In both cases the trading value of the currency has almost nothing to do with who originated it, and almost everything to do with how the general public feels about it.

Just like crypto, most "government" currencies are worth what they're worth only because everyone agrees that they are. That's called "fiat" currency. And that's why fiat currency exchange markets exist. The US Dollar hasn't been "convertible" (redeemable for a fixed amount of precious metal) since 1971, and many other world currencies were already backed in some way by the US Dollar at that time.

The real difference is in the supply.

Government fiat currency is difficult to counterfeit, although the government (or reserve bank) can always make more whenever they want. We trust them not to print more money, increasing the money supply and devaluing the currency. However, this is exactly what has happened sometimes in the past, and no doubt will happen again in the future.

Crypto currency is virtually impossible to counterfeit, and IIRC there's a finite (but not precisely known) amount of it that can be made, no matter who you are.

Personally, I still use physical fiat currency and no crypto. I'd like to use crypto, but regulation in my country makes it very difficult to use without registering your details with a central authority. And although everyone's pushing e-money options which are similarly tracked, thankfully I still have the option of using anonymous cash.

I don't do anything bad or illegal. I just believe that government and big business don't deserve to know everything I do in my life simply because they want to.

I second the "waterproofing a regular backpack" concept.

I commute by bicycle in a place that has a tropical summer rainy season. In fact, I'm looking at a storm brewing outside my window right now. Several years ago I started a hunt for a waterproof bag, but after a while I realized that a truly waterproof bag in the size I needed (40-50 l) was going to A) be very hard to find, and B) cost a small fortune, many times what a regular pack that size would cost.

So I decided to buy a regular, well-made and sturdy backpack, and to try using a waterproof backpack cover (outer) on it. At first it wasn't so good, but ever since I slightly modified the cover to stay snugly attached over the top of the backpack (the problem is where the shoulder straps attach) it's done a great job. The straps get soaked, and some parts of the pack that touch my back get damp in really heavy rain, but almost never enough to make it through to the inside.

I still keep some important things in plastic bags inside the bag, but it's very rarely necessary.

Another advantage of using a separate outer cover is that regular packs tend to be more serviceable, with pockets and straps and whatnot, which you can use freely when the weather's good, and will generally stay completely dry under the cover (although they will be less accessible obviously).

To say that social media is just people socializing through media is rather like saying that newspapers are just news on paper.

In both cases it ignores the deliberate, pervasive, and frequently toxic efforts of the platform curators to maximize "engagement" with their audience in pursuit of ad revenue.

When I socialize with people offline, it looks almost nothing like modern social media "services".

As the owner of a relatively new Android phone, who wanted to disable a software update nag, this is no longer always true.

In my research I built a history of instructions for disabling these nag screens/notifications on phones from this manufacturer. At first, there were things you could do on the phone itself. Then you had to change a setting with ADB. Then you had to disable a system app with ADB. Then you had to get root access to uninstall the app with ADB. And now, for my phone and other recent models, there's literally nothing you can do, even with root access in ADB, short of flashing custom firmware.

This is amazing. I've been on a bit of a J2ME jag lately, and it can be difficult to find working copies of games, and then guess the requirements for running them. There are archives of dozens of copies of the same game, all with nearly identical file names, but each one has been tweaked for a different series of phones. Which file targets which phones? Who knows?!

I loaded your .jar into my emulator and it worked first time. I had also seen this specific game and wanted to play it, but it seemed only to be available in Russian and Chinese.

Thanks for all your hard work. It's really appreciated!

For anyone who's interested in J2ME horror, I also recommend the Silent Hill Orphan series. There are three games that I know of; point-and-click first-person adventures with simple combat. I bought and played them on an actual phone back in the day, but I think they're still good in emulation.

Yes, and you've got to remember to download it as soon as you buy it. I've been stung a couple of times by companies going out of business or inventing rationales for removing "old" things.

I presume that the code was tested for various cases where there was at least one previous password on record, but everyone forgot about new users with no previous passwords. However I'm having trouble imagining what the code could actually be doing.

I can only imagine a dynamically typed language, and a "checkedPasswords" variable being declared but uninitialized, then a loop incrementing that variable for each non-similar password pulled from the records, and finally a check to see if checkedPasswords equals the number of stored previous passwords.

The execution environment could type and initialize the variable by default after the first increment, but in the case of the user having no previous passwords on record that wouldn't happen, and the final equivalency check would be comparing an integer to some internal "NaN" state, thus failing.

I've had a copy for a long time, and I dust it off to try playing it every year or so. My Japanese reading skill is improving very slowly, so each time I make a little more progress before giving up.

It feels super interesting in a surreal, David Lynch/Haruki Murakami/Garage way.

I fixed it, but that is weird. I originally thought it had a double "r", but I looked it up to check and I'd swear that the results spelled it with only one. Now I check again and it's a double "r".

Must be arrabbiata, 'cause it's got quite a burn.

I know it's a really picky take, but I resent the implication that I should want to keep my personal files mixed in at the same level of the file hierarchy as all my applications' random settings, cached data, and temporary garbage. Documents, Music, Videos, Projects, .config, .cache, SelfishAppName, OtherSelfishAppName...

It bothered me when Microsoft started doing it in Win95, and it still bothers me in Linux. Especially when software acts surprised (or occasionally indignant) that I don't keep all my files in those directories. I have lost small bits of my own work over the years by forgetting to back up things that recalcitrant software refused to store anywhere else.

But I am amused that this is the same name that I use at the top of my own storage hierarchy for self-made things.

I used one of the i5 CPUs with HD2500 integrated graphics in my main gaming PC for several years, up until only about 3-4 years ago. The performance was OK for me, but I paired it with a much newer, discrete GPU. Those integrated graphics are really going to hold you back. In games from 2012-2014 (around when those CPUs came out), they average 20-40 fps on lowest settings.

You don't have to use Steam, but it is a very painless way to play games that you own on Steam. I use Lutris for my non-Steam Windows games. It works well on my main gaming PC, but I often have issues with it on my laptops which have older integrated graphics, due to lack of Vulkan support, which Lutris seems to insist upon even when the software can use OpenGL.