Just speaking as someone in the field, you would be surprised at how many IT decisions happen the way they do because nobody wants to be the one who gets called when an ornery geriatric complains that LibreOffice doesn’t have the ‘mail merge’ button in the right place.
The old saying goes, “nobody ever got fired for buying Cisco.”
I would consider it a privilege to live long enough to see the EU invest in and adopt FOSS software as a matter of national security.
Like all things FOSS & Libre, when a place as large as Europe benefits from the investment, so too do all of us benefit in kind.
It is the natural order of things; programmers love to program so much that they will do it for free, independent of any profit motive. We only see programmers charging money for their work because you basically need to sell something to survive in our Bootstrappist hellscape. Improving material conditions wouldn’t just make life better for everyone, it would also result in better, newer software, delivered faster.
Wendy Kerby is off limits!
Doesn’t matter. I was a bike messenger for 5 years. We all carried our U-Locks, some carried crowbars, batons, pistols, bear mace, stun guns… None of that matters when someone in a 2 ton death missile can basically light you out from behind faster than you can react.
The problem is and forever will be drivers.
Something something of the deed
I buy things that are a one-time purchase sometimes entirely because I was given the option.
“y’know, they call 'em fingers, but I never see them ‘fing.’ Oh, wait, there they go.”
Reporters are just common workers like you and me, except, they have a ridiculously dangerous job that was so important that it was considered by Thomas Jefferson as the “fourth estate.” The idea behind “democracy dies in darkness” was one born from class struggle, and I think we should see the removal of that slogan in that context.
I chose not to have kids not because I didn’t ask to be born, but because I am fully aware that I do not have what it takes to be a good parent. I have major issues with sensory overload, and little kids are basically little perfect generators for unpredictable noise and smells.
If I had conceived a kid accidentally, of course I’d spend every last ounce of energy I had in me making sure that they had a lovely childhood. But IMO, being able to recognize this simple fact is what separates me from my own parents, and them not being able to recognize that simple fact is what robbed me of having a childhood at all.
One thing that I never see discussed when global population decline is brought up is that maybe we don’t need 7 billion humans on Earth, each competing for increasingly fewer resources? Our population could be declining because we have reached the limit of what resources our global economic system can provide.
I have seen the polemics take the shape that humanity needs to be this large or else we will go extinct somehow, but I can’t be the only one who understands that if we grow to the point where we exhaust all available resources, our species is doomed. Conservation as a concept is an inherently selfish one — it’s ostensibly about biodiversity for the sake of the Earth, but really, it’s moreso about maintaining the kind of environment that humans find most comfortable. Humans can survive in the desert but not when it’s 145 °F during the day.
I swear to God, I feel like the global rise in far-right parties has less to do with any kind of global cabal, and more to do with the fact that Boomers everywhere are powered by nostalgia. Seems like Boomers everywhere will stop at nothing to bring back the world of their parents that they never experienced.
Just look at how much of Russia’s foreign policy is basically “damn, remember when we were the USSR?”
I have been living in Philly for a decade now, and in that time, I am not sure I have seen a single new house go up for less than $500k. Everything in the $50k-$300k range has been either an ugly condo or old track housing from the post-WW2 period.
I am a designer, but I once did a project with a very very major and recognizable tech corporation that, no joke, implemented an 8 character limit on passwords for storage reasons.
This company made in the tune of tens of billions of dollars per year, and they were penny-pinching on literal bytes of data.
I can’t say who it is, but their name begins with ‘M’ and ends in ‘cAfee.’
One of my favorite memories of how much Something Awful’s sysadmins were absolutely amateur hour back in the early 2000s was the “lappy” to “laptop” debacle. Apparently Lowtax found the term “lappy” so annoying that he ordered his system administrator to do a find/replace for every instance of “lappy,” replacing them with “laptop.”
Unfortunately this included usernames and passwords, as well as anything that just managed to have the letters “lappy” in that order anywhere in the word. So, there was one user named ‘Clappy’ who woke up one day to find his name changed to ‘Claptop.’ Apparently this is also how people discovered that they were storing password unsalted in plain text in a fucking MySQL database, which if you’re old enough, you probably already remember that the combination of MySQL and PHPmyAdmin were like Swiss cheese when it comes to site defense. :p
I don’t even understand that. The still-thriving, 30-year history of video game warez really says otherwise.