...it's

The obvious answer is to simply disconnect regions that impose internet-breaking restrictions. If a region believes the rest of the world is responsible for parenting their dumb children, and in particular they're willing to sue when someone else fails to live down to the standards they think their little sheltered idiots need to engage the world and that they're too incompetent to provision themselves, then merely politely tell them their entire region is insufficiently sophisticated to interact and pull their plug.

We really need a FOSS maintained "Gilead regions" IP block list, v4 and v6, for independent operators and national ISPs and DNS providers engaged to banlist those regions from interacting with the an internet that doesn't work for them. They have every right to decide for themselves, but not for anyone else.

FreeBSD powers my personal infrastructure and has for decades. It is easy to use, not bloated (too badly, though you now have to take steps to keep that damn Wayland out of a server, WTF, but you can with /etc/make.conf). Having eventually made the shift to Poudriere, the package and code management is very good. Fixes for maintained packages are an overnight thing, but some of the major upstream dependencies have the same level of responsiveness as in Linux - better than any commercial software, but not as good as pure FreeBSD.

Moving from SVN to git kinda sucked, but now it works well enough and gets the job done and keeps the Linux heads happy.

whut?

Time out, it kinda got ahead of us, everyone needs a break. Just unplug the whole internet and let NIST catch up. It's not safe to be connected without a current CVE database.

Yes!

We must build an absolute monopoly on inventions which is permanent and heritable even if by so doing retard the progress of science and the useful arts. Without legislative protection, innovation would be like fire, expansible over all space, without lessening their density in any point; and like the air in which we breathe, move, and have our physical being, incapable of confinement, or exclusive appropriation. Society must give a permanent exclusive right to the profits arising from them, lest they be denied by their nature the status of property.

Email is, by far, the best communications modality yet devised. I have never heard a remotely coherent argument against it but am inundated with endless marketing invective and paid articles decrying it and extolling the virtues of yet another short lived, idiotic alternative, inevitably proprietary and VC funded still in the burning OPM stage.

It is a transparently disingenuous hype machine desperately intent to lock up commercial ownership of private communications.

Don't breathe that crappy free air, try our UltraChat brand premium air! All the hip kids have switched, they all hate free air and get so much more done on UltraChat! If you were actually cool you'd already be breathing UltraChat Air, boomer. And your first 10,000 breaths are free*!!!

* $8/month after the first 10k up to 5 Gbreaths, contact your corporate sales executive to continue breathing after 5G.

Don't wait for your contact to "expire"

No seriously, you'll die. Pay up.

What makes a good text coms system:
Global interoperability
portability
adherence to open standards
Reliability
store & forward
Local storage and background sync
fast, indexed search
save draft and resume later
structured formatting
Organizational mechanisms like folders
centralized directory

What has all that and more? email. always has, always will. Chat is for children trying to hook up and well-suited to that level of complexity, but nothing more. I don't get how any company or team can be so flabbergastingly idiotic as to willingly cede control of their core intelligence to strategically misaligned scammers trying to lock it up for profit.

If you want a chat interface with the features of an email backend, try delta-chat. I'm not entirely happy with their PGP protocol, but there is some slow progress: https://support.delta.chat/t/a...

And redmine. I mean updating anything is a horror show, but redmine.

Companies suffering should band together and fund a FOSS tool that meets their needs. Or just set feature bounties for projects that are a near fit. Those fees would fund an awful lot of really great development by talented people and create a lasting legacy.

Talk to me about IOPS -- Input/Output operations Per Second -- or don't pretend you're talking to me about performance.

Not saying this isn't actually really exciting, but that's the metric in at least 90% of use cases.

I use a livescribe pretty regularly: I have one in my pocket right now. While I agree the form factor of the pens is suboptimal, as are the cartridges, it does the job for me. I've only lost one so far to overzealous inspection at an airport as a spy device because it has audio recording capability. In theory that one might come back, but the office it is stored in is only open a few hours a day, a few days a week at the airport and the release documents have two names on them and... long story.

Anyway, while I appreciate the OP's interest in a fully digital format and read through hoping to find something super cool I hadn't run across yet, the drift in the conversation to pre-digital technologies mirrors my own adoption of the livescribe pen. The books you fill out don't crash and are immediately re-viewable and sunlight readable. The pens are robust and while the cartridges run out of ink far too quickly and without any real warning, it isn't a meaningful cost burden to keep a few spares around.

The form factor of the pen and small note book is time-proven and convenient if you're moving around. It is unobtrusive in meetings, works well in the field, and you can easily have a hand or two free without catastrophic gravitational consequences.

Having a digital copy of my notes is organizationally helpful, even if my writing is not sufficiently legible for useful distribution. The accurate time stamps let me do things like post-correlate a digital picture with the notes unambiguously or a GPS coordinate or any other time stamped media. Occasionally I use the audio recording capability to integrate time-stamped conversational notes when I don't have time to write them all down, just noting a word or two here and there as I can to provide a visual/temporal reference in the converted media.

I am most pleased with myself when I can make a quick sketch on paper and email it out in a few seconds. I have occasionally considered a pen-enhanced phablet as an increasing drift toward virtualization, but that would lose the archival paper copy, the tangible organization of the pages and books, and would be far more fragile and prone to being out of juice when I need it. The pen wakes up in about 3 seconds and even if I haven't charged it in a month, is ready to work - and if the battery is dead, I still take perfectly usable notes I can later digitize by writing over them if I really need to.

For me it solves a few requirements:

• 
  * Archival (fairly, the notebooks aren't acid free or anything),
  * Reliable (works even if the battery is dead, though the small cartridges undermine this a bit,)
  * Durable (my pen has been in some atypically demanding environments like direct sunlight in measured ambient temperatures of 57C and kept working fine even when digital camera and phone couldn't take pictures because they were too hot,)
  * Time stamped entries,
  * Digital distribution/record keeping is painless,
  * Handles sketches well,
  * Can correlate to other digital media via time stamp metadata fairly automatically,
  * Fully cloudless local operation so you don't have to trust a company full of people you've never met.

But....

• 
  * I don't use the handwriting recognition tool. It is kind of cool, but not accurate enough with my crappy writing to be worth the cost,
  * I would prefer a more pen-like pen,
  * I wish the notebook software could recognize some simple glyphs so certain notes could be automatically extracted or highlighted (I'm thinking "to do" and "important" etc marks),
  * It'd be awesome if it took standard Fisher cartridges.

World's largest *unclassified* tunnel boring machine.

My sense is that the MEAN Stack (Mongo, Express, AngularJS, Node) is sort of winning. There's some packaging of it over at mean.io.

Personally, I'm really getting interested in Meteor (www.meteor.com). Watch the videos, and realize I saw a smart non-coder go from zero to *ridiculously* interactive site design in three months.

Paying for extra emission reduction would put you at a competitive disadvantage against power plants who just did the bare minimum. Or, in a highly regulated environment, it might run you afoul of price controls.