I used to think "incel" was a made-up controversy of mainstream outlets picking up on some bizarre, niche forum of a very wide, global internet, but that this essay get made makes we reconsider that conclusion.
Free Software is important, and promoting its use in the fundamental components of software architecture and systems design is important, as is having its principles applied to critical aspects of modern communication -- arguably now including social network systems.
Dating sites are not a critical aspect of modern communications. This essay comes across as someone who thinks the reason they don't get hits on Tinder is because there's a binary blob somewhere, when chances are higher it's because the blob is you.
FSF has more important things to work on and much lower hanging fruit than this.
Can you be forced to open up a physical safe? (Generally not, but the police can call a safe-cracker to get in as long as they have a warrant.)
But how about a booby-trapped safe? Or one that incinerates the paper contents if a lock is forced?
I think those are the types of comparisons that should be made when doing legal analysis on smartphone / computer storage devices (again, assuming the police have a judicially-approved warrant).
The "it's encrypted so the bits don't philosophically exist" argument doesn't pass muster, sorry. You could say that about any stream of data, mathematically speaking. Or even programmatically speaking. ("This spreadsheet containing my drug cartel's finances is only such if you interpret the magnetic data in a certain way!") Unless the Feds are calculating hash collisions on you to plant evidence, it should be assumed that encrypted data is not data nullis until decrypted.
It's a free service. Just don't use it. What the fuck is wrong with people? If it's not the government trying to control us it's corporations or it's the "public opinion". How about you just go about doing your own thing and come up with something better? Ohh wait the entire world has plenty of alternatives!
In my experience, it's only those who don't use it (or ultra-Libertarians) that can say this with a straight face. If you're "always online" and have a normal number of friends, you should be more than aware of FB's deep tendrils into American life. If you don't have FB and don't use it, great. You're definitely in the minority (among those with regular internet access).
This is like someone in 1991 saying they "don't have a TV" and implying that the FCC has no need to regulate.
For any breakup of Google or Facebook, the FTC should focus on splitting all the ad networks back out, and enforcing data escrow and consumer protection laws (a la consumer research companies like credit bureaus are now). DOJ can focus on un-doing the Instagram/WhatsApp mergers, etc. (For Google, FTC might be able to split Chrome and Chrome OS from the site, and Play Services from Android.
Next up: Amazon and its vertical commerce infrastructure monopoly.
Hopefully, after that point, the public cloud companies will agree to divestiture of those into non-vendor-lock-in utils. Maybe.
Funny you somehow think you deserve an add-free browsing experience... you don't
No one "deserves" an ad-free browsing experience, but if someone wants to create a browser that blocks images, or engages in other commercial interactions, that should be their business. And the market should decide that........ except that Google now controls the browser, and also controls the ads (and controls a bunch of other things). And monopolies using their monopoly power in one market (browsers, or Android Chrome must-carry agreements, etc) to enrich them in another market, that's basically the definition of anti-competitive behavior.
If the DOJ (no particular friend of Big Tech in this Administration) wanted an excuse to probe Google with the FTC for some anti-trust discovery, this would be a quick ticket.
The world's dominant browser requiring that the world's dominant ad network always be displayed would be a wonderful reason to force a divestiture of one or the other (or, preferably, split everything up into components).
Now, if you want to have the conveniences of modern life along with no Amazon, that's another story. Note that she'd have the same sort of difficulties if she tried to get completely away from the electric company....
Well, that's kind of the point. Electric companies started out private, and eventually became highly regulated utilities. If Amazon is already this impossible to realistically avoid, that implies that we should move to regulating it as such.
More likely, this would mean splitting it up into its component parts , taking good hard look at doing it to their competitors (read: Google), and then regulating the bits most likely to get into trouble that aren't already regulated: AWS springs to mind.
Sometimes I feel like the generation in power in both Silicon Valley and Washington, DC have forgotten (or never watched enough) dystopian 1970s and early '80s sci-fi.
If there was ever a case for actual use of the x32 ABI, performance and memory restricted devices with 64bit processors in a controlled ecosystem would definitely be it.
Most people aren't going to be needing 64bits for memory on an Android device any time soon -- rather than letting it be pulled from the kernel, the why not push for performance and efficiency in the areas where it still actually counts?
The arguments that walls and fences shouldn't be built because there are very expensive ways to breach them is rather ludicrous.
The tunnels are much cheaper than the wall. If you can defeat a security measure with a much cheaper tool, then it's worthless.
That makes no sense, and wouldn't even be relevant if it was true. If you have to spend a month of effort and a lot of money building into a capital resource like an underground tunnel as opposed to the trivial effort of walking 100 meters because there's no barrier, that's a significant cost balance in favor of a deterrent.
They don't go to the mountains because they can stay on the flat land and build tunnels. The wall might keep out refugees, but it won't keep out drugs. Only legalization and treatment can fix the drug problem, no wall will do that. Everything else overwhelmingly goes the other direction across the border, like money or guns. Meanwhile our foreign policy and our drug policy both actively create refugees...
That's a pretty odd rebuttal. Tunnels exist, but they are major capital investments by cartels. They are also limited in area and can be detected by throwing tech at the areas where they occur. Walls are not impenetrable and aren't designed to be. They're designed to be deterrent, not defend against an army. With crossing reduced down significantly, CBP can focus their efforts on other issues, such as tracking down tunnels and tracking cartel members back to the point of origin.
The arguments that walls and fences shouldn't be built because there are very expensive ways to breach them is rather ludicrous. Reducing traffic and making it more difficult is *why* you build one.
Umm, I live in California, NONE of those cities were ever designed with cars in mind, as they were fucking established almost 100 years before the invention of the ICE.
Depends how much you want to read into "designed".
The current downtown core of San Diego (to say nothing of Old Town) was laid out before cars, correct. But the majority of the residential and commercial areas in the City of San Diego proper developed after cars were clearly being introduced, with the vast majority of it coming after World War II, by which time CA was well on its way to cars being an expected part of daily life.
Arguably, the single most important factor in San Diego's layout is geography (canyons and hills), but if there was any sort of design assumption that could be said to be applied to San Diego as a whole, it's that of a massive, suburban-oriented small town. Hardly any of the current SD neighborhoods, and few of the other cities in the county, have the density of pre-ICE layouts beyond their downtown cores (which are themselves much smaller than the cores of cities and towns on the east coast).
I'm assuming there's a RP Zero in there and its a single board computer that runs linux. Strange that it crashes though, it might need a heatsink and some cooling vents.
Yo dawg, I heard you like computing, so I hooked a computer up to your computer.
Los Angeles San Diego (my home town) Most of California outside of the super-high-density downtown cores
Hell, I *live* in Downtown San Diego (which is as dense as SD gets) and a) cars are important (though parking is now restricted on 5th Ave during Friday and Saturday nights to make room for Uber pickups), and b) scooters are everywhere and are universally despised despite being pretty fun to ride.
San Diego is an urban area where walls EXIST. Yes, they work there - at slowing people slightly - because THEY ARE MANNED AND PATROLLED NEARBY. That is not happening along the entire border, nor proposed.
The 2006 study on GK's effectiveness noted a 76% drop from 1992-2004 in San Diego County, so I'd put it at more than "slowing people slightly". It's a fair argument that some/many of the would-be crossers tried crossing more East instead (not just into Imperial County, but much further east... past Yuma in AZ, NM, and TX). One doesn't need to build an entire wall everywhere and Trump's proposal doesn't do that. CBP knows where walls are needed and where they're not, and they're fully capable of allocating resources accordingly.
The technology in the budget requests goes to a lot of IR, drones, and the like... Exactly the kind of smart allocation of resources everyone on all sides appears to claim to want.
The most bizarre thing about this is that all of this technical funding (well, at least a lot of it) is already in the request that the Trump Administration is making. Border walls do work (ask any resident of San Diego), and technology can be used in places where the border fencing is not necessary. (As an example, the border wall ends about 20 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean here as the urbanized portion of Tijuana ends and the mountain terrain on both sides provides a good deterrent.)
Here's more detail on the request from a few days ago. Really not sure what Pelosi is yelling about at this point, since a comprehensive mixed-focus border strengthening is ostensibly what both sides want:
Washington — As negotiations between lawmakers to reopen the government continue to be locked in a stalemate, the White House is standing firm on its $5.7 billion demand to construct a "steel barrier" along the U.S.-Mexico frontier. It is also asking for billions of dollars in additional funding for immigration judges and border security.
The administration's negotiating team, led by Vice President Mike Pence, Department of Homeland Security (DHS) secretary Kirstjen Nielsen and White House senior adviser Jared Kushner, have provided Democrats with an outline of their demands for a deal to end the partial shutdown.
In addition to President Trump's unwavering $5.7 billion request for border barrier funds, the White House is demanding $563 million for 75 additional immigration judges and support staff, $211 million to hire 750 additional Border Patrol officers, $571 million to deploy 2,000 law enforcement personnel, $4.2 billion for 52,000 detention beds, $675 million for inspection technology at ports of entry and $800 million for "humanitarian needs," which include funds for medical support, transportation, supplies and temporary facilities along the southwestern border.
In contrast to the rest of the state, San Diego still officially has a realistic view on the border situation,
What is a realistic view on the border situation?
That Operation Gatekeeper in the '90s was a success, and that barriers/fences/walls/whatever function as a deterrent to illegal crossing, which is not something that should be encouraged.
San Ysidro is the busiest land border crossing in the Western Hemisphere. Any native San Diegan is well aware of border issues surrounding illegal immigration. (I used to attend classes in Otay Mesa, about 1/4 mile from the mostly-commercial crossing there.)
The contrast with the official view of the State of California now ("sanctuary state!" "unlimited resources!" "walls are immoral and don't work") is absolutely stunning. We have a wall now. It works. Whether we should build more is a policy question, but anyone who makes a blanket statement about how horrible or ineffective walls are... does not live in San Diego or is under the age of 25.
This has been part of the kerfuffle between one of the TV stations here (the only non-network affiliate with a local news team) and CNN, which blew up the other day. Criticism or accusations of it being "right wing" miss the point that *all* of the local reporting by TV stations has been a) pretty level-handed, and b) in agreement that borders are A Thing and that having border fencing helps. It's self-evident for those here, but not to the national media that came in when the caravan arrived and San Ysidro was closed briefly.
Native Californian (San Diegan) here and I agree with you about the tipping point.
There are a whole host of factors going on here. I don't think it's irreversable (the pendulum always swings back), but we're reaching a tipping point of absurdity no doubt. In no particular order, some of the causes might be:
* Silicon Valley tax revenue flooding the state budget, allowing it to undertake expensive projects w/o much thought * Progressive Millennials sorting themselves out of the rest of the country and wanting to stay in urban areas more than usual * Gen-X and Boomers moving out or cashing out their homes to retire elsewhere where money lasts longer * Trump fatigue lowering voter enthusiasm among moderate-conservative Californians outside the central valley * Trump anger increasing turnout among young progressives, turning the blue parts of CA really, really, really blue
San Diego in particular is experiencing this. Although coastal CA from the Bay to LA has been pretty progressive for a long time, San Diego has traditionally been comparatively pretty moderate. A strong military presence and a very laid back attitude toward life has kept a moderate status quo in effect for a very long time. Compared to the rest of CA cities, crime is low, the pace is relaxed, commerce is good as a tourist town, and we're not directly connected to the urban morass of Greater Los Angeles, being separated from OC by 20 miles of Camp Pendleton and from the rest of the country by deserts, forests, and mountains. Our County Board of Supervisors went through about 15 years were all 5 incumbents kept getting reelected not because of advantage, but because everything was just going pretty well.
That's changed just recently in 2016 and now much more so in 2018. Suddenly the city council is controlled by a veto-proof majority of 6/9 Democrats, and the regional planning council (SANDAG) was re-constituted after an accounting scandal to give the City of San Diego almost veto control over the other cities in the county when it comes to long term transit planning and the like.
The result has been a swath of relatively left-wing movements that have left a lot of longer-term San Diegans slightly bewildered. Banning of styrofoam and straws; a completely laughable goal of having 20% of all commute traffic done by bike by ~2025 (which is insane -- San Diego is incredibly hilly without many flat biking routes) has caused the council to convert car lanes to bike lanes in a "build it and they will come" notion; and a few other notably questionable decisions have ensued.
In contrast to the rest of the state, San Diego still officially has a realistic view on the border situation, but it may just be a matter of time until the council adopts an attitude more in line with the "sanctuary" position. I think *THAT* might be the last straw and cause a push back from the "silent majority" of San Diegans who would prefer the more moderate policies status quo ante, but it'll be hard to tell until then.
What I can say right now is that a lot of California isn't as blue as the noisiest folks, and I'm hoping the tipping point into absurdity results in a reaction among the residents who think the state has gone too far, regardless of their views on the rest of national politics.
Everyone's going off about foldable/rollable phones. Aside from the fact that that should prevent some types of crush/bend damage (sitting down with your phone in your back pocket at a weird angle), I'm not sure how much value is there.
OTOH, I do feel like LG is really underrated when it comes to phones generally. Samsung gets all the limelight (so much so that I've had to explain/clarify to a few folks that my Android phone is the same as their "Samsung" when it comes to being an alternative to Apple), but LG really does make good hardware. I've been a user of theirs since the original LG "The V", up through the EnV, the Voyager, and into the G2/G3/G5 and now V20.
Although Apple has finally caught up (and although the "killer app" of Snapchat is still horrible on Droid), LG's camera quality is absolutely amazing, especially in low light conditions. If you take a lot of difficult shots or are in dark environments, they've always provided a reliable, strong capture that I sometimes get comments on.
The other thing is that they're one of the few manufacturers still often pushing removable batteries. This gives you a lot more options for managing power consumption if you're taking trips or going through extended uses. It also makes direct extended batteries possible, which will be far superior to add on battery packs.
In short, if you're looking for an Android device and want options besides Samsung, take a look at the recent LG stuff. You might like it.
I'm either an old Millennial or young X-er depending on which metric you use, so I've spent time with Boomers, X, and Millennials and I have to say that most Millennials I've come across have been hard working. This goes against the stereotype, but they generally work at least as hard as anyone else. What they're less likely to do is put up with nonsense and meaningless ritual at work. They don't seem to feel as strongly about "paying dues" - they want to be paid for what they actually do.
Millennials who decided government work was glamorous based on their starry-eyed Obamania and HOPE posters in 2008, thinking they were going to be the next break-out data.gov rock star were going to be in for a rude awakening one way or another.
If they're replaced by Gen-X'ers who wouldn't mind the general stability and have a realistic outlook on both the world and the US government, I'm not really sure that's a bad thing. When people get disillusioned, someone has to pay for that phase change (usually in the form of training for turnover). Better that everyone has their eyes open at the beginning of the employment transaction.
Indeed it is. What we should do is strip out this boiler plate and put it in a separate system that can be in charge of doing the all that same boiler plate stuff.
I always find the dichotomy between people who are happy with copy paste boiler plate code in one place and then get super angry when things like docker or snap ship embedded libraries.
Dammit I'm making a point, don't use my own logic against me!
That would be fine if that's *ALL* it did. In fact, for "standard" daemons that have absolutely 0 changes to the init script template other than setting the program/exec and service name (and maybe permanent flags like a user to setuid to), it would be trivial to write a wrapper that did just that. I might even suggest that.
The problem is that systemd goes *way* beyond that.
Have you ever looked at some bash startup scripts? Its difficult to analyse compared to the declarative style. Bash scripts are a much more serious support issue compared to the simplicity of systemd declarative unit files.
Shell, and scripting generally in shell languages, is a key component of all *nix systems. Yes, it's possible to write horrible shell code in an init script, but that's largely the fault of the *author*. Most init scripts are simple; except for whatever custom logic is needed uniquely for this daemon, the rest is boilerplate.
Knowing the quality of 90% of the init scripts I've had to review, I'd be very surprised if there's any overall security advantage to init+the daemons systemd replaced compared with systemd itself.
You're conflating three different things: service management, init scripts, and the daemons themselves.
Daemon code quality is out of scope. A bug in the program should be fixed or handled upstream (unless you're a 2019 dev where no one fixes anything because they don't care if it crashes as long as someone spins up another one).
Init script quality varies *heavily* by distro/ecosystem. Debian/Ubuntu scripts, in my experience, are hot messes. Scripts written to be completely distro agnostic are usually pretty bad, because typically the writer doesn't understand the differences between distros. Init scripts for RH/Fedora/EL should be fine unless there's a bug in whatever custom logic is being written in there to handle the service's unique needs. The SysVInitscript template is trivial to cut and paste.
Service management is where the bugs come in (especially because it's naturally event based). But I'd rather those bugs be isolated in a relatively small location with specific tasks and without it running as PID1 when it doesn't have to. (See: supervise/tcpserver, xinetd, etc.)
Slashdot Mirror
I used to think "incel" was a made-up controversy of mainstream outlets picking up on some bizarre, niche forum of a very wide, global internet, but that this essay get made makes we reconsider that conclusion.
Free Software is important, and promoting its use in the fundamental components of software architecture and systems design is important, as is having its principles applied to critical aspects of modern communication -- arguably now including social network systems.
Dating sites are not a critical aspect of modern communications. This essay comes across as someone who thinks the reason they don't get hits on Tinder is because there's a binary blob somewhere, when chances are higher it's because the blob is you.
FSF has more important things to work on and much lower hanging fruit than this.
Unless you're trying to get from downtown Los Angeles to downtown San Francisco during rush hour!
You can get that flight for $100 on a good day through Southwest.
I'd think the bigger flaw might be that we'd need USB sticks made out of uranium. But that's just me.
Can you be forced to open up a physical safe? (Generally not, but the police can call a safe-cracker to get in as long as they have a warrant.)
But how about a booby-trapped safe? Or one that incinerates the paper contents if a lock is forced?
I think those are the types of comparisons that should be made when doing legal analysis on smartphone / computer storage devices (again, assuming the police have a judicially-approved warrant).
The "it's encrypted so the bits don't philosophically exist" argument doesn't pass muster, sorry. You could say that about any stream of data, mathematically speaking. Or even programmatically speaking. ("This spreadsheet containing my drug cartel's finances is only such if you interpret the magnetic data in a certain way!") Unless the Feds are calculating hash collisions on you to plant evidence, it should be assumed that encrypted data is not data nullis until decrypted.
It's a free service. Just don't use it. What the fuck is wrong with people? If it's not the government trying to control us it's corporations or it's the "public opinion". How about you just go about doing your own thing and come up with something better? Ohh wait the entire world has plenty of alternatives!
In my experience, it's only those who don't use it (or ultra-Libertarians) that can say this with a straight face. If you're "always online" and have a normal number of friends, you should be more than aware of FB's deep tendrils into American life. If you don't have FB and don't use it, great. You're definitely in the minority (among those with regular internet access).
This is like someone in 1991 saying they "don't have a TV" and implying that the FCC has no need to regulate.
For any breakup of Google or Facebook, the FTC should focus on splitting all the ad networks back out, and enforcing data escrow and consumer protection laws (a la consumer research companies like credit bureaus are now). DOJ can focus on un-doing the Instagram/WhatsApp mergers, etc. (For Google, FTC might be able to split Chrome and Chrome OS from the site, and Play Services from Android.
Next up: Amazon and its vertical commerce infrastructure monopoly.
Hopefully, after that point, the public cloud companies will agree to divestiture of those into non-vendor-lock-in utils. Maybe.
Funny you somehow think you deserve an add-free browsing experience... you don't
No one "deserves" an ad-free browsing experience, but if someone wants to create a browser that blocks images, or engages in other commercial interactions, that should be their business. And the market should decide that.... .... except that Google now controls the browser, and also controls the ads (and controls a bunch of other things). And monopolies using their monopoly power in one market (browsers, or Android Chrome must-carry agreements, etc) to enrich them in another market, that's basically the definition of anti-competitive behavior.
If the DOJ (no particular friend of Big Tech in this Administration) wanted an excuse to probe Google with the FTC for some anti-trust discovery, this would be a quick ticket.
The world's dominant browser requiring that the world's dominant ad network always be displayed would be a wonderful reason to force a divestiture of one or the other (or, preferably, split everything up into components).
Well, that's kind of the point. Electric companies started out private, and eventually became highly regulated utilities. If Amazon is already this impossible to realistically avoid, that implies that we should move to regulating it as such.
More likely, this would mean splitting it up into its component parts , taking good hard look at doing it to their competitors (read: Google), and then regulating the bits most likely to get into trouble that aren't already regulated: AWS springs to mind.
Sometimes I feel like the generation in power in both Silicon Valley and Washington, DC have forgotten (or never watched enough) dystopian 1970s and early '80s sci-fi.
If there was ever a case for actual use of the x32 ABI, performance and memory restricted devices with 64bit processors in a controlled ecosystem would definitely be it.
Most people aren't going to be needing 64bits for memory on an Android device any time soon -- rather than letting it be pulled from the kernel, the why not push for performance and efficiency in the areas where it still actually counts?
The arguments that walls and fences shouldn't be built because there are very expensive ways to breach them is rather ludicrous.
The tunnels are much cheaper than the wall. If you can defeat a security measure with a much cheaper tool, then it's worthless.
That makes no sense, and wouldn't even be relevant if it was true. If you have to spend a month of effort and a lot of money building into a capital resource like an underground tunnel as opposed to the trivial effort of walking 100 meters because there's no barrier, that's a significant cost balance in favor of a deterrent.
They don't go to the mountains because they can stay on the flat land and build tunnels. The wall might keep out refugees, but it won't keep out drugs. Only legalization and treatment can fix the drug problem, no wall will do that. Everything else overwhelmingly goes the other direction across the border, like money or guns. Meanwhile our foreign policy and our drug policy both actively create refugees...
That's a pretty odd rebuttal. Tunnels exist, but they are major capital investments by cartels. They are also limited in area and can be detected by throwing tech at the areas where they occur. Walls are not impenetrable and aren't designed to be. They're designed to be deterrent, not defend against an army. With crossing reduced down significantly, CBP can focus their efforts on other issues, such as tracking down tunnels and tracking cartel members back to the point of origin.
The arguments that walls and fences shouldn't be built because there are very expensive ways to breach them is rather ludicrous. Reducing traffic and making it more difficult is *why* you build one.
Umm, I live in California, NONE of those cities were ever designed with cars in mind, as they were fucking established almost 100 years before the invention of the ICE.
Depends how much you want to read into "designed".
The current downtown core of San Diego (to say nothing of Old Town) was laid out before cars, correct. But the majority of the residential and commercial areas in the City of San Diego proper developed after cars were clearly being introduced, with the vast majority of it coming after World War II, by which time CA was well on its way to cars being an expected part of daily life.
Arguably, the single most important factor in San Diego's layout is geography (canyons and hills), but if there was any sort of design assumption that could be said to be applied to San Diego as a whole, it's that of a massive, suburban-oriented small town. Hardly any of the current SD neighborhoods, and few of the other cities in the county, have the density of pre-ICE layouts beyond their downtown cores (which are themselves much smaller than the cores of cities and towns on the east coast).
I'm assuming there's a RP Zero in there and its a single board computer that runs linux. Strange that it crashes though, it might need a heatsink and some cooling vents.
Yo dawg, I heard you like computing, so I hooked a computer up to your computer.
Name one.
Los Angeles
San Diego (my home town)
Most of California outside of the super-high-density downtown cores
Hell, I *live* in Downtown San Diego (which is as dense as SD gets) and a) cars are important (though parking is now restricted on 5th Ave during Friday and Saturday nights to make room for Uber pickups), and b) scooters are everywhere and are universally despised despite being pretty fun to ride.
San Diego is an urban area where walls EXIST. Yes, they work there - at slowing people slightly - because THEY ARE MANNED AND PATROLLED NEARBY. That is not happening along the entire border, nor proposed.
The 2006 study on GK's effectiveness noted a 76% drop from 1992-2004 in San Diego County, so I'd put it at more than "slowing people slightly". It's a fair argument that some/many of the would-be crossers tried crossing more East instead (not just into Imperial County, but much further east... past Yuma in AZ, NM, and TX). One doesn't need to build an entire wall everywhere and Trump's proposal doesn't do that. CBP knows where walls are needed and where they're not, and they're fully capable of allocating resources accordingly.
The technology in the budget requests goes to a lot of IR, drones, and the like... Exactly the kind of smart allocation of resources everyone on all sides appears to claim to want.
So, again... What's the problem?
The most bizarre thing about this is that all of this technical funding (well, at least a lot of it) is already in the request that the Trump Administration is making. Border walls do work (ask any resident of San Diego), and technology can be used in places where the border fencing is not necessary. (As an example, the border wall ends about 20 miles inland from the Pacific Ocean here as the urbanized portion of Tijuana ends and the mountain terrain on both sides provides a good deterrent.)
Here's more detail on the request from a few days ago. Really not sure what Pelosi is yelling about at this point, since a comprehensive mixed-focus border strengthening is ostensibly what both sides want:
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/white-house-asks-for-billions-of-dollars-to-fund-border-operations/
In contrast to the rest of the state, San Diego still officially has a realistic view on the border situation,
What is a realistic view on the border situation?
That Operation Gatekeeper in the '90s was a success, and that barriers/fences/walls/whatever function as a deterrent to illegal crossing, which is not something that should be encouraged.
San Ysidro is the busiest land border crossing in the Western Hemisphere. Any native San Diegan is well aware of border issues surrounding illegal immigration. (I used to attend classes in Otay Mesa, about 1/4 mile from the mostly-commercial crossing there.)
The contrast with the official view of the State of California now ("sanctuary state!" "unlimited resources!" "walls are immoral and don't work") is absolutely stunning. We have a wall now. It works. Whether we should build more is a policy question, but anyone who makes a blanket statement about how horrible or ineffective walls are... does not live in San Diego or is under the age of 25.
This has been part of the kerfuffle between one of the TV stations here (the only non-network affiliate with a local news team) and CNN, which blew up the other day. Criticism or accusations of it being "right wing" miss the point that *all* of the local reporting by TV stations has been a) pretty level-handed, and b) in agreement that borders are A Thing and that having border fencing helps. It's self-evident for those here, but not to the national media that came in when the caravan arrived and San Ysidro was closed briefly.
Native Californian (San Diegan) here and I agree with you about the tipping point.
There are a whole host of factors going on here. I don't think it's irreversable (the pendulum always swings back), but we're reaching a tipping point of absurdity no doubt. In no particular order, some of the causes might be:
* Silicon Valley tax revenue flooding the state budget, allowing it to undertake expensive projects w/o much thought
* Progressive Millennials sorting themselves out of the rest of the country and wanting to stay in urban areas more than usual
* Gen-X and Boomers moving out or cashing out their homes to retire elsewhere where money lasts longer
* Trump fatigue lowering voter enthusiasm among moderate-conservative Californians outside the central valley
* Trump anger increasing turnout among young progressives, turning the blue parts of CA really, really, really blue
San Diego in particular is experiencing this. Although coastal CA from the Bay to LA has been pretty progressive for a long time, San Diego has traditionally been comparatively pretty moderate. A strong military presence and a very laid back attitude toward life has kept a moderate status quo in effect for a very long time. Compared to the rest of CA cities, crime is low, the pace is relaxed, commerce is good as a tourist town, and we're not directly connected to the urban morass of Greater Los Angeles, being separated from OC by 20 miles of Camp Pendleton and from the rest of the country by deserts, forests, and mountains. Our County Board of Supervisors went through about 15 years were all 5 incumbents kept getting reelected not because of advantage, but because everything was just going pretty well.
That's changed just recently in 2016 and now much more so in 2018. Suddenly the city council is controlled by a veto-proof majority of 6/9 Democrats, and the regional planning council (SANDAG) was re-constituted after an accounting scandal to give the City of San Diego almost veto control over the other cities in the county when it comes to long term transit planning and the like.
The result has been a swath of relatively left-wing movements that have left a lot of longer-term San Diegans slightly bewildered. Banning of styrofoam and straws; a completely laughable goal of having 20% of all commute traffic done by bike by ~2025 (which is insane -- San Diego is incredibly hilly without many flat biking routes) has caused the council to convert car lanes to bike lanes in a "build it and they will come" notion; and a few other notably questionable decisions have ensued.
In contrast to the rest of the state, San Diego still officially has a realistic view on the border situation, but it may just be a matter of time until the council adopts an attitude more in line with the "sanctuary" position. I think *THAT* might be the last straw and cause a push back from the "silent majority" of San Diegans who would prefer the more moderate policies status quo ante, but it'll be hard to tell until then.
What I can say right now is that a lot of California isn't as blue as the noisiest folks, and I'm hoping the tipping point into absurdity results in a reaction among the residents who think the state has gone too far, regardless of their views on the rest of national politics.
Everyone's going off about foldable/rollable phones. Aside from the fact that that should prevent some types of crush/bend damage (sitting down with your phone in your back pocket at a weird angle), I'm not sure how much value is there.
OTOH, I do feel like LG is really underrated when it comes to phones generally. Samsung gets all the limelight (so much so that I've had to explain/clarify to a few folks that my Android phone is the same as their "Samsung" when it comes to being an alternative to Apple), but LG really does make good hardware. I've been a user of theirs since the original LG "The V", up through the EnV, the Voyager, and into the G2/G3/G5 and now V20.
Although Apple has finally caught up (and although the "killer app" of Snapchat is still horrible on Droid), LG's camera quality is absolutely amazing, especially in low light conditions. If you take a lot of difficult shots or are in dark environments, they've always provided a reliable, strong capture that I sometimes get comments on.
The other thing is that they're one of the few manufacturers still often pushing removable batteries. This gives you a lot more options for managing power consumption if you're taking trips or going through extended uses. It also makes direct extended batteries possible, which will be far superior to add on battery packs.
In short, if you're looking for an Android device and want options besides Samsung, take a look at the recent LG stuff. You might like it.
I'm either an old Millennial or young X-er depending on which metric you use, so I've spent time with Boomers, X, and Millennials and I have to say that most Millennials I've come across have been hard working. This goes against the stereotype, but they generally work at least as hard as anyone else. What they're less likely to do is put up with nonsense and meaningless ritual at work. They don't seem to feel as strongly about "paying dues" - they want to be paid for what they actually do.
Millennials who decided government work was glamorous based on their starry-eyed Obamania and HOPE posters in 2008, thinking they were going to be the next break-out data.gov rock star were going to be in for a rude awakening one way or another.
If they're replaced by Gen-X'ers who wouldn't mind the general stability and have a realistic outlook on both the world and the US government, I'm not really sure that's a bad thing. When people get disillusioned, someone has to pay for that phase change (usually in the form of training for turnover). Better that everyone has their eyes open at the beginning of the employment transaction.
the rest is boilerplate.
Indeed it is. What we should do is strip out this boiler plate and put it in a separate system that can be in charge of doing the all that same boiler plate stuff.
I always find the dichotomy between people who are happy with copy paste boiler plate code in one place and then get super angry when things like docker or snap ship embedded libraries.
Dammit I'm making a point, don't use my own logic against me!
That would be fine if that's *ALL* it did. In fact, for "standard" daemons that have absolutely 0 changes to the init script template other than setting the program/exec and service name (and maybe permanent flags like a user to setuid to), it would be trivial to write a wrapper that did just that. I might even suggest that.
The problem is that systemd goes *way* beyond that.
Have you ever looked at some bash startup scripts? Its difficult to analyse compared to the declarative style. Bash scripts are a much more serious support issue compared to the simplicity of systemd declarative unit files.
Shell, and scripting generally in shell languages, is a key component of all *nix systems. Yes, it's possible to write horrible shell code in an init script, but that's largely the fault of the *author*. Most init scripts are simple; except for whatever custom logic is needed uniquely for this daemon, the rest is boilerplate.
I'd submit that if you can't understand this code, you're not ready to operate or administer a *nix system at the command line or service management debugging level.
https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/EPEL:SysVInitScripts#Initscript_template
Knowing the quality of 90% of the init scripts I've had to review, I'd be very surprised if there's any overall security advantage to init+the daemons systemd replaced compared with systemd itself.
You're conflating three different things: service management, init scripts, and the daemons themselves.
Daemon code quality is out of scope. A bug in the program should be fixed or handled upstream (unless you're a 2019 dev where no one fixes anything because they don't care if it crashes as long as someone spins up another one).
Init script quality varies *heavily* by distro/ecosystem. Debian/Ubuntu scripts, in my experience, are hot messes. Scripts written to be completely distro agnostic are usually pretty bad, because typically the writer doesn't understand the differences between distros. Init scripts for RH/Fedora/EL should be fine unless there's a bug in whatever custom logic is being written in there to handle the service's unique needs. The SysVInitscript template is trivial to cut and paste.
Service management is where the bugs come in (especially because it's naturally event based). But I'd rather those bugs be isolated in a relatively small location with specific tasks and without it running as PID1 when it doesn't have to. (See: supervise/tcpserver, xinetd, etc.)