Let's be honest here, the last Presidential election was divisive. Regardless of who won, bipartisanship is, if not at an all time low, pretty close to it's all time low.
Russia wants the U.S. to be divided politically. It makes things easier for them. They could almost certainly not care who won the Presidency as long as neither party gets along with the other. And if Clinton had won, she'd have had a Republican controlled House and Senate to deal with, so she wouldn't have had any sort of cakewalk.
About the only thing that the Russians couldn't count on was that Trump would be so blindingly incompetent. I mean, you have to figure they know he'd suck at the job, and again, that plays well for them. But this bad?
Okay, you have physical access to the machine, and you use that to take all the money out. And then the next person who tries to use the ATM notices that there's no cash in the ATM and calls the bank. (Or the ATM does that by itself.)
Or you install the software that allows you to take cash out as often as you want until the bank realizes what's happening and cycles that particular ATM out or unplugs it/puts an "Out of Order" sign on it.
The first method, you get cash once, and it's probably far more obvious who did it because they'll know when the ATM was emptied of cash. The second method, you wait a few days or weeks to start looting, and it's much less obvious when the hack occurred.
Actually, I don't have an iPhone. I refuse to buy one... but I digress.
No, progress is not inevitable. But we're not at the end of it yet either. There are self-driving cars now. Are they great? Not really. And we're probably never going to have autonomous Formula-1 racing. But progress is being made in the field.
Sure, if there was only one company looking at self-driving cars, then it would be much less likely to happen in the short or long term. But there's more than one company looking at it. And competition in the field drives (if you'll pardon the pun) progress.
50 years ago, we hadn't landed on the moon yet. 30 years ago, the first smartphone hadn't been invented yet. Hell, 10 years ago, home use 3D printing wasn't really a thing
Are there a lot of technological hurdles to overcome before we have good self-driving cars? Ones that even your grandma feels safe using? Sure.
But to say, flat out, that we're never going to reach it is asinine.
My biggest problem with GIMP (or at least the GIMP of four years ago) is that it feels just enough like Photoshop to get you feeling that it shouldn't be a problem to use. However, there's enough differences where, coming off of a decade of using Photoshop at work, you end up muttering "Ok, what is the damn shortcut for that function?"
... they're going to be criticized no matter what they do about this.
I mean, if they hire an outside group to handle this, the user-base will complain that either the wrong group was picked, or that group was not conservative enough, not liberal enough, not whatever enough... you pick. Hell, they'd probably get accused of everything under the sun.
However, the same thing will happen if they pick internal users to be their test-bed for this. "Oh, you picked the wrong users. They're too conservative, too liberal, whatever." It doesn't matter, there's bad optics no matter what.
Doesn't mean that they shouldn't try. Just be prepared for the butt-hurt no matter what you do.
Just how many tabs are people keeping open at a time that this is considered a good feature? I mean, at home or at work, I only ever have maybe a half-dozen or so tabs open at once. Whereas an old roommate of mine used to have dozens of tabs open at the same time.
But I don't recall him ever complaining about clicking on a tab and it not rendering immediately. It was more of a "which tab was it again"? problem as he looked through the ones he had open.
Yes, there are tech failings in this incident. There were also human failings. Let's not let the tech failings overshadow the human ones.
I mean, sure, let's get better tech solutions for this. But we can't ignore the fact that the President, who tweets about anything that upsets him, couldn't be bothered to interrupt his golf game to say that this was a false alarm.
Okay, look, when someone is voting for a state-wide office, like Governor or Senator, it literally does not matter if or how their district is gerrymandered. That is because all the votes across the state are tallied and if you get more than 50% of the votes, you win.
But when it's for something like a state legislator or a Representative in Congress, you are voting in a district in that state. Now, your district for a state legislator is likely to be different than your district for a Representative because there are a lot more state legislators in any given state than that state has Representatives in Congress.
But you're voting in a district for a candidate on that district's slate of candidates. Only the voters in that district count towards which candidate on that slate wins. And that's where gerrymandering plays a factor. Districts can be drawn to favor one party or the other. And that happens all the damn time. With the right demographic data, it's relatively simple to draw the districts in a state to ensure that even though one party has more registered voters, the other party stays in power.
Hell, North Carolina has a history of this. There was someone involved with the North Carolina elections who, for an interview on The Daily Show, inadvertently admitted that the recent laws that they had passed were targeting voters that traditionally voted for the Democratic party.
Why does the Vatican get a pass? They helped cover up pedophile priests for decades.
If someone is convicted of espionage, your plan is to kick them out of the country instead of punishing them? I mean, unless they have diplomatic immunity so that we couldn't prosecute them, what does that solve?
Why are you limiting prosecution of preachers to Wahabis and Salafists? I mean, if you're serious about religion being used against the U.S....
The First Amendment has never shielded you from non-governmental consequences. (And there are a few things, like threatening public officials, that don't have First Amendment protection to begin with.)
Simply put, if I express an unpopular opinion, albeit one that is protected by the First Amendment, the government may not abridge my speech. My employer, however is perfectly free to tell me to, say, stop telling everyone that "The Last Jedi" is the best Star Wars movie ever and anyone who thinks otherwise is a drooling dimwit, and I'm surprised they managed to dress themselves this morning. (I was picking an obviously odd example.)
Actually, in California, political affiliation is a protected class (states can add to federally protected classes, but they cannot remove any federally protected classes). So, he (or rather his lawyers) can argue that he was fired for his conservative views. Now, whether that argument works....?
Yeah, within the last 24 hours, Bitcoin's price dropped over $2000 and has recovered about $800 of that (so down about $1200), and that was probably based in part on the news from Microsoft.
I'm fully expecting another decent drop once enough people realize the ramifications of this.
That may be, but considering that the CEO sold millions in stock after learning of the problem, but before the hoi polloi were notified means that the SEC just might be crawling up his ass.
You cannot make something that is perfectly legal, illegal because you feel it is morally wrong.
How very strange. Politicians want to do this all the time. Maybe they're just saying it to placate or appeal to a voting bloc, but you literally cannot swing a dead cat in the Deep South without hitting a politician who wants to outlaw abortion, gay marriage, and in some extreme cases, religion other than Christianity.
Yes, but if a private company placed an advertisement where, in the advertisement, they said "No one over the age of 40 need apply.", they'd potentially be breaking the law.
Now, to be fair, there are some jobs where, if you're over a certain age, you're probably not going to be hired. I don't believe the major airlines are looking to fill the ranks of their pilots with people in their 70s, for instance.
But when it's not the advertisement explicitly stating it, but it's the algorithm behind showing the digital advertisement to selected groups, is that still discrimination? Well, yes. But you have a harder time proving it, because you never see the advertisement to begin with.
Anyone can pick up a newspaper and look in the Help Wanted section.
Yeah, but it's walking genital warts like Paul Ryan who lump Social Security into "entitlements". And it's the same bunch of ambulatory STDs who were fiscal conservatives worried about the deficit until Trump was elected, and then they couldn't add 1.5 trillion to the deficit (the tax bill which passed the Senate last night) fast enough.
That assumes that Bitcoin plummeting won't have a chain reaction to other crypto-currencies.
If Bitcoin slowly drops, say, a daily decline of 0.25%-0.50% of it's daily opening value, the markets of other crypto-currencies could adjust. But if Bitcoin drops, say, 30%-40% in a day, how do you think other crypto-currencies are going to fare?
"What can we get away with?" has been a corporate tactic for a very long time. And while it's hardly limited to corporations, they tend to have bigger legal teams.
Yeah, but look at the context. Before he was elected, he was like "Well, you can't trust the stock market highs under Obama, because it's totally a bubble, and therefore doesn't count, because reasons. But now that I'm in charge, it's totally accurate, and not a bubble because other reasons." Yes, the stock market is higher, but Trump is basically asking you to take his word that the stock market highs under Obama don't count, because he doesn't want them to.
Look, it's a sad state of affairs that I expect politicians are going to lie. But it's a given these days. Trump is just a prolific liar while simultaneously being really bad at it. Then through in that he seems to have this massive inferiority complex when it comes to anything Obama did....
Slashdot Mirror
Anyone they could.
Let's be honest here, the last Presidential election was divisive. Regardless of who won, bipartisanship is, if not at an all time low, pretty close to it's all time low.
Russia wants the U.S. to be divided politically. It makes things easier for them. They could almost certainly not care who won the Presidency as long as neither party gets along with the other. And if Clinton had won, she'd have had a Republican controlled House and Senate to deal with, so she wouldn't have had any sort of cakewalk.
About the only thing that the Russians couldn't count on was that Trump would be so blindingly incompetent. I mean, you have to figure they know he'd suck at the job, and again, that plays well for them. But this bad?
Okay, you have physical access to the machine, and you use that to take all the money out. And then the next person who tries to use the ATM notices that there's no cash in the ATM and calls the bank. (Or the ATM does that by itself.)
Or you install the software that allows you to take cash out as often as you want until the bank realizes what's happening and cycles that particular ATM out or unplugs it/puts an "Out of Order" sign on it.
The first method, you get cash once, and it's probably far more obvious who did it because they'll know when the ATM was emptied of cash. The second method, you wait a few days or weeks to start looting, and it's much less obvious when the hack occurred.
Actually, I don't have an iPhone. I refuse to buy one... but I digress.
No, progress is not inevitable. But we're not at the end of it yet either. There are self-driving cars now. Are they great? Not really. And we're probably never going to have autonomous Formula-1 racing. But progress is being made in the field.
Sure, if there was only one company looking at self-driving cars, then it would be much less likely to happen in the short or long term. But there's more than one company looking at it. And competition in the field drives (if you'll pardon the pun) progress.
50 years ago, we hadn't landed on the moon yet.
30 years ago, the first smartphone hadn't been invented yet.
Hell, 10 years ago, home use 3D printing wasn't really a thing
Are there a lot of technological hurdles to overcome before we have good self-driving cars? Ones that even your grandma feels safe using? Sure.
But to say, flat out, that we're never going to reach it is asinine.
My biggest problem with GIMP (or at least the GIMP of four years ago) is that it feels just enough like Photoshop to get you feeling that it shouldn't be a problem to use. However, there's enough differences where, coming off of a decade of using Photoshop at work, you end up muttering "Ok, what is the damn shortcut for that function?"
... they're going to be criticized no matter what they do about this.
I mean, if they hire an outside group to handle this, the user-base will complain that either the wrong group was picked, or that group was not conservative enough, not liberal enough, not whatever enough... you pick. Hell, they'd probably get accused of everything under the sun.
However, the same thing will happen if they pick internal users to be their test-bed for this. "Oh, you picked the wrong users. They're too conservative, too liberal, whatever." It doesn't matter, there's bad optics no matter what.
Doesn't mean that they shouldn't try. Just be prepared for the butt-hurt no matter what you do.
Reagan raised taxes eleven times during his two terms. That alone would get him called a RINO by some members of the party.
Just how many tabs are people keeping open at a time that this is considered a good feature? I mean, at home or at work, I only ever have maybe a half-dozen or so tabs open at once. Whereas an old roommate of mine used to have dozens of tabs open at the same time.
But I don't recall him ever complaining about clicking on a tab and it not rendering immediately. It was more of a "which tab was it again"? problem as he looked through the ones he had open.
Yes, there are tech failings in this incident. There were also human failings. Let's not let the tech failings overshadow the human ones.
I mean, sure, let's get better tech solutions for this. But we can't ignore the fact that the President, who tweets about anything that upsets him, couldn't be bothered to interrupt his golf game to say that this was a false alarm.
That's the problem right now.
Okay, look, when someone is voting for a state-wide office, like Governor or Senator, it literally does not matter if or how their district is gerrymandered. That is because all the votes across the state are tallied and if you get more than 50% of the votes, you win.
But when it's for something like a state legislator or a Representative in Congress, you are voting in a district in that state. Now, your district for a state legislator is likely to be different than your district for a Representative because there are a lot more state legislators in any given state than that state has Representatives in Congress.
But you're voting in a district for a candidate on that district's slate of candidates. Only the voters in that district count towards which candidate on that slate wins. And that's where gerrymandering plays a factor. Districts can be drawn to favor one party or the other. And that happens all the damn time. With the right demographic data, it's relatively simple to draw the districts in a state to ensure that even though one party has more registered voters, the other party stays in power.
Hell, North Carolina has a history of this. There was someone involved with the North Carolina elections who, for an interview on The Daily Show, inadvertently admitted that the recent laws that they had passed were targeting voters that traditionally voted for the Democratic party.
Why does the Vatican get a pass? They helped cover up pedophile priests for decades.
If someone is convicted of espionage, your plan is to kick them out of the country instead of punishing them? I mean, unless they have diplomatic immunity so that we couldn't prosecute them, what does that solve?
Why are you limiting prosecution of preachers to Wahabis and Salafists? I mean, if you're serious about religion being used against the U.S....
Oh, wait, you're not.
Welcome to the slippery slope. Here's your ski pass.
The First Amendment has never shielded you from non-governmental consequences. (And there are a few things, like threatening public officials, that don't have First Amendment protection to begin with.)
Simply put, if I express an unpopular opinion, albeit one that is protected by the First Amendment, the government may not abridge my speech. My employer, however is perfectly free to tell me to, say, stop telling everyone that "The Last Jedi" is the best Star Wars movie ever and anyone who thinks otherwise is a drooling dimwit, and I'm surprised they managed to dress themselves this morning. (I was picking an obviously odd example.)
Actually, in California, political affiliation is a protected class (states can add to federally protected classes, but they cannot remove any federally protected classes). So, he (or rather his lawyers) can argue that he was fired for his conservative views. Now, whether that argument works....?
Yeah, within the last 24 hours, Bitcoin's price dropped over $2000 and has recovered about $800 of that (so down about $1200), and that was probably based in part on the news from Microsoft.
I'm fully expecting another decent drop once enough people realize the ramifications of this.
That may be, but considering that the CEO sold millions in stock after learning of the problem, but before the hoi polloi were notified means that the SEC just might be crawling up his ass.
How very strange. Politicians want to do this all the time. Maybe they're just saying it to placate or appeal to a voting bloc, but you literally cannot swing a dead cat in the Deep South without hitting a politician who wants to outlaw abortion, gay marriage, and in some extreme cases, religion other than Christianity.
And I'd really like to think that Collins will stick to that, but I'm not going to be a bit surprised if she doesn't.
the "bad guys" have to steal your phone AND your laptop now to get away with their cunning plan?
Yes, but if a private company placed an advertisement where, in the advertisement, they said "No one over the age of 40 need apply.", they'd potentially be breaking the law.
Now, to be fair, there are some jobs where, if you're over a certain age, you're probably not going to be hired. I don't believe the major airlines are looking to fill the ranks of their pilots with people in their 70s, for instance.
But when it's not the advertisement explicitly stating it, but it's the algorithm behind showing the digital advertisement to selected groups, is that still discrimination? Well, yes. But you have a harder time proving it, because you never see the advertisement to begin with.
Anyone can pick up a newspaper and look in the Help Wanted section.
Yeah, but it's walking genital warts like Paul Ryan who lump Social Security into "entitlements". And it's the same bunch of ambulatory STDs who were fiscal conservatives worried about the deficit until Trump was elected, and then they couldn't add 1.5 trillion to the deficit (the tax bill which passed the Senate last night) fast enough.
That assumes that Bitcoin plummeting won't have a chain reaction to other crypto-currencies.
If Bitcoin slowly drops, say, a daily decline of 0.25%-0.50% of it's daily opening value, the markets of other crypto-currencies could adjust. But if Bitcoin drops, say, 30%-40% in a day, how do you think other crypto-currencies are going to fare?
"What can we get away with?" has been a corporate tactic for a very long time. And while it's hardly limited to corporations, they tend to have bigger legal teams.
Yeah, but look at the context. Before he was elected, he was like "Well, you can't trust the stock market highs under Obama, because it's totally a bubble, and therefore doesn't count, because reasons. But now that I'm in charge, it's totally accurate, and not a bubble because other reasons." Yes, the stock market is higher, but Trump is basically asking you to take his word that the stock market highs under Obama don't count, because he doesn't want them to.
Look, it's a sad state of affairs that I expect politicians are going to lie. But it's a given these days. Trump is just a prolific liar while simultaneously being really bad at it. Then through in that he seems to have this massive inferiority complex when it comes to anything Obama did....
Funny, that's what LGBTQ people want too, and yet there are "conservatives" who want to take away their rights.