He wrote one on-topic memo. This guy kept posting off-topic even after being asked to stop. And in the Damore situation, the people who brought attention to it in that case were the SJWs who leaked the memo, not Damore. So your OP was just plain off topic. Maybe you just haven't had your morning coffee yet.
The more obvious and simpler explanation is that, like every workplace, if you start distributing controversial stuff it eventually becomes an issue. People ask you to stop because it's primarily a workplace, not a political debating forum, and if it's bad enough you can get fired.
And, to be honest, the larger world has no idea who the guy is nor to they pay any attention to what he has to say no matter how much attention he seeks. He has found/created a small pond, and careens around like a shark in a goldfish bowl. That's not particularly bad or at all unique, but certainly no one at Intel gives a crap what he thinks, and to expect any different shows a lack of perspective.
Guess what? Nobody give a shit what you think either. As the software he writes and manages runs most of the devices on the planet and is the world's most widely used OS, some of us actually care what he thinks. You, not so much...
Not many EVs up north though. Distances are too long. Most EVs in norway are clustered ariound the bigger cities both because driving distances are less and because they are excempt from road tolls which are common in the urban centres. The temperatures in these areas are more modereate, though there is little evidence that EVs suffer hugely in the cold. 20-30% reduced range seem to be the norm, but keep in mind that snowy roads and winter tires also degrade range so it is not just about the cold. Also the effect is less on longer drives as the battery comes up to working temperature.
Most EVs keep their batteries warm all the time to prevent degradation. Its actually quite effective as I've owned 2 EVs and neither have noticeably lost range in the 5 years I've owned the older one. The problem is that this slowly drains power from the battery and in cold weather the drain is magnified. I love EVs but I'm not sure owning them north of the arctic circle is really necessary or that practical both because there are so few people up there and the engineering issues with battery life.
Just about every drop of oil that Norway sells ends up in the atmosphere - a large proportion of it as CO2. If Norway doesn't sell their oil, it doesn't contribute to the CO2 issue.
That's an incredibly simplistic way to look at a fungible commodity. All it would really do it shift where the oil is currently coming from and likely increase some really marginal types of oil production which would likely increase total CO2 output. Econ is dismal and boring but it does often keep one from making the problems worse which is likely what your suggestion would do.
This is true, but once you get started, you might find that you actually like or even love electric cars. I got a 3 year lease on a Nissan Leaf to use as a daily commute to work car (over 40 miles in total for going to work and coming back). I loved having an electric car. It cost me about $1 a day in electricity to drive it. My friends loved riding in the car and my (at the time) girlfriend loved riding in it too. I have relatives I need to see who moved away and unfortunately my other car basically died from old age, so an electric car with a range of 85 or so miles per full charge wasn't practical for me to use as an only car. But as range goes up, in a few more years it might be practical for me to go back to an electric car. No oil changes. No gasoline to buy. Fewer engine parts to break down over time. Yeah, I'd definitely go back.
Then buy a Volt. No range issues and still will do almost all of your daily driving on the battery. The Leaf (and most of the other EVs) aren't really practical first cars. The Volt is...
Transportation related CO2 emissions are the greatest single source of climate change. Makes sense to tax fossil fuel cars and subsidize EVs.
(The rest of you comment is irrelevant to this discussion.)
That's a bit of a misleading breakdown it seems. Transportation is both its own industry and counted in the "industry" category as well. When you use a carbon calculator to see what your choices influence the amount of carbon you create, you will see that individual transportation causes most of your carbon output. Generally its about 1/3 air transport (1 cross country flight a year), 1/3 transport (about 30 mi/day) and 1/3 everything else combined. That mostly stems from the fact that centralized power and industrial utilization of that power are quite efficient. Your ICE car's engine on the other hand is a hugely inefficient as the economies of scale just aren't present to make it practical to create an engine that runs as cleanly. And as cars are so ubiquitous its a hard sector to clean up from a green POV. Subsidies on electric cars make sense as they: 1) work as this article shows, 2) have a high effect, 3) re-balance the market to take into account all the externalized costs created by burning fossil fuels.
Also, on a side note, ICE cars suck, seriously you like having a slow car that handles like shit? Enjoy eating my dust.
The only thing that needs to be pointed out, to make this whole yarn bunkum, is that, MySpace now equals DeadSpace. Fads today gone tomorrow. The noise of the proletariat is still driven by today's bright shiny, whether that be a fake egoist individual or object. Most of the rubbish about division is being driven by corporations so the psychopaths at the top can keep power and create chaos all to feed their ego. The false narratives of colour versus color (heh heh) or religion vs religion or make vs female, a fake narrative a false construct created by stink tanks and PR=B$ to keep workers divided because the workers united will hang the fucking corrupt bosses.
The tech companies have neglible power, look what happened to hasta la vista or the lotus eaters or all the other once dominating tech companies and their products that simply died. M$ is dying in slow motion, only assiduous lobbying and corruption keeping it on life support. Google tail is definitely going between it's legs to protect it's genitals, it's power a marketing illusion, the reality it lives or dies at the people's whim. The halls of power a cracked with panic seeking stuff to blame and refusing to accept, yep, your ego, greed and lusts are solely to be blamed and is your downfall, as in the past so in the future. Rise to the top on popularity and the rush of blood from your brain to your genitals basically cripples your thinking and you own ego becomes your undoing. Technology is totally reliant on everything working, the greater the failure that technology causes, the more rapid technologies demise.
A failing AI does not indulge in plots, it simply fails, stuck in loops, crashes, simply fails to work. A failing AI does not work 99% and only fail 1%, like all software typical failure is BSOD, done and finished.
Why do I feel like this post was generated by an AI algorithm?
More than half of the tech employees will be from sales, marketing, or management rather than the actual technical people.
This, 1000 times this...this tech boom is different from the tech boom at the end of the late 90s. This time around its marketing and sales dominated and that I think accounts for the difference in effects of the two booms. Last time around it was mostly engineers moving to the west coast, art and culture boomed, and housing prices didn't get out of hand. This time, its mostly marketing folks, we have toxic culture stories on a regular basis and art and culture are being choked out of major urban areas by housing prices that prevent normal folks from ever owning a home (or ever paying it off). Somehow I don't think this is a case of bad tech culture, its bad culture from the outside coming into the tech sector.
Already it's being exploited and wasting everyone's computing power to scrape up cryptopennies
By default uBlock Origin includes a block list to protect against resource abusing scripts, such as coin mining scripts. And, if you think the default block list is not enough, you can add additional block lists to uBlock Origin like the NoCoin list. So protect yourself with uBlock Origin and browse happy.
I don't mind the postal service at all, as you've said they have improved.
But I do think Amazon could pay them more and the government prop up the post office less. Why does that have to hurt the post office? They could still deliver Amazon packages, just pay what it actually costs to ship them.
Because FedEX and UPS don't deliver to most of the rural US. Typical city dweller...most rural areas are only served by USPS which is why it runs at a loss. Also because leaders 100 years ago knew it was a good thing to promote a global mail/package delivery system.
They are subsidizing Amazon, also every rural address is subsidized as well as every other business that involves package delivery. This isn't political but somehow you (and Trump) are turning a very successful government service (over 100 years, can move a letter from one end of the country to the other in 3 days for less than 50 cents) into a political stunt. If you support reducing the USPS, then you are the type of person who politicizes everything to the detriment of everyone...and even worse without even trying to understand the situation which in this case is actually quite easy to understand.
That was one of the worst ML "papers" I've ever seen. I'm not sure who this guy is, but the paper's didn't use the standard ML jargon for any of the techniques they used. If CMU wasn't attached (disclaimer, I have a CS degree from CMU), I might claim that this is probably a Mechanical Turk. The system seems to use a mix of game theory, alpha-beta pruning and RL techniques (specifically Actor-Critic) but none of the "correct" descriptions or references to those things are present in the article. I guess because its for Science and not a real academic journal, maybe they just didn't want to scare anyone but the paper used other complex terms in place of the ones real ML researchers would use. Also, the claims of general purpose use fall very flat due to the immense amount of domain logic explained in the paper. This is very sad as advances in RL have recently shown the ability to learn in generic domains without code modifications (which is the bogus claim the paper makes) but papers about those systems use the same terms as real ML papers.
Also, this guy's title at CMU isn't that of a usual CS Prof. He is some kind of associated researcher but that seems to be attached to a different dept at a different school inside of CMU (as in not CMU's CS school but instead associated with CIT). This entire thing seems fishy...
Too bad the capitalists who build power plants for profit consider it a bad investment. Not so renewable power. The hard-nosed businessmen have spoken. The age of nuclear power plants has passed.
So where is all that base load power going to come from then? Storage isn't even in the ballpark right now. Where are those 50 TWhs of power are going to come from? We have to get base load from fossil fuels today and for likely the next several decades mostly due to your poorly informed objections to nuclear power.
The main speaker for the Sierra Club on the topic of nuclear power for 20 years didn't know what background radiation was. As a result, we have to keep those coal fired plants online for another 20 years to make up for it. Considering the coal ash created by those plants is actually more radioactive than nuclear waste, your effect is likely counter to your goal. Please, please, please learn something on the topic of nuclear power before judging it. Its cost and problems largely come from dealing with the people like you and less from the incredibly difficult technical challenges involved which is really quite incredible.
We can solve this flaw by issuing expensive citations for bad music. That way the "artist" will lose their basic income to the citations and be back properly living in the gutter.
Wow, just wow...so someone doing something they love (even if they are bad at it) means they should starve? Even in a UBI system? Just think about what that comment says about you as a human being...or maybe just lighten up a bit and listen to some tunes.
Parties predated the Constitution, as they are an inevitable byproduct of electoral democracy. Some of the founders hoped to avoid them, but they split into the Federalist and Anti-Federalist parties as the Constitution was being written. Primaries are an internal party matter, each makes its own rules and there was no need for either to be mentioned in the Constitution. The term Gerrymandering didn't exist until 1812 and States draw congressional districts. Corporate personhood is a fundamentally necessary legal concept that predates the Colonies, which were themselves incorporated. As are municipalities, churches, NGOs, unions, non-profits, etc. Their personhood is established in common law, and supported by the Constitutional rights to free association and making contracts.
False, formal political parties came after the Constitution. Calling the Federalists and Anti-Federalists parties isn't really fair. And the constitutional conventioneers were far too productive and reasonable for that to be true. The first true political party was Jefferson's Democratic Republicans which eventually became the current Democratic party.
Anytime there are two or more differing viewpoints, people will break into groups by which viewpoint they prefer. That's not the same as a political party where all viewpoints are filtered through the party line. Its the raising of the party line above the individual viewpoint that defines a political party for me, but perhaps I'm just too cynical.
Our English is changing. We are taught not to write in the passive because Americans can't understand it.
No, we understand it just fine. Its just that that tense is so often used to weasel out of responsibility that we started treating those that used it quite badly. So you quite rationally stopped doing it altogether. And nothing of value was lost.
Bah, in a place as big as Munich Administration you can infiltrate a spy any fucking time. Or bribe someone who already works there. Software has no power to prevent that.
Yea, but that takes time and money. Cyber (their term, not mine) is about doing espionage and propaganda at a mass scale, on a budget (eg Putin). Oh, did you think it was about the LULZ?
Intuit publishes QuickBooks, and Sage publishes Peachtree and Sage Accounting.
Nobody else can just publish those for Linux. If you want those exact programs on another OS, you must convince the publishers it's a worthwhile market.
There are cloud offerings for all of these. Your desktop OS does not matter these days. If it still matters, you are either doing something very special, or doing something incorrectly. These days a Windows only app is pretty useless since I want to be able to use a tablet or my phone with shared apps and data and the MS offerings in those spaces are either dead or dying. The 90's called, they want their post back.
Who the hell runs an accounting package on their desktop in 2017 in a business with 50 people?
You don't know what you're talking about. Accounting for a 50 person company can't be done well in a browser. It's the wrong tool for the job.
There's about 5 cloud offerings from companies with billions in market cap and another 5 from startups with billions in VC funding. Even Peachtree has a cloud offering now. Pro tip: if your post can be disproved with less than 2 google searches, its not a good post.
Linux is all well and fine and great and dandy, except when it comes to: C) Enterprise grade support
Hahahahahahahahahahaha, oh, you were serious. For high-end enterprise grade service, Windows doesn't even get mentioned. Windows is mostly for accountant's and lawyer's desktops these days. The market for Windows Apps dried up over a decade ago. The only packages left are older packages that are usually 20-25 years old at this point. And those are facing competition from cloud providers for those enterprise markets where it doesn't matter at all what OS the user is using. The 90's called, they want their posts and arguments back.
There's a whole world of small-market software packages for every industry. Each organization is too small to justify custom software, but their needs are complex and homogenous enough to create a market for a few hundred copies of some package. Those packages may be migrating to a web-services approach, but any of them that have a desktop executable will be Windows-only; the Mac and Linux markets aren't big enough to justify a cross-platform solution. So if you insist on Linux everywhere, you will have to invest a lot of effort "making do," and you will probably still fall behind your peers.
OK, and if you think any of the state of the art city-management software is still written as a Windows App, I have a bridge to sell you. There are software packages that aren't suitable for moving to the web (usually graphics packages that need a real graphics card) but other than that, all (as in 100% if you took VC funding) Enterprise software for the last 15 years has been written for the web (or at least has a web GUI). The argument that there are Windows specific packages that city employees need sounds very spurious. 10 to 15 years ago sure, but today...I seriously doubt it. Anything that the city might need that's Window's only is likely 15 years old or older. If you are basing your public functions on 15 year old Windows software, then you are setting yourself up to fail.
Not to mention that as a city, you are likely handing all of your data over to hackers in short order. Maybe that's not a big deal in every case but I bet that there are quite a few city databases that contain large amounts of PII. This entire thing smells of politics and little else.
Or you just use taxation on tobacco products to cover the cost difference, as less tobacco is consumed costs should go down as the tax money dwindles.
They did that already, in 1983 in the 3rd federal increase of tobacco taxes. There have been, what, 3 to 6 more tax increases since then. Just so you know, anti-smokers tend to NOT be very accurate in their use of facts in this debate. Smokers have lower heath care costs (mostly due to not living to their 80s) and the local governments are addicted to the extra tax income those taxes bring in. Basically, this type of sin tax is the only way politicians can get support for regressive taxation. And you are falling right into it.
Another thought, most smokers are doing it to deal with stress. By reducing their vacation time, you are only making it harder for them to quit. By supporting these "tough on" policies you are supporting a historical tradition that includes the war on drugs, prohibition, and the other sin policies that have been time and time again proved to be ineffective in the best cases and disastrous in the worst.
Slashdot Mirror
I was referring to Damore with that part.
He wrote one on-topic memo. This guy kept posting off-topic even after being asked to stop. And in the Damore situation, the people who brought attention to it in that case were the SJWs who leaked the memo, not Damore. So your OP was just plain off topic. Maybe you just haven't had your morning coffee yet.
The more obvious and simpler explanation is that, like every workplace, if you start distributing controversial stuff it eventually becomes an issue. People ask you to stop because it's primarily a workplace, not a political debating forum, and if it's bad enough you can get fired.
That's all it is.
He wasn't fired. He left of his own accord.
And, to be honest, the larger world has no idea who the guy is nor to they pay any attention to what he has to say no matter how much attention he seeks. He has found/created a small pond, and careens around like a shark in a goldfish bowl. That's not particularly bad or at all unique, but certainly no one at Intel gives a crap what he thinks, and to expect any different shows a lack of perspective.
Guess what? Nobody give a shit what you think either. As the software he writes and manages runs most of the devices on the planet and is the world's most widely used OS, some of us actually care what he thinks. You, not so much...
Not many EVs up north though. Distances are too long. Most EVs in norway are clustered ariound the bigger cities both because driving distances are less and because they are excempt from road tolls which are common in the urban centres. The temperatures in these areas are more modereate, though there is little evidence that EVs suffer hugely in the cold. 20-30% reduced range seem to be the norm, but keep in mind that snowy roads and winter tires also degrade range so it is not just about the cold. Also the effect is less on longer drives as the battery comes up to working temperature.
Most EVs keep their batteries warm all the time to prevent degradation. Its actually quite effective as I've owned 2 EVs and neither have noticeably lost range in the 5 years I've owned the older one. The problem is that this slowly drains power from the battery and in cold weather the drain is magnified. I love EVs but I'm not sure owning them north of the arctic circle is really necessary or that practical both because there are so few people up there and the engineering issues with battery life.
Just about every drop of oil that Norway sells ends up in the atmosphere - a large proportion of it as CO2. If Norway doesn't sell their oil, it doesn't contribute to the CO2 issue.
That's an incredibly simplistic way to look at a fungible commodity. All it would really do it shift where the oil is currently coming from and likely increase some really marginal types of oil production which would likely increase total CO2 output. Econ is dismal and boring but it does often keep one from making the problems worse which is likely what your suggestion would do.
This is true, but once you get started, you might find that you actually like or even love electric cars. I got a 3 year lease on a Nissan Leaf to use as a daily commute to work car (over 40 miles in total for going to work and coming back). I loved having an electric car. It cost me about $1 a day in electricity to drive it. My friends loved riding in the car and my (at the time) girlfriend loved riding in it too. I have relatives I need to see who moved away and unfortunately my other car basically died from old age, so an electric car with a range of 85 or so miles per full charge wasn't practical for me to use as an only car. But as range goes up, in a few more years it might be practical for me to go back to an electric car. No oil changes. No gasoline to buy. Fewer engine parts to break down over time. Yeah, I'd definitely go back.
Then buy a Volt. No range issues and still will do almost all of your daily driving on the battery. The Leaf (and most of the other EVs) aren't really practical first cars. The Volt is...
Transportation related CO2 emissions are the greatest single source of climate change. Makes sense to tax fossil fuel cars and subsidize EVs. (The rest of you comment is irrelevant to this discussion.)
Transportation is not the greatest single source in the US. https://www.epa.gov/ghgemissio...
That's a bit of a misleading breakdown it seems. Transportation is both its own industry and counted in the "industry" category as well. When you use a carbon calculator to see what your choices influence the amount of carbon you create, you will see that individual transportation causes most of your carbon output. Generally its about 1/3 air transport (1 cross country flight a year), 1/3 transport (about 30 mi/day) and 1/3 everything else combined. That mostly stems from the fact that centralized power and industrial utilization of that power are quite efficient. Your ICE car's engine on the other hand is a hugely inefficient as the economies of scale just aren't present to make it practical to create an engine that runs as cleanly. And as cars are so ubiquitous its a hard sector to clean up from a green POV. Subsidies on electric cars make sense as they: 1) work as this article shows, 2) have a high effect, 3) re-balance the market to take into account all the externalized costs created by burning fossil fuels.
Also, on a side note, ICE cars suck, seriously you like having a slow car that handles like shit? Enjoy eating my dust.
The only thing that needs to be pointed out, to make this whole yarn bunkum, is that, MySpace now equals DeadSpace. Fads today gone tomorrow. The noise of the proletariat is still driven by today's bright shiny, whether that be a fake egoist individual or object. Most of the rubbish about division is being driven by corporations so the psychopaths at the top can keep power and create chaos all to feed their ego. The false narratives of colour versus color (heh heh) or religion vs religion or make vs female, a fake narrative a false construct created by stink tanks and PR=B$ to keep workers divided because the workers united will hang the fucking corrupt bosses.
The tech companies have neglible power, look what happened to hasta la vista or the lotus eaters or all the other once dominating tech companies and their products that simply died. M$ is dying in slow motion, only assiduous lobbying and corruption keeping it on life support. Google tail is definitely going between it's legs to protect it's genitals, it's power a marketing illusion, the reality it lives or dies at the people's whim. The halls of power a cracked with panic seeking stuff to blame and refusing to accept, yep, your ego, greed and lusts are solely to be blamed and is your downfall, as in the past so in the future. Rise to the top on popularity and the rush of blood from your brain to your genitals basically cripples your thinking and you own ego becomes your undoing. Technology is totally reliant on everything working, the greater the failure that technology causes, the more rapid technologies demise.
A failing AI does not indulge in plots, it simply fails, stuck in loops, crashes, simply fails to work. A failing AI does not work 99% and only fail 1%, like all software typical failure is BSOD, done and finished.
Why do I feel like this post was generated by an AI algorithm?
More than half of the tech employees will be from sales, marketing, or management rather than the actual technical people.
This, 1000 times this...this tech boom is different from the tech boom at the end of the late 90s. This time around its marketing and sales dominated and that I think accounts for the difference in effects of the two booms. Last time around it was mostly engineers moving to the west coast, art and culture boomed, and housing prices didn't get out of hand. This time, its mostly marketing folks, we have toxic culture stories on a regular basis and art and culture are being choked out of major urban areas by housing prices that prevent normal folks from ever owning a home (or ever paying it off). Somehow I don't think this is a case of bad tech culture, its bad culture from the outside coming into the tech sector.
Already it's being exploited and wasting everyone's computing power to scrape up cryptopennies
By default uBlock Origin includes a block list to protect against resource abusing scripts, such as coin mining scripts. And, if you think the default block list is not enough, you can add additional block lists to uBlock Origin like the NoCoin list. So protect yourself with uBlock Origin and browse happy.
Ah yes, because proxies don't exist in 2017...
I don't mind the postal service at all, as you've said they have improved.
But I do think Amazon could pay them more and the government prop up the post office less. Why does that have to hurt the post office? They could still deliver Amazon packages, just pay what it actually costs to ship them.
Because FedEX and UPS don't deliver to most of the rural US. Typical city dweller...most rural areas are only served by USPS which is why it runs at a loss. Also because leaders 100 years ago knew it was a good thing to promote a global mail/package delivery system.
They are subsidizing Amazon, also every rural address is subsidized as well as every other business that involves package delivery. This isn't political but somehow you (and Trump) are turning a very successful government service (over 100 years, can move a letter from one end of the country to the other in 3 days for less than 50 cents) into a political stunt. If you support reducing the USPS, then you are the type of person who politicizes everything to the detriment of everyone...and even worse without even trying to understand the situation which in this case is actually quite easy to understand.
Also, this guy's title at CMU isn't that of a usual CS Prof. He is some kind of associated researcher but that seems to be attached to a different dept at a different school inside of CMU (as in not CMU's CS school but instead associated with CIT). This entire thing seems fishy...
Oh, go fuck yourself, you sanctimonious prick.
Guess someone didn't get that job...
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder and some (many) would say that those images are beautiful. Just saying...
Too bad the capitalists who build power plants for profit consider it a bad investment. Not so renewable power. The hard-nosed businessmen have spoken. The age of nuclear power plants has passed.
So where is all that base load power going to come from then? Storage isn't even in the ballpark right now. Where are those 50 TWhs of power are going to come from? We have to get base load from fossil fuels today and for likely the next several decades mostly due to your poorly informed objections to nuclear power.
The main speaker for the Sierra Club on the topic of nuclear power for 20 years didn't know what background radiation was. As a result, we have to keep those coal fired plants online for another 20 years to make up for it. Considering the coal ash created by those plants is actually more radioactive than nuclear waste, your effect is likely counter to your goal. Please, please, please learn something on the topic of nuclear power before judging it. Its cost and problems largely come from dealing with the people like you and less from the incredibly difficult technical challenges involved which is really quite incredible.
We can solve this flaw by issuing expensive citations for bad music. That way the "artist" will lose their basic income to the citations and be back properly living in the gutter.
Wow, just wow...so someone doing something they love (even if they are bad at it) means they should starve? Even in a UBI system? Just think about what that comment says about you as a human being...or maybe just lighten up a bit and listen to some tunes.
Parties predated the Constitution, as they are an inevitable byproduct of electoral democracy. Some of the founders hoped to avoid them, but they split into the Federalist and Anti-Federalist parties as the Constitution was being written. Primaries are an internal party matter, each makes its own rules and there was no need for either to be mentioned in the Constitution. The term Gerrymandering didn't exist until 1812 and States draw congressional districts. Corporate personhood is a fundamentally necessary legal concept that predates the Colonies, which were themselves incorporated. As are municipalities, churches, NGOs, unions, non-profits, etc. Their personhood is established in common law, and supported by the Constitutional rights to free association and making contracts.
False, formal political parties came after the Constitution. Calling the Federalists and Anti-Federalists parties isn't really fair. And the constitutional conventioneers were far too productive and reasonable for that to be true. The first true political party was Jefferson's Democratic Republicans which eventually became the current Democratic party.
Anytime there are two or more differing viewpoints, people will break into groups by which viewpoint they prefer. That's not the same as a political party where all viewpoints are filtered through the party line. Its the raising of the party line above the individual viewpoint that defines a political party for me, but perhaps I'm just too cynical.
Our English is changing. We are taught not to write in the passive because Americans can't understand it.
No, we understand it just fine. Its just that that tense is so often used to weasel out of responsibility that we started treating those that used it quite badly. So you quite rationally stopped doing it altogether. And nothing of value was lost.
PS Its Dixie, not Dixy
Bah, in a place as big as Munich Administration you can infiltrate a spy any fucking time. Or bribe someone who already works there. Software has no power to prevent that.
Yea, but that takes time and money. Cyber (their term, not mine) is about doing espionage and propaganda at a mass scale, on a budget (eg Putin). Oh, did you think it was about the LULZ?
Adobe publishes Photoshop, not the Linux folks.
Intuit publishes QuickBooks, and Sage publishes Peachtree and Sage Accounting.
Nobody else can just publish those for Linux. If you want those exact programs on another OS, you must convince the publishers it's a worthwhile market.
There are cloud offerings for all of these. Your desktop OS does not matter these days. If it still matters, you are either doing something very special, or doing something incorrectly. These days a Windows only app is pretty useless since I want to be able to use a tablet or my phone with shared apps and data and the MS offerings in those spaces are either dead or dying. The 90's called, they want their post back.
Who the hell runs an accounting package on their desktop in 2017 in a business with 50 people? You don't know what you're talking about. Accounting for a 50 person company can't be done well in a browser. It's the wrong tool for the job.
There's about 5 cloud offerings from companies with billions in market cap and another 5 from startups with billions in VC funding. Even Peachtree has a cloud offering now. Pro tip: if your post can be disproved with less than 2 google searches, its not a good post.
Linux is all well and fine and great and dandy, except when it comes to: C) Enterprise grade support
Hahahahahahahahahahaha, oh, you were serious. For high-end enterprise grade service, Windows doesn't even get mentioned. Windows is mostly for accountant's and lawyer's desktops these days. The market for Windows Apps dried up over a decade ago. The only packages left are older packages that are usually 20-25 years old at this point. And those are facing competition from cloud providers for those enterprise markets where it doesn't matter at all what OS the user is using. The 90's called, they want their posts and arguments back.
There's a whole world of small-market software packages for every industry. Each organization is too small to justify custom software, but their needs are complex and homogenous enough to create a market for a few hundred copies of some package. Those packages may be migrating to a web-services approach, but any of them that have a desktop executable will be Windows-only; the Mac and Linux markets aren't big enough to justify a cross-platform solution. So if you insist on Linux everywhere, you will have to invest a lot of effort "making do," and you will probably still fall behind your peers.
OK, and if you think any of the state of the art city-management software is still written as a Windows App, I have a bridge to sell you. There are software packages that aren't suitable for moving to the web (usually graphics packages that need a real graphics card) but other than that, all (as in 100% if you took VC funding) Enterprise software for the last 15 years has been written for the web (or at least has a web GUI). The argument that there are Windows specific packages that city employees need sounds very spurious. 10 to 15 years ago sure, but today...I seriously doubt it. Anything that the city might need that's Window's only is likely 15 years old or older. If you are basing your public functions on 15 year old Windows software, then you are setting yourself up to fail.
Not to mention that as a city, you are likely handing all of your data over to hackers in short order. Maybe that's not a big deal in every case but I bet that there are quite a few city databases that contain large amounts of PII. This entire thing smells of politics and little else.
Its how to explain a SQL injection to someone non-technical. https://xkcd.com/327/
Or you just use taxation on tobacco products to cover the cost difference, as less tobacco is consumed costs should go down as the tax money dwindles.
They did that already, in 1983 in the 3rd federal increase of tobacco taxes. There have been, what, 3 to 6 more tax increases since then. Just so you know, anti-smokers tend to NOT be very accurate in their use of facts in this debate. Smokers have lower heath care costs (mostly due to not living to their 80s) and the local governments are addicted to the extra tax income those taxes bring in. Basically, this type of sin tax is the only way politicians can get support for regressive taxation. And you are falling right into it.
Another thought, most smokers are doing it to deal with stress. By reducing their vacation time, you are only making it harder for them to quit. By supporting these "tough on" policies you are supporting a historical tradition that includes the war on drugs, prohibition, and the other sin policies that have been time and time again proved to be ineffective in the best cases and disastrous in the worst.