They switched to a rapid-release schedule of a new full version number every few weeks as of v5 in summer 2011... I can't tell you when we actually went from 9 to 10, though -- I'm on the auto-updating beta (or the auto-bloating, to be snide about it) and the new numbering system makes all of the releases blur together.
Adding: To be fair, I *do* find some of the headlines quite funny, and most of us already get a better gist of the article contents from reading other people's comments...it's just the presentation drags it down.
I agree... I look forward to April Fool's jokes each year, and can see how this one would be great fun if we were kids playing an April Fool's Joke on a teacher, or perhaps close friends that have a playful sort of rivalry -- but when it's just an anonymous change making a website a PITA to read without a bookmarklet, it's a lot less entertaining.
Or even more likely, obsessively monitoring a mate because jealousy/control issues make everyone sexually compatible look like a romantic threat -- or stalking an ex to find out whether they're filing for a restraining order or moving somewhere else in an attempt to escape. (I've known a few people that cheated, but far more like me that dated an insecure paranoid control freak...)
The attitude the warning is given with makes a huge impact on how it's received, and if the worst happens, whether the person is viewed positively as having tried to hard to warn everyone or as a smug jerk that thinks he's better than everyone else working there.
Very few people react to superiority by welcoming the individual's input or wanting to do what the individual says they should; they react even more negatively to the (to be blunt) childish "neener neener I'm right you're wrong, idiots." Since most people can pick up on both unspoken thoughts to some degree, the tactic you describe actually reduces the chances of anyone listening to you; it also runs the risk of the people above you noticing that you're quietly letting the project founder, which reflects badly on you.
It works out much better if you offer the basic information -- don't go overboard or put a big effort into it -- with either an air of helpfulness/concern or, at worst, "here's the info, take it or leave it" neutrality. If you're not listened to, disengage emotionally like a professional, and if things ultimately do go wrong, focus on the frustration & disappointment at having been ignored again, maybe even toss in a head-shaking, "dammit, wish they'd listened," to a co-worker you're friendly with. People (including the ones above you) will misinterpret those feelings as being a reaction to the project not doing well, and conclude that you have benevolent motivations (rather than primarily just wanting to show them up) which makes them more likely to listen in the long run.
1) In the early 90s, I was a teenager using a trusty Apple IIgs to write & edit my first full-length novel, first on 3.5" floppies and then a 20mb Seagate external hard drive. Two or three years into the project, when a summer of 6-8 hour days working on it had the first full rough draft 99% finished and partway into heavy restructuring/editing, I turned the IIgs on only to have it inform me there was no bootable disk. (I later learned that my mother had just vacuumed the drive, including running the brush along the grill.) I tried everything I could think of -- letting the drive warm up longer before turning the computer on, re-seating/moving/replacing the SCSI card -- with no luck. I *had* made floppy backups of the drive, but they turned out to be unreadable. I rewrote most of the missing chapters from memory, but the final two gave me enough trouble that I ultimately gave up.
2) A few years ago, I got back into writing after a decade-long hiatus and eventually decided to try my hand at editing & finishing up the above-mentioned novel. Another year or so of work went by, this time with verified backups made both locally & with an online service that kept multiple versions of each file. I bought an old IBM T20 to work on away from my desk, but it couldn't handle both the online backup and OpenOffice, so I saved my files on a flash drive to transfer to the main system every night or two.
After working intensely all weekend on a couple of chapters, I returned to my office plugged in the flash drive, and was informed that it was unformatted. I refrained from panic, and booted up the old IBM, since I'd set OpenOffice to auto-save every few minutes...only to discover that the autosave directory was empty & the temp folders lacked any relevant files. Using testdisk to investigate made it clear that even though the program had shown the little autosaving bar periodically while I worked, it had never actually done anything, so I was SOL there.
I had dd copy the flash disk to an.img file, which required multiple passes as the drive evidently had some kind of very serious problem, made a copy of the.img, then ran testdisk on the copy to search for the most crucial files. The good news is that it found them; the bad news is that they were corrupt... The worse news, I soon learned, is that a single modern Open Document file is actually multiple files crammed together into a zipfile, and since a tiny problem can render a zipfile unopenable, the contents were lost. Frustrating & severely disheartening for me, but not half as bad as for the people showing up that lost a major work project or doctoral thesis and begged for help only to be smugly told they should've made backups more often.
Spideroak for my crucial working files along with local backup here, too; I find it's also helpful at times to have it back up the autosave/temp directories used when I work on them. I just wish that they'd come to their senses and offer a more reasonable pricing scheme -- a lot of users could use a few more GB for breathing room and would pay a few dollars each month (like ~$1/GB) for it, but will never come *close* to 100GB, let alone pay $100-120/year for the useless space, especially if our connection is too slow for large-scale backup/restore situations...
I don't know if it will work with brand-name services rather than just servers, but you might look into LuckyBackup, as it does allow the creation & scheduling of multiple backup profiles. Combining it with SpiderOak (the best free online live-versioning backup I can find) set to constantly back up select crucial files & associated autosave directories works extremely well for me.
Bosses discriminate against other traits -- disability (even if "in the closet" they're often just perceptible enough), not finishing college, majoring in a non-STEM discipline, being unmarried, being childless or childfree, not being openly religious, age, and a strongly introverted or shy personality are the ones I've heard of, offhand.
That said, plenty of women are mistaken for men online (often deliberately) because they have a unisex username, act confident, and/or have preferences/interests associated with guys. It has happened here on/. at least once even to women that had a username containing a female epithet like "chick" or "girl."
It's no different from the preinstalled Windows crap -- it comes from the manufacturer and sponsoring companies (including the cell provider), not the OS itself. I believe it can be removed by rooting the device -- I *know* it can be by replacing the crappy built-in bloated copy of Android with a good alternative distribution like Cyanogenmod. Even that's really no different from having to install a standalone copy of Windows in order to get rid of some of the more persistent junk, except in Windows it often has meant tracking down & manually installing all of the drivers that had been included on the manufacturer's copy.
I agree, though obtaining, being on, or publicly over-using a substance without harming someone shouldn't be lumped in with the other types because of the high percentage of self-destructive behavior being spurred by an attempt to self-treat undiagnosed intolerably strong symptoms of psychiatric illness, not poor impulse control. The ones that get caught often aren't educated enough to realize they have a mental illness; all they know is that they spend much of their time full of pain & fear and/or involuntarily flash back to horrible things that happened, and that the substance alleviates part or all of it when they can't take any more.
Unfortunately, it's extremely hard to make someone understand how powerful the drive to make intense mental pain/fear go away can be, and as a result most (if not all) countries have used approaches to curb illegal substance abuse that were ineffective at best. I've never used drugs or deliberately gotten drunk, but it's because I've had adequate mental health care -- from past experience, I can tell you that depression, PTSD, and anxiety can be so powerful that it makes hiking off-trail through the mountains on a freshly-broken knee without help look like a cakewalk in comparison.
Almost all devices use 1 of 4 connectors, and it's standardized to the point that few people have to think about it, especially as devices tend to use the largest kind that will fit: -- Old 'A' rectangle port: computers, power adapters, other things you plug a device into -- Old 'A' rectangle plug: anything connecting without a cable (flash drive, card reader, etc.) -- Old 'B' squarish port: printers, scanners, full-scale external drives -- 'Mini B' wavy trapezoid port: older e-readers/mp3/cameras, similar-sized speakers, etc. -- 'Micro B' super-narrow port: newer cells, e-readers, other tiny/skinny devices
If a USB cable breaks or we want an extra, we can easily just grab one of the same type from another device, left-overs from the past, or buy them quite cheaply. They were all designed to be sturdy, so unlike many of the proprietary connectors I've dealt with, and the plug won't wiggle around much or lose connection when plugged in. It also stays in place securely on its own without needing breakable latches like many proprietary connectors rely on.
In contrast, each proprietary connector is different, and many of them weren't designed to be durability. If we need a new proprietary cable, we're limited to buying a new one somewhere for substantially more than an equivalent USB of whatever kind. I've owned my share of devices with proprietary connectors over the years, so this is all based on extensive experience.
"May you live in interesting times" was used as a curse for good reason...
It's disturbing that most people growing up right now will look back on this as the good old days without even pausing to consider that adults of the time were under a great deal of stress, and will mimic the mistakes made in the 90s/00s in hope of returning society to the happy, trusting time they recall.
The best way to keep bugs out is to pull pantyhose over the computer (or glue it over any vents if it's a laptop) -- the mesh fabric keeps the little bastards out while allowing the air to circulate & heat to escape. I've learned that a similar approach with the cooling platform makes the fan last a lot longer in an environment that is prone to dust, animal/pet fur, and so forth.
The magic is the fantasy kind, not sleight** of hand -- the quote refers to humans' tendency to resort to supernatural explanations for things that they lack the necessary scientific knowledge to otherwise fully understand. Arthur C. Clarke wrote the "law" after publishing The Sentinel (upon which 2001 was based), in which the narrator describes the underlying mechanisms of an alien object as probably belonging "to a technology that lies beyond our horizons, perhaps to the technology of para-physical forces."
**sleight = an action performed with cunning and dexterity; being "slight of" something means it's unusually small. (Both would earn a guy quite a reputation in the bedroom, but I'm pretty sure most would rather be known for one than the other.)
Your interpretation is a lot closer to one of my favorite signatures, though: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo."
Just using a VPN isn't enough -- most of them hand over user data to the US government without question when asked, regardless of whether the VPN account was free or paid and even if the VPN company and all of its servers are located in other parts of the world. (Yes, the article was focused on the use of VPNs for file-sharing, but the lesson remains the same: don't trust them to protect your personal data from your government.)
Finally something progressives and conservatives can team up to fight.
I wish... Based on recent years, the political reaction will be more like: -- Most of the party that's clearly not in charge will condemn the latest overreach, declare that this sort of thing wouldn't happen on their watch, and that if given power again they'll be certain to reverse it. -- Most of the party in power will either remain silent or make vague supportive comments about doing what we must for security. The rare over-enthusiastic sort will say it's a great step forward blah blah blah. -- A few from both sides will "reluctantly" support it, saying that they're outnumbered by the majority but that if enough people like *them* are given power, things will change. -- Once an election takes place, some or most of the individuals involved will swap places.
I'd say that it didn't kill any ecosystem -- there are have been plenty of RSS-reading extensions, apps/programs, services & sites thriving all along, so the Reader-specific ecosystem of will largely disperse to those. Reader has been losing users for the last year or two because of Google's unpopular changes, so the alternatives started finding ways to absorb ex-Reader users a good while ago.
I gave up on Reader back when they fucked with the layout & added the black bar, and I'm glad I did so instead of wasting time making CSS stylesheets for Stylish. I'm just as happy using a mix of NewsFox when in Firefox, the built-in Opera newsreader, and Android apps on my phone & Nook Touch.
It doesn't work on most Android devices, as the vast majority haven't been granted an Android 4.0 upgrade even if they're physically capable of easily running it. (Didn't Android 2.x just recently stop being the most prevalent?)
I'm starting to worry that Google's becoming too complacent about its users' goodwill for its own good... First it didn't upgrade Market versions prior to 2.3 to Play, breaking search so users had to choose & mark things for download using their computers. Now it's releasing a cloud app that's more simplistic than many popular apps or games available for quite old devices (possibly as early as 1.6) yet coded it to only be compatible with v4, locking out the vast majority of Android device owners. None of that's even taking into consideration the potential long-term effect of users rejecting new Google services, which is what 98% of the people I'm seeing comment outside that Reddit thread (on sites like Slashdot or Ars Technica) state they're doing.
I just recently got my first Android smartphone (LG Marquee, which runs 2.3.6), but I have the unpleasant feeling that it's just in time to see the empire start rapidly losing ground to competitors that haven't become as lax about customer satisfaction. Hopefully the competition will goose Google into waking up enough to pay more attention before it's too late...
Apple initially 'got it' with the Apple II family of computers, so old software from the 8-bit Apple II were playable on every computer in the A2 line, including the 16-bit Apple IIgs. Forgetting the importance of backwards-compatibility (or, perhaps, Wozniak taking the knowledge with him when he left) very nearly destroyed the company.
Just because it looks like war "usually" lacks substantial collateral damage doesn't mean that's actually the case; an attacking military like ours will typically keep the full toll to itself (or not keep track), give numbers knowing they won't register meaningfully in most people's minds, and/or imply (if not state outright) that the people that were hit were enemies.
We're rarely told about things like tactically unimportant shantytowns well removed from the real target being bombed seemingly without reason, long enough that adults & kids hiding (ineffectively) in their shacks snap, bolting into the open like the 13-year-old girl that lost one leg and her little sister's life. To be fair, I do recall hearing about a boy from Iraq brought here to the US for emergency care after he picked up a "ball" (cluster bomb), losing an eye, both hands, nearly disemboweling himself, lodging shrapnel in his brain, and killing his big brother...but I might well have only heard about it because the kid was brought to my area for care.
I mean, think about it -- cluster bombs aren't used in carefully targeted attacks to get rid of "bad guys", because government leaders & the military of a country have bunkers to hide in and enough warning of incoming attacks to reach them. It's the average, everyday civilians like us that are caught outside when an invading force starts dropping shit like cluster bombs, or that later find the undetonated remainders the hard way afterwards -- and the attacker isn't exactly going to consult locals to be sure it's not when all of the kids & many parents are walking to/from school...
I also started out with Ubuntu (8.04), but thankfully the first distro I tried after I got fed up with its issues in early '10 was Simply Mepis, which has to be the easiest one ever. After I'd gotten used to it, I felt comfortable enough trying out OpenSuSE, Fedora, etc. to enjoy distro-hopping and start learning the commandline for fun since it wasn't as necessary as it had been for me in Ubuntu. If I'd gone straight for Debian either before or after Ubuntu, though, I'm pretty sure I would've given up on Linux for good.
I think we really need a page or site for users like us to offer our experiences with different distros in order to help one another discover which ones to try out. It's frustrating to see how many people try a distro that's too far beyond their skill level and react by deciding that either all of Linux is far too hard, or that Ubuntu & its derivatives are the only real options.
Actually, few *aren't* easy to set up: which have you tried? I fell for the "Ubuntu is the only user-friendly distro" FUD for my first two years as a Linux user, and when the Ubuntu releases became intolerably unstable on my computer starting in late '09, I almost gave up on Linux entirely because I was so certain all other distros were a nightmare for non-geeks & had forums full of snarky asshats.
Thankfully I had a few live CDs I'd been thinking about trying when an Ubuntu update rendered my hard drive unbootable... I tried Simply Mepis for a few months and was enchanted, then gave OpenSuSE & Fedora a few months each and tried lesser-known distros I heard about like Samity or Petite. The results: the ones I tried were uniformly more stable & easier than Ubuntu -- my mother, a barely computer-literate senior citizen, can use & even install/set up the mainstream ones without trouble -- and *all* of them had a much friendlier, more user-centric vibe at their forums. I only ran into a handful that weren't functional out of the proverbial box, and almost all of those stated openly that they're for advanced users.
I'd highly recommend that you give the other mainstream distros a try if you haven't done so at least within the past 4 years; you just might be very, very surprised... (FWIW I think the easiest/friendliest is Simply Mepis, which is my favorite, but I'm sure that fans of the others would argue!)
The most amusing I saw renamed all objects to "oink!" and had NPC speech replaced with altered versions of famous quotes ("honor thy father and thy hoe, babycakes") if the player couldn't answer a few questions based on information in the printed manual correctly after two tries. That was in Ultima VII: Serpent Isle -- I always wondered just how the development team got the idea for that.
Oh, ouch... I just looked it up on Wikipedia, and found a nasty copy-protection approach used in one of the early games -- the floppy disk for Atari version of Ultima IV had an unformatted track the game was programmed to look for, and if it was absent, the the player's party would be slaughtered during every battle. Worse, the German distributor didn't know about the unformatted track, so all of the copies they sold had impossible-to-win battles.
Slashdot Mirror
They switched to a rapid-release schedule of a new full version number every few weeks as of v5 in summer 2011... I can't tell you when we actually went from 9 to 10, though -- I'm on the auto-updating beta (or the auto-bloating, to be snide about it) and the new numbering system makes all of the releases blur together.
Can we offer to vote for him so he doesn't take that drastic step, ignoring that most of us aren't Australian?
Adding: To be fair, I *do* find some of the headlines quite funny, and most of us already get a better gist of the article contents from reading other people's comments...it's just the presentation drags it down.
I agree... I look forward to April Fool's jokes each year, and can see how this one would be great fun if we were kids playing an April Fool's Joke on a teacher, or perhaps close friends that have a playful sort of rivalry -- but when it's just an anonymous change making a website a PITA to read without a bookmarklet, it's a lot less entertaining.
Intended purpose: catch cheating spouses.
Or even more likely, obsessively monitoring a mate because jealousy/control issues make everyone sexually compatible look like a romantic threat -- or stalking an ex to find out whether they're filing for a restraining order or moving somewhere else in an attempt to escape. (I've known a few people that cheated, but far more like me that dated an insecure paranoid control freak...)
The attitude the warning is given with makes a huge impact on how it's received, and if the worst happens, whether the person is viewed positively as having tried to hard to warn everyone or as a smug jerk that thinks he's better than everyone else working there.
Very few people react to superiority by welcoming the individual's input or wanting to do what the individual says they should; they react even more negatively to the (to be blunt) childish "neener neener I'm right you're wrong, idiots." Since most people can pick up on both unspoken thoughts to some degree, the tactic you describe actually reduces the chances of anyone listening to you; it also runs the risk of the people above you noticing that you're quietly letting the project founder, which reflects badly on you.
It works out much better if you offer the basic information -- don't go overboard or put a big effort into it -- with either an air of helpfulness/concern or, at worst, "here's the info, take it or leave it" neutrality. If you're not listened to, disengage emotionally like a professional, and if things ultimately do go wrong, focus on the frustration & disappointment at having been ignored again, maybe even toss in a head-shaking, "dammit, wish they'd listened," to a co-worker you're friendly with. People (including the ones above you) will misinterpret those feelings as being a reaction to the project not doing well, and conclude that you have benevolent motivations (rather than primarily just wanting to show them up) which makes them more likely to listen in the long run.
I've had two data disasters over the years:
1) In the early 90s, I was a teenager using a trusty Apple IIgs to write & edit my first full-length novel, first on 3.5" floppies and then a 20mb Seagate external hard drive. Two or three years into the project, when a summer of 6-8 hour days working on it had the first full rough draft 99% finished and partway into heavy restructuring/editing, I turned the IIgs on only to have it inform me there was no bootable disk. (I later learned that my mother had just vacuumed the drive, including running the brush along the grill.) I tried everything I could think of -- letting the drive warm up longer before turning the computer on, re-seating/moving/replacing the SCSI card -- with no luck. I *had* made floppy backups of the drive, but they turned out to be unreadable. I rewrote most of the missing chapters from memory, but the final two gave me enough trouble that I ultimately gave up.
2) A few years ago, I got back into writing after a decade-long hiatus and eventually decided to try my hand at editing & finishing up the above-mentioned novel. Another year or so of work went by, this time with verified backups made both locally & with an online service that kept multiple versions of each file. I bought an old IBM T20 to work on away from my desk, but it couldn't handle both the online backup and OpenOffice, so I saved my files on a flash drive to transfer to the main system every night or two.
After working intensely all weekend on a couple of chapters, I returned to my office plugged in the flash drive, and was informed that it was unformatted. I refrained from panic, and booted up the old IBM, since I'd set OpenOffice to auto-save every few minutes...only to discover that the autosave directory was empty & the temp folders lacked any relevant files. Using testdisk to investigate made it clear that even though the program had shown the little autosaving bar periodically while I worked, it had never actually done anything, so I was SOL there.
I had dd copy the flash disk to an .img file, which required multiple passes as the drive evidently had some kind of very serious problem, made a copy of the .img, then ran testdisk on the copy to search for the most crucial files. The good news is that it found them; the bad news is that they were corrupt... The worse news, I soon learned, is that a single modern Open Document file is actually multiple files crammed together into a zipfile, and since a tiny problem can render a zipfile unopenable, the contents were lost. Frustrating & severely disheartening for me, but not half as bad as for the people showing up that lost a major work project or doctoral thesis and begged for help only to be smugly told they should've made backups more often.
Spideroak for my crucial working files along with local backup here, too; I find it's also helpful at times to have it back up the autosave/temp directories used when I work on them. I just wish that they'd come to their senses and offer a more reasonable pricing scheme -- a lot of users could use a few more GB for breathing room and would pay a few dollars each month (like ~$1/GB) for it, but will never come *close* to 100GB, let alone pay $100-120/year for the useless space, especially if our connection is too slow for large-scale backup/restore situations...
I don't know if it will work with brand-name services rather than just servers, but you might look into LuckyBackup, as it does allow the creation & scheduling of multiple backup profiles. Combining it with SpiderOak (the best free online live-versioning backup I can find) set to constantly back up select crucial files & associated autosave directories works extremely well for me.
Bosses discriminate against other traits -- disability (even if "in the closet" they're often just perceptible enough), not finishing college, majoring in a non-STEM discipline, being unmarried, being childless or childfree, not being openly religious, age, and a strongly introverted or shy personality are the ones I've heard of, offhand.
That said, plenty of women are mistaken for men online (often deliberately) because they have a unisex username, act confident, and/or have preferences/interests associated with guys. It has happened here on /. at least once even to women that had a username containing a female epithet like "chick" or "girl."
It's no different from the preinstalled Windows crap -- it comes from the manufacturer and sponsoring companies (including the cell provider), not the OS itself. I believe it can be removed by rooting the device -- I *know* it can be by replacing the crappy built-in bloated copy of Android with a good alternative distribution like Cyanogenmod. Even that's really no different from having to install a standalone copy of Windows in order to get rid of some of the more persistent junk, except in Windows it often has meant tracking down & manually installing all of the drivers that had been included on the manufacturer's copy.
I agree, though obtaining, being on, or publicly over-using a substance without harming someone shouldn't be lumped in with the other types because of the high percentage of self-destructive behavior being spurred by an attempt to self-treat undiagnosed intolerably strong symptoms of psychiatric illness, not poor impulse control. The ones that get caught often aren't educated enough to realize they have a mental illness; all they know is that they spend much of their time full of pain & fear and/or involuntarily flash back to horrible things that happened, and that the substance alleviates part or all of it when they can't take any more.
Unfortunately, it's extremely hard to make someone understand how powerful the drive to make intense mental pain/fear go away can be, and as a result most (if not all) countries have used approaches to curb illegal substance abuse that were ineffective at best. I've never used drugs or deliberately gotten drunk, but it's because I've had adequate mental health care -- from past experience, I can tell you that depression, PTSD, and anxiety can be so powerful that it makes hiking off-trail through the mountains on a freshly-broken knee without help look like a cakewalk in comparison.
Almost all devices use 1 of 4 connectors, and it's standardized to the point that few people have to think about it, especially as devices tend to use the largest kind that will fit:
-- Old 'A' rectangle port: computers, power adapters, other things you plug a device into
-- Old 'A' rectangle plug: anything connecting without a cable (flash drive, card reader, etc.)
-- Old 'B' squarish port: printers, scanners, full-scale external drives
-- 'Mini B' wavy trapezoid port: older e-readers/mp3/cameras, similar-sized speakers, etc.
-- 'Micro B' super-narrow port: newer cells, e-readers, other tiny/skinny devices
If a USB cable breaks or we want an extra, we can easily just grab one of the same type from another device, left-overs from the past, or buy them quite cheaply. They were all designed to be sturdy, so unlike many of the proprietary connectors I've dealt with, and the plug won't wiggle around much or lose connection when plugged in. It also stays in place securely on its own without needing breakable latches like many proprietary connectors rely on.
In contrast, each proprietary connector is different, and many of them weren't designed to be durability. If we need a new proprietary cable, we're limited to buying a new one somewhere for substantially more than an equivalent USB of whatever kind. I've owned my share of devices with proprietary connectors over the years, so this is all based on extensive experience.
We live in interesting times.
"May you live in interesting times" was used as a curse for good reason...
It's disturbing that most people growing up right now will look back on this as the good old days without even pausing to consider that adults of the time were under a great deal of stress, and will mimic the mistakes made in the 90s/00s in hope of returning society to the happy, trusting time they recall.
The best way to keep bugs out is to pull pantyhose over the computer (or glue it over any vents if it's a laptop) -- the mesh fabric keeps the little bastards out while allowing the air to circulate & heat to escape. I've learned that a similar approach with the cooling platform makes the fan last a lot longer in an environment that is prone to dust, animal/pet fur, and so forth.
The magic is the fantasy kind, not sleight** of hand -- the quote refers to humans' tendency to resort to supernatural explanations for things that they lack the necessary scientific knowledge to otherwise fully understand. Arthur C. Clarke wrote the "law" after publishing The Sentinel (upon which 2001 was based), in which the narrator describes the underlying mechanisms of an alien object as probably belonging "to a technology that lies beyond our horizons, perhaps to the technology of para-physical forces."
**sleight = an action performed with cunning and dexterity; being "slight of" something means it's unusually small. (Both would earn a guy quite a reputation in the bedroom, but I'm pretty sure most would rather be known for one than the other.)
Your interpretation is a lot closer to one of my favorite signatures, though:
"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo."
Just using a VPN isn't enough -- most of them hand over user data to the US government without question when asked, regardless of whether the VPN account was free or paid and even if the VPN company and all of its servers are located in other parts of the world. (Yes, the article was focused on the use of VPNs for file-sharing, but the lesson remains the same: don't trust them to protect your personal data from your government.)
Finally something progressives and conservatives can team up to fight.
I wish... Based on recent years, the political reaction will be more like:
-- Most of the party that's clearly not in charge will condemn the latest overreach, declare that this sort of thing wouldn't happen on their watch, and that if given power again they'll be certain to reverse it.
-- Most of the party in power will either remain silent or make vague supportive comments about doing what we must for security. The rare over-enthusiastic sort will say it's a great step forward blah blah blah.
-- A few from both sides will "reluctantly" support it, saying that they're outnumbered by the majority but that if enough people like *them* are given power, things will change.
-- Once an election takes place, some or most of the individuals involved will swap places.
I'd say that it didn't kill any ecosystem -- there are have been plenty of RSS-reading extensions, apps/programs, services & sites thriving all along, so the Reader-specific ecosystem of will largely disperse to those. Reader has been losing users for the last year or two because of Google's unpopular changes, so the alternatives started finding ways to absorb ex-Reader users a good while ago.
I gave up on Reader back when they fucked with the layout & added the black bar, and I'm glad I did so instead of wasting time making CSS stylesheets for Stylish. I'm just as happy using a mix of NewsFox when in Firefox, the built-in Opera newsreader, and Android apps on my phone & Nook Touch.
It doesn't work on most Android devices, as the vast majority haven't been granted an Android 4.0 upgrade even if they're physically capable of easily running it. (Didn't Android 2.x just recently stop being the most prevalent?)
I'm starting to worry that Google's becoming too complacent about its users' goodwill for its own good... First it didn't upgrade Market versions prior to 2.3 to Play, breaking search so users had to choose & mark things for download using their computers. Now it's releasing a cloud app that's more simplistic than many popular apps or games available for quite old devices (possibly as early as 1.6) yet coded it to only be compatible with v4, locking out the vast majority of Android device owners. None of that's even taking into consideration the potential long-term effect of users rejecting new Google services, which is what 98% of the people I'm seeing comment outside that Reddit thread (on sites like Slashdot or Ars Technica) state they're doing.
I just recently got my first Android smartphone (LG Marquee, which runs 2.3.6), but I have the unpleasant feeling that it's just in time to see the empire start rapidly losing ground to competitors that haven't become as lax about customer satisfaction. Hopefully the competition will goose Google into waking up enough to pay more attention before it's too late...
Apple initially 'got it' with the Apple II family of computers, so old software from the 8-bit Apple II were playable on every computer in the A2 line, including the 16-bit Apple IIgs. Forgetting the importance of backwards-compatibility (or, perhaps, Wozniak taking the knowledge with him when he left) very nearly destroyed the company.
Just because it looks like war "usually" lacks substantial collateral damage doesn't mean that's actually the case; an attacking military like ours will typically keep the full toll to itself (or not keep track), give numbers knowing they won't register meaningfully in most people's minds, and/or imply (if not state outright) that the people that were hit were enemies.
We're rarely told about things like tactically unimportant shantytowns well removed from the real target being bombed seemingly without reason, long enough that adults & kids hiding (ineffectively) in their shacks snap, bolting into the open like the 13-year-old girl that lost one leg and her little sister's life. To be fair, I do recall hearing about a boy from Iraq brought here to the US for emergency care after he picked up a "ball" (cluster bomb), losing an eye, both hands, nearly disemboweling himself, lodging shrapnel in his brain, and killing his big brother...but I might well have only heard about it because the kid was brought to my area for care.
I mean, think about it -- cluster bombs aren't used in carefully targeted attacks to get rid of "bad guys", because government leaders & the military of a country have bunkers to hide in and enough warning of incoming attacks to reach them. It's the average, everyday civilians like us that are caught outside when an invading force starts dropping shit like cluster bombs, or that later find the undetonated remainders the hard way afterwards -- and the attacker isn't exactly going to consult locals to be sure it's not when all of the kids & many parents are walking to/from school...
I also started out with Ubuntu (8.04), but thankfully the first distro I tried after I got fed up with its issues in early '10 was Simply Mepis, which has to be the easiest one ever. After I'd gotten used to it, I felt comfortable enough trying out OpenSuSE, Fedora, etc. to enjoy distro-hopping and start learning the commandline for fun since it wasn't as necessary as it had been for me in Ubuntu. If I'd gone straight for Debian either before or after Ubuntu, though, I'm pretty sure I would've given up on Linux for good.
I think we really need a page or site for users like us to offer our experiences with different distros in order to help one another discover which ones to try out. It's frustrating to see how many people try a distro that's too far beyond their skill level and react by deciding that either all of Linux is far too hard, or that Ubuntu & its derivatives are the only real options.
Actually, few *aren't* easy to set up: which have you tried? I fell for the "Ubuntu is the only user-friendly distro" FUD for my first two years as a Linux user, and when the Ubuntu releases became intolerably unstable on my computer starting in late '09, I almost gave up on Linux entirely because I was so certain all other distros were a nightmare for non-geeks & had forums full of snarky asshats.
Thankfully I had a few live CDs I'd been thinking about trying when an Ubuntu update rendered my hard drive unbootable... I tried Simply Mepis for a few months and was enchanted, then gave OpenSuSE & Fedora a few months each and tried lesser-known distros I heard about like Samity or Petite. The results: the ones I tried were uniformly more stable & easier than Ubuntu -- my mother, a barely computer-literate senior citizen, can use & even install/set up the mainstream ones without trouble -- and *all* of them had a much friendlier, more user-centric vibe at their forums. I only ran into a handful that weren't functional out of the proverbial box, and almost all of those stated openly that they're for advanced users.
I'd highly recommend that you give the other mainstream distros a try if you haven't done so at least within the past 4 years; you just might be very, very surprised... (FWIW I think the easiest/friendliest is Simply Mepis, which is my favorite, but I'm sure that fans of the others would argue!)
The most amusing I saw renamed all objects to "oink!" and had NPC speech replaced with altered versions of famous quotes ("honor thy father and thy hoe, babycakes") if the player couldn't answer a few questions based on information in the printed manual correctly after two tries. That was in Ultima VII: Serpent Isle -- I always wondered just how the development team got the idea for that.
Oh, ouch... I just looked it up on Wikipedia, and found a nasty copy-protection approach used in one of the early games -- the floppy disk for Atari version of Ultima IV had an unformatted track the game was programmed to look for, and if it was absent, the the player's party would be slaughtered during every battle. Worse, the German distributor didn't know about the unformatted track, so all of the copies they sold had impossible-to-win battles.