Virgin requires that you buy Virgin-only phones. I found out yesterday that existing customers can keep buying new Android stuff but NEW customers will be forced into buying obnoxiously overpriced iPhones. I'm still tempted to leave them on principle.
I have them and generally have been happy with their service...but it looks like it's porting time. Pity because they have always given me good service and the CSRs seem to be decent. No Android? No customer.
Top earners use automation to increase per-worker productivity. The worker that becomes more productive does not reap any benefits from the heightened productivity; wages and hours remain the same while the company either pushes out more product on the same count of man-hours or jobs are eliminated. Historically this worked out okay because the automation required replacement jobs that the displaced workers would shift to. What we are currently living through is a form of automation unlike any in history, where there may be one new replacement job for every hundred workers displaced.
Technically, the top earners have not stolen anything. Ethically speaking, however, they have improved their ability to make money off of their workers while sharing none of the benefits with those workers. The corporate machine is oiled with the blood of the workers. Total capitalism is as bad as total socialism; there must be a balance or everything goes to pot.
Apple is a great example of where this ultimately goes. Apple Computer has an astonishing amount of cold hard cash at its disposal that is doing nothing other than sitting in a bunch of banks. That cash has effectively been removed from the economy. The richest people in the world have hoards of cash that they will never use. The wealth concentrates in the hands of what you call "the top earners" and is permanently removed from the economy. This process very literally shrinks the economy. They have plenty of cash to ride out decades-long recessions while the workers that actually do the real work that funnels the dollars up to "top earners" has no savings and becomes more destitute as a result of the economic conditions created by this cash hoarding.
But go on, continue to insist that the people at the very top hoarding their cash is a good thing and totally okay because "they've earned it." At some point your house of cards comes crashing down, and I can pretty much guarantee that you aren't one of these rich people that will escape a new automation-fueled recession unscathed...only further begging the question: why do you have a problem with taking money back from the wealth concentrators when you'll never EVER be one of them?
Chrome isn't #1 because it's a good browser. It's #1 because google.com and a thousand other websites nag you to install it. Avast Antivirus nags you to install it on every big update and the box is checked by default. Tons of software installers try to hoist a Chrome and/or Google Toolbar on you and the boxes are checked by default. Google has paid off millions of people to thrust Chrome in your face at every turn and try to install it and force it to be the default browser without you noticing that it's happened.
Chrome is big because you have to actively resist installing and keeping it at this point. Chrome does not deserve its market share; it is not organic, it is bought and paid for.
I've found WinSCP to be better than FileZilla especially since so many providers offer SFTP now anyway. I don't store my passwords so the master password thing is not an issue to me. Don't store passwords if you don't want them to be found.
If I had mod points I would give you all of them because I did not know about this obscure tax code which explicitly targets "the technical services industry" and cuts off any hope of large growth for computer-related contractors. Here's a link for anyone interested. While it may be a bit off-topic for this discussion I appreciate you bringing it up for us to learn something about it.
Infrastructure projects could do it. There is no way to offshore infrastructure projects. Treated-as-disposable Indian people aren't going to be able to get a job building a bridge in Nevada. Unfortunately, infrastructure has to be paid for by government, which is paid by taxing rich people, which is evil because they "earned" it through being C-level while the company they are a figurehead for was automating jobs away.
No. The functionality really needs to be part of Thunderbird itself, not a Java-based "repeater" of sorts. With Thunderbird proper I can tell a user how to install it over the phone easily. That program would require adding Java to the mix and a lot more links get added to the chain that can break and cause extra support issues.
I don't know when the last time you checked was (I've used K-9 since I got the HTC Dream around 2008) but just the per-account settings menu has 9 sub-menus and can change everything from notification sound and vibration type per account to account color marker to IMAP polling frequency to what IMAP folder is used for inbox/sent/outbox/deleted/spam/archive/drafts to whether the data for that account is stored on the external SD card or internal memory to what color the notification LED blinks for that account. That's ONLY the settings that can be changed for each account you use. Global settings has 7 sub-menus controlling themes, font size, how the correspondents are shown and whether your contacts database is pulled from, threaded view, quiet time, lock screen notification control, gestures, and behavior on message deletion, just to name a few.
The "problem" with Thunderbird is that it's a very mature product. It has quirks, yes, but it is very near the pinnacle of what an email client should be. It handles loads of messages (I've seen hundreds of thousands in a single folder) and accounts very well. It is easy to migrate from one machine to another. It is a cross-platform program in the sense that the exact same code base is used for all major platforms and behaves almost identically. It has calendaring and can integrate with Google services at no cost. It makes Outlook look like a piece of shit (hint: Outlook really is a piece of shit) and if there were some way to attach an Exchange account to it then Outlook would probably start to slowly die off.
Security fixes and minor updates to keep it from crashing as systems evolve are all Thunderbird ever needs. Thunderbird was a mature product a very long time ago (in software development terms) and the main reason it keeps getting updated is because it shares a lot of code with Firefox and Mozilla is an organization that simply cannot resist fucking with things for the sake of fuckery and little else. The absolutely retarded "Correspondents" column introduction is a prime example of Mozilla just not being a good company anymore. Mozilla has become the Lennart Poettering of Web software: stupid decisions are "features" and closed with WONTFIX or NOTABUG. I stopped using their feedback system because they don't ever listen, so why bother? The one good thing about Thunderbird is that Mozilla has largely ignored it and that's exactly what Thunderbird users want, especially after the Chromification of the UI. Chrome's UI and options panel are both utter shit. Luckily you can turn the menu bar back on in Thunderbird and get the full options and functionality back.
Someone above referred to how lame it is that there's no Thunderbird for Android. Check out K-9 Mail; it's a lot better than the stupid mail apps that come with phones and if Thunderbird ever made it to Android it wouldn't be far off from what K-9 is. Also K-9 lets you import/export your mail settings so you can migrate it to a new phone easily.
I have examined the concepts and languages involved in functional programming and I do not see their value. Most of my work is split between C and shell scripts with random PHP, SQL, etc. peppered in as necessary. My question is simple: what can functional programming do for me, in practical terms? Including a real-world example is mandatory to answer the question. I always see platitudes regarding either "elegance" or "you'll have to think differently" but neither is an actual benefit. I don't need a hammer that is hard to use and makes me think about the nature of hammers and their usage; I need something that is efficient and straightforward when I decide to forcefully attach two things using nails.
As far as I can tell, functional programming is only useful as a thought exercise...which means that (compared to "uncool" but widespread languages like the C family) it's not useful when you actually want to get something done.
I see that you've criticized something I've said but offered no information in response. Please enlighten us with detailed information to fill in the knowledge you feel is lacking. Feel free to provide the needed information on how to sign up for your newsletter while you're at it. I'm sure several readers would like to keep up-to-date on your current state of snark at any given time.
They can't criminally charge you for not taking the sobriety field test. They can and will take your license away. That's not a criminal process, it's a regulatory one. Different states may have different variations but the song generally remains the same. Driving is legally considered a privilege, not a right. It isn't the same thing.
I agree with your second part. Civil asset forfeiture is a blatantly unconstitutional thing that is constantly abused. It's still not a constitutional action, but the guys with the guns make the rules in the end.
There is precedent for this when the defendant has already decrypted the drive for authorities and then refuses to do so for the court. In that case, the contents are considered a "foregone conclusion" and there is no question that the defendant both acknowledges the encrypted volume and knows the key to decrypt it. This is a reasonable balance against Fifth Amendment protections.
If he has not ever revealed the password to authorities, the Constitution absolutely prohibits this action by the court. A man cannot be compelled to self-incriminate, the court may not presume guilt (innocent until proven guilty), and the court can only establish guilt through due process of law (everything from investigation to conviction) and with equal protection under the law (the law is applied the same way to everyone). This ruling blatantly violates most of these basic rights if the contents of the drive are not a "foregone conclusion."
We can split hairs all day long over this. The Raspberry Pi and its successors are not general-purpose computer systems for the era they are built within. They don't come with a display, keyboard, mouse, they don't have enough RAM to run a modern browser (at least the original Pi doesn't) and even when the RAM was upgraded they still have a pokey ARM chip at the core. The Pi boards are just little bare compute boards. They don't even come with a case or a power supply. They are designed to be embedded devices, not general-purpose computers (in the colloquial sense, not the "it can do more than a highly specialized set of operations" sense.) The Pi is literally nothing more than a cell phone board design modified to expose various ports and GPIO pins. To say that it's a computer is like saying the Apple Watch is a computer. In a strict technical sense it is, but it's not useful to the general public for their day-to-day computing tasks.
If I reference the HP Pavilion p563w, I'm talking about a complete general-purpose computer with very particular specifications sold to the public under a specific model number. Same thing for the Commodore 64, or the Apple IIe, or the Atari ST 1040. When I say "Raspberry Pi B+" I'm talking about a specific model of embedded processing board. To say that "The Raspberry Pi has beaten the Commodore 64 in total sales" while combining the Pi A, Pi B, Pi A+, Pi B+, Pi Zero, Pi 2B, Pi 3B, and all the other Pi variations into the entire brand name "Raspberry Pi" is complete and utter bullshit. To claim that the Pi is a general-purpose computer just because it has USB, ethernet, HDMI, and Wi-Fi is disingenuous at best because it can barely even execute a modern internet browser on some models, if it can run one at all, and once it's running it's unusably slow. Being able to spin up a copy of Firefox or Chromium isn't optional for a computer meant to be useful to the unwashed masses. It's intended to be an embedded device, plain and simple. My Pi B is sitting on a shelf next to me, unused because the only thing it's good for is Xbian, and even that struggles to perform acceptably.
Before anyone says something: no, Midori does not count.
Commodore released two major variants of the Commodore 64: the Commodore 64 and the cost-reduced Commodore 64C. The C64C used more dense DRAM chips (41464 instead of 4164) and had a case in the C128 style, but it was identical in all functional aspects to the original C64. The original C64 has three variants as well, though to claim that is almost nit-picking since it's the contents of the ROMs that differentiates them.
Commodore never upgraded the C64. Expansions like an REU were made for it, but those were external devices. The processor upgrades like the SuperCPU were not integrated into the C64. You can't count in this kind of stuff as a change to the system itself.
The Commodore 64 is "the best-selling home computer of all time" which is based on the fact that the Commodore 64 is a very specific model of computer. The Raspberry Pi 3 IS NOT the same thing as a Raspberry Pi. That's like saying the Commodore 128 is the same thing as the Commodore 64. The C64C was "the same thing" as the C64 because it was a cost-reduced version that was otherwise a completely identical piece of hardware. Each RPi is a completely different computer from the core chip to the peripherals to the I/O.
Combining all computers that are branded Raspberry Pi and saying they have sold more units combined than the Commodore 64 is one thing, but saying "The Pi has beaten the C64 as the most units of a single computer sold" is an outright lie. The Pi series is also not a computer made for general-purpose use; it's an embedded system, and by that standard I'm willing to bet that there's some model of wireless router that has sold more units than the C64; perhaps the venerable Linksys WRT54G?
tl;dr: the C64 still holds the crown. The article is based on bullshit logic.
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Virgin phones are generally carrier-locked CDMA phones.
Virgin requires that you buy Virgin-only phones. I found out yesterday that existing customers can keep buying new Android stuff but NEW customers will be forced into buying obnoxiously overpriced iPhones. I'm still tempted to leave them on principle.
I have them and generally have been happy with their service...but it looks like it's porting time. Pity because they have always given me good service and the CSRs seem to be decent. No Android? No customer.
Top earners use automation to increase per-worker productivity. The worker that becomes more productive does not reap any benefits from the heightened productivity; wages and hours remain the same while the company either pushes out more product on the same count of man-hours or jobs are eliminated. Historically this worked out okay because the automation required replacement jobs that the displaced workers would shift to. What we are currently living through is a form of automation unlike any in history, where there may be one new replacement job for every hundred workers displaced.
Technically, the top earners have not stolen anything. Ethically speaking, however, they have improved their ability to make money off of their workers while sharing none of the benefits with those workers. The corporate machine is oiled with the blood of the workers. Total capitalism is as bad as total socialism; there must be a balance or everything goes to pot.
Apple is a great example of where this ultimately goes. Apple Computer has an astonishing amount of cold hard cash at its disposal that is doing nothing other than sitting in a bunch of banks. That cash has effectively been removed from the economy. The richest people in the world have hoards of cash that they will never use. The wealth concentrates in the hands of what you call "the top earners" and is permanently removed from the economy. This process very literally shrinks the economy. They have plenty of cash to ride out decades-long recessions while the workers that actually do the real work that funnels the dollars up to "top earners" has no savings and becomes more destitute as a result of the economic conditions created by this cash hoarding.
But go on, continue to insist that the people at the very top hoarding their cash is a good thing and totally okay because "they've earned it." At some point your house of cards comes crashing down, and I can pretty much guarantee that you aren't one of these rich people that will escape a new automation-fueled recession unscathed...only further begging the question: why do you have a problem with taking money back from the wealth concentrators when you'll never EVER be one of them?
This video is always relevant, more so in the way they discuss avoiding employing American workers than PERM in specific: PERM Fake Job Ads defraud Americans to secure green cards
Chrome isn't #1 because it's a good browser. It's #1 because google.com and a thousand other websites nag you to install it. Avast Antivirus nags you to install it on every big update and the box is checked by default. Tons of software installers try to hoist a Chrome and/or Google Toolbar on you and the boxes are checked by default. Google has paid off millions of people to thrust Chrome in your face at every turn and try to install it and force it to be the default browser without you noticing that it's happened.
Chrome is big because you have to actively resist installing and keeping it at this point. Chrome does not deserve its market share; it is not organic, it is bought and paid for.
You can use it with WINE and when Linux was my primary desktop OS I used to use gFTP or lftp instead.
Yes. It will see the partial file and ask you if you want to resume or restart from scratch.
I've found WinSCP to be better than FileZilla especially since so many providers offer SFTP now anyway. I don't store my passwords so the master password thing is not an issue to me. Don't store passwords if you don't want them to be found.
If I had mod points I would give you all of them because I did not know about this obscure tax code which explicitly targets "the technical services industry" and cuts off any hope of large growth for computer-related contractors. Here's a link for anyone interested. While it may be a bit off-topic for this discussion I appreciate you bringing it up for us to learn something about it.
Infrastructure projects could do it. There is no way to offshore infrastructure projects. Treated-as-disposable Indian people aren't going to be able to get a job building a bridge in Nevada. Unfortunately, infrastructure has to be paid for by government, which is paid by taxing rich people, which is evil because they "earned" it through being C-level while the company they are a figurehead for was automating jobs away.
Windows 7 (and 2008 R2) patches aren't listed there, they'll be here instead.
Hey, that looks nice. I may have to try it out. Thanks!
No. The functionality really needs to be part of Thunderbird itself, not a Java-based "repeater" of sorts. With Thunderbird proper I can tell a user how to install it over the phone easily. That program would require adding Java to the mix and a lot more links get added to the chain that can break and cause extra support issues.
I don't know when the last time you checked was (I've used K-9 since I got the HTC Dream around 2008) but just the per-account settings menu has 9 sub-menus and can change everything from notification sound and vibration type per account to account color marker to IMAP polling frequency to what IMAP folder is used for inbox/sent/outbox/deleted/spam/archive/drafts to whether the data for that account is stored on the external SD card or internal memory to what color the notification LED blinks for that account. That's ONLY the settings that can be changed for each account you use. Global settings has 7 sub-menus controlling themes, font size, how the correspondents are shown and whether your contacts database is pulled from, threaded view, quiet time, lock screen notification control, gestures, and behavior on message deletion, just to name a few.
Maybe you should check again.
The "problem" with Thunderbird is that it's a very mature product. It has quirks, yes, but it is very near the pinnacle of what an email client should be. It handles loads of messages (I've seen hundreds of thousands in a single folder) and accounts very well. It is easy to migrate from one machine to another. It is a cross-platform program in the sense that the exact same code base is used for all major platforms and behaves almost identically. It has calendaring and can integrate with Google services at no cost. It makes Outlook look like a piece of shit (hint: Outlook really is a piece of shit) and if there were some way to attach an Exchange account to it then Outlook would probably start to slowly die off.
Security fixes and minor updates to keep it from crashing as systems evolve are all Thunderbird ever needs. Thunderbird was a mature product a very long time ago (in software development terms) and the main reason it keeps getting updated is because it shares a lot of code with Firefox and Mozilla is an organization that simply cannot resist fucking with things for the sake of fuckery and little else. The absolutely retarded "Correspondents" column introduction is a prime example of Mozilla just not being a good company anymore. Mozilla has become the Lennart Poettering of Web software: stupid decisions are "features" and closed with WONTFIX or NOTABUG. I stopped using their feedback system because they don't ever listen, so why bother? The one good thing about Thunderbird is that Mozilla has largely ignored it and that's exactly what Thunderbird users want, especially after the Chromification of the UI. Chrome's UI and options panel are both utter shit. Luckily you can turn the menu bar back on in Thunderbird and get the full options and functionality back.
Someone above referred to how lame it is that there's no Thunderbird for Android. Check out K-9 Mail; it's a lot better than the stupid mail apps that come with phones and if Thunderbird ever made it to Android it wouldn't be far off from what K-9 is. Also K-9 lets you import/export your mail settings so you can migrate it to a new phone easily.
I have examined the concepts and languages involved in functional programming and I do not see their value. Most of my work is split between C and shell scripts with random PHP, SQL, etc. peppered in as necessary. My question is simple: what can functional programming do for me, in practical terms? Including a real-world example is mandatory to answer the question. I always see platitudes regarding either "elegance" or "you'll have to think differently" but neither is an actual benefit. I don't need a hammer that is hard to use and makes me think about the nature of hammers and their usage; I need something that is efficient and straightforward when I decide to forcefully attach two things using nails.
As far as I can tell, functional programming is only useful as a thought exercise...which means that (compared to "uncool" but widespread languages like the C family) it's not useful when you actually want to get something done.
No, just the one you foolishly used to open it for law enforcement already. The lesson is "never decrypt for the cops in the first place."
Dear Keyboard First Year Law Student,
I see that you've criticized something I've said but offered no information in response. Please enlighten us with detailed information to fill in the knowledge you feel is lacking. Feel free to provide the needed information on how to sign up for your newsletter while you're at it. I'm sure several readers would like to keep up-to-date on your current state of snark at any given time.
That's not "my reasoning." I didn't make that decision. Go be a sovereign citizen traveler somewhere else.
They can't criminally charge you for not taking the sobriety field test. They can and will take your license away. That's not a criminal process, it's a regulatory one. Different states may have different variations but the song generally remains the same. Driving is legally considered a privilege, not a right. It isn't the same thing.
I agree with your second part. Civil asset forfeiture is a blatantly unconstitutional thing that is constantly abused. It's still not a constitutional action, but the guys with the guns make the rules in the end.
There is precedent for this when the defendant has already decrypted the drive for authorities and then refuses to do so for the court. In that case, the contents are considered a "foregone conclusion" and there is no question that the defendant both acknowledges the encrypted volume and knows the key to decrypt it. This is a reasonable balance against Fifth Amendment protections.
If he has not ever revealed the password to authorities, the Constitution absolutely prohibits this action by the court. A man cannot be compelled to self-incriminate, the court may not presume guilt (innocent until proven guilty), and the court can only establish guilt through due process of law (everything from investigation to conviction) and with equal protection under the law (the law is applied the same way to everyone). This ruling blatantly violates most of these basic rights if the contents of the drive are not a "foregone conclusion."
We can split hairs all day long over this. The Raspberry Pi and its successors are not general-purpose computer systems for the era they are built within. They don't come with a display, keyboard, mouse, they don't have enough RAM to run a modern browser (at least the original Pi doesn't) and even when the RAM was upgraded they still have a pokey ARM chip at the core. The Pi boards are just little bare compute boards. They don't even come with a case or a power supply. They are designed to be embedded devices, not general-purpose computers (in the colloquial sense, not the "it can do more than a highly specialized set of operations" sense.) The Pi is literally nothing more than a cell phone board design modified to expose various ports and GPIO pins. To say that it's a computer is like saying the Apple Watch is a computer. In a strict technical sense it is, but it's not useful to the general public for their day-to-day computing tasks.
If I reference the HP Pavilion p563w, I'm talking about a complete general-purpose computer with very particular specifications sold to the public under a specific model number. Same thing for the Commodore 64, or the Apple IIe, or the Atari ST 1040. When I say "Raspberry Pi B+" I'm talking about a specific model of embedded processing board. To say that "The Raspberry Pi has beaten the Commodore 64 in total sales" while combining the Pi A, Pi B, Pi A+, Pi B+, Pi Zero, Pi 2B, Pi 3B, and all the other Pi variations into the entire brand name "Raspberry Pi" is complete and utter bullshit. To claim that the Pi is a general-purpose computer just because it has USB, ethernet, HDMI, and Wi-Fi is disingenuous at best because it can barely even execute a modern internet browser on some models, if it can run one at all, and once it's running it's unusably slow. Being able to spin up a copy of Firefox or Chromium isn't optional for a computer meant to be useful to the unwashed masses. It's intended to be an embedded device, plain and simple. My Pi B is sitting on a shelf next to me, unused because the only thing it's good for is Xbian, and even that struggles to perform acceptably.
Before anyone says something: no, Midori does not count.
Commodore released two major variants of the Commodore 64: the Commodore 64 and the cost-reduced Commodore 64C. The C64C used more dense DRAM chips (41464 instead of 4164) and had a case in the C128 style, but it was identical in all functional aspects to the original C64. The original C64 has three variants as well, though to claim that is almost nit-picking since it's the contents of the ROMs that differentiates them.
Commodore never upgraded the C64. Expansions like an REU were made for it, but those were external devices. The processor upgrades like the SuperCPU were not integrated into the C64. You can't count in this kind of stuff as a change to the system itself.
The Commodore 64 is "the best-selling home computer of all time" which is based on the fact that the Commodore 64 is a very specific model of computer. The Raspberry Pi 3 IS NOT the same thing as a Raspberry Pi. That's like saying the Commodore 128 is the same thing as the Commodore 64. The C64C was "the same thing" as the C64 because it was a cost-reduced version that was otherwise a completely identical piece of hardware. Each RPi is a completely different computer from the core chip to the peripherals to the I/O.
Combining all computers that are branded Raspberry Pi and saying they have sold more units combined than the Commodore 64 is one thing, but saying "The Pi has beaten the C64 as the most units of a single computer sold" is an outright lie. The Pi series is also not a computer made for general-purpose use; it's an embedded system, and by that standard I'm willing to bet that there's some model of wireless router that has sold more units than the C64; perhaps the venerable Linksys WRT54G?
tl;dr: the C64 still holds the crown. The article is based on bullshit logic.