I don't think the USA can take any credit or blame for the Arab Spring. That was a big domino effect with Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain.
I don't think Libya would be any better. Syria would probably still have a civil war, but would be better without the CIA supporting the rebels and that power vaccum allowing the rise of ISIS. Iraq would be WAAAAAY better off. Even under Sadam, as crazy as that fucker was. Maybe the Kurds in Iraq are better off for our intervention, but that's a big maybe. It's not millions in dead Iraqi civilians... it's only like.... 300,000.... *cough*.
Overall though, yeah, pissing away blood and money in the desert didn't even make sense when they had a lot of oil we wanted. Now that we don't want it as bad, it all looks really pointless. Imagine if we had taken all the money and manpower we spent on the Iraq war and put it developing our own oil reserves and making alternatives to oil.
I have reasonable confidence when I buy on Steam that I will continue owning that game, at least to the extent you can own a digital object.
And that extent is near-zero. Steam games come with DRM. You don't own the things you bought. Valve allows you to do some things because they feel like it. They have a track record and they're flush with cash at the moment, but if that changed they could simply pull the plug and walk away. They could also selectively screw over individuals. If your account is banned you cannot log in, download, or play any of your games. As a policy, they will not tell you why your account is banned, simply stating you violated their terms of service.
What are their terms of service?
This Steam Subscriber Agreement ("Agreement") is a legal document that explains your rights and obligations as a subscriber of Steam from Valve Corporation, a corporation under the laws of the State of Washington, with its registered office at 10400 NE 4th St., Bellevue, WA 98004, United States, registered with the Washington Secretary of State under number 60 22 90 773, VAT ID No. EU 8260 00671 (“Valve”). Please read it carefully.
SECTION 11 CONTAINS A BINDING ARBITRATION AGREEMENT AND CLASS ACTION WAIVER. IT MAY AFFECT YOUR LEGAL RIGHTS. PLEASE READ IT. IF YOU ARE A CUSTOMER WITH RESIDENCE IN THE EUROPEAN UNION, SECTION 11 DOES NOT APPLY TO YOU.
1. REGISTRATION AS A SUBSCRIBER; APPLICATION OF TERMS TO YOU; YOUR ACCOUNT
Steam is an online service offered by Valve.
You become a subscriber of Steam ("Subscriber") by completing the registration of a Steam user account. This Agreement takes effect as soon as you indicate your acceptance of these terms. You may not become a subscriber if you are under the age of 13. Steam is not intended for children under 13 and Valve will not knowingly collect personal information from children under the age of 13.
A. Contracting Party
For any interaction with Steam your contractual relationship is with Valve. Except as otherwise indicated at the time of the transaction (such as in the case of purchases from another Subscriber in a Subscription Marketplace), any transactions for Subscriptions (as defined below) you make on Steam are being made from Valve.
B. Subscriptions; Content and Services
As a Subscriber you may obtain access to certain services, software and content available to Subscribers. The Steam client software and any other software, content, and updates you download or access via Steam, including but not limited to Valve or third-party video games and in-game content, and any virtual items you trade, sell or purchase in a Steam Subscription Marketplace are referred to in this Agreement as “Content and Services”; the rights to access and/or use any Contents and Services accessible through Steam are referred to in this Agreement as "Subscriptions."
Each Subscription allows you to access particular Content and Services. Some Subscriptions may impose additional terms specific to that Subscription ("Subscription Terms") (for example, an end user license agreement specific to a particular game, or terms of use specific to a particular product or feature of Steam). Also, additional terms (for example, payment and billing procedures) may be posted on http://www.steampowered.com/ or within the Steam service ("Rules of Use"). Rules of Use include the Steam Online Conduct Rules http://steampowered.com/index.... and the Steam Refund Policy http://store.steampowered.com/.... The Subscription Terms, the Rules of Use, and the Valve Privacy Policy (which can be found at http://www.valvesoftware.com/p...) are binding on you once you indicate your acceptance of them or of this Agreement, or otherwise become bound by them as described in Section
SSDs have a bunch of tiny wires. When you push electricity through wires they heat up, they're not perfect super-conductors. If you heat it up too much, it will of course burn, but they avoid that. Still, heating up a wire over and over will have some wear and tear. For big thick power-lines in houses, this doesn't have too much effect, but for tiny precision electronics, it builds up. And SSD's have a LOT of those wires with a little bit of manufacturing variance which makes some parts fail sooner.
They burn out the same way lightbulbs burn out. They don't have moving parts, right?
If they make a decent interface from a phone to a real monitor, (and they get their butts out of their heads when it comes to bluetooth support for mouse and keyboard) then most people's use-case for owning anything other than a phone really diminishes.
I don't know if it has to be wired. Mirroring the screen via chromecast didn't work so well for me, but maybe they could get it working. There's a few niche products out there that have a dock, but they didn't catch on.
I could see a world where we all just walk around with our main computer on our body all the time. Instead of a work computer or a rig at home. A workstation would just be a chair, monitor, keyboard/mouse, wifi, and some place to plug in. And of course a bitchin' VR supporting super-computer next to a cybernetic psychic dolphin.
We have that. And we've had that for a long time. Modern hard encryption is unbreakable. A $35 computer with $1 of electricity can make something all of the NSA's and Google's servers and god's own memory pool would still take thousands of years to brute-force.
The debate is if using it should be illegal.
If the use of hard encryption was illegal and they compelled companies and citizens to use inferior or broken encryption, they could get into and snoop on whomever they wish. Possibly requiring a warrant, depending how they do it. But if they made it illegal, they could arrest anyone that they caught using hard encryption. It's the stuff of nightmares and campy sci-fi from the 70's.
But there's a deeper thing here, which is: Technology doesn't solve humanity's problems. It was always naive to think so. Technology is an enabler, but humanity has to deal with humanity's problems. I think we're both over-reliant on technology as a way to solve things and probably, at this moment, over-indexing on technology as a source of all problems, too.
It won't solve all our problems. But we've made the blind see, the lame walk, fed the world, cured a lot of cancer, fought off a lot of diseases, empowered billions, and unless we have some sort of additional advances things look pretty damn grim when it comes to global warming.
You are working on self-driving cars. "1.3 million people die in road crashes each year. An additional 20-50 million are injured or disabled". This is a problem. You are working on solving it. That justifies the investment, all the work, and your fucking stock price.
You want non-discriminatory hiring practices that truly adhere to being an equal opportunity employer? Automate it. Remove discriminatory factors and strive for a meritocracy that's blind to race, religion, or creed. If the process for raising complaints is painful, fix it. Streamlining and automating HR sounds like something you could sell.
You are a technology company. Act like it.
Technology doesn't solve ALL of humanity's problems. Yet.
Yes and no. Some near term death will be the predictable outcome.
You. Fucking. Monster.
How has interventionist policy worked out in Syria, Libya, Yemen, etc...
It worked out really shitty in Iraq. We got a lot of people killed, made a power vacuum, spawned ISIS, and through all that (further) destabilized and threw Syria into (more) turmoil. Syria is a proxy war where the CIA is supporting rebels while Russia supports Assad. It's a real shit-show. Hundreds of thousands dead, ~5 million refugees, threat of international war. But that doesn't mean we should stop all food shipments to China. Really, the come-back "But what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?" is very apt here. The state of Syria is irrelevant. The CIA are being dicks on one side of the map, so it's time to starve the other side and cut off a major source of our own income? Monstrous.
We had no intervention in Libya. We let the Arab Spring happen. That's not on us. We can neither claim victory nor fault for that.
We are currently turning a blind eye to Yemen because we sell weapons to the Saudis. There is no intervention. You are delusional on multiple fronts.
we can harm the plan[e]t to or not; that really is the choice.
The absolute worst sort of eco-terrorist monster that's advocating for the death of millions.
If you live in a city you're hypocrite. If you grow your own food (First off, wow, that's actually pretty amazing in today's America, but) you're operating under a laughably inefficient agricultural system that cannot scale to feed the world. If you grow economically viably food-source you are a hypocrite as you are obviously financially dependent on shipping food around. You have no logical basis for this stance. It's impossible to be internally consistent without being a monster. You just want to see foreigners die. You want to "save the planet" by killing off the masses. You are a bigger and more immediate problem than the loss of biodiversity.
Only if you take his statement at face value and ignore the massive trade war where "Respect our IP laws" is a major demand of the USA. So.... woo. We've successfully extracted lip-service from the leader of China. Talk is cheap.
Did anyone check the brand-name of the Chinese official making this vow? Was it Xi or was it a knock-off ><i brand?
Just like fiat money, they exist to the extent that people believe in them. And most people believe in intellectual property. Authors and artists and clinical-trail-paying medical researchers deserve to get paid.
But US copyright and IP law is pretty fucking atrocious.
"We just want to extend the functionality of the native Linux. Make it better and easier to use! Of course it has to go through our SysInternals, as that's how we package that functionality. Trust us, once there's a group of people using these features, we PROMISE that we'll continue maintaining sysInternals and that everyone who is locked in and dedicated to using these features won't be bit in the ass. It's open source! If they don't like where it goes they can just switch away or fork it. We've got our top men working to make sure it's not a convoluted clusterfuck that's impossible for others to pick up. Top Men. And if they do try to fork it and develop it on their own, we certainly won't yank the chain with backwards-incompatible changes to the official branch."
Oh look at this fancy dandy drinking the name-brandy dirt. Us working plebs have to drink the free no-name garbage-brand dirt what our employers buy in bulk.
No, it wasn't necessary, but changing it also didn't warrant adopting and supporting racism, sexism, and bigotry, or linking to their site which also has a manifesto against meritocracy. That people are defending her, supporting her witch-hunting tool, and not simply choosing an alternative or making up their own is appalling.
To support this sort of offensiveness and hostility towards whole demographics in the name of.... stopping Linus from being hostile towards individuals who screwed up? That's hypocritical and delusional to an extreme.
Specifically, all the zero-day exploits in the "arsenal" of the CIA and friends are simply bugs that they could fix to make the USA more secure. They could inform the maintainers, make patches, and close security holes. But they don't, as seen with the vault7 leak. Instead they hoard these things in a hope to use them offensively against others. Who knows who else has found the exact same security holes. It's the part where they choose not to make citizens more secure in exchange for... well... things like this. That's what gets me. Not only are they choosing offense over defense, but every bit of offense they develop is by definition a failure in defense.
That's the motte. Sounds nice doesn't it? Very defensible. Who could possible be against that?
The bailey, " We must make room for people who are not like us to enter our field and succeed there. This means not only inviting them in, but making sure that they are supported and empowered." is something else entirely and goes WAY beyond treating everyone equal or having basic human respect.
And elsewhere: "We don't live in an equitable society, so justice must come first. That's the reason that certain groups are extended additional protections and others are not. "
Read that again. She is arguing specifically AGAINST equality and she wants special treatment DESPITE not having the merit to justify it.
Farewell and thank you for a job well done. It's important to remember to count all the victories and remind ourselves at how good it can be. Who would have thought that astronomy would be a hot field? But with better eyes and better thoughts we can peer deeper into the inky blank and make better sense of what we're seeing. Human advancement is possible. The stars are ever closer. Thank you Kepler.
Anything that affects merit is factored into a (well run) meritocracy and that includes human factors. You've set up a false dichotomy and you're on the war-path for no reason. There are plenty of places striving and failing at being meritocratic, but I don't think that's enough reason to simply give up on rewarding people who do a good job.
Linux was held as the last bastion of the assholeocracy
Most of corporate America, Sous chefs, Stock brokers, Most of the middle east, Marines, Construction sites, African warlords, Pretty much any work environment that fosters ambition, China. Did you know that China executes thousands of people every year. They account for more than half the executions in the world. Have you read anything about their social credit score? It's essentially illegal to be a muslim in some places. Speaking of which, women can now drive in Saudi Arabia, that's a big win, but they still can't walk around a hijab. Or more importantly get jobs or an education and segregation is still a big thing. Russia is pretty much an open kleptocracy. When looking at all that.... you really thought that LINUX was "the last bastion of assholes"? You've earned your troll mod.
You need to get out more and observe the world rather than attacking one of the best examples of a meritocracy that humanity has to offer.
It's in a companies best interest to serve as many users as possible, it's in a government's interest to serve as few as possible and to require as many as possible to think like they do.
ha, that's cute. You've got to step away from the propaganda machine dude.
It's in the companies best interest to sign up as many users as possible and then deliver as little service as possible. They get paid and don't do much actual work. "Bu bu bu but then I'll take my business elsewhere and the free market competition will reign supreme". Yeah, sure. And I'd agree. If there was a free market. But there's not. The top telecoms refuse to compete with each other and very blatantly carved up the nation into territories. The only ISPs that compete would be... what? Google fiber trying to come to town? But the telecoms bottom out the price in any city they come to, sue them for rights to touch city property poles, and are generally anti-competitive. If Mr. Moneybags Google can't overcome the barrier to entry for running a competitive ISP, THERE IS NO FREE MARKET. And in that scenario, businesses are just about as bad as any government boogeyman you can imagine.
On the flip side, to wear an entirely different shade of propaganda glasses, it's in the government's interests to serve as many as possible to the best of their ability for as cheap as possible so that the voting constituents are as happy as can be so that the heads of government get re-elected. And that's bullshit. It's also propaganda, but it makes about as much sense as yours. The less propaganish version: If enough people are pissed at the municipal wifi, it'll be a political issue with the mayor. Which is arguably MORE control than they have under monopoly shitsville.
Now if you say "if things were SO bad under the telcoms, someone would step up and offer competition"... that's EXACTLY what the call for municipal wifi is about. It's SO BAD we'd even prefer government run services.
And the history of the government rolling back amendment granted rights
My Goodness! That would be comparable to business violating terms of a contract! Which they NEVER do... But wait a second, where has the government rolled on amendments? Are you talking about the fact that there are hate-speech laws and you can't go buy a nuke at 7/11? Well kiddo, companies ALSO bend the rules wherever possible if they can squeeze a buck out of it.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think the USA can take any credit or blame for the Arab Spring. That was a big domino effect with Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen, Syria, and Bahrain.
I don't think Libya would be any better. Syria would probably still have a civil war, but would be better without the CIA supporting the rebels and that power vaccum allowing the rise of ISIS. Iraq would be WAAAAAY better off. Even under Sadam, as crazy as that fucker was. Maybe the Kurds in Iraq are better off for our intervention, but that's a big maybe. It's not millions in dead Iraqi civilians... it's only like.... 300,000.... *cough*.
Overall though, yeah, pissing away blood and money in the desert didn't even make sense when they had a lot of oil we wanted. Now that we don't want it as bad, it all looks really pointless. Imagine if we had taken all the money and manpower we spent on the Iraq war and put it developing our own oil reserves and making alternatives to oil.
Arrays of floors start at ZERO!
I have reasonable confidence when I buy on Steam that I will continue owning that game, at least to the extent you can own a digital object.
And that extent is near-zero. Steam games come with DRM. You don't own the things you bought. Valve allows you to do some things because they feel like it. They have a track record and they're flush with cash at the moment, but if that changed they could simply pull the plug and walk away. They could also selectively screw over individuals. If your account is banned you cannot log in, download, or play any of your games. As a policy, they will not tell you why your account is banned, simply stating you violated their terms of service.
What are their terms of service?
This Steam Subscriber Agreement ("Agreement") is a legal document that explains your rights and obligations as a subscriber of Steam from Valve Corporation, a corporation under the laws of the State of Washington, with its registered office at 10400 NE 4th St., Bellevue, WA 98004, United States, registered with the Washington Secretary of State under number 60 22 90 773, VAT ID No. EU 8260 00671 (“Valve”). Please read it carefully.
SECTION 11 CONTAINS A BINDING ARBITRATION AGREEMENT AND CLASS ACTION WAIVER. IT MAY AFFECT YOUR LEGAL RIGHTS. PLEASE READ IT. IF YOU ARE A CUSTOMER WITH RESIDENCE IN THE EUROPEAN UNION, SECTION 11 DOES NOT APPLY TO YOU.
1. REGISTRATION AS A SUBSCRIBER; APPLICATION OF TERMS TO YOU; YOUR ACCOUNT
Steam is an online service offered by Valve.
You become a subscriber of Steam ("Subscriber") by completing the registration of a Steam user account. This Agreement takes effect as soon as you indicate your acceptance of these terms. You may not become a subscriber if you are under the age of 13. Steam is not intended for children under 13 and Valve will not knowingly collect personal information from children under the age of 13.
A. Contracting Party
For any interaction with Steam your contractual relationship is with Valve. Except as otherwise indicated at the time of the transaction (such as in the case of purchases from another Subscriber in a Subscription Marketplace), any transactions for Subscriptions (as defined below) you make on Steam are being made from Valve.
B. Subscriptions; Content and Services
As a Subscriber you may obtain access to certain services, software and content available to Subscribers. The Steam client software and any other software, content, and updates you download or access via Steam, including but not limited to Valve or third-party video games and in-game content, and any virtual items you trade, sell or purchase in a Steam Subscription Marketplace are referred to in this Agreement as “Content and Services”; the rights to access and/or use any Contents and Services accessible through Steam are referred to in this Agreement as "Subscriptions."
Each Subscription allows you to access particular Content and Services. Some Subscriptions may impose additional terms specific to that Subscription ("Subscription Terms") (for example, an end user license agreement specific to a particular game, or terms of use specific to a particular product or feature of Steam). Also, additional terms (for example, payment and billing procedures) may be posted on http://www.steampowered.com/ or within the Steam service ("Rules of Use"). Rules of Use include the Steam Online Conduct Rules http://steampowered.com/index.... and the Steam Refund Policy http://store.steampowered.com/.... The Subscription Terms, the Rules of Use, and the Valve Privacy Policy (which can be found at http://www.valvesoftware.com/p...) are binding on you once you indicate your acceptance of them or of this Agreement, or otherwise become bound by them as described in Section
Ok, what's a simple word for the traces going into and out of transistors?
Light bulbs are solid state, riiiiiiight?
SSDs have a bunch of tiny wires. When you push electricity through wires they heat up, they're not perfect super-conductors. If you heat it up too much, it will of course burn, but they avoid that. Still, heating up a wire over and over will have some wear and tear. For big thick power-lines in houses, this doesn't have too much effect, but for tiny precision electronics, it builds up. And SSD's have a LOT of those wires with a little bit of manufacturing variance which makes some parts fail sooner.
They burn out the same way lightbulbs burn out. They don't have moving parts, right?
If they make a decent interface from a phone to a real monitor, (and they get their butts out of their heads when it comes to bluetooth support for mouse and keyboard) then most people's use-case for owning anything other than a phone really diminishes.
I don't know if it has to be wired. Mirroring the screen via chromecast didn't work so well for me, but maybe they could get it working. There's a few niche products out there that have a dock, but they didn't catch on.
I could see a world where we all just walk around with our main computer on our body all the time. Instead of a work computer or a rig at home. A workstation would just be a chair, monitor, keyboard/mouse, wifi, and some place to plug in. And of course a bitchin' VR supporting super-computer next to a cybernetic psychic dolphin.
We have that. And we've had that for a long time. Modern hard encryption is unbreakable. A $35 computer with $1 of electricity can make something all of the NSA's and Google's servers and god's own memory pool would still take thousands of years to brute-force.
The debate is if using it should be illegal.
If the use of hard encryption was illegal and they compelled companies and citizens to use inferior or broken encryption, they could get into and snoop on whomever they wish. Possibly requiring a warrant, depending how they do it. But if they made it illegal, they could arrest anyone that they caught using hard encryption. It's the stuff of nightmares and campy sci-fi from the 70's.
Augmented reality. Now available in the The Joo Janta 200 Super-Chromatic Peril Sensitive Sunglasses!
They'll get paid to show a rival's ad when people scowl at the billboard in some sort of false-flag operation.
This is one of the more cyberpunk tidbits I've heard within the last 3 months, but some tattoos were really throwing off facial recognition. And they found that you could paint your face and effectively fool the system into no longer recognizing your face as a face. So all that really weird face makeup you see in Blade-runner, cyberpunk2020, and Shadowrun could retro-actively be argued as a means to avoid being tagged and identified.
Advertisers. Marketing. Sales.
But there's a deeper thing here, which is: Technology doesn't solve humanity's problems. It was always naive to think so. Technology is an enabler, but humanity has to deal with humanity's problems. I think we're both over-reliant on technology as a way to solve things and probably, at this moment, over-indexing on technology as a source of all problems, too.
It won't solve all our problems. But we've made the blind see, the lame walk, fed the world, cured a lot of cancer, fought off a lot of diseases, empowered billions, and unless we have some sort of additional advances things look pretty damn grim when it comes to global warming.
You are working on self-driving cars. "1.3 million people die in road crashes each year. An additional 20-50 million are injured or disabled". This is a problem. You are working on solving it. That justifies the investment, all the work, and your fucking stock price.
You want non-discriminatory hiring practices that truly adhere to being an equal opportunity employer? Automate it. Remove discriminatory factors and strive for a meritocracy that's blind to race, religion, or creed. If the process for raising complaints is painful, fix it. Streamlining and automating HR sounds like something you could sell.
You are a technology company. Act like it.
Technology doesn't solve ALL of humanity's problems. Yet.
Yes and no. Some near term death will be the predictable outcome.
You. Fucking. Monster.
How has interventionist policy worked out in Syria, Libya, Yemen, etc...
It worked out really shitty in Iraq. We got a lot of people killed, made a power vacuum, spawned ISIS, and through all that (further) destabilized and threw Syria into (more) turmoil. Syria is a proxy war where the CIA is supporting rebels while Russia supports Assad. It's a real shit-show. Hundreds of thousands dead, ~5 million refugees, threat of international war. But that doesn't mean we should stop all food shipments to China. Really, the come-back "But what does that have to do with the price of tea in China?" is very apt here. The state of Syria is irrelevant. The CIA are being dicks on one side of the map, so it's time to starve the other side and cut off a major source of our own income? Monstrous.
We had no intervention in Libya. We let the Arab Spring happen. That's not on us. We can neither claim victory nor fault for that.
We are currently turning a blind eye to Yemen because we sell weapons to the Saudis. There is no intervention. You are delusional on multiple fronts.
we can harm the plan[e]t to or not; that really is the choice.
The absolute worst sort of eco-terrorist monster that's advocating for the death of millions.
If you live in a city you're hypocrite. If you grow your own food (First off, wow, that's actually pretty amazing in today's America, but) you're operating under a laughably inefficient agricultural system that cannot scale to feed the world. If you grow economically viably food-source you are a hypocrite as you are obviously financially dependent on shipping food around. You have no logical basis for this stance. It's impossible to be internally consistent without being a monster. You just want to see foreigners die. You want to "save the planet" by killing off the masses. You are a bigger and more immediate problem than the loss of biodiversity.
Only if you take his statement at face value and ignore the massive trade war where "Respect our IP laws" is a major demand of the USA. So.... woo. We've successfully extracted lip-service from the leader of China. Talk is cheap.
Did anyone check the brand-name of the Chinese official making this vow? Was it Xi or was it a knock-off ><i brand?
By that logic, do laws even exist?
Just like fiat money, they exist to the extent that people believe in them. And most people believe in intellectual property. Authors and artists and clinical-trail-paying medical researchers deserve to get paid.
But US copyright and IP law is pretty fucking atrocious.
"We just want to extend the functionality of the native Linux. Make it better and easier to use! Of course it has to go through our SysInternals, as that's how we package that functionality. Trust us, once there's a group of people using these features, we PROMISE that we'll continue maintaining sysInternals and that everyone who is locked in and dedicated to using these features won't be bit in the ass. It's open source! If they don't like where it goes they can just switch away or fork it. We've got our top men working to make sure it's not a convoluted clusterfuck that's impossible for others to pick up. Top Men. And if they do try to fork it and develop it on their own, we certainly won't yank the chain with backwards-incompatible changes to the official branch."
So... looots of milk and chocolate. Hell, just throw a snickers bar in there. Whipping on top if possible.
Oh look at this fancy dandy drinking the name-brandy dirt. Us working plebs have to drink the free no-name garbage-brand dirt what our employers buy in bulk.
At least it's not that burnt starbucks crap.
No, it wasn't necessary, but changing it also didn't warrant adopting and supporting racism, sexism, and bigotry, or linking to their site which also has a manifesto against meritocracy. That people are defending her, supporting her witch-hunting tool, and not simply choosing an alternative or making up their own is appalling.
To support this sort of offensiveness and hostility towards whole demographics in the name of.... stopping Linus from being hostile towards individuals who screwed up? That's hypocritical and delusional to an extreme.
Specifically, all the zero-day exploits in the "arsenal" of the CIA and friends are simply bugs that they could fix to make the USA more secure. They could inform the maintainers, make patches, and close security holes. But they don't, as seen with the vault7 leak. Instead they hoard these things in a hope to use them offensively against others. Who knows who else has found the exact same security holes. It's the part where they choose not to make citizens more secure in exchange for... well... things like this. That's what gets me. Not only are they choosing offense over defense, but every bit of offense they develop is by definition a failure in defense.
That's the motte. Sounds nice doesn't it? Very defensible. Who could possible be against that?
The bailey, " We must make room for people who are not like us to enter our field and succeed there. This means not only inviting them in, but making sure that they are supported and empowered." is something else entirely and goes WAY beyond treating everyone equal or having basic human respect.
And elsewhere: "We don't live in an equitable society, so justice must come first. That's the reason that certain groups are extended additional protections and others are not. "
Read that again. She is arguing specifically AGAINST equality and she wants special treatment DESPITE not having the merit to justify it.
Farewell and thank you for a job well done. It's important to remember to count all the victories and remind ourselves at how good it can be. Who would have thought that astronomy would be a hot field? But with better eyes and better thoughts we can peer deeper into the inky blank and make better sense of what we're seeing. Human advancement is possible. The stars are ever closer. Thank you Kepler.
Anything that affects merit is factored into a (well run) meritocracy and that includes human factors. You've set up a false dichotomy and you're on the war-path for no reason. There are plenty of places striving and failing at being meritocratic, but I don't think that's enough reason to simply give up on rewarding people who do a good job.
Linux was held as the last bastion of the assholeocracy
Most of corporate America, Sous chefs, Stock brokers, Most of the middle east, Marines, Construction sites, African warlords, Pretty much any work environment that fosters ambition, China. Did you know that China executes thousands of people every year. They account for more than half the executions in the world. Have you read anything about their social credit score? It's essentially illegal to be a muslim in some places. Speaking of which, women can now drive in Saudi Arabia, that's a big win, but they still can't walk around a hijab. Or more importantly get jobs or an education and segregation is still a big thing. Russia is pretty much an open kleptocracy. When looking at all that.... you really thought that LINUX was "the last bastion of assholes"? You've earned your troll mod.
You need to get out more and observe the world rather than attacking one of the best examples of a meritocracy that humanity has to offer.
And really, this is what you're defending. This is what you want replace all those "assholes" with. Racism, sexism, hatred, and bigotry. Just... come on.... How can you read through that and not feel disgust?
Whatever mental gymnastics you feel you need to justify advocating for genocide. You do you.
It's in a companies best interest to serve as many users as possible, it's in a government's interest to serve as few as possible and to require as many as possible to think like they do.
ha, that's cute. You've got to step away from the propaganda machine dude.
It's in the companies best interest to sign up as many users as possible and then deliver as little service as possible. They get paid and don't do much actual work. "Bu bu bu but then I'll take my business elsewhere and the free market competition will reign supreme". Yeah, sure. And I'd agree. If there was a free market. But there's not. The top telecoms refuse to compete with each other and very blatantly carved up the nation into territories. The only ISPs that compete would be... what? Google fiber trying to come to town? But the telecoms bottom out the price in any city they come to, sue them for rights to touch city property poles, and are generally anti-competitive. If Mr. Moneybags Google can't overcome the barrier to entry for running a competitive ISP, THERE IS NO FREE MARKET. And in that scenario, businesses are just about as bad as any government boogeyman you can imagine.
On the flip side, to wear an entirely different shade of propaganda glasses, it's in the government's interests to serve as many as possible to the best of their ability for as cheap as possible so that the voting constituents are as happy as can be so that the heads of government get re-elected. And that's bullshit. It's also propaganda, but it makes about as much sense as yours. The less propaganish version: If enough people are pissed at the municipal wifi, it'll be a political issue with the mayor. Which is arguably MORE control than they have under monopoly shitsville.
Now if you say "if things were SO bad under the telcoms, someone would step up and offer competition"... that's EXACTLY what the call for municipal wifi is about. It's SO BAD we'd even prefer government run services.
And the history of the government rolling back amendment granted rights
My Goodness! That would be comparable to business violating terms of a contract! Which they NEVER do... But wait a second, where has the government rolled on amendments? Are you talking about the fact that there are hate-speech laws and you can't go buy a nuke at 7/11? Well kiddo, companies ALSO bend the rules wherever possible if they can squeeze a buck out of it.