There's a difference between upgrading to a new device because it has more features and being forced to buy a new device with fewer features because the manufacturer has decided to stop the old one working properly.
In the former case you'll think "Man I'm glad I upgraded. This new device is so much better than the old one. In fact I'll probably not keep this one for as long. New is good, so I'll plan on an upgrade sooner this time". In the later case you'll think "This sucks. I was forced to buy a new device because they killed the old one and then I discovered I had to spend extra money to get a worse user experience than the last time. Next time I'll buy one from the competition".
Using forced obsolescence to get people to upgrade and then removing features from the new models the way Apple and Samsung do is dumb in the long run because you're essentially putting people in a position where they're forced to transition to a new vendor even if they were initially happy with what they bought. You're turning people who like the brand and will buy it if they can to people who avoid the brand at all costs.
This 'crackdown' means H1Bs get paid more. Also consider the following conversation
India : Because of [a very convoluted argument] you owe us social security payments and if you pay social security will go bankrupt now rather than in a couple of decades. US : Err, no. We're not going to do that.
If you contribute to social security but never claim a pension that doesn't mean you can claim the money back. I've paid tax in loads of places that I'm not going to get a pension in. I can't 'negotiate' to get my money back. It's just gone.
I.e. the idea is that the message is a virus which tricks civilisations into spending all their resources sending more copies of it, even if they die in the process. I.e. it parasitises civilisations in way analogous to the way biological viruses parasitise cells.
I still reckon Contact would have been better if the message had been like this instead of the aliens being benign and all powerful - basically God substitutes for atheists like Sagan. In my experience the universe is full of fucking fuckers and you need to fuck them before they fuck you. This is why - pace Sagan - we need nukes to keep the God damn Russians and Chinese at bay.
However I just thought it was funny to say that anyone who criticizes the fact that this sort of sci fi has ended up in an actual science paper was some sort of shill for the little grey men.
Have you thought of doing a firmware reset on the device? I did that for a quite a while on my Galaxy S5 before finally snapping and buying a V20 this year.
A firmware reset and a new battery is almost as a good as having a new phone in my experience. I.e. new versions of Android aren't slower if you do a clean install but a phone that's gone through multiple OS upgrades is going to be unusably slow.
Bust a few large tech companies. Find out they're underpaying people on H1Bs and make them pay up with back pay.
So the people on H1B visas get a salary increase and the tech companies lose the incentive to fire Americans and replace them with H1Bs.
Who loses in this scenario? Well the tech companies do, but it'll be hard for them to spin this as a bad thing. And unlike many will actually go bankrupt since most are sitting on enormous piles of cash.
Animojis from the iPhone X or AR Emojis from the S9 may not be your thing, but they are absolutely driving interest in the flagship phones from both companies.
Are they though? Apple and Samsung obfuscate their sales figures but there's a fair bit of evidence that new generations of high end phones have disappointing sales figures and people are either keeping their old phone or buying a budget one.
The majority of people download zero apps per month.
And of the ones who do how many need a 2.8Ghz Snapdragon 845 SoC? The apps I use would run fine on a much slower CPU than that.
It's like with PCs. An old high end or new budget device is good enough for most people. And people bitch about the features that are being removed from new end devices.
The Pentagon is reiterating that a battle in Syria that allegedly left some number of Russian mercenaries dead was purely an act of self-defense on the part of U.S. forces. Indeed, the Pentagon still does not know exactly who it is that American forces targeted during their retaliatory strike on Feb. 7.
"Our strikes were done out of self-defense," Pentagon chief spokesperson Dana W. White told reporters on Feb. 22. "We were very clear about that. We saw that group moving towards us. We still don't know, and I won't speculate, about the intentions or the composition of that group."
White reiterated that the United States did everything it could do ensure that no Russian forces got caught in the crossfire in Syria. "What I can tell you is that we used our deconfliction phone line, and we used it before, during and after the strike," White said. "And we were assured by the Russians that there were no Russians involved. And so those are all of the details that I have...That was purely out of self-defense."
The Pentagon statement contradicts a recent Bloomberg report that suggested that the White House would attempt to showcase the recent battle as an example of the Trump Administration's tough stance on Russia. A source told Bloomberg that the "Trump administration is considering citing the deaths of scores of Russian mercenaries in a Feb. 7 battle with U.S.-backed forces in Syria as evidence of the president's tough stance toward the Kremlin."
The Bloomberg report also cited White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders as making an "oblique reference" to the incident in Syria. ""He has done a number of things to put pressure on Russia and to be tough on Russia. Just last week, there was an incident that will be reported in the coming days, and another way that this president was tough on Russia," Sanders said during a press briefing.
It is unclear exactly who was involved in the Feb. 7 battle and how many Russians actually died. Media reports have diverged wildly from paper to paper and from source to source. The best estimates for Russian mercenary casualties seem to be roughly around 40 dead and 70 wounded. "Those are figures for combined casualties, referencing 3 companies of Wagner involved in support of Syrian forces," Center for Naval Analyses research scientist Michael Kofman wrote in his personal blog. "Of these the number of PMCs [private military contractors] killed and wounded is probably more than a dozen but doubtfully exceeds 30-40."
Both the Pentagon and the Russian government are deemphasizing the Feb. 7 incident because a wider conflict that is spiraling out of control does not benefit anyone.
Yeah, but because we're all stupid now Futurism has a to write the clickbait article as 'new magic component will lead to ELECTRONIC BRAINS'. As if the problem of AI is going to be solved by some low level component as opposed to understanding the high level organisation.
President Xi Jinping is making himself President for Life by removing term limits from the state constitution and and writing the snappily named "Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era" into the Party's one.
China has also cracked down on dissent very strongly since Xi's rise to power, under the cover of cracking down on corruption, something China is not short of. The collective leadership and term limits that were the norm after Mao and Deng is going away and the CCP is going back to full on dictatorship.
Which probably bodes poorly for places like Taiwan and Japan.
At a Central Committee plenary session in January, party leaders decided on a plan to write Xi's guiding principle into the constitution at the National People's Congress scheduled for next month. Xi will also be formally elected to his second term at the annual meeting of the rubber-stamp parliament, which opens March 5.
The principle, entitled "Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era," was added to the Communist Party's constitution last year.
The country's constitution was first adopted in 1982 and has not been amended since 2004. Speculation that Xi might seek to stay in office past his mandate has hit a fever pitch since he unveiled a new leadership line-up in October that didn't include a clear possible heir.
Xi, as the son of a famed Communist Party veteran, is known as a "princeling." He rose through the ranks to the position of Shanghai's party leader in 2007 before being promoted the same year to the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee. A year later, in a sign that he would succeed then-leader Hu Jintao, he was tapped to be vice president.
Since his elevation to the presidency in 2012, Xi has overseen a wide-ranging crackdown on corruption that has helped him eliminate rivals and consolidate his grip on power.
As commander in chief of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, Xi has also been at the helm of a military modernization campaign that poured cash into the country's defense budgets while streamlining its forces.
He has also moved to shore up his legacy, last year taking on the mantle of "core" of the party leadership, elevating him above his predecessors to a position reminiscent of communist China's founder, Mao Zedong.
But at least one analyst said the announcement revealed weakness in the Communist Party's bid to maintain power.
"I interpret this piece of news as evidence that the CCP is weaker and more vulnerable than thought, not strong and stable," Lyle Morris, a China expert and senior analyst at the Rand Corp., wrote on Twitter in reference to the party. "A party that allows a leader through cult and power of personality to re-write the rules of succession is not a political party confident in itself."
Be ready to break things. Sometimes things get through QA, sometimes you break the build. A lot of times that will get caught in your continuous integration systems and testing and everything like that. But sometimes even you just push production, like bad code to production, so you're going to break stuff. The most important thing I can say from day one is to know how to fix it. Know how to back the changes out, know how to do things that can undo the damage that you do and then just accept it. It happens, we have a "broken build bear" that we pass around our office for people that do it as a shaming mechanism, but it's mostly in good fun. But it is important to sort of know how to undo.
For reasons yet to be explained, she chose to put her campaign into the hands of a youngish technocrat, appropriately named Mook, whose faith lay in "data analytics," and whose computer-generated analyses apparently helped convince her that her victory depended on appealing primarily to several distinct constituencies - women, blacks, academics and gender-challenged people.
As for the deplorables, those white working men and women once thought of by Democrats as the heart and sinew of their party, they could be taken for granted; and despite warnings from seasoned politicians like her husband, who read the volatile national political mood, they were.
That's an interesting idea but I honestly don't think Hillary is as smart as that. She badly wanted to be POTUS and if she could have sucked up to those working class white voters to get elected and then shafted them once she was in power she'd have done it.
None of those charged are in custody, according to Peter Carr, a spokesman for the special counselâ(TM)s office. Russia does not allow its citizens to be extradited to the United States to face trial, so it is unlikely the individuals will be turned over, but the indictment probably will prevent them from traveling outside Russia.
So the only point indicting them was so it looked like the investigation was going somewhere and people like you could say "22 indictments so far" instead of "9 indictments so far".
Still look what Rosenstein said when it happened :
Now, there is no allegation in this indictment that any American was a knowing participant in this illegal activity. There is no allegation in the indictment that the charged conduct altered the outcome of the 2016 election.
I.e. you can't use the indictment of a bunch of Russians, in Russia who posed as Americans to attack Trump.
Not necessarily. Look at Rotherham council. On the one hand they covered up the enslavement of 1400 children because of concerns about appearing racist - the children were mostly white and the pedo ring was mostly Pakistani.
So Rotherham council must have been a painfully PC place, right? Turns out it wasn't.
Published in January 2015, the Casey report concluded that the council had a bullying, sexist culture of covering up information and silencing whistleblowers, and was "not fit for purpose"
Clintonâ(TM)s team spent a whopping $1 billion on the election in all â" about twice what Donald Trumpâ(TM)s campaign spent. Clinton spent $72 million on television ads in the final weeks alone
Next time she should hire those Russians who apparently spend $100K on FB ads which swung the election. She'd save 99.9% of her cash and additionally have won the election instead of losing it.
If the Dems are interested I'll set up a call with my buddy Subtle Dmitri and he'll hand over his entire arsenal of social media memes.
Including "Buff Bernie", "Satan : I win if Clinton wins, Jesus : not if I can help it" and "Not My President"
Actually it looks like the Dems are already running with the later, so Dmitri wants his fee for that. Oh yeah, he's says Vladimir says thanks for the uranium.
Thiel, who himself is gay, has supported gay rights causes such as the American Foundation for Equal Rights and GOProud. He invited conservative columnist Ann Coulter, who is a friend of his, to Homocon 2010 as a guest speaker. Coulter later dedicated her 2011 book, Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America, to Thiel. Thiel is also mentioned in the acknowledgments of Coulter's "Adios, America: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole". In 2012, Thiel donated $10,000 to Minnesotans United for All Families, in order to fight Minnesota Amendment 1.
He's was anti gay marriage in 2012, but he's not anti gay. Wasn't Obama still denying he supported gay marriage back in 2008?
2008: As a presidential candidate, Obama pledges to repeal DOMA and 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell,' which banned the service of openly gay troops in the U.S. military He also says, repeatedly, that he is against gay marriage. "I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian - for me - for me as a Christian, it is also a sacred union. God's in the mix," he tells pastor Rick Warren at the Saddleback Presidential Forum in April.
So Thiel's great sin was not coming round to supporting gay marriage as opposed to civil partnerships quickly enough. So clearly he has to be outed and shamed publicly. After all we can't have those filthy homos straying off the vote plantation and thinking they're allowed to not change their opinion when the Democrats tell them to.
Slashdot Mirror
Jesus dude. When you're in a hole stop digging.
Nice. Did you make any money out of that?
There's a difference between upgrading to a new device because it has more features and being forced to buy a new device with fewer features because the manufacturer has decided to stop the old one working properly.
In the former case you'll think "Man I'm glad I upgraded. This new device is so much better than the old one. In fact I'll probably not keep this one for as long. New is good, so I'll plan on an upgrade sooner this time". In the later case you'll think "This sucks. I was forced to buy a new device because they killed the old one and then I discovered I had to spend extra money to get a worse user experience than the last time. Next time I'll buy one from the competition".
Using forced obsolescence to get people to upgrade and then removing features from the new models the way Apple and Samsung do is dumb in the long run because you're essentially putting people in a position where they're forced to transition to a new vendor even if they were initially happy with what they bought. You're turning people who like the brand and will buy it if they can to people who avoid the brand at all costs.
This 'crackdown' means H1Bs get paid more. Also consider the following conversation
India : Because of [a very convoluted argument] you owe us social security payments and if you pay social security will go bankrupt now rather than in a couple of decades.
US : Err, no. We're not going to do that.
If you contribute to social security but never claim a pension that doesn't mean you can claim the money back. I've paid tax in loads of places that I'm not going to get a pension in. I can't 'negotiate' to get my money back. It's just gone.
Oh I know. I mentioned and idea like this here.
https://entertainment.slashdot...
I.e. the idea is that the message is a virus which tricks civilisations into spending all their resources sending more copies of it, even if they die in the process. I.e. it parasitises civilisations in way analogous to the way biological viruses parasitise cells.
I still reckon Contact would have been better if the message had been like this instead of the aliens being benign and all powerful - basically God substitutes for atheists like Sagan. In my experience the universe is full of fucking fuckers and you need to fuck them before they fuck you. This is why - pace Sagan - we need nukes to keep the God damn Russians and Chinese at bay.
However I just thought it was funny to say that anyone who criticizes the fact that this sort of sci fi has ended up in an actual science paper was some sort of shill for the little grey men.
Hit the space road, alien shill.
Have you thought of doing a firmware reset on the device? I did that for a quite a while on my Galaxy S5 before finally snapping and buying a V20 this year.
A firmware reset and a new battery is almost as a good as having a new phone in my experience. I.e. new versions of Android aren't slower if you do a clean install but a phone that's gone through multiple OS upgrades is going to be unusably slow.
Bust a few large tech companies. Find out they're underpaying people on H1Bs and make them pay up with back pay.
So the people on H1B visas get a salary increase and the tech companies lose the incentive to fire Americans and replace them with H1Bs.
Who loses in this scenario? Well the tech companies do, but it'll be hard for them to spin this as a bad thing. And unlike many will actually go bankrupt since most are sitting on enormous piles of cash.
Animojis from the iPhone X or AR Emojis from the S9 may not be your thing, but they are absolutely driving interest in the flagship phones from both companies.
Are they though? Apple and Samsung obfuscate their sales figures but there's a fair bit of evidence that new generations of high end phones have disappointing sales figures and people are either keeping their old phone or buying a budget one.
The majority of people download zero apps per month.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/08...
And of the ones who do how many need a 2.8Ghz Snapdragon 845 SoC? The apps I use would run fine on a much slower CPU than that.
It's like with PCs. An old high end or new budget device is good enough for most people. And people bitch about the features that are being removed from new end devices.
http://nationalinterest.org/bl...
The Pentagon is reiterating that a battle in Syria that allegedly left some number of Russian mercenaries dead was purely an act of self-defense on the part of U.S. forces. Indeed, the Pentagon still does not know exactly who it is that American forces targeted during their retaliatory strike on Feb. 7.
"Our strikes were done out of self-defense," Pentagon chief spokesperson Dana W. White told reporters on Feb. 22. "We were very clear about that. We saw that group moving towards us. We still don't know, and I won't speculate, about the intentions or the composition of that group."
White reiterated that the United States did everything it could do ensure that no Russian forces got caught in the crossfire in Syria. "What I can tell you is that we used our deconfliction phone line, and we used it before, during and after the strike," White said. "And we were assured by the Russians that there were no Russians involved. And so those are all of the details that I have...That was purely out of self-defense."
The Pentagon statement contradicts a recent Bloomberg report that suggested that the White House would attempt to showcase the recent battle as an example of the Trump Administration's tough stance on Russia. A source told Bloomberg that the "Trump administration is considering citing the deaths of scores of Russian mercenaries in a Feb. 7 battle with U.S.-backed forces in Syria as evidence of the president's tough stance toward the Kremlin."
The Bloomberg report also cited White House Press Secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders as making an "oblique reference" to the incident in Syria. ""He has done a number of things to put pressure on Russia and to be tough on Russia. Just last week, there was an incident that will be reported in the coming days, and another way that this president was tough on Russia," Sanders said during a press briefing.
It is unclear exactly who was involved in the Feb. 7 battle and how many Russians actually died. Media reports have diverged wildly from paper to paper and from source to source. The best estimates for Russian mercenary casualties seem to be roughly around 40 dead and 70 wounded. "Those are figures for combined casualties, referencing 3 companies of Wagner involved in support of Syrian forces," Center for Naval Analyses research scientist Michael Kofman wrote in his personal blog. "Of these the number of PMCs [private military contractors] killed and wounded is probably more than a dozen but doubtfully exceeds 30-40."
Both the Pentagon and the Russian government are deemphasizing the Feb. 7 incident because a wider conflict that is spiraling out of control does not benefit anyone.
Bloomberg's Everytown for Gun Safety is fake news
https://crimeresearch.org/2014...
Yeah, but because we're all stupid now Futurism has a to write the clickbait article as 'new magic component will lead to ELECTRONIC BRAINS'. As if the problem of AI is going to be solved by some low level component as opposed to understanding the high level organisation.
Both have problems, in varying degrees, with North Korea
China uses North Korea to needle the US. And, in the future to probe US missile defences in a plausibly deniable way.
But I'm a skeptic, not a septic.
https://www.urbandictionary.co...
President Xi Jinping is making himself President for Life by removing term limits from the state constitution and and writing the snappily named "Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era" into the Party's one.
China has also cracked down on dissent very strongly since Xi's rise to power, under the cover of cracking down on corruption, something China is not short of. The collective leadership and term limits that were the norm after Mao and Deng is going away and the CCP is going back to full on dictatorship.
Which probably bodes poorly for places like Taiwan and Japan.
https://www.japantimes.co.jp/n...
At a Central Committee plenary session in January, party leaders decided on a plan to write Xi's guiding principle into the constitution at the National People's Congress scheduled for next month. Xi will also be formally elected to his second term at the annual meeting of the rubber-stamp parliament, which opens March 5.
The principle, entitled "Xi Jinping Thought on Socialism with Chinese Characteristics for a New Era," was added to the Communist Party's constitution last year.
The country's constitution was first adopted in 1982 and has not been amended since 2004. Speculation that Xi might seek to stay in office past his mandate has hit a fever pitch since he unveiled a new leadership line-up in October that didn't include a clear possible heir.
Xi, as the son of a famed Communist Party veteran, is known as a "princeling." He rose through the ranks to the position of Shanghai's party leader in 2007 before being promoted the same year to the all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee. A year later, in a sign that he would succeed then-leader Hu Jintao, he was tapped to be vice president.
Since his elevation to the presidency in 2012, Xi has overseen a wide-ranging crackdown on corruption that has helped him eliminate rivals and consolidate his grip on power.
As commander in chief of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, Xi has also been at the helm of a military modernization campaign that poured cash into the country's defense budgets while streamlining its forces.
He has also moved to shore up his legacy, last year taking on the mantle of "core" of the party leadership, elevating him above his predecessors to a position reminiscent of communist China's founder, Mao Zedong.
But at least one analyst said the announcement revealed weakness in the Communist Party's bid to maintain power.
"I interpret this piece of news as evidence that the CCP is weaker and more vulnerable than thought, not strong and stable," Lyle Morris, a China expert and senior analyst at the Rand Corp., wrote on Twitter in reference to the party. "A party that allows a leader through cult and power of personality to re-write the rules of succession is not a political party confident in itself."
When they arrive, slap them hard on the back and then look them in the eye and say in as sinister a manner as possible.
"We like team players here, Nugget. Are you a team player?"
Emphasise the words 'team' and 'player'.
Then walk off.
Also have a broken build bear
http://www.vikingcodeschool.co...
Be ready to break things. Sometimes things get through QA, sometimes you break the build. A lot of times that will get caught in your continuous integration systems and testing and everything like that. But sometimes even you just push production, like bad code to production, so you're going to break stuff. The most important thing I can say from day one is to know how to fix it. Know how to back the changes out, know how to do things that can undo the damage that you do and then just accept it. It happens, we have a "broken build bear" that we pass around our office for people that do it as a shaming mechanism, but it's mostly in good fun. But it is important to sort of know how to undo.
I suppose you could get them for breaking campaign finance law.
Then again Hillary broke campaign finance law by using her law firm as a proxy to pay Steele.
http://thehill.com/opinion/cam...
https://www.washingtontimes.co...
For reasons yet to be explained, she chose to put her campaign into the hands of a youngish technocrat, appropriately named Mook, whose faith lay in "data analytics," and whose computer-generated analyses apparently helped convince her that her victory depended on appealing primarily to several distinct constituencies - women, blacks, academics and gender-challenged people.
As for the deplorables, those white working men and women once thought of by Democrats as the heart and sinew of their party, they could be taken for granted; and despite warnings from seasoned politicians like her husband, who read the volatile national political mood, they were.
There's a horrible plausibility to this.
That's an interesting idea but I honestly don't think Hillary is as smart as that. She badly wanted to be POTUS and if she could have sucked up to those working class white voters to get elected and then shafted them once she was in power she'd have done it.
Those Russians that got indicted will never be tried because Russia won't extradite them.
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
None of those charged are in custody, according to Peter Carr, a spokesman for the special counselâ(TM)s office. Russia does not allow its citizens to be extradited to the United States to face trial, so it is unlikely the individuals will be turned over, but the indictment probably will prevent them from traveling outside Russia.
So the only point indicting them was so it looked like the investigation was going somewhere and people like you could say "22 indictments so far" instead of "9 indictments so far".
Still look what Rosenstein said when it happened :
https://www.realclearpolitics....
Now, there is no allegation in this indictment that any American was a knowing participant in this illegal activity. There is no allegation in the indictment that the charged conduct altered the outcome of the 2016 election.
I.e. you can't use the indictment of a bunch of Russians, in Russia who posed as Americans to attack Trump.
The DNC claim they told her those states were competitive and she ignored them
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
I guess in lieu of agreement on that both she and they have decided to blame it on Russia.
Not necessarily. Look at Rotherham council. On the one hand they covered up the enslavement of 1400 children because of concerns about appearing racist - the children were mostly white and the pedo ring was mostly Pakistani.
So Rotherham council must have been a painfully PC place, right? Turns out it wasn't.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Published in January 2015, the Casey report concluded that the council had a bullying, sexist culture of covering up information and silencing whistleblowers, and was "not fit for purpose"
Clintonâ(TM)s team spent a whopping $1 billion on the election in all â" about twice what Donald Trumpâ(TM)s campaign spent. Clinton spent $72 million on television ads in the final weeks alone
Next time she should hire those Russians who apparently spend $100K on FB ads which swung the election. She'd save 99.9% of her cash and additionally have won the election instead of losing it.
If the Dems are interested I'll set up a call with my buddy Subtle Dmitri and he'll hand over his entire arsenal of social media memes.
Including "Buff Bernie", "Satan : I win if Clinton wins, Jesus : not if I can help it" and "Not My President"
http://www.nydailynews.com/new...
Actually it looks like the Dems are already running with the later, so Dmitri wants his fee for that. Oh yeah, he's says Vladimir says thanks for the uranium.
If they'd have got it out earlier it might have made a difference but they're a day late and a ruble short. Sad.
Amusingly the post above you is literally comparing him to people who supported the Nazis.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Thiel, who himself is gay, has supported gay rights causes such as the American Foundation for Equal Rights and GOProud. He invited conservative columnist Ann Coulter, who is a friend of his, to Homocon 2010 as a guest speaker. Coulter later dedicated her 2011 book, Demonic: How the Liberal Mob Is Endangering America, to Thiel. Thiel is also mentioned in the acknowledgments of Coulter's "Adios, America: The Left's Plan to Turn Our Country Into a Third World Hellhole". In 2012, Thiel donated $10,000 to Minnesotans United for All Families, in order to fight Minnesota Amendment 1.
He's was anti gay marriage in 2012, but he's not anti gay. Wasn't Obama still denying he supported gay marriage back in 2008?
http://time.com/3816952/obama-...
2008: As a presidential candidate, Obama pledges to repeal DOMA and 'Don't Ask, Don't Tell,' which banned the service of openly gay troops in the U.S. military
He also says, repeatedly, that he is against gay marriage. "I believe that marriage is the union between a man and a woman. Now, for me as a Christian - for me - for me as a Christian, it is also a sacred union. God's in the mix," he tells pastor Rick Warren at the Saddleback Presidential Forum in April.
So Thiel's great sin was not coming round to supporting gay marriage as opposed to civil partnerships quickly enough. So clearly he has to be outed and shamed publicly. After all we can't have those filthy homos straying off the vote plantation and thinking they're allowed to not change their opinion when the Democrats tell them to.