Just speaking as someone in the field, you would be surprised at how many IT decisions happen the way they do because nobody wants to be the one who gets called when an ornery geriatric complains that LibreOffice doesn't have the 'mail merge' button in the right place.
The old saying goes, "nobody ever got fired for buying Cisco."
I would consider it a privilege to live long enough to see the EU invest in and adopt FOSS software as a matter of national security.
Like all things FOSS & Libre, when a place as large as Europe benefits from the investment, so too do all of us benefit in kind.
It is the natural order of things; programmers love to program so much that they will do it for free, independent of any profit motive. We only see programmers charging money for their work because you basically need to sell something to survive in our Bootstrappist hellscape. Improving material conditions wouldn't just make life better for everyone, it would also result in better, newer software, delivered faster.
Doesn't matter. I was a bike messenger for 5 years. We all carried our U-Locks, some carried crowbars, batons, pistols, bear mace, stun guns... None of that matters when someone in a 2 ton death missile can basically light you out from behind faster than you can react.
The problem is and forever will be drivers.
Homie is really out here playing devil's advocate on behalf of cancer.
Reporters are just common workers like you and me, except, they have a ridiculously dangerous job that was so important that it was considered by Thomas Jefferson as the "fourth estate." The idea behind "democracy dies in darkness" was one born from class struggle, and I think we should see the removal of that slogan in that context.
I want to believe you're right, but in a world where AI can fully replace human labor, that will likely also apply to the areas of mass surveillance and military suppression.
Imo, one of the scariest and most frustrating developments in robotics in the past 50 years is the ability to process billions of text and voice conversations, all at once, 24/7. Things really take a different tone when all of a sudden the US Government can find it feasible to listen to all of us, every time.
I swear to God, I feel like the global rise in far-right parties has less to do with any kind of global cabal, and more to do with the fact that Boomers everywhere are powered by nostalgia. Seems like Boomers everywhere will stop at nothing to bring back the world of their parents that they never experienced.
Just look at how much of Russia's foreign policy is basically "damn, remember when we were the USSR?"
"Well, wants to send me and people like me to a concentration camp, but I do hate gay people sooooooooooooooooooo"
This entire line of thought comes from the fact that we have parents who are actively in our lives every damn day saying that nobody deserves to earn over $7.50 / hr because they only earned like $2-$3 / hr in the 70s. They are an active detriment that is preventing any means of progress.
They will not entertain information about buying power, inflation, or ballooning revenues / puckering salaries. This is a sore spot with millennials for this reason. We are not the ones bringing this up, our parents, who did enjoy life 50 years ago, are.
You can pretend that this is about having a toilet indoors all you'd like, they had access to pensions back then.
I am a designer, but I once did a project with a very very major and recognizable tech corporation that, no joke, implemented an 8 character limit on passwords for storage reasons.
This company made in the tune of tens of billions of dollars per year, and they were penny-pinching on literal bytes of data.
I can't say who it is, but their name begins with 'M' and ends in 'cAfee.'
One of my favorite memories of how much Something Awful's sysadmins were absolutely amateur hour back in the early 2000s was the "lappy" to "laptop" debacle. Apparently Lowtax found the term "lappy" so annoying that he ordered his system administrator to do a find/replace for every instance of "lappy," replacing them with "laptop."
Unfortunately this included usernames and passwords, as well as anything that just managed to have the letters "lappy" in that order anywhere in the word. So, there was one user named 'Clappy' who woke up one day to find his name changed to 'Claptop.' Apparently this is also how people discovered that they were storing password unsalted in plain text in a fucking MySQL database, which if you're old enough, you probably already remember that the combination of MySQL and PHPmyAdmin were like Swiss cheese when it comes to site defense. :p
What, so now it's "gay" to be a man who is sexually and romantically attracted exclusively to other men? Man, what's up with this world.