't take time to prepare, or that they fear not getting people to agree to interviews if they point out when the interviewees are outright lying, but the result is that so much of American journalism completely fails to be much more than a bullhorn for bulls**t artists. That's not journalism; that's being a PR mouthpiece. There's a difference.
That's not true. For example, the BBC goes to great lengths to present both sides of an argument. In fact the BBC has been criticised for it, because some people feel that they give fringe views only held by a small number of people too much weight in comparison to more mainstream ones.
Let me restate that. There are no American news outlets that don't suck. The Beeb is usually pretty good, but it tends to cover British politics, which most of us Yanks don't care about, rather than U.S. politics, which we do.
Tape disables it, but it is hard to reenable it without it becoming semi-permanently reenabled until you get more tape. I've done that for my iPad, because I don't ever use the camera on that, but it isn't nearly as practical for my phone, which I do sometimes use for spontaneous pictures.
And no, a case won't cover the camera, because they're all specifically designed to avoid doing that.
Facts don't have a political slant, but collections of facts do. By choosing which facts to present, you can shape the narrative to support a particular position or weaken support for that position. For example, you might:
point out the number of times guns were used to protect people while leaving out the number of times guns were used for homicide and suicide, or vice versa
tell the number of abortions by minors lacking parental consent without telling how many of the unwanted pregnancies were caused by parents or family members
tell how raising minimum wage will improve the amount of money available to the working poor, but ignore the increased cost of goods or ignore the number of workers replaced by automation sooner than they otherwise would have been
And so on. The problem is, all the sources of news are so skewed in one way or another that people don't know who to trust anymore. Clearly, some sources are particularly bad, and filtering out that noise is a laudable effort, but without a quality source of news to replace it, I fear that the void will just be filled by more noise.
I'm right with you except for the "no camera". What I want is a sliding cover over the camera or a camera that flips 90 degrees so that it points into the innards of the device. There are times when I want devices to have a camera, but I want it to be entirely under my control, and I don't feel that any software can adequately provide that control.
Well, and I couldn't care less about changing the IMSI.
Slashdot Mirror
Not at all. For far less than that, you can rent any number of semi-public venues like stadium, concert halls, church basements, etc. for an evening during the slow season. Those areas are zoned for large numbers of people, have parking for large numbers of people, and comply with applicable fire codes already.
And just to clarify, my point about things being taught in school was not intended to imply that people learn solely at school, but rather to emphasize that skills are much easier to find in the job market if the majority of students come out of school with those skills. For skills that are almost never taught in school, the overwhelming majority of people with those skills will have gotten them while on the job, which means they already have jobs. Thus, if the applicant pool is going to grow, it will only grow significantly if lots of people have opportunities to gain those skills on the job. Otherwise, the pool will grow very, very slowly, if at all, and may even shrink if the rate of attrition exceeds the rate of people randomly choosing to learn that particular skill on their own.
What you're missing is that there are an infinite number of possible things to learn and each person has a finite amount of time in which to learn them. And there's a finite number of people in the CS field as a whole, and thus a finite subset of those people who will chose to learn that particular skill. Those people likely all have jobs. So as I said, at that point, you have two options: A. pay enough above market rates to steal somebody from some other company or B. hire somebody without that particular skill and let your new hire learn while doing.
The things I'm saying match what the news outlets were saying while the ACA was being designed. Read that second paragraph again. The whole reason the ACA is a train wreck is because of concessions the Democrats made to the Republicans. This is all well-established fact. Anyone arguing against those facts need only spend two minutes doing a Google search of historical news articles to find out that their opinion is based on pure fantasy and lies.
One of us is spouting revisionist history, but it's not me. You've been lied to. Now go back to Fox News or Breitbart or whoever fed you that disinformation and tell them, "Stop with the fake news already."
Wow. I bet you're fun at parties. :-D
I'm suddenly reminded of a conversation I had in which a product was described as containing Chihuahua cheese, and I snarkily asked how one milks a chihuahua.
320M people total. 200M workforce participation rate. https://data.bls.gov/timeserie...
48M people over 65. https://www.census.gov/newsroo... 74M people under 18. https://www.childstats.gov/ame...
So you want retired people and children to work?
There are a couple of problems with using those numbers as-is.
First, merely having a job (workforce participation) tells you nothing about whether you are underemployed, whereas unemployment takes that into account.
Second, workforce participation tells you nothing about how many people were forced into retiring earlier than originally planned, but concluded that they wouldn't be able to find work, so they didn't bother. The question isn't whether anyone over 65 is working, but rather whether the number of people over 65 who are working has decreased, and whether that decrease was caused by a lack of opportunity to keep working or by having so much money that they didn't feel the need to keep working.
Because most schools don't teach either of those subjects, much less both of them. OpenCL is an extremely niche skill in and of itself, and Verilog is typically only taught in a CE or EE program, which are a lot less common than CS programs. When you're hiring for a niche of a niche and most of the people have to learn those skills on the job, how can you reasonably expect to be able to hire people with those skills? If people have both of those skills, they probably already work at a GPU manufacturer, and most of those folks aren't looking for jobs.
The more rare your requirements are, the more it is going to cost you, and unfortunately, too many companies aren't willing to pay those costs. So the choices are A. underpay and let the person learn the specific skillset on the job, or B. pay through the nose.
Forget the amendments. The entire design was a compromise to win Republican votes. The Democrats wanted to set up a single payer system, and the Republicans nearly ruptured an aneurysm, so they walked it back to a design that the Republicans said they would be willing to vote for, and then they still didn't.
The Republican party are amazingly skilled manipulators. The Democrats compromise, allowing the Republicans to trick them into adding flaws into bills, and then the Republicans turn around and use the flaws that they introduced to help them attack "the Democrats' bills" so that once they gain enough power, they can put in something entirely different without having to compromise. It's utterly disgusting.
To be fair, the Democrats attempt this sort of manipulation, too, but they're nowhere near as good at it.
Will it crash constantly like their Blu-Ray players? :-D I kid! I kid!
Just be sure to stop looking through them well in advance of totality ending. Otherwise, with the magnification, it'll likely burn a hole right through the back of your head. :-D
But seriously, I ended up with some hard plastic lenses that got recalled, but in spite of that, they were plenty dark enough—way darker than the arc welding mask that I seem to recall using at the annular eclipse thirty-ish years ago (which was still dark enough to do the job).
The previous version of the OS won't boot from APFS. So instead of being able to surgically excise enough of the OS to let you reinstall the previous OS (IIRC, this minimally amounts to turning off system integrity protection, booting from an external drive or recovery partition, and 'rm'ing a handful of files, but I usually nuke all of /System plus about a dozen files at the root level), you have to:
And worse, because it modifies the filesystem, you can't even take the shortcut of dd'ing it to a new disk to make up for not having a proper backup ahead of time. Your previous filesystem metadata is *gone*, so the only thing you can do if you don't have a backup is dd to a new disk, run Carbon Copy Cloner ($), and likely reinstall all your apps because the copy protection files have different inode numbers (well, the HFS+ synthetic equivalent of an inode number).
So instead of taking all of three minutes not including the install time and posing essentially zero risk to the user's data, a filesystem-replacing downgrade takes the better part of a day and leaves you with your backup as the only copy of your data during the entire period. Instead of being a low-risk downgrade that I would do without giving it a second thought, it's a downgrade that I would strongly advise against attempting even by the most technically adept people.
Apple should have waited a full release after the filesystem was *bootable* before even *considering* upgrading existing volumes. They should, however, set up *new* volumes with the new filesystem. But migrating existing disks the moment you consider it to be robust enough for a root volume is just plain insane. This makes me think that I should skip the next OS X release entirely and wait for the following major version. It's way too risky a change to not be under the user's control.
The forced upgrade was terrifying enough on iOS where, on average, the only thing of value is a handful of photos that haven't been copied to your computer or iCloud yet, where app developers aren't doing their own crazy copy protection schemes, and where I trust the backups to be complete. (For example, I can tell you horror stories of users losing all their photos because of Time Machine not backing up bundles that are open and Apple's software stupidly storing everything in an opaque library bundle for no good reason.) IMO, forcing upgrades on OS X so soon is, frankly, nuts...
...and completely unnecessary, too. I'm sure, being Apple, that the upgrade process happens silently in the background, similar to the way encryption happens, in which case there's nothing preventing them from adding a single button to Disk Utility that says "Upgrade volume to APFS" and asking the user whether to upgrade during the installation process.
At this point, it is largely a zero-sum game. Every dollar spent on research in one area is a dollar that can't be spent in another area. One disease's gains represent another disease's losses. The exceptions are the additional knowledge of general techniques for doing gene splicing and other similar areas, but that sort of research is sufficiently independent of what disease you're trying to cure that I doubt it is even typically done by the same organizations.
In general, I would agree, but unfortunately, when you're talking about genetic modifications to human cells, as I understand it, the treatment tends to be highly specific to a single person, forget a single disease. So apart from the basic gene splicing techniques themselves (which are, I think, fairly well understood at this point), these studies basically just teach us whether you can cure a specific strain of a specific cancer in a specific person. If you're going to do an experimental treatment, if you're going to gain roughly the same knowledge either way, it seems like it would make more sense to try it on a strain of cancer that has a 90% chance of killing the person in the next year rather than a 2% chance. That's all I'm saying.
Yeah. For the cost of feeding 17 starving children in Bangladesh for a month, you could buy a small cup of coffee. :-D
The one that finds out after installing it that some critical piece of software no longer works and tries to downgrade.
I don't disagree. Clearly, chemo is a terrible way to cure disease. It's the modern medical equivalent of leeches. But if you're going to spend X dollars finding a cure for something, do you want to pick a disease that makes up 25% of childhood cancer deaths and dropping rapidly (leukemia) or a disease that has caused a consistent 30% of childhood cancer deaths for decades (brain cancer) with minimal progress? Do you want to be one of hundreds of companies in a crowded field for a disease that kills only 10% of the people who get it (and dropping) or the one company that promises possible salvation for a disease that kills 90% of the people who get it?
Let's put this in perspective. ALL already had treatments that put 98% of affected children into remission within a couple of months, with 8% of those eventually relapsing. So 90% are completely cured with existing therapies. There are other cancers where the numbers are an order of magnitude worse. I'm puzzled why the focus seems to be on diseases that medical science has already very nearly cured, rather than the ones that kill most of the people who get them.
Also, is this actually measurably better than existing treatments? If existing treatments fail to produce remission in 2% and allow a relapse in another 8%, you'd expect only about 20% of the patients to be in that 2% group that weren't helped by chemo. So a remission rate of only 83% is probably not statistically significantly different from what they would have gotten if they had used the current generation of chemo, and doesn't necessarily indicate any benefit for people who did not respond to chemo. So this could very well be a no-op, all at a tremendous cost that insurance won't cover (because it is experimental).
I'm not saying that the research isn't valuable, because it is, but in the zero-sum game of medical research, seeing the first approved cell-based cancer treatment be for a disease that is already all but cured just seems bafflingly backwards. I would have expected the first treatments to be for things like pancreatic cancer or mesothelioma or, if you want a childhood cancer with a high case fatality rate, perhaps neuroblastoma. Brain cancers kill significantly more kids than leukemia, despite being much less common.
Not when the answer is obvious.
What about this news site does the government find so terrifying?
Goatse.
There's a big difference between saying that there are very few (if any) sources of news that don't pick and choose facts in ways that bias public perception and saying that "there are no facts". As someone who chose communications (broadcasting) as my second major in undergrad, I lament the decline in the quality of journalism. It's really, really obvious how far things have fallen, at least from my perspective, and I thought that long before the "fake news" claims began—like a decade before, and maybe longer.
My view is that if you don't get your news from multiple sources—both left-biased and right-biased—you are likely uninformed, and even if you do, you might be uninformed. :-)
With an average of less than two months' use per drive, the current Seagate drives showed a 1.55% failure rate over three months, or a 6.2% expected annual failure rate, assuming all else is equal. With an average of five days' use per drive, the current HGST drives showed a 0% failure rate over three months, or a 0% expected annual failure rate. To be fair, the HGST cluster isn't nearly big enough and hasn't run nearly long enough for those numbers to be statistically signifiant yet. That said, in the times I've looked at their stats, no Seagate drive has ever done much better than about a 5% expected annual failure rate, and no HGST drive has ever exceeded one percent. So it isn't conclusive, but it is strongly suggestive.
It's not just the bias, and it isn't the lack of publishing the analysis. It's the lack of actually doing the analysis and fact checking. It's the interviews where the interviewees say things that require a complete lack of understanding of the facts of the issue they're talking about, and then the interviewers don't appear to even know enough about the issues to point out how utterly absurd the things they're saying are.
It's really bad when some of the most respected names in journalism here are comedians. They seem to be the only journalists with enough ability to think on their feet to ask the tough questions.
I'm not sure if the problem is that the journalists are clueless, that they don't take time to prepare, or that they fear not getting people to agree to interviews if they point out when the interviewees are outright lying, but the result is that so much of American journalism completely fails to be much more than a bullhorn for bulls**t artists. That's not journalism; that's being a PR mouthpiece. There's a difference.
Let me restate that. There are no American news outlets that don't suck. The Beeb is usually pretty good, but it tends to cover British politics, which most of us Yanks don't care about, rather than U.S. politics, which we do.
Tape disables it, but it is hard to reenable it without it becoming semi-permanently reenabled until you get more tape. I've done that for my iPad, because I don't ever use the camera on that, but it isn't nearly as practical for my phone, which I do sometimes use for spontaneous pictures.
And no, a case won't cover the camera, because they're all specifically designed to avoid doing that.
Facts don't have a political slant, but collections of facts do. By choosing which facts to present, you can shape the narrative to support a particular position or weaken support for that position. For example, you might:
And so on. The problem is, all the sources of news are so skewed in one way or another that people don't know who to trust anymore. Clearly, some sources are particularly bad, and filtering out that noise is a laudable effort, but without a quality source of news to replace it, I fear that the void will just be filled by more noise.
I'm right with you except for the "no camera". What I want is a sliding cover over the camera or a camera that flips 90 degrees so that it points into the innards of the device. There are times when I want devices to have a camera, but I want it to be entirely under my control, and I don't feel that any software can adequately provide that control.
Well, and I couldn't care less about changing the IMSI.