This is something I've been fascinated by since I was exposed to it - if you look up "Dunbar's Number" or its more colloquial name, the "Monkeysphere", it talks about exactly this, that there is an upper limit to the number of individuals a single person can have meaningful relationships with. The number varies but the average appears to be around 150.
After that, people cease being people but are more like caricatures, like the people that make the garbage go away. We know they're there, they come to our homes frequently, but we know nothing about them and they have no impact on our daily lives. It doesn't make us hate them necessarily, but we don't know them to trust them.

I am not a sociologist in any way, but I have a feeling that religion was a way to expand this number to build bigger civilizations. It was a shortcut of 'I don't need to have a relationship with you, I just have to know you believe in the same general nexus of ideas that informs my identity, so I can trust you without knowing you.'

Related to the rest, one of my frequent observations is "Americans have largely forgotten how to disagree without being disagreeable".
Though there are a lot of pressures to continue fomenting discontent. Anger is an emotion that spreads much faster and broader than most other emotional information (CGP Grey has a very informative video video about this called 'This Video Will Make You Angry' and it's well-worth watching).
Anyone what wants to obtain or preserve a position of power finds that the levers of Fear and Anger are very potent and effective levers to pull.
To defuse that we need to be more cynical about the information we acquire and ingest (better bullshit detectors, to put it more colorfully), but that opposes the various forces that do not want us to question their authority or power, or don't want us to fight the impulse to buy today's New And Improved Widget.

Anyway! Those groups willing to discuss opposing ideas without being trolls about it can be found, I'm in a few of them, but they are needles in a haystack. And it only takes one individual that can mute the whole conversation when a topic comes up that sets them off. It can be challenging to accept that questioning an idea is not (necessarily) the same as attacking the person(s) that have the idea - especially when it's my ideas being questioned!
I realized I was still young that my opinions and beliefs are subject to change without notice, and that was a useful perspective for me to internalize, though I still get defensive in some situations despite knowing all of that and I have to tamp that down when it happens.

Finishing with another favorite quote of mine that I wish more people followed:
"The trick is to keep your identity separate from your opinions. They are objects in a box you carry with you, and should be easily replaceable if it turns out they're no good. If you think the opinions in the box are who you are, then you'll cling to them despite any evidence to the contrary. Bottom line: If you want to always be right, you must always be prepared to change your mind." --CGP Grey

Not being able to move the task bar is not a personal irritation but it's an unnecessary, annoying change.
However, further down in the article it says that "Unfortunately, another Windows 10 taskbar feature is sorely missed, which is the ability to uncombine open windows for the same program."
I'm surprised that isn't getting more attention. That would make my taskbar functionally unusable. I have too many breadcrumb windows open during the course of my day and nesting similar instances of a program all one one taskbar icon makes it incredibly difficult to tell at a glance what is where.
I'm going to be really annoyed if this isn't fixed (or a workaround available) by the time Win11 is forced on me through work.

My experience was very similar, except s/Windows 10/Windows 2000.

It wasn't until XP started including DRM as part of Media Player, and began degrading functions (like searching for files), and the whole Windows ME debacle that I finally understood why there wasn't a Windows Tech Edition. I was not their customer, and never would be.

I finally made it my New Year's Resolution in 2008 to cease using Windows and ended up switching to Gentoo Linux, and have been satisfied with that decision ever since. Sure, I missed out on a lot of gaming options, and Gentoo can be/is often a headache, but having a desktop that worked sanely in ways I either understood or could figure out was worth every trade. Gentoo made me understand how Linux worked better than any other distribution that simply got me up and running, with little knowledge of what it took under the hood to get there.

It is sad to me that it always seems to take another version of Windows to finally persuade folks to turn away. If I thought Windows XP was bad enough to make the switch....

Microsoft's marketing message may be that they're trying to change, but not in ways that are ever likely to re-earn my trust or confidence. I'll work with the platform if I have to in order to keep a job, but I will no longer give the company any more of my personal money, or use their platform for any purpose short of those for which I have no say.

The first family computer I can recall was a TI 99-4a, but I was perhaps five years old and I really only knew about the cartridge games. TI Invaders, Early Learning Fun, a racecar game, and maybe one or two others. My older brother using the ROM BASIC to prompt me to type in my name, and then to print my name over and over again was something I still remember feeling astonished about. Ahh, the days of 40 GOTO 20 loops...

My elementary school had TRS-80s, and I don't remember much except we played boring math games on them, and we were warned to never ever press the orange button.

Later on we upgraded to the Apple IIgs (after the school got a set of Apple IIe systems, no coincidence there), which was a beautiful little system for its time. We even had the color dot-matrix Imagewriter II printer, and we printed our own birthday and holiday cards, and even some family newsletters. I had a pretty decent set of software, and it got a lot of use. We were all very disappointed that the hardware line was discontinued not even a year after our investment, but it meant we were soon able to get a lot of discounted software that was pretty decent. Space Quest I & II, The Print Shop, The Newsroom, Silpheed, Kings Quest 3, Wings of Fury, Pinball/Adventure/Music Construction Set, Final Assault (there's an easter egg in there for a unique sound track I've never found on Youtube), so many others I'm forgetting....

The next family PC was a Packard Bell 386SX in the early 90s, my entry into the MS-DOS world and away from Apple. That's the time when I first used BBSes, then Prodigy, and eventually Internet access between that and the Pentium 133 we got several years later. They were always situated in the shared room, though once we got the Pentium system I was allowed to have the 386 in my bedroom. Not that I could really get up to much mischief; a 130MB hard drive 1MB of RAM, a hand-me-down 9600-baud modem, and its inability to even play MP3s severely curtailed what I could do on it. I remember the sales guy saying we'd never fill up 130MB. Took me about a year. That OS got trashed and rebuilt more times than I can count, but the original HD never failed until I was done with the desktop for good.

But its limited capabilities in no way prevented me from long nights spent MUCKing into my high school years, after I bought and paid for my own second phone line.... I wish we had kept the Apple IIgs in the family, though. Even now there are songs and sounds from games and such that I miss, and emulators don't do it justice to my memory.

I was looking for a comment like this, and I'm glad I wasn't disappointed!

It feels Dilbert-ish, really.
"But I just don’t buy the claim that it’s impossible." = "I will reject what you say to me until you say what I want to hear."

In the same way that technology doesn't respect copyright (how many copies did you make of this to see it on your screen?), it doesn't magically know when the law now states 'okay, because of a court ruling, I shall no longer do what I was designed to do.' It is a complex calculator, and it will give up its secrets to anyone that gives it the code.

So how about you try this master-backdoor trick with your own personal documents and finances, Mr. Wray? Does that make you feel warm and fuzzy? Or was that shiver you felt the deeper, unacknowledged realization of the limitations of mathematical reality?

Sorry, Wray. You are not Q, and you cannot make it so.

In general, the 'dark web' is parts of the Internet that can only be accessed if you configure your system in a particular way. Whether that's running a TOR browser, or joining as a Freenet node, or something like that. The content is (generally) still HTML-based code, so standard web browser engines are used. But just having the address to the site, or even the server's IP, won't provide the information. As a result, they also aren't indexed, and can be difficult to navigate.

There's another coined phrase of 'deep web', which are non-indexed websites that you may still be able to access if you are told of their addresses. These can still be reached with a standard browser and configuration. I might make it analogous to Youtube videos that are posted by their owners but marked 'Unlisted'.

Well, yes, voting for emotional reasons is equally valid. The outcome of emotional decisions may not be rational, but they're not invalid because of it.

Even if one votes against their personal welfare, isn't that an outcome they desire? Put another way: if I am a wealthy individual, and I vote for a way that will result in my wealth going away, then that is the outcome I want. An outcome that does not result in my wealth going away is then what I did not want.

This isn't about whether the outcome of a vote is positive or negative for a given voter. It is about understanding the consequences of the winner-take-all system that we have, and how it hamstrings third-party votes. As I stated in my original comment, third parties have and do win sometimes, but such events are rare.

There is nothing wrong at all with voting for a 3rd party. If enough people agree with that same 3rd party, they'll win, and that'll shake up the game. So it may also be considered a strategic choice. The Spoiler Effect is where a given majority of voters are concerned that their choice will not get enough support, and thus they will vote for the candidate they can stand a little more, guaranteeing that their ideal choice will not get enough support.

It reminds me a bit of playing the lottery: the given statement is 'if you buy a ticket you won't win; if you don't buy one you can't win.' Though some people do win. Similarly, 3rd parties can never win unless people do buck the Spoiler Effect and vote for them anyway.

The act of voting is in declaring one's preference, is it not? The outcome desired is one's voted preference. That doesn't seem arbitrary. Though this whole Brexit thing, where people voted for an outcome they apparently didn't want, is still sort of boggling.

It is absolutely true that voting for 3rd parties impacts politics. And as a voter, any individual is free to vote for whomever they want. Even before the general election, if the two parties see that a 3rd party candidate is picking up a voter base (Perot, Sanders, etc.), they'll often modify their course and try to pick up those independents. This is normal and good.

My statement as above could be simplified thus: One should consider their personal desires, and decide whether they would prefer to make a principled stand for the 3rd party of their actual preference, or a calculated stand to avoid the party they can stand the least from winning.

You can do all three of those things you mentioned, and much more effectively, by removing the spoiler effect. And this is a much more positive approach overall. It frees everyone from having to struggle with that internal dilemma, by allowing them to vote for the party or candidate they really do want, while still giving them a say in the matter if it turns out that the 3rd party never won enough votes to be a contestant.

I despair of either of the two main parties putting such a thing into play, though, since such a change would reduce their own political power.

I would like to agree with you, but I suggest you look up the phenomenon called the Spoiler Effect.

CGP Grey has very well-done 6.5-minute video about it here, which is also worth watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

In summary: A 3rd party candidate is statistically more likely to be closer in ideology to one of the two major parties.

If you have primary parties A and B, and C is the 3rd party, C is probably more like B than A (for this example). If you and I vote for C because we hate A and like C better than B, our votes didn't count for B. So instead of a vote being a 49% A and 51% B vote, it may well turn out 49% A, 41% B, and 10% C. Thus the party we least liked, A, is the winner.

As long as we have first-past-the-post, winner-take-all elections, it is one's rational self-interest to vote strategically against the party they least want to win, rather than for the party they most want to win. It took me some fifteen years to come to that realization, and it is still depressing. The only way C wins is if C can either pull enough votes from A and B, or draws all of B's votes. It could and has happened, but it's extraordinarily rare. Usually A or B will adopt the the strongest primary platform of C to keep those votes for themselves.

This is admittedly conspiracy-minded, so your mileage may vary, but I had a thought about this particular approach that I was reminded of by your post.

Let's say Apple does create the tool, and through some hypothetical (read: impossible) means they successfully avoid leaking it. What's to stop an organization like the NSA using their own techniques to break the phones, then hinting - if exposed - that they obtained the process from Apple in some backchannel way? There's really no practical way for Apple to prove a negative in this scenario.

As this is now a matter under public scrutiny, if Apple was forced to cave, the public would know it. So now any other organization with the skill to break the security of the phones, but doesn't want to reveal that they have that ability, have some pretty deep plausible deniability. It only works if Apple creates the tool, though.

Oh, I won't deny that. They're having the same app shortage with their mobile platform, too.

But Microsoft is good about not being realistic with some of their approaches. They saw the popularity of the iPod and iTunes and created the Zune, now defunct. They see Apple's app store and they want that money, too. Giving away Windows 10 for free allows them to set that foundation. Because not only is it free - as this very article states, they're actively trying to push it on everyone. That's rather novel behavior for them. We have to fight to not install this update. Apple's made OS X updates for free, but never with this kind of forced-upgrade pressure.

Microsoft's motivations always come down to money via market dominance. Given that Windows and Office are (generally speaking) their prime sources of income, when they decide to give away a full update of Windows for free... then there's another way they intend to recover that money. The app store, sparse though it may be right now, is the most reasonable conclusion I've been able to draw. After all, if their app store suddenly fills up with apps but the majority of their users are on Windows 7, that's a lot of lost sales.

Get the App store on everyone's system first, and that's a major obstacle overcome. Unlike the present vicious-circle failure of trying to push a new mobile ecosystem, there's a huge and entrenched Windows market already. Now they can promise app developers all of these extra eyeballs via Windows 10.

I actually have an idea about this. This is purely opinion, but I think it's all about Microsoft's App store.

Apple is making buckets of money from their App store. Microsoft sees this, concludes it is unacceptable, and wants to get that money for itself, or at least as much of it as possible.

Now, Windows 8 and 8.1 had the App store, but 8 - while perhaps not a marketing disaster like Vista - still doesn't sit well with people. Windows 7 is well-liked, but there's no App store. Therefore: Upgrade everyone to Windows 10 for free, and wait for money to start rolling in via app purchases, in-menu advertisements, and other benefits. Maybe they can even sell telemetry data to marketing firms, depending on how much they wash it and how close they want to toe a legal line about turning over such information to third parties.

I've yet to hear any better explanation.

Personal anecdote:

I live about three miles from my local airport, and I have learned that while taxi drivers will take me home from there, they outright refuse (using silent neglect) to pick me up. I called not one but two different taxi services, the first one with over an hour's notice, and neither one could get a taxi to me. The dispatcher apologized, but that was all they could do. I ended up driving to the airport myself in a rush and paying for multiple-day airport parking instead. Subsequent occasions faired no better, and I eventually stopped trying.

Regardless of how one thinks they should work, evidence so far suggests that you're only guaranteed service once you're actually sitting in the taxi.

One of my greatest sticking points has been Quickbooks. There are several little office shops I've helped that would be just fine using Linux for nearly everything else - Thunderbird, Firefox, and a few other odds and ends cover their general needs.

Except Quickbooks. Gnucash is just not a suitable alternative for their business accounts. I can get the Quickbooks database to run on Linux (with difficulty, sometimes), but the GUI must be not-Linux.

That'd be my vote.

It certainly helps if you don't care to get the domain back!

If someone is watching a given domain to pounce it as soon as it expires, there's really nothing to be done aside from not allowing it to expire. But the proxy company could potentially do so as a matter of automation, since they already have the domain on file along with other information about it. So while you may ordinarily have a grace period of a few days before anyone notices - purely by chance, of course - you might not have it in this case.

Anyway, the question wasn't really meant to have an answer as such, because - as you pretty much point out - the answer is 'yes, they totally can, as can anyone else'. It's more an advisory phrasing of 'if you use a proxy domain service, be aware that this is something they could legally do, as they already know you and the value of the domain to you'.