It really seems to be. They don't have money, and that's not just Starfleet. Not that I want to get into nits, but because Star Trek had a lot of writers, the only thing we really have to go on is the guidance given, and Roddenberry was huge on the whole "they don't use money" thing. There's definitely signs that there's capitalism outside the Federation, or at the fringes, but even then they often go on a moral crusade about it, to the extent of creating a capitalist race of awful Ferengi, just to really heavy-fist that right up in ya.
Also, the characters clearly don't think of the Enterprise as a warship, as they have noncombatant families and schools and crap in next gen. Obviously, it is a warship, but it seems to be created by the same cheerful laborers who somehow lack for nothing.
Are they? I mean, Trump isn't leading the country yet, so we don't know. But there were PLENTY of people who said they WOULD leave- celebrities, mostly- and they sure as shit haven't done so. If America becomes a dystopia, you will see luminaries run away. This is at least testable.
> as humans become smarter they become more left leaning
This is inaccurate. Hell, the average IQ of Republicans is higher than that of Democrats, but by a trivial amount. Intelligence isn't correlated with political leaning.
> I for one am happy to leave.
You posted as AC, so it's not like we can check on your progress.
You're modded insightful? Fucking Mao was a populist demagogue who murdered like fifty fucking million Chinese. He's one of the top murderers in human history, and he happened within the lifetime of many alive today.
> The visa system just need to be restructured to give all the power to the worker allowing them to easily move from one company to another without fear of getting kicked out of the country.
There's two common complaints- one of them is that the visa system can be used as a way to guarantee very compliant workers. The second is that these compliant workers compete with local workers. I have no real idea what Trump thinks about the system: he certainly hasn't spent much time talking about the plight of the foreigners who come into the corporatist system with a set of rules that would never be allowed to be laid upon citizens, to make them some kind of labor-class, be it visas that glue you to a specific company or farm workers who are forced to put up with terrible conditions. If he's serious about cutting these numbers down with deportation, that solves the problem via fiat. If he actually tries to get anti-corporatist laws that do what you suggest through Congress, that solves the problem via market. Both of these would be pretty big efforts, but the Republican Congress is a lot more likely to go along with the first than the second.
> But I believe that if you've already been vetted by the US government in terms of a security clearance or a DoD ID then you don't need to pay for PreCheck, you can just use those lanes automatically.
This is ABSOLUTELY FALSE. People with clearances don't get to use those lines for free.
> if you fly more than a few times a year it is absolutely in your best interest to pay for PreCheck
Yes dude, that itself IS THE PROBLEM. The PreCheck is even less secure than the currenty TSA bullshit, which is itself just a security theater. It's the same security as pre-TSA, except now you have to pay for the TSA to not scan your nads with their nadscanomatic. This means that the TSA now has financial incentive to make their regular lines longer and shittier, and to make their scanning more intrusive, and to let their paying customers through with just the protection money. Of COURSE it is "worth it" to pay. If I sat outside your fucking door with a gun and charged you 50 cents each time you used it, it would be "worth it" for you to pay as well.
And of course, whatever small chance they have of actually finding a weapon (I think the tests showed about 30%? I could easily be wrong on that, but it was definitely not many) is reduced even further for anyone who can pass that stupid check.
> I've flown to Israel multiple times (on El Al) and their security precautions (while undoubtedly invasive to anyone) are tailored to the perceived "risk profiles" of the passengers.
Israel has actual security at their airports though. And they don't let terrorists pay 85 a year to opt out, either. Just as you would expect of a group providing actual security.
Star Trek IS a Mad Max dystopia. While most episodes focus on the collectivist postcapitalist society that is the Federation, the way humanity gets there in by almost going extinct in world war III. It features nukes, genetic engineering, and racists. Hoping for Star Trek is super duper dark.
If it was about that, then they'd open those lines to anyone who had been vetted by the government already. They don't. The lines are open for those who pay.
I don't trust the carry on luggage with the laptop. My backpack has a "checkpoint friendly" part, where I can just bisect the bag and have the laptop available for their X-Ray devices. But you should absolutely put the little tray with your shoes in front (along with any belt), followed by anything else you can justify putting into a little tray, followed by your actual carry-on item. This way, you'll at least get your shoes while the decide to screen the living shit out of your carry on bags.
The whole thing is fucking awful. The fact that they will sell you a special line where they check almost nothing proves that it's a scam.
I don't know why they would tell you to leave your guns at home. If you do that, you won't have any guns where you are flying to. You should instead check them in baggage.
> As I pointed out in my original post, Russian trolls will mod me down to try and prevent people from seeing the truth of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
I'm personally totally convinced that this happened, because I saw it happen in real time as did you. Even slashdot wasn't immune to this, IMO, and I absolutely saw it on other forums. This is *totally separate* from the "Russians helped Trump" claims, however. Trump has huge organic support among his base, as witnessed in the primaries. I did see a bunch of Russians (who identified as such), saying that they really liked Trump. Trump enjoys huge popularity in Russia (and a lot less popularity in some other parts of Europe). So finding openly Russian posters endorsing Trump or shitting on Clinton was no more surprising than finding a British poster who endorses Hillary and shits on Trump. The idea that the Russian government is successfully feeding disinfo to constitutional conservatives is left wing conspiracy tier claims.
> It's quite funny to watch them first deny the facts, then attempt to deflect, then finally come full circle and deny their own words.
I'm glad you're amusing yourself, but the simple fact is that you can't meaningfully fight shills by playing by the rules. I respect that you try, however. Here's a standard exchange, going exactly as you stated:
(post on a topic) (shill comes in with shill points) (you argue with shill) (shill flatly denies stuff) (you link to sources) (shill deflects implications) (you demonstrate the deflections are invalid) (shill flatly denies their above words) (you demonstrate their own logical incoherence, prove that they are a liar, and move on)
And here's how every forum on the internet displays it to all users except the ones who have way too much time on their hands: (post on a topic) (shill comes in with shill points) (you argue with shill) (shill flatly denies stuff)
The point I'm making is that shills make use of posting tricks that use the mechanisms of the discussion boards against the other users. This means that by the time you get down into the weeds, the shill has succeeded. You aren't going to convince a shill, especially not a foreign government shill. Your entire goal should be to succinctly argue enough that anyone who cares will not accept the shill arguments uncritically, and maybe even do research themselves. Shills are fighting for mindspace of readers, they'll yield any battle that doesn't gain them ground in that one area, because they aren't fighting that battle.
It's possible the Libertarians would have done better with someone else, but given that Johnson has done the best of any Libertarian in the history of the party (twice- his 2012 run was a record for the party too), it seems a bit of an odd argument. I know, I know, the main party candidates are the big drivers here, but performing well in 2012 is still a legit mark in his favor regardless.
That there are Russian shills on the internet is an undeniable fact. That they are on forums steering the conversation when they can is almost assuredly the case- I've seen such cases myself. But that doesn't mean that every piece of right wing journalism is magically fake news nor Russian spies.
CNN right now says Trump has 62,693,993 votes in the popular vote. That's more than any Republican has ever gotten in the popular vote (closest was George Bush in 2004, with 62,040,610). Obviously, these numbers are influenced by there being more Americans than before, and Trump is at 46.3% of the popular vote, while GWB's reelection was 51%. It is off by a few percent only, however- whatever the magnitude of Trump's thing, it still only affected a couple voters out of every hundred.
For comparison, Obama got 69.5 million votes in 2008, and 66 million in 2012, to Clinton's 65 million.
I feel that the solid performance of the 3rd parties this time around is the big thing not being talked about. Gary Johnson in 2012 set yellow team records for a Libertarian with 1.3 million votes. In 2016, he got over 4 million votes- Wikipedia says it is "more votes than the previous eight Libertarian presidential tickets combined", and was over 3%. The Greens got.36% of the vote in 2012, and 1% of the popular vote.
The reason that the 3rd party tickets are interesting is that *both are the same candidates as in 2012*. It is implausible that Johnson and Stein quadrupled and tripled in popularity- it is much more likely that many voters who consider themselves leaning towards the libertarians or the greens, but who usually vote for republicans or democrats, instead did not, driven away by the candidates.
America didn't seem to stay home, is my point- they definitely chose third party options a lot more than normal, though.
I mean, it's bullshit for the reason the summary said- they basically accused Ron Paul of being a KGB agent. If the Russian propaganda machine is secretly vigorously promoting conservative libertarians, free market libertarians, and every right wing blog they can name, give me a fucking break. Just like when they made a list of "fake news" sites that somehow included every single right wing website except fox news, and it was some liberal professor who made the list. Just because the right has loonies doesn't mean that the left loonies should be dug up and given a grand platform to blather.
The fact that Debian doesn't meet Stallman's standards is a problem with Stallman's standards. Trisquel gives you what you are looking for, but when you can't use your hooble-dooble because the company is a bunch of apes that never made a FOSS driver, you'll be angry at the company, and a little angry that you didn't bend for just that one thing. You can run Debian as a fully free software Linux build, why is that not good enough? Because you could, if you wanted, not do that?
Their rationale on not including some of these- which dot a bunch of "i"s and cross a bunch of "t"s- is just very rms: https://www.gnu.org/distros/co...
Basically, if there's a clearly labelled option to use nonfree / proprietary dudes, that disqualifies you. I have never met a single soul in person who finds that distinguishment useful, and outside of the FSF I suspect it is a rare opinion indeed, even among folks who jump through the requisite hoops to run only free software.
This makes a lot of assumptions. You sound like you are talking about a pizzabox server in a rack. My home box gets rebooted whenever I update, which is every couple months, and it also gets rebooted if it gets dicked up, which is about every few weeks, and almost always related to some game that hates my video driver. It also gets turned off if I go on travel. Sometimes I turn it off to save power (especially during the summer, when running a heater in an air conditioned home just bothers me). And what if I lose power? I have a UPS, but I lose all home power at least four times a year, which is shitty, but hey, what are you gonna do? Replace the one bad transformer? I'm sure there's a few more years in it, and where would the repair dudes hang out if not for their seasonal meet-and-greet green box?
I think boot time is worth being concerned about on a main rig. It's definitely worth being concerned about on a laptop. Maybe you have the one laptop that always and without fail restores from hibernate, but I'd call coming up from hibernate about a 90% success rate, and sometimes you need that to happen faster. Plus, since this is a conversation about Linux, it should be pointed out that Linux's support for hibernate and suspend is all over the fucking map still- if you have a mainstream distro on a top tier lappie, sure, it's perfect. If you have something, uh, vintage, maybe not.
> Senate traditionalists won't abolish the filibuster.
They *probably* will. In 2013, all Republicans (and some Democrats) voted against a "nuclear option" on every executive appointed BESIDES the supreme court. At the time, Republicans claimed that they would change it to Supreme Court nominees the next time they had a full-red setup, as a manner of threatening the Democrats. The Democrats ignored it, lusting after a chance to pack federal circuit courts with liberals, and lo, it was done.
So while they MIGHT not abolish what is left of the filibuster- just supreme court picks- they probably will. They threatened to do so should the Democrats override Senate tradition, and the Democrats did exactly that, and then spammed through whatever they wanted until they lost the Senate.
> they will sorely miss the power to filibuster the Democrats
They already don't have that power, though, because the Democrats already gutted the filibuster. That's the problem- it gave them full justification and motive. Maybe they won't do it. But they probably will.
> It's been going on for nearly eight years.
Republican obstruction has been going on for two years by some definitions, six years by others. They certainly had no say at all during the first two years of Obama's presidency, when he had a full-blue congress that was uninterested in the minority party at all. The Republicans seemed to have seized on that as their casus belli, and mostly said so at the time. This is definitely a bad thing (and it could escalate to ruinous), but its clear that the Republicans generally blame the Democrats for this escalation. The Democrats, of course, blame the Republicans. It isn't business as usual, and it's pretty dangerous.
When I was in college, there was one summer that I didn't have any useful classes to take. So I decided to get a job. This was actually hella hard, given that it was summer in a college town. I ended up working at a temp agency. The temp agency was clearly used to dealing with really uneducated folks- the competency test was literally fitting blocks into holes. A monkey could literally do it, a dog could not. So that was what they were selecting for- someone on the plus side of the monkey-dog IQ axis. Eventually, they sent me to the college, where I was helping the medical folks sort and move a bunch of documents. The intro to this was from a seriously tired-of-this-shit receptionist. She talked to me in small words and slowly, which I just assumed meant she was not very bright. She mentioned that the previous three people from the temp agency hadn't worked out, and I should just do the best I could, and ask if I had questions.
As I was in the corner sorting and hauling books and folders, I overheard her on the phone- clearly normal or better intelligence. That was when I figured it out- she really assumed I was profoundly stupid, just because I came from the same agencies as the previous workers. I had no polite way to bring this up, so I just kept my head down and did my manual labor plus basic literacy job, until a doctor came in bitching about his internet not working. He kept pulling random people from around the office to help him, but they couldn't. Eventually, I mentioned I could probably help (and solved it immediately), and once the office figured out I was just some student trying to make a few bucks during the summer, the way they interacted with me changed COMPLETELY. No more tiny words and slow-speak, no more avoidance as if I was just barely not a beast. It was pretty fucking enlightening though.
Remember, this is for bypassing an "are you the owner of this purged ipad" check. It's not security sensitive- the worst case scenario is that a thief gains access to a fully purged ipad. Your solution would work, but would be a lot of complexity, because as soon as the authenticated user bypasses the lock, the critical stage would have to be undone in some manner- for instance, the critical ciphertext could be replaced with plaintext, creating a potential failure point. Alternatively, the "authenticate" code could be replaced with a stub, penalizing every future bootup forever with it.
It could be done, but I just don't see that it's all that important. This doesn't get you to user data, it just lets you use an ipad you stole after you reset it. That's undesired, but how about they just fix their shitty array boundary checking instead?
Slashdot Mirror
As long as it's not "Italeave". I seriously can't deal with seeing that on headlines.
> It's not a collectivist postcapitalist society.
It really seems to be. They don't have money, and that's not just Starfleet. Not that I want to get into nits, but because Star Trek had a lot of writers, the only thing we really have to go on is the guidance given, and Roddenberry was huge on the whole "they don't use money" thing. There's definitely signs that there's capitalism outside the Federation, or at the fringes, but even then they often go on a moral crusade about it, to the extent of creating a capitalist race of awful Ferengi, just to really heavy-fist that right up in ya.
Also, the characters clearly don't think of the Enterprise as a warship, as they have noncombatant families and schools and crap in next gen. Obviously, it is a warship, but it seems to be created by the same cheerful laborers who somehow lack for nothing.
I can't wait for all the "how to I update my authorized_hosts on my printer" posts on stack.
> Smart people are leaving here.
Are they? I mean, Trump isn't leading the country yet, so we don't know. But there were PLENTY of people who said they WOULD leave- celebrities, mostly- and they sure as shit haven't done so. If America becomes a dystopia, you will see luminaries run away. This is at least testable.
> as humans become smarter they become more left leaning
This is inaccurate. Hell, the average IQ of Republicans is higher than that of Democrats, but by a trivial amount. Intelligence isn't correlated with political leaning.
> I for one am happy to leave.
You posted as AC, so it's not like we can check on your progress.
You're modded insightful? Fucking Mao was a populist demagogue who murdered like fifty fucking million Chinese. He's one of the top murderers in human history, and he happened within the lifetime of many alive today.
> The visa system just need to be restructured to give all the power to the worker allowing them to easily move from one company to another without fear of getting kicked out of the country.
There's two common complaints- one of them is that the visa system can be used as a way to guarantee very compliant workers. The second is that these compliant workers compete with local workers. I have no real idea what Trump thinks about the system: he certainly hasn't spent much time talking about the plight of the foreigners who come into the corporatist system with a set of rules that would never be allowed to be laid upon citizens, to make them some kind of labor-class, be it visas that glue you to a specific company or farm workers who are forced to put up with terrible conditions. If he's serious about cutting these numbers down with deportation, that solves the problem via fiat. If he actually tries to get anti-corporatist laws that do what you suggest through Congress, that solves the problem via market. Both of these would be pretty big efforts, but the Republican Congress is a lot more likely to go along with the first than the second.
> But I believe that if you've already been vetted by the US government in terms of a security clearance or a DoD ID then you don't need to pay for PreCheck, you can just use those lanes automatically.
This is ABSOLUTELY FALSE. People with clearances don't get to use those lines for free.
> if you fly more than a few times a year it is absolutely in your best interest to pay for PreCheck
Yes dude, that itself IS THE PROBLEM. The PreCheck is even less secure than the currenty TSA bullshit, which is itself just a security theater. It's the same security as pre-TSA, except now you have to pay for the TSA to not scan your nads with their nadscanomatic. This means that the TSA now has financial incentive to make their regular lines longer and shittier, and to make their scanning more intrusive, and to let their paying customers through with just the protection money. Of COURSE it is "worth it" to pay. If I sat outside your fucking door with a gun and charged you 50 cents each time you used it, it would be "worth it" for you to pay as well.
And of course, whatever small chance they have of actually finding a weapon (I think the tests showed about 30%? I could easily be wrong on that, but it was definitely not many) is reduced even further for anyone who can pass that stupid check.
> I've flown to Israel multiple times (on El Al) and their security precautions (while undoubtedly invasive to anyone) are tailored to the perceived "risk profiles" of the passengers.
Israel has actual security at their airports though. And they don't let terrorists pay 85 a year to opt out, either. Just as you would expect of a group providing actual security.
Star Trek IS a Mad Max dystopia. While most episodes focus on the collectivist postcapitalist society that is the Federation, the way humanity gets there in by almost going extinct in world war III. It features nukes, genetic engineering, and racists. Hoping for Star Trek is super duper dark.
You just have to put them in checked baggage. I don't know why the article tells you to leave them behind.
> How can people live without guns!
They can't, they'll just got conquered by people with guns.
> Water? I can do without that
They'll have water where you're going, though, and for free!
If it was about that, then they'd open those lines to anyone who had been vetted by the government already. They don't. The lines are open for those who pay.
I don't trust the carry on luggage with the laptop. My backpack has a "checkpoint friendly" part, where I can just bisect the bag and have the laptop available for their X-Ray devices. But you should absolutely put the little tray with your shoes in front (along with any belt), followed by anything else you can justify putting into a little tray, followed by your actual carry-on item. This way, you'll at least get your shoes while the decide to screen the living shit out of your carry on bags.
The whole thing is fucking awful. The fact that they will sell you a special line where they check almost nothing proves that it's a scam.
I don't know why they would tell you to leave your guns at home. If you do that, you won't have any guns where you are flying to. You should instead check them in baggage.
They even have a webpage for it: https://www.tsa.gov/travel/tra...
Note if you have an expensive and/or fragile scope, you can carry that through the checkpoints as per normal.
> As I pointed out in my original post, Russian trolls will mod me down to try and prevent people from seeing the truth of Russia's invasion of Ukraine.
I'm personally totally convinced that this happened, because I saw it happen in real time as did you. Even slashdot wasn't immune to this, IMO, and I absolutely saw it on other forums.
This is *totally separate* from the "Russians helped Trump" claims, however. Trump has huge organic support among his base, as witnessed in the primaries. I did see a bunch of Russians (who identified as such), saying that they really liked Trump. Trump enjoys huge popularity in Russia (and a lot less popularity in some other parts of Europe). So finding openly Russian posters endorsing Trump or shitting on Clinton was no more surprising than finding a British poster who endorses Hillary and shits on Trump. The idea that the Russian government is successfully feeding disinfo to constitutional conservatives is left wing conspiracy tier claims.
> It's quite funny to watch them first deny the facts, then attempt to deflect, then finally come full circle and deny their own words.
I'm glad you're amusing yourself, but the simple fact is that you can't meaningfully fight shills by playing by the rules. I respect that you try, however. Here's a standard exchange, going exactly as you stated:
(post on a topic)
(shill comes in with shill points)
(you argue with shill)
(shill flatly denies stuff)
(you link to sources)
(shill deflects implications)
(you demonstrate the deflections are invalid)
(shill flatly denies their above words)
(you demonstrate their own logical incoherence, prove that they are a liar, and move on)
And here's how every forum on the internet displays it to all users except the ones who have way too much time on their hands:
(post on a topic)
(shill comes in with shill points)
(you argue with shill)
(shill flatly denies stuff)
The point I'm making is that shills make use of posting tricks that use the mechanisms of the discussion boards against the other users. This means that by the time you get down into the weeds, the shill has succeeded. You aren't going to convince a shill, especially not a foreign government shill. Your entire goal should be to succinctly argue enough that anyone who cares will not accept the shill arguments uncritically, and maybe even do research themselves. Shills are fighting for mindspace of readers, they'll yield any battle that doesn't gain them ground in that one area, because they aren't fighting that battle.
It's possible the Libertarians would have done better with someone else, but given that Johnson has done the best of any Libertarian in the history of the party (twice- his 2012 run was a record for the party too), it seems a bit of an odd argument. I know, I know, the main party candidates are the big drivers here, but performing well in 2012 is still a legit mark in his favor regardless.
That there are Russian shills on the internet is an undeniable fact. That they are on forums steering the conversation when they can is almost assuredly the case- I've seen such cases myself. But that doesn't mean that every piece of right wing journalism is magically fake news nor Russian spies.
Well, Americans didn't stay home.
CNN right now says Trump has 62,693,993 votes in the popular vote. That's more than any Republican has ever gotten in the popular vote (closest was George Bush in 2004, with 62,040,610). Obviously, these numbers are influenced by there being more Americans than before, and Trump is at 46.3% of the popular vote, while GWB's reelection was 51%. It is off by a few percent only, however- whatever the magnitude of Trump's thing, it still only affected a couple voters out of every hundred.
For comparison, Obama got 69.5 million votes in 2008, and 66 million in 2012, to Clinton's 65 million.
I feel that the solid performance of the 3rd parties this time around is the big thing not being talked about. Gary Johnson in 2012 set yellow team records for a Libertarian with 1.3 million votes. In 2016, he got over 4 million votes- Wikipedia says it is "more votes than the previous eight Libertarian presidential tickets combined", and was over 3%. The Greens got .36% of the vote in 2012, and 1% of the popular vote.
The reason that the 3rd party tickets are interesting is that *both are the same candidates as in 2012*. It is implausible that Johnson and Stein quadrupled and tripled in popularity- it is much more likely that many voters who consider themselves leaning towards the libertarians or the greens, but who usually vote for republicans or democrats, instead did not, driven away by the candidates.
America didn't seem to stay home, is my point- they definitely chose third party options a lot more than normal, though.
I mean, it's bullshit for the reason the summary said- they basically accused Ron Paul of being a KGB agent. If the Russian propaganda machine is secretly vigorously promoting conservative libertarians, free market libertarians, and every right wing blog they can name, give me a fucking break. Just like when they made a list of "fake news" sites that somehow included every single right wing website except fox news, and it was some liberal professor who made the list. Just because the right has loonies doesn't mean that the left loonies should be dug up and given a grand platform to blather.
> We are all in a cave, strapped to a stone. Everything is an illusion.
Right, but my iStone is smoother and thinner than yours.
The fact that Debian doesn't meet Stallman's standards is a problem with Stallman's standards. Trisquel gives you what you are looking for, but when you can't use your hooble-dooble because the company is a bunch of apes that never made a FOSS driver, you'll be angry at the company, and a little angry that you didn't bend for just that one thing. You can run Debian as a fully free software Linux build, why is that not good enough? Because you could, if you wanted, not do that?
Their rationale on not including some of these- which dot a bunch of "i"s and cross a bunch of "t"s- is just very rms:
https://www.gnu.org/distros/co...
Basically, if there's a clearly labelled option to use nonfree / proprietary dudes, that disqualifies you. I have never met a single soul in person who finds that distinguishment useful, and outside of the FSF I suspect it is a rare opinion indeed, even among folks who jump through the requisite hoops to run only free software.
> yay gentoo! Its very easy
no
This makes a lot of assumptions. You sound like you are talking about a pizzabox server in a rack. My home box gets rebooted whenever I update, which is every couple months, and it also gets rebooted if it gets dicked up, which is about every few weeks, and almost always related to some game that hates my video driver. It also gets turned off if I go on travel. Sometimes I turn it off to save power (especially during the summer, when running a heater in an air conditioned home just bothers me). And what if I lose power? I have a UPS, but I lose all home power at least four times a year, which is shitty, but hey, what are you gonna do? Replace the one bad transformer? I'm sure there's a few more years in it, and where would the repair dudes hang out if not for their seasonal meet-and-greet green box?
I think boot time is worth being concerned about on a main rig. It's definitely worth being concerned about on a laptop. Maybe you have the one laptop that always and without fail restores from hibernate, but I'd call coming up from hibernate about a 90% success rate, and sometimes you need that to happen faster. Plus, since this is a conversation about Linux, it should be pointed out that Linux's support for hibernate and suspend is all over the fucking map still- if you have a mainstream distro on a top tier lappie, sure, it's perfect. If you have something, uh, vintage, maybe not.
> Senate traditionalists won't abolish the filibuster.
They *probably* will. In 2013, all Republicans (and some Democrats) voted against a "nuclear option" on every executive appointed BESIDES the supreme court. At the time, Republicans claimed that they would change it to Supreme Court nominees the next time they had a full-red setup, as a manner of threatening the Democrats. The Democrats ignored it, lusting after a chance to pack federal circuit courts with liberals, and lo, it was done.
So while they MIGHT not abolish what is left of the filibuster- just supreme court picks- they probably will. They threatened to do so should the Democrats override Senate tradition, and the Democrats did exactly that, and then spammed through whatever they wanted until they lost the Senate.
> they will sorely miss the power to filibuster the Democrats
They already don't have that power, though, because the Democrats already gutted the filibuster. That's the problem- it gave them full justification and motive. Maybe they won't do it. But they probably will.
> It's been going on for nearly eight years.
Republican obstruction has been going on for two years by some definitions, six years by others. They certainly had no say at all during the first two years of Obama's presidency, when he had a full-blue congress that was uninterested in the minority party at all. The Republicans seemed to have seized on that as their casus belli, and mostly said so at the time. This is definitely a bad thing (and it could escalate to ruinous), but its clear that the Republicans generally blame the Democrats for this escalation. The Democrats, of course, blame the Republicans. It isn't business as usual, and it's pretty dangerous.
When I was in college, there was one summer that I didn't have any useful classes to take. So I decided to get a job. This was actually hella hard, given that it was summer in a college town. I ended up working at a temp agency. The temp agency was clearly used to dealing with really uneducated folks- the competency test was literally fitting blocks into holes. A monkey could literally do it, a dog could not. So that was what they were selecting for- someone on the plus side of the monkey-dog IQ axis. Eventually, they sent me to the college, where I was helping the medical folks sort and move a bunch of documents. The intro to this was from a seriously tired-of-this-shit receptionist. She talked to me in small words and slowly, which I just assumed meant she was not very bright. She mentioned that the previous three people from the temp agency hadn't worked out, and I should just do the best I could, and ask if I had questions.
As I was in the corner sorting and hauling books and folders, I overheard her on the phone- clearly normal or better intelligence. That was when I figured it out- she really assumed I was profoundly stupid, just because I came from the same agencies as the previous workers. I had no polite way to bring this up, so I just kept my head down and did my manual labor plus basic literacy job, until a doctor came in bitching about his internet not working. He kept pulling random people from around the office to help him, but they couldn't. Eventually, I mentioned I could probably help (and solved it immediately), and once the office figured out I was just some student trying to make a few bucks during the summer, the way they interacted with me changed COMPLETELY. No more tiny words and slow-speak, no more avoidance as if I was just barely not a beast. It was pretty fucking enlightening though.
Should they HAVE to, though?
Remember, this is for bypassing an "are you the owner of this purged ipad" check. It's not security sensitive- the worst case scenario is that a thief gains access to a fully purged ipad. Your solution would work, but would be a lot of complexity, because as soon as the authenticated user bypasses the lock, the critical stage would have to be undone in some manner- for instance, the critical ciphertext could be replaced with plaintext, creating a potential failure point. Alternatively, the "authenticate" code could be replaced with a stub, penalizing every future bootup forever with it.
It could be done, but I just don't see that it's all that important. This doesn't get you to user data, it just lets you use an ipad you stole after you reset it. That's undesired, but how about they just fix their shitty array boundary checking instead?