Apple straight out of college was an effective place with Woz doing the design and Jobs doing the marketing. I.e. in human terms they were an fresh face type, straight out of college and keen to change the world.
Apple had a mid life crisis when Jobs was fired. People like Sculley and his successors almost run it into the ground. Human terms - mid 20's crisis.
Jobs came back and introduced OS-X and the iPhone. Apple prospered. Human terms : mid thirties prosperity.
Now Jobs is gone and Woz is estranged. And they're making dumb mistakes like this. And, probably more importantly following the industry trend to price gouge people through built in obsolescence, removing features and unserviceability.
For instance there are now claims that there is some form of collaboration between Russia and 'Black Lives Matter'. That's just the kind of things governments come up with to discredit activism.
That report was by The Guardian, a far left UK paper, who went digging for Russia links to discredit Trump and prove Hillary's 'Russia collusion' narrative.
The main topics covered by the groups run from Russia were race relations, Texan independence and gun rights. RBC counted 16 groups relating to the Black Lives Matter campaign and other race issues that had a total of 1.2 million subscribers. The biggest group was entitled Blacktivist and reportedly had more than 350,000 likes at its peak.
Actually backing BLM and Texan independence is straight out of Dugin's playbook. Quite literally - Foundations of Geopolitics has a set of recommended things a Russian government should do to destabilise the US and backing 'separatism' and 'Afro-America racists' are among those things.
The book emphasizes that Russia must spread Anti-Americanism everywhere: "the main 'scapegoat' will be precisely the U.S."
In the United States:
Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements - extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics."
Also if Russia's goal is to 'spread Anti-Americanism everywhere' it doesn't make sense to back one US party over the other. Presumably the FSB are smart enough to realise that changing the POTUS at the top of the system isn't enough to convert the US from a strategic competitor to an ally.
The reason for that is that isolationism and abandoning allies isn't a viable strategy for the US. Trump may have said some isolationist things as a candidate but like US POTUSs before him he's ended up abandoning them in office for the simple reason they are disastrous
Putin is a foreign policy realist, and he'd presumably expect this. Actually I suspect he thought he'd get honeymoon period like he did with W Bush and Obama and then the US would revert to business as usual. Unfortunately for him that hasn't been the case with Trump. Trump bombed a Syrian airbase which had Russian personnel on it, though he warned them first. He also shot down a Syrian jet
He didn't care if any of it was true or not. And neither did the DNC, CNN or Buzzfeed. All they wanted was a big compendium of rumours that they could use to discredit Trump. Well for a while, until it became clear that not only was it all a pack of lies, they'd all known it was a pack of lies.
Meanwhile Trump Jr went to a meeting with a Russian lawyer some oppo research, worked out that the person he was dealing with was a Russian agent trying to lobby about the Magnitsky act and more importantly didn't have any information and then he walked. No money changed hands and neither did any information.
Unlike with the Clinton campaign which did pay and didn't declare it
Following the bombshell revelation on Tuesday that Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) funded the "Trump-Russia" dossier, a non-partisan group filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC), saying that the Clinton campaign and the DNC broke campaign finance laws.
The Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the FEC on Wednesday stating that the Clinton campaign and the DNC violated campaign finance laws because they failed to "accurately disclose payments related to the so-called Trump Dossier," Law Newz reported.
The Campaign Legal Center filed the complaint after The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that Mark Elias - a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC - hired Fusion GPS to conduct "research" on then-candidate Donald Trump.
Adav Noti, who previously served as the FEC's Associate General Counsel for Policy, filed the complaint which Law Newz obtained:
This complaint is filed pursuant to 52 U.S.C. SS 30109(a)(1) and is based on information providing reason to believe that the Democratic National Committee ("DNC")(C00010603) and Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign committee Hillary for America (C00575795) have failed to file accurate reports, in violation of the Federal Election Campaign Act ("FECA"), 52 U.S.C. SS 30101, et seq., and Commission regulations. Specifically, the DNC and Hillary for American reported dozens of payments totaling millions of dollars to the law firm Perkins Coie with the purpose described as "Legal Services" or "Legal and Compliance Consulting," when in reality, at least some of those payments were earmarked for the firm Fusion GPS, with the purpose of conducting opposition research on Donald Trump. By failing to file accurate reports, the DNC and Hillary for America undermined the vital public information role that reporting is intended to serve. "If the Commission, upon receiving a complaint . . . has reason to believe that a person has committed, or is about to commit, a violation of [FECA] . . . [t]he Commission shall make an SS 30109(a)(2) (emphasis added); see also 11 C.F.R. SS 111.4(a) (emphasis added). Law Newz cited campaign legal experts as saying that it is illegal for a "campaign to pay a law firm who then hires other [firm] to perform campaign-related activities without reporting the purpose of the expenditures."
That's the funny thing about Trump and the Republicans. As scummy as they are, the Democrats are clearly worse.
Also the Russiagate narrative was 'Trump paid foreigners to get opposition intelligence to influence a US election'. No evidence of that came out. What did come out was that the DNC paid FusionGPS to get the Steele dossier. The one which accused Trump of hiring Russian prostitutes to pee on Obama's bed. Basically it was a bunch of gossip.
Still consider, Steele was a foreigner. And the DNC paid him for opposition research. Which he may have got from Russian intelligence. To influence a US election. I.e. the exact thing they accused Trump of.
It's always struck me as rather naive that the FSB would think that getting Trump elected would solve all their problems and that they'd be try to swing the election for him. It's much more likely that they just want to create chaos in the US and will oppose any US POTUS. In fact both Bush and Obama aimed for a better relationship with Russia. Bush said he'd looked into Putin's eyes and seen a good man (McCain quipped that 'when I look into Putin's eyes I see the letters K, G and B'). Obama and Clinton tried their reset policy and Clinton sold Russian uranium. None of that helped of course - Putin invaded Georgia when Bush was POTUS and invaded Ukraine when Obama was POTUS and Clinton was secretary of state.
Probably Dugin's Foundations of Geopolitics is a better indication of how Russia sees the US. As an enemy that needs to be destroyed
The book emphasizes that Russia must spread Anti-Americanism everywhere: "the main 'scapegoat' will be precisely the U.S."
In the United States:
Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements â" extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics."
And of course we found out that Russia had backed BLM and US separatist movements
You're still SOL when it comes to being at the mercy of software updates though.
Funny thing is, Microsoft got going because people were sick of dumb terminals connected to mainframes and minicomputers. The mini/mainframe would go down from time to time when software was updated and that obviously drove people trying to do actual work on the terminals absolutely crazy because there was nothing they could do until the mini/mainframe was back up.
The original notion of a personal computer was to avoid this. The user controlled what software got installed. If they bricked it, they could fix it. If they didn't change anything, nothing got changed by a third party.
In a way 'cloud computing' and 'automatic updates' are a rollback to the mainframe days that personal computers, Dos and later Windows were a move away from.
It was a clamshell device running Geos. Folded up it had an external display for phone stuff.
Now I reckon something like this might be viable now. You'd have Windows on both the phone and PDA side. The phone would be somewhat limited - i.e. basically a dumb phone for calls. Everything else would done on the PDA side. They could use one of the Atom descendents like this
Of course Microsoft have managed to wreck the desirability of such a such a device. Right now if you look at all device classes Windows and Android are actually neck and neck - Windows dominates desktops and notebooks but Android dominates tablets and phones
It's questionable if there is still a market for a clamshell phone sized device running desktop Windows. Basically you'd end up with a 5 to 6 inch display, which is probably too small to do desktop stuff.
Also even though desktop Windows has most of the desktop market share, it's no longer the only desktop OS. Back in the old days if you wanted to view.doc and.xls files you basically needed Windows and Microsoft Office. Now it's not like that - both open OK on my Android phone and Mac using non Microsoft OSs and non Microsoft office packages. And if you want to run Photoshop or Office you need a big screen and fast processor.
I actually thought they'd do something like this with WIndows Phone. Instead they decided to kill Win32 support and try to move everyone to buying Metro apps from the Windows Store. And they Metroised Windows 8. Still perhaps now they've officially dropped Windows Phone they might decide to rethink. I suspect the ship has sailed for Win32 anyway though, and that probably means the end of Microsoft in the long run. If you're going to move from Win32 to a new OS as a user you'd be better off moving from Microsoft to Android, Chrome, macOS, iOS or Linux.
Yeah, I remember when I got out of uni and started working there were still a few IPX and NBF networks. You had Dos machines with a network redirector that allowed you to access networked file servers and network printers.
It was all kind of remarkable actually. Because MS didn't have a viable server OS NetBios was peer to peer. And getting network access to work inside a Dos interrupt handler must have been a nightmare. Bill Gates went crazy at the 64K low memory footprint and so Larry Osterman got it down to less than one KB with some clever code.
I only ever used it over a modem, and only really to pick up emails. Back then emails were plain text and probably only a few KB each. So Trumpet wasn't the bottleneck in that case.
"The Mohammedan conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. The Islamic historians and scholars have recorded with great glee and pride the slaughters of Hindus, forced conversions, abduction of Hindu women and children to slave markets and the destruction of temples carried out by the warriors of Islam during 800 AD to 1700 AD. Millions of Hindus were converted to Islam by sword during this period."
Giving the invaders credit for the bits of culture they didn't destroy is obscene.
Studies show that when an answer, even an unwelcome one, is delivered in an authoritative tone by an attractive Millennial with a septum piercing the user will get back into line and realise it is they who are at fault.
How many US Presidents have run for office on a 'We need to stop intervening abroad" platform? Every single one has backed down from it once they're in office, presumably based on issues like the ones I raised.
Admittedly none of them have done much to stop Iran or North Korea getting nukes, but all of them have been at least rhetorically committed to stopping that.
Actually Trump is an interesting case. When he was running he wanted to change the US's arrangement whereby the US extends its nuclear umbrella and in return Japan and South Korea do not build nukes. He even signalled that if the price for withdrawing US guarantees was that they did build nukes, he'd be fine with that.
In the same New York Times interview in March, Trump indicated that Japan and South Korea might need to obtain their own nuclear arsenal to protect themselves from North Korea and China if the U.S. is unable to defend them. "It's a position that we have to talk about," he said. "If the United States keeps on its path, its current path of weakness, they're going to want to have that anyway with or without me discussing it, because I don't think they feel very secure in what's going on with our country." "At some point, we cannot be the policeman of the world. And unfortunately, we have a nuclear world now," he later added. Trump also said Japan and Korea might need to pay more for their own defense. "You know, when we did these deals, we were a rich country. We're not a rich country. We were a rich country with a very strong military and tremendous capability in so many ways. We're not anymore," he told the newspaper. "We have a military that's severely depleted. We have nuclear arsenals which are in very terrible shape. They don't even know if they work."
And then in office people obviously explained why this is a bad idea - China might decide that it should strike first - and he backed off.
James Mattis made it clear the US remains committed to defend Japan.
The Pentagon said defense secretary James Mattis called his Japanese counterpart Itsunori Onodera on Wednesday and "underscored that the US commitment to defend Japan, including the US extended deterrence commitment, remains ironclad".
The Pentagon statement said Mattis "also underscored the United States would work with Japan to enhance its ballistic missile defense capabilities".
It was not immediately clear if the Spy-6 radar system was discussed. Mattis also called his South Korean opposite number, Song Young-moo, who this week called for US tactical nuclear weapons to be deployed on the Korean peninsula for the first time since 1991, as well as other strategic assets such as aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and B-52 bombers.
The US has thus far opposed any redeployment of nuclear weapons. The Pentagon statement on the Mattis-Song conversation said only that the US defense secretary stressed that "any threat to the United States, its territories, or its allies will be met with a massive, effective, and overwhelming military response".
Trump himself told the South Koreans that the US remained committed to its existing security guarantees
President Trump and Acting President Hwang Kyo-Ahn of the Republic of Korea (ROK) spoke by telephone today. Acting President Hwang congratulated the President on his inauguration. The two discussed the importance of the U.S.-ROK alliance. President Trump reiterated our ironclad commitment to defend the ROK, including through the provision of extended deter
Transporter: This is probably pure BS as implemented, especially because it relies on the Heisenberg compensator. If exotic matter is possible, it is at least in principle a possibility to open a traversable wormhole to quickly move from one place to another. But it wouldn't work like the transporter on Star Trek.
Transporters Star Trek style have the major philosophical problem that they're doing a
cp./You SomePlaceNew/ rm./You
and not a
mv./You SomePlaceNew/
Which makes a difference if the You has a sense of subjective experience. Being moved is something which shouldn't feel like dying for the You going into the device. Being copied and then deleted would. Or maybe it wouldn't. In any case for the person leaving the device both would feel the same. I.e. for the You that steps out both of these feel the same, but for the You that steps in one may feel like a fiery death, and you can't tell by asking the You that steps out.
This would make me very wary on using a transporter.
Ironically when Stargate:SG1 started the eponymous device was a traversable wormhole which doesn't have the philosophical problem a Star Trek style transporter does. Later on in the episode "48 hours" they retconned the device into working like a Trek style transporter which does a a disassembly, storage and reassembly which means it does. Oh dear...
It's not even clear if storing the actual atoms or storing the information avoids the philosophical problem - clearly being disassembled into atoms and reassembled could well be as subjectively nasty as being disassembled into information and then have that information applied to new atoms.
Of course they probably did this so they could shamelessly reuse scripts written for the Trek universe where transporter glitches are used as plot points. At least they had a sense of self awareness about being derivative though - much of the humour comes from O'Neill breaking the fourth wall by commenting on how the plot is reusing Sci Fi cliches.
China would attack Taiwan, and maybe Japan too. There'd be a regional war as all the other Asian powers divided into pro China and anti China groups.
Russia would invade all of Ukraine, and threaten one of the Baltic States. They'd be opposed by the UK, Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary. France and Germany may intervene on the NATO side or might decide to sit it out.
Iran and Saudi Arabia would escalate their proxy war into actual open war.
It's worth pointing out that Japan, Saudi Arabia and Taiwan are all able to build nukes relatively quickly if they are forced to. The reason they haven't done so is because the US has done a deal with them - so long as they don't claim to be a nuclear power they're under the US's nuclear umbrella. Of course if you're China then it is in your interests to strike before Japan or Taiwan have built a survivable second strike force which is non trivial - you need a SLBMs to guarantee that a first strike won't wipe out all your warheads. Submarines take time to build.
Iran would become an open nuclear power. So would Israel. Israel might decide to strike Iran before Iran had a viable second strike force. Or Saudi Arabia might.
I.e. US hegemony has frozen in a lot of conflicts that would otherwise have escalated. In particular a lot of US allies have not developed nuclear weapons in return for guarantees from the US that it would retaliate against a nuclear attack on them. If that guarantee goes away they would probably build their own nukes but they'd be vulnerable to a nuclear armed opponent striking before they'd built a survivable deterrent force.
One of the things that make dealing with Iran hard is these sorts of calculations. From a US point of view Iran having a small number of ICBMs isn't fatal - the US could probably shoot them down and in any case deterrence applies. What makes it hard is that US allies like Israel or Saudi Arabia may regard Iranian nukes as being something they cannot tolerate and threaten to leave the current arrangement they have with the US where they do not openly wield nukes in return for US protection.
It's the same in a way for North Korea. Japan has not openly nuclearised in return for security guarantees from the US. They may well regard a nuclear NK as being intolerable. On the other hand China may regard a nuclear Japan as intolerable.
The US's hegemony allows it to interpose itself in between the two sides of all these conflicts and that is beneficial. If it pulls back, I think you'd see one of them explode.
Russia and China have both made clear statements that they are wannabe expansionist powers. Right now the US keeps them in check. If it didn't it's hard to see who else would. On the other hand expansionism is something which always leads to war in the long run because expansionist powers keep grabbing more and more until they inadvertently make the case that appeasement has failed and that war is inevitable. .
True, and that's another reason why a large public sector is dangerous. It creates corruption because public sector employees realise they can monetize their position as gatekeeper to public sector resources.
The best option is to get rid of the risk assessments, introducing more dangerous field trips to fun destinations like Raqqa and go for a "(much) fewer but (much) stronger" graduates strategy.
Counterpoint - most of the total sales happen in the first couple of months after release. Crack protection can delay for about that.
Incidentally if your game contacts a server, the server can request checksum checks from the clients and kick ones that have get the answer wrong. So you can ban cracked copies from online play. I.e. the current popularity of online multiplayer makes it easier to do crack detection because you've got a trusted server doing the checks rather than potentially cracked client code.
So you've worked 10- to 12-hour days for the past two years, trying to make your latest game the best ever. You even added copy protection to try to stop the pirates, but within a few days of release there are already crack patches flying around the Internet. Now anyone can help themselves to your hard work, without so much as a "please" or "thank you."
This is what happened to Insomniac's 1999 Playstation release, Spyro 2: Ripto's Rage. Even though it had good copy protection, it was cracked in a little over a week. So when we moved on to Spyro: Year of the Dragon (YOTD), we decided that something more had to be done to try to reduce piracy. The effort was largely successful. Though a cracked version of YOTD has become available, it took over two months for the working patch to appear, after numerous false starts on the part of the pirates (the patch for the European version took another month on top of that). The release of patches that didn't work caused a great deal of confusion among casual pirates and plenty of wasted time and disks among the commercial ones.
Two months may not seem like a long time, but between 30 and 50 percent of most games' total sales occur in that time. Approximately 50 percent of the total sales of Spyro 2, up to December 2000, were in the first two months. Even games released in the middle of the year rather than the holiday season, such as Eidetic's Syphon Filter, make 30 percent of their total sales in the first two months. If YOTD follows the same trend, as it almost certainly will, those two to three months when pirated versions were unavailable must have reduced the overall level and impact of piracy. On top of this, since YOTD was released in Europe one month after the U.S., those two months protected early European sales from pirated copies of the U.S. version.
So why did it take so long to crack YOTD when a patch was available for Spyro 2 so quickly? The difference was that Spyro 2 only had copy protection, while YOTD added crack protection. The crack protection complemented the copy protection by checking for alterations to the game, rather than just making sure the game was run from an original disk. This extra layer of protection slowed down the crackers significantly, because removing the copy protection had to be done without triggering the crack protection. Basically, YOTD is booby-trapped â" one wrong bit and it will blow up in your face. This article will explain the techniques that we used in YOTD, what we learned from using them, and some ideas about how to take our techniques even farther. However, I will not go into explicit detail, as most of the coding involved is relatively simple. Crack protection is more about out-thinking the crackers than out-coding them. A great advantage of any method of protection is novelty. Even a new implementation will give an advantage over simply reusing code, regardless of whether it was successful in previously delaying a crack.
And if people refuse to do what they are required they are denied treatment.
The NHS has previously removed treatment from patients who paid for a drugs that their doctors prescribed but the NHS refused to pay for. The NHS is a monopoly, and it punishes people who try to circumvent its authority. Occasionally that punishment results in those people dying.
In the future, there are going to be a lot more cases like the one last week, when Nice recommended that the NHS should not pay for Avastin, a drug for those suffering from bowel cancer. Nice accepts that Avastin can lengthen the lives of some patients: it just doesn't think it's worth what it costs. If the NHS were to pay for it for every patient who might benefit, it would not be able to afford to buy better, more effective treatments for other patients suffering from other diseases. So, Nice concludes, patients as a whole are better served if the NHS doesn't buy Avastin.
If it was your life, or that of your spouse or child or parent, that might be lengthened by a course of Avastin, you would be unlikely to share that judgment. Indeed, as the NHS wouldn't pay for it, you would probably do all you could to raise the £21,000 needed for the 12-month course that might give you a new lease of life.
Until last year, the result of doing so would be that you lost your right to any care at all from the NHS. The case of Linda O'Boyle - who died of cancer not long after she was deprived of free NHS care, because she had the temerity to pay for a drug the NHS refused to fund - persuaded Labour to commission a report on "co-payments". That report led to new guidelines on the matter: "Patients who switch between NHS and private status should not be put at any advantage or disadvantage in relation to the NHS care they receive. They are entitled to NHS services on exactly the same basis of clinical need as any other patient."
So if you're suffering from bowel cancer and are languishing in an NHS ward, and your doctor thinks you would benefit from Avastin but can't prescribe it because the NHS won't pay for it, can you now pay for it yourself without losing your NHS care?
You would think the answer would surely be "yes". In fact, it is often "no". For the guidelines also state that any "additional private care" (that is, any drug that you have paid for yourself) "should be carried out separately from NHS care". And if it cannot be carried out separately - which in many cases it cannot be, because NHS trusts do not have separate facilities - then it should not be carried out at all.
Last March, the Department of Health ruled that, because it was impossible to provide the relevant treatment "separately", a patient who wanted a more sophisticated lens for his eye than the NHS was willing to provide could not pay for one and still occupy an NHS bed. So despite the adoption of guidelines that appear to proclaim the opposite, the ban on co-payments is still largely in place: whether your local hospital is considered to have "separate facilities" is down to the whim of its administrators, who may have ideological objections to co-payments.
The resulting "policy" is unfair, arbitrary and cruel. It serves nothing except the meanest, dog-in-the-manger egalitarianism. No one is harmed when an NHS patient with bowel cancer uses his or her own money to pay for a course of Avastin. When the NHS refuses to provide care to those who do, it does not hurt those people alone: it also sacrifices a source of revenue that could be used to improve its services for everyone else - for example, by buying Avastin for people who can't afford it.
Or look at Charlie Gard. The NHS refused to treat him. His parents crowd funded the money for treatment in the US but Great Ormond Street Hospital fought them in court and refused to let him leave the hospital al
Being able to vote out a government every four to five years is much less effective than being able to change from one private company to another.
Which is why public sector stuff is much less alert to customers than private sector stuff. For an example in the US visit the DMV or a typical post office and then head to a restaurant. The workers in the restaurant kiss your ass for a tip, the people in the DMV or post office don't care if you never come back - they'll still have their jobs and fewer customers means less work for them.
For instance, when [a member state] gets a device, how do they get information that might be encrypted on the device." [...] Share the wealth. "Some member states are more equipped technically to do that [extract information from a seized device] than others," King said. "We want to make sure no member state is at a disadvantage, by sharing the tech expertise among the member states and reinforcing the support that Europol can offer."
I think they're worried about the Five Eyes countries sharing information with each other, but not with EU countries
One of the interesting contradictions of the UK being a member of the EU was that it always had much better intelligence sharing with the Five Eyes countries than it did with any EU country.
Slashdot Mirror
Societies with corporal punishment of children produces adults who are keen to go abroad and conquer new territory.
Beat your children for ze Fatherland!
Because corporations have an age like people do.
Apple straight out of college was an effective place with Woz doing the design and Jobs doing the marketing. I.e. in human terms they were an fresh face type, straight out of college and keen to change the world.
Apple had a mid life crisis when Jobs was fired. People like Sculley and his successors almost run it into the ground. Human terms - mid 20's crisis.
Jobs came back and introduced OS-X and the iPhone. Apple prospered. Human terms : mid thirties prosperity.
Now Jobs is gone and Woz is estranged. And they're making dumb mistakes like this. And, probably more importantly following the industry trend to price gouge people through built in obsolescence, removing features and unserviceability.
Human terms : coming to the end of a tech career.
Yup, it's a characteristically sleazy but effective move by the Clintons and DNC.
For instance there are now claims that there is some form of collaboration between Russia and 'Black Lives Matter'. That's just the kind of things governments come up with to discredit activism.
That report was by The Guardian, a far left UK paper, who went digging for Russia links to discredit Trump and prove Hillary's 'Russia collusion' narrative.
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
The main topics covered by the groups run from Russia were race relations, Texan independence and gun rights. RBC counted 16 groups relating to the Black Lives Matter campaign and other race issues that had a total of 1.2 million subscribers. The biggest group was entitled Blacktivist and reportedly had more than 350,000 likes at its peak.
Actually backing BLM and Texan independence is straight out of Dugin's playbook. Quite literally - Foundations of Geopolitics has a set of recommended things a Russian government should do to destabilise the US and backing 'separatism' and 'Afro-America racists' are among those things.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The book emphasizes that Russia must spread Anti-Americanism everywhere: "the main 'scapegoat' will be precisely the U.S."
In the United States:
Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements - extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics."
Also if Russia's goal is to 'spread Anti-Americanism everywhere' it doesn't make sense to back one US party over the other. Presumably the FSB are smart enough to realise that changing the POTUS at the top of the system isn't enough to convert the US from a strategic competitor to an ally.
The reason for that is that isolationism and abandoning allies isn't a viable strategy for the US. Trump may have said some isolationist things as a candidate but like US POTUSs before him he's ended up abandoning them in office for the simple reason they are disastrous
https://slashdot.org/comments....
Putin is a foreign policy realist, and he'd presumably expect this. Actually I suspect he thought he'd get honeymoon period like he did with W Bush and Obama and then the US would revert to business as usual. Unfortunately for him that hasn't been the case with Trump. Trump bombed a Syrian airbase which had Russian personnel on it, though he warned them first. He also shot down a Syrian jet
http://time.com/4823314/syria-...
I.e. he's actually noticeably more hawkish on Russia than Obama and W Bush were in the first year in office.
Yeah, one of them is illegal if you don't declare the payments.
Steele was basically asking people, including FSB types, for all the rumours they'd heard about Trump.
I.e. he was pretty much a cut out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
He didn't care if any of it was true or not. And neither did the DNC, CNN or Buzzfeed. All they wanted was a big compendium of rumours that they could use to discredit Trump. Well for a while, until it became clear that not only was it all a pack of lies, they'd all known it was a pack of lies.
Meanwhile Trump Jr went to a meeting with a Russian lawyer some oppo research, worked out that the person he was dealing with was a Russian agent trying to lobby about the Magnitsky act and more importantly didn't have any information and then he walked. No money changed hands and neither did any information.
Unlike with the Clinton campaign which did pay and didn't declare it
http://www.dailywire.com/news/...
Following the bombshell revelation on Tuesday that Hillary Clinton's presidential campaign and the Democratic National Committee (DNC) funded the "Trump-Russia" dossier, a non-partisan group filed a complaint with the Federal Election Commission (FEC), saying that the Clinton campaign and the DNC broke campaign finance laws.
The Campaign Legal Center filed a complaint with the FEC on Wednesday stating that the Clinton campaign and the DNC violated campaign finance laws because they failed to "accurately disclose payments related to the so-called Trump Dossier," Law Newz reported.
The Campaign Legal Center filed the complaint after The Washington Post reported on Tuesday that Mark Elias - a lawyer representing the Clinton campaign and the DNC - hired Fusion GPS to conduct "research" on then-candidate Donald Trump.
Adav Noti, who previously served as the FEC's Associate General Counsel for Policy, filed the complaint which Law Newz obtained:
This complaint is filed pursuant to 52 U.S.C. SS 30109(a)(1) and is based on information providing reason to believe that the Democratic National Committee ("DNC")(C00010603) and Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign committee Hillary for America (C00575795) have failed to file accurate reports, in violation of the Federal Election Campaign Act ("FECA"), 52 U.S.C. SS 30101, et seq., and Commission regulations.
Specifically, the DNC and Hillary for American reported dozens of payments totaling millions of dollars to the law firm Perkins Coie with the purpose described as "Legal Services" or "Legal and Compliance Consulting," when in reality, at least some of those payments were earmarked for the firm Fusion GPS, with the purpose of conducting opposition research on Donald Trump. By failing to file accurate reports, the DNC and Hillary for America undermined the vital public information role that reporting is intended to serve.
"If the Commission, upon receiving a complaint . . . has reason to believe that a person has committed, or is about to commit, a violation of [FECA] . . . [t]he Commission shall make an SS 30109(a)(2) (emphasis added); see also 11 C.F.R. SS 111.4(a) (emphasis added).
Law Newz cited campaign legal experts as saying that it is illegal for a "campaign to pay a law firm who then hires other [firm] to perform campaign-related activities without reporting the purpose of the expenditures."
That's the funny thing about Trump and the Republicans. As scummy as they are, the Democrats are clearly worse.
Also the Russiagate narrative was 'Trump paid foreigners to get opposition intelligence to influence a US election'. No evidence of that came out. What did come out was that the DNC paid FusionGPS to get the Steele dossier. The one which accused Trump of hiring Russian prostitutes to pee on Obama's bed. Basically it was a bunch of gossip.
Still consider, Steele was a foreigner. And the DNC paid him for opposition research. Which he may have got from Russian intelligence. To influence a US election. I.e. the exact thing they accused Trump of.
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
It's always struck me as rather naive that the FSB would think that getting Trump elected would solve all their problems and that they'd be try to swing the election for him. It's much more likely that they just want to create chaos in the US and will oppose any US POTUS. In fact both Bush and Obama aimed for a better relationship with Russia. Bush said he'd looked into Putin's eyes and seen a good man (McCain quipped that 'when I look into Putin's eyes I see the letters K, G and B'). Obama and Clinton tried their reset policy and Clinton sold Russian uranium. None of that helped of course - Putin invaded Georgia when Bush was POTUS and invaded Ukraine when Obama was POTUS and Clinton was secretary of state.
Probably Dugin's Foundations of Geopolitics is a better indication of how Russia sees the US. As an enemy that needs to be destroyed
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
The book emphasizes that Russia must spread Anti-Americanism everywhere: "the main 'scapegoat' will be precisely the U.S."
In the United States:
Russia should use its special services within the borders of the United States to fuel instability and separatism, for instance, provoke "Afro-American racists". Russia should "introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements â" extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S. It would also make sense simultaneously to support isolationist tendencies in American politics."
And of course we found out that Russia had backed BLM and US separatist movements
https://slashdot.org/comments....
You're still SOL when it comes to being at the mercy of software updates though.
Funny thing is, Microsoft got going because people were sick of dumb terminals connected to mainframes and minicomputers. The mini/mainframe would go down from time to time when software was updated and that obviously drove people trying to do actual work on the terminals absolutely crazy because there was nothing they could do until the mini/mainframe was back up.
The original notion of a personal computer was to avoid this. The user controlled what software got installed. If they bricked it, they could fix it. If they didn't change anything, nothing got changed by a third party.
In a way 'cloud computing' and 'automatic updates' are a rollback to the mainframe days that personal computers, Dos and later Windows were a move away from.
A long time ago I owned one of these
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
It was a clamshell device running Geos. Folded up it had an external display for phone stuff.
Now I reckon something like this might be viable now. You'd have Windows on both the phone and PDA side. The phone would be somewhat limited - i.e. basically a dumb phone for calls. Everything else would done on the PDA side. They could use one of the Atom descendents like this
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Or they could run on ARM with their x86 to ARM emulator.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Of course Microsoft have managed to wreck the desirability of such a such a device. Right now if you look at all device classes Windows and Android are actually neck and neck - Windows dominates desktops and notebooks but Android dominates tablets and phones
http://gs.statcounter.com/os-m...
It's questionable if there is still a market for a clamshell phone sized device running desktop Windows. Basically you'd end up with a 5 to 6 inch display, which is probably too small to do desktop stuff.
Also even though desktop Windows has most of the desktop market share, it's no longer the only desktop OS. Back in the old days if you wanted to view .doc and .xls files you basically needed Windows and Microsoft Office. Now it's not like that - both open OK on my Android phone and Mac using non Microsoft OSs and non Microsoft office packages. And if you want to run Photoshop or Office you need a big screen and fast processor.
I actually thought they'd do something like this with WIndows Phone. Instead they decided to kill Win32 support and try to move everyone to buying Metro apps from the Windows Store. And they Metroised Windows 8. Still perhaps now they've officially dropped Windows Phone they might decide to rethink. I suspect the ship has sailed for Win32 anyway though, and that probably means the end of Microsoft in the long run. If you're going to move from Win32 to a new OS as a user you'd be better off moving from Microsoft to Android, Chrome, macOS, iOS or Linux.
Yeah, I remember when I got out of uni and started working there were still a few IPX and NBF networks. You had Dos machines with a network redirector that allowed you to access networked file servers and network printers.
It was all kind of remarkable actually. Because MS didn't have a viable server OS NetBios was peer to peer. And getting network access to work inside a Dos interrupt handler must have been a nightmare. Bill Gates went crazy at the 64K low memory footprint and so Larry Osterman got it down to less than one KB with some clever code.
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.c...
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.c...
I only ever used it over a modem, and only really to pick up emails. Back then emails were plain text and probably only a few KB each. So Trumpet wasn't the bottleneck in that case.
Exactly. And the Muslim conquest of India was described as 'probably the bloodiest story in history'
https://themuslimissue.wordpre...
"The Mohammedan conquest of India is probably the bloodiest story in history. The Islamic historians and scholars have recorded with great glee and pride the slaughters of Hindus, forced conversions, abduction of Hindu women and children to slave markets and the destruction of temples carried out by the warriors of Islam during 800 AD to 1700 AD. Millions of Hindus were converted to Islam by sword during this period."
Giving the invaders credit for the bits of culture they didn't destroy is obscene.
Pay? Everyone used Trumpet Winsock which was shareware though very few people paid.
https://tech.slashdot.org/stor...
And of course when Windows 95 came out it had a built in TCP/IP stack.
Studies show that when an answer, even an unwelcome one, is delivered in an authoritative tone by an attractive Millennial with a septum piercing the user will get back into line and realise it is they who are at fault.
How many US Presidents have run for office on a 'We need to stop intervening abroad" platform? Every single one has backed down from it once they're in office, presumably based on issues like the ones I raised.
Admittedly none of them have done much to stop Iran or North Korea getting nukes, but all of them have been at least rhetorically committed to stopping that.
Actually Trump is an interesting case. When he was running he wanted to change the US's arrangement whereby the US extends its nuclear umbrella and in return Japan and South Korea do not build nukes. He even signalled that if the price for withdrawing US guarantees was that they did build nukes, he'd be fine with that.
http://time.com/4437089/donald...
In the same New York Times interview in March, Trump indicated that Japan and South Korea might need to obtain their own nuclear arsenal to protect themselves from North Korea and China if the U.S. is unable to defend them. "It's a position that we have to talk about," he said. "If the United States keeps on its path, its current path of weakness, they're going to want to have that anyway with or without me discussing it, because I don't think they feel very secure in what's going on with our country."
"At some point, we cannot be the policeman of the world. And unfortunately, we have a nuclear world now," he later added.
Trump also said Japan and Korea might need to pay more for their own defense. "You know, when we did these deals, we were a rich country. We're not a rich country. We were a rich country with a very strong military and tremendous capability in so many ways. We're not anymore," he told the newspaper. "We have a military that's severely depleted. We have nuclear arsenals which are in very terrible shape. They don't even know if they work."
And then in office people obviously explained why this is a bad idea - China might decide that it should strike first - and he backed off.
James Mattis made it clear the US remains committed to defend Japan.
https://www.theguardian.com/wo...
The Pentagon said defense secretary James Mattis called his Japanese counterpart Itsunori Onodera on Wednesday and "underscored that the US commitment to defend Japan, including the US extended deterrence commitment, remains ironclad".
The Pentagon statement said Mattis "also underscored the United States would work with Japan to enhance its ballistic missile defense capabilities".
It was not immediately clear if the Spy-6 radar system was discussed. Mattis also called his South Korean opposite number, Song Young-moo, who this week called for US tactical nuclear weapons to be deployed on the Korean peninsula for the first time since 1991, as well as other strategic assets such as aircraft carriers, nuclear submarines and B-52 bombers.
The US has thus far opposed any redeployment of nuclear weapons. The Pentagon statement on the Mattis-Song conversation said only that the US defense secretary stressed that "any threat to the United States, its territories, or its allies will be met with a massive, effective, and overwhelming military response".
Trump himself told the South Koreans that the US remained committed to its existing security guarantees
https://www.whitehouse.gov/the...
President Trump and Acting President Hwang Kyo-Ahn of the Republic of Korea (ROK) spoke by telephone today. Acting President Hwang congratulated the President on his inauguration. The two discussed the importance of the U.S.-ROK alliance. President Trump reiterated our ironclad commitment to defend the ROK, including through the provision of extended deter
Transporter: This is probably pure BS as implemented, especially because it relies on the Heisenberg compensator. If exotic matter is possible, it is at least in principle a possibility to open a traversable wormhole to quickly move from one place to another. But it wouldn't work like the transporter on Star Trek.
Transporters Star Trek style have the major philosophical problem that they're doing a
and not a
Which makes a difference if the You has a sense of subjective experience. Being moved is something which shouldn't feel like dying for the You going into the device. Being copied and then deleted would. Or maybe it wouldn't. In any case for the person leaving the device both would feel the same. I.e. for the You that steps out both of these feel the same, but for the You that steps in one may feel like a fiery death, and you can't tell by asking the You that steps out.
This would make me very wary on using a transporter.
Ironically when Stargate:SG1 started the eponymous device was a traversable wormhole which doesn't have the philosophical problem a Star Trek style transporter does. Later on in the episode "48 hours" they retconned the device into working like a Trek style transporter which does a a disassembly, storage and reassembly which means it does. Oh dear...
It's not even clear if storing the actual atoms or storing the information avoids the philosophical problem - clearly being disassembled into atoms and reassembled could well be as subjectively nasty as being disassembled into information and then have that information applied to new atoms.
Of course they probably did this so they could shamelessly reuse scripts written for the Trek universe where transporter glitches are used as plot points. At least they had a sense of self awareness about being derivative though - much of the humour comes from O'Neill breaking the fourth wall by commenting on how the plot is reusing Sci Fi cliches.
HANG THE EXTREMISTS!
If the US got rid of nukes
China would attack Taiwan, and maybe Japan too. There'd be a regional war as all the other Asian powers divided into pro China and anti China groups.
Russia would invade all of Ukraine, and threaten one of the Baltic States. They'd be opposed by the UK, Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary. France and Germany may intervene on the NATO side or might decide to sit it out.
Iran and Saudi Arabia would escalate their proxy war into actual open war.
It's worth pointing out that Japan, Saudi Arabia and Taiwan are all able to build nukes relatively quickly if they are forced to. The reason they haven't done so is because the US has done a deal with them - so long as they don't claim to be a nuclear power they're under the US's nuclear umbrella. Of course if you're China then it is in your interests to strike before Japan or Taiwan have built a survivable second strike force which is non trivial - you need a SLBMs to guarantee that a first strike won't wipe out all your warheads. Submarines take time to build.
Iran would become an open nuclear power. So would Israel. Israel might decide to strike Iran before Iran had a viable second strike force. Or Saudi Arabia might.
I.e. US hegemony has frozen in a lot of conflicts that would otherwise have escalated. In particular a lot of US allies have not developed nuclear weapons in return for guarantees from the US that it would retaliate against a nuclear attack on them. If that guarantee goes away they would probably build their own nukes but they'd be vulnerable to a nuclear armed opponent striking before they'd built a survivable deterrent force.
One of the things that make dealing with Iran hard is these sorts of calculations. From a US point of view Iran having a small number of ICBMs isn't fatal - the US could probably shoot them down and in any case deterrence applies. What makes it hard is that US allies like Israel or Saudi Arabia may regard Iranian nukes as being something they cannot tolerate and threaten to leave the current arrangement they have with the US where they do not openly wield nukes in return for US protection.
It's the same in a way for North Korea. Japan has not openly nuclearised in return for security guarantees from the US. They may well regard a nuclear NK as being intolerable. On the other hand China may regard a nuclear Japan as intolerable.
The US's hegemony allows it to interpose itself in between the two sides of all these conflicts and that is beneficial. If it pulls back, I think you'd see one of them explode.
Russia and China have both made clear statements that they are wannabe expansionist powers. Right now the US keeps them in check. If it didn't it's hard to see who else would. On the other hand expansionism is something which always leads to war in the long run because expansionist powers keep grabbing more and more until they inadvertently make the case that appeasement has failed and that war is inevitable. .
Reminds me of this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
True, and that's another reason why a large public sector is dangerous. It creates corruption because public sector employees realise they can monetize their position as gatekeeper to public sector resources.
The best option is to get rid of the risk assessments, introducing more dangerous field trips to fun destinations like Raqqa and go for a "(much) fewer but (much) stronger" graduates strategy.
Counterpoint - most of the total sales happen in the first couple of months after release. Crack protection can delay for about that.
Incidentally if your game contacts a server, the server can request checksum checks from the clients and kick ones that have get the answer wrong. So you can ban cracked copies from online play. I.e. the current popularity of online multiplayer makes it easier to do crack detection because you've got a trusted server doing the checks rather than potentially cracked client code.
https://www.gamasutra.com/view...
And if people refuse to do what they are required they are denied treatment.
The NHS has previously removed treatment from patients who paid for a drugs that their doctors prescribed but the NHS refused to pay for. The NHS is a monopoly, and it punishes people who try to circumvent its authority. Occasionally that punishment results in those people dying.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/new...
Or look at Charlie Gard. The NHS refused to treat him. His parents crowd funded the money for treatment in the US but Great Ormond Street Hospital fought them in court and refused to let him leave the hospital al
Being able to vote out a government every four to five years is much less effective than being able to change from one private company to another.
Which is why public sector stuff is much less alert to customers than private sector stuff. For an example in the US visit the DMV or a typical post office and then head to a restaurant. The workers in the restaurant kiss your ass for a tip, the people in the DMV or post office don't care if you never come back - they'll still have their jobs and fewer customers means less work for them.
For instance, when [a member state] gets a device, how do they get information that might be encrypted on the device." [...] Share the wealth. "Some member states are more equipped technically to do that [extract information from a seized device] than others," King said. "We want to make sure no member state is at a disadvantage, by sharing the tech expertise among the member states and reinforcing the support that Europol can offer."
I think they're worried about the Five Eyes countries sharing information with each other, but not with EU countries
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
One of the interesting contradictions of the UK being a member of the EU was that it always had much better intelligence sharing with the Five Eyes countries than it did with any EU country.