Also, just to be clear:

I don't give a rat's arse which party you support.
I *do* care about what policies you support.

** uncommon

Maybe not blaming people on a self-help site would have helped them not to radicalize

They self-radicalized long before the word "incel" entered the common parlance. Which is what happens when you create an echo chamber of a bunch of angry lonely men and base post visibility on engagement.

Why do I care what the UN's preferred wording is?

You made a false claim about the origin of the terminology. You should care about being factually accurate.

The correct and proper legal term in the USA is "illegal alien"

It literally is not. That term, while it exists in the US code, is incommon. The most common term in the US code is just "alien", and when specifically discussing the undocumented, "Unauthorized Alien". I didn't include a discussion of US code just so you could pretend it didn't exist.

And I'm sorry if you don't like being called out for wanting cheap, exploitable labor to pick your damn cotton,

I'm struggling to understand what your argument is. You seem to be declaring that any job involving cotton is inherently slavery, even if the people are free to come and go as they choose and are paid for their labour. If that's not your argument, then please clarify, as otherwise, I'm baffled.

Democrats want cheap labor they can exploit.

Democrats (aka, the party that is constantly pushing for bills for higher minimum wages and mandates for better working conditions, while the Republicans do the opposite, pushing deregulation) want above all a regularized system with rules and oversight to prevent abuses. Most also want a path to citizenship for people who work for a given number of years with no criminal record (7 years is a common number suggested, though even decades would be better than "never"), though this is secondary to the primary issue. What Democrats do not want is a masked gestapo kidnapping people who want to be in the US working, from in front of their children, and throwing them into "Alligator Alcatraz".

These things are the exact same thing that the immigrants themselves want. You can't sit here and pretend to be an advocate for immigrants when arguing for policies that they are opposed to and opposing policies that they support.

If I'm understanding the article correctly, the conference room window mitigation wouldn't work against this. It doesn't rely on vibrations of the windows. Instead, you'd just need a piece of paper inside the room, lit by ordinary lamps. As long as the light reflecting off the paper could pass through the windows unmodified (i.e. the windows provide clear visibility) the white noise vibrations of the windows would have no effect.

On the other hand, lightweight curtains that blocked the view through the window would stop this technique, but probably wouldn't significantly reduce what was detectable from a laser bounced off the windows (assuming no white noise).

I think we're talking past one another. I'll try to be clearer.

Sure, but that's not the point. The point is that Android does prevent most users from using anything other than Play. Not by actually blocking them from using other app stores but by simply not offering the option. And that's a good thing, because most users have no idea how to decide whether or not something is safe.

I think perhaps the confusion here is because you and I are looking at this from different directions. You seem to be looking at it from the perspective of what you or I might want to choose. I'm looking at it from the perspective of an engineer whose job is to keep 3B users safe, most of whom have no idea how to make judgments about what is safe and what isn't. Keeping them within the fenced garden (it's a low fence, but still a fence) allows them to do what they want without taking much risk. The fact that the fence is easily stepped over preserves the freedom of more clueful and/or adventurous users to take greater risks. I think this has been a good balance.

I'm pretty sure that the ability to allow unknown sources is required by the Android compliance definition document, and that a manufacturer who disables it is not allowed to call their device Android, or to pre-install the Google apps or Play.

Until Epic decides that they want their store to be able to install and update as seamlessly as Play can, and gets a court to order that. Still, your point is valid, there is still some friction for other stores. Is it enough? I guess we'll find out. Will it be allowed to remain? I guess we'll find that out, too.

goo.gl links are a significant abuse vector, so Google has to maintain a non-trivial team to monitor and mitigate the abuse. I'll bet there are several full-time employees working on that, and that the total annual cost is seven figures.

Even if it weren't an abuse vector, the nature of Google's internal development processes mean that no service can be left completely unstaffed. The environment and libraries are constantly evolving, and all the services require constant attention to prevent bit rot. A fraction of one engineer would probably be enough for something like goo.gl if it weren't abused, but that's still six figures per year, not pennies.

This isn't true for the vast majority of Android users. To a first approximation, all Android users are using devices that have "unknown sources" disabled, so they can only get stuff from Play. Of course, it's trivial to find out how to enable unknown sources and install stuff from other places and I'd expect that nearly all slashdotters who use Android have at least experimented with that, even if they don't use f-droid or whatever on a regular basis. But slashdotters are not remotely a good representative sample of Android users.

If you're talking about desktop/laptop software, sure... but most Android users don't use a desktop or a laptop and are accustomed to expecting that anything they can install is safe. And even among those who do use a non-mobile device, people expect mobile devices to be safer, because they are. This court ruling may change that, to some degree. The result will probably be good for Apple, since Android insecurity will drive people to the safety of Apple's walled garden.

Delegating security decisions to users is the best way to ensure that users have no security. I'm all for enabling users who understand what they're doing to make their own choices and are willing to accept the consequences, but the vast, vast majority don't understand security or the consequences of their security decisions, especially not in the face of clever attackers who are quite good at making malware appear completely innocuous. Even a knowledgeable security professional can't reliably distinguish malware from a legitimate app, not without deep and very specific expertise, and not always even then, and you think your grandma can?

There are three billion Android devices in the world; it's used by approximately 1/3 of all people living, and they put a lot of very important information about themselves in their devices. Android platform security decisions have enormous consequences. Android has gradually gotten more opinionated about user security because we've found time and again that if you ask users, they don't understand the implications and they make bad choices.

Many people think that the existence of unlockable bootloaders and the developer options are bad choices and suggest that we should push the Android ecosystem into the Apple model of closed, locked-down hardware and a closed app ecosystem. I disagree, and I've worked hard to make sure that the ability of people to run the software they want on the hardware they own is not restricted. For example, I have regular meetings with the leaders of various Android ROMs, including Lineage, Graphene, Calyx, etc., to help them navigate the security hardware changes that we make. This isn't something I do because my management tells me to, it's something I do on my own because I think it's important.

User freedom is deeply important to me... and so is user security, but these things are in tension. To a first approximation, increasing one decreases the other. IMO, Android has struck the right balance. By default, devices are locked down and software comes from a controlled source, but users who know what they're doing have the right and ability to remove the restrictions (mostly; low-level firmware is locked down -- I would like to see Android gain a "dev screw" capability like ChromeOS to completely open it up in a safe way). This court ruling seems likely to upset that balance in a direction that endangers users who don't know what they're doing -- and it doesn't provide any additional capabilities to users who do. It's all risk, no benefit.

Try a web search for my username and "Android". Or look for "swillden" in the AOSP codebase and commit logs. Seriously, why would you imply that I'm lying when it's extremely easy to verify? And if you think that I made up a /. username to match some rando Android engineer, look at my /. UID. I've been on /. since before Android even existed.

You have an odd definition of "subsidize".

First, why not just admit you want slaves to pick your cotton?

I had no idea that slaves were free to go at any time. And if your concern is abusive employers, then the solution to that is regulation and oversight.

Undocumented migrants to the US go through great risk to get employment opportunities that, while terrible from the perspective of US norms, are far more than they have available at home. That's why they come in the first place. What they DON'T want is, just to pick a random example, a masked gestapo kidnapping them in front of their children and throwing them into something its creators lovingly refer to as "Alligator Alcatraz". They came to work.

Second, they are a net drain on the economy because they send more money back home than they add to GDP.

Asserting things flatly in contradiction with the research does not make it true. Once again, to repeat: the economy is not a zero-sum game. Labour creates wealth; it does not redistribute from some fixed pool. Their labor creates wealth in the US, but they are given only a tiny fraction of that. And on that they pay taxes for services that they are barred from receiving. From the pittiance they have left, the majority furthermore gets spent within the US.

Total remittances from the US amount to $98B; this is a mixture of remittances from undocumented workers and documented. Documented immigrants are vastly more common than undocumented (14,1% of the US population vs. 3,2%) and tend to earn much higher salaries (though they remit a smaller % of them), so only a relatively small fraction of that (a few tens of billions) is from undocumented workers. In terms of the share of the workforce, 6,7% of the workforce is undocumented and 18,6% are all immigrants combined. Keep these numbers in mind when you look at the next number: the US economy is 30 TRILLION dollars. E.g. the value that undocumented workers remit is in the ballpark one-thousandth of the economy, yet they're 1 in 15 workers. The value that all immigrant workers remit is in the ballpark of 1/300th of the economy, and they're one in five workers. And remember that it is work that creates wealth.

There simply is no comparison: the amount that undocumented workers contribute to the economy is vastly, by orders of magnitude, more than they earn, let alone remit.

Third, the correct and legal term is "illegal alien". "Undocumented migrant" is a BS euphemism invented by left-wing reporters to support a political agenda.

"Undocumented migrant" is not modern, did not originate in the US, and has its roots in academic and international discourse. It is the preferable language of the UN since 1975, aka half a century. Alien" is a perfectly valid legal term, although "illegal alien" is rarely used in the US code (the US has a wide range of alien categories referenced in the code, including "resident and nonresident", "immigrant and nonimmigrant", "asylee and refugee", etc aliens). "Unauthorized alien" is probably the most common adjective phrase, although just "alien" is more common still (for example: 18 U.S.C. 1325, "Unauthorized Entry by Alien"). "Migrant" and "alien" are not synonyms, and require unique terminology - migrant is much more specific, and "migrant worker" more specific still. "Illegal" is malformed terminology and commonly inaccurate. For example, a large fraction of people who are in the US without authorization did not enter the country illegally, but rather overstayed visas. It is also illogical to refer to a person as illegal, rather than an act.

(This is also a good time to drop a reminder that being in the US without authorization is generally a civil, not criminal, violation)

The phrase is "script kiddies", meaning young guys who know how to execute a script but don't understand how it works.

"Script kitties" is a funny visual, though. Thanks for that :-)

Very, very unlikely -- the resources required to do good malware detection at any sort of scale are enormous -- but also irrelevant. The issue isn't what the best app store does, it's what the worst does. Users who would choose an app store because it does extremely good vetting are users who would be careful what they install regardless of how careful their store is. It's the users who aren't cautious that will be harmed by Google being required to give them access to many app stores.

Also, just to be clear, if you wrote your post coming from a personal perspective:

Don't define yourself relative to others. If you do, you will never be happy, in a relationship or out of one. I mean, sure, you may get the initial "sugar rush" from a new relationship, but you will be doomed to destroying it due to overdependency on the other person for your happiness and self-esteem, which is something that cannot be sustained. You need to be able to find happiness and respect for yourself on your own.

But if that's not about you, then just let this stand as an aside to anyone who needs to hear it.

Nobody means "single men" when they talk about incels. Incels - to both the general public, and to self-identified incels, refers to "...member[s] of an online subculture of mostly male and heterosexual[2] people who define themselves as unable to find a romantic or sexual partner despite desiring one [who] often blame, objectify, and denigrate women and girls as a result."

To be clear, the movement did start as a website and mailing list that was basically just for people who were chronically single, but with no connotations beyond that (it was actually a woman who started it). But it morphed beyond all recognition from its founding. To quote Alana (who started the original): "It definitely wasn't a bunch of guys blaming women for their problems. That's a pretty sad version of this phenomenon that's happening today. Things have changed in the last 20 years" and "Like a scientist who invented something that ended up being a weapon of war, I can't uninvent this word, nor restrict it to the nicer people who need it".