My only hope is that they take them down just in the EU so those EU politicians can see for themselves what happens when you let their opposition have that kind of power.
That's exactly what they want: the power to take down the political speech of the opposition. Did you really think reports of their own speech would ever result in a take down? The whole point here is to ensure that only one voice is heard: theirs. A little bit of controlled opposition will be allowed, but nobody who opposes the great and mighty EU or its policies will ever be given any kind of platform again.
It is official; Netcraft now confirms: smartphones are dying.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered smartphone community when Gartner confirmed that smartphone market share has dropped yet again, now down to to 408 million units per quarter. Coming close on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that smart[phones have lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Smartphones are collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict smartphone's future. The hand writing is on the wall: smartphones face a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for smartphones because smartphones are dying. Things are looking very bad for smartphones. As many of us are already aware, smartphones continue to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Windows 10 Phone is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Windows developer Steve Ballmer only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: smartphones are dying.
All major surveys show that smartphones have steadily declined in market share. Smartphones are very sick and their long term survival prospects are very dim. If smartphones are to survive at all it will be among phone dilettante dabblers like Nokia. Smartphones continue to decay. Nothing short of a cockeyed miracle could save smartphones from their fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes, smartphones are dead.
After decades of struggling with virus scanners that insisted on slowly, laboriously scanning every.h file on every access during every compile, the insistence of sysadmins on braindead security policies has already wasted months of my life. I guess my only question is: what's different now? Is it, perhaps, that they themselves would also be bothered by it this time?
Go do your f'ing job and install the patches from hell, I say. And if the drop in performance bothers you, maybe we can finally talk about turning down the virus scanner to a normal level of security.
Is FB actually scanning my entire computer every time I log in? Does a browser provide the kind of access needed to determine that malware is present in the first place?
Excuse me, but if there is anything requiring constant maintenance, it's cars! Cars have regular, pre-scheduled maintenance cycles, generally performed by specialized mechanics. And here in the Netherlands a car is required by law to be tested for possible safety issues every year.
And no, they don't add new capabilities to your car during maintenance.
If it were my livelyhood and I already put in the effort, I'd see that as an excellent way to keep out competitors. But you'd be batshit insane to actually _want_ to learn all that crap if you were just starting out, considering how much the city has grown since 1865, and how easy GPS (possibly with live updates on road conditions) makes things nowadays...
Do you honestly believe that Russian hackers not only had an internet-connected camera running inside their national spying agency, but in fact had it aimed so you could see the Red Square? Because while that may make perfect sense in a movie, it really doesn't in real life.
And why would the Dutch give away such a massive advantage? Why not just keep spying? Ah wait, let me answer that: because in the Netherlands there is a lot of discussion at the moment about a new law that would massively increase the powers of this very same agency to spy on its own citizens.
And on top of that... Why weren't the Americans warned of this ongoing hack attack? Don't believe all this crap, it's all BS...
To be more precise, the Dutch government wants to enshrine in law what is already common practice anyway: Dutch citizens being spied upon without a warrant by their own government.
And consider this: which government would voluntarily give up such a massive advantage that spying on the Russians might bring? Whatever technique they were using, you can rest assured the Russians will find it and close it now (assuming it existed of course).
And on top of that... They didn't even warn the Americans of what was apparently a massive attack on their democracy. I'm sure that will go down well...
Dude, talk about missing the point. If your data is already encrypted anyway it's no problem if it gets sniffed by Spectre and/or Meltdown, now is it? The discussion was about when your data is potentially available for sniffing, i.e. when it is not encrypted.
Nobody has any clue what those neural nets are really doing, but surely we can make them not only understand things like ethical considerations and safety, but we can even enforce it.
Oh, frequently we can't even agree on the most ethical course of action ourselves, so how's a poor AI supposed to figure it out?
The Russians seem immune to olive branch gestures.
That's rich, coming from the nation that blames absolutely every ill in the world (including everything that's wrong in their own country) on the Russians. Would you care to provide a list of things the Russians have _actually_ done wrong (as opposed to a list of things they've been accused of, without any substantiating evidence whatsoever)? Because to me it looks very much like the US needed a new cold war and a new opponent so its military programs could continue to be funded, and the Russians, without any doing on their part, happened to draw the short straw.
Those people are self-selected loud-mouths who have a cause to push. Normal people, and that's still the vast majority of them, aren't nearly as nutty.
Your lazy and careless attitude is typical of a PC owner who thinks what is true for his little home devices are true for virtualized systems
Anyone who puts his data and his software on _someone else's computer_ didn't really care about its security in the first place. Otherwise he would have invested in a computer of his own, and kept everything in-house.
The "dark net", in its original definition, was a part of the internet that was unobservable, because it existed behind passwords, or because it was simply not indexed in search engines. The phrase "internet clandestin" immediately tags a big "illegal!" tag on the whole thing.
Also, "internet" is kind of a funny choice. How about "réseau reliant les ordinateurs à l'échelle mondiale"?
You checked every single one? On December 31st? Or do you just make shit up to sound like an ass?
They didn't have internet. They didn't have email. They had phone lines and fax systems, and that's how they did their business. The internet was slow, cumbersome, expensive, unreliable, and offered no added value in their eyes.
Also, I'm not quite sure how you went from me making a general statement about the state of the business landscape in 1997, a statement which I stand by BTW, to somehow implying that is some kind of logical statement that can be falsified if even a single customer had a single static webpage online at 23:59 on december 31st, but I'm just going to guess it is because you are an autistic asshat.
Yes, Open Source has changed the world. And I'm going to argue that the most important thing that ever came out of the Open Source community was not Linux, nor GNU (the whole of it), but specifically GCC.
GCC is what enables you to sit down and write software without having to pay a massive sum to a compiler vendor. GCC is what lets young people interested in programming experiment, learn, and ultimately become professionals. GCC is why we have the rest of GNU and the Linux kernel. GCC is the reason we have free versions of Visual Studio. And GCC is the reason C++ is the most important programming language today. In many ways, GCC changed the direction the software world has taken, allowing software to be written that would otherwise never have existed, and planting the seeds of the value of Open Source software in people's minds.
In 1997 I worked for a company that had a specific, dedicated machine where we could access "the internet". We had nothing at our desks - not internet, nor email. We were connected to the backbone using an ISDN line, and we didn't have a website. There was some talk at that time of making software to let our customers sell stuff across the internet. I left soon after, so I don't know if anything ever came of it.
Every company on the internet? Certainly not at that time. Neither us, nor our ~1500 customers had a webpage.
>Taxes, some of which will hopefully be paid by these people, reduced benefits from other programs, and reduced administration in running the program.
This tired argument again?
1. These people are getting barely enough money to live on in the first place. They will not be paying taxes. Also, "hopefully" is not a good way to govern. 2. Just _reduced_ benefits? What happened to eliminating those altogether? Reducing won't eliminate overhead. 3. Reduced administration will not pay for the difference. Shall we do some math?
Apparently minimum cost of living is something like $15000/year in the US, so let's set UB to that level. There are 308 million people living in the US. Simple multiplication tells us we need $4.6 trillion/year to pay for UBI.
The total US federal income for 2016 was $3.3 trillion. If the US were to implement a $4.6 trillion UBI program, it would be short $1.3 trillion per year - and that's assuming it is willing to give up completely on healthcare, education, infrastructure, defense, research, fire departments, a police force, etc.
Of course you can just raise taxes... Let's say we just keep defense and interest payments, and get rid of all other US government programs (that means no more social security, medicare, medicaid, unemployment compensation, pensions, the supplementary nutrition assistance program, education, veterans benefits, housing assistance, etc.). That means we still have to somehow come up with $0.9 trillion for defense and interest payments, plus of course $4.6 trillion for UBI. Income taxes would have to be raised from its current level of $1.5 trillon to $5.5 trillion, so each American taxpayer will have to pay 3.7 times as much income tax. If you think that's feasible, great, let's have UBI!
Shall we do it for Finland? The cost of living is at least something like E10800/year (that's for a _student_, living in _student housing_, not for normal families, but hey, let's roll with it). There are 5.5 million people in Finland. UBI for the whole country would cost E59 billion per year. Total government revenue for Finland is E55 billion.
Actually this UBI program is only paying E6720/year. This is below cost of living, so either these people have some other source of income, or they are living in cardboard boxes. Even so, rolling it out to the whole nation would cost E37 billion, leaving precious little for other government expenditures.
I feel quite strongly about abolishing political parties. They concentrate power in the hands of a few unelected people. Let each politician run on his own merits, and act on his own concience rather than according to some party line.
This is especially urgent because any district-based system (like the US has) automatically leads to it also being a two-party system. Such a system doesn't allow for new ideas and new parties to appear - there is simply no space for new parties to slowly grow into a real, serious, political party.
Without political parties, there will be a much wider pool of candidates for each state. Each candidate will have to convince the voters of the quality of his policies, instead of riding on some abstract national program (and loon candidates can be avoided fairly easily by making them collect some number of signatures before their candidacy is allowed).
Governing would become a matter of negotiation a lot more than it is today, but you'd be rid of the deadlock where one party blocks the other on principle.
I'd also add a few rules about laws only covering one subject at a time (no riders for completely unrelated subjects), add an upper limit to the length of any law, and I'd mandate that any proposed plan must always be accompanied by a detailed description of how much money will be needed, and where it will be taken from.
And perhaps each law must be explained by the politician who proposed it in three separate schools. If the kids don't understand it, start over.
Or alternatively, keep the system as it is today, but send multiple politicians to Washington for each state, with each wielding a fraction of the state vote that is determined by how many people voted for him.
Or do voting on a permanent basis: each citizen receives a token that he can entrust to a politician of his choice. Allow for the token to be recovered and entrusted to another politician at any time. On the first day of every month, replace all politicians that lost the trust of their voters. Instead of having to look great once every four years, let them represent you every single day of their carreer...
Slashdot Mirror
My only hope is that they take them down just in the EU so those EU politicians can see for themselves what happens when you let their opposition have that kind of power.
That's exactly what they want: the power to take down the political speech of the opposition. Did you really think reports of their own speech would ever result in a take down? The whole point here is to ensure that only one voice is heard: theirs. A little bit of controlled opposition will be allowed, but nobody who opposes the great and mighty EU or its policies will ever be given any kind of platform again.
It is official; Netcraft now confirms: smartphones are dying.
One more crippling bombshell hit the already beleaguered smartphone community when Gartner confirmed that smartphone market share has dropped yet again, now down to to 408 million units per quarter. Coming close on the heels of a recent Netcraft survey which plainly states that smart[phones have lost more market share, this news serves to reinforce what we've known all along. Smartphones are collapsing in complete disarray, as fittingly exemplified by failing dead last in the recent Sys Admin comprehensive networking test.
You don't need to be a Kreskin to predict smartphone's future. The hand writing is on the wall: smartphones face a bleak future. In fact there won't be any future at all for smartphones because smartphones are dying. Things are looking very bad for smartphones. As many of us are already aware, smartphones continue to lose market share. Red ink flows like a river of blood.
Windows 10 Phone is the most endangered of them all, having lost 93% of its core developers. The sudden and unpleasant departures of long time Windows developer Steve Ballmer only serve to underscore the point more clearly. There can no longer be any doubt: smartphones are dying.
All major surveys show that smartphones have steadily declined in market share. Smartphones are very sick and their long term survival prospects are very dim. If smartphones are to survive at all it will be among phone dilettante dabblers like Nokia. Smartphones continue to decay. Nothing short of a cockeyed miracle could save smartphones from their fate at this point in time. For all practical purposes, smartphones are dead.
ISO-9000 compliance, I believe. Having "appropriate security measures" in place is mandated.
After decades of struggling with virus scanners that insisted on slowly, laboriously scanning every .h file on every access during every compile, the insistence of sysadmins on braindead security policies has already wasted months of my life. I guess my only question is: what's different now? Is it, perhaps, that they themselves would also be bothered by it this time?
Go do your f'ing job and install the patches from hell, I say. And if the drop in performance bothers you, maybe we can finally talk about turning down the virus scanner to a normal level of security.
Is FB actually scanning my entire computer every time I log in? Does a browser provide the kind of access needed to determine that malware is present in the first place?
When New Horizons spotted her from the Kuiper Belt, astronomers assigned her object code "2018 YMFA"!
Excuse me, but if there is anything requiring constant maintenance, it's cars! Cars have regular, pre-scheduled maintenance cycles, generally performed by specialized mechanics. And here in the Netherlands a car is required by law to be tested for possible safety issues every year.
And no, they don't add new capabilities to your car during maintenance.
Sure, in some places the sea level is dropping, but in others it is rising much more. You have to look at the global picture! ;-)
If it were my livelyhood and I already put in the effort, I'd see that as an excellent way to keep out competitors. But you'd be batshit insane to actually _want_ to learn all that crap if you were just starting out, considering how much the city has grown since 1865, and how easy GPS (possibly with live updates on road conditions) makes things nowadays...
Do you honestly believe that Russian hackers not only had an internet-connected camera running inside their national spying agency, but in fact had it aimed so you could see the Red Square? Because while that may make perfect sense in a movie, it really doesn't in real life.
And why would the Dutch give away such a massive advantage? Why not just keep spying? Ah wait, let me answer that: because in the Netherlands there is a lot of discussion at the moment about a new law that would massively increase the powers of this very same agency to spy on its own citizens.
And on top of that... Why weren't the Americans warned of this ongoing hack attack? Don't believe all this crap, it's all BS...
To be more precise, the Dutch government wants to enshrine in law what is already common practice anyway: Dutch citizens being spied upon without a warrant by their own government.
And consider this: which government would voluntarily give up such a massive advantage that spying on the Russians might bring? Whatever technique they were using, you can rest assured the Russians will find it and close it now (assuming it existed of course).
And on top of that... They didn't even warn the Americans of what was apparently a massive attack on their democracy. I'm sure that will go down well...
Dude, talk about missing the point. If your data is already encrypted anyway it's no problem if it gets sniffed by Spectre and/or Meltdown, now is it? The discussion was about when your data is potentially available for sniffing, i.e. when it is not encrypted.
As per Google Translate:
(French) "clandestine"
(English) "illegal"
Nobody has any clue what those neural nets are really doing, but surely we can make them not only understand things like ethical considerations and safety, but we can even enforce it.
Oh, frequently we can't even agree on the most ethical course of action ourselves, so how's a poor AI supposed to figure it out?
The Russians seem immune to olive branch gestures.
That's rich, coming from the nation that blames absolutely every ill in the world (including everything that's wrong in their own country) on the Russians. Would you care to provide a list of things the Russians have _actually_ done wrong (as opposed to a list of things they've been accused of, without any substantiating evidence whatsoever)? Because to me it looks very much like the US needed a new cold war and a new opponent so its military programs could continue to be funded, and the Russians, without any doing on their part, happened to draw the short straw.
"Ouch, I stubbed my toe!" "Damn those Russians!"
Those people are self-selected loud-mouths who have a cause to push. Normal people, and that's still the vast majority of them, aren't nearly as nutty.
Your lazy and careless attitude is typical of a PC owner who thinks what is true for his little home devices are true for virtualized systems
Anyone who puts his data and his software on _someone else's computer_ didn't really care about its security in the first place. Otherwise he would have invested in a computer of his own, and kept everything in-house.
The "dark net", in its original definition, was a part of the internet that was unobservable, because it existed behind passwords, or because it was simply not indexed in search engines. The phrase "internet clandestin" immediately tags a big "illegal!" tag on the whole thing.
Also, "internet" is kind of a funny choice. How about "réseau reliant les ordinateurs à l'échelle mondiale"?
1500 customers is pretty tiny.
Our 1500 customers were all businesses, with a combined turnover in the couple of billion euro range.
You checked every single one? On December 31st? Or do you just make shit up to sound like an ass?
They didn't have internet. They didn't have email. They had phone lines and fax systems, and that's how they did their business. The internet was slow, cumbersome, expensive, unreliable, and offered no added value in their eyes.
Also, I'm not quite sure how you went from me making a general statement about the state of the business landscape in 1997, a statement which I stand by BTW, to somehow implying that is some kind of logical statement that can be falsified if even a single customer had a single static webpage online at 23:59 on december 31st, but I'm just going to guess it is because you are an autistic asshat.
Yes, Open Source has changed the world. And I'm going to argue that the most important thing that ever came out of the Open Source community was not Linux, nor GNU (the whole of it), but specifically GCC.
GCC is what enables you to sit down and write software without having to pay a massive sum to a compiler vendor. GCC is what lets young people interested in programming experiment, learn, and ultimately become professionals. GCC is why we have the rest of GNU and the Linux kernel. GCC is the reason we have free versions of Visual Studio. And GCC is the reason C++ is the most important programming language today. In many ways, GCC changed the direction the software world has taken, allowing software to be written that would otherwise never have existed, and planting the seeds of the value of Open Source software in people's minds.
In 1997 I worked for a company that had a specific, dedicated machine where we could access "the internet". We had nothing at our desks - not internet, nor email. We were connected to the backbone using an ISDN line, and we didn't have a website. There was some talk at that time of making software to let our customers sell stuff across the internet. I left soon after, so I don't know if anything ever came of it.
Every company on the internet? Certainly not at that time. Neither us, nor our ~1500 customers had a webpage.
>Taxes, some of which will hopefully be paid by these people, reduced benefits from other programs, and reduced administration in running the program.
This tired argument again?
1. These people are getting barely enough money to live on in the first place. They will not be paying taxes. Also, "hopefully" is not a good way to govern.
2. Just _reduced_ benefits? What happened to eliminating those altogether? Reducing won't eliminate overhead.
3. Reduced administration will not pay for the difference. Shall we do some math?
Apparently minimum cost of living is something like $15000/year in the US, so let's set UB to that level. There are 308 million people living in the US. Simple multiplication tells us we need $4.6 trillion/year to pay for UBI.
The total US federal income for 2016 was $3.3 trillion. If the US were to implement a $4.6 trillion UBI program, it would be short $1.3 trillion per year - and that's assuming it is willing to give up completely on healthcare, education, infrastructure, defense, research, fire departments, a police force, etc.
Of course you can just raise taxes... Let's say we just keep defense and interest payments, and get rid of all other US government programs (that means no more social security, medicare, medicaid, unemployment compensation, pensions, the supplementary nutrition assistance program, education, veterans benefits, housing assistance, etc.). That means we still have to somehow come up with $0.9 trillion for defense and interest payments, plus of course $4.6 trillion for UBI. Income taxes would have to be raised from its current level of $1.5 trillon to $5.5 trillion, so each American taxpayer will have to pay 3.7 times as much income tax. If you think that's feasible, great, let's have UBI!
Shall we do it for Finland? The cost of living is at least something like E10800/year (that's for a _student_, living in _student housing_, not for normal families, but hey, let's roll with it). There are 5.5 million people in Finland. UBI for the whole country would cost E59 billion per year. Total government revenue for Finland is E55 billion.
Actually this UBI program is only paying E6720/year. This is below cost of living, so either these people have some other source of income, or they are living in cardboard boxes. Even so, rolling it out to the whole nation would cost E37 billion, leaving precious little for other government expenditures.
PS. I wouldn't use computers, except for the token thing. That would totally work as a smartphone app.
I feel quite strongly about abolishing political parties. They concentrate power in the hands of a few unelected people. Let each politician run on his own merits, and act on his own concience rather than according to some party line.
This is especially urgent because any district-based system (like the US has) automatically leads to it also being a two-party system. Such a system doesn't allow for new ideas and new parties to appear - there is simply no space for new parties to slowly grow into a real, serious, political party.
Without political parties, there will be a much wider pool of candidates for each state. Each candidate will have to convince the voters of the quality of his policies, instead of riding on some abstract national program (and loon candidates can be avoided fairly easily by making them collect some number of signatures before their candidacy is allowed).
Governing would become a matter of negotiation a lot more than it is today, but you'd be rid of the deadlock where one party blocks the other on principle.
I'd also add a few rules about laws only covering one subject at a time (no riders for completely unrelated subjects), add an upper limit to the length of any law, and I'd mandate that any proposed plan must always be accompanied by a detailed description of how much money will be needed, and where it will be taken from.
And perhaps each law must be explained by the politician who proposed it in three separate schools. If the kids don't understand it, start over.
Or alternatively, keep the system as it is today, but send multiple politicians to Washington for each state, with each wielding a fraction of the state vote that is determined by how many people voted for him.
Or do voting on a permanent basis: each citizen receives a token that he can entrust to a politician of his choice. Allow for the token to be recovered and entrusted to another politician at any time. On the first day of every month, replace all politicians that lost the trust of their voters. Instead of having to look great once every four years, let them represent you every single day of their carreer...