"everyone was given equal opportunity" How would you go about doing this for 7 billion people? I guess one solution could be to wage world wide war until there is only a few thousand people left alive and they can restart the perfect society where everyone has equal opportunities. Since the beginning of human history civilizations and societies have been created by war and then eventually destroyed by war.
Dude I was generalizing over the past 15+ years of MS operating system releases and upgrades. Yes, there were numerous changes in the.NET framework between 4.0 and 4.5 and if you were not smart enough to realize that before updating to 4.5 any problems you encountered in your applications were all on you. And why did you need to upgrade from 4.0 to 4.5 in the first place? Was there some functionality you needed that only 4.5 could provide or did you see a new shiny and just updated.NET? And anecdotal references to driver complaints, office issues, or Xbox are usually from people who say "Look there is a new update I best install it immediately!".
"existing custom applications are going to require significant updates when migrating to the latest windows versions" If it is one thing MS does well it is backwards capability. The vast majority of existing custom applications developed under XP will run under Vista, Win7, Win8, and even Win10. Hell I still have a VB application developed on Win2000 that installs and runs on Win7.
The costs associated with purchasing Windows licenses is cheaper than moving to another platform. You will need to come up with one hell of a sales pitch to get a company to move off a platform they have sunk millions of dollars into for some possible costs savings 10 years into the future. And complaining about the "evils" of MS is really not a persuasive argument.
"indispensible apps " How about the millions of custom internal and intranet only business applications used by companies around the world. Companies have invested too much money and time developing these applications to suddenly want to port them over to a different platform. There are also quite a lot of business critical 3rd party software purchased by companies that offer no alternative platform support. Companies also face the exorbitant costs associated with retraining or re-staffing IT departments to handle another platform so why would someone want to go through all the bother just to move off Windows?
"We can use big data mining to uncover YOUR secrets, too!" Every individual, major corporation, and government agency is already under attack every day. And those perpetrating the attacks are after personal information capable of inflicting great harm to the individual. And the government not only has to deal with domestic attempts to breach their systems looking for information but also attempts from well funded and very capable foreign agents. The US government has had legal access to a citizens personal information since way before the Internet age. Tax records, personal property titles, drivers licenses, and marriage licenses are just some of the sources of personal information the government has access to. Your tax records alone can allow the government to profile you in great detail.Your phone call history, which has been compiled since the advent of the telephone for billing purposes, is fairly harmless in the grand scheme of things. And didn't Congress specifically revoke the US security agencies authority on bulk collection of this type of data a few months back?
I won't brush aside the statement claiming the US was built on the backs of African Americans but the mainly white immigrants from Europe did a hell of a lot more. From the minute their ships docked and they were enlisted in the Union army which had a role in defeating the southern slave owners. And you do need to prove yourself if you wish to be successful in life. Standing around bemoaning the hardships your ancestors had to put up with will not get you very far. Without a doubt racism exists in the minds of individuals but there have been great strides in eliminating institutional level racism. There are laws and statutes in place to provide recourse if you feel you are being discriminated against because of the color of your skin. The "All men created equal..." declaration in the US Constitution was BS as soon as the ink dried. However I look at the Constitution as a work in progress were the goal is to eventually create a society where those types of declarations become more than words on a piece of paper.
One of the underlying themes in analyzing race equality is the assumption that there are no economically disadvantaged white people. There are white people living in poverty with criminal records, poor educations, and very few opportunities to improve their situation. I cringe every time I hear someone making rash generalizations when describing and labeling the residents of the US. The US is the most diverse country in the world when it comes to race, ethnicity, and pretty much every religion known to man. The elimination of racial strife will never happen until people start taking personal responsibility for their decisions, Laws, statutes, and government legislation cannot make the problems go away unless the individual attempts to make their own opportunities. The screeching lunatics and hardliners on both the left and right drown out the vast majority of the population and create false perceptions. There is racism in the US today but there has been progress in fighting racism. Just imagine if you lived in the deep south 40 years ago and someone told you a black man would be elected President of the US. I imagine both black and whites could not even imagine such a thing. And you do not need a college degree to succeed in life. Gates, Jobs, and Zuckenburg didn't need a degree and look where they ended up. I have worked in the IT field for 28 years and have found it is pretty easy to evaluate someones technical skills during an interview. Their formal education credentials are really not that important to me when deciding who to hire.
Define fair. Race should never be used to deny opportunities which is the text book definition of racism. There are plenty of laws on the books that provide recourse for anyone feeling discriminated against. However using race to increase opportunities for a particular group is also racism.
Race is the most meaningless metric of all when it comes to evaluating an ideal workforce. The last thing minority activists want is for competence to become the deciding factor when determining who to hire. If competence can be overridden by the color of someones skin than that only bolsters the idea that there are inferior races that need to be graded on a different scale. And justifying a bias based on race to make up for some historical wrongdoing just perpetuates injustice. Why should someone today accept reverse discrimination for the actions of others hundreds of years ago? And releasing data to be "fair" begs the question of who judges what is fair and what is not? Standing around waiting for the world to be fair will only guarantee failure propped up by an appalling entitlement complex.
The entire Japanese home island was a valid military target in WW2. The idiocy around thinking you could actually win a war while pulling your punches didn't come along to long after WW2 ended.
Every single OS currently being used has 0-day exploits just waiting to be found. So by your reckoning I guess all the developers involved in creating and maintaining these OS's are incompetent? The real incompetence is in all those companies calling themselves security experts. These deep-think groups of geniuses are always 2 steps behind those creating the exploits. They publish white papers containing postmortems on exploits that have already reeked havoc. And the vast majority of exploits today are caused by social engineering tricks, negligent system administration, lack of codified IT practices, and of course reckless and click happy users who have never seen a hyperlink they wouldn't click on.
Jury nullification is not a legal defense in any US court room. Jury nullification has been legally challenged at every court level in the US and each time declared illegal. Jury nullification would inject politics into the legal proceedings. Look closely at the trials involving white on black crimes in the south 40 years ago with all white jurors to see what jury nullification looks like. Snowden sealed his fate when he published information on foreign intelligence operations. He systematically violated the Espionage act. You don't walk away from this charge. Like it or not the US is not the only country that conducts intrusive foreign intelligence operations with little regard for other countries laws. As long as this fact holds true the government is going to treat breaches of national security in matters related to foreign operations very seriously and make sure the penalties are substantial.
Of course the verdict is decided because he has already admitted he performed illegal acts. There is no gray area on this point. Had he only released information related to domestic activities he could have used the remaining foreign related information as leverage to bargain with the government. The government would have taken that deal in a second and would settle on charging him with some minor misdemeanor related to the theft with no jail time. But he has a history of making bad decisions. His first bad decision was releasing the information BEFORE he was safely ensconced in some Latin American paradise. His second bad decision was thinking the material related to foreign intelligence operations was some how illegal and infringed on the rights of US citizens. Foreign intelligence operations outside of the US are not subject to the US Constitution or Bill of Rights. The only law that applies to foreign intelligence operations is don't get caught. He should resign himself to living in Russia under constant surveillance by the FSB. If he leaves Russia he will have to evade the US, English, Australian, German, French, and New Zealand security services because a lot of the information released also involved their security services operations.
The Constitution may be a little ambiguous in some areas but it doesn't place any restrictions on what state intelligence and clandestine security agencies can do outside of US sovereign territory in the name of national security.The only rule when it comes to conducting intelligence operations in foreign lands is don't get caught. That's why foreign embassies across the world are heavily staffed with intelligence operatives giving them diplomatic immunity if caught in a compromising situation.
"granted infinite power outside of US " The amount of power the US or any country has outside their own borders is ultimately decided by military and economic strength.
Putting spyware in routers going overseas, and the key word here is overseas, is what a foreign intelligence service does to fulfill the mandate of their agencies. Clandestine foreign security and intelligence agencies across the world return the favor by doing everything they can possibly do to collect military, political, and industrial information from the US. The US Constitution and Bill of Rights do not come into play outside of US sovereign territory. And no one has ever found any government mandated back doors in Windows and that is not from a lack of people trying. And I think the NSA should be disbanded as soon as every other foreign intelligence service in the world does the same thing. But we would probably still have to maintain some type of foreign intelligence service just to make sure the other security services were actually disbanded.
Extraction sites tend to be located in under developed rural areas where income levels are lower than in highly populated urban centers. Although there are oil pumps scattered throughout some of the wealthy suburbs of LA that are hidden by clever landscaping. They could discover vast oil and gas fields under any large city but the costs to get at such a resource is astronomical. Energy resource extraction has always been dangerous, dirty, expensive, and controversial. But the fact is even those complaining the loudest against exploiting fossil fuels directly benefit from the oil,,gas, and petroleum products produced. The environment also takes a major hit when extracting the rare earth elements needed for building all of our modern day electronics. Everything from computers, cell phones, and cruise missiles. The toxicity emanating from these mining areas is almost as dangerous as a open nuclear waste landfill. The US closed down almost all of the rare earth element mines because the cost of satisfying the EPA requirements made it cheaper just to buy the rare earth elements mined in foreign countries.
Their mandated function is to bolster national security through spying using both SIGINT and HUMINT. Questioning their activities in the US domestic space may be warranted but all foreign activities are fair game. And if they only released an executable it might be prudent to not install it. However, they released the source code to the world at large. And this particular tool is for companies and organizations that provide contracted services to the NSA and need to satisfy a certain level of security awareness before they are granted a contract.
If people ever want Israel to back off from publicly naming their enemies and unilaterally conducting military operations to protect their state than the incitement to violence against Israel needs to end. And since every Arab country that has ever tried to militarily defeat Israel has had their asses handed to them incitement and the left wing useful idiots is all they have left to keep their fight alive. Forget about nuclear weapons. Right now the deadliest weapons in the world are the rockets that Hamas and other affiliated groups launch against Israel. Rockets funded by Iran. For every rocket fired 2 Palestinians die and millions of dollars in infrastructure is destroyed. The Arabs in the middle east are deathly afraid of Israel not because Israel has nuclear weapons but because Israel knows how to deal with attacks against themselves and has a 65 year track record to prove it. Israel does not ask permission or give two shits about what the "international" community thinks.
Israel has had nuclear weapons for over 30 years and have not used them or even threatened to use them. They don't hold weekly "Death to Iran" parades and their leaders don't make speeches aimed at the elimination of Iran. Granted Israel is certainly not afraid to employ their conventional weapons when threatened. And they don't waste time gathering a consensus or asking permission or approval from the US or any other country.
The Ukraine gave up their nuclear missiles and look where that got them. There will never be another country that has nuclear weapons willing to give them up based on paper agreements or treaties. There was never any down side to SA giving up their nuclear weapons program. They are not facing off against any great foe intent on invading their country. The US, Russia, and China arsenals are held in check by the MAD doctrine. On the other hand Israel is surrounded by 80 million implacable enemies who are always looking for Israel to drop their guard. No matter how good Israels conventional forces are they could eventually be defeated by sheer numbers and there is certainly no shortage of raving lunatics from the surrounding Arab countries to feed into the meat grinder. The Iranians can chant "death to Israel" at their weekly prayer groups until they are blue in the face but the Iranian leadership knows exactly what would happen if they decided to play nuclear chicken with Israel. They are much safer playing nuclear chicken with the US.
England paid for it's continued survival by handing over just about every technological and engineering breakthrough they had mastered or were in the process of mastering to the US. In return the US supplied England with ships, planes, ammunition, food, trucks, clothing, fuel, and eventually US lives. And the folks at Bletchley Park would have had a much harder time breaking the Enigma code if not for the 2 Polish mathematicians who originally reverse engineered the pre-war business version model of the machine and forwarded all their research to England prior to Germany invading Poland.
Minorities can leverage the Internet to make themselves appear larger than they really are. And of course the majorities do the same thing which has led to soaring animosities between both peoples and states across the world. And make no mistake the government is a failure in every way that matters. If the Senators and representatives in Congress had a shred of decency and honor they would acknowledge the failure, step down, and allow special elections to select their replacements. Mid term elections happen all the time. A symbolic restart would go a long way towards solving the countries many problems.
Slashdot Mirror
"everyone was given equal opportunity" How would you go about doing this for 7 billion people? I guess one solution could be to wage world wide war until there is only a few thousand people left alive and they can restart the perfect society where everyone has equal opportunities. Since the beginning of human history civilizations and societies have been created by war and then eventually destroyed by war.
Dude I was generalizing over the past 15+ years of MS operating system releases and upgrades. Yes, there were numerous changes in the .NET framework between 4.0 and 4.5 and if you were not smart enough to realize that before updating to 4.5 any problems you encountered in your applications were all on you. And why did you need to upgrade from 4.0 to 4.5 in the first place? Was there some functionality you needed that only 4.5 could provide or did you see a new shiny and just updated .NET? And anecdotal references to driver complaints, office issues, or Xbox are usually from people who say "Look there is a new update I best install it immediately!".
"existing custom applications are going to require significant updates when migrating to the latest windows versions" If it is one thing MS does well it is backwards capability. The vast majority of existing custom applications developed under XP will run under Vista, Win7, Win8, and even Win10. Hell I still have a VB application developed on Win2000 that installs and runs on Win7.
The costs associated with purchasing Windows licenses is cheaper than moving to another platform. You will need to come up with one hell of a sales pitch to get a company to move off a platform they have sunk millions of dollars into for some possible costs savings 10 years into the future. And complaining about the "evils" of MS is really not a persuasive argument.
"indispensible apps " How about the millions of custom internal and intranet only business applications used by companies around the world. Companies have invested too much money and time developing these applications to suddenly want to port them over to a different platform. There are also quite a lot of business critical 3rd party software purchased by companies that offer no alternative platform support. Companies also face the exorbitant costs associated with retraining or re-staffing IT departments to handle another platform so why would someone want to go through all the bother just to move off Windows?
"We can use big data mining to uncover YOUR secrets, too!"
Every individual, major corporation, and government agency is already under attack every day. And those perpetrating the attacks are after personal information capable of inflicting great harm to the individual. And the government not only has to deal with domestic attempts to breach their systems looking for information but also attempts from well funded and very capable foreign agents. The US government has had legal access to a citizens personal information since way before the Internet age. Tax records, personal property titles, drivers licenses, and marriage licenses are just some of the sources of personal information the government has access to. Your tax records alone can allow the government to profile you in great detail.Your phone call history, which has been compiled since the advent of the telephone for billing purposes, is fairly harmless in the grand scheme of things. And didn't Congress specifically revoke the US security agencies authority on bulk collection of this type of data a few months back?
I won't brush aside the statement claiming the US was built on the backs of African Americans but the mainly white immigrants from Europe did a hell of a lot more. From the minute their ships docked and they were enlisted in the Union army which had a role in defeating the southern slave owners. And you do need to prove yourself if you wish to be successful in life. Standing around bemoaning the hardships your ancestors had to put up with will not get you very far. Without a doubt racism exists in the minds of individuals but there have been great strides in eliminating institutional level racism. There are laws and statutes in place to provide recourse if you feel you are being discriminated against because of the color of your skin. The "All men created equal..." declaration in the US Constitution was BS as soon as the ink dried. However I look at the Constitution as a work in progress were the goal is to eventually create a society where those types of declarations become more than words on a piece of paper.
One of the underlying themes in analyzing race equality is the assumption that there are no economically disadvantaged white people. There are white people living in poverty with criminal records, poor educations, and very few opportunities to improve their situation. I cringe every time I hear someone making rash generalizations when describing and labeling the residents of the US. The US is the most diverse country in the world when it comes to race, ethnicity, and pretty much every religion known to man. The elimination of racial strife will never happen until people start taking personal responsibility for their decisions, Laws, statutes, and government legislation cannot make the problems go away unless the individual attempts to make their own opportunities. The screeching lunatics and hardliners on both the left and right drown out the vast majority of the population and create false perceptions. There is racism in the US today but there has been progress in fighting racism. Just imagine if you lived in the deep south 40 years ago and someone told you a black man would be elected President of the US. I imagine both black and whites could not even imagine such a thing. And you do not need a college degree to succeed in life. Gates, Jobs, and Zuckenburg didn't need a degree and look where they ended up. I have worked in the IT field for 28 years and have found it is pretty easy to evaluate someones technical skills during an interview. Their formal education credentials are really not that important to me when deciding who to hire.
Define fair. Race should never be used to deny opportunities which is the text book definition of racism. There are plenty of laws on the books that provide recourse for anyone feeling discriminated against. However using race to increase opportunities for a particular group is also racism.
Race is the most meaningless metric of all when it comes to evaluating an ideal workforce. The last thing minority activists want is for competence to become the deciding factor when determining who to hire. If competence can be overridden by the color of someones skin than that only bolsters the idea that there are inferior races that need to be graded on a different scale. And justifying a bias based on race to make up for some historical wrongdoing just perpetuates injustice. Why should someone today accept reverse discrimination for the actions of others hundreds of years ago? And releasing data to be "fair" begs the question of who judges what is fair and what is not? Standing around waiting for the world to be fair will only guarantee failure propped up by an appalling entitlement complex.
The entire Japanese home island was a valid military target in WW2. The idiocy around thinking you could actually win a war while pulling your punches didn't come along to long after WW2 ended.
Every single OS currently being used has 0-day exploits just waiting to be found. So by your reckoning I guess all the developers involved in creating and maintaining these OS's are incompetent? The real incompetence is in all those companies calling themselves security experts. These deep-think groups of geniuses are always 2 steps behind those creating the exploits. They publish white papers containing postmortems on exploits that have already reeked havoc. And the vast majority of exploits today are caused by social engineering tricks, negligent system administration, lack of codified IT practices, and of course reckless and click happy users who have never seen a hyperlink they wouldn't click on.
Jury nullification is not a legal defense in any US court room. Jury nullification has been legally challenged at every court level in the US and each time declared illegal. Jury nullification would inject politics into the legal proceedings. Look closely at the trials involving white on black crimes in the south 40 years ago with all white jurors to see what jury nullification looks like. Snowden sealed his fate when he published information on foreign intelligence operations. He systematically violated the Espionage act. You don't walk away from this charge. Like it or not the US is not the only country that conducts intrusive foreign intelligence operations with little regard for other countries laws. As long as this fact holds true the government is going to treat breaches of national security in matters related to foreign operations very seriously and make sure the penalties are substantial.
Of course the verdict is decided because he has already admitted he performed illegal acts. There is no gray area on this point. Had he only released information related to domestic activities he could have used the remaining foreign related information as leverage to bargain with the government. The government would have taken that deal in a second and would settle on charging him with some minor misdemeanor related to the theft with no jail time. But he has a history of making bad decisions. His first bad decision was releasing the information BEFORE he was safely ensconced in some Latin American paradise. His second bad decision was thinking the material related to foreign intelligence operations was some how illegal and infringed on the rights of US citizens. Foreign intelligence operations outside of the US are not subject to the US Constitution or Bill of Rights. The only law that applies to foreign intelligence operations is don't get caught. He should resign himself to living in Russia under constant surveillance by the FSB. If he leaves Russia he will have to evade the US, English, Australian, German, French, and New Zealand security services because a lot of the information released also involved their security services operations.
The Constitution may be a little ambiguous in some areas but it doesn't place any restrictions on what state intelligence and clandestine security agencies can do outside of US sovereign territory in the name of national security.The only rule when it comes to conducting intelligence operations in foreign lands is don't get caught. That's why foreign embassies across the world are heavily staffed with intelligence operatives giving them diplomatic immunity if caught in a compromising situation.
"granted infinite power outside of US " The amount of power the US or any country has outside their own borders is ultimately decided by military and economic strength.
It's all about scale. Comparing small Nordic countries to the US is foolish.
Putting spyware in routers going overseas, and the key word here is overseas, is what a foreign intelligence service does to fulfill the mandate of their agencies. Clandestine foreign security and intelligence agencies across the world return the favor by doing everything they can possibly do to collect military, political, and industrial information from the US. The US Constitution and Bill of Rights do not come into play outside of US sovereign territory. And no one has ever found any government mandated back doors in Windows and that is not from a lack of people trying. And I think the NSA should be disbanded as soon as every other foreign intelligence service in the world does the same thing. But we would probably still have to maintain some type of foreign intelligence service just to make sure the other security services were actually disbanded.
Distribution of wealth only guarantees every one will be equally poor.
Extraction sites tend to be located in under developed rural areas where income levels are lower than in highly populated urban centers. Although there are oil pumps scattered throughout some of the wealthy suburbs of LA that are hidden by clever landscaping. They could discover vast oil and gas fields under any large city but the costs to get at such a resource is astronomical. Energy resource extraction has always been dangerous, dirty, expensive, and controversial. But the fact is even those complaining the loudest against exploiting fossil fuels directly benefit from the oil,,gas, and petroleum products produced. The environment also takes a major hit when extracting the rare earth elements needed for building all of our modern day electronics. Everything from computers, cell phones, and cruise missiles. The toxicity emanating from these mining areas is almost as dangerous as a open nuclear waste landfill. The US closed down almost all of the rare earth element mines because the cost of satisfying the EPA requirements made it cheaper just to buy the rare earth elements mined in foreign countries.
Their mandated function is to bolster national security through spying using both SIGINT and HUMINT. Questioning their activities in the US domestic space may be warranted but all foreign activities are fair game. And if they only released an executable it might be prudent to not install it. However, they released the source code to the world at large. And this particular tool is for companies and organizations that provide contracted services to the NSA and need to satisfy a certain level of security awareness before they are granted a contract.
If people ever want Israel to back off from publicly naming their enemies and unilaterally conducting military operations to protect their state than the incitement to violence against Israel needs to end. And since every Arab country that has ever tried to militarily defeat Israel has had their asses handed to them incitement and the left wing useful idiots is all they have left to keep their fight alive. Forget about nuclear weapons. Right now the deadliest weapons in the world are the rockets that Hamas and other affiliated groups launch against Israel. Rockets funded by Iran. For every rocket fired 2 Palestinians die and millions of dollars in infrastructure is destroyed. The Arabs in the middle east are deathly afraid of Israel not because Israel has nuclear weapons but because Israel knows how to deal with attacks against themselves and has a 65 year track record to prove it. Israel does not ask permission or give two shits about what the "international" community thinks.
Israel has had nuclear weapons for over 30 years and have not used them or even threatened to use them. They don't hold weekly "Death to Iran" parades and their leaders don't make speeches aimed at the elimination of Iran. Granted Israel is certainly not afraid to employ their conventional weapons when threatened. And they don't waste time gathering a consensus or asking permission or approval from the US or any other country.
The Ukraine gave up their nuclear missiles and look where that got them. There will never be another country that has nuclear weapons willing to give them up based on paper agreements or treaties. There was never any down side to SA giving up their nuclear weapons program. They are not facing off against any great foe intent on invading their country. The US, Russia, and China arsenals are held in check by the MAD doctrine. On the other hand Israel is surrounded by 80 million implacable enemies who are always looking for Israel to drop their guard. No matter how good Israels conventional forces are they could eventually be defeated by sheer numbers and there is certainly no shortage of raving lunatics from the surrounding Arab countries to feed into the meat grinder. The Iranians can chant "death to Israel" at their weekly prayer groups until they are blue in the face but the Iranian leadership knows exactly what would happen if they decided to play nuclear chicken with Israel. They are much safer playing nuclear chicken with the US.
England paid for it's continued survival by handing over just about every technological and engineering breakthrough they had mastered or were in the process of mastering to the US. In return the US supplied England with ships, planes, ammunition, food, trucks, clothing, fuel, and eventually US lives. And the folks at Bletchley Park would have had a much harder time breaking the Enigma code if not for the 2 Polish mathematicians who originally reverse engineered the pre-war business version model of the machine and forwarded all their research to England prior to Germany invading Poland.
Minorities can leverage the Internet to make themselves appear larger than they really are. And of course the majorities do the same thing which has led to soaring animosities between both peoples and states across the world. And make no mistake the government is a failure in every way that matters. If the Senators and representatives in Congress had a shred of decency and honor they would acknowledge the failure, step down, and allow special elections to select their replacements. Mid term elections happen all the time. A symbolic restart would go a long way towards solving the countries many problems.