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.

The Russian Duma already voted for the annexation of the occupied territories. The article does not state what would be the legal status of the region. It says that many point of the proposal are secret, but I got the feeling that a non trivial point is glossed over.

In 2023 they ask for an exemption for something that should be delivered by 2025. Is it really bad planning or an attempt to save on labour cost?

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.