We had an unusually sad case here when a college freshman (great grades, opted to attend classes here to be close to her family, community volunteer, planned to be a policewoman, etc.) was driving through a crosswalk/intersection that pedestrians consider dangerous one morning in late 2010 while texting, and didn't see a woman with her two-year-old kid until it was too late. The woman was gravely injured and had to be put in an induced coma for weeks & rehabbed for months before she could go home, the little girl died on the scene, and obviously the young woman's life is permanently fucked up both legally & emotionally.
There's actually something better -- steering wheel-mounted rocker switches for volume & to cycle through radio presets. My 2006 Toyota Solara came with the steering wheel radio/CD controls, and I'd very highly recommend having them.
You might want to check out the Trinity Desktop environment, then -- it's KDE 3 under continued development by another team. I've been using it part-time alongside KDE 4 (which has some better points & some inferior ones) in SimplyMepis for quite a while with no less luck than I did when I last used KDE 3 in 2008.
Shills are generally paid for -- just disliking a company (like Apple) or pointing out flaws in its behavior/products doesn't mean the person was paid to do so, otherwise just about everyone would have a nicely stuffed bank account.
Not that I'd exactly mind the extra money if one of Apple's many rivals wants to pay me...
Several years ago, it was a haven for people that enjoyed the relief from using a UNIX-like OS -- but that had nothing to do with Apple in the vast majority of cases, as they were using BSD or Linux. It certainly has been nice to see facts start ending the brief reign of the rabid Apple retards that would rather let Steve Jobs' corpse rape their dad than admit there could be anything negative about any of Apple's products.
If you think that merely having a job (which isn't the case for all computer geeks) makes a person immune to having their vote bought or to rhetoric, you need to get out a lot more...
Not quite. The Green parties started out back in the 1970s with an initial focus of environmentalism, but rapidly expanded to include other issues. As Wikipedia explains,
"Green politics is a political ideology that aims for the creation of an ecologically sustainable society rooted in environmentalism, social liberalism, and grassroots democracy....In addition to democracy and ecological issues, green politics is concerned with civil liberties, social justice, nonviolence and tends to support social progressivism....as the 'Green' ideology expanded, there also came into separate existence green movements on the political right in the form of green conservatism and eco-capitalism."
The US branch in California does a much better job than the UK Green site does of showing the key values that the parties share by phrasing the goals like questions. A few from the site:
How can we ... encourage people to commit themselves to lifestyles that promote their own health? ... ensure that representatives will be fully accountable to the people who elected them? ... have a decentralized, democratic society with our political, economic and social institutions locating power on the smallest scale (closest to home) that is efficient and practical? ... restrict the size and concentrated power of corporations without discouraging superior efficiency or technological innovation? ... induce our government and other institutions to practice fiscal responsibility? ... reclaim our country's finest shared ideals: the dignity of the individual, democratic participation, and liberty and justice for all? ... induce people and institutions to think in terms of the long range future, and not just in terms of their short range selfish interest?
I don't know which issues the UK Greens are prioritizing, but aside from regional issues, the different groups do tend to be very alike, and I know that the ideals here were pretty similar to the above when I first voted in 1995, so they've been beyond environmentalism for a long time.
Look up where the dental schools are in your area/state -- they usually offer heavily discounted care in exchange for letting already-trained students to practice under supervision, and they might also pay you to be used in the final exam. I've been going to one near me, and while it varies, they seem to charge from 1/4 to 1/2 the normal rate in our area for their various services.
If there isn't a dental school that you can reach, look up where the public clinics & county health services are at in your area; they sometimes include dental care and charge at a sliding-scale based on what you can afford to pay.
Hope you manage to get care soon... I learned the hard way after breaking one of my molars that often the break actually happens because the tooth has become fragile due to a severe cavity being present, and if it's not treated/removed, you can end up with a very nasty or dangerous infection. (I luckily avoided infection, but got told off by the student that rebuilt the tooth for me -- which thankfully didn't cost more than a normal filling.)
That might only work over the phone... My father attempted it in-person at the local Comcast office this past year, and they refused to fix his rate. When he walked across a breezeway and ordered service from one of the big DSL providers, their employees told him that they get a *lot* of new account subscriptions that way now.
My own household has gone cable-free for a few years despite my mother having a massive TV obsession. Most of our approach is a mixture of Netflix, Hulu (which has a surprising amount of really good older movies/shows), and network websites. Also, a close relative set up a Slingbox at his place on a spare cable box that mom uses when she has some reason to see something live (since he already has cable and an extra box isn't a big cost); he'll probably set up a proxy for her to watch Hulu once they ban non-cable subscribers, too.
We've been debating going with satellite service for a few years now, though, since it's significantly cheaper than cable and supposedly has better options.
Because in the case of Sonic.net, the founder/CEO, Dane Jasper, actively disagrees with the existence of usage caps, and has stated in interviews that he feels the government should be doing more to protect broadband customers from that kind of crap. There's a good article covering his (and by extension Sonic.net's) stance here.
I usually think back to a very common use/meaning of the word "cyber" in 90s chatrooms. (I have no connection to that article, it was just one of the first useful search results.)
Oh, there's a passageway labeled payg to that land -- it's just that the sexy expensive phones we all like to pal around with are too loyal to the provider they 'share spectrum space with' to follow us through it.
In Germany it's 3GB on a no-contract no-commitment prepaid SIM for €20/mo. (if you go over, you still get service, but 56k-ish speeds) This is on the Deutsche Telekom network, probably the best in that market.
Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile here in the US has a no-contract plan through their website that's fairly similar: it's US$30/month for 100 min talk + 5GB data at 4G speed, then 56k-ish speeds after that. All of the other plans I've been able to find cost 2-3 times as much to allow smartphones, and most only include 50-200 megs of data usage with high per-kilobyte charges beyond it, and many now include wifi & Google Talk use in counting towards included data/minutes.
I sure hope T-Mobile decides to stick with the US market in the long run, needless to say -- we need them.
Wow, the sites that page links to have some really interesting things for sale—even children! Makes for a great new parental threat: "Bratleigh, don't forget, little boys and girls that misbehave at the airport are confiscated by the TSA and auctioned off to meaner parents..."
I downloaded it about a year ago to try out Writer, but it was significantly slower & more resource-hungry on my ancient laptop than OO had been. When I checked the list of changes, it basically looked like all of the add-ons I have no use for (i.e. math/science-oriented) had been integrated, which would explain the performance hit.
Hah. My effeminate ex-BF was the one that was scared enough of everyone that he felt the need to be armed at all times, sleep with his bedroom door locked, and to let me speak up when big scary teen boys were doing something that upset him. He knew that statistics meant he was merely more likely to get himself shot if conflict did break out, but he was too scared to go unarmed -- wuss.
Anyway, statistics show that by keeping a gun around, you merely increase the chances of a family member accidentally getting shot and of yourself being killed in the event of a break-in. Otherwise, we're talking more about attempting to resist government agents with guns, a warrant arrest that took place in my city showed how that turns out -- someone in the household shot through the front door at the agents with an AK-47, causing minor injuries to two, so the agents stormed into the house in full battle gear, killed the family's pet boxer, and overpowered the family before anything else could happen.
There's a reason that we rarely hear about ICE, the police, and similar being killed in the line of duty (and when it does happen, it's usually stupid shit like a traffic stop gone horribly wrong): they usually know in advance which civilians are remotely likely or capable of firing back, and make damn sure they're protected and if necessary shoot before the civilian gets a chance. The civilian doesn't even need to be armed or clearly dangerous; they've shot quite a few mentally disabled people (like a former classmate of mine) for merely running towards them or making the wrong movement -- person's dead on the ground before they could've drawn a gun even if they did have one.
What we are experiencing is the emotionally governed (mostly fear-based) decision-making by a majority of people who have become too fat, intellectually lazy*, naive, complacent, and unable to look beyond the immediate moment.
Wait a minute there... Fat people are as politically well-informed as the rest of us, there's no way to tell how a stranger became overweight, what they are/aren't doing about it, or how intellectually curious they are -- and there's plenty of skinny people that only care about the 'information' they can get from tabloids. Claiming that mental laziness is a trait of fat people is an especially bizarre thing to say on Slashdot, considering geeks are often overweight for a variety of reasons.
No, I'm not a fat activist, I'm thin/fit. I just really dislike the assumption that one can know a person's mind based on their body's appearance, thanks to a childhood with too many people figuring that having a disabled body must result in having a disabled brain. (It helps that my two ex-BFs and a close friend of mine were all overweight or obese yet intellectually driven, of course.)
intellectually lazy... "Stupid" if you like, because they do not love to learn new things though they are capable of it and have more access to knowledge now than ever before in all of history.
I'd definitely go with "intellectually lazy" -- that meets the definition you gave, while 'stupid' (low IQ) folks can love to learn new things but just aren't very good at comprehending them.
We wish that's what would happen. More realistically, most of the country will be too busy focusing on entertainment & their bills or job woes to notice what DHS is up to & too uneducated to fully understand it or the freedoms we've been losing; of the people that do notice, most will decide/realize they're powerless to do anything and feel fortunate if DHS hires them given the job market's a mess -- a very small percentage will actively try to change the situation, only to fail or come under DHS scrutiny because there aren't enough activists to make a dent in the problem.
Just consider the closest thing we've had to a grassroots movement in decades (i.e. Occupy)... The government has been alternately ignoring it, seeding it with dissidents, and attacking it physically or legally, and the media convinced the rest of the population that the participants are either hooligans, spoiled trust fund babies, or 'dirty' hippies from '68 that found a time machine. The one success that I saw Occupy claim -- temporary halt of foreclosure evictions during part of December -- turned out to be something that the banks have done every year for ages.
Go back before the Mac came out, and you'll find the 'good' Apple. The original Apple I was sold as a motherboard kit (hard to get much more open than that); the Apple II series was designed to let users poke at the guts, replace & upgrade parts, add any of a countless number of third-party cards & hardware of all kinds, and modify/customize as much as we could manage with the help of the various books about its hardware. For a while there, in fact, there were even legal Apple II clones sold in stores, and obviously there was an overabundance of third-party software.
The Macintosh was the first Apple system to be tightly locked-down, in keeping with the way Jobs wanted Apple to evolve. As soon as the idealistic Woz was no longer around to champion the highly profitable Apple II line (which financed all of the pricy projects Apple undertook like the Mac, Lisa, etc.) Jobs did his best to eliminate it. That was how the company/products started shifting towards the locked-down approach they have now, almost destroying & greatly diminishing the former behemoth in the process.
Skillsets disruptive to the status quo, for instance. Hacking. Encryption.... By making it fun, easy, interesting and profitable, it would be very easy to imagine this model catching on among the mainstream Facebook crowd who are currently sitting around playing FarmVille instead. And thus, you'd have a means of bringing the mainstream back to reality and fixing society while making money for yourself in the process.
Most people don't have the talents required for advanced tech work to be pleasurable even if they're extremely bright, as their strengths lie in different areas. They're playing Facebook games in their downtime, no different from folks that play console games, read tech sites, watch TV, etc. -- and there's no reason to believe they're not in "reality."
Gay guys are attracted to ADULTS of the same sex; they're no more interested in little boys than hetero guys are in little girls. Are you trying to imply that you molest little girls, or are you truly cowardly enough that you'll only admit your beliefs anonymously?
Slashdot Mirror
Hey, if I had four arms and a girlfriend, I could probably do all of that too!
We had an unusually sad case here when a college freshman (great grades, opted to attend classes here to be close to her family, community volunteer, planned to be a policewoman, etc.) was driving through a crosswalk/intersection that pedestrians consider dangerous one morning in late 2010 while texting, and didn't see a woman with her two-year-old kid until it was too late. The woman was gravely injured and had to be put in an induced coma for weeks & rehabbed for months before she could go home, the little girl died on the scene, and obviously the young woman's life is permanently fucked up both legally & emotionally.
Anything without a volume knob.
There's actually something better -- steering wheel-mounted rocker switches for volume & to cycle through radio presets. My 2006 Toyota Solara came with the steering wheel radio/CD controls, and I'd very highly recommend having them.
You might want to check out the Trinity Desktop environment, then -- it's KDE 3 under continued development by another team. I've been using it part-time alongside KDE 4 (which has some better points & some inferior ones) in SimplyMepis for quite a while with no less luck than I did when I last used KDE 3 in 2008.
Shills are generally paid for -- just disliking a company (like Apple) or pointing out flaws in its behavior/products doesn't mean the person was paid to do so, otherwise just about everyone would have a nicely stuffed bank account.
Not that I'd exactly mind the extra money if one of Apple's many rivals wants to pay me...
Several years ago, it was a haven for people that enjoyed the relief from using a UNIX-like OS -- but that had nothing to do with Apple in the vast majority of cases, as they were using BSD or Linux. It certainly has been nice to see facts start ending the brief reign of the rabid Apple retards that would rather let Steve Jobs' corpse rape their dad than admit there could be anything negative about any of Apple's products.
If you think that merely having a job (which isn't the case for all computer geeks) makes a person immune to having their vote bought or to rhetoric, you need to get out a lot more...
Not quite. The Green parties started out back in the 1970s with an initial focus of environmentalism, but rapidly expanded to include other issues. As Wikipedia explains,
"Green politics is a political ideology that aims for the creation of an ecologically sustainable society rooted in environmentalism, social liberalism, and grassroots democracy. ...In addition to democracy and ecological issues, green politics is concerned with civil liberties, social justice, nonviolence and tends to support social progressivism. ...as the 'Green' ideology expanded, there also came into separate existence green movements on the political right in the form of green conservatism and eco-capitalism."
The US branch in California does a much better job than the UK Green site does of showing the key values that the parties share by phrasing the goals like questions. A few from the site:
How can we
... encourage people to commit themselves to lifestyles that promote their own health?
... ensure that representatives will be fully accountable to the people who elected them?
... have a decentralized, democratic society with our political, economic and social institutions locating power on the smallest scale (closest to home) that is efficient and practical?
... restrict the size and concentrated power of corporations without discouraging superior efficiency or technological innovation?
... induce our government and other institutions to practice fiscal responsibility?
... reclaim our country's finest shared ideals: the dignity of the individual, democratic participation, and liberty and justice for all?
... induce people and institutions to think in terms of the long range future, and not just in terms of their short range selfish interest?
I don't know which issues the UK Greens are prioritizing, but aside from regional issues, the different groups do tend to be very alike, and I know that the ideals here were pretty similar to the above when I first voted in 1995, so they've been beyond environmentalism for a long time.
Look up where the dental schools are in your area/state -- they usually offer heavily discounted care in exchange for letting already-trained students to practice under supervision, and they might also pay you to be used in the final exam. I've been going to one near me, and while it varies, they seem to charge from 1/4 to 1/2 the normal rate in our area for their various services.
If there isn't a dental school that you can reach, look up where the public clinics & county health services are at in your area; they sometimes include dental care and charge at a sliding-scale based on what you can afford to pay.
Hope you manage to get care soon... I learned the hard way after breaking one of my molars that often the break actually happens because the tooth has become fragile due to a severe cavity being present, and if it's not treated/removed, you can end up with a very nasty or dangerous infection. (I luckily avoided infection, but got told off by the student that rebuilt the tooth for me -- which thankfully didn't cost more than a normal filling.)
and viola! It gets cheaper.
Ah, but do the fiddle and violin drop in price, too? What about other instruments? ;)
That might only work over the phone... My father attempted it in-person at the local Comcast office this past year, and they refused to fix his rate. When he walked across a breezeway and ordered service from one of the big DSL providers, their employees told him that they get a *lot* of new account subscriptions that way now.
My own household has gone cable-free for a few years despite my mother having a massive TV obsession. Most of our approach is a mixture of Netflix, Hulu (which has a surprising amount of really good older movies/shows), and network websites. Also, a close relative set up a Slingbox at his place on a spare cable box that mom uses when she has some reason to see something live (since he already has cable and an extra box isn't a big cost); he'll probably set up a proxy for her to watch Hulu once they ban non-cable subscribers, too.
We've been debating going with satellite service for a few years now, though, since it's significantly cheaper than cable and supposedly has better options.
Because in the case of Sonic.net, the founder/CEO, Dane Jasper, actively disagrees with the existence of usage caps, and has stated in interviews that he feels the government should be doing more to protect broadband customers from that kind of crap. There's a good article covering his (and by extension Sonic.net's) stance here.
I usually think back to a very common use/meaning of the word "cyber" in 90s chatrooms. (I have no connection to that article, it was just one of the first useful search results.)
Oh, there's a passageway labeled payg to that land -- it's just that the sexy expensive phones we all like to pal around with are too loyal to the provider they 'share spectrum space with' to follow us through it.
In Germany it's 3GB on a no-contract no-commitment prepaid SIM for €20/mo. (if you go over, you still get service, but 56k-ish speeds) This is on the Deutsche Telekom network, probably the best in that market.
Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile here in the US has a no-contract plan through their website that's fairly similar: it's US$30/month for 100 min talk + 5GB data at 4G speed, then 56k-ish speeds after that. All of the other plans I've been able to find cost 2-3 times as much to allow smartphones, and most only include 50-200 megs of data usage with high per-kilobyte charges beyond it, and many now include wifi & Google Talk use in counting towards included data/minutes.
I sure hope T-Mobile decides to stick with the US market in the long run, needless to say -- we need them.
Wow, the sites that page links to have some really interesting things for sale—even children! Makes for a great new parental threat: "Bratleigh, don't forget, little boys and girls that misbehave at the airport are confiscated by the TSA and auctioned off to meaner parents..."
I downloaded it about a year ago to try out Writer, but it was significantly slower & more resource-hungry on my ancient laptop than OO had been. When I checked the list of changes, it basically looked like all of the add-ons I have no use for (i.e. math/science-oriented) had been integrated, which would explain the performance hit.
Hah. My effeminate ex-BF was the one that was scared enough of everyone that he felt the need to be armed at all times, sleep with his bedroom door locked, and to let me speak up when big scary teen boys were doing something that upset him. He knew that statistics meant he was merely more likely to get himself shot if conflict did break out, but he was too scared to go unarmed -- wuss.
Anyway, statistics show that by keeping a gun around, you merely increase the chances of a family member accidentally getting shot and of yourself being killed in the event of a break-in. Otherwise, we're talking more about attempting to resist government agents with guns, a warrant arrest that took place in my city showed how that turns out -- someone in the household shot through the front door at the agents with an AK-47, causing minor injuries to two, so the agents stormed into the house in full battle gear, killed the family's pet boxer, and overpowered the family before anything else could happen.
There's a reason that we rarely hear about ICE, the police, and similar being killed in the line of duty (and when it does happen, it's usually stupid shit like a traffic stop gone horribly wrong): they usually know in advance which civilians are remotely likely or capable of firing back, and make damn sure they're protected and if necessary shoot before the civilian gets a chance. The civilian doesn't even need to be armed or clearly dangerous; they've shot quite a few mentally disabled people (like a former classmate of mine) for merely running towards them or making the wrong movement -- person's dead on the ground before they could've drawn a gun even if they did have one.
What we are experiencing is the emotionally governed (mostly fear-based) decision-making by a majority of people who have become too fat, intellectually lazy*, naive, complacent, and unable to look beyond the immediate moment.
Wait a minute there... Fat people are as politically well-informed as the rest of us, there's no way to tell how a stranger became overweight, what they are/aren't doing about it, or how intellectually curious they are -- and there's plenty of skinny people that only care about the 'information' they can get from tabloids. Claiming that mental laziness is a trait of fat people is an especially bizarre thing to say on Slashdot, considering geeks are often overweight for a variety of reasons.
No, I'm not a fat activist, I'm thin/fit. I just really dislike the assumption that one can know a person's mind based on their body's appearance, thanks to a childhood with too many people figuring that having a disabled body must result in having a disabled brain. (It helps that my two ex-BFs and a close friend of mine were all overweight or obese yet intellectually driven, of course.)
intellectually lazy ... "Stupid" if you like, because they do not love to learn new things though they are capable of it and have more access to knowledge now than ever before in all of history.
I'd definitely go with "intellectually lazy" -- that meets the definition you gave, while 'stupid' (low IQ) folks can love to learn new things but just aren't very good at comprehending them.
We wish that's what would happen. More realistically, most of the country will be too busy focusing on entertainment & their bills or job woes to notice what DHS is up to & too uneducated to fully understand it or the freedoms we've been losing; of the people that do notice, most will decide/realize they're powerless to do anything and feel fortunate if DHS hires them given the job market's a mess -- a very small percentage will actively try to change the situation, only to fail or come under DHS scrutiny because there aren't enough activists to make a dent in the problem.
Just consider the closest thing we've had to a grassroots movement in decades (i.e. Occupy)... The government has been alternately ignoring it, seeding it with dissidents, and attacking it physically or legally, and the media convinced the rest of the population that the participants are either hooligans, spoiled trust fund babies, or 'dirty' hippies from '68 that found a time machine. The one success that I saw Occupy claim -- temporary halt of foreclosure evictions during part of December -- turned out to be something that the banks have done every year for ages.
Considering that their eBook reader runs a version of it...
Or used to. They made it hacker-resistant with the December OS updates...
No, B&N hoped it would be hacker-resistant, but the XDA devs released updates to their rooting methods (like ManualNooter) pretty quickly.
After reading the above, I was quite amused to see the BBC's cheery comment on Google+ that
The motto of the London Olympics has also been revealed: "Inspire a generation".
Of course, acting like fascists does tend to inspire people, just not usually in a way the fascists agree with...
Go back before the Mac came out, and you'll find the 'good' Apple. The original Apple I was sold as a motherboard kit (hard to get much more open than that); the Apple II series was designed to let users poke at the guts, replace & upgrade parts, add any of a countless number of third-party cards & hardware of all kinds, and modify/customize as much as we could manage with the help of the various books about its hardware. For a while there, in fact, there were even legal Apple II clones sold in stores, and obviously there was an overabundance of third-party software.
The Macintosh was the first Apple system to be tightly locked-down, in keeping with the way Jobs wanted Apple to evolve. As soon as the idealistic Woz was no longer around to champion the highly profitable Apple II line (which financed all of the pricy projects Apple undertook like the Mac, Lisa, etc.) Jobs did his best to eliminate it. That was how the company/products started shifting towards the locked-down approach they have now, almost destroying & greatly diminishing the former behemoth in the process.
Skillsets disruptive to the status quo, for instance. Hacking. Encryption. ... By making it fun, easy, interesting and profitable, it would be very easy to imagine this model catching on among the mainstream Facebook crowd who are currently sitting around playing FarmVille instead. And thus, you'd have a means of bringing the mainstream back to reality and fixing society while making money for yourself in the process.
Most people don't have the talents required for advanced tech work to be pleasurable even if they're extremely bright, as their strengths lie in different areas. They're playing Facebook games in their downtime, no different from folks that play console games, read tech sites, watch TV, etc. -- and there's no reason to believe they're not in "reality."
Gay guys are attracted to ADULTS of the same sex; they're no more interested in little boys than hetero guys are in little girls. Are you trying to imply that you molest little girls, or are you truly cowardly enough that you'll only admit your beliefs anonymously?