Honestly, he wants to return Russia to it’s ‘glory days’, which means back when it was an imperial power, and they could send tanks into Hungary to crush people protesting for democracy. When Ukrainians threw out their pro-Russian president, he saw that influence he wanted slipping away.

Yeah, but every time I have to buy something new, they automatically sign me up again. They never give me an opt-out.

Nah, you’re not abnormal. I’ve had the same thing happen at multiple store. The most invasive has been Microcenter; they tell me that I have to give them my email in order to wait in line for tech support, and then bombard me with spam. Every time I buy something new there, I have to tell the cashier to NOT use the address on file that they won’t unlink from my bank card.

“Gunslinger” is largely going to be after 1865, after the US Civil War. Revolvers as we know them in the old west only existed after the 1850s. The first revolvers that you would call a revolver would be about 1835. So you don’t really have the overlap for French privateer, unless it’s a former privateer.

I’m curious how hard it would be for a typical user to chain VPNs together so that my traffic went sequentially through VPNs. In theory it seems like VPN #1 would know that it was connected to my home and VPN #2, so it couldn’t tell where data was originating. VPN #2 could see the site that was being accessed and VPN #1, but not me.

I have no idea if it actually works this way in practice through.

It depends on whether you believe that people should be allowed to use narcotics or not. I tend to believe that people should be able to make that choice for themselves–as it’s their own body–and ordering narcotics online decreases violence in the drug trade since there’s no longer obvious fights over territories, etc.

The same interagency cooperation that makes it easier to track down one groups of people and punish them also makes it easier to track down other groups of people that you might agree with.

Depending on what you’re doing, that probably wouldn’t be a significant hinderance to law enforcement. Child sexual abuse, drug trafficking, etc., all tends to get lots of interagency cooperation, regardless of political issues.

I’ve tried to use it, but have not managed to get it to work. Which is a bummer.

I should probably try again now that I have a new computer. My old computer was so old that a lot of stuff wasn’t working correctly.

ISPs definitely keep records. At least some VPNs claim that they don’t, and that their networks are set up in such a way that they can’t. Some organizations claim to validate the claims of the VPNs, but it’s unclear if they’re trustworthy.

So your choice is to use something that definitely keeps logs, or to use a company that at least says that they don’t/can’t.

Yeah, I don’t have any great options there, sorry.

By the time I’ve gotten around to getting rid of old bicycles, I’m usually selling them for pennies or giving them away, because I ride them right into the ground.

It does, but you have to manually configure it to turn off javascript entirely.

A bike with a motor, or a bicycle?

If the former, you can always use Cycletrader. For the latter, well, sorry.

If it makes you feel better, I’m mildly autistic, so I tend to see things a bit more literally than most.

There’s a certain level of due-diligence that you can use when you’re moving personal information around on the cloud. Hospitals have a legal obligation to keep your medical records secure; Google does not.

…Why would you post unencrypted personal information onto the cloud in the first place?

Interesting. I’ve noticed that a lot of my text messages to my partner fail to send as well, and I also swear frequently and voluminously. I should test this and see if this is what is going on with my carrier.

His attorney probably should have raised that objection in the first place. He should have objected based on the phone not being material to the search of the car. But if he didn’t raise the objection correctly during the initial trial, then he can’t raise the objection on the appeal either.

A court, however, can force you to give up a password or hold you in contempt (which is essentially the rubber hose option)

That remains to be seen; I don’t think that there’s ever been a definitive ruling on this in the US. One real problem is that they would have to be able to prove that you knew the password, and that can be a real problem. I have an old Tails drive; it’s been years since I used it, and I have no idea what the password is anymore. Shit, I sometimes have a brain fart and can’t remember the passphrase for my password manager, and I use that a lot.

IIRC, it takes around 100 generations to see a significant shift in skin pigmentation due to evolution. For humans, that would work out to about 1700 years for people that were moved from the Nordic regions to sub-Saharan Africa to develop dark skins (assuming that there were no other factors in play).

Evolution can take what seems like a really long time.

720p? Pfffft. 240i. Rip them in ‘2014 YouTube over 2G’ quality.