Australia is buying its way out of a massive deal for French-designed diesel submarines in order to buy its way into a US-UK deal for nuclear subs, despite the fact that for decades it's been well-established that our primary concern is our local area. We don't need or want the power projection capabilities that require nuclear subs like America has.
We love military spending here
This is not a forum for political debate
Which is it? A post about the moral value of political spending—whether it was negative towards military spending like this one, or if it were a hypothetical one in favour of spending more on the military—is inherently making a political statement, regardless of which way it was meant. You can hardly say there's no room for political discussion in a post about one of the biggest things politics spends money on.
The original post was about how people who are pro military spending are not the best people. It's a pretty damn good military satire if you ask me. I just took that satire and built on it by discussing the matter more seriously.
I have no idea what that means. The post was about military spending by Australia and Canada, I was pointing out the ridiculous overspending on military in Australia and the related international embarrassment of reneging on a signed deal in order to further increase that spending. It seemed relevant.
Our government breaking expensive contracts we didn't need to sign up to a different more expensive deal we really don't need, while failing to properly fund our domestic needs is so shit.
sublemmy
Community
Don't need to hear his excuse, the answer is pretty obvious. Companies are really fucking stupid. They saw an increase in demand during COVID and assumed that, rather than being a temporary blip due to lockdowns, this was a permanent change. And so they drastically over-hired during that period, without thought for how it might end up affecting people down the line when they inevitably have to lay them off.
I think the idea is that libertarianism is basically a milder form of anarcho capitalism, and ancaps believe in a world without any government. The only "police" would be private armed guards who go entirely unchecked—except by other private armed guards. Locking up "undesirables" is totally something that would happen in ancapistan.
It's not just a matter of learning, but also using a platform that supports it. If someone is part of the vast majority who prefer to just use webmail like gmail.com, GPG is just straight-up not an option, no matter how much they might be willing to learn.
How in the hells do you do E2E encrypted email anyway? Email is a pretty well-defined protocol, and that protocol is not encrypted.
We've had GPG for a while, but that requires the other user also be on a platform that supports it. Was E2E only for other users of Skiff?
Honestly so would I, but looking back on it now, I can't say that Microsoft has been bad for it. If Microsoft hadn't bought it, maybe someone else would have, who would have been far worse. Google might have bought it and shut it down 6 months later. Or Facebook data-mined it and sold all your private repos off to Russia. Or we could have been in a world where Microsoft did what many (myself included) expected would happen, with them ruining it themselves.
Yes, GitHub staying independent would have been the best-case scenario. But what we got was probably second-best.
phone, dead
A product which, as interesting as it was, had sadly failed pretty resoundingly in the market under Ballmer's leadership.
AR/VR product dead
As far as I'm aware, Hololens still exists? True it's a product not getting as much attention as might have the potential to, but the same can be said for the entire VR market. Outside of a couple of very narrow fields, nobody has managed to get VR to really catch on the way the hype suggested it might back when Google Glass was a thing or when Hololens was first announced. (Who knows, maybe Apple will manage it with their product like how they made smartphones and tablets mainstream.)
non-Xbox peripherals
Honestly that seems like a real stretch. What exactly was their raison d'être? There are so many options for peripherals from companies that are better at it.
App Store, a joke
A joke when it was released under Ballmer. Still a joke today. That's not a mark in Nadella's favour, for sure, but nor can it really be counted against him.
Edge now a bloated privacy invading Chrome clone
Edge only existed under Nadella. Under Ballmer Microsoft still had Internet Explorer.
Great for the shareholder, not for the customer
Depends on what customer you're talking about. As a software engineer, his tenure has been incredible. WSL is probably the single greatest thing to happen to Windows since '95. .NET Core and later simple .NET is such a huge improvement over the ancient .NET Framework for developing modern applications.
As an RTS gamer, I suspect he probably didn't have a lot of involvement here, but it was still under his leadership of Microsoft that we've seen the greatest era in Microsoft's first-party gaming since the 1997–2007 period when the original trilogy + AoM were being released by Ensemble Studios.
The creativity and inventiveness at Microsoft died under Ballmer. Nearly any Microsoft watcher will tell you he's turned it around for the better not just in terms of business, but in terms of how it impacts the customer, as well.
Personally I've been relatively disappointed with Microsoft over the last 2-ish years, but compared to the last half-decade or so of Ballmer, the first 8 years of Nadella's tenure were impeccable.
he won’t ever be as big as van Gogh
Wait until you learn how big van Gogh was during his life...
Are you kidding? He's made some...questionable decisions over the last couple of years, but look at where Microsoft is at today compared to when Ballmer left. It's a much more successful, more exciting, and more open company than it was. Could you imagine Ballmer's Microsoft releasing WSL? Or greenlighting a major faithful remaster and re-release of all 4 of the big Age of Empires games, as well as developing an entire new one? Or buying and actually being a surprisingly good steward of GitHub?
He's far from perfect, and all the enshittification of the last 2 or 4 years should be roundly criticised. But overall, Nadella has been a net positive for the company both financially and in terms of the company's societal impact.
The same can not be said for Google's Pichai...
When webmasters running homely sites with flavor of their own personality
Honestly this is why I'm so bullish on ActivityPub. Like this video sort of gets at (apologies that that's a Nebula link. I think you can get one Nebula video for free if you're not a subscriber, or you can wait until it goes up on the TechAltar YouTube channel after a couple of days or maybe a week—the full interviews with fediverse people are unlikely to go on YT though; I'm currently watching the Automattic CEO interview and finding it brilliant), federation is a really great way of going back to a world of smaller sites hosted by people with a passion for what they're doing. But it'll be even better, because of the ability to interact with all these different sites with one unified account. Tumblr and WordPress embracing ActivityPub are an awesome step in that direction.
edit: looks like the main video is already up on YouTube. Must have been only a 1 day delay on this one.
Did they survive? In my case, they got stronger.
In principle, I actually support the idea of people running sites being able to support themselves financially through advertising. I just don’t like when the ads go too far into obnoxious territory. So before all this, I used Adblock Plus with its "acceptable ads policy" to let through unobtrusive banner ads but block prerolls, large graphics, and interstitial ads.
Unfortunately, ABP didn’t adapt to YouTube’s changes quickly enough, so I switched to uBlock Origin. Now I don’t even see unobtrusive ads. Google shot themselves in the foot over this one.
Android works just fine with the Play Store being locked down but enabling other sources being trivial if you know where to look.
Heck, even Apple isn’t a stranger to this way of doing things. For like a decade now Mac’s Gatekeeper has given you a warning that is easily bypassed when you try to install something that isn’t either from the Mac App Store or from a third-party with an Apple code signing certificate.
I've never seen someone use this in the home (i.e., non-business/school) environment.
Browsers have their own user profiles now, but that's a much newer feature than Incognito mode.
It's neither. It's to stop recording in your local history. To stop people who might be using the same computer as you from snooping.
Look at how they marketed it when it first came out. It's when you want to buy your partner a gift without them knowing.
The article isn't stupid. The court that made the decision is.
