But your comment is one (of many!) examples that the left is no more rational or measured than the right.
I'm a moderate conservative and I don't represent the left.
Interesting. Either your comments on/. disagree with your self-perspective or I'm confusing you with someone else (the latter is not at all unlikely; I'm bad with names).
I find it interesting that the Republicans who derided Obama all these years are hyperventilating that Trump will get the same treatment by the Democrats.
I haven't seen that dynamic. I have seen many on the left refusing to admit that Trump will be the nation's president. I haven't yet seen anything equivalent to the "birther" crap, but I won't be surprised if it arises. The closest I've seen so far is Democrats decrying the electoral college for "not doing its job", which they think is to refuse to elect a manifestly bad candidate.
I certainly understand their emotional position. I'm fairly terrified of President Trump myself. Not so much his domestic agenda (though I expect the result to be bad insofar as he follows through with his campaign promises, especially his protectionism), but as commander in chief and the man in position to push The Button. I'm also concerned with the likelihood that his election will exacerbate racial and ethnic tensions, though I suspect he's already done all the damage that he's going to do in that respect.
But, regardless of my fears, Trump will be the president, and I will respect the office, though not the man in it. That doesn't mean I'll hesitate to cricitize, or to outright oppose any illegal actions he might take.
As my mom taught me: "Two wrongs don't make a right!"
As my father taught me: "What goes around comes around."
I'm giving Mr. Trump the same level of respect that the Republicans gave President Obama for eight years.
I often told my right-wing friends who said the same thing about Obama that they were wrong, and that left-wingers might be elitists but they at least recognized that their president was their president whether they liked him or not. But your comment is one (of many!) examples that the left is no more rational or measured than the right.
Post-rational, post-truth politics, that's what we've got. On both sides.
As my mom taught me: "Two wrongs don't make a right!"
"Gender Dysphoria" is not a mental illness. Unless being gay is a mental illness too, which I guess it is by your definition...
Wrong on both counts. It is classified as a mental illness so that insurance companies pay out on gender reassignment surgery, the same cannot be said for homosexuality. I'm afraid you can't just say "I want the money but without the negative connotation".
That is, ultimately, what this is about. They want Gender Dysphoria to be in some sort of weird quantum state of illness and identity, where they can pick either one based on what is most beneficial to them at any given time.
Want to pick and choose what treatment you get? Then it's identity, and you don't "need" dysphoria to have it.
Want to get a shared insurance fund to pay for your SRS and Transitioning? Then it's a mental illness and coverage is required by law.
You don't understand what mental illness is. This isn't a case of picking and choosing, it's clear-cut diagnosis and treatment.
To understand this, you first have to realize that any given cluster of behavioral symptoms may or may not constitute mental illness. Two people can have exactly the same symptoms and one is diagnosed as sick and the other as healthy. What makes the difference? Whether or not the person is able to function in society.
A person with gender dysphoria (or any other out-of-norm behavior) is mentally ill if and only if their condition results in an inability to function in society. In societal contexts that accept them as they are and are willing to treat them as the gender identity they prefer, many are able to function and are therefore not sick. For others, even with social accommodations, they are still uncomfortable in their bodies and can't function and therefore are sick. This may look like "picking and choosing", but it's just a direct result of how severe their gender dysphoria is -- something that no one can know until the individual tries living one way for a while.
It's a form of the Motte and Bailey post-modernist fallacy, the same one that brings us "crybullying" -- aka, "I'm so oppressed that I'm going to ruin your life for upsetting me."
Oh, stop being such an asshole. People suffering from this condition aren't doing it just to inconvenience you, they really are struggling with problems, and the fact that you can't relate doesn't make them in any way less real. The same is true of people suffering from other mental and physical illnesses. That guy in the wheelchair doesn't refuse to get up and walk just because he thinks it's funny to make you pay for a wheelchair ramp, and the man who feels like he should have been a woman isn't doing it just to bug you either.
That of course leads us to the greater question of, "What is a mental illness, anyway? And why?". If people can be functional in society, ought we define something as an illness? Maybe, maybe not.
If behavior that is outside of the range of normalcy does not impede functioning in society, it is not a mental illness. The diagnostic criteria for mental illnesses describe lots of behaviors associated with them, but the diagnostic manual also specifies that behaviors constitute an illness only if they interfere with the person's ability to function in society.
So, according to psychology, the answer to the question of whether we should define something to be an illness if they can function is "no".
In the case of gender dysphoria, then, there are people with the characteristics of this illness who are and are not ill, depending on whether it interferes with their functioning in society. Those who find that it makes them unable to work, etc., are ill, those who get along fine are not. This means that the context may determine whether or not someone is considered sick. If they live and work in an environment that accepts their behavior and everything works fine, then they're not sick. If their environment does not accept their behavior and this causes distress and prevents them from functioning then they are sick... but it's generally more effective and better for everyone involved if everyone changes to accommodate them, because the accommodation required is small and easy -- just treat them as though they were the gender they wish they were.
In some cases, sufferers of gender dysphoria find that they're sufficiently unhappy in their own bodies that they can't function normally even if others make the relevant accommodations. They have a mental illness. There are two approaches to treating this mental illness: Adjusting their bodies to match their gender identities, or adjusting their gender identities to match their bodies. It's generally thought that the former is more practical and feasible than the latter, though some professionals disagree, citing studies that show that gender reassignment has poor outcomes.
over time the pioneers were promoted, and the newer generations are not as innovative and code efficient as their elders.
I disagree. What's changed isn't the quality of the people, it's the nature (mainly, size) of the company and the expectations users have of its products, which changes the sort of work that can be done.
The difference with crypto is that the volatility resulting from these swings is enormous.
That's not a "crypto" difference; it's a normal characteristic of commodities that typically trade in low volumes. If bitcoins were being bought and sold in large quantities by many big institutional investors, with lots of focus on identifying and exploiting arbitrage opportunities, the volatility would be reduced.
Have you tried to use the internet with *ALL* of google's services blocked? Without google very large swaths of the internet simply break
Don't block them, just use the tracking opt-out. Works fine. If you have specific examples of stuff that actually breaks, let me know and I'll file bugs.
Yes I am, and I benefit from that directly. I see little benefit from someone else driving a new car while I don't.
You're benefitting from less pollution being emitted by that guy's car. And you're also not really paying for it; your children or grandchildren will be doing that. Whether that last bit makes it better, worse or has no relevance is a complicated question.
As long as you are an accomplished researcher with at least one PhD, a founder of at least one industry and all around good guy.
Actually, for software engineering positions Google doesn't care about research, and doesn't care about PhDs (or degrees at all). Being a good guy/gal does matter, though. As does being able to think and code on your feet.
it's simply none of Google's business in the first place.
Correction: It's Google's business if you choose to use their services, because your eyeballs and the information needed to target the right ads to them are the "fee" you pay for the use of the services. If you don't like that, you can choose not to use the services. Of course, there are Google ads on lots of third-party sites, but Google makes it easy for you to ensure that Google doesn't track you on those sites as well if you want, including browser plug-ins that ensure your don't-track-me preferences don't get lost.
The most ubiquitous (widely-deployed) products are bound to be subject to the greatest number of "bug reports" (CVEs), by virtue of the fact that they are "under the microscope" and so broadly used.
Open source products also get a boost, by dint of the simple fact that finding bugs is easier. Security researchers try to focus their time on the most-used software rather than the easiest-to-analyze software, but the time spent on easy-to-analyze software often generates more bugs. This is exacerbated when there is an entity that pays out good cash for vulnerability reports. Android's bug reports jumped significantly when Google began paying bounties, for example, but that doesn't mean the platform got less secure.
True, however Android also suffers from very long delays between serious vulnerability being found and the majority of network-connected installs being patched. The combination of that and a large number of vulnerabilities is pretty bad.
It's not good, certainly, but it's not as bad as that makes it appear, at least not for users who stick with the Google Play store, and even users who don't but leave "Verified Apps" turned on. The Play store is pre-vetted and Verified Apps checks sideloads and apps from other stores. Both of those mechanisms can fail because things can slip through the cracks, but it's an another (large) hurdle that attackers have to jump through to get malicious code onto user devices.
In addition, the slow update issue also inflates the bug count, because people report vulnerabilities against very old versions of Android which, while they do still exist in the wild, constitute a fairly small number of devices. Often bugs still exist on newer releases but aren't exploitable on newer releases because SELinux blocks the exploit chain. By that I mean that while the reported vulnerability exists on new releases, the researchers can't find any way to use it to gain real access to anything else. So, they typically then verify that it also exists on Kit Kat (SELinux was turned on in enforcing mode in Lollipop) and submit the report, but claim it as a vulnerability on the latest version because it still exists, even if it's not usable. If Android devices were upgraded reliably they probably wouldn't even bother submitting. The Android security team is glad they do, though, since there's always the chance that some clever person could find a working exploit chain.
Anyway, as a practical matter although Android has lots of reported vulnerabilities the ecosystem is actually quite healthy. Few devices actually getting exploited and nearly all of those only after the user went out of their way to take on extra risks.
"Qualcomm has detailed the Snapdragon 835 processor, which will power most of the leading Android smartphones this year. It's designed to grab information from the air at gigabit speeds and turn it into rich virtual and augmented reality experiences, ".
It's a processor. I certainly welcome advancement but it's a piece of silicon that does math problems. This one does them a little faster than the last one on a little less power. It ain't magic.
You should have kept reading.
As the rest of the summary details, most of what's new about this SoC is related to boosting LTE speeds and improving graphics performance, not general computation. The marketingspeak is actually more informative than your abbreviated summary.
Anything that makes Merkel and her disasterous policies look bad.
This, a thousand times this. The difference between "fake news" and "real news worthy of further investigation" is all in who gets to define it, of course.
A story entitled "Watergate Hotel Break-in Has Possible Ties to Nixon White House" would have been called "fake news" by most people in 1972 (and certainly by Nixon himself).
I think the source matters more than the content. Something apparently unbelievable from a random blogger or even an obscure "news organization" that was incorporated just last week might well get taken down as fake news... but if the same content is published by the New York Times, or Der Spiegel, and reputable investigative reporters are standing behind it as real news, then claims that it's fake are going to be tough to sell.
In the example you cite, with Woodward and Bernstein's names on the bylines and the articles published in the Washington Post, the story would have been broken and any government attempt to label it as fake news would have failed.
I'm far from certain this proposed law is a good idea, but ridiculous, thought-free reactions like yours and many others on this article really don't constitute a serious argument against it.
A big chunk of East Palo Alto is under rent control, so those people will be paying rent that's far below market price for years to come.
It's worth pointing out that rent control and building restrictions are the primary cause of high rents. Start issuing building permits for high-density high-rise housing and the market will naturally produce affordable rents. I don't know about East Palo Alto, but in many areas with rent controls there is an exemption for "luxury" apartments, which motivates landlords to build those rather than more affordable housing -- and even to tear down rent-controlled housing so they can build luxury apartments.
Silicon Valley's problem isn't the influx of tech money, it's the combination of the influx of tech money with the old guard residents who want to keep their sleepy suburban communities unchanged. The latter disallow high-density urban development which means the former drives up the prices, massively -- of course, that works very well for said old residents who have seen their homes appreciate up to 40X in value. I have a friend who bought a small three-bedroom home in Mountain View for $1.2M, from the original owner who built it in the late 60s for $30K.
So, indeed, if you give 50% of your earnings away to charity, you'd think that maybe you get achieve this "no tax" sort of status, but actually the government restricts the benefit so that you can't just "give it all away" and reap some outrageous deduction benefit (those who are highly charitable know this to be true).
What charitable giving does is simply reduce your income -- at best. If you make $100,000 and give $40,000 away, then you pay taxes as though you had only made $60,000. This doesn't allow you erase your tax liability, it just means that you pay the same taxes as someone who made $60,000.
There are some limits. In general, you can only deduct charitable contributions up to 50% of your income. If you make $100K and donate $60K, only $50K of the donation counts. So you have $40K left after your donation but pay taxes on $50K. Also, there are some charitable institutions which have a 30% limit. There are some other limits if your giving is in the form of property with long-term capital gains.
Huge numbers of processors and cores only give the highest performance if the software is designed to make effective use of those resources. Typical amateur software and most freeware is single-threaded, and that software benefits from high clock rates and high instructions-per-clock.
The design choices that allow large numbers of moderate-power cores differ from the choices that would allow one or two extremely fast cores, and Intel isn't about to design a different core that would optimize single thread speed. For home users that aren't running multi-threaded games, this direction of development is not in our favor.
For home users, computers got fast enough years ago. Consumers are pushing for thinner and lighter, longer battery life, etc., not more horsepower. The customers demanding power are the big data centers... and they do know how to make effective use of large numbers of cores, and their focus -- as I said previously -- is on performance per watt, not raw performance.
Heh. I should mention that the desktop in my home office has 40 cores @ 2.6 Ghz. My heavy-duty processing requirements are for compiling large software packages, and that is a highly parallelizable problem (I typically do make -j80). The other bottleneck when building software is disk I/O, which is why I have 1.25 TB of SSD.
Fun fact: a lot of accidents with moderate damage occur where the driver presses the brakes deeply, then releases because he or she realizes someone might be behind them, and THEN collides with the car in front. Mercedes specifically created an emergency brake system to counter this. It would keep applying the brakes when pressed "vigorously" for a few seconds after the driver released them. Gives you a hell of a surprise the first time you feel it...
Ouch. That seems like a cure worse than the disease.
They continue to make up most of the OS User Space tools, except with embedded Linux where BusyBox typically replaces them. You are confusing the OS with applications in the repository.
Is the GUI platform part of the applications? The desktop environment? How about the init system? Audio system? Networking stack?
GNU provides a compiler (though much of the world has moved to LLVM), libc, one of the common shells (though not even the most common any more... that is dash, a somewhat stripped-down bash replacement), and a bunch of command-line tools. While the GNU components are important they hardly constitute "most" of the operating system. On systems that have moved away from the SYSV init script system and for users who don't use the command line, I'll bet you could rip out many of those command-line tools without causing any problems.
Slashdot Mirror
A yahoo email address was my first official email.
Psst. <whisper>Dude, you don't say that out loud. It's almost as bad as admitting you had an aol.com address.</whisper>
But your comment is one (of many!) examples that the left is no more rational or measured than the right.
I'm a moderate conservative and I don't represent the left.
Interesting. Either your comments on /. disagree with your self-perspective or I'm confusing you with someone else (the latter is not at all unlikely; I'm bad with names).
I find it interesting that the Republicans who derided Obama all these years are hyperventilating that Trump will get the same treatment by the Democrats.
I haven't seen that dynamic. I have seen many on the left refusing to admit that Trump will be the nation's president. I haven't yet seen anything equivalent to the "birther" crap, but I won't be surprised if it arises. The closest I've seen so far is Democrats decrying the electoral college for "not doing its job", which they think is to refuse to elect a manifestly bad candidate.
I certainly understand their emotional position. I'm fairly terrified of President Trump myself. Not so much his domestic agenda (though I expect the result to be bad insofar as he follows through with his campaign promises, especially his protectionism), but as commander in chief and the man in position to push The Button. I'm also concerned with the likelihood that his election will exacerbate racial and ethnic tensions, though I suspect he's already done all the damage that he's going to do in that respect.
But, regardless of my fears, Trump will be the president, and I will respect the office, though not the man in it. That doesn't mean I'll hesitate to cricitize, or to outright oppose any illegal actions he might take.
As my mom taught me: "Two wrongs don't make a right!"
As my father taught me: "What goes around comes around."
Yeah, because cycles of vengeance end well.
I'm giving Mr. Trump the same level of respect that the Republicans gave President Obama for eight years.
I often told my right-wing friends who said the same thing about Obama that they were wrong, and that left-wingers might be elitists but they at least recognized that their president was their president whether they liked him or not. But your comment is one (of many!) examples that the left is no more rational or measured than the right.
Post-rational, post-truth politics, that's what we've got. On both sides.
As my mom taught me: "Two wrongs don't make a right!"
"Gender Dysphoria" is not a mental illness. Unless being gay is a mental illness too, which I guess it is by your definition...
Wrong on both counts. It is classified as a mental illness so that insurance companies pay out on gender reassignment surgery, the same cannot be said for homosexuality. I'm afraid you can't just say "I want the money but without the negative connotation".
That is, ultimately, what this is about. They want Gender Dysphoria to be in some sort of weird quantum state of illness and identity, where they can pick either one based on what is most beneficial to them at any given time.
Want to pick and choose what treatment you get? Then it's identity, and you don't "need" dysphoria to have it.
Want to get a shared insurance fund to pay for your SRS and Transitioning? Then it's a mental illness and coverage is required by law.
You don't understand what mental illness is. This isn't a case of picking and choosing, it's clear-cut diagnosis and treatment.
To understand this, you first have to realize that any given cluster of behavioral symptoms may or may not constitute mental illness. Two people can have exactly the same symptoms and one is diagnosed as sick and the other as healthy. What makes the difference? Whether or not the person is able to function in society.
A person with gender dysphoria (or any other out-of-norm behavior) is mentally ill if and only if their condition results in an inability to function in society. In societal contexts that accept them as they are and are willing to treat them as the gender identity they prefer, many are able to function and are therefore not sick. For others, even with social accommodations, they are still uncomfortable in their bodies and can't function and therefore are sick. This may look like "picking and choosing", but it's just a direct result of how severe their gender dysphoria is -- something that no one can know until the individual tries living one way for a while.
It's a form of the Motte and Bailey post-modernist fallacy, the same one that brings us "crybullying" -- aka, "I'm so oppressed that I'm going to ruin your life for upsetting me."
Oh, stop being such an asshole. People suffering from this condition aren't doing it just to inconvenience you, they really are struggling with problems, and the fact that you can't relate doesn't make them in any way less real. The same is true of people suffering from other mental and physical illnesses. That guy in the wheelchair doesn't refuse to get up and walk just because he thinks it's funny to make you pay for a wheelchair ramp, and the man who feels like he should have been a woman isn't doing it just to bug you either.
That of course leads us to the greater question of, "What is a mental illness, anyway? And why?". If people can be functional in society, ought we define something as an illness? Maybe, maybe not.
If behavior that is outside of the range of normalcy does not impede functioning in society, it is not a mental illness. The diagnostic criteria for mental illnesses describe lots of behaviors associated with them, but the diagnostic manual also specifies that behaviors constitute an illness only if they interfere with the person's ability to function in society.
So, according to psychology, the answer to the question of whether we should define something to be an illness if they can function is "no".
In the case of gender dysphoria, then, there are people with the characteristics of this illness who are and are not ill, depending on whether it interferes with their functioning in society. Those who find that it makes them unable to work, etc., are ill, those who get along fine are not. This means that the context may determine whether or not someone is considered sick. If they live and work in an environment that accepts their behavior and everything works fine, then they're not sick. If their environment does not accept their behavior and this causes distress and prevents them from functioning then they are sick... but it's generally more effective and better for everyone involved if everyone changes to accommodate them, because the accommodation required is small and easy -- just treat them as though they were the gender they wish they were.
In some cases, sufferers of gender dysphoria find that they're sufficiently unhappy in their own bodies that they can't function normally even if others make the relevant accommodations. They have a mental illness. There are two approaches to treating this mental illness: Adjusting their bodies to match their gender identities, or adjusting their gender identities to match their bodies. It's generally thought that the former is more practical and feasible than the latter, though some professionals disagree, citing studies that show that gender reassignment has poor outcomes.
Dude, your creepy level of loyalty is misplaced: you're working for the bad guys.
Dude, you're wrong.
over time the pioneers were promoted, and the newer generations are not as innovative and code efficient as their elders.
I disagree. What's changed isn't the quality of the people, it's the nature (mainly, size) of the company and the expectations users have of its products, which changes the sort of work that can be done.
The difference with crypto is that the volatility resulting from these swings is enormous.
That's not a "crypto" difference; it's a normal characteristic of commodities that typically trade in low volumes. If bitcoins were being bought and sold in large quantities by many big institutional investors, with lots of focus on identifying and exploiting arbitrage opportunities, the volatility would be reduced.
Have you tried to use the internet with *ALL* of google's services blocked? Without google very large swaths of the internet simply break
Don't block them, just use the tracking opt-out. Works fine. If you have specific examples of stuff that actually breaks, let me know and I'll file bugs.
So, are you a janitor or a security guard? Because those are the only two positions at Google that people over 40 qualify for.
Software engineer, currently working on Android.
Yes I am, and I benefit from that directly. I see little benefit from someone else driving a new car while I don't.
You're benefitting from less pollution being emitted by that guy's car. And you're also not really paying for it; your children or grandchildren will be doing that. Whether that last bit makes it better, worse or has no relevance is a complicated question.
As long as you are an accomplished researcher with at least one PhD, a founder of at least one industry and all around good guy.
Actually, for software engineering positions Google doesn't care about research, and doesn't care about PhDs (or degrees at all). Being a good guy/gal does matter, though. As does being able to think and code on your feet.
If you're over 50 years old and looking for a job at Google , apply now!
Well, year-after next I'll be 50. But I'm already working for Google. What should I do?
Well if the concern is about confidential data, then just wait for the next public leak and the problem will be solved.
Public leak of Google-managed personal information? Has there ever been such a thing? Not that I'm aware of.
it's simply none of Google's business in the first place.
Correction: It's Google's business if you choose to use their services, because your eyeballs and the information needed to target the right ads to them are the "fee" you pay for the use of the services. If you don't like that, you can choose not to use the services. Of course, there are Google ads on lots of third-party sites, but Google makes it easy for you to ensure that Google doesn't track you on those sites as well if you want, including browser plug-ins that ensure your don't-track-me preferences don't get lost.
Says the Android security engineer.
So, are you arguing that anything I said is untrue? If so, what?
The most ubiquitous (widely-deployed) products are bound to be subject to the greatest number of "bug reports" (CVEs), by virtue of the fact that they are "under the microscope" and so broadly used.
Open source products also get a boost, by dint of the simple fact that finding bugs is easier. Security researchers try to focus their time on the most-used software rather than the easiest-to-analyze software, but the time spent on easy-to-analyze software often generates more bugs. This is exacerbated when there is an entity that pays out good cash for vulnerability reports. Android's bug reports jumped significantly when Google began paying bounties, for example, but that doesn't mean the platform got less secure.
True, however Android also suffers from very long delays between serious vulnerability being found and the majority of network-connected installs being patched. The combination of that and a large number of vulnerabilities is pretty bad.
It's not good, certainly, but it's not as bad as that makes it appear, at least not for users who stick with the Google Play store, and even users who don't but leave "Verified Apps" turned on. The Play store is pre-vetted and Verified Apps checks sideloads and apps from other stores. Both of those mechanisms can fail because things can slip through the cracks, but it's an another (large) hurdle that attackers have to jump through to get malicious code onto user devices.
In addition, the slow update issue also inflates the bug count, because people report vulnerabilities against very old versions of Android which, while they do still exist in the wild, constitute a fairly small number of devices. Often bugs still exist on newer releases but aren't exploitable on newer releases because SELinux blocks the exploit chain. By that I mean that while the reported vulnerability exists on new releases, the researchers can't find any way to use it to gain real access to anything else. So, they typically then verify that it also exists on Kit Kat (SELinux was turned on in enforcing mode in Lollipop) and submit the report, but claim it as a vulnerability on the latest version because it still exists, even if it's not usable. If Android devices were upgraded reliably they probably wouldn't even bother submitting. The Android security team is glad they do, though, since there's always the chance that some clever person could find a working exploit chain.
Anyway, as a practical matter although Android has lots of reported vulnerabilities the ecosystem is actually quite healthy. Few devices actually getting exploited and nearly all of those only after the user went out of their way to take on extra risks.
Dang I'm getting sick of marketing speak:
"Qualcomm has detailed the Snapdragon 835 processor, which will power most of the leading Android smartphones this year. It's designed to grab information from the air at gigabit speeds and turn it into rich virtual and augmented reality experiences, ".
It's a processor. I certainly welcome advancement but it's a piece of silicon that does math problems. This one does them a little faster than the last one on a little less power. It ain't magic.
You should have kept reading.
As the rest of the summary details, most of what's new about this SoC is related to boosting LTE speeds and improving graphics performance, not general computation. The marketingspeak is actually more informative than your abbreviated summary.
Anything that makes Merkel and her disasterous policies look bad.
This, a thousand times this. The difference between "fake news" and "real news worthy of further investigation" is all in who gets to define it, of course.
A story entitled "Watergate Hotel Break-in Has Possible Ties to Nixon White House" would have been called "fake news" by most people in 1972 (and certainly by Nixon himself).
I think the source matters more than the content. Something apparently unbelievable from a random blogger or even an obscure "news organization" that was incorporated just last week might well get taken down as fake news... but if the same content is published by the New York Times, or Der Spiegel, and reputable investigative reporters are standing behind it as real news, then claims that it's fake are going to be tough to sell.
In the example you cite, with Woodward and Bernstein's names on the bylines and the articles published in the Washington Post, the story would have been broken and any government attempt to label it as fake news would have failed.
I'm far from certain this proposed law is a good idea, but ridiculous, thought-free reactions like yours and many others on this article really don't constitute a serious argument against it.
A big chunk of East Palo Alto is under rent control, so those people will be paying rent that's far below market price for years to come.
It's worth pointing out that rent control and building restrictions are the primary cause of high rents. Start issuing building permits for high-density high-rise housing and the market will naturally produce affordable rents. I don't know about East Palo Alto, but in many areas with rent controls there is an exemption for "luxury" apartments, which motivates landlords to build those rather than more affordable housing -- and even to tear down rent-controlled housing so they can build luxury apartments.
Silicon Valley's problem isn't the influx of tech money, it's the combination of the influx of tech money with the old guard residents who want to keep their sleepy suburban communities unchanged. The latter disallow high-density urban development which means the former drives up the prices, massively -- of course, that works very well for said old residents who have seen their homes appreciate up to 40X in value. I have a friend who bought a small three-bedroom home in Mountain View for $1.2M, from the original owner who built it in the late 60s for $30K.
So, indeed, if you give 50% of your earnings away to charity, you'd think that maybe you get achieve this "no tax" sort of status, but actually the government restricts the benefit so that you can't just "give it all away" and reap some outrageous deduction benefit (those who are highly charitable know this to be true).
What charitable giving does is simply reduce your income -- at best. If you make $100,000 and give $40,000 away, then you pay taxes as though you had only made $60,000. This doesn't allow you erase your tax liability, it just means that you pay the same taxes as someone who made $60,000.
There are some limits. In general, you can only deduct charitable contributions up to 50% of your income. If you make $100K and donate $60K, only $50K of the donation counts. So you have $40K left after your donation but pay taxes on $50K. Also, there are some charitable institutions which have a 30% limit. There are some other limits if your giving is in the form of property with long-term capital gains.
Huge numbers of processors and cores only give the highest performance if the software is designed to make effective use of those resources. Typical amateur software and most freeware is single-threaded, and that software benefits from high clock rates and high instructions-per-clock.
The design choices that allow large numbers of moderate-power cores differ from the choices that would allow one or two extremely fast cores, and Intel isn't about to design a different core that would optimize single thread speed. For home users that aren't running multi-threaded games, this direction of development is not in our favor.
For home users, computers got fast enough years ago. Consumers are pushing for thinner and lighter, longer battery life, etc., not more horsepower. The customers demanding power are the big data centers... and they do know how to make effective use of large numbers of cores, and their focus -- as I said previously -- is on performance per watt, not raw performance.
Heh. I should mention that the desktop in my home office has 40 cores @ 2.6 Ghz. My heavy-duty processing requirements are for compiling large software packages, and that is a highly parallelizable problem (I typically do make -j80). The other bottleneck when building software is disk I/O, which is why I have 1.25 TB of SSD.
Fun fact: a lot of accidents with moderate damage occur where the driver presses the brakes deeply, then releases because he or she realizes someone might be behind them, and THEN collides with the car in front. Mercedes specifically created an emergency brake system to counter this. It would keep applying the brakes when pressed "vigorously" for a few seconds after the driver released them. Gives you a hell of a surprise the first time you feel it...
Ouch. That seems like a cure worse than the disease.
They continue to make up most of the OS User Space tools, except with embedded Linux where BusyBox typically replaces them. You are confusing the OS with applications in the repository.
Is the GUI platform part of the applications? The desktop environment? How about the init system? Audio system? Networking stack?
GNU provides a compiler (though much of the world has moved to LLVM), libc, one of the common shells (though not even the most common any more... that is dash, a somewhat stripped-down bash replacement), and a bunch of command-line tools. While the GNU components are important they hardly constitute "most" of the operating system. On systems that have moved away from the SYSV init script system and for users who don't use the command line, I'll bet you could rip out many of those command-line tools without causing any problems.