Also: microwave ovens. You know how, when you go to someone else's house, their microwave is utterly incomprehensible? Every single microwave oven ever made requires a different esoteric incantation to do the simplest goddamn thing. I had one, many years ago, that just had two knobs. One was a cook time knob, and the other might have been power level. I can understand the desire for some slightly more complex controls than those, but that was by far the simplest microwave oven I've ever seen. Rarely did any visitor need help operating it, and if they did, I could just say, 'put in your food and turn the knob' and that was the 95% use case instructions.
Manufactured outrage allows people to feign wounded astonishment that their opponent would sink so low. Right now, liberals are manufacturing outrage about what was quite obviously a throw-away, sarcastic statement from Trump. The other day, conservatives in North Carolina were trying to stir up outrage by accusing Tim Kaine of wearing a Honduran flag lapel pin during his convention speech (their accusation ended with the one-word sentence "Shameful."). Turns out they were just ignorant, and Kaine's pin was not a Honduran flag but a service pin in honor of his son, who is in the Marines and deployed at the moment.
I'm not totally sure why we do this. I mean, it's not persuasive, it's only reinforcing for people who already believe their side is right. Maybe if one side were constantly being accused of bullshit without accusing the other side as well, it would appear weak?
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
I own three computers running Windows 7 at the moment. For my primary desktop, I bought a new hard drive and installed Windows 10 on it to check it out. I didn't hate it, but I was left asking why I would bother upgrading when there is no killer feature of Windows 10 that seems to make it better than 7? Then I got busy, and I put the Windows 7 drive back in because I needed to get stuff done and not waste time configuring a new OS. I've been thinking of switching back recently, but then all this news comes out about not being able to disable Cortana or lock screens or apps...
They almost had me, but now I'm going to continue putting it off.
Yeah, robocopy is how I do backups for my own computer these days. Combined with svn. I store all my data in a version controlled directory, commit to my off-site repo when I'm done for the day, and then in the middle of the night I robocopy the contents of my working directory to a backup hard disk that I occasionally swap off-site. Weekly, I copy the SVN repos off-site. Sounds a little paranoid, but I saw too many sad grad students walk in to the help desk with the only copy of their entire thesis on a 3.5" floppy disk that had gone bad...
I was doing IT support many years ago as an undergrad. I was called to someone's office because their hard drive had failed. When I arrived, she had already purchased a new hard drive, and was quite pleased with herself for having made backups. She had a tape backup drive and multiple tapes that she swapped on a schedule so they'd wear evenly, stored the tapes in different locations, and so on. So all she needed me to do was install the new hardware and restore the backup onto it.
I put the new HDD in, booted off the recovery floppy disk, and went to restore the backup off the tape. In her backup software, she had checked the box next to 'C:\'. Turns out, the software defaulted to not backup subdirectories. So all she had on all of her backup tapes was the contents of her root directory: autoexec.bat, config.sys, and that sort of junk. That was a depressing trip.
The US IRS tax system is set up to make us ALL guilty of tax fraud
No, it isn't. It's just the result of a hundred or so years of feature creep and kludges meant to encourage/discourage certain behaviors in the population (like mortgage interest deductions to encourage home ownership) and to favor certain businesses as a result of lobbying and cronyism. It sucks, and it should be simplified drastically, but the tax preparation lobby is now very powerful and strongly resists efforts to make taxes easier.
It also explains why there are tens of thousands of armed IRS agents, equipped with REAL assault rifles (fully automatic, short barrel carbines) and other real military-grade equipment.
This is just untrue. The IRS' enforcement division has a payroll of about 3,500 people, about 2,500 of whom are agents (1). According to IRS policy, those agents might be armed with Remington Model 870 or 11-87 shotguns; Smith & Wesson M&P15 rifles; and/or Glock 22, 23, and 27 pistols (2). None of these weapons is fully automatic, none is unavailable to civilians, and there is nothing specially 'military-grade' about any of them.
You are entitled to your own opinions about the IRS, but not your own facts.
I just tried it. It's better than the typing exercises that were inflicted upon me as a kid... transcribing nonsense like 'ask a sad dad lad had gad' and on and on to infinity. My typing speed was always poor on such things because it's gibberish. The zombie game is better, although it has kind of an odd and repetitive dictionary... I've just typed the word 'xylem' more times in one game than I have in the rest of my life. My one problem with it is that it still doesn't give me a coherent sentence to type, so I feel like my WPM as measured in the game is quite a bit lower than when I type in real conditions. On the other hand, maybe for a beginning typist, that's not a big issue?
Non-terrorism, non-suicide gun deaths are already so much higher than terrorism- or workplace- or hate- or school-related mass shootings that we shouldn't be noticing these things (as much as we are). In 2015, in the US, there were 22 mass shootings (defined as shootings where 4 or more people were shot). In these 22 incidents – which averaged about one every 16 days – 133 people were killed and 52 were wounded.* Around 10 times as many people are killed falling down stairs in the US each year.
It seems clear that the true menace is staircases.
Uh, please note that I'm not advocating for allowing drunken nightclub patrons to carry firearms.
I seem to remember the GNAA being part of slashdot since, well forever.
Yeah, but isn't that kind of weird? I mean, I started reading Slashdot in the late 90s, and GNAA has always been here. Who are these people who are so dedicated that they tirelessly post the same shitposts to every article, every day, for almost 20 years? How do they have time for this? Do they never grow bored, or tired? Do they never become disenchanted with their chosen occupation?
It's like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill only to watch it roll back down, except somehow even less useful than that.
My first was David A Lien, Learning BASIC for Tandy Computers
It has a series of cartoon illustrations in which a dude argues with his witty computer, which appealed to me as a youth.
Plus, copying programs out of magazines like BYTE and the like. I think I really learned how to program by debugging my transcription errors from magazines, then by figuring out how to alter the functionality of the programs that I'd entered.
What? I'm not defending their behavior. I just said that MS is taking away user choice, and I think that's bad. I also think that as long as they're taking away user choice, it's better that they do it without misleading people into thinking they're being offered an opt-out. But I certainly believe that they should be offering users a clear and simple way to opt out of the upgrade.
I think that Microsoft is being manipulative, abusive, and dishonest with their users. And if I'm supposed to be an MS shill, then I think they should review their hiring process.
According to Pew Research, 41% of Americans believe that it is likely that the second coming of Jesus will occur within forty years. Make that 58% when looking at white evangelical Christians. Some number of these people are actually in positions to make decisions that affect our country. Our previous president claimed that God told him to ban embryonic stem cell research using federal funding.
So even if the rapture isn't right around the corner, one thing we have to deal with in the US is that quite a lot of people believe that it is.
Apparently many of these malwares also encrypt data on attached volumes like Windows shares and the like. It seems to me that the best approach is a 'pull' solution, where Mom keeps her photos in a place that's shared on her network, and then another machine does periodic backups of that share. Mom's computer doesn't have write access to the pulling machine, in fact doesn't even know or care that it's there. So the backups are safe.
That means having a linux machine in the house to do the pulling. Build a super tiny linux box with a big hard drive, stick it in a closet, and let it pull nightly backups from Mom's computer. If she gets ransomwared, just reformat her hard drive, reinstall the OS, and grab her personal files from the backup. She never has to interact with linux, and her files are pretty safe.
The close button (red X) didn't work as users expected. It was a user interface failure, and Microsoft solved the problem. Now the dialog box correctly tells users, as MS intends, that their options are to upgrade now or schedule a time for upgrade. No more users getting surprised and outraged when closing the dialog box results in an unexpected Windows 10 upgrade.
Whether or not you are a fan of MS's upgrade approach, this is a solution to the UI problem. We can still be outraged about forced upgrades, but this isn't a terrible fix.
I guess if you're going to go on a shooting spree culminating in suicide, you might as well shoot everyone who's ever done anything that you perceived as bad or unfair to you. You'll never see any consequences regardless of the number of people you killed or maimed, so why not?
I mean, other than the fact that the whole idea is monstrous.
Washington state voted that way 4 years ago, and it hasn't shown up yet.
I guess you're not from around here? There are three recreational marijuana stores within just a few miles of my office. In Washington State. They've been open and doing business for months.
People tell lies all the time, and most of them don't bother me that much. Politicians lie, and I get it. They tell lies that people want to hear so they can get elected. White lies smooth social interactions. All kinds of lies. But this particular lie really pisses me off.
It often starts with words like 'To better serve our customers' or 'For your convenience' and then it says something that makes my life worse and less convenient. And it's so goddamn transparent.
'To better serve our customers, we are closing the only branch of our business in your town. The nearest branch will be conveniently located 40 miles away.'
Fuck you. You aren't doing it to better serve your customers, you're doing it because you've decided that this branch doesn't bring in enough money. You're already pissing me off by closing the store. Why piss me off more by shitting all over me with lies?
Certainly it's possible, and they're readily available. It seems to me that it's less important in this case that they used SHA1 and more important that they didn't salt. If they had salted their passwords, even if the attackers managed to learn the salt value they would still have to generate a whole custom rainbow table just for that password table. And that takes a lot of computational effort, especially for longer passwords containing a variety of non-alpha characters.
I suppose that there are other problems with using a weaker hash, but any hash is susceptible to rainbow tables without salting or double hashing or something of the sort.
True, but if your password is ten or fewer characters in length, then it can likely be found in an SHA1 rainbow table, which are readily available. FTFA, it sounds like LinkedIn doesn't salt their password hashes, so it turns out to be trivially easy to crack most shorter passwords just given the hashed value.
In the past, when I have asked this question, the answer has been that suicide is illegal because attempting suicide and failing gives authorities the ability to intervene and provide a person with mental health care. I understand that most people who fail at suicide wind up being glad they failed, so perhaps this intervention is appropriate. I'm not entirely convinced, but I'm willing to entertain the notion.
I certainly believe that people should have the right to end their own lives, for whatever reasons they wish. But if the reason is a treatable mental illness, then I'd rather that they get treatment than die based upon their incorrect assessment of their future quality of life.
The first order of business ought to be updating the course material to answer those frequently-asked-questions, so they don't need to be asked in the first place.
In my experience teaching college students, most of them don't read the syllabus or anything else I hand to them. Then I get questions from students about things that were explained on the syllabus. I have stood in front of a room full of students and stated a simple fact that had been printed on the syllabus (the exam will be next Tuesday, the 24th) and then called on a student who had his hand raised, who then asked when the exam was going to be because he hadn't been paying attention.
As an instructor, I make the information available clearly on the syllabus, on the course web site, and in class, and I still get people asking questions. So I can understand the professor's frustration, and I can also assure you that no matter how the information is made available, there are students who lack the ability, initiative, or interest to look it up.
If you have a panic attack whenever you see a cop, that would seem to warrant an examination of your own life. Don't ride dirty. Don't have guns, drugs or drug paraphernalia on you or in your car.
I don't have a panic attack when I see a cop, but I *am* acutely aware that the cops are not my friend. I don't really know what constitutes 'riding dirty'. I don't have guns, drugs, or drug paraphernalia in my car. But if a cop has a notion to fuck up my day and my car because I'm driving through his shitty little town and they make their revenues by making bullshit traffic stops and ginning up cause to search my car and stealing any cash I have through civil forfeiture, there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. I'm completely powerless in that situation, and a lot of the creepy fucks who are attracted to police work get their jollies by taking advantage of that power imbalance. Or maybe they're just corrupt and greedy. Their motivation doesn't matter that much.
There are plenty of examples of this behavior in news reports. There is no reason to believe it can't happen to me. I mean, here's one from just a few days ago, where the only reason the victims had their money (~$50,000) returned is that they were a Christian band who had raised the money for an orphanage, and that kind of thing makes bad headlines. http://dailysignal.com/2016/04...?
I would be surprised if even half of the Democrats I know will vote for Hillary ever.
I'm a registered Democrat, and to put it lightly, I'm not a big fan of Hillary. But if it actually mattered, I would hold my nose and vote for her over Trump. As it is, though, I live in an overwhelmingly red state. We're giving our votes to the Republican nominee, regardless of who it is or what their policies are (or whether they even have any). So I might just go ahead and vote for Trump anyway. My vote is meaningless in the context of the electoral college, but I'd rather not help give the impression that Hillary enjoys more popular support than she really does.
Congress can keep most candidates in check with the exception of Clinton.
I'm not so sure. Right now, the Republican majority in the House is gung-ho anti-Obama, and it seems like the main reason they don't like him is because he's a Democrat who won the Presidency. But President Hillary Clinton? They've made a hobby of openly loathing Hillary for decades. Provided we maintain a R majority in the House, and expecting a pretty evenly balanced Senate, I can't imagine that she's going to have an easy time with the Congress. I would expect them, especially in the House, to do everything they can to sabotage her policy agenda.
Great, if you only have one email account. I'm a student, so I have an official university email address that they insist upon using for all correspondence. I'm also an employee, so that's another email account. I have a gmail account for some personal stuff. I also have another free email account. I have an email address on the virtual server that I rent. Each of these accounts has its own web mail interface, different from the others.
With Thunderbird, I can combine all five email accounts into one common interface, so I can send and receive email while keeping my accounts segregated. I know I can forward all of these accounts to a single account, but I prefer to keep them separate for a variety of reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
Also: microwave ovens. You know how, when you go to someone else's house, their microwave is utterly incomprehensible? Every single microwave oven ever made requires a different esoteric incantation to do the simplest goddamn thing. I had one, many years ago, that just had two knobs. One was a cook time knob, and the other might have been power level. I can understand the desire for some slightly more complex controls than those, but that was by far the simplest microwave oven I've ever seen. Rarely did any visitor need help operating it, and if they did, I could just say, 'put in your food and turn the knob' and that was the 95% use case instructions.
Manufactured outrage allows people to feign wounded astonishment that their opponent would sink so low. Right now, liberals are manufacturing outrage about what was quite obviously a throw-away, sarcastic statement from Trump. The other day, conservatives in North Carolina were trying to stir up outrage by accusing Tim Kaine of wearing a Honduran flag lapel pin during his convention speech (their accusation ended with the one-word sentence "Shameful."). Turns out they were just ignorant, and Kaine's pin was not a Honduran flag but a service pin in honor of his son, who is in the Marines and deployed at the moment. I'm not totally sure why we do this. I mean, it's not persuasive, it's only reinforcing for people who already believe their side is right. Maybe if one side were constantly being accused of bullshit without accusing the other side as well, it would appear weak? https://www.washingtonpost.com...
I own three computers running Windows 7 at the moment. For my primary desktop, I bought a new hard drive and installed Windows 10 on it to check it out. I didn't hate it, but I was left asking why I would bother upgrading when there is no killer feature of Windows 10 that seems to make it better than 7? Then I got busy, and I put the Windows 7 drive back in because I needed to get stuff done and not waste time configuring a new OS. I've been thinking of switching back recently, but then all this news comes out about not being able to disable Cortana or lock screens or apps... They almost had me, but now I'm going to continue putting it off.
Yeah, robocopy is how I do backups for my own computer these days. Combined with svn. I store all my data in a version controlled directory, commit to my off-site repo when I'm done for the day, and then in the middle of the night I robocopy the contents of my working directory to a backup hard disk that I occasionally swap off-site. Weekly, I copy the SVN repos off-site. Sounds a little paranoid, but I saw too many sad grad students walk in to the help desk with the only copy of their entire thesis on a 3.5" floppy disk that had gone bad...
I was doing IT support many years ago as an undergrad. I was called to someone's office because their hard drive had failed. When I arrived, she had already purchased a new hard drive, and was quite pleased with herself for having made backups. She had a tape backup drive and multiple tapes that she swapped on a schedule so they'd wear evenly, stored the tapes in different locations, and so on. So all she needed me to do was install the new hardware and restore the backup onto it.
I put the new HDD in, booted off the recovery floppy disk, and went to restore the backup off the tape. In her backup software, she had checked the box next to 'C:\'. Turns out, the software defaulted to not backup subdirectories. So all she had on all of her backup tapes was the contents of her root directory: autoexec.bat, config.sys, and that sort of junk. That was a depressing trip.
The US IRS tax system is set up to make us ALL guilty of tax fraud
No, it isn't. It's just the result of a hundred or so years of feature creep and kludges meant to encourage/discourage certain behaviors in the population (like mortgage interest deductions to encourage home ownership) and to favor certain businesses as a result of lobbying and cronyism. It sucks, and it should be simplified drastically, but the tax preparation lobby is now very powerful and strongly resists efforts to make taxes easier.
It also explains why there are tens of thousands of armed IRS agents, equipped with REAL assault rifles (fully automatic, short barrel carbines) and other real military-grade equipment.
This is just untrue. The IRS' enforcement division has a payroll of about 3,500 people, about 2,500 of whom are agents (1). According to IRS policy, those agents might be armed with Remington Model 870 or 11-87 shotguns; Smith & Wesson M&P15 rifles; and/or Glock 22, 23, and 27 pistols (2). None of these weapons is fully automatic, none is unavailable to civilians, and there is nothing specially 'military-grade' about any of them.
You are entitled to your own opinions about the IRS, but not your own facts.
1) https://www.irs.gov/uac/crimin...
2) https://www.irs.gov/irm/part9/...
I just tried it. It's better than the typing exercises that were inflicted upon me as a kid... transcribing nonsense like 'ask a sad dad lad had gad' and on and on to infinity. My typing speed was always poor on such things because it's gibberish. The zombie game is better, although it has kind of an odd and repetitive dictionary... I've just typed the word 'xylem' more times in one game than I have in the rest of my life. My one problem with it is that it still doesn't give me a coherent sentence to type, so I feel like my WPM as measured in the game is quite a bit lower than when I type in real conditions. On the other hand, maybe for a beginning typist, that's not a big issue?
Non-terrorism, non-suicide gun deaths are already so much higher than terrorism- or workplace- or hate- or school-related mass shootings that we shouldn't be noticing these things (as much as we are). In 2015, in the US, there were 22 mass shootings (defined as shootings where 4 or more people were shot). In these 22 incidents – which averaged about one every 16 days – 133 people were killed and 52 were wounded.* Around 10 times as many people are killed falling down stairs in the US each year.
It seems clear that the true menace is staircases.
Uh, please note that I'm not advocating for allowing drunken nightclub patrons to carry firearms.
*http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/Justice/2015/1214/2015-US-mass-shootings-The-sky-is-not-falling
I seem to remember the GNAA being part of slashdot since, well forever.
Yeah, but isn't that kind of weird? I mean, I started reading Slashdot in the late 90s, and GNAA has always been here. Who are these people who are so dedicated that they tirelessly post the same shitposts to every article, every day, for almost 20 years? How do they have time for this? Do they never grow bored, or tired? Do they never become disenchanted with their chosen occupation?
It's like Sisyphus pushing the boulder up the hill only to watch it roll back down, except somehow even less useful than that.
My first was David A Lien, Learning BASIC for Tandy Computers
It has a series of cartoon illustrations in which a dude argues with his witty computer, which appealed to me as a youth.
Plus, copying programs out of magazines like BYTE and the like. I think I really learned how to program by debugging my transcription errors from magazines, then by figuring out how to alter the functionality of the programs that I'd entered.
What? I'm not defending their behavior. I just said that MS is taking away user choice, and I think that's bad. I also think that as long as they're taking away user choice, it's better that they do it without misleading people into thinking they're being offered an opt-out. But I certainly believe that they should be offering users a clear and simple way to opt out of the upgrade.
I think that Microsoft is being manipulative, abusive, and dishonest with their users. And if I'm supposed to be an MS shill, then I think they should review their hiring process.
According to Pew Research, 41% of Americans believe that it is likely that the second coming of Jesus will occur within forty years. Make that 58% when looking at white evangelical Christians. Some number of these people are actually in positions to make decisions that affect our country. Our previous president claimed that God told him to ban embryonic stem cell research using federal funding.
So even if the rapture isn't right around the corner, one thing we have to deal with in the US is that quite a lot of people believe that it is.
Apparently many of these malwares also encrypt data on attached volumes like Windows shares and the like. It seems to me that the best approach is a 'pull' solution, where Mom keeps her photos in a place that's shared on her network, and then another machine does periodic backups of that share. Mom's computer doesn't have write access to the pulling machine, in fact doesn't even know or care that it's there. So the backups are safe.
That means having a linux machine in the house to do the pulling. Build a super tiny linux box with a big hard drive, stick it in a closet, and let it pull nightly backups from Mom's computer. If she gets ransomwared, just reformat her hard drive, reinstall the OS, and grab her personal files from the backup. She never has to interact with linux, and her files are pretty safe.
The close button (red X) didn't work as users expected. It was a user interface failure, and Microsoft solved the problem. Now the dialog box correctly tells users, as MS intends, that their options are to upgrade now or schedule a time for upgrade. No more users getting surprised and outraged when closing the dialog box results in an unexpected Windows 10 upgrade.
Whether or not you are a fan of MS's upgrade approach, this is a solution to the UI problem. We can still be outraged about forced upgrades, but this isn't a terrible fix.
Yeah but why off the ex-girlfriend too?
I guess if you're going to go on a shooting spree culminating in suicide, you might as well shoot everyone who's ever done anything that you perceived as bad or unfair to you. You'll never see any consequences regardless of the number of people you killed or maimed, so why not?
I mean, other than the fact that the whole idea is monstrous.
Washington state voted that way 4 years ago, and it hasn't shown up yet.
I guess you're not from around here? There are three recreational marijuana stores within just a few miles of my office. In Washington State. They've been open and doing business for months.
Why do companies bother to say this kind of crap?
People tell lies all the time, and most of them don't bother me that much. Politicians lie, and I get it. They tell lies that people want to hear so they can get elected. White lies smooth social interactions. All kinds of lies. But this particular lie really pisses me off.
It often starts with words like 'To better serve our customers' or 'For your convenience' and then it says something that makes my life worse and less convenient. And it's so goddamn transparent.
'To better serve our customers, we are closing the only branch of our business in your town. The nearest branch will be conveniently located 40 miles away.'
Fuck you. You aren't doing it to better serve your customers, you're doing it because you've decided that this branch doesn't bring in enough money. You're already pissing me off by closing the store. Why piss me off more by shitting all over me with lies?
Sorry. Sore topic.
Certainly it's possible, and they're readily available. It seems to me that it's less important in this case that they used SHA1 and more important that they didn't salt. If they had salted their passwords, even if the attackers managed to learn the salt value they would still have to generate a whole custom rainbow table just for that password table. And that takes a lot of computational effort, especially for longer passwords containing a variety of non-alpha characters.
I suppose that there are other problems with using a weaker hash, but any hash is susceptible to rainbow tables without salting or double hashing or something of the sort.
True, but if your password is ten or fewer characters in length, then it can likely be found in an SHA1 rainbow table, which are readily available. FTFA, it sounds like LinkedIn doesn't salt their password hashes, so it turns out to be trivially easy to crack most shorter passwords just given the hashed value.
Why? Why should suicide be illegal?
In the past, when I have asked this question, the answer has been that suicide is illegal because attempting suicide and failing gives authorities the ability to intervene and provide a person with mental health care. I understand that most people who fail at suicide wind up being glad they failed, so perhaps this intervention is appropriate. I'm not entirely convinced, but I'm willing to entertain the notion.
I certainly believe that people should have the right to end their own lives, for whatever reasons they wish. But if the reason is a treatable mental illness, then I'd rather that they get treatment than die based upon their incorrect assessment of their future quality of life.
The first order of business ought to be updating the course material to answer those frequently-asked-questions, so they don't need to be asked in the first place.
In my experience teaching college students, most of them don't read the syllabus or anything else I hand to them. Then I get questions from students about things that were explained on the syllabus. I have stood in front of a room full of students and stated a simple fact that had been printed on the syllabus (the exam will be next Tuesday, the 24th) and then called on a student who had his hand raised, who then asked when the exam was going to be because he hadn't been paying attention.
As an instructor, I make the information available clearly on the syllabus, on the course web site, and in class, and I still get people asking questions. So I can understand the professor's frustration, and I can also assure you that no matter how the information is made available, there are students who lack the ability, initiative, or interest to look it up.
If you have a panic attack whenever you see a cop, that would seem to warrant an examination of your own life. Don't ride dirty. Don't have guns, drugs or drug paraphernalia on you or in your car.
I don't have a panic attack when I see a cop, but I *am* acutely aware that the cops are not my friend. I don't really know what constitutes 'riding dirty'. I don't have guns, drugs, or drug paraphernalia in my car. But if a cop has a notion to fuck up my day and my car because I'm driving through his shitty little town and they make their revenues by making bullshit traffic stops and ginning up cause to search my car and stealing any cash I have through civil forfeiture, there is absolutely nothing I can do about it. I'm completely powerless in that situation, and a lot of the creepy fucks who are attracted to police work get their jollies by taking advantage of that power imbalance. Or maybe they're just corrupt and greedy. Their motivation doesn't matter that much.
There are plenty of examples of this behavior in news reports. There is no reason to believe it can't happen to me. I mean, here's one from just a few days ago, where the only reason the victims had their money (~$50,000) returned is that they were a Christian band who had raised the money for an orphanage, and that kind of thing makes bad headlines. http://dailysignal.com/2016/04...?
I would be surprised if even half of the Democrats I know will vote for Hillary ever.
I'm a registered Democrat, and to put it lightly, I'm not a big fan of Hillary. But if it actually mattered, I would hold my nose and vote for her over Trump. As it is, though, I live in an overwhelmingly red state. We're giving our votes to the Republican nominee, regardless of who it is or what their policies are (or whether they even have any). So I might just go ahead and vote for Trump anyway. My vote is meaningless in the context of the electoral college, but I'd rather not help give the impression that Hillary enjoys more popular support than she really does.
Congress can keep most candidates in check with the exception of Clinton.
I'm not so sure. Right now, the Republican majority in the House is gung-ho anti-Obama, and it seems like the main reason they don't like him is because he's a Democrat who won the Presidency. But President Hillary Clinton? They've made a hobby of openly loathing Hillary for decades. Provided we maintain a R majority in the House, and expecting a pretty evenly balanced Senate, I can't imagine that she's going to have an easy time with the Congress. I would expect them, especially in the House, to do everything they can to sabotage her policy agenda.
Compared to gmail accessed via web...
Great, if you only have one email account. I'm a student, so I have an official university email address that they insist upon using for all correspondence. I'm also an employee, so that's another email account. I have a gmail account for some personal stuff. I also have another free email account. I have an email address on the virtual server that I rent. Each of these accounts has its own web mail interface, different from the others.
With Thunderbird, I can combine all five email accounts into one common interface, so I can send and receive email while keeping my accounts segregated. I know I can forward all of these accounts to a single account, but I prefer to keep them separate for a variety of reasons.