That "rebuild cities further inland" 'solution' sounds like a programmer that once worked for us that said in response to a question about how supportable a technique of his was, "all systems should be rewritten every 5 years anyway". Immaturity is no excuse for irresponsibility.

Targeting ads is not selling data. I'll grant you that targeting political ads is its own form of evil, but that's not what Cambridge Analytica was about. Facebook gave them the actual targeting data (i.e., the lists of actual users and their preferences), supposedly for academic research. And then CA used that data to micro target ads to specific users.

In any case, after 2016, Google stopped allowing targeted political ads (either x months before an election, or with some other caveats - but at least they did something). Facebook did not.

And that's beyond the whole issue that a typical Facebook 'news feed' is 80% paid content disguised to look like news items - often tagged with the name of a friend who supposedly 'recommended' it. I think the actual verbiage is something like [YOUR FRIEND'S NAME] likes [THIS ADVERTISER]. i.e., they didn't recommend the item you're seeing, but you're free to assume they did, and that's the whole point... This whole phony news feed thing is what was exploited to allow ads that, for example, said "hey, targeted fellow black guy in Detroit, this black lives matter group thinks we should all sit out the election as a protest".

This is nothing like the 'extensive use' the Obama campaign made of the social network in 2008 and 2012. It's fraud. Aided and abetted by Mr Zuckerberg, thank you very much.

The converse is "I don't want Google facilitating the targeting of dishonest political ads to specific subsets of the population". At some point we need some new rules governing political speech. The old "I'm candidate X, and I approve this message" rule has become irrelevant. I think Google restricted targeted political advertising on YouTube during the last election, but I'm not sure, and who knows whether it was effective.

Political speech used to be limited by cost - hence the crazy "money is speech" argument. But spam is practically free - beyond whoever charges for the mailing list. Don't know what the balance is, but there are competing forces at play - not all of which are bad. Functional democracy requires an informed and engaged public. Some kind of cheap way of messaging could potentially blunt the distorting effects of money on politics, but inundation with spam isn't in anybody's interest...

Right you are. Whether that translates into a monopoly over similar implementations is a whole other question, though.

Don't get me wrong - the original iPhone was a unique (at the time) packaging of a specific set of features that nobody had combined before. it was nicely executed. That doesn't mean they own exclusive rights to package those features together indefinitely. Besides, the main selling point of the first generation iPhone was that it supported iTunes - which was the direction feature phones were evolving in at the time.

And galleries, museums and art experts are largely market manipulators - focused at least partly (I'd say largely) on choosing and building valuable (i.e. recognizable) brands.

My question is why do they even care. Is booting from an SSD somehow more secure - or more subject to Microsoft's control? The speed difference in booting can't be that important to them, can it?

I 'graduated' from a 5.something incher with big bezels to a 6.something incher with minimal bezels. The extra size felt excessive at first - and not worth the extra weight, plus having a device that barely fits in my pocket. I'm used to it now, but I'd prefer to have a device the size of my old 5-incher but without the bezels. Is that so hard to imagine? I do appreciate the all-day battery life of my big phone, but I don't really care so much about having a 'flagship-level' processor. The processor in my Oneplus 7t is several years out of date, and performs fine. A new device with comparable performance - and presumably lighter battery consumption - would be perfect. Just the thing to deal with the reduced space for a big battery in a smaller phone.

So...
1. Size - 5 1/2 inch screen, minimal bezels.
2. Processor - reasonable performance, good battery life - as opposed to an expensive flagship chip.
3. Good enough camera for taking occasional pictures. Don't need a pro job.
4. Decent speakers - the only luxury I demand. I'm too lazy to deal with headphones for casual listening.
5. Price - cheap to midrange $350-$400 tops.
6. Great update policy - no excuse for planned obsolescence.

All eminently doable - if we could just prove there's a market for such a thing.

They raised rates a tiny amount, and when the stock market noticed and had a single down week, they promised to stop - and the market went back to its "there's no place else to invest" bull phase.

The fact that the market was 'doing well' while prices on a specific set of commodities seemed stable is not an indication of no inflation. Housing costs, in particular continued to rise the whole time. So did health care costs. And a market that rises just because there's nowhere else to invest is hardly a sign of a healthy economy. But hey,... Dow 36000!!! it's the 80's all over again.

Microsoft may want to extinguish desktop Linux, but their biggest growth area is in cloud computing - where they've pretty much conceded Linux is the way to go. If only to lure AWS linux deployments over to their platform. WSL is, paradoxically, an attempt to prevent developers from using desktop Linux for their work by including a server-only linux distro in the Windows desktop. Nobody but a developer would ever use it - and that crowd could easily (and probably did) dual-boot into Linux to do their work without WSL. So this thing is hardly an act of Microsoft love for linux on the desktop.

And how do you propose people go about determining truth, if their main research tool is a Google search that turns up unreliable sources as readily as reliable ones. Just how much effort do you expect people to put into verifying a stupid tweet. But such stupidities metastasize until you have a significant portion of society believing that there are baby eaters among us. If that's not proof of the public's inability to police truth for themselves, then I don't know what is.

We used to have a limited selection of journalistic sources. For the most part they relied on one of 2 business models.

1.. A reputation for honest journalism (however biased - at least not reporting, or correcting if reported, outright falsehoods. That reputation allowed them to make money by either selling newspapers or advertisements to advertisers that cared about where their ads were placed.

2. Information as entertainment. The National Inquirer, etc. Junk journalism and gossip that didn't pretend to be anything else.

These outlets had limited space, which alone was enough to keep the idiocy to a minimum. And the advertisers that funded them had a limited enough set of choices that their ad-buying could be a moderating factor by itself. Compare all of that to what social media has wrought - content costs nothing, distribution costs nothing, conventions about clearly demarking journalistic content from paid content have been utterly jettisoned. And finally, ads are largely placed algorithmically, so that advertisers have almost no way to exert any kind of moderating influence. Perfect shit storm of disinformation and propaganda. And you propose people without enough common sense to ignore pizza-gate conspiracies police all of this for themselves? Quite the optimist...

I care less about who is doing the speaking than whether whatever 'facts' they claim to be reporting are actually true. Let 'em all say whatever they want, as long as there's some fact-checking mechanism in place - at least for posts that get viewed by a huge following. Preferrably there'd be competing fact-checkers who cold all rate whatever posts they feel are worth rating - paid for by links to their sites to explain their rationales, while generating valuable traffic to support the checkers.

And yes, Twitter needs to vet a set of reliable fact-checkers from a universe of top-tier journalistic orgs - so that it doesn't just become another outlet for out-and-out propagandists...

The only money in linux is servers and (indirectly) Android and Chromebook devices. The desktop - even if successful (I use it) isn't a moneymaker. Does Canonical even break even on the few Dell laptops that come with an official Canonical-supported OS? I doubt it.

That's all fine, except that cloud deployment seems to be where all the server money is going. That could be a good think if IBM (or Canonical) could somehow attract enough capital and mindshare to become big players in that arena. Probably too late by a decade, but maybe worth a try...

I think at this point, Russia is going to have to pull out of Crimea too.

When Russia started blustering about NATO (was it only?) a few months ago, I though it would be a really good compromise to call their bluff and commit to a NATO-free Ukraine as long as Russia gave back Crimea. Was that a stupid utopian fantasy, or just stupid enough to have been a real solution?

Trump is dumb as a post. Tucker, on the other hand, is pure evil. He probably knows what he's doing - though maybe it's no more than trolling for ratings.