Pardons are forgiveness for guilt. He is guilty of nothing. Betraying a criminal conspiracy to violate our own laws and subvert the open process of their deliberation and public oversight is hardly a crime. If anything it is the people he exposed who should be recieving pardons if they are to be allowed to continue to walk free.

I am far more concerned with the administrations dangerous decision to lie to the public and cover up clear evidence of its own wrongdoing.

For the binaries groups? Obsessive gotta-collect-all-the-media pirates, mostly.

My ISP doesn't have their own netnews server anymore. At first they farmed it out to a third party but still included the service, but then they dropped it entirely.

I've been looking around for a service that suits my needs, I don't need/want binaries and I don't want to have to pay whatever month to something like Giganews to help bankroll the piracy for everyone else.

You CAN post YouTube comments using the old pre google+ identity. You have to manually switch it to the old identity in settings. See that little icon with your name attached on the upper right of the YouTube main page? Click it and you can tell it to use the old identity. Every once in a while in the past they'd switch it back but they haven't done it in a while.

But we shouldn't have had to do that.

Microsoft IS worse than Sony, always has been. Some divisions of Sony might have a "minor" in evil, but Microsoft has a Double-major in evil, a Minor in evil and is professional chair throwing extend embrace extinguish brand evil.

So PC centric developers are holding games hostage as well, right?

You don't pay less, you "spend" less, there's a difference. PC gaming is some Ian in the UK or Ivan in Russia spending all his quid or rubles on a PC, and then pirating all his stuff instead of paying less for hardware and then having money for games.

Or you have the guys playing nothing but one map in something like CS/LoL over and over and over and then BRAGGING that they don't buy games.

And then some people wondering why the PC release of multi-platform releases is an afterthought.

Here, let me give you an anecdote, do you know how Gaijin the developers of war thunder finish funding that game's development? They did a console game that was basically a pre-test of War Thunder:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

They openly said that without that game, there would have been no War Thunder.

That's right you do, but it leads to:

Mods exist because BRICers and Second Worlders are too cheap to buy games. Gamers who play nothing but free mods are why the PC is an afterthought. Sure there may be a few patches as well, but mods are the favorite of gamers who care more about free-as-in-beer than anything else.

Servers are a continuing expense that cost money to run don't they? PC gamers pay for WoW or EVE subscriptions, right? So they're idiots too because all games should have free multiplayer? PS+ isn't just multiplayer, there are other benefits as well, besides, it's less than one game a year. $49.95. Yeah yeah, spend $$$ on an overpriced video card but $49.95 a year is too much to help pay for server costs.

What interface is that? Who gets to say an interface is wrong? Isn't choice of UI a good thing? Some people might prefer a certain UI some might prefer something different. After all there are mods that change the UI in PC games, isn't there? And if it's controls that you're actually referring to, who says I can't use different controls?

I don't do that, only idiot shooter and sports game only dudebro gamers do that.

While I wouldn't say that Windows is an OS for stupid people. I do think that just because one can game on a badly designed general purpose OS like Windows...doesn't mean one should.

I am more concerned about this development of what appear to be nonsensical computer generated response comments.

Exactly. What is the difference between an automated system and one with a human at the helm when you can just replace the human with impunity if he decides he doesn't want to help you anymore?

Its not like some criminal gang where a defector could mean consequences. A defector from the drone murder program is just....replaced. Even if 100% of pilots became disgusted with the job and refused within a year.... it wouldn't even slow them down, it would just increase their training costs.

Right now, there effectively is no difference between the existing drone program and automated kill bots. The problem is what people want to do and are allowed to get away with. As long as they can murder with impunity, the methods which they use are unimportant.

I just don't see the point. These will be developed, and no amount of banning them will stop it or even slow it down.

The thing is...they can put whatever restrictions they want, and you can then either put up with it, or go to court over it, spend lots of money on lawyers. If you win, all you get is to exercise your rights, either way you pay out the big money; out of pocket.

Then, should you want another event, expect to be denied or offered the same terms and to AGAIN need to go to court over it, and pay out big bucks to win again.

Mass Cann here in Boston had this problem year after year. The city would deny their permit, they would sue, they would win, next year, same thing.

So effectively, there is a massive unapproved tax on events the city officials don't like.

That's one of the reasons I don't use sudo on internet facing machines or have a KVM exposed to the internet, but that's another story.
To sum up I just have the opinion that one step root access from out on the internet is an accident waiting to happen - especially if you are likely to log on from anywhere and not a known trusted address.

Make a good policy, no passwords, only keys, and every employee has one.

And that laptop thief that is going to get an employees machine eventually is going to have one click access to root on your server - now that's a major fuckup isn't it?

However if an employee has to do "sudo" all the time, they just start turning their brain off while doing it.

I prefer "su" so as to keep things entirely separate although others swear by "sudo" for user tracking - either way if they can't keep track of context they should lay off the drugs.

Only about 3% of what other countries call "nuclear waste" gets turned into actual waste. The rest is converted back into more fuel.

Clearly a major error which I addressed and you embraced as propaganda with a disgusting little goalpost shift trick. If you want to be taken seriously I suggest less deliberate dishonesty.

Usually the problem is something like, "it isn't giving me the newest driver" or simply the poor quality of the drivers in the first place. (For awhile there, if I clicked on the start button, it would cause my screen to reset!) And a lot of "your driver stopped responding so we turned it off, then back on again."

In some ways, I like that the drivers are being pushed to me automatically, but at the same time, if I'm doing multiple reinstalls in a single day, I've already downloaded the drivers... I don't need them to be downloaded YET AGAIN, every install...

Sure there's a reason. Gaming without Microsoft/Windows, at least if you go Sony or Nintendo. There's also the console exclusive games that have never had a PC release. And the consoles are designed specifically for gaming, you don't have to worry about AVG or whatever deciding it wants to run a scan when you're playing, you don't have to worry about the OS monitoring a print spooler, and all the other things Windows does that isn't gaming.

Console gaming is gaming without the hassle.

Besides, PC gamers only "think" they are the master race. PC gamers are actually the cheapskate piracy lovin bourgeois scum of gaming. Filthy PC gamers right there at the bottom with phone gamers and those filthy dudebro console gamers who only play shooters and sports games

You didn't get far in reading my post above - "That thief with a stolen laptop can't use a key to get full access remotely" was mentioned, but maybe I should add another. The tiny amount of extra effort required by disabling root logins covers a lot of possibilities. I've gained access to a former workplace as much as three years after leaving by running the wrong old script - whoops! That human intervention of cancelling accounts depends on things like those HR people talking to IT people (Eloi vs Moorlocks in some places). Having a procedure that does not have an unreliable person as a vital part of the chain is a better idea than the latter - or in more diplomatic terms keeping it simple with one less thing to go wrong.

Next step, laugh at the 'hackers' wasting all that effort trying to guess the root password

Logs get full of such attempts even when root is not able to login. Once it gets tedious you can install sshgaurd or similar to block them and not be bothered by so many of such fruitless attempts clogging up the logs.

Now that's nice - blaming me for your deliberate misleading shift of the goalposts.
Politeness is wasted on "ends justifies the means" extremists like you that just see it as weakness.