Which is a pretty accurate description of a startup company. So the GST system penalizes companies that are trying to get off the ground. In spite of al the loopholes and other funy business in the US tax code, this is one of its benefits. Low/no taxes on new businesss give them a chance to get started and eventually become tax revenue sources.

Actually, you've got that backwards. Businesses pay sales taxes on materials consumed within the business. But not on materials used in the final product. So that's the accounting nightmare. Taxing everything would make accounting much simpler.

Sell your greatest weakness like it's your greatest strength. I'm not in marketing, but I see this all time.

We are the enemy. Telling us anything would be providing information to the enemy.

I've been a user since Dapper Drake. Later, gator.

Before people inside Microsoft said that, other people inside Microsoft said the opposite. But good luck finding that reference now, because of all the people crowing triumphantly about the particular reference that you cited.

And nuclear war winnable?

This guy is a moron. GPS (and other technologies) make precision guided munitions possible. Which means smaller and fewer warheads are needed to take out a target. So, they reduce collateral damage and the need to escalate to strategies like carpet bombing. Or nuke the entire region to take out a few select targets.

Which hilariously hasn't really panned out for them. I use Chrome and Firefox side by side on Windows and Linux (Pale Moon x64 on Windows, actually) and the only websites which are more reliable in Chrome are gmail and G+, and the latter of those still isn't very good. In spite of running G+ in Google's browser, their interface still takes longer than eternity to load and it still jumps around like crazy. And now that Chrome is approaching Firefox levels of functionality, guess what? It's just as heavy as Firefox, maybe even more bloated.

That's easy enough to build in $CMS_OF_YOUR_CHOICE, you can literally get it by installing Drupal and some modules and enabling them. (start with views, date, and calendar.) You're going to need some online storage someplace for your files anyway, getting it with web hosting doesn't really cost more.

To be fair, Metro isn't actually gone. It's still a big part of Windows 10. You can even still enable the AOL start screen if for some reason you want to do that. So it's going to continue to rear its freakish head periodically for the next while.

... the 1980's were a blur. Now, they'll be a pixelated blur.

I considered that, and have cut/am cutting off other forms of voluntarily information/thought exposure. But with /. there's no point. This has been my homepage for 15 years. I can't imagine how many reams of e-paper I've written on here in that time. I am absolutely easily doxxable, and anybody who's mining this site already knows everything I think. And you can't delete your accounts and posts. I'm already naked here, so there's no point being modest now.

Exactly. There's nothing wrong with technology or tools. It's how they're used that makes all the difference.

Which is why I'm feeling kind of hopeless about the ubiquitous surveillance thing. Yes, encryption is great. It is definitely better than no encryption. But you still can't trust it.

Are the algorithms secure? NSA already intentionally weakened one. And they employ more mathematicians than anyone else in the world. They could have cracked AES and SHA-2/3/whatever years ago and how would you know?

Can't trust your software. Even FOSS. See the Underhanded C Contest. And I'm calling it now that systemd is a plot to infiltrate and subvert the Linux ecosystem by the US military via the Red Hat corporation. I know, I know, tinfoil hat, but 8 years from now it'll be "duh, everybody knew that!"

Can't trust your hardware. Corrupted harddrive firmware. The binary blobs that are the heart of your cellphone radio. Intel's locked-down bootloaders.

And that's just the shit that's obvious or that we know about. If you have a near limitless budget, insanely smart people, government authority to do whatever you want, and no conscience, well, sky's the limit. If it were my job (and I were evil) that's absolutely what I'd do. Hell, just have an agent apply for a job at Apple, Google, Microsoft, Cisco, etc etc and sneak in whatever vulnerabilities you want.

You can never lock everything down. There's too many attack vectors, and the adversary is very good at what they do.

And you can't "secure" the services that make everything work together, anyway. Your phone company kind of needs to know where your phone is to route calls to it, and they need to know what calls you make to whom in order to bill you for it. And someone HAS to have the root password to that database for it to work.

No, the only way to stop this is a political system that makes such attacks against the citizenry illegal, an oversight process, and severe penalties for those who violate your rights.

For instance, in my job, I have full, back end access to the hospital database. I can see all your medical records, all your billing records. I have to in order to do my job (data warehousing and analysis). OH NO YOUR MEDICAL RECORDS AREN'T SECURE! Umm, yes they are. What I do on the database is logged, there is a internal review board and a privacy office who reviews all internal requests for data, no non-aggregated data leaves the organization, and there are severe penalties for misuse of your records. HIPAA. If I mistakenly misuse your records, I'm fired. If I maliciously misuse your records, I go to felony prison. And that's actually enforced.

No technological solution can keep your devices and communications secure. It has to be a political system, and the political will is not there to establish such a system. Half of Americans WANT the government tracking everything they do. There's no real pressure for lawmakers to act, and whenever they do they put in so much weasel language it makes no difference. "The government is forbidden from doing awful things A, B, and C. Unless it has a good reason to."

Is what it is.

International treaty that, if every actually finished, will get ignored by war mongering countries/states.

Presumably, you'll either use a gamepad or you'll connect a keyboard and mouse, like you can with Surface or Android or perhaps iOS for all I know, although I'd guess not and I'm too lazy to look it up.