They really should. God knows nobody actually reads them. I think those comment forms are kind of like the "close door" button on elevators. It's there to make people feel like they're doing something, but it's not actually connected to anything.
We're not talking about whitehouse.gov here.
Many government agencies, the FCC among them, are required by law to seek public comment on regulatory changes, and to actually read and consider all of the comments submitted. No, the decisionmakers don't actually read every one of the tens of thousands of comments submitted, but staffers do, and they create summaries that identify all of the points raised by the commenters, and how many raised them, and the decisionmakers do read those and take the public opinions presented into account. They're required to, by law, and believe it or not most federal employees actually do try to do their jobs in good faith.
Now, it's certainly possible that Pai was given strict instructions by Trump about what he is to do here, and that he'll make a show of examining the public response and then ignore it... but the comments are on the public record, and that will be obvious. Opponents of the administration will be free to make lots of political hay from it, and if they can interest Congress, a Congressional investigation could go after Pai.
None of this guarantees that the wrong thing won't happen, but it's absolutely false to say that these comments don't matter.
FWIW, here's what I submitted:
As a software and network engineer of 30 years, I sincerely request that the FCC retain strong net neutrality safeguards, under Title II. It's essential that we retain the original design of the Internet, with its "smart" endpoints and "dumb" pipes. The Internet has flourished specifically because of this technical architecture, and the FCC did the right thing in taking regulatory steps to prevent that architecture from being undermined by ISPs who see opportunities to line their pockets by exploiting their gatekeeper positions. I'm a strong believer in the power of free markets and I would prefer to trust in the power of competition to prevent abuse, but in most regions of the country there is little to no competition. Until that is fixed, until every home has easy access to a choice of a half dozen or more Internet providers who are true competitors, it's crucial that we employ regulation to prevent big ISPs from violating the architecture of the Internet.
The ports should be smart enough to not take the full voltage. I've already seen a few folks fry their expensive phones by plugging in the wrong USB C cable.
The problem is bad cables. I don't know why the USBIF is allowing so many manufacturers to call their cables "USB type C" when they don't comply with the specifications. Avoid buying bad cables and everything will be fine. On Amazon, look for Benson Leung's reviews.
I like the feel of USB-C. Every cable I have tried goes in easily and with a satisfying click. So far I only have factory provided cables though, maybe third party ones are that bad. I have to admit I'm a bit afraid of ordering more cables.
He does standard compliance testing to verify that each cable, charger or hub fully and correctly implements the spec. There is a lot of crap out there, but there's also plenty of good stuff.
This is what get you with this guy: used and thrown away. Sounds like Comey wasn't willing to help bury the investigation into the mango-in-chief's ties to Russia. With the way the swamp is being "drained" in DC, I expect the new head of the FBI to be someone from the mob.;)
Didn't you read Trump's letter? He says that Comey told him three times that he (Trump) wasn't under investigation. Since Trump would never lie, and the FBI would never lie to a target of investigation, you can take it as gospel truth that that wasn't what happened.
</sarcasm>
Was I the only one that found it utterly bizarre that Trump chose to mention that in his letter firing Comey?
What Google wants to eliminate is security vulnerabilities, which has many implications.
Then why are they writing their own kernel and OS from scratch?
Linux is the single largest source of vulnerabilities in Android, in spite of being a small portion of the codebase. It's also not true that the Fuschia kernel is being written "from scratch". It's based on Little Kernel (https://github.com/littlekernel/lk/wiki/Introduction).
I'm very well aware that hardly any OEMs offer unlockable devices. Google does (all devices sold by Google are unlockable). Motorola does. If you want to see more OEMs offering the feature, you should vote with your wallet by buying devices that serve your needs.
Oh... one more point: SafetyNet's root detection also does not mean Google is opposed to rooting. It just means that Google understands that some apps don't want to run on rooted devices, and Google believes app developers should have that choice.
Control your own device, can no longer run some apps? Sounds like a big "fuck you" to users unless Google have a strong control on which apps can do this.
It's not for Google to control. That is between apps and users. Apps that lock out users create an opportunity for competing apps that don't.
I know you mean well, but what prevents telecoms and phone companies from locking all bootloaders? That certainly seems to be the trend around here.
You can buy your devices from Google. They're always unlockable. I realize that may mean prioritizing access over other features you might want... but if enough people do it, maybe OEMs will get the message.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. By insurance companies helping to carry the load of preventive maintenance they're helping to avoid catastrophic problems. This is a known in the industry. Get with it.
I've struggled to find the logic as well in that thinking and I realized I was incorrectly using logic to solve an emotional problem. I think the reason they vote against their interests has more to do with pride than any real fear of socialism.
I think that's almost right, but not quite.
What you're missing is the effect of history, specifically that the system used to work better for them. They had decent blue-collar jobs and reasonable health care (with respect to the standard of the era, which was abysmal compared to today) and felt able to take pride in their self-sufficiency -- and in some regions also their superiority to another big chunk of the population, blacks (not that most of them really thought about that aspect of it, it's just the way things were).
Now, their decent blue-collar jobs have taken a beating from foreign competition and automation and greedy rich bastards. For those who unconsciously (or consciously) consoled themselves with their superiority to blacks, the left has been waging an assault on that as well... but not just by saying "you're not superior", which all but the true racists would accept. No, the assault focuses on telling these white blue collar workers that they themselves are evil oppressors, elevating themselves by keeping their boot on the neck of the black man. Regardless of the truth or falsehood of that claim (it's a mixed bag, honestly, and even where it's true it's rarely intentional -- which doesn't make it less true), it's adding insult to injury to people who see their own socioeconomic status dropping like a rock.
What they want is to get the good old days back (regardless of whether they were objectively good). Yes, it's about pride and it's about economics, but it's about recovering the system that gave their parents/grandparents both. That was a system in which they had reasonable economic stability through hard work which let them hold their heads high. They weren't rich, life was a struggle, but it was decent and they could feel like they did it themselves.
Instead, the left wants to tell them that since they're now the dregs of society, the government should step in and prop them up. Note that this is the government that many consider to be the direct or indirect cause of their socioeconomic slide, and the government many have been suspicious of for centuries (especially in the south, which didn't much care for Yankee federalism even before the war and the horrors of reconstruction).
To vote for this aid requires this group of people to accept that they are not who they think they are. It means accepting a different identity, and one that they particularly despise. To them, their identity is that of the middle class working man. Not rich, but not poor, the backbone of the country -- including in terms of paying taxes. People with that identity see wealth redistribution schemes as taking from people like them to give to the despised lazy underclass -- even if they personally would currently be on the receiving end.
Moreover, it also has implications about who people perceive that their ancestors were. If it's not the case that their own current bad circumstances are a result of government interference, globalism, affirmative action, etc., then it must be the case that their ancestors' prior success was luck rather than rugged independence, lifting themselves by their own bootstraps.
If voting for your own economic interest requires voting against your personal and family identity, you'll vote against your own economic interest and look for an alternative that allows you to retain both. You'll vote for the guy who claims he'll "Make America Great Again". And note that this is doubly true of the people who actually aren't struggling economically, but merely fear that they or their children may struggle in the future. They not only want the old days back, they also don't want to foot the bill to lift "those people" out of their economic doldrums... r
For those that could afford the premiums, the ACA became medical disaster insurance.
Really, insurance should be disaster-proofing, not pre-payment for common events. To use a car analogy, it makes sense to insure your car against collisions, but not to try to use your insurance to cover oil changes.
I'm not saying that healthcare insurance shouldn't cover preventative care, but rather that insurance isn't the right way to structure health care payments.
They are doing this to go after the Rooters. They want to close off the "Root your device and load whatever you want" hole in these devices.
(Android security platform engineer here)
Google has no interest in eliminating the ability to root. Quite the opposite, actually. There's a pretty strong sentiment among Google engineers in general, and the Android security team in particular, that it's important that users have the ability to fully own and control their own hardware. Take a look at how Chromebook security and the required "dev screw" works for an example of how we really think it ought to be.
What Google wants to eliminate is security vulnerabilities, which has many implications. I could write an essay on what they are and how they relate to each other, but here I'll just boil it down to: The best thing to do for the security of typical user devices is to lock them down rather tightly, including removing root. However, users who want to should be able to deliberately unlock their bootloader, after which they should be able to install and run whatever software they want, whether that's a slightly-modified stock image that includes the 'su' binary, or full-on custom ROMs.
But... OEMs have for many years not liked the idea of unlockable bootloaders. This has led the modding and rooting community to seek out and exploit privilege escalation vulnerabilities in the OS that allow them to modify the system. That's nice for modders and rooters, sort of, but really bad for the rest of the ecosystem, because privilege escalation vulnerabilities are at least as available to malicious attackers as they are to power users.
As the Android security team tightens down the hatches, notably (but not exclusively) by employing SELinux to block off most of the exploit chains, so even when you find a vulnerability in one app or system component you can't use it to do anything, modders and rooters are finding that it is getting harder and harder to find exploitable vulns. Yay for security, bad for rooting devices with permalocked bootloaders (which is most devices).
Zombie Ryushu (and many others) interpret this as Google being opposed to rooting, but what's really going on is just improving security. If you want to root, you should be able to root... but you should only be able to do it by explicitly unlocking the device security protections. And that unlocking process must be somewhat hard, to mitigate social engineering attacks. Hence: enable the hidden developer options, flip the OEM unlock switch, install adb and fastboot on a computer, connect via USB, adb reboot-bootloader, fastboot oem unlock, read the scary text on the display and manipulate the buttons to say "okay", etc. Nothing in that process is hard, but it's the sort of thing you're going to find difficult to social engineer a typical user into doing.
Bottom line: If you want to root, buy a device with an unlockable bootloader and root it. If you buy a device with a permalocked bootloader, don't be surprised if you find it can't be rooted. That's a Good Thing, it means that system security is solid.
Oh... one more point: SafetyNet's root detection also does not mean Google is opposed to rooting. It just means that Google understands that some apps don't want to run on rooted devices, and Google believes app developers should have that choice.
Not invented here... once again. Sigh. I hope it dies
What Google needs to do is upgrade Android to use cgroups for app isolation, and switch to using JVM bytecodes so they can recycle the vast amount of work in the OpenJDK project.
App isolation of the sort provided by cgroups (which is mostly about resource accounting) really isn't that much of a problem in Android. The addition of SELinux has done far, far more to improve overall system security than cgroups could, and there is still more that can be done with SELinux. Don't get me wrong, there are ways in which cgroups could help, but most of them can be just as effectively achieved by SELinux, with less disruption to the architecture.
As for JVM bytecodes, that would be very bad for performance. Since performance == battery life, users would hate that. A better solution is just to ensure that cached native code is correctly generated and cannot be modified after generation. There aren't any attacks (AFAIK) which subvert the native compilation step, or the.dex bytecodes.
Horseshit. If one political party accepts science and the other rejects it, using that science to make decisions not equate to supporting the party that accepts it. If Democrats believed that foodborne illnesses were caused by demons, the FDA would not be furthering a political ideology.
All true. However, I have to bring up some of the points mentioned by the AC that got modded down to -1, because he wasn't entirely wrong. Democrats -- thanks mostly to the element of the party from the education-loving Northeast -- tend to take a more favorable view of educated opinions, and therefore science, but they're far from perfect. In particular, anywhere that science conflicts with other elements of their ideology, science loses, e.g. all of the science that shows that GMOs are safe. Both parties take an anti-scientific perspective on nuclear power (though the Dems are worse on this issue than the Reps). The Democrats most often diverge from science when it interferes with the anti-establishment element of the party from the left coast. The Republicans most often diverge from science when it interferes with the religious right element from the deep south. But there are other cases for both.
There is no "party of science". There are two parties that each have their own bundle of ideological views, derived from the allied subcultures that compose them, and both love science when it supports their ideology and ignore/hate it when it contradicts. On the whole, Democrats are more pro-science than Republicans, but not in every area.
Where we would like to think that *somehow* facts will win the argument, there are way to many alternate realities floating around with their on version of facts and truth these days.
Fuck that. An abundance of lies does not mean we can't have an objective reality.
Indeed we can... and it starts by objectively comparing your own and your party's beliefs with the best ground truth knowledge available, which is provided by science, and admitting where they do and don't coincide.
Personally, I find it's easiest to do that if you avoid being emotionally tied to either party.
Corporations don't pay taxes anyway. Never have, never will. Every dime you collect from a corporation gets shifted onto someone.
Corporate taxes are just a sneaky way to tax individuals -- employees, customers and shareholders -- without making it obvious that's what's happening. This is bad in two ways. First, it's bad because taxpayers should know what they're paying. Second, it's bad because it means it's the corporations who decide where to shift their alleged tax burden to, and that is almost certainly not the same place that you'd like it to land.
So this is basically a large wealth transfer (which all taxes in principle are), not some utopian new idea that somehow pays for itself, right?
Absolutely. However, it's a less invasive, less condescending, less costly and more scalable and likely less economically distortive approach to doing exactly what welfare systems do now. To start with, assume that instead of $30K we set the UBI at what traditional means-tested welfare typically pays people now, then (a) pay that to everyone and (b) increase taxes to cover it. For most people, on average, this will result in no net change. You'll get UBI checks of, say, $1K per month, but your taxes will increase by $12K annually, so you get neither benefit, nor cost. In any particular situation that may not be exactly true, but it will be close. The degree of redistribution applied is a separate variable, based on how you allocate the taxes.
This system is less invasive and less condescending than means-tested welfare because it means that those who need assistance don't have to open the details of their lives and behavior to government scrutiny in order to qualify. It's less costly because the administrative overhead is much smaller than means-tested welfare. Not zero, certainly, but much smaller than now because the only thing you need to do to get UBI is to prove that you're alive and of the appropriate age. Fraud control will be important, but it will mostly consist of ensuring that birth certificates are only issued to real people and deaths are noticed and recorded, as well as giving people a mechanism to dispute the misrouting of payments. For the same reasons, it's more scalable. Means-tested systems introduce all sorts of odd economic distortions based on the exact rules. UBI would have effects vs a pure market system (which no one actually has), but economists argue that they would be smaller.
The big risk, of course, is that UBI may encourage able-bodied people not to work. That's a problem if and only if we need those people to work. The motivation for exploring UBI is that maybe we don't need everyone working now, and in the future it seems extremely likely that we'll need less human labor due to AI-driven expansion in automation of production and distribution.
Let me first point out that I'm in favor of experimentation with UBI because I think that in a decade or two the coming wave of automation will make it both necessary and affordable. But I still find it bizarre that people would say they favor UBI in order to have "greater financial independence and self-reliance". What? In what way does UBI give you greater financial independence or self-reliance? Relying on government payouts, funded by taxes collected from others, is not independence except in the narrowest possible sense and it is pretty much the opposite of "self-reliance".
As I said, I think UBI will be necessary, and I think it's a much less invasive, condescending and economically distortive form of public safety net than more traditional means testing. But self-reliance it is most definitely not.
Slashdot Mirror
They really should. God knows nobody actually reads them. I think those comment forms are kind of like the "close door" button on elevators. It's there to make people feel like they're doing something, but it's not actually connected to anything.
We're not talking about whitehouse.gov here.
Many government agencies, the FCC among them, are required by law to seek public comment on regulatory changes, and to actually read and consider all of the comments submitted. No, the decisionmakers don't actually read every one of the tens of thousands of comments submitted, but staffers do, and they create summaries that identify all of the points raised by the commenters, and how many raised them, and the decisionmakers do read those and take the public opinions presented into account. They're required to, by law, and believe it or not most federal employees actually do try to do their jobs in good faith.
Now, it's certainly possible that Pai was given strict instructions by Trump about what he is to do here, and that he'll make a show of examining the public response and then ignore it... but the comments are on the public record, and that will be obvious. Opponents of the administration will be free to make lots of political hay from it, and if they can interest Congress, a Congressional investigation could go after Pai.
None of this guarantees that the wrong thing won't happen, but it's absolutely false to say that these comments don't matter.
FWIW, here's what I submitted:
Oops, accidentally modded "Overrated". Posting to undo mod.
The ports should be smart enough to not take the full voltage. I've already seen a few folks fry their expensive phones by plugging in the wrong USB C cable.
The problem is bad cables. I don't know why the USBIF is allowing so many manufacturers to call their cables "USB type C" when they don't comply with the specifications. Avoid buying bad cables and everything will be fine. On Amazon, look for Benson Leung's reviews.
I like the feel of USB-C. Every cable I have tried goes in easily and with a satisfying click. So far I only have factory provided cables though, maybe third party ones are that bad. I have to admit I'm a bit afraid of ordering more cables.
Look for Benson Leung's review before buying: https://www.amazon.com/gp/prof...
He does standard compliance testing to verify that each cable, charger or hub fully and correctly implements the spec. There is a lot of crap out there, but there's also plenty of good stuff.
You seem not to have read the post you replied to.
This is what get you with this guy: used and thrown away. Sounds like Comey wasn't willing to help bury the investigation into the mango-in-chief's ties to Russia. With the way the swamp is being "drained" in DC, I expect the new head of the FBI to be someone from the mob. ;)
Didn't you read Trump's letter? He says that Comey told him three times that he (Trump) wasn't under investigation. Since Trump would never lie, and the FBI would never lie to a target of investigation, you can take it as gospel truth that that wasn't what happened.
</sarcasm>
Was I the only one that found it utterly bizarre that Trump chose to mention that in his letter firing Comey?
What Google wants to eliminate is security vulnerabilities, which has many implications.
Then why are they writing their own kernel and OS from scratch?
Linux is the single largest source of vulnerabilities in Android, in spite of being a small portion of the codebase. It's also not true that the Fuschia kernel is being written "from scratch". It's based on Little Kernel (https://github.com/littlekernel/lk/wiki/Introduction).
You can always buy phones from Google. They're unlockable. Motorola offers some as well.
I'm very well aware that hardly any OEMs offer unlockable devices. Google does (all devices sold by Google are unlockable). Motorola does. If you want to see more OEMs offering the feature, you should vote with your wallet by buying devices that serve your needs.
Oh... one more point: SafetyNet's root detection also does not mean Google is opposed to rooting. It just means that Google understands that some apps don't want to run on rooted devices, and Google believes app developers should have that choice.
Control your own device, can no longer run some apps? Sounds like a big "fuck you" to users unless Google have a strong control on which apps can do this.
It's not for Google to control. That is between apps and users. Apps that lock out users create an opportunity for competing apps that don't.
Is anyone else noticing the irony of the android engineer's signature tag?
I don't see any irony. Now, if I'd said there should be no unlockable bootloaders, then there would be. But I said the opposite.
I know you mean well, but what prevents telecoms and phone companies from locking all bootloaders? That certainly seems to be the trend around here.
You can buy your devices from Google. They're always unlockable. I realize that may mean prioritizing access over other features you might want... but if enough people do it, maybe OEMs will get the message.
An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. By insurance companies helping to carry the load of preventive maintenance they're helping to avoid catastrophic problems. This is a known in the industry. Get with it.
Just because it's known doesn't mean it's good.
I've struggled to find the logic as well in that thinking and I realized I was incorrectly using logic to solve an emotional problem. I think the reason they vote against their interests has more to do with pride than any real fear of socialism.
I think that's almost right, but not quite.
What you're missing is the effect of history, specifically that the system used to work better for them. They had decent blue-collar jobs and reasonable health care (with respect to the standard of the era, which was abysmal compared to today) and felt able to take pride in their self-sufficiency -- and in some regions also their superiority to another big chunk of the population, blacks (not that most of them really thought about that aspect of it, it's just the way things were).
Now, their decent blue-collar jobs have taken a beating from foreign competition and automation and greedy rich bastards. For those who unconsciously (or consciously) consoled themselves with their superiority to blacks, the left has been waging an assault on that as well... but not just by saying "you're not superior", which all but the true racists would accept. No, the assault focuses on telling these white blue collar workers that they themselves are evil oppressors, elevating themselves by keeping their boot on the neck of the black man. Regardless of the truth or falsehood of that claim (it's a mixed bag, honestly, and even where it's true it's rarely intentional -- which doesn't make it less true), it's adding insult to injury to people who see their own socioeconomic status dropping like a rock.
What they want is to get the good old days back (regardless of whether they were objectively good). Yes, it's about pride and it's about economics, but it's about recovering the system that gave their parents/grandparents both. That was a system in which they had reasonable economic stability through hard work which let them hold their heads high. They weren't rich, life was a struggle, but it was decent and they could feel like they did it themselves.
Instead, the left wants to tell them that since they're now the dregs of society, the government should step in and prop them up. Note that this is the government that many consider to be the direct or indirect cause of their socioeconomic slide, and the government many have been suspicious of for centuries (especially in the south, which didn't much care for Yankee federalism even before the war and the horrors of reconstruction).
To vote for this aid requires this group of people to accept that they are not who they think they are. It means accepting a different identity, and one that they particularly despise. To them, their identity is that of the middle class working man. Not rich, but not poor, the backbone of the country -- including in terms of paying taxes. People with that identity see wealth redistribution schemes as taking from people like them to give to the despised lazy underclass -- even if they personally would currently be on the receiving end.
Moreover, it also has implications about who people perceive that their ancestors were. If it's not the case that their own current bad circumstances are a result of government interference, globalism, affirmative action, etc., then it must be the case that their ancestors' prior success was luck rather than rugged independence, lifting themselves by their own bootstraps.
If voting for your own economic interest requires voting against your personal and family identity, you'll vote against your own economic interest and look for an alternative that allows you to retain both. You'll vote for the guy who claims he'll "Make America Great Again". And note that this is doubly true of the people who actually aren't struggling economically, but merely fear that they or their children may struggle in the future. They not only want the old days back, they also don't want to foot the bill to lift "those people" out of their economic doldrums... r
For those that could afford the premiums, the ACA became medical disaster insurance.
Really, insurance should be disaster-proofing, not pre-payment for common events. To use a car analogy, it makes sense to insure your car against collisions, but not to try to use your insurance to cover oil changes.
I'm not saying that healthcare insurance shouldn't cover preventative care, but rather that insurance isn't the right way to structure health care payments.
They are doing this to go after the Rooters. They want to close off the "Root your device and load whatever you want" hole in these devices.
(Android security platform engineer here)
Google has no interest in eliminating the ability to root. Quite the opposite, actually. There's a pretty strong sentiment among Google engineers in general, and the Android security team in particular, that it's important that users have the ability to fully own and control their own hardware. Take a look at how Chromebook security and the required "dev screw" works for an example of how we really think it ought to be.
What Google wants to eliminate is security vulnerabilities, which has many implications. I could write an essay on what they are and how they relate to each other, but here I'll just boil it down to: The best thing to do for the security of typical user devices is to lock them down rather tightly, including removing root. However, users who want to should be able to deliberately unlock their bootloader, after which they should be able to install and run whatever software they want, whether that's a slightly-modified stock image that includes the 'su' binary, or full-on custom ROMs.
But... OEMs have for many years not liked the idea of unlockable bootloaders. This has led the modding and rooting community to seek out and exploit privilege escalation vulnerabilities in the OS that allow them to modify the system. That's nice for modders and rooters, sort of, but really bad for the rest of the ecosystem, because privilege escalation vulnerabilities are at least as available to malicious attackers as they are to power users.
As the Android security team tightens down the hatches, notably (but not exclusively) by employing SELinux to block off most of the exploit chains, so even when you find a vulnerability in one app or system component you can't use it to do anything, modders and rooters are finding that it is getting harder and harder to find exploitable vulns. Yay for security, bad for rooting devices with permalocked bootloaders (which is most devices).
Zombie Ryushu (and many others) interpret this as Google being opposed to rooting, but what's really going on is just improving security. If you want to root, you should be able to root... but you should only be able to do it by explicitly unlocking the device security protections. And that unlocking process must be somewhat hard, to mitigate social engineering attacks. Hence: enable the hidden developer options, flip the OEM unlock switch, install adb and fastboot on a computer, connect via USB, adb reboot-bootloader, fastboot oem unlock, read the scary text on the display and manipulate the buttons to say "okay", etc. Nothing in that process is hard, but it's the sort of thing you're going to find difficult to social engineer a typical user into doing.
Bottom line: If you want to root, buy a device with an unlockable bootloader and root it. If you buy a device with a permalocked bootloader, don't be surprised if you find it can't be rooted. That's a Good Thing, it means that system security is solid.
Oh... one more point: SafetyNet's root detection also does not mean Google is opposed to rooting. It just means that Google understands that some apps don't want to run on rooted devices, and Google believes app developers should have that choice.
Well, I think the base of Magenta is LK, which is on practically every Android phone out there (it serves as the bootloader)
Often, but not always. LK is often the basis of the Trusted Execution Environment OS as well.
Not invented here... once again. Sigh. I hope it dies
What Google needs to do is upgrade Android to use cgroups for app isolation, and switch to using JVM bytecodes so they can recycle the vast amount of work in the OpenJDK project.
App isolation of the sort provided by cgroups (which is mostly about resource accounting) really isn't that much of a problem in Android. The addition of SELinux has done far, far more to improve overall system security than cgroups could, and there is still more that can be done with SELinux. Don't get me wrong, there are ways in which cgroups could help, but most of them can be just as effectively achieved by SELinux, with less disruption to the architecture.
As for JVM bytecodes, that would be very bad for performance. Since performance == battery life, users would hate that. A better solution is just to ensure that cached native code is correctly generated and cannot be modified after generation. There aren't any attacks (AFAIK) which subvert the native compilation step, or the .dex bytecodes.
Horseshit. If one political party accepts science and the other rejects it, using that science to make decisions not equate to supporting the party that accepts it. If Democrats believed that foodborne illnesses were caused by demons, the FDA would not be furthering a political ideology.
All true. However, I have to bring up some of the points mentioned by the AC that got modded down to -1, because he wasn't entirely wrong. Democrats -- thanks mostly to the element of the party from the education-loving Northeast -- tend to take a more favorable view of educated opinions, and therefore science, but they're far from perfect. In particular, anywhere that science conflicts with other elements of their ideology, science loses, e.g. all of the science that shows that GMOs are safe. Both parties take an anti-scientific perspective on nuclear power (though the Dems are worse on this issue than the Reps). The Democrats most often diverge from science when it interferes with the anti-establishment element of the party from the left coast. The Republicans most often diverge from science when it interferes with the religious right element from the deep south. But there are other cases for both.
There is no "party of science". There are two parties that each have their own bundle of ideological views, derived from the allied subcultures that compose them, and both love science when it supports their ideology and ignore/hate it when it contradicts. On the whole, Democrats are more pro-science than Republicans, but not in every area.
Where we would like to think that *somehow* facts will win the argument, there are way to many alternate realities floating around with their on version of facts and truth these days.
Fuck that. An abundance of lies does not mean we can't have an objective reality.
Indeed we can... and it starts by objectively comparing your own and your party's beliefs with the best ground truth knowledge available, which is provided by science, and admitting where they do and don't coincide.
Personally, I find it's easiest to do that if you avoid being emotionally tied to either party.
corporations will weasel out of paying
Corporations don't pay taxes anyway. Never have, never will. Every dime you collect from a corporation gets shifted onto someone.
Corporate taxes are just a sneaky way to tax individuals -- employees, customers and shareholders -- without making it obvious that's what's happening. This is bad in two ways. First, it's bad because taxpayers should know what they're paying. Second, it's bad because it means it's the corporations who decide where to shift their alleged tax burden to, and that is almost certainly not the same place that you'd like it to land.
Freedom yes... self-reliance? I suppose it might create a *feeling* of self-reliance, but the opposite is the truth.
Sure, that's all good... but it's really not independence and it's the opposite of self-sufficiency.
Well - you have more financial independence because you know that at least part of your income will be steady.
That is the "narrowest possible sense" to which I referred.
So this is basically a large wealth transfer (which all taxes in principle are), not some utopian new idea that somehow pays for itself, right?
Absolutely. However, it's a less invasive, less condescending, less costly and more scalable and likely less economically distortive approach to doing exactly what welfare systems do now. To start with, assume that instead of $30K we set the UBI at what traditional means-tested welfare typically pays people now, then (a) pay that to everyone and (b) increase taxes to cover it. For most people, on average, this will result in no net change. You'll get UBI checks of, say, $1K per month, but your taxes will increase by $12K annually, so you get neither benefit, nor cost. In any particular situation that may not be exactly true, but it will be close. The degree of redistribution applied is a separate variable, based on how you allocate the taxes.
This system is less invasive and less condescending than means-tested welfare because it means that those who need assistance don't have to open the details of their lives and behavior to government scrutiny in order to qualify. It's less costly because the administrative overhead is much smaller than means-tested welfare. Not zero, certainly, but much smaller than now because the only thing you need to do to get UBI is to prove that you're alive and of the appropriate age. Fraud control will be important, but it will mostly consist of ensuring that birth certificates are only issued to real people and deaths are noticed and recorded, as well as giving people a mechanism to dispute the misrouting of payments. For the same reasons, it's more scalable. Means-tested systems introduce all sorts of odd economic distortions based on the exact rules. UBI would have effects vs a pure market system (which no one actually has), but economists argue that they would be smaller.
The big risk, of course, is that UBI may encourage able-bodied people not to work. That's a problem if and only if we need those people to work. The motivation for exploring UBI is that maybe we don't need everyone working now, and in the future it seems extremely likely that we'll need less human labor due to AI-driven expansion in automation of production and distribution.
Let me first point out that I'm in favor of experimentation with UBI because I think that in a decade or two the coming wave of automation will make it both necessary and affordable. But I still find it bizarre that people would say they favor UBI in order to have "greater financial independence and self-reliance". What? In what way does UBI give you greater financial independence or self-reliance? Relying on government payouts, funded by taxes collected from others, is not independence except in the narrowest possible sense and it is pretty much the opposite of "self-reliance".
As I said, I think UBI will be necessary, and I think it's a much less invasive, condescending and economically distortive form of public safety net than more traditional means testing. But self-reliance it is most definitely not.