On my Windows 7 machine, every cumulative security update since last October has failed anyway. I was told that it might have to do with the fact that it's a dual boot system. Be that as it may, since I use Linux for main work it doesn't matter that much, I will just make sure that I never use Windows for any payments or passwords and let Windows slowly 'phase out'. (Unfortunately, I cannot give it up entirely, because I'm using a lot of commercial Windows-only audio software.)
Seconded. I'm using the Tough Solar Protrek, steel version. It doesn't have moon phases, sunrise/sunset and atomic clock radion reception, but it's water proof to 200m (important for me, since I like to swim without getting my watch stolen), analog/digital and has all the sensors. It's a great watch, I can only recommend it! (On a side note, as a European I bought it over Ebay from a NY watch store, which even after import taxes was still way cheaper than any shop in Europe!)
I'd love to get my hands on the Titanium version of this watch, but unfortunately that was and still is above my budget.
Maybe, but that's hardly a reason for not being at least minimally prepared for both possibilities. And there is another classic, of course, to keep an eye on. A global deadly virus outbreak is probably the biggest threat among those three.
The whole pseudo-debate about the validity of climate science research is instigated, paid for, and kept alive by lobby groups of the petrochemical industry. A whole bunch of fake scientists and lobbyists have made a career in various conservative think-tanks and fake 'institutes' in the US whose sole purpose is to spread doubt about scientific results that have been established world-wide and by independent research organizations, institutions and countries. The only reason why this topic has been politicized so much in the US is that the petrochemical industry is traditionally linked and intertwined with the Republican party more than with the Democrats.
Nowhere else is the scientific consensus debated, the debate elsewhere is a fairly rational debate about the means to counter global warming and about how dangerous it may be for the respective country and its economy (how much to err on the side of caution, how much money to spend, etc.). This whole whole pseudo-debate is confined to the US only. No serious people outside the US have any reason to doubt the opinion of the vast majority of scientists world-wide, because elsewhere less lobbyist money has been spent and conservatives have no problems with accepting current scientific consensus. You have no idea how outright bizarre and batshit crazy this whole US pseudo-debate appears to the rest of the world, and if you're a conservative American, you should definitely start asking yourself whether mixing up values and facts in this anti-scientific way is really worth the damage in reputation. It is perfectly feasible to be conservative and accept the current state of the art of science (whether it later turns out to be wrong or right, that's a completely different question), in fact, I'm inclined to believe that many people with such views send mankind to the moon.
The saddest thing is that most of the people who continue to politicize this purely scientific topic and 'debate' it as if it where a matter of deciding which values to defend do not even realize that they are just tools for the US oil lobby and for some Republican politicians who ran out of topics to distinguish themselves from no less conservative Democrats. They think they are discussing in a world-wide debate, whereas in reality they are lost in a homegrown disinformation campaign.
Why don't you discuss quantum theory or relativity theory instead? Or how about particle physics? I'm sure you can cast doubt on particle physics, too, after all it's pretty clear that all of the areas of physics I've just mentioned are wrong somewhere and at some point. The standard model cannot be all there is, right. Maybe you can come up with some big conspiracy here as well, from the comfortable chair in your home and without doing some real work, and find some crackpot complaints that CERN doesn't release all their raw data on the Internet or has used some 'smoothing' to 'fake results'. I'll tell why you don't do that, though. Because there is no big industry with a huge lobby apparatus that would benefit from spreading doubts about current research in particle physics.
Finally someone who knows what he's talking about. Russian trolls are also very active on German forums. It has been nothing more than a nuisance at first (who takes comments 'I like Putin because he's a strong man and a good leader' seriously), but they've become more sophisticated and are trying to undermine our elections. The best way of countering them is to close their sockpuppet accounts and very actively destroy their botnets.
On the contrary, Slashdot should hire Trump to take care of this forum. He would be the best for this job, because he knows words, he has the best words.
That's a nonexistent pseudo-problem that has been exaggerated out of all proportions by the hysterical mass medias. The percentage of muslims in the US is about 1% and in the EU is about 6%. Even with massive migration (way more than we see now in e.g. Sweden and Germany), these percentages would stay far below any significant threshold and muslims would stay a small minority. The EU could easily deal with with twice or four times the percentage with an overall negligible impact on society as a whole, and even more so for the US.
I would be surprised if this wasn't already in effect in the US. If a company's products cause illness, won't they loose any class action suit and have to pay millions? Don't they break the law by knowingly selling products that cause illness? I would think so.
Also, the idea of slowly forcing companies out of business by putting a financial burden on them if they cause illness or even death seems a bit odd to me. You don't want to prevent illness and death in the first place by adequate consumer protection laws and their enforcement? A company can just kill a few customers here and there if they can get away with it financially? Only in the US can someone come up with such an idea...
Actually, Windows 10 is less secure than any previous version of Windows, because it is almost impossible for any administrator to distinguish legitimate outbound network traffic from that of trojans and viruses. If Microsoft published a definitive list of all servers their software connects to without asking the user, explain what it does and what it transmits, and allowed you to block the traffic at will, then maybe it would be more secure. But right now, no way. It opens so many connections, it's impossible for anyone outside Microsoft to know what's really going on. (Don't forget that allegedly Microsoft-owned can also be hijacked, e.g. by direct attack on Microsoft's infrastructure or by DNS poisoning.)
I'm using MacOS, Windows and Linux for a long time, though mostly Linux for work and programming nowadays, and I'd say the reason is that Linux is not particularly better than Windows in many respects. It's mostly different. I've had no weird update problems on Linux ever (maybe I was lucky), in contrast to many update problems and rollbacks in Windows. But there are many other problems on Linux and I've often had to twiddle around with configuration files in/etc to fix things. Overall, both operating systems are fairly stable.
Privacy, free (as in 4 freedoms), and controlled updates are indeed big selling points for Linux. Who wants to use a developer machine that connects to 100+ servers owned by another company without any control by the local administrator?
Facebook and most other social "media", including Slashdot, are the cancer of society. They destruct social relations, damage their users' brain by reducing the average attention span to 17 seconds and reading comprehension to 0, exploit compulsary habits and psychological deficits, collect data, bombard users with fake news, arbitrary opinions and modern snowball system chain letters, encourage trolling and antisocial behavior, and generally try to capture as many subscriber as possible in a race to the absolute bottom of what mankind has to offer.
Luckily I don't use Facebook but after almost two decades of being Slashdot under various user names, I have come to the conclusion that the majority of the remaining users are stupid, barely educated, unlikeable sociopaths with a complete lack of empathy and no grasp of reality at all. It's a complete waste of time to converse with them, except for the two or three exceptions who haven't realized yet how bad this place has become.
So in a nutshell, nobody cares about Facebook and Slashdot should do humanity a favor and close.
Oops, I thought he was talking in general. So what he suggests is in his opinion that Canada's Liberals are not liberal at all but rather authoritarians who plan to pass similar Draconian surveillance laws. My apologies to the OP for the snarky comment above then. Got it now.
Apart from the obvious destruction of democracy, this also looks like a gigantic security hole. It depends a bit on how access is regulated, but this sure looks as if spying on Brits by foreign intelligence agencies has also become way easier than before. It's almost impossible to imagine that there are no moles or 'bad actors' in those 48 organizations, let alone inside the individual ISPs who store all this data.
Not really, it's definitely possible to block or heuristically throttle down encrypted traffic in a way that makes it all but unusuable for web surfing, streaming, downloading of larger files, etc. You're right that potential terrorists will continue to be able to exchange small encrypted text messages, though, that is indeed impossible to block.
I've heard many stupid comments about purported "liberals", but this tops all of them. Go get some basic introduction to political philosophy or even just a good book on European history that covers the political movements from 18. to 20. Century in order to get at least a very rough idea about what the terms you are using actually mean.
I'm using a very simple rule for scientific results in fields I don't know much about and unless I happen to come up with some generally accepted and confirmed-to-be-successful better way of doing science in that field (which would highly unlikely if I don't know much about it):
I take the current state of the art in the respective field, what the majority of scientists currently agree upon, as my guideline for forming beliefs and informing me for decision making.
Anything else is just stupid. Of course, scientists can turn out to be wrong, science is a highly critical, highly competitive and constantly evolving process, but basing my decisions on the assumption that they could turn out to be wrong in some distant future is just a miserable display of ignorance. It reminds me of this self-published book I've recently seen on Amazon in which some guy uses high school maths to "prove" Einstein wrong, because he didn't "understand relative motion".
Moreover, let me stress the obvious that even if 95% of all climate scientists had conspired to fake their results, this would in no way whatsoever show that climate change is not man-made and not dangerous for the future of mankind. It's kind of entertaining when laymen and crackpots attempt to show something in science by discrediting scientists, but only up to a certain point. At some point, the lack of basic logic and thinking skills just gets annoying. Nobody and nothing except their own stupidity keeps those climate conspiracy nuts from publishing a revolutionary article in Nature.
Nah, Trump was vague (or contradictory) about his real policies right from the start, other Republicans were primarily against him because they feared that he's leaning too much towards the Democrats.
So far, the start doesn't look too bad. He might do a good job as a president. I just hope that he gets rid of this Steve Bannon, who should not be let anywhere near a government, and also stops promoting torture. There may occur some minor problems with his narcissism and the way he seems to judge other people from a purely personal point of view, but no bigger problems than past presidents might have had. Let's just hope that he doesn't turn all international affairs into a giant pissing contest...
US TV channels have never been credible news sources. If you want good information, read at least the Washington Post or New York Times. The International New York Tribune is also very good if you have less time, and then there are several good non-US journals and newspapers to choose from. You can read them online, no need to get them in paper.
Also: If you read a good newspaper and have a brain of your own, then bias is not important at all.
Well, I can answer that. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were the best and most qualified for the highest office among all living Americans at age 35 or above. Nobody else is smarter or otherwise better equipped for the highest duty for his country, or else why would they have become presidential candidates in the first place? So there can be no loss either way. President Trump represents the best that America could possibly offer right now in terms of what voters and the electoral college think, directly followed by H. Clinton who won the popular vote. Not even Chuck Norris would have been better suited to become the next president of the US of A, which is why even he himself advertised for Trump. If you pardon me this French phrase, Trump and Clinton are both the creme de la creme of American society.
You couldn't be wronger than that. People are way more open to rational arguments than is commonly thought, and they are certainly not natural killers. There is also no reason to believe that mankind cannot change to the better, just take a look at how societies have changed to the better during the past 200 years. Death penalty and slavery used to be normal, not they are prohibited almost everywhere, women ethnic minorities could not vote, now they can vote almost everywhere.
The list could go on and on how societies have changed for the better. The situation has also dramatically improved regarding armed conflicts and wars, mainly because of international human rights and contracts that entangle former enemy nations with each other. It only appears otherwise, because there were more deaths in the 20th century than ever before, but these occurred thanks to advances in weapon's technology. There used to be a time were it was normal and accepted to wage a war against a neighboring country just to gain some territory. This is no longer accepted anywhere in the world.
If I had mod points, I'd mod you up. Musk seems overly optimistic about this issue. There will be mass unemployment, mass poverty, more homeless people and more families at the lower end of the income ladder who struggle to survive. Judging from history, the gap between the rich and the poor will continue to increase like it has during the past 40-50 years. There is more potential for unrest and civil war in the US than for basic income. As for other countries in the world, BI might be a bit more likely because of different election systems, but I wouldn't raise my hopes too high either.
Slashdot Mirror
On my Windows 7 machine, every cumulative security update since last October has failed anyway. I was told that it might have to do with the fact that it's a dual boot system. Be that as it may, since I use Linux for main work it doesn't matter that much, I will just make sure that I never use Windows for any payments or passwords and let Windows slowly 'phase out'. (Unfortunately, I cannot give it up entirely, because I'm using a lot of commercial Windows-only audio software.)
Don't worry, you will still be able to find even the smallest detail after a few days of zoom and enhance.
Seconded. I'm using the Tough Solar Protrek, steel version. It doesn't have moon phases, sunrise/sunset and atomic clock radion reception, but it's water proof to 200m (important for me, since I like to swim without getting my watch stolen), analog/digital and has all the sensors. It's a great watch, I can only recommend it! (On a side note, as a European I bought it over Ebay from a NY watch store, which even after import taxes was still way cheaper than any shop in Europe!)
I'd love to get my hands on the Titanium version of this watch, but unfortunately that was and still is above my budget.
Very easy to solve, like all trolley problems. Send it to the region where the smallest number of people will die from the impact.
Maybe, but that's hardly a reason for not being at least minimally prepared for both possibilities. And there is another classic, of course, to keep an eye on. A global deadly virus outbreak is probably the biggest threat among those three.
The opposite is the case. Large rant follows.
The whole pseudo-debate about the validity of climate science research is instigated, paid for, and kept alive by lobby groups of the petrochemical industry. A whole bunch of fake scientists and lobbyists have made a career in various conservative think-tanks and fake 'institutes' in the US whose sole purpose is to spread doubt about scientific results that have been established world-wide and by independent research organizations, institutions and countries. The only reason why this topic has been politicized so much in the US is that the petrochemical industry is traditionally linked and intertwined with the Republican party more than with the Democrats.
Nowhere else is the scientific consensus debated, the debate elsewhere is a fairly rational debate about the means to counter global warming and about how dangerous it may be for the respective country and its economy (how much to err on the side of caution, how much money to spend, etc.). This whole whole pseudo-debate is confined to the US only. No serious people outside the US have any reason to doubt the opinion of the vast majority of scientists world-wide, because elsewhere less lobbyist money has been spent and conservatives have no problems with accepting current scientific consensus. You have no idea how outright bizarre and batshit crazy this whole US pseudo-debate appears to the rest of the world, and if you're a conservative American, you should definitely start asking yourself whether mixing up values and facts in this anti-scientific way is really worth the damage in reputation. It is perfectly feasible to be conservative and accept the current state of the art of science (whether it later turns out to be wrong or right, that's a completely different question), in fact, I'm inclined to believe that many people with such views send mankind to the moon.
The saddest thing is that most of the people who continue to politicize this purely scientific topic and 'debate' it as if it where a matter of deciding which values to defend do not even realize that they are just tools for the US oil lobby and for some Republican politicians who ran out of topics to distinguish themselves from no less conservative Democrats. They think they are discussing in a world-wide debate, whereas in reality they are lost in a homegrown disinformation campaign.
Why don't you discuss quantum theory or relativity theory instead? Or how about particle physics? I'm sure you can cast doubt on particle physics, too, after all it's pretty clear that all of the areas of physics I've just mentioned are wrong somewhere and at some point. The standard model cannot be all there is, right. Maybe you can come up with some big conspiracy here as well, from the comfortable chair in your home and without doing some real work, and find some crackpot complaints that CERN doesn't release all their raw data on the Internet or has used some 'smoothing' to 'fake results'. I'll tell why you don't do that, though. Because there is no big industry with a huge lobby apparatus that would benefit from spreading doubts about current research in particle physics.
Finally someone who knows what he's talking about. Russian trolls are also very active on German forums. It has been nothing more than a nuisance at first (who takes comments 'I like Putin because he's a strong man and a good leader' seriously), but they've become more sophisticated and are trying to undermine our elections. The best way of countering them is to close their sockpuppet accounts and very actively destroy their botnets.
On the contrary, Slashdot should hire Trump to take care of this forum. He would be the best for this job, because he knows words, he has the best words.
The ongoing islamisation of the population
That's a nonexistent pseudo-problem that has been exaggerated out of all proportions by the hysterical mass medias. The percentage of muslims in the US is about 1% and in the EU is about 6%. Even with massive migration (way more than we see now in e.g. Sweden and Germany), these percentages would stay far below any significant threshold and muslims would stay a small minority. The EU could easily deal with with twice or four times the percentage with an overall negligible impact on society as a whole, and even more so for the US.
I would be surprised if this wasn't already in effect in the US. If a company's products cause illness, won't they loose any class action suit and have to pay millions? Don't they break the law by knowingly selling products that cause illness? I would think so.
Also, the idea of slowly forcing companies out of business by putting a financial burden on them if they cause illness or even death seems a bit odd to me. You don't want to prevent illness and death in the first place by adequate consumer protection laws and their enforcement? A company can just kill a few customers here and there if they can get away with it financially? Only in the US can someone come up with such an idea...
an extremely negative and not rationally justified attitude towards something or someone?
Actually, Windows 10 is less secure than any previous version of Windows, because it is almost impossible for any administrator to distinguish legitimate outbound network traffic from that of trojans and viruses. If Microsoft published a definitive list of all servers their software connects to without asking the user, explain what it does and what it transmits, and allowed you to block the traffic at will, then maybe it would be more secure. But right now, no way. It opens so many connections, it's impossible for anyone outside Microsoft to know what's really going on. (Don't forget that allegedly Microsoft-owned can also be hijacked, e.g. by direct attack on Microsoft's infrastructure or by DNS poisoning.)
I'm using MacOS, Windows and Linux for a long time, though mostly Linux for work and programming nowadays, and I'd say the reason is that Linux is not particularly better than Windows in many respects. It's mostly different. I've had no weird update problems on Linux ever (maybe I was lucky), in contrast to many update problems and rollbacks in Windows. But there are many other problems on Linux and I've often had to twiddle around with configuration files in /etc to fix things. Overall, both operating systems are fairly stable.
Privacy, free (as in 4 freedoms), and controlled updates are indeed big selling points for Linux. Who wants to use a developer machine that connects to 100+ servers owned by another company without any control by the local administrator?
Facebook and most other social "media", including Slashdot, are the cancer of society. They destruct social relations, damage their users' brain by reducing the average attention span to 17 seconds and reading comprehension to 0, exploit compulsary habits and psychological deficits, collect data, bombard users with fake news, arbitrary opinions and modern snowball system chain letters, encourage trolling and antisocial behavior, and generally try to capture as many subscriber as possible in a race to the absolute bottom of what mankind has to offer.
Luckily I don't use Facebook but after almost two decades of being Slashdot under various user names, I have come to the conclusion that the majority of the remaining users are stupid, barely educated, unlikeable sociopaths with a complete lack of empathy and no grasp of reality at all. It's a complete waste of time to converse with them, except for the two or three exceptions who haven't realized yet how bad this place has become.
So in a nutshell, nobody cares about Facebook and Slashdot should do humanity a favor and close.
Thank you for your attention, assholes!
Oops, I thought he was talking in general. So what he suggests is in his opinion that Canada's Liberals are not liberal at all but rather authoritarians who plan to pass similar Draconian surveillance laws. My apologies to the OP for the snarky comment above then. Got it now.
Apart from the obvious destruction of democracy, this also looks like a gigantic security hole. It depends a bit on how access is regulated, but this sure looks as if spying on Brits by foreign intelligence agencies has also become way easier than before. It's almost impossible to imagine that there are no moles or 'bad actors' in those 48 organizations, let alone inside the individual ISPs who store all this data.
Not really, it's definitely possible to block or heuristically throttle down encrypted traffic in a way that makes it all but unusuable for web surfing, streaming, downloading of larger files, etc. You're right that potential terrorists will continue to be able to exchange small encrypted text messages, though, that is indeed impossible to block.
I've heard many stupid comments about purported "liberals", but this tops all of them. Go get some basic introduction to political philosophy or even just a good book on European history that covers the political movements from 18. to 20. Century in order to get at least a very rough idea about what the terms you are using actually mean.
I'm using a very simple rule for scientific results in fields I don't know much about and unless I happen to come up with some generally accepted and confirmed-to-be-successful better way of doing science in that field (which would highly unlikely if I don't know much about it):
I take the current state of the art in the respective field, what the majority of scientists currently agree upon, as my guideline for forming beliefs and informing me for decision making.
Anything else is just stupid. Of course, scientists can turn out to be wrong, science is a highly critical, highly competitive and constantly evolving process, but basing my decisions on the assumption that they could turn out to be wrong in some distant future is just a miserable display of ignorance. It reminds me of this self-published book I've recently seen on Amazon in which some guy uses high school maths to "prove" Einstein wrong, because he didn't "understand relative motion".
Moreover, let me stress the obvious that even if 95% of all climate scientists had conspired to fake their results, this would in no way whatsoever show that climate change is not man-made and not dangerous for the future of mankind. It's kind of entertaining when laymen and crackpots attempt to show something in science by discrediting scientists, but only up to a certain point. At some point, the lack of basic logic and thinking skills just gets annoying. Nobody and nothing except their own stupidity keeps those climate conspiracy nuts from publishing a revolutionary article in Nature.
Nah, Trump was vague (or contradictory) about his real policies right from the start, other Republicans were primarily against him because they feared that he's leaning too much towards the Democrats.
So far, the start doesn't look too bad. He might do a good job as a president. I just hope that he gets rid of this Steve Bannon, who should not be let anywhere near a government, and also stops promoting torture. There may occur some minor problems with his narcissism and the way he seems to judge other people from a purely personal point of view, but no bigger problems than past presidents might have had. Let's just hope that he doesn't turn all international affairs into a giant pissing contest...
US TV channels have never been credible news sources. If you want good information, read at least the Washington Post or New York Times. The International New York Tribune is also very good if you have less time, and then there are several good non-US journals and newspapers to choose from. You can read them online, no need to get them in paper.
Also: If you read a good newspaper and have a brain of your own, then bias is not important at all.
That's right, so shout it like a mantra: You've got to respect the president-erect!
Well, I can answer that. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were the best and most qualified for the highest office among all living Americans at age 35 or above. Nobody else is smarter or otherwise better equipped for the highest duty for his country, or else why would they have become presidential candidates in the first place? So there can be no loss either way. President Trump represents the best that America could possibly offer right now in terms of what voters and the electoral college think, directly followed by H. Clinton who won the popular vote. Not even Chuck Norris would have been better suited to become the next president of the US of A, which is why even he himself advertised for Trump. If you pardon me this French phrase, Trump and Clinton are both the creme de la creme of American society.
You couldn't be wronger than that. People are way more open to rational arguments than is commonly thought, and they are certainly not natural killers. There is also no reason to believe that mankind cannot change to the better, just take a look at how societies have changed to the better during the past 200 years. Death penalty and slavery used to be normal, not they are prohibited almost everywhere, women ethnic minorities could not vote, now they can vote almost everywhere.
The list could go on and on how societies have changed for the better. The situation has also dramatically improved regarding armed conflicts and wars, mainly because of international human rights and contracts that entangle former enemy nations with each other. It only appears otherwise, because there were more deaths in the 20th century than ever before, but these occurred thanks to advances in weapon's technology. There used to be a time were it was normal and accepted to wage a war against a neighboring country just to gain some territory. This is no longer accepted anywhere in the world.
So don't be such a cynic.
If I had mod points, I'd mod you up. Musk seems overly optimistic about this issue. There will be mass unemployment, mass poverty, more homeless people and more families at the lower end of the income ladder who struggle to survive. Judging from history, the gap between the rich and the poor will continue to increase like it has during the past 40-50 years. There is more potential for unrest and civil war in the US than for basic income. As for other countries in the world, BI might be a bit more likely because of different election systems, but I wouldn't raise my hopes too high either.