Perhaps this is a matter of different perspectives? Every tool I use is an investment for me, it might be light if I only use it once, it might be heavy if I use it for years. That investment is all the time I take to learn the various concepts involved and how to think about problems to fit the tool. But it is also all the time needed to constantly keep in mind if that tool is affected by the latest security vulnerability, how changing trends in the industry affects my use of the tool, and what to do if the tool becomes abandonware.

Reading code is hard. Writing can sometimes even be faster than reading, especially when there are many unknowns involved. So saying "you can just read it" doesn't really work for me. There's no "just" in reading. Taking in new tools is an investment, a burden, and I am perfectly entitled to avoid tools where that burden is harder than the expected outcome. It's impossible to know for sure, of course, but you can often guess pretty good very early.

What's important to notice however, is that the oldest of these are from 2009. At no time in the intervening 15 years (!) did someone say "Windows is unusable for desktops because it is not manageable".

That's first and foremost a cultural difference, not a technical. Sure, there's nothing to prevent a Linux vendor to write "install scripts" that copy files willy-nilly across the file system, and many vendors have done this but always with disastrous results and since Linux people hate it, those products are either repackaged or stored in a separate directory far away from other files.

This means installing software at scale (any number of systems), or the question how to cleanly uninstall software it not a question you should ever ask in a Linux environment. The questions you should ask are different in a Linux environment. That is why the tools look different.

Tools like gsettings are culturally alien to the unix world. Instead, home directories are seeded with dotfiles. And dotfiles are kept in version control. Yes, that means that unix people can't answer the quesion how to lock the proxy settings so the user is unable to change them. Instead, should a sensitive system require it, they would instead manage by policy and disallow any traffic outside said proxy.

I have some experience at places where Linux are run on desktops at scale, but they all have in common that these are engineers for whom Linux is the better experience to begin with. It's not like that for administrative staff and management. And as much as I'd like to tell people to use Prezi instead of Powerpoint, and Markdown instead of Word, sometimes Libre Office is the best answer.

We have to be practical. Still, I feel that too often it is engineering that has to use tools intended for administrative people. Once in a while, they other way around may not be that bad.

For a modern workplace, where smartphone and cloud based applications rule, the traditional Windows tools like AD and GP can only do so much. You also need MDM tools, and something like SAML. If you are looking for an out-of-the-box tool that can manage both Linux and Windows clients, Red Hat has FreeIPA. It's not AD, but it goes beyond that capability.

Still nothing, three decades later. Not because Microsoft engineers couldn't do it, of course, but becasue they didn't want to. It doesn't fit the Windows model. They did recently adopt SSH, but that was because they want to use Windows in cloud-like environments, where expectations are set by Linux-style tools.

By the time Windows got to the point where it even could be centrally managed in any reasonable fashion, Linux environments was routinely run an order of magnitude larger still.

There is a reason why the whole cloud runs Linux. Anything else is a rounding error. That's because Linux is inherently so much less work to manage at scale.

If something like Group Policies would somehow be accepted by the Linux community, that could only be a step backwards. A well run Ansible or Puppet or similar environment works on a completely different scale.

Honest question: Why? If you want a Windows-like environment, run Windows.

I get this all the time when people ask about a Linux equivalent for something, and aren't really satistied when it doesn't work or look the same. Linux isn't a clone of Windows. Linux comes from an older heritage, and has a unique culture. You are in for a hard time if you want to use Linux like you would use Windows. That's a suboptimal experience, at best.

That said, of course Linux should be easy to manage. But Windows is from a single corporate entity, of course their management tools will be different. It used to be unix admins that laughed about people using Windows as servers. The culture around Linux is one of scriptabiliy where even the user interface, the basic shell, is one where every command is inherently a script. That's why management on Linux looks like Ansible and OpenSSH, not like Remote Desktop and Group Policies.

You could write something like Group Policies for Linux of course, but it wouldn't be a complete solution so people would just continue using Ansible, OpenSSH, and the respective package managers.

That link goes to the Greece financial crisis which, according to the Wikipedia page, started in 2009. Varoufakis was elected minister of finance in early 2015 and resigned only half a year later. From the outside, it seems impossible that his half year miniterial tenure could have caused a crisis half a decade earlier. At the time, Greece had already defaulted twice on their loans and were about to do it a third time.

There is certainly some misunderstanding here, and I am unsure about where it is. Perhaps another example could have been more clear.

When you "buy the S&P500" you do not buy stock from companies. No S&P ETF takes part in private placements or IPOs. They buy "used" shares on the open market, with the single intention of selling it on the open market to someone else.

When you buy the S&P, at no point do you give money to any of the S&P companies (except perhaps a small fee to the ETF issuer, most of which are public companies, but let's not split hairs about that).

There are of course other methods of buying the S&P500, such as tracker certificates, but they only add layers of indirection to the above, they do not change the fundamental facts about it.

> you don't know how things work and don't want to learn

I am not sure how to respond to this.

The ad sellers and the journalists are normally separate and will not interfer much with one another's work. It also helps that they never say no to money. I don't know about the New York Times specifically but similar things have happened many times in other newspapers, and there is such a thing as a paid editorial. Those are usually clearly marked as such, but it's basically the same thing.

(However, there may be other reasons why you might want to go with a competitor instead, and not pay the newspaper you hate $100k.)

That ... does not hold at all. You wouldn't buy or subscribe to an openly Nazi paper unless you are a full blown white supremacist.

NATO was explicitly built to keep Europe in line. That worked to the benefit of everyone, until national security intrests and land expansion put a stop to it.

A lot hinges on this being true, but being deflationary is not unique to gold. It is also true for a lot of other things, including stocks. Yet we think it is good that regular people spend their earnings on stock, and it is generally considered to be one of the things which made American economy uniquely strong. So much so that other countries seek to mimic it.

The argument should cut both ways: A strong stock market which is deflationary should lead to economic stagnation. Why buy a pizza today when you can buy S&P500 and buy two pizzas tomorrow?

Reality seems to disagree here. People buy what they need and want, today, and whether the rest is stored in fiat currency, stocks, or gold seems to matter very little for economic productivity.

The problem with zero interest rate is that it doesn't incentivize better ideas. Why would you work to increase productivity if capital has no cost?

The period 2016-2021 was one where interest rates were the lowest, sometimes even negative, and you saw companies hiring endlessly, and acquiring competitors with no intention of doing anything their their products.

It is very hard to compete on talent and good ideas in such an environment when your all competitors are burning through loaned and venture capital (which itself is also largely loaned at some point).

Why? If you and I earn $100 per year, every year, that means there is no economic growth. We spend half of it on food, clothes, and other necessities and buy stocks with the other half, stocks will go up in value.

An non-growing economy has aspects of a zero-sum game. Speculation can still occur, and can continue unbounded. Stocks, gold, bitcoin, have historically all been deflationary.

In the public CA PKI, it is the CA which has the power to revoke their issued certificates. In other systems, it can be the private key for the certificate itself. In either case, the certificate is not to be trusted anymore.

Revocation is the least of your worries should your signature algorithm be broken in the future.

From my limited understanding, I can immediately think of a dozen ways to implement such an attack, and none would be helped by Google attesting that the device is indeed a legitimate Android(tm) device.

It is very hard to understand how this would make any difference juridically. The technical difficulties of avoiding phishing aside, contracts can be contested for a multitude of reasons, including contracts being signed involuntarily.

Is that so? I always thought that the design choice that only hashes of the public keys were public was a pretty clever way to make the whole scheme quantum-proof. What did I miss?

The practice around revocations need to be secure of course, but that's more on an engineering problem than a cryptographical.