Sincerely? I’d expect to see astrolabes or sextants being pulled from storage.

My country is a bit towards the south and nobody really knows how our ships still manage to float.

We have ships where the entire navigation suite has been replaced with a commercial GPS.

The guns are fired… Every now and then. Sparingly. We still have ammunition from the 70’s in stock. Some times we even manage to misplace equipment.

Yet somehow we’re considered as the reliable ally, although a bit… wierd.

It would be both terrifying and fabulous if the dead were to rise and fight back.

The religious crackpots behind these extremist governments often hold deeply entrenched eschatological views and concerns.

The dead rising would scare the lights from them.

In my country, jury duty can be refused and is deemed as a role, not an obligation. It is an honor, as it is very rare to have such added role in court; takes very complex and often serious crimes. People called for it often accept but I have heard of situations where people object from personal or moral values.

And, again, in my country, voting is not an obligation, nor legal, nor moral. It is a right and the duty to vote is considered a matter of respect towards the right that was acquired through a revolution and the individual right to be part of the political destiny of the nation, no matter how small.

Maybe I’m splitting hairs, here, but I don’t care.

A duty arises from a personal sense of necessity to do something. Call moral obligation if it is easier for you. Being moral relative… Obligation is determined, enforced and enforceable by law.

I have the duty of cast my vote in any election, not an obligation.

A simple example.

duty ≠ obligation

To need it explained and clarified into body of law is scary.

There are a few EU alternatives. Why are those not being considered.

LiberaPay is one.

I did and nowhere is Signal mentioned in the article.

You state Whatsapp uses Signal. So, again: how?

To my knowledge, under Signal, the encription keys are locally generated and stored, and the traffic flows between end points as a closed packet.

This does not seem to be the case here, as the keys are generated and stored outside your equipment and, thus, are viable to be used by a third party to access packets.

But I admit I speak heavily burdened by technical ignorance.

How?

The Mafia and most, if not all organized crime syndicates, started as a way for people to defend themselves from abusive governments, officials, etc. Mafia thrives by getting along with people, not openly prey on them.

Syndicates also tend to be patriotic, in the sense that they are defending or at least looking to preserve their interests where they are rooted.

Mafia tends to arbour great disdain for police and similar forces. They can be useful if bribeable or somehow coherced to look the other way but they are still police. The enemy.

I’ll give you an extreme example.

In Brasil, the Comando Vermelho is one of the largest, if not te largest, criminal organization on the country. They are well known for their extremely violent and cruel methods. Yet they are the biggest employers in the areas they control. They build schools, pay people for their work (mostly unrelated to criminal activities), distribute food, run clinics. They act as de facto police, courts and punishers, to keep peace. They nearly replace the state because the state nearly abandoned the poorest of poor, amongst who they set grounds, in the favelas.

I can’t imagine the resistance they would pose to an invading force.

And, I can’t confirm this, but I have a memory of reading somewhere that during WW2, the Mafia helped the Allies infiltrate areas.

Foreigns agents have no semblance of authority outside their country.

When in doubt call the Carabinieri. Or the local Mafia chapter.

Portuguese. And it depends on the day.

I started picking up english even before being formally taught. I can easily follow a film, a podcast or some other media in full english with no need to dedicate the entirety of my attention to it. I can pick up humour and innuendo, along with cultural cues. Even some degree of lingo and slang.

Speaking can sometimes be challenging as I speak very fast in my native language and I tend to try to achieve to same in english, only to sound like a washing machine full of marbles on high speed.

When can I get a bit lost? Very dense accents, like scotish or some from the US. The Louisiana one throws me off completely. The australians are cool, except for their local wording that can be a bit harder to follow. Took me ages to figure what a sheila was and that calling someone a dingo was an insult.

And by the way: why can a kangoroo be a wallabee and just to rub salt on the wound most people will call it a 'roo?

Don’t know. But thank you for the warning.

GOG sent an email the other day warning the game was on discount and after taking another look at hardware the requirements it felt like a good benchmark for the technology of the time.

It was heavy back then.

I moved to a DDR4/AM4 platform when I assembled my current machine because the AM3 platform was being labelled as end of cycle and the FM segment seemed too niche.

The scales tiped when I discovered many AM4 CPUs carried on chip graphic processing capabilities and being in need of a graphics card it was more affordable for me to just buy an APU than buy a CPU and add a GPU on top.

Not being a gamer and a Linux user, throwing money on a graphics card, that by then were heavily price inflated, made little sense, so I opted by the AM4 platform.

Currently, I’m considering building a machine capable of running Wasteland 2, because that game has been under my eye for years.

I’m finding graphic cards with 4GB of memory on the market with very interesting prices. Used CPUs are cheap, unless I aim for the top tier models, with 6 or more cores. I still have the memory chips from the machine I retired (8GB) and getting an additional 8 is nothing out of reach. I just need to find a motherboard that can take 16GB or more of memory.

If I can assemble a machine capable of running that game, I’m fairly confident the system itself will be more than enough to comply with my daily computing needs and then some.

I’m already considering building a maxed out AMD based machine, with DDR3.

The last machine I had with that technology lasted me 12 years. I can vouch for it.

I know they existed but I’m not familiar with their work. So, just listen to what you can and have fun.

There more subtle ways to sow discord. But carry on. Let’s see of this sets enough asses on fire and meaningful things start being done.

Toasted AI! The best kind of AI!

Yet! But should.