Some of them use Phorm, which is just as bad as what Google are doing. Of course, Google's real aim is to get everyone onto fast internet connections (if possible, without having to build too many of those connections themselves) so they'll stick everything in the cloud, mostly using very well-known providers of free cloud services.
(Also, if they can get your web history rather than just sniffing your connections, they get the full URLs without having to muck around with DPI and without any hassle involving HTTPS - and the subsidiary resources are less interesting to them than the pages.)
iWork is a pretty decent office suite (although IDK if it handles ODF properly): for actual spreadsheeting, Numbers is very nice (although it isn't suitable for the kind of monstrosities that Excel can be used for), and Keynote makes Powerpoint seem horribly primitive. The downside is Pages, which is quite decent for desktop publishing (far less painful than Word for anything fancy) and pretty decent for simple authoring, but not as good for moderately-complex documents - in particular, the formatting UI is horribly inefficient without using shortcuts (which also affects Keynote, but you don't tend to want to do so much formatting in a slideshow). That said, Pages complements LaTeX fairly nicely - the thins which are irritating to do in one are usually day in the other.
Photoshop would probably be the most important program to get working, since that is often mentioned as being one of the critically-missing programs for Linux.
FaceTime would be worthwhile if you have friends with iThings, but that would probably require you to pirate it. There might also be decent software on the Mac AppStore.
They used to allow arbitrary text as well as users' names as tag (I don't use Facebook anymore, so I don't know if they still do). Since they get people to upload their address books, it becomes easier to guess which MarkT you are. Those are the "shadow profiles" which sometimes get talked about.
The EC's biggest problem stems from EU governments that actively lobby it to pass regulations and directives on unpopular topics. Local politicians seldom mention that their great new reform is a mere transcription into local law of an EU directive (aka something they're obligated to do). In contrast, they'll sure as hell blame EU technocrats (which, incidentally, they named) for coming up with directives that force them to pass much needed yet highly unpopular reforms.
You forgot the worst trick they have: first get their pet bureaucrats in Brussels to introduce some regulation which forces them to do something unpopular that they know is bad but is good for their mates, or, if they can't get away with that, introduce a regulation that they can misinterpret to do what they want to do - see, for example, the fiasco involving the privatisation of British Rail.
And yet Darth Mandelson kept on coming back. Of course, it helped that some of his friends were friends with News Corp, and that he was being encouraged to do what the US government (and their loyal dogs in Westminster) wanted him to do anyway.
The "legitimate" use would be for things like chatterbots (on corporate pages, for example), or for external clients (or bridging to other protocols) without having the rely on the broken XMPP interface (so you get friend lists and so on).
That doesn't stop Facebook keeping the information they can extract from the tag, regarding your friends and your interests and so on. Also, that doesn't do you any good if you aren't a Facebook user yourself.
It isn't just for dodgy photos: there is also the network analysis which Facebook does. For example, they look at all those address books people upload, and the photos you are tagged in, and find that you are X% likely to be a pot smoker and Y% likely to be a pirate and so on, and they can sell that information to a potential employer or your wife's divorce lawyer or whatever. All that can be generated without any involvement on your part, it just takes a few irresponsible friends.
Al Smith would also be on the radical left fringe today, so it isn't just that the left and right have flipped but that the whole of American politics has moved a long way to the right.
It depends if any of the cartel were vertically-integrated with an OEM: if so, they could have been shifting all the profits into the panel-making section rather than the bundling and distribution.
If that's the same video as the one I'm thinking of (it might not be, I thought the block looked like a concrete paver), the man with the block was rather hesitant, but then killed her before it had gone on for long, as though he didn't really like what he was doing and wanted to kill her quickly. If even the people doing that sort of thing aren't really committed or think things have gone too far, that suggests the moderates might well have a better chance next time there's upheaval there.
There's also the children's rights aspect: a child's right to proper healthcare trumps a parent's rights to idiocy, a point well-established by cases involving faith healing
What is really needed is a new charter to replace the Magna Carta (what's left of it) and the Act of Settlement (which has been gutted by the fact that all the rights it guaranteed to the people were subject to limitation by parliament) to reflect the fact that now the people can't rely on parliament to protect their liberties. Three hundred years ago, Parliament was the public's best defence against a dictatorial crown and their corrupt servants, now it is the crown and the crown servants who are the public's best protection against a dictatorial parliament and their corrupt servants.
Unfortunately, it would probably be constitutionally simpler to create a republic[1] than it would to limit parliamentary sovereignty in a constitutionally-binding way.
[1] Although actually creating a British republic would be effectively impossible since that would mean defining the reserve powers of the president and the limits of parliament, as a party controlling the presidency and the commons would have absolutely unlimited power, whereas even without a veto power the Crown has enough powers to throw a serious spanner in the works of any home-grown Hitler (if you control the executive, the judiciary, the military, and the revenues of the Duchy of Lancaster, the fact that someone else controls the legislature and supply becomes less critical, at least in the short term). The Commonwealth Realms don't have that problem because they have limited parliamentary powers and procedures for binding constitutional amendments.
They don't have to do anything as risky as delete data, some creative mis-entry would cause no end of trouble and could be far more lucrative (since it would be very useful for identity theft). Intelligence agencies the world over keep learning the hard way that you don't treat people with access to sensitive data badly or they sell it: now that every arm of the government has so much sensitive data, it is time for them to learn that too.
Last time, the north (or at least the rich industrialists in the north) needed the south more than the south (or at least the rich planters in the south) needed the north. Now, it is quite possible that if some of the crazier red areas were to secede, the rest of the country would be better off without them, since the red states tend to be net drains on the federal government (rural areas cost more and produce less, basically) and it would allow the rest of the country to shift somewhat more towards rational politics by removing a whole load of tea baggers and crazy evangelicals. Then the remainder of the USA can get the secessionist politicians (or their successors) to sell out their citizens for a nice one-sided trade agreement (it seems to work everywhere else), and the USA gets to keep all the benefits of a single state except some of the military manpower.
In South Australia they teach source analysis in schools, but only really in History and English (and in English it is part of literary criticism in general, or used to be), and not properly until year 10 (approx. US 9th grade). Unfortunately, that's really too late to start.
One of the major factors was the protectionist rules regarding cotton exports: British cotton importers were wiling to pay more for baled cotton than the northern manufacturers, and charged less for shipping. However, cotton exports were restricted to protect the US spinning and weaving industries, and there were strict regulations limiting the use of foreign ships for costal shipping (although that was normal: partly it was economic, and partly it was to ensure a good supply of potential conscripts). The tobacco planters were in a similar position, although they had less of a price advantage over their foreign competitors than the cotton planters.
Of course, the planters wanted to keep slavery and lose the protectionism, but the slavery question wasn't the driving factor for the elite (and abolition didn't happen until war was already underway). The Union didn't just let the South secede and then hope to keep business ties as they were, partly because they would then lose the tax advantages they had over the British and French, and partly because the last thing they wanted was a British-aligned state there.
Actually, even a fibre-based mesh network would be quite bad for latency, since a lot of latency comes from switchgear.
What you'd probably want to do is have a hierarchy with a highly redundant mesh, so you have lines which only connect every 10km or so, but the endpoints of each segment are connected to local lines and to house-to-house links, so that there are many redundant paths between any two nodes but so that latency can be kept down when the network is intact.
Because if you happen to think that all your daughter needs to know is how to cook, clean, look after her husband, and submit to you favourite god, and your daughter as a good little $religionist agrees, that has serious problems for her future rights (principally, that being completely uneducated and dependent on your family makes it difficult if not impossible to exercise them). Similarly, if your son wants to go down the mine with his older brothers, his dad, his uncles, and like his granddad and great-granddad once did, he's going to be screwed if the mine closes (and that sort of thing happened to people within living memory).
That means you have to mandate some kind of minimum education, and that needs to be complete enough for someone to be a well-rounded and independently functioning member of society, able to understand and analyse issues and come to an opinion or an understanding of the relevant facts (notwithstanding the fairly poor job we are actually doing in that regard, but that's another matter). This means that you need a sound basis in a wide variety of fields, so you end up with a semi-arbitrary list of all the things that people in each field think are most important. Evolution is one of the central facts of modern biology, and is one of the things which children are in greatest danger of being mislead about, so it makes sense to include it in the biology curriculum.
I don't think it is mandatory to teach about evolution, since it is usually only covered in passing before children reach the age where they start to specialise, but rather that it is forbidden to teach creationism (or anything other than evolution - i.e. no Lysenkoism or Intelligent Design or anything similar) as science or to omit evolution where it is relevant.
The problem isn't a Mathusian catastrophe (which can, on a global scale, be filed in the same category as the invasion of lizard men and the sun exploding), but rather that you get a diminishing return on increasing population. Essentially, a district has to figure out how much it will cost them to maintain the cost of living (and quality of life, however defined) at its current level for each new person. If that cost is more than the benefit they can expect to get (which would usually be economic but could also be social or cultural), they're probably better off discouraging immigration and child-bearing.
In the past, the burden of each person has been quite small (and may even be negative if more people provide economies of scale), but once you have to desalinate water, import large amounts of food, do major infrastructure works to prevent unreasonable commutes (or get businesses to decentralise), it is easy for a region to be overpopulated or close to it.
Slashdot Mirror
Some of them use Phorm, which is just as bad as what Google are doing. Of course, Google's real aim is to get everyone onto fast internet connections (if possible, without having to build too many of those connections themselves) so they'll stick everything in the cloud, mostly using very well-known providers of free cloud services.
(Also, if they can get your web history rather than just sniffing your connections, they get the full URLs without having to muck around with DPI and without any hassle involving HTTPS - and the subsidiary resources are less interesting to them than the pages.)
iWork is a pretty decent office suite (although IDK if it handles ODF properly): for actual spreadsheeting, Numbers is very nice (although it isn't suitable for the kind of monstrosities that Excel can be used for), and Keynote makes Powerpoint seem horribly primitive. The downside is Pages, which is quite decent for desktop publishing (far less painful than Word for anything fancy) and pretty decent for simple authoring, but not as good for moderately-complex documents - in particular, the formatting UI is horribly inefficient without using shortcuts (which also affects Keynote, but you don't tend to want to do so much formatting in a slideshow). That said, Pages complements LaTeX fairly nicely - the thins which are irritating to do in one are usually day in the other.
Photoshop would probably be the most important program to get working, since that is often mentioned as being one of the critically-missing programs for Linux.
FaceTime would be worthwhile if you have friends with iThings, but that would probably require you to pirate it. There might also be decent software on the Mac AppStore.
They used to allow arbitrary text as well as users' names as tag (I don't use Facebook anymore, so I don't know if they still do). Since they get people to upload their address books, it becomes easier to guess which MarkT you are. Those are the "shadow profiles" which sometimes get talked about.
The EC's biggest problem stems from EU governments that actively lobby it to pass regulations and directives on unpopular topics. Local politicians seldom mention that their great new reform is a mere transcription into local law of an EU directive (aka something they're obligated to do). In contrast, they'll sure as hell blame EU technocrats (which, incidentally, they named) for coming up with directives that force them to pass much needed yet highly unpopular reforms.
You forgot the worst trick they have: first get their pet bureaucrats in Brussels to introduce some regulation which forces them to do something unpopular that they know is bad but is good for their mates, or, if they can't get away with that, introduce a regulation that they can misinterpret to do what they want to do - see, for example, the fiasco involving the privatisation of British Rail.
And yet Darth Mandelson kept on coming back. Of course, it helped that some of his friends were friends with News Corp, and that he was being encouraged to do what the US government (and their loyal dogs in Westminster) wanted him to do anyway.
The "legitimate" use would be for things like chatterbots (on corporate pages, for example), or for external clients (or bridging to other protocols) without having the rely on the broken XMPP interface (so you get friend lists and so on).
That doesn't stop Facebook keeping the information they can extract from the tag, regarding your friends and your interests and so on. Also, that doesn't do you any good if you aren't a Facebook user yourself.
It isn't just for dodgy photos: there is also the network analysis which Facebook does. For example, they look at all those address books people upload, and the photos you are tagged in, and find that you are X% likely to be a pot smoker and Y% likely to be a pirate and so on, and they can sell that information to a potential employer or your wife's divorce lawyer or whatever. All that can be generated without any involvement on your part, it just takes a few irresponsible friends.
In fact, the EU already has - they are supposed to give you everything they have on you if you ask for it.
Al Smith would also be on the radical left fringe today, so it isn't just that the left and right have flipped but that the whole of American politics has moved a long way to the right.
Now if only he hadn't been working for a party that supports at-will dismissal.
It depends if any of the cartel were vertically-integrated with an OEM: if so, they could have been shifting all the profits into the panel-making section rather than the bundling and distribution.
He's got the dirt.
If that's the same video as the one I'm thinking of (it might not be, I thought the block looked like a concrete paver), the man with the block was rather hesitant, but then killed her before it had gone on for long, as though he didn't really like what he was doing and wanted to kill her quickly. If even the people doing that sort of thing aren't really committed or think things have gone too far, that suggests the moderates might well have a better chance next time there's upheaval there.
There's also the children's rights aspect: a child's right to proper healthcare trumps a parent's rights to idiocy, a point well-established by cases involving faith healing
I think the licence is downloaded from their servers: I agreed to a error 500 page.
What is really needed is a new charter to replace the Magna Carta (what's left of it) and the Act of Settlement (which has been gutted by the fact that all the rights it guaranteed to the people were subject to limitation by parliament) to reflect the fact that now the people can't rely on parliament to protect their liberties. Three hundred years ago, Parliament was the public's best defence against a dictatorial crown and their corrupt servants, now it is the crown and the crown servants who are the public's best protection against a dictatorial parliament and their corrupt servants.
Unfortunately, it would probably be constitutionally simpler to create a republic[1] than it would to limit parliamentary sovereignty in a constitutionally-binding way.
[1] Although actually creating a British republic would be effectively impossible since that would mean defining the reserve powers of the president and the limits of parliament, as a party controlling the presidency and the commons would have absolutely unlimited power, whereas even without a veto power the Crown has enough powers to throw a serious spanner in the works of any home-grown Hitler (if you control the executive, the judiciary, the military, and the revenues of the Duchy of Lancaster, the fact that someone else controls the legislature and supply becomes less critical, at least in the short term). The Commonwealth Realms don't have that problem because they have limited parliamentary powers and procedures for binding constitutional amendments.
They don't have to do anything as risky as delete data, some creative mis-entry would cause no end of trouble and could be far more lucrative (since it would be very useful for identity theft). Intelligence agencies the world over keep learning the hard way that you don't treat people with access to sensitive data badly or they sell it: now that every arm of the government has so much sensitive data, it is time for them to learn that too.
Last time, the north (or at least the rich industrialists in the north) needed the south more than the south (or at least the rich planters in the south) needed the north. Now, it is quite possible that if some of the crazier red areas were to secede, the rest of the country would be better off without them, since the red states tend to be net drains on the federal government (rural areas cost more and produce less, basically) and it would allow the rest of the country to shift somewhat more towards rational politics by removing a whole load of tea baggers and crazy evangelicals. Then the remainder of the USA can get the secessionist politicians (or their successors) to sell out their citizens for a nice one-sided trade agreement (it seems to work everywhere else), and the USA gets to keep all the benefits of a single state except some of the military manpower.
In South Australia they teach source analysis in schools, but only really in History and English (and in English it is part of literary criticism in general, or used to be), and not properly until year 10 (approx. US 9th grade). Unfortunately, that's really too late to start.
One of the major factors was the protectionist rules regarding cotton exports: British cotton importers were wiling to pay more for baled cotton than the northern manufacturers, and charged less for shipping. However, cotton exports were restricted to protect the US spinning and weaving industries, and there were strict regulations limiting the use of foreign ships for costal shipping (although that was normal: partly it was economic, and partly it was to ensure a good supply of potential conscripts). The tobacco planters were in a similar position, although they had less of a price advantage over their foreign competitors than the cotton planters.
Of course, the planters wanted to keep slavery and lose the protectionism, but the slavery question wasn't the driving factor for the elite (and abolition didn't happen until war was already underway). The Union didn't just let the South secede and then hope to keep business ties as they were, partly because they would then lose the tax advantages they had over the British and French, and partly because the last thing they wanted was a British-aligned state there.
Actually, even a fibre-based mesh network would be quite bad for latency, since a lot of latency comes from switchgear.
What you'd probably want to do is have a hierarchy with a highly redundant mesh, so you have lines which only connect every 10km or so, but the endpoints of each segment are connected to local lines and to house-to-house links, so that there are many redundant paths between any two nodes but so that latency can be kept down when the network is intact.
Because if you happen to think that all your daughter needs to know is how to cook, clean, look after her husband, and submit to you favourite god, and your daughter as a good little $religionist agrees, that has serious problems for her future rights (principally, that being completely uneducated and dependent on your family makes it difficult if not impossible to exercise them). Similarly, if your son wants to go down the mine with his older brothers, his dad, his uncles, and like his granddad and great-granddad once did, he's going to be screwed if the mine closes (and that sort of thing happened to people within living memory).
That means you have to mandate some kind of minimum education, and that needs to be complete enough for someone to be a well-rounded and independently functioning member of society, able to understand and analyse issues and come to an opinion or an understanding of the relevant facts (notwithstanding the fairly poor job we are actually doing in that regard, but that's another matter). This means that you need a sound basis in a wide variety of fields, so you end up with a semi-arbitrary list of all the things that people in each field think are most important. Evolution is one of the central facts of modern biology, and is one of the things which children are in greatest danger of being mislead about, so it makes sense to include it in the biology curriculum.
I don't think it is mandatory to teach about evolution, since it is usually only covered in passing before children reach the age where they start to specialise, but rather that it is forbidden to teach creationism (or anything other than evolution - i.e. no Lysenkoism or Intelligent Design or anything similar) as science or to omit evolution where it is relevant.
The problem isn't a Mathusian catastrophe (which can, on a global scale, be filed in the same category as the invasion of lizard men and the sun exploding), but rather that you get a diminishing return on increasing population. Essentially, a district has to figure out how much it will cost them to maintain the cost of living (and quality of life, however defined) at its current level for each new person. If that cost is more than the benefit they can expect to get (which would usually be economic but could also be social or cultural), they're probably better off discouraging immigration and child-bearing.
In the past, the burden of each person has been quite small (and may even be negative if more people provide economies of scale), but once you have to desalinate water, import large amounts of food, do major infrastructure works to prevent unreasonable commutes (or get businesses to decentralise), it is easy for a region to be overpopulated or close to it.