Google Fiber is available in my metro area. The problem - roughly 80% of the population lives outside city limits. Google Fiber is only available within city limits. Google made business decisions to save their money on infrastructure to not offer it outside the city limits. There's not really anything we can do about that. I have no idea if they did their research or not, but the reason that most people live outside city limits is that property is ridiculously expensive within the city limits and most metro residents are simply priced out of living there. I guess they didn't get enough millionaires to buy it there. If they weren't smart enough to realize that desperately poor people who make up the other main group of residents within city limits weren't likely to buy much either, then maybe they need to look at their people who made the decisions to offer what they offered where they offered it. As far as I can tell nobody in my county of residence can get Google Fiber, which is a real shame because I'm sure a lot of us would get it if we could. And I do truly mean that as far as I know ZERO county residents where I live can get Google Fiber. ZERO. We can't buy what you won't sell to us, Google.
If something like this were available to individuals, it could have been very useful to me recently. Last year it came to light that a relative may have wronged the rest of my family to the tune of a possibly very large sum of money that I hadn't even known existed, but the lawyer informing me of this likelihood could not act on it himself (on my family's behalf) because of his prior involvement in the situation, so advised me to get another lawyer and file suit about it myself. But just the filing fees, never mind attorney's fees, would be about a month's rent, and I can't risk that kind of money just to find out whether there's a lot more money due to me or not. I asked several lawyers if they would look at the facts of the matter (neatly packaged by the involved lawyer), decide whether it seemed likely that they would win the case, and take it on a contingency basis if so, but none would even consider that.
My best friend is a guy I've known since college. After graduation he went to law school and he's taught me a lot about how the law really works in the USA. I'm not claiming I can practice law, but let's just say that I'm a talented amateur with a better understanding of the system and its realities than the average Joe who isn't a lawyer. I can tell you that lawyers do not care at all if you were wronged and getting justice bankrupts you and ruins your life financially. Nor do they think that you being ruined means that anything is wrong with the system or that the system needs any tweaks at all.
I see what you did there. You conveniently forgot to point out that while the judge did indeed say what you quoted, that same judge also sentenced all 4 men to 25 years in prison anyway. The sentences were upheld on appeal 2-1 with all 3 judges rejecting the entrapment and government misconduct issues raised by defendants.
Oracle is claiming their lawyer was so incompetent that the wrong verdict was reached.
So now the judge is supposed to believe that same lawyer when she suggests that Oracle should have a new trial.
Sure.
Not exactly, but you're kind of close. Oracle is claiming that Google failed to give them critical information in discovery and that this information would have led to a completely different verdict. There may or may not be a subtle implication that their own lawyer was at fault for not figuring this out sooner or they may be saying that Google simply hid stuff from them. I don't care enough to read the docs to try to figure it out as best I can as a non-lawyer. Sometimes legal documents use negative language or say things the opposite of how normal people would say it and if you haven't been trained in that stuff, you can come to the wrong conclusion. My best friend is a lawyer and he's taught me a lot about how the law really works over the years, but I'm just an informed amateur.
You might note that in the past it was known in death penalty cases for the accused to defend themselves so that if they got convicted, they could then claim on appeal that they had incompetent legal representation (themselves). The courts don't allow those kind of appeals any more, which is why when the accused want to defend themselves, some judges won't allow it. Even though appellate courts probably (NOTHING is 100% sure in the legal world) won't allow people who represented themselves to appeal on the basis of having incompetent legal help, lower courts almost always make some PD attend the trial as an adviser just in case. While this is not a death penalty case, I can't say that there's no chance that someone in court wouldn't indeed argue basically "Yes, when we went to trial my lawyer was incompetent and missed something but now you need to listen to him/her because they're got their act together". If normal people knew what really goes on in the US legal system, they would be appalled. For example, it's not unheard of for the DA's office to drop charges for real crimes where they know the accused is guilty simply because the accused hired a lawyer and the DA's office can't be bothered to show up in court and actually prosecute the case. I'm not saying this happens in murder cases and I'm not saying it happens most of the time, but it definitely happens.
I do. There aren't really a lot of places he could be and be protected from being killed or forcibly brought back to stand trial in the USA. Given that both his father and girlfriend have both been seen getting on flights to Moscow to visit him, you seem to be suggesting a highly unlikely scenario here.
and also still a reliable source of information, especially on matters to do with Russia... a nation with the potential to take over the media and even explode journalists.
You can believe what you like about Snowden and the NSA, but trusting the info stream from Snowden inside of Russia is stupid.
Now you are dead on the money with this comment, but I got branded a troll here the last time I made a post suggesting something negative about Snowden. We'll see how yours does.
"94% of Republicans, 92% of Democrats, and 85% of independents on Facebook"
THINK that they have never been swayed. They are wrong. Maybe no individual post has ever swayed them; however, multiple people posting opinions almost certainly has. There's a reason why WWII Germany, modern day Russia, and political parties worldwide put out propaganda. IT WORKS.
Yes, it definitely works but it depends on what the message is. You can't just do it for anything. For example the following types of messages are very effective.
1. Exceptionalism - We're special and better than everybody else because of where we were born. Americans are perhaps the most notorious for this, but it's certainly not limited to them. This message works really well right now in Russia, for example. Probably China too.
2. Everybody else (or specific named country X) is out to get us. You can also throw in the part where it's because they're jealous (see #1).
3. We're just trying to take back what is rightfully ours. China in the South China Sea. Russia in Crimea. The USA in the 1800s when it kept beating up Mexico and taking its land.
4. All of our problems are because of outside force/country/group X. The common enemy theme is always effective.
Big lies in general, which may be related to a category above, are also often effective. I have a co-worker who fled the USSR during its final years and he and his parents have lived in the USA (and are US citizens) since the early 1990s. Know what his mom watches on TV to get her news? RT (Russia Today) which is quite possibly the most inaccurate and dishonest news source on the planet. They're ethnic Ukrainians and they have no love for Mother Russia, yet mama believes everything RT says. The fact that they get proven wrong over and over again in no way causes her to ever disbelieve them or to seek alternate sources of news.
Look at all the politicians who were against LGBT rights 10 years ago compared to now. Someone has changed their mind. It is the gradual acceptance of people and the political zeitgeist. People preaching acceptance have made a difference on their audience. A single post may not change anyone's mind. Dozens of people expressing an opinion might change someone's mind without them even knowing it.
I think it was mostly when the LGBT community came up with the genius idea to reframe it as a civil rights struggle. That changed the narrative from "Wish those stupid gays would go back in the closet and stop trying to make everybody else gay" to one of "You're discriminating against them by denying them what they want when what they want doesn't impact you at all". That is a powerful and effective change.
Those incessant political Facebook posts have certainly changed the way I think.
First, they have changed my opinion of many of my Facebook friends due to their endless attempts to shove political arguments (of all persuasions) in my face (thank God for the "unfollow" button).
Yep. Almost all the people I'm friends with who went to high school with me and still live in our small hometown are extreme right wing wing nuts. And they're all pretty much trying to outdo each other for craziness. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them still believe Obama was born in Kenya and that makes him ineligible to be president, although I don't see any of them saying that about Ted Cruz and we know for a fact he was born outside the USA.
Second, they have changed my opinion of Facebook and social media as a whole. Social media continues to devolve into more yelling, screaming, threats, trolling, guilt by association, and mob justice. And what makes it bad for Facebook is that the harder they try to "fix" things, the worse it becomes.
I learned long ago to be extremely careful about discussing politics or religion, especially with friends. I sincerely wish more people would take that lesson to heart.
Twitter is even worse, which is a big part of why I'm not on there. But if somebody posts something nutso on Facebook, like "I'm angry that US Olympic athlete XXXX didn't cover his/her heart during the anthem" it's not a big deal, but let some nobody post that on Twitter and suddenly it takes on a life of its own and becomes like some super big deal as if the crackpot opinion of one complainer suddenly becomes the most important thing on earth. My best friend and I also have talked about how we don't make political posts by design but so many of the people I know in Facebook seem to only post on politics that I don't know if they have any other interests.
You do know that China simply steals or buys its way into a lot of technological progress, right? Both the USA and Taiwan have recently arrested people who were happy to pass on secrets of various kinds to their masters in the PRC for money.
But I also am a bit amused that you seem to think that quantum encryption - if they even pull it off - won't be used for bad purposes for the state. Maybe you're not aware of this, but people in China are not allowed Twitter or Facebook accounts because - I kid you not kid - the government is terrified of their possible use to mobilize the masses against the Communist Party. Mark Zuckerburg can suck up to them all he wants and continue to learn Mandarin in his spare time but it's not going to get them to relax their paranoia against a street revolution.
I have a question not directed at you. Let's just say for example that they get this to work. Let's say that for now there is no way to break it. Is there a way to mess with the photons so that even if the encryption can't be broken, nobody on either end can use it for communication because it gets scrambled while going between the 2 sites?
If you state your opinion reasonably and rationally, Slashdot is almost always interested in hearing it.
I think "sometimes" is more accurate than "almost always" but it depends on what you're talking about. If you dare to post anything critical of the sacred cows most of the readers hold dear, they'll simply moderate your comments as a "troll".
From what EditorDavid posted above from the anonymous poster... I quote: What can I do to be able to securely chat and place audio/video calls? What do you think is the best device to buy and what apps to use on it?
Looks to me like the anonymous poster is willing to abandon his Windows Phone so I don't know why the blurb below the poster's quote immediately asked for a solution "especially for a Windows Phone user".
I get the wish for secure phone calls to a certain extent, but the anonymous poster sure doesn't seem to be doing anything that absolutely requires this kind of security. Is it really worth buying a new phone and software packages to try to get secure calls to Mommy when there are so many people with cell phones that any logical person would realize that every call can't be monitored by The Man?
You really only see this type of thinking in the West.
While there is certainly some component of that, it's not the major reason why things are as they are. Airlines in the USA are not owned or managed by the government. If it really came down to this, the US government might let all them go out of business and let new airlines be built out of the ashes. Switzerland did that. Plus, some airlines are actually owned by the government in the countries where they are based or the relationship is not all that independent. Air France, for example, is theoretically an independent company, but if they were going out of business the French government would surely step in and save them despite it violating EU laws to do so. The US airlines know that the government may not have their backs like they did the automobile industry. Plus, being publicly traded on the US stock market is probably for them a bad thing. This causes them to make decisions for short term profit to keep the stock price high. Finally, in the USA most customers who fly in coach only care about price and literally everything else is negotiable. They will make decisions on price alone. This puts pressure on the majors US carriers to compete at perhaps unrealistic price levels with the smaller airlines, which no doubt reduces money available to spend to upgrade old computer systems.
Here it is:
"Whistle-blowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant risks," Assange said. "As a 27-year-old, works for the DNC, was shot in the back, murdered just a few weeks ago for unknown reasons as he was walking down the street in Washington."
He's strongly implying that the deceased man gave him information and that he was killed in retaliation. It's impossible for any reasonable person to conclude anything else when the quote is taken in context. Saying anything else is just being dishonest.
Well, as I don't trust Assange at all, I'm not ruling out the possibility that Rich actually had nothing to do with Wikileaks and his unfortunately death is simply a convenient way to pin the leaks on a dead guy so that the people who might care to figure who leaked the information give up on finding the real source.
The same is true for Donald's comment about Second Amendment Solutions. He was suggesting (in jest?) someone should assassinate Hilary if she wins. If you're not American and lack the proper context then you might have missed that. But there isn't a man or woman alive in the United States who didn't get his message loud and clear..
There apparently are men at least who are alive in the US who didn't get the message. I know that Trump likes to say vague and inflammatory things all the time and this statement to me seems to mean that he's suggesting people assassinate Hillary, but it's not conclusive that's what he meant. Now at the time right after he said it he could have said something like this - "Now that I hear what I just said, I want to be clear that I mean that if you value your 2nd amendment rights you need to vote against Hillary Clinton. I'm not at all suggesting that anybody shoot her." People would laugh and cheer. But that's not what he said. In fact he has yet to state that's what he meant, although Rudy Gilliani, Sean Hannity and a Trump spokesman have already said that they know for an absolute fact that Trump was not suggesting assassination. I can also say that if Hillary had said this about Trump that the right wing nutters would completely have lost their minds over it and insisted that the only possible way to take that was that she wanted Trump assassinated and she needs to go to jail for that. I can say that I think that to most Americans who are not Republican wing nuts that they interpreted this as a vague call to shoot Hillary, sure.
If you were sharing recent experience at over 50 years old being unable to find an IT job, I'd say you probably have a valid complaint. But not so much at age 35. I'm old enough to remember the Y2K era and I was in IT then. Still am. What I find is that when people say they can't find IT jobs, usually it involves one of the following issues.
1) You've got a narrow skill set. You know only how to do something that's not much in demand or antiquated and while you may be very good at it, there just aren't very many jobs around for it. For example, you may be a great mainframe programmer, but if nobody wants to use that specific mainframe, you've got nothing else to offer.
2) A ton of people who say they can't find jobs don't tell you that they live in small towns where there just aren't all that many IT jobs available and somebody else already has those jobs. Since people who live in small towns are often very reluctant to leave them, that means that there just aren't very many jobs available in IT unless someone dies or retires.
It's certainly possible, although unlikely, that neither of these applies to you and you've just had an unusual situation, but almost every case of IT workers not being able to find job who aren't old enough for it to be age discrimination is because of what I listed.
https://www.nomorobo.com/
I'm a satisfied user. There's no charge for landlines. Yes I have a landline. It's worked great for me. Even some charities I do actually contribute to can't get through to me because of it. I get multiple robocalls a day and this gets them all. It's been months since the last one got through. Note that they don't support all carriers, but if you have VOIP through somebody (I have AT&T's Uverse) there's a good chance they can fix your problem. As I don't pay for their non-free mobile service I can't comment on that, but the free service on landlines is great.
Lol. If you ever go to China then you will understand that written road rules don't really seem to matter. There is a definite attitude of biggest gets right of way. If you get hit by this thing you are going to be the one in trouble.
This. A million times this. I've been to China. It's one scary place to be in an automobile. A few years ago I was in Shanghai and I took a taxi from my hotel to the airport. It was a fairly long drive, maybe 40 minutes, and a good chunk of it was on a 6 lane (each direction) highway. It was maybe around 10:30 AM and since the airport is, like in many major cities, actually fairly far away from the city center and kind of in the middle of nowhere, there weren't a lot of cars on the road at the time. My taxi driver was fine but the other drivers were most assuredly not. I saw people talking on mobile phones and some woman putting on makeup and many cars swerving back and forth between multiple lanes without a care in the world. My driver couldn't speak English and I can't speak Mandarin, but it was obvious that he wasn't happy with what he was seeing either. I've also spent time in Guangdong province in the south where my (at the time) girlfriend's brother-in-law drove us around. He was fine but traffic there is chaotic. You'll see intersections of multiple roads with no traffic signs or lights and it's every car for itself. There are videos on YouTube of really scary near misses in China where someone will avoid death at the hands of another driver by the slimmest of margins. I'm not so much worried about this bus crashing as I am wondering what will happen when some careless driver crashes into it when driving underneath it.
You can't launch something like this without somebody noticing so by getting approval that should, in theory, mean that nobody panics that some bad guy is trying to launch a primitive ICBM towards who knows what and thus the rocket isn't shot down.
Presumably these are the same people who keep thinking you can make uncrackable DRM.
I don't disagree with your post in general, but there actually is uncrackable DRM. Nobody yet has cracked Cinavia protection for Blu Ray discs. Cinavia is an audio watermark that is optional for Blu Ray and DVD discs. No player is required to support it for DVD but all Blu Ray players are now required to support it on Blu Ray discs. It's expensive so it's not used by most studios. Now there is one company (DVD Ranger I think) who claims they cracked it but testing showed that all they did was find a way to replace the audio during ripping with a Cinavia free AC-3 file that they had previous stored on a server somewhere and secretly downloaded it during the ripping process. AnyDVD HD did find a way to put something in rips that causes some PC software players to ignore Cinavia on playback (in theory software players are supposed to detect that the copy or rip has Cinavia and stop playback) but they didn't remove it. To date nobody has found a way to remove it from a disc that has it. All you can do is ignore it or replace it with the audio from another disc (usually DVD) that doesn't have it.
Anyone interested in what the "new Theranos" is should approach it as if it were a brand new company, with little/no track record and in the very early R&D phase. Perhaps with even more caution than that, if only to protect themselves from their historical baggage, and if not then at least to penalize socially irresponsible corporate practices.
Investors are often stupid. You might remember how SCO's stock value was propped up for years by nothing but the hope by ignorant investors that they might actually win their case and hit the jackpot. This happened for quite a long time after it was clear to any IT person or legal person who wasn't involved in the case that SCO wasn't going to win. So it wouldn't surprise me at all if there are people out there who want to dump money in Theranos despite their past history.
Winning an Olympic medal in some places can be life changing. It can make some of them national hero's and set them and their family up for years to come.
This is a really good point. Winning a single gold medal 40 years ago is the unfortunate thing that gave us Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner and her awful family. Members of 1984 US women's gymnastic team are still famous here in the US, especially Mary Lou Retton. Nadia Comaneci has been the subject of interviews this year on the 40th anniversary of her excellence in Olympic gymnastics. These are but a few examples.
So you're saying that somehow the DNC generated 3.7 million more votes for Clinton than Sanders?
How, exactly?
I have some distant cousins who are huge Sanders supporters, so I can comment on this. Basically the really hardcore supporters are claiming that votes for Sanders were either not counted at all or given to Clinton instead. Depends on who is telling this conspiracy theory which one they go with. And yes, they do truly believe that they had the votes to win every state (or almost every state) and the DNC was conspiring against them to steal the primary for Hillary. And this was all what they were saying before the Wikileaks event.
and fleeing prosecution to "frenemy" nations made you a genius security researcher as well. Maybe there's some kind of cause-effect relationship there that I don't understand. I look forward to Edward Snowden's future cure for cancer because apparently he is some kind of super genius who can achieve anything he wants.
The irony here is they can extradite someone who links to things but not an actual child rapist such as Roman Polanski who is evading US justice in Poland. That's a pretty huge double standard considering the "think of the children" excuse used for internet crackdowns.
You obviously don't understand in reality how the US government works in some cases, so I'm gong to explain it to you. First of all, the US actually did submit papers to Poland requesting that Polanski be extradited. The Polish government rejected them. However, I'm pretty sure that Polanski feared that the Polish government might not always reject such requests, so apparently he's now back in France. French law prevents his extradition.
What you also need to know is that US government will never, ever, admit this but in some cases they don't really and truly care all that much about getting the person extradited. It's more about political grandstanding than anything else. Polanski's victim has long asked for the case to be dropped because she says that she long ago forgave him and she can't get past it because the US government won't stop making an issue of it and the press won't leave her alone about it. Are her wishes being listened to? No they are not. The reason is that because she was so underage at the time (What was it? 13 years old maybe...) that the US government doesn't want to seem to be soft on abusing minors and giving preferential treatment to Polanski when they go after child porn people all the time. The government won't admit it, but I think they were pretty satisfied with Switzerland confining him to his home for 2 months and the ongoing attempts to extradite him do prevent him from ever returning to the USA, which I believe is the true but unstated goal of the US government. His punishment in reality is that he can't come back to the USA again. Bobby Fischer, the former world chess champion, was locked up in Japan for about half a year while they "investigated" his situation. Fischer violated US law with his rematch against Spassky because it was held in Yugoslavia which was under embargo at the time. Fischer was a very mentally disturbed person and his constant complaints against the USA and flaunting the fact that he broke US law with the rematch eventually got the US government interested in proving a point to him, so they got the Japanese to lock him up on nebulous charges. Fischer was eventually released and given Icelandic citizenship, which pretty much assured both that he was punished for his crime with the Japanese lockup and that he wouldn't return to the USA, which I think were the real goals of the US government. Similarly the US government doesn't really want Polanski to come back to the US nor are that really all that keen to lock him up any more than they've already done, but they can't admit that.
That RT has become a major source of news that you can't get on most major news channels.
I'll leave it to the reader to decide what, if any, value RT has by providing the following link. It has "highlights" of their coverage of the situation in Ukraine 2 years ago. https://www.buzzfeed.com/kathe...
You are choosing to NOT be on Netflix (US/Canada)|Hulu|Amazon|YouTube RED...hmmm yeah
Let's see how long that lasts.
Maybe longer than you realize. CBS has never been part of Hulu and I think no part of those other services either. At present they believe that they can make more money by getting people to pay for their own streaming service which they don't have to share with anybody else. We'll see how that works with Star Trek.
But alas, as I'm in the U.S. I will have to wait till it comes out a year later on US Netflix. I will survive..somehow.
I'm not sure how you'll survive in the USA since apparently some dangerous, perhaps gun wielding, person is preventing you from seeing Star Trek for a year. After all you said you have to wait, which implies that you have no choice in matter. Now if you had said that you are choosing to wait because you don't want to pay to subscribe to CBS' online service, that would be one thing, but that's not what you said. You said you have to wait, so perhaps you should see what your legal remedies are against these people who are preventing you from potentially subscribing to the service.
Slashdot Mirror
Google Fiber is available in my metro area. The problem - roughly 80% of the population lives outside city limits. Google Fiber is only available within city limits. Google made business decisions to save their money on infrastructure to not offer it outside the city limits. There's not really anything we can do about that. I have no idea if they did their research or not, but the reason that most people live outside city limits is that property is ridiculously expensive within the city limits and most metro residents are simply priced out of living there. I guess they didn't get enough millionaires to buy it there. If they weren't smart enough to realize that desperately poor people who make up the other main group of residents within city limits weren't likely to buy much either, then maybe they need to look at their people who made the decisions to offer what they offered where they offered it. As far as I can tell nobody in my county of residence can get Google Fiber, which is a real shame because I'm sure a lot of us would get it if we could. And I do truly mean that as far as I know ZERO county residents where I live can get Google Fiber. ZERO. We can't buy what you won't sell to us, Google.
If something like this were available to individuals, it could have been very useful to me recently. Last year it came to light that a relative may have wronged the rest of my family to the tune of a possibly very large sum of money that I hadn't even known existed, but the lawyer informing me of this likelihood could not act on it himself (on my family's behalf) because of his prior involvement in the situation, so advised me to get another lawyer and file suit about it myself. But just the filing fees, never mind attorney's fees, would be about a month's rent, and I can't risk that kind of money just to find out whether there's a lot more money due to me or not. I asked several lawyers if they would look at the facts of the matter (neatly packaged by the involved lawyer), decide whether it seemed likely that they would win the case, and take it on a contingency basis if so, but none would even consider that.
My best friend is a guy I've known since college. After graduation he went to law school and he's taught me a lot about how the law really works in the USA. I'm not claiming I can practice law, but let's just say that I'm a talented amateur with a better understanding of the system and its realities than the average Joe who isn't a lawyer. I can tell you that lawyers do not care at all if you were wronged and getting justice bankrupts you and ruins your life financially. Nor do they think that you being ruined means that anything is wrong with the system or that the system needs any tweaks at all.
I see what you did there. You conveniently forgot to point out that while the judge did indeed say what you quoted, that same judge also sentenced all 4 men to 25 years in prison anyway. The sentences were upheld on appeal 2-1 with all 3 judges rejecting the entrapment and government misconduct issues raised by defendants.
Oracle is claiming their lawyer was so incompetent that the wrong verdict was reached.
So now the judge is supposed to believe that same lawyer when she suggests that Oracle should have a new trial.
Sure.
Not exactly, but you're kind of close. Oracle is claiming that Google failed to give them critical information in discovery and that this information would have led to a completely different verdict. There may or may not be a subtle implication that their own lawyer was at fault for not figuring this out sooner or they may be saying that Google simply hid stuff from them. I don't care enough to read the docs to try to figure it out as best I can as a non-lawyer. Sometimes legal documents use negative language or say things the opposite of how normal people would say it and if you haven't been trained in that stuff, you can come to the wrong conclusion. My best friend is a lawyer and he's taught me a lot about how the law really works over the years, but I'm just an informed amateur.
You might note that in the past it was known in death penalty cases for the accused to defend themselves so that if they got convicted, they could then claim on appeal that they had incompetent legal representation (themselves). The courts don't allow those kind of appeals any more, which is why when the accused want to defend themselves, some judges won't allow it. Even though appellate courts probably (NOTHING is 100% sure in the legal world) won't allow people who represented themselves to appeal on the basis of having incompetent legal help, lower courts almost always make some PD attend the trial as an adviser just in case. While this is not a death penalty case, I can't say that there's no chance that someone in court wouldn't indeed argue basically "Yes, when we went to trial my lawyer was incompetent and missed something but now you need to listen to him/her because they're got their act together". If normal people knew what really goes on in the US legal system, they would be appalled. For example, it's not unheard of for the DA's office to drop charges for real crimes where they know the accused is guilty simply because the accused hired a lawyer and the DA's office can't be bothered to show up in court and actually prosecute the case. I'm not saying this happens in murder cases and I'm not saying it happens most of the time, but it definitely happens.
I don't believe Snowden is in Russia
I do. There aren't really a lot of places he could be and be protected from being killed or forcibly brought back to stand trial in the USA. Given that both his father and girlfriend have both been seen getting on flights to Moscow to visit him, you seem to be suggesting a highly unlikely scenario here.
and also still a reliable source of information, especially on matters to do with Russia... a nation with the potential to take over the media and even explode journalists. You can believe what you like about Snowden and the NSA, but trusting the info stream from Snowden inside of Russia is stupid.
Now you are dead on the money with this comment, but I got branded a troll here the last time I made a post suggesting something negative about Snowden. We'll see how yours does.
"94% of Republicans, 92% of Democrats, and 85% of independents on Facebook"
THINK that they have never been swayed. They are wrong. Maybe no individual post has ever swayed them; however, multiple people posting opinions almost certainly has. There's a reason why WWII Germany, modern day Russia, and political parties worldwide put out propaganda. IT WORKS.
Yes, it definitely works but it depends on what the message is. You can't just do it for anything. For example the following types of messages are very effective.
1. Exceptionalism - We're special and better than everybody else because of where we were born. Americans are perhaps the most notorious for this, but it's certainly not limited to them. This message works really well right now in Russia, for example. Probably China too.
2. Everybody else (or specific named country X) is out to get us. You can also throw in the part where it's because they're jealous (see #1).
3. We're just trying to take back what is rightfully ours. China in the South China Sea. Russia in Crimea. The USA in the 1800s when it kept beating up Mexico and taking its land.
4. All of our problems are because of outside force/country/group X. The common enemy theme is always effective.
Big lies in general, which may be related to a category above, are also often effective. I have a co-worker who fled the USSR during its final years and he and his parents have lived in the USA (and are US citizens) since the early 1990s. Know what his mom watches on TV to get her news? RT (Russia Today) which is quite possibly the most inaccurate and dishonest news source on the planet. They're ethnic Ukrainians and they have no love for Mother Russia, yet mama believes everything RT says. The fact that they get proven wrong over and over again in no way causes her to ever disbelieve them or to seek alternate sources of news.
Look at all the politicians who were against LGBT rights 10 years ago compared to now. Someone has changed their mind. It is the gradual acceptance of people and the political zeitgeist. People preaching acceptance have made a difference on their audience. A single post may not change anyone's mind. Dozens of people expressing an opinion might change someone's mind without them even knowing it.
I think it was mostly when the LGBT community came up with the genius idea to reframe it as a civil rights struggle. That changed the narrative from "Wish those stupid gays would go back in the closet and stop trying to make everybody else gay" to one of "You're discriminating against them by denying them what they want when what they want doesn't impact you at all". That is a powerful and effective change.
Those incessant political Facebook posts have certainly changed the way I think.
First, they have changed my opinion of many of my Facebook friends due to their endless attempts to shove political arguments (of all persuasions) in my face (thank God for the "unfollow" button).
Yep. Almost all the people I'm friends with who went to high school with me and still live in our small hometown are extreme right wing wing nuts. And they're all pretty much trying to outdo each other for craziness. I wouldn't be surprised if some of them still believe Obama was born in Kenya and that makes him ineligible to be president, although I don't see any of them saying that about Ted Cruz and we know for a fact he was born outside the USA.
Second, they have changed my opinion of Facebook and social media as a whole. Social media continues to devolve into more yelling, screaming, threats, trolling, guilt by association, and mob justice. And what makes it bad for Facebook is that the harder they try to "fix" things, the worse it becomes.
I learned long ago to be extremely careful about discussing politics or religion, especially with friends. I sincerely wish more people would take that lesson to heart.
Twitter is even worse, which is a big part of why I'm not on there. But if somebody posts something nutso on Facebook, like "I'm angry that US Olympic athlete XXXX didn't cover his/her heart during the anthem" it's not a big deal, but let some nobody post that on Twitter and suddenly it takes on a life of its own and becomes like some super big deal as if the crackpot opinion of one complainer suddenly becomes the most important thing on earth. My best friend and I also have talked about how we don't make political posts by design but so many of the people I know in Facebook seem to only post on politics that I don't know if they have any other interests.
You do know that China simply steals or buys its way into a lot of technological progress, right? Both the USA and Taiwan have recently arrested people who were happy to pass on secrets of various kinds to their masters in the PRC for money.
But I also am a bit amused that you seem to think that quantum encryption - if they even pull it off - won't be used for bad purposes for the state. Maybe you're not aware of this, but people in China are not allowed Twitter or Facebook accounts because - I kid you not kid - the government is terrified of their possible use to mobilize the masses against the Communist Party. Mark Zuckerburg can suck up to them all he wants and continue to learn Mandarin in his spare time but it's not going to get them to relax their paranoia against a street revolution.
I have a question not directed at you. Let's just say for example that they get this to work. Let's say that for now there is no way to break it. Is there a way to mess with the photons so that even if the encryption can't be broken, nobody on either end can use it for communication because it gets scrambled while going between the 2 sites?
If you state your opinion reasonably and rationally, Slashdot is almost always interested in hearing it.
I think "sometimes" is more accurate than "almost always" but it depends on what you're talking about. If you dare to post anything critical of the sacred cows most of the readers hold dear, they'll simply moderate your comments as a "troll".
From what EditorDavid posted above from the anonymous poster... I quote:
What can I do to be able to securely chat and place audio/video calls? What do you think is the best device to buy and what apps to use on it?
Looks to me like the anonymous poster is willing to abandon his Windows Phone so I don't know why the blurb below the poster's quote immediately asked for a solution "especially for a Windows Phone user".
I get the wish for secure phone calls to a certain extent, but the anonymous poster sure doesn't seem to be doing anything that absolutely requires this kind of security. Is it really worth buying a new phone and software packages to try to get secure calls to Mommy when there are so many people with cell phones that any logical person would realize that every call can't be monitored by The Man?
You really only see this type of thinking in the West.
While there is certainly some component of that, it's not the major reason why things are as they are. Airlines in the USA are not owned or managed by the government. If it really came down to this, the US government might let all them go out of business and let new airlines be built out of the ashes. Switzerland did that. Plus, some airlines are actually owned by the government in the countries where they are based or the relationship is not all that independent. Air France, for example, is theoretically an independent company, but if they were going out of business the French government would surely step in and save them despite it violating EU laws to do so. The US airlines know that the government may not have their backs like they did the automobile industry. Plus, being publicly traded on the US stock market is probably for them a bad thing. This causes them to make decisions for short term profit to keep the stock price high. Finally, in the USA most customers who fly in coach only care about price and literally everything else is negotiable. They will make decisions on price alone. This puts pressure on the majors US carriers to compete at perhaps unrealistic price levels with the smaller airlines, which no doubt reduces money available to spend to upgrade old computer systems.
Here it is: "Whistle-blowers go to significant efforts to get us material and often very significant risks," Assange said. "As a 27-year-old, works for the DNC, was shot in the back, murdered just a few weeks ago for unknown reasons as he was walking down the street in Washington." He's strongly implying that the deceased man gave him information and that he was killed in retaliation. It's impossible for any reasonable person to conclude anything else when the quote is taken in context. Saying anything else is just being dishonest.
Well, as I don't trust Assange at all, I'm not ruling out the possibility that Rich actually had nothing to do with Wikileaks and his unfortunately death is simply a convenient way to pin the leaks on a dead guy so that the people who might care to figure who leaked the information give up on finding the real source.
The same is true for Donald's comment about Second Amendment Solutions. He was suggesting (in jest?) someone should assassinate Hilary if she wins. If you're not American and lack the proper context then you might have missed that. But there isn't a man or woman alive in the United States who didn't get his message loud and clear. .
There apparently are men at least who are alive in the US who didn't get the message. I know that Trump likes to say vague and inflammatory things all the time and this statement to me seems to mean that he's suggesting people assassinate Hillary, but it's not conclusive that's what he meant. Now at the time right after he said it he could have said something like this - "Now that I hear what I just said, I want to be clear that I mean that if you value your 2nd amendment rights you need to vote against Hillary Clinton. I'm not at all suggesting that anybody shoot her." People would laugh and cheer. But that's not what he said. In fact he has yet to state that's what he meant, although Rudy Gilliani, Sean Hannity and a Trump spokesman have already said that they know for an absolute fact that Trump was not suggesting assassination. I can also say that if Hillary had said this about Trump that the right wing nutters would completely have lost their minds over it and insisted that the only possible way to take that was that she wanted Trump assassinated and she needs to go to jail for that. I can say that I think that to most Americans who are not Republican wing nuts that they interpreted this as a vague call to shoot Hillary, sure.
If you were sharing recent experience at over 50 years old being unable to find an IT job, I'd say you probably have a valid complaint. But not so much at age 35. I'm old enough to remember the Y2K era and I was in IT then. Still am. What I find is that when people say they can't find IT jobs, usually it involves one of the following issues.
1) You've got a narrow skill set. You know only how to do something that's not much in demand or antiquated and while you may be very good at it, there just aren't very many jobs around for it. For example, you may be a great mainframe programmer, but if nobody wants to use that specific mainframe, you've got nothing else to offer.
2) A ton of people who say they can't find jobs don't tell you that they live in small towns where there just aren't all that many IT jobs available and somebody else already has those jobs. Since people who live in small towns are often very reluctant to leave them, that means that there just aren't very many jobs available in IT unless someone dies or retires.
It's certainly possible, although unlikely, that neither of these applies to you and you've just had an unusual situation, but almost every case of IT workers not being able to find job who aren't old enough for it to be age discrimination is because of what I listed.
https://www.nomorobo.com/ I'm a satisfied user. There's no charge for landlines. Yes I have a landline. It's worked great for me. Even some charities I do actually contribute to can't get through to me because of it. I get multiple robocalls a day and this gets them all. It's been months since the last one got through. Note that they don't support all carriers, but if you have VOIP through somebody (I have AT&T's Uverse) there's a good chance they can fix your problem. As I don't pay for their non-free mobile service I can't comment on that, but the free service on landlines is great.
Lol. If you ever go to China then you will understand that written road rules don't really seem to matter. There is a definite attitude of biggest gets right of way. If you get hit by this thing you are going to be the one in trouble.
This. A million times this. I've been to China. It's one scary place to be in an automobile. A few years ago I was in Shanghai and I took a taxi from my hotel to the airport. It was a fairly long drive, maybe 40 minutes, and a good chunk of it was on a 6 lane (each direction) highway. It was maybe around 10:30 AM and since the airport is, like in many major cities, actually fairly far away from the city center and kind of in the middle of nowhere, there weren't a lot of cars on the road at the time. My taxi driver was fine but the other drivers were most assuredly not. I saw people talking on mobile phones and some woman putting on makeup and many cars swerving back and forth between multiple lanes without a care in the world. My driver couldn't speak English and I can't speak Mandarin, but it was obvious that he wasn't happy with what he was seeing either. I've also spent time in Guangdong province in the south where my (at the time) girlfriend's brother-in-law drove us around. He was fine but traffic there is chaotic. You'll see intersections of multiple roads with no traffic signs or lights and it's every car for itself. There are videos on YouTube of really scary near misses in China where someone will avoid death at the hands of another driver by the slimmest of margins. I'm not so much worried about this bus crashing as I am wondering what will happen when some careless driver crashes into it when driving underneath it.
You can't launch something like this without somebody noticing so by getting approval that should, in theory, mean that nobody panics that some bad guy is trying to launch a primitive ICBM towards who knows what and thus the rocket isn't shot down.
Presumably these are the same people who keep thinking you can make uncrackable DRM.
I don't disagree with your post in general, but there actually is uncrackable DRM. Nobody yet has cracked Cinavia protection for Blu Ray discs. Cinavia is an audio watermark that is optional for Blu Ray and DVD discs. No player is required to support it for DVD but all Blu Ray players are now required to support it on Blu Ray discs. It's expensive so it's not used by most studios. Now there is one company (DVD Ranger I think) who claims they cracked it but testing showed that all they did was find a way to replace the audio during ripping with a Cinavia free AC-3 file that they had previous stored on a server somewhere and secretly downloaded it during the ripping process. AnyDVD HD did find a way to put something in rips that causes some PC software players to ignore Cinavia on playback (in theory software players are supposed to detect that the copy or rip has Cinavia and stop playback) but they didn't remove it. To date nobody has found a way to remove it from a disc that has it. All you can do is ignore it or replace it with the audio from another disc (usually DVD) that doesn't have it.
Anyone interested in what the "new Theranos" is should approach it as if it were a brand new company, with little/no track record and in the very early R&D phase. Perhaps with even more caution than that, if only to protect themselves from their historical baggage, and if not then at least to penalize socially irresponsible corporate practices.
Investors are often stupid. You might remember how SCO's stock value was propped up for years by nothing but the hope by ignorant investors that they might actually win their case and hit the jackpot. This happened for quite a long time after it was clear to any IT person or legal person who wasn't involved in the case that SCO wasn't going to win. So it wouldn't surprise me at all if there are people out there who want to dump money in Theranos despite their past history.
Winning an Olympic medal in some places can be life changing. It can make some of them national hero's and set them and their family up for years to come.
This is a really good point. Winning a single gold medal 40 years ago is the unfortunate thing that gave us Caitlyn (formerly Bruce) Jenner and her awful family. Members of 1984 US women's gymnastic team are still famous here in the US, especially Mary Lou Retton. Nadia Comaneci has been the subject of interviews this year on the 40th anniversary of her excellence in Olympic gymnastics. These are but a few examples.
So you're saying that somehow the DNC generated 3.7 million more votes for Clinton than Sanders?
How, exactly?
I have some distant cousins who are huge Sanders supporters, so I can comment on this. Basically the really hardcore supporters are claiming that votes for Sanders were either not counted at all or given to Clinton instead. Depends on who is telling this conspiracy theory which one they go with. And yes, they do truly believe that they had the votes to win every state (or almost every state) and the DNC was conspiring against them to steal the primary for Hillary. And this was all what they were saying before the Wikileaks event.
and fleeing prosecution to "frenemy" nations made you a genius security researcher as well. Maybe there's some kind of cause-effect relationship there that I don't understand. I look forward to Edward Snowden's future cure for cancer because apparently he is some kind of super genius who can achieve anything he wants.
The irony here is they can extradite someone who links to things but not an actual child rapist such as Roman Polanski who is evading US justice in Poland. That's a pretty huge double standard considering the "think of the children" excuse used for internet crackdowns.
You obviously don't understand in reality how the US government works in some cases, so I'm gong to explain it to you. First of all, the US actually did submit papers to Poland requesting that Polanski be extradited. The Polish government rejected them. However, I'm pretty sure that Polanski feared that the Polish government might not always reject such requests, so apparently he's now back in France. French law prevents his extradition.
What you also need to know is that US government will never, ever, admit this but in some cases they don't really and truly care all that much about getting the person extradited. It's more about political grandstanding than anything else. Polanski's victim has long asked for the case to be dropped because she says that she long ago forgave him and she can't get past it because the US government won't stop making an issue of it and the press won't leave her alone about it. Are her wishes being listened to? No they are not. The reason is that because she was so underage at the time (What was it? 13 years old maybe...) that the US government doesn't want to seem to be soft on abusing minors and giving preferential treatment to Polanski when they go after child porn people all the time. The government won't admit it, but I think they were pretty satisfied with Switzerland confining him to his home for 2 months and the ongoing attempts to extradite him do prevent him from ever returning to the USA, which I believe is the true but unstated goal of the US government. His punishment in reality is that he can't come back to the USA again. Bobby Fischer, the former world chess champion, was locked up in Japan for about half a year while they "investigated" his situation. Fischer violated US law with his rematch against Spassky because it was held in Yugoslavia which was under embargo at the time. Fischer was a very mentally disturbed person and his constant complaints against the USA and flaunting the fact that he broke US law with the rematch eventually got the US government interested in proving a point to him, so they got the Japanese to lock him up on nebulous charges. Fischer was eventually released and given Icelandic citizenship, which pretty much assured both that he was punished for his crime with the Japanese lockup and that he wouldn't return to the USA, which I think were the real goals of the US government. Similarly the US government doesn't really want Polanski to come back to the US nor are that really all that keen to lock him up any more than they've already done, but they can't admit that.
That RT has become a major source of news that you can't get on most major news channels.
I'll leave it to the reader to decide what, if any, value RT has by providing the following link. It has "highlights" of their coverage of the situation in Ukraine 2 years ago.
https://www.buzzfeed.com/kathe...
You are choosing to NOT be on Netflix (US/Canada)|Hulu|Amazon|YouTube RED...hmmm yeah Let's see how long that lasts.
Maybe longer than you realize. CBS has never been part of Hulu and I think no part of those other services either. At present they believe that they can make more money by getting people to pay for their own streaming service which they don't have to share with anybody else. We'll see how that works with Star Trek.
But alas, as I'm in the U.S. I will have to wait till it comes out a year later on US Netflix. I will survive..somehow.
I'm not sure how you'll survive in the USA since apparently some dangerous, perhaps gun wielding, person is preventing you from seeing Star Trek for a year. After all you said you have to wait, which implies that you have no choice in matter. Now if you had said that you are choosing to wait because you don't want to pay to subscribe to CBS' online service, that would be one thing, but that's not what you said. You said you have to wait, so perhaps you should see what your legal remedies are against these people who are preventing you from potentially subscribing to the service.