No problem using cash here in the UK. In fact I know of one cafe in east london than ONLY accepts cash. Yeah, probably a tax dodge but even so, your card or phone is no use there.

Someone will have to explain the point of apple pay and whatever the google equivalent is. You spend all the time setting it up just to duplicate the functionality of the contactless bank card you already had. Ummmm... why?? Just use the bank card! Not only frankly is it easier to use a card than faff around getting a phones NFC and/or a QR code on the screen to work with a reader, but it makes your phone a horrendous single point of failure if you lose it.

"It has no such mechanism"

It doesn't need such a mechanism - the app is perfectly capable of iterating through /proc/asound itself and it can get USB device notifications from udev. Yes a faff, but frankly it could have all been dumped in a library to take care of instead of some resource heavy, bug ridden daemon.

The argument against SMS is way overblown. For it to work an attacker would not only have to gain access to your account details but also spoof your phone on the phone network. Possible? Yes, likely? Unless a nation state is after you - no.

And many people still don't use a smartphone - good luck getting an auth app running on a nokia 6310 and having one running on the same machine as you're logging in to you account on isn't smart.

"These are userspace problems to solve."

These are application problems to solve. The application thats playing the sound/music/whatever needs to be told which sound device to use. This isn't rocket science - how do you think this stuff worked back in the day even before pulseaudio came along? Fine, if someone wants to create a gateway process that apps just connect to and it marshals everything for them then fine, but its hardly a must have.

I think you're a bit confused. Alsa is the OS interface between the user process and the sound devices. Alsa accepts PCM and sends it to the device. I suggest you read this page as your knowledge appears to be high level hearsay:

https://www.alsa-project.org/a...

I've programmed Alsa in C many times so I do have a clue what I'm talking about.

And vice versa I forgot to add above.

The bluetooth driver is not the sound system. The headset dumps a load of compressed sound data into a buffer which the bluetooth subsystem will have to convert to PCM and then that subsystem feeds it to Alsa.

"ALSA out of the box only allows one program to access a sound card at the time. "

Not sure where you got that idea from, I've never had an issue with a number of my sound processes all working at the same time.

"There is no way to dynamically add something like a bluetooth headset and have it automatically appear to applications"

Why would that be the concern of the sound system? Its up to the driver/OS to do that linking.

Lets not worry about the psychological effect of being "born" in a spaceship with no parents and being expected to colonise some planet no one has ever visited. Yes, I can see perfectly well adjusted individuals coming out the other end.

Go back to your sci fi books mate.

I'm not even american you utter plank and I don't give a toss about maga but DEI is all over europe too now.

Oh dear, you're conflating different things. Yes, I believe DEI is just a way to get incompetents into positions they don't have the skills for simply because they're black/gay/[whatever] just to box tick quotas and prevent people who do have the skills from getting the role, but I don't care about the politics of the people who wrote/designed/built the stuff I use daily otherwise there's a ton of stuff I wouldn't use.

"Leave me the fuck out of your whining."

So you're losing the argument and run off. Standard issue lefty behaviour. You're nothing if not a cliche.

Sounds like this Overstreet guy suffers from a bad case of it. But then its fairly common amongst the supposed "L337" in tech IME. Yes they're smart , but they think they're a genius and can't deal very well with people which may or may not be aspergers related though plenty of people who are bad with others are neurotypical but just utter dicks.

"The bad programmer apologizes and fixes it. The good one plays the blame game and even may throw in a tantrum. "

ITYM the other way around because thats been my experience. Good programmers know their limits and will admit to cocking things up. Incompentents blame other people for their failings as in other areas of life.

If either of the 2 explanations were correct surely this would be a rather common phenomenon given the number of old dead satellites from the 60s and 70s that must be up there?