Did you notice how the quality of the results returned by google degraded over the years? When it started they had to take out of the market the competition and they strived to return the best possible results. When they became an oligopoly with their alter ego bing they begun to restrict the navigation to the sites in their friendly network.
The other big sites played the same game sharing links mostly with the other big known sites, the media took part in the game by attracting the attention on those big known sites. A combination of restricted horizon, but with overload of information to reduce the users need to look outside that horizon. This is the result you see today.
It depends on if you are a heavy mouse user or a heavy keyboard user and you are using a laptop with a restricted keyboard. Personally to scroll a document I prefer the buttons page up/down home/end. Often I also use those buttons to select big parts of a file that I want to copy. E. g. Shift+Ctrl+End form me is a useful combination. On the other hand I rarely use the numeric pad for numbers, but I also feel more comfortable typing with the left hand, I guess that a lot more people heavy keyboard user would prefer the numeric pad.
Yes the mouse is changing the habits for a lot of people, but the numlock may still be useful for some.
If you see war as a struggle to get access to scarce resources and if you notice that currently humankind is depleting most of the available resources then you might come to the conclusion that if in the future we will not need to go to war something terrible must have happened. Are you sure about the future you want?
Years I I remember reading something about it as an evolutionary necessity. I have no reference now. Anyway it says that having in a tribe people accustomed to fall asleep at different times and in different condition allowed to have always at least one person on a watch for dangers coming from the outside. This does nor explain why people struggle to fall asleep for long hours, but at least it gives a partial explanation.
Any known password manager is a target.
If you have a Linux PC you can create a partition encrypted with LUKS and save the passwords in txt files. Even this solutions has a small risk because when you open a file it might end up in the cache. But it is still safer than Keepass.
Downside. It might take a little bit more than few clicks to access to your passwords. But I suspect that the concern over too many clicks is inflated by the big corporations looking to dumb down their users.
Like all the big corporations IBM has bought a lot of small competitors in the past. Red Hat was the only name widely known to the public because IBM targets are software tools for business or the backend of the enterprise infrastructure.
Here there is a list of all their acquisitions.
Meanwhile from the beginning of the years 2000s they decided they wanted to become a consultancy company and rely more on external developers (especially from Indian companies). Internal developers slowly became demoralised in the middle of repeated rounds of redundancies, the quality of their services declined and they lost a lot of clients.
You may see IBM as an innovative company, a little bit for their past reputation and a little bit for the recent advanced projects they announced. But although they have some very advanced research centers the bulk of their work is the one they carry out on the client sites. That part of their work is lagging behind. At the end of the '90s you could find many big companies around the world that handed over to IBM almost all their IT systems. Now it does not happen any more. They are one of the many providers.
This is one of the things I pointed out in the post on the permanent war. Russia since the beginning dumped into the war old and outdated equipment. They sent to the front those who they considered the less valuable soldiers at the same time initially they avoided to send recruits from the draft to minimise the political backlash within Russia.
Since the beginning they handled it as a long term attrition war.
Is Orwell fiction becoming real? Ukraine and the permanent war.
cross-posted from: https://lemmy.basedcount.com/post/46440
This was posted as a question on stackexchange and many subreddits, but was quickly downvoted, taken out of sight and then deleted. So this is a new attempt to post it as a discussion. Actually there are not so many evidences that the war in Ukraine is a permanent war, the title was meant to give the idea of the war that is convenient for the great powers who pretend to fight a fake cold war. Many evidences point to the fact that the US, or better say corporate America is complicit.
A small premise, this post ignores the European (EU) leaders since I suspect that in this story they are just puppets.
The war in Ukraine has been very convenient for both, the US corporations that could exploit the war to speculate on food prices and push up the inflation and the Russian government that could silence the opposition and send to the front, or push to hide abroad, young people who could have fuelled rebellions.
For the first part of the above statement please note that while the media claimed that Ukraine and Russia together sold more than 27% of the wheat produced in the world, it later turned out that the claim was about the wheat sold on the international market, not the whole world production, therefore it was misleading. Furthermore notwithstanding the war that share is actually increasing, so the war did not reduce the supply of wheat, however it is enough to give an excuse to raise the prices again. In the meantime in Eastern EU countries there have been many protests because the flood of grains coming from Ukraine pushed down the prices paid to the producers while at the same time the prices to the consumers doubled. Who benefits from this speculation? Obviously the food industry, but not only those selling to consumers. The international market for grains is almost an oligopoly dominated by Cargill and ADM.
Grain is not the only sector that took advantage from the war. Although fossil fuels are produced all around the world most of them are traded on the US markets and American traders gain a commission on each sale. The war allowed a lot of speculation even in this sector and it also allowed "emergency" plans that drew huge amount of state funds into gas infrastructure, like the REPowerEU (don't be misled by icons and pictures of wind turbines).
On the Russian side the war allowed the government to issue strong censorship laws. Furthermore the threat of being sent to the front pushed a lot of young Russians to flee abroad, and they are the ones who could have supported rebellions against the government, for more information any search engine with the keywords russian abroad avoid draft will return a lot of results. Another point is that the news told that many detainees were forced to enrol of the army and go to fight on the front lines. But although the news hinted that those detainees might be common criminals chances are that there were a lot of political prisoners among them.
Until here I mentioned the hints that this war might be convenient for both the US and Russian side, to this I can simply add that restarting the cold war might be a very useful propaganda tool. But there are are also hints that this might be a permanent war.
The first hint are the many claims by Western leaders about the intention to keep it a low intensity conflict.
The second hint is the failure of the Russian sanctions. Those sanctions were full of holes from the beginning. So much that Europan and US companies did or are still doing business with the Russians. A comment to this question migh point out another hole.
Another factor weakening the sanctions is the unwillingness of the US to enforce them strongly. Many small countries in Asia, Africa and Latin America still trade with the Russian. The US showed that when they want to really enforce some sanctions many of those countries fall into line. It happened with Iran or Cuba, but not now even if the case should be stronger.
Another hint is that the Russians are saving their best equipment and used the war to dump the old one. To this the Western media turned a blind eye, they made great news of the sinking of the Russian "Flagship" in the black sea pretending not to know that it was 40 years old and due to be scrapped. The other ships destroyed in the conflict like the Saratov were even older.
Even on the Western side the conflict has been a dumping ground for outdated equipment. Although the promised F-16 have been modernised it is still a plane designed almost 50 years ago. Even the Leopard tanks are quite old by now.