I'm pretty sure it was a little over half of the voting-eligible population who voted this time around. Children and non-citizens don't count; non-citizens could leave at any time and aren't really an integral part of our society, and children are going to grow up to be just like the rest of the voting population before long.
Regardless, if about half of our population is that mentally challenged, that's a very bad sign for our society.
Jumbo jets and earthmovers aren't consumer goods. So I'll admit that America still makes some pretty good industrial equipment. We make some kick-ass rockets too (SpaceX). As for passive electronic components, I'm pretty sure that's BS; that stuff is all made overseas now. We still make high-value stuff like Intel CPUs. But we don't do the assembly for electronics now either; that's all in Asia now, except for military stuff which is very expensive.
BTW, the #2 manufacturing country for exports is Germany. America doesn't export that much. That's not a great position for a very large economic power; we export a lot of low-value crap like coal and corn, but not stuff people (and businesses) in other countries actually want to buy (except Intel CPUs of course). Considering how dependent we are on other nations for manufactured goods, that's a big disadvantage; usually it's 3rd-world nations that export low-value stuff and import high-value stuff.
The removable keyboard bit sounds interesting, but for the non-Android OS that runs Android apps from Google's Play store, 1) has anyone actually demonstrated this is feasible, and 2) is it legally possible (would Google lock out such an OS)?
Probably not. That would require people and companies running Windows to finally wake up and smell the coffee after seeing all this stuff with telemetry, spyware, ads, forced updates, etc., and then go to all the trouble of actually switching over (which would involve some pain, mainly due to Windows-only software and a lack of qualified IT people). I have zero hope that that will happen. So, I'm enjoying sitting back and watching all these people and companies suffer with MS's shenanigans. AFAIC, they've brought it on themselves.
Why should MS care about putting out a "minimally viable product"? It's not like customers are going to switch to something else, so it's perfectly rational for them to concentrate their efforts on siphoning your personal data.
And why exactly should MS give two shits about your "requirements"? What exactly are you going to do if MS tells you to take your requirements and stick them up your ass, and that you're going to use Windows 10 or else? ("or else" being "you're on your own--good luck trying to keep Windows 7 secure after we've cut off support for it".)
I sincerely hope that when Win7 finally gets EOLed, that MS tells companies like this that they're going to use Win10 with telemetry, spying, and ads whether they like it or not. These stupid F500 companies are going to gripe and complain, then they're going to bend over and take it.
we are seeing such heterosexual and masculine behavior increasingly being socially shamed, criminalized, and treated as a mental illness.
Citation needed. I haven't seen anything like this at all, except maybe on some internet forums populated by activists, who do not represent the general population.
Exactly./r/HillaryClinton is exactly the same way. As a Bernie supporter, I went on there one day, posted something very mildly critical of Hillary, and BOOM! I was banned immediately, within minutes IIRC.
You have to really be devoid of critical thinking skills to support either one of these horrible people, so it only makes sense that forums devoted to them would be completely intolerant of dissenting opinions.
Oh please. Slashdot's method is a complete and total failure, and partially responsible for this site's massive decline. Good people don't even bother moderating, because the disincentives are too high: you don't get enough points, and also you can't post in the entire story after that without undoing your moderations. I stopped bothering to moderate ages ago because of the latter. If I'm interested enough in a discussion thread to read through it, I'm most likely going to want to put my 2 cents in somewhere, and I'm not going to give that up because of some dumb philosophical dedication to the cause of moderation.
SoylentNews does it far better, and with Slashdot's own codebase mostly. All they did was tweak it a little: good-karma users get to moderate far more often, and you're only prevented from posting in a *thread* that you moderated in, not the entire discussion. Stupid Slashdot, on the other hand, wastes time and resources mucking around with the UI, but steadfastly refuses to fix its broken old moderation system.
Exactly. And this shows just how far gone this country is. About half the population is a bunch of uneducated conspiracy-theory-believing wackos. And the other half are better educated and are able to rationalize away their support for an utterly corrupt warmonger. There is no hope for us.
You guys are all missing an important feature of Reddit: the subreddits. Yes, each subreddit has (unpaid) moderators who can squelch any speech they dislike, but unlike Slashdot, on Reddit if you don't like it you can simply create your own subreddit and moderate it however you like, or go to some other subreddit that has moderation you like better. There's hundreds of thousands of subreddits, so you're bound to find one you like; they're not all lumped together. *That* is why Reddit became so popular. If you don't like the moderators on/r/politics, you can go to/r/pol instead (or vice versa). If you don't like the moderators on/r/HillaryClinton, you can go to/r/Democrats or whatever instead. And so on. There's endless alternatives, without having to leave the site. That just doesn't exist on other forums like Slashdot, Hacker News, etc. Even if you get banned on a subreddit, that doesn't affect your dealings on other subreddits. And it's trivially easy to create a new account and switch to it anyway (I have a handful myself that I switch between), so it's easy to get around a ban, unlike sites that require a unique email address per account.
Take Slashdot. If you don't adopt a shrill "Microsoft is evil!" view, you ARE considered toxic.
Oh bullshit. This place is absolutely full of both Microsoft and Apple fanboys. Posting anything anti-MS here will get you all kinds of nasty responses from the MS shills and trolls.
So... what? My stupid family uses FB too. I don't. I really have little desire to spend my valuable time talking to people I have nothing in common with other than some family ties.
The only real reason I have a FB account at all is because it's required for Tinder. But that doesn't require me to actually *use* the FB account much (except post my Tinder photos on it, since that's how Tinder gets your photos).
Then her supporters actively started a hate campaign against trump supporters which was very loud, childish and sometime violent which didn't help matters at all.
Don't forget the hate campaign her supporters started against the Bernie supporters. Sometimes I think I want to join the alt-right, start watching Inforwars, and join a militia just because Hillary's supporters have turned me off so much!
Someone needs to write a book about what an awful campaign she ran; basically the "how to lose an election" handbook.
It's not entirely because of some backlash against progressivism. Bernie was doing great in spite of the DNC sabotaging him at every turn, and had a lot of support among the white working class because he actually addressed their issues and came to talk to them.
Trump won because Hillary was such an incredibly horrible candidate, with multiple scandals, obvious corruption, terrible treatment of the Bernie supporters in her own party (making lots of them sit out the election or vote for someone else, including Trump), and corporate elitism, plus a record of warmongering. Basically, there really wasn't anything progressive about Hillary at all; she's part of the corporatist elitist part of the Democratic Party (the "establishment"), who gave lip service to some progressive issues to try to retain those votes but that's it. She just didn't inspire enough people to come out and vote for her, and as a result we had an extremely low turnout (compare the numbers to 2008), and another very unpopular candidate was elected.
Ask women how things are going with that equal pay for equal work.
You're exactly right about the shitty police shooting minorities, but not this one. There's no evidence any more that women are getting paid less for the same job. They're getting paid less overall, but that's because they choose lower-paying jobs and sacrifice their careers for family (i.e., they don't work 100-hour weeks like the workaholic men).
We need a nickname like this for Trump. "Crooked Hillary" is totally apt and accurate, but Trump is equally bad, just in different ways (looking at his cabinet picks here at the moment...), so he needs a suitable nickname in the same vein.
It IS crazy. You might as well buy a netbook computer, because that's how big and clunky the thing will be. There's simply no room on a modern 5.5" screen cellphone to put a physical keypad; either it's going to be huge (5.5" screen plus fixed keypad or keyboard), or it's going to be a slider, which have proven to have mechanical problems plus they're super-thick (this coming from someone who'd happily accept more thickness in exchange for a bigger battery). Not only that, the keypad will have limited usefulness, because you'll still have to use the on-screen keyboard for texting; I don't know about you, but most of my phone typing is text, not numbers. Who the hell still messes with phone numbers anyway? Are you of retirement age? Do you still use AOL? It's not like I get new phone numbers from people *that* often; I'm not quite that popular with women.... (though now I'm over 40, it does seem like my popularity with them has quadrupled or more, probably because I still look good and am in shape, and the competition from men in my age group is so pathetic).
Here's the features you need in a modern smartphone for success: 1) user-replaceable battery 2) SD card slot 3) USB-c 4) IP68 waterproof 5) Android OS and access to the Google Play store. Going with a non-Android OS is doomed to failure, because of the apps; it's the same reason desktop Linux hasn't taken over much from Windows. A big bonus to woo customers away from other premium Android phones would be to eliminate all the crapware and make a streamlined, high-performance version of Android. A lot of people would probably jump on that, given the interest in Google's Nexus/Pixel phones. Throw in the features above (battery, SDcard, waterproof) and keep the price in-line with the Galaxy and Pixel phones and you've got a winner because it'll cover everyone's bases. (The weakness of the Galaxy line is the software: all the crapware and bloatware on Samsung's Android version. The weakness of Google's phones is the hardware: a lack of features like a removable battery and SDcard slot.)
Great, which means we'll only be able to buy American-made cellphones, which means we'll be stuck with $2000 iPhones and their shitty walled gardens.
Face it: American companies haven't been able to build great products for a long time. Our cars have sucked for decades (not counting Japanese cars made in American factories; those are good). Our home appliances are all crap now that they've merged into one big company. We haven't built the best electronics since the 60s or 70s. We still make good CPU dies though, so I guess there's that. I will admit, though: I have an American-made automated cat litter box and that thing is fantastic, though very expensive.
WTF makes you think the Justice Department gives a rat's ass about this? If the DOJ doesn't feel like pursuing an anti-trust case against Microsoft (even at the height of their abusive monopoly with IE6 back in 1999), what makes you think a conservative Trump DOJ is going to care about Facebook? (Or, if Hillary somehow wins the Electoral College election, that her DOJ would care?)
Face it: we're on our own with these abusive companies. If we want to keep them in line, we have to be willing to vote with our feet. We have proven, over and over and over, that we are simply not willing to do that.
That's true, however all the masses of rubes out there love these platforms and refuse to give them up no matter how abusive they get, so developers target them anyway, hoping to capitalize on the popularity of these platforms, much like pets will eagerly await crumbs falling off their masters' tables.
You don't have to have 100% marketshare to be an "actual monopoly", according to the laws, just an overwhelming marketshare with too much power.
Your first sentence was 100% correct: anti-trust protection is only as good as the court decisions. We saw this firsthand in 1999/2000 with the Microsoft trial: they were ruled an abusive monopoly (and with less than 100% marketshare remember), but then GWB took over and the DOJ dropped the case, so there was zero punishment. It had nothing to do with being a "true horizontal monopoly", it had everything to do with corruption in the government. If GWB hadn't won, most likely MS would have been broken up. The Judge really hated them and wanted to throw the book at them.
Given the fact that this was the Year of the Telemetry desktop for Windows, as well as that abysmal Fuck-You-That's-Why proprietary offering from the "Pros" at Apple, I'd say it's a big deal. Linux becomes more and more attractive by the minute when considering the alternatives.
Only to people who don't have a herd mentality. As much as I'd like to see everyone switch to Linux, we're just not seeing it happen in any significant amount; instead, everyone is simply rationalizing the new normal in their heads somehow, and accepting MS Telemetry and Forced Reboots, or evangelizing how carrying around a bunch of expensive dongles really is a better way to do things. Every once in a while you'll come across someone who says "I've finally had it with this crap, so I've switched to Linux|Ubuntu|etc", but they're rare.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm pretty sure it was a little over half of the voting-eligible population who voted this time around. Children and non-citizens don't count; non-citizens could leave at any time and aren't really an integral part of our society, and children are going to grow up to be just like the rest of the voting population before long.
Regardless, if about half of our population is that mentally challenged, that's a very bad sign for our society.
Jumbo jets and earthmovers aren't consumer goods. So I'll admit that America still makes some pretty good industrial equipment. We make some kick-ass rockets too (SpaceX). As for passive electronic components, I'm pretty sure that's BS; that stuff is all made overseas now. We still make high-value stuff like Intel CPUs. But we don't do the assembly for electronics now either; that's all in Asia now, except for military stuff which is very expensive.
BTW, the #2 manufacturing country for exports is Germany. America doesn't export that much. That's not a great position for a very large economic power; we export a lot of low-value crap like coal and corn, but not stuff people (and businesses) in other countries actually want to buy (except Intel CPUs of course). Considering how dependent we are on other nations for manufactured goods, that's a big disadvantage; usually it's 3rd-world nations that export low-value stuff and import high-value stuff.
The removable keyboard bit sounds interesting, but for the non-Android OS that runs Android apps from Google's Play store, 1) has anyone actually demonstrated this is feasible, and 2) is it legally possible (would Google lock out such an OS)?
Probably not. That would require people and companies running Windows to finally wake up and smell the coffee after seeing all this stuff with telemetry, spyware, ads, forced updates, etc., and then go to all the trouble of actually switching over (which would involve some pain, mainly due to Windows-only software and a lack of qualified IT people). I have zero hope that that will happen. So, I'm enjoying sitting back and watching all these people and companies suffer with MS's shenanigans. AFAIC, they've brought it on themselves.
Why should MS care about putting out a "minimally viable product"? It's not like customers are going to switch to something else, so it's perfectly rational for them to concentrate their efforts on siphoning your personal data.
And why exactly should MS give two shits about your "requirements"? What exactly are you going to do if MS tells you to take your requirements and stick them up your ass, and that you're going to use Windows 10 or else?
("or else" being "you're on your own--good luck trying to keep Windows 7 secure after we've cut off support for it".)
I sincerely hope that when Win7 finally gets EOLed, that MS tells companies like this that they're going to use Win10 with telemetry, spying, and ads whether they like it or not. These stupid F500 companies are going to gripe and complain, then they're going to bend over and take it.
The Vulcans should have shot down Cochrane's ship and launched beacons warning others away from this planet.
we are seeing such heterosexual and masculine behavior increasingly being socially shamed, criminalized, and treated as a mental illness.
Citation needed. I haven't seen anything like this at all, except maybe on some internet forums populated by activists, who do not represent the general population.
Exactly. /r/HillaryClinton is exactly the same way. As a Bernie supporter, I went on there one day, posted something very mildly critical of Hillary, and BOOM! I was banned immediately, within minutes IIRC.
You have to really be devoid of critical thinking skills to support either one of these horrible people, so it only makes sense that forums devoted to them would be completely intolerant of dissenting opinions.
Oh please. Slashdot's method is a complete and total failure, and partially responsible for this site's massive decline. Good people don't even bother moderating, because the disincentives are too high: you don't get enough points, and also you can't post in the entire story after that without undoing your moderations. I stopped bothering to moderate ages ago because of the latter. If I'm interested enough in a discussion thread to read through it, I'm most likely going to want to put my 2 cents in somewhere, and I'm not going to give that up because of some dumb philosophical dedication to the cause of moderation.
SoylentNews does it far better, and with Slashdot's own codebase mostly. All they did was tweak it a little: good-karma users get to moderate far more often, and you're only prevented from posting in a *thread* that you moderated in, not the entire discussion. Stupid Slashdot, on the other hand, wastes time and resources mucking around with the UI, but steadfastly refuses to fix its broken old moderation system.
Exactly. And this shows just how far gone this country is. About half the population is a bunch of uneducated conspiracy-theory-believing wackos. And the other half are better educated and are able to rationalize away their support for an utterly corrupt warmonger. There is no hope for us.
You guys are all missing an important feature of Reddit: the subreddits. Yes, each subreddit has (unpaid) moderators who can squelch any speech they dislike, but unlike Slashdot, on Reddit if you don't like it you can simply create your own subreddit and moderate it however you like, or go to some other subreddit that has moderation you like better. There's hundreds of thousands of subreddits, so you're bound to find one you like; they're not all lumped together. *That* is why Reddit became so popular. If you don't like the moderators on /r/politics, you can go to /r/pol instead (or vice versa). If you don't like the moderators on /r/HillaryClinton, you can go to /r/Democrats or whatever instead. And so on. There's endless alternatives, without having to leave the site. That just doesn't exist on other forums like Slashdot, Hacker News, etc. Even if you get banned on a subreddit, that doesn't affect your dealings on other subreddits. And it's trivially easy to create a new account and switch to it anyway (I have a handful myself that I switch between), so it's easy to get around a ban, unlike sites that require a unique email address per account.
Take Slashdot. If you don't adopt a shrill "Microsoft is evil!" view, you ARE considered toxic.
Oh bullshit. This place is absolutely full of both Microsoft and Apple fanboys. Posting anything anti-MS here will get you all kinds of nasty responses from the MS shills and trolls.
But the stupid family still uses FB so...
So... what? My stupid family uses FB too. I don't. I really have little desire to spend my valuable time talking to people I have nothing in common with other than some family ties.
The only real reason I have a FB account at all is because it's required for Tinder. But that doesn't require me to actually *use* the FB account much (except post my Tinder photos on it, since that's how Tinder gets your photos).
Then her supporters actively started a hate campaign against trump supporters which was very loud, childish and sometime violent which didn't help matters at all.
Don't forget the hate campaign her supporters started against the Bernie supporters. Sometimes I think I want to join the alt-right, start watching Inforwars, and join a militia just because Hillary's supporters have turned me off so much!
Someone needs to write a book about what an awful campaign she ran; basically the "how to lose an election" handbook.
It's not entirely because of some backlash against progressivism. Bernie was doing great in spite of the DNC sabotaging him at every turn, and had a lot of support among the white working class because he actually addressed their issues and came to talk to them.
Trump won because Hillary was such an incredibly horrible candidate, with multiple scandals, obvious corruption, terrible treatment of the Bernie supporters in her own party (making lots of them sit out the election or vote for someone else, including Trump), and corporate elitism, plus a record of warmongering. Basically, there really wasn't anything progressive about Hillary at all; she's part of the corporatist elitist part of the Democratic Party (the "establishment"), who gave lip service to some progressive issues to try to retain those votes but that's it. She just didn't inspire enough people to come out and vote for her, and as a result we had an extremely low turnout (compare the numbers to 2008), and another very unpopular candidate was elected.
Ask women how things are going with that equal pay for equal work.
You're exactly right about the shitty police shooting minorities, but not this one. There's no evidence any more that women are getting paid less for the same job. They're getting paid less overall, but that's because they choose lower-paying jobs and sacrifice their careers for family (i.e., they don't work 100-hour weeks like the workaholic men).
We need a nickname like this for Trump. "Crooked Hillary" is totally apt and accurate, but Trump is equally bad, just in different ways (looking at his cabinet picks here at the moment...), so he needs a suitable nickname in the same vein.
It IS crazy. You might as well buy a netbook computer, because that's how big and clunky the thing will be. There's simply no room on a modern 5.5" screen cellphone to put a physical keypad; either it's going to be huge (5.5" screen plus fixed keypad or keyboard), or it's going to be a slider, which have proven to have mechanical problems plus they're super-thick (this coming from someone who'd happily accept more thickness in exchange for a bigger battery). Not only that, the keypad will have limited usefulness, because you'll still have to use the on-screen keyboard for texting; I don't know about you, but most of my phone typing is text, not numbers. Who the hell still messes with phone numbers anyway? Are you of retirement age? Do you still use AOL? It's not like I get new phone numbers from people *that* often; I'm not quite that popular with women.... (though now I'm over 40, it does seem like my popularity with them has quadrupled or more, probably because I still look good and am in shape, and the competition from men in my age group is so pathetic).
Here's the features you need in a modern smartphone for success: 1) user-replaceable battery 2) SD card slot 3) USB-c 4) IP68 waterproof 5) Android OS and access to the Google Play store. Going with a non-Android OS is doomed to failure, because of the apps; it's the same reason desktop Linux hasn't taken over much from Windows. A big bonus to woo customers away from other premium Android phones would be to eliminate all the crapware and make a streamlined, high-performance version of Android. A lot of people would probably jump on that, given the interest in Google's Nexus/Pixel phones. Throw in the features above (battery, SDcard, waterproof) and keep the price in-line with the Galaxy and Pixel phones and you've got a winner because it'll cover everyone's bases. (The weakness of the Galaxy line is the software: all the crapware and bloatware on Samsung's Android version. The weakness of Google's phones is the hardware: a lack of features like a removable battery and SDcard slot.)
Great, which means we'll only be able to buy American-made cellphones, which means we'll be stuck with $2000 iPhones and their shitty walled gardens.
Face it: American companies haven't been able to build great products for a long time. Our cars have sucked for decades (not counting Japanese cars made in American factories; those are good). Our home appliances are all crap now that they've merged into one big company. We haven't built the best electronics since the 60s or 70s. We still make good CPU dies though, so I guess there's that. I will admit, though: I have an American-made automated cat litter box and that thing is fantastic, though very expensive.
It doesn't really matter what the motivation is, people are willingly going that way.
WTF makes you think the Justice Department gives a rat's ass about this? If the DOJ doesn't feel like pursuing an anti-trust case against Microsoft (even at the height of their abusive monopoly with IE6 back in 1999), what makes you think a conservative Trump DOJ is going to care about Facebook? (Or, if Hillary somehow wins the Electoral College election, that her DOJ would care?)
Face it: we're on our own with these abusive companies. If we want to keep them in line, we have to be willing to vote with our feet. We have proven, over and over and over, that we are simply not willing to do that.
That's true, however all the masses of rubes out there love these platforms and refuse to give them up no matter how abusive they get, so developers target them anyway, hoping to capitalize on the popularity of these platforms, much like pets will eagerly await crumbs falling off their masters' tables.
You don't have to have 100% marketshare to be an "actual monopoly", according to the laws, just an overwhelming marketshare with too much power.
Your first sentence was 100% correct: anti-trust protection is only as good as the court decisions. We saw this firsthand in 1999/2000 with the Microsoft trial: they were ruled an abusive monopoly (and with less than 100% marketshare remember), but then GWB took over and the DOJ dropped the case, so there was zero punishment. It had nothing to do with being a "true horizontal monopoly", it had everything to do with corruption in the government. If GWB hadn't won, most likely MS would have been broken up. The Judge really hated them and wanted to throw the book at them.
Given the fact that this was the Year of the Telemetry desktop for Windows, as well as that abysmal Fuck-You-That's-Why proprietary offering from the "Pros" at Apple, I'd say it's a big deal. Linux becomes more and more attractive by the minute when considering the alternatives.
Only to people who don't have a herd mentality. As much as I'd like to see everyone switch to Linux, we're just not seeing it happen in any significant amount; instead, everyone is simply rationalizing the new normal in their heads somehow, and accepting MS Telemetry and Forced Reboots, or evangelizing how carrying around a bunch of expensive dongles really is a better way to do things. Every once in a while you'll come across someone who says "I've finally had it with this crap, so I've switched to Linux|Ubuntu|etc", but they're rare.