This XKCD needs updating... or does Allo have so few users it doesn't even register on the radar?

That's a matter of opinion and there are several levels of prostitution, from street walking to brothels to high end escorts. It is possible to have a positive client/provider relationship where both parties are equally happy with the arrangement.

I know it's difficult to establish who is doing it out of their free will and who is being coerced beyond a reasonable level (arguably we're almost all "coerced" to work by the need to feed and house ourselves), but there are sex workers who have made a rational choice and are happy with it.

I think that's about right, sadly.

Future historians may look on the last few hundred years in the same way as the first Greek/Mycenaean civilisation prior to the Greek dark ages, or Rome prior to the fall of the empire.

There have been blips before. They never last. We're just unlucky that we're living through the end of one and can remember the high water mark.

Dostoyevsky also wrote Crime and Punishment, which is also appropriate.

I found War and Peace a long but relatively easy read (I also enjoyed Anna Karenina). I've found other books harder going and hence longer reads - I find Thomas Hardy hard going, and I've attempted (and failed) to read Ulysses (Joyce)

I don't know if this is a common UK thing - and possibly age related as younger people here mostly use celcius - but I think of low temperatures in celcius and high temperatures in fahrenheit.

So for me, 0 is freezing, negative numbers are really cold (-5C to -6C is about as low as I've seen it get here), 0 - 10 is varying degrees of chilly - all in celcius.

I still think of hot as 80s and 90s though, and if someone tells me it's 30C I do the mental conversion to fahrenheit to get a sense of just how hot that is.

The difference between wrongly balanced braces and whitespace is that whitespace is invisible. You're literally trying to debug an invisible error - it's indented to the same level, but with a single tab instead of spaces.

Maybe I'm using the wrong editor, but I get annoyed at the number of times it seems to forget that I'm using spaces to indent and adds a tab, throwing off the code. I have to keep running the "convert tabs to spaces" function on it before I save.

OK, I'm an occasional Python programmer, so maybe it annoys me more than someone working with it all day every day. It's just a mental gear shift and annoyance that I could do without compared with every other language I currently use. There's a lot I like about Python, but the whitespace thing is a pain in the arse.

Agree. Code should not fail to run because of programmer errors that are not visible in the text editor - i.e. a stray tab instead of spaces.

It's also a nightmare copying code snippets, especially from the web - you might as well retype them by the time you've fixed the tab vs. space issues.

People outside of the geek bubble don't care about peer to peer. Mostly they don't care about encryption either (although WhatsApp does have end to end encryption). They care about what their friends use. Whatsapp has a critical mass. I use it because of the people I want to talk to, not because of its technical qualities.

And at least it's not Facebook Messenger... although it still surprises me that FB haven't eliminated it to have a single messaging platform to support, given that they own WhatsApp.

I'm also not sure how you'd manage to get peer to peer working on mobile - what with battery considerations and lack of permanent connectivity.

I don't know about you, but I can't stand that music with rocks in.

I hate that aspect of it. I hate the fact that someone with better bargaining skills than me could get exactly the same product for less money. Sadly, here in the UK, dealers are the norm. There is a direct sales showroom for one manufacturer fairly close to me, but they only sell for MSRP - and even I could get 10% off that at a dealer.

I wonder if I could argue that haggling on price discriminates against the less socially capable..!?

Yep. I did a month long road trip with a mate of mine in the mid 90s. Flew into the east coast, picked up a hire car, drove to the west. We didn't even have accommodation planned for the first night - just got in the car and drove until we found a motel.

As I understand it now, you need to know your entire itinerary in advance.

Apparently it's now a software option to swap them from Samsung's version to the Android standard, so yes.

Unfortunately they put the fingerprint scanner right next to the camera lens on the back. Great idea if you want all your photos to be soft focus through the fingerprint smudges...

Sorry, short forum posts don't lend themselves to nuances - I meant fair game for people knowing. If you choose to make it public you do so aware of how society might react (regardless of the wrongs and rights of the reaction), but in this case it sounds like he was "outed" against his will.

OK, I see what you're saying, particularly when it comes to lifestyle subs and doms.

Obviously it's different who enjoy the role play of a dom/sub relationship without it necessarily defining how they behave outside of that relationship.

Yeah, I got what you meant, I was agreeing. It seems to be the personality type that makes them dominants makes them act that way to everyone, which makes them arseholes to everyone except the subs who actively seek out that kind of behaviour.