Judging by the sheer amount of crap which needed to be disabled in my new Windows 8.1 box, Microsoft is going to double down on bad design, and give people a shitty user interface on both portable and desktop machines.
The out of the box interface of Windows 8.1 on my 23" non-touch monitor tells me the people in charge are idiots, and aren't paying attention to what people do with computers, and are focused on something else.
Seriously, if you have a keyboard and a mouse, and no touchscreen... don't give me the romper room version which has been optimized for touch. Every interface queue is wrong in that case.
The OS itself seems pretty sweet -- once you effectively make it look like Windows 2003. But the "vision of the future" which is this terrible interface? Not for a desktop machine. Not at all.
What they do with Windows 10 remains to be seen. But my bet is one marketing winning out over engineering. I'd say almost of the "innovations" in 8.1 are annoying crap which needed to be disabled. I fail to see why Windows 10 will change that.
I fear they're going to come up with an interface which fails at either task.
The XPrize is partnering with the medical center at the University of California, San Diego on that consumer testing, since it requires recruiting more than 400 people with a variety of medical conditions.
Yeah, and are these patients consenting to this? And what does the TOS say about who owns the data?
Sorry, but I interpret this as "we're going to give your private medical information to a corporation to test their technology, once they have it there's no going back".
Sounds incredibly stupid from a privacy standpoint.
Roland Miller's upcoming book, Abandoned in Place, serves as a masterful interpretation of many other United States research facilities in the coming century as this superpower furiously disregards climate change, global warming, income inequality, government corruption, and a failed foreign policy in a race to a dystopian hell the likes of which mankind has never known.
So, everything is proceeding according to plan, then?
Surely you don't think that's by accident. People have spent good money to ensure that happens.
I just wish other countries would already learn up and stop sending anyone into usa for being prosecuted for cybercrime
Essentially, this.
As soon as US law enforcement started using parallel construction (otherwise known as perjury with permission)... nobody in the world should ever trust a damned thing claimed by US law enforcement.
They can, and will, lie and manipulate their data to make all sorts of things look true.
I'm afraid it's never going to happen, but claims by a US law enforcement agency should be treated as if they're lies... because they probably are.
And any extradition request is likely to be so much crap, designed to intimidate people they don't like.
Sadly, American "law enforcement" has demonstrated the US is now more or less a banana republic where the police make up the law, and lie about how they arrived at any conclusions.
I Guess this means the (alleged) North Korea Sony hack was legal
There is precisely zero difference between one government and another saying they have the right to break into any system they want.
Unless one of those governments really are stupid enough to think "we're the good guys, it's OK". Because, obviously, the other government believes the same thing.
Essentially every nation on Earth has equal standing to break into US and UK systems.
Claiming otherwise is essentially irrational bullshit whereby the US and UK are special. That's the argument of morons.
No, the present story basically says they were "designed and carried out with the intention of attribution to another individual, group or nation state"... as in, anybody but you.
That is the definition of all false flag operations.
But for some reason a bunch of people are trying to arbitrarily define false flag in a specific context. I'm saying that's mostly meaningless drivel by people who are trying to arbitrarily define false flag in a specific context.
Yes, it's a false flag operation. Those have been known about for a long time. Why everybody is trying to assign a specific set of semantics I have no idea.
Actually, for me it's the general problem of futurists... they're usually pie-in-the-sky out of touch with reality.
And since they're chomping at the bit proponents of a technology, they keep telling us how it will be inevitable we all have this stuff.
The vast majority of this stuff is just wishful thinking... like flying cars and Mr. Fusion... both of which have been coming Real Soon Now for decades.
So when I hear the CEO of a technology company telling us what the wonderful future will be... I'm generally forced to conclude this is the deluded ramblings of the CEO of a technology company.
Many years in the tech industry tells me the prognostications of tech CEOs are about as useful as augury with chicken innards, only slightly less entertaining.
So they have put it in charge of the guy from Nest, who pretty much is running the ship in such a way as to guarantee Google gets analytics about your household.
Sorry, Eric... but maybe people simply don't give a crap about this stuff, and they'll continue to be hostile to the people around them who wear them.
Google keeps telling us what the future is going to be... the problem is that future is designed to profit Google.
Sorry, but no. Keep telling us how these technologies will revolutionize the world. And we'll keep yawning at you and wondering why you think we care.
According to one insider, Universal believes that Spotify is directly hurting sales at stores like iTunes.
Or, you know, maybe the insiders are morons who believe in their unrealistic assumptions about just how much they're going to sell.
Because, you know, according to the copyright idiots, more value than the GDP of the US or any other country is lost to piracy.
Maybe the pay-for-play digital music market is exceedingly finite, and your wishful thinking of getting billions of dollars for doing nothing is complete crap?
The last time we eradicated some power-hungry murderous group in the middle-east
Except, you've never done any such thing.
You've convinced yourself that the forces of truth and justice went in and cleaned up things right good.
All you really did is bluster around for a while and then leave saying "mission accomplished". Only to discover you'd left a power vacuum in unstable societies where this could happen.
America has achieved damned little there, despite claiming the contrary.
No, it's a problem with governments, being beholden to corporations, trying to force corporations to stop being regulated, but doing it in a ham handed way which can't work.
So every idiot who keeps telling us how awesome the free market will be once they force it on all of us is trying to make sure governments have no power over corporations, and undermining their ability to do anything.
Unfortunately the people who believe that, once forced upon us, the free markets will bring us the bright shining future... well, they have no more facts and certainty of the outcomes than Stalin did.
I see the forcing of your ideology on the world as being little different when it's sociopathic capitalists, or sociopathic communists.
It's some clown willing to let the world burn to bring about their ideological purity. In its pure form, capitalism and communism are both inherently dangerous ideologies, believed dogmatically by people, and which rest on assumptions which CANNOT be true for the simple fact they they ignore human nature and reality.
A free market is a lie. Communism is a lie. Killing government so we can live in some fucking Libertarian fantasy is a fucking lie.
The world full of clowns who are so damned convinced they hold Holy Fucking Truth, and are willing to force the rest of us to play along.
i don't care how much you hate the USA, you fail the ability of coherent thought if you think the USA and ISIS are morally the same
You know, taken to the extreme, that becomes a difficult position to defend.
A group of people who want to force their beliefs on the world, and who are willing to cause civilian deaths if it achieves their ends, who don't care about the rights of anybody not in their number... and then there's ISIS.
ISIS pretty much act like barbarians. Then again, killing civilians indiscriminately with drone strikes as "collateral damage" is pretty barbaric as well.
America are no angels here, and their security apparatus is undermining the rights and liberties of everyone on the planet.
I find it hard to accept the notion that there is no moral equivalency for the worst behavior.
I think ISIS are ideological crazy bastards. And then I look a the American right, and see equally crazy bastards who want the world to reflect their religion and are more than willing to force their beliefs on power through force.
And then I'm forced to conclude they're really both crazy and delusional, and view their own cause as somehow being different.
Government destroys the free market with every step it takes, it's time for governments to die.
The "free market" is a complete and unmitigated fucking lie.
There will always be distorting factors -- like companies forming cartels to screw over everybody else, or morons who think corporations should have free speech, or idiots who think the free market is a real thing.
There never has been, and never CAN a free market. That particular piece of horse shit lie is predicated on lies and fancies which ignore human nature and reality, and which merely hope that things will all work once people are forced to live with it... the exact same insane assumptions made by Communists.
Know what is time to fucking die? The idiotic belief that capitalism is some noble goal, that it works and achieves optimal outcomes, or that human society could function without governments.
Sorry, Roman, but you're delusional as always.
Laissez faire capitalism is as much of a death sentence as pure communism. They're both founded on lies and fictions, and it's time to stop listening to the fairy tales.
You mean all those corporate tax cuts which were handed to them which was supposed to trickle down to the rest of us?
Sorry, but bitching about the tax increases on corporations which would be required to enforce the law against those same damned corporations is absurd.
It's the years of giving corporations tax breaks and loop holes which is why there isn't sufficient tax base for this stuff.
How much money does Google and other large corporations effectively launder through international loopholes?
And how much money are the wealthy politicians hiding, and how much tax breaks have been given to the wealthy -- again, under the lie that it would trickle down to the rest of us.
Thirty years of tax policy has only served to make the corporations and the wealthy have even more money, while the rest of us starve... and now we bitch that those tax cuts have made it impossible to apply the fucking law.
Just bloody awesome.
Welcome to the fucking oligarchy, kiddies. It's all downhill from here.
Eat the damned rich, and stop pretending that lining their pockets helps the rest of society.
Unfortunately it's greedy rich assholes, under the payroll of greedy rich corporations, who pass the laws -- laws designed to line the pockets of greedy rich assholes.
Actually, I would say we can't trust law enforcement these days... because when law enforcement cites a corporate NDA to not be able to tell us how they're using software which is designed to violate your constitutional rights... law enforcement is fucking lying to you.
Law enforcement is consistently trying to hide what they do, consistently saying the law means what they say it means, and consistently ignoring the constitutionality of what they do, and colluding to commit perjury by hiding the truth about how they found certain information.
When law enforcement stops caring about the law... it's time to stop treating them with trust or respect.
Pretty much all law enforcement these days feels it operates in a special magic bubble.
The rest of us say "fuck that, follow the low, or be charged under it".
General warrants, probable cause, free from unreasonable search and seizure... these things tell me most people in law enforcement are committing treason.
So, no, we cannot fucking trust law enforcement. Because they are no longer trustworthy.
Because, as much as our current government wants to think so, there is no legal basis to deny a citizen re-entry.
Certainly not on a whim. Certainly not at the discretion of a border guard.
I suspect this is true in a lot of places, because the UN has rules about making people effectively stateless.
Governments would typically have to demonstrate a lot of things in order to say "this citizen can no longer come here"... and they'd probably be stripping of you of citizenship to send you back to your country of birth.
A natural born Canadian citizen? Good luck trying to deny them entry to Canada.
The fact is, there is no legal precedent in Canada for this, and it comes from increasing government overreach and redefining policy without any court backing.
Border agents should require some level of suspicion or proof to do this, not arbitrary whim of an asshole with nothing better to do.
Of course, the problem with that is taking a corporation on face value when they say "our product is safe, we promise, and until you can prove it is we assume it is".
Because, let's face it, corporations are assholes, and injecting genes into a plant which have no natural way of getting there... and assuming that is safe in the long term isn't based on anything meaningful.
It's based purely on "we have no evidence to show this is safe, but we bought off politicians who agree with us that we'll let you guys be the guinea pigs".
They're a for-profit corporation, who see this as their bread and butter technology.
All you need is an idiot CEO to say "I want this" and an asshole lawyer to agree with him.
Are you honestly expecting principle, logic, and honesty from this?
It's a corporation looking out for its own interests. If that means fucking everybody else over or coming up with your own interpretation of the law? So be it.
I expect nothing less from this kind of situation.
Slashdot Mirror
I'll give you my alternate theory:
Judging by the sheer amount of crap which needed to be disabled in my new Windows 8.1 box, Microsoft is going to double down on bad design, and give people a shitty user interface on both portable and desktop machines.
The out of the box interface of Windows 8.1 on my 23" non-touch monitor tells me the people in charge are idiots, and aren't paying attention to what people do with computers, and are focused on something else.
Seriously, if you have a keyboard and a mouse, and no touchscreen ... don't give me the romper room version which has been optimized for touch. Every interface queue is wrong in that case.
The OS itself seems pretty sweet -- once you effectively make it look like Windows 2003. But the "vision of the future" which is this terrible interface? Not for a desktop machine. Not at all.
What they do with Windows 10 remains to be seen. But my bet is one marketing winning out over engineering. I'd say almost of the "innovations" in 8.1 are annoying crap which needed to be disabled. I fail to see why Windows 10 will change that.
I fear they're going to come up with an interface which fails at either task.
Yeah, and are these patients consenting to this? And what does the TOS say about who owns the data?
Sorry, but I interpret this as "we're going to give your private medical information to a corporation to test their technology, once they have it there's no going back".
Sounds incredibly stupid from a privacy standpoint.
So, everything is proceeding according to plan, then?
Surely you don't think that's by accident. People have spent good money to ensure that happens.
Wow ... and on a rocket launch pad, that "conflagration" could be quite, er, dramatic.
Would not ever want to be the poor bastard who had to lock himself into that room and hope it would hold up.
That's the "curl up in a corner and keep screaming until they find you" room.
Essentially, this.
As soon as US law enforcement started using parallel construction (otherwise known as perjury with permission) ... nobody in the world should ever trust a damned thing claimed by US law enforcement.
They can, and will, lie and manipulate their data to make all sorts of things look true.
I'm afraid it's never going to happen, but claims by a US law enforcement agency should be treated as if they're lies ... because they probably are.
And any extradition request is likely to be so much crap, designed to intimidate people they don't like.
Sadly, American "law enforcement" has demonstrated the US is now more or less a banana republic where the police make up the law, and lie about how they arrived at any conclusions.
Land of the free? Yeah, right.
There is precisely zero difference between one government and another saying they have the right to break into any system they want.
Unless one of those governments really are stupid enough to think "we're the good guys, it's OK". Because, obviously, the other government believes the same thing.
Essentially every nation on Earth has equal standing to break into US and UK systems.
Claiming otherwise is essentially irrational bullshit whereby the US and UK are special. That's the argument of morons.
No, the present story basically says they were "designed and carried out with the intention of attribution to another individual, group or nation state" ... as in, anybody but you.
That is the definition of all false flag operations.
But for some reason a bunch of people are trying to arbitrarily define false flag in a specific context. I'm saying that's mostly meaningless drivel by people who are trying to arbitrarily define false flag in a specific context.
Yes, it's a false flag operation. Those have been known about for a long time. Why everybody is trying to assign a specific set of semantics I have no idea.
Honestly though, the average driver seems to barely be able to navigate in two dimensions.
You think most drivers could qualify for a pilots license?
I sure as hell don't. Because that's pretty much what they'd need.
I think preventing that is a good thing. Hell, I see people who can't understand what the lane markings and the stop signs mean.
Is there an actual story here? Like anything with a link?
Or do we just get a one line snippet that says "RMS says Facebook evil 'n Stuff".
Come on guys ... two sentences and no links. That's not an actual "story".
Actually, for me it's the general problem of futurists ... they're usually pie-in-the-sky out of touch with reality.
And since they're chomping at the bit proponents of a technology, they keep telling us how it will be inevitable we all have this stuff.
The vast majority of this stuff is just wishful thinking ... like flying cars and Mr. Fusion ... both of which have been coming Real Soon Now for decades.
So when I hear the CEO of a technology company telling us what the wonderful future will be ... I'm generally forced to conclude this is the deluded ramblings of the CEO of a technology company.
Many years in the tech industry tells me the prognostications of tech CEOs are about as useful as augury with chicken innards, only slightly less entertaining.
So they have put it in charge of the guy from Nest, who pretty much is running the ship in such a way as to guarantee Google gets analytics about your household.
Sorry, Eric ... but maybe people simply don't give a crap about this stuff, and they'll continue to be hostile to the people around them who wear them.
Google keeps telling us what the future is going to be ... the problem is that future is designed to profit Google.
Sorry, but no. Keep telling us how these technologies will revolutionize the world. And we'll keep yawning at you and wondering why you think we care.
No, a false flag merely attempts to disguise itself as coming from another source ... that's it.
What you specifically use it for isn't part of the definition.
Pretty much any reason you can think of why it is advantageous to make people think it was someone other than you is why you might run a false flag.
You're both assigning arbitrary constraints to a false-flag, and those constraints simply don't exist.
Right, so you only kill 25 people in addition to who you're looking for ... as opposed to 200 more. But you still don't care if it's innocent people.
That totally makes it civilized. Sure.
Or, you know, maybe the insiders are morons who believe in their unrealistic assumptions about just how much they're going to sell.
Because, you know, according to the copyright idiots, more value than the GDP of the US or any other country is lost to piracy.
Maybe the pay-for-play digital music market is exceedingly finite, and your wishful thinking of getting billions of dollars for doing nothing is complete crap?
The US and the UK have defined the playing field such that every other government will decree it is their sovereign right to break into any system.
And to claim otherwise if a steaming pile of shit.
And now I believe the black hat hackers should more or less just go scorched earth.
If there's no system left, there's no evidence. Just burn it on your way out.
And the rest of the world will be stuck in the middle, and our own governments will have made it impossible for us to have any security.
Fucking morons.
Except, you've never done any such thing.
You've convinced yourself that the forces of truth and justice went in and cleaned up things right good.
All you really did is bluster around for a while and then leave saying "mission accomplished". Only to discover you'd left a power vacuum in unstable societies where this could happen.
America has achieved damned little there, despite claiming the contrary.
No, it's a problem with governments, being beholden to corporations, trying to force corporations to stop being regulated, but doing it in a ham handed way which can't work.
So every idiot who keeps telling us how awesome the free market will be once they force it on all of us is trying to make sure governments have no power over corporations, and undermining their ability to do anything.
Unfortunately the people who believe that, once forced upon us, the free markets will bring us the bright shining future ... well, they have no more facts and certainty of the outcomes than Stalin did.
I see the forcing of your ideology on the world as being little different when it's sociopathic capitalists, or sociopathic communists.
It's some clown willing to let the world burn to bring about their ideological purity. In its pure form, capitalism and communism are both inherently dangerous ideologies, believed dogmatically by people, and which rest on assumptions which CANNOT be true for the simple fact they they ignore human nature and reality.
A free market is a lie. Communism is a lie. Killing government so we can live in some fucking Libertarian fantasy is a fucking lie.
The world full of clowns who are so damned convinced they hold Holy Fucking Truth, and are willing to force the rest of us to play along.
Those people should be fucking shot.
You know, taken to the extreme, that becomes a difficult position to defend.
A group of people who want to force their beliefs on the world, and who are willing to cause civilian deaths if it achieves their ends, who don't care about the rights of anybody not in their number ... and then there's ISIS.
ISIS pretty much act like barbarians. Then again, killing civilians indiscriminately with drone strikes as "collateral damage" is pretty barbaric as well.
America are no angels here, and their security apparatus is undermining the rights and liberties of everyone on the planet.
I find it hard to accept the notion that there is no moral equivalency for the worst behavior.
I think ISIS are ideological crazy bastards. And then I look a the American right, and see equally crazy bastards who want the world to reflect their religion and are more than willing to force their beliefs on power through force.
And then I'm forced to conclude they're really both crazy and delusional, and view their own cause as somehow being different.
Ummmm ... no consumer directly eats corn or soybeans? What bit of unfounded assertion is that rubbish?
Because consumers most certainly DO eat those things. You may not, but they're readily found in grocery stores.
Ever eaten edamame at a sushi restaurant or corn on the cob?
The "free market" is a complete and unmitigated fucking lie.
There will always be distorting factors -- like companies forming cartels to screw over everybody else, or morons who think corporations should have free speech, or idiots who think the free market is a real thing.
There never has been, and never CAN a free market. That particular piece of horse shit lie is predicated on lies and fancies which ignore human nature and reality, and which merely hope that things will all work once people are forced to live with it ... the exact same insane assumptions made by Communists.
Know what is time to fucking die? The idiotic belief that capitalism is some noble goal, that it works and achieves optimal outcomes, or that human society could function without governments.
Sorry, Roman, but you're delusional as always.
Laissez faire capitalism is as much of a death sentence as pure communism. They're both founded on lies and fictions, and it's time to stop listening to the fairy tales.
You mean all those corporate tax cuts which were handed to them which was supposed to trickle down to the rest of us?
Sorry, but bitching about the tax increases on corporations which would be required to enforce the law against those same damned corporations is absurd.
It's the years of giving corporations tax breaks and loop holes which is why there isn't sufficient tax base for this stuff.
How much money does Google and other large corporations effectively launder through international loopholes?
And how much money are the wealthy politicians hiding, and how much tax breaks have been given to the wealthy -- again, under the lie that it would trickle down to the rest of us.
Thirty years of tax policy has only served to make the corporations and the wealthy have even more money, while the rest of us starve ... and now we bitch that those tax cuts have made it impossible to apply the fucking law.
Just bloody awesome.
Welcome to the fucking oligarchy, kiddies. It's all downhill from here.
Eat the damned rich, and stop pretending that lining their pockets helps the rest of society.
Unfortunately it's greedy rich assholes, under the payroll of greedy rich corporations, who pass the laws -- laws designed to line the pockets of greedy rich assholes.
Actually, I would say we can't trust law enforcement these days ... because when law enforcement cites a corporate NDA to not be able to tell us how they're using software which is designed to violate your constitutional rights ... law enforcement is fucking lying to you.
Law enforcement is consistently trying to hide what they do, consistently saying the law means what they say it means, and consistently ignoring the constitutionality of what they do, and colluding to commit perjury by hiding the truth about how they found certain information.
When law enforcement stops caring about the law ... it's time to stop treating them with trust or respect.
Pretty much all law enforcement these days feels it operates in a special magic bubble.
The rest of us say "fuck that, follow the low, or be charged under it".
General warrants, probable cause, free from unreasonable search and seizure ... these things tell me most people in law enforcement are committing treason.
So, no, we cannot fucking trust law enforcement. Because they are no longer trustworthy.
Because, as much as our current government wants to think so, there is no legal basis to deny a citizen re-entry.
Certainly not on a whim. Certainly not at the discretion of a border guard.
I suspect this is true in a lot of places, because the UN has rules about making people effectively stateless.
Governments would typically have to demonstrate a lot of things in order to say "this citizen can no longer come here" ... and they'd probably be stripping of you of citizenship to send you back to your country of birth.
A natural born Canadian citizen? Good luck trying to deny them entry to Canada.
The fact is, there is no legal precedent in Canada for this, and it comes from increasing government overreach and redefining policy without any court backing.
Border agents should require some level of suspicion or proof to do this, not arbitrary whim of an asshole with nothing better to do.
Of course, the problem with that is taking a corporation on face value when they say "our product is safe, we promise, and until you can prove it is we assume it is".
Because, let's face it, corporations are assholes, and injecting genes into a plant which have no natural way of getting there ... and assuming that is safe in the long term isn't based on anything meaningful.
It's based purely on "we have no evidence to show this is safe, but we bought off politicians who agree with us that we'll let you guys be the guinea pigs".
They're a for-profit corporation, who see this as their bread and butter technology.
All you need is an idiot CEO to say "I want this" and an asshole lawyer to agree with him.
Are you honestly expecting principle, logic, and honesty from this?
It's a corporation looking out for its own interests. If that means fucking everybody else over or coming up with your own interpretation of the law? So be it.
I expect nothing less from this kind of situation.