The decision to publicly confirm this *now* probably has something to do with Reality Winner leaking similar (the same?) information last week. Up until now, the public focus had been on the psy-ops. Lawsuits filed in November regarding attacks on election systems were thrown out for a lack of standing. Which was probably the right thing to do, our intelligence agencies should be investigating things like this, not courts and lawyers.
There are legitimate reasons that the "they" you speak of wouldn't release the evidence. First, your "they" seems to be a conflation of the NSA and Dan Rather. Our intelligence agencies do not perform the same job as the press. Intel guys are engaged in covert ops where secrecy is critical to success. The press are in the business of exposing secrets that the public should be aware of. It's likely that the NSA got some details through mass-surveillance operations that they don't want us to know about. Even in the absence of that, it seems prudent for them to thoroughly comb through what they have, and confer with the more traditional, physical spy agencies to see if they have anything relevant. Maybe that even involves waiting for agents with a physical presence in Russia to find out more.
I'd love to see the evidence made public immediately, but if it comes down to waiting or compromising the investigation, I'd rather wait. Especially considering that investigations of this type don't particularly lend themselves to crowdsourcing, given the highly secretive/proprietary nature of the actors on both sides.
What Trump promised was a Muslim ban, which is exactly what his tribalist base wants. The text of the order was a (piss-poor) attempt to deliver on that in a (maybe) legal way, per the man's own words. Any other reading of the situation requires you to let someone pull the wool over your eyes.
Regarding the effect of the ban itself, it's even worse security theater than the TSA. It could be 6 countries, or 13 countries, or we could ban international travel altogether, and it wouldn't help. A bit of critical thinking while examining the backgrounds of those committing the attacks would tell you this. Or, you could take the word of the intelligence agencies (any, take your pick), who have concluded that nationality is not a reliable threat indicator. Unlike the TSA, however, the travel ban wastes more than money, time, and freedom. It wastes our country's standing and credibility.
What Hillary thinks isn't relevant to any of this.
And that's why Russia launched the campaign in the first place. Undermine trust in the political system and cause internal instability. It's worked beautifully. That doesn't mean we shouldn't investigate and work to secure the election process. We should have started that 15 - 20 years ago, really, when we started bringing out electronic voting. We have been talking about it on Slashdot for well over a decade.
From what I understand, wordpress.com (which Automattic runs) provides limited, free hosting for web sites that run on the Wordpress software. The software itself is open-source and not developed by the company.
It would be like blaming a privilege escalation vulnerability in the Linux kernel on the office policies at Red Hat.
I don't see Apple as being doomed, I actually see them as being guaranteed survival. Hell, even if they were to go insolvent from gross mismanagement, there's a good chance the government would step in to bail them out like they did the auto companies. Apple's future has become an issue of national pride, just as much as GM's.
But Apple isn't in any financial trouble, nor do I expect them to be. What I expect is that they won't be able to put out blockbuster products every couple of years into perpetuity. They move from underdog, imaginative innovators to something much less special (but no less successful monetarily). In other words, the glory days are over.
What I was getting at was "Yes, he's overreacting to a joke, but Apple's glory days are also probably over."
Now that the cell phone market is saturated, and their spinoffs like tablets and smart watches have failed to capture the same success, the shareholders are going to get antsy. In the long term, focus could shift away from real innovation to "innovation" in the financial sense, that is, squeezing every last drop out of what they already have. And I think that would work wonderfully for the shareholders. Apple could avoid that future, sure. I'm just not confident they will. Now that they've made it to the big leagues and the founder is gone, pressure will build heavily for them to make money in more guaranteed ways. Once you have a war chest like Apple does, you don't need to innovate anymore. The safer option is actually to monetize everything within your grasp. No R&D needed, just the stroke of a pen. Using money and market position to make more money. That keeps the company's valuation growing, even if its product lines stagnate. You can already see their transition to this phase beginning. Their acquisition of Beats (by Dre) fits the strategy to a T. Get the branding right. Get the celebrity endorsement. Jack the price up. The value of the product is a secondary concern. Real innovation isn't even on the menu with that acquisition.
To be fair, Apple does still have huge, new products being developed. The Apple car, for one. (Have they killed that yet? I recall reading something to that effect, but IIRC it was never officially announced in the first place, so take it with a shaker of salt.) But, it takes more than expertise and willpower to make it to where Apple is. It takes all of that, plus luck. I think Apple's products get a bit more credit than they deserve for innovating. They didn't make the first MP3 player, or even the first smartphone. What they did was to incrementally improve on those things and more importantly popularize them. The electronics had become miniaturized enough so that you could do those sort of computery things in your hand instead of at a desk. If Apple didn't put a touch screen in a phone, someone else would have done it within a couple of years. That owes as much to timing and being in the right industry as it does to any innate capacity to invent.
Maybe Apple's luck hasn't run out and they still have some aces up their sleeves. But they are certainly hedging their bets and exploring a future as a luxury brand for consumer gadgets.
The other comments here have already answered why MS still offers a 32-bit OS - not a hard question.
What strikes me as weird is why many Linux distros today aren't offering a 32-bit OS. The next Debian release won't have a 32-bit version, for example. They should know that a good chunk of their users are computer hobbyists who run it on older, repurposed hardware. And not as old as you might think, Intel was shipping 32-bit Atoms through 2010 at least. I have one I'm using to this day as a low-power fileserver/seedbox/irc-bouncer.
Really odd to see them drop x86 support when they support other weird architectures I haven't seen since the 90s, or ever. Does anyone know why?
"How so" is that the cost of the initial purchase is an order of magnitude higher than what you'd pay for OS upgrades on either platform. While it's hard to predict an annual subscription fee that MS hasn't implemented yet, they'd be crazy to set it anywhere close to what they sell boxed OSes for. Something in the range of $20/year would be my wild guess. At that rate, it would take decades for you to break even on avoiding the Apple tax.
It should be noted how narrowly this is being applied. It looks like they arrived at the 40% number by only looking at specific companies, and specific positions within those companies. I guess it's good that some companies are slowly shifting to focus on the important things (productivity, not timeclocks) but this is hardly the 35-hour-workweek standard we should be implementing.
A line is actually one-dimensional. The "political compass" chart expands that to 2 dimensions. Unfortunately, our world operates in at least 4 dimensions.
What is stopping Microsoft from giving a special deal to Adobe et al.? They could let the big guys in free... Wouldn't even need to be all of them, just enough to jump start their app market. The little guys would often, I think, be willing to pay for the exposure, for access to that market.
Why I think this hasn't happened is because stuff like Premier and AutoCAD isn't what the average computer runs. Those generally run on "workstations" in an office somewhere, where they are already paying MS directly for enterprise stuff. These guys arent going to go to an app store to get their CAD software. What MS wants to do is to bifurcate the PC ecosystem into business and consumer spheres. They already have businesses well-monetized, what they don't have is an app store where the masses can pay them for their digital baubles.
A prison should be a place we want never to use, but are sometimes forced to, because in some cases there is no better solution. Every prisoner should be a heavy burden on the government, proportional to his time incarcerated, to disincentivize excessive punishment. (Crime victims and moral panic already provide a heavy incentive in the other direction.)
What metric should we use to judge the justice system? How about how much they can reduce crime, and how few people they need to lock up.
I fail to see the appeal as well. But, I think the people who watch e-sports today are the same type of people who would have watched physical sports in ages past. So the "watching other people play games" market isn't growing, it's just shifting to new games.
That's already baked-in. Children were targeted in Manchester. Then you also have the angle of those kids that leave Europe to marry jihadis they meet online. The only thing worse than a pedophile is an Arabian pedophile...
I wouldn't say it's "staged", as in false flag, but I do think these terrorist groups are starting to coordinate their attacks with elections, for maximum effect.
As much as we like to think of them as purely religious fanatics, they do have more worldly goals. The big one being to cause our society to eat itself from within.
I hate Twitter as well. I hate it so much that I don't even use it. Actually, "hate" is too strong a word. Is it that I pity the users? No that's not quite it either...
I do feel comfortable saying this: it is a terrible method of communication. By design, it promotes banal soundbites and sloganeering. The most depth you will ever get in a Twitter post is what Kim Kardashian had for breakfast, or what Donald Trump accidentally mashed on his keyboard when he fell asleep watching Fox News, or what new fetish some popufur has discovered. Even if there is some profound, free thinker who has a Twitter account, you won't find any profundity there. At best you'll get a link to somewhere else that actually has something worth reading. That is on top of all the negatives that the other social media have, like the strengthening of filter bubble.
I would tell everyone complaining about Twitter to "put their money where their mouth is", but it doesn't even require any money, it just requires you to stop being a sheep. Don't use it. Not only will you help yourself, you will work to bring down the beast. No users, no money, no Twitter.
Right, I hear about "ageism" all the time, but is there any actual (non-anecdotal) evidence for it?
To counter the anecdotal, I serve up my own anecdote: I'm in my 20s, I am college-educated, but I have a hell of a time finding any real IT work. The one job I did land in IT was remote tech support for barely above minimum wage. (Actual support, not script-reading; most calls I'd need to dick around with MySQL, or SSH into their server to install some software package, or other things on that level.) The majority of positions that pay above Wal-Mart wages require X years of experience.
Contrast this with someone I know who is pushing 50 and has no formal education beyond high school. He does, however, have a lot of experience. In the past 5 years he's had to change jobs thrice (layoffs) and it's never been a super big problem for him to find a new one.
Nobody is talking about pulling content. But hey, let's not let that get in the way of an opportunity to talk about Hillary Clinton - truly our country's greatest problem. Pay no mind to what's going on with the man who actually made it to the white house. Shh.... Believe me.... believe.
I treat people with UIDs above ~2000000 as suspiciously as ACs. Above 2 or 3 mil, it's mostly shills and sheltered, intellectually useless children from 4chan.
Only it's not quite so simple. This particular issue cuts widely across party, ideological, religious, and other divides. What we have seen in the marijuana legalization movement is a true bottom-up, single-issue, grassroots, non-affiliated reform movement. It's a result of people analyzing the facts available to them and seeing that the laws don't match up. And there was no party or ideology guiding all these disparate individuals, over half the population now, to the same conclusion. Having followed this particular issue very closely, from without and within (knowing personally activists involved with NORML and MPP), I feel qualified to make this statement. You can either take my word for it, or look at the polls, or really any other hard data you can find. None of it contradicts what I am saying.
Doubtlessly, there will be political groups trying to claim the mantle of marijuana law reform. I have even heard, in the wild, things like "Trump is relaxing marijuana laws" when he is totally disinterested in the issue, and his appointees (Jeff Sessions) are taking direct action in the opposite direction. It should be noted that what Sessions is undoing is the Obama-era, states-rights policy of not enforcing federal marijuana laws in states that have voted to bypass them.
I'm sure you can cite examples of libertarians calling for marijuana law reform, because I've heard it too. But to say that it can be claimed as a "libertarian success" - how is that? Do most reform advocates identify as libertarian? Have libertarians campaigned anywhere in the same league as non-affiliated groups like NORML and MPP? Have elected libertarians swung the marijuana vote in any state legislature? Hell, do they even have any representatives in the legislatures in question?
The problem in Beijing isn't so much carbon mono/di-oxide, as it is soot, sulfur compounds, ozone, and others. I mean, the carbon is there too, but I presume you were referring to what is visible, or hurts you when you inhale it. That is what sets the air in Beijing apart from the air in LA, where those problems have been solved or pre-empted by regulation.
So why is the US being declared the biggest carbon producer a hyperbole? Do you take issue with the measurements they used? There are a number to choose from, and by all of them the US is either #1 or close to the top.
Actually, never mind, I don't think you are interested in getting to the bottom of this issue. You just needed another opportunity to throw around the phrase "White guilt". Let me guess, you also rail against identity politics?
Slashdot Mirror
The decision to publicly confirm this *now* probably has something to do with Reality Winner leaking similar (the same?) information last week. Up until now, the public focus had been on the psy-ops. Lawsuits filed in November regarding attacks on election systems were thrown out for a lack of standing. Which was probably the right thing to do, our intelligence agencies should be investigating things like this, not courts and lawyers.
There are legitimate reasons that the "they" you speak of wouldn't release the evidence. First, your "they" seems to be a conflation of the NSA and Dan Rather. Our intelligence agencies do not perform the same job as the press. Intel guys are engaged in covert ops where secrecy is critical to success. The press are in the business of exposing secrets that the public should be aware of. It's likely that the NSA got some details through mass-surveillance operations that they don't want us to know about. Even in the absence of that, it seems prudent for them to thoroughly comb through what they have, and confer with the more traditional, physical spy agencies to see if they have anything relevant. Maybe that even involves waiting for agents with a physical presence in Russia to find out more.
I'd love to see the evidence made public immediately, but if it comes down to waiting or compromising the investigation, I'd rather wait. Especially considering that investigations of this type don't particularly lend themselves to crowdsourcing, given the highly secretive/proprietary nature of the actors on both sides.
What Trump promised was a Muslim ban, which is exactly what his tribalist base wants. The text of the order was a (piss-poor) attempt to deliver on that in a (maybe) legal way, per the man's own words. Any other reading of the situation requires you to let someone pull the wool over your eyes.
Regarding the effect of the ban itself, it's even worse security theater than the TSA. It could be 6 countries, or 13 countries, or we could ban international travel altogether, and it wouldn't help. A bit of critical thinking while examining the backgrounds of those committing the attacks would tell you this. Or, you could take the word of the intelligence agencies (any, take your pick), who have concluded that nationality is not a reliable threat indicator. Unlike the TSA, however, the travel ban wastes more than money, time, and freedom. It wastes our country's standing and credibility.
What Hillary thinks isn't relevant to any of this.
And that's why Russia launched the campaign in the first place. Undermine trust in the political system and cause internal instability. It's worked beautifully. That doesn't mean we shouldn't investigate and work to secure the election process. We should have started that 15 - 20 years ago, really, when we started bringing out electronic voting. We have been talking about it on Slashdot for well over a decade.
From what I understand, wordpress.com (which Automattic runs) provides limited, free hosting for web sites that run on the Wordpress software. The software itself is open-source and not developed by the company.
It would be like blaming a privilege escalation vulnerability in the Linux kernel on the office policies at Red Hat.
I don't see Apple as being doomed, I actually see them as being guaranteed survival. Hell, even if they were to go insolvent from gross mismanagement, there's a good chance the government would step in to bail them out like they did the auto companies. Apple's future has become an issue of national pride, just as much as GM's.
But Apple isn't in any financial trouble, nor do I expect them to be. What I expect is that they won't be able to put out blockbuster products every couple of years into perpetuity. They move from underdog, imaginative innovators to something much less special (but no less successful monetarily). In other words, the glory days are over.
What I was getting at was "Yes, he's overreacting to a joke, but Apple's glory days are also probably over."
Now that the cell phone market is saturated, and their spinoffs like tablets and smart watches have failed to capture the same success, the shareholders are going to get antsy. In the long term, focus could shift away from real innovation to "innovation" in the financial sense, that is, squeezing every last drop out of what they already have. And I think that would work wonderfully for the shareholders. Apple could avoid that future, sure. I'm just not confident they will. Now that they've made it to the big leagues and the founder is gone, pressure will build heavily for them to make money in more guaranteed ways. Once you have a war chest like Apple does, you don't need to innovate anymore. The safer option is actually to monetize everything within your grasp. No R&D needed, just the stroke of a pen. Using money and market position to make more money. That keeps the company's valuation growing, even if its product lines stagnate. You can already see their transition to this phase beginning. Their acquisition of Beats (by Dre) fits the strategy to a T. Get the branding right. Get the celebrity endorsement. Jack the price up. The value of the product is a secondary concern. Real innovation isn't even on the menu with that acquisition.
To be fair, Apple does still have huge, new products being developed. The Apple car, for one. (Have they killed that yet? I recall reading something to that effect, but IIRC it was never officially announced in the first place, so take it with a shaker of salt.) But, it takes more than expertise and willpower to make it to where Apple is. It takes all of that, plus luck. I think Apple's products get a bit more credit than they deserve for innovating. They didn't make the first MP3 player, or even the first smartphone. What they did was to incrementally improve on those things and more importantly popularize them. The electronics had become miniaturized enough so that you could do those sort of computery things in your hand instead of at a desk. If Apple didn't put a touch screen in a phone, someone else would have done it within a couple of years. That owes as much to timing and being in the right industry as it does to any innate capacity to invent.
Maybe Apple's luck hasn't run out and they still have some aces up their sleeves. But they are certainly hedging their bets and exploring a future as a luxury brand for consumer gadgets.
The other comments here have already answered why MS still offers a 32-bit OS - not a hard question.
What strikes me as weird is why many Linux distros today aren't offering a 32-bit OS. The next Debian release won't have a 32-bit version, for example. They should know that a good chunk of their users are computer hobbyists who run it on older, repurposed hardware. And not as old as you might think, Intel was shipping 32-bit Atoms through 2010 at least. I have one I'm using to this day as a low-power fileserver/seedbox/irc-bouncer.
Really odd to see them drop x86 support when they support other weird architectures I haven't seen since the 90s, or ever. Does anyone know why?
"How so" is that the cost of the initial purchase is an order of magnitude higher than what you'd pay for OS upgrades on either platform. While it's hard to predict an annual subscription fee that MS hasn't implemented yet, they'd be crazy to set it anywhere close to what they sell boxed OSes for. Something in the range of $20/year would be my wild guess. At that rate, it would take decades for you to break even on avoiding the Apple tax.
It should be noted how narrowly this is being applied. It looks like they arrived at the 40% number by only looking at specific companies, and specific positions within those companies. I guess it's good that some companies are slowly shifting to focus on the important things (productivity, not timeclocks) but this is hardly the 35-hour-workweek standard we should be implementing.
Or, it could be both.
A line is actually one-dimensional. The "political compass" chart expands that to 2 dimensions. Unfortunately, our world operates in at least 4 dimensions.
What is stopping Microsoft from giving a special deal to Adobe et al.? They could let the big guys in free... Wouldn't even need to be all of them, just enough to jump start their app market. The little guys would often, I think, be willing to pay for the exposure, for access to that market. Why I think this hasn't happened is because stuff like Premier and AutoCAD isn't what the average computer runs. Those generally run on "workstations" in an office somewhere, where they are already paying MS directly for enterprise stuff. These guys arent going to go to an app store to get their CAD software. What MS wants to do is to bifurcate the PC ecosystem into business and consumer spheres. They already have businesses well-monetized, what they don't have is an app store where the masses can pay them for their digital baubles.
Not unless the hardware manufacturers double their prices too.
What is an "AOL job" now anyway... do they police AIM or something?
A prison should be a place we want never to use, but are sometimes forced to, because in some cases there is no better solution. Every prisoner should be a heavy burden on the government, proportional to his time incarcerated, to disincentivize excessive punishment. (Crime victims and moral panic already provide a heavy incentive in the other direction.)
What metric should we use to judge the justice system? How about how much they can reduce crime, and how few people they need to lock up.
I fail to see the appeal as well. But, I think the people who watch e-sports today are the same type of people who would have watched physical sports in ages past. So the "watching other people play games" market isn't growing, it's just shifting to new games.
That's already baked-in. Children were targeted in Manchester. Then you also have the angle of those kids that leave Europe to marry jihadis they meet online. The only thing worse than a pedophile is an Arabian pedophile...
I wouldn't say it's "staged", as in false flag, but I do think these terrorist groups are starting to coordinate their attacks with elections, for maximum effect.
As much as we like to think of them as purely religious fanatics, they do have more worldly goals. The big one being to cause our society to eat itself from within.
I hate Twitter as well. I hate it so much that I don't even use it. Actually, "hate" is too strong a word. Is it that I pity the users? No that's not quite it either...
I do feel comfortable saying this: it is a terrible method of communication. By design, it promotes banal soundbites and sloganeering. The most depth you will ever get in a Twitter post is what Kim Kardashian had for breakfast, or what Donald Trump accidentally mashed on his keyboard when he fell asleep watching Fox News, or what new fetish some popufur has discovered. Even if there is some profound, free thinker who has a Twitter account, you won't find any profundity there. At best you'll get a link to somewhere else that actually has something worth reading. That is on top of all the negatives that the other social media have, like the strengthening of filter bubble.
I would tell everyone complaining about Twitter to "put their money where their mouth is", but it doesn't even require any money, it just requires you to stop being a sheep. Don't use it. Not only will you help yourself, you will work to bring down the beast. No users, no money, no Twitter.
Right, I hear about "ageism" all the time, but is there any actual (non-anecdotal) evidence for it?
To counter the anecdotal, I serve up my own anecdote: I'm in my 20s, I am college-educated, but I have a hell of a time finding any real IT work. The one job I did land in IT was remote tech support for barely above minimum wage. (Actual support, not script-reading; most calls I'd need to dick around with MySQL, or SSH into their server to install some software package, or other things on that level.) The majority of positions that pay above Wal-Mart wages require X years of experience.
Contrast this with someone I know who is pushing 50 and has no formal education beyond high school. He does, however, have a lot of experience. In the past 5 years he's had to change jobs thrice (layoffs) and it's never been a super big problem for him to find a new one.
Nobody is talking about pulling content. But hey, let's not let that get in the way of an opportunity to talk about Hillary Clinton - truly our country's greatest problem. Pay no mind to what's going on with the man who actually made it to the white house. Shh.... Believe me.... believe.
I treat people with UIDs above ~2000000 as suspiciously as ACs. Above 2 or 3 mil, it's mostly shills and sheltered, intellectually useless children from 4chan.
Only it's not quite so simple. This particular issue cuts widely across party, ideological, religious, and other divides. What we have seen in the marijuana legalization movement is a true bottom-up, single-issue, grassroots, non-affiliated reform movement. It's a result of people analyzing the facts available to them and seeing that the laws don't match up. And there was no party or ideology guiding all these disparate individuals, over half the population now, to the same conclusion. Having followed this particular issue very closely, from without and within (knowing personally activists involved with NORML and MPP), I feel qualified to make this statement. You can either take my word for it, or look at the polls, or really any other hard data you can find. None of it contradicts what I am saying.
Doubtlessly, there will be political groups trying to claim the mantle of marijuana law reform. I have even heard, in the wild, things like "Trump is relaxing marijuana laws" when he is totally disinterested in the issue, and his appointees (Jeff Sessions) are taking direct action in the opposite direction. It should be noted that what Sessions is undoing is the Obama-era, states-rights policy of not enforcing federal marijuana laws in states that have voted to bypass them.
I'm sure you can cite examples of libertarians calling for marijuana law reform, because I've heard it too. But to say that it can be claimed as a "libertarian success" - how is that? Do most reform advocates identify as libertarian? Have libertarians campaigned anywhere in the same league as non-affiliated groups like NORML and MPP? Have elected libertarians swung the marijuana vote in any state legislature? Hell, do they even have any representatives in the legislatures in question?
What is your income, $16k/year? (Not that I think a UBI would reach even that high)
The problem in Beijing isn't so much carbon mono/di-oxide, as it is soot, sulfur compounds, ozone, and others. I mean, the carbon is there too, but I presume you were referring to what is visible, or hurts you when you inhale it. That is what sets the air in Beijing apart from the air in LA, where those problems have been solved or pre-empted by regulation.
So why is the US being declared the biggest carbon producer a hyperbole? Do you take issue with the measurements they used? There are a number to choose from, and by all of them the US is either #1 or close to the top.
Actually, never mind, I don't think you are interested in getting to the bottom of this issue. You just needed another opportunity to throw around the phrase "White guilt". Let me guess, you also rail against identity politics?