While the precise way the term "polyamory" is used varies from one person to another, it's frequently used as a shorthand for "ethical non-monogamy" or similar. Swinging or bringing in temporary outside partners are very much forms of ethical non-monogamy and involve a person being amorous with more than one person at a time. I'd say the term fits.
You seem to have a fairly narrow view of polyamory, where if it's not full inclusion of everybody with everybody it doesn't count. That's absolutely a type of polyamory, but it's by no means the only one. In fact, I think it's relatively rare; most people that I know in poly relationships (warning: anecdote; warning: sampling bias) are at least open to the idea of either themselves or their partner(s) having a fling, without some or any of the other partner(s), without it being expected to become a long-term thing. Often (though not always) there's an expectation that the partners will meet the newcomer before things go past a certain point, and there are of course rules in place for things like STI safety, but real-world poly relationships are often just like normal pairwise relationships, except you're allowed to be in more than one at a time.
Sometimes they even form chains of considerable length. I have never met my girlfriend's (other) boyfriend's best-friend-and-fuck-buddy's girlfriend... and while it would be fun to do so at some point, it's no big deal to me. I'm not interested in my girlfriend's boyfriend as anything other than a friend, either, and to even call him that is stretching things a bit at this point as we've only met a handful of times.
$50 at current price, $60 list. That's new, in stock. What do we get for that?
Android 4.4 KitKat (not Jellybean; I don't know what the update story is though) 4GB of storage (not 512MB; still a bit low but adequate and good for the price. Expandable via microSD, of which Amazon will sell you 16GB for $6) 512MB of RAM (are you not clear on the difference between RAM and persistent storage? A little low but fairly typical for low-end devices) Dual-core 1GHz CPU (decidedly low for a modern phone, but only because our standards are so high; quite suitable for a cheap device) Dual-SIM with tri-band HSPA+ (up to 42Mbps, sometimes called 4G) Front-facing camera and LED flash for rear camera (features often omitted from the cheapest of phones)
There are lots of people in Africa who can afford an $88 smartphone, but that doesn't make it a cheap smartphone. You can find brand new Android and Windows Phone devices for under $60 right here in the US. The Android devices probably don't have too great of an update story, but that's an OEM problem and one that Google can obviously avoid. It seems like Google could easily make a device that costs less than $80, and when you're targeting the developing world, I feel like it would be a lot easier to sell a smartphone costing nearly $50 than nearly $90!
Function is technically a meta key, but practice it triggers special OS- or even hardware-defined functions (like screen brightness controls) rather than behaving like a traditional meta key that does things like turn the S key into the Save key.
Also, a real keyboard user can always find a use for more meta keys. For example, on Windows, did you know that you can hold Shift with the arrow keys to select text as the cursor moves, Ctrl to move by words (or paragraphs, for vertical) at a time, and Ctrl+Shift together with the arrow keys to select by the word or paragraph? I use this *constantly* - I literally used it once without even realizing what I was doing while writing this very paragraph, when I decided to re-write a sentence - and it drives me nuts when I don't have it.
With that said, I'm with you on Caps Lock. I technically use it more often than Scroll Lock, but unlike Scroll Lock (which very few laptop keyboards have anymore) it's completely replaceable with just a little user effort. But yeah, as Sowelu said, the lack of accelerator keys on Mac keyboards is fucking terrible. You can have my PgUp/PgDn/Home/End keys (and real Insert and Delete for good measure) when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
Oh, and most 15+" non-Apple widescreen laptops have a numpad. Apple doesn't, and never has, even on their 17" laptops... which is just stupid. Without the numpad you just have a bunch of wasted space on either side of the keyboard; they put in speaker grilles there but they are neither necessary nor sufficient to produce sound quality that many non-Apple laptops achieve with much smaller speaker grilles while also making numerical entry really easy.
As you say, touch is very helpful even when not using a "touch-oriented" interface. When my girlfriend and I are watching Netflix on her machine, it's a lot easier to poke the screen where the play/pause button appears than to move the mouse pointer to that button, click it, and then move it off again so the playback controls vanish. When using a trackpad, it can actually be easier to do things like swipe up on a taskbar icon (check it out: this does the same thing as right-clicking on the icon, displaying the jump list; this feature was added in Win7) than to move the pointer down there and right-click it. When reading over somebody's shoulder, scrolling (in, say, a web page or PDF) with a fingertip is a lot easier than grabbing the mouse or keyboard, especially if you're standing.
There are a lot of places where touch is a win, even on devices that you aren't using like a tablet. Of course, that gets even more true with the increasing number of "2-in-1" Windows laptops that can detach or fold away their keyboards, becoming quite respectable tablets; my Yoga 2 Pro, for example, can easily be used on an airplane tray-table with the keyboard folded back 315 degrees and acting as a stand for the screen. Never mind that a Mac's hinge won't go even close to 180 degrees, it would be useless if it could unless you had some peripheral like a mouse (that doesn't fit on the small surface)
Apple's Windows drivers are, and always have been, a total shit-show. Gaping security holes allowing trivial local EoP, lack of power management support so Macs run noisier and have substantially less battery life under Windows than under OS X, lower-performance graphics drivers than the ones from the GPU maker, and (as you say) stability issues.
Apple has made Windows on a Mac a decidedly second-class experience, and that seems to be by design. Even their user-space software shows it; iTunes for Windows (or Safari, when that was a thing, or Quicktime, when anybody cared) has always been a much worse user experience than on Mac OS.
Also, since we're talking about touch pads: clickpads suck, always have, and probably always will. Multi-touch helps (although two-finger click is no substitute for a dedicated hardware button), the pressure required to click is always too high (because if they made it closer to what a button's pressure would be, you'd click by accident, because some moron decided the whole tracking surface needed to be the button...), and gestures alone will never match the kinds of things you can have with gestures (which all PCs have supported for at least five years now) plus hardware buttons.
Historically, the reason that Macs had poor battery life under Windows was because Apple did not provide worthwhile drivers for their (proprietary) hardware, leading to things like fans that ran at full speed constantly, rather than running on demand. It was 100% Apple's fault; Windows has plenty of features for reducing power usage, but the Bootcamp-provided drivers - the only ones that work at all, in most cases, on Apple hardware - didn't support low-power states.
Now, this was on 2007-2009 hardware, which is a long time ago. Maybe Apple has decided that it's worth making their machines run a little better under their competitor's OS now. After all, it's obvious that it's their fault and users are totally savvy enough to blame Apple, instead of blaming Microsoft, when a MacBook has bad battery life in Windows... right?
Yep. I have a Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro (this was before the news about Lenovo shitting all over users with Superfish and whatnot came out, I wouldn't buy one now, but last year it looked like a good choice) that cost $1200. Its specs were equal to or better than the (very few) Macs in its price range, except for battery life, where it's merely adequate.
The "better screen" claim is especially hilarious; the Lenovo has 3200x1800, a higher resolution than any13" (or 15") Mac I'm aware of, and it's a touchscreen to boot (which is actually really handy on that form factor, when you fold the keyboard away and use it for things like watching movies on the plane). I wish it had a better pointing device than the clickpad, but at least you can still get non-Applie laptops with things other than clickpads; not so for Apple.
Calls cost $0.20/min (unless using WiFi calling, another feature that they've had for years but that others are slow to adopt)
However, as Dragonslicer points out, you need to have a compatible device. Skype or Google Voice are possible over the throttled data connection and cheaper than the international calls, though.
Ever since Office 2007, MS Office has been able to open, edit, and save ODF files. (OK, I think 2007 needed a plugin for it, but the plugin was free from MSFT. Or maybe it only needed the plugin for PDF export, I forget). 2010 and 2013 certainly support them, and I expect 2011 and 2014 (Mac versions) do too.
Using ODF for internal documents should allow compatibility just fine.
The sad thing is, Office is quite capable of handling ODF these days (and has been for the last few releases, all the way back to 2007 if you installed a free plug-in from Microsoft). If the people you work with have upgraded their Office installs any time in the last decade, they should be able to handle the ODF family of formats.
I wonder how often the request for a different format was just from some idiot who didn't even try opening the file...
It actually goes a bit beyond this: even since Vista, IE has (by default) run with a *restricted* token that has even less privileges than the normal use. It is Low integrity level, meaning it can't interact with Medium integrity processes or write to most of the file system, registry, or other secured resources.
Unfortunately, as Microsoft is wont to do, they fucked up the sandbox. The default configuration of IE only uses Protected Mode (Low IL) for the Internet and Restricted security zones. Notably, this excludes pages hosted on the local machine. Now, if you've got a code execution bug in IE, you can use that to run a webserver (on localhost). That webserver can host the exploit itself. Then you direct your hijacked, sandboxed IE to the localhost page, watch as the tab's process gets re-launched with normal privileges, and then you compromise that new process. You can protect yourself from this by going to Internet Options -> Security -> Local Intranet -> Enable Protected Mode.
Similarly, the default "Don't notify me when I make changes to Windows settings" feature of UAC in Win7 (and above) is breakable; it's possible to get from medium IL to High IL (Administrator) if you have it enabled and are logged in as a member of the Administrators group. The fix is simple - just set it back to always prompting even for Windows settings (or do what I do, and have it actually ask for your password Sudo-style, though you need to use the Local Security Policy editor, secpol.msc, for that), or run as a non-member of Administrators - but most people never do any of these things.
Microsoft is aware of both issues, and has issued no fixes for them. The POC program to silently elevate an arbitrary binary from Medium IL is blocked by Windows Defender (and probably other antivirus programs) but it would be easy enough to disguise it in such a way that the AV programs miss it.
Oh, please. Cheating is bad, but "one of the cruelest and most inhumane things one person can do to another" is at risk of breaking my hyperboleometer. Discounting things like giving your partner a disease, which is a risk that increases when cheating but is its own separate problem, the heartbreak from cheating is nothing compared to the enduring pain from the death of a loved one, or the trauma of violent rape, or the horror of the battlefield, or even the crippling injuries one can get from a car crash. Cheating is cruelty and betrayal, but at the end of the day it's not likely to ruin your whole life, much less end it.
Besides, humans aren't really wired very well for monogamy. I mean, some people find that their completely natural state, sure, but most of the way we view the topic is due to societal expectation. Throughout history, the powerful have had mistresses or consorts or even kept harems, there have been entire societies that practiced polygamy at all levels, and various forms of consensual non-monogamy have been practiced more-or-less in secret for centuries even in "modern" culture. If you think you can truly be your partner's everything, the only one they'll ever need to provide everything they desire, then (statistically speaking) you're delusional. I'm not saying that justifies lying and cheating any more than the DMCA and eternal copyrights justify pirating music, but it does mean you shouldn't be surprised when it happens, and that you're better off changing the rules and saving everybody - yourself included - the anguish.
Cheating may feel inhumane, but it is very, very human.
I wonder how long it's going to take before polyamory and related "ethical non-monogamy" concepts become as accepted in society as, say, anal hetero sex or lesbian sex (neither of which are universally accepted, but at least they aren't seen as completely bizarre anymore). The ideas aren't new; swinging/wife-swapping (at least in semi-secret) goes back at least a hundred years, there have been multi-partner communes since decades ago, Heinlein wrote of multi-partner families as a social norm in a number of his books... but it's only relatively recently that social norms have come to accept the concept, and it's still viewed askance by many even in those parts of the west coast where it's most common.
This, and the whole "unlimited talk, text, data" (where the data slows down after a certain level but never gets cut entirely), plus free tethering, were T-Mobile's first big pushes in their "Un-carrier" initiative, and I'm glad as hell to see that they've had their effect and brought the rest of the industry around (to some degree or another so far, at least).
However, there's still more tricks up TMo's sleeve that, at least for now, mean I'd be crazy to switch. The big one for me is the free international roaming; I go overseas a couple times a year, and being able to continue using my same number is fantastic. SMS, MMS, and data are free and unlimited (the data is throttled, but it's usable for email, navigation, and even streaming music) to US numbers no matter where they're located. Calls cost $0.20/min (unless using WiFi calling, another feature that they've had for years but that others are slow to adopt) but you can get (visual) voicemail for free, and the data rate is fast enough for Skype too. They just announced that in Canada and Mexico you'll actually get full service - no charge on calls, no throttling on data beyond what your plan normally includes - which is also a strong incentive.
Wait, I'm confused. It sounds like you're trying to say you don't care, but then you say that care at least a little bit anyhow. Why do you care about that?
This post brought to you courtesy of the word "not" (or contraction suffix "n't"): the three-character strings that literally completely reverse what you mean.
I remember seeing some research that, in addition to doing preemptive packet drops like that, also tinkered with the ramp-up (slow start) and fallback algorithms that TCP/IP uses (this required custom TCP/IP code; I forget if it was via raw sockets or modifying the kernel code). The result was an amazing increase in throughput on high-use switches, dropping buffer usage by nearly 10x and potentially saving a bunch on datacenter costs because you could use less expensive network hardware. This was out of MS Research in 2008 or 2009. I don't know if they ever went anywhere with it, though.
How often do you check the entire signing chain of a certificate?
HPKP (HTTP Public Key Pinning) would solve this - and indeed, Google already does key pinning for its own properties in Chrome - but otherwise... it might eventually be noticed, but it would take a long time. That ignores the opportunities for targeted surveillance, too; if most peoples' traffic doesn't get intercepted, that doesn't mean *your* traffic doesn't get intercepted; you just have to check it yourself.
Exactly. Besides, it's not as if RAM I/O is the bottleneck in most scenarios. RAM is slower than cache, but many, many times faster than HDD. HDD can achieve about 200MB/sec (according to the speeds I've seen out of ddrescue, with SATA3 7200RPM 3TB 3.5" disks) in bulk transfer, although it's a good bit slower in random access. RAM is much faster than that and not penalized by random access (no seek times). The CPU can spend the billion or so cycles it has any time there's a non-trivial hard disk access to optimize RAM, pushing little-used data into compression and pulling out data for a process you're switching to, without there being a meaningful performance cost.
Also, random thought: is the pagefile already storing pages compressed? Assuming you aren't using NTFS compression on it, my naïve assumption is that the pagefile stores uncompressed RAM pages. This is obviously inefficient, both in terms of the required pagefile size and in terms of the time it takes to swap the data into and out of the pagefile (remember, HDD I/O is slow; the time used for compressing the data in CPU and RAM is more than paid back for by the time saved in disk I/O). That makes me suspect they were already compressing paged data, but I hadn't ever heard about it.
Bear in mind that, much like disk compression, there's often a time where the CPU is not the bottleneck and therefore has spare cycles to spend on things like compression. Of course, RAM is so much faster than disk access that the bottlenecks from RAM I/O won't be that significant by themselves (and even if they would be, the data to compress comes from and then goes back to RAM, so that bottleneck persists) but any time you have something that isn't CPU-bound, you can free up some working memory by compressing stale pages. CPUs, especially on modern machines that typically have around four cores, are very rarely at 100% utilization in real-world scenarios.
All you've really done is re-create a vastly simpler version of the existing progressive tax system, one with two brackets. I'd tend to throw a third bracket in there for the ultra-rich, maybe one that kicks in after your millionth or even ten millionth dollar of pre-tax annual income, but the idea (to tax all kinds of income at the same rate and keep the system simple, while ensuring people at the bottom make enough to live on) has merit even without that.
Tie that 20K to inflation and maybe tweak the number a bit (20K is pretty much destitute for a household in many parts of the country; rent alone often costs around half of that) but I can see the appeal.
With that said, I think there's a better approach (although it still involves making capital gains, etc. be taxed at the same rate as your other income)... but that's definitely interesting.
No, free market of labour would mean that anyone who could get a job offer in the USA could come in. Not many people would want this!
FTFY, I hope. Punctuation is useful, and misusing (or omitting) it can completely change the meaning of your words.
For the record, there's actually some pretty compelling evidence that this kind of free trade on labor across borders - commonly referred to simply as "open borders" - would have an incredibly beneficial effect on the global economy. The problem is that while it would raise average wealth (globally) by a lot, it would - at least, in the short term - depress American workers' wealth. Since people are selfish and unwilling to give up even a little of what they have - often, admittedly, with reason; many in the US live paycheck-to-paycheck and barely make ends meet - American workers aren't going to vote for this.
It's a form of international oppression, really; we have the wealth to support tons of immigrant workers, but we keep them out (and keep them poor) to avoid impoverishing a relatively small number of American workers. It's counterproductive in the long term, too; as those immigrants created value through their labors and made money to spend on what others are creating, this would stimulate the economy and there would be more jobs and money to go around for everybody. But because economic rises on that level take years or maybe even decades, while American farmers or construction workers could lose their jobs tomorrow and be broke in two weeks, the populace won't stand for it.
Slashdot Mirror
While the precise way the term "polyamory" is used varies from one person to another, it's frequently used as a shorthand for "ethical non-monogamy" or similar. Swinging or bringing in temporary outside partners are very much forms of ethical non-monogamy and involve a person being amorous with more than one person at a time. I'd say the term fits.
You seem to have a fairly narrow view of polyamory, where if it's not full inclusion of everybody with everybody it doesn't count. That's absolutely a type of polyamory, but it's by no means the only one. In fact, I think it's relatively rare; most people that I know in poly relationships (warning: anecdote; warning: sampling bias) are at least open to the idea of either themselves or their partner(s) having a fling, without some or any of the other partner(s), without it being expected to become a long-term thing. Often (though not always) there's an expectation that the partners will meet the newcomer before things go past a certain point, and there are of course rules in place for things like STI safety, but real-world poly relationships are often just like normal pairwise relationships, except you're allowed to be in more than one at a time.
Sometimes they even form chains of considerable length. I have never met my girlfriend's (other) boyfriend's best-friend-and-fuck-buddy's girlfriend... and while it would be fun to do so at some point, it's no big deal to me. I'm not interested in my girlfriend's boyfriend as anything other than a friend, either, and to even call him that is stretching things a bit at this point as we've only met a handful of times.
To take an example straight off the page I linked:
http://smile.amazon.com/BLU-Da...
$50 at current price, $60 list. That's new, in stock. What do we get for that?
Android 4.4 KitKat (not Jellybean; I don't know what the update story is though)
4GB of storage (not 512MB; still a bit low but adequate and good for the price. Expandable via microSD, of which Amazon will sell you 16GB for $6)
512MB of RAM (are you not clear on the difference between RAM and persistent storage? A little low but fairly typical for low-end devices)
Dual-core 1GHz CPU (decidedly low for a modern phone, but only because our standards are so high; quite suitable for a cheap device)
Dual-SIM with tri-band HSPA+ (up to 42Mbps, sometimes called 4G)
Front-facing camera and LED flash for rear camera (features often omitted from the cheapest of phones)
You are full of shit. GTFO, troll.
There are lots of people in Africa who can afford an $88 smartphone, but that doesn't make it a cheap smartphone. You can find brand new Android and Windows Phone devices for under $60 right here in the US. The Android devices probably don't have too great of an update story, but that's an OEM problem and one that Google can obviously avoid. It seems like Google could easily make a device that costs less than $80, and when you're targeting the developing world, I feel like it would be a lot easier to sell a smartphone costing nearly $50 than nearly $90!
Function is technically a meta key, but practice it triggers special OS- or even hardware-defined functions (like screen brightness controls) rather than behaving like a traditional meta key that does things like turn the S key into the Save key.
Also, a real keyboard user can always find a use for more meta keys. For example, on Windows, did you know that you can hold Shift with the arrow keys to select text as the cursor moves, Ctrl to move by words (or paragraphs, for vertical) at a time, and Ctrl+Shift together with the arrow keys to select by the word or paragraph? I use this *constantly* - I literally used it once without even realizing what I was doing while writing this very paragraph, when I decided to re-write a sentence - and it drives me nuts when I don't have it.
With that said, I'm with you on Caps Lock. I technically use it more often than Scroll Lock, but unlike Scroll Lock (which very few laptop keyboards have anymore) it's completely replaceable with just a little user effort. But yeah, as Sowelu said, the lack of accelerator keys on Mac keyboards is fucking terrible. You can have my PgUp/PgDn/Home/End keys (and real Insert and Delete for good measure) when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
Oh, and most 15+" non-Apple widescreen laptops have a numpad. Apple doesn't, and never has, even on their 17" laptops... which is just stupid. Without the numpad you just have a bunch of wasted space on either side of the keyboard; they put in speaker grilles there but they are neither necessary nor sufficient to produce sound quality that many non-Apple laptops achieve with much smaller speaker grilles while also making numerical entry really easy.
As you say, touch is very helpful even when not using a "touch-oriented" interface. When my girlfriend and I are watching Netflix on her machine, it's a lot easier to poke the screen where the play/pause button appears than to move the mouse pointer to that button, click it, and then move it off again so the playback controls vanish. When using a trackpad, it can actually be easier to do things like swipe up on a taskbar icon (check it out: this does the same thing as right-clicking on the icon, displaying the jump list; this feature was added in Win7) than to move the pointer down there and right-click it. When reading over somebody's shoulder, scrolling (in, say, a web page or PDF) with a fingertip is a lot easier than grabbing the mouse or keyboard, especially if you're standing.
There are a lot of places where touch is a win, even on devices that you aren't using like a tablet. Of course, that gets even more true with the increasing number of "2-in-1" Windows laptops that can detach or fold away their keyboards, becoming quite respectable tablets; my Yoga 2 Pro, for example, can easily be used on an airplane tray-table with the keyboard folded back 315 degrees and acting as a stand for the screen. Never mind that a Mac's hinge won't go even close to 180 degrees, it would be useless if it could unless you had some peripheral like a mouse (that doesn't fit on the small surface)
Apple's Windows drivers are, and always have been, a total shit-show. Gaping security holes allowing trivial local EoP, lack of power management support so Macs run noisier and have substantially less battery life under Windows than under OS X, lower-performance graphics drivers than the ones from the GPU maker, and (as you say) stability issues.
Apple has made Windows on a Mac a decidedly second-class experience, and that seems to be by design. Even their user-space software shows it; iTunes for Windows (or Safari, when that was a thing, or Quicktime, when anybody cared) has always been a much worse user experience than on Mac OS.
Also, since we're talking about touch pads: clickpads suck, always have, and probably always will. Multi-touch helps (although two-finger click is no substitute for a dedicated hardware button), the pressure required to click is always too high (because if they made it closer to what a button's pressure would be, you'd click by accident, because some moron decided the whole tracking surface needed to be the button...), and gestures alone will never match the kinds of things you can have with gestures (which all PCs have supported for at least five years now) plus hardware buttons.
Historically, the reason that Macs had poor battery life under Windows was because Apple did not provide worthwhile drivers for their (proprietary) hardware, leading to things like fans that ran at full speed constantly, rather than running on demand. It was 100% Apple's fault; Windows has plenty of features for reducing power usage, but the Bootcamp-provided drivers - the only ones that work at all, in most cases, on Apple hardware - didn't support low-power states.
Now, this was on 2007-2009 hardware, which is a long time ago. Maybe Apple has decided that it's worth making their machines run a little better under their competitor's OS now. After all, it's obvious that it's their fault and users are totally savvy enough to blame Apple, instead of blaming Microsoft, when a MacBook has bad battery life in Windows... right?
Yep. I have a Lenovo Yoga 2 Pro (this was before the news about Lenovo shitting all over users with Superfish and whatnot came out, I wouldn't buy one now, but last year it looked like a good choice) that cost $1200. Its specs were equal to or better than the (very few) Macs in its price range, except for battery life, where it's merely adequate.
The "better screen" claim is especially hilarious; the Lenovo has 3200x1800, a higher resolution than any13" (or 15") Mac I'm aware of, and it's a touchscreen to boot (which is actually really handy on that form factor, when you fold the keyboard away and use it for things like watching movies on the plane). I wish it had a better pointing device than the clickpad, but at least you can still get non-Applie laptops with things other than clickpads; not so for Apple.
"Next"? Did you even read the *SUMMARY*, much less TFA? It's already possible to finance the phone, and the term is two years, not three to five.
Some people...
Whoa, I hadn't heard about that. Not a huge surprise to me, though, I guess; I hardly ever see Sprint users anymore.
Would be interesting to know how the market share has changed. Has Sprint actually lost customers, or has TMo just gained a bunch?
From my post, self-quoting:
However, as Dragonslicer points out, you need to have a compatible device. Skype or Google Voice are possible over the throttled data connection and cheaper than the international calls, though.
Ever since Office 2007, MS Office has been able to open, edit, and save ODF files. (OK, I think 2007 needed a plugin for it, but the plugin was free from MSFT. Or maybe it only needed the plugin for PDF export, I forget). 2010 and 2013 certainly support them, and I expect 2011 and 2014 (Mac versions) do too.
Using ODF for internal documents should allow compatibility just fine.
The sad thing is, Office is quite capable of handling ODF these days (and has been for the last few releases, all the way back to 2007 if you installed a free plug-in from Microsoft). If the people you work with have upgraded their Office installs any time in the last decade, they should be able to handle the ODF family of formats.
I wonder how often the request for a different format was just from some idiot who didn't even try opening the file...
It actually goes a bit beyond this: even since Vista, IE has (by default) run with a *restricted* token that has even less privileges than the normal use. It is Low integrity level, meaning it can't interact with Medium integrity processes or write to most of the file system, registry, or other secured resources.
Unfortunately, as Microsoft is wont to do, they fucked up the sandbox. The default configuration of IE only uses Protected Mode (Low IL) for the Internet and Restricted security zones. Notably, this excludes pages hosted on the local machine. Now, if you've got a code execution bug in IE, you can use that to run a webserver (on localhost). That webserver can host the exploit itself. Then you direct your hijacked, sandboxed IE to the localhost page, watch as the tab's process gets re-launched with normal privileges, and then you compromise that new process. You can protect yourself from this by going to Internet Options -> Security -> Local Intranet -> Enable Protected Mode.
Similarly, the default "Don't notify me when I make changes to Windows settings" feature of UAC in Win7 (and above) is breakable; it's possible to get from medium IL to High IL (Administrator) if you have it enabled and are logged in as a member of the Administrators group. The fix is simple - just set it back to always prompting even for Windows settings (or do what I do, and have it actually ask for your password Sudo-style, though you need to use the Local Security Policy editor, secpol.msc, for that), or run as a non-member of Administrators - but most people never do any of these things.
Microsoft is aware of both issues, and has issued no fixes for them. The POC program to silently elevate an arbitrary binary from Medium IL is blocked by Windows Defender (and probably other antivirus programs) but it would be easy enough to disguise it in such a way that the AV programs miss it.
Oh, please. Cheating is bad, but "one of the cruelest and most inhumane things one person can do to another" is at risk of breaking my hyperboleometer. Discounting things like giving your partner a disease, which is a risk that increases when cheating but is its own separate problem, the heartbreak from cheating is nothing compared to the enduring pain from the death of a loved one, or the trauma of violent rape, or the horror of the battlefield, or even the crippling injuries one can get from a car crash. Cheating is cruelty and betrayal, but at the end of the day it's not likely to ruin your whole life, much less end it.
Besides, humans aren't really wired very well for monogamy. I mean, some people find that their completely natural state, sure, but most of the way we view the topic is due to societal expectation. Throughout history, the powerful have had mistresses or consorts or even kept harems, there have been entire societies that practiced polygamy at all levels, and various forms of consensual non-monogamy have been practiced more-or-less in secret for centuries even in "modern" culture. If you think you can truly be your partner's everything, the only one they'll ever need to provide everything they desire, then (statistically speaking) you're delusional. I'm not saying that justifies lying and cheating any more than the DMCA and eternal copyrights justify pirating music, but it does mean you shouldn't be surprised when it happens, and that you're better off changing the rules and saving everybody - yourself included - the anguish.
Cheating may feel inhumane, but it is very, very human.
I wonder how long it's going to take before polyamory and related "ethical non-monogamy" concepts become as accepted in society as, say, anal hetero sex or lesbian sex (neither of which are universally accepted, but at least they aren't seen as completely bizarre anymore). The ideas aren't new; swinging/wife-swapping (at least in semi-secret) goes back at least a hundred years, there have been multi-partner communes since decades ago, Heinlein wrote of multi-partner families as a social norm in a number of his books... but it's only relatively recently that social norms have come to accept the concept, and it's still viewed askance by many even in those parts of the west coast where it's most common.
This, and the whole "unlimited talk, text, data" (where the data slows down after a certain level but never gets cut entirely), plus free tethering, were T-Mobile's first big pushes in their "Un-carrier" initiative, and I'm glad as hell to see that they've had their effect and brought the rest of the industry around (to some degree or another so far, at least).
However, there's still more tricks up TMo's sleeve that, at least for now, mean I'd be crazy to switch. The big one for me is the free international roaming; I go overseas a couple times a year, and being able to continue using my same number is fantastic. SMS, MMS, and data are free and unlimited (the data is throttled, but it's usable for email, navigation, and even streaming music) to US numbers no matter where they're located. Calls cost $0.20/min (unless using WiFi calling, another feature that they've had for years but that others are slow to adopt) but you can get (visual) voicemail for free, and the data rate is fast enough for Skype too. They just announced that in Canada and Mexico you'll actually get full service - no charge on calls, no throttling on data beyond what your plan normally includes - which is also a strong incentive.
At a guess, so they can say "See, we've ditched contract plans! Come to us and go contract-free!"
If they still have the contract plan, then they can advertise their non-contract plan but they can't say that they've ditched contracts entirely.
Wait, I'm confused. It sounds like you're trying to say you don't care, but then you say that care at least a little bit anyhow. Why do you care about that?
This post brought to you courtesy of the word "not" (or contraction suffix "n't"): the three-character strings that literally completely reverse what you mean.
I remember seeing some research that, in addition to doing preemptive packet drops like that, also tinkered with the ramp-up (slow start) and fallback algorithms that TCP/IP uses (this required custom TCP/IP code; I forget if it was via raw sockets or modifying the kernel code). The result was an amazing increase in throughput on high-use switches, dropping buffer usage by nearly 10x and potentially saving a bunch on datacenter costs because you could use less expensive network hardware. This was out of MS Research in 2008 or 2009. I don't know if they ever went anywhere with it, though.
How often do you check the entire signing chain of a certificate?
HPKP (HTTP Public Key Pinning) would solve this - and indeed, Google already does key pinning for its own properties in Chrome - but otherwise... it might eventually be noticed, but it would take a long time. That ignores the opportunities for targeted surveillance, too; if most peoples' traffic doesn't get intercepted, that doesn't mean *your* traffic doesn't get intercepted; you just have to check it yourself.
Exactly. Besides, it's not as if RAM I/O is the bottleneck in most scenarios. RAM is slower than cache, but many, many times faster than HDD. HDD can achieve about 200MB/sec (according to the speeds I've seen out of ddrescue, with SATA3 7200RPM 3TB 3.5" disks) in bulk transfer, although it's a good bit slower in random access. RAM is much faster than that and not penalized by random access (no seek times). The CPU can spend the billion or so cycles it has any time there's a non-trivial hard disk access to optimize RAM, pushing little-used data into compression and pulling out data for a process you're switching to, without there being a meaningful performance cost.
Also, random thought: is the pagefile already storing pages compressed? Assuming you aren't using NTFS compression on it, my naïve assumption is that the pagefile stores uncompressed RAM pages. This is obviously inefficient, both in terms of the required pagefile size and in terms of the time it takes to swap the data into and out of the pagefile (remember, HDD I/O is slow; the time used for compressing the data in CPU and RAM is more than paid back for by the time saved in disk I/O). That makes me suspect they were already compressing paged data, but I hadn't ever heard about it.
Bear in mind that, much like disk compression, there's often a time where the CPU is not the bottleneck and therefore has spare cycles to spend on things like compression. Of course, RAM is so much faster than disk access that the bottlenecks from RAM I/O won't be that significant by themselves (and even if they would be, the data to compress comes from and then goes back to RAM, so that bottleneck persists) but any time you have something that isn't CPU-bound, you can free up some working memory by compressing stale pages. CPUs, especially on modern machines that typically have around four cores, are very rarely at 100% utilization in real-world scenarios.
All you've really done is re-create a vastly simpler version of the existing progressive tax system, one with two brackets. I'd tend to throw a third bracket in there for the ultra-rich, maybe one that kicks in after your millionth or even ten millionth dollar of pre-tax annual income, but the idea (to tax all kinds of income at the same rate and keep the system simple, while ensuring people at the bottom make enough to live on) has merit even without that.
Tie that 20K to inflation and maybe tweak the number a bit (20K is pretty much destitute for a household in many parts of the country; rent alone often costs around half of that) but I can see the appeal.
With that said, I think there's a better approach (although it still involves making capital gains, etc. be taxed at the same rate as your other income)... but that's definitely interesting.
FTFY, I hope. Punctuation is useful, and misusing (or omitting) it can completely change the meaning of your words.
For the record, there's actually some pretty compelling evidence that this kind of free trade on labor across borders - commonly referred to simply as "open borders" - would have an incredibly beneficial effect on the global economy. The problem is that while it would raise average wealth (globally) by a lot, it would - at least, in the short term - depress American workers' wealth. Since people are selfish and unwilling to give up even a little of what they have - often, admittedly, with reason; many in the US live paycheck-to-paycheck and barely make ends meet - American workers aren't going to vote for this.
It's a form of international oppression, really; we have the wealth to support tons of immigrant workers, but we keep them out (and keep them poor) to avoid impoverishing a relatively small number of American workers. It's counterproductive in the long term, too; as those immigrants created value through their labors and made money to spend on what others are creating, this would stimulate the economy and there would be more jobs and money to go around for everybody. But because economic rises on that level take years or maybe even decades, while American farmers or construction workers could lose their jobs tomorrow and be broke in two weeks, the populace won't stand for it.