If you know someone with cable/satellite that's willing, pay to have an extra box added at their place and for part of their bill, then hook it up to a Slingbox or similar device that allows for remote viewing and channel-changing.
There are a *lot* of popular genre titles that don't require or provoke conscious thought, yet are pleasurable or even "addictive." Or at least, most people are competent/literate enough in their native language to not find most popular books mentally taxing; are you implying that doesn't apply to you?
It's awful to say, but I've wondered at times whether Hawaii and Alaska exist as states primarily to give future aggressors in the East convenient targets away from the mainland. Bombing a major West Coast city as a warning shot would cause far more damage to our nation in terms of both industry and (if relevant) radiation than striking our more remote states.
Does anyone really want to work for Best Buy? Or for matter Yahoo?
They do if there's high unemployment in their area and they can't afford to be out of work for weeks or months. Also, the ones that flock to jobs with flexible hours or where they can work at home often do so because something in their life conflicts with working 9-5 M-F, like watching their kids/parents during afternoons, accommodating a medical problem they have, being able to rush off to handle their disabled kid's medical emergencies, and so forth.
...it's not unreasonable that troubled companies need all hands on deck while at their most vulnerable.
It is if it results in a loss of productivity & hard workers.
I know more than a few people (in a variety of disciplines) that work far more effectively when they're at home away from the noise & distractions of a cubicle farm, plus they automatically put in far more unpaid hours because they don't have the physical work/home divide and aren't recovering from the stresses of the office.
Or, to refer to a stance favored by many Slashdotters: if students can get a high-quality university/grad education online at home, then it makes little sense to assume they can't succeed using exactly the same approach in a white-collar job, considering the vast majority of people take jobs that are no more (usually far less) intellectually demanding than a good education is.
They've loosened up. It let me use æ (merged ae) & double a few letters in my surname and use a nickname as my real first name when I started & renamed my current account last year.
...increasingly one cannot open a google account without a valid cellphone numbr for verification...
Google Voice & landline #s worked as of last week. Their system lets you choose whether to send an automated voice call or text message to the number you plug in, and either doesn't check or doesn't care whether the number really goes to a cellphone.
(Not that they really need to take such steps beyond attempting to limit our ability to open new accounts; the contact lists of Android cellphone users & Gmail users alone are probably more than enough to identify our real names & numbers.)
...it's dominANT, like "is dominant in BDSM scenes" rather than "will dominate the penis-length competition" or "that bitch is totally dominating his ass."
Nothing: my doctor's paid the same whether she orders a test, refers me to specialists, or tells me to take ibuprofen, as my HMO (Kaiser) is also the sole employer/owner of the lab, pharmacy, and staff.
My theory is that in a long-lost tongue coded in some people's genes, "canonical" means "will get you laid." It'd explain a lot about Ubuntu's popularity and blog names like "omg ubuntu!", if you think about it.
As a Cyanogen newbie that ditched Ubuntu 3 years ago, though, it's nice to see that even if little else is familiar, I'll still get to periodically protest, "but my distro already can do that, dammit!" (Though admittedly it's very unlikely to get me laid.)
They're still doing that; the one exception is the local "we play anything" station, which doesn't have a live DJ most of the time. Of course, now virtually nobody records with a tape deck or even from the live stream, so there's little reason to not let songs play all the way through...
Most store bags develop holes the first/second time in the washing machine, as they're made of very cheap, flimsy fabric. In order to get bags that can actually be washed, one has to buy standard canvas/similar tote bags, which usually cost quite a bit more than the store bags do.
Birth defects can come from any number of sources, and are not necessarily indicative that the parents are genetically unfit.
Bingo. I have VACTERL defects, and my (internationally top-ranked) pediatric surgeon at UC San Francisco made it clear that there was *nothing* my parents did wrong or could've done to prevent it -- birth defects like mine are random errors/mutations within the first month of development, and aren't passed on to the next generation.
Which would you rather have:..."Wheelchair Willie"...Or: "Willie" is perfectly healthy and normal... This is a no-brainer even for self-centered assholes who hate other people being alive. (Because of the inconveniences those other people make for them.)
It's not a no-brainer for those of us that actually have birth defects, actually. A hell of a lot of people that are born disabled agree with the social model of disability; we're fine with having surgery to alleviate pain or extend our lives, but not to make us normal just for the sake of normality or so (as you put it) others aren't "inconvenienced" by having to accommodate more than one way of doing things. (Relatedly, a hell of a lot of us are stuck on government support as adults only because we're not similar enough to the norm society caters to in the workplace, not because we're incapable of doing the work at all.)
1) McDonald's management & quality control testified that the company was aware that their coffee was heated ~20F over that of other restaurants (to near boiling), that over 700 people had already been injured, that the company never had taken steps to change the temperature or warn customers and that it had no intention whatsoever of doing so in the future. (I can't find the right website, but one explains, as my textbook in college did, that McDonald's had been ordered to reduce the temperature in past cases but hadn't done so.)
2) The 79-year-old woman wasn't merely burned: she suffered 3rd degree burns (which at 185F takes only 2-3 seconds) on her groin, thighs, and butt, had to be hospitalized for 7 days, confined to her home for 3 weeks while a relative traveled to care for her, then a further hospital stay for skin grafts; in this time, she dropped from 113 to 83 pounds, and it was uncertain whether she'd survive.
3) Her family initially approached McDonald's to cover her out-of-pocket medical expenses plus $2k to cover the caregiving relative's lost wages. McDonald's offered only $800; when it refused to increase that amount, their lawyer sued in court for $100k, largely to send a message that its behavior was unacceptable -- but they were awarded far more. As of 1997, it still inexplicably left the temperature at near-boiling, even though that little old woman wasn't the last one hurt by far.
Consider, people... Most of us expect that if we splash a hot drink on our skin, it will hurt for a while, not that it will cause permanent tissue damage requiring skin grafts and hospitalization. If that wasn't the case, nobody would buy hot beverages on the way to work/elsewhere in the morning or allow them around little kids.
The 90s are *supposed* to be, but it's not the case... I don't know how many other groups are affected, but at least some of the ones I hung out on (like rec.games.computer.ultima.dragons) from 1995 through the early 00s are missing quite a few posts.
Guess my inner geek is still young, as I thought it was quite amusing, as was one comment to a YouTube video of the alert begging "please someone hack into Fox News to do this on Easter!"
I've found several videos of the alert during 2-3 different shows at YouTube (today's uploads: 'emergency zombie alert system') but haven't seen any that actually mention the zombies in the on-screen alert yet...they all just say that there's a civil emergency without mentioning what it is.
When I read the Slate article, my thought was that he simply landed at the wrong university. He would have fit in well over at Berkeley when I was a student there in the late 90s & early 00s, and the focus of our classes matched what it sounds like he craved. That said, I ddin't feel like the Slate article was necessarily terribly accurate; among many other discrepancies, I've run across too many articles now (like Cory Doctorow's) that say he was well-liked, had quite a few friends that he collaborated with, and that his big problem was more that he had trouble dealing with the disappointment when his friends/mentors didn't live up to his expectations.
From everything I've read, he was already well-known & respected among the Internet elite (plus becoming close friends with many of them) as he'd been actively contributing to projects like the Semantic Web since he was 13-14 years old, and was easily mistaken for an adult online due to how well-spoken and bright he was.
He'd then ended up gaining the respect of people active in intellectual property reform by releasing a massive number of public/government law documents with others in the PACER/RECAP project, rallying people with his own activist org Demand Progress, and then by acquiring & intending to release a massive amount of scholarly articles that weren't available outside affluent libraries & universities.
The public didn't hear about him (and people like me aware of IP activism but not involved in it didn't know his name/identity) until his suicide, yes. However, just killing oneself or being made 'an example' by the government doesn't get that kind of attention -- in order to do that, a person has to do something to gain the respect of some fairly influential people first.
Severely depressed & even suicidal people often can hide it dangerously well, especially around others that aren't close enough to know little tell-tale signs. Also, at least 2-3 people that were extremely close to him wrote that he was known among friends to have been fighting repeated bouts with depression for years. He evidently was known among his close friends as the sort that hated to accept help, and that he believed it was crucial to appear to the world as if the prosecution wasn't getting to him.
Speaking as somebody that has been close to severely depressed people, there's also the huge problem that eventually the repeated mood crashes look normal & un-alarming -- so it's very common for loved ones to be caught off-guard by a suicide (or attempt). From the outside, we can only see a rough outline of just how bad the depression is, and a non-dangerous "very badly depressed" tends to look a hell of a lot like "suicidally depressed" unless the person wants us to know. If that person isn't the demonstrative sort, or the depression has convinced them (as often happens) that they're a horrible burden everyone would be better without, then we only see it in involuntary/unintentional actions, and that's if we know what to look for.
Aaron Swartz's behavior the day before & day of his death was a textbook example of red flags for looming suicide. He abruptly shifted from miserable to upbeat, and took one of the people closest to him out to a special meal and indulged in his absolute favorite foods... The next morning, he was visibly depressed and said that he was going to stay at home alone to "rest" and pretended to not notice when asked why he had (evidently out of character) gotten fully dressed as if going out in public. Somebody as depressed as he evidently was won't have the energy to get totally dressed for no reason at all.
Yes, it's possible that he was murdered, but there'd be little reason for anyone to bother: MIT & JSTOR had dropped charges, while the prosecution fully believed at that point that they were guaranteed to win, either in a court trial or by forcing him to accept a pretty vicious plea bargain. I don't believe that it's an act of freedom or anything other than a tragic loss, but depression is the emotional equivalent of profound hallucination -- and I don't think we do his memory or others fighting the disorder justice by favoring conspiracy theories over recognizing just how deadly it can be to even the brightest, strongest, most rational people.
Slashdot Mirror
If you know someone with cable/satellite that's willing, pay to have an extra box added at their place and for part of their bill, then hook it up to a Slingbox or similar device that allows for remote viewing and channel-changing.
There are a *lot* of popular genre titles that don't require or provoke conscious thought, yet are pleasurable or even "addictive." Or at least, most people are competent/literate enough in their native language to not find most popular books mentally taxing; are you implying that doesn't apply to you?
No no no... have you any idea what happens when you mix light sabers and lens flares?
Well, my theory is that's how Rainbow Brite came about in the 80s...or was that the result of light sabers and LSD?
IMHO, Abrams' shit tendencies will *not* ruin Star Wars like they ruined Star Trek.
Of course not, the people responsible for Jar Jar Binks/Episode 1 did.
It's awful to say, but I've wondered at times whether Hawaii and Alaska exist as states primarily to give future aggressors in the East convenient targets away from the mainland. Bombing a major West Coast city as a warning shot would cause far more damage to our nation in terms of both industry and (if relevant) radiation than striking our more remote states.
Does anyone really want to work for Best Buy? Or for matter Yahoo?
They do if there's high unemployment in their area and they can't afford to be out of work for weeks or months. Also, the ones that flock to jobs with flexible hours or where they can work at home often do so because something in their life conflicts with working 9-5 M-F, like watching their kids/parents during afternoons, accommodating a medical problem they have, being able to rush off to handle their disabled kid's medical emergencies, and so forth.
...it's not unreasonable that troubled companies need all hands on deck while at their most vulnerable.
It is if it results in a loss of productivity & hard workers.
I know more than a few people (in a variety of disciplines) that work far more effectively when they're at home away from the noise & distractions of a cubicle farm, plus they automatically put in far more unpaid hours because they don't have the physical work/home divide and aren't recovering from the stresses of the office.
Or, to refer to a stance favored by many Slashdotters: if students can get a high-quality university/grad education online at home, then it makes little sense to assume they can't succeed using exactly the same approach in a white-collar job, considering the vast majority of people take jobs that are no more (usually far less) intellectually demanding than a good education is.
They've loosened up. It let me use æ (merged ae) & double a few letters in my surname and use a nickname as my real first name when I started & renamed my current account last year.
...increasingly one cannot open a google account without a valid cellphone numbr for verification...
Google Voice & landline #s worked as of last week. Their system lets you choose whether to send an automated voice call or text message to the number you plug in, and either doesn't check or doesn't care whether the number really goes to a cellphone.
(Not that they really need to take such steps beyond attempting to limit our ability to open new accounts; the contact lists of Android cellphone users & Gmail users alone are probably more than enough to identify our real names & numbers.)
I use the ripoff "Dean's List" book my mother bought when I was a college freshman. Best reason for its existence as far as I'm concerned.
Old man noises
*imagines it* *shudders* Can I have a side of brain bleach with that?
...it's dominANT, like "is dominant in BDSM scenes" rather than "will dominate the penis-length competition" or "that bitch is totally dominating his ass."
Nothing: my doctor's paid the same whether she orders a test, refers me to specialists, or tells me to take ibuprofen, as my HMO (Kaiser) is also the sole employer/owner of the lab, pharmacy, and staff.
My theory is that in a long-lost tongue coded in some people's genes, "canonical" means "will get you laid." It'd explain a lot about Ubuntu's popularity and blog names like "omg ubuntu!", if you think about it.
As a Cyanogen newbie that ditched Ubuntu 3 years ago, though, it's nice to see that even if little else is familiar, I'll still get to periodically protest, "but my distro already can do that, dammit!" (Though admittedly it's very unlikely to get me laid.)
They're still doing that; the one exception is the local "we play anything" station, which doesn't have a live DJ most of the time. Of course, now virtually nobody records with a tape deck or even from the live stream, so there's little reason to not let songs play all the way through...
rabid anime fanboy + brony + valley girl with a severe squint + manic pixie dream girl = emoji ?
(All I know is that whenever I see an emoji, I automatically start to read the person's words with a strong valley girl accent in my mind.)
Most store bags develop holes the first/second time in the washing machine, as they're made of very cheap, flimsy fabric. In order to get bags that can actually be washed, one has to buy standard canvas/similar tote bags, which usually cost quite a bit more than the store bags do.
Birth defects can come from any number of sources, and are not necessarily indicative that the parents are genetically unfit.
Bingo. I have VACTERL defects, and my (internationally top-ranked) pediatric surgeon at UC San Francisco made it clear that there was *nothing* my parents did wrong or could've done to prevent it -- birth defects like mine are random errors/mutations within the first month of development, and aren't passed on to the next generation.
Which would you rather have: ..."Wheelchair Willie"...Or: "Willie" is perfectly healthy and normal ... This is a no-brainer even for self-centered assholes who hate other people being alive. (Because of the inconveniences those other people make for them.)
It's not a no-brainer for those of us that actually have birth defects, actually. A hell of a lot of people that are born disabled agree with the social model of disability; we're fine with having surgery to alleviate pain or extend our lives, but not to make us normal just for the sake of normality or so (as you put it) others aren't "inconvenienced" by having to accommodate more than one way of doing things. (Relatedly, a hell of a lot of us are stuck on government support as adults only because we're not similar enough to the norm society caters to in the workplace, not because we're incapable of doing the work at all.)
That's not the full facts, either -- here's some of what you missed:
1) McDonald's management & quality control testified that the company was aware that their coffee was heated ~20F over that of other restaurants (to near boiling), that over 700 people had already been injured, that the company never had taken steps to change the temperature or warn customers and that it had no intention whatsoever of doing so in the future. (I can't find the right website, but one explains, as my textbook in college did, that McDonald's had been ordered to reduce the temperature in past cases but hadn't done so.)
2) The 79-year-old woman wasn't merely burned: she suffered 3rd degree burns (which at 185F takes only 2-3 seconds) on her groin, thighs, and butt, had to be hospitalized for 7 days, confined to her home for 3 weeks while a relative traveled to care for her, then a further hospital stay for skin grafts; in this time, she dropped from 113 to 83 pounds, and it was uncertain whether she'd survive.
3) Her family initially approached McDonald's to cover her out-of-pocket medical expenses plus $2k to cover the caregiving relative's lost wages. McDonald's offered only $800; when it refused to increase that amount, their lawyer sued in court for $100k, largely to send a message that its behavior was unacceptable -- but they were awarded far more. As of 1997, it still inexplicably left the temperature at near-boiling, even though that little old woman wasn't the last one hurt by far.
Consider, people... Most of us expect that if we splash a hot drink on our skin, it will hurt for a while, not that it will cause permanent tissue damage requiring skin grafts and hospitalization. If that wasn't the case, nobody would buy hot beverages on the way to work/elsewhere in the morning or allow them around little kids.
The 90s are *supposed* to be, but it's not the case... I don't know how many other groups are affected, but at least some of the ones I hung out on (like rec.games.computer.ultima.dragons) from 1995 through the early 00s are missing quite a few posts.
Guess my inner geek is still young, as I thought it was quite amusing, as was one comment to a YouTube video of the alert begging "please someone hack into Fox News to do this on Easter!"
I've found several videos of the alert during 2-3 different shows at YouTube (today's uploads: 'emergency zombie alert system') but haven't seen any that actually mention the zombies in the on-screen alert yet...they all just say that there's a civil emergency without mentioning what it is.
When I read the Slate article, my thought was that he simply landed at the wrong university. He would have fit in well over at Berkeley when I was a student there in the late 90s & early 00s, and the focus of our classes matched what it sounds like he craved. That said, I ddin't feel like the Slate article was necessarily terribly accurate; among many other discrepancies, I've run across too many articles now (like Cory Doctorow's) that say he was well-liked, had quite a few friends that he collaborated with, and that his big problem was more that he had trouble dealing with the disappointment when his friends/mentors didn't live up to his expectations.
From everything I've read, he was already well-known & respected among the Internet elite (plus becoming close friends with many of them) as he'd been actively contributing to projects like the Semantic Web since he was 13-14 years old, and was easily mistaken for an adult online due to how well-spoken and bright he was.
He'd then ended up gaining the respect of people active in intellectual property reform by releasing a massive number of public/government law documents with others in the PACER/RECAP project, rallying people with his own activist org Demand Progress, and then by acquiring & intending to release a massive amount of scholarly articles that weren't available outside affluent libraries & universities.
The public didn't hear about him (and people like me aware of IP activism but not involved in it didn't know his name/identity) until his suicide, yes. However, just killing oneself or being made 'an example' by the government doesn't get that kind of attention -- in order to do that, a person has to do something to gain the respect of some fairly influential people first.
Severely depressed & even suicidal people often can hide it dangerously well, especially around others that aren't close enough to know little tell-tale signs. Also, at least 2-3 people that were extremely close to him wrote that he was known among friends to have been fighting repeated bouts with depression for years. He evidently was known among his close friends as the sort that hated to accept help, and that he believed it was crucial to appear to the world as if the prosecution wasn't getting to him.
Speaking as somebody that has been close to severely depressed people, there's also the huge problem that eventually the repeated mood crashes look normal & un-alarming -- so it's very common for loved ones to be caught off-guard by a suicide (or attempt). From the outside, we can only see a rough outline of just how bad the depression is, and a non-dangerous "very badly depressed" tends to look a hell of a lot like "suicidally depressed" unless the person wants us to know. If that person isn't the demonstrative sort, or the depression has convinced them (as often happens) that they're a horrible burden everyone would be better without, then we only see it in involuntary/unintentional actions, and that's if we know what to look for.
Aaron Swartz's behavior the day before & day of his death was a textbook example of red flags for looming suicide. He abruptly shifted from miserable to upbeat, and took one of the people closest to him out to a special meal and indulged in his absolute favorite foods... The next morning, he was visibly depressed and said that he was going to stay at home alone to "rest" and pretended to not notice when asked why he had (evidently out of character) gotten fully dressed as if going out in public. Somebody as depressed as he evidently was won't have the energy to get totally dressed for no reason at all.
Yes, it's possible that he was murdered, but there'd be little reason for anyone to bother: MIT & JSTOR had dropped charges, while the prosecution fully believed at that point that they were guaranteed to win, either in a court trial or by forcing him to accept a pretty vicious plea bargain. I don't believe that it's an act of freedom or anything other than a tragic loss, but depression is the emotional equivalent of profound hallucination -- and I don't think we do his memory or others fighting the disorder justice by favoring conspiracy theories over recognizing just how deadly it can be to even the brightest, strongest, most rational people.