Can you blame them though? Every time they do this the government just gives them toothless admonishment. Our representatives probably wouldn't even do that, but they want to make a sound bite for the news they can use when running for reelection, but their words are worth about as much as their weight in anything.
If most people woke up and realized that they could walk into a bank and rob it with no real consequence to themselves, how long do you think it would take before they were all hit? I personally wouldn't give it past 10 o'clock that morning, even accounting for daylight saving time.
Normally this is where people blame Republicans, the so-called party of business, but Obama did fuck all about this either and its not a secret that Hillary was pretty cozy with the big Wall St. firms so its not as though the Democrats are hardly any better. Until the C-level executives start getting thrown into jail for this kind of behavior, you'd be a fool to expect anything else from them.
How is LinkedIn worth $26 billion dollars? If the EU rejects this Microsoft shareholders should write them a nice thank you letter. Microsoft doesn't exactly have the best history with acquisitions.
It's not that surprising. As Microsoft moves towards being a service company, they care less and less about keeping their own source closed or sabotaging open source projects. You can use Azure to run Linux just as easily as Windows. Why should Microsoft care, they get paid anyhow.
I doubt they'll ever open source their core product like Office, but if open sourcing their tools or contributing to open source projects makes it easier for people to use Microsoft services, that's money for Microsoft that isn't going to someone else.
They'll never be as open source friendly as some would like, but at least they're a lot less hostile. Since they got rid of Ballmer who was the obstinate type that kept trying pound square pegs into circle holes, they've been a lot more willing to accept that not every single part of a solution needs to be something from Microsoft.
No, they were able to do this because EA was dumb. Never trust state information that the client is giving you in a networked game or at the very least sanity check it occasionally if its not feasible to do everything server-side. Anyone who played MMOs or shooters back in the 90's probably has fond memories of all the crazy hacks people could use because the server would just accept whatever data the client sent.
If a government can legally compel a company to hand over their advertising information, there's no functional difference between the two. I can think of very little that a government might want to know about a person that an advertising agency would have no interest in collecting.
I think that Bill Hicks's thoughts on the matter are still quite appropriate.
Just to play devil's advocate, does Twitter also have a right to ban Chinese people from using their service since they can decide on their police for the use of their service?
Obviously most people would state that Twitter shouldn't be allowed to do that, but should they be able to ban anyone who talks about China?
Somewhere in there is a line that gets crossed and it goes from perfectly acceptable (or even expected) to ban to morally reprehensible (or outright wrong) to ban. I think most people draw the line not through any moral justification or philosophy that the follow, but whether they agree or disagree in that particular case, even if it results in arbitrary judgement or inconsistent rules.
Early on many of them did it about equally with the left and right, but they found that they got more clicks and shares from the right.
If I had to speculate on this, it's because websites like the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, etc. already fill that market. They've already built their brand and there's a certain legitimacy to those sites even if it's known that they are heavily left-leaning. The political right really didn't have anything like that, at least not on the same level. The only one I can think of that gets posted on the the internet regularly is Breitbart, and maybe Drudge Report but the latter doesn't really create its own content. Otherwise the right's main sources for media are still Fox News and AM radio which may not be as easy to share on something like Facebook.
I don't think Facebook can really solve this problem as creating an algorithm that can detect fake news would require some top-notch AI. Otherwise, actual intelligent humans will just figure out how to get around the algorithm and you get a weird cat and mouse approach. The underlying problem is that people want news that confirms their existing beliefs and not something which contains factual information or even an objective assessment of factual information. That's not something Facebook can do anything about.
In their desire to become some all-encompassing one-stop-shop for people, they had to anticipate that they'd drag in political discourse and all of the ire that goes with arguing on the internet. They could have just stayed a nice website where people could post pictures of their family or a recent vacation, but it sprawled out from there. I haven't used it in years (I stopped shortly before the big Facebook game craze swept through the user base and everyone was playing some farm game through Facebook), but I imagine its a bit of an overgrown mess at this point.
The only real solution is for users to engage with each other and point out the fake news. I recall some years (early 2000's around time of the Iraq war) in the past a relative of mine had emailed everyone in the family what was effectively fake news. It was something to the extent about Muslim's taking over America and how in a decade they'd be in complete control. I just pointed out that according to census data, Islam was a tiny minority and that it was essentially impossible for this to happen based on immigration and birth rates. Maybe things have changed, but this person did admit that they were wrong and emailed everyone saying that their previous email probably wasn't true.
You can't stop fake news, but you can train people to spot it and ignore it, removing the profit incentive. However, I don't think that's an easy task either as apparently humans have evolved to possess those cognitive biases and have a tendency to fall into them.
You probably don't want to go around talking about a right to life with the incoming administration. They're liable to interpret that in ways you won't like.
I'm not really worried about the environmental effects of climate change. We've scientifically progressed to the point where that can be managed. The real danger is that the impacts to the less advanced parts of the world are going to spur mass out migration. To some extent we're already seeing this in parts of the world. I don't know if it's fair to squarely lay all blame at the feet of climate change as shit like this happened historically before mankind could have any significant effect on the planet, but if we do have any potential to control these outcomes it would be best to prevent them.
As xenophobic as people might want to accuse America of being now, imagine what it would be like if millions flooded into the country to escape some hell wrought in their own lands due to prolonged weather effects such as drought, flooding, etc. Even the bleeding hearts who might normally feel obligated to help out in such matters will hoist the black flag if it gets bad enough.
I'm not fearful of the times ahead, but I don't think they'll be easy either. There's been all kinds of doom, whether from religious demagogues or scholars, preached in the past and yet humanity has endured and I suspect we will in the future. However, I didn't expect either the Brexit vote or Trump to succeed, but I think both show a level of dissatisfaction in the populace that's only going to grow further as time goes on. This feels like the beginning of transitional period for humanity where the old systems break down and give way to something new and different.
The free version of Resolve is okay, but it has some features removed that you can only get in the $1,000 paid version. If you're a small independent it's probably fine for a lot of people, but for a professional shop, some of those are a must. Final Cut X was disappointing though. I think they should have just called it the new iMovie and given it away for free while working on making the professional version worth a damn. No idea if it's gotten better since release as I haven't looked at it for years now.
In reality it's even fewer than that. Even with the electoral college, the vast majority of those electoral votes are secure. Unless something very strange happens, California's 55 votes are going to the Democrat candidate and, Texas's 38 are going to the Republican. This holds for most other states as well. A quick glance at the election results showed that about 40 states had at least a 5% gap between Clinton and Trump. In 10 or fewer states can you even really call this a close election.
What it really comes down to are 3-5 swing states where the vote could go either way because the voting isn't so one-sided that it requires divine intervention to go the other way. Those swing states might have 20 million voters collectively and the margin of victory in those states will probably come down to a few hundred thousand or even less. Michigan with 16 EC votes was decided by a difference of ~15,000 out of ~4.5 million voters. Contrast that with a tiny state like North Dakota (3 EC votes) that had gap about an order of magnitude larger in absolute terms (~115K difference) while having an order of magnitude fewer total voters.
We already have a Senate which accomplished essentially that though. I think we could get by changing to a popular vote, but it should be done using instant runoff voting or some similar system that allows for some choice outside of the two big political parties. I would imagine that in the current election, such a system would have allowed a huge number of voters to pick the candidate that they actually want to vote for while allowing for fallback choices if their first choice doesn't win.
If we're going to do it, let's do it properly and create a system that allows us to pick an executive without the shitty two-party system's endorsement of a single candidate. If three people from the Republican party and four Democrats want to all run, go ahead and let them all join the fray along with some Libertarians, Socialists, and anyone else who's interested.
Maybe we could take it a step further and go back to the old system of the second runner up being vice president as something like a single transferable vote system makes that possible.
Cost of living is also quite a bit higher though as well. Effectively, I believe that their $16 minimum wage comes out ahead of U.S. minimum wage (at least the Federal minimum wage, but not necessarily that of some states or cities) when adjusting for Purchase Power Parity, but it isn't going to translate into minimum wage workers being more wealthy to a considerable amount.
Also, some people would consider the Australia's government (currently a coalition lead by the Liberal Party of Australia (don't let the name fool you, the main "politically left" party is Labor)) to be as bad or worse than U.S. conservatives. If you're leaving the U.S. because of Trump, Australia isn't going to be any different or better for you politically speaking.
Nah. He can't write. I tried to explain the importance of this and find some reasons for him to learn such as being able to write letters to his mother, but according to him she can't read very fast and he doesn't want to waste time writing slow enough for her.
After explaining all of this to a redneck relative in Nebraska, he now wants to actively cause global warming so that the sea levels rise and drown all of the evil liberals on the coast so that he can deny global warming in peace.
These particular bulbs are capable of changing color, so there needs to be someway of controlling them that doesn't necessitate replacing the light fixture itself or running more cabling all over the place. That means they need to use some kind of wireless technology and it's easiest just to use something standard that's well documented and already has legal approval.
I suppose you could argue that the technology itself is pointless, but that could probably be said about plenty of things you consider necessary or vital as well, so there's not much point in going down that route since it's largely personal opinion or arbitrary. I suppose that this should be a lesson to hardware manufacturers that they need to consider security, or at least have some kind of physical hardware reset.
I don't care if you want to classify it as civil disobedience or not, suppressing someone else's speech is antithetical to a free society. The answer to speech that you dislike is more to oppose it with your own free speech, not to shut it down.
If you find phone banks utterly detestable, the solution is to start a political campaign to end them and then point a phone bank of your own at the various members of Congress. Perhaps they'll quickly grow less fond of the notion that robodialers are perfectly legal when used for political purposes.
Given how well the technology industry has managed to standardize on so many other connectors and formats, I'm sure standardized batteries will be a walk in the park.
As even phones with replacement batteries were still overheating, the issue wasn't isolated to just the battery itself. Having a user removable battery wouldn't have solved the problem and the phones would need to be recalled. Perhaps after several months a new battery could be designed in such a way to be resilient to whatever was causing the problem, but there's no guarantee of such depending on the root cause, and it would still mean several months of consumers not being able to use their device.
There are arguments to be made for use replaceable batteries, but this is not one of them.
Presumably part of the difficulty with solving any problem the first time is figuring out a good method to use, implementing it, and testing to make sure it works properly. Once you've solved that problem, it becomes much easier to do it a second time because you know what needs to be done and people have experience doing it so it goes considerably faster. That isn't proof that they were actually capable of going through everything, but if we want to think about it logically, the outcome was always going to be the same.
First of all, if someone actually had something really damning they would have released it months ago if they had any intention of going public at all. Anything that's immediately and undeniably legally actionable gives you perfect blackmail material that can be used to control the president of the United States. No one in a position to collect that kind of information (blackmail) is going to waste that kind of opportunity. If you want to argue that someone who might have said information wants to release it to cause disarray, there's a more compelling argument that disarray is maximized if you only release the data some time after a Clinton victory.
It's therefore safe to assume that there's no silver bullet in the new data dump to start with and that it only contains more of the same, which the FBI have already said isn't going to get anyone to indict Clinton, even though they've essentially stated she's been pretty duplicitous about the whole thing. She's hardly the only corrupt person in D.C. and it's more likely than not if she were to go down, she could take a lot of other people with her on both sides of the isle. As much as the Republicans love talking about how corrupt she is, exposing it probably slits many of their own throats in the process. Elections are basically a trial in the court of public opinion anyways, so making swing voters think Hillary is guilty is effectively just as good as legally proving it.
I bank at a credit union so I'm somewhat biased, but a credit union is basically a bank where by virtue of opening an account with them, you also become a partial owner of the business. It's similar to working for a company that gives you stock as part of working at that company. Because you're a partial owner of the credit union, you can vote on proposals just like you could vote if you were a stockholder for some company. Most people don't participate in this process, but they have the opportunity to do so if they're so inclined.
Additionally, because you are an owner of the credit union, when they make money, they pay that to you, the owner. If a private bank does well and makes a lot of money, they're under no obligation to pass on those profits to their account holders. If there's sufficient competition, private banks typically do this in the form of offering better rates in order to get customers to deposit their money with that bank, but with a credit union the financial gains are paid out to the members, as though it were a company where all profits went to dividends.
Probably the best reason people praise them is because they tend to be local organizations instead of big national chains. This means that the people working there are more likely to know you personally, especially if you attend any of the member events that most credit unions have from time to time. This makes customer support much, much better. Odds are if you have to call your credit union frequently, you'll be dealing with the same people most of the time. Contrast this with a huge bank that likely has a call center.
Credit unions aren't perfect, and typically if you want the best possible rate, a huge national chain bank will be the one giving it to you in the vast majority of cases, but for me personally, the better customer service experience is worth more than a slightly better interest rate on my savings account.
Samsung doesn't care about Android, they care about selling Samsung phones. They would rather make the money that Google is currently making from having all of those different services. There's very little profit to be made by being yet another hardware vendor, especially if you have to source components from the same suppliers as your competition. If Samsung didn't also have its own hardware division, they'd likely wind up just as unprofitable as their competitors.
They want people to start using those Samsung services and getting attached to them, so that they don't have as easy of a choice when it comes to upgrading and switching, because leaving Samsung means leaving your services. Google makes it easy to move between manufacturers with their services, but the manufacturers don't make any money as the race to the bottom continually sucks out the profit margin.
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Can you blame them though? Every time they do this the government just gives them toothless admonishment. Our representatives probably wouldn't even do that, but they want to make a sound bite for the news they can use when running for reelection, but their words are worth about as much as their weight in anything.
If most people woke up and realized that they could walk into a bank and rob it with no real consequence to themselves, how long do you think it would take before they were all hit? I personally wouldn't give it past 10 o'clock that morning, even accounting for daylight saving time.
Normally this is where people blame Republicans, the so-called party of business, but Obama did fuck all about this either and its not a secret that Hillary was pretty cozy with the big Wall St. firms so its not as though the Democrats are hardly any better. Until the C-level executives start getting thrown into jail for this kind of behavior, you'd be a fool to expect anything else from them.
How is LinkedIn worth $26 billion dollars? If the EU rejects this Microsoft shareholders should write them a nice thank you letter. Microsoft doesn't exactly have the best history with acquisitions.
It's not that surprising. As Microsoft moves towards being a service company, they care less and less about keeping their own source closed or sabotaging open source projects. You can use Azure to run Linux just as easily as Windows. Why should Microsoft care, they get paid anyhow.
I doubt they'll ever open source their core product like Office, but if open sourcing their tools or contributing to open source projects makes it easier for people to use Microsoft services, that's money for Microsoft that isn't going to someone else.
They'll never be as open source friendly as some would like, but at least they're a lot less hostile. Since they got rid of Ballmer who was the obstinate type that kept trying pound square pegs into circle holes, they've been a lot more willing to accept that not every single part of a solution needs to be something from Microsoft.
I wonder if they have any relation to the recent "super" moons that we've been hearing about recently.
No, they were able to do this because EA was dumb. Never trust state information that the client is giving you in a networked game or at the very least sanity check it occasionally if its not feasible to do everything server-side. Anyone who played MMOs or shooters back in the 90's probably has fond memories of all the crazy hacks people could use because the server would just accept whatever data the client sent.
If a government can legally compel a company to hand over their advertising information, there's no functional difference between the two. I can think of very little that a government might want to know about a person that an advertising agency would have no interest in collecting.
I think that Bill Hicks's thoughts on the matter are still quite appropriate.
Just to play devil's advocate, does Twitter also have a right to ban Chinese people from using their service since they can decide on their police for the use of their service?
Obviously most people would state that Twitter shouldn't be allowed to do that, but should they be able to ban anyone who talks about China?
Somewhere in there is a line that gets crossed and it goes from perfectly acceptable (or even expected) to ban to morally reprehensible (or outright wrong) to ban. I think most people draw the line not through any moral justification or philosophy that the follow, but whether they agree or disagree in that particular case, even if it results in arbitrary judgement or inconsistent rules.
Early on many of them did it about equally with the left and right, but they found that they got more clicks and shares from the right.
If I had to speculate on this, it's because websites like the Huffington Post, Daily Kos, etc. already fill that market. They've already built their brand and there's a certain legitimacy to those sites even if it's known that they are heavily left-leaning. The political right really didn't have anything like that, at least not on the same level. The only one I can think of that gets posted on the the internet regularly is Breitbart, and maybe Drudge Report but the latter doesn't really create its own content. Otherwise the right's main sources for media are still Fox News and AM radio which may not be as easy to share on something like Facebook.
I don't think Facebook can really solve this problem as creating an algorithm that can detect fake news would require some top-notch AI. Otherwise, actual intelligent humans will just figure out how to get around the algorithm and you get a weird cat and mouse approach. The underlying problem is that people want news that confirms their existing beliefs and not something which contains factual information or even an objective assessment of factual information. That's not something Facebook can do anything about.
In their desire to become some all-encompassing one-stop-shop for people, they had to anticipate that they'd drag in political discourse and all of the ire that goes with arguing on the internet. They could have just stayed a nice website where people could post pictures of their family or a recent vacation, but it sprawled out from there. I haven't used it in years (I stopped shortly before the big Facebook game craze swept through the user base and everyone was playing some farm game through Facebook), but I imagine its a bit of an overgrown mess at this point.
The only real solution is for users to engage with each other and point out the fake news. I recall some years (early 2000's around time of the Iraq war) in the past a relative of mine had emailed everyone in the family what was effectively fake news. It was something to the extent about Muslim's taking over America and how in a decade they'd be in complete control. I just pointed out that according to census data, Islam was a tiny minority and that it was essentially impossible for this to happen based on immigration and birth rates. Maybe things have changed, but this person did admit that they were wrong and emailed everyone saying that their previous email probably wasn't true.
You can't stop fake news, but you can train people to spot it and ignore it, removing the profit incentive. However, I don't think that's an easy task either as apparently humans have evolved to possess those cognitive biases and have a tendency to fall into them.
You probably don't want to go around talking about a right to life with the incoming administration. They're liable to interpret that in ways you won't like.
Soda is fucking terrible for you. That's why I always make sure to dilute it with an equal part of rum or whiskey.
I'm not really worried about the environmental effects of climate change. We've scientifically progressed to the point where that can be managed. The real danger is that the impacts to the less advanced parts of the world are going to spur mass out migration. To some extent we're already seeing this in parts of the world. I don't know if it's fair to squarely lay all blame at the feet of climate change as shit like this happened historically before mankind could have any significant effect on the planet, but if we do have any potential to control these outcomes it would be best to prevent them.
As xenophobic as people might want to accuse America of being now, imagine what it would be like if millions flooded into the country to escape some hell wrought in their own lands due to prolonged weather effects such as drought, flooding, etc. Even the bleeding hearts who might normally feel obligated to help out in such matters will hoist the black flag if it gets bad enough.
I'm not fearful of the times ahead, but I don't think they'll be easy either. There's been all kinds of doom, whether from religious demagogues or scholars, preached in the past and yet humanity has endured and I suspect we will in the future. However, I didn't expect either the Brexit vote or Trump to succeed, but I think both show a level of dissatisfaction in the populace that's only going to grow further as time goes on. This feels like the beginning of transitional period for humanity where the old systems break down and give way to something new and different.
The free version of Resolve is okay, but it has some features removed that you can only get in the $1,000 paid version. If you're a small independent it's probably fine for a lot of people, but for a professional shop, some of those are a must. Final Cut X was disappointing though. I think they should have just called it the new iMovie and given it away for free while working on making the professional version worth a damn. No idea if it's gotten better since release as I haven't looked at it for years now.
In reality it's even fewer than that. Even with the electoral college, the vast majority of those electoral votes are secure. Unless something very strange happens, California's 55 votes are going to the Democrat candidate and, Texas's 38 are going to the Republican. This holds for most other states as well. A quick glance at the election results showed that about 40 states had at least a 5% gap between Clinton and Trump. In 10 or fewer states can you even really call this a close election.
What it really comes down to are 3-5 swing states where the vote could go either way because the voting isn't so one-sided that it requires divine intervention to go the other way. Those swing states might have 20 million voters collectively and the margin of victory in those states will probably come down to a few hundred thousand or even less. Michigan with 16 EC votes was decided by a difference of ~15,000 out of ~4.5 million voters. Contrast that with a tiny state like North Dakota (3 EC votes) that had gap about an order of magnitude larger in absolute terms (~115K difference) while having an order of magnitude fewer total voters.
We already have a Senate which accomplished essentially that though. I think we could get by changing to a popular vote, but it should be done using instant runoff voting or some similar system that allows for some choice outside of the two big political parties. I would imagine that in the current election, such a system would have allowed a huge number of voters to pick the candidate that they actually want to vote for while allowing for fallback choices if their first choice doesn't win.
If we're going to do it, let's do it properly and create a system that allows us to pick an executive without the shitty two-party system's endorsement of a single candidate. If three people from the Republican party and four Democrats want to all run, go ahead and let them all join the fray along with some Libertarians, Socialists, and anyone else who's interested.
Maybe we could take it a step further and go back to the old system of the second runner up being vice president as something like a single transferable vote system makes that possible.
Cost of living is also quite a bit higher though as well. Effectively, I believe that their $16 minimum wage comes out ahead of U.S. minimum wage (at least the Federal minimum wage, but not necessarily that of some states or cities) when adjusting for Purchase Power Parity, but it isn't going to translate into minimum wage workers being more wealthy to a considerable amount.
Also, some people would consider the Australia's government (currently a coalition lead by the Liberal Party of Australia (don't let the name fool you, the main "politically left" party is Labor)) to be as bad or worse than U.S. conservatives. If you're leaving the U.S. because of Trump, Australia isn't going to be any different or better for you politically speaking.
Nah. He can't write. I tried to explain the importance of this and find some reasons for him to learn such as being able to write letters to his mother, but according to him she can't read very fast and he doesn't want to waste time writing slow enough for her.
After explaining all of this to a redneck relative in Nebraska, he now wants to actively cause global warming so that the sea levels rise and drown all of the evil liberals on the coast so that he can deny global warming in peace.
These particular bulbs are capable of changing color, so there needs to be someway of controlling them that doesn't necessitate replacing the light fixture itself or running more cabling all over the place. That means they need to use some kind of wireless technology and it's easiest just to use something standard that's well documented and already has legal approval.
I suppose you could argue that the technology itself is pointless, but that could probably be said about plenty of things you consider necessary or vital as well, so there's not much point in going down that route since it's largely personal opinion or arbitrary. I suppose that this should be a lesson to hardware manufacturers that they need to consider security, or at least have some kind of physical hardware reset.
I don't care if you want to classify it as civil disobedience or not, suppressing someone else's speech is antithetical to a free society. The answer to speech that you dislike is more to oppose it with your own free speech, not to shut it down.
If you find phone banks utterly detestable, the solution is to start a political campaign to end them and then point a phone bank of your own at the various members of Congress. Perhaps they'll quickly grow less fond of the notion that robodialers are perfectly legal when used for political purposes.
Given how well the technology industry has managed to standardize on so many other connectors and formats, I'm sure standardized batteries will be a walk in the park.
Getting stoned out of your wits isn't the same as getting unwittingly stoned even if the outcome is much the same.
As even phones with replacement batteries were still overheating, the issue wasn't isolated to just the battery itself. Having a user removable battery wouldn't have solved the problem and the phones would need to be recalled. Perhaps after several months a new battery could be designed in such a way to be resilient to whatever was causing the problem, but there's no guarantee of such depending on the root cause, and it would still mean several months of consumers not being able to use their device.
There are arguments to be made for use replaceable batteries, but this is not one of them.
Presumably part of the difficulty with solving any problem the first time is figuring out a good method to use, implementing it, and testing to make sure it works properly. Once you've solved that problem, it becomes much easier to do it a second time because you know what needs to be done and people have experience doing it so it goes considerably faster. That isn't proof that they were actually capable of going through everything, but if we want to think about it logically, the outcome was always going to be the same.
First of all, if someone actually had something really damning they would have released it months ago if they had any intention of going public at all. Anything that's immediately and undeniably legally actionable gives you perfect blackmail material that can be used to control the president of the United States. No one in a position to collect that kind of information (blackmail) is going to waste that kind of opportunity. If you want to argue that someone who might have said information wants to release it to cause disarray, there's a more compelling argument that disarray is maximized if you only release the data some time after a Clinton victory.
It's therefore safe to assume that there's no silver bullet in the new data dump to start with and that it only contains more of the same, which the FBI have already said isn't going to get anyone to indict Clinton, even though they've essentially stated she's been pretty duplicitous about the whole thing. She's hardly the only corrupt person in D.C. and it's more likely than not if she were to go down, she could take a lot of other people with her on both sides of the isle. As much as the Republicans love talking about how corrupt she is, exposing it probably slits many of their own throats in the process. Elections are basically a trial in the court of public opinion anyways, so making swing voters think Hillary is guilty is effectively just as good as legally proving it.
I bank at a credit union so I'm somewhat biased, but a credit union is basically a bank where by virtue of opening an account with them, you also become a partial owner of the business. It's similar to working for a company that gives you stock as part of working at that company. Because you're a partial owner of the credit union, you can vote on proposals just like you could vote if you were a stockholder for some company. Most people don't participate in this process, but they have the opportunity to do so if they're so inclined.
Additionally, because you are an owner of the credit union, when they make money, they pay that to you, the owner. If a private bank does well and makes a lot of money, they're under no obligation to pass on those profits to their account holders. If there's sufficient competition, private banks typically do this in the form of offering better rates in order to get customers to deposit their money with that bank, but with a credit union the financial gains are paid out to the members, as though it were a company where all profits went to dividends.
Probably the best reason people praise them is because they tend to be local organizations instead of big national chains. This means that the people working there are more likely to know you personally, especially if you attend any of the member events that most credit unions have from time to time. This makes customer support much, much better. Odds are if you have to call your credit union frequently, you'll be dealing with the same people most of the time. Contrast this with a huge bank that likely has a call center.
Credit unions aren't perfect, and typically if you want the best possible rate, a huge national chain bank will be the one giving it to you in the vast majority of cases, but for me personally, the better customer service experience is worth more than a slightly better interest rate on my savings account.
Samsung doesn't care about Android, they care about selling Samsung phones. They would rather make the money that Google is currently making from having all of those different services. There's very little profit to be made by being yet another hardware vendor, especially if you have to source components from the same suppliers as your competition. If Samsung didn't also have its own hardware division, they'd likely wind up just as unprofitable as their competitors.
They want people to start using those Samsung services and getting attached to them, so that they don't have as easy of a choice when it comes to upgrading and switching, because leaving Samsung means leaving your services. Google makes it easy to move between manufacturers with their services, but the manufacturers don't make any money as the race to the bottom continually sucks out the profit margin.