Same issue in may other major cities that over-gentrify. You can't expect the people that actually do the work to commute ever-increasing distances, so you end up either having to support disproportionate salaries in the region, or you get surrounding ghettos for people that no better option available to them.

... that the wrong message is getting across, you need to double your efforts to get the *right* message across, not try and silence/ridicule the critics. Working to silence/sensor people that you haven't convinced just legitimacies their side of the argument and causes more people to doubt your intentions. You either have a choice to take a vaccine, or you don't... It doesn't look good when the government says you have a choice, except when it comes to information/opinions about your choices. Stupid people will always continue to make stupid choices. There's no way around that. Taking an authoritarian stance on information/influence just breeds distrust and reluctance. If people are out there making crap up about risks and such, then the government needs to be providing people access to the information on those platforms so individuals to make their own educated choices. Every time they threaten block someone from a platform, or delay/withhold/hide information for any reason when called out to provide it, it erodes any trust they hope to build. When people cannot find answers to their questions from the official sources, they start looking for answers from unofficial ones. "We don't know, but trust us, it's nothing to be worried about" simply isn't good enough.

... from Nineteen Eighty-Four.

This is why I don't even bother with positive reviews / ratings. I go straight to negative reviews. Real people generally only post when they have a problem and many people will post negatively due to unreasonable expectations. I read what the complainers have to say and whether there seems to be any basis/consistency across the complaints and whether anything i deem a concern is raised and make my decision based on that. It's like the nonsense on looking at EBay seller ratings. Do I go with the seller with 99.6% or 99.7%?? It's all gamed when money is at stake.

I get paid for what I produce, not how many hours I warm a seat. I write code and assemble software. I don't work on a production line where my work can be measured by a quantity per hour or identified fault rate. At the end of the sprint or month, my employer assesses whether the progress made justifies my cost. I would write far, far worse software if I was concerned in any way about KPIs like lines typed per hour. That said, some days I spend maybe 2 hours actually writing code, other days I spend 6+ when I'm in a zone.

XKCD was not wrong. What makes a password secure is the length of the password, not so much the characters within it. When your system *allows* the use of special characters, is case sensitive, allows numbers, and allows a maximum length of 200+, with a reasonable minimum length requirement then it is about as secure as it's going to be. Forcing particular patterns means people will use predictable combinations, and end up creating hard copies of their passwords. In this day and age with 2-factor authentication, and the fact that passwords are authenticated server side, requiring "secure" passwords is a complete joke. Every system should be logging failed attempts for review and temporarily / permanently locking accounts that fail password attempts after a limited number of tries. It doesn't matter if it's a brute force or dictionary attack, after 4 "guesses" the account is locked for 15 minutes, after 8 guesses it's locked for 30 minutes, after 16 guesses it's locked permanently. etc. Attackers can launch DoS style attacks by locking user accounts, but it's on the system admins to be monitoring and blocking attack routes. Password managers are no answer, they just serve as a honey pot for attacks, and are a single point of failure as the whole point of them is to generate completely illegible, long passwords that you don't need to remember. The minute you don't have access to your manager, you've locked yourself out of every other system. A system's weakest link is the person sitting in the chair, and no amount of password "security" is going to prevent that person from getting tricked into giving an attacker that's smarter than they are exactly what they need to gain access. The same goes for having devices remembering passwords for you. Now your sensitive system's access depends on the laughable security measures on your phone. (you know, the fancy facial ID or fingerprint that doesn't work reliably or can be fooled so you set up an easy backup override?)

To say math is an expression of "Truth" to the universe (i.e. the Language of God) is a falsehood. Pi can never be fully expressed in the limited base 10 number set that we've invented. As such, you can only ever get increasing close to ever truly expressing the actual circumference or area of a simple circle. (How a finite value can only be determined for a shape with corners??) That we write off elements that get us close enough but remain infinite as "irrational" about sums up what Mathematics is all about. Maths is a way of probing the limits of our own perception for things that fail to be fully explained or predicted/measured any other way. (Light/Photon, subatomic interactions, gravity, etc.) Stoned hippies spend days taking drugs and staring at their fingers. Mathematicians spend them making symbols up and staring at blackboards.

Tell me about it. Not that long ago I read an article where I believe a study in Germany was correlating Sociopathy/Psycopathy with a distinct lack of social media presence. I.e. Sociopaths could be identified effectively by shying away from social media. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. I get what software developers and the companies that fund them are trying to do, but it's like trying to establish a "Pre-crime" ruling on people, or enabling a social stigma ala Gataga. I live by a fairly simple code... If you treat someone as if they are a thief, don't be surprised if they start stealing from you. If you give corporations and individuals the tools and the right to discriminate against a group of people over fear of some trait they may or may not have, don't expect sympathy if they game the system and act out in the way you fear they might. And we criticize China for their social credit, big brother, and ethnic "re-education" programs. Different rationality, same stinking piles of poop.

You know the saying: "If you aren't paying for the product, you're the product being sold." Step 1: Offer service for free to build trust to weed out the viruses, Trojans, spyware, and ransomware. Step 2: Worm your services so deep as to manifest symptoms and problems. Act like a virus. Step 3: Embed other services and recommendations in the guise of something useful. Act like a Trojan. Step 4: Record browsing and general computer habits to on-sell to anyone willing to pay for it. Act like spyware. Step 5: Locate any competing malware or "services" to the above, identify them as threats, and offer to remove them, but only if you first upgrade to Premium. Act like ransomware. My bet is Step 5 will start as early as 2020. Happy New Years!

The phishing e-mails on my junk e-mail account inform me when my junk service passwords are compromised. I apparently also have uploaded a lot of indecent photos of myself, so I really should look into that.

Yeah, so Google is going to start rehashing and sending my passwords through to additional endpoints to inspect/compare whether or not my credentials might be compromised. Thanks, but no thanks. If Google wants to do something good for the state of the Internet it should get RID of "remember my password". This, along with Microsoft's "hide file extensions for known file types" have to be the biggest culprits to the spread of phishing and malware attacks. People will "remember their passwords" a lot better if they don't rely on their browsers and devices to do it for them. IMHO password services are nothing more than glorified honeypots. Good luck when one of those gets successfully hacked or taken down.

And this is why the U.S. and other "Western" nations will struggle in a prolonged conflict, whether in the Middle East, against Russia, or China. The US military has exceptional first-strike capability, however in a drawn out war stuff gets damaged and worn out. Being able to get machinery and equipment back out in the field fast is critical. If soldiers are relying on GPS, HUDs, computerized equipment, combat vehicles, etc. not being able to quickly service these will be detrimental in an extended conflict. I remember photos of ground crews walking down an airstrip to pick up rocks so an F35 doesn't take one in the intake. Su-29's can be outfitted with grills to take off from a gravel road. American equipment is already a glass cannon by comparison which is fine provided you have the skills, equipment, and permission to perform the necessary maintenance to keep that equipment in the field.

His comment was about the collection-fest that FPS games have devolved to with weapons that either fall into irrelevance, or differ from each other superficially. Personally I hated that aspect about games like Borderlands which were just a barrage of "special" or "common" drops with you constantly assessing and having to reassess DPS... Coupled by the nonsense of needing to be a certain "level" to be able to point a gun and pull a trigger. I believe his point was that in a FPS, every gun should serve a purpose and fill a role where some are better in certain situations, but you find a use for all of them. In Counterstrike you had to save round $$ to select from a relatively small assortment of guns. You could later collect skins for your favourites. I enjoyed the initial rarity of weapons and ammo in a game like DayZ, where a gun became a very valuable tool. Despite the game's numerous problems IMO they've detracted from it by continually adding in more and more millitary-grade weaponry. It's not that this type of gear doesn't have a place in the game, but it devolves into servers full of players hoarding guns and armour and stealing from each other when offline. It's about making the equipment in a game have meaning throughout the game, not restraining modding, level designs, etc. etc. etc.

S/he is one of them, obviously.

And I think this highlights the problem. For you, Pop!_OS "Just works" but you could ask another person and they'd swear by Redhat, or Ubuntu, or ... How many different distributions and front-ends are there anyways?! IMO this is the bugbear of OpenSource compared to proprietary. Limitless freedom, but slow/reluctant to consolidate. As a software dev I *hate* working in O/S environments like dealing with Javascript frameworks & .Net Core compared to .Net. Finding reliable, current information about a specific version, breaking changes, and the endless bickering of "ew, why would you use X when Y is so much better." At the end of the day I just want to write code that Builds and Runs, not chasing NPM incompatibilities and warnings that some group of geeks decided the patterns they, or the group before them originally came up weren't all that good, so they marked them UNSAFE_ or obsolete and giving me a mystery deadline to remove stuff that they bloody well recommended in the first place. For end users, they buy computers to "do stuff", they don't care what happens under the hood, but the minute they can't just visit a site/app store to get what they want, and worry about which combination of what is on their hardware, click, they switch off. It's not a case of "Pop!_OS Just Works", it's got to be "Linux Just Works". It has to be sell-able as a whole with an agreed standardized functionally complete core, but have the *optional* freedom to allow people that care about it to tinker, and have a community to help figure out their own problems with the compatibility of the bits they substitute.