> "Geez, look at all these tools. I wish I had fewer tools in my toolbox."
No, but I do here people who go in to modify something say "Gosh, I wish there weren't so many different types of connectors, why does this screw have a starburst and this one a rhombus on it?"
Remember that for every Clever Lad who writes this code, an army of dudes has to come through and read and modify it over time.
That's not to speak against it- merely that as the language gets broader, supporting it becomes slower and more expensive.
Neither major party candidate had a great deal of support to give for net neutrality. Hillary was somewhat in favor of it, Trump was opposed and linked it to censorship (specifically the fairness doctrine) and is opposed. Sanders was furiously in favor of the idea, but of course, he didn't get the nomination. I've had a hard time following how it is supported or opposed in Congress, but my general impression is that a few more Democrats normally favor it, versus Republicans. Regardless, I don't think net neutrality will last under Trump, and I think it would have been hurt under Clinton.
The real reason net neutrality is on the ropes is this: the idea was barely discussed by anyone during the election, in comparison to other issues. The companies that stand to profit from net neutrality are electronic media companies, and the companies that stand to profit from its removal are electronic infrastructure companies, and both will continue their fight under the covers. There wasn't much input from the electorate on the topic at all this cycle.
Google News is dubious as a news source, but when this AMP shit started, I completely stopped using it on mobile. Like most "mobile friendly" websites, it disables pinch to zoom some significant portion of the time, making it shitty. MUCH more importantly, I can't share or use links without copypasta to some note app and manual dicking, as the summary states. It is a total failure, making what was once trivial into a giant pile of shit.
My response was, I stopped using it completely. I'm sure others still use it, or never care about being unable to share it, or actually share the awful amp link. Sometimes I could make it work by asking it to load as desktop, but that's up to the server to respect that, and in any event requires loading everything twice just to claw our way back to minimum internet functionality.
The display is shitty, the URL is shitty, the scrolling is broken, the zooming is shitty. It's total garbage. Fuck AMP in every diseased orifice it has.
> No, because most people are grossly uninformed, and unable to grasp statistical risks.
I know that the statistical risk of letting government set policy without regard to personal choice is pretty significant, even if I agree with their desired goals.
> parents delaying vaccinations in a misguided attempt to reduce risk to their child are achieving the exact opposite outcome
Not really, no. First, as I pointed out, the article itself disagrees with its own headline, by saying that the long term results of delayed and prompt are the same. Second, if that's the only issue, I'm sure some pro-delay person would just do the MMR first or whatever.
> Further the only way you could describe as a "guess" that increasing the length of time a child is not vaccinated will increase their risk of disease is if you don't believe that vaccines are effective.
Absolutely incorrect. A small delay would obviously increase the window during which an unvaccinated child could be exposed to the disease, but if that window takes place during a part of the child's life where he's very unlikely to be exposed in any event (baby versus child, etc), then the effect could easily not show up in the statistics. The fact that the delayed and un-delayed cases end up with the same average effects proves this- if the delay window was when all the viruses showed up, you'd expect to see that in the data. You don't.
> nonmedical exemptions to immunization mandates should be barred
Presumably you mean as the AMA says it: with this standing as a gate to enter public schooling. This is a reasonably contentious issue: the antivax group is still small, and will probably stay that way. Blocking access to schools is taking a very strong stance on it, one which will strongly motivate the opposite team. Note also that this sort of thing always seems to be 100%: a state either allows philosophical exemptions, or they do not. Middle ground solutions, such as having some small percent of schools that allow philosophical exemptions, never even enter the debate. Meanwhile, since much of the antivax stuff is fueled by raw fear, your go-to solution involves mandating stuff (and you probably approve of public service messages that portray those who don't vaccinate as stupid, backwards, or malicious, instead of ignorant, unpersuaded, and scared).
Believe as you like. But remember policy like this can very much end up with headlines like "President Alex Jones".
The seizures caused as a result of the vaccine- which appear to be the entire reason for that article- are listed as "These seizures do not cause any long-term health effects." The remainder of the article guesses (a pretty reasonable guess, but still a guess) that more cases of diseases will affect some children because they simply won't have their immunity yet, because they won't have received the vaccine. That article is not a compelling reason to avoid delaying vaccines (nor is it a compelling argument to delay vaccines). Additionally, that article is not very persuasive- an antivaxxer will read that article and say "well how about I skip the vaccine and reduce the odds of vaccine-induced seizures, not from 1 in 1500 to 1 in 3000, but to 0?".
> I want people to get vaccinated based off the CDC's recommended timing
And not based on their own personal choice?
I think most of the antivaxxer plague has come from two twinned issues: the general avoidance of discussion of vaccine risk and reward (which in turn spawns a literally endless web of conspiracy theories), and "trolley problem", where getting a vaccine is seen as an action that damages the recipient (and can kill them) some tiny fraction of the time, an an INaction where not getting a vaccine results in a much larger set of damage and death. The problem is that it is phrased as action/inaction, and many parents will suspect or avoid vaccines based on the horror of an action they took harming their child, versus an inaction they took harming their child, with action/inaction being handled totally differently (and not as rationally) as action/action in all of our minds.
Anyway, I'm getting off topic- your article doesn't bring up anything regarding differing outcomes for delayed versus non-delayed, and it's reasonable to assume that most Republican voters like the idea of the delayed schedule (and/or are neutral on the issue)- hence all the candidates basically holding identical positions on the issue. I'll also point out that turning the discussion to "should the vaccines be later or on schedule" at least gets children vaccinated at a higher rate, which is something that is not discussed in the article (except to assume that some of the delayers will miss it- it totally ignores whatever fraction of parents would bail on vaccines completely if offered only as a batch that they suspect is harmful).
Trump's has spoken up in favor of "spreading out" vaccinations. He hasn't spoken against vaccines in general. Last I checked, there wasn't any data showing that "spreading out" vaccinations either helped or hurt a damned thing. I will point this out- every Republican candidate that was asked about the issue last year basically said the same thing as Trump- so whatever his opinion is, it must play super well with Republicans, and also be considered politically safe (and medically safe, probably) by mainstream candidates like Rubio.
The anti-vax crowd does love Trump, however, and they clearly think he will make some vaccine related statement at some point. Assuming he doesn't, some fraction of that will stick with Trump over their antivax, and some others will stick with their antivax over Trump. The most likely result of Trump's presidency, regarding vaccines, is that there's slightly fewer antivaxxers in a few years, compared to today.
I agree. But, there may be a flip side: tor in general seems to believe, probably rightly, that more users increases anonymity for all users. The other piece is that security and privacy software don't have the level of buy-in that they should pretty much anywhere, to the point where merely having privacy and security programs on your computer can be phrased as if it were a bad or sketchy thing- the "something to hide" fallacy, which is played over and over again in media.
So when I see an app become free, my assumption is that they want a large number of installed instances of it. Usually that's for a reason like "microtransactions" or "user monitoring / data brokering and mining". But it also helps all of tor's goals without that.
Anyway, it's worth considering. Certainly, no one who wanted privacy was seriously oscillating over whether to make their multi-hundred dollar purchase cost X+1 dollars, where X > 300, and likely > 500.
I think it was a political stunt to try to soft-ban encryption solutions, by overtly forcing a very prominent privacy oriented company into unlocking their own crypto by pushing in a backdoored update. The end result would be that any company that didn't have a backdoor ready to go for any device or OS that it touched would look like it was standing in opposition to law enforcement, and that this would be considered a legal risk, and therefore, no one would continue making encryption easier and/or more reliable.
I don't think they "consumed their gains" with it. Kabylake is on the same process, and is almost the same chip, as Skylake. It's an odd feature to get such billing, and it doesn't have to be DMCA protected for Kabylake to play it- it just supports that DRM in hardware. That's not very great, IMO, but I can see why people will like the idea. But anyway, supporting H.265 on chip seems like the sort of thing Intel would do to have a marketable feature, the DRM support is just what makes Netflix happy.
Microprocessors aren't Turing complete. Programming languages can be. But to answer your question- yes, you can emulate any machine on any machine, if you have enough time and space. Those are very real constraints, though, and to get good performance you usually have to do other tricks to make it work correctly, and those tricks are not always generally extensible. Here's an example: find an emulator for Radiant Silvergun. Then tell me if you are having a great time playing it on that emulator.
Oh hey, you can actually help me with a customization problem! When I go to log in (xfce spin, which use lightdm), I have two wacky things I want to change.
The first is, my leftmost monitor, which is vertical, displays as if it were horizontal. It should instead display as if it were vertical, which it is. It works fine once I'm in xfce proper, but not at the login screen.
The second is, I don't know how to change the user icon that lightdm or whatever it is displays. It's just that little awful genericman. I want it to be the same cool F-Zero icon I use for all my logins (Captain Falcon, of course). The background on the login I can set by changing/etc/lightdm-lightdm-gtk-greeter.conf, and that works fine, but the other details still escape me.
They can be a bit of a hassle, and they are necessary for a lot of functionality that other OSes would have built in, or that would come along with a download of the relevant program. MP3 playback just became native, but most codecs you still have to pull down from a third party thing. In the case of video drivers, you pretty much need to do everything in the correct order. There's like five ways to do it, and each one you can screw up.
Ex: if I type: dnf install nvidia-driver akmod-nvidia I'm screwed. I also need kernel-devel, and it needs to be FIRST on that line, I think. Otherwise the driver will grab some wrong version of a kernel header. This is trivial in Windows, where you uncheck all the malware and click next. It's totally possible in Linux, and the machine you get when you are done is very powerful, but it definitely requires more drama.
> Are you installing all your Windows software from the Microsoft App Store?
In win-world, I would save my installers in some directory. I could then use them on a fresh box, or I'd have a nice list of things to get a fresh version of. Out of the box, Windows (especially Windows 7) had a decent amount of entertainment and media support, whereas in Fedora you have to add rpm fusion at a minimum and then get stuff. I have this line in my rebuild notes:
> And what level of customization do you have on Windows? Changing the wallpaper?
You can change things like the wallpaper pretty easily in Windows, and if someone has something else, there will be an installer for it. Overall, you can't customize much, but what you can customize is just click a few things, done. In Fedora, I have to find a forum thread that tells me how to do stuff. The end result is much better, of course.
Basically, recommending Fedora as a casual drop in for Windows and OS X seems a little irresponsible. I normally try to sell it as, hey, you'll need to dick around with the packages a little, but you'll end up owning your own box. But most folks I know who run Linux on their main box are on Ubuntu, and I suspect it makes you do that stuff a little later, and for fewer things.
For many values of "superior", but certainly not all of them. I'm running FC24 on my main box right now, and I have a big list of things I need to pull from third party repos before it is functional for stuff besides development and web browsing. Customization is always possible, but usually difficult, and some peripherals are just a gamble. Vastly more secure, you control your system instead of your system controlling you, better resource usage in almost every case... but still, more hassle than Windows, which every software is always sure to support.
This is pretty much the posterboy article for "ethics in games journalism". But there seems to be little ethics, and more importantly, not really any games journalism.
In the past, when there was sort of a thing as games journalism, it was because there were very few media outlets for discussing games. You had some magazines with nationwide distribution, and that was about it. Since many gamers took their queues from these magazines, the magazines had a motivation to provide a fair environment (their subscription fee or face value of magazine), games companies had plenty of motivation to give them early review copies (they would have their game covered before it came out, building hype), and they had every motivation to buy advertisements (perfectly targeted ad).
Once everything went online, this broke. First, there's too damned many "game journalists" now. Because it's interesting and fun, there's no shortage of willing games journalists and bloggers. Since some people just come for the hype, a reviewer who just sucks every cock poked at him will do just fine in the marketplace, and someone who just generally is genuinely entertaining can do even better. This means that there's no reason for a game company to treat any given magazine, fanzine, blogger, or website even remotely fairly. Second, no one is paying subscriptions any more. Not only are some people willing to do it for effectively free ("brand building"!), plenty of places are entirely ad driven. That means that their readers are no longer part customer, part product- they are now entirely product. Third, the direct interface of the web has dramatically hurt the entire idea. Not only can I got directly to the developer's website and read their promo or ad copy to my heart's content, I can also find people on the very first day discussing it in forums.
Games are a product, not a natural phenomena, not a political opinion, and sometimes not even art. How can you call covering a product "journalism"? It is quite fair to call it advertising, even if the writer wasn't directly paid to shill the product, even if he didn't get it early, or for free, etc.
"Games journalism", if it existed, would look like Consumer Reports. It would be subscription only. The testing would be done blind. The reviews would make some attempt at being scientific, with space for editorialization (especially needed for the artistry that games often have, and dishwashers normally do not).
But that doesn't exist, or I've never heard of it.
So some shitty games get massive press because they pay for it, one way or another. These companies don't keep around their marketing departments for no fucking reason, after all. They don't drop dollars on ads for no reason either. A lot of this also makes an errant assumption regarding gamers and their reasons to game: while some are probably seeking The Best Experience, others just want to have fun with their friends, or with a broader group of acquaintances- for them, finding a popular game will be more rewarding than finding a masterful one.
If you, personally, want to find a game to play, you have more tools than ever. You can look at the now decayed husk of the games journalists of the past, you can read the ad copy, you can find promo videos on youtube, you can confine your google search to reddit or voat or whatever, you can follow a youtube personality who has similar tastes to you, and some games even offer a trial period where you can determine whether you like it or not. It is frustrating if you try to fit the square peg of last century's comprehensive and mostly neutral point of view advance reviews into the round hole of a constantly updated online product that markets other products to you from inside itself, but it can be more reasonable if you widen the net you cast, which is vastly easier than it used to be.
Science is most assuredly not a democracy. Leaders may be determined by geography, tradition, and popularity, but truth is not determined in such a way.
Slashdot Mirror
> "Geez, look at all these tools. I wish I had fewer tools in my toolbox."
No, but I do here people who go in to modify something say "Gosh, I wish there weren't so many different types of connectors, why does this screw have a starburst and this one a rhombus on it?"
Remember that for every Clever Lad who writes this code, an army of dudes has to come through and read and modify it over time.
That's not to speak against it- merely that as the language gets broader, supporting it becomes slower and more expensive.
I totally agree with this sentiment. I hate ads a lot, and Netflix offers an ad-free service. If that changes, I'm gone.
Neither major party candidate had a great deal of support to give for net neutrality. Hillary was somewhat in favor of it, Trump was opposed and linked it to censorship (specifically the fairness doctrine) and is opposed. Sanders was furiously in favor of the idea, but of course, he didn't get the nomination. I've had a hard time following how it is supported or opposed in Congress, but my general impression is that a few more Democrats normally favor it, versus Republicans. Regardless, I don't think net neutrality will last under Trump, and I think it would have been hurt under Clinton.
The real reason net neutrality is on the ropes is this: the idea was barely discussed by anyone during the election, in comparison to other issues. The companies that stand to profit from net neutrality are electronic media companies, and the companies that stand to profit from its removal are electronic infrastructure companies, and both will continue their fight under the covers. There wasn't much input from the electorate on the topic at all this cycle.
I'll try that, thanks!
No idea why I didn't try good old "lowercase I, octothorpe, numeral zero". Sixty percent of the time, it works every time!
> I just have my mobile browser spoof its user agent string to indicate that it's a desktop one
That works on a shrinking subset of sites. Many of them will poll the display for size, and then serve you their shitty-shit version based on that.
Google News is dubious as a news source, but when this AMP shit started, I completely stopped using it on mobile. Like most "mobile friendly" websites, it disables pinch to zoom some significant portion of the time, making it shitty. MUCH more importantly, I can't share or use links without copypasta to some note app and manual dicking, as the summary states. It is a total failure, making what was once trivial into a giant pile of shit.
My response was, I stopped using it completely. I'm sure others still use it, or never care about being unable to share it, or actually share the awful amp link. Sometimes I could make it work by asking it to load as desktop, but that's up to the server to respect that, and in any event requires loading everything twice just to claw our way back to minimum internet functionality.
The display is shitty, the URL is shitty, the scrolling is broken, the zooming is shitty. It's total garbage. Fuck AMP in every diseased orifice it has.
> No, because most people are grossly uninformed, and unable to grasp statistical risks.
I know that the statistical risk of letting government set policy without regard to personal choice is pretty significant, even if I agree with their desired goals.
> parents delaying vaccinations in a misguided attempt to reduce risk to their child are achieving the exact opposite outcome
Not really, no. First, as I pointed out, the article itself disagrees with its own headline, by saying that the long term results of delayed and prompt are the same. Second, if that's the only issue, I'm sure some pro-delay person would just do the MMR first or whatever.
> Further the only way you could describe as a "guess" that increasing the length of time a child is not vaccinated will increase their risk of disease is if you don't believe that vaccines are effective.
Absolutely incorrect. A small delay would obviously increase the window during which an unvaccinated child could be exposed to the disease, but if that window takes place during a part of the child's life where he's very unlikely to be exposed in any event (baby versus child, etc), then the effect could easily not show up in the statistics. The fact that the delayed and un-delayed cases end up with the same average effects proves this- if the delay window was when all the viruses showed up, you'd expect to see that in the data. You don't.
> nonmedical exemptions to immunization mandates should be barred
Presumably you mean as the AMA says it: with this standing as a gate to enter public schooling. This is a reasonably contentious issue: the antivax group is still small, and will probably stay that way. Blocking access to schools is taking a very strong stance on it, one which will strongly motivate the opposite team. Note also that this sort of thing always seems to be 100%: a state either allows philosophical exemptions, or they do not. Middle ground solutions, such as having some small percent of schools that allow philosophical exemptions, never even enter the debate. Meanwhile, since much of the antivax stuff is fueled by raw fear, your go-to solution involves mandating stuff (and you probably approve of public service messages that portray those who don't vaccinate as stupid, backwards, or malicious, instead of ignorant, unpersuaded, and scared).
Believe as you like. But remember policy like this can very much end up with headlines like "President Alex Jones".
The seizures caused as a result of the vaccine- which appear to be the entire reason for that article- are listed as "These seizures do not cause any long-term health effects." The remainder of the article guesses (a pretty reasonable guess, but still a guess) that more cases of diseases will affect some children because they simply won't have their immunity yet, because they won't have received the vaccine. That article is not a compelling reason to avoid delaying vaccines (nor is it a compelling argument to delay vaccines). Additionally, that article is not very persuasive- an antivaxxer will read that article and say "well how about I skip the vaccine and reduce the odds of vaccine-induced seizures, not from 1 in 1500 to 1 in 3000, but to 0?".
> I want people to get vaccinated based off the CDC's recommended timing
And not based on their own personal choice?
I think most of the antivaxxer plague has come from two twinned issues: the general avoidance of discussion of vaccine risk and reward (which in turn spawns a literally endless web of conspiracy theories), and "trolley problem", where getting a vaccine is seen as an action that damages the recipient (and can kill them) some tiny fraction of the time, an an INaction where not getting a vaccine results in a much larger set of damage and death. The problem is that it is phrased as action/inaction, and many parents will suspect or avoid vaccines based on the horror of an action they took harming their child, versus an inaction they took harming their child, with action/inaction being handled totally differently (and not as rationally) as action/action in all of our minds.
Anyway, I'm getting off topic- your article doesn't bring up anything regarding differing outcomes for delayed versus non-delayed, and it's reasonable to assume that most Republican voters like the idea of the delayed schedule (and/or are neutral on the issue)- hence all the candidates basically holding identical positions on the issue. I'll also point out that turning the discussion to "should the vaccines be later or on schedule" at least gets children vaccinated at a higher rate, which is something that is not discussed in the article (except to assume that some of the delayers will miss it- it totally ignores whatever fraction of parents would bail on vaccines completely if offered only as a batch that they suspect is harmful).
Trump's has spoken up in favor of "spreading out" vaccinations. He hasn't spoken against vaccines in general. Last I checked, there wasn't any data showing that "spreading out" vaccinations either helped or hurt a damned thing. I will point this out- every Republican candidate that was asked about the issue last year basically said the same thing as Trump- so whatever his opinion is, it must play super well with Republicans, and also be considered politically safe (and medically safe, probably) by mainstream candidates like Rubio.
The anti-vax crowd does love Trump, however, and they clearly think he will make some vaccine related statement at some point. Assuming he doesn't, some fraction of that will stick with Trump over their antivax, and some others will stick with their antivax over Trump. The most likely result of Trump's presidency, regarding vaccines, is that there's slightly fewer antivaxxers in a few years, compared to today.
> words
I'm not really sure those all quite qualify as words....
I agree. But, there may be a flip side: tor in general seems to believe, probably rightly, that more users increases anonymity for all users. The other piece is that security and privacy software don't have the level of buy-in that they should pretty much anywhere, to the point where merely having privacy and security programs on your computer can be phrased as if it were a bad or sketchy thing- the "something to hide" fallacy, which is played over and over again in media.
So when I see an app become free, my assumption is that they want a large number of installed instances of it. Usually that's for a reason like "microtransactions" or "user monitoring / data brokering and mining". But it also helps all of tor's goals without that.
Anyway, it's worth considering. Certainly, no one who wanted privacy was seriously oscillating over whether to make their multi-hundred dollar purchase cost X+1 dollars, where X > 300, and likely > 500.
I think it was a political stunt to try to soft-ban encryption solutions, by overtly forcing a very prominent privacy oriented company into unlocking their own crypto by pushing in a backdoored update. The end result would be that any company that didn't have a backdoor ready to go for any device or OS that it touched would look like it was standing in opposition to law enforcement, and that this would be considered a legal risk, and therefore, no one would continue making encryption easier and/or more reliable.
> Wow! To think, we're alive at such a time.
Truly, I have waited my entire life to see a small alien craft taking a nice fart through Chilean airspace for some alien reason.
I don't think they "consumed their gains" with it. Kabylake is on the same process, and is almost the same chip, as Skylake. It's an odd feature to get such billing, and it doesn't have to be DMCA protected for Kabylake to play it- it just supports that DRM in hardware. That's not very great, IMO, but I can see why people will like the idea. But anyway, supporting H.265 on chip seems like the sort of thing Intel would do to have a marketable feature, the DRM support is just what makes Netflix happy.
No, the "thousand eyes" gets bugs fixed. The proprietary bugs are only known by your enemies, and are not being fixed.
> retroactive amnesia has set into my brain
All of them?
Microprocessors aren't Turing complete. Programming languages can be. But to answer your question- yes, you can emulate any machine on any machine, if you have enough time and space. Those are very real constraints, though, and to get good performance you usually have to do other tricks to make it work correctly, and those tricks are not always generally extensible. Here's an example: find an emulator for Radiant Silvergun. Then tell me if you are having a great time playing it on that emulator.
Oh hey, you can actually help me with a customization problem! When I go to log in (xfce spin, which use lightdm), I have two wacky things I want to change.
The first is, my leftmost monitor, which is vertical, displays as if it were horizontal. It should instead display as if it were vertical, which it is. It works fine once I'm in xfce proper, but not at the login screen.
The second is, I don't know how to change the user icon that lightdm or whatever it is displays. It's just that little awful genericman. I want it to be the same cool F-Zero icon I use for all my logins (Captain Falcon, of course). The background on the login I can set by changing /etc/lightdm-lightdm-gtk-greeter.conf, and that works fine, but the other details still escape me.
> What's the problem with third-party repos?
They can be a bit of a hassle, and they are necessary for a lot of functionality that other OSes would have built in, or that would come along with a download of the relevant program. MP3 playback just became native, but most codecs you still have to pull down from a third party thing. In the case of video drivers, you pretty much need to do everything in the correct order. There's like five ways to do it, and each one you can screw up.
Ex: if I type:
dnf install nvidia-driver akmod-nvidia
I'm screwed. I also need kernel-devel, and it needs to be FIRST on that line, I think. Otherwise the driver will grab some wrong version of a kernel header. This is trivial in Windows, where you uncheck all the malware and click next. It's totally possible in Linux, and the machine you get when you are done is very powerful, but it definitely requires more drama.
> Are you installing all your Windows software from the Microsoft App Store?
In win-world, I would save my installers in some directory. I could then use them on a fresh box, or I'd have a nice list of things to get a fresh version of. Out of the box, Windows (especially Windows 7) had a decent amount of entertainment and media support, whereas in Fedora you have to add rpm fusion at a minimum and then get stuff. I have this line in my rebuild notes:
dnf install gstreamer{1,}-{ffmpeg,libav,plugins-{good,ugly,bad{,-free,-nonfree}}} --setopt=strict=0
> And what level of customization do you have on Windows? Changing the wallpaper?
You can change things like the wallpaper pretty easily in Windows, and if someone has something else, there will be an installer for it. Overall, you can't customize much, but what you can customize is just click a few things, done. In Fedora, I have to find a forum thread that tells me how to do stuff. The end result is much better, of course.
Basically, recommending Fedora as a casual drop in for Windows and OS X seems a little irresponsible. I normally try to sell it as, hey, you'll need to dick around with the packages a little, but you'll end up owning your own box. But most folks I know who run Linux on their main box are on Ubuntu, and I suspect it makes you do that stuff a little later, and for fewer things.
Make ORGAN SHORTAGES worse? Holy moly the utilitarians are out in fucking FORCE. Way to spin a positive into a negative.
For many values of "superior", but certainly not all of them. I'm running FC24 on my main box right now, and I have a big list of things I need to pull from third party repos before it is functional for stuff besides development and web browsing. Customization is always possible, but usually difficult, and some peripherals are just a gamble. Vastly more secure, you control your system instead of your system controlling you, better resource usage in almost every case... but still, more hassle than Windows, which every software is always sure to support.
This is pretty much the posterboy article for "ethics in games journalism". But there seems to be little ethics, and more importantly, not really any games journalism.
In the past, when there was sort of a thing as games journalism, it was because there were very few media outlets for discussing games. You had some magazines with nationwide distribution, and that was about it. Since many gamers took their queues from these magazines, the magazines had a motivation to provide a fair environment (their subscription fee or face value of magazine), games companies had plenty of motivation to give them early review copies (they would have their game covered before it came out, building hype), and they had every motivation to buy advertisements (perfectly targeted ad).
Once everything went online, this broke. First, there's too damned many "game journalists" now. Because it's interesting and fun, there's no shortage of willing games journalists and bloggers. Since some people just come for the hype, a reviewer who just sucks every cock poked at him will do just fine in the marketplace, and someone who just generally is genuinely entertaining can do even better. This means that there's no reason for a game company to treat any given magazine, fanzine, blogger, or website even remotely fairly. Second, no one is paying subscriptions any more. Not only are some people willing to do it for effectively free ("brand building"!), plenty of places are entirely ad driven. That means that their readers are no longer part customer, part product- they are now entirely product. Third, the direct interface of the web has dramatically hurt the entire idea. Not only can I got directly to the developer's website and read their promo or ad copy to my heart's content, I can also find people on the very first day discussing it in forums.
Games are a product, not a natural phenomena, not a political opinion, and sometimes not even art. How can you call covering a product "journalism"? It is quite fair to call it advertising, even if the writer wasn't directly paid to shill the product, even if he didn't get it early, or for free, etc.
"Games journalism", if it existed, would look like Consumer Reports. It would be subscription only. The testing would be done blind. The reviews would make some attempt at being scientific, with space for editorialization (especially needed for the artistry that games often have, and dishwashers normally do not).
But that doesn't exist, or I've never heard of it.
So some shitty games get massive press because they pay for it, one way or another. These companies don't keep around their marketing departments for no fucking reason, after all. They don't drop dollars on ads for no reason either. A lot of this also makes an errant assumption regarding gamers and their reasons to game: while some are probably seeking The Best Experience, others just want to have fun with their friends, or with a broader group of acquaintances- for them, finding a popular game will be more rewarding than finding a masterful one.
If you, personally, want to find a game to play, you have more tools than ever. You can look at the now decayed husk of the games journalists of the past, you can read the ad copy, you can find promo videos on youtube, you can confine your google search to reddit or voat or whatever, you can follow a youtube personality who has similar tastes to you, and some games even offer a trial period where you can determine whether you like it or not. It is frustrating if you try to fit the square peg of last century's comprehensive and mostly neutral point of view advance reviews into the round hole of a constantly updated online product that markets other products to you from inside itself, but it can be more reasonable if you widen the net you cast, which is vastly easier than it used to be.
> Science is a democracy
Science is most assuredly not a democracy. Leaders may be determined by geography, tradition, and popularity, but truth is not determined in such a way.
> And how does this differ from Windows 10 telemetry?
In the DPRK version, you have the option to view the spying screenshots, according to the article.