So... that makes it... ok?

In my country the person whose phone has been wiretapped gets to know about it after the wiretapping is over. Of course they don't get to know about it when they are monitored, as it defeats the purpose. Not all people agree on whether it's acceptable at all, but that's not the argument here. When you're actively monitoring someone's calls, mail, text messages or emails, social media and messengers you obviously don't want the "monitoree" to know about being monitored. However once you're done, the person should be informed.

And when you're not actively monitoring someone's communication but are accessing his cloud accounts, etc. the comparison should be to search warrant on your house and confiscation of your stuff - again even if you're not there at the time of search, you will be informed about it.

You want to make sure search warrants are not given too lightly, and you need to make sure these "gag orders" are only used when such measures are justified. From the numbers it seems that these gag orders are just rubber stamped as if they are the default - that shouldn't be the case. I also suspect the warrants themselves are being given on way too flimsy grounds... I'd love to see some numbers of how many of these warrants actually lead to arrest.

Your comment seems to ignore the point completely, as if you hadn't even read the beginning of the summary:

Crypto is also a word on its own. But you're right about "encrypt" being the correct term here. Using "crypto" as short for crypto-currency or as substitute to verb "encrypt" are both just kind of "internet slang" - nothing wrong with that IMHO, as long as your message gets across :)

Yes, people probably like it to be simple - totally featureless then again, nope. Features that don't make it any harder or more confusing to use, there's no justification of not providing any. Any decent OS needs to include some sort of text-file editor, and we're not living in the 80's - the days when you could get away with shipping an OS that bundled EDLIN as only text-editor (and it wasn't like you could just go to internet and download one) are far gone.

I find it ridiculous that people are actually defending Microsoft for bundling the most featureless text editor with their OS. For not putting effort to ensure that the essential applications are professionally designed.

When Win95 came, I kept using MS-DOS Editor, because it was so much better - a 16-bit DOS application originally introduced in MS-DOS 5.0 beat their brand new and shiny 32-bit Windows application. In fact it seems that many improvements to it were made, some that I wasn't even aware of. I could have sworn I used EDIT to work with multiple files at once in DOS 5, but now that I read Wikipedia page of MS-DOS Editor it says that multiple files (up to 9) support was added to Windows 95/MS-DOS 7 only, not for MS-DOS 5&6. Not certain about that, but it may have been that because it was otherwise better than Notepad that I kept using it with Win95 and only under it found the multiple files capability. Apparently the W95 version also supported splitting the screen and showing more than one file at time - this I wasn't even aware. It seems that it was improved from earlier version, while the text editor they wrote for Windows as Win32 application was lousy even in comparison to MS-DOS Editor's earlier versions :D

It's laughable. And to defend is laughable. It's their choice of course and of course as long as customers are completely willing to smile while taking it up their bums - while paying for it - this is what happens: you end up with crap and you need to download a 3rd party application just for a frigging basic text editor - because notepad is not just only a basic text editor, it's subpar to basic text editor.

Why people don't demand professional quality from their OS is beyond me. A text-editor is much more of an essential part of any end-user OS than a basic image editor. It doesn't have to be the best god damned editor there is (besides, beginners don't really like Emacs nor Vim - they are not "beginner friendly"), but it should at least be good.

MS Paint was actually introduced in Windows 95 - Windows 3.x bundled with Windows version of Zsoft's Paintbrush, dubbed as "Microsoft Paintbrush" (but with credits for the code to Zsoft). I remember so well how disappointed I was when I first saw MS Paint in '95 - before I actually used to work with Paintbrush sometimes, but MS Paint was really close to useless for me. Of course it's changed since that, but originally Paint felt like a downgrade :D

I see them often mentioned as a same product, but MS Paint was not the same program as Paintbrush; or if it was, I don't understand what happened to it when they changed the name.

From the link:

LOL, no it didn't >:D There were so much better Pinball games already, it was like some PD game from early 90's as far as how it felt and how much detail and gameplay features had been put to it.

P.S. I don't mean this as response to commenter, just as comment on the link :) It made me chuckle.

Windows 3.0 didn't have Paint (nor Wordpad, or what it was called - it had Write, I think). It had PaintBrush. I don't know if there's any connection between it and older ZSoft PaintBrush for DOS, but I've always somehow assumed there was.
I remember when we got a new 75Mhz Pentium system in '95 and I was trying it out thinking what a let down and a downgrade this Paint thing is :D It really was, although I'm sure it's gotten far beyond the ol' PaintBrush by this date. Haven't really used it since W95.

Couldn't have said that any better (or even half as well, I doubt).

On a related note, why do people get excited that ads might be tailored to them? Would they rather the same number of ads, but with random ads?

I would. I do.

As for me, I learned many years ago that the secret to happiness is to ignore ALL ads. Amazing how little it matters if they target ads to my interests if I ignore the ads anyways....

Because nothing bad ever happened with data collected for profiling&tracking? Yeah it matters to me. But then I don't get to see most of the ad's anyway (I have disabled ad blocking here though, but I still have tracking&profiling and 3rd party scripts blocked. Easy to ignore them indeed.

I think I might have a signature about the latter part of your sentence :o ...yeah, there it is :D

It's called empathy. Yeah, it's kinda hilarious, in a dark humour manner, but it's also sad. Their choice to ignore stupid religious reasoning was justified, yet they died because stupid people made religion out of finding some animals may not be good for you, instead of just telling people it might make you sick and even kill you. I've never heard of this happening with pork though, but who knows back then? They didn't deserve to die because they used reason over religion - and the knowledge could have been written in some less stupid way. Why would you assume it made any sense to not eat pork, when the only reason told to you is "god doesn't like it"? Tragic.

Agreed. I have nothing to add right now :)

Why, because he isn't all religious about it?

That would explain why we are also so hell bent of preventing certain countries from ever getting any kind of nuclear power.

Also it's not like nuclear power has no negative environmental effects - yeah, generating power doesn't create emissions like burning coal and oil does, but that's only part of it. It would be better for climate though, but what gets rarely mentioned in these discussions is the pollution to local environment from mining uranium, and it's not pretty.

There's also the unsolved issue of long time storage of nuclear waste. Nevertheless, these problems do pale in comparison to threat from climate change, let's just say that if the choice is between oil/coal vs. nuclear, I would choose nuclear any day, but it's a temporary solution at the best.