Linus just talks like a sailor.

Arrh, I dun think so me shiverin' matey!

With the same right you reserve for you the right to pollute people's memory long-term with your opinion.

There's a major difference: if you don't want to read my opinion, you're free not to. Advertisement is ubiquitous and inescapable. You can't opt out. Therefore it's brainwashing.

Also, if you read what I write, it won't stay with you for the next 40 years. Ads on the other hand are carefully crafted to act as memes that grab onto your mind and won't let go.

a way to make targeted ads acceptable to users

That's like trying to come up with a way to make waterboarding more enjoyable...

Advertising, be it on television, newspapers, the internet or roadsign billboards, feels like mind rape to me.

I'm middle-aged and I remember more ads from my youth than stuff I learned at school. Ads for products that don't even exist anymore, but I can't get rid of the stupid ads in my head. Why do advertisers give themselves the right to pollute people's memory long-term with their shit?

Back in the days, Google was still seen as a benevolent company that innovated for the sake of innovation - and not to sell your data to the highest biddest and monetize your entire life, as everybody now knows. Yet I didn't want a Gmail account.

Why? Because at the beginning, Gmail was invite-only. And that my friends is a classic sales tactic to generate a false impression of privilege, the desire to be allowed in, and when a vendor has to rely on such tactics to drive up sales, something doesn't smell right.

That was my first hint that Google's interest wasn't the user'.

I suspect a lot of diagnoses concern borderline cases, that would previously not have been counted as verified autism - so before, people would be classified as "odd" or "geeky" but not as someone who carries a mental disability.

The same thing happened with depression. In the old days, depression was virtually unheard of, aside from extreme cases of people constantly trying to take their own lives. Nowadays, everybody and their dog gets depressed at some point during the year, and prescribed medicine.

kills the virus as well...

Well written software that works so well you don't want to update are few and far between. It's not even laziness by the developers, it's just that all pieces of software have flaws, however hard the developers try to produce quality code. That's just the nature of software.

If you have such a piece of software, well... don't update.

127.0.0.1

Hack away my friend...

Bullshit - or selective memory.

Back in the days, you bought a bunch of floppies, installed the software, and then spent years putting up with a lot of annoying bugs that required buying the next version of the software if you wanted to get rid of them. If they had fixed them, maybe.

Updating is great: if you have a slightly shitty piece of software, you stand a fair chance of getting corrections for free. The only annoying thing is when something that works great stops working great because the developer had a brainwave and decided to come up with Something Even Greater[tm] that turns out to suck. But then, you get that for free too, while before, again, you had to pay for the next version of the software to discover the sucky new feature that replaced the useful one.

I'm reassured.

Tell that to the poor sods in Gitmo still awaiting trial - or charges, for that matter.

Didn't our current Glorious Leader promise to close down that shame of a concentration camp years ago, incidentally?

So, 8 years for one person to be taken off the no-fly list. At this rate, ,by around 1,000,000 AD give or take, all innocent citizens denied their basic constitutional right to travel freely without trial will finally be allowed to board an airplane. Good news!

Infinite energy.

Genius...

What does he think he's going to achieve with that? More people will get smarter on the internet and in the end, his state's ability to spy on its own citizens will suffer.

The interface between the parts is made very thin (or left void to reduce clinging together during the actual printing), and you break it by hand after printing.