> How is climate change killing rainforest trees? Most trees actually thrive in warmer climates, unless exposed to severe drought.

Well, i'm not an expert and mostly don't know the answer to this question, but i suppose that there are several ways in which climate change can substantially change the environment around you which is both detrimental to humans and the local fauna and flora.
For instance it can increase the occurrence of severe weather conditions such as tornados, extreme raining, extreme drought, flooding, etc. Increasing the temperature can change the conditions for certain plants to develop (or not develop) and this can determine the death (or spread) of whole species, humans included.

Cutting a large number of trees, in particular, can make the whole area more subject to avalanches, floods and make it harder for the local fauna to find places where to live, hunt, etc.

Unfortunately most of these changes have a domino effect that can be hard to foresee but can easily go outside our ability to do anything about it in a very short time.
The problem though is not "we should not hurt nature"... nature doesn't have a will, nor feelings... you can't hurt nature in any way shape or form. Even if we detonated all our nuclear weapons all around the world... the world would still survive for the next billion years as it did with past, plant-scale disasters that were much worse than anything we can do.

The problem is that these changes can easily be our end and the end for many species who depend on specific climate conditions to survive. Even if we like to think to be the dominant species and be above the rules of the physical world... we really aren't. We are actually quite fragile and any change can have a domino effect that will end up killing us all sooner or later or making our life (especially the life of our children) a nightmare. Besides, destroying the place where we are born, where we grew up, where we live... is not something any human wishes (unless he is severely mentally ill) and does willingly.

So perhaps this is just a matter of education. If you don't know/understand that what you are doing is stupid/dangerous/deadly... then you see no reason to change what your are doing. Teach your children the importance of taking care for the living creatures and plants around you, and they will be far more respectful when they grow up.

> then what's the point of it all?

Why should there be a point?
We all wish to have a meaning, but so far i saw no proof or even hint in that direction.
Nature simply doesn't care, and it doesn't care because it isn't capable of thinking, it is just a set of rules (physical, chemical and nuclear) that are applied "as is", without any regard to their consequences.
But since we are capable of thinking we anthropomorphize everything, from animals to plants to nature and universe itself because we, apparently, find it hard to believe that there is really no point at all in our existence (or in the existence of the universe for that matter).

The more we find out about how the universe were we exist works and the more we begin to realize that not only we are not at the center of the universe, but we are completely irrelevant, and perhaps existence itself is irrelevant too. The sheer immensity of the universe tells us that we are completely irrelevant, we are not even ants on someone's garden... we are far less than this.

No matter what you do, you will die one day, this is pretty much the only thing we know for sure, and the people around you will die too. In a matter of a bunch of years no one will even remember you existed, no one will know how you spent your life, which experiences you lived through, who you loved or hated, what was important to you, what fights you fought at great expenses for yourself... and no one will care either.

Perhaps one day a kid will take a look at an old picture of you and wonder "who the hell is this guy?" and then realize that you lived your whole life, you did things, you met people, you loved someone and then one day you died... but all that information is now lost and the only proof you ever existed is that un-named pictured... and the kid will realize that one day this will be his fate as well... or at least this is what happened to me when, as a kid, many many years ago, i looked at some black and white family pictures of people that, perhaps, were my long-dead relatives... and i didn't know anything about them. I didn't know how long they lived, i didn't know what was important to them, i didn't know what they did for a living, i didn't know who was important to them, heck, i didn't even know their name. Those rotting pictures were the only proof that they even existed and i figured out that no matter what i do, no matter how much i care for something or someone... it will all be gone one day, once and for all. Even my lineage will be gone one day. Perhaps in a few years after my death, perhaps in a few centuries, perhaps in a few millennials... but one day no one will know anything about me and most likely there will not even be any physical evidence i existed, not even a file on someone's old computer.

So what's the point? But the next obvious question is "why should there be a point?" There is no guarantee that there actually is a point. We are so proud of ourselves, so "full of ourselves", so arrogant, that we actually believe that certainly there MUST be a point. But if you look at it from a more humble perspective you understand that there is no reason there should be a point at all, that nature/the universe owns you nothing. You exist, and it is up to you to decide what's your point, or you can decide that you have no point at all.

So, what's my point? Well, i could never find a meaningful reason for my existence, so i decided that since i have no idea if there is a point (and most likely there isn't) then i would try to spend an happy life, together with he people i like and love, doing the things i enjoy... and who cares if it is all useless. My life and the life of the people i love is my reason for living. It makes me happy, and that's enough, that is sufficient to me.

Every machine that we use regularly has some issues with time, require maintenance, etc. Why should it be different here?
The money your are spending on them is not wasted, it is literally necessary to save our own existence and style of life...

That's false.
Sargon of Akkad for instance never called for violence, he didn't even use mean words that leftists usually find intolerable, yet he got to the point where he couldn't even get money from his supporters because Patreon didn't like what he said.
And guess what, when he moved from Patreon to SubscribeStar (i believe that's the name) Patron together with PayPal managed to bully SubscribeStar too removing their way to collect money from supporters of thousands of other creators...

So yes, it is censorship.

> Afraid of a little light nudity

Yes, as most americans are. This fear of nudity (and porn too) comes straight from the puritan superstition that had a massive influence in the US and, more generally, in english speaking countries (UK included). So this has not much to do about Facebook, but a lot to do about the damages the superstition does to your civilization and country as a whole. Superstition is cancer, and should be treated like you treat cancer. It should be detected and slowly eradicated from everywhere it shows its ugly head. No exceptions. But to do so you should not use violence or force, you should use reason and arguments in a way to show that superstitious people are just silly children who never grew out of their primordial fears. I used to believe in Santa too when i was a small child, then i grew up.

> vague, under-defined abstractions like freedom & free speech

I don't agree with this. You should be allowed to say, write and depict (photos included) whatever you like, and i should be allowed to fiercely criticize it.
Who is trying to "define" what freedom of speech means is simply trying to justify censorship in a shape or another. I'm an adult, and i don't need other adults to decide what i should or should not listen, hear or watch and certaintly i should not have other adults stopping me from comunicating my ideas to others, even when such ideas are disgusting. Other humans should simply have no right to limit my freedom to exchange ideas in any shape or form, even when this offends the feelings of someone else, be it the last superstitious idiot or the president of my country. Safe spaces are a way to keep persons from growing up and develop critical thinking (a process that is frequently very painful), they do not exist to help them, but to caghe them and keep them under control.

So, i should be allowed to even willingly spread misinformation, but you should be allowed to publicly laugh at me and tell everyone how stupid i am to believe in such things (and of course explain why).

> Facebook's a symptom, not cause.

That's right. The fact that there are many idiots who believe that the earth is flat or that vaccines are poison is not because of Facebook... it is because of a school system that is simply not working. The first thing the school should teach is to think rationally and critically, the second thing is to give you the tools (science education mostly) that allows you to do exactly that.

I already pay my ISP the amount of money they are asking for the bandwidth i have.
What i do with it is none of their business.

ISPs are greedy assholes who want to be paid 2 or more times for the same service.
If you sold me a 100Mbps bandwidth for one month with an unlimited number of terabytes, and I'm paying for it the exact amount of money you are asking, then don't complain if i happen to actually use it.

This is wishful thinking.

Humans are not machines, no matter how much attention you pay while you work on something, you will end up making mistakes sometime even if you strictly adhere to best practices, industry standards and have a deep knowledge of both the language you are using and the framework around your software.

And consider that most people who does a job (any job) don't usually give two fucks about your product, all they care is being paid at the end of the month (and rightly so) so don't expect high quality software anyways.

> That's only a horrible risk if you consider exposing the source code of your system a bad thing.

And it usually is, as thousands of hacks of open source software prove pretty much every day.

The idea that if the source is available it makes it safer is a fallacy, because yes, many more eyes can look into it and find bugs, but the people that will actually bother to take a look is mostly people with bad intentions, because they can make huge profits from it, not people who has nothing to gain from it... and certainly they will not share with the original developers their findings.

So, for every bug that is reported in open source software you can safely assume that 10 times that amount are bugs who are NOT reported and that silently wait to be exploited the moment it hurts the most for someone who happens to use that software.

Like it or not, finding bugs in closed source software is far harder since you do not have the source code to study and it takes some very skilled guys to do it without the source code, exactly as it is much harder to repair a PCB board without the schematics than a PCB board with freely available schematics.

I'm confused by your confusion.

Are you saying that rich people should just work for free because they are rich?
I guess it is exactly the opposite, rich people are rich because they don't work for free...

Is it really surprising that someone is actually wanting to pay someone else to take care of a cause that apparently matters to them?

You might not like Trump, but he is being the front man for millions of other persons who want him to win at the next elections because they have similar ideas/goals.

Besides... can you tell me the name of a recent american president who was not filthy rich? Didn't they seek money from their supporters too to run their campaigns and their propaganda? Or is it "confusing" only when Trump does it?

Some users are idiots and will never learn, but bugs in software, even serious ones, are unavoidable, so you will always have this kind of issue where someone finds a zero day and uses it to steal, lock or destroy your data. This can happen to everyone.

What users (and system administrators) need to learn is to make offline backups as frequently as possible. Yes, perhaps you will lose some data, but not enough to justify paying a ransom to have it back, because most of it is safe in your offline backup anyways.

Automatic cloud storage can also help with this (see OneDrive for instance who automatically backs up users documents), unfortunately most of these services think it is their duty to become the mommy, or the police, of their own users and see nothing wrong regularly violating the privacy of million of users both manually and/or automatically, this of course pushes people away from their services, no one likes the idea of having a mommy who takes a peek at their data from time to time to see if it is acceptable for their terms of service (or even legal).

That is what happens when

1) you use services that employ algorithms intended to treat you as a child your whole life and don't see anything wrong with it, hence encouraging this behavior who spreads like wildfire on the internet

2) you are so polite that you will happily give up some words of your vocabulary, self censoring yourself and others, to protect the stupid feelings of some retarded niggher-faggot who can't accept jokes and insults because he/she is still a dumb child at 40

Perhaps the problem is not the availability of guns in America, but a specific ethnic group that, even if it is a small minority, manages to commit the majority of violent crimes. Perhaps you should ban that instead than trying to ban people from owning stuff.

Perhaps it is because I'm european and i consider privacy a serious issue, but that's the minimum requirement i expect if i trust someone with my data.

It should be pretty obvious to anyone offering space "on the cloud" that the only way their business model has a chance to work is to not threat their users as little children who need to be protected for their own sake.

Is it so odd to ask that MY data remains mine and private? I don't think so. I believe this is a quite basic request, something that anyone who offers private space online should easily grasp, and certainly something i require if I'm going to entrust my data to third parties.

The fact that my data is stored somewhere online instead then somewhere on a disk offline on my desk's drawer doest change my expectation of privacy, nor should it.

It is actually very simple... are you in the business of offering private space on the cloud, if yes... then it is PRIVATE, no exceptions.

Only the stupid ones, the ones that don't get there concept of "my stuff is none of your business". This kind of shit is why people don't trust cloud services (and rightly so). I don't want my tools to spy on my or decide what kind of data I'm allowed to own. My tools have to work for me, not against me, it doesn't matter if i use them for legal or even illegal purposes.

The problem is actually far simpler. What i store on my disks, be them offline or online, is not something i want Microsoft, or anyone else for this matter, to investigate, block or delete. It is my stuff, it can be legal or illegal, but it is still my private stuff and it belongs to me.

Until cloud companies decide if they want to be the police of the world or a freaking company offering disk space to their users they will simply be seen as unreliable spies. Don't look at my data, not manually not automatically, it is not yours. It is as simple as that.