b2600

You don’t need a phone number to open a google or gmail account. It asks for it but it’s a skippable step

Gmail is slow to load compared to others. Notably, FastMail. I abandoned Inbox a while ago because of load time. Coming close to abandoning Gmail too. Takes way to long to load. This happens for me on low end laptops AND high end desktops.

Curious why you tossed Apple in there. In worldwide usage it's a fraction compared to the other three. (I feel compelled to state I use an iPhone in order to avoid this comment being interpreted incorrectly).

Just started diving into it. It's fascinating from a bureaucratic, administrative, and operational perspective. --we have to increase CI/Intelligence capability or we'll lose primacy to another agency-- Paraphrasing

So poor people don't/won't read the Economist? They "don't care to". wow. BTW, these click-bait sites are rewarded by your employer who then is able to pay you. As an aside: Doesn't google still provide a text only web cache that strips ads? What if I use wget or curl? What about reader view in safari or firefox, absent from chrome of course. Rss? Blocking ads is only one way to go.

I think there is some tremendous gap between what a site believes it's value to be and the value to the person behind the keyboard. My opinion is the reverse of yours. Internet users aren't necessarily cheap, the sites overvalue the content they provide. Just because someone provides content doesn't mean it's good enough to make a living. If people leave site A because they charge for site B that's free but of less value, it may mean that site A doesn't provide enough value for the price they want to charge.Personally, I don't care how intrusive you think they are, I'm not going to view them. Why would you want me to, I'm not going to click anyway. I do pay for several sites via subscription (FT, WSJ, NYT, and others) and I pay for my email service(s) and I pay for Amazon and Netflix and Mubi and Hulu. Oh, I also pay for my broadband connection. If you think that anyone who puts content online should be compensated by default, that's the weirdest contention I've ever heard.

In the comedy movie "Back to School", wealthy business man Thornton Melon hires Kurt Vonnegut to write an essay for him on Kurt Vonnegut for English Literature class. The professor knows Melon did not write the essay and tells him "Whoever did write this doesn't know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut!." He got an F.

Engineer is liberally defined nowadays. It apparently no longer means someone who has a B.S.(or above) in Engineering.

Facebook has no idea how many fake accounts exist and neither do I. But it is definitely higher than 11.2%. That estimate was self-serving for business purposes not a serious analysis.

I guess I'm reading these two examples as: 1. an extra goto and 2. a strategy dealing with creating an ssl store that uses a 32(!) bit key. I'm not implying malice but they seem fundamentally different type of errors.

I don't know if comparing "bugs" from AV software and OSs is apples to apples. Also, goto followed by erroneous goto looks like an error (I know) but

"keys are generated, they're inserted using the first 32 bits of MD5(serialNumber||issuer) as the key. If a match is found for a key, they just pull the previously generated certificate and key out of the binary tree"

doesn't

That would be targeted to individual(s) not "all email from everyone" NSLs target a service or an individual or a corporation. Bad as that is, it's not intercepting, storing, scanning every email.

"the Pixel is a joke compared to the iPhone 6s in my opinion" That's a very unusual opinion. Most reviews I've seen contradict this. Hell, you could compare the 6p with the 6s and the iPhone would win (in my opinion) but it wouldn't blow it out of the water. I haven't had hands on with the Pixel yet so I'll reserve my personal judgement but I have owned the 6s, the 6p, and the iPhone 7 (daily driver). Furthermore, it made be different in your use case but most iPhone users have all sorts of Google apps making the ecosystem argument irrelevant.