To take this to a bit of an absurd hyperbole, that's like Old Dixie plantation owners saying that there's no real alternative to slavery to harvest cotton.
If you care about your control of the computers you own, or privacy, or freedom, or community, or pick your reason, there are real alternatives. You just have to care about one or all of the above more than convenience.
Sadly, our culture generally fails to sacrifice anything anymore for any of our ideals beyond bread and circuses. We don't stand up for the public domain, we pirate or pay. We couldn't just do without that entertainment. We don't make political sacrifices, or work for campaigns we believe in to help third parties, we barely manage to vote for one of the 2 parties that are the problem.
So yes, if you can't put forth any effort at all, there's no alternative. But realize that you're saying the digital equivalent of there's no alternative to being fat and eating fast food. Because any of the alternatives take work and may be unpleasant in any of a number of ways. But Slashdot rightly ridicules that delusion while perpetuating that everyone has to use Windows and take whatever Microsoft gives them.
I know I'm strange, but I find software somewhat frequently that just works on linux but has no Windows version, or requires me figuring out how to add perl, python, insert scripting layer that isn't there first, and then translate unix style conf file to something that works on Windows.
Plenty of complicated stuff beyond a keyboard and mouse is done on Linux computers, it's just not home stuff. Almost all our scientific hardware and radiation control systems and the like run linux. We've had people re-write their own drivers for some hardware on Linux because trying to get EPICS to work on Windows is seen as far harder, and mostly a waste of time for one hardware device out of thousands.
I don't know if what you say is true, nor how the law is actually written, but it seems to me a working justice system would never allow "following the law(s)" to count as probable cause. Theoretically it makes the concept of probable cause oxymoronic - ideally everyone would follow the law(s), so if following the law(s) is probable cause, you basically have probable cause against everyone. In which case it's the same as a legal system that doesn't have any requirement for probable cause to investigate.
For losing weight, I agree. But what about those who eat large meals, eat cookies etc all the time, popcorn, whatever is around and spend a lot of time sitting around and never gain weight? As reported by those who LIVE WITH the person?
As I understand it, if you eat 1,000 calorie meals three times a day and snack frequently, you'd have to be exercising almost all the time also to not gain lots of weight. There's no time for them to be fasting half the week to make up for it, or spending half the week working out - the people living in the house with them would sort of notice that I'd think.
I suppose it's possible the 3 slices of loaded pizza, 10 oreo cookies and the like are actually much less calories than we would expect - me measure them very wrong. And it's possible everyone who knows people like this are all lying for some weird reason, but that seems unlikely. What reason would someone have to miss or missreport *not* *gaining* weight?
I'd say there are things people can do, but they're not considered "OK" in this culture. I think it's clear you can overcome some human brain activity by taking certain drugs / medicine. There are some that are even legal to take with a doctor watching and prescribing them.
One recent one, Contrave, has been shown in trials (google the manufacturer studies) to have a significant effect. It's now available for that use approved by the FDA and your doctor can prescribe it for you.
I'm not a doctor, but I think it works by stopping the addiction factor / response that some fat people get from eating. It's made up of 2 addiction treatment medicines combined, so that would make sense. Basically I imagine you stop getting the "high" from eating, and so have no where near as much incentive to eat more than you need to feel full.
Of course, this only works for those people who overeat because they get a drug like "high" from eating. And it only helps to the point they would lose weight from stopping that overeating due to the food "addiction" they might have.
I figure beyond that, you need something that makes people able to feel full on much less food, because people who have stronger hunger response or higher efficiency extracting calories or slower metabolism or the like still have to overcome those issues.
I do wonder though if the stronger hunger response might be equivalent to my hypothesis of the "addiction" and hence also helped by the addiction treatment drugs? Following that, some recommend Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to help change behavior - things like removing temptations from your life. In the way recovering alcoholics don't have beer in the house to help stay on the wagon, don't have snacks or ice cream or whatever your overeating food of choice in the house.
Sometimes the simple necessity of going to the store to buy whatever it is you would get empty calories from helps you pause and think "I don't need this" and then you get to not make that mistake.
No where I've worked (till I became IT) let me install software on my computer, or be an admin. I could use the software provided in very specific ways, or I would get it trouble.
It's far more common from what I've read on the net to have Windows locked down in a managed deployment at midsize and larger companies. Most companies don't have the allocated resources to have IT be the inside equivalent of the Geek Squad. Maybe where you've worked did.
What's more interesting to me is that most Linux software (if you know what you're doing) can be installed inside a user account, just like more and more Windows software is getting to be (Think Chrome), unless the computers have Applocker or SELinux or the like running. And most people don't do that because of the difficulty in creating all the rules.
If you believe Snowden at all, he and plenty of others tried through channels, and nothing happened for years. Are you also for people just sitting on 0days when companies decide to wait 14 years to patch?
It sounded like responsible disclosure to me.
And really, did he reveal anything we all didn't strongly suspect anyway? Not that made the news. Sure it pissed off a lot of people, but there wouldn't have been anything to tell if a) the govt was playing by the rules or b) actually responded to internal concerns in any real way vs covering it all up.
Then again, maybe he's the best Russian agent in decades for discrediting the US. In either case, it seems like he did everyone some good in calling the NSA out - though whether it really makes any difference is hard to tell.
Well, I can sort of see a point of confusion - i.e. the President can veto a law, but congress can sort of "veto the veto" trough the 2/3 majority overrule vote (and I forget off the top of my head what the term for this is)... Of course, I really doubt 2/3 of congress would agree the sky is blue or the earth is round currently.
And as much as I thought SystemD was stupid and a solution in search of a problem, I much prefer inelegant technical solutions to design decisions that spy on you and segment features based on whether you're "enterprise" enough.
Also, SL7 is as solid for me as 6 so it's basically learning some new stuff unnecessarily. Well, I've given up on *anyone* leaving UIs the hell alone, and systemD seems to be decently backward compatible with init scripts and the service control syntax.
Now that I plan to try very hard to use SL7 as my Win7 replacement desktop OS, I might even find the faster boot times of SystemD vaguely useful.
I'm moving to Linux. I run a desktop, and I don't need anything that requires me to let any company peruse my data at will for "badness", or injects Ads INTO the OS - that used to be *called* MALWARE.
I already have a crappy annoying spying random upgrading experience in my Android phone, I DO NOT WANT on my desktop.
For what I've tried, it seems faster than VMWare Desktop on my Lenovo W520. And so far it's done everything I need in a VM. It's not a hypervisor, but for desktop virtualization, I can't see paying for VMWare anymore.
I don't know - it seems to be less relevant every year. I can do lots of proprietary stuff on tablets (though I don't think Android is better, but it's a different thing than a PC in my use cases). Many Many things that used to be Windows only are now web based, or offered that way (I'm thinking TurboTax).
If you already use FLOSS on Windows, either because it's good, or it's free, the vast majority runs on whatever. For home uses, I've been able to use LibreOffice for a long time, and really never used MS Office. For business - I don't work in the normal place, but PDF and Wiki are used far more than Word. Social Networking / web based are also used for collaboration now, and it's not Sharepoint (Confluence, FOSWiki, Yammer). E-mail is MS. but Thunderbird works, OWA is actually pretty good in the latest refresh, and plenty of people use GMail. You don't really need Outlook, especially the vast majority of people(at my work) who don't do ANY calendaring.
Windows 10 privacy concerns and cloud logins have me actively trying to migrate to my offices latest Linux platform - Scientific Linux 7. I'm amazed the stuff I can do just fine, and about the same on SL7 as on Windows 7. Now, I'm not going to say this would work for everyone, or even most people, but it's more plausible every year to use other platforms than Windows. Part of it is choosing software.
Our chat is OpenFire XMPP. I run Pidgin on Windows. Runs the same on Linux.
E-mail is a sticking point, I'm trying out some exchange plugins for Thunderbird. I got Outlook 2010 to run, but it can't autodiscover Office 365 for some reason. That has been flaky for us under Windows however. OWA is surprisingly usable for me. And I know more people who use webmail than thick clients anyway.
I use KeePass password manager. Runs on mono and is packaged very easily - and looks the same as on Windows.
I use AutoIT for scripting parts of Windows. That works in Crossover (Which I'm considering purchasing, but you could use the free Wine), and compiles the exe (and runs it too).
For AD we run Windows servers, but use terminal services for interacting with them. This works with rdesktop just fine on Linux. Most of our other tools are web based consoles now. Netwrix, can be web based. ESET AV, Webbased. Foreman/Puppet - web based. Inventory and ticketing, web based. Documentation is Wiki so web based.
Windows base image creation is VM based, and Virtual Box runs on Linux also.
Putty and X forwarding and MIT Kerberos 4 Windows tools are unnecessary on Linux, that's all built in. SVN works fine on Linux. Geppetto works fine on Linux.
I need to learn a new Desktop Environment, but that's true for Win10 also.
Java is actually easier with OpenJDK vs the horror that is Oracle's java 1.8 installers (for me).
The problem MS has IMHO is that Windows 7 can hang on like XP did. And plenty of people use less and less Windows software as everything is moving to "The Cloud" or web based. Smartphones have proven to people that they can do lots of things with different apps, and just because it isn't pixel by pixel Windows doesn't stop them from banking, documenting, picture editing, etc. Tablets have solidified that, and Microsoft is doing the last thing I think they ought to be doing with Windows - reminding people of use environments (like tablets and/or phones) that lets those people work WITHOUT WINDOWS.
And the tablet / smartphone / Apple ecosystem has forced more and more companies to stop being Windows only.
Finally, for gaming - Steam has more and more Linux titles. Isolated consoles also compete well - my PS4 isn't a privacy risk to me as it's limited and all I'm doing is playing games. My taxes isn't on there, and I'm not browsing the web on it. Mobile Gaming is also hugely popular. Windows 10 might eventually become a hybrid X Box sort of thing for some people, but AAA PC Gaming has been pretty dead for years already, and indie is Linux friendly.
TL;DR - I think Windows only software isn't needed nearly as much each year that goes by. PC Gaming has been pretty weak for a decade.
I'd say it's somewhat relevant - it's saying that 'we have a problem now - here's how the "internet of things" will make that problem worse. Maybe figure out mitigations before you buy into the "internet of things"' . . .
However, here it's likely preaching to the choir. But for general consumption / random google search results, it seems like it's a good idea to point out that this could be an issue.
So get a free security suite. Comodo IS for instance is HIPS, Firewall, Sandbox and the like, and will block or sandbox things it doesn't recognize, well before there's a signature. It also can use their cloud engine for near realtime signature updates for the lightly used AV engine (it's not needed much as HIPS etc blocks before AV would scan in my experience)...
For free at home, I use Comodo (I know there's controversy, but it's worked well for me and others I know for years). If I wanted to pay or at work, I'd recommend ESET.
I wonder if it's more that Facebook is dead among the audience of Slashdot? Though I wonder if it was ever really a thing for the type of people on Slashdot...
Why? Because some people don't play follow the fad, or because of something specifically wrong about Slashdot? I mean, reddit to me was always something different from Slashdot - I never really saw any sort of content curation or the like - though apparently based on this I just managed to totally miss a lot of Reddit. Anyway, Slashdot really hasn't changed that much for me since I started using it years ago.
Electricity use - did you even watch the video? Of course not. Also, the data survives a drive failure.
What I wonder is why they think this is better than LTO6, which already has robots etc COTS solution. It's possible, maybe, that it takes less space. It is resilient to stray magnets in a way tapes maybe wouldn't be - but is that a common issue with LTO?
I'm no MS Shill, but I really hate Java. Mostly because for some reason people still use it on the web, but can't be arsed to update so it works with Java 8.
Oh, and I hate that the installer and configuratior is almost impossible to successfully script - so managed deployments are a PITA. Somehow, going from java 7 to java 8 with what seemed a consistent, simple jre-bla-bla.exe/s REBOOT=Suppress make Java 8 unable to install. The only way to get it to work was to go find the javacpl.exe they hid in the Program Files (x86)/Java folder, run it, and manually uncheck "Enable Java in the browser". There IS NO CLI way to do this that I can find. Then you can install Java 8 and then get to go back and re-check that box.
The problem with Android is that you don't get root on your own devices. People who do run Cyanogenmod can run a simple application permissions "firewall" which is somewhat like HIPS on Windows. It can block or return blank or fake data on anything you don't think the app needs to function for you. And from the reports I've heard, almost no apps crash or refuse to run when this is done.
If we had actual control over our devices, we'd not have privacy issues.
It's pretty ironic the supposed security we would get from walled gardens with managed OSs actually just changed the hackers stealing info to anyone who wants to pay to steal info, but now it's legitimate because they paid someone to steal your info.
Can't the US just print some dollars to pay the debt payments? I would think we'd only hit a wall when people stop buying new debt offerings. I mean, all the debt we already have is stipulated to be paid in dollars only, so we could just create, what, several "Trillion Dollar Coins" and pay it all off tomorrow. That would be a horrible idea because inflation and a likely immediate junk rating for all US bonds, but it could be done.
The US isn't going to be unable to pay the installment... Stop thinking of the govt like a personal checkbook.
I'm not sure about the math, but I'd rather pay people (at the really small level of welfare currently) to party than have them be desperate such that they steal from me, or mug me or worse.
The people I know of on Welfare are in a situation where there's no better choice for them. I guess that's obvious. For the fraction of taxes it costs, do we really want people starving in the streets more than we already have?
Well, now you're moving the goalposts aren't you? Putting something up as collateral doesn't mean you don't own it, at least not to anyone I've ever talked to.
Do you also believe that if I'd bought the car (at a much higher interest rate) with an unsecured personal loan I'd also not own it?
And if you're going to talk about property seizure if you're severely delinquent on a debt, well none of us own anything... Just look at people who didn't pay their debt, went to court and were ordered to pay, and didn't - eventually the local sheriff can come and start auctioning off property to get that judgement paid.
So I don't really get your point. I own the car for any purpose I can imagine. Heck, I can even sell the car to someone else, and either they or I can pay off the loan. I've done this several times when trading in a car. Now, it'd be crazy for someone to pay me full value of the car without taking the lein into account, but that's really no different than taking expected maintenance or wear item replacement into account.
However, as far as I know, the purchaser doesn't have to do that, and can keep making payments or contract with me to keep making the payments, and as long as the lein is made good, it doesn't matter who owns the car.
It's like you can't wrap your head around buying debt obligations along with assets, but this is very common in many situations, and would also apply here.
Slashdot Mirror
To take this to a bit of an absurd hyperbole, that's like Old Dixie plantation owners saying that there's no real alternative to slavery to harvest cotton.
If you care about your control of the computers you own, or privacy, or freedom, or community, or pick your reason, there are real alternatives. You just have to care about one or all of the above more than convenience.
Sadly, our culture generally fails to sacrifice anything anymore for any of our ideals beyond bread and circuses. We don't stand up for the public domain, we pirate or pay. We couldn't just do without that entertainment. We don't make political sacrifices, or work for campaigns we believe in to help third parties, we barely manage to vote for one of the 2 parties that are the problem.
So yes, if you can't put forth any effort at all, there's no alternative. But realize that you're saying the digital equivalent of there's no alternative to being fat and eating fast food. Because any of the alternatives take work and may be unpleasant in any of a number of ways. But Slashdot rightly ridicules that delusion while perpetuating that everyone has to use Windows and take whatever Microsoft gives them.
I know I'm strange, but I find software somewhat frequently that just works on linux but has no Windows version, or requires me figuring out how to add perl, python, insert scripting layer that isn't there first, and then translate unix style conf file to something that works on Windows.
Plenty of complicated stuff beyond a keyboard and mouse is done on Linux computers, it's just not home stuff. Almost all our scientific hardware and radiation control systems and the like run linux. We've had people re-write their own drivers for some hardware on Linux because trying to get EPICS to work on Windows is seen as far harder, and mostly a waste of time for one hardware device out of thousands.
I'm solving this by installing Scientific Linux 7.1. Why fight the OS and the OS vendor? That doesn't make any sense to me...
I don't know if what you say is true, nor how the law is actually written, but it seems to me a working justice system would never allow "following the law(s)" to count as probable cause. Theoretically it makes the concept of probable cause oxymoronic - ideally everyone would follow the law(s), so if following the law(s) is probable cause, you basically have probable cause against everyone. In which case it's the same as a legal system that doesn't have any requirement for probable cause to investigate.
For losing weight, I agree. But what about those who eat large meals, eat cookies etc all the time, popcorn, whatever is around and spend a lot of time sitting around and never gain weight? As reported by those who LIVE WITH the person?
As I understand it, if you eat 1,000 calorie meals three times a day and snack frequently, you'd have to be exercising almost all the time also to not gain lots of weight. There's no time for them to be fasting half the week to make up for it, or spending half the week working out - the people living in the house with them would sort of notice that I'd think.
I suppose it's possible the 3 slices of loaded pizza, 10 oreo cookies and the like are actually much less calories than we would expect - me measure them very wrong. And it's possible everyone who knows people like this are all lying for some weird reason, but that seems unlikely. What reason would someone have to miss or missreport *not* *gaining* weight?
I'd say there are things people can do, but they're not considered "OK" in this culture. I think it's clear you can overcome some human brain activity by taking certain drugs / medicine. There are some that are even legal to take with a doctor watching and prescribing them.
One recent one, Contrave, has been shown in trials (google the manufacturer studies) to have a significant effect. It's now available for that use approved by the FDA and your doctor can prescribe it for you.
I'm not a doctor, but I think it works by stopping the addiction factor / response that some fat people get from eating. It's made up of 2 addiction treatment medicines combined, so that would make sense. Basically I imagine you stop getting the "high" from eating, and so have no where near as much incentive to eat more than you need to feel full.
Of course, this only works for those people who overeat because they get a drug like "high" from eating. And it only helps to the point they would lose weight from stopping that overeating due to the food "addiction" they might have.
I figure beyond that, you need something that makes people able to feel full on much less food, because people who have stronger hunger response or higher efficiency extracting calories or slower metabolism or the like still have to overcome those issues.
I do wonder though if the stronger hunger response might be equivalent to my hypothesis of the "addiction" and hence also helped by the addiction treatment drugs? Following that, some recommend Cognitive Behavioral Therapy to help change behavior - things like removing temptations from your life. In the way recovering alcoholics don't have beer in the house to help stay on the wagon, don't have snacks or ice cream or whatever your overeating food of choice in the house.
Sometimes the simple necessity of going to the store to buy whatever it is you would get empty calories from helps you pause and think "I don't need this" and then you get to not make that mistake.
No where I've worked (till I became IT) let me install software on my computer, or be an admin. I could use the software provided in very specific ways, or I would get it trouble.
It's far more common from what I've read on the net to have Windows locked down in a managed deployment at midsize and larger companies. Most companies don't have the allocated resources to have IT be the inside equivalent of the Geek Squad. Maybe where you've worked did.
What's more interesting to me is that most Linux software (if you know what you're doing) can be installed inside a user account, just like more and more Windows software is getting to be (Think Chrome), unless the computers have Applocker or SELinux or the like running. And most people don't do that because of the difficulty in creating all the rules.
If you believe Snowden at all, he and plenty of others tried through channels, and nothing happened for years. Are you also for people just sitting on 0days when companies decide to wait 14 years to patch?
It sounded like responsible disclosure to me.
And really, did he reveal anything we all didn't strongly suspect anyway? Not that made the news. Sure it pissed off a lot of people, but there wouldn't have been anything to tell if
a) the govt was playing by the rules
or
b) actually responded to internal concerns in any real way vs covering it all up.
Then again, maybe he's the best Russian agent in decades for discrediting the US. In either case, it seems like he did everyone some good in calling the NSA out - though whether it really makes any difference is hard to tell.
Well, I can sort of see a point of confusion - i.e. the President can veto a law, but congress can sort of "veto the veto" trough the 2/3 majority overrule vote (and I forget off the top of my head what the term for this is)... Of course, I really doubt 2/3 of congress would agree the sky is blue or the earth is round currently.
And as much as I thought SystemD was stupid and a solution in search of a problem, I much prefer inelegant technical solutions to design decisions that spy on you and segment features based on whether you're "enterprise" enough.
Also, SL7 is as solid for me as 6 so it's basically learning some new stuff unnecessarily. Well, I've given up on *anyone* leaving UIs the hell alone, and systemD seems to be decently backward compatible with init scripts and the service control syntax.
Now that I plan to try very hard to use SL7 as my Win7 replacement desktop OS, I might even find the faster boot times of SystemD vaguely useful.
I'm moving to Linux. I run a desktop, and I don't need anything that requires me to let any company peruse my data at will for "badness", or injects Ads INTO the OS - that used to be *called* MALWARE.
I already have a crappy annoying spying random upgrading experience in my Android phone, I DO NOT WANT on my desktop.
For what I've tried, it seems faster than VMWare Desktop on my Lenovo W520. And so far it's done everything I need in a VM. It's not a hypervisor, but for desktop virtualization, I can't see paying for VMWare anymore.
I don't know - it seems to be less relevant every year. I can do lots of proprietary stuff on tablets (though I don't think Android is better, but it's a different thing than a PC in my use cases). Many Many things that used to be Windows only are now web based, or offered that way (I'm thinking TurboTax).
If you already use FLOSS on Windows, either because it's good, or it's free, the vast majority runs on whatever. For home uses, I've been able to use LibreOffice for a long time, and really never used MS Office. For business - I don't work in the normal place, but PDF and Wiki are used far more than Word. Social Networking / web based are also used for collaboration now, and it's not Sharepoint (Confluence, FOSWiki, Yammer). E-mail is MS. but Thunderbird works, OWA is actually pretty good in the latest refresh, and plenty of people use GMail. You don't really need Outlook, especially the vast majority of people(at my work) who don't do ANY calendaring.
Windows 10 privacy concerns and cloud logins have me actively trying to migrate to my offices latest Linux platform - Scientific Linux 7. I'm amazed the stuff I can do just fine, and about the same on SL7 as on Windows 7. Now, I'm not going to say this would work for everyone, or even most people, but it's more plausible every year to use other platforms than Windows. Part of it is choosing software.
Our chat is OpenFire XMPP. I run Pidgin on Windows. Runs the same on Linux.
E-mail is a sticking point, I'm trying out some exchange plugins for Thunderbird. I got Outlook 2010 to run, but it can't autodiscover Office 365 for some reason. That has been flaky for us under Windows however. OWA is surprisingly usable for me. And I know more people who use webmail than thick clients anyway.
I use KeePass password manager. Runs on mono and is packaged very easily - and looks the same as on Windows.
I use AutoIT for scripting parts of Windows. That works in Crossover (Which I'm considering purchasing, but you could use the free Wine), and compiles the exe (and runs it too).
For AD we run Windows servers, but use terminal services for interacting with them. This works with rdesktop just fine on Linux. Most of our other tools are web based consoles now. Netwrix, can be web based. ESET AV, Webbased. Foreman/Puppet - web based. Inventory and ticketing, web based. Documentation is Wiki so web based.
Windows base image creation is VM based, and Virtual Box runs on Linux also.
Putty and X forwarding and MIT Kerberos 4 Windows tools are unnecessary on Linux, that's all built in. SVN works fine on Linux. Geppetto works fine on Linux.
I need to learn a new Desktop Environment, but that's true for Win10 also.
Java is actually easier with OpenJDK vs the horror that is Oracle's java 1.8 installers (for me).
The problem MS has IMHO is that Windows 7 can hang on like XP did. And plenty of people use less and less Windows software as everything is moving to "The Cloud" or web based. Smartphones have proven to people that they can do lots of things with different apps, and just because it isn't pixel by pixel Windows doesn't stop them from banking, documenting, picture editing, etc. Tablets have solidified that, and Microsoft is doing the last thing I think they ought to be doing with Windows - reminding people of use environments (like tablets and/or phones) that lets those people work WITHOUT WINDOWS.
And the tablet / smartphone / Apple ecosystem has forced more and more companies to stop being Windows only.
Finally, for gaming - Steam has more and more Linux titles. Isolated consoles also compete well - my PS4 isn't a privacy risk to me as it's limited and all I'm doing is playing games. My taxes isn't on there, and I'm not browsing the web on it. Mobile Gaming is also hugely popular. Windows 10 might eventually become a hybrid X Box sort of thing for some people, but AAA PC Gaming has been pretty dead for years already, and indie is Linux friendly.
TL;DR - I think Windows only software isn't needed nearly as much each year that goes by. PC Gaming has been pretty weak for a decade.
I'd say it's somewhat relevant - it's saying that 'we have a problem now - here's how the "internet of things" will make that problem worse. Maybe figure out mitigations before you buy into the "internet of things"' . . .
However, here it's likely preaching to the choir. But for general consumption / random google search results, it seems like it's a good idea to point out that this could be an issue.
So get a free security suite. Comodo IS for instance is HIPS, Firewall, Sandbox and the like, and will block or sandbox things it doesn't recognize, well before there's a signature. It also can use their cloud engine for near realtime signature updates for the lightly used AV engine (it's not needed much as HIPS etc blocks before AV would scan in my experience)...
For free at home, I use Comodo (I know there's controversy, but it's worked well for me and others I know for years). If I wanted to pay or at work, I'd recommend ESET.
I wonder if it's more that Facebook is dead among the audience of Slashdot? Though I wonder if it was ever really a thing for the type of people on Slashdot...
Why? Because some people don't play follow the fad, or because of something specifically wrong about Slashdot? I mean, reddit to me was always something different from Slashdot - I never really saw any sort of content curation or the like - though apparently based on this I just managed to totally miss a lot of Reddit. Anyway, Slashdot really hasn't changed that much for me since I started using it years ago.
Electricity use - did you even watch the video? Of course not. Also, the data survives a drive failure.
What I wonder is why they think this is better than LTO6, which already has robots etc COTS solution. It's possible, maybe, that it takes less space. It is resilient to stray magnets in a way tapes maybe wouldn't be - but is that a common issue with LTO?
I'm no MS Shill, but I really hate Java. Mostly because for some reason people still use it on the web, but can't be arsed to update so it works with Java 8.
Oh, and I hate that the installer and configuratior is almost impossible to successfully script - so managed deployments are a PITA. Somehow, going from java 7 to java 8 with what seemed a consistent, simple jre-bla-bla.exe /s REBOOT=Suppress make Java 8 unable to install. The only way to get it to work was to go find the javacpl.exe they hid in the Program Files (x86)/Java folder, run it, and manually uncheck "Enable Java in the browser". There IS NO CLI way to do this that I can find. Then you can install Java 8 and then get to go back and re-check that box.
This is crazy.
the truly benevolent devices from trusted companies/organisations
I don't think such a thing exists. And even if it does today, what about in 5 years? Think about sourceforge for instance...
The problem with Android is that you don't get root on your own devices. People who do run Cyanogenmod can run a simple application permissions "firewall" which is somewhat like HIPS on Windows. It can block or return blank or fake data on anything you don't think the app needs to function for you. And from the reports I've heard, almost no apps crash or refuse to run when this is done.
If we had actual control over our devices, we'd not have privacy issues.
It's pretty ironic the supposed security we would get from walled gardens with managed OSs actually just changed the hackers stealing info to anyone who wants to pay to steal info, but now it's legitimate because they paid someone to steal your info.
Can't the US just print some dollars to pay the debt payments? I would think we'd only hit a wall when people stop buying new debt offerings. I mean, all the debt we already have is stipulated to be paid in dollars only, so we could just create, what, several "Trillion Dollar Coins" and pay it all off tomorrow. That would be a horrible idea because inflation and a likely immediate junk rating for all US bonds, but it could be done.
The US isn't going to be unable to pay the installment... Stop thinking of the govt like a personal checkbook.
I'm not sure about the math, but I'd rather pay people (at the really small level of welfare currently) to party than have them be desperate such that they steal from me, or mug me or worse.
The people I know of on Welfare are in a situation where there's no better choice for them. I guess that's obvious. For the fraction of taxes it costs, do we really want people starving in the streets more than we already have?
Well, now you're moving the goalposts aren't you? Putting something up as collateral doesn't mean you don't own it, at least not to anyone I've ever talked to.
Do you also believe that if I'd bought the car (at a much higher interest rate) with an unsecured personal loan I'd also not own it?
And if you're going to talk about property seizure if you're severely delinquent on a debt, well none of us own anything... Just look at people who didn't pay their debt, went to court and were ordered to pay, and didn't - eventually the local sheriff can come and start auctioning off property to get that judgement paid.
So I don't really get your point. I own the car for any purpose I can imagine. Heck, I can even sell the car to someone else, and either they or I can pay off the loan. I've done this several times when trading in a car. Now, it'd be crazy for someone to pay me full value of the car without taking the lein into account, but that's really no different than taking expected maintenance or wear item replacement into account.
However, as far as I know, the purchaser doesn't have to do that, and can keep making payments or contract with me to keep making the payments, and as long as the lein is made good, it doesn't matter who owns the car.
It's like you can't wrap your head around buying debt obligations along with assets, but this is very common in many situations, and would also apply here.