Yes. Memory and storage were at a very high premium until the 1990s, and when C was first being developed, it wasn’t uncommon for computers to output to printers (that’s why print() and co are named what they are), so every character was at a premium. In the latter case, you were literally paying in ink and paper by the character. These contributed to this convention that we’re still stuck with today in C.

Awaken from thy slumber XMPP! Bring us new and better implementations and standards, and the network effect we once enjoyed now solidified by law.

When I worked delivery, at multiple places, we did in fact not see a dime of this fee. Got chewed out by customers a couple of times over it though.

bedroom eyes

You battle your significant other for honor in bed?

I don’t know if they stopped, but American kids at least used to be taught both Celsius and Fahrenheit. At least in some parts anyway. I was taught both as a kid, with my school largely banning the use of Fahrenheit by staff on campus even, for instance.

I’m guessing it’s also not feasible to get her a visa on the other side, meaning nowhere to go. I also wouldn’t be surprised if her family being more closely watched and targeted if they leave isn’t also part of why they feel they can’t.

Don’t worry they’ll follow you to space.

Not since the Romanian police got him, that’s for sure.

My dogs are spoiled brats. One of them half the time will turn her nose up at anything I give her, only accepting some of what I’m currently eating, even if what was given her is the same or better than what I’m having.

That’s a bit cruel to Gary, Indiana, don’t you think?

A game where using the in-build chat is a bannable offense.

The article indicated that, apparently, Shorts is even more unprofitable than regular YouTube. So they don't even have that going for them

At one point it was both. At one point they internally added support for longer file names in DOS, and then a later version of the filesystem also started supporting it. I think that on DOS and Windows (iirc even today), they never actually solved it, and paths on Windows and NTFS can only be 256 characters long in total or something (I don’t remember what the exact limit was/is).

Vivaldi is fairly nice, but it's another Chromium. Similar to Brave, they've said they won't be including the Topics API, so it doesn't quite feed into the monoculture. (Disappointingly, they seem like they won't be disabling WEI, Google's latest land grab. Admittedly, for understandable reasons that mirror the original DRM for the web a decade ago, the blunt fact is that they seem like they'll go along with it anyway.) Considering the team is (supposedly) largely shared from some people that used to develop their own engine (Presto, before Opera switched to Chromium), I could also believe they could (possibly would) hard fork Chromium if they felt it necessary. If this is enough for you, then I'm sure you'll have a wonderful time with it, and I've enjoyed it well enough when I've tried it. Personally, I don't daily it.

The military would like to know your location.

I agree with most of that, but I feel like we weren’t using the same Internet 15 years ago. There were still ample popups and popunders, many of which you couldn’t easily close (more than a few did the funny ‘you are an idiot’ trick of just open windows faster than you can close them to me). They were loud, both visually but also they would actually play sound in non-video pages (sometimes multiple at once). Most of them were either disgust or porn based (or the really funny meme of both at the same time). And there were so. Many. Viruses. I feel like advertisers have never been particularly respectful of the end user, and the main difference is that now they’re actively spying, where they maybe weren’t 20 years ago.

Some nits: Apple could access many classes of data stored on iCloud by default (including any photos), even now, but you can make almost every class end to end encrypted now if you explicitly chose to. Previously, and by default now, it’s Apple policy and internal controls over the keys your data is encrypted with that protect that data, not the encryption itself (though you can opt in to the encryption itself protecting you from Apple). From what I understand, Apple is only known to actually scan iCloud mailboxes regularly, with the on-device scanning having never been implemented. Outside of nits, considering the delay between the proposed scanning and offering of a wider E2EE program for iCloud, I doubt the two are actually related myself.

Anyone can build an implementation of the Signal client, but few do already because Signal actively works to prevent them from working with the Signal infrastructure, and likely will continue to do so. It’s one of the more common complaints about Signal, but it was built on the assumption that centralized services would be easier to use and to make private if the platform holder wanted, as well as more robust against attacks. They could well be wrong, and people just haven’t thought of and deployed the right tech, but it’s neither here nor there; I’m doubtful they can be convinced on this, and I’d doubt they’d be made to open up anyway by this regulation, meaning they’re not obligated to.

That’s true, but macs also do have more security controls, configured more sensibly by default. BitLocker, the system’s full disc encryption feature for example, is still considered a premium product reserved for more expensive editions, whereas macs, android, and iOS have had it standard and default enabled (the latter two with no option to disabled it) in current versions for years. Windows still does not require (or last I checked even offer) things like application sandboxing or runtime hardening by default (this may well have changed in the past couple of years, but I’ve heard nothing of it). While the Universal Windows Platform does have a functional permissions system, that whole platform is (as I understand it) limited to the Microsoft store (which as I understand is ignored by vendors), and the last time I looked at it, it was a mess. There are other such things. Which isn’t to say macs can’t get malware, they can, and they’ll get more malware as time goes on. There are other measures set up on Windows but not macOS, but they don’t appear to be as effective to me, and they seem to be mainly focused on reacting to specific incidents. Security-wise, the two really are not the same.

You saw it too, that muffalo cane at me with a chainsaw.