Comey's conclusion was that there was nothing there to prosecute-- essentially that there were some bad decisions, even some reckless behavior, but nothing criminal.
The fundamental problem facing the skills gap, however, is that there aren't enough people coming into the field to begin with.
The fundamental problem with business computer security is that businesses (and their executives) don't really value security. First, they won't pay for it. If you ask them to buy any security products, they want to buy the cheapest one. If you ask them to pay for a security product that isn't 100% necessary, they'll say no. If you ask them to hire a security expert, they'll complain about that expert's salary. If you present them with a security audit that includes a lot of problems, they won't fund the project to fix those problems.
But almost as importantly, the executives will place their own convenience at a higher importance than security. I've seen CEOs order that they be exempted from password requirements because they use their child's first name for every password on every service and computer, and they don't want to have to remember a different password. I've seen executives refuse to make multi-factor authentication mandatory because they, personally, find it annoying to use. I've seen executives insist that they can't have any kind of antivirus product installed on their computer, because it would supposedly slow them down too much. If a company's management refuses to have reasonable security policies placed on them, it creates a gaping security hole.
If you want businesses to have better security, the first step is to convince them that they need to fund security and make it a priority for the whole company.
I'd say a lot of evidence is out there to the contrary. I see much newer vehicles in what we consider poor neighborhoods than what's in my driveway.
You think all poor people are poor because they're irresponsible, and your big evidence is "I've seen poor people that drive a newer car than mine"? I mean, what, you couldn't even find a vague and misleading statistic from the Heritage Foundation to back that up?
Meh. People also said there was no point in Apple going after the desktop market because Microsoft had that sewn up. Also, there was no point in going after the smartphone market because companies like Motorola were too entrenched to compete with. There was no point in making tablets, since Microsoft had tried and failed, showing that nobody wanted a tablet. For that matter, when Microsoft made the first XBox, people thought that was silly because Sony and Nintendo were too unstoppable.
Maybe you can explain why when Clinton lost the election that the international arm of the clinton foundation [observer.com] shut down almost right away as the donation stream abruptly stopped.
The Clinton Foundation isn't shutting down. They started shutting down parts of it as long ago as last summer. One of the explanations at the time was that they were actually trying to get rid of some of the international programs that would represent conflicts of interest if she were to be elected president.
The other stories you cited, about Clinton Foundation donors getting access to the State Department, have already been investigated. Basically, it appears that some donors seemed to be trying to use their donations to the Clinton Foundation in order to get access to talk to Clinton about State department business. The investigations showed that it didn't work. Even the article you cited says, "The emails show that, in these and similar cases, the donors did not always get what they wanted, particularly when they sought anything more than a meeting."
Not that I particularly like Clinton anyway. If you can prove she committed a crime, lock her up. If there's proof that Trump committed any crimes, lock him up too. Bad acts by one political party doesn't excuse bad acts by the other.
Well it could be true-ish. He may have proposed a treaty.
But that should immediately raise questions like, what would the treaty have agreed to? Were the terms fair? Did we have reason to believe Putin intended to honor such a treaty?
It's not just that Amazon is good at the back end stuff like managing a supply chain. They've also been working on that "Amazon Go" thing where you have a store without cashiers or checkout lines. If they can bring a lot of automation and efficiency to Whole Foods, they could bring prices down quite a lot, which has been one of the principle complaints about Whole Foods.
Of course, that wouldn't necessarily be good for the people who work at Whole Foods...
As a company you can basically describe what you're doing (opening the kimono) to the experts and prove that you're doing things securely.
And what if they leave some things out of that description?
Because if we're talking about intelligence agencies compromising developers and having them weaken security in their own products, it doesn't seem like they'd then disclose that weakness to security experts. I posited in the previous post that an intelligence agency might try to get some innocent-looking malicious code into an open source project. So what if that intelligence agency had the cooperation of the developer of a closed source project? The code wouldn't even need to look particularly innocent then.
Well no, it's not a loophole when you're using a deduction in the sort of situation that the deduction was created for. For example, if you deduct the interest for your mortgage using a deduction so home owners can deduct their mortgage interest, that's not a loophole.
But I don't accept the concept that, "if it's not so blatantly illegal that you get arrested, it's ethical." Just to make a wild example, so things are a bit more obvious: Let's say you adopted an Algerian orphan that you've never met, in order to funnel your $10 million per year income through him in such a way that you can report $0 of income last year. So far, the IRS hasn't come after you (fingers crossed!). You're pretty sure that you can get away with it anyway, but only because of an obscure 1863 law intended to prevent parents from needing to report their kid's paper-route money as income. According to that law, there's supposed to be a limit of $10/year on your child's income, but there's an even more arcane law that specifically exempts Algerians from certain tax limits, so combining those two laws, your lawyer thinks the whole situation is uncertain enough that the IRS couldn't get a conviction.
If you were to do something like that, I'd say that's a pretty clear example of exploiting a tax loophole.
So on the one side of things, you have the very standard, normal, acceptable tax deduction for mortgage interest. On the other side, you have a (admittedly contrived) example of obviously unethical exploitation of a tax loophole involving a sham adoption.
And then there's a lot of stuff in between. You take a friend out to lunch and claim it's a business expense, even when it's not really a business lunch. You own your own company and use your car as your personal car, but you claim it's a company car. You claim your company operates in a state that it doesn't operate in because that state has favorable tax laws. You start a corporation and claim it's a home business that is run out of your apartment, and then claim your rent is a business expense, even though your corporation barely does anything and you don't really work at home. As a CEO, you arrange to somehow get your income in a form that you can claim is capital gains, so you don't have to pay the income tax rate. Or, you just don't pay your taxes, and hope the IRS doesn't notice.
People do all kinds of things to avoid taxes. I'd say some are technically legal but unethical, while others might be technically illegal but fairly innocuous. I'm not saying that it's easy to know where to draw the line, but I don't think it's all 100% ethical just because the government doesn't bring a case against you.
Thank you for posting. The first question about something like this should be "what problem are they trying to solve?" and your post gives some idea of the answer to that.
Having looked at this list, it doesn't seem like the problems they're experiencing are caused by using Linux. If their computers take 20 minutes to boot, there must be something wrong with their computers. If the complaint is that some people are using OpenOffice and some are using LibreOffice, that has nothing to do with the OS whatsoever. Either way, it's pretty easy to fix both of those at once: Buy new computers, and install the same office suite on all of them.
If the problem is that they have web applications that only work in a specific version of a specific web browser, that's not really a problem with their OS. If it only works on IE 6, then you might need to stick with an old version of Windows in order to use it, but migrating to Windows 10 isn't going to help. The real solution is to develop a new, modern web application (or at least overhaul the old one's front end) so that it's more browser-agnostic.
If the problem is that your IT people are all Android developers, then once again, I don't know how switching to Windows helps. Maybe the best solution would be to wait for Google to come out with their Android/ChromeOS hybrid and switch to that instead of one of the current Linux desktop distros.
The only issue that you've raised that seems like it might point you in the direction of Windows is, "they can't fill the position for admins with good knowledge of Linux desktops". It is possible that it's easier to find cheap Windows support than cheap Linux support. On the other hand, if the common computer problems are caused by having extremely old/slow hardware, and having old legacy apps that require Windows XP, then I'm not sure Windows support staff is a very good investment. You're going to hire a bunch of additional people and pay for a large-scale migration, only to find that you still have all the same problems.
Maybe there's more to it, and I'd be interested to know the details. However, it kind of sounds like someone in charge is under a mistaken impression that running Windows will fix problems that have nothing to do with the desktop OS.
You can't blame a company or an individual for taking every LEGAL tax write off and advantage that is offered to them.
Well I can't necessarily blame a CEO for trying to maximize profit, at least inasmuch as he has a legal duty to the shareholders to do so. However, I sure can blame an individual for taking advantage of loopholes in the tax code. Taxes present an interesting ethical problem. We have "paying all the taxes you're supposed to" on one side, and on the other you have "people who are clearly and explicitly breaking the law in evading taxes." And then, yes, there's a sort of spectrum between those two. You have people who fudge the numbers a bit, who take highly questionable deductions that they're not supposed to. You have people who engage in extensive legal and financial acrobatics to make income not look like income. Because of how the laws are set up, it might be that the income isn't officially, legally income, but it's income, and they're not paying taxes on it. There are people who are breaking the law, but an auditor might not be able to tell, or a jury probably wouldn't convict. Or sometimes, they're just breaking the law in little ways that they're hoping the IRS will never notice.
And I really don't think all of that behavior is OK just because people aren't being charged with crimes. I'll admit that it's not easy to know where to draw the line between "ethically taking deductions," and "unethically avoiding taxes", but I'd maintain that there is a difference.
Do you not take every deduction you can? Do you offer to pay more tax than you have to?
Honestly, I probably don't. I don't go looking for tax deductions that weren't explicitly intended to apply to me.
Also, it's possible to disguise malicious code to look like it's doing something else (e.g. The Underhanded C Contest). It's entirely possible that intelligence agencies try to insert these kinds of things into open source projects.
But I don't think that was davidwr's point. I take the statement "Published source makes it a lot easier to spot problems with the code." to be pointing out that it's much ore difficult to identify weaknesses if you're provided a compiled binary, as opposed to having access to the source code. It's not that open source code is a guarantee that someone will spot bugs, but with closed source, you're completely at the mercy of the original developer.
That's an interesting point. I'm not sure I agree that it's a very meaningful distinction. In my mind, when "propaganda" is "truth with a spin", the spin needs to be something that misleads or manipulates, which makes it "fake" in some sense. Meanwhile, a lot of lies and false stories have some element of truth in order to make them more believable.
The reason I made a point of calling it "propaganda" is that, to me, calling it "fake news" makes it sound... not very nefarious. I'm not sure why. Maybe because the terminology is so simple, the kind of language a child might use. It makes it sound like the fake news could be playful shenanigans, or an innocent mistake. It seems like anything that isn't 100% accurate could be labelled "fake news", even if it was an honest attempt to figure out what happened, based on the available information.
Propaganda, on the other hand, makes me think of figures like Stalin and Hitler. Not everything they said was a lie, but they intersperse lies with truth in order to achieve the desired effect of manipulating the populace. The term went out of style following WW2 because it had been associated with those kinds of regimes.
But I think, to a large extent, we're just sharing our personal connotations of the words, not really arguing about definitions.
You're absolutely correct that the state should never be allowed to have anything resembling a monopoly on the news. However, that doesn't mean that public news sources can't be valuable, and relatively unbiased. I would say that, in my experience, the BBC, PBS, and NPR are all more reliable and unbiased the Fox, CNN, or MSNBC.
How much would it cost to fund proper investigative journalistic institutions, non-commercial like the BBC, that could identify, shame, and counter such efforts?
There isn't really any amount of money that could fund enough journalism to counter propaganda. And really, let's call it "propaganda". The term "fake news" makes it sound trivial, and diminishes the danger this stuff represents. "Propaganda" has become a dirty word because it conjures images of authoritarian dictators performing mass manipulation, but the thing is, that's exactly what's going on.
You're never going to completely counter the ability to disseminate propaganda. There will always be some people who believe it. And no amount of journalism alone can counter it.
If you want to counter is as thoroughly as possible, first, you need a good education system. People need to know what propaganda is, and how it works, so they can spot it. They need people to know enough history to understand when and how propaganda has been used in the past, and for what reasons. You need people to know enough logic to spot poor arguments, and enough philosophy to understand why a logically consistent argument might still lead you astray. You need this kind of education to be widespread and free, so that as many people receive it as possible.
Then, yes, you also need journalistic institutions that at least attempt to be unbiased. They also need to be set up to avoid turning into tabloids, chasing the most sensationalistic stories rather than informing the public. You need extensive fact-checking, in order to make sure everything said is as accurate as possible. The information they provide needs to be open and freely available. I'm not sure how you accomplish those things.
You also need good communications infrastructure, so people can talk to each other. Here's where it gets hard: You need public forums that also attempt to be free of bias and sensationalism. Computerized social networks, which are becoming the popular public forums, aim to get their audience to feel the need to constantly review their feeds, and because of that, they're designed to elicit and promote controversy. Facebook and twitter may be the worst things ever to happen to public discourse.
There are a few different aspects to your question that I want to expand a little:
1) You're implying that she was completely incompetent, and should have been fired. That's possible. However, I'd also point out that Yahoo was a flailing mess of a company before she took over, and it's not as though there was a clear and easy path to rehabilitate them. Getting purchased by Verizon may have simply been the best play that they had. If so, she got that done.
2) You're implying that being attractive helps you become a CEO (or keep the position once you have it). I think this is a bit of an unfortunate fact of life. People are often judged on superficial things. I think there have been studies indicating that taller men, for example, enjoy more success in politics and in business. There have been studies that indicate people lend more credibility to men with deep voices. People perceive more attractive people as being nicer, smarter, and better in bed. What can you do?
3) You're implying that being a woman helps you become CEO (or keep the position once you get it). That certainly doesn't seem to be the trend. It's not as though there are just tons and tons of female CEOs. Your own post illustrates that female CEOs don't seem to get more respect than their male counterparts. There may be some degree to which people would hesitate to fire a woman because it might "look bad", but ultimately, I doubt that would have much of an effect for very long.
4) There seems to be an assumption that CEOs are generally competent and doing a good job. Therefore, if one CEO is not doing a good job and isn't immediately fired, that person must be an outlier. All I can say is, that doesn't seem to be the case as far as I can tell. I see the insides of a lot of companies, big and small, and a lot of the upper management (including CEOs) frequently make bad decisions without much consequence.
Some people still want to accomplish things and do things with their lives. Some want to continue to gain prestige, wealth, and power. Also, I understand how not having a job can sound nice, but it gets depressing after a while. Even if it's not a "job" per se, it's nice to have some kind of role to play in society that's more than a hobby.
We're at the point where the government is so involved in everything that elections are nearly pointless.
I think it really depends on what you mean by "pointless". From the rest of your post, it really sounds like anything that doesn't give you exactly what you want is "pointless". I don't think that's a very fair assessment.
If you want the federal government to disband and form a confederacy instead, then you're right to think that neither Republicans or Democrats will bring you closer to that goal. However, if you think that the election won't have an impact on your life, or on the lives of your friends and family members, you're probably wrong.
That always seemed like a bizarrely stupid argument to make. He claims that there were literally millions of fraudulent votes across the country. Meanwhile, he won some states by a few thousand votes. If we assume that he's correct, that there was massive voter fraud, but we have no evidence who who received the fraudulent votes, then we have every reason to enterain the possibility that Clinton actually won the election.
He's presenting an argument, the natural conclusion of which is that his legitimacy as president is uncertain. Either he's lying and making things up, or he should be prepared to step aside after a thorough investigation and recount.
I'm not going to berate you, but I think you're wrong.
Or actually, let me start with this: I think it's unfortunate that we have a two-party system. I think we should consider rethinking our elections in order to allow more parties to have more of a voice. I'd also agree that we should do something about campaign finance to restrict the undue influence held by the rich. So maybe we'd agree on that much.
However, we've certainly seen that there is a difference between Republicans and Democrats. If you look at the things Obama tried to do, and then you look a the things Trump has been trying to do, those are definitely different sets of things. What's more, I think a lot of the difficulty in promoting 3rd parties is actually the fault of the people. It's tribalism. Political parties are like sports teams, and which one you want to win isn't really about which one is best or which one is going to implement good policies. It's all identity politics, and part of the reason for that is it's what voters are choosing.
As for the dreaded hax0rz TFA details, how come during the election season Obama said, flat-out and public, that there was no interference going on and that everything was fine?
I don't think that's true. I remember there being talk, even before the election, that the Russians were attempting to hack the election, and that it was very troubling. It was reported at the time that Obama had contacted Putin and had told him to "cut it out". It was so well known to be an issue that Clinton accused Trump, in one of the national debates, of being a Russian puppet. This was no secret.
What the Obama administration had said is that they didn't have evidence that votes were actually changed. That is, they knew there were various attempts to influence the election in different ways, but they didn't know for sure (or at least, weren't prepared to reveal) whether Russia had been able to actually change votes in the computerized voting systems. For that, you'd need to do an extensive recount. Unfortunately, in some of these locations, where isn't necessarily a paper trail to recount.
People in the Obama administration have indicated that Obama didn't want to come out too strongly/directly saying, "Hey everyone, Russia is trying to hack the election in favor of Trump!" because he was concerned that it would seem like a partisan attack, rather than an unbiased statement of fact. Along with everything else, Trump was saying that he wasn't going to accept the results of the election unless he won, so Obama didn't want to throw the validity of the election into doubt. Still, the administration did say that the Russians were trying to influence the election, and they seemed to be doing it in order to help Trump.
Maybe you haven't found 64bit Office to be stable because you're not using it, because you're superstitiously avoiding it...?
Microsoft still recommends 32bit Office because of legacy support. If you have a plug-in or some other software that integrates into Office, there's a decent chance that it was designed for 32bit Office. Specifically, there are a bunch of crappy old plugins developed several years ago, before 64bit Office was available, and then have had minimal support and development since.
Microsoft maintains its market position by continuing legacy support for crappy old business apps for businesses who can neither afford to update the app nor find a new solution. Therefore, the recommendation amounts to "We don't know whether you're running some crappy outdated plugin, so therefore it's safer to go ahead and install the slightly crappier but more compatible version."
I'm not sure what you're referring to here. I've supported thousands of machines running Office in the past few years, and haven't seen a greater incidence of problems with 64bit Office.
You're right that crappy old Office plugins designed for the 32bit version don't work in the 64bit version. If you need that legacy support, sure, use the 32bit version. But IMO the 32bit version should be treated like a legacy version that's maintained to support old plugins and 32bit Windows.
A 64bit OS is not necessarily better than a 32bit OS in all situations. However, as the post points out, there are various improvements in 64bit Windows over 32bit Windows that makes it superior for modern laptops/desktops.
I don't think the argument is written very clearly, but I think the central argument is more like, "64bit Windows can still run 32bit apps. 64bit Windows is objectively better. I don't like having to support 32bit Windows. Why is Microsoft still offering 32bit Windows?" I think the main reason he brings up Apple is to say, "Apple has done this for years. Why can't Microsoft?"
And he has a point. The main reason that I can think of is that Microsoft must still be committed to supporting old hardware. Microsoft has a tendency to provide extremely long legacy support, not breaking backward compatibility. Also, they wanted to push everyone to move to Windows 10, and they probably wanted to provide old 32bit computers an upgrade path.
I do think they Microsoft should start de-emphasizing 32bit versions of their OS and their apps. If you download Windows 10 from their website, 64bit and 32bit are presented as roughly equally valid, even though people generally shouldn't be installing 32bit Windows anymore. If you go to download the Office suite in O365, I think it still gives you the 32bit version by default, and you have to jump through a small hoop to get the 64bit version. IMO, 64bit should be the default going forward, and 32bit presented as a de-emphasized legacy option for people who need it.
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Comey's conclusion was that there was nothing there to prosecute-- essentially that there were some bad decisions, even some reckless behavior, but nothing criminal.
The fundamental problem facing the skills gap, however, is that there aren't enough people coming into the field to begin with.
The fundamental problem with business computer security is that businesses (and their executives) don't really value security. First, they won't pay for it. If you ask them to buy any security products, they want to buy the cheapest one. If you ask them to pay for a security product that isn't 100% necessary, they'll say no. If you ask them to hire a security expert, they'll complain about that expert's salary. If you present them with a security audit that includes a lot of problems, they won't fund the project to fix those problems.
But almost as importantly, the executives will place their own convenience at a higher importance than security. I've seen CEOs order that they be exempted from password requirements because they use their child's first name for every password on every service and computer, and they don't want to have to remember a different password. I've seen executives refuse to make multi-factor authentication mandatory because they, personally, find it annoying to use. I've seen executives insist that they can't have any kind of antivirus product installed on their computer, because it would supposedly slow them down too much. If a company's management refuses to have reasonable security policies placed on them, it creates a gaping security hole.
If you want businesses to have better security, the first step is to convince them that they need to fund security and make it a priority for the whole company.
I'd say a lot of evidence is out there to the contrary. I see much newer vehicles in what we consider poor neighborhoods than what's in my driveway.
You think all poor people are poor because they're irresponsible, and your big evidence is "I've seen poor people that drive a newer car than mine"? I mean, what, you couldn't even find a vague and misleading statistic from the Heritage Foundation to back that up?
Meh. People also said there was no point in Apple going after the desktop market because Microsoft had that sewn up. Also, there was no point in going after the smartphone market because companies like Motorola were too entrenched to compete with. There was no point in making tablets, since Microsoft had tried and failed, showing that nobody wanted a tablet. For that matter, when Microsoft made the first XBox, people thought that was silly because Sony and Nintendo were too unstoppable.
Maybe you can explain why when Clinton lost the election that the international arm of the clinton foundation [observer.com] shut down almost right away as the donation stream abruptly stopped.
The Clinton Foundation isn't shutting down. They started shutting down parts of it as long ago as last summer. One of the explanations at the time was that they were actually trying to get rid of some of the international programs that would represent conflicts of interest if she were to be elected president.
The other stories you cited, about Clinton Foundation donors getting access to the State Department, have already been investigated. Basically, it appears that some donors seemed to be trying to use their donations to the Clinton Foundation in order to get access to talk to Clinton about State department business. The investigations showed that it didn't work. Even the article you cited says, "The emails show that, in these and similar cases, the donors did not always get what they wanted, particularly when they sought anything more than a meeting."
Not that I particularly like Clinton anyway. If you can prove she committed a crime, lock her up. If there's proof that Trump committed any crimes, lock him up too. Bad acts by one political party doesn't excuse bad acts by the other.
Well it could be true-ish. He may have proposed a treaty.
But that should immediately raise questions like, what would the treaty have agreed to? Were the terms fair? Did we have reason to believe Putin intended to honor such a treaty?
It's not just that Amazon is good at the back end stuff like managing a supply chain. They've also been working on that "Amazon Go" thing where you have a store without cashiers or checkout lines. If they can bring a lot of automation and efficiency to Whole Foods, they could bring prices down quite a lot, which has been one of the principle complaints about Whole Foods.
Of course, that wouldn't necessarily be good for the people who work at Whole Foods...
As a company you can basically describe what you're doing (opening the kimono) to the experts and prove that you're doing things securely.
And what if they leave some things out of that description?
Because if we're talking about intelligence agencies compromising developers and having them weaken security in their own products, it doesn't seem like they'd then disclose that weakness to security experts. I posited in the previous post that an intelligence agency might try to get some innocent-looking malicious code into an open source project. So what if that intelligence agency had the cooperation of the developer of a closed source project? The code wouldn't even need to look particularly innocent then.
Well no, it's not a loophole when you're using a deduction in the sort of situation that the deduction was created for. For example, if you deduct the interest for your mortgage using a deduction so home owners can deduct their mortgage interest, that's not a loophole.
But I don't accept the concept that, "if it's not so blatantly illegal that you get arrested, it's ethical." Just to make a wild example, so things are a bit more obvious: Let's say you adopted an Algerian orphan that you've never met, in order to funnel your $10 million per year income through him in such a way that you can report $0 of income last year. So far, the IRS hasn't come after you (fingers crossed!). You're pretty sure that you can get away with it anyway, but only because of an obscure 1863 law intended to prevent parents from needing to report their kid's paper-route money as income. According to that law, there's supposed to be a limit of $10/year on your child's income, but there's an even more arcane law that specifically exempts Algerians from certain tax limits, so combining those two laws, your lawyer thinks the whole situation is uncertain enough that the IRS couldn't get a conviction.
If you were to do something like that, I'd say that's a pretty clear example of exploiting a tax loophole.
So on the one side of things, you have the very standard, normal, acceptable tax deduction for mortgage interest. On the other side, you have a (admittedly contrived) example of obviously unethical exploitation of a tax loophole involving a sham adoption.
And then there's a lot of stuff in between. You take a friend out to lunch and claim it's a business expense, even when it's not really a business lunch. You own your own company and use your car as your personal car, but you claim it's a company car. You claim your company operates in a state that it doesn't operate in because that state has favorable tax laws. You start a corporation and claim it's a home business that is run out of your apartment, and then claim your rent is a business expense, even though your corporation barely does anything and you don't really work at home. As a CEO, you arrange to somehow get your income in a form that you can claim is capital gains, so you don't have to pay the income tax rate. Or, you just don't pay your taxes, and hope the IRS doesn't notice.
People do all kinds of things to avoid taxes. I'd say some are technically legal but unethical, while others might be technically illegal but fairly innocuous. I'm not saying that it's easy to know where to draw the line, but I don't think it's all 100% ethical just because the government doesn't bring a case against you.
Thank you for posting. The first question about something like this should be "what problem are they trying to solve?" and your post gives some idea of the answer to that.
Having looked at this list, it doesn't seem like the problems they're experiencing are caused by using Linux. If their computers take 20 minutes to boot, there must be something wrong with their computers. If the complaint is that some people are using OpenOffice and some are using LibreOffice, that has nothing to do with the OS whatsoever. Either way, it's pretty easy to fix both of those at once: Buy new computers, and install the same office suite on all of them.
If the problem is that they have web applications that only work in a specific version of a specific web browser, that's not really a problem with their OS. If it only works on IE 6, then you might need to stick with an old version of Windows in order to use it, but migrating to Windows 10 isn't going to help. The real solution is to develop a new, modern web application (or at least overhaul the old one's front end) so that it's more browser-agnostic.
If the problem is that your IT people are all Android developers, then once again, I don't know how switching to Windows helps. Maybe the best solution would be to wait for Google to come out with their Android/ChromeOS hybrid and switch to that instead of one of the current Linux desktop distros.
The only issue that you've raised that seems like it might point you in the direction of Windows is, "they can't fill the position for admins with good knowledge of Linux desktops". It is possible that it's easier to find cheap Windows support than cheap Linux support. On the other hand, if the common computer problems are caused by having extremely old/slow hardware, and having old legacy apps that require Windows XP, then I'm not sure Windows support staff is a very good investment. You're going to hire a bunch of additional people and pay for a large-scale migration, only to find that you still have all the same problems.
Maybe there's more to it, and I'd be interested to know the details. However, it kind of sounds like someone in charge is under a mistaken impression that running Windows will fix problems that have nothing to do with the desktop OS.
You can't blame a company or an individual for taking every LEGAL tax write off and advantage that is offered to them.
Well I can't necessarily blame a CEO for trying to maximize profit, at least inasmuch as he has a legal duty to the shareholders to do so. However, I sure can blame an individual for taking advantage of loopholes in the tax code. Taxes present an interesting ethical problem. We have "paying all the taxes you're supposed to" on one side, and on the other you have "people who are clearly and explicitly breaking the law in evading taxes." And then, yes, there's a sort of spectrum between those two. You have people who fudge the numbers a bit, who take highly questionable deductions that they're not supposed to. You have people who engage in extensive legal and financial acrobatics to make income not look like income. Because of how the laws are set up, it might be that the income isn't officially, legally income, but it's income, and they're not paying taxes on it. There are people who are breaking the law, but an auditor might not be able to tell, or a jury probably wouldn't convict. Or sometimes, they're just breaking the law in little ways that they're hoping the IRS will never notice.
And I really don't think all of that behavior is OK just because people aren't being charged with crimes. I'll admit that it's not easy to know where to draw the line between "ethically taking deductions," and "unethically avoiding taxes", but I'd maintain that there is a difference.
Do you not take every deduction you can? Do you offer to pay more tax than you have to?
Honestly, I probably don't. I don't go looking for tax deductions that weren't explicitly intended to apply to me.
Also, it's possible to disguise malicious code to look like it's doing something else (e.g. The Underhanded C Contest). It's entirely possible that intelligence agencies try to insert these kinds of things into open source projects.
But I don't think that was davidwr's point. I take the statement "Published source makes it a lot easier to spot problems with the code." to be pointing out that it's much ore difficult to identify weaknesses if you're provided a compiled binary, as opposed to having access to the source code. It's not that open source code is a guarantee that someone will spot bugs, but with closed source, you're completely at the mercy of the original developer.
That's an interesting point. I'm not sure I agree that it's a very meaningful distinction. In my mind, when "propaganda" is "truth with a spin", the spin needs to be something that misleads or manipulates, which makes it "fake" in some sense. Meanwhile, a lot of lies and false stories have some element of truth in order to make them more believable.
The reason I made a point of calling it "propaganda" is that, to me, calling it "fake news" makes it sound... not very nefarious. I'm not sure why. Maybe because the terminology is so simple, the kind of language a child might use. It makes it sound like the fake news could be playful shenanigans, or an innocent mistake. It seems like anything that isn't 100% accurate could be labelled "fake news", even if it was an honest attempt to figure out what happened, based on the available information.
Propaganda, on the other hand, makes me think of figures like Stalin and Hitler. Not everything they said was a lie, but they intersperse lies with truth in order to achieve the desired effect of manipulating the populace. The term went out of style following WW2 because it had been associated with those kinds of regimes.
But I think, to a large extent, we're just sharing our personal connotations of the words, not really arguing about definitions.
You're absolutely correct that the state should never be allowed to have anything resembling a monopoly on the news. However, that doesn't mean that public news sources can't be valuable, and relatively unbiased. I would say that, in my experience, the BBC, PBS, and NPR are all more reliable and unbiased the Fox, CNN, or MSNBC.
How much would it cost to fund proper investigative journalistic institutions, non-commercial like the BBC, that could identify, shame, and counter such efforts?
There isn't really any amount of money that could fund enough journalism to counter propaganda. And really, let's call it "propaganda". The term "fake news" makes it sound trivial, and diminishes the danger this stuff represents. "Propaganda" has become a dirty word because it conjures images of authoritarian dictators performing mass manipulation, but the thing is, that's exactly what's going on.
You're never going to completely counter the ability to disseminate propaganda. There will always be some people who believe it. And no amount of journalism alone can counter it.
If you want to counter is as thoroughly as possible, first, you need a good education system. People need to know what propaganda is, and how it works, so they can spot it. They need people to know enough history to understand when and how propaganda has been used in the past, and for what reasons. You need people to know enough logic to spot poor arguments, and enough philosophy to understand why a logically consistent argument might still lead you astray. You need this kind of education to be widespread and free, so that as many people receive it as possible.
Then, yes, you also need journalistic institutions that at least attempt to be unbiased. They also need to be set up to avoid turning into tabloids, chasing the most sensationalistic stories rather than informing the public. You need extensive fact-checking, in order to make sure everything said is as accurate as possible. The information they provide needs to be open and freely available. I'm not sure how you accomplish those things.
You also need good communications infrastructure, so people can talk to each other. Here's where it gets hard: You need public forums that also attempt to be free of bias and sensationalism. Computerized social networks, which are becoming the popular public forums, aim to get their audience to feel the need to constantly review their feeds, and because of that, they're designed to elicit and promote controversy. Facebook and twitter may be the worst things ever to happen to public discourse.
There are a few different aspects to your question that I want to expand a little:
1) You're implying that she was completely incompetent, and should have been fired. That's possible. However, I'd also point out that Yahoo was a flailing mess of a company before she took over, and it's not as though there was a clear and easy path to rehabilitate them. Getting purchased by Verizon may have simply been the best play that they had. If so, she got that done.
2) You're implying that being attractive helps you become a CEO (or keep the position once you have it). I think this is a bit of an unfortunate fact of life. People are often judged on superficial things. I think there have been studies indicating that taller men, for example, enjoy more success in politics and in business. There have been studies that indicate people lend more credibility to men with deep voices. People perceive more attractive people as being nicer, smarter, and better in bed. What can you do?
3) You're implying that being a woman helps you become CEO (or keep the position once you get it). That certainly doesn't seem to be the trend. It's not as though there are just tons and tons of female CEOs. Your own post illustrates that female CEOs don't seem to get more respect than their male counterparts. There may be some degree to which people would hesitate to fire a woman because it might "look bad", but ultimately, I doubt that would have much of an effect for very long.
4) There seems to be an assumption that CEOs are generally competent and doing a good job. Therefore, if one CEO is not doing a good job and isn't immediately fired, that person must be an outlier. All I can say is, that doesn't seem to be the case as far as I can tell. I see the insides of a lot of companies, big and small, and a lot of the upper management (including CEOs) frequently make bad decisions without much consequence.
why ever work again??
Some people still want to accomplish things and do things with their lives. Some want to continue to gain prestige, wealth, and power. Also, I understand how not having a job can sound nice, but it gets depressing after a while. Even if it's not a "job" per se, it's nice to have some kind of role to play in society that's more than a hobby.
We're at the point where the government is so involved in everything that elections are nearly pointless.
I think it really depends on what you mean by "pointless". From the rest of your post, it really sounds like anything that doesn't give you exactly what you want is "pointless". I don't think that's a very fair assessment.
If you want the federal government to disband and form a confederacy instead, then you're right to think that neither Republicans or Democrats will bring you closer to that goal. However, if you think that the election won't have an impact on your life, or on the lives of your friends and family members, you're probably wrong.
That always seemed like a bizarrely stupid argument to make. He claims that there were literally millions of fraudulent votes across the country. Meanwhile, he won some states by a few thousand votes. If we assume that he's correct, that there was massive voter fraud, but we have no evidence who who received the fraudulent votes, then we have every reason to enterain the possibility that Clinton actually won the election.
He's presenting an argument, the natural conclusion of which is that his legitimacy as president is uncertain. Either he's lying and making things up, or he should be prepared to step aside after a thorough investigation and recount.
I'm not going to berate you, but I think you're wrong.
Or actually, let me start with this: I think it's unfortunate that we have a two-party system. I think we should consider rethinking our elections in order to allow more parties to have more of a voice. I'd also agree that we should do something about campaign finance to restrict the undue influence held by the rich. So maybe we'd agree on that much.
However, we've certainly seen that there is a difference between Republicans and Democrats. If you look at the things Obama tried to do, and then you look a the things Trump has been trying to do, those are definitely different sets of things. What's more, I think a lot of the difficulty in promoting 3rd parties is actually the fault of the people. It's tribalism. Political parties are like sports teams, and which one you want to win isn't really about which one is best or which one is going to implement good policies. It's all identity politics, and part of the reason for that is it's what voters are choosing.
As for the dreaded hax0rz TFA details, how come during the election season Obama said, flat-out and public, that there was no interference going on and that everything was fine?
I don't think that's true. I remember there being talk, even before the election, that the Russians were attempting to hack the election, and that it was very troubling. It was reported at the time that Obama had contacted Putin and had told him to "cut it out". It was so well known to be an issue that Clinton accused Trump, in one of the national debates, of being a Russian puppet. This was no secret.
What the Obama administration had said is that they didn't have evidence that votes were actually changed. That is, they knew there were various attempts to influence the election in different ways, but they didn't know for sure (or at least, weren't prepared to reveal) whether Russia had been able to actually change votes in the computerized voting systems. For that, you'd need to do an extensive recount. Unfortunately, in some of these locations, where isn't necessarily a paper trail to recount.
People in the Obama administration have indicated that Obama didn't want to come out too strongly/directly saying, "Hey everyone, Russia is trying to hack the election in favor of Trump!" because he was concerned that it would seem like a partisan attack, rather than an unbiased statement of fact. Along with everything else, Trump was saying that he wasn't going to accept the results of the election unless he won, so Obama didn't want to throw the validity of the election into doubt. Still, the administration did say that the Russians were trying to influence the election, and they seemed to be doing it in order to help Trump.
Maybe you haven't found 64bit Office to be stable because you're not using it, because you're superstitiously avoiding it...?
Microsoft still recommends 32bit Office because of legacy support. If you have a plug-in or some other software that integrates into Office, there's a decent chance that it was designed for 32bit Office. Specifically, there are a bunch of crappy old plugins developed several years ago, before 64bit Office was available, and then have had minimal support and development since.
Microsoft maintains its market position by continuing legacy support for crappy old business apps for businesses who can neither afford to update the app nor find a new solution. Therefore, the recommendation amounts to "We don't know whether you're running some crappy outdated plugin, so therefore it's safer to go ahead and install the slightly crappier but more compatible version."
64 bit ms office doesn't work as well as 32 bit.
I'm not sure what you're referring to here. I've supported thousands of machines running Office in the past few years, and haven't seen a greater incidence of problems with 64bit Office.
You're right that crappy old Office plugins designed for the 32bit version don't work in the 64bit version. If you need that legacy support, sure, use the 32bit version. But IMO the 32bit version should be treated like a legacy version that's maintained to support old plugins and 32bit Windows.
A 64bit OS is not necessarily better than a 32bit OS in all situations. However, as the post points out, there are various improvements in 64bit Windows over 32bit Windows that makes it superior for modern laptops/desktops.
I don't think the argument is written very clearly, but I think the central argument is more like, "64bit Windows can still run 32bit apps. 64bit Windows is objectively better. I don't like having to support 32bit Windows. Why is Microsoft still offering 32bit Windows?" I think the main reason he brings up Apple is to say, "Apple has done this for years. Why can't Microsoft?"
And he has a point. The main reason that I can think of is that Microsoft must still be committed to supporting old hardware. Microsoft has a tendency to provide extremely long legacy support, not breaking backward compatibility. Also, they wanted to push everyone to move to Windows 10, and they probably wanted to provide old 32bit computers an upgrade path.
I do think they Microsoft should start de-emphasizing 32bit versions of their OS and their apps. If you download Windows 10 from their website, 64bit and 32bit are presented as roughly equally valid, even though people generally shouldn't be installing 32bit Windows anymore. If you go to download the Office suite in O365, I think it still gives you the 32bit version by default, and you have to jump through a small hoop to get the 64bit version. IMO, 64bit should be the default going forward, and 32bit presented as a de-emphasized legacy option for people who need it.