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I have a Western Electric 1D2 pay phone. It's hooked up in my office. https://flic.kr/p/5Duj1k

Took my camera to work, stepped outside to snap photos about every 10-15 minutes. Took about 30, then stitched the photos together from start to finish. https://flic.kr/s/aHsm3hyXWX Nikon D7200, cheap Tamron 70-300mm lens, snap-on-the-lens solar filter, all hand held.

We did lots of pre-planning, selected Jackson Hole and got reservations about a year ago for eight of us. Weather looked iffy for a bit but was clear for the eclipse. Crowds were not bad in town. The locals called it just slightly busier than a normal summer weekend. We suspect that there are only so many rooms available and people got scared off by the hype. Outside town in the Tetons it was a different story.

Took some photos (mostly automated to not miss the experience). https://flic.kr/s/aHsm6RakMj

I also uploaded about 150 shots to the Eclipse Megamovie: https://eclipsemega.movie/

Rear-ending is something that always comes up in /. discussions about driving, especially by US drivers (the site is rather US centric). Everyone and their dog seem to have been in at least one such accident. I have never been in such an accident, nor have I heard of any European friends that had such an accident.

Add to that, statistics show that US drivers have far more accidents, injuries and deaths per distance (per km or per mile, whatever you like to use) than European drivers, especially those from western European countries. This while US streets are wider and straighter; quite some Americans are scared stiff by our narrow, winding roads - we're routinely doing things like driving 80 km/hr (the legal limit) on country roads, and not slowing down for oncoming traffic while the road is so narrow there's not even a line in the middle... because the road simply is plenty wide enough for two cars.

Much stricter driving training does help a lot.

Here's a picture of my (now dead) Subaru with an annotation of the previous four accidents, all of which involved being rear-ended, 75% of which involved being rear-ended while I was at a stop, at a stoplight, with cars in front of me. In two of the cases I was watching the person driving getting closer and closer, while honking my horn, which she couldn't hear (both times a she) because she was talking on her phone. I am pretty sure most of the people who hit me could have passed driving tests, because then they wouldn't've been talking on their phones, so I'm not sure that's a fix. (It's one I'd love, but it's not enough.) I don't have a picture of the time I nearly was killed in the same sort of accident: roadway at a stop, with big signs up saying "accident ahead: detour", and I came to a complete stop like everyone else, and the semi truck driver behind me never even slowed down, so he hit me at well over 100kph. (Yay subaru station wagons: extra crumple zones, in that case, two meters of crumple zone.) He was adjusting his radio when he hit me -- which, again, a driving test probably wouldn't catch.
Oh by the way that blue Subaru got rear-ended a fifth time by a pickup and that time it was totaled. I dunno what the pickup driver was doing to not notice me sitting at a red stoplight.

I was about to say much the same thing... Just because we [residents of the Puget Sound Basin] don't live in a dried brown wasteland like California, that doesn't mean we don't have problems of our own. We've had a series of drier than normal summers (low groundwater recharge), and last winter was (as your link shows) extraordinarily dry (less water coming into the rivers and resevoirs).

Here's a picture I took roughly two years ago showing the normal snowpack on the Olympics around this time of year. (That snow normally persists well into May or June.) But, if you look at this webcam, you can see the much smaller pack we have this year. If you look at The Brothers (just left of center in my picture, almost to the left hand side of the webcam), the difference is particularly stark.

Microsoft has finally gone too far:

https://flic.kr/p/nJ4xag

http://flic.kr/p/efUuQR

They would be blurry and discolored anyway. I believe that pictures from the dreams are more suggestive than realistic. Like one of the photos I created a while ago: http://flic.kr/p/7A83gW . Look how the plants are all recognizable, even if you can not see them directly. They are all just shapes in dirty water, but the brain thinks that they are real.

You're durn right it's a trap!

Eh, nowadays people just type what they want in the Google Search bar, remember the Facebook login debacle?

On the other hand, URLs are going back to the AOL keyword origins anyway, look at this domains: http://nyti.ms/, http://flic.kr/, http://youtu.be/ . Yes, they're real. And yes, I hate them.

How about compelling evidence that it *is* being astroturfed? Businesses are getting so brazen at this that they just come right out and say it in written form that they'll give something in return for positive reviews...

newsletter asking to shill

Yelp review calling out owner with a *response* from the owner

I saw the stupid Twitter-140-character-limit-moronity-mandated URL-shortened http://flic.kr/ the other day, and I thought, the concept of ccTLDs are dead! Why not just use http://flickr/ if you're going to do that.

Yeah, the Internet is getting stupider and stupider every second...

Somehow in my world view, the concept progress somehow involved a rise in the standard of living globally. In a more selfish angle, poverty anywhere is a threat to prosperity everywhere ... but it should come as no surprise that a low standard of living has a lower carbon footprint, but a reversal into the medieval dark ages, into a world of filth and disease is not where I thought progress would take me.

The hint of "noble savage" that this particular article seems to dig up almost horrifies me. The illusion that somehow all of us should aspire to simple living goes against two centuries of human culture. Even they aspire for me, as the article clearly spells out "Discomfort is an investment". These people aren't comfortable, the population explosion and the draw-in into the cities is causing the rural india to collapse, the two-bit farmer who grew his own grain & sold his veggies during the rains is gone. Fewer hands to till and more mouths to feed.

Because I live in urban India, I see slums day in & day out. I walk by them, I occasionally grab a cup of chai from the roadside vendor (hey, I got an immune system, don't I?). I end up people-watching, the drunkard husband, the garbage picker kids, the housemaid wife, the precocious teenager dreaming of a gangster life. Vivid, poignant & stark at the same time. But very rarely do I click a picture or write about what I see (maybe I'm in middle-class denial, I don't know). Though occasionally rant about the representation of it in popular culture. This is the bombay I love to visit, not the slums or the bombed hotels.

I want progress, not just for me ... but for everyone. Not a green planet that's So-so-Soylent. Let me have my dream, at least ... don't glorify my nightmares :(

Ugh, I think I've spent all the optimism I'd had for the day.

It's not really becoming popular because it is better to hear music off one. The vinyl turntable is a performance instrument all of its own.

About a year back I ran into someone who had a vinyl turntable hooked into Ubuntu studio. He'd essentially use the turntable hooked into the MIDI port(?) which lets him control any soundtrack with a touch of his finger.

The guy was explaining how the user interface of a turntable supersedes anything else out there for what he's doing. That in some sense, it's the touch screen of the music man.

Sure, people selling little baggies of things will prosper and grow. But it ain't going to be cheerios.

Honestly, I'm an Indian IT guy who looks like this and is a straight edge vegetarian. But despite all that, twice in Portland, people have stopped me and asked me for some weed.

Now, there's a market which expands during a recession.

You look like Kumar??? :) :) :)

Sure, people selling little baggies of things will prosper and grow. But it ain't going to be cheerios.

Honestly, I'm an Indian IT guy who looks like this and is a straight edge vegetarian. But despite all that, twice in Portland, people have stopped me and asked me for some weed.

Now, there's a market which expands during a recession.