Comment Re:Find my device is new? (Score 2) 277
My mum lost her phone a couple of weeks ago.
I didn't realize flowers had phones.
Hate to break this to you, but people didn't call you a pansy because of your mother.
My mum lost her phone a couple of weeks ago.
I didn't realize flowers had phones.
Hate to break this to you, but people didn't call you a pansy because of your mother.
Nor does it deserve the title Everyone's favorite init tool
Personally, I read that as sarcasm. I still presume it was intended that way.
Agreed. It's like Microsoft's famous 'Where do you want to go today?'
I always read that as the first part of a conversation with your evil jailer: "Where do you want to go today? 'Cos this trains going to Hell, with stops in Dis and the Lake of Fire. If you upgrade to First Class, we'll take the pitchfork out of your ass.... and put it somewhere else."
Then Microsoft dropped the slogan. And I kicked ketamine.
But NOT macOS.
Tee Hee.
They're still arguing over which shade of black their hats should be.
> Pie in the sky, I know. But still, as an exercise in theoretical modeling, it's fascinating.
except that all firewalls have been compromised. therefore, pie in the sky.
As Homer Simpson famously said, all good jokes have multiple layers. Just like information security schemas.
Is it 1998?
A useful metaphor in which to consider the problem might be a principle that's used to establish construction standards so that fires don't spread too widely or rapidly in very large buildings and other structures. What they do is they integrate fire-proof barriers at critical points, which block air transfer and heat exchange, and therefore limit the damage that a fire can do.
Stay with me here; this might get a bit arcane....
Imagine if we could apple a similar concept to computing and networks. Imagine if, instead of air and heat exchange, we limited the transfer of data between segmented portions of a network. This 'firewall'—to coin a phrase—would provide us with the ability to operate with relative security, and we could therefore rest assured that the designated secure parts of the network remain secure, while still allowing access to less secure areas via some sort of notional 'gateway'.
Pie in the sky, I know. But still, as an exercise in theoretical modeling, it's fascinating.
Executive Orders are not binding from administration to administration.
That's not the same thing as not having force of law.
Yes, the EO can be unilaterally undone at the stroke of a pen. But the Paris Accords require a lot longer.
You see, you can undo the Executive Order, but if the President signed a contract, for example, the next President along can't pretend the contract doesn't exist. Even if he undoes the Executive Order committing the government to enter the contract, the contract itself remains. He still has to exit according to the terms of the contract itself. Barack Obama had the authority to commit the USA to the Paris Accords. Donald Trump has every right to say 'Nuh', but that's not the same as calling backsies. He still has to follow the formal process for withdrawal.
In this particular case, it's a bit moot, because all the meaningful bits are voluntary (which calls into question why one would bother to withdraw at all), but in other respects, this is a pretty important distinction. Executive Orders—or more to the point, their effects—don't just vanish in a puff of smoke when the next President changes his mind. Hence the force of law distinction.
You're literally just repeating exactly what he said in different language. Since the Paris accord never passed through the Congress or Senate, it was an agreement made by the president alone under his existing authority and lacks any of the force of law.
I would agree with you wholeheartedly—except I won't. Because what you're saying is factually incorrect:
Executive orders have the full force of law, based on the authority derived from statute or the Constitution itself.
So unless you have a valid constitutional, jurisdictional or legislative argument to make, you'll have to content yourself with being dead wrong. If the agreement is signed by the President under his authority and pursuant to his existing powers, it has the force of law.
Can Donald Trump reverse it? Yes, but he can't pretend it was never signed. The process for exiting the agreement can only be completed in 2020.
How can you call her a whistle blower? The value of the information to the American public was small or non-existent and it tipped off the Russian that we were on to them.
Without completely disagreeing with the first clause, I feel compelled to note that the Russians have been aware the US is on to them for some time. There's nothing in the publicly released parts of the analysis that they didn't know.
And the question of whether whistle-blowers can blow the same whistle twice is sufficiently abstruse that I feel it's safe to say that in the grander scheme of things, I don't give a flying fuck. She acted in the public interest and provided us with material that reinforced an admittedly already strong case that Russia was engaged in a concerted attempt to infiltrate American electoral systems.
She was also a whack job. These statements are not contradictory in any way.
In these tweets he admitted to actions that were at the least stupid, and possibly criminal, but were also incredibly disloyal to subordinates that went out on a limb to lie to the American people in an attempt to defend him.
Since when is the top man of ANY hierarchical organization required to behave in accordance with his subordinates' supposed wishes?? Trump is the President of the United States. He is the chief executive of everyone in this country.
You're missing the point. His staff were lying to cover his ass, because to say that he pressured the director of the FBI to lay off a case, and then fired him when he wouldn't—for any reason whatsoever—puts him at risk of being prosecuted for obstruction of justice. Then Donald Trump undid all of their efforts by saying that he did exactly that.
And you may say Donald Trump is the top man in the hierarchy—even if pretty much every student of government ever would argue about checks and balances and how tripartate government (legislative, executive and judicial) are coequal, and for damn good reason—but if we grant that he is the Chief Executive in the business sense of the word, he is still not above the law. No one is.
Obstruction of justice is a serious offense no matter who does it. The gravity of the crime gets worse, not better, as you rise in the hierarchy. His staff were culpable for lying in his defence. He is wide open to prosecution for his statements.
And a legal nit for those who want to rebut this with the argument that he has the authority to give instructions to anyone in government, any time. Yes, he has the legal right to do so, but that doesn't mean that obstruction of justice didn't occur. Motive, the question of who benefits, and whether he was successful or not in actually obstructing the course of justice are all immaterial to a court of law to the determination of whether someone is guilty of obstruction or not. If you tried to gum up the works to keep a case from moving forward, you're guilty. Even if you used legal means to do so.
So you would do what? Bomb Russia?
Oh, I don't know. How about not roll back the sanctions you placed on them for doing exactly this?
How about getting the President to listen to his own National Security Advisor, and Secretaries of State and Defence, and vocally support Article 5 of the NATO treaty?
How about the administration not try to hide communications with them from their own government?
How about quit fucking lying about having no contact with them? If they're no threat, and if it's no big deal, then why lie? That's a real question—why so much deception? It makes no sense.
How about quit treating the whole situation as utterly innocuous, and without indulging in dated anti-Soviet rhetoric or blowing it off as it's perfectly normal, come to grips with the fact that Russia is a strategic competitor, and is opposed to many American interests?
How about admitting that the Putin administration has a stake in deligitimising democratic norms and processes, because doing so helps him maintain a increasingly tight grip on the Russian population, and maybe, you know, not fucking help with that?
Those people have suddenly become immensely skilled hackers?
Dude, the Soviets have been weaponising software for practically ever.
Some questions:
Yes it does, because it diminishes the ability of nations to coordinate their actions. It leaves US-based corporations (a large constituency among polluters) free to continue flouting established science and driving their aging, archaic business models along, dragging the American economy with it. This is bad for voters.
No. China and the EU see a strategic opportunity here to use technological advances to do the the USA in the 21st Century what the USA did to Britain in the 19th Century—use newer industrial technology to out-compete the established corporate interests.
There is a global cost to this, but China especially is willing to suffer in order to win. Its more interventionist economic policies have already given it a strategic advantage in terms of alternative energy tech (especially solar), and if it has to accept a 1-2% mid-term drop in GDP in order to sideline the USA, it will happily pay that price.
Fuck your straw man.
Just because you can't see the wisdom of a largely voluntary commitment process, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist. The Obama administration managed a near-miracle in the way this was structured, so that the bulk of the commitments came into the non-binding schedule 2 portion of the agreement. This meant that countries would not be straitjacketed into onerous commitments that they had no hope in honouring. By allowing signatories the right to choose how far they want to go, and when they'll get there, they made it possible for everybody to sign the same document. And the genius of that is because it allows recalcitrant countries to be singled out and cajoled into coming along for the ride without having to deal with corrupt, backward, reactionary legislatures like the American Senate, just to take a random example out of the air. But more on that in a moment....
Redistribution of the ability to survive. Because countries don't survive climate change, species do.
... or don't.
You know what cheating is? Cheating is when simply fucking lying about climate change because you're fat and rich today and "fuck you that's why" becomes your ruling mantra. That is pretty much what the Republican party had done. Nowhere else in the world is the question of climate change a partisan platform issue.
The only other nations who didn't ratify the Accords are Nicaragua and Syria. Syria didn't attend COP21, because they were kind of distracted. Nicaragua refused to sign on because they didn't think the Accords went far enough. The USA is literally alone in this folly.
The Senate majority's willingness to put party before country (or species, for that matter) is the cheat. President Obama acted in the national and global interest, doing everything within his legal power to ensure that American came along, even if the Republican party didn't want to.
If we are willing to work for it, and fight for it, and believe in it, then I am absolutely certain that generations from now, we will be able to look back and tell our children that this was the moment when we began to provide care for the sick and good jobs to the jobless; this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal; this was the moment when we ended a war and secured our nation and restored our image as the last, best hope on earth.
Context matters, dipshit.
It wasn't a harm but merely declining to bear the cost of Netflix's business model, and forcing even non-Netflix subscribers to pay for Netflix traffic in the process.
Comcast's customers were already paying for that traffic. Making Netflix/Level3 pay again is double-dipping.
Level3 offered to meet all costs involved in upgrading the connection. Comcast still refused. It was a bad faith interaction, and no amount of apologism and misconstruction will change that. Comcast wanted Netflix back on Akamai and other CDNs, and was willing to play dirty to get them back there.
Within a week of Netflix knuckling under and paying Comcast for access to its customers, video quality returned to pre-dispute levels. That means that this was never a hardware issue. It was Comcast deliberately slowing an information provider's traffic in order to extract more money from them.
Even if you grant—and I don't—that Comcast was right to demand more money, using artificial congestion to degrade their own customers' internet experience was an unethical move, and one that Net Neutrality would not allow. It's the business equivalent of holding a gun to the baby's head. Only an asshole would do that.
The Netflix incident was traced to a dispute over peering on a transit partner, not an issue of an ISP slowing traffic as so many have claimed.
So yeah, that was fake news.
No it wasn't, and stop using bullshit phrases to shut down the conversation. Netflix had to go to a peering partner because Comcast refused to discuss in good faith a direct linkage at the bandwidth levels that Comcast's own customers required. Then Comcast starved the peering partner by refusing to provide the proper throughput, even when the peering partner offered to pay all expenses related to it.
Comcast turned down offers of reasonable recompense and instead attacked the quality of the service in order to promote its own OTT video offering.
In short: They degraded another service in order to make it appear worse than of their own. This behaviour is exactly what Net Neutrality is designed to prevent.
News. Not Fake.
People who honestly question the need for Network Neutrality simply don't understand how an internet works. They latch onto a single convenient datum and ignore the system itself. Those who dishonestly question it are just assholes.
Remember to say hello to your bank teller.
