The USPS is not subsidized. And yet all the anti-government types keep trying to point to it as a failure when it's probably one of the best run government departments. Mostly because the USPS is required to act much like an independent business because of the 1971 Postal Reorganization Act. Tax dollars are only used in limited cases, such as delivery of voting materials overseas. Junk mail actually keeps the system going. Amazon can deliver to this remoate place in the Himalayas, but it won't deliver to some places in the US that the post office does serve. Profit is what matters to Amazon.
Certainly the postal system could be improved, but I don't understand why it's constantly held up as an example of wasteful government.
The only reason Facebook orignally wanted personal info is so that people could find their "friends". Similarly, LinkedIn has legitimate reasons for asking you to list where you have worked in the past. It is NOT about accountability, since you can lie all you want on those sites (and many do).
But Reddit, Slashdot, etc, have no legitimate interest in knowing who you are. But there are ways to know who's worth listening to and who should be given less credence - ie, modding, anonymous cowards, who recently the person joined, ignore lists, etc. That's how things worked in the early internet days, such as with usenet, bboards, etc, and you didn't know who people were except by their email addresses (which would change with every job, or for students every semester).
I have gone and posted anonymously several times when I was including details that would make it easier to identify who I was in real life or what company I was currently working at, etc.
Yes. Yes we are. Often it's not whether a politician is left, right, up, or down, but whether they are in the majority or not. Once a party is in power they inevitably throw out their old ideas and start marching in lockstep.
Right now, if you are Republican and disagree with the president then you are likely to not win the next election. If the Republicans were full of McCains and Flakes then I might actually register a party preference and vote that way, but instead it's got too many toadies so I'll stick to a no-preference stance.
A flawed law designed to slow down sex trafficking but which actually goes too far. That's the whole point, you get too caught up in the rules and start forgetting about the reason for the rules or whether the rules are just or not. As in, "I'm not personally against prostitution, but the law is the law", and eventually it's "ok, they scooped up and jailed 10 people, 9 are probably innocent but it's better than letting that one guy go free", to "sure the government is probably overreaching and I'm worried about the people who disappear, but at least the government is strong and taking action".
This has nothing to do with sex trafficking or left/right politics. It's about a stupid law, and stupid people who defend the stupid law merely because they read the law's title.
It's a bit naive to assume legislators actually read the legislations they're voting on. Almost all will vote exactly how they are told to by their party leadership or risk losing campaign financing. And the legislation is often so large that it's an enormous time to read it all between the time it leaves committee and is taken up for a vote. There's also the added pressure that if you vote against something like that because of a bad last-minute addition you will be seen as not tough enough on crime.
There's no possible way that my gossip and photos are even remotely worth $4.99 a month. Maybe it's worth that much from someone who's a compulsive buyer of online goods with no control over the impulse to click; maybe it's worth more than that for celebrities, but for the verage person that's way overpriced.
Generally, advertising costs should be LESS than that the amount of profit increase due to advertising. Or at least that's how it worked before the dotcom "new economy" shit.
Adblock works amazingly well on slashdot. All you're going to see are the single line text only ad up top, and the "sponsored" content, both of which are relatively new. Nothing whatsoever add related shows up on the right side-bar except for the button to opt-out of ads and the number of moderator points I have.
Youtube is the worst offender I think for me. I've turned on a lot of privacy settings on Google+ and I haven't seen anything so far that hints at tracking. I don't use gmail. I don't use a lot of google stuff on Android. But Youtube is the one that tries to figure out what videos I want to see. So far I see three different "profiles" that indicate three different types of people; the one from my Roku w/o being logged in, my PC without being logged in, and my PC while logged in.
I have only 3 posts I think on Facebook, so it's not learning much about me from its main site. I disable ads there and have privacy options on. Nevertheless, it has shown suggestions for videos or groups that can only have come from data from other sites. I do believe I have that ubiquitous "share on facebook" icon blocked and disabled, so I'm suspecting other sites are willfully sharing their data with Facebook.
Windows is in decline in many arenas. For home use, many past Windows users are just opting for smart phones and tablets rather than having a computer. The enterprise is the last bastion of Windows but usage there is declining in the back-office, and with so many web based applications all you really need is a browser (then the trick becomes how to avoid Office 365 in the cloud).
Buy one with Windows pre-installed, then overwrite it with Linux, BSD, etc. Or... repartition so you keep Windows for games but do all your web browsing and work on Linux.
At work though you're usualy screwed, you use what the bosses tell you to use, but at least you're being compensated for it.
Like the people who get extremely angry when they see a gold dress and others see a black dress. An utterly unimportant issue that got some people bothered.
Turning yourself into the police is sort of a way to say "I was totally justified in my actions" or "I don't feel guilty".
You REUSE those bags! In europe those were one euro per bag. I get cloth bags send to me by some charities as a thank you give, and those last a very long time. If youre spending 10c every trip to get a bag, you're doing it wrong. There's nothing silly or unusual about the California rules.
I really liked the old paper bags. They would easily hold up over multiple uses, and were handy for storage and the like. Back in the 70s many people saved those rather than treating them as disposables (even though disposable was all the fashion in the 70s). You start talking to people who were around in the great depression and they didn't treat anything as disposable.
Also remember, we actually re-used those paper bags, because they weren't flimsy. Go a bit further back, I can remember one of my grandmothers with a small foldable grocery cart, of which I saw many in use in the neighborhood.
I remember some sturdy melamine type utensils, that you used in car hops (ie, those Happy Days type drive-ins). You didn't take them with you. Today at work we have biodegradable utensils that are cheap.
Reusable bags are very common in the US now, despite everyone predicting doom and gloom. Charities send you more bags over time until have more than you need. I do have some old single-use bags from before the ban, but I keep those for use in my small wastebasket in the bathroom. However when I do take my reusable bags to grocery stores in other counties, they will give me odd looks like I'm from Mars.
Multiplayer screws up so many games. Ie, Skrim, single player, you want to use a mouse, and Microsoft says "no, it's unfair for you to have a mouse". Stupid.
I thought they already had mouse/keyboard support in older xboxes? There are some games on xbox that I can't even begin to imagine being played with only a console controller.
Oh ya? Well my daddy can beat up your daddy! Not that it's important, but as long as you're arguing with kindergarten level rhetoric I guess I can play along.
The problem isn't private prisons per se, but the government is basically washing their hands of the problem, 'outsourcing' the problem and failing to be accountable.
Slashdot Mirror
The USPS is not subsidized. And yet all the anti-government types keep trying to point to it as a failure when it's probably one of the best run government departments. Mostly because the USPS is required to act much like an independent business because of the 1971 Postal Reorganization Act. Tax dollars are only used in limited cases, such as delivery of voting materials overseas. Junk mail actually keeps the system going. Amazon can deliver to this remoate place in the Himalayas, but it won't deliver to some places in the US that the post office does serve. Profit is what matters to Amazon.
Certainly the postal system could be improved, but I don't understand why it's constantly held up as an example of wasteful government.
The only reason Facebook orignally wanted personal info is so that people could find their "friends". Similarly, LinkedIn has legitimate reasons for asking you to list where you have worked in the past. It is NOT about accountability, since you can lie all you want on those sites (and many do).
But Reddit, Slashdot, etc, have no legitimate interest in knowing who you are. But there are ways to know who's worth listening to and who should be given less credence - ie, modding, anonymous cowards, who recently the person joined, ignore lists, etc. That's how things worked in the early internet days, such as with usenet, bboards, etc, and you didn't know who people were except by their email addresses (which would change with every job, or for students every semester).
I have gone and posted anonymously several times when I was including details that would make it easier to identify who I was in real life or what company I was currently working at, etc.
Agreed, the title should be "Why You Should Not Use The Cloud."
Yes. Yes we are. Often it's not whether a politician is left, right, up, or down, but whether they are in the majority or not. Once a party is in power they inevitably throw out their old ideas and start marching in lockstep.
Right now, if you are Republican and disagree with the president then you are likely to not win the next election. If the Republicans were full of McCains and Flakes then I might actually register a party preference and vote that way, but instead it's got too many toadies so I'll stick to a no-preference stance.
A flawed law designed to slow down sex trafficking but which actually goes too far. That's the whole point, you get too caught up in the rules and start forgetting about the reason for the rules or whether the rules are just or not. As in, "I'm not personally against prostitution, but the law is the law", and eventually it's "ok, they scooped up and jailed 10 people, 9 are probably innocent but it's better than letting that one guy go free", to "sure the government is probably overreaching and I'm worried about the people who disappear, but at least the government is strong and taking action".
This has nothing to do with sex trafficking or left/right politics. It's about a stupid law, and stupid people who defend the stupid law merely because they read the law's title.
It's a bit naive to assume legislators actually read the legislations they're voting on. Almost all will vote exactly how they are told to by their party leadership or risk losing campaign financing. And the legislation is often so large that it's an enormous time to read it all between the time it leaves committee and is taken up for a vote. There's also the added pressure that if you vote against something like that because of a bad last-minute addition you will be seen as not tough enough on crime.
Ya, but then you got to spend all that on your employees, vans, etc.
Generally I've found that the price is identical with or without windows.
There's no possible way that my gossip and photos are even remotely worth $4.99 a month. Maybe it's worth that much from someone who's a compulsive buyer of online goods with no control over the impulse to click; maybe it's worth more than that for celebrities, but for the verage person that's way overpriced.
Generally, advertising costs should be LESS than that the amount of profit increase due to advertising. Or at least that's how it worked before the dotcom "new economy" shit.
Never seen any of that on slashdot. Are you sure you're using adblock and noscript correctly?
You can disable that uploading.
Adblock works amazingly well on slashdot. All you're going to see are the single line text only ad up top, and the "sponsored" content, both of which are relatively new. Nothing whatsoever add related shows up on the right side-bar except for the button to opt-out of ads and the number of moderator points I have.
Youtube is the worst offender I think for me. I've turned on a lot of privacy settings on Google+ and I haven't seen anything so far that hints at tracking. I don't use gmail. I don't use a lot of google stuff on Android. But Youtube is the one that tries to figure out what videos I want to see. So far I see three different "profiles" that indicate three different types of people; the one from my Roku w/o being logged in, my PC without being logged in, and my PC while logged in.
I have only 3 posts I think on Facebook, so it's not learning much about me from its main site. I disable ads there and have privacy options on. Nevertheless, it has shown suggestions for videos or groups that can only have come from data from other sites. I do believe I have that ubiquitous "share on facebook" icon blocked and disabled, so I'm suspecting other sites are willfully sharing their data with Facebook.
Windows is in decline in many arenas. For home use, many past Windows users are just opting for smart phones and tablets rather than having a computer. The enterprise is the last bastion of Windows but usage there is declining in the back-office, and with so many web based applications all you really need is a browser (then the trick becomes how to avoid Office 365 in the cloud).
Buy one with Windows pre-installed, then overwrite it with Linux, BSD, etc. Or... repartition so you keep Windows for games but do all your web browsing and work on Linux.
At work though you're usualy screwed, you use what the bosses tell you to use, but at least you're being compensated for it.
I have a clay tablet. It says "Enoch's slightly used sheep, get two for the price of one!"
Like the people who get extremely angry when they see a gold dress and others see a black dress. An utterly unimportant issue that got some people bothered.
Turning yourself into the police is sort of a way to say "I was totally justified in my actions" or "I don't feel guilty".
You REUSE those bags! In europe those were one euro per bag. I get cloth bags send to me by some charities as a thank you give, and those last a very long time. If youre spending 10c every trip to get a bag, you're doing it wrong. There's nothing silly or unusual about the California rules.
I really liked the old paper bags. They would easily hold up over multiple uses, and were handy for storage and the like. Back in the 70s many people saved those rather than treating them as disposables (even though disposable was all the fashion in the 70s). You start talking to people who were around in the great depression and they didn't treat anything as disposable.
Also remember, we actually re-used those paper bags, because they weren't flimsy. Go a bit further back, I can remember one of my grandmothers with a small foldable grocery cart, of which I saw many in use in the neighborhood.
I remember some sturdy melamine type utensils, that you used in car hops (ie, those Happy Days type drive-ins). You didn't take them with you. Today at work we have biodegradable utensils that are cheap.
Reusable bags are very common in the US now, despite everyone predicting doom and gloom. Charities send you more bags over time until have more than you need. I do have some old single-use bags from before the ban, but I keep those for use in my small wastebasket in the bathroom. However when I do take my reusable bags to grocery stores in other counties, they will give me odd looks like I'm from Mars.
Multiplayer screws up so many games. Ie, Skrim, single player, you want to use a mouse, and Microsoft says "no, it's unfair for you to have a mouse". Stupid.
I thought they already had mouse/keyboard support in older xboxes? There are some games on xbox that I can't even begin to imagine being played with only a console controller.
Oh ya? Well my daddy can beat up your daddy! Not that it's important, but as long as you're arguing with kindergarten level rhetoric I guess I can play along.
The problem isn't private prisons per se, but the government is basically washing their hands of the problem, 'outsourcing' the problem and failing to be accountable.