Presumably not all purchased at once, likely not all by the same person, how many places sell SIM cards in NYC? At that scale likely pretend to (or actually) run a few different chains of corner stores and be doing a hopping business with all the drug dealers who live nearby or whatever...

It's not a leak because the SS put out a literal press release that the news articles all quoted from. https://www.secretservice.gov/...

It's not necessarily collusion. NYT has printed dumber crap, and that's coming from someone who even still has a subscription (mostly for the crossword admittedly). Hanlon's razor.

"And we encourage developers to add a hard dependency on systemd to use it, and we require anyone who wants to use any part of systemd (or the many things with a dependency on it) to use it."

Why, in my day, we had to whistle no faster than 299 baud! And it was uphill both ways!

It may just be my extreme inexperience, but then that's because I'm 15.
I trained myself to program when i was 12. I had been doing HTML fairly (and by fairly, I mean quite well) by 9 or 10 years.
And did I mention I've run Linux on my laptop that I bought myself a year ago since about a month after I bought it? (Suse, Fedora, CentOS, and Ubuntu have all been used for at least a month. I've experimented with Slackware too.) I taught myself Linux with no help from my parents; my dad designs chips for IBM, but knows little about the software side of things. And I mean _very_ little.
And I've run IRCd's since 12. Not to mention running a VPS (that, once again, I pay for *by myself*, albeit with a weekly allowance from dad as he won't allow me to get a job yet) for a year now. I've had around 5 satisfied customers most of the time since I turned it into a hosting company about 3 months ago. Now, no, it is NOT all my work paying off -- I didn't find the customers; my older friends did. But keeping them satisfied? Yes, that is all my work. I'm the sole admin of the "company" (well, the sole not-in-training admin).
And don't forget administering a dedi for an online friend for about half a year before that.

Guess what I think helped me to be able to teach myself how to program -- the fact that I've had a computer to be on since I was 5!
My reasons:
* I'm curious about computers in general because (to give one of many reasons) I've been around them from an age when most people are curious
* I've been curious around computers for so long!
* and I have had time to experiment with computers for so long (in particular, modern software/OS's).

Now, don't get me wrong -- I'm not saying that I'm infallible, or that it necesarily "qualifies me to have an opinion on IT." I'm saying that a lot of people in their 20's ARE qualified to have those opinions, because they have been around computers for a long time, and thus have had more time to tinker with them while more curious than most adults -- and yes, I believe that children are more curious than adults.

Most people DON'T simply think it is just because they've had a PC or Mac. If they do, I agree with you -- they are dumb as shit.

By the way, just because you didn't grow up in a datacenter, you only grew up with computers throughout most of school and home life, doesn't mean as much as you made it out to. They really, really, are not so different that growing up with computers helps you none. They are both based around computers. /rant. :)