Much of the problem could be fixed if the police simply learned not to do what the computer tells them, and think it through first.

I think you're asking a lot from PC Plod. Thinking, that is.

You don't use LO because an unaffiliated third party wrote a plugin you don't like?

That's completely fucking insane.

I don't think Google has any intention or desire to kill F-droid

I think it's very likely to get caught in the crossfire. I don't think f-droid is big enough that anyone except engineers at google even know about its existence let alone care.

But damnit I care!

Don't get me wrong, I don't think google leadership is non-evil or altruistic, but I don't think F-droid is on their radar at all. I do get that tying something to a real-world ID and money is harder to scale, much harder and malware is a pretty low margin business.

Bottom line, I don't think F-Droid is at risk,

I think it is, effectively. When giants fight, the ants get crushed underfoot. The problem is that developers working for no money don't want to spend $25 and do a bunch of admin for the privilege.

This is a really interesting comment, thanks!

While I doubt the motivations of the people at the top, I too have spent some time in big tech (not google) and bloody hell the sheer inventiveness of people trying to fuck with it for evil is never ending.

And there's literally nothing people won't do to make ill gotten gains.

My personal experience

Not a gamer myself these days, but yeah cheaters suck. It basically destroys that entire segment of products. Google's customers don't want cheating, the game makers don't want cheating and so on. And it also applies to all sorts of security things. For better or worse most people cannot manage their own security, certainly not when there's a multibillion dollar industry of some of the world's leading experts arrayed against them to try and steal their stuff. And most people do in fact need to get on with their life day to day, like with banking, payments and so on.

I'm still going to be really pissed off if google do successfully kill F-droid though.

Because the parent(s) have their $100k+ office job and have to continue working when they get home.

The median salary is $51,000, with the median household income being $84,000.

The kid is coddled by society because 'we can't punish kids anymore because that's child abuse',

People need 2 jobs to make rent, and tech companies are profiting massively by relentlessly pushing massively addictive device behaviour and your solution is to start beating kids to see if it helps.

Next you'll be telling me that GIF isn't pronounced like "whiff".

I'm on a Q820 from 17 years ago at home.

Still runs fine, still had more RAM and disc than a number of new laptops which is a bit sad.

I remember the nimbus!

My school had a network of discless machines.

They could also boot into BBC mode with a reasonably good BBCBasic interpreter and RM mode as xxx well.

They were pretty good in their niche, really though the Archi was a fool 32 bit very fast RISC computer that knocked the competition into a cocked hat. Struggled on a bit but then vanquished into the embedded space until a few years ago.

1941 to 1990

You mean 1939?

Oh yeah wait a mo America only "came to its allies aid" after being attacked. That my man is not being a reliable ally, that's being purely self interested.

US hasn't been a reliable ally to anyone sans maybe Israel in decades.

When has the US been a reliable ally?

Parents no longer parent and expect the schools to teach their unruly and coddled child.

cool.

Why?

The computers sat in a lab, and the kids would interact with them a couple times a week in a structured (instructed) setting.

Good grief no!

All the value I got was in the non structured settings where you could fart around on the computers without interference from teachers who by and large didn't know much about computers at all. Of course there was no internet at that point so that was mostly programing. I always did best in the least heavily structured subjects.

I do not know why Americans hate nuance so much but it's pretty deeply ingrained in our culture.

Puritanism.

Murder a bunch of toddlers? Murder is a sin and you're going to hell.

Steal a loaf of bread to feed you starving kid? Stealing is a sin and you're going to hell.

The end result's the same and equally bad either way, regardless of the sin. This strips away all nuance. If you're good you go to heaven, if you sin you go to hell.

Are you human? Please complete the following captcha:

What's 0.1 + 0.2.

If the answer is 0.30000000001 then you failed.

Seriously, it's a pretty common metaphor. People don't literally mean the physical objects known as screens are bad per-se. It's what's on the majority of them in the hands of kids the majority of the time. It's much easier to say "screens" as opposed to specifying particular kinds of social media, and particular genres of short form videos and etc. Because we both know that if people didn't be 100% fully precise then you'd be complaining that forums are technically social media and some of those are fine etc etc.

A nerd might say "well akshually it's what's on the screen" whereas most people know what's meant by the phrase.

People don't use pedantically precise language all the time, fully caveated and cited as if they are having a particularly obnoxious internet debate. People use slang, jargon, shorthand, metaphor and simile in order to communicate.

Iâ(TM)m betting during the boom of the gold rush there wasnâ(TM)t any pickaxe vendor lagging behind in sales. Not even the biggest ones.

It isn't. They are doing very, very well with stock nearly doubling in a year. That's mad crazy levels of growth. But they're doing incredibly well from a solid base. Intel spent a decade fucking up so they're a long way down which means they have higher to climb.