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Bill Gates, a man who’s worth an estimated $107 billion, suggested on Wednesday he’d be open to voting for President Donald Trump in 2020 if the Democrats try to make him pay his fair share in taxes. The bizarre suggestion is just the latest sign that American oligarchs are prepared to support an authoritarian if Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax moves forward. “If I had to pay $20 billion, it’s fine,” Gates said at the New York Times DealBook conference yesterday when discussing a possible wealth tax. “But when you say I should pay $100 billion, then I’m starting to...

A teacher at a California high school wore blackface on Halloween while imitating rapper Common – and spat out a cringeworthy in-class performance, video shows. The unidentified Milpitas Unified School District staffer, who is white, swayed as he rapped to students over a simple beat while wearing a basic black-and-white ensemble in front of a class at Milpitas High School, The Mercury News reported. “Opportunities limitless, possibilities senseless, what will you do?” the educator rapped. “Millions of people, not enough to eat, what will we do? With A.I. Microsoft technology, the future – it‘s up to you. You can do...

Amazon Web Services is "still evaluating options" after the Department of Defense selected Microsoft for a $10 billion contract to move the agency's database to the cloud, according to a source close to the situation. "We're surprised about this conclusion," an AWS spokesperson said in a statement. "AWS is the clear leader in cloud computing, and a detailed assessment purely on the comparative offerings clearly lead to a different conclusion. We remain deeply committed to continuing to innovate for the new digital battlefield where security, efficiency, resiliency, and scalability of resources can be the difference between success and failure." This...

From California raging wildfires and fear of more wildfires causing Pacific Gas and Electric to warn that up to 850-thousand customers...... Protesters back on the streets of Iraq today with at least 40 reported dead.... The demonstrations continuing in Lebanon..... The streets of Bolivia's capital La Paz blocked today in protest at the election result..... Some one million people reported participating in a mass rally in Santiago, Chile...... A federal judge ruling late Friday that the Justice Department must hand over grand jury materials from the Robert Mueller investigation to the Democrat controlled House Judiciary Committee.... The news late Thursday...

Microsoft has emerged victorious in a dramatic competition for public cloud resources for the U.S. Defense Department, beating out market leader Amazon Web Services, the Pentagon said on Friday. The contract could be worth as much as $10 billion over a decade, according to a statement. Microsoft stock rose as much as 3% in extended trading after the announcement, and Amazon stock dipped less than 1% (Please see full article at the link)

MICROSOFT HAS HAD A MIXED MONTH in terms of market share, as we dive into the murky world of Netmarketshare's figures for September. Windows 10 is the big winner (as you'd hope). In terms of desktop/laptop users, it's now comfortably over the halfway line, with 52.38 per cent of the market (+1.39). With less than four months until it reaches end of life, Windows 7 still remains a major force, though it continues to drop. It now stands at 28.17 (-2.17). Lesser versions of Windows continue to chug along - Windows 8.x now stands at 4.1 per cent (-0.73) of...

Windows 10 could be better if only Microsoft got rid of its layers of made-men, according to a former Microsoft distinguished engineer. Tired of boring, buggy Windows 10 updates? You can blame them on Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella's failure to eliminate the company's legacy of appointing "made-men".

Power in the palm of your hand

Jeffrey Epstein, a powerful pedophile who got a pass from multiple justice systems, until his luck ran out, is dead. These are bits and pieces of a much bigger picture about the powerful relationships that he maintained with some very powerful people. We know that Epstein had a relationship with Bill Gates that was compelling enough to get the Microsoft kingpin to donate millions on his behalf. In October, 2014, the Media Lab received a two-million-dollar donation from Bill Gates; Ito wrote in an internal e-mail, “This is a $2M gift from Bill Gates directed by Jeffrey Epstein.” Cohen replied,...

So when I went to turn off my Windows7 machine last night, I got the warning not to turn it off because it was doing updates, so I left it going and went to sleep. In the morning, it took forever to start, but it did start. I looked at Dilbert and turned it off normally. Now I've come home and the startup didn't complete after ten minutes or so, so I turned it off and then turned it on again. The system suggested "Startup Repair" so I took that option and after a while, it asked if I wanted...

There’s no way I can write about the return of Flight Simulator without sharing just a little bit of my own story for context,... ... Like many of its predecessors, the new simulator models the entire planet, including something like 40,000 airports worldwide. I used to brag in presentations about FSX that we started with 2 terabytes of scenery data, and then compressed that to fit onto a couple of DVDs in a box. The world in the new version consists of 2 petabytes of data — yes, that’s one thousand times bigger. The scenery is built on Bing satellite...

Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a filing to the Supreme Court on Wednesday that the company disagrees with President Trump’s decision to terminate DACA, the Obama-era program that shields some immigrants without documentation from being deported. ″We are distressed at the prospect of ripping our DACA colleagues from the fabric of our company,” Cook and HR head Deidre O’Brien wrote in a friend-of-the-court brief. Apple said it employs 443 dreamers, or people that DACA protects from deportation. The Trump administration’s effort to undo DACA is part of a broader effort to restrict immigration, whether it’s through family separation at...

Newly unsealed court documents have revealed a secret legal battle between Microsoft and one of America’s leading prosecutors focused on chasing Chinese technology companies breaking U.S. law. U.S. attorney Alexander Solomon—who also happens to be the lead prosecutor on two criminal cases involving Huawei—just scored a big victory in that tussle, forcing Microsoft to keep quiet about a demand to hand over customer emails. That request was originally filed in August 2018 and was followed by a gag order. Both were kept secret until Wednesday, when it emerged Microsoft was told to hand over emails, text messages and voicemails belonging...

The rise of killer robots is now unstoppable and a new digital Geneva Convention is essential to protect the world from the growing threat they pose, according to the President of the world’s biggest technology company. In an interview with The Telegraph, Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, said the use of 'lethal autonomous weapon systems' poses a host of new ethical questions which need to be considered by governments as a matter of urgency. He said the rapidly advancing technology, in which flying, swimming or walking drones can be equipped with lethal weapons systems – missiles, bombs or guns –...

Microsoft says it'll offer free security updates through the 2020 election in the United States — and in other interested democratic countries with national elections next year — for federally certified voting systems running on soon-to-be-outdated Windows 7 software.

More Huawei defiance was aimed at U.S. President Trump on Sunday, but this time it was coming from much closer to home. Brad Smith, the President and Chief Legal Officer of America’s own Microsoft has criticized his government’s treatment of the Chinese tech giant—suggesting that the company’s U.S. supply chain restrictions should be revisited. In an interview, Smith suggests that the action taken against Huawei should be revisited, ensuring that anything done has a “sound basis in fact, logic, and the rule of law.” He has seen this first-hand, when Microsoft has itself engaged with the U.S. bodies enforcing the...

One step forward, er, one step back. Nobody gets too far like that Microsoft's build 18362.356 (KB4515384​​​​​) for its Windows 10 May 2019 Update (version 1903) rolled out on Tuesday with security improvements for Internet Explorer, Microsoft Edge, networking tech and input devices – and a CPU usage fix that, for some, has broken desktop search.The security tweaks address a variety of speculative execution side-channel vulnerabilities known as microarchitecture data sampling (MDS) for 32-bit x86 versions of Windows. Intel dealt with the CVEs at issue – CVE-2019-11091, CVE-2018-12126, CVE-2018-12127, CVE-2018-12130 – in May.The update, released concurrently with Build 17763.737 for...

Help! I have a three week old HP laptop that was working beautifully until the Microsoft update on 27 August 2019. Since then my browser tabs have been crashing repeatedly throughout every session, and periodically, the computer crashes too. I'm a simple user with just enough savvy to post here and build simple websites. I don't have the skills to sort this out, and need some help, please. I've already tried doing a system restore to an earlier date, but the computer keeps crashing before it completes. I've run CCleaner and Malwarebytes too many times to count. I've sent countless...

An interesting new angle has emerged in the Jeffrey Epstein case. In August, the New York Times offered the following tidbit from Epstein. Mr. Epstein then meandered into a discussion of other prominent names in technology circles. He said people in Silicon Valley had a reputation for being geeky workaholics, but that was far from the truth: They were hedonistic and regular users of recreational drugs. He said he’d witnessed prominent tech figures taking drugs and arranging for sex (Mr. Epstein stressed that he never drank or used drugs of any kind). Back then, the Times was looking into Epstein's...

Some Insiders are more equal than others (sorry, Release Preview) Microsoft has attempted to clear the murky waters of its Windows Insider programme by stowing its virtual coin toss for those on the Slow Ring.Build 18362.10019 of Windows 10 went out last night to those keen to get their mitts on 19H2, the version expected to drop at some point this month.Unlike previous releases, Microsoft has turned on the new features for all Insiders.The previous arrangement had some users running build 18362.10014 with the new toys turned off while all the good little Insiders on build 18362.10015 had their stockings...