It may be worse than that. The security people may be the ones recommending these third-party solutions because it gives them a goat to sacrifice if something goes wrong. "It's not MY fault, the vendor screwed us!" Covering your ass is job priority #1 in our modern world.
From the summary:
Trump could have spent those crucial early weeks mass-producing tests to detect the virus, asking companies to manufacture protective equipment and ventilators, and otherwise steeling the nation for the worst
Ronald Klain is a moron. The reason we had battalions of grandmas sewing masks is because we do not have any of the infrastructure, tooling or workers to produce these things. America has become the Outsourced Nation. In fact, the number one best thing that could be done at the time was to shut down the borders to prevent new infections from incoming from the outside. The Democrats started calling it racist and encouraged people to go out and visit Chinatown. The official line went from "masks are useless" to "masks are mandatory". It's absolutely dishonest to lay the entirety of the blame at the feet of Trump. Every government official, from local to state to federal, fucked this up, and most of them were screwing around with it for political reasons.
These COVID articles are so transparently political it's becoming farcical. You want to avoid the next pandemic in America? Make America nationalistic again. Bring our troops home, bring manufacturing home, boot out illegals and immigrants that are lowering Americans' wages, and engage in trade with other countries like we care about our own people instead of multinational corporations. We can't be prepared unless we support our own people and our own industry.
But that will never happen because morons hear "nationalism" and then shit themselves out of fear of Nazis. It's all so tiresome.
Name 5 people who want to go to war with China over the Uighurs.
Unpatched vulnerabilities? Access to source code? Rogue elements on staff?
I don't believe anything that comes out of Twitter Corporate. They lie to themselves as much as they lie to everybody else. The whole thing is a cesspool and all thinking people should abandon it altogether. You are not your Twitter handle. You are not promoting yourself by being on Twitter, you are promoting Twitter by being on Twitter. Twitter long ago abandoned any pretense of being an open platform. It is nothing but a containment site for morons, narcissists and scolds.
you can always pay for your own email
I do. I pay for and run a couple of email servers for various clients. And ensuring delivery to gmail is about 75% of my time spent on it. Google does what it wants, and everybody else has to fall in line because so many people use it, which is not how email is supposed to work. Google does not get to dictate how email works; Google does not get to dictate how HTTP works.
And you can stop with the "it's a free service" nonsense. Google did not build gmail out of the goodness of their corporate heart. They took over another segment of the open Internet for their own purposes. It's the behavior of a monopolist.
If she was "spewing standard lefty talking points", she wouldn't get anything even remotely like the amount of attention she's getting today. She'd be getting the same amount of attention as every other talking head "spewing standard lefty talking points".
It's like you don't know anything about TV and media.
She's young, pretty, scrappy, and most of all a visible minority, which makes for great TV. And DC is a town that lives and breathes the media. So she fights far outside her weight class. I guarantee that behind the scenes, the DNC would absolutely love to shut her up, or at least put a leash on her. But the DNC is lashed together with the media, so they have to play along.
A talent that allows her to easily eclipse even the most egregious mistakes she makes,
Yeah, you really don't know anything about the media.
We're still talking about Dan Quayle and "potatoe". AOC could crap her pantsuit on TV and it would get 5 minutes of coverage, 3 column inches in the NYT, and anytime somebody brought it up after that they would be called a racist.
Comparing AOC to Trump is pretty accurate, though. With Trump's victory quite a lot of people noticed that you don't have to be the old-school buttoned down politician anymore. Brash and combative are popular now. Personally, I find it refreshing as being lied to by a mountebank politician is more annoying than being lied to by a circus performer. What's funny to me is AOC and Trump are far more alike than different in their politics and backgrounds. I'd rather have a government full of Trumps and AOCs than the passel of lawyers we've got now.
I've gone down the PWA rabbit hole a few times. All in all, I really like the concept, and for simple things they work really well. The problem right now is on iOS the service worker has some limitations that prevent it from being really useful, but it's close.
The service worker concept does skeeve me out a bit. I'm not sure I want some chucklehead's JS doing things in the background that touch on things like notifications and background sync. And the available ways you can shoot yourself in the foot, multiple times, with PWAs is pretty impressive. At a certain point it may be more efficient to learn native app development, or pay a native app developer, and just take the 30% app store hit. Number one is what the GP was talking about, which is lack of network connectivity. If you're not super careful, your app will at best seem broken. At worst, you can open yourself up to fraud. Frameworks help in mitigating this, but it's not simple.
So Appke decided that hsving amazon prine in their devise was worh giving Anazon a bit if a orice reducten, Amazon saved a bit of money, and All currently sopported IOS/iPad os/TV os devices got the prome app, whst js the fuss about, apoart from apples bean counters ir looks like evrybody wins?
-- Sent from my iPhoan
Separate, physical papers are much harder to tamper with on any substantial scale
Dumping mailbags full of votes from particular districts into a furnace is fast, easy, and scales pretty well. Any method you use to verify ballot receipt or ballot counting is computerized, and therefore subject to the same interference problems as a computerized voting machine. Not to mention there is no good way to ensure that your mail-in vote is counted as you intended without having some kind of receipt that can be used for nefarious purposes, like vote-buying or intimidation.
Even with the much smaller--and simpler to deal with--numbers of absentee ballots there's a dozen stories every election cycle about mishandling, miscounting, and other issues. We're now talking about a helluva lot more ballots with nearly no procedures or methods for oversight, and limited time to implement them if they existed.
If everybody wasn't so out of their minds with partisanship, we could do something like expanding election day to election week to give poll stations enough time to limit the numbers of people congregated at once. Even that simple solution is not without problems, but at least it's not trusting that your unsecured mail-in ballot will be counted.
I had a look for it, and I think it was a NOVA episode called "Secrets of Stonehenge". But for what it's worth, I also found another reference to it on Wikipedia:
Radar mapping also reveals that three chalk ridges in the Stonehenge area are aligned by geological accident on the midsummer sunrise/midwinter axis. This natural solstitial alignment would have symbolized cosmic unity to the ancients, a place where Heaven and Earth were unified by some supernatural force. This seems to have set the blueprint for solstitial alignments in Stonehenge and the timber circles at Durrington Walls and Woodhenge as well
Most of what we know about that period is rampant guesswork and handwaving. Doesn't make it any less interesting. But I'm going to go to my grave believing that neolithic peoples traveled from all over the island to have a sick rave because that's pretty awesome.
Claims about mail-in-ballot fraud are simply not justified. Ballot fraud is rare, and there's not even a clear cut mechanism how one would be able to do it on a large scale.
This is just dumb. If it was suggested that we mailed out computerized voting machines to every registered voter, Slashdot would lose its goddamn mind.
If you can't see that mailing massive numbers of ballots out and expecting interference-free election returns, no matter your gimcrack verification methods, you're either deluding yourself or are too stupid to see the problems. Elections that have even the faintest whiff of jiggery-pokery erode what little faith we have in the democratic process. I mean, hell, people are still beefing about the 2000 Bush/Gore clusterfuck.
But so long as every Democrat politician is 100% on board with mail-in ballots, the Republicans should get with the program. The quickest way to turn a Democrat into a fierce opponent of mail-in ballots is to have a news story about some postal worker in a MAGA hat dumping a mailbag into a dumpster. Fake a photograph if you have to. Democrats are still opposed to Voter ID laws because they think they're a tool for voter suppression.
I swear to God, I think this election will be the first ever in American history where everybody will call "do-over!" and we'll actually have to make a procedure for it.
I've found that there has never been a cogent or coherent thought expressed when it contains childish partisan neologisms like "Ratbublicans", "Demonrats", "Rethuglicans" or "Democraps".
It's a great time-saver.
I saw some public TV program on Stonehenge that suggested the site had a naturally occurring geographical feature that happened to line up with the solstices. The people noticed that, and built the rest around it. They also traced the origin of various animals (from their teeth) found in midden piles from the time Stonehenge was built, and it indicated that the animals lived in areas all over the UK, and as far North as Scotland. The suggestion was that folks came from all over to build it.
So, basically, neolithic people invented Glastonbury. It explains a lot.
But what you should care about is that this would be a massive expansion of federal power into the traditional liberties of the private sector
Remember how Slashdot was all in on "Net Neutrality" just a short time ago? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
Remember when Democrats were agitated about corporate control of the media? Pepperidge Farm remembers.
I don't know about everybody else, but I am really disturbed at how much of the open Internet in the US is under control of a few big corporations. At this point, Google has the power to force a new email standard completely outside of the RFC process. They've already done so, when they forced mail servers to have IPv6 PTR records. Whether that particular thing is good or bad, it demonstrates a massive power imbalance not previously seen. Twitter has repeatedly engaged in disproportionate punishments skewed in favor of the Left, which would be considered electioneering by the same Left if it went the other way.
The Section 230 protections were not handed down to Moses from God. Corporations are creatures of the law, not the other way around. If corporations are enjoying a monopoly, the law may be used to break up that monopoly. In the case of the Internet, it's nearly a requirement if we want to have an open Internet in this country.
Yes, this! People to be called out--not silenced. Because if they're simply silenced, no one learns from their mistakes.
"Calling people out" can lead to "getting people fired," and it seems to happen with disturbing regularity. That helps neither the person nor the argument.
Most people should probably just mind their own business. If somebody's grandma says something you don't like, it's not a requirement to jump in and correct them. You don't get extra Internet points for doing so, and social media Likes are not viable currency in any gas station I've ever been in.
The promise of the Internet in the early to mid-90s was that this technology would lead everybody to become philosopher-kings and elevate humanity. Instead we turned everybody into humorless snitches and scolds. Instead of elevating humanity, we degenerated into witch burners chasing down ever more fanciful hobgoblins.
E = MC ** 2 +- 3db
