The bad moderation is NOT Microsoft's fault. That's slashdot's local incompetence and also the growing intolerance of thought-provoking comments. I would argue that the google is the main culprit there. Pandering to the users is largely based on avoiding showing them hits that they don't like.
However, your main point about the security problems of Windows 10 is related to the EULA problem I mentioned and the increased spyware is actually Microsoft trying to play catch-up in a different form of EVIL, where Google and Amazon are the current leaders.
Er... I mean "Good thing I missed it." Seriously, my wife might not have understood. I'm just interested in the technology, but I do live within easy bicycling range of Akihabara and used to work there.
But even more seriously, folks, I think we need to rethink our entire philosophy of reproduction. There are evolutionary reasons that we are strongly driven to have as many children as possible. The genes are blind (and I strongly recommend The Blind Watchmaker) and the combinations are random. Under normal equilibrium conditions, half the time the resulting combinations are below average and are expected to die off. In other words, you need two dead babies to keep things on an even keel. At least that's how Ma Nature sees it.
We don't have to do things the natural way, but right now we're managing to do worse. But if you start thinking about two-way handling you wind up in the land of the Chinese Granny Amazons, and you probably don't want to go there. Unless you're a starving author looking for work? Call me?
I don't think Microsoft is even close to the #1 EVIL company now, though they probably were in the past. The bigger problem is that there are so many evil contenders at the top that it's hard to pick #1, but I can fairly easily think of at least 10 corporations that are clearly more evil than today's fading Microsoft.
However, I think MS was an important innovator in new forms of EVIL. It is quite possible that the EULA deserves the #1 EVIL innovation rank. The fundamental notion of "Legally it ain't our fault, no matter how badly we phucked up or how badly it phucks you up" is truly evil. I'm not even saying that Microsoft originated the concept of evading liability, but I think they perfected it.
Can you imagine how different software would be if there were some expectation of liability for the harms? Talk about defensive programming.
(P.S. Now that I think about it a bit more, I'm doubtful that "innovator" can be applied to Microsoft even in this context. They just steal bad ideas and perfect their badness. Rather sad that they can't perfect any of the good ideas they've stolen or bought. Highly negative influence, yes, but I still can't rate them as #1 EVIL now.)
Because the artists do DESERVE some compensation for their creativity.
ROFLMAO at the notion of the google sharing any of the cash with the creators. The google has become the great master of profiting from OTHER people's creativity. How much content does the google create?
More details on the sins of the google in my earlier comment, but let me just recap:
Today's motto: "All your attention are belong to us, the google."
That will be $10/month, please.
(P.S. I really wish reality was nicer, but at this point things are so phucked up we practically deserve Trump.)
Four months for free? Mostly just tells you how low the actual cost of the content is--but I think it's worth even less. MUCH less than my time.
Production costs? How much actual content does the google produce? Kind of a great business model, if you can get it, eh?
I used to be a big supporter of the google. I really bought into that stuff about avoiding evil, but the money drove them to their new slogan: "All your attention are belong to us, the google."
Share the world's information? No, hoard your personal information and use it to manipulate and even control you.
Make people wiser? No, just help narrow-minded fools stuff their eyeballs and ear-holes with "evidence" of whatever insane things they most prefer to believe.
However, none of that is why I hate the google so much now. It's their continuous support of spammers, which mostly mystifies me. The scamming spammers are stealing attention that the google could profit from. It might be professional courtesy, but I think it's more likely just the cost-benefit analysis. Much cheaper to ignore the spammers and scammers than to fight them, and if it's wasting vast amounts of nice people's time and attention, it just proves how little the google cares.
Is there a solution? Sorry, but the google somehow can't seem to find any such results. (Actually, there are LOTS of solutions to various problems and especially to the criminal scams of the spammers, but don't hold your breath waiting for any improvements.)
(P.S. I'm absolutely NOT saying that the google is the only EVIL corporation out there. I'm just unable to name a more EVIL one.)
So there. It was tough, but I managed to avoid the long-comment penalty. Resulting terseness may be hard to follow, but feel free to ask for clarification, eh?
More complete Subject: Eyeballs, censorship, media pollution, and stuffing your eyeballs and earholes with garbage (and you can see why I feel threatened by the so-called long-comment penalty, but I'll try to keep it brief).
Facebook needs eyeballs to sell and appeals to freedom of speech to reduce their operating costs for censorship, even when it is richly deserved. However, this is just one aspect of broader media pollution driven by the quest for more eyeballs, best typified by the collapse of CNN's pretenses to be a media organization dedicated to the public interest. While CNN is just following their business model into the toilet, the terrorists do love the free publicity of such disaster porn. To my way of thinking that kind of ratings-driven free publicity is clearly related to the rise of the Donald, too.
However, the REAL damage is from people who use the Internet to gorge themselves on poisonous lies. Whatever insane thing you prefer to believe, you can get as much "evidence" as you want on today's Web. Again, the eyeball-driven model actually encourages pandering to such narrow-minded people, and in the google's case, they could risk losing their favored-search-engine status if they showed people too much stuff that offended them, no matter how true it was. (Remember, "All your attention are belong to us, the [google|facebook|TLC].")
Solution? As regards the mass media, stop doing what the terrorists want. Agree NOT to compete for eyeballs by supporting terrorists. Actually, that should apply broadly to ANY news involving events that were motivated by the quest for free publicity. Not censorship, but a kind of negotiated settlement. Report the news, but don't exaggerate or emphasize publicity-seeking stories to get more eyeballs. STOP feeding the monsters.
Looked it over, but I can't figure out what it means. Both the google's version of "My Activity" and the slashdot side consisting of an article and visible comments. Now I expect such obfuscation from the google since their motto became "All your attention are belong to us", but I confabulate that slashdot used to be more revealing.
Short summary: The level of information that the "My Activity" page reveals is without form or meaning. Too much data and no way to understand how it is used, though I'm still sure it is mostly used to manipulate and twist us to the google's will. What we really need to know is HOW the google analyzes the data and WHEN it is being used and in WHICH ways. Probably an impossible problem since all of us are too stupid to understand the google. The google will tell me so, even though the search "how to outsmart google" came up with a couple of interesting books (that are not available locally, at least not in English).
Long answer: Naw, I can't be bothered to write more, and would be "penalized" for the long comment if I did. Today's slashdot doesn't motivate the effort to write so thoughtfully. It doesn't even have a fraction of the funny comments it used to. However, I might be confabulating myself again.
(Now if slashdot supported such a financial model, I might be motivated to help support a project to detect abusive long comments, such as long cut-and-paste blurbs from the Web. Whoa, dead horse, whoa.)
And I think it is because you are an extremist on the edge of insanity that you cannot understand my boredom and slight annoyance with your rants. I don't like everything about the real world and I'm even doing what I can to improve it, but I start by living there. I actually donated my poll tax to Bernie Sanders.
If you think what you wrote about President Obama is concrete facts and not your interpretation, then you also need to work on your reading comprehension. However you have provoked me enough to throw in the ontology of lies:
Level 0: Self-contradiction. Known to be at least partly false before checking anything, though it is logically possible for both sides to be false at the same time.
Level 1: Counterfactual statements. Any fool can check the facts (and this is where you should start).
Level 2: Partial truths. Especially popular with politicians and lawyers, though the Donald rarely gets this high without a teleprompter.
Level 3: Framing. Such techniques as telling the truth in an unbelievable way or slanted-by-assumption questions like "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?"
Okay, you included a few more words this time. You are still playing out-of-context framing games, and I conclude it is not worth continuing this discussion, notwithstanding your clarification of a few more items and areas where we are probably in agreement. I regard you as too Sophistic and too extremist and too unreasonable and, probably more importantly, regard my own time as too limited.
I remind you of the election of 2000. The broken dynamics of American elections tend to make every election (but especially each presidential election) into a horse race, no matter how vast the differences between the candidates.
By the way, I am not a Hillary lover. Nor a hater. I actually think she's better than the average politician in most ways, but she has been targeted for vilification to an amazing degree. To me the funniest part is that most of it was collateral vilification that would have been directed at her husband if he were not effectively retired from politics. Perhaps her worst problem is that she's more of a lawyer than a politician, and even the politicians don't like lawyers, notwithstanding the awkward reality that most of them are one.
No, that is NOT what I wrote. Go back and try again. Cutting out a couple of words is a form a framing, one of the higher techniques of lying. Perhaps you do not intend to lie, but if so, you need to try again to READ WHAT I WROTE. Or are you actually asking for a complete ontology of lies? (I'm actually trying to refine it to deal with sincere confabulation.)
Now about the topic of "Democrat" with the capital letter. I think there are two plausible senses. One is a voter who votes that way on a more or less mindless basis, including straight ticket voting. The other sense is someone who is officially registered as a Democrat, usually as part of a mechanism to control participation in the primaries. You obviously do not qualify under the first definition, and you have said nothing about the second.
By the way, I am not a Democrat in either sense. I generally vote that way, and especially in presidential elections, and in the past I've voted in primaries for both parties. However, my Democratic votes are quite often negative votes against execrable candidates from the so-called Republican Party and an acknowledgement of the winner-take-all process in American elections, where third party candidates can only affect the outcomes in negative ways. This year my vote was finally lost, but in my younger days when I had lots of votes and the American political situation seemed less dire, my primary selective principle was to vote for the underdog, especially a person who might represent a group that seemed underrepresented, such as a woman candidate. (No, that is not why I would vote for Hillary if I still had a vote. Trump is just an amazingly execrable option even by today's so-called Republican standards.)
Well, I suppose a reader could interpret what I wrote that way, though I'm inclined to regard it as a dishonest reading. Let me try to restate it more clearly.
Many reports from career civil servants indicate that the big dick Cheney and Rumsfeld took these practices to more extreme levels than they had previously witnessed. No one is claiming that such partisan hiring and firing practices don't exist, but there used to be broad agreement that they needed to be limited, especially at the federal level, and there were various safeguards to limit them. All such safeguards were attacked quite systematically and expertly, though there is some disagreement as to whether Cheney or Rumsfeld was the better bureaucratic infighter.
Considering the way you twisted your little "news reports", I do not believe you could be any kind of "Democrat" in the capitalized usage. You seem to be citing those slanted items with the intent of refuting something I did not say.
Yes, it's obviously true, but is that the best strategy? I'm trying to remember what the Art of War said about understanding your enemy... While I definitely tend to regard hateful people as enemies, I really do not understand them...
Actually, I am most mystified by why he did such a thing. It doesn't seem to be any of his business, and it was long before he could make political hay from it. He loves money, but he loves authority and extreme punishment at least $80,000 more than he loves money?
In the context of this discussion, it seems extremely unlikely that such a person would be issuing many pardons except to his co-conspirators, and in that context it would make excellent sense to discourage them from testifying against him.
Hmm... Now I wonder if Edgar Snowden in his former employment could have dug up any additional dirt on Trump University and various other so-called business activities?
No, you are lying, but what else do you expect from a Trump supporter?
Perhaps we can have a meaningful discussion if you can start with a single truth: Who do you hate most?
Imagine that I am a visitor from another planet trying to understand these human emotions. On the evidence so far, you most hate Hillary in particular or possibly women in general. Were you perhaps hurt by a woman? Or perhaps more likely that you caused hurt to some woman, but you feel it was justified?
I think everyone will agree that Trump loves money. A lot. Even Trump's most ardent supporters.
Did you know that Trump spent about $80,000 to run an ad in favor of the death penalty for the kids who confessed to the rape and murder of the Central Park jogger in 1989?
Funny thing about that story. They were innocent and their confessions were coerced lies. The REAL rapist was identified more than 10 years later and the kids (grown into prison-hardened adults) were released. No one seems to have detected any apology from Trump.
If you scratch an ardent Trump supporter, you find a hater. My mental image is the Donald sitting on a high chair that he imagines to be a throne. One leg is for government haters, and the others are for Hillary haters, bigots, and racists. Some of them are trying to realize that hate is a bad sales pitch, and they are trying to put a nice veneer on it, trying to fudge some positive reason to support Trump, but scratch the paint and you'll see the hate.
In conclusion, Trump is distinctly unlikely to pardon Edward Snowden.
President Obama is many things, but on his list of top personal identities, I don't see any identity that would pardon Edward Snowden. I think he's a good man, and even a good president under the circumstances, but it ain't going to happen.
Just to clarify my analysis, let me pick the personal identity of "politician". I happen to think it might be Obama's #1 identity, but it's certainly near the top of his list. Pardoning Snowden would be extremely bad as a political move and would give enormous fuel and enthusiasm to his political enemies.
The best candidate to pardon Snowden would probably be a philosopher who was primarily concerned about right and wrong, and you better not hold your breath waiting for one to become president. I actually think that Obama has a philosophical streak, but not in his top 10 identities. His identity as a lawyer is certainly higher, and professional lawyers are trained to ignore such trivialities as right and wrong.
On the third hand, I also blame the big dick Cheney, both for creating the personal-privacy-abusing national security apparatus that Obama has to deal with (in his persona as a realist) and for stuffing the entire civil service with ideologues. That may be the worst legacy of Dubya's miserable failure of an administration. The federal civil service was supposed to be task-oriented and apolitical, an organization of professionals who would competently and impartially administer whatever legislation the political process threw at them, and even ignoring political pressures from the executive branch. Not so under Cheney and his cronies, who actively worked to drive out competent careerists and carefully screened the personal politics of all new hires. Of course the punchline is that the so-called Republican Party now blames Obama for being unable to fix the system they worked so hard to break and keep broken.
Pardoning Snowden? You'd be better off hoping they decided corporations are inhuman monstrosities hiding under the legal fiction of decency.
What happened to the funny and sometimes even insightful slashdot of old? Several hundred comments so far, and the word "liability" does not appear once? Well, I'll spare you the long rant about the devolution of slashdot and just make the obvious comment about how Microsoft works:
MS = innovative financial models, NOT innovative software. GREAT money. Good software? Not so much.
The financial innovation that this article is about involves liability evasion. You youngsters may not believe me, but there used to be times when a company could be held legally liable for egregious mistakes that hurt the customers. Microsoft isn't the only anti-liability innovator, but the EULA was a major breakthrough and completely distorted Microsoft's developmental priorities. Security? Why worry? Whatever goes wrong, Microsoft has NO liability.
Actually, I don't even know what I'm talking about. I'm virtually certain I never read the entire EULA in any of it's cursed incarnations. More power to you if you have, but I have read enough EULA stuff so that I am unable to imagine the grounds of this nuisance lawsuit and amazed that Microsoft was willing to pay any money to make it go away. I hope that the precedent is going to come back and haunt them.
Not betting on it. I am certain that the newest diabolical incarnation of the EULA has several pages of disclaimers covering upgrades, and you retroactively accepted it when your firstborn child got ahold of the software and gnawed a hole in the shrinkwrap with his or her first tooth.
I could mention a few other anti-software-quality innovations that have helped make Microsoft the "success" it supposedly is. There was a time I would even have been motivated by the hope slashdot mattered.
Maybe the FBI and various other authoritarian people are watching us?
Maybe in a flying pig's eye, but maybe there's a solution?
Too many people are deluding themselves with such notions as "It's okay since I would never do anything wrong."
WRONG. You certainly will do plenty of things wrong, and the police don't believe there is such a thing as an innocent mistake. If they watch you closely enough, they have you by the balls, which they've already been watching, to boot.
That's just the stick side of our loss of privacy. Of course no one is perfect, and everyone makes mistakes. There are plenty of laws on the books and if the police want you badly enough and have enough data on you, then they will get you. Not just the police, however. Criminals, too, without even commenting on the other similarities.
The carrot side of privacy loss is actually worse. By knowing your interests, tastes, and even your strengths, you can be manipulated and twisted. Maybe it's relatively harmless like buying the "right" toothpaste or a worthless certificate from Trump University, but there aren't any limits. Considering monetary threats, there's always debt slavery, which is how a lot of kids feel about their student loans. If you're a threat to the authorities, the question is what sort of sex crime you can be seduced with... Or maybe the biggest threat is to your most precious and limited resource, your short time on earth? As today's google sees it, based on their massive amounts of personal information you have so foolishly entrusted to the google, "All your attention are belong to us."
Solution? Oh yeah, I was mumbling about a solution, wasn't I?
KEEP YOUR OWN PERSONAL INFORMATION. Just make it illegal to keep anyone's personal information without that person's permission. The information can exist, but it has to be stored where and how the person wants it to be stored, and anyone who wants to look at it needs to ask nicely and then delete the copy of the information as soon as the purpose of the asking has been satisfied.
My theory is that Trump did it. He encouraged the leave vote, and whether or not Brexit was his fault, he's snapping up bargain-priced stocks dragged down in the ensuing panic. Of course, that's pretending he's as rich as he claims and actually has the free cash to play with. If so, he can easily make enough money to pay for his presidential campaign, and he can just tap some of his other assets while he's waiting for the stock prices to recover from the panic. Just one example of a money-making scam based on Brexit. If the Donald is half as smart as he claims, then he could make even more money with a smaller investment from currency speculation on the bounces.
Can you spell "conflict of interest"? The Donald can't.
I think the reality is probably different, but I'm not holding my breath for Trump to release his tax returns so I can find out. I shudder to think it, but if he does become president, we may find out about the real and EVIL power of insider trading by the deepest and most powerful insider ever. We already have sufficient evidence about his business morals, but I also believe it is impossible to make 10% of the money he claims by honest and ethical means.
My analysis is that there are four main groups of Trump supporters: Government haters, Hillary haters, bigots, and racists. The purist government haters are thrilled by the idea of Europe disintegrating and many are even hoping that Trump will destroy the federal government so the US can be disunited. You have to admit that would be great for the international companies racing to the bottom on the backs of the cheapest labor available from the smallest and weakest countries.
Anyway, right now we need international cooperation more than ever, not the Brexit kick in the teeth. Climate change, for starters. The only way I can agree with this vote is if you convince me it is too late and England was right to dash for the lifeboat.
Me? I'm a lunatic clinging to hope for the future of homo sapiens. I even hope that slashdot could get better. ROFLMAO.
Slashdot Mirror
The bad moderation is NOT Microsoft's fault. That's slashdot's local incompetence and also the growing intolerance of thought-provoking comments. I would argue that the google is the main culprit there. Pandering to the users is largely based on avoiding showing them hits that they don't like.
However, your main point about the security problems of Windows 10 is related to the EULA problem I mentioned and the increased spyware is actually Microsoft trying to play catch-up in a different form of EVIL, where Google and Amazon are the current leaders.
Er... I mean "Good thing I missed it." Seriously, my wife might not have understood. I'm just interested in the technology, but I do live within easy bicycling range of Akihabara and used to work there.
But even more seriously, folks, I think we need to rethink our entire philosophy of reproduction. There are evolutionary reasons that we are strongly driven to have as many children as possible. The genes are blind (and I strongly recommend The Blind Watchmaker ) and the combinations are random. Under normal equilibrium conditions, half the time the resulting combinations are below average and are expected to die off. In other words, you need two dead babies to keep things on an even keel. At least that's how Ma Nature sees it.
We don't have to do things the natural way, but right now we're managing to do worse. But if you start thinking about two-way handling you wind up in the land of the Chinese Granny Amazons, and you probably don't want to go there. Unless you're a starving author looking for work? Call me?
Or revive it after the holiday? Or implement some mechanism to extend the life of important stories above transient tripe?
Or a mechanism so slashdot could fund the best improvements that the most members want to use?
Gaddap, ya' dead horse, giddap.
I don't think Microsoft is even close to the #1 EVIL company now, though they probably were in the past. The bigger problem is that there are so many evil contenders at the top that it's hard to pick #1, but I can fairly easily think of at least 10 corporations that are clearly more evil than today's fading Microsoft.
However, I think MS was an important innovator in new forms of EVIL. It is quite possible that the EULA deserves the #1 EVIL innovation rank. The fundamental notion of "Legally it ain't our fault, no matter how badly we phucked up or how badly it phucks you up" is truly evil. I'm not even saying that Microsoft originated the concept of evading liability, but I think they perfected it.
Can you imagine how different software would be if there were some expectation of liability for the harms? Talk about defensive programming.
(P.S. Now that I think about it a bit more, I'm doubtful that "innovator" can be applied to Microsoft even in this context. They just steal bad ideas and perfect their badness. Rather sad that they can't perfect any of the good ideas they've stolen or bought. Highly negative influence, yes, but I still can't rate them as #1 EVIL now.)
Because the artists do DESERVE some compensation for their creativity.
ROFLMAO at the notion of the google sharing any of the cash with the creators. The google has become the great master of profiting from OTHER people's creativity. How much content does the google create?
More details on the sins of the google in my earlier comment, but let me just recap:
Today's motto: "All your attention are belong to us, the google."
That will be $10/month, please.
(P.S. I really wish reality was nicer, but at this point things are so phucked up we practically deserve Trump.)
Four months for free? Mostly just tells you how low the actual cost of the content is--but I think it's worth even less. MUCH less than my time.
Production costs? How much actual content does the google produce? Kind of a great business model, if you can get it, eh?
I used to be a big supporter of the google. I really bought into that stuff about avoiding evil, but the money drove them to their new slogan: "All your attention are belong to us, the google."
Share the world's information? No, hoard your personal information and use it to manipulate and even control you.
Make people wiser? No, just help narrow-minded fools stuff their eyeballs and ear-holes with "evidence" of whatever insane things they most prefer to believe.
However, none of that is why I hate the google so much now. It's their continuous support of spammers, which mostly mystifies me. The scamming spammers are stealing attention that the google could profit from. It might be professional courtesy, but I think it's more likely just the cost-benefit analysis. Much cheaper to ignore the spammers and scammers than to fight them, and if it's wasting vast amounts of nice people's time and attention, it just proves how little the google cares.
Is there a solution? Sorry, but the google somehow can't seem to find any such results. (Actually, there are LOTS of solutions to various problems and especially to the criminal scams of the spammers, but don't hold your breath waiting for any improvements.)
(P.S. I'm absolutely NOT saying that the google is the only EVIL corporation out there. I'm just unable to name a more EVIL one.)
So there. It was tough, but I managed to avoid the long-comment penalty. Resulting terseness may be hard to follow, but feel free to ask for clarification, eh?
More complete Subject: Eyeballs, censorship, media pollution, and stuffing your eyeballs and earholes with garbage (and you can see why I feel threatened by the so-called long-comment penalty, but I'll try to keep it brief).
Facebook needs eyeballs to sell and appeals to freedom of speech to reduce their operating costs for censorship, even when it is richly deserved. However, this is just one aspect of broader media pollution driven by the quest for more eyeballs, best typified by the collapse of CNN's pretenses to be a media organization dedicated to the public interest. While CNN is just following their business model into the toilet, the terrorists do love the free publicity of such disaster porn. To my way of thinking that kind of ratings-driven free publicity is clearly related to the rise of the Donald, too.
However, the REAL damage is from people who use the Internet to gorge themselves on poisonous lies. Whatever insane thing you prefer to believe, you can get as much "evidence" as you want on today's Web. Again, the eyeball-driven model actually encourages pandering to such narrow-minded people, and in the google's case, they could risk losing their favored-search-engine status if they showed people too much stuff that offended them, no matter how true it was. (Remember, "All your attention are belong to us, the [google|facebook|TLC].")
Solution? As regards the mass media, stop doing what the terrorists want. Agree NOT to compete for eyeballs by supporting terrorists. Actually, that should apply broadly to ANY news involving events that were motivated by the quest for free publicity. Not censorship, but a kind of negotiated settlement. Report the news, but don't exaggerate or emphasize publicity-seeking stories to get more eyeballs. STOP feeding the monsters.
Looked it over, but I can't figure out what it means. Both the google's version of "My Activity" and the slashdot side consisting of an article and visible comments. Now I expect such obfuscation from the google since their motto became "All your attention are belong to us", but I confabulate that slashdot used to be more revealing.
Short summary: The level of information that the "My Activity" page reveals is without form or meaning. Too much data and no way to understand how it is used, though I'm still sure it is mostly used to manipulate and twist us to the google's will. What we really need to know is HOW the google analyzes the data and WHEN it is being used and in WHICH ways. Probably an impossible problem since all of us are too stupid to understand the google. The google will tell me so, even though the search "how to outsmart google" came up with a couple of interesting books (that are not available locally, at least not in English).
Long answer: Naw, I can't be bothered to write more, and would be "penalized" for the long comment if I did. Today's slashdot doesn't motivate the effort to write so thoughtfully. It doesn't even have a fraction of the funny comments it used to. However, I might be confabulating myself again.
(Now if slashdot supported such a financial model, I might be motivated to help support a project to detect abusive long comments, such as long cut-and-paste blurbs from the Web. Whoa, dead horse, whoa.)
And I think it is because you are an extremist on the edge of insanity that you cannot understand my boredom and slight annoyance with your rants. I don't like everything about the real world and I'm even doing what I can to improve it, but I start by living there. I actually donated my poll tax to Bernie Sanders.
If you think what you wrote about President Obama is concrete facts and not your interpretation, then you also need to work on your reading comprehension. However you have provoked me enough to throw in the ontology of lies:
Level 0: Self-contradiction. Known to be at least partly false before checking anything, though it is logically possible for both sides to be false at the same time.
Level 1: Counterfactual statements. Any fool can check the facts (and this is where you should start).
Level 2: Partial truths. Especially popular with politicians and lawyers, though the Donald rarely gets this high without a teleprompter.
Level 3: Framing. Such techniques as telling the truth in an unbelievable way or slanted-by-assumption questions like "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?"
Okay, you included a few more words this time. You are still playing out-of-context framing games, and I conclude it is not worth continuing this discussion, notwithstanding your clarification of a few more items and areas where we are probably in agreement. I regard you as too Sophistic and too extremist and too unreasonable and, probably more importantly, regard my own time as too limited.
I remind you of the election of 2000. The broken dynamics of American elections tend to make every election (but especially each presidential election) into a horse race, no matter how vast the differences between the candidates.
By the way, I am not a Hillary lover. Nor a hater. I actually think she's better than the average politician in most ways, but she has been targeted for vilification to an amazing degree. To me the funniest part is that most of it was collateral vilification that would have been directed at her husband if he were not effectively retired from politics. Perhaps her worst problem is that she's more of a lawyer than a politician, and even the politicians don't like lawyers, notwithstanding the awkward reality that most of them are one.
No, that is NOT what I wrote. Go back and try again. Cutting out a couple of words is a form a framing, one of the higher techniques of lying. Perhaps you do not intend to lie, but if so, you need to try again to READ WHAT I WROTE. Or are you actually asking for a complete ontology of lies? (I'm actually trying to refine it to deal with sincere confabulation.)
Now about the topic of "Democrat" with the capital letter. I think there are two plausible senses. One is a voter who votes that way on a more or less mindless basis, including straight ticket voting. The other sense is someone who is officially registered as a Democrat, usually as part of a mechanism to control participation in the primaries. You obviously do not qualify under the first definition, and you have said nothing about the second.
By the way, I am not a Democrat in either sense. I generally vote that way, and especially in presidential elections, and in the past I've voted in primaries for both parties. However, my Democratic votes are quite often negative votes against execrable candidates from the so-called Republican Party and an acknowledgement of the winner-take-all process in American elections, where third party candidates can only affect the outcomes in negative ways. This year my vote was finally lost, but in my younger days when I had lots of votes and the American political situation seemed less dire, my primary selective principle was to vote for the underdog, especially a person who might represent a group that seemed underrepresented, such as a woman candidate. (No, that is not why I would vote for Hillary if I still had a vote. Trump is just an amazingly execrable option even by today's so-called Republican standards.)
Well, I suppose a reader could interpret what I wrote that way, though I'm inclined to regard it as a dishonest reading. Let me try to restate it more clearly.
Many reports from career civil servants indicate that the big dick Cheney and Rumsfeld took these practices to more extreme levels than they had previously witnessed. No one is claiming that such partisan hiring and firing practices don't exist, but there used to be broad agreement that they needed to be limited, especially at the federal level, and there were various safeguards to limit them. All such safeguards were attacked quite systematically and expertly, though there is some disagreement as to whether Cheney or Rumsfeld was the better bureaucratic infighter.
Considering the way you twisted your little "news reports", I do not believe you could be any kind of "Democrat" in the capitalized usage. You seem to be citing those slanted items with the intent of refuting something I did not say.
What are you really?
Beat me to it?
Yes, it's obviously true, but is that the best strategy? I'm trying to remember what the Art of War said about understanding your enemy... While I definitely tend to regard hateful people as enemies, I really do not understand them...
Actually, I am most mystified by why he did such a thing. It doesn't seem to be any of his business, and it was long before he could make political hay from it. He loves money, but he loves authority and extreme punishment at least $80,000 more than he loves money?
In the context of this discussion, it seems extremely unlikely that such a person would be issuing many pardons except to his co-conspirators, and in that context it would make excellent sense to discourage them from testifying against him.
Hmm... Now I wonder if Edgar Snowden in his former employment could have dug up any additional dirt on Trump University and various other so-called business activities?
No, you are lying, but what else do you expect from a Trump supporter?
Perhaps we can have a meaningful discussion if you can start with a single truth: Who do you hate most?
Imagine that I am a visitor from another planet trying to understand these human emotions. On the evidence so far, you most hate Hillary in particular or possibly women in general. Were you perhaps hurt by a woman? Or perhaps more likely that you caused hurt to some woman, but you feel it was justified?
Who do you hate most?
Okay, so now we know you're a hater. Who do you hate most?
I think everyone will agree that Trump loves money. A lot. Even Trump's most ardent supporters.
Did you know that Trump spent about $80,000 to run an ad in favor of the death penalty for the kids who confessed to the rape and murder of the Central Park jogger in 1989?
Funny thing about that story. They were innocent and their confessions were coerced lies. The REAL rapist was identified more than 10 years later and the kids (grown into prison-hardened adults) were released. No one seems to have detected any apology from Trump.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... is one reference source.
If you scratch an ardent Trump supporter, you find a hater. My mental image is the Donald sitting on a high chair that he imagines to be a throne. One leg is for government haters, and the others are for Hillary haters, bigots, and racists. Some of them are trying to realize that hate is a bad sales pitch, and they are trying to put a nice veneer on it, trying to fudge some positive reason to support Trump, but scratch the paint and you'll see the hate.
In conclusion, Trump is distinctly unlikely to pardon Edward Snowden.
President Obama is many things, but on his list of top personal identities, I don't see any identity that would pardon Edward Snowden. I think he's a good man, and even a good president under the circumstances, but it ain't going to happen.
Just to clarify my analysis, let me pick the personal identity of "politician". I happen to think it might be Obama's #1 identity, but it's certainly near the top of his list. Pardoning Snowden would be extremely bad as a political move and would give enormous fuel and enthusiasm to his political enemies.
The best candidate to pardon Snowden would probably be a philosopher who was primarily concerned about right and wrong, and you better not hold your breath waiting for one to become president. I actually think that Obama has a philosophical streak, but not in his top 10 identities. His identity as a lawyer is certainly higher, and professional lawyers are trained to ignore such trivialities as right and wrong.
On the third hand, I also blame the big dick Cheney, both for creating the personal-privacy-abusing national security apparatus that Obama has to deal with (in his persona as a realist) and for stuffing the entire civil service with ideologues. That may be the worst legacy of Dubya's miserable failure of an administration. The federal civil service was supposed to be task-oriented and apolitical, an organization of professionals who would competently and impartially administer whatever legislation the political process threw at them, and even ignoring political pressures from the executive branch. Not so under Cheney and his cronies, who actively worked to drive out competent careerists and carefully screened the personal politics of all new hires. Of course the punchline is that the so-called Republican Party now blames Obama for being unable to fix the system they worked so hard to break and keep broken.
Pardoning Snowden? You'd be better off hoping they decided corporations are inhuman monstrosities hiding under the legal fiction of decency.
What happened to the funny and sometimes even insightful slashdot of old? Several hundred comments so far, and the word "liability" does not appear once? Well, I'll spare you the long rant about the devolution of slashdot and just make the obvious comment about how Microsoft works:
MS = innovative financial models, NOT innovative software. GREAT money. Good software? Not so much.
The financial innovation that this article is about involves liability evasion. You youngsters may not believe me, but there used to be times when a company could be held legally liable for egregious mistakes that hurt the customers. Microsoft isn't the only anti-liability innovator, but the EULA was a major breakthrough and completely distorted Microsoft's developmental priorities. Security? Why worry? Whatever goes wrong, Microsoft has NO liability.
Actually, I don't even know what I'm talking about. I'm virtually certain I never read the entire EULA in any of it's cursed incarnations. More power to you if you have, but I have read enough EULA stuff so that I am unable to imagine the grounds of this nuisance lawsuit and amazed that Microsoft was willing to pay any money to make it go away. I hope that the precedent is going to come back and haunt them.
Not betting on it. I am certain that the newest diabolical incarnation of the EULA has several pages of disclaimers covering upgrades, and you retroactively accepted it when your firstborn child got ahold of the software and gnawed a hole in the shrinkwrap with his or her first tooth.
I could mention a few other anti-software-quality innovations that have helped make Microsoft the "success" it supposedly is. There was a time I would even have been motivated by the hope slashdot mattered.
Maybe the FBI and various other authoritarian people are watching us?
Maybe in a flying pig's eye, but maybe there's a solution?
Too many people are deluding themselves with such notions as "It's okay since I would never do anything wrong."
WRONG. You certainly will do plenty of things wrong, and the police don't believe there is such a thing as an innocent mistake. If they watch you closely enough, they have you by the balls, which they've already been watching, to boot.
That's just the stick side of our loss of privacy. Of course no one is perfect, and everyone makes mistakes. There are plenty of laws on the books and if the police want you badly enough and have enough data on you, then they will get you. Not just the police, however. Criminals, too, without even commenting on the other similarities.
The carrot side of privacy loss is actually worse. By knowing your interests, tastes, and even your strengths, you can be manipulated and twisted. Maybe it's relatively harmless like buying the "right" toothpaste or a worthless certificate from Trump University, but there aren't any limits. Considering monetary threats, there's always debt slavery, which is how a lot of kids feel about their student loans. If you're a threat to the authorities, the question is what sort of sex crime you can be seduced with... Or maybe the biggest threat is to your most precious and limited resource, your short time on earth? As today's google sees it, based on their massive amounts of personal information you have so foolishly entrusted to the google, "All your attention are belong to us."
Solution? Oh yeah, I was mumbling about a solution, wasn't I?
KEEP YOUR OWN PERSONAL INFORMATION. Just make it illegal to keep anyone's personal information without that person's permission. The information can exist, but it has to be stored where and how the person wants it to be stored, and anyone who wants to look at it needs to ask nicely and then delete the copy of the information as soon as the purpose of the asking has been satisfied.
Oh wait. Can pig's fly?
My theory is that Trump did it. He encouraged the leave vote, and whether or not Brexit was his fault, he's snapping up bargain-priced stocks dragged down in the ensuing panic. Of course, that's pretending he's as rich as he claims and actually has the free cash to play with. If so, he can easily make enough money to pay for his presidential campaign, and he can just tap some of his other assets while he's waiting for the stock prices to recover from the panic. Just one example of a money-making scam based on Brexit. If the Donald is half as smart as he claims, then he could make even more money with a smaller investment from currency speculation on the bounces.
Can you spell "conflict of interest"? The Donald can't.
I think the reality is probably different, but I'm not holding my breath for Trump to release his tax returns so I can find out. I shudder to think it, but if he does become president, we may find out about the real and EVIL power of insider trading by the deepest and most powerful insider ever. We already have sufficient evidence about his business morals, but I also believe it is impossible to make 10% of the money he claims by honest and ethical means.
My analysis is that there are four main groups of Trump supporters: Government haters, Hillary haters, bigots, and racists. The purist government haters are thrilled by the idea of Europe disintegrating and many are even hoping that Trump will destroy the federal government so the US can be disunited. You have to admit that would be great for the international companies racing to the bottom on the backs of the cheapest labor available from the smallest and weakest countries.
Anyway, right now we need international cooperation more than ever, not the Brexit kick in the teeth. Climate change, for starters. The only way I can agree with this vote is if you convince me it is too late and England was right to dash for the lifeboat.
Me? I'm a lunatic clinging to hope for the future of homo sapiens. I even hope that slashdot could get better. ROFLMAO.