I love how these rants always jump straight into the second amendment when the first has been under fire for so long that its barely recognizable and the fourth and fifth are under heavy fire daily right now and the 6th, 8th, 9th and 10th are quite subject to interpretation of words like "excessive" and "speedy." I notice not too many people bemoan the loss of the 18th either.
The 2nd is probably the least-diminished of the "well-known" amendments (admittedly in large part due to the tireless lobbying of the NRA. Sure you have to jump through a few hoops in some jurisdictions but for the most part you can get your guns without too much trouble as long as you don't have a record.) So why is it always the jumping off (and frequently only) point for red rants about the erosion of the constitution?
Free speech? Privacy? Who needs that shit when we can all just go out and shoot things!
I don't know about any particular state, but that's exactly how things are setup federally. SCOTUS regularly reinterprets laws (even the constitution periodically) because its assumed from step 0 that the legislature is made up of people who are going to fuck up periodically, either through malice or incompetence, and that having a system in place to double-check their work is a worthwhile thing.
From all I've seen, yes. I'm screwed if I ever have to cross the border cause I just flat out don't use social media so even if I could remember my passwords to hand over, there's nothing of interest on my accounts.
He needs to get his priorities straight!
He has his priorities straight -- they're just not the same as your priorities.
Trump's priority isn't to stop terrorists.. None of these schemes would do a lick to stop any but the absolute dumbest of terrorists (wait.. you could buy that second phone a month earlier and use it a bit so its not clean when you get to the border? Who would ever think of doing that?!) Trump's priority is to make newsworthy statements that make dumb people think he's doing something to stop "the terrorists." Whether any particular plan is actually effective at doing that is of secondary concern.
Well that seems to be the only one the US government doesn't want to stamp all over. So that's something.
Of course, it was probably more useful back when it was your musket against the other guy's musket. Now that its your hunting rifle or even assault rifle against their drone strikes.. yeah good luck there.
Dissent is always patriotic. The damned country was founded based on (extreme) dissent!
As for racist well.. if you put a racist in the White House and you dislike his racist policies then of course your dissent is unlikely to be racist. That's kind of the point.
As for whatever action the US takes being bad well.. only the bad ones. Unfortunately with Trump that seems to be basically all of them -- his "actions" are so bloody ridiculous that even his own party is dissenting at this point.
Its not about Trump being a republican. Its about Trump being a fricken disaster of a president in general. I'm not going to claim Hillary would have been better (I still have my doubts about that..) but I'm pretty sure she couldn't have been much worse at this point.
I'm old enough, but I totally get it. There's a lot of cool stuff that IoT could bring to bear.
Unfortunately, we'll never see most of it due to lack of standards, lack of security and a race that started from the bottom and is trying to dig itself lower in terms of quality. IoT's potential has been entirely coopted by hype and marketing before it even had a chance to spread its wings.
There might be penalties under civil or criminal law.
Almost certainly not criminal. Even civil is doubtful since they only changed things on their server (didn't physically damage the device or anything.)
At some point as more and more things (internet of or otherwise) become dependent on remote servers that the purchaser has no control over, laws will start having to be written to cover such things. For now though, the EULA/ToS is all you really have to rely on and those pretty much invariably disclaim any liability for any reason.
As for open source, the comparison isn't even valid. "Refusing to help" is a totally different subject than "actively denying access," open source or otherwise. And of course since open source is well, open, denying access isn't really a (technical) possibility.. though it may be a practical one as most of your customers won't know how to do anything when handed 100,000 lines of code.
I've got two questions for you: 1) Is this a bad thing? Do we really need to waste our top notch programming talent writing A-B tests? Cause somebody's gotta do it.
2) What's your alternative? Everyone throws around the idea of licensing software developers but the problem there is practicality. Again, somebody's got to be writing those A-B tests and if you drain out the people who's abilities don't really exceed that level of work, that means you'll be needing to waste your much more talented programmers doing menial tasks like that while more important (but lower paid) jobs get left undone.
I don't see the amount of software needed dropping, and I don't see people getting smarter.
Our only hope to improve software in general really is to try to make our tools more foolproof and less error-prone. But that in itself is not an easy task as removing complexity also has a tendency to remove generality and you end up with people having to put more effort into working around your tool than they save by working with it. Not that improvements can't be made -- and they are made incrementally all the time -- but silver bullets there are not so tool improvement by itself isn't likely to solve the software quality problems either, at least not in the foreseeable future.
Do you perhaps have a suggestion for improving software quality without reducing quantity?
There's a difference though -- complexity. The law doesn't change much from day to day so the stuff you use at your current job is basically identical to the stuff you used at your last job and will use at your next job, and has remained basically the same since you passed the bar.
Not to downplay lawyers -- the law is horrendously complex and ugly and they have to spend many years learning the ins and outs. But its mostly consistent across jobs and across time.
Software is neither. Within an organization, software is changing constantly and just keeping up with it can be a challenge. A developer changing jobs would be more akin to a lawyer trying to figure out the legal code of an entirely different state (or maybe even country if you're comparing against extremely large software systems) than just moving to the company down the road.
Now whether that justifies the entitlement you see in a lot of software people? Depends on your point of view I guess, and how far any particular person takes it. Dress code became the battleground because it doesn't matter at all to job performance while still being a small middle finger to the types of managers (and businesses) who are stuck up enough to care what some goon in the basement is wearing.
As developers move out of the basement, and we keep inventing tools and frameworks and APIs to lower the complexity of software development, its not really a surprise that we're slowly losing our ability to keep fighting that fight.
Why do you care? Do I suddenly become incapable of doing my job if I don't happen to dress to your fashion sense?
If I want your respect, I'll consider wearing clothes you like. Otherwise, go do your job and let me do mine in all my scrubby comfortableness. Its not everybody's dream to be a middle manager.
Mostly because that hood that protects you from the elements is also pretty good at protecting you from being identified unless you're staring straight into a camera, giving hoodies a link to criminal activity that makes people uncomfortable.
Obviously that's not the main use for hoodies, probably not even close. But thanks to movies and TV playing it up to 11 over the past couple of decades, the association has gotten fairly deeply ingrained in society.
Self-publishing is a very risky proposition. You have to put in all of the work up front and you have no idea if you're going to see a dime of returns on it. Like any other business, if you're successful you can do well but if you're not, you often lose everything.
At least when you're selling out, you're guaranteed a paycheck even if its somewhat less than your real potential is worth. That's important to a lot of people. Not everyone is willing to fall on the "risk" side of the risk-vs-reward dichotomy.
Never mind the fact that writing is only one aspect of a production. Unless you're writing purely in vlog style, you're going to have to come up with actors and sound techs and set designers and directors and producers and all those other people you see in the credits with weird job titles. Some writers may be able to handle all of that themselves but I imagine that's not the majority, at least not if they want it all done well.
Not that I disagree that the publishers are often pretty scummy to their "employees." But they do provide some benefit as well. If they didn't, the world would have stopped bothering with them years or even decades ago.
There's not really anyone who would "bust" them. That would be essentially a breach of contract which is a civil matter and their customers would have to bring the suit -- the same customers who are concerned about people knowing what they do online.
Of course if any VPN provider was caught selling data, the media would likely be all over it. The bad PR would probably be worse than any fine given that the entire reason people use them is to avoid exactly things like that.
That said, if VPNs do end up going mainstream over this or whatever else in the future, it won't take long for lawmakers to start forcing VPN providers to keep detailed logs and crap like the ISPs have to now. What they'll come up with to deal with the fact that you can use a VPN from another country is anyone's guess, but its not like the US is unknown for sicking its nose in other countries' business at the best of times. Or force US ISPs to filter known foreign VPNs or something equally goofy that won't really work but will mask over the problem enough to appease the media lobbyists and police agencies.
Oh I'm definitely not saying the police don't take liberties with their powers that they shouldn't have. I'm just saying that comparing such to PP isn't fair.
Though there's still at least some distinction there: You're in their house so expecting that they'll follow your rules is a bit foolhardy, and you can be fairly sure that they won't publicize any recordings they do take that they weren't supposed to (that is, if nobody knows they exist then there's a bit of a no harm, no foul rule in play. Same as if the people who recorded the PP meetings just kept it to themselves -- nobody would be the wiser even though they technically were still in the wrong.)
That said, there are times in a police station when you can absolutely guarantee privacy -- when you're with your lawyer. The police may not get punished for invading your personal privacy (even when they should,) but they sure as hell would take some heat if it came to light that they were recording your confidential meetings with your lawyer.
Given the choice between the two evils of government and multinationals, the US seems to be the only (developed) country than consistently prefers the one they can't vote out or influence in any significant way.
Historically, you can see some justification. Back when companies were local things and a large chain was a half dozen outlets in 2 or 3 cities, "voting" with your dollars likely was a much faster way to promote positive change than waiting for congress to get off their asses (even more so in the days when congress still had day jobs and only met a couple of times a year.)
But once those companies hit national, never mind international, scale.. that just doesn't really work anymore. Its easy to organize a boycott of a few hundred people in a localized area. Its pretty much impossible to do so when you have to simultaneously get people together in hundreds of cities across dozens of states or even countries in order to make a significant enough dent in the company's profits for them to give two craps.
It would be nice if "game mode" didn't interfere with the bloody games. No, I don't want to record my fucking game or post it to Facebook or have a damned popup showing up every time I load a program that lets me tell Windows its a game but has no option for "no, this isn't a game and stop freaking asking already."
See also nVidia's ShadowPlay (which records whether you want it to or not, just in case you change your mind partway through and want to be able to start 30ish seconds before you hit the record button and so on..) They have a global disable option (that may or may not actually work) but its pretty well-hidden.
I'm sure the PS and XBox do similar things, but at least in those instances because the whole environment is so controlled they can ensure that the games are designed to only use 80% cpu or whatever restrictions are needed to allow the behind-the-scenes recording without interfering with play. PCs don't have that capability since my hardware and usage style are under my control rather than theirs.
Not to mention people with double screens who may be running more than one game at once. Consider things like Minecrafters that have a separate camera account or (in my case,) having two copies running so that I can duplicate creative-mode contraptions into survival and such things. Yes people who do that are "rare" but not rare enough that we should be ignored -- especially the Youtuber types.
I like how half your arguments are "nobody uses it so why improve it?" Did you not perhaps think that improving the product might be a reason for people to start using it?
Edge having a builtin ereader in particular is rather interesting. You can get addons to do it in Chrome (and presumably FF and others) but I don't think any other browser has such a thing native yet.
Paint having 3D capabilities? Sure that won't help most people but consider say.. small game developers. Those that don't have the skills or knowledge to go crazy with something like Maya or 3dsmax. For comparison in the 2D space, just try doing a simple line drawing in Photoshop or GIMP. Its bloody near impossible because those apps are so focused on "professional" features.
If this new 3D modeling mode in Paint can fill in the role of "dead simple but does the job for dead simple tasks" like it does for 2D, then it could be a great boon to folk who just need a basic model but aren't the artsy type.
Huge difference here: Those police officers are out in the public streets in full view of everyone. There is no expectation of privacy.
The PP employees are (presumably) having their conversation in a private room since you expect the conversation to be well.. private.
If you go into a police station and have a conversation with an officer, you would expect it to be private by default as well because that's a totally different situation from being out on the street.
"Expectation of privacy" is quite an important concept here. Context matters.
I don't want to know that the email I sent came from me. I want to know if the email you sent came from you. And since I can't enforce you to use cryptosigning (at least not for a much wider definition of "you" than a handful of friends or coworkers,) it just kind of fizzled and died.
Microsoft would have had to take the point on that one since, at the time this was a big deal, Outlook was far and away the most widely-used email client. If they'd made Outlook create and use a public signature by default (and behind the scenes,) it would probably be ubiquitous by now.
I mean sure they would have gotten some flak since I'm sure they would have hosted the public keys on their own system and all the MS haters would come out bitching about antitrust and MS "forcing" them to do things and whatnot, but overall it would almost certainly have made signed emails ubiquitous by now, even if MS' own version fell off. Because all of the competition would have been scrambling to match or exceed MS ("you can choose PGP or GPG! OMG the features!")
But they didn't, and in some way its too late by now since the email client market is much more fractured. At the very least, Google and Apple would need to team up with MS to implement it across all of their PC, web-based and mobile email readers.
I don't particularly see it happening though. They're all far more likely at this point to suggest using their walled-garden systems (Skype can be used as an Exchange email client!) rather than trying to do something that would have more global reach.
I'm guessing you're comparing against one or two specific services (the 140 remark is an obvious Twitter reference..)
But many forum systems do all of those things at least as good as email -- especially handling of conversation threads where email relies on parsing out RE: and FW: lines while lots of forums (such as Slashdot for example) provide correctly nested reply chains.
Email's main benefit over all of these system is its ubiquity. Its usually not the best at anything, but its good enough and you know with near-100% certainty that if you send an email, it will show up in the recipients inbox (barring network of spam filtering issues) and that they will be able to read it (whether they actually do or not is up to them, but that's the case with every system.)
Sure you can. You can setup trust systems like Bitcoin does with its blockchains (and there's already lots of research being started into how the blockchain concept can be used to decentralize other things while retaining a strong level trust.)
Email clients automatically generating and including PGP/GPG signatures would go a long way as well. As long as its behind the scenes, the dumb masses won't care and those that do care will have a good method to at least do whitelisting and greylisting controls (blacklisting is more difficult since spammers already create thousands of new email accounts and it wouldn't be hard for them to create thousands of new signatures to go with them.) Of course in a way that's just moving the problem up the chain (since the public halves of those keys need to be hosted somewhere.) But its a start if nothing else while we wait for blockchaining or other distributed trust systems to make their way into the world.
1) People do care. That's why the research exists in the first place (though of course like other mental disorders, there's a lot of misinformation and stupidity out there eg telling depressed people to "just be happy" or alcoholics to "just stop drinking" as if they'd never thought to try that.)
2) Even if MDMA psychotherapy works and was made legal, prevention is always better than curing after the fact.
3) I'm pretty sure Tetris has fewer side effects than chemical interventions of pretty much any sort.
Unless you can show that his orange skin is natural, the comparison is nowhere close to valid and you're just looking for an excuse to be racist.
Or perhaps you can show that Trump's skin tone is natural? I mean if he came out with some (real, believable) evidence that the orange color is due to some sort of skin disease or birth defect or something, all of us mockers would have a large amount of egg on our faces. But as long as its just "uses way too much fake tan lotion," we're in a completely different realm.
A stronger argument would be that there's no reason to take pot shots at Trump's skin color when he does so many more important things that are equally absurd.
Slashdot Mirror
I love how these rants always jump straight into the second amendment when the first has been under fire for so long that its barely recognizable and the fourth and fifth are under heavy fire daily right now and the 6th, 8th, 9th and 10th are quite subject to interpretation of words like "excessive" and "speedy." I notice not too many people bemoan the loss of the 18th either.
The 2nd is probably the least-diminished of the "well-known" amendments (admittedly in large part due to the tireless lobbying of the NRA. Sure you have to jump through a few hoops in some jurisdictions but for the most part you can get your guns without too much trouble as long as you don't have a record.) So why is it always the jumping off (and frequently only) point for red rants about the erosion of the constitution?
Free speech? Privacy? Who needs that shit when we can all just go out and shoot things!
I don't know about any particular state, but that's exactly how things are setup federally. SCOTUS regularly reinterprets laws (even the constitution periodically) because its assumed from step 0 that the legislature is made up of people who are going to fuck up periodically, either through malice or incompetence, and that having a system in place to double-check their work is a worthwhile thing.
Or is not having that suspicious?
From all I've seen, yes. I'm screwed if I ever have to cross the border cause I just flat out don't use social media so even if I could remember my passwords to hand over, there's nothing of interest on my accounts.
He needs to get his priorities straight!
He has his priorities straight -- they're just not the same as your priorities.
Trump's priority isn't to stop terrorists.. None of these schemes would do a lick to stop any but the absolute dumbest of terrorists (wait.. you could buy that second phone a month earlier and use it a bit so its not clean when you get to the border? Who would ever think of doing that?!) Trump's priority is to make newsworthy statements that make dumb people think he's doing something to stop "the terrorists." Whether any particular plan is actually effective at doing that is of secondary concern.
Well that seems to be the only one the US government doesn't want to stamp all over. So that's something.
Of course, it was probably more useful back when it was your musket against the other guy's musket. Now that its your hunting rifle or even assault rifle against their drone strikes.. yeah good luck there.
Dissent is always patriotic. The damned country was founded based on (extreme) dissent!
As for racist well.. if you put a racist in the White House and you dislike his racist policies then of course your dissent is unlikely to be racist. That's kind of the point.
As for whatever action the US takes being bad well.. only the bad ones. Unfortunately with Trump that seems to be basically all of them -- his "actions" are so bloody ridiculous that even his own party is dissenting at this point.
Its not about Trump being a republican. Its about Trump being a fricken disaster of a president in general. I'm not going to claim Hillary would have been better (I still have my doubts about that..) but I'm pretty sure she couldn't have been much worse at this point.
I'm old enough, but I totally get it. There's a lot of cool stuff that IoT could bring to bear.
Unfortunately, we'll never see most of it due to lack of standards, lack of security and a race that started from the bottom and is trying to dig itself lower in terms of quality. IoT's potential has been entirely coopted by hype and marketing before it even had a chance to spread its wings.
There might be penalties under civil or criminal law.
Almost certainly not criminal. Even civil is doubtful since they only changed things on their server (didn't physically damage the device or anything.)
At some point as more and more things (internet of or otherwise) become dependent on remote servers that the purchaser has no control over, laws will start having to be written to cover such things. For now though, the EULA/ToS is all you really have to rely on and those pretty much invariably disclaim any liability for any reason.
As for open source, the comparison isn't even valid. "Refusing to help" is a totally different subject than "actively denying access," open source or otherwise. And of course since open source is well, open, denying access isn't really a (technical) possibility.. though it may be a practical one as most of your customers won't know how to do anything when handed 100,000 lines of code.
I've got two questions for you:
1) Is this a bad thing? Do we really need to waste our top notch programming talent writing A-B tests? Cause somebody's gotta do it.
2) What's your alternative? Everyone throws around the idea of licensing software developers but the problem there is practicality. Again, somebody's got to be writing those A-B tests and if you drain out the people who's abilities don't really exceed that level of work, that means you'll be needing to waste your much more talented programmers doing menial tasks like that while more important (but lower paid) jobs get left undone.
I don't see the amount of software needed dropping, and I don't see people getting smarter.
Our only hope to improve software in general really is to try to make our tools more foolproof and less error-prone. But that in itself is not an easy task as removing complexity also has a tendency to remove generality and you end up with people having to put more effort into working around your tool than they save by working with it. Not that improvements can't be made -- and they are made incrementally all the time -- but silver bullets there are not so tool improvement by itself isn't likely to solve the software quality problems either, at least not in the foreseeable future.
Do you perhaps have a suggestion for improving software quality without reducing quantity?
There's a difference though -- complexity. The law doesn't change much from day to day so the stuff you use at your current job is basically identical to the stuff you used at your last job and will use at your next job, and has remained basically the same since you passed the bar.
Not to downplay lawyers -- the law is horrendously complex and ugly and they have to spend many years learning the ins and outs. But its mostly consistent across jobs and across time.
Software is neither. Within an organization, software is changing constantly and just keeping up with it can be a challenge. A developer changing jobs would be more akin to a lawyer trying to figure out the legal code of an entirely different state (or maybe even country if you're comparing against extremely large software systems) than just moving to the company down the road.
Now whether that justifies the entitlement you see in a lot of software people? Depends on your point of view I guess, and how far any particular person takes it. Dress code became the battleground because it doesn't matter at all to job performance while still being a small middle finger to the types of managers (and businesses) who are stuck up enough to care what some goon in the basement is wearing.
As developers move out of the basement, and we keep inventing tools and frameworks and APIs to lower the complexity of software development, its not really a surprise that we're slowly losing our ability to keep fighting that fight.
Why do you care? Do I suddenly become incapable of doing my job if I don't happen to dress to your fashion sense?
If I want your respect, I'll consider wearing clothes you like. Otherwise, go do your job and let me do mine in all my scrubby comfortableness. Its not everybody's dream to be a middle manager.
Mostly because that hood that protects you from the elements is also pretty good at protecting you from being identified unless you're staring straight into a camera, giving hoodies a link to criminal activity that makes people uncomfortable.
Obviously that's not the main use for hoodies, probably not even close. But thanks to movies and TV playing it up to 11 over the past couple of decades, the association has gotten fairly deeply ingrained in society.
Self-publishing is a very risky proposition. You have to put in all of the work up front and you have no idea if you're going to see a dime of returns on it. Like any other business, if you're successful you can do well but if you're not, you often lose everything.
At least when you're selling out, you're guaranteed a paycheck even if its somewhat less than your real potential is worth. That's important to a lot of people. Not everyone is willing to fall on the "risk" side of the risk-vs-reward dichotomy.
Never mind the fact that writing is only one aspect of a production. Unless you're writing purely in vlog style, you're going to have to come up with actors and sound techs and set designers and directors and producers and all those other people you see in the credits with weird job titles. Some writers may be able to handle all of that themselves but I imagine that's not the majority, at least not if they want it all done well.
Not that I disagree that the publishers are often pretty scummy to their "employees." But they do provide some benefit as well. If they didn't, the world would have stopped bothering with them years or even decades ago.
There's not really anyone who would "bust" them. That would be essentially a breach of contract which is a civil matter and their customers would have to bring the suit -- the same customers who are concerned about people knowing what they do online.
Of course if any VPN provider was caught selling data, the media would likely be all over it. The bad PR would probably be worse than any fine given that the entire reason people use them is to avoid exactly things like that.
That said, if VPNs do end up going mainstream over this or whatever else in the future, it won't take long for lawmakers to start forcing VPN providers to keep detailed logs and crap like the ISPs have to now. What they'll come up with to deal with the fact that you can use a VPN from another country is anyone's guess, but its not like the US is unknown for sicking its nose in other countries' business at the best of times. Or force US ISPs to filter known foreign VPNs or something equally goofy that won't really work but will mask over the problem enough to appease the media lobbyists and police agencies.
Oh I'm definitely not saying the police don't take liberties with their powers that they shouldn't have. I'm just saying that comparing such to PP isn't fair.
Though there's still at least some distinction there: You're in their house so expecting that they'll follow your rules is a bit foolhardy, and you can be fairly sure that they won't publicize any recordings they do take that they weren't supposed to (that is, if nobody knows they exist then there's a bit of a no harm, no foul rule in play. Same as if the people who recorded the PP meetings just kept it to themselves -- nobody would be the wiser even though they technically were still in the wrong.)
That said, there are times in a police station when you can absolutely guarantee privacy -- when you're with your lawyer. The police may not get punished for invading your personal privacy (even when they should,) but they sure as hell would take some heat if it came to light that they were recording your confidential meetings with your lawyer.
Given the choice between the two evils of government and multinationals, the US seems to be the only (developed) country than consistently prefers the one they can't vote out or influence in any significant way.
Historically, you can see some justification. Back when companies were local things and a large chain was a half dozen outlets in 2 or 3 cities, "voting" with your dollars likely was a much faster way to promote positive change than waiting for congress to get off their asses (even more so in the days when congress still had day jobs and only met a couple of times a year.)
But once those companies hit national, never mind international, scale.. that just doesn't really work anymore. Its easy to organize a boycott of a few hundred people in a localized area. Its pretty much impossible to do so when you have to simultaneously get people together in hundreds of cities across dozens of states or even countries in order to make a significant enough dent in the company's profits for them to give two craps.
Yep. That's why I said "its a start" rather than "its a solution."
It would be nice if "game mode" didn't interfere with the bloody games. No, I don't want to record my fucking game or post it to Facebook or have a damned popup showing up every time I load a program that lets me tell Windows its a game but has no option for "no, this isn't a game and stop freaking asking already."
See also nVidia's ShadowPlay (which records whether you want it to or not, just in case you change your mind partway through and want to be able to start 30ish seconds before you hit the record button and so on..) They have a global disable option (that may or may not actually work) but its pretty well-hidden.
I'm sure the PS and XBox do similar things, but at least in those instances because the whole environment is so controlled they can ensure that the games are designed to only use 80% cpu or whatever restrictions are needed to allow the behind-the-scenes recording without interfering with play. PCs don't have that capability since my hardware and usage style are under my control rather than theirs.
Not to mention people with double screens who may be running more than one game at once. Consider things like Minecrafters that have a separate camera account or (in my case,) having two copies running so that I can duplicate creative-mode contraptions into survival and such things. Yes people who do that are "rare" but not rare enough that we should be ignored -- especially the Youtuber types.
I like how half your arguments are "nobody uses it so why improve it?" Did you not perhaps think that improving the product might be a reason for people to start using it?
Edge having a builtin ereader in particular is rather interesting. You can get addons to do it in Chrome (and presumably FF and others) but I don't think any other browser has such a thing native yet.
Paint having 3D capabilities? Sure that won't help most people but consider say.. small game developers. Those that don't have the skills or knowledge to go crazy with something like Maya or 3dsmax. For comparison in the 2D space, just try doing a simple line drawing in Photoshop or GIMP. Its bloody near impossible because those apps are so focused on "professional" features.
If this new 3D modeling mode in Paint can fill in the role of "dead simple but does the job for dead simple tasks" like it does for 2D, then it could be a great boon to folk who just need a basic model but aren't the artsy type.
You mean the GWX ("Get Windows 10") nagware wasn't a security fix? But it was marked as critical!
Huge difference here: Those police officers are out in the public streets in full view of everyone. There is no expectation of privacy.
The PP employees are (presumably) having their conversation in a private room since you expect the conversation to be well.. private.
If you go into a police station and have a conversation with an officer, you would expect it to be private by default as well because that's a totally different situation from being out on the street.
"Expectation of privacy" is quite an important concept here. Context matters.
Problem with that is adoption.
I don't want to know that the email I sent came from me. I want to know if the email you sent came from you. And since I can't enforce you to use cryptosigning (at least not for a much wider definition of "you" than a handful of friends or coworkers,) it just kind of fizzled and died.
Microsoft would have had to take the point on that one since, at the time this was a big deal, Outlook was far and away the most widely-used email client. If they'd made Outlook create and use a public signature by default (and behind the scenes,) it would probably be ubiquitous by now.
I mean sure they would have gotten some flak since I'm sure they would have hosted the public keys on their own system and all the MS haters would come out bitching about antitrust and MS "forcing" them to do things and whatnot, but overall it would almost certainly have made signed emails ubiquitous by now, even if MS' own version fell off. Because all of the competition would have been scrambling to match or exceed MS ("you can choose PGP or GPG! OMG the features!")
But they didn't, and in some way its too late by now since the email client market is much more fractured. At the very least, Google and Apple would need to team up with MS to implement it across all of their PC, web-based and mobile email readers.
I don't particularly see it happening though. They're all far more likely at this point to suggest using their walled-garden systems (Skype can be used as an Exchange email client!) rather than trying to do something that would have more global reach.
I'm guessing you're comparing against one or two specific services (the 140 remark is an obvious Twitter reference..)
But many forum systems do all of those things at least as good as email -- especially handling of conversation threads where email relies on parsing out RE: and FW: lines while lots of forums (such as Slashdot for example) provide correctly nested reply chains.
Email's main benefit over all of these system is its ubiquity. Its usually not the best at anything, but its good enough and you know with near-100% certainty that if you send an email, it will show up in the recipients inbox (barring network of spam filtering issues) and that they will be able to read it (whether they actually do or not is up to them, but that's the case with every system.)
Sure you can. You can setup trust systems like Bitcoin does with its blockchains (and there's already lots of research being started into how the blockchain concept can be used to decentralize other things while retaining a strong level trust.)
Email clients automatically generating and including PGP/GPG signatures would go a long way as well. As long as its behind the scenes, the dumb masses won't care and those that do care will have a good method to at least do whitelisting and greylisting controls (blacklisting is more difficult since spammers already create thousands of new email accounts and it wouldn't be hard for them to create thousands of new signatures to go with them.) Of course in a way that's just moving the problem up the chain (since the public halves of those keys need to be hosted somewhere.) But its a start if nothing else while we wait for blockchaining or other distributed trust systems to make their way into the world.
1) People do care. That's why the research exists in the first place (though of course like other mental disorders, there's a lot of misinformation and stupidity out there eg telling depressed people to "just be happy" or alcoholics to "just stop drinking" as if they'd never thought to try that.)
2) Even if MDMA psychotherapy works and was made legal, prevention is always better than curing after the fact.
3) I'm pretty sure Tetris has fewer side effects than chemical interventions of pretty much any sort.
Unless you can show that his orange skin is natural, the comparison is nowhere close to valid and you're just looking for an excuse to be racist.
Or perhaps you can show that Trump's skin tone is natural? I mean if he came out with some (real, believable) evidence that the orange color is due to some sort of skin disease or birth defect or something, all of us mockers would have a large amount of egg on our faces. But as long as its just "uses way too much fake tan lotion," we're in a completely different realm.
A stronger argument would be that there's no reason to take pot shots at Trump's skin color when he does so many more important things that are equally absurd.