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Republicans

Republicans Block Latest Attempt At Curbing NSA Power 445

Robotron23 writes: The latest attempt at NSA reform has been prevented from passage in the Senate by a margin of 58 to 42. Introduced as a means to stop the NSA collecting bulk phone and e-mail records on a daily basis, the USA Freedom Act has been considered a practical route to curtailment of perceived overreach by security services, 18 months since Edward Snowden went public. Opponents to the bill said it was needless, as Wall Street Journal raised the possibility of terrorists such as ISIS running amok on U.S. soil. Supporting the bill meanwhile were the technology giants Google and Microsoft. Prior to this vote, the bill had already been stripped of privacy protections in aid of gaining White House support. A provision to extend the controversial USA Patriot Act to 2017 was also appended by the House of Representatives.

Comment Not an issue if corporations do their job (Score 1) 257

You can't have anything you dislike removed. However if you're a lazy corporation or a corporation that relies on spying on people then it's in your interest to undermine the law and remove anything requested so the law looks stupid and you can avoid it all together. It doesn't take a genius to see what's happening.

Comment Currentc is awful (Score 1) 631

It only benefits the retailers. They have silly requires like SS number and driving licence which I assume is for tracking you but I certainly don't trust that info who companies that have been in the news for questionable security. Plus by excluding credit cards consumers lose the protections they get from credit cards should their phone get lost and on top of being a clunky system of scanning bar codes what stops anyone from using it if they can guess my pass code? Android phones especially are easy to unlock if they're using the finger dragging symbol drawing. Not that iPhones are much harder given its only 4 numbers in most cases.

Comment Re: I don't really see the point. (Score 1) 130

Most people don't need to do that and unless you're doing serious 3d modelling GIS data processing / interpretation or gaming most desktop apps do not need a core i7 and 16gb of memory. I have an old thinkpad (one of the last IBM labelled ones) and with an SSD and ubuntu is does everything I want except gaming (though it will play TF2 but gets hot at fuck) and it doesn't need all the memory or CPU to do the job. So while that's good that you can do that but for like 99% of people it's unnecessary.

That said you can do 3d modelling, video conversion and 3d gaming on an iPad so of course the hardware will be used to do those things though But most people don't want to do those things on a desktop let alone on an iPad and it doesn't change the fact there are a lot of tasks people want to do and can do on the iPad. Some of them it does better and some things desktops do better. Different tools for different jobs.

Comment Re: I don't really see the point. (Score 1) 130

The hardware the original ipad had in it would be more of a problem than the software but unless you're obsessive about apps it still works as a device for reading books, surfing the net, watching videos, etc. I suspect the main reason the 1st iPad has a shorter support lifespan was because the hardware was a bit poor but even with that in mind and even if you are totally into apps the idea of having the buy every version of the iPad is entirely unnecessary. It received OS updates for just over 2 years and would have had app support at least until the 2013 which means you could have went from the 1st iPad to a 4th gen one (released end of 2012) and been fully supported which the exception of course where apps would require more power or memory.

Comment Re: I don't really see the point. (Score 3, Insightful) 130

For most people it is just a toy but that doesn't mean those who do more should go without. Everything you said applies to the vast majority of desktops too. You don't need to upgrade. My iPad air didn't magically turn to shit. It'll be a viable device for years to come.

Comment Re:Still try to do proprietary email? (Score 1) 173

A lot of them are but they've always been that way. I think the bigger problem is simply accessibility to newsgroups. You have to know about them and possibly buy into a service. A lot of ISPs don't bother with servers or if they do you wouldn't know it unless you went hunting through their help pages. I'm not sure why ISPs care. I would have thought the bandwidth would be better (if they exclude pirating groups) so part of me would not be surprised if the likes of Google and other companies who make a living off tracking people and selling ads are encouraging ISPs to drop newsgroups. It is a far superior way to communicate I think simply because it's like email and the data is removed from the view (as it should be). No need to worry about a website being viewable in mobile browsers and desktops. Let the application deal with that. Its downside, if you want to call it that, is a company can't own it and monetise it. Even ISPs can't honestly find a way to add a further expense on top of it. Even if they did there would be so many other choices in providers.

Comment Re: Why? (Score 1) 109

You're only allowed to speak out because they allow it. Huge chunks of the population technically don't have constitutional rights thanks to the constitution free zone around the border. Technically no one in Florida is covered by the constitution. The U.S. government just does a better job at making people think they're free.

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