NoScript blocks all cryptocurrency miners, as well as a bunch of other stuff. There's also uBlock if you want a little easier time of it, and don't mind trusting the block list maintainers.
91% of China is ethnic Han Chinese and it's all being surveilled and firewalled pretty heavily. The worst surveillance state I can think of is North Korea, which is even more ethnically pure.
I thought it would have been obvious that what breeds a surveillance state is the *state* who runs it, not the ethnicity of the people. But these days, I guess attacking Communism isn't enough - the core values of our nation must be assaulted as well.
The surveys are designed to measure very specific sentiments people have. Knowing people's sentiments can be useful and interesting - most immediately to the fields of psychology and sociology, which in turn have an impact on basically everything humans are involved in. It doesn't measure actual quality-of-life, and doesn't pretend to. There are a bunch of studies that do try to measure quality-of-life, and off the top of my head, those studies pretty much agree with people's sentiments.
You seem to be stuck in 2012 regarding the price/performance tradeoff in phone hardware. That tradeoff improving is what made it worthwhile for me to buy in. Whatever CPU they put in my $30 ZTE phone is plenty for web browsing, YouTube, messaging, torrenting, WiFi hotspot (worked well enough to game on), recording video, playing music (with DSPs active), real-time GPS navigation, checking the weather forecast -- everything I have ever seen anyone use a smartphone for. What do YOU think the general public does with their phones?
Regarding Android compatibility, I realize it would take quite a bit of engineering to implement all the APIs and services Android provides on top of the Linux kernel. I'm not a developer so I don't feel qualified to comment further on what kind of resources that'd take, or whether it would be financially worth it. But I do feel qualified to assert that for most people, Android compatibility ranges from much-appreciated to absolutely critical. I'd consider buying a phone without it, but most I know wouldn't.
You don't even need to appeal to the most people, just the most voters. With election turnouts at historic lows, that bar is lower than it's ever been.
I do very much believe there is an untapped, privacy-focused market segment for this kind of thing. It has some overlap, but is not identical to, the target market for the Essential phone. I'm currently in the sub-$100 market when it comes to smart phones, but I would gladly pay many times that amount to have a phone free from Android/Google. It doesn't need to be modular, it doesn't need a huge-ass screen or an octo-core processor, facial recognition, or fingerprint reading... better, in fact, that it DOESN'T have those things. I don't need them, they compromise privacy, and increase the cost.
It DOES need to work, out of the box. No weird reflashing routines, no kernel/driver issues, none of that janky CyanogenMod stuff. It does need to be compatible with Android apps, for most people. (For me, I'd be OK with using an open-source Telegram client, if the official Android one doesn't work for some reason. What few other apps I use can either be replaced or accessed through a browser.)
Google really is one of the big reasons I'm hesitant to use my smartphone for anything non-trivial. They (and Apple) are two of the reasons I didn't even own one until a couple years ago. I couldn't bear to spend $500+ for that. I'm just sitting here waiting for someone to monetize me.
It's worth listening to if you're concerned with how Cold War II is playing out, which is among the most important geo-political developments of the 7 to 10 years. What would be ignorant is if you choose to ignore what's going on in the world.
This is exactly the kind of thing the amendment process should be used for, when advances in technology start taking away rights that were previously not threatened to the same extent (and thus didn't need to be enumerated.) But in the past hundred years, the process has mostly been used or proposed for irrelevant BS (Prohibition, banning gay marriage) that, even if they were good ideas, belong in the US Code and not the Constitution.
He just gave you the characteristics particular to tracking. I don't think the mechanisms used to implement it differ much on the client side compared to plain, non-tracking ads. Your computer isn't going to know what the server does with the information it sends back. Or the intentions of the people controlling that server, or whoever they might sell the data to. There are, however, people dedicated to determining that. They maintain block lists broken down by category. The uBlock Origin plugin for Firefox will give you a list of these lists for you to use, examine, edit, whatever.
Is the company required to even respond to your grievance on Twitter? I mean, when you call them, you expect somebody to pick up. When you shout at them on Twitter is there any such guarantee? Or does the company get to decide which complaints to address and which to ignore? If JetBlue is responding to 10 people on Twitter a day, out of thousands of mentions... And probably hundreds of people on the phone at any given time...
I already wear my computer, there's a specialized cloth flap in most of my clothes to slide it in. The real question is why would I want it strapped to my wrist instead?
Thats the sort of thing done between allied nations. China is likely not sharing that kind of espionage information with the US, their economic interests seem opposed enough for it not to make sense.
I'm curious what this "ample evidence" is, because all the evidence I've seen says that the US's hybrid public-private healthcare system is roughly half as efficient as the next-worse country, when measured in dollars expended per capita. And for all that money, 1 in 10 still have no coverage at all. Of the 9 that are considered "covered", several will discover their coverage only kicks in after they been bankrupted by thousands in medical bills, or doesn't cover things that are considered basic medical care by everyone but the insurance company. Before Obamacare, the situation was way worse in all those regards.
Now, it did accelerate the trend of rising costs - a trend which began way before the ACA. Consider that Obamacare is a corporate welfare package - the subsidies are not paid to citizens, or to doctors, they are paid to insurance companies. Sure, some of it does trickle down to the people actually needing and/or providing care... but only after the insurance bureaucracy has taken its cut. When you realize that most other civilized nations have forgone propping up that particular class of overpaid middlemen, it starts becoming clear why costs are double in the United States. See, "free-market efficiency" only works where there is a free market. When you're lying unconscious and bleeding from a car wreck, you're not able to shop around for the best or the cheapest surgeon. Neither is your insurance company. You are taken, involuntarily, to whoever is nearest and immediately available. To take only the simplest example.
For the supposedly excellent quality of care these insurance guys arrange for us, it sure isn't showing up in any measurable ways. Life expectancy in the US has dipped from its peak, which was still below other nations. The rate of pregnancy-related deaths where I live in Texas has spiked closer to African countries than anything in the developed world. Around 2014, half the abortion clinics were shut down, and people were unable to get that service at any cost without going out-of-state (which might mean a 2 or 3 day round trip, for all you tiny-state guys) or going to Mexico. I'm not sure if the situation has been fixed since then, but it matters little to the unwanted orphans or the mothers who died while Republicans played political football with peoples' health. That particular fiasco doesn't have to do with the ACA or insurance companies, but it goes to show where their concerns *don't* lie, which is in improving health care.
This is a good opportunity to note that, as I'm sure has been beaten into your head, Obamacare was originally conceived as a way to transition the country to a bona-fide public health care system. It was envisioned that it would have a "public option", which would eventually become the only one worth considering for most people as the private insurance costs continued to spiral out of control and the marketplace collapsed. It was, indeed, carefully constructed as a way to make the transition to public health care palatable to Americans. What I pray for is that we don't keep the current broken system, or go back to the old broken system, but that we get past this weird complex about government doing anything useful, and implement the solution. Most other reasonable nations solved the issue 30 to 60 years ago. I'm tired of falling behind - Make America great again!
I can also tell you that they cut those employee's hours by way more than 8%... company-wide... at around the same time. I know someone who manages several stores for Starbucks, but I also read about it on Google News. Hours were cut by about a third IIRC. The company was trying to keep everyone below the top levels in the dark about it, of course.
Expensive? My last two Android phones were $20 and $30 and left me wanting for very little. If you're continuing to hand over $800 or even $300 to these guys, every year or two, in return for anything less than perfection... perhaps it's time to look at your role in enabling the obscenity.
I've reached the destination you are pondering, years ago already. I don't subscribe to cable TV, satellite, "on demand" anything, or "streaming services". Very rarely even do I torrent such entertainment these days. There ARE totally other things to do to fill up any empty hours you might find in your day.
But this funny business with net neutrality is designed exactly for people like you and me. We say we don't want it, and we won't pay... the cable company says "Yes you will, unless you also want us to cut off Facebook and YouTube." (Or meter your internet back to the 90s, or whatever other schemes they can come up with to keep it palatable while maintaining the illusion of choice and a free market.) Crapcast never envisioned half or more of the population going without TV, any more than the power companies expect people to start deciding they don't need electricity in 2018. In today's corporate welfare state, your right to choose how to spend your money is secondary to the special interests' "right to profit".
The only retail chain(s) who could even come close to competing on product selection would be whatever the Australian equivalent of Wal Mart is. And personally, every single time I've used Amazon, it's precisely because I want something that Wal Mart *doesn't* have. Like, I guess some people do buy Lipton tea bags and issues of Popular Mechanics off Amazon, but I don't think that's the cause of their wildfire success.
I ordered an iced coffee at McDonalds recently after hearing everyone say this, and it was gross. Much too watery. Maybe the hot coffee is better, but don't try ordering something that takes more than hitting a button to make.
As much as there is to complain about with Starbucks, I've never had a problem with the quality of the coffee or the training of the staff.
Nobody's saying you can't carry an emergency phone for when you *want* people to know where you are. Plenty of cars come with exactly that feature built in. GM calls it OnStar and advertised it heavily, but I think other manufacturers have similar systems now. IIRC they use satellites and/or cell networks.
Well, first you'd need a healthcare system to put the funds into. Like... An honest-to-god healthcare system, accountable to the nation it serves, not shareholders and medical billing beaurocracy (what are called "special interests" in the public sector).
The jobs Ive had that involved significant productivity were cool with letting me run down the stairs for 10 minutes once a day. That's in addition to the normal lunch hour. But next I guess you'll tell me you and the guy in the article both work Mission Control at NASA and can't leave the room.
But if your time really is that valuable, and your mission that critical, the pizza delivery guy actually serves as support staff for the fatass Sperglord, thereby increasing HIS productivity. But then you also have to factor in the wasted time on the toilet shitting out double the normal human allocation of fuel.
Slashdot Mirror
NoScript blocks all cryptocurrency miners, as well as a bunch of other stuff. There's also uBlock if you want a little easier time of it, and don't mind trusting the block list maintainers.
Cannibalism isn't necessarily murder either. For example, someone dies of natural causes and afterward their flesh is eaten.
And with monoculturalism we get Pyongyang.... Your assertions are bold, but your examples are weak, and I've yet to see any serious reasoning.
91% of China is ethnic Han Chinese and it's all being surveilled and firewalled pretty heavily. The worst surveillance state I can think of is North Korea, which is even more ethnically pure.
I thought it would have been obvious that what breeds a surveillance state is the *state* who runs it, not the ethnicity of the people. But these days, I guess attacking Communism isn't enough - the core values of our nation must be assaulted as well.
The surveys are designed to measure very specific sentiments people have. Knowing people's sentiments can be useful and interesting - most immediately to the fields of psychology and sociology, which in turn have an impact on basically everything humans are involved in. It doesn't measure actual quality-of-life, and doesn't pretend to. There are a bunch of studies that do try to measure quality-of-life, and off the top of my head, those studies pretty much agree with people's sentiments.
You seem to be stuck in 2012 regarding the price/performance tradeoff in phone hardware. That tradeoff improving is what made it worthwhile for me to buy in. Whatever CPU they put in my $30 ZTE phone is plenty for web browsing, YouTube, messaging, torrenting, WiFi hotspot (worked well enough to game on), recording video, playing music (with DSPs active), real-time GPS navigation, checking the weather forecast -- everything I have ever seen anyone use a smartphone for. What do YOU think the general public does with their phones?
Regarding Android compatibility, I realize it would take quite a bit of engineering to implement all the APIs and services Android provides on top of the Linux kernel. I'm not a developer so I don't feel qualified to comment further on what kind of resources that'd take, or whether it would be financially worth it. But I do feel qualified to assert that for most people, Android compatibility ranges from much-appreciated to absolutely critical. I'd consider buying a phone without it, but most I know wouldn't.
You don't even need to appeal to the most people, just the most voters. With election turnouts at historic lows, that bar is lower than it's ever been.
I do very much believe there is an untapped, privacy-focused market segment for this kind of thing. It has some overlap, but is not identical to, the target market for the Essential phone. I'm currently in the sub-$100 market when it comes to smart phones, but I would gladly pay many times that amount to have a phone free from Android/Google. It doesn't need to be modular, it doesn't need a huge-ass screen or an octo-core processor, facial recognition, or fingerprint reading... better, in fact, that it DOESN'T have those things. I don't need them, they compromise privacy, and increase the cost.
It DOES need to work, out of the box. No weird reflashing routines, no kernel/driver issues, none of that janky CyanogenMod stuff. It does need to be compatible with Android apps, for most people. (For me, I'd be OK with using an open-source Telegram client, if the official Android one doesn't work for some reason. What few other apps I use can either be replaced or accessed through a browser.)
Google really is one of the big reasons I'm hesitant to use my smartphone for anything non-trivial. They (and Apple) are two of the reasons I didn't even own one until a couple years ago. I couldn't bear to spend $500+ for that. I'm just sitting here waiting for someone to monetize me.
It's worth listening to if you're concerned with how Cold War II is playing out, which is among the most important geo-political developments of the 7 to 10 years. What would be ignorant is if you choose to ignore what's going on in the world.
This is exactly the kind of thing the amendment process should be used for, when advances in technology start taking away rights that were previously not threatened to the same extent (and thus didn't need to be enumerated.) But in the past hundred years, the process has mostly been used or proposed for irrelevant BS (Prohibition, banning gay marriage) that, even if they were good ideas, belong in the US Code and not the Constitution.
He just gave you the characteristics particular to tracking. I don't think the mechanisms used to implement it differ much on the client side compared to plain, non-tracking ads. Your computer isn't going to know what the server does with the information it sends back. Or the intentions of the people controlling that server, or whoever they might sell the data to. There are, however, people dedicated to determining that. They maintain block lists broken down by category. The uBlock Origin plugin for Firefox will give you a list of these lists for you to use, examine, edit, whatever.
Is the company required to even respond to your grievance on Twitter? I mean, when you call them, you expect somebody to pick up. When you shout at them on Twitter is there any such guarantee? Or does the company get to decide which complaints to address and which to ignore? If JetBlue is responding to 10 people on Twitter a day, out of thousands of mentions... And probably hundreds of people on the phone at any given time...
I already wear my computer, there's a specialized cloth flap in most of my clothes to slide it in. The real question is why would I want it strapped to my wrist instead?
Thats the sort of thing done between allied nations. China is likely not sharing that kind of espionage information with the US, their economic interests seem opposed enough for it not to make sense.
I'm curious what this "ample evidence" is, because all the evidence I've seen says that the US's hybrid public-private healthcare system is roughly half as efficient as the next-worse country, when measured in dollars expended per capita. And for all that money, 1 in 10 still have no coverage at all. Of the 9 that are considered "covered", several will discover their coverage only kicks in after they been bankrupted by thousands in medical bills, or doesn't cover things that are considered basic medical care by everyone but the insurance company. Before Obamacare, the situation was way worse in all those regards.
Now, it did accelerate the trend of rising costs - a trend which began way before the ACA. Consider that Obamacare is a corporate welfare package - the subsidies are not paid to citizens, or to doctors, they are paid to insurance companies. Sure, some of it does trickle down to the people actually needing and/or providing care... but only after the insurance bureaucracy has taken its cut. When you realize that most other civilized nations have forgone propping up that particular class of overpaid middlemen, it starts becoming clear why costs are double in the United States. See, "free-market efficiency" only works where there is a free market. When you're lying unconscious and bleeding from a car wreck, you're not able to shop around for the best or the cheapest surgeon. Neither is your insurance company. You are taken, involuntarily, to whoever is nearest and immediately available. To take only the simplest example.
For the supposedly excellent quality of care these insurance guys arrange for us, it sure isn't showing up in any measurable ways. Life expectancy in the US has dipped from its peak, which was still below other nations. The rate of pregnancy-related deaths where I live in Texas has spiked closer to African countries than anything in the developed world. Around 2014, half the abortion clinics were shut down, and people were unable to get that service at any cost without going out-of-state (which might mean a 2 or 3 day round trip, for all you tiny-state guys) or going to Mexico. I'm not sure if the situation has been fixed since then, but it matters little to the unwanted orphans or the mothers who died while Republicans played political football with peoples' health. That particular fiasco doesn't have to do with the ACA or insurance companies, but it goes to show where their concerns *don't* lie, which is in improving health care.
This is a good opportunity to note that, as I'm sure has been beaten into your head, Obamacare was originally conceived as a way to transition the country to a bona-fide public health care system. It was envisioned that it would have a "public option", which would eventually become the only one worth considering for most people as the private insurance costs continued to spiral out of control and the marketplace collapsed. It was, indeed, carefully constructed as a way to make the transition to public health care palatable to Americans. What I pray for is that we don't keep the current broken system, or go back to the old broken system, but that we get past this weird complex about government doing anything useful, and implement the solution. Most other reasonable nations solved the issue 30 to 60 years ago. I'm tired of falling behind - Make America great again!
I can also tell you that they cut those employee's hours by way more than 8%... company-wide... at around the same time. I know someone who manages several stores for Starbucks, but I also read about it on Google News. Hours were cut by about a third IIRC. The company was trying to keep everyone below the top levels in the dark about it, of course.
Expensive? My last two Android phones were $20 and $30 and left me wanting for very little. If you're continuing to hand over $800 or even $300 to these guys, every year or two, in return for anything less than perfection... perhaps it's time to look at your role in enabling the obscenity.
Sounds like you listen to bad predictors.
"Crypto exchange system" sounds closer to PGP to me.
I've reached the destination you are pondering, years ago already. I don't subscribe to cable TV, satellite, "on demand" anything, or "streaming services". Very rarely even do I torrent such entertainment these days. There ARE totally other things to do to fill up any empty hours you might find in your day.
But this funny business with net neutrality is designed exactly for people like you and me. We say we don't want it, and we won't pay... the cable company says "Yes you will, unless you also want us to cut off Facebook and YouTube." (Or meter your internet back to the 90s, or whatever other schemes they can come up with to keep it palatable while maintaining the illusion of choice and a free market.) Crapcast never envisioned half or more of the population going without TV, any more than the power companies expect people to start deciding they don't need electricity in 2018. In today's corporate welfare state, your right to choose how to spend your money is secondary to the special interests' "right to profit".
The only retail chain(s) who could even come close to competing on product selection would be whatever the Australian equivalent of Wal Mart is. And personally, every single time I've used Amazon, it's precisely because I want something that Wal Mart *doesn't* have. Like, I guess some people do buy Lipton tea bags and issues of Popular Mechanics off Amazon, but I don't think that's the cause of their wildfire success.
I ordered an iced coffee at McDonalds recently after hearing everyone say this, and it was gross. Much too watery. Maybe the hot coffee is better, but don't try ordering something that takes more than hitting a button to make.
As much as there is to complain about with Starbucks, I've never had a problem with the quality of the coffee or the training of the staff.
Nobody's saying you can't carry an emergency phone for when you *want* people to know where you are. Plenty of cars come with exactly that feature built in. GM calls it OnStar and advertised it heavily, but I think other manufacturers have similar systems now. IIRC they use satellites and/or cell networks.
Well, first you'd need a healthcare system to put the funds into. Like... An honest-to-god healthcare system, accountable to the nation it serves, not shareholders and medical billing beaurocracy (what are called "special interests" in the public sector).
The jobs Ive had that involved significant productivity were cool with letting me run down the stairs for 10 minutes once a day. That's in addition to the normal lunch hour. But next I guess you'll tell me you and the guy in the article both work Mission Control at NASA and can't leave the room.
But if your time really is that valuable, and your mission that critical, the pizza delivery guy actually serves as support staff for the fatass Sperglord, thereby increasing HIS productivity. But then you also have to factor in the wasted time on the toilet shitting out double the normal human allocation of fuel.