To the kids out there. This is a great time to be alive. You can build anything, learn anything, and talk to anyone. Do cool stuff. Learn everything. There are no limits and powerful hardware is cheap. Look around at how lucky you are to be alive right now. It is an amazing time!

Don't lie to the kids. There are limits. But it doesn't make the gist of your sentiment less worth noting. There is indeed a vast space of interesting things to do within those limits. The basic limit, beyond the less talked about ones, is that you need to somehow provide for yourself and get along in society. However aside from that, with your spare time, a raspberry pi and and a cheap hdtv and keyboard, you can do some pretty amazing things. Add a few things purchased relatively inexpensively from adafruit and amazon, and you can really do some pretty amazing things. It may be a ton of work, you may not cash in on it, but it doesn't take tens of thousands of dollars and a CS degree from a place with expensive big buildings. What was locked away from the masses of past generations in expensive ivory towers can now be burned on a dvd super cheap.

Trump is unfortunate. Keep your head down kids, the shit is going to get thick here for a few years.

That sounds like my rationalization for not giving any real consideration during the campaign to the contingency of Trump winning. Oops.

I'd call it common sense to keep better tabs on visitors/new immigrants from such regions,

Your comment clearly willfully neglects the issues surrounding religious persecution and rivalry that is at the heart of this. I'd accuse you of being naive, but I doubt that is accurate.

Equal Protection Under The Law. Nice concept.

Also, it's ridiculous to expect authorities to track down half a million victims and help them clean up their computers.

How about for a start posting a list of IP addresses, or possibly more nuanced evidential trace information, to a global database that anyone can check if they like? The early adopter power users might load the simple app that facilitates ensuring that they can at least pull such minimal notification if they are interested. That doesn't sound infeasible to me, though I invite comments explaining what is wrong with my theoretical reasonable solution.

Until I hear a much better story about why the authorities can get away with knowing computers are compromised with unauthorized accessors, while not notifying the owners so that they can remedy the situation including optionally exercising their right to prosecute the offender... Well, I'll assume something slightly less than fully above board policy is going on.

It seems to me that if the efforts were made to get the hacked victims notified, more effective and appropriate market pressures would travel upstream to the relevant insufficiently supported device manufacturers.

The same way a VPN is secure generally? What you mean perhaps is- How is any VPN guaranteed to be reliable across national borders utilizing publicly available commercial infrastructure network interconnections even against a cooperating international community opposed to it? And the answer is that no such guarantee was ever implied or presumed by anyone who gave it much thought.

Thanks. I wasn't very aware of that history, nor the wikipedia snippet I'll post below when I made the comment, but I feel somewhat vindicated even though someone downmodded my already karmatically unenhanced comment. Jerk.

CyanogenMod grew in popularity, and a community of developers, called the CyanogenMod Team (and informally "Team Douche"[17])

So yes, I'll double down on my original comment that naming your product after a poison, or your development team after a term with sexist and/or derogatory connotations, might have clearly displayed an intent to repel a majority of potential users instead of attract them. What a disservice those branding choices did for the wider public's general ability to obtain viable alternatives to the open source android mobile phone OS.

And can we please get a name that doesn't sound like a well known poison associated with spies? Going with refined sugar based confections for branding does seem like a smarter tactic, sigh...

you're the one guilty of distortion, and really, simply trolling.

Bullshit. What part of "Trump is horrible. No doubt about that." did you not factor into your understanding of my position?

I'll reiterate and further clarify two points I was trying to make-

1) The Khan family may have been defamed, however if so it was subsequent to a very(*highest level*) overt provocation. As it happens, I agree with most of how you chose to portray the issue. If the Khan family had succeeded in preventing Trump from being the president-elect, and believed that their behavior had helped achieve that, I'd f'n love them for it. And think Trump got what he deserved. Unfortunately, we live in a different universe.

2) The media narrative on Trump seems IMO to have not included as much as I think is deserved, my other point that

But the way he wins is to be provocative and get poorly thought out overinflammatory responses from his political opponents to his provocations.

In other words "provocation and trolling- Trump gets it.". I think this is something everyone on the planet needs to get a generally better understanding of ASAP. I am very, very worried about the transition and coming years. I don't like what I think I see as far as the popular narratives of Trump misunderstanding what kind of player he is. Being misunderstood I think is how he has accumulated so much dangerous power.

... utilizing Free and Open Source Software ...

In case this happens to be a sly attempt to muddle the public's long term memory of the relationship between PRISM (not Prisma) and Facebook. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PRISM_%28surveillance_program%29

The documents identified several technology companies as participants in the PRISM program, including Microsoft in 2007, Yahoo! in 2008, Google in 2009, Facebook in 2009, Paltalk in 2009, YouTube in 2010, AOL in 2011, Skype in 2011 and Apple in 2012.[23]

Second class citizenry. What could possibly go wrong. If only that was the basis of Trump's illegal immigration stance.

I hope for your sake that was a troll. Alcohol is great as a disinfectant. In moderation for many people it is a great stress reliever and social lubricant. Hammers are great at building houses. Just because hammers can also be accidentally dropped on a foot or used as a murder weapon doesn't mean... I'm sure you catch my drift.

FYI- if you've ever experimented with burning either tobacco or cannabis, you really ought to try a modern vape. Just as alcohol's benefit to the field of medicine has been enhanced by synergistic advances, so too have the benefits of cannabis with the modern synergistic advances in paraphrenalia.

+1, keep up the good work using your brain regardless of how much bloodflow was required. Part of the pattern here is "non-normality implies negative results". Just because something is different doesn't necessarily mean it is bad. Especially when, as @limaxray pointed out- you can verify the false theory by simply looking outside and realizing the sky isn't in the process of falling (except when it literally is, not that that matters)

A) Pot research has a history of being biased

I nominate this for understatement of they year/decade/century/millenia (no offence to the other nominees)