They revealed the existence of PRISM and afterwards published lots of analysis on the Snowden leaks. I believe they were also involved in the Panama Papers and I believe they broke the news about a UK/US black site and some war crimes after the invasion of Iraq
Cars of all sizes are usually much cheaper outside the US, so I don't think it's a price thing. Maybe just because they don't spend as much time in the car or something?
When Facebook says "users" in claims like these, what they actually mean are accounts. This statistic includes all the multi accounts, fake accounts, spam accounts, and bot accounts. They have been getting sued over the past several years for charging advertisers when a bot or fake account engages with the advertised content.
Have you tried sending a picture via iMessage MMS? My wife's iPhone compresses every single picture she sends down to like 32kb and converts it to a JPEG. That's with the setting to compress images to save data turned off (I'd hate to see what it sends when its turned on). The pictures I send her arrive only compressed down to 700k-1.1mb and retain formatting and even transparency (our carrier limits MMS messages to 1.2mb).
Oh, what's even better is that it tricks the iPhone owner into thinking that a full resolution image was sent. On my wife's end she see's the full resolution original format image in the messages thread, not the blurry 32kb version everyone else gets so she had no idea that this happens.
Yes I'm well aware. What I'm talking about is iMessage doing it's own compression, which is more than what the carrier limit requires, as well as stripping file formatting from images and making them all JPEG. Me and my wife are on the same family plan so we have the same carrier. If the 32kb was a carrier limit, then the pictures I send my wife would be 32kb and just as blurry as the ones she sends me. They aren't, however. They're only compressed enough to where the fit the MMS size limit for the carrier
Walls of homes are usually insulated enough to make an IR camera useless unless it's inside the home. It would be good for identifying cracks that heat can seap through though. Surveillance by laser microphones can easily be mitigated by curtains or blinds. Both of those also require the person spying to intentionally use them to spy. There is no legal commercial device that could prevent your neighbor's Xfinity Hotspot from selling what you do in your own home to Facebook/Google to use to target you with ads.
From my brief experience working at a similar company, calling the software they use closed-sourced is a bit of a reach. When I worked there, we almost exclusively used rebranded and slightly modified open source/freeware CMS systems. Actually the only software we sold that was completely developed in-house were testing/configuration tools or extremely simple and basically worthless LDAP auth based reporting programs that could only be used on-premise.
> One average US citizen produces around 20 tons of CO2 per year. A bus needs 3 of them working full-time. This completely dwarfs the emissions due to fuel use.
Are you trying to say that these people wouldn't already exist without the bus? So everytime we commission a new bus, 3 fully grown licensed drivers appear in a flash of smoke from the storage compartment of the bus?
> cars _save_ _time_
Cars only save time if there aren't very many of them. Look at Northern Virginia, at 3 A.M you can drive 10 miles in 10 minutes because the roads are direct and have high speed limits, but that same drive would take close to an hour during the day.
Do a mental experiment. Suppose that you have technology that can make buses drive themselves.
First, you want to solve the problem of long bus intervals. It's still not economic to just buy more buses because they require a lot of power to run and do tons of road damage.
But you can make buses smaller! And by making them smaller, you can run them faster without incurring a lot of useless overhead.
Heck, you can just idle, dare I say _park_, these unused small buses when there is no demand. And since it's so easy to manage the fleet this way, you can make personalized buses for every passenger.
I think this is supposed to be the last preview version of FFI and the other JEPs from Project Panama, so hopefully we will have them at least but I definitely share a bit of that concern.
Surprisingly, China has lifted some 800 million people from poverty so it does happen. I'm not a communist and wouldn't prefer a communist country but I've gotta give credit where it's due.
That only happened after it embraced the free market and capitalism though. Communist China was, as you say, quite poor for decades.
Capitalism can take many forms and is often tempered with more socialist policies. No country – including the United States" is "pure capitalist". China has its own spin on capitalism, but that doesn't make it not-capitalism.
Communist governance of assimilated subjects is about the opposite of democratic governance over diverse states' free citizens.
Communist economies are about the opposite of free enterprise.
Capitalism is its own purely economic animal, perhaps directly opposed to a communist economy, but not the opposite of a communist government.
Really capitalism is not conceptully supposed to be a form of government to begin with, but it can snuggle up to any government from democracy to communism to monarchy and anything in between.
And there you go.
As an "ism" capitalism has been with us since prehistoric times, any actual governance it accomplishes is effectively done by the different types of political systems it has operated with, that have come and gone over the millennia.
Sometimes the strength of the capital is greater than the resources or political will of the government in power at the time, sometimes not. Debt can distort this balance.
I mostly agree with you on this, although I do think in the case of modern China to be intellectually honest one has to be careful to not attribute all the good things to capitalism and all the bad things to communism.
