No, it goes to show that a lot of companies are operating on razor thin margins or lose money pursuing this business in an attempt to gain customers.
That doesn't contradict what the OP said. Apple can get away with high margins because people (even many supposed geeks) will continuously bleat about their supposedly high quality software (not even mentioning the software UX), even when it is clearly inferior to the other offerings in the same price range. The iPhone 1 is a classic example of this... a very shitty phone that did a couple of interesting (by no means unique, innovative or superlative) things, wasn't even 3G but still required an expensive data plan, couldn't even send picture texts (which was the ONLY way to send pics to a lot of smartphone users in those days), and had locked down app marketplace until competition from the G1 forced them to open it, but they could still tack on a couple hundred dollar premium and become a worldwide sensation because... why?
Because we're Apple and fuck you, that's why.
Other companies have to operate on razor thin or (after particularly unwise decisions) negative margins to compete, not because they're morons (well, not usually), but because they don't have the ridiculously over-the-top, undeserved reputation that Apple has. They can't demand an Apple tax; Apple can. And the Apple tax is pure profit, pure margin padding.
Stop pretending this is some kind of savvy or smart thing they've done. The vast majority of wise technical decisions that form the foundation of the Apple empire are remnants from ~30 years ago when they had an actual premium product that IBM couldn't compete with. This gave them a few million loyal fanboys who remembered the good old days even after Apple became a joke in the 1990s, and they ultimately gave Steve Jobs his second chance at greatness. Almost all of the rest is marketing, and the marketing gives them leverage to demand a margin like no other company on earth.
Linux might not be user-friendly, but at least it's not actively user-hostile.
Unfortunately, GNOME is most certainly actively user-hostile. I don't have the links handy, but some high profile devs have made some pretty explicit comments about how having any room for user customization, even hidden in advanced tabs or config files, is an inherently bad thing. One of them even said he "dies a little inside" every time he hears someone say that "Linux is about choice."
Some of their more notorious antics here have involved screensavers (not something I hugely care about myself, but they engaged in a very long and deceptive campaign where they pretended they were interested about doing screensavers "right", but in reality they were just trying to nix them entirely) and then forcing auto-suspend on laptop lid close... and then mocking their critics with a giant "press this button! You now have 10 minutes of sleep-free laptop closing ability, feel free to run!" 'workaround' app.
There's a lot more to the Linux desktop than Gnome, of course (KDE or XFCE being good places to start), but it's worth remembering just how we arrived at this point. GNOME was becoming the standard...
and then they shot themselves in the foot repeatedly because they thought that the secret to desktop Linux's success must lay in treating users like shit, because that's what AAPL and MSFT do. And then in response to that, Ubuntu created Unity, and then KDE got a small bump but nowhere near what it deserved to get (probably because people were still smarting over the KDE 4 debacle), and XFCE got more stable and usable (if still a bit barren)... and here we are today. We still haven't recovered from the damage wrought by GNOME's user-hostile policies; in fact, in the aftermath of Windows 8-10, I believe that desktop Linux might have even made it into the (low) double digits if it weren't for the lingering effects of the GNOME 3 bomb.
Remember abandoning floppies on the iMac, and what a hoo-ha there was over that?
No, I have no firsthand memory of that because only diehard Apple fanboys with too much money and not enough sense cared about iMacs during that era. Do you actually believe late-90s Macs (let alone the cutesy and hobbled iMac line) were leading anything? Keep in mind this was not merely pre-x86 but also pre-OS X, though well after the price of PCs had begun to seriously plummet.
The rest of the world realized that, while floppies certainly sucked, the floppy drives weren't all that expensive so we sensibly waited a few extra years until flash drives became more ubiquitous.
Is the Apple RDF so strong with you that you honestly believe that late 90s iMacs were a main driver of flash drive popularity? Serious question.
Apple has always taken the role of change agent.
Uh yeah, except for when they aren't, like when they released an EDGE-only phone in a 3G era, using a touchscreen interface that was considerably worse than what Nokia already had on the market, and not even bothering to support MMS (which, in those days, was the only easy way of sending a pic to someone.)
Apple has "led" in a very, very few select areas, but in many other areas they've purposely lagged, only to periodically "discover" the features that the rest of the world has been enjoying for years and then they pretend that they've invented it... and then people like you believe them.
I'm not even going to get into the question of where "minimalism" borders sadomasochism (and/or blatant cash grabs.)
What exactly is/was the "polish" though? The awkward (if slightly sturdier) chiclet keyboard? The uselessly oversized touchpad that's prompting them to take steps to make the keyboard even smaller? The built-in hard buttons that are harder to use and make the touchpad feel a bit unstable? The lack of ports? The excessive thinness, resulting in suboptimal battery life and durability?
Literally the only two things that have ever caught my attention about Macbooks are a decent screen and those wonderful magnetic cables. That's it. Everything else about the hardware is mediocre, yet everyone always tries to claim it's the gold standard. This isn't a a new thing; it's been this way for years.
> When this study was done for job interviews, the test was always low class black names vs. obvious middle/upper class white names.
Bullshit. They used names like Jamal and Lakisha. Those both are names from the african continent, neither are 'ghetto' mispronunciations of everyday products.
It is crazy what theories assholes will invent to deny that racism exists. The funny thing is that such denials end up as a sort of meta independent proof themselves.
While I think name-based studies like this have the potential to be the least biased because they remove hard-to-control issues related to appearance and behavior, that's a load of shit. Unless you have some income data (or other socioeconomic data) related to these names that you're holding out on?
If they can't bother to find "white" names that have socioeconomic stats roughly approximating the "black" names they're using, or at least find a plausible way to correct for the differences, AND establish that certain names really are typically viewed as white or black, these conclusions are pretty suspect.
I very strongly suspect that the effect they're trying to measure is real and significant and of course racism is a thing (including blacks against blacks and blacks against whites for that matter), but that doesn't mean you can handwave this away by some astoundingly irrelevant assertion (if it's even true) that Jamal is a perfectly common name "from the African continent."
The Touch Bar I understand slashdot will pan because, somehow, the culture here has been dominated by technophobia.
It's not technophobia to prefer full sized tactile function keys one can easily hit without looking at the keyboard. I'm all for incorporating little e-ink displays on the tops of real keys (I think I read something about that being in the pipeline recently?), but this thing is a clearly regression for anyone who uses their laptop for serious work.
And let's get to the meat of why this change actually happened: to make the keyboard even smaller and the touchpad even bigger. Which is extremely stupid. Your touchpad doesn't need to be that big, really it doesn't. Maybe an "accessibility model" could be made for people who have actual medical disorders, but I'm not particularly gifted with fine-motor coordination and yet I could easily use something half that size. Also, I really, really prefer hard buttons that aren't built into the pad itself, giving the whole thing an unstable feel.
And there is no long term plan right now, they're doing everything they can to stave off complete collapse.
Unalloyed ignorance. They don't desire to diminish, but they will certainly survive it (although a name change or two may occur.) Read the words of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Read the words of Osama bin Laden. Read the words of the propaganda magazines like Dabiq and Inspire. Read the words of Sayyid Qutb, the father of the modern Islamist movement. Although they try to inspire immediate long wolf attacks in the here and now as part of that long strategy of attrition, their long term strategy is lain plain for all to see. They view the west as effeminate and weak, and they view their victory as coming after a very long low-level conflict alternating with periods of high-level conflict when they and their brothers are "strong".
ISIS has demonstrated a willingness to repeatedly alternate between overt and "fourth generation warfare" (blending in with the population) with an eye for the long view. Ignore this at your peril.
I haven't followed this and I can't view the video right now.
Well, what are you views on the Canadian Human Rights Commission? Out of curiosity.
So don't alienate those second and third generation immigrants by suggesting the Muslims are a dangerous "other" and fundamentally predisposed to terrorism.
15% truth, 85% self-flagellation. It is not primarily our fault if people grow up dreaming about killing as many non-combatants as possible. It's particularly not the fault of Europe, where the social safety net is an order of magnitude better than America's, yet the extremism problem is much worse
If you require coddling to be dissuaded from joining the likes of ISIS or carrying out a lone wolf attack, you're a bad person and/or your upbringing and ideology are horrible, and it's completely reasonable to discuss taking measures to keep you from joining our society. Period.
So if it's just populism and narcissism then why are self-identified white nationalists acting like he's their saviour?
Hitler was raving about Jews before anyone gave a shit about what he said. Trump is a bandwagon-jumper with no shame who used to be a Democrat. That should be clear to even the laziest observer.
If Hillary Clinton could convince white nationalists to vote for her, while all sane intellectuals realized she didn't mean what she said and had no intention of supporting white nationalism, that would be *fantastic*. That was part of the appeal of Trump, particularly early on (an appeal I briefly flirted with, though I quickly realized he was too incompetent and vain to make it work.) Troll the media; troll the extremists. That was all great shit while it lasted, before it became apparent that Trump didn't really care and wasn't smart enough to soften his stance after he was nominated or otherwise wink at the savvy people in the audience.
But there's also stuff that I'd consider straight racism.
See the above.
The causation is demographic anxiety, that the US will become a Latino country.
No, it isn't. If Latin America were full of highly successful countries, many of which put our to shame, with little gang violence to worry about, this demographic anxiety would not exist.
For example, other than a handful of people no one really cares about, there is no discrimination against East Asians around here. (The trade situation with China is entirely different; I'm talking about East Asian immigrants as a whole.) In fact, the last time I checked they were doing "better" than white people by roughly the same margin that white people were doing "better" than blacks. I myself worked at a company that displayed a ridiculously overt pro-Asian bias (and not just for salary reasons either; the people we were hiring were all recent American citi
In Canada we've taken 25k and had absolutely no problem.
History tells us that these things can take time. In terms of ISIS operatives already planning mayhem, I would expect them to wait some years. Patience is explicitly part of their M.O. They know they can't win a lightning war. Their strategy, if you care tor read any of their literature, is explicitly one of long-term attrition to sway public opinion.
But there is also a much more latent threat of pissed-off second and third generation immigrants, which worryingly enough often tend to be much more prone to jihadi ideology. If those 25k have fairly large families and 1% of their children are involved in some form of nastiness (not necessarily overtly violent) as a result of their conservative upbringing combined with their resentment for the Iraq War or western support of that dirty Shiite Assad... we're still talking about something on the order of a thousand troublemakers here, a thousand people doing things to embolden the right.
Incidentally, as a Canadian, you should be outraged by the way Tarek Fatah was treated by your senator Mitchell, and I suspect he was not alone in that attitude amongst your left. The most nauseating and damaging thing the "progressive" left has done (mostly in the UK, but to some extent in the New World as well) is to imply that only vilely conservative Muslims are "true" Muslims.
That's why you need to rely on tone and subtext.
The tone and subtext is cynical populism tinged with narcissism combined with an inability to properly phrase things to clearly illustrate his intended focus.
I don't know how racist he is personally, though he does have a long history of racially questionable statements and actions.
This new low-level McCarthyism is extremely damaging. Don't weaken the word racism like that. There used to be words like "insensitivity" or even "political incorrectness" to describe people who weren't actually racist but just didn't care about carefully mincing words to describe their position, but it's all gone by the wayside. They're all "racists" now, and this weakening of the term has emboldened millions of actual racists.
The person you describe (a crypto-racist expounding carefully crafted dog-whistles) may well describe people like the late William F. Buckley. It almost certainly does not describe Donald J. Trump.
Again, subtext. Notice how blacks and latinos are always "the blacks" and "the latinos"? That's because blacks and latinos are not part of his group.
"The whites" are not generally viewed a cohesive group (or at least, it's not thought proper to discuss things openly, but that doesn't mean people like you should be engaging in witch-hunts.) "The West", a non-racial term, is used instead to identify and contrast the different values between subcultures.
White is thought of, rightly or wrongly, as the vanilla in our culture. It's still the plurality and it's thought (and the statistics do back up) that the most diversity there. There's usually very little to be gained by addressing "the whites"... in fact, if Trump did do such a thing, people like you would instantly call him a racist. The left doesn't really permit discussion of white culture (if indeed such a thing exists--I'm pretty dubious myself), and particularly not in a positive light.
Illegal immigration thing is really only an issue when it's non-whites
1. Plenty of Latinos consider themselves white, and a good number of them you'd readily consider white, or at least perhaps up until you heard them speak with an accent. This applies to their own self-image as well; the questions on our Census were changed a few years back after it become apparent that many Latinos were routinely self-identifying as "white".
And the ambiguity of the exact details of the path I prefer does not cause or imply an ambiguity in the broad goals that I favor. That's the "easiness" I tried to explain... I can clearly outline the goals and factors that I'm concerned about, and analyze the pros and cons of any proposed action. That's markedly different from a traditional hard left approach that tries to reconcile blatantly contradictory goals, in addition to mixing in goals that shouldn't be goals (self-flagellation and promotion of a very naive multiculturalism in the west without regard to the likely long-term consequences.)
sent text messages to 7,500 potential witnesses of a homicide using phone numbers from a nearby cell tower's logs... Investigators will also consider calling the numbers of people who don't respond voluntarily, but they would be required to obtain another court order to do so.
I'm not certain it makes any goddamn sense to privilege textual communication over audio communication. Yes, I'm certain it's a bit more awkward having to talk to a police officer in real time, but I find it a bit strange that they're lowing the legal bar for texts. Is there any prior precedent for this?
A brief clarification and additional wrinkle to note here regarding what I just wrote about exceptions to my semi-isolationist leanings: I think that a support for separatism for safety concerns is generally a lot more defensible... unfortunately, this provides a horrible precedent for some countries, particularly China and Russia, who will use it as justification for the creation of satellite states with puppet governments.
I don't have a good answer to that, except to say that we should try to push for a "soft" separatism as much as possible. And in some particularly volatile cases, it provides another reason to consider not intervening. In the case of Rwanda (a very tragic situation when we consider precisely how the Tutsi / Hutu divide originally came about), we might have facilitated an escape or regional protectionism without elevating our support to helping them counterattack (or advocating actual separatism, not unlike our protection of Kurdish areas in Northern Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion.) Actually I'm a bit ignorant about the eventual outcome of that conflict... Kosovo might be a better example. Our recognition of it as a separate country is probably noble in intention, but protection without the endorsement of separatism may be a better solution, particularly with a resurgent Russian imperialism backing (and/or outright controlling) separatist movements in Ukraine or possibly other Eastern European countries.
My semi-protectionist stance, therefore, would try to do the minimum necessary to prevent genocide generally without engaging in regime change, recognition of new states or other geopolitical maneuvers that are prone to backfiring or setting bad precedent.
Actually, I'm not even sure I'd say I'm 100% against regime change... simple assassination without an actual war, if it could be accomplished, and if we could be reasonably confident that the successor would be more reasonable, might not be a bad idea. Except, will that lead to China and Russia more openly pursuing assassination efforts?
I don't know. I can outline the goals of my favored ideology much more confidently than I can confidently say which specific policies will support those goals. But it's fairly clear that the orthodox neoconservative / realpolitik approach is out.
Also, being able to send arbitrary files through the file browser (right-click menu) or command line could, depending on the typical tasks encountered, be a bit more flexible than simply sharing select folders, although I've already acknowledged that instantaneous, simultaneous access to the same files could obviously be a boon in some setups.
I never brought up a Windows host. The person I was reply to specifically wanted a Linux desktop.
With Virtualbox using Guest Additions yes, you can have shared folders. I'm sure something equivalent exists in QEMU/KVM. If you need truly simultaneous access to the same file from both Linux and Windows then this would be the easiest solution (although if you were familiar with Xen I'm sure you could modify Qubes to do the same.)
Qubes is designed with high security in mind, and so its default configuration requires you to manually approve whenever any VM wants to interact with another one (this is pretty darn fast in practice.) Short of altering how Xen is working behind the scenes, you could doubtless write some scripts to mimic some basic form of folder sharing if need be, although to avoid seeing the GUI prompts you'd need to modify Dom0 as well.
The "host" in Qubes, Dom0, is based on Fedora Linux, but it isn't intended to be used for regular work. If you had anything performance-intensive you could use it pretty much normally (and that would be the only good reason to even consider using Dom0 for anything other than hypervisor and desktop management stuff), though for security reasons it was intentionally designed to not have any network access. Qubes is currently based on Xen, which is a type 1 hypervisor and while it's commonplace for people to think of Dom0 in Xen as being the equivalent of the host OS in a Virtualbox / VMWare / QEMU setup, this is not quite true as hardware drivers can be exclusively put in VMs outside of Dom0 which, in combination with protection via vt-d (which Qubes does make use of), is an extremely secure way of doing things.
A focus on security concerns does have a slight impact on usability in Qubes here and there, but for the vast majority of usage cases (i.e. unless you're switching between Windows and Linux to work on the same set of files a couple dozen times an hour) it's much easier than juggling multiple desktops using something like Virtualbox. Qubes' VMs are much faster, too, even though Virtualbox claims to be using paravirt drivers as well now.
But she's a reasonable protest vote inasmuch as she stands a zero percent chance of winning, but pushing her (and Johnson's) numbers up will increase the odds that someone will finally attempt to dismantle the two party system by trying to abolish first past the post elections. It'll be a long process, but it's conceivable. A lot of people on both sides are sick of having to deal with the party establishment. The more rejection of Trump (admittedly, he's a special case but it's naive to flatly call him anti-establishment) and Hillary we see, the more seriously politicians in dead-end careers due to party politics will discuss, behind closed doors, the possibility of nuking the whole damn thing.
Johnson is the best protest vote right now, with Stein being the second-best. Voting Trump as a protest vote is playing with fire. The man has sucked up to the establishment and base far too strongly, and demonstrated far too little focus or intelligence for him to be a plausible anti-establishment crusader. He's more likely to be a Howard Stern version of Bush Jr. at this point.
I more or less agree, but it's a hell of a lot harder to reasonably call it corruption if neither she nor her campaign has any control of the money. What does her charity do?
If the charity really is spending that money on charitable causes, and not on anything Clinton benefits from except to the extent that her name is on the charity, then that particular issue (not necessarily others) would look pretty damn benign to me. You have to have an ounce of perspective and priority in these things... there are a thousand things we should worry about before we get concerned that someone is contributing to a legitimate charity.
Here, I'll spend 5 minutes on Google, why not. Ok, so this is the charity in question.
Charitable grants are not a major focus of the Clinton Foundation, which instead keeps most of its money in house and hires staff to carry out its own humanitarian programs [source from Polififact]
Grants might be a shady way to funnel money out of the charity but if it's mostly kept in-house that makes it a harder to abuse.
The foundation appears to be involved in healthcare, disaster relief, climate change, and economic growth,
It's worth noting that the donation in question appears to have been exclusively to the Clinton Foundation, not the Clinton Family Foundation, which is more privately held and guarded.
So no, on the whole this doesn't particularly strike me as being a very damning case of corruption. You want to fight corruption? Start with zero political donations from legal entities that are not individuals, and all donations must be public. Money shouldn't be treated as "free speech". That's the overriding issue here.
Santorum doesn't even know the 9th Amendment exists
To be fair, almost everyone is ignorant or apathetic about the ninth (and most important) amendment. Even the libertarian and anti-federal government types tend to dwell far more on the tenth.
As a nation of 30 million Saudi Arabia has already accepted 100k [wikipedia.org]. Sure they could do more, especially considering they're the source of the whabbism driving ISIS, but it's not true that Arab nations aren't accepting refugees. Sure there's a few holdouts but many, especially Turkey, are doing a lot.
Turkey is not an Arabic nation. They don't speak the same language (except some as a second language primarily for reading the "original" Qu'ran) or ethnically identify with Arabs, excepting any pan-Islamic movements that might be popular over there.
Saudi Arabia took a long time to accept even the 100k, and that's a drop in the bucket compared to what Europe is taking. It's more than what we're taking, true, but at the end of the day America and Europe are proposing to take both moderates and extremists out of the Arabic-speaking parts of the Middle East. If we're taking out millions of moderates, then we're giving the crazies the upper hand. If we're taking out the extremists, we're increasing the odds/prevalence of terrorist attacks, which over time will only embolden the right and far right.
There are ways to help these people flee the war zone that avoid these dire risks. I say we focus on those ways, and we worry about creating some kind of global super duper pluralistic multicultural utopia much later... after Islamists no longer have multiple strong seats of power.
On the one hand you're using a careful literal parsing to defend Trump from charges of racism.
At the same time you're claiming he can't be called racist based on his words, because can't take Trump's words seriously.
I'm saying that dissecting the words of a man who is known to blurt out dumb shit gets old and isn't a good indicator of his political leanings. He leans pro-police and anti-immigration. You caricature these positions as "racist" at your (and the nation's) own peril. I would've thought that the Brexit result (something that is a hundred times more dangerous to them than Trump is to us) would've made this clear enough... people are getting tired of having the conversation be hijacked and turned into a finger-pointing anti-racism game. There are plenty of intellectually honest ways to rebut his statements about supporting the police or his ridiculous "wall".
Donald Trump does not strike me, in any way, as a person with racist leanings. He's merely a demagogue and a populist and an airhead, and not very long ago he was a registered Democrat.
Which is basically saying "I can't be racist! I have black friends!" (I can explain why this argument is false).
No no.... argh. I don't feel like repeating myself here. The point is that he's not engaged in any overt campaign of "othering". If he were keeping Latinos at arms length in all areas then you might have a slightly more reasonable case for parsing his comments about the "Mexican" judge as racist.
So according to logic a Black Panther couldn't be judged by a white judge. Or an accused rapist judged by a female.
Yes, more or less. According to that logic. I already said (and you quoted where I said it) that I think this logic isn't reasonable, but by itself it's not racist. It's just dumb. Your case against Trump as a dumb person is much, much stronger than your case against him as a racist. Play to your strengths, damnit.
There are two aspects where race is important. Both white and black cops can be racist against black civilians, that's actually well established research wise.
I wouldn't doubt it, but if you'll notice I'm talking about importance regarding effective solutions. Non-explicit bias is extremely hard to stamp out (and it's also extremely hard to measure the precise magnitude of that bias. Do black people commit more crimes per capita or are police just more likely to arrest them? Adjusting for poverty makes sense, but what other fac
Also, to clarify, Dom0[1] is currently based on Fedora. So, depending on the details of that Skylake issue, you might not need to do anything special.
1. This can be very roughly thought of as the "host OS" but Qubes has managed to move a lot of stuff out of Dom0 for security reasons (most notably net connectivity--for updates, Dom0 has to use a special proxy through one of its VMs. From my understanding, Dom0 itself has no network driver whatsoever.)
Slashdot Mirror
bleat*, goddamnit
Apple can get away with high margins because people (even many supposed geeks) will continuously bleat about their supposedly high quality software
beat about their supposedly high-quality hardware*
No, it goes to show that a lot of companies are operating on razor thin margins or lose money pursuing this business in an attempt to gain customers.
That doesn't contradict what the OP said. Apple can get away with high margins because people (even many supposed geeks) will continuously bleat about their supposedly high quality software (not even mentioning the software UX), even when it is clearly inferior to the other offerings in the same price range. The iPhone 1 is a classic example of this... a very shitty phone that did a couple of interesting (by no means unique, innovative or superlative) things, wasn't even 3G but still required an expensive data plan, couldn't even send picture texts (which was the ONLY way to send pics to a lot of smartphone users in those days), and had locked down app marketplace until competition from the G1 forced them to open it, but they could still tack on a couple hundred dollar premium and become a worldwide sensation because... why?
Because we're Apple and fuck you, that's why.
Other companies have to operate on razor thin or (after particularly unwise decisions) negative margins to compete, not because they're morons (well, not usually), but because they don't have the ridiculously over-the-top, undeserved reputation that Apple has. They can't demand an Apple tax; Apple can. And the Apple tax is pure profit, pure margin padding.
Stop pretending this is some kind of savvy or smart thing they've done. The vast majority of wise technical decisions that form the foundation of the Apple empire are remnants from ~30 years ago when they had an actual premium product that IBM couldn't compete with. This gave them a few million loyal fanboys who remembered the good old days even after Apple became a joke in the 1990s, and they ultimately gave Steve Jobs his second chance at greatness. Almost all of the rest is marketing, and the marketing gives them leverage to demand a margin like no other company on earth.
Linux might not be user-friendly, but at least it's not actively user-hostile.
Unfortunately, GNOME is most certainly actively user-hostile. I don't have the links handy, but some high profile devs have made some pretty explicit comments about how having any room for user customization, even hidden in advanced tabs or config files, is an inherently bad thing. One of them even said he "dies a little inside" every time he hears someone say that "Linux is about choice."
Some of their more notorious antics here have involved screensavers (not something I hugely care about myself, but they engaged in a very long and deceptive campaign where they pretended they were interested about doing screensavers "right", but in reality they were just trying to nix them entirely) and then forcing auto-suspend on laptop lid close... and then mocking their critics with a giant "press this button! You now have 10 minutes of sleep-free laptop closing ability, feel free to run!" 'workaround' app.
There's a lot more to the Linux desktop than Gnome, of course (KDE or XFCE being good places to start), but it's worth remembering just how we arrived at this point. GNOME was becoming the standard... and then they shot themselves in the foot repeatedly because they thought that the secret to desktop Linux's success must lay in treating users like shit, because that's what AAPL and MSFT do. And then in response to that, Ubuntu created Unity, and then KDE got a small bump but nowhere near what it deserved to get (probably because people were still smarting over the KDE 4 debacle), and XFCE got more stable and usable (if still a bit barren)... and here we are today. We still haven't recovered from the damage wrought by GNOME's user-hostile policies; in fact, in the aftermath of Windows 8-10, I believe that desktop Linux might have even made it into the (low) double digits if it weren't for the lingering effects of the GNOME 3 bomb.
Remember abandoning floppies on the iMac, and what a hoo-ha there was over that?
No, I have no firsthand memory of that because only diehard Apple fanboys with too much money and not enough sense cared about iMacs during that era. Do you actually believe late-90s Macs (let alone the cutesy and hobbled iMac line) were leading anything? Keep in mind this was not merely pre-x86 but also pre-OS X, though well after the price of PCs had begun to seriously plummet.
The rest of the world realized that, while floppies certainly sucked, the floppy drives weren't all that expensive so we sensibly waited a few extra years until flash drives became more ubiquitous.
Is the Apple RDF so strong with you that you honestly believe that late 90s iMacs were a main driver of flash drive popularity? Serious question.
Apple has always taken the role of change agent.
Uh yeah, except for when they aren't, like when they released an EDGE-only phone in a 3G era, using a touchscreen interface that was considerably worse than what Nokia already had on the market, and not even bothering to support MMS (which, in those days, was the only easy way of sending a pic to someone.)
Apple has "led" in a very, very few select areas, but in many other areas they've purposely lagged, only to periodically "discover" the features that the rest of the world has been enjoying for years and then they pretend that they've invented it... and then people like you believe them.
I'm not even going to get into the question of where "minimalism" borders sadomasochism (and/or blatant cash grabs.)
What exactly is/was the "polish" though? The awkward (if slightly sturdier) chiclet keyboard? The uselessly oversized touchpad that's prompting them to take steps to make the keyboard even smaller? The built-in hard buttons that are harder to use and make the touchpad feel a bit unstable? The lack of ports? The excessive thinness, resulting in suboptimal battery life and durability?
Literally the only two things that have ever caught my attention about Macbooks are a decent screen and those wonderful magnetic cables. That's it. Everything else about the hardware is mediocre, yet everyone always tries to claim it's the gold standard. This isn't a a new thing; it's been this way for years.
> When this study was done for job interviews, the test was always low class black names vs. obvious middle/upper class white names.
Bullshit. They used names like Jamal and Lakisha. Those both are names from the african continent, neither are 'ghetto' mispronunciations of everyday products.
It is crazy what theories assholes will invent to deny that racism exists. The funny thing is that such denials end up as a sort of meta independent proof themselves.
While I think name-based studies like this have the potential to be the least biased because they remove hard-to-control issues related to appearance and behavior, that's a load of shit. Unless you have some income data (or other socioeconomic data) related to these names that you're holding out on?
If they can't bother to find "white" names that have socioeconomic stats roughly approximating the "black" names they're using, or at least find a plausible way to correct for the differences, AND establish that certain names really are typically viewed as white or black, these conclusions are pretty suspect.
I very strongly suspect that the effect they're trying to measure is real and significant and of course racism is a thing (including blacks against blacks and blacks against whites for that matter), but that doesn't mean you can handwave this away by some astoundingly irrelevant assertion (if it's even true) that Jamal is a perfectly common name "from the African continent."
More specifically, embedded Linux needs to die off.
In favor of?
"Now With LASERS!"
I think you meant to say, "Now with thorium!"
"Solar FREAKIN' Roof Tiles!"
There's a nice neutral article title. Someone else can come up with a good blurb.
Whoah, a 4-digit UID who thinks the Slashdot Effect is still a thing?
You're like one of those Japanese soldiers discovered on an island who still thinks WW2 is going on.
That may just be the best simile I've read all year.
The Touch Bar I understand slashdot will pan because, somehow, the culture here has been dominated by technophobia.
It's not technophobia to prefer full sized tactile function keys one can easily hit without looking at the keyboard. I'm all for incorporating little e-ink displays on the tops of real keys (I think I read something about that being in the pipeline recently?), but this thing is a clearly regression for anyone who uses their laptop for serious work.
And let's get to the meat of why this change actually happened: to make the keyboard even smaller and the touchpad even bigger. Which is extremely stupid. Your touchpad doesn't need to be that big, really it doesn't. Maybe an "accessibility model" could be made for people who have actual medical disorders, but I'm not particularly gifted with fine-motor coordination and yet I could easily use something half that size. Also, I really, really prefer hard buttons that aren't built into the pad itself, giving the whole thing an unstable feel.
And there is no long term plan right now, they're doing everything they can to stave off complete collapse.
Unalloyed ignorance. They don't desire to diminish, but they will certainly survive it (although a name change or two may occur.) Read the words of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Read the words of Osama bin Laden. Read the words of the propaganda magazines like Dabiq and Inspire. Read the words of Sayyid Qutb, the father of the modern Islamist movement. Although they try to inspire immediate long wolf attacks in the here and now as part of that long strategy of attrition, their long term strategy is lain plain for all to see. They view the west as effeminate and weak, and they view their victory as coming after a very long low-level conflict alternating with periods of high-level conflict when they and their brothers are "strong".
ISIS has demonstrated a willingness to repeatedly alternate between overt and "fourth generation warfare" (blending in with the population) with an eye for the long view. Ignore this at your peril.
I haven't followed this and I can't view the video right now.
Well, what are you views on the Canadian Human Rights Commission? Out of curiosity.
So don't alienate those second and third generation immigrants by suggesting the Muslims are a dangerous "other" and fundamentally predisposed to terrorism.
15% truth, 85% self-flagellation. It is not primarily our fault if people grow up dreaming about killing as many non-combatants as possible. It's particularly not the fault of Europe, where the social safety net is an order of magnitude better than America's, yet the extremism problem is much worse
If you require coddling to be dissuaded from joining the likes of ISIS or carrying out a lone wolf attack, you're a bad person and/or your upbringing and ideology are horrible, and it's completely reasonable to discuss taking measures to keep you from joining our society. Period.
So if it's just populism and narcissism then why are self-identified white nationalists acting like he's their saviour?
Hitler was raving about Jews before anyone gave a shit about what he said. Trump is a bandwagon-jumper with no shame who used to be a Democrat. That should be clear to even the laziest observer.
If Hillary Clinton could convince white nationalists to vote for her, while all sane intellectuals realized she didn't mean what she said and had no intention of supporting white nationalism, that would be *fantastic*. That was part of the appeal of Trump, particularly early on (an appeal I briefly flirted with, though I quickly realized he was too incompetent and vain to make it work.) Troll the media; troll the extremists. That was all great shit while it lasted, before it became apparent that Trump didn't really care and wasn't smart enough to soften his stance after he was nominated or otherwise wink at the savvy people in the audience.
But there's also stuff that I'd consider straight racism.
See the above.
The causation is demographic anxiety, that the US will become a Latino country.
No, it isn't. If Latin America were full of highly successful countries, many of which put our to shame, with little gang violence to worry about, this demographic anxiety would not exist.
For example, other than a handful of people no one really cares about, there is no discrimination against East Asians around here. (The trade situation with China is entirely different; I'm talking about East Asian immigrants as a whole.) In fact, the last time I checked they were doing "better" than white people by roughly the same margin that white people were doing "better" than blacks. I myself worked at a company that displayed a ridiculously overt pro-Asian bias (and not just for salary reasons either; the people we were hiring were all recent American citi
In Canada we've taken 25k and had absolutely no problem.
History tells us that these things can take time. In terms of ISIS operatives already planning mayhem, I would expect them to wait some years. Patience is explicitly part of their M.O. They know they can't win a lightning war. Their strategy, if you care tor read any of their literature, is explicitly one of long-term attrition to sway public opinion.
But there is also a much more latent threat of pissed-off second and third generation immigrants, which worryingly enough often tend to be much more prone to jihadi ideology. If those 25k have fairly large families and 1% of their children are involved in some form of nastiness (not necessarily overtly violent) as a result of their conservative upbringing combined with their resentment for the Iraq War or western support of that dirty Shiite Assad... we're still talking about something on the order of a thousand troublemakers here, a thousand people doing things to embolden the right.
Incidentally, as a Canadian, you should be outraged by the way Tarek Fatah was treated by your senator Mitchell, and I suspect he was not alone in that attitude amongst your left. The most nauseating and damaging thing the "progressive" left has done (mostly in the UK, but to some extent in the New World as well) is to imply that only vilely conservative Muslims are "true" Muslims.
That's why you need to rely on tone and subtext.
The tone and subtext is cynical populism tinged with narcissism combined with an inability to properly phrase things to clearly illustrate his intended focus.
I don't know how racist he is personally, though he does have a long history of racially questionable statements and actions.
This new low-level McCarthyism is extremely damaging. Don't weaken the word racism like that. There used to be words like "insensitivity" or even "political incorrectness" to describe people who weren't actually racist but just didn't care about carefully mincing words to describe their position, but it's all gone by the wayside. They're all "racists" now, and this weakening of the term has emboldened millions of actual racists.
The person you describe (a crypto-racist expounding carefully crafted dog-whistles) may well describe people like the late William F. Buckley. It almost certainly does not describe Donald J. Trump.
Again, subtext. Notice how blacks and latinos are always "the blacks" and "the latinos"? That's because blacks and latinos are not part of his group.
"The whites" are not generally viewed a cohesive group (or at least, it's not thought proper to discuss things openly, but that doesn't mean people like you should be engaging in witch-hunts.) "The West", a non-racial term, is used instead to identify and contrast the different values between subcultures.
White is thought of, rightly or wrongly, as the vanilla in our culture. It's still the plurality and it's thought (and the statistics do back up) that the most diversity there. There's usually very little to be gained by addressing "the whites"... in fact, if Trump did do such a thing, people like you would instantly call him a racist. The left doesn't really permit discussion of white culture (if indeed such a thing exists--I'm pretty dubious myself), and particularly not in a positive light.
Illegal immigration thing is really only an issue when it's non-whites
1. Plenty of Latinos consider themselves white, and a good number of them you'd readily consider white, or at least perhaps up until you heard them speak with an accent. This applies to their own self-image as well; the questions on our Census were changed a few years back after it become apparent that many Latinos were routinely self-identifying as "white".
2. Admitting only for the sake
And the ambiguity of the exact details of the path I prefer does not cause or imply an ambiguity in the broad goals that I favor. That's the "easiness" I tried to explain... I can clearly outline the goals and factors that I'm concerned about, and analyze the pros and cons of any proposed action. That's markedly different from a traditional hard left approach that tries to reconcile blatantly contradictory goals, in addition to mixing in goals that shouldn't be goals (self-flagellation and promotion of a very naive multiculturalism in the west without regard to the likely long-term consequences.)
sent text messages to 7,500 potential witnesses of a homicide using phone numbers from a nearby cell tower's logs ... Investigators will also consider calling the numbers of people who don't respond voluntarily, but they would be required to obtain another court order to do so.
I'm not certain it makes any goddamn sense to privilege textual communication over audio communication. Yes, I'm certain it's a bit more awkward having to talk to a police officer in real time, but I find it a bit strange that they're lowing the legal bar for texts. Is there any prior precedent for this?
A brief clarification and additional wrinkle to note here regarding what I just wrote about exceptions to my semi-isolationist leanings: I think that a support for separatism for safety concerns is generally a lot more defensible... unfortunately, this provides a horrible precedent for some countries, particularly China and Russia, who will use it as justification for the creation of satellite states with puppet governments.
I don't have a good answer to that, except to say that we should try to push for a "soft" separatism as much as possible. And in some particularly volatile cases, it provides another reason to consider not intervening. In the case of Rwanda (a very tragic situation when we consider precisely how the Tutsi / Hutu divide originally came about), we might have facilitated an escape or regional protectionism without elevating our support to helping them counterattack (or advocating actual separatism, not unlike our protection of Kurdish areas in Northern Iraq prior to the 2003 invasion.) Actually I'm a bit ignorant about the eventual outcome of that conflict... Kosovo might be a better example. Our recognition of it as a separate country is probably noble in intention, but protection without the endorsement of separatism may be a better solution, particularly with a resurgent Russian imperialism backing (and/or outright controlling) separatist movements in Ukraine or possibly other Eastern European countries.
My semi-protectionist stance, therefore, would try to do the minimum necessary to prevent genocide generally without engaging in regime change, recognition of new states or other geopolitical maneuvers that are prone to backfiring or setting bad precedent.
Actually, I'm not even sure I'd say I'm 100% against regime change... simple assassination without an actual war, if it could be accomplished, and if we could be reasonably confident that the successor would be more reasonable, might not be a bad idea. Except, will that lead to China and Russia more openly pursuing assassination efforts?
I don't know. I can outline the goals of my favored ideology much more confidently than I can confidently say which specific policies will support those goals. But it's fairly clear that the orthodox neoconservative / realpolitik approach is out.
Also, being able to send arbitrary files through the file browser (right-click menu) or command line could, depending on the typical tasks encountered, be a bit more flexible than simply sharing select folders, although I've already acknowledged that instantaneous, simultaneous access to the same files could obviously be a boon in some setups.
I never brought up a Windows host. The person I was reply to specifically wanted a Linux desktop.
With Virtualbox using Guest Additions yes, you can have shared folders. I'm sure something equivalent exists in QEMU/KVM. If you need truly simultaneous access to the same file from both Linux and Windows then this would be the easiest solution (although if you were familiar with Xen I'm sure you could modify Qubes to do the same.)
Qubes is designed with high security in mind, and so its default configuration requires you to manually approve whenever any VM wants to interact with another one (this is pretty darn fast in practice.) Short of altering how Xen is working behind the scenes, you could doubtless write some scripts to mimic some basic form of folder sharing if need be, although to avoid seeing the GUI prompts you'd need to modify Dom0 as well.
The "host" in Qubes, Dom0, is based on Fedora Linux, but it isn't intended to be used for regular work. If you had anything performance-intensive you could use it pretty much normally (and that would be the only good reason to even consider using Dom0 for anything other than hypervisor and desktop management stuff), though for security reasons it was intentionally designed to not have any network access. Qubes is currently based on Xen, which is a type 1 hypervisor and while it's commonplace for people to think of Dom0 in Xen as being the equivalent of the host OS in a Virtualbox / VMWare / QEMU setup, this is not quite true as hardware drivers can be exclusively put in VMs outside of Dom0 which, in combination with protection via vt-d (which Qubes does make use of), is an extremely secure way of doing things.
A focus on security concerns does have a slight impact on usability in Qubes here and there, but for the vast majority of usage cases (i.e. unless you're switching between Windows and Linux to work on the same set of files a couple dozen times an hour) it's much easier than juggling multiple desktops using something like Virtualbox. Qubes' VMs are much faster, too, even though Virtualbox claims to be using paravirt drivers as well now.
But she's a reasonable protest vote inasmuch as she stands a zero percent chance of winning, but pushing her (and Johnson's) numbers up will increase the odds that someone will finally attempt to dismantle the two party system by trying to abolish first past the post elections. It'll be a long process, but it's conceivable. A lot of people on both sides are sick of having to deal with the party establishment. The more rejection of Trump (admittedly, he's a special case but it's naive to flatly call him anti-establishment) and Hillary we see, the more seriously politicians in dead-end careers due to party politics will discuss, behind closed doors, the possibility of nuking the whole damn thing.
Johnson is the best protest vote right now, with Stein being the second-best. Voting Trump as a protest vote is playing with fire. The man has sucked up to the establishment and base far too strongly, and demonstrated far too little focus or intelligence for him to be a plausible anti-establishment crusader. He's more likely to be a Howard Stern version of Bush Jr. at this point.
If the charity really is spending that money on charitable causes, and not on anything Clinton benefits from except to the extent that her name is on the charity, then that particular issue (not necessarily others) would look pretty damn benign to me. You have to have an ounce of perspective and priority in these things... there are a thousand things we should worry about before we get concerned that someone is contributing to a legitimate charity.
Here, I'll spend 5 minutes on Google, why not. Ok, so this is the charity in question.
Charitable grants are not a major focus of the Clinton Foundation, which instead keeps most of its money in house and hires staff to carry out its own humanitarian programs [source from Polififact]
Grants might be a shady way to funnel money out of the charity but if it's mostly kept in-house that makes it a harder to abuse.
The foundation appears to be involved in healthcare, disaster relief, climate change, and economic growth,
It's worth noting that the donation in question appears to have been exclusively to the Clinton Foundation, not the Clinton Family Foundation, which is more privately held and guarded.
So no, on the whole this doesn't particularly strike me as being a very damning case of corruption. You want to fight corruption? Start with zero political donations from legal entities that are not individuals, and all donations must be public. Money shouldn't be treated as "free speech". That's the overriding issue here.
Santorum doesn't even know the 9th Amendment exists
To be fair, almost everyone is ignorant or apathetic about the ninth (and most important) amendment. Even the libertarian and anti-federal government types tend to dwell far more on the tenth.
As a nation of 30 million Saudi Arabia has already accepted 100k [wikipedia.org]. Sure they could do more, especially considering they're the source of the whabbism driving ISIS, but it's not true that Arab nations aren't accepting refugees. Sure there's a few holdouts but many, especially Turkey, are doing a lot.
Turkey is not an Arabic nation. They don't speak the same language (except some as a second language primarily for reading the "original" Qu'ran) or ethnically identify with Arabs, excepting any pan-Islamic movements that might be popular over there.
Saudi Arabia took a long time to accept even the 100k, and that's a drop in the bucket compared to what Europe is taking. It's more than what we're taking, true, but at the end of the day America and Europe are proposing to take both moderates and extremists out of the Arabic-speaking parts of the Middle East. If we're taking out millions of moderates, then we're giving the crazies the upper hand. If we're taking out the extremists, we're increasing the odds/prevalence of terrorist attacks, which over time will only embolden the right and far right.
There are ways to help these people flee the war zone that avoid these dire risks. I say we focus on those ways, and we worry about creating some kind of global super duper pluralistic multicultural utopia much later... after Islamists no longer have multiple strong seats of power.
On the one hand you're using a careful literal parsing to defend Trump from charges of racism. At the same time you're claiming he can't be called racist based on his words, because can't take Trump's words seriously.
I'm saying that dissecting the words of a man who is known to blurt out dumb shit gets old and isn't a good indicator of his political leanings. He leans pro-police and anti-immigration. You caricature these positions as "racist" at your (and the nation's) own peril. I would've thought that the Brexit result (something that is a hundred times more dangerous to them than Trump is to us) would've made this clear enough... people are getting tired of having the conversation be hijacked and turned into a finger-pointing anti-racism game. There are plenty of intellectually honest ways to rebut his statements about supporting the police or his ridiculous "wall".
Donald Trump does not strike me, in any way, as a person with racist leanings. He's merely a demagogue and a populist and an airhead, and not very long ago he was a registered Democrat.
Which is basically saying "I can't be racist! I have black friends!" (I can explain why this argument is false).
No no.... argh. I don't feel like repeating myself here. The point is that he's not engaged in any overt campaign of "othering". If he were keeping Latinos at arms length in all areas then you might have a slightly more reasonable case for parsing his comments about the "Mexican" judge as racist.
So according to logic a Black Panther couldn't be judged by a white judge. Or an accused rapist judged by a female.
Yes, more or less. According to that logic. I already said (and you quoted where I said it) that I think this logic isn't reasonable, but by itself it's not racist. It's just dumb. Your case against Trump as a dumb person is much, much stronger than your case against him as a racist. Play to your strengths, damnit.
There are two aspects where race is important. Both white and black cops can be racist against black civilians, that's actually well established research wise.
I wouldn't doubt it, but if you'll notice I'm talking about importance regarding effective solutions. Non-explicit bias is extremely hard to stamp out (and it's also extremely hard to measure the precise magnitude of that bias. Do black people commit more crimes per capita or are police just more likely to arrest them? Adjusting for poverty makes sense, but what other fac
Also, to clarify, Dom0[1] is currently based on Fedora. So, depending on the details of that Skylake issue, you might not need to do anything special.
1. This can be very roughly thought of as the "host OS" but Qubes has managed to move a lot of stuff out of Dom0 for security reasons (most notably net connectivity--for updates, Dom0 has to use a special proxy through one of its VMs. From my understanding, Dom0 itself has no network driver whatsoever.)
I had two people different
Yoda speak I know not why did I.