I love how whataboutism is used to gloss over the very real cultural destruction that the holy warriors of Islam visited on the nations and peoples they conquered.
I love how you feel that you are that you are entitled to point out the sins of Islam but that it is unfair if you are outed as a hypocrite in light of the past transgressions of your own people and Judeo/Christian religion. You criticising Islam for the Islamic conquest is like a shoplifter calling a purse snatcher a thief. What was it Jesus Christ said?.... Ah, yes: "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone...", you must come from the only nation in the world who never attacked and destroyed other cultures to enrich it self since you feel yourself so without sin that you are entitled to throw stones. The Islamic conquest was no better or worse than the Germanic takeover of the Roman West. The United States, Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Russia,... etc... none of these countries are in any position to criticise the Islamic conquest without answering some very embarrassing questions about their own past.
How much is "Islamic" and how much is stolen from cultures that they have destroyed? For example "islamic" arches can clearly be seen in pre-islamic Persia. You will fins that most things that Muslims claim to have invented turn out to be "we destroyed this library but copied this bit"
For one thing, according to some interpretations of the Koran Islam does not allow it's followers to create images of living creatures which has led to a lot of artistic energy and creativity being poured into geometric artwork and the mathematics of geometry. Secondly, the pre-Islamic cultures you cite (Persia in this case) are the same cultures that contributed to the development of geometric art after they converted to Islam. There was no destruction of cultures to speak of, just a change of religion and a change of management much like there was when the Roman empire disintegrated in Europe. Germanic kings took over from Roman administrators and people largely welcomed them despite their occasional brutality because as a general rule they did a better job of defending the population than corrupt and incompetent Roman governors had and the new rulers for the most part just took over the existing Roman institutions and ran them more efficiently and with much less corruption rather than laying waste to everything in their path. The same applies to the Islamic conquest of the orient in many cases. As for stealing from cultures you destroyed, odds are you are either an American, and Americans destroyed thousands of cultures in order to steal a continent from hem or a Brit who did the same to build an empire so please try not to throw stones, you live in a glass house.
It makes me feel safe knowing that no matter how evil a killer robot they make, it can be remotely hacked in about 3 seconds by any idiot with a webbrowser.
In Putin's Russia the evil killer AI robot hacks you!
It's too quiet. How can pedestrians keep being absorbed in their smartphones if you can't hear traffic anymore over the music you're playing on your headphones?
Just do what electric car manufacturers are already doing, put some speakers on the car and play a distinct whizzing noise when the vehicle is moving that intensifies when the driver steps on the accelerator. If pedestrians smartphone zombies become a major problem we can always take the pedestrian detection AI from self driving cars, install it in these trucks and have it play a very loud recording of a shrill female voice yelling in a cranky tone of voice (think Michelle Wolf) the words: "LOOOK OUT!!!...you brainless smartphone zombie!" every time one of them seems likely to wander onto the road.
I'm job-seeking right now and they always ask. ALWAYS.
I love how this was passed thru (the law) because of male/female pay issues.
the REAL issue is that it makes negotiating a one-way street, with the company having all the power and you have nearly none.
A) Everybody fibs about that anyway because your former employer is not going to answer questions about your previous pay from a competitor anyway.
B) That's what unions were for before Reagan/Thatcher and the rest of the neocon free market mafia convinced the working man that unions are the librul commie spawn of Lucifer. I countries where they still have strong unions the unions will get you a lawyer if you get involved in a lawsuit with an employer... well, at least they do where I come from.
all of a sudden. What happened to "I've got nothing to hide."?
I expect the banks are quite rightly concerned the Russians will use the data on their customer's tax cheating as 'kompromat' to blackmail them but then to be fair to the banks they've never pretended they have nothing to hide which is why we have had the concept of bank secrecy almost as long as we've had banks. I expect expect many other kinds of companies are concerned with trade secrets escaping to Russia which I'd think is a legitimate concern. A more interesting question to ask, however, is does anybody want to bet that the US Government hasn't bullied half of Silicone Valley to do the same with everything from anti-virus software through popular office suites to fruit ninja games?
So... You use pro-Hillary propaganda to smear Trump, anti-Trump violence to smear Trump, and pro-Trump activists to smear Trump.
You've invented a scenario in which you and your team are never responsible for any of the legitimately shitty things you have done. You're trying to dodge responsibility for your humiliating loss, your violent fascism, your support of hate groups like BLM, and your Clinton/Russian bribery collusion. You think that pointing and shrieking at Trump will distract us. It won't.
You are a sniveling coward, an intellectual weakling, and a traitor deserving execution.
You are an Anonymous Coward in real life too aren't you?
May I point out that Hillary was also for Black Lives Matter and Blacktivist, the two groups being paid to protest?
... and everything that the GOP, Trump and Bannon manage to screw up is actually clever sabotage funded by George Soros. Oh, and did you know that Soros is the leader of the Illuminati and a secret worshipper of Satan whose has been working in secret for decades to destroy Christian conservatism in the USA and replace it with Islam?
I asked for turn by turn directions to Mars, and it took me to Elon Musk's estate?
Funny, I asked the same question and the hit Google gave me was a cul-de-sac in a little village south of Lyon in France.
Mercury, the hit Google gave me was a tour operator in San Francisco
Venus, the hit Google gave me was... uhumm... a brothel in Berlin.
Saturn, the hit Google gave me was Saturn Electronics in Belchford, UK.
Neptune, the hit Google gave me was the Neptune hotel, in Weybridge, London, UK.
Uranus, Aapparently there is a place in Paris called IBM Uranus.
It's easier to take off gloves for a quick auth than it is a hat, scarf, sunglasses, etc.
With modern face recognition algorithms hats are not much of an issue unless you extend 'hat' to include ski masks and riot police helmets. Sunglasses can be an issue, but worst case you can train the face ID to recognise your face with and without glasses just like you can program multiple fingers into your thumbprint sensor or even the same finger multiple times. As for scarves, how hard is it to pull down your scarf for a sec to access your phone?.. or even take off your shades and pull down your scarf?... even that probably takes less time than it takes to pull off your glove and put it back on.
There could never be any plausible malicious intent by people in Cuba against U.S. Embassy personnel. There's just no precedent and no motive.
The Cuban people were NOT indoctrinated for years to view U.S. Government entities as their enemy. There is NO possibility that rogue elements within Cuban society might be doing this 'For Fidel' out of ideological zeal.
Nope. None of that should even be considered.
I'm pretty sure they US public has been more thoroughly indoctrinated to view Cuba as the spawn of Satan by the US media than the Cuban government could ever hope to indoctrinate the Cuban people to view the US as a mere 'enemy'. I attribute this largely to the fact that the average Cuban is better educated and generally better informed than the average American.
The idea that everybody needs to learn to code is ridiculous. It's like saying that everybody needs to learn how to build a house, or how to build a car, etc.
Just like learning basic carpentry or basic auto repair is a useful life skill, so are basic computer skills. But if programming isn't your thing, then learning it isn't going to do you a lot of good in your life.
That maybe true but he still has a point. People who think they can pull off something like Brexit or MAGA, seal their borders, isolate themselves from the outside world and that this will bring a golden flood of high paying jobs for unskilled labour are deluding themselves even if it is an idea that is extremely to sell. Getting a higher level education is essential, building up your national education system is essential to national success in 21st century and is more important that practically anything else a nation can do. Trying to fix national finances by making extensive cuts in the education system like the British are doing, thus wrecking it (as the US is doing for different reasons, i.e. to pander to religious nut-bags and paddlers of predatory student loans) is a road that leads to nowhere.
But the take-home lesson here shouldn't be that if you avoid those you're good. The lesson is that in the end, you're taking every provider's word for security. Certainly some are good and some aren't, but there is literally no way for you to be able to tell which ones are good.
I'd primarily use a VPN provider to make life harder for the RIAA, MPAA, Sony, HBO, and the rest of that ilk and to make it harder for them to identify me and then sue me for damages because they themselves forced me to torrent their movies and music because of their own artificial trade barriers (and I'd preferably use a VPN service headquartered in Europe to make it that little bit harder since most of these corps are US based which significantly increases the legal complexities). I have no delusions about a simple VPN service shielding me from a determined FBI/CIA/MI6/BND/FSB/NSA/DGSE effort to identify me. If those guys really want you, they are going to get you, just ask Osama.
I...wouldn't exactly...want to be Puerto Rico trying to float the bonds required to build that shiny new infrastructure; but it is worth noting that their current(or pre-getting-destroyed) grid was actually absurdly skewed toward expensive fuels.
Per EIA electricity production was almost 50% oil, 34% natural gas, 17% coal, 2% misc renewables.
That is a really, really, lousy set of numbers when you are already a poor island with relatively high transportation costs. Even if you don't give a damn about the environment, oil is silly expensive compared to coal as a base load option; and natural gas has always been quite versatile in terms of spinup/spindown and plant construction; plus it has gotten crazy cheap of late.
Aside from trying to get the anachronistic legal situation that ruins their transport costs sorted out; that's a generating situation ripe to be replaced by something cheaper; and a time when it already needs substantial repair and/or replacement is a convenient opportunity.
I was trying to be sarcastic there but apparently there are a lot of people on Slashdot today who need to look sarcasm up on Wikipedia. My point is that if your energy infrastructure is a smouldering pile of ruins you are going to have to buy a shiny new infrastructure anyway so why not go for Musk's option? If any of these corporate types can be persuaded to do this at a price that Puerto Rico's purse can handle it is Musk. In fact I think Musk might be persuaded to do the whole thing at something close to cost just so he can use Puerto Rico as a showcase for what his tech can do on a large scale. I somehow don't see Big Coal, Oil & Gas doing anything other than profiting massively off of any reconstruction in Puerto Rico with the usual corruption and massive waste of taxpayer money. Either way, Puerto Ricans are going to have to rebuild their infrastructure. The problem with that is that in many ways Puerto Rico is the USA's Greece and the US has made the same mistake as the EU did dealing with Greece which is that they saddled the taxpayers there with massive debts in order to ensure that a bunch of bankers don't have to suffer the consequences of making stupid investments. In order for reconstruction in Puerto Rico to happen the US Government is first going to have to see to it that a substantial part of Puerto Ricos debt is written off and that means (Shock!! HORROR!!!) that the carrion eaters of Wall Street will finally have to be punished for making stupid investment decisions a-la the old Republicam mantra: 'Let fail what is destined to fail'. Not that I'm holding my breath expecting a bunch of Republicans to live up to their own ideals (any more than I'd trust the Corporate Democrats to do that, but It's the Reps. not the Dems. who own Congress and the White House at the moment so the onus is on the Reps.). If there is no debt write-off, all Puerto Ricans can look forward to is a few decades of Baghdad style electricity rationing and exorbitant bills for maintaining and feeding antiquated and patched up petroleum and coal plants with fuel so that Wall Street bankers and Big Coal, Oil and Gas can profit from Puerto Rico's misery.
In other news Elon Musk doesn't understand being poor.
Why? Are Puerto Ricans so poor that they wouldn't be able to afford to purchase adequate supplies of sun and wind to generate power with? I can see how that would be a valid point in a world where petroleum, natural gas and coal are available free of charge.
In Europe you generally don't see headlines about how some big corporation just reported its largest profit in its entire history and is also laying off thousands of workers.
Biggest corporate news out of Europe, about European company, that I can think about in past couple years is Volkswagen and their vast emissions scandal.
Which is all the more ironic coming from Europe, given the 'Democratic Socialists' over there are so climate-woke and eco-conscious compared to us not-any-brand of socialist coal-burner Americans who allegedly make crappy sooty cars...but invented Tesla and autonomous driving anyways just for kicks.
I think the stereotypes you subscribe to aren't working.
Funny, what I remember most is a bunch of headlines coming out of Europe about a string of corporations being punished by the EU for abusive practices like using their dominant market position to stifle competition, price fixing and general anti-trust activities. The latest examples are Microsoft and Google which, incidentally, are still free to continue those abusive practices in the USA where the government sees nothing wrong with corporations abusing monopolies to screw the public. Still, these fines are often used by a certain species of US commentators to claim the EU preferentially victimises US corporations which is bullshit. Some other greedy corporations honoured by the EU with major fines include: Intel, Telefonica, Servier, Volvo, MAN, Volvo/Renault, Daimler, Iveco, DAF, Scania, Asahi, Pilkington, Saint-Gobain, Soliver, Sony, Qualcomm, Chunghwa, LG Electronics, Philips and Samsung SDI, Panasonic, Toshiba and Facebook to name a few examples. That list is not exactly dominated by US corporations. The EU seems to pretty evenhanded when it comes to handing out tough love. Oh... I doubt Apple will remain the only prominent name on the back-taxes to-do list for long.
EU as a whole, and most member and quasi-member nations, believe in social welfare, not corporate welfare. The US is different in this regard. Americans are against social welfare, but very much in favor of corporate welfare, under the misguided belief that this will translate into jobs.
It doesn't of course. Less taxes means more profits but more profits doesn't lead to more jobs. But since Americans are against social welfare, they have a comparatively poor public education system, so it's hardly surprising that the average american voter can not understand much more than rudimentary economics. Just look at how much they confuse the concept of a government budget with that of their own personal budget. Utterly senseless.
You left out that if you lower the taxes which means more profits those profits get exported, instantly, to tax havens like Panama using creative bookkeeping methods where they further increase the estimated 29 trillion dollars kept in such tax havens. The US state of Kansas is a good example of this, they forged ahead with an experiment in massive tax cutting for the wealthy based on the notion that it would cause an increase in investment in the local economy and shrink government... it didn't. Rich people took the money they saved on taxes into out of state tax havens, state revenues fell off a cliff but since even the staunchest of conservatives did not want to make any cuts government did not shrink so they propped up the state of Kansas with borrowing. Republican Governor Sam Brownback is now watching his much lauded (by ultra conservatives) regimen of tax cuts being rolled back by, of all things, a moderate Republican-Democratic coalition which is now at war with Brownback trying to pass a veto proof income tax increase. Now try to imagine what kind of a raging dumpster fire of a fucking mess Brownback had to make of Kansas (or any American state for that matter) to motivate Republicans and Democrats to get together and raise taxes.
According To Star Trek: Discovery, Starfleet Still Runs Microsoft Windows
Better headline: "Whoever creates the tech props for Star Trek: Discovery has a wicked sense of humour" (assuming this really is decompiled Stuxnet code)
The company has decided to remove the aging port from its latest handsets.
That's ageism!
Seriously though, what the fuck is wrong with companies? The headphone jack still works, digital wireless headphones have to use audio compression to have enough bandwidth and we're already listening to compressed audio in the first place. Are all new engineers deaf?
No, it's just that many people don't realise that the crappy earbuds that ship with their phones have lousy audio quality (go read some Amazon headphone reviews) and if they do know they just don't give enough of a shit to give up the convenience of earbuds to go chasing after something better because that means buying bulkier headphones, never mind chasing after the the 'live concert quality' audio which is the only thing that will satisfy a true audiophile.
My car has aux in. They talk about how 3.5mm Jack's are crap and wear out. Well now I'm going to wear out my charging port and turn my phone into a paper weight. I think about it every time I plug my phone in to it.
Who ever talked about the 3.5mm jack wearing out? My problem is that the dam chord attached to it succumbs to metal fatigue but then again that is that is also a problem with micro USB, mini USB, USB-A, USB-C, Lightning connectors, PC laptop power connectors,... and basically anything else that connects to my computer/cell-phone/music-player and that has a thin and dainty chord.
Sucks to get stuck with Bluetooth if you want to travel, though... Many overseas airlines will not allow use of Bluetooth headphones...
Seriously? You can get an adapter for peanuts and use any 3,5mm headphones you happen to have laying around your house. I've got literally two dozen earbuds and half a dozen regular ones all with the beloved 3,5mm jack.
Wikipedia suggests that Russia spoofs GPS whenever Putin is in the area.
No! No hack, no spoof. Putin Strong, like bull. Forceful personality warps space around him. West just jealous they not have such leader.
That's nothing! Our great leader has a furry alien parasite on his head that makes him hyper intelligent, the greatest negotiator of all time, a business genius without peer and he has good genes... good genes, great genes, absolutely amazing, wonderful genes, he is always a winner and his eloquence warps reality itself into... an alternate reality, of... alternative facts... and he gets two scoops of ice cream because he's an alpha male, not a one scoop pyjama boy.
And we have been doing this for ages. The only difference is that before, we had no idea what we were doing. We looked for random changes caused by cosmic rays etc. in living things; we even put seeds under an X-Ray (or beta, or gamma-rays) to make random changes in the genetics; or we cross-bread two different plants, producing a random mix of genes that often was not viable of itself,but we could harvest the germ and make it grow outside the seed.
All this we do, and they even get to call the results of this random, uncontrolled gene editing 'organic'.
The difference is that now, we are making single changes that we have an ability to know and predict the results of. This is a much, much safer form of genetic modification than what we have been doing for centures.
For one thing I'm pretty sure that people breeding domestic animals had a pretty clear idea of what they were doing and what goals they wanted to achieve even if they did not understand the underlying mechanism. Portraying them as stupid bumbling barbarians making random modifications with no logic or method is incorrect. As for:
This is a much, much safer form of genetic modification than what we have been doing for centures.
They said something similar about every single time they messed with an ecosystem and completely fucked up. They also said this when they wanted to use nuclear weapons as demolition explosives to dig harbours, mines, canals and huge water reservoirs. Today the thought of detonating a 1 megaton nuclear explosive to create an artificial lake makes us cringe. Combine scientists with a god complex, greedy corporate executives with flexible morals and corrupt/gullible politicians and disaster follows. Call it by Freischutz's 1st law: "If something can be completely fucked up beyond all recognition with catastrophic consequences, eventually some arrogant fucktard will fuck it up beyond all recognition with catastrophic consequences" (witness the US presidency). Plus, this is just going to get worse, at first it's single modifications, then multiple complex ones, then completely re-coding the entire genome of some organism to create a new species and that is where the real potential is for the shit to hit the fan, when scientists start making too many too extensive modifications to an insanely complex system that they don't really understand and where there are simply too many ways for things to go FUBAR. Eliminating mosquito is bad enough. They may be really irritating little fuckers and spreader of disease but mosquitoes are also a major part of any ecosystem in which they exist and if you inadvertently make your GM'ed mosquito effort too aggressive and collapse the mosquito population you will cause some major carnage, not just mass death of fish, other insects that feed on mosquitoes but also the animals that feed on those other insects and that creates an existential dilemma for any humans who derive their living from hunting/catching/farming fish and birds.
Slashdot Mirror
I love how whataboutism is used to gloss over the very real cultural destruction that the holy warriors of Islam visited on the nations and peoples they conquered.
I love how you feel that you are that you are entitled to point out the sins of Islam but that it is unfair if you are outed as a hypocrite in light of the past transgressions of your own people and Judeo/Christian religion. You criticising Islam for the Islamic conquest is like a shoplifter calling a purse snatcher a thief. What was it Jesus Christ said? .... Ah, yes: "He that is without sin among you, let him first cast a stone...", you must come from the only nation in the world who never attacked and destroyed other cultures to enrich it self since you feel yourself so without sin that you are entitled to throw stones. The Islamic conquest was no better or worse than the Germanic takeover of the Roman West. The United States, Britain, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, Portugal, Russia, ... etc... none of these countries are in any position to criticise the Islamic conquest without answering some very embarrassing questions about their own past.
How much is "Islamic" and how much is stolen from cultures that they have destroyed? For example "islamic" arches can clearly be seen in pre-islamic Persia. You will fins that most things that Muslims claim to have invented turn out to be "we destroyed this library but copied this bit"
For one thing, according to some interpretations of the Koran Islam does not allow it's followers to create images of living creatures which has led to a lot of artistic energy and creativity being poured into geometric artwork and the mathematics of geometry. Secondly, the pre-Islamic cultures you cite (Persia in this case) are the same cultures that contributed to the development of geometric art after they converted to Islam. There was no destruction of cultures to speak of, just a change of religion and a change of management much like there was when the Roman empire disintegrated in Europe. Germanic kings took over from Roman administrators and people largely welcomed them despite their occasional brutality because as a general rule they did a better job of defending the population than corrupt and incompetent Roman governors had and the new rulers for the most part just took over the existing Roman institutions and ran them more efficiently and with much less corruption rather than laying waste to everything in their path. The same applies to the Islamic conquest of the orient in many cases. As for stealing from cultures you destroyed, odds are you are either an American, and Americans destroyed thousands of cultures in order to steal a continent from hem or a Brit who did the same to build an empire so please try not to throw stones, you live in a glass house.
... Jeremy Clarkson isn't going to like this.
It makes me feel safe knowing that no matter how evil a killer robot they make, it can be remotely hacked in about 3 seconds by any idiot with a webbrowser.
In Putin's Russia the evil killer AI robot hacks you!
It's too quiet. How can pedestrians keep being absorbed in their smartphones if you can't hear traffic anymore over the music you're playing on your headphones?
Just do what electric car manufacturers are already doing, put some speakers on the car and play a distinct whizzing noise when the vehicle is moving that intensifies when the driver steps on the accelerator. If pedestrians smartphone zombies become a major problem we can always take the pedestrian detection AI from self driving cars, install it in these trucks and have it play a very loud recording of a shrill female voice yelling in a cranky tone of voice (think Michelle Wolf) the words: "LOOOK OUT!!! ...you brainless smartphone zombie!" every time one of them seems likely to wander onto the road.
I'm job-seeking right now and they always ask. ALWAYS.
I love how this was passed thru (the law) because of male/female pay issues.
the REAL issue is that it makes negotiating a one-way street, with the company having all the power and you have nearly none.
A) Everybody fibs about that anyway because your former employer is not going to answer questions about your previous pay from a competitor anyway. ... well, at least they do where I come from.
B) That's what unions were for before Reagan/Thatcher and the rest of the neocon free market mafia convinced the working man that unions are the librul commie spawn of Lucifer. I countries where they still have strong unions the unions will get you a lawyer if you get involved in a lawsuit with an employer
all of a sudden. What happened to "I've got nothing to hide."?
I expect the banks are quite rightly concerned the Russians will use the data on their customer's tax cheating as 'kompromat' to blackmail them but then to be fair to the banks they've never pretended they have nothing to hide which is why we have had the concept of bank secrecy almost as long as we've had banks. I expect expect many other kinds of companies are concerned with trade secrets escaping to Russia which I'd think is a legitimate concern. A more interesting question to ask, however, is does anybody want to bet that the US Government hasn't bullied half of Silicone Valley to do the same with everything from anti-virus software through popular office suites to fruit ninja games?
So... You use pro-Hillary propaganda to smear Trump, anti-Trump violence to smear Trump, and pro-Trump activists to smear Trump.
You've invented a scenario in which you and your team are never responsible for any of the legitimately shitty things you have done. You're trying to dodge responsibility for your humiliating loss, your violent fascism, your support of hate groups like BLM, and your Clinton/Russian bribery collusion. You think that pointing and shrieking at Trump will distract us. It won't.
You are a sniveling coward, an intellectual weakling, and a traitor deserving execution.
You are an Anonymous Coward in real life too aren't you?
May I point out that Hillary was also for Black Lives Matter and Blacktivist, the two groups being paid to protest?
... and everything that the GOP, Trump and Bannon manage to screw up is actually clever sabotage funded by George Soros. Oh, and did you know that Soros is the leader of the Illuminati and a secret worshipper of Satan whose has been working in secret for decades to destroy Christian conservatism in the USA and replace it with Islam?
I asked for turn by turn directions to Mars, and it took me to Elon Musk's estate?
Funny, I asked the same question and the hit Google gave me was a cul-de-sac in a little village south of Lyon in France. ... uhumm... a brothel in Berlin.
Mercury, the hit Google gave me was a tour operator in San Francisco
Venus, the hit Google gave me was
Saturn, the hit Google gave me was Saturn Electronics in Belchford, UK.
Neptune, the hit Google gave me was the Neptune hotel, in Weybridge, London, UK.
Uranus, Aapparently there is a place in Paris called IBM Uranus.
It's easier to take off gloves for a quick auth than it is a hat, scarf, sunglasses, etc.
With modern face recognition algorithms hats are not much of an issue unless you extend 'hat' to include ski masks and riot police helmets. Sunglasses can be an issue, but worst case you can train the face ID to recognise your face with and without glasses just like you can program multiple fingers into your thumbprint sensor or even the same finger multiple times. As for scarves, how hard is it to pull down your scarf for a sec to access your phone? .. or even take off your shades and pull down your scarf? ... even that probably takes less time than it takes to pull off your glove and put it back on.
There could never be any plausible malicious intent by people in Cuba against U.S. Embassy personnel. There's just no precedent and no motive.
The Cuban people were NOT indoctrinated for years to view U.S. Government entities as their enemy. There is NO possibility that rogue elements within Cuban society might be doing this 'For Fidel' out of ideological zeal.
Nope. None of that should even be considered.
I'm pretty sure they US public has been more thoroughly indoctrinated to view Cuba as the spawn of Satan by the US media than the Cuban government could ever hope to indoctrinate the Cuban people to view the US as a mere 'enemy'. I attribute this largely to the fact that the average Cuban is better educated and generally better informed than the average American.
The idea that everybody needs to learn to code is ridiculous. It's like saying that everybody needs to learn how to build a house, or how to build a car, etc.
Just like learning basic carpentry or basic auto repair is a useful life skill, so are basic computer skills. But if programming isn't your thing, then learning it isn't going to do you a lot of good in your life.
That maybe true but he still has a point. People who think they can pull off something like Brexit or MAGA, seal their borders, isolate themselves from the outside world and that this will bring a golden flood of high paying jobs for unskilled labour are deluding themselves even if it is an idea that is extremely to sell. Getting a higher level education is essential, building up your national education system is essential to national success in 21st century and is more important that practically anything else a nation can do. Trying to fix national finances by making extensive cuts in the education system like the British are doing, thus wrecking it (as the US is doing for different reasons, i.e. to pander to religious nut-bags and paddlers of predatory student loans) is a road that leads to nowhere.
And WANSecurity.
But the take-home lesson here shouldn't be that if you avoid those you're good. The lesson is that in the end, you're taking every provider's word for security. Certainly some are good and some aren't, but there is literally no way for you to be able to tell which ones are good.
I'd primarily use a VPN provider to make life harder for the RIAA, MPAA, Sony, HBO, and the rest of that ilk and to make it harder for them to identify me and then sue me for damages because they themselves forced me to torrent their movies and music because of their own artificial trade barriers (and I'd preferably use a VPN service headquartered in Europe to make it that little bit harder since most of these corps are US based which significantly increases the legal complexities). I have no delusions about a simple VPN service shielding me from a determined FBI/CIA/MI6/BND/FSB/NSA/DGSE effort to identify me. If those guys really want you, they are going to get you, just ask Osama.
GM can't do it.
...so they did the next best thing which is to launch whiny ad hominem attacks on Tesla and Musk.
I...wouldn't exactly...want to be Puerto Rico trying to float the bonds required to build that shiny new infrastructure; but it is worth noting that their current(or pre-getting-destroyed) grid was actually absurdly skewed toward expensive fuels. Per EIA electricity production was almost 50% oil, 34% natural gas, 17% coal, 2% misc renewables. That is a really, really, lousy set of numbers when you are already a poor island with relatively high transportation costs. Even if you don't give a damn about the environment, oil is silly expensive compared to coal as a base load option; and natural gas has always been quite versatile in terms of spinup/spindown and plant construction; plus it has gotten crazy cheap of late. Aside from trying to get the anachronistic legal situation that ruins their transport costs sorted out; that's a generating situation ripe to be replaced by something cheaper; and a time when it already needs substantial repair and/or replacement is a convenient opportunity.
I was trying to be sarcastic there but apparently there are a lot of people on Slashdot today who need to look sarcasm up on Wikipedia. My point is that if your energy infrastructure is a smouldering pile of ruins you are going to have to buy a shiny new infrastructure anyway so why not go for Musk's option? If any of these corporate types can be persuaded to do this at a price that Puerto Rico's purse can handle it is Musk. In fact I think Musk might be persuaded to do the whole thing at something close to cost just so he can use Puerto Rico as a showcase for what his tech can do on a large scale. I somehow don't see Big Coal, Oil & Gas doing anything other than profiting massively off of any reconstruction in Puerto Rico with the usual corruption and massive waste of taxpayer money. Either way, Puerto Ricans are going to have to rebuild their infrastructure. The problem with that is that in many ways Puerto Rico is the USA's Greece and the US has made the same mistake as the EU did dealing with Greece which is that they saddled the taxpayers there with massive debts in order to ensure that a bunch of bankers don't have to suffer the consequences of making stupid investments. In order for reconstruction in Puerto Rico to happen the US Government is first going to have to see to it that a substantial part of Puerto Ricos debt is written off and that means (Shock!! HORROR!!!) that the carrion eaters of Wall Street will finally have to be punished for making stupid investment decisions a-la the old Republicam mantra: 'Let fail what is destined to fail'. Not that I'm holding my breath expecting a bunch of Republicans to live up to their own ideals (any more than I'd trust the Corporate Democrats to do that, but It's the Reps. not the Dems. who own Congress and the White House at the moment so the onus is on the Reps.). If there is no debt write-off, all Puerto Ricans can look forward to is a few decades of Baghdad style electricity rationing and exorbitant bills for maintaining and feeding antiquated and patched up petroleum and coal plants with fuel so that Wall Street bankers and Big Coal, Oil and Gas can profit from Puerto Rico's misery.
In other news Elon Musk doesn't understand being poor.
Why? Are Puerto Ricans so poor that they wouldn't be able to afford to purchase adequate supplies of sun and wind to generate power with? I can see how that would be a valid point in a world where petroleum, natural gas and coal are available free of charge.
In Europe you generally don't see headlines about how some big corporation just reported its largest profit in its entire history and is also laying off thousands of workers.
Biggest corporate news out of Europe, about European company, that I can think about in past couple years is Volkswagen and their vast emissions scandal.
Which is all the more ironic coming from Europe, given the 'Democratic Socialists' over there are so climate-woke and eco-conscious compared to us not-any-brand of socialist coal-burner Americans who allegedly make crappy sooty cars...but invented Tesla and autonomous driving anyways just for kicks.
I think the stereotypes you subscribe to aren't working.
Funny, what I remember most is a bunch of headlines coming out of Europe about a string of corporations being punished by the EU for abusive practices like using their dominant market position to stifle competition, price fixing and general anti-trust activities. The latest examples are Microsoft and Google which, incidentally, are still free to continue those abusive practices in the USA where the government sees nothing wrong with corporations abusing monopolies to screw the public. Still, these fines are often used by a certain species of US commentators to claim the EU preferentially victimises US corporations which is bullshit. Some other greedy corporations honoured by the EU with major fines include: Intel, Telefonica, Servier, Volvo, MAN, Volvo/Renault, Daimler, Iveco, DAF, Scania, Asahi, Pilkington, Saint-Gobain, Soliver, Sony, Qualcomm, Chunghwa, LG Electronics, Philips and Samsung SDI, Panasonic, Toshiba and Facebook to name a few examples. That list is not exactly dominated by US corporations. The EU seems to pretty evenhanded when it comes to handing out tough love. Oh... I doubt Apple will remain the only prominent name on the back-taxes to-do list for long.
EU as a whole, and most member and quasi-member nations, believe in social welfare, not corporate welfare. The US is different in this regard. Americans are against social welfare, but very much in favor of corporate welfare, under the misguided belief that this will translate into jobs.
It doesn't of course. Less taxes means more profits but more profits doesn't lead to more jobs. But since Americans are against social welfare, they have a comparatively poor public education system, so it's hardly surprising that the average american voter can not understand much more than rudimentary economics. Just look at how much they confuse the concept of a government budget with that of their own personal budget. Utterly senseless.
You left out that if you lower the taxes which means more profits those profits get exported, instantly, to tax havens like Panama using creative bookkeeping methods where they further increase the estimated 29 trillion dollars kept in such tax havens. The US state of Kansas is a good example of this, they forged ahead with an experiment in massive tax cutting for the wealthy based on the notion that it would cause an increase in investment in the local economy and shrink government... it didn't. Rich people took the money they saved on taxes into out of state tax havens, state revenues fell off a cliff but since even the staunchest of conservatives did not want to make any cuts government did not shrink so they propped up the state of Kansas with borrowing. Republican Governor Sam Brownback is now watching his much lauded (by ultra conservatives) regimen of tax cuts being rolled back by, of all things, a moderate Republican-Democratic coalition which is now at war with Brownback trying to pass a veto proof income tax increase. Now try to imagine what kind of a raging dumpster fire of a fucking mess Brownback had to make of Kansas (or any American state for that matter) to motivate Republicans and Democrats to get together and raise taxes.
According To Star Trek: Discovery, Starfleet Still Runs Microsoft Windows
Better headline: "Whoever creates the tech props for Star Trek: Discovery has a wicked sense of humour" (assuming this really is decompiled Stuxnet code)
That's ageism! Seriously though, what the fuck is wrong with companies? The headphone jack still works, digital wireless headphones have to use audio compression to have enough bandwidth and we're already listening to compressed audio in the first place. Are all new engineers deaf?
No, it's just that many people don't realise that the crappy earbuds that ship with their phones have lousy audio quality (go read some Amazon headphone reviews) and if they do know they just don't give enough of a shit to give up the convenience of earbuds to go chasing after something better because that means buying bulkier headphones, never mind chasing after the the 'live concert quality' audio which is the only thing that will satisfy a true audiophile.
My car has aux in. They talk about how 3.5mm Jack's are crap and wear out. Well now I'm going to wear out my charging port and turn my phone into a paper weight. I think about it every time I plug my phone in to it.
Who ever talked about the 3.5mm jack wearing out? My problem is that the dam chord attached to it succumbs to metal fatigue but then again that is that is also a problem with micro USB, mini USB, USB-A, USB-C, Lightning connectors, PC laptop power connectors, ... and basically anything else that connects to my computer/cell-phone/music-player and that has a thin and dainty chord.
Sucks to get stuck with Bluetooth if you want to travel, though... Many overseas airlines will not allow use of Bluetooth headphones...
Seriously? You can get an adapter for peanuts and use any 3,5mm headphones you happen to have laying around your house. I've got literally two dozen earbuds and half a dozen regular ones all with the beloved 3,5mm jack.
Wikipedia suggests that Russia spoofs GPS whenever Putin is in the area.
No! No hack, no spoof. Putin Strong, like bull. Forceful personality warps space around him. West just jealous they not have such leader.
That's nothing! Our great leader has a furry alien parasite on his head that makes him hyper intelligent, the greatest negotiator of all time, a business genius without peer and he has good genes... good genes, great genes, absolutely amazing, wonderful genes, he is always a winner and his eloquence warps reality itself into ... an alternate reality, of ... alternative facts... and he gets two scoops of ice cream because he's an alpha male, not a one scoop pyjama boy.
And we have been doing this for ages. The only difference is that before, we had no idea what we were doing. We looked for random changes caused by cosmic rays etc. in living things; we even put seeds under an X-Ray (or beta, or gamma-rays) to make random changes in the genetics; or we cross-bread two different plants, producing a random mix of genes that often was not viable of itself,but we could harvest the germ and make it grow outside the seed.
All this we do, and they even get to call the results of this random, uncontrolled gene editing 'organic'.
The difference is that now, we are making single changes that we have an ability to know and predict the results of. This is a much, much safer form of genetic modification than what we have been doing for centures.
For one thing I'm pretty sure that people breeding domestic animals had a pretty clear idea of what they were doing and what goals they wanted to achieve even if they did not understand the underlying mechanism. Portraying them as stupid bumbling barbarians making random modifications with no logic or method is incorrect. As for:
This is a much, much safer form of genetic modification than what we have been doing for centures.
They said something similar about every single time they messed with an ecosystem and completely fucked up. They also said this when they wanted to use nuclear weapons as demolition explosives to dig harbours, mines, canals and huge water reservoirs. Today the thought of detonating a 1 megaton nuclear explosive to create an artificial lake makes us cringe. Combine scientists with a god complex, greedy corporate executives with flexible morals and corrupt/gullible politicians and disaster follows. Call it by Freischutz's 1st law: "If something can be completely fucked up beyond all recognition with catastrophic consequences, eventually some arrogant fucktard will fuck it up beyond all recognition with catastrophic consequences" (witness the US presidency). Plus, this is just going to get worse, at first it's single modifications, then multiple complex ones, then completely re-coding the entire genome of some organism to create a new species and that is where the real potential is for the shit to hit the fan, when scientists start making too many too extensive modifications to an insanely complex system that they don't really understand and where there are simply too many ways for things to go FUBAR. Eliminating mosquito is bad enough. They may be really irritating little fuckers and spreader of disease but mosquitoes are also a major part of any ecosystem in which they exist and if you inadvertently make your GM'ed mosquito effort too aggressive and collapse the mosquito population you will cause some major carnage, not just mass death of fish, other insects that feed on mosquitoes but also the animals that feed on those other insects and that creates an existential dilemma for any humans who derive their living from hunting/catching/farming fish and birds.