Draws power from the payment terminal like existing wireless payment systems. It's existing tech Visa just put it in a ring.
I don't think a ring can carry a large enough antenna to draw power from the terminal, but power requirements are very low, so you could power it from a battery built into the ring for quite a long time. Months at least, if not years.
So, this is a fancy RFID tag then? Basically, you wave your radio-barcode through the induction field and the payment terminal then goes online using the ring's serial number instead of your credit card number?
More likely it's a contactless smart card, which means it has a microprocessor and does a cryptographic exchange with the terminal. This has been doable for many years. In fact, I did a consulting gig with a company making such a ring about 15 years ago. It was going to revolutionize payments, of course.
In all seriousness, once we get fully transitioned to contactless payment, it really opens up the options for the payment form factors. I still think NFC (in your mobile phone) will be the most convenient method for most people because the display and touchscreen enables user controls and because pretty much everyone carries a phone all the time anyway, but once you're using RF and don't need a card-sized antenna there's really no limit to what form factors you can use for payment credentials. The processor can be as small as 2mm square, and shrinking every year.
When Sarah Palin became the first major politician to use twitter, the Democrats laughed at her. When she said that Putin, if not thwarted, may eye invading Ukraine, they laughed at her. When she said she didn't read any one newspaper for her news (as anyone who looks at news aggregators doesn't), they laughed at her. When she said Obamacare would destroy the quality (not access, but quality) of medical care in this country, they ridiculed her.
They also laughed at her when she said that man coexisted with dinosaurs.
AI is not chess playing programs or Go playing programs. Ridiculous.
So what is? Seriously, can you answer that question?
People have tried for a long time to define what artificial intelligence is/will be. Turing defined it as a chatbot, essentially. Whether or not the Turing test has been passed is a question for debate, but if it hasn't it will be pretty soon. For a long time many people used chess as the gold standard. When that was beaten, Go looked like a good tool to measure AI.
So far, the skeptical definition of AI seems to be "Whatever a human can do that a computer can't yet do".
Given what you've said, at some point I should probably try it all again. It wouldn't be all that much work to do so... if they have fixed it, it would be good to know.
If you do, I'd be interested to hear the result. And if it's still broken, I'll file a bug.
It sounds like all of that pre-dated the effort to make sure that everything that's supposed to be deleted is really gone. My guess (and it's only a guess) is that your diagnosis is reasonably accurate, but things have changed since then.
Indeed, for they will not be on speaking terms with me after I render their PC essentially useless for their purposes by sticking on an OS that is not supported by the various bits of propriety work-related software they need (they're still 3-4 years from retirement).
Odds are good that it would run under WINE, though you'd have to test it to find out. VirtualBox is also a reasonable solution in many cases, especially if the bits in question aren't used heavily.
Google is first and foremost a data warehouse who sells data directly or indirectly of every type to anyone willing to pay or it.
This is completely incorrect. Google does not sell user data. Google's targeted advertising model is about using data to target ads; actually giving the data to advertisers would lower its value to Google, among other problems.
Also, Google isn't fundamentally an advertising company. It's a technology company. Its largest products are monetized through advertising, but not all. In fact the percentage of its revenue that comes from advertising is declining, and I expect that trend to continue.
But doesn't say "there is no location history". And, based on other Google experiences, I suspect the information is still there on Google's servers since they don't seem to actually delete anything - they just have a "deleted" flag which makes the information unavailable to you... except when they screw up (which I've seen).
Cite? From what I've seen (from the inside), Google is pretty careful to actually delete data that's users don't want retained. This is actually a hard thing to do completely since there are backup tapes, etc., but it can be done by encrypting everything with user-specific keys and then deleting the keys for the data that isn't supposed to be kept.
So leaving your PV-encrusted Tesla parked out in the sun all day will charge the battery enough to move you 6.3 miles.
And who wants to leave their $100K car out in the sun all day? Even if you could get 30-40 miles worth of charge out of it, it would clearly not be worth the weathering. Better to park the car in a garage and cover the roof with solar panels.
The pain I was referring to hasn't existed for a few years now. There was a time when using a Mac was painful because it required you to find all new/different applications, and in many cases they might not exist. Today, that's simply irrelevant for any decent web-based app, which is the majority of what people use their computers for. It's still occasionally an issue for non-web apps, but it's reduced even there.
Exactly. There is and always has been a reason to distinguish between the general concept of an internet, and the specific, publicly-accessible, globe-spanning Internet.
However, I guess that it is very rare for AP articles to need to draw that distinction. Whatever. I'm going to continue using "Internet" to refer to the Internet and "internet" to refer to the concept of an internet.
"if you need to run windows on new hardware (Kaby Lake processors and later), you will have to install Windows 10"
Yep think about that, an operating system still in it's supported lifecycle can no longer be used on new hardware, not for any technical reasons but because Microsoft wants to make more money by having your OS serve you ads.
Microsoft has to do this. Not to make "more money" but to make money at all.
Being the PC OS maker has been Microsoft's bread and butter from day one. It's how they got their start in the DOS era, and Windows has carried them through the rest of it. They've had some other profitable products, but everything else has been a sideshow... and most of those sideshows (e.g. Office) have been built on the back of that OS engine. They've made their money by selling copies of Windows to OEMs.
This was possible, and very lucrative, because as the dominant PC OS maker, Microsoft Windows was the platform targeted by all of the app developers, which meant that everyone had to run Windows, which meant that hardware manufacturers had to ship their machines with Windows, which they could only get by paying Microsoft. But most applications today live on the web. ChromeOS has become a perfectly reasonable substitute for the majority of users, and the pain involved in switching to an alternative like OS X has largely evaporated. Windows still has some of its lock-in power left, but not much. In the consumer space, the one remaining bastion has been gaming... but it's clear that SteamOS is going to take that away. The enterprise space has lots of tie-ins with Active Directory and other services, but Microsoft needs more.
So, they realize that their business model is rapidly heading towards obsolescence. Their lock-in is moribund and their competition is all free. The only way to compete with free, in the long run, is also to be free, so Windows has to be free. But how do you make money with free? It's possible to do it with support and services, but not on anything remotely like the scale Microsoft needs. That route means taking a massive revenue cut. Plus, Microsoft is already exploiting the available revenue there; it's in the enterprise space.
What else works? Well, Apple makes lots of money selling hardware, but Microsoft doesn't really do hardware and the only place to make really big money in hardware is in the premium niche. Below that, hardware is already commoditized. Margins are razor thin and competition is fierce. And the premium segment isalso tough to break into, and Apple has most of it sewn up.
What's left? Advertising. There are lots and lots of billions in advertising, and it is and has always been the way to make money on the creation of mass market free content.
Windows 10 is Microsoft's first big step towards an advertising-based business model for Windows. Will it piss people off? Sure, some of them. Will it work? That's hard to say. But the alternative isn't to continue business as usual, the alternative is to cease to exist, mostly. The alternative is to gradually lose market share to Linux (including ChromeOS) from the bottom and OS X from the top.
So Microsoft can't care if it loses 10% (to pick a number without any basis) of its user base because it pisses them off by forcing an "upgrade" to an ad-supported model, because it's going to lose users by not forcing an upgrade. Different users, perhaps, and maybe a bit slower, but it's going to lose that 10% and more if it continues business as usual.
By switching to a model that is services-supported for enterprise operations and advertising-supported for consumer operations, Microsoft Windows has a future. Without that switch, it doesn't. So, they're going to take their lumps and do it.
Yes, I also can't figure out why preventing illegal immigration to save literally billions per year is a good idea.
What does building a wall have to do with preventing illegal immigration? Most illegal immigrants enter the country legally, you know.
If you want to deter illegal immigration there's a much easier and cheaper way: throw Americans who employ illegal immigrants in jail. To make that even easier and cheaper, give a green card to any illegal immigrant who turns in his/her employer. Note that there are various ways in which this doesn't work perfectly, but it's a 95%-effective solution which costs very little, as opposed to an outrageously-expensive 30%-effective solution.
Just because your friends and family are all retarded doesn't mean the rest of the world is.
Said the guy who has never done tech support. Sorry, the ratio of people among those who call tech support because they have difficulty completing technical tasks that could complete the task based on your instructions vs those who couldn't is extremely slanted.
Fixed that for you.
Yes, you're right that many people struggle with technology. On the other hand, tech support calls are obviously not an unbiased representation of the set of users as a whole, because those who don't struggle generally don't call.
Had he gone through channels, that public service would never have occurred.
Exactly, and that's not armchair theorizing. We have several clear examples of people who tried to go through channels and got slapped down hard for it. And by "slapped down" I mean "Home raided by armed agents, arrested, indicted, prosecuted on unsustainable charges and rendered unemployable". Hell, we know that a man whose job it was to work with whistleblowers under the law was forced out for trying to do his job in the face of illegal actions by his superiors.
What Snowden did was necessary and it was the only way it could be done.
And, sadly enough, it appears that it was insufficient.
Libertarians will never be more than a fringe force on American politics, simply because they're intrinsically unwilling to build kind of structured organization that makes it possible to win tens of millions of votes.
This is true, and it creates an interesting bias in American politics (and perhaps in democratic politics in general). It means that the laws and government structures we define through the system are inherently biased towards interference and imposition because the people who are most effective at pushing their views are those who think in terms of structure and control. Building a party requires leaders who are willing to impose controls on party members and members who are willing to accept them.
To call anybody in a mainstream US political activity marxist is a staggering misunderstanding as to what the term means.
The ignorance there is yours. The feminist and racial ideas promoted by Hillary and Sanders are rooted in a mix of progressivism and critical theory, and critical theory is simply another term for "neo-Marxism". That's not an accusation or an interpretation, that's how the people who developed this theory actually understand themselves.
While that's true, it's misleading because the word "Marxism" has very nasty connotations that the academic, theoretical aspects of Marx's work don't deserve. I'm not saying Marx's economics was right[*], but Marx himself would have been horrified to see what vicious and power-hungry people were able to do by exploiting his high-minded, if technically erroneous, ideas, and it's the work of those people which Americans associate with his name. Also, it's misleading because the "neo-" is guaranteed to be overshadowed by the "Marxist". Neo-Marxists change Marx's theory in some important ways. They're also wrong, but perhaps less so, and their changes remove some of the ideas which made it easy to justify exploitation by the vicious and power-hungry.
So, "neo-Marxist" is correct in the dry, academic sense, but it's very misleading in terms of the connotations and reactions the phrase will generate.
. .
[*] Specifically, Marx's labor theory of value completely ignores the extremely important aspect of information flow. This makes his theory very fundamentally wrong in multiple ways. For example, it completely ignores the competitive market forces enabled by innovation. Marx assumed a static economy, where everyone producing widget X did it the same way, with the same inputs of labor and materials. In such an economy, there is no value in competition, and all value really does derive from labor (and materials, but those also boil down to the labor to extract/obtain them). In reality, competition creates various forms of innovation to create efficiencies that drive down the labor and material costs, and to create entirely new categories of goods that obsolete others.
Another important example which I think most people in the world still don't get is that ignoring information flows implies that there is no value in the work done by owners and managers of capital. It implies that those who merely shuffle money (e.g. investment bankers) around are pure waste, which is also very wrong. They and their focus on extracting maximal returns from capital[**] are critically important in ensuring that resources flows to the enterprises that can make most effective use of them, where "most effective" is defined as "pleases the most people as evidenced by their willingness to pay money."
[**] Footnotes with foonotes are awesome. Also, it should be mentioned that some work of owners and managers of capital is not productive, but rent-seeking facilitated by restriction of information flows. Government action is required to prevent that, though it should be done by shining light onto the operations not by trying to regulate their actions. Active regulation creates motive for regulatory capture.
Actually, it's even easier than editing logind.conf (which requires a patch file or an editing script); all they need to to is add --without-kill-user-processes to the configure invocation in the dpkg build script.
It's systemd for deciding that this is a sane default behavior and the debian guys for not having the balls to stand up to this bullshit.
The Debian guys don't have to "stand up"... all they have to do is uncomment the "KillUserProcess" line in logind.conf and change it to "no". I can give them a sed one-liner if they need it.
Seriously, now, fsck systemd: Slackware and OpenBSD for me from now on.
Why are you blaming systemd for having an optional feature that you don't happen to want? You should be blaming Debian for deciding that this feature is one that everyone wants by default. We can debate whether or not systemd should have this option, but the real question is why Debian thinks it should be turned on for everyone.
Changes like this make me wonder if the systemd developers even use Linux beyond their local development workstations.
Right sentiment, wrong target.
Oh, I suppose it seems odd that systemd is offering such a feature. I guess there are some contexts in which it may make sense, so perhaps there is justification for it. But merely having the optional feature doesn't imply that systemd developers are insane or clueless.
No, the insane/clueless here are the Debian developers who are deciding to turn this feature on by default. The insanity is in deciding that this behavior is what everyone wants, not in providing it as an option.
What I'm taking away from this is that anything David ever has made or will make in the future should not be trusted.
While I'll grant that the you're partially justified by the ridiculously bad summary, your takeaway is dead wrong.
First, having just skimmed through the article and the (very interesting!) paper, let me point out why the summary is ridiculously bad. Chaum's protocol does not include a backdoor, and certainly not "just to please governments".
What Chaum did was to describe a really cool anonymous routing and communications protocol, with a number of highly desirable properties. The biggest one is that his protocol is designed to be secure against nation state access, unlike Tor. It should also be quite a bit faster than Tor because communications require no public key cryptographic operations; everything is done with very-fast symmetric crypto, building on top of a precomputed homomorphic encryption. Making this scheme work, though, depends on the existence of a trusted third party (TTP).
In general, relying on a TTP is problematic in contexts where there isn't any obvious person or organization who could be trusted. And for a global communications network that will be used by lots of people and which many governments might like to penetrate, and which in fact is specifically focused on trying to prevent penetration by nation states, there clearly exists NO such single party.
Chaum's solution to the problem of how to trust when no one is trustworthy (a common problem in security design, actually) is to distribute the trust (a common solution, though Chaum's implementation is particularly clever). By arranging things so that the TTP role is spread across many different nations, each of which is fairly trustworthy except in particular areas, and selecting those nations so the areas in which they're untrustworthy are different, and designing the cryptography so that any abuse of the TTP role requires willing participation of 100% of said nations, it may be possible to construct a TTP which is trustworthy in the aggregate, even though no individual member is fully trustworthy.
This is a very clever solution to what I would have said is a completely intractable problem.
You present it as though there were a choice. As internet access spread beyond a small number of geeks (and people started to buy stuff via the internet) then adverts began to appear in earnest and what you describe is more less inevitable.
This is true, it was inevitable, but you give the wrong reason.
Telling people (at least the non-tech "general public") not to use sites that have advertising is akin to telling them not use the web at all. When a platform becomes as widely used and powerful as the web then it inevitably becomes of interest to the rich and powerful who wish to control it.
No, the reason advertising was inevitable on the web has nothing to do with class warfare.
The real reason is that while it's practical to self-fund a small server in your basement, dorm room or university computer room that can serve static or semi-static content to a small population of users, it's an entirely different proposition to build and operate infrastructure capable of serving dynamic information to a billion users. Doing the latter requires tens of billions of dollars of infrastructure and billions of dollars of annual operation expenses.
Scaling the web up to where it could serve the entire population of the developed world, as it does now, required lots and lots of money. Where was that money going to come from? It ultimately had to come from the users, and there were really only two obvious ways for that to work: subscriptions or advertising. A subscription-based approach would have either placed barriers all over the web that made its core feature -- hyperlinking -- nearly useless, or else required the establishment of some sort of enormous micropayments system. But micropayments suck in all sorts of ways. I won't go into why because that's another (lengthy) post.
Advertising, however, has long proven to be the ideal way to fund large-scale mass media infrastructure. It made inexpensive newspapers possible, and then paid for free radio and television broadcasts, paying for armies of reporters and tens of thousands of local radio and TV broadcast stations. It works even better in the case of the web. It scales beautifully with the size of the audience, adds no friction to cross-site links and enables the economic creation and distribution of all sorts of mass-market content and services. Further, on the web it's possible to do targeted advertising, which increases the revenue potential and therefore decreases the amount of advertising necessary to fund the web (if you think there's a lot of advertising on the web now, be glad you're not seeing what it would look like without targeting).
Advertising also sucks. It gets in the way of the content that users are actually seeking. Advertisers devise and implement various tricks to make their ads more prominent than others, and more prominent than the content it's bookending. On TV, for example, ads are louder than most programs. Users develop schemes to avoid having to see the unwanted advertising content, and advertisers find ways to thwart these schemes. On the web, it's potentially even worse because of the possibility of malware getting inserted into advertising channels. And targeted advertising creates privacy concerns.
BUT the servers have to be funded somehow, and the old web model of donated equipment and bandwidth simply can't serve the entire population. And while advertising sucks, it sucks much less than the other alternative funding mechanisms.
So, advertising is inevitable. And given that there's a big money hose, it's then inevitable that the rich and powerful will be looking to find ways to siphon some of that money off for themselves. But that's an effect, not the cause, of advertising on the web.
Slashdot Mirror
Draws power from the payment terminal like existing wireless payment systems. It's existing tech Visa just put it in a ring.
I don't think a ring can carry a large enough antenna to draw power from the terminal, but power requirements are very low, so you could power it from a battery built into the ring for quite a long time. Months at least, if not years.
So, this is a fancy RFID tag then? Basically, you wave your radio-barcode through the induction field and the payment terminal then goes online using the ring's serial number instead of your credit card number?
More likely it's a contactless smart card, which means it has a microprocessor and does a cryptographic exchange with the terminal. This has been doable for many years. In fact, I did a consulting gig with a company making such a ring about 15 years ago. It was going to revolutionize payments, of course.
In all seriousness, once we get fully transitioned to contactless payment, it really opens up the options for the payment form factors. I still think NFC (in your mobile phone) will be the most convenient method for most people because the display and touchscreen enables user controls and because pretty much everyone carries a phone all the time anyway, but once you're using RF and don't need a card-sized antenna there's really no limit to what form factors you can use for payment credentials. The processor can be as small as 2mm square, and shrinking every year.
When Sarah Palin became the first major politician to use twitter, the Democrats laughed at her. When she said that Putin, if not thwarted, may eye invading Ukraine, they laughed at her. When she said she didn't read any one newspaper for her news (as anyone who looks at news aggregators doesn't), they laughed at her. When she said Obamacare would destroy the quality (not access, but quality) of medical care in this country, they ridiculed her.
They also laughed at her when she said that man coexisted with dinosaurs.
AI is not chess playing programs or Go playing programs. Ridiculous.
So what is? Seriously, can you answer that question?
People have tried for a long time to define what artificial intelligence is/will be. Turing defined it as a chatbot, essentially. Whether or not the Turing test has been passed is a question for debate, but if it hasn't it will be pretty soon. For a long time many people used chess as the gold standard. When that was beaten, Go looked like a good tool to measure AI.
So far, the skeptical definition of AI seems to be "Whatever a human can do that a computer can't yet do".
Given what you've said, at some point I should probably try it all again. It wouldn't be all that much work to do so... if they have fixed it, it would be good to know.
If you do, I'd be interested to hear the result. And if it's still broken, I'll file a bug.
It sounds like all of that pre-dated the effort to make sure that everything that's supposed to be deleted is really gone. My guess (and it's only a guess) is that your diagnosis is reasonably accurate, but things have changed since then.
Indeed, for they will not be on speaking terms with me after I render their PC essentially useless for their purposes by sticking on an OS that is not supported by the various bits of propriety work-related software they need (they're still 3-4 years from retirement).
Odds are good that it would run under WINE, though you'd have to test it to find out. VirtualBox is also a reasonable solution in many cases, especially if the bits in question aren't used heavily.
Google is first and foremost a data warehouse who sells data directly or indirectly of every type to anyone willing to pay or it.
This is completely incorrect. Google does not sell user data. Google's targeted advertising model is about using data to target ads; actually giving the data to advertisers would lower its value to Google, among other problems.
Also, Google isn't fundamentally an advertising company. It's a technology company. Its largest products are monetized through advertising, but not all. In fact the percentage of its revenue that comes from advertising is declining, and I expect that trend to continue.
First Google dropped the "do no evil" motto years ago publicly.
Cite? As a Google employee, AFAIK the motto still exists and is still important. Also, it's actually "Don't be evil".
But doesn't say "there is no location history". And, based on other Google experiences, I suspect the information is still there on Google's servers since they don't seem to actually delete anything - they just have a "deleted" flag which makes the information unavailable to you... except when they screw up (which I've seen).
Cite? From what I've seen (from the inside), Google is pretty careful to actually delete data that's users don't want retained. This is actually a hard thing to do completely since there are backup tapes, etc., but it can be done by encrypting everything with user-specific keys and then deleting the keys for the data that isn't supposed to be kept.
So leaving your PV-encrusted Tesla parked out in the sun all day will charge the battery enough to move you 6.3 miles.
And who wants to leave their $100K car out in the sun all day? Even if you could get 30-40 miles worth of charge out of it, it would clearly not be worth the weathering. Better to park the car in a garage and cover the roof with solar panels.
The pain I was referring to hasn't existed for a few years now. There was a time when using a Mac was painful because it required you to find all new/different applications, and in many cases they might not exist. Today, that's simply irrelevant for any decent web-based app, which is the majority of what people use their computers for. It's still occasionally an issue for non-web apps, but it's reduced even there.
Exactly. There is and always has been a reason to distinguish between the general concept of an internet, and the specific, publicly-accessible, globe-spanning Internet.
However, I guess that it is very rare for AP articles to need to draw that distinction. Whatever. I'm going to continue using "Internet" to refer to the Internet and "internet" to refer to the concept of an internet.
"if you need to run windows on new hardware (Kaby Lake processors and later), you will have to install Windows 10" Yep think about that, an operating system still in it's supported lifecycle can no longer be used on new hardware, not for any technical reasons but because Microsoft wants to make more money by having your OS serve you ads.
Microsoft has to do this. Not to make "more money" but to make money at all.
Being the PC OS maker has been Microsoft's bread and butter from day one. It's how they got their start in the DOS era, and Windows has carried them through the rest of it. They've had some other profitable products, but everything else has been a sideshow... and most of those sideshows (e.g. Office) have been built on the back of that OS engine. They've made their money by selling copies of Windows to OEMs.
This was possible, and very lucrative, because as the dominant PC OS maker, Microsoft Windows was the platform targeted by all of the app developers, which meant that everyone had to run Windows, which meant that hardware manufacturers had to ship their machines with Windows, which they could only get by paying Microsoft. But most applications today live on the web. ChromeOS has become a perfectly reasonable substitute for the majority of users, and the pain involved in switching to an alternative like OS X has largely evaporated. Windows still has some of its lock-in power left, but not much. In the consumer space, the one remaining bastion has been gaming... but it's clear that SteamOS is going to take that away. The enterprise space has lots of tie-ins with Active Directory and other services, but Microsoft needs more.
So, they realize that their business model is rapidly heading towards obsolescence. Their lock-in is moribund and their competition is all free. The only way to compete with free, in the long run, is also to be free, so Windows has to be free. But how do you make money with free? It's possible to do it with support and services, but not on anything remotely like the scale Microsoft needs. That route means taking a massive revenue cut. Plus, Microsoft is already exploiting the available revenue there; it's in the enterprise space.
What else works? Well, Apple makes lots of money selling hardware, but Microsoft doesn't really do hardware and the only place to make really big money in hardware is in the premium niche. Below that, hardware is already commoditized. Margins are razor thin and competition is fierce. And the premium segment isalso tough to break into, and Apple has most of it sewn up.
What's left? Advertising. There are lots and lots of billions in advertising, and it is and has always been the way to make money on the creation of mass market free content.
Windows 10 is Microsoft's first big step towards an advertising-based business model for Windows. Will it piss people off? Sure, some of them. Will it work? That's hard to say. But the alternative isn't to continue business as usual, the alternative is to cease to exist, mostly. The alternative is to gradually lose market share to Linux (including ChromeOS) from the bottom and OS X from the top.
So Microsoft can't care if it loses 10% (to pick a number without any basis) of its user base because it pisses them off by forcing an "upgrade" to an ad-supported model, because it's going to lose users by not forcing an upgrade. Different users, perhaps, and maybe a bit slower, but it's going to lose that 10% and more if it continues business as usual.
By switching to a model that is services-supported for enterprise operations and advertising-supported for consumer operations, Microsoft Windows has a future. Without that switch, it doesn't. So, they're going to take their lumps and do it.
Yes, I also can't figure out why preventing illegal immigration to save literally billions per year is a good idea.
What does building a wall have to do with preventing illegal immigration? Most illegal immigrants enter the country legally, you know.
If you want to deter illegal immigration there's a much easier and cheaper way: throw Americans who employ illegal immigrants in jail. To make that even easier and cheaper, give a green card to any illegal immigrant who turns in his/her employer. Note that there are various ways in which this doesn't work perfectly, but it's a 95%-effective solution which costs very little, as opposed to an outrageously-expensive 30%-effective solution.
Just because your friends and family are all retarded doesn't mean the rest of the world is.
Said the guy who has never done tech support. Sorry, the ratio of people among those who call tech support because they have difficulty completing technical tasks that could complete the task based on your instructions vs those who couldn't is extremely slanted.
Fixed that for you.
Yes, you're right that many people struggle with technology. On the other hand, tech support calls are obviously not an unbiased representation of the set of users as a whole, because those who don't struggle generally don't call.
Had he gone through channels, that public service would never have occurred.
Exactly, and that's not armchair theorizing. We have several clear examples of people who tried to go through channels and got slapped down hard for it. And by "slapped down" I mean "Home raided by armed agents, arrested, indicted, prosecuted on unsustainable charges and rendered unemployable". Hell, we know that a man whose job it was to work with whistleblowers under the law was forced out for trying to do his job in the face of illegal actions by his superiors.
What Snowden did was necessary and it was the only way it could be done.
And, sadly enough, it appears that it was insufficient.
Libertarians will never be more than a fringe force on American politics, simply because they're intrinsically unwilling to build kind of structured organization that makes it possible to win tens of millions of votes.
This is true, and it creates an interesting bias in American politics (and perhaps in democratic politics in general). It means that the laws and government structures we define through the system are inherently biased towards interference and imposition because the people who are most effective at pushing their views are those who think in terms of structure and control. Building a party requires leaders who are willing to impose controls on party members and members who are willing to accept them.
The ignorance there is yours. The feminist and racial ideas promoted by Hillary and Sanders are rooted in a mix of progressivism and critical theory, and critical theory is simply another term for "neo-Marxism". That's not an accusation or an interpretation, that's how the people who developed this theory actually understand themselves.
While that's true, it's misleading because the word "Marxism" has very nasty connotations that the academic, theoretical aspects of Marx's work don't deserve. I'm not saying Marx's economics was right[*], but Marx himself would have been horrified to see what vicious and power-hungry people were able to do by exploiting his high-minded, if technically erroneous, ideas, and it's the work of those people which Americans associate with his name. Also, it's misleading because the "neo-" is guaranteed to be overshadowed by the "Marxist". Neo-Marxists change Marx's theory in some important ways. They're also wrong, but perhaps less so, and their changes remove some of the ideas which made it easy to justify exploitation by the vicious and power-hungry.
So, "neo-Marxist" is correct in the dry, academic sense, but it's very misleading in terms of the connotations and reactions the phrase will generate.
.
.
[*] Specifically, Marx's labor theory of value completely ignores the extremely important aspect of information flow. This makes his theory very fundamentally wrong in multiple ways. For example, it completely ignores the competitive market forces enabled by innovation. Marx assumed a static economy, where everyone producing widget X did it the same way, with the same inputs of labor and materials. In such an economy, there is no value in competition, and all value really does derive from labor (and materials, but those also boil down to the labor to extract/obtain them). In reality, competition creates various forms of innovation to create efficiencies that drive down the labor and material costs, and to create entirely new categories of goods that obsolete others.
Another important example which I think most people in the world still don't get is that ignoring information flows implies that there is no value in the work done by owners and managers of capital. It implies that those who merely shuffle money (e.g. investment bankers) around are pure waste, which is also very wrong. They and their focus on extracting maximal returns from capital[**] are critically important in ensuring that resources flows to the enterprises that can make most effective use of them, where "most effective" is defined as "pleases the most people as evidenced by their willingness to pay money."
[**] Footnotes with foonotes are awesome. Also, it should be mentioned that some work of owners and managers of capital is not productive, but rent-seeking facilitated by restriction of information flows. Government action is required to prevent that, though it should be done by shining light onto the operations not by trying to regulate their actions. Active regulation creates motive for regulatory capture.
Actually, it's even easier than editing logind.conf (which requires a patch file or an editing script); all they need to to is add --without-kill-user-processes to the configure invocation in the dpkg build script.
It's systemd for deciding that this is a sane default behavior and the debian guys for not having the balls to stand up to this bullshit.
The Debian guys don't have to "stand up"... all they have to do is uncomment the "KillUserProcess" line in logind.conf and change it to "no". I can give them a sed one-liner if they need it.
Seriously, now, fsck systemd: Slackware and OpenBSD for me from now on.
Why are you blaming systemd for having an optional feature that you don't happen to want? You should be blaming Debian for deciding that this feature is one that everyone wants by default. We can debate whether or not systemd should have this option, but the real question is why Debian thinks it should be turned on for everyone.
Changes like this make me wonder if the systemd developers even use Linux beyond their local development workstations.
Right sentiment, wrong target.
Oh, I suppose it seems odd that systemd is offering such a feature. I guess there are some contexts in which it may make sense, so perhaps there is justification for it. But merely having the optional feature doesn't imply that systemd developers are insane or clueless.
No, the insane/clueless here are the Debian developers who are deciding to turn this feature on by default. The insanity is in deciding that this behavior is what everyone wants, not in providing it as an option.
What I'm taking away from this is that anything David ever has made or will make in the future should not be trusted.
While I'll grant that the you're partially justified by the ridiculously bad summary, your takeaway is dead wrong.
First, having just skimmed through the article and the (very interesting!) paper, let me point out why the summary is ridiculously bad. Chaum's protocol does not include a backdoor, and certainly not "just to please governments".
What Chaum did was to describe a really cool anonymous routing and communications protocol, with a number of highly desirable properties. The biggest one is that his protocol is designed to be secure against nation state access, unlike Tor. It should also be quite a bit faster than Tor because communications require no public key cryptographic operations; everything is done with very-fast symmetric crypto, building on top of a precomputed homomorphic encryption. Making this scheme work, though, depends on the existence of a trusted third party (TTP).
In general, relying on a TTP is problematic in contexts where there isn't any obvious person or organization who could be trusted. And for a global communications network that will be used by lots of people and which many governments might like to penetrate, and which in fact is specifically focused on trying to prevent penetration by nation states, there clearly exists NO such single party.
Chaum's solution to the problem of how to trust when no one is trustworthy (a common problem in security design, actually) is to distribute the trust (a common solution, though Chaum's implementation is particularly clever). By arranging things so that the TTP role is spread across many different nations, each of which is fairly trustworthy except in particular areas, and selecting those nations so the areas in which they're untrustworthy are different, and designing the cryptography so that any abuse of the TTP role requires willing participation of 100% of said nations, it may be possible to construct a TTP which is trustworthy in the aggregate, even though no individual member is fully trustworthy.
This is a very clever solution to what I would have said is a completely intractable problem.
You present it as though there were a choice. As internet access spread beyond a small number of geeks (and people started to buy stuff via the internet) then adverts began to appear in earnest and what you describe is more less inevitable.
This is true, it was inevitable, but you give the wrong reason.
Telling people (at least the non-tech "general public") not to use sites that have advertising is akin to telling them not use the web at all. When a platform becomes as widely used and powerful as the web then it inevitably becomes of interest to the rich and powerful who wish to control it.
No, the reason advertising was inevitable on the web has nothing to do with class warfare.
The real reason is that while it's practical to self-fund a small server in your basement, dorm room or university computer room that can serve static or semi-static content to a small population of users, it's an entirely different proposition to build and operate infrastructure capable of serving dynamic information to a billion users. Doing the latter requires tens of billions of dollars of infrastructure and billions of dollars of annual operation expenses.
Scaling the web up to where it could serve the entire population of the developed world, as it does now, required lots and lots of money. Where was that money going to come from? It ultimately had to come from the users, and there were really only two obvious ways for that to work: subscriptions or advertising. A subscription-based approach would have either placed barriers all over the web that made its core feature -- hyperlinking -- nearly useless, or else required the establishment of some sort of enormous micropayments system. But micropayments suck in all sorts of ways. I won't go into why because that's another (lengthy) post.
Advertising, however, has long proven to be the ideal way to fund large-scale mass media infrastructure. It made inexpensive newspapers possible, and then paid for free radio and television broadcasts, paying for armies of reporters and tens of thousands of local radio and TV broadcast stations. It works even better in the case of the web. It scales beautifully with the size of the audience, adds no friction to cross-site links and enables the economic creation and distribution of all sorts of mass-market content and services. Further, on the web it's possible to do targeted advertising, which increases the revenue potential and therefore decreases the amount of advertising necessary to fund the web (if you think there's a lot of advertising on the web now, be glad you're not seeing what it would look like without targeting).
Advertising also sucks. It gets in the way of the content that users are actually seeking. Advertisers devise and implement various tricks to make their ads more prominent than others, and more prominent than the content it's bookending. On TV, for example, ads are louder than most programs. Users develop schemes to avoid having to see the unwanted advertising content, and advertisers find ways to thwart these schemes. On the web, it's potentially even worse because of the possibility of malware getting inserted into advertising channels. And targeted advertising creates privacy concerns.
BUT the servers have to be funded somehow, and the old web model of donated equipment and bandwidth simply can't serve the entire population. And while advertising sucks, it sucks much less than the other alternative funding mechanisms.
So, advertising is inevitable. And given that there's a big money hose, it's then inevitable that the rich and powerful will be looking to find ways to siphon some of that money off for themselves. But that's an effect, not the cause, of advertising on the web.