Stage 1 isn't exactly about being violent and murderous. It means the person's horizon when it comes to moral reasoning is that of rewards vs. punishment. A small child thinks like this. For them, they do something "because pa will give me a candy!" or don't do something "because mom will scold me!" An adult who happens to remain at that level of moral reasoning simply doesn't understand notions such as "the dignity of the human person", and merely feels it's fine for someone to do anything they want whenever they want to if it feels good and no one will punish them. So whether they will do something really bad depends on what they want and their perception of how likely they are to be punished or not if this they want is either illegal or even just socially condemned.
Which is why, incidentally, most researches on what actually reduces crime end up concluding it's the certainty of being caught more than the harshness of the punishment. Harshness begins to be influential once certainty of being caught (with very few false positives and negatives) reaches a high threshold.
Actually, the amount of people who not commit violence and muder only due to the risk of being caught and punished is known. That's stage 1 in Kohlberg's scale of moral reasoning, and about 2% to 5% of the adult population on any social context are stuck on it due to cognitive deficiencies. Most people overcome that stage by age 3, with the vast majority reaching stages 3 or 4 (from six known stages) within their lifetimes.
Funny you say that. When I watched The Phantom Menace I found Darth Maul as an utterly forgettable character. He appears, do mean stuff, kills one of the good guys and gets killed, all the while uttering maybe 3 words. I felt he was the very definition of one-dimensional character writing: no story, no motivation, no nothing, brutal just because and evil for evil's sake.
That's what I remember of him, at least. But I'd like to know what you saw in him that made you like the character.
I'm under no obligation, ethically or morally, to actually do that.
It depends on the ethical system you adopt. For example, if you're going with Protestant ethics, then your affirmation is correct and you are under no obligation. If you go with Catholic ethics though, then it is incorrect and you're indeed under the obligation to do that. Similarly, at a more general level in Consequentialist ethics you're (usually) under no obligation, while on Virtue and Deontological ethics you are under the obligation.
As such, your affirmation says more about which ethical framework you subscribe to than about the issue itself.
The current tab is a shade of a grey brighter... so not "super obvious".
My active tab looks almost white to me, while all the other tabs look gray. I have no difficulty at all in distinguishing them.
However, I did calibrate my monitor, crudely, with Window 10's built in calibration wizard (Settings -> Display -> Advanced display settings -> Color calibration) after installing it on this computer months ago, so maybe that has something to do with it being quite obvious which tab is which.
we should try to ask these questions about the accuracy of radiocarbon dating
That's my point. There isn't something to look at, because there is no additional prediction provided by critics of radiocarbon dating. There is no "better theory" linked to that criticism that'd allow one to connect the existing data points in a better way, and without that any such criticism cannot overcome the negative heuristics of current existing research programmes.
The link explains this point more clearly than I myself could, so I suggest reading it.
(...) the only people who tend to question the dating techniques belong to ostracized groups - like the creationists.
The problem isn't questioning, it's not providing a theory that provides for predictions and that predicts more than the established theory.
So, pointing problems in this or that doesn't cut it. Problems we find in everything, and they can have a ton of different causes. You have to point out the problem, and then provide a theory that explains this problem alongside everything else that was also explained by the not-so-correct theory so that the state of knowledge afterwards is increased rather than decreased.
Creationists don't do any of those things, so they're seen as a making a lot of noise about nothing as all they do is to provide criticisms and lists of issues rather than actually contributing something of positive to the debate.
And anyone who is outside of that boarder? Doesn't even register as a person.
Actually, the statistical distribution of that behavior has been mapped. To sum up studies that began in the late 1950's and continue until today, roughly 40% of the adult population thinks in terms of group, with a mentality of "what my group thinks is right, is right for me; what it thinks is wrong, is wrong for me; within my group there are individuals; outside my group there are no individuals, just other groups and their indistinct members; other groups are all wrong and shouldn't really exist, but if we have to interact with them, they are at best allies, at worst enemies, and most of the time indifferent." That's stage 3 in the Kohlberg scale of moral reasoning, which is one of the most well tested formal psychological theories ever, a gold standard in falsifiability and reproducibility when it comes to psychometrics.
Then, about 45% of the population thinks in terms of inter-group relationships, looking at society as composed of multiple groups, thinking in terms of inter-group rules of coexistence, and recognizing other groups as having in principle a right to exist as long as they don't try to damage the social fabric that keeps the different groups from fighting each other. That's stage 4 in the scale.
And then about 5% move beyond that and begin thinking that people are individuals first and foremost, group-affiliated second, and therefore that such boundaries are irrelevant. That's stage 5, and there are others.
So, while you're correct that most people are like that, in fact about 94% are like that if we take into account stages 1 and 2 (roughly equivalent to psychopathy and sociopathy), there are about 6% that do think of all, in the strong meaning of "all', as persons. But yes, it's certainly a minority.
Raise the price of steel to support the roughly 80k steel workers in the US and you raise the price of every car made which hurts 2 million auto workers + everyone who buys a car.
That isn't necessarily bad if it were done across the board so as to better equalize the standard of living between all professional categories, as in that case the auto workers would also benefit on the long haul. The real problem is doing that to the lowest level of the economic pyramid, while allowing the distance between the base and the top. Then there's no real benefit, just a reshuffling that keeps the true beneficiaries intact.
Since when is the internet 'essential'? You can live your life just fine without it.
The same goes for phone service (in case it's from another company), electricity, gas, and running water and sewage treatment. If you doubt this, just look into how things were done for the first 99,99% of human history.
As such, would it be okay for your local utilities to cut your service alleging you probably planned and committed copyright infringement using their services to: (probably) talk with your fellow copyright infringement co-conspirators, power your computer, nourish yourself with something cooked while (probably) committing it, and taking pees during the (alleged) committing of those infringements?
I DO think we have a problem when people strive for equality of outcome (...) We should absolutely get equality of opportunity, because this is the moral things to do
The problem with that distinction is that equality of opportunity cannot exist if people are born with different talents and backgrounds. Consider it this way: if we define a point in time t0 at which the "equal opportunity" race begins, at the end of which, let's call it t1, some will have won in terms of outcomes while others will have lost, that ignores that t0 itself is the set of different outcomes of a race that began at t-1. In fact, you can set t0 at any point in the life of the individual, or even before it (see recent research showing how one's father and even grandfather's life events affect one's epigenetic makeup), and that point will be the set of different outcomes of some earlier supposedly equal-opportunity starting point.
As such, there's no real distinction between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome, as making sure that any t0 involves equal opportunities means that it, as the outcome of t-1, is an equal outcomes scenario too.
Given that there's no objective qualitative distinction between "opportunity" and "outcome" then, that whatever point we chose for that divide is arbitrary, and from that adopt one of three positions:
a) Abandon the notion that equality of opportunity (and thus of outcome) is a good.
Or keep the the notion that equality of opportunity-outcome is a good and then either:
b) Opt for the one t0 to strive to set as equal-outcome as possible so as to have it becoming the best possible equal-opportunity starting point for t1+. (This one is similar to your point, but requiring much more active effort.)
c) Strive to keep equality of opportunity-outcome going for the full set of point in the... t-n-1, t-n, t-n+1... t-1, t0, t1... tn-1, tn, tn+1... line.
In the real world, a "party" is a club of people. These people move around, new people entering, other people leaving, and people changing clubs. And there's an interesting history of how and where the many individuals of the club called "Democrat Party" moved to in the decades since and which people replaced the as those left and where these came from. Google it, and google the same for the club "Republican Party". You'll find all the plot twists quite interesting, if not entertaining.
You undermine your own point. Either the "problem" is that this is a physical-mathematical proof, in which case it by definition is bounded by the uncertainties inherent in all physical theories, or it's a pure mathematical proof, in which case any reference to the actual physical world is irrelevant since it applies to a subset of all possible physics (at Tegmark level II, so not even that high), which subset may or not intersect with ours. Both cases work in opposition to your argument, which is therefore invalid.
any mathematical proof critically requires a consistent (i.e. completely true) theory as basis
Not really. Per Laplace's Rule of Succession, a completely true theory would require infinitely many (not just "many", infinitely many) data points of corroboratory evidence with exactly zero data points of falsified evidence, which isn't possible. Similarly, a completely false theory would require infinitely many data points of falsified evidence with exactly zero data points of corroboratory evidence. As such, any theory at most approaches a status of complete falseness or completely truthfulness, without ever reaching any of those two extremes.
Given that, either you accept that a mathematical proof about a physical question can be given with the added caveat that they're bound by the "truthfulness factor" of the theory, so that a theory that's 0.99999% certain (most physics ones) allows for mathematical proofs that are also at most 0.99999% certain, or you require the impossible level of 1.0 truthfulness and therefore reject any proof, mathematical or otherwise, about anything at all.
Any other technology this abysmally bad has just been scrapped.
Low hanging fruits. We first developed the easy technologies, in which the S curve had a short slow R&D start, then a relatively steep exponential growth curve, and a slowly developing plateau. Alongside that we stumbled upon classic computation, which had (emphasis on had) the most insanely steep exponential growth of all technologies developed before and probably will never be matched again. That one has now matured and plateaued too. So now we're entering the realm of hard to develop technologies that might have a very, VERY long initial R&D curve, followed by a slightly exponential, perhaps even linear, growth curve, followed by a long, looong plateauing.
So, the choices are:
a) Don't even try. Keep going for the few remaining low hanging fruits and then stop and keep forever iterating and gold plating over what has already been done.
b) Accept the R&D phase is now going to take decades, maybe even centuries, before turning into anything resembling a growth curve. Adjust societal investments according to the new reality.
I prefer "b". Bring on the multi-generational efforts with risk of ending up empty handed after 100, 500 or 10,000 years of effort. It's best to do that in hope science and technology will keep advancing than to shrug and let it go.
You need a private key to encrypt and anything you encrypt, you can decrypt.
No, you need a public key do encrypt. The private key is for decrypting. So, yes, they can encrypt anything you receive by having your public key, and they only you can read the encrypted version.
I think you're confusing two things. One is the encryption or lack thereof of the e-mail contents. Another is the encryption or lack thereof of the mailbox. Their mailbox is encrypted using the same same public key used to send PGP e-mail to you. As such, your private key is needed to unlock both the mailbox and, within it, the body of any PGP-encrypted e-mail. They explain this here.
So, while it's true that non-PGP-encrypted e-mail you received was sent and remained as plain text while in transit, after received it's encrypted and then stored in that state. Of course that isn't as good as receiving PGP-encrypted e-mail directly, but it's better than having your mailbox sitting on the server with all the plain text e-mail in it still as plain text. At least hackers won't get them if they break into the server. And if it's true that ProtonMail itself doesn't keep a copy for themselves on the side, neither will their staff.
But charging a fee for access to the Google Play Store is probably going to mean that we're going to have to get our apps at a Samsung store from now on, and that would definitely be terrible for everybody involved.
Why? Other phone makers might go for any store, from Google's own to Samsung's to Amazon's to F-Droid. That kind of forced competition is good. It encourages app developers to actually provide their apps in multiple stores, thus reducing the need for Google's.
And if users are worried about losing their app investment if they change stores, well, just give preference to apps that allow the pro version of their apps to be activated irrespective of the store they were bought in. For example, by providing a key screen with a code that can be copied and applied to the free version downloaded from another store to turn it into the pro one, or something along those lines.
People that send you mail without having an encryption client, as far as I can tell, still have mail stored unencrypted (it would make little sense to encrypt it as ProtonMail would have those keys).
I don't think that's the case. On their Security page they say this:
"(...) your data is encrypted in a way that makes it inaccessible to us. Data is encrypted on the client side using an encryption key that we do not have access to. This means we don't have the technical ability to decrypt your messages, and as a result, we are unable to hand your data over to third parties. (...) For this reason, we are also unable to do data recovery. If you forget your password, we cannot recover your data."
The paid plan also provides the option of using one's own custom domain, so transferring services later wouldn't be difficult.
Which service is relatively new and might have more open addresses.
I've read good things about ProtonMail. It's the service I've been considering myself, although I haven't committed yet.
How do I get my 50k emails OUT of gmail and the IN to the new service.
Gmail supports IMAP, so you can do that with any IMAP-capable desktop email client such as Thunderbird. Configure both accounts in the client and simply copy the emails by hand. In my experience it's better to do this in batches of 100 to 500 emails at a time.
If you'd like something more automated, you can write a small Python script using the OfflineIMAP module to first download you Gmail messages locally and then upload them to your new email provider. I used it years ago when the small business I worked for at the time switched email providers. It's pretty easy to do. I managed to write something that did the job in about half a day even though I didn't know Python at all at the time. It then took about five days for the 20 accounts or so to transfer. The few emails that didn't transfer failed because they had some malformed headers that the destination email provider disliked, so I had to fix those by hand before managing to successfully upload them too, which took one or two additional days.
Actually, it's price based on demand after artificially enlisting most world governments to use their monopoly on violence so as to forcefully restrict offer, which would be infinite otherwose, resulting in baseline prices of $0 plus voluntary patronage. Given all of those as assumptions, then yes, demand.
(...) we've actually read their damned book and it's vile.
I don't actually think it's vile. It's very old, and full of very old allegories and metaphors that once properly understood are quite enlightening. The problem is more with the uninitiated believers who take things literally, or at most up to the first metaphorical level, and thus don't understand what they're reading. That's where most problems come from.
The word acknowledges where the first one came from, not requires that every following one come the same way.
So, every time the Old Testament, either in the Hebrew original or in its Greek translation, and every time the New Testament in the Greek original, talk about someone's "breathing", they're being metaphorical, and actually meaning "this isn't really about breathing but we'll use the word anyway"?
Oh, cool. then murder is just "mischief" according to the Bible. Good to know.
That word is translated in other versions as "injury".
If you Google the passage you'll see there are interpretation that go with a reading that this passage means something akin to this: if an assailant hits the woman, and she gives birth to a premature but still living baby due to it, and the baby survives, then the assailant must pay a fine because of the premature child bearing he caused, otherwise it counts as "further injury" and the eye for an eye kicks in. That seems to me to be quite the forced interpretation, but yes, it's a possible reading if one absolutely doesn't want to go with the clearer one.
Slashdot Mirror
Stage 1 isn't exactly about being violent and murderous. It means the person's horizon when it comes to moral reasoning is that of rewards vs. punishment. A small child thinks like this. For them, they do something "because pa will give me a candy!" or don't do something "because mom will scold me!" An adult who happens to remain at that level of moral reasoning simply doesn't understand notions such as "the dignity of the human person", and merely feels it's fine for someone to do anything they want whenever they want to if it feels good and no one will punish them. So whether they will do something really bad depends on what they want and their perception of how likely they are to be punished or not if this they want is either illegal or even just socially condemned.
Which is why, incidentally, most researches on what actually reduces crime end up concluding it's the certainty of being caught more than the harshness of the punishment. Harshness begins to be influential once certainty of being caught (with very few false positives and negatives) reaches a high threshold.
Actually, the amount of people who not commit violence and muder only due to the risk of being caught and punished is known. That's stage 1 in Kohlberg's scale of moral reasoning, and about 2% to 5% of the adult population on any social context are stuck on it due to cognitive deficiencies. Most people overcome that stage by age 3, with the vast majority reaching stages 3 or 4 (from six known stages) within their lifetimes.
If you need to invoke an old magic book and cult mentality
Someone has difficulty understanding what's written and prefers to substitute their own straw-men for what was actually said.
PS: I'm not Christian.
PPS: Max Weber.
Darth Maul bad was not
Funny you say that. When I watched The Phantom Menace I found Darth Maul as an utterly forgettable character. He appears, do mean stuff, kills one of the good guys and gets killed, all the while uttering maybe 3 words. I felt he was the very definition of one-dimensional character writing: no story, no motivation, no nothing, brutal just because and evil for evil's sake.
That's what I remember of him, at least. But I'd like to know what you saw in him that made you like the character.
I'm under no obligation, ethically or morally, to actually do that.
It depends on the ethical system you adopt. For example, if you're going with Protestant ethics, then your affirmation is correct and you are under no obligation. If you go with Catholic ethics though, then it is incorrect and you're indeed under the obligation to do that. Similarly, at a more general level in Consequentialist ethics you're (usually) under no obligation, while on Virtue and Deontological ethics you are under the obligation.
As such, your affirmation says more about which ethical framework you subscribe to than about the issue itself.
The current tab is a shade of a grey brighter ... so not "super obvious".
My active tab looks almost white to me, while all the other tabs look gray. I have no difficulty at all in distinguishing them.
However, I did calibrate my monitor, crudely, with Window 10's built in calibration wizard (Settings -> Display -> Advanced display settings -> Color calibration) after installing it on this computer months ago, so maybe that has something to do with it being quite obvious which tab is which.
we should try to ask these questions about the accuracy of radiocarbon dating
That's my point. There isn't something to look at, because there is no additional prediction provided by critics of radiocarbon dating. There is no "better theory" linked to that criticism that'd allow one to connect the existing data points in a better way, and without that any such criticism cannot overcome the negative heuristics of current existing research programmes.
The link explains this point more clearly than I myself could, so I suggest reading it.
(...) the only people who tend to question the dating techniques belong to ostracized groups - like the creationists.
The problem isn't questioning, it's not providing a theory that provides for predictions and that predicts more than the established theory.
So, pointing problems in this or that doesn't cut it. Problems we find in everything, and they can have a ton of different causes. You have to point out the problem, and then provide a theory that explains this problem alongside everything else that was also explained by the not-so-correct theory so that the state of knowledge afterwards is increased rather than decreased.
Creationists don't do any of those things, so they're seen as a making a lot of noise about nothing as all they do is to provide criticisms and lists of issues rather than actually contributing something of positive to the debate.
And anyone who is outside of that boarder? Doesn't even register as a person.
Actually, the statistical distribution of that behavior has been mapped. To sum up studies that began in the late 1950's and continue until today, roughly 40% of the adult population thinks in terms of group, with a mentality of "what my group thinks is right, is right for me; what it thinks is wrong, is wrong for me; within my group there are individuals; outside my group there are no individuals, just other groups and their indistinct members; other groups are all wrong and shouldn't really exist, but if we have to interact with them, they are at best allies, at worst enemies, and most of the time indifferent." That's stage 3 in the Kohlberg scale of moral reasoning, which is one of the most well tested formal psychological theories ever, a gold standard in falsifiability and reproducibility when it comes to psychometrics.
Then, about 45% of the population thinks in terms of inter-group relationships, looking at society as composed of multiple groups, thinking in terms of inter-group rules of coexistence, and recognizing other groups as having in principle a right to exist as long as they don't try to damage the social fabric that keeps the different groups from fighting each other. That's stage 4 in the scale.
And then about 5% move beyond that and begin thinking that people are individuals first and foremost, group-affiliated second, and therefore that such boundaries are irrelevant. That's stage 5, and there are others.
So, while you're correct that most people are like that, in fact about 94% are like that if we take into account stages 1 and 2 (roughly equivalent to psychopathy and sociopathy), there are about 6% that do think of all, in the strong meaning of "all', as persons. But yes, it's certainly a minority.
More about the scale here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Raise the price of steel to support the roughly 80k steel workers in the US and you raise the price of every car made which hurts 2 million auto workers + everyone who buys a car.
That isn't necessarily bad if it were done across the board so as to better equalize the standard of living between all professional categories, as in that case the auto workers would also benefit on the long haul. The real problem is doing that to the lowest level of the economic pyramid, while allowing the distance between the base and the top. Then there's no real benefit, just a reshuffling that keeps the true beneficiaries intact.
Since when is the internet 'essential'? You can live your life just fine without it.
The same goes for phone service (in case it's from another company), electricity, gas, and running water and sewage treatment. If you doubt this, just look into how things were done for the first 99,99% of human history.
As such, would it be okay for your local utilities to cut your service alleging you probably planned and committed copyright infringement using their services to: (probably) talk with your fellow copyright infringement co-conspirators, power your computer, nourish yourself with something cooked while (probably) committing it, and taking pees during the (alleged) committing of those infringements?
I DO think we have a problem when people strive for equality of outcome (...) We should absolutely get equality of opportunity, because this is the moral things to do
The problem with that distinction is that equality of opportunity cannot exist if people are born with different talents and backgrounds. Consider it this way: if we define a point in time t0 at which the "equal opportunity" race begins, at the end of which, let's call it t1, some will have won in terms of outcomes while others will have lost, that ignores that t0 itself is the set of different outcomes of a race that began at t-1. In fact, you can set t0 at any point in the life of the individual, or even before it (see recent research showing how one's father and even grandfather's life events affect one's epigenetic makeup), and that point will be the set of different outcomes of some earlier supposedly equal-opportunity starting point.
As such, there's no real distinction between equality of opportunity and equality of outcome, as making sure that any t0 involves equal opportunities means that it, as the outcome of t-1, is an equal outcomes scenario too.
Given that there's no objective qualitative distinction between "opportunity" and "outcome" then, that whatever point we chose for that divide is arbitrary, and from that adopt one of three positions:
a) Abandon the notion that equality of opportunity (and thus of outcome) is a good.
Or keep the the notion that equality of opportunity-outcome is a good and then either:
b) Opt for the one t0 to strive to set as equal-outcome as possible so as to have it becoming the best possible equal-opportunity starting point for t1+. (This one is similar to your point, but requiring much more active effort.)
c) Strive to keep equality of opportunity-outcome going for the full set of point in the ... t-n-1, t-n, t-n+1 ... t-1, t0, t1 ... tn-1, tn, tn+1 ... line.
In the real world, a "party" is a club of people. These people move around, new people entering, other people leaving, and people changing clubs. And there's an interesting history of how and where the many individuals of the club called "Democrat Party" moved to in the decades since and which people replaced the as those left and where these came from. Google it, and google the same for the club "Republican Party". You'll find all the plot twists quite interesting, if not entertaining.
Mathematical proofs deals with absolute truth.
You undermine your own point. Either the "problem" is that this is a physical-mathematical proof, in which case it by definition is bounded by the uncertainties inherent in all physical theories, or it's a pure mathematical proof, in which case any reference to the actual physical world is irrelevant since it applies to a subset of all possible physics (at Tegmark level II, so not even that high), which subset may or not intersect with ours. Both cases work in opposition to your argument, which is therefore invalid.
any mathematical proof critically requires a consistent (i.e. completely true) theory as basis
Not really. Per Laplace's Rule of Succession, a completely true theory would require infinitely many (not just "many", infinitely many) data points of corroboratory evidence with exactly zero data points of falsified evidence, which isn't possible. Similarly, a completely false theory would require infinitely many data points of falsified evidence with exactly zero data points of corroboratory evidence. As such, any theory at most approaches a status of complete falseness or completely truthfulness, without ever reaching any of those two extremes.
Given that, either you accept that a mathematical proof about a physical question can be given with the added caveat that they're bound by the "truthfulness factor" of the theory, so that a theory that's 0.99999% certain (most physics ones) allows for mathematical proofs that are also at most 0.99999% certain, or you require the impossible level of 1.0 truthfulness and therefore reject any proof, mathematical or otherwise, about anything at all.
Any other technology this abysmally bad has just been scrapped.
Low hanging fruits. We first developed the easy technologies, in which the S curve had a short slow R&D start, then a relatively steep exponential growth curve, and a slowly developing plateau. Alongside that we stumbled upon classic computation, which had (emphasis on had) the most insanely steep exponential growth of all technologies developed before and probably will never be matched again. That one has now matured and plateaued too. So now we're entering the realm of hard to develop technologies that might have a very, VERY long initial R&D curve, followed by a slightly exponential, perhaps even linear, growth curve, followed by a long, looong plateauing.
So, the choices are:
a) Don't even try. Keep going for the few remaining low hanging fruits and then stop and keep forever iterating and gold plating over what has already been done.
b) Accept the R&D phase is now going to take decades, maybe even centuries, before turning into anything resembling a growth curve. Adjust societal investments according to the new reality.
I prefer "b". Bring on the multi-generational efforts with risk of ending up empty handed after 100, 500 or 10,000 years of effort. It's best to do that in hope science and technology will keep advancing than to shrug and let it go.
You need a private key to encrypt and anything you encrypt, you can decrypt.
No, you need a public key do encrypt. The private key is for decrypting. So, yes, they can encrypt anything you receive by having your public key, and they only you can read the encrypted version.
Oops! The missing link: How to use PGP.
and no way for that mail to be encrypted
I think you're confusing two things. One is the encryption or lack thereof of the e-mail contents. Another is the encryption or lack thereof of the mailbox. Their mailbox is encrypted using the same same public key used to send PGP e-mail to you. As such, your private key is needed to unlock both the mailbox and, within it, the body of any PGP-encrypted e-mail. They explain this here.
So, while it's true that non-PGP-encrypted e-mail you received was sent and remained as plain text while in transit, after received it's encrypted and then stored in that state. Of course that isn't as good as receiving PGP-encrypted e-mail directly, but it's better than having your mailbox sitting on the server with all the plain text e-mail in it still as plain text. At least hackers won't get them if they break into the server. And if it's true that ProtonMail itself doesn't keep a copy for themselves on the side, neither will their staff.
But charging a fee for access to the Google Play Store is probably going to mean that we're going to have to get our apps at a Samsung store from now on, and that would definitely be terrible for everybody involved.
Why? Other phone makers might go for any store, from Google's own to Samsung's to Amazon's to F-Droid. That kind of forced competition is good. It encourages app developers to actually provide their apps in multiple stores, thus reducing the need for Google's.
And if users are worried about losing their app investment if they change stores, well, just give preference to apps that allow the pro version of their apps to be activated irrespective of the store they were bought in. For example, by providing a key screen with a code that can be copied and applied to the free version downloaded from another store to turn it into the pro one, or something along those lines.
Nothing is really being lost with this change.
People that send you mail without having an encryption client, as far as I can tell, still have mail stored unencrypted (it would make little sense to encrypt it as ProtonMail would have those keys).
I don't think that's the case. On their Security page they say this:
"(...) your data is encrypted in a way that makes it inaccessible to us. Data is encrypted on the client side using an encryption key that we do not have access to. This means we don't have the technical ability to decrypt your messages, and as a result, we are unable to hand your data over to third parties. (...) For this reason, we are also unable to do data recovery. If you forget your password, we cannot recover your data."
The paid plan also provides the option of using one's own custom domain, so transferring services later wouldn't be difficult.
Which service is relatively new and might have more open addresses.
I've read good things about ProtonMail. It's the service I've been considering myself, although I haven't committed yet.
How do I get my 50k emails OUT of gmail and the IN to the new service.
Gmail supports IMAP, so you can do that with any IMAP-capable desktop email client such as Thunderbird. Configure both accounts in the client and simply copy the emails by hand. In my experience it's better to do this in batches of 100 to 500 emails at a time.
If you'd like something more automated, you can write a small Python script using the OfflineIMAP module to first download you Gmail messages locally and then upload them to your new email provider. I used it years ago when the small business I worked for at the time switched email providers. It's pretty easy to do. I managed to write something that did the job in about half a day even though I didn't know Python at all at the time. It then took about five days for the 20 accounts or so to transfer. The few emails that didn't transfer failed because they had some malformed headers that the destination email provider disliked, so I had to fix those by hand before managing to successfully upload them too, which took one or two additional days.
it's nothing more than pricing based on demand
Actually, it's price based on demand after artificially enlisting most world governments to use their monopoly on violence so as to forcefully restrict offer, which would be infinite otherwose, resulting in baseline prices of $0 plus voluntary patronage. Given all of those as assumptions, then yes, demand.
(...) we've actually read their damned book and it's vile.
I don't actually think it's vile. It's very old, and full of very old allegories and metaphors that once properly understood are quite enlightening. The problem is more with the uninitiated believers who take things literally, or at most up to the first metaphorical level, and thus don't understand what they're reading. That's where most problems come from.
The word acknowledges where the first one came from, not requires that every following one come the same way.
So, every time the Old Testament, either in the Hebrew original or in its Greek translation, and every time the New Testament in the Greek original, talk about someone's "breathing", they're being metaphorical, and actually meaning "this isn't really about breathing but we'll use the word anyway"?
Oh, cool. then murder is just "mischief" according to the Bible. Good to know.
That word is translated in other versions as "injury".
If you Google the passage you'll see there are interpretation that go with a reading that this passage means something akin to this: if an assailant hits the woman, and she gives birth to a premature but still living baby due to it, and the baby survives, then the assailant must pay a fine because of the premature child bearing he caused, otherwise it counts as "further injury" and the eye for an eye kicks in. That seems to me to be quite the forced interpretation, but yes, it's a possible reading if one absolutely doesn't want to go with the clearer one.
Uhhh, no. I'm old enough to know better.
There are controversies, or maybe two sides to that. You remember one. Here are the two takes, the one I referred to, and a disagreeing one.