DUH. No shit, but has already been said, that TCP/IP stack doesn't have to be shared with the OS or the applications ("apps"). That's the threat vector, not so much the cell carrier.
Cool. I think I've seen that in many phones, but it makes me nervous that it's just a software "option" rather than physically disconnecting something inside. Plus, in one case the phone was still nagging to "upgrade" it's OS even after I turned off cellular data access. Since the transceiver is all commingled with the voice features, I doubt that a kill switch would be an easy feature to make nowadays.
Your solution also solves another problem. Many commercial vessels cannot dock at most of the worlds ports with arms onboard. However, a smaller vessel could just escort the cargo ship into port then turn around, guns bristling. If ever there was a place to drop a neutron bomb it is Somalia. That would solve the same problem a lot faster. However, we wouldn't want to be hitting Ethiopia or Eritrea next door. They only kill each other (no piracy).
There is, however, the possibility that the phone's VoIP stack could be separated by hardware or software from the general purpose IP stack for apps, though. Just don't allow any socket calls in the phone's OS.
The ability to use modern cell towers (4G vs 3G) which also gives you lower battery usage, but without the need to worry about the phone being hacked over IP or by crappy applications that depend on TCP/IP and thus create lots (how every many apps you use) of tiny attack surfaces on your phone. I don't want apps. I don't want a phone that can do anything but calls and SMS. To that end, it'd also be nice if the call and SMS log wiped itself after about 12 hours. Haven't seen that feature set anywhere, but it's probably because I'm about the only person left on Earth who thinks phone apps are the most laughable useless excuses for applications I've ever seen (and nowhere near worth the security risk).
Yeah, but Dead Kennedy's did their version specifically to highlight the murder of Harvey Milk by a cop who said he ate too many Twinkies. The chorus "I Fought the Law and I won." is much different (as a previous poster pointed out) than The Clash version because DK wanted to highlight the injustice and ridiculous nature of the case. They also say "I AM the law so.... I won." that lyric points to the fact that the murderer was a local cop. Not to say I don't like The Clash's version, it's pretty great, it just didn't fit the occasion I was acting out in.
2. TV without a spy cam for The Man.
3. Phone without a spy cam for The Man.
4. Car without an "eco" nag feature
5. Thermostat without a microphone
6. Car with manual windows
7. Phone without TCP/IP stack that also has modern 4G connectivity and a easily replaced battery
8. Apple or M$ desktop OS without an "App Store"
9. Car without a GPS and camera that will upload to The Man via The Cloud
10. Computer OS from Apple or M$ without "management" features or a forced upgrade death clock.
I know right? Well, that reminds me of the time when I was staffing at Def Con 5 (I think - been years ago) and we were using the Alexis Park Hotel. We warned the owner and staff about idiot script kiddies breaking and "hacking" everything in sight. They laughed and said "We ran this hotel for 20 years with nothing but pen and paper. It was a lot better in most ways. If they break anything, we'll just go right back to that method. It works just fine and it's not hackable." I have to say that I could have kissed the lot of them. They were wonderful people with a refreshingly Luddite confidence I found very practical.
Thanks (I think). I don't like authority, don't like being fleeced and lied to, and I'm not ashamed of driving hard. I don't see that it's trolling, unless you are a cop who likes to fund your city with speeding tickets. If you are, okay yeah, that was trolling. Also, if you are, die slowly on fire, please. Thanks.;-P
I got busted for speeding last year but it was pretty egregious. I peeled out at a light and was going 73 in a 40 MPH zone. The cop who pulled me over was an ass, though, and wrote the ticket for 80. That way it's 40 over the limit and the fines and penalties go way up. So, I asked the cop to see the radar. He flatly refused. I told him I think that's because he didn't have radar and that he was just mad because I had a nice car and I broke traction at the light and he took it as a personal challenge to his authority. To that he blew up, had me exit the car, and searched my shit without my consent/signature, by the way, since I flatly refused consent. So, I'm sitting in the back of his car and he finds my cell phone. The fucker immediately brings it to me to unlock. I was like "Sure, no problem." My phone is a Philips E570 and it doesn't even have a TCP/IP stack (battery lasts 5-6 months, though - yes *months*). My call history was disabled, my texts (which I get few of) were cleared, and there was four fifths of five eighths of FUCK ALL for him to see. So, he gets pissed at that "What kind of shitty phone do you use man?" to which I replied "One that cops can't rape for info, it would seem, officer." So, he then wrote this huge angry, lying, bullshit rant on the ticket for the judge to read. So, I was looking at a fat ticket that could have revoked my license and even possibly jail time. I was pissed because he claimed he found my speed by "pacing" even though it took him forever to catch me nearly a quarter mile behind (he had to escape from behind a bunch of cars, I was in the front rank). There is no way he could have paced me, realistically - he just wanted to write that magical "40MPH Over" on the ticket to try to take my license or fuck me into the stony lonesome jailhouse. So, after a couple of months we go to court. I absolutely refused to go along with any of the charges and kept telling them "let's do a jury trial." Finally, the judge asks me "Why do you want a trial? That costs a lot of time and money and would cost you far more if you lost." I told the judge "Because the officer is lying and I can't stand it. It's also because I don't believe you can find seven people in this town who would agree with the cops that fleece us all day." The judge was pretty angry at that and gave me a lecture about how wonderful the pigs are and what great civil servants they are. So, I shrugged that off, too and said "Then let's do a trial." My lawyer kept having to interrupt and say things like "... uhm.. I mean.. that is... if we can't come to another agreement or set of charges." I had all kinds of photos of the area where I peeled out. Documentation showing my car was rear wheel drive and there was a 15% grade causing it to easily break traction taking off. The jury would have told the DA to fuck herself, I'm pretty sure and the bitch knew it. So, in the end after all the bullshit lectures and down-talking to me, you know what they got me on (because I agreed) ? Failure to use turn signal. I piddly $35 ticket and a 2 point violation only (wrist slap). The judge was FURIOUS and told me I'd better hope I don't have any more cases come up with him. Then as I paid my $35 at the fine window and the officer was walking off I started singing Dead Kennedy's "I Fought the Law and I WON." and giggling like a 10 year old girl. He looked like he wanted to fucking shoot me in the face. I can't think of too many more satisfying situations. It fucking rocked. I still peel out at that light to this day. Fuck the police.
Oh and Satan called. He promised not to roast your soul in hell for all eternity if you'll just buy a smart hub, smart thermostat, smart TV, and smart phone. I swear he PROMISED!
So, did they take out the microphone? Didn't think so. Of course it's just like other "smart displays". It's just that people are so sick to death of being spied on and used for research and ad revenue the only play for trust they had left was to drop the camera. Didn't you see Facebook make a similar play by promising not to spy on video calls. Yeah, this evil global megacorp "promised", hehe. *belly laugh* Gets me every time. Let's just put it this way, if you are dumb enough to buy a "smart" anything, you deserve whatever you get: spying, leaking, dehumanizing devices that link you to the evilsphere.
One group of asshole corporate-feudalists are saying another group of asshole corporete-feudalists aren't trustworthy? Well, did it ever occur to folks that the whole system SSL established is based on one group of bean counting weasels telling other weasels about "trust". Mother fucking corporations shouldn't be even allowed to utter or write the word "trust". There is nobody I trust less, and their mewling about "Hey, they aren't trustworthy!" means four fifths of five-eighths of fuck all to me. The whole system of trust in SSL is fucking BROKEN. I don't trust any CA to do proper due-dilligence. They are all cheap and don't do a good job (as someone who has done an awful lot of CSRs). They don't even do an adequate job. Crowd sourcing trust from someone other than a corporate jackbooted firm like Verisign/Symantec would be welcome.
DragonflyBSD is cool. I hate how Google likes to take names from other projects without even looking. Then they do some kind of shitty manuever like this and folks think "That sucks!" Well, DragonflyBSD doesn't suck. It's HAMMER file system is very functional and has cutting edge features.
One time I took a friend to the ER and she wasn't injured and couldn't really represent herself. The nurse who was going to check us in couldn't get the job done because her tablet kept getting a BSOD. All IT systems can go down, but goddamn, wouldn't you think that having Windows in the ER would be beyond "asking for it" ? I'm not the biggest fan of AIX, but at least the other ER I took her to could check her in, they used an AIX based patient system. Unbelievable. I bet they have insecure-as-hell Android and iOS systems handling patient records, too. What's the advantage of that? Nurses can take selfies while the system is down (or being spied on by Russians and Chinese) ?
First off, fuck you. Second, that study is all you got after throwing all those grenades? What a load of shit, Coward. That fucking study has 30 people in it. What about the other 174,200 people in the USA alone that aren't getting your wonder-cure? If it's a cure, why didn't anyone else pick up on that, or is everyone else just not as smart as you? It's full of shit AC's like you that need to stay the fuck off the cain and/.
AROS is a failure. There are like two guys working in the wilderness on it. MorphOS and AmigaOS v4.x both did a bunch of un-Amiga things like adopt Unix-like programming APIs. Now, don't get me wrong. I *love* Unixy stuff. However, it's just not appropriate for the Amiga. It was always meant to be a lean and mean close to the metal programming platform. The custom chips allow you to take control of the hardware in surprisingly straightforward ways. If you have some cop following you around everywhere policing all your memory usage, it's great for stability, but blows for performance. Newer hardware using the PPC is utter trash and total blasphemy against the 68k CISC ISA, too. The PPC sucked for ASM coders and MOS + AOS4 both embraced the new school "let's wrap everything in bubble wrap" philosophy. Yes, it makes them more stable and easier to port things like web browsers over to. However, it also takes away from their microcomputer appeal and hardware hackability. All the newschool Amigas feel sterile and neutered. There isn't anything really cool about them as they just look like low-powered PCs with commodity hardware. To some, that's exactly what they wanted. To others, it sucks balls. What we really need is for a braver group of coders to do a clean room implementation of AmigaOS 3.1 which was leaked years ago. Just ignore Hyperion (they are in.nl anyway). Let them threaten to sue and freak out. They've come with too little WAY too late. AmigaOS doesn't need to morph into Ubuntu, it needs to embrace the 3.x roots that made the Amiga "a console with a keyboard" not "just another PC". I have tried to re-write parts of the OS myself, but it's a HUGE job and I get stuck on the BCPL linker crap every time.
Haage & Partner released AmigaOS 3.9 in the 90's which definitely was an upgrade to 3.1. It had a much better version of the formatting and partitioning tools. It also had a few updates to the user interface and the text to speech voice phonemes were updated. So, it sounded different when you told it to say "This is Amiga speaking." Now, this update is from Hyperion. I haven't seen it yet, but I'm highly suspicious (but nonetheless curious). They have a fairly shady and shaky claim to rights to AmigaOS and Kickstart. However, they are very *loud* about those claims. Notice even in the announcement they want you to know they are the *sole* IP holder. I'm not a lawyer, but Hyperion has always seemed like a jumped up small-game company grabbing for lost Amiga glory. It's rumored that they bought the IP for Kickstart for $1 between a couple of friends. There are several other IP holders such as Cloanto in Italy and a few ex-licensees (or so they claim) in the USA too. One more colorful guy was an ex-trucker who wanted to resurrect the Amiga as a PC (the horror! and no 68k - blasphemer!). Who knows what lost legal deals ESCOM and Gateway did when they owned, the IP, too. The Amiga historical landscape is littered with people claiming to own the various critical trademarks such as AmigaOS, Amiga, Kickstart, and so forth. Nobody will know for sure until there is a knock down drag-out lawsuit and somebody goes home crying. The problem is, there is so few bucks left to make it's not worth the hassle. The Vampire Amiga folks are doing amazing things with their FPGA Apollo 68080 core. I run one in an Amiga 500 and it takes all comers. Not everything is perfect or stable, but it gives you RTG, upgraded sound, HDMI output, half a gig of RAM (a lot for Amiga apps), wifi, MicroSD storage, IDE, and a smoking fast processor that will eat the 68060 alive many times over. Highly recommended.
So, they cured cancer/malaria/AIDS in Europe? Oh, wait, you spouted some ridiculous bullshit about "life expectancy" instead of any real evidence or thought. I've lived in Europe before myself (Norway). I remember people waiting months to see a specialist, in the second richest country (per capita) in Europe. So, yeah, they couldn't figure out the billing or the actual care, either. I'm not exactly itching to sign onto that garbage. The only difference between strutting doctors that are full of shit over their non-accomplishments in the USA versus Europe is how much less they have to work in Europe.
Can medicine not actually *cure* anything anymore? This seems like something someone should have got a pat on the head and a "good job" from their research lead on, not a fuxxoring Nobel Prize. Note that they didn't give one in literature this year. Good. When there aren't Nobel-worth advances, then there shouldn't be Nobel prizes. Giving them out anyway waters them down (as if the stupid Peace Prizes to genocidal politicians weren't bad enough). From my lay perspective medical advances in the last 30 years have been weak, AF. They haven't really cured anything or significantly made people healthier or live longer. The only thing they seem to have become really really good at is billing.
The fundamental mismatch here is that you give a fuck what "consumers" want/need and I only care about what works for me. I don't give half a fuck to justify my desktop paradigm or whatever. I'm glad "users" have a place to go that doesn't pollute my space. Systemd is a great example of what happens when you let GNOME / GUI assholes who drone on about "consumers" try to tweak the operating system. It's funny they always use the same examples, too: Plug and Play and problems with hibernation/sleep. Both of those things have worked for me for at least a decade and probably a lot longer than that. They aren't reasons to break the Philosophy or swallow a poison pill like systemd/journald. You repeatedly carry the torch for "the consumer" (some kind of nebulous non-technical user, from your descriptions). I don't care if the consumer buys a $99 laptop and sets themselves on fire. In fact, as long as they could do it quietly, that might be preferred. All they seem to do is ruin shit in the end and you'll have to pardon me if I don't give a fuck about their "needs" for some handholding GUI bullshit to insure they don't have to learn anything.
I'm a frequent user of Fluxbox, Blackbox, OpenBox, WindowMaker, AwesomeWM, and Enlightenment. Over the years, I've seen them do some nice things that it took both Windows and MacOS many years to duplicate (virtual desktops with independent contexts and fast switching between them with hotkeys for example). Running on a lot of old hardware, I appreciate the 10MB or so that most of them occupy. I own several macs of various stripes and vintages and I have since the 1980's. So, I'm not an Apple hater. I will grant that they do a good job of desktop integration and have a lot of fans. However, I think you are being a bit rough on the Unix desktop interfaces et al. The ones I use aren't trying to appeal to Joe User or Grandma. They are for technical power users who want extremely high performance (low latency etc..). Notice that all those are X11 window managers and not desktop environments. There are a breed of us who don't want a desktop file manager, don't appreciate a control panel, hate desktop bus protocols (DBUS and friends) for being un-unixy etc.. I find using the latest OSX to be pretty tedious because Apples constant poorly tested updates that often botch up Mail.app and others on my couple of OSX machines. At work, they think they are doing me a favor by providing a Mac. Little do they know I load rEFIt and run BSD on it most of the time. For me, my style, and my needs "The Unix Desktop" is super slim, super light, super customized (used config files in CVS for decades have tons of custom themes and keystrokes), and totally superior to my desktop experience elsewhere. I don't really care if Joe Desktop can't dig it or doesn't want to edit text files to customize his rig. In fact, I'm glad the rungs on the ladder are high enough he won't want to try. I don't want to hear his fucking whining, and the air is clearer up where the masses can't climb.
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DUH. No shit, but has already been said, that TCP/IP stack doesn't have to be shared with the OS or the applications ("apps"). That's the threat vector, not so much the cell carrier.
Cool. I think I've seen that in many phones, but it makes me nervous that it's just a software "option" rather than physically disconnecting something inside. Plus, in one case the phone was still nagging to "upgrade" it's OS even after I turned off cellular data access. Since the transceiver is all commingled with the voice features, I doubt that a kill switch would be an easy feature to make nowadays.
Your solution also solves another problem. Many commercial vessels cannot dock at most of the worlds ports with arms onboard. However, a smaller vessel could just escort the cargo ship into port then turn around, guns bristling. If ever there was a place to drop a neutron bomb it is Somalia. That would solve the same problem a lot faster. However, we wouldn't want to be hitting Ethiopia or Eritrea next door. They only kill each other (no piracy).
There is, however, the possibility that the phone's VoIP stack could be separated by hardware or software from the general purpose IP stack for apps, though. Just don't allow any socket calls in the phone's OS.
The ability to use modern cell towers (4G vs 3G) which also gives you lower battery usage, but without the need to worry about the phone being hacked over IP or by crappy applications that depend on TCP/IP and thus create lots (how every many apps you use) of tiny attack surfaces on your phone. I don't want apps. I don't want a phone that can do anything but calls and SMS. To that end, it'd also be nice if the call and SMS log wiped itself after about 12 hours. Haven't seen that feature set anywhere, but it's probably because I'm about the only person left on Earth who thinks phone apps are the most laughable useless excuses for applications I've ever seen (and nowhere near worth the security risk).
Yeah, but Dead Kennedy's did their version specifically to highlight the murder of Harvey Milk by a cop who said he ate too many Twinkies. The chorus "I Fought the Law and I won." is much different (as a previous poster pointed out) than The Clash version because DK wanted to highlight the injustice and ridiculous nature of the case. They also say "I AM the law so.... I won." that lyric points to the fact that the murderer was a local cop. Not to say I don't like The Clash's version, it's pretty great, it just didn't fit the occasion I was acting out in.
2. TV without a spy cam for The Man.
3. Phone without a spy cam for The Man.
4. Car without an "eco" nag feature
5. Thermostat without a microphone
6. Car with manual windows
7. Phone without TCP/IP stack that also has modern 4G connectivity and a easily replaced battery
8. Apple or M$ desktop OS without an "App Store"
9. Car without a GPS and camera that will upload to The Man via The Cloud
10. Computer OS from Apple or M$ without "management" features or a forced upgrade death clock.
I know right? Well, that reminds me of the time when I was staffing at Def Con 5 (I think - been years ago) and we were using the Alexis Park Hotel. We warned the owner and staff about idiot script kiddies breaking and "hacking" everything in sight. They laughed and said "We ran this hotel for 20 years with nothing but pen and paper. It was a lot better in most ways. If they break anything, we'll just go right back to that method. It works just fine and it's not hackable." I have to say that I could have kissed the lot of them. They were wonderful people with a refreshingly Luddite confidence I found very practical.
Thanks (I think). I don't like authority, don't like being fleeced and lied to, and I'm not ashamed of driving hard. I don't see that it's trolling, unless you are a cop who likes to fund your city with speeding tickets. If you are, okay yeah, that was trolling. Also, if you are, die slowly on fire, please. Thanks. ;-P
Smart enough to figure out how to login, at least, Coward.
I got busted for speeding last year but it was pretty egregious. I peeled out at a light and was going 73 in a 40 MPH zone. The cop who pulled me over was an ass, though, and wrote the ticket for 80. That way it's 40 over the limit and the fines and penalties go way up. So, I asked the cop to see the radar. He flatly refused. I told him I think that's because he didn't have radar and that he was just mad because I had a nice car and I broke traction at the light and he took it as a personal challenge to his authority. To that he blew up, had me exit the car, and searched my shit without my consent/signature, by the way, since I flatly refused consent. So, I'm sitting in the back of his car and he finds my cell phone. The fucker immediately brings it to me to unlock. I was like "Sure, no problem." My phone is a Philips E570 and it doesn't even have a TCP/IP stack (battery lasts 5-6 months, though - yes *months*). My call history was disabled, my texts (which I get few of) were cleared, and there was four fifths of five eighths of FUCK ALL for him to see. So, he gets pissed at that "What kind of shitty phone do you use man?" to which I replied "One that cops can't rape for info, it would seem, officer." So, he then wrote this huge angry, lying, bullshit rant on the ticket for the judge to read. So, I was looking at a fat ticket that could have revoked my license and even possibly jail time. I was pissed because he claimed he found my speed by "pacing" even though it took him forever to catch me nearly a quarter mile behind (he had to escape from behind a bunch of cars, I was in the front rank). There is no way he could have paced me, realistically - he just wanted to write that magical "40MPH Over" on the ticket to try to take my license or fuck me into the stony lonesome jailhouse. So, after a couple of months we go to court. I absolutely refused to go along with any of the charges and kept telling them "let's do a jury trial." Finally, the judge asks me "Why do you want a trial? That costs a lot of time and money and would cost you far more if you lost." I told the judge "Because the officer is lying and I can't stand it. It's also because I don't believe you can find seven people in this town who would agree with the cops that fleece us all day." The judge was pretty angry at that and gave me a lecture about how wonderful the pigs are and what great civil servants they are. So, I shrugged that off, too and said "Then let's do a trial." My lawyer kept having to interrupt and say things like "... uhm.. I mean.. that is... if we can't come to another agreement or set of charges." I had all kinds of photos of the area where I peeled out. Documentation showing my car was rear wheel drive and there was a 15% grade causing it to easily break traction taking off. The jury would have told the DA to fuck herself, I'm pretty sure and the bitch knew it. So, in the end after all the bullshit lectures and down-talking to me, you know what they got me on (because I agreed) ? Failure to use turn signal. I piddly $35 ticket and a 2 point violation only (wrist slap). The judge was FURIOUS and told me I'd better hope I don't have any more cases come up with him. Then as I paid my $35 at the fine window and the officer was walking off I started singing Dead Kennedy's "I Fought the Law and I WON." and giggling like a 10 year old girl. He looked like he wanted to fucking shoot me in the face. I can't think of too many more satisfying situations. It fucking rocked. I still peel out at that light to this day. Fuck the police.
Oh and Satan called. He promised not to roast your soul in hell for all eternity if you'll just buy a smart hub, smart thermostat, smart TV, and smart phone. I swear he PROMISED!
So, did they take out the microphone? Didn't think so. Of course it's just like other "smart displays". It's just that people are so sick to death of being spied on and used for research and ad revenue the only play for trust they had left was to drop the camera. Didn't you see Facebook make a similar play by promising not to spy on video calls. Yeah, this evil global megacorp "promised", hehe. *belly laugh* Gets me every time. Let's just put it this way, if you are dumb enough to buy a "smart" anything, you deserve whatever you get: spying, leaking, dehumanizing devices that link you to the evilsphere.
One group of asshole corporate-feudalists are saying another group of asshole corporete-feudalists aren't trustworthy? Well, did it ever occur to folks that the whole system SSL established is based on one group of bean counting weasels telling other weasels about "trust". Mother fucking corporations shouldn't be even allowed to utter or write the word "trust". There is nobody I trust less, and their mewling about "Hey, they aren't trustworthy!" means four fifths of five-eighths of fuck all to me. The whole system of trust in SSL is fucking BROKEN. I don't trust any CA to do proper due-dilligence. They are all cheap and don't do a good job (as someone who has done an awful lot of CSRs). They don't even do an adequate job. Crowd sourcing trust from someone other than a corporate jackbooted firm like Verisign/Symantec would be welcome.
DragonflyBSD is cool. I hate how Google likes to take names from other projects without even looking. Then they do some kind of shitty manuever like this and folks think "That sucks!" Well, DragonflyBSD doesn't suck. It's HAMMER file system is very functional and has cutting edge features.
One time I took a friend to the ER and she wasn't injured and couldn't really represent herself. The nurse who was going to check us in couldn't get the job done because her tablet kept getting a BSOD. All IT systems can go down, but goddamn, wouldn't you think that having Windows in the ER would be beyond "asking for it" ? I'm not the biggest fan of AIX, but at least the other ER I took her to could check her in, they used an AIX based patient system. Unbelievable. I bet they have insecure-as-hell Android and iOS systems handling patient records, too. What's the advantage of that? Nurses can take selfies while the system is down (or being spied on by Russians and Chinese) ?
First off, fuck you. Second, that study is all you got after throwing all those grenades? What a load of shit, Coward. That fucking study has 30 people in it. What about the other 174,200 people in the USA alone that aren't getting your wonder-cure? If it's a cure, why didn't anyone else pick up on that, or is everyone else just not as smart as you? It's full of shit AC's like you that need to stay the fuck off the cain and /.
AROS is a failure. There are like two guys working in the wilderness on it. MorphOS and AmigaOS v4.x both did a bunch of un-Amiga things like adopt Unix-like programming APIs. Now, don't get me wrong. I *love* Unixy stuff. However, it's just not appropriate for the Amiga. It was always meant to be a lean and mean close to the metal programming platform. The custom chips allow you to take control of the hardware in surprisingly straightforward ways. If you have some cop following you around everywhere policing all your memory usage, it's great for stability, but blows for performance. Newer hardware using the PPC is utter trash and total blasphemy against the 68k CISC ISA, too. The PPC sucked for ASM coders and MOS + AOS4 both embraced the new school "let's wrap everything in bubble wrap" philosophy. Yes, it makes them more stable and easier to port things like web browsers over to. However, it also takes away from their microcomputer appeal and hardware hackability. All the newschool Amigas feel sterile and neutered. There isn't anything really cool about them as they just look like low-powered PCs with commodity hardware. To some, that's exactly what they wanted. To others, it sucks balls. What we really need is for a braver group of coders to do a clean room implementation of AmigaOS 3.1 which was leaked years ago. Just ignore Hyperion (they are in .nl anyway). Let them threaten to sue and freak out. They've come with too little WAY too late. AmigaOS doesn't need to morph into Ubuntu, it needs to embrace the 3.x roots that made the Amiga "a console with a keyboard" not "just another PC". I have tried to re-write parts of the OS myself, but it's a HUGE job and I get stuck on the BCPL linker crap every time.
Haage & Partner released AmigaOS 3.9 in the 90's which definitely was an upgrade to 3.1. It had a much better version of the formatting and partitioning tools. It also had a few updates to the user interface and the text to speech voice phonemes were updated. So, it sounded different when you told it to say "This is Amiga speaking." Now, this update is from Hyperion. I haven't seen it yet, but I'm highly suspicious (but nonetheless curious). They have a fairly shady and shaky claim to rights to AmigaOS and Kickstart. However, they are very *loud* about those claims. Notice even in the announcement they want you to know they are the *sole* IP holder. I'm not a lawyer, but Hyperion has always seemed like a jumped up small-game company grabbing for lost Amiga glory. It's rumored that they bought the IP for Kickstart for $1 between a couple of friends. There are several other IP holders such as Cloanto in Italy and a few ex-licensees (or so they claim) in the USA too. One more colorful guy was an ex-trucker who wanted to resurrect the Amiga as a PC (the horror! and no 68k - blasphemer!). Who knows what lost legal deals ESCOM and Gateway did when they owned, the IP, too. The Amiga historical landscape is littered with people claiming to own the various critical trademarks such as AmigaOS, Amiga, Kickstart, and so forth. Nobody will know for sure until there is a knock down drag-out lawsuit and somebody goes home crying. The problem is, there is so few bucks left to make it's not worth the hassle. The Vampire Amiga folks are doing amazing things with their FPGA Apollo 68080 core. I run one in an Amiga 500 and it takes all comers. Not everything is perfect or stable, but it gives you RTG, upgraded sound, HDMI output, half a gig of RAM (a lot for Amiga apps), wifi, MicroSD storage, IDE, and a smoking fast processor that will eat the 68060 alive many times over. Highly recommended.
So, they cured cancer/malaria/AIDS in Europe? Oh, wait, you spouted some ridiculous bullshit about "life expectancy" instead of any real evidence or thought. I've lived in Europe before myself (Norway). I remember people waiting months to see a specialist, in the second richest country (per capita) in Europe. So, yeah, they couldn't figure out the billing or the actual care, either. I'm not exactly itching to sign onto that garbage. The only difference between strutting doctors that are full of shit over their non-accomplishments in the USA versus Europe is how much less they have to work in Europe.
Can medicine not actually *cure* anything anymore? This seems like something someone should have got a pat on the head and a "good job" from their research lead on, not a fuxxoring Nobel Prize. Note that they didn't give one in literature this year. Good. When there aren't Nobel-worth advances, then there shouldn't be Nobel prizes. Giving them out anyway waters them down (as if the stupid Peace Prizes to genocidal politicians weren't bad enough). From my lay perspective medical advances in the last 30 years have been weak, AF. They haven't really cured anything or significantly made people healthier or live longer. The only thing they seem to have become really really good at is billing.
The only thing that makes you look like more of a fairy than playing soccer is playing soccer on a Microsoft gaming console.
Some of us truly don't give a fuck. You guys didn't get the memo about the web + javascript becoming a honeypot around year 2000.
The fundamental mismatch here is that you give a fuck what "consumers" want/need and I only care about what works for me. I don't give half a fuck to justify my desktop paradigm or whatever. I'm glad "users" have a place to go that doesn't pollute my space. Systemd is a great example of what happens when you let GNOME / GUI assholes who drone on about "consumers" try to tweak the operating system. It's funny they always use the same examples, too: Plug and Play and problems with hibernation/sleep. Both of those things have worked for me for at least a decade and probably a lot longer than that. They aren't reasons to break the Philosophy or swallow a poison pill like systemd/journald. You repeatedly carry the torch for "the consumer" (some kind of nebulous non-technical user, from your descriptions). I don't care if the consumer buys a $99 laptop and sets themselves on fire. In fact, as long as they could do it quietly, that might be preferred. All they seem to do is ruin shit in the end and you'll have to pardon me if I don't give a fuck about their "needs" for some handholding GUI bullshit to insure they don't have to learn anything.
I'm a frequent user of Fluxbox, Blackbox, OpenBox, WindowMaker, AwesomeWM, and Enlightenment. Over the years, I've seen them do some nice things that it took both Windows and MacOS many years to duplicate (virtual desktops with independent contexts and fast switching between them with hotkeys for example). Running on a lot of old hardware, I appreciate the 10MB or so that most of them occupy. I own several macs of various stripes and vintages and I have since the 1980's. So, I'm not an Apple hater. I will grant that they do a good job of desktop integration and have a lot of fans. However, I think you are being a bit rough on the Unix desktop interfaces et al. The ones I use aren't trying to appeal to Joe User or Grandma. They are for technical power users who want extremely high performance (low latency etc..). Notice that all those are X11 window managers and not desktop environments. There are a breed of us who don't want a desktop file manager, don't appreciate a control panel, hate desktop bus protocols (DBUS and friends) for being un-unixy etc.. I find using the latest OSX to be pretty tedious because Apples constant poorly tested updates that often botch up Mail.app and others on my couple of OSX machines. At work, they think they are doing me a favor by providing a Mac. Little do they know I load rEFIt and run BSD on it most of the time. For me, my style, and my needs "The Unix Desktop" is super slim, super light, super customized (used config files in CVS for decades have tons of custom themes and keystrokes), and totally superior to my desktop experience elsewhere. I don't really care if Joe Desktop can't dig it or doesn't want to edit text files to customize his rig. In fact, I'm glad the rungs on the ladder are high enough he won't want to try. I don't want to hear his fucking whining, and the air is clearer up where the masses can't climb.