Indeed. Concentration camps soon to follow. Oh, wait...

You are doing this wrong. This is not about friends of the government that may have done the one or other evil thing. It is about all the people the government does not like.

You are naive. There are maybe something like 20-30 active terrorists in the world. They could not be a threat to the US if they tried really hard. This is about mechanisms to mark "undesirables" and make their life miserable in order to keep all the sheep in line.

It is the logic of totalitarianism and it has nothing to do with "protecting Americans" (not that that is somehow inherently more desirable than, say, protecting Europeans). It has everything to do with creating and maintaining a vast, diffuse threat from "the outside" to keep the population quiet and in fear and behind their leaders. This is a very old tactics, perfected in the 3rd Reich. The Nazis also documented this approach well, and what has been going on in the US for more than a decade now is straight from their playbooks.

I do not think it is "groupthink". IT showed up some years ago and it has (had) US business hours. A discussion would take off reasonably, moderations were reasonably, but then, at the start of the US work-day, suddenly everything changed with postings down-modded from 5 to -1 in a short time, trollish comments, sometimes straight out of a psyops manual, and the like. They have gotten more subtle, but my guess is this is commercial, paid-for "opinion" manipulation.

Where I live the power and water company is required by law to give me a paper bill and payments are universally bank transfers. Also, if they have instructions for their customers, they must come on paper. As to payment, not the whole world is backwards as the US. I used a paper check the last time about 12 years ago (because some US organization paid me money that way), but otherwise paper checks have been out of use for about 25 years here and banks have stopped issuing them. Electronic interbank-transfers are so cheap ( 1 cent per) that you usually do not pay for them at all.

Firefox's strength was always a large library of plugins, never it's User Interface.

Arguably Firefox's User Experience has degraded, as it is not as configurable as before.

I do not watch videos done by the power company or the water company.

And that is a different story discussed in a different place. This discussion here is about zero-days in Tails, not about TOR vulnerabilities.

"Smartphones are for work, for life. They're not toys, they're tools."

Eh, if that were strictly the case, the market would be a lot different. Smartphones are a lot of things: tool, toy, fashion, entertainment.

Well the DRM isn't actually a useful feature, but having a player that supports BD-J, when BD-J is used for some kinds of DRM, is useful insofar as it lets you view the DRM'd discs.

If the question is whether BD-J being part of Blu Ray has added any useful features to Blu Ray, then I think the answer is no.

American engineering tends to use US-customary units. Scientific research mostly uses metric, but engineering uses mostly US-customary, somewhat varying by field (e.g. medical devices tend to use metric).

Interestingly it's so ingrained into a lot of aspects of North American production that even Canada, which has switched to using metric for engineering, has a lot of parts specified in a way that obviously refers to customary units, with things strangely coming in multiples of 25.4mm, 0.454kg, and the like.

Indeed. The text is a nice, manipulative propaganda piece. While I don't know women in the game industry, I know several female engineers, in EE, CS and some other fields. Some of them are very attractive, some are more plain. (I don't mind either way, conversation is far more important than looks.) Now, from their comments, there is no specific discrimination against women in tech. Some think there may be a slight bias either way, but not anything significant. Of course, incompetent women get yelled at and derided just the same as incompetent men, but they though that was rightfully deserved. And the one thing that they universally find quite repulsive is women playing the "women card" to get ahead instead of demonstrating solid skills. Most of them have observed that happening.

My conclusion is that this is nothing but a part of an ongoing power-grab effort by styling women as victims and men as primitive cave-men.

They just send data to some server they own in clear and they know your last public IP. For spywork, that is enough. If laws are draconian enough, they are also sure to find _something_ when they kick down your door. Also, when you are not on US ground (warning: current state, this may change), they may also just drone-murder you and bypass any legality whatsoever.

There are some things you can do even when second-rate, just by throwing resources at the problem. They may also have _bought_ these exploits form people that are not second-rate.