Only thing I can think of that comes close is simplification of written Chinese under Mao, but even that wasn't as radical as this. (During the Cultural Revolution, the leftists wanted to switch to a Latin alphabet, but even Mao couldn't make that happen.)

What is it with dictators trying to shape their countries' cultures with changing alphabet in the name of modernity?

Look at Ataturk and what he did to Turkish. He changed the alphabet to be Latin too, but with extra accents on some letters to make up for the sounds that do not exist in Latin. The result is that the same letters sound different. For example the c letter sounds like sh, and so on.

Turks today do not speak English, Spanish nor French, nor any other widespread language despite that the alphabet is 'Western'. They are also cut off form their 600 or so years of recorded history with a vast amount of literature written in the Osmanli script, which is Arabic derived.

Even the first compendium of Turkic languages, Kashgari's Diwan Lughat Al Turk, completed in 1074 C.E., cannot be read today by a learned Turk. Only academics versed in the Osmanli script can.

Now, another dictator is doing the same thing to another country in the name of modernization. The results will be similar.

Really? Interesting...as I understand it, the Cultural Revolution was basically an expulsion of anything Western...I'm surprised they wanted to convert to a Latin alphabet.

Your understanding is not entirely incorrect. The Cultural Revolution was not anti-Western as much as it was anti-capitalist and especially anti-traditionalist.

Kazakh was written in Arabic script for a thousand years prior to Soviet times. Try again.

Gambling has long been a protected area due to the social damage it causes beyond the immediate impact to the individual. Loot boxes are gambling without a doubt. They're fine as a game mechanic, so long as you never have to exchange real money to obtain them.

The sad thing is that companies will just move the point of payment. Buying "lives" or "health potions" or something like that, which lets you grind for currency to buy loot boxes and grinding without buying these things will be made impossible.

We had a similar problem here in the states, hundreds of millions of dead bodies in the streets because they couldn't afford health insurance (not to mention actual health care)... we got Obamacare as a fix, and now the streets only have living homeless people in them.

Apple knew exactly what they were doing.

Such weasel words: "Non-genuine display." It is a genuine display, it's just not made by or for Apple.

OS 11.3.1 Fixes Bug Where Third-Party Screen Repairs Made iPhone 8 Touchscreens Stop Working

... so all the screaming of bloody murder over Apple doing this deliberately to hurt people who use 3rd party spares was completely unwarranted. I suppose we'll have to going back to sharpening our teeth now in preparation for the next feeding frenzy.

So could a repair guy install a modded screen that also captures PIN-code data and exfiltrates it, now?
This might come in handy around DC and such.

Instructions to delivery service: Just move dead body over to the side if package will not fit between legs.

I only know three people that own GM cars, and that's only because of MAGA. All three of them keep guns in their trunks. Hopefully some law prevents them from giving access to some random delivery person to their guns.

Why does Amazon wants access to a car or my house?

Here's a $50 solution
1) Get large crate, fix it in place to prevent removal
2) Get padlock
3) Leave padlock inside crate
4) Delivery guy places package in crate
5) Delivery guy uses padlock, locks crate
6) Get home, use only key to open padlock
7) Get package
8) ???
9) PROFIT!

And before people start tearing down this idea, ask yourself, is the flaw you found worse than "letting a stranger in my home"....

Given the high rent in California many people with jobs are homeless or living out of cars. They need to save money so ordering on Amazon makes sense. They can use smartphones to order but need an address for delivery. Till now they have been using Amazon lockers. Now they can get it delivered to their car.

They classify all the other vehicles (pickups, SUVs) as trucks.

There's a reason Corollas became the best selling car of all time over the VW bug a little over twenty years ago. I have a 1992 sixth generation Corolla with nearly 500k miles.

Indeed.

The Nipponese made vehicles of such quality that the earth's preeminent automobile manufacturer was torn asunder, and Detroit has never been the same.

Ironic, perhaps, that two of the nations vanquished in the 2nd World War (Germany and Japan) grew to dominate worldwide automotive manufacturing.

Perhaps divesting one's national goals from military encroachment to industrial excellence promotes national productivity. Who knew?

We have monochrome designs where we previously had full colour designs (Android, etc) with all the associated loss of valuable information.

We have flat designs where we can't see what's clickable.

We have thinner fonts and lines which are harder to read unless you have perfect vision.

Why isn't there massive pushback from all these changes which reduce usability instead of enhancing it ?

Since the bloody article can't even show the visual differences here are screenshots comparing the old and new:

* The left column/sidebar of Inbox, Important, Sent Mail, etc. is wider. Number of unread are now in their own sub-column instead of immediately after the Folder name.

Old left Sidebar
New left Sidebar

* Tabs (Primary, Social, Promotions, Updates, Forums) no longer have a vertical line separating them. You HAVE to mouse over them to see where each button ends.

Old Tabs
New Tabs

* The 2nd column which showed the Senders and the number of emails in a thread no longer shows (#) but just the # number by itself making this harder to read.

Old senders
New senders

The Topic column is less wide, meaning you can't see entire short emails now.

Old subject
New subject

Do. Not. Want.

--
"Get off my LAN." -- Grumpy old programmer

Here are step-by-step instructions to try out the new UI:

1. Click on Gear top right

2. Click on the first menu choice Try the new Gmail
If you don't see "Try the new Gmail" menu choice -- it hasn't been rolled out to your account (yet).

3. Select the layout Default, Comfortable, Compact
Don't worry if you picked the wrong choice. You can click on gear icon in the top right and the non-descript Display density to choose between the three.

Thankfully we can Go back to classic Gmail for now -- until Google rams it down our throats, whether we want it or not.

Why isn't there massive pushback from all these changes which reduce usability instead of enhancing it ?

Because modern UI design is a crypto-fascist plot. Think about it. Have you ever met a UI designer? No one has. They don't exist.

UI tweaks are a control mechanism. The NSA, working with MI6 and former KGB expats, have infiltrated Silicon Valley. Internet is the new mass media. Control the internet population and you control the world.

These UI changes are part of a long game to degrade people's ability to absorb accurate information. Pretty soon everything will be eggshell colored text on an ivory background. At that point, who's to say who is right? Fake news, real news, it all reads the same when everything is illegible. The CIA wins.

There is a resistance movement. We render everything as green text on a black background, just as god intended. Our callsign is ][. Look for us in the dark places on the interwebs, where mortals fear to tread.

You forgot:

We now have light gray on white visual elements, because high contrast, easy to spot UI elements are so gauche.

We have mystery meat navigation elements (text doesn't show up until you mouse over), because even though designers 15 years ago figured out that was bad, a new generation apparently has to relearn the same lessons.

Sigh... Generally speaking, the new UI looks prettier and more professional / polished (the old UI was admittedly ugly), but it actually looks slightly less usable to me. It's a shame we can't get both.

Someone over a year ago on Microsoft NBC said something along the lines that "we take what Trump says too seriously and what he does not seriously enough." Sounds like you're in that category. He's much more careful with his actions than his mouth.

make Apple great again?

Or will Cook help Trump think different?

Old people vote.

Hey, nice spin.

They are preventing a small child (not toddler, he can't toddle, having never been conscious in his life), in a vegetative state, from being kept permanently in that vegetative state, after two years of legal wranglings with the parents, where NO OTHER REPUTABLE DOCTOR in the world has been able to suggest anything but palliative care (one tried, was thrown out of court for being an absolute quack - heard much of him recently?), and who has been on life-support his entire life, FOR FREE, WITHOUT CHARGE, EVER. Taken to court, the Supreme Court, the European Court of Human Rights and the European Supreme Court, and ALL said "Nope, he has no chance of a life, we need to end his life-support" despite multiple appeals.

Being held in a hospital ON LIFE SUPPORT that fucking morons are trying to storm to "free" the child, against the parent's wishes and legal orders, disturbing other patients (including children and parents in worse situations), harassing and threatening medical staff (who are nothing to do with it) and generally running up the fucking costs to the taxpayer.

P.S. Learn your fucking country's procedures. NOT ONE GOVERNMENT REPRESENTATIVE has any say whatsoever in if the child is treated or not (without life-long, free and constant permanent treatment the child dies, with it he merely never gains consciousness, and there's not a reputable doctor in the world that disagrees). The courts have decided. Many of them. Several times. More times than even people who seek legal euthanasia in another country require.

So... BOLLOCKS to your spin. Because it's utter shite and keeping a boy who could be in constant pain and suffering alive to keep his parents happy, at ENORMOUS medical, policing and legal cost... FOR FREE. He's vegetative. Brain-dead. Never seen the light of day. A brain destroyed from birth by a neurological condition that's entirely untreatable and will only worsen. And an army of doctors kept him alive by default without question for two years while the legal wranglings go on, and they may be ordered by a court of law to "cease treatment" (i.e allow him to die naturally, rather than sustain him artificially for his entire life).

It's almost like it has nothing to do with expense, but what's right for the boy, isn't it?

P.S. Look up the Bambino Jesu hospital the parents want to send him to. It's a fucking Vatican-funded profit center, scam-host and shithole.

Before you comment on that as a statement against the NHS, go work in one of their hospitals and see the doctors and nurses crying and fighting all day to save the child, and then being threatened, attacked and harassed in their own homes for doing so (My girlfriend worked in Great Ormond Street... same thing, about six months ago, similar case, the people "protesting" were fucking cunts just out to spoil for a fight, and even the parents were pleading them to go away. I think the child's name in that instance was Charlie Gard or similar?).

I don't care who made the happen. It's great news.

It's funny that the same people who believe it's too much regulation to require banks to disclose information about rates and fees are going to celebrate requiring hospitals to do the same thing. Government regulation of private industry was supposed to be bad, remember?

And, there are big problems with requiring medical providers to post prices: First, all medical providers have multi-tiered pricing. This is a "feature" of our "free market", insurance-driven health care system. The price you would be charged is completely different from the price your insurance company would be charged. For example, let's say an abdominal surgery costs $100,000.00 to an individual. That's actually pretty close to what your hospital would charge you for say, a gall bladder removal. That exact same surgery, billed to an insurance company, would be $15,000.00. For those of you without calculators, that means insurance companies pay about 15% of what individuals pay for the same service. In any other industry, that kind of two-tiered pricing would be illegal.

Second, posting prices really doesn't help the average person. Let's say your doctor tells you that you need cancer surgery for your kid, or your wife. Are you really going to shop for the cheapest price? If you actually have a wife or a kid, you know the answer is "No". Also, posting a price doesn't take into consideration what happens once you are getting a procedure. If there is any kind of complication, the price could skyrocket. If they open you up for a simple appendectomy, and they find your appendix has burst, that posted price will mean nothing.

The experience of practically every country in the whole fucking wide world has taught us one thing: If you really want to get medical costs under control, and get better outcomes for everyone, just create a universal single-payer system and let the government regulate prices. It's the only thing that works. There are no "free market" solutions to health care costs. After all, in a "free market", what you would you be willing to pay to live instead of die? If you've been stung by a bee and you'll die without an Epipen, what's to stop a provider from expecting you to mortgage your house to pay for it? Would you do it? You're not in a position to say, "Oh, I'll just go elsewhere", because you're in fucking anaphylactic shock and you're going to choke to death.

I'm sorry, but there are just no free market solutions to health care.

In reviewing insurance bills for a recent uncomplicated procedure, the hospital billed a total of $65000 and the insurance paid about $8000 after prenegotiated discounts were applied.

The insurance then ran into a technical problem/mistake in which it was retroactively cancelled. The hospital actually returned their payment. During the year it took to straighten that out, I was facing $65K in bills that they wouldn't negotiate to less than about $30K despite the existence of documentation that they had been satisfied with $8K from insurance. Needless to say, I focused on (and eventually succeeded in) reversing the insurance problem.

I've heard that the real reason for this is so they could write off $65K if a patient doesn't pay instead of $8K. I'm not an expert in the accounting, but I'm sure in my case that is what they would have been claiming as their loss.

The experience left me with a solid belief that posting prices alone would do nothing. That approach will only serve to drive more people into the wasteful net of insurance.

What is needed is a truth in pricing act. Hospitals should be required to have fixed, public, non-negotiable prices that apply to all payees whether insurance or cash. If the hospital chooses to pay some of those themselves in indigent cases, that is the price they should be allowed to write off. This approach would make some true headway in getting the insurance problem reigned in.

Posting their false prices does nothing except bolster their already drastically inflated claims of losses.

I've an uncle who was an appliance repairman. He explained that the manufacturers deliberately build and design the components to be non-standard. Then they'll get a patient on the part so that 3rd parties can't build them. Then they raised the price for the parts to be so high that it's often cheaper to buy a new item then to fix the one you have.

This is why, he explained, that my parents had the refrigerator they bought with their house for 30 years while my brother was on his third in 15 years. When I showed him 3D printers he went to a tech school and is now a machinist.

I'm fine with the manufacturers requiring authorized repairs while the item is still under warranty. But once that warranty is out then it should be repairable by anyone. What I hope will happen is that open communities like https://www.ifixit.com/ will continue to flourish.

All these manufacturers that want to ban right to repair laws should be forced to provide a minimum of five years warranty repair on any hardware, and seven years guaranteed continuous software updates.

WTF?! From what orifice did you pull those arbitrary numbers from?

If they're going to use copyright law to make maintenance illegal, then the free warranty should be 95 years from the year of its first publication or a term of 120 years from the year of its creation. That is how long they are demanding that it be illegal for you to repair your items. Once the copyright on the firmware (or whatever bullshit it is) expires, then circumventing the DRM ceases to be prohibited by DMCA and the warranty can end.

The most egregious example I've come across is my shiny new Hyundai i30. They have proximity keys. You can buy the blank for around $100 or so, and most locksmiths will program them for a few dollars. But they need to get the secret code to match it to the car's Engine Control Unit. Obtaining that is a 60 second task for a Hyundai dealership, but they won't tell other locksmiths what it is. So you can only obtain the key from Hyundai: Cost: $1,500.

The price is not too far from what they charge for a ECU, which is not too surprising because the other route you can take is to replace the ECU and keys.

So, as a way-out-there social liberal who really dislikes Trump and has said bad things about him (and thought worse things), I feel like I owe it to somebody to say 'well done.'

The cognitive dissonance in my head right now is making it hard for me to follow the threads in the comments. I really did not see this one coming.

Just, wow.

I'm on the conservative/libertarian end across from you. I did not vote for Trump. I think he's an egotistical asshole with no fixed ideological principles of his own to speak of, has no filters between his emotions and his mouth, and doesn't know when it's best to keep said mouth shut.

I'm almost as stunned as you.

I admire your honesty, we need more of that.

If I may, allow me to suggest reading a fantastic book by Jonah Goldberg called "The Suicide Of The West". Absolutely brilliant, no matter where you stand ideologically or politically.

Strat

He also seems to be instrumental in getting progress towards an actual peace treaty between North & South Korea.

But hey, let's focus on a hooker he may or may not have fucked years ago!

> almost $1 million from Hillary.

Not true. That money was from Terry McAuliffe the Virginia governor who got it from Hillary, and the part from Hillary was much less than a million dollars. According to Newsweek, and I save the article just to debunk these sort of claims, it was only $675,288. Not evidence that it influenced McCabe has ever been release much less proof that McCabe didn't fully investigate Hillary because of it.

Oh, well then, no harm, no foul if it was only a measly ~$700,000 from a DNC political apparatchik. Oh, and ~$300,000 from HRC. That's chump-change, not even worth mentioning! I mean, sure, you could probably hire a contract-killer for less, but human life is cheap! There's no way that tiny amount of pocket change could influence somebody being paid those luxurious government wages.

Strat

if they are already doing this, then the hearing that authorized the Trump campaign surveillance needs to be made available to the appropriate committees.

Do you actually live in the U.S.? If so, what rock are you living under to have escaped the news of the failed Nunes stunt and not know that that's essentially what happened... or that it is kinda the nature of the FISA court that the presented information would often compromise our or our allies' intelligence assets.

I'm almost as stunned as you.

What is more likely, a sudden break out of ethics in Trump world or something else?

I'm guessing it is something else. Here are some possibilities.

1.) Good people are doing their jobs. It has nothing to do with Trump. Some other event is responsible.
2.) Trump appointed one or more of those good people. (It is certainly possible. His major criteria is how much they praise him, which doesn't eliminate the possibility of competence.)
3.) They are being rejected because the requests are now so bat shit crazy that not even FISA will tolerate it.

Personally, if I was going to bet money, I'd bet on 3. We'd need to see a random sampling of requests then and now to really conclude much...

Drupal and php are so well secured and up to date that this can happen is simply inconceivable

Why don't developers just write code that doesn't have security holes in it?

Presumably because they can't. It's time we started programing computer resource sandboxes into every application by default.

Linux and Mac, and Windows all have things for this. Macs have a dtrace based sandbox that can be per application or per process.

sandboxes can specify what a process and all child processes can do at the computer resource level. Can they get on the network? Can they access the file system? what files can they access? do they have write permission? how much memory can they use? how much cpu? and so on.

If we always launched processes with these clamped down a lot of security holes would not be exploitable. Why is it these are largely unused?

Nah, I'm pretty sure it's Russians paying China to be a proxy, who's paying North Korea to be a proxy.

You know what they say. The proxy of my enemy is my proxy.

It's proxies all the way down.

Etc.

I'm going to take a wild stab in the dark, and guess one of the 17 countries whose infrastructure North Korea is accused of trying to hack is NOT China.

Dear Editors,

Please save us some trouble and just start including this in every Alexa/Siri story posted here.

Thanks and regards,

--Z.

Did you try "sudo make me a sandwich"?

No hacking possible. It was the only way to have this nifty toy and be safe.

I just left mine sitting on a shelf in an Amazon warehouse, unordered. I think that's the safest option.