Amazon's appstore runs with the same level of privilege as F-Droid. If you allow it to, it will check for updates to your apps (just like F-Droid), but it can't install apps without your permission. Google's core apps all run as root and have complete access to your data.
Amazon's a sleazy dataminer, too, but their appstore on Android is nothing like Google Play in its ability to be creepy and invasive.
And there is a standard instrument for someone or organisation writing an opinion on a political issue, and then seeking a mass of others to endorse it. It's called a petition.
Standardized by who, exactly? It's clear from the identical letters what is a form letter and what is an individually crafted letter. There's nothing fraudulent about form letters, even if they are lazy and tasteless.
Why do you think you should be the one who gets to decide how the rest of us communicate with our government?
Black powder sucks, which is why it's as commonly used today as muskets and other obsoleted technology. It's not like it's a drop-in replacement for nitrocellulose; very few currently used cartridges could accommodate an adequate load of black powder. Besides that, it's corrosive and dirty. Bleh.
Smokeless gunpowder isn't a mixture of powders, though. It's (mostly) nitrocellulose. To make a consistent product, you'll need a consistent stock of cellulose (paper, cotton, etc), a consistent stock of nitric and sulfuric acid, and a consistent process of carrying out the reaction and cutting/flaking the product. It's not a difficult process, but it's more involved than making black powder (which is not worth going back to) and consistency is key.
Making primers, which are primary explosives by necessity, is not something that a sane amateur would do in his garage. I'm a chemist and even I don't want to fuck with making primers.
Yeah, the rule is generally that the speed of any given car moving on a road will be inversely related to the speed that the car is capable of achieving. The exceptions appear to be the WRX and the Prius.
If you're pulling up to a stop light and want to know which lane will move faster once the light turns green, pick the lane with the rusty old minivans and econoboxes over the one with the sportscars.
The faster people realize this the better this world will become.
How I stopped worrying and learned to love the creeps.
Also, OEM/carrier crapware was far more likely to do funky stuff in the background without the user's knowledge/approval than GMS.
I don't have much experience with OEM/carrier crapware, but it must be pretty extreme if people are running to Google to get away from funky stuff happening in the background. GMS is in constant communication with Google and runs with root access and the ability to do/read/install anything without the user's knowledge/approval.
Most people may install CM/AOSP to subsequently install gapps, but I went that way to get Google's creepy feelers out of my phone.
...and the grid network has gone to hell.
I'm glad that it's not just me who thinks so. I'm installing a PV setup at home just to have reliable electric service.
It's that we trust 400 of them by default in the first place, and any one of them should be easy enough to subvert by a sufficiently powerful nation-state.
Some of them are directly run by nation-states.
A decent stepping stone would be to allow multiple CA signatures on a certificate. Then, a user can decide how much they trust a certificate based on which CAs trust that certificate. As an added bonus, and verified through DANE or the like, it would be necessary to compromise multiple CAs in order to present a forged certificate. This moves us toward the big web of trust that you propose.
Once this is set up, we can start pruning the massive implicitly trusted root CA list and bring a little sanity to who we need to "trust". If you haven't done so, take a look a the lists sometime. Your computer/browser completely trust any certificate signed by any one of those foreign governments or unrecognizable organizations. How secure is that?
New incandescents and halogen bulbs have markedly short lifespans, too. Most of the old incandescents in my house that are many years (to decades) old are stamped "USA". The older ones that fail are stamped "Mexico" and the newest ones made in China rarely last more than a few months. This generally tracks the age of the bulbs as manufacturing was moved and costs were cut.
If you go to the hardware store, you'll see new halogen bulbs bragging about how they'll "Last 1 Year!!". Sometimes they do, while the ten year old bulbs next to them keep going. I'm hoping that the LED bulbs that I'm replacing them with last longer.
All of the networking functions are performed by native tools, but I'm not sure of the details. As a fingers-crossed-with-rescue-media-ready experiment, OS X seems to run normally with all of the shells removed (except the terminal and my own scripts, of course).
"Gimme gimme gimme. Mine mine mine!!!" -populous
To be fair, they learned it from watching the ruling class who have already taken most of the pie and left the scraps for the hoi polloi to fight over.
I just wished they would make it impossible to use terminals at all anymore so we would never be bothered by such garbage again. I guess Gnome is not as awesome as they thought they were since it is still (technically) possible to fire up a terminal and start, EGAD!, typing. What an archaic concept.
Don't worry. In Gnome 3.swipeup.swipeleft, the terminal will be replaced by a multitouch paint program where you enter all of your commands from an arcane collection of gestures! Four-finger-left, three-finger-pinch, tap for the win!
So you think that money is the root of all evil. Have you ever asked what is the root of money? -- Ayn Rand
