diyorgasms

These allegations of sexual assault really should be investigated in good faith. The time is coincidental, I'll grant that, with the allegations being levied against Assange shortly after WikiLeaks published something so prominent, but non-consensual sexual activity is a horrible thing to do to a person, and the impact of such should not be mitigated.

If the US weren't the global hegemon then our actions would resemble those of a rogue state. However, if we weren't a global hegemon, it would be unlikely that the US would be in a position to take these same actions.

Self-preservation is a hell of a drug. I can't bring myself to blame him for hedging his bets.

You talk elsewhere in this thread about being charitable in your arguments. You are either being deliberately obtuse or distinctly uncharitable in this comment.

The GP (I believe) is making the point that the CIA doesn't hold a monopoly on abduction under color of law. Furthermore I think GP is questioning the assertion that this was not an extraordinary rendition mission, being that this seems not to fit the pattern of a simple extradition.

That's what I gathered from the article too.

It seems strange that there's an awful lot of pro-Israel handwaving in this thread implying that The Intercept (of all outlets) would publish this piece at the behest of the US government.

>Besides, "reddit" isn't a single entity.

It's almost as if reddit is made up of millions of users and you can deduce the "average" or aggregate opinion of reddit by examining voting patterns.

Allowing people to work for less would cause a race to the bottom in which nobody would make enough to survive.

We've seen the tech giants collude to suppress wages, imagine what fast food companies would do if they realized there was no floor to wages.

Finally, I flatly refuse to accept that people are undeserving of a minimal standard of comfort. Just because somebody doesn't know how to code, or hold other marketable skills does not mean we should not value them and the quality of their existence.

I most certainly am interested. Thank you for the link.

And for what it's worth, I hope the Al Jazeera America cutbacks don't affect the excellent written journalism you all do.

This is one of the most horribly elitist comments I think I have ever seen on this site.

Cost is a huge consideration for prospective college student, especially since the onset of the Great Recession.

Furthermore, quality education is available at (I would estimate) most institutions of higher learning. It's just that the students have to do some research to find out who the good professors are at the less prestigious schools.

I think you are doing yourself, your company, and the graduates of less prestigious institutions of higher learning a great disservice being so dismissive toward "lesser" schools.

I don't really think this is a liberal/conservative issue. I'm what most Americans would call extremely liberal, and yet one of the very few legislators whose views consistently align with my own on matters of encryption and privacy is a tea-party libertarian Republican.

I think the proper political theory axis on which to hang this debate is libertarian-authoritarian, both of which exist in liberal and conservative thought.

And government will be irrelevant after the heat death of the universe. Of course any system can be subverted. That doesn't stop some implementations from being better than others.

Oh having used enough "enterprise" software in my day, I have very few doubts that this was a bug. I only have doubts that Sanders' campaign would have discovered this while the Clinton campaign did not. Both have presumably talented people working for them, it strikes me as unlikely that both sides were not a party to malfeasance. As such, it would not surprise me if the company leadership were covering for the Clinton campaign.

Right? Bernie just got some endorsements (which he has been sorely lacking), and all of a sudden this company (the CEO of which is a public Clinton supporter) has a problem that affects the Sanders campaign but not the Clinton campaign, on word from the company that there was a bad actor in the Sanders campaign but not the Clinton campaign.

Sure it's possible that the Sanders campaign did exploit this and the Clinton campaign did not. But I'm skeptical as hell given the political allegiances of the company's leadership.

> Why not let that person have the job?

For the same reason we have minimum wage laws. Pitting workers against each other in a race to the bottom leads to unsustainably, exploitatively low wages.

Yes, in my response I am trying to be as explicit as possible in saying that I think these inefficiencies are a net good. However, they are still inefficiencies. There will almost always be somebody willing to work for less, and things like union protection keep that from happening. The result is a net positive for the workers. However, that doesn't stop the process from being economically inefficient.

This is a complex issue well outside of my personal areas of expertise, but I would certainly think that workers earning meaningful equity would induce them to act in the best interestes of the company, because their own interests would be better aligned with the company's interests.

I don't think this is a continental divide at all. I think what PG said here would be considered reprehensible to a lot of Americans, and I count myself among that contingent.

This isn't demonstrative of a divide between continents, this is a musing of a man so far out of touch with regular society that he sees a large swath of society as an inefficiency waiting to be obsoleted by a tech startup (which would presumably increase his personal wealth in the process).

Historically, unions have been very antagonistic to capital. Paul Graham is basically the definition of capital; he uses his wealth to generate more wealth. And what he is suggesting is that startups could fix the inefficiencies in the market that unions have created. The problem is that fixing these inefficiencies would primarily benefit people like PG, who make their money from the ownership of enterprises rather than labor.

Generally speaking, the inefficiencies of unions exist to protect the interests of the workers, who generate wealth for the company but more often than not do not have an equity stake in the business. Unions exist to maintain the balance between capital and labor, and to make sure that people like PG don't deprive the laborers of fair remuneration for their work.

While we can almost always find someone who will do a job for less money, as a society we have an interest in providing an equitable share to labor, as there are far more workers driving this global economy than there are venture capitalists (or even just plain old capitalists) contributing to the economy in the form of seed round funding and the like.

Wow, that's not a review, that's a murder!

Hit the nail on the head though. I think it's fairly accurate as to their failings.

I think you're painting the humanities with an overly broad brush, and writing off an entire field of study because of some presupposed notion.

And that you specifically exempt STEM fields from your ire has you playing right into the worst stereotypes of STEM arrogance.

Remember, however neat these are, Lenovo is a company that has been caught multiple times inserting spyware into their products. There are other enterprise-class solutions out there that are satisfactorily good. We need not keep giving money to a company that time and time again violates our trust.

"I work for the NSA." Doesn't give me any useful information about their duties or role in the organization, but I know where they work. I imagine cover stories are more important when dealing with human intelligence assets (spies undercover).

Out of curiousity, why?

If your kid isn't underage, then presumably they are capable of making rational decisions about with whom and to what they consent. And at that point it's none of your damn business.

I speak only for myself, but I recently met someone who works for the NSA, and I told him off like I've never told anyone off before. It was my goal to do my best to break him as a person as much as I can with words.

People who work for these agencies deserve no quarter, and they serve no useful place in a free and open society. I don't view myself as a 'mean' person, and I probably wasn't particularly effective when abusing this guy, but I like to think it's the thought that counts.

As for the why, have you ever tried installing vanilla Windows on a modern notebook? I know Linux has a reputation for bad driver support, but in my experience with Dell, Lenovo, and HP, a vanilla Windows installation will have no graphics driver, no network driver (neither wired nor wireless), sometimes the sound drivers are missing. It is a shitshow. Meanwhile, Linux on the same machine generally works out of the box.

But the answer to the question "Why do OEM versions of Windows even exist in the first place" is that without OEM customization, a Windows computer is a non-functional computer.

Presumably the millimeter wave body scanners, which are both invasive and relatively unstudied in its health effects.

A charter school is not a public school. It exists outside of this system you are talking about, and has a whole host of other problems. But it is disingenuous to bring a charter school into this discussion, because they are not the same thing as publicly funded public schools.

I'm not saying it can't be both. But American companies already own the mobile operating system space. If we're owned by the US, it's likely there. And those companies are most likely but playing ball with the Chinese as nicely as they ate with the Americans. And that's why backdoors built into Chinese hardware for Chinese spies seems at least plausible to me.

If they are preventing you from loading your own software, in my mind that lends credence to the idea that ZTE has some sort of spying capability (beyond the usual smartphone spying capabilities) that they really don't want to lose.

I think parent's point was a play on "said the pot to the kettle". Neither business would be healthy if suddenly their ad revenue disappeared.