It's not just Walmart or the super-low-cost retail stores anymore, either -- from what my 65-year-old aunt told us last year, the nicer department stores like the one she works at now do the "all night" Thanksgiving thing as well. Since that part of the family lives 2+ hours from us, that means a good third of the extended family (offspring of my paternal grandma & her sister) has to take off right after dinner if she's assigned the 11pm-onward shift. People usually fret over the effect on young families, but from my POV it seems even more fucked-up to ask a senior to skip or cut short the one holiday she gets to see the cousins she grew up with.
Being psychotic is a different, unrelated mental state where the person loses touch with reality in some manner:hallucinating, bizarre/illogical thinking, delusions, abnormal violence, or similar things.
TFS is being a bit misleading, though: 195k BTC is *currently* valued at $US150M, but depending on how much each original transaction was worth in USD when it took place, the total value could be one hell of a lot less. Early on when a bitcoin wasn't worth much, each transaction could easily have involved anywhere from 'multiple' to 'several dozen' bitcoins, so those exchanges could add up to a pretty substantial percentage of the 195k without being worth anywhere near even one million US dollars.
A lot of people already either have very weak skills at "jump-starting conversations" or none at all -- it's one of the reasons shyness, social anxiety, and stress during the holidays are all so common. That's not even including people that are wired for different conversational patterns/approaches (e.g. autistics like me).
There's no way that AOL is going to just give away the code even if they're not currently planning on using it -- the best chance is to find out how much money they'd want in exchange for the source if the buyer'ssole intent is to crowdfund its purchase in order to open it for historical archiving & public use. Tech history orgs might even be willing to donate because of WinAmp's historical importance.
Someone with experience crowdfunding &handling the open-sourcing of proprietary projects should be involved, so the chance isn't blown by inexperience. For example, they might know whether AOL is more likely to agree to the sale if the logos/name or other elements are left out of the deal.
I've been warning people away from them ever since leaders stated in early 2010 that they don't give a shit what users want or need -- not exactly a stance that suggests they're likely to stop at anything short of legal ramifications in their pursuit of ways to profit off their users.
Iknow where you're coming from, but the problem isn't the Linux community -- it's squarely with Canonical, Shuttleworth, and the fans they've taught their attitude to. If you ignore them and just pay attention to the community-oriented distro teams/developers, you'll find that they haven't really changed.
I came to Linux because it's a worldwide community of people driven by their talents to work together and create something great & beneficial; as you said, no politics, big egos or childish bullshit. In the big window-button fiasco 2 years after I started using it, the Ubuntu leadership (echoed by fanboys) openly said they didn't give a shit what the users wanted or needed, and even mild criticism at the forums was leading to bans. Worse, after an update fucked up my install, I decided to try a live CD for another distro and discovered that the "all other distros are too user-unfriendly for regular users"was a load of FUD lies; they were willing to drive Linux users to Windows as long as it kept us from their "competitors"!
I almost gave up on Linux at that moment just because, like you, I assumed that the whole community must be like Canonical/Ubuntu. Luckily the live CD pointed me to Fedora's site, which had an area dedicated to showing users how we could use all different kinds of talents to help out & participate (making me feel wanted & useful) plus a forum full of people being honest without repercussions, and visiting the sites for other distros like OpenSuSE or SimplyMEPISshowed the same thing. I hope you'll be able to find a similar haven and enjoy the good parts of the community.
Well, here's some of the stuff my family used for the 8-12 hour drives to visit relatives when I was a kid: -- Non-dense cereals (different brands/flavors to suit people) in ziploc baggies -- Anything that can be used in a non-refrigerated brown-bag lunch works -- bring an ice chest for anything that's better when cold. -- Cheese & deli meat safe at room temp (e.g. salami, pepperoni...) -- Soft French bread rounds (for sandwiches or alone) & mustard -- Large croissants (alone or sandwiches) -- Garlic bread -- Mozzarella "string" cheese or mozzarella balls -- Buy pizzas & immediately cover in plastic wrap and refrigerate until cold, then cut into pieces (square pizza is easiest), wrap them individually & keep in ice chest. -- Books/websites aimed at getting kids to start cooking always have at least a few ideas for quick &easy food/snacks you can make with little effort.
Things you or others could make relatively quickly orpossibly buy at a bakery: -- Rum cake, pound cake, spice cake, etc. -- Brownies (preferably using a sweet liquor like rum or kahlua; quadruple the alcohol in it so it doesn't all burn off, and you'll have some very relaxed/happy travelers without it being enough to hurt a kid or someone on medication) -- Sweet or pizza-type focaccia, the moister the better
It's not "by mistake" given they knew freezing clams kills them -- it's premeditated. Whether they were cackling with malicious glee or simply didn't give a shit (which seems disturbingly near-sociopathic) doesn't change that.
Is it really "intelligent" design to leave a person's privates dangling loose in the air and changing sizes all the time? (paraphrased from a quote by author Karen Chance)
A smart philanthropist would wait to get as much as he can for his creation and then invest all of it -- he could then divide the generated interest between philanthropy & further investment, plus possibly a small amount to survive on while working on his next endeavor unless he works better while holding a day job.
First, Feinstein & co. aren't real liberals -- our country's idea of a "liberal" is actually what qualified as center-conservative until relatively recently in UShistory, and they're still center-right in other first-world democracies. From what I've heard, Ted Kennedy was the last real liberal to be a political success, and he served from freaking 1962 (when liberal still meant liberal to a large degree) until he died 5 years ago.
Second, only politicians willing to largely support the military/spying & corporatocracy have a chance at winning a federal position. "Somebody"digs up dirt on any politicians that try to defy it, and let their lapdogs in the media tear the person's career to shreds. Smart voters realize that our options boil down to voting for the politician whose other beliefs/actions align with their own, or for one that will betray everything they care about.
So given the Republican & Libertarian parties are also full of pro-spying &even more full of pro-military-industrial types, what precisely do you think that voting against Democratswould accomplish for a state like California? Are you claiming that a conservative/libertarian politician wouldn't take the opportunity to undermine or destroy as many of California's liberal-leaning policies as possible?
Wanting a "streamlined" option for accomplishing a task has nothing to do with how smart or knowledgeable a person is. For example, I've used Linux for 5 years and have installed plenty of firmware, but I find doing so stressful and tedious -- I'd rather click through a few screens so Ican start actively working on the device.
Besides, if you're a Linux user, you should know perfectly well that these days, it really doesn't take any more intelligence/knowledge to use it than to use OSXor Windows. To be honest, I find Mac OSX the hardest for some reason.:-)
Exactly -- NASA created the first complete liquid diet (called Vivonex 100) way back in the late 1950s for astronauts. It became a core treatment for infants &kids in a dangerous "failure to thrive" state due to malabsorption or malnutrition (often due to GI defects) and prodded companies to start producing commercial nutrition-replacement beverages. IMHO it's a good example of how NASA's research has helped everyday regular people and even (as in my case)saved lives.
Is/.'s server giving anyone else a hard time -- like logging them out with unusual frequency and/or not showing some of the paragraph breaks & spaces in preview/post mode that they visibly put there while typing? The last few days, I've been logged out 3-4 times, had to write "<br><br>" in my posts to keep random paragraphs from running together in preview/post, and force a non-breaking space in some places because similarly random spaces in my posts aren't showing up outside the text box. (No, I didn't change any settings...)
Oh shit, it's Eddie's ancestor -- Genuine People Personalities are right around the bend! Kill it! Kill it with fi...whoops, too late for that reaction...
I stayed away from G+until recently for the same reason... Online I've gone by a few different handles, one of which matches the nickname I've gone by IRL since I was 10 years old -- just my first or first & last initials. Google+ doesn't accept that. I don't want to use my last name, because it's unusual enough to act like a "come harass me" beacon to an abusive ex-BF stalker I don't want any contact with.
Idon't buy that it's for those users' comfort at all, though... Google has been partnering increasingly with stores (which, based on my grocery store, then pester customers to link their G+and clubcard accounts), and when it comes to selling user data after gathering &cross-referencing it to get as much info as possible, real names are much more valuable than fake ones. Ithink that's the real reason Google wants us to use our "real"names -- not for civility or users' comfort, but because they can sell the cross-referenced grocery-shopping, app store purchases, home address, etc. of a "real"person for a lot more than they can sell just a pseudonym and a few purchases
Last Iheard, Google was allowing obvious pseudonyms in the "also known as"type field, but still required a "realistic"name for the account. (I use a "realistic"pseudonym myself.)
Icebike is probably talking about the small minority of sites that are coded to detect Adblock's mere presence and refuse to load. Here's one error page (can't figure out which site it originally came from) that I noticed in my older browser history earlier: https://adscendmedia.com/gateway_adblock.php?p=13727
there is a lot of stuff on the net you simply can't get to with Adblock turned on).
Report the problem sites at the Adblock forum -- the people behind the extension & EasyList-type subscriptions really want to know about those incidents so they can tweak the filters to prevent that problem. (While Ican usually find a filter that's interfering with a site, I've now seen a few sites that detect Adblock's mere presence and refuse to load, so I'm guessing you mean that sort of trouble.)
The tiring part isn't the length (it's no worse than many academic &literary texts), it's the unfamiliar grammar,sentence structures and word definitions. For example, in Modern English, "secure" as a non-technical word refers to being protected from danger so "secure in your papers"makes very little sense; "the people...no Warrants shall issue"would sound like a clumsy way to say civilians can't create warrants.
Iwonder how many more Americans would have a better grasp of our Bill of Rights and Constitution if they were translated into modern English...
I'm surprised the lack of capital letters doesn't bother you, then. A lack of capitals or basic punctuation is what really bothers me, as not having those elements makes posts much more difficult for me to read.
It doesn't bother me when users sign posts *if* they aren't inexplicably changing languages just to display their adoration for another culture. There was one user on a forum Ihung out on several years ago that went 'all the way' in that department: she posted a couple dozen times per day, and diligently placed an overly-cutesy "aloha ^_^" at the beginning and end of every single one.
Would anyone really be likely to use a 9" screen hooked up to a RPi for any of those endeavors, though? Iworked recently with an old computer of mine with an 11" monitor, and it felt cramped enough that Iwouldn't use it if Ihad a larger screen of any sort available.
That said, don't forget that there's a growing number of people getting into older games, which were primarily written for 4:3 screens, as are a lot of games written for use in a windowed environment (some genres are also more comfortable for me that way, I've noticed). For productivity or reading on a small screen, Ifind 16:10 only slightly nicer than 16:9. (The 16:x can be useful on a 22" screen the once or twice a year I compare documents, but yeah, that's about it. My Nook Simple Touch taught me that 3:4 is excellent for e-books or writing/editing documents on a 6" screen, on the other hand.)
After seeing this Wikipedia diagram, what I think would work best on a small screen is a 3:2 that can switch orientations. As it's directly between 16:10 and 4:3, I think it would offer the benefits of both while minimizing their drawbacks. It's a shame the industry is so damned focused on video that we're unlikely to see it even on a productivity-oriented device.
The original spirit of hacking was finding ways to make hardware do things far beyond what its creators intended or even realized was possible -- pushing it to its limits -- either by altering the hardware itself (like by soldering new connections), or by reprogramming the firmware. It takes a great deal of raw creativity of the sort that the vast majority of adults lose before adulthood, from what Ican tell, and for experienced hacking, highly detailed knowledge of the hardware.
The software-focused activities you describe use a different, more guided form of creativity that builds on existing creations or concepts. (The potential exception: "playing with pretty pictures" if they'refrom scratch or a new way of combining existing elements.) Within those endeavors, you're not likely to do the technological equivalent to a kid (or artist) painting the sky lime green just to see how it will affect the way the classic-green grass looks -- but the tech-equivalent might be exact what you'd try if you were cobbling together pieces from a few failed hardware projects to see if you could make a robot that can detect salinity levels in tears.
Hopefully real hardware hackers can pitch in and come up with a better explanation than this.:-p
Slashdot Mirror
It's not just Walmart or the super-low-cost retail stores anymore, either -- from what my 65-year-old aunt told us last year, the nicer department stores like the one she works at now do the "all night" Thanksgiving thing as well. Since that part of the family lives 2+ hours from us, that means a good third of the extended family (offspring of my paternal grandma & her sister) has to take off right after dinner if she's assigned the 11pm-onward shift. People usually fret over the effect on young families, but from my POV it seems even more fucked-up to ask a senior to skip or cut short the one holiday she gets to see the cousins she grew up with.
Being psychotic is a different, unrelated mental state where the person loses touch with reality in some manner:hallucinating, bizarre/illogical thinking, delusions, abnormal violence, or similar things.
TFS is being a bit misleading, though: 195k BTC is *currently* valued at $US150M, but depending on how much each original transaction was worth in USD when it took place, the total value could be one hell of a lot less. Early on when a bitcoin wasn't worth much, each transaction could easily have involved anywhere from 'multiple' to 'several dozen' bitcoins, so those exchanges could add up to a pretty substantial percentage of the 195k without being worth anywhere near even one million US dollars.
Replying to undo accidental troll moderation (damn it!)
A lot of people already either have very weak skills at "jump-starting conversations" or none at all -- it's one of the reasons shyness, social anxiety, and stress during the holidays are all so common. That's not even including people that are wired for different conversational patterns/approaches (e.g. autistics like me).
There's no way that AOL is going to just give away the code even if they're not currently planning on using it -- the best chance is to find out how much money they'd want in exchange for the source if the buyer'ssole intent is to crowdfund its purchase in order to open it for historical archiving & public use. Tech history orgs might even be willing to donate because of WinAmp's historical importance.
Someone with experience crowdfunding &handling the open-sourcing of proprietary projects should be involved, so the chance isn't blown by inexperience. For example, they might know whether AOL is more likely to agree to the sale if the logos/name or other elements are left out of the deal.
I've been warning people away from them ever since leaders stated in early 2010 that they don't give a shit what users want or need -- not exactly a stance that suggests they're likely to stop at anything short of legal ramifications in their pursuit of ways to profit off their users.
Iknow where you're coming from, but the problem isn't the Linux community -- it's squarely with Canonical, Shuttleworth, and the fans they've taught their attitude to. If you ignore them and just pay attention to the community-oriented distro teams/developers, you'll find that they haven't really changed.
I came to Linux because it's a worldwide community of people driven by their talents to work together and create something great & beneficial; as you said, no politics, big egos or childish bullshit. In the big window-button fiasco 2 years after I started using it, the Ubuntu leadership (echoed by fanboys) openly said they didn't give a shit what the users wanted or needed, and even mild criticism at the forums was leading to bans. Worse, after an update fucked up my install, I decided to try a live CD for another distro and discovered that the "all other distros are too user-unfriendly for regular users"was a load of FUD lies; they were willing to drive Linux users to Windows as long as it kept us from their "competitors"!
I almost gave up on Linux at that moment just because, like you, I assumed that the whole community must be like Canonical/Ubuntu. Luckily the live CD pointed me to Fedora's site, which had an area dedicated to showing users how we could use all different kinds of talents to help out & participate (making me feel wanted & useful) plus a forum full of people being honest without repercussions, and visiting the sites for other distros like OpenSuSE or SimplyMEPISshowed the same thing. I hope you'll be able to find a similar haven and enjoy the good parts of the community.
Well, here's some of the stuff my family used for the 8-12 hour drives to visit relatives when I was a kid:
-- Non-dense cereals (different brands/flavors to suit people) in ziploc baggies
-- Anything that can be used in a non-refrigerated brown-bag lunch works -- bring an ice chest for anything that's better when cold.
-- Cheese & deli meat safe at room temp (e.g. salami, pepperoni...)
-- Soft French bread rounds (for sandwiches or alone) & mustard
-- Large croissants (alone or sandwiches)
-- Garlic bread
-- Mozzarella "string" cheese or mozzarella balls
-- Buy pizzas & immediately cover in plastic wrap and refrigerate until cold, then cut into pieces (square pizza is easiest), wrap them individually & keep in ice chest.
-- Books/websites aimed at getting kids to start cooking always have at least a few ideas for quick &easy food/snacks you can make with little effort.
Things you or others could make relatively quickly orpossibly buy at a bakery:
-- Rum cake, pound cake, spice cake, etc.
-- Brownies (preferably using a sweet liquor like rum or kahlua; quadruple the alcohol in it so it doesn't all burn off, and you'll have some very relaxed/happy travelers without it being enough to hurt a kid or someone on medication)
-- Sweet or pizza-type focaccia, the moister the better
It's not "by mistake" given they knew freezing clams kills them -- it's premeditated. Whether they were cackling with malicious glee or simply didn't give a shit (which seems disturbingly near-sociopathic) doesn't change that.
Is it really "intelligent" design to leave a person's privates dangling loose in the air and changing sizes all the time? (paraphrased from a quote by author Karen Chance)
A smart philanthropist would wait to get as much as he can for his creation and then invest all of it -- he could then divide the generated interest between philanthropy & further investment, plus possibly a small amount to survive on while working on his next endeavor unless he works better while holding a day job.
First, Feinstein & co. aren't real liberals -- our country's idea of a "liberal" is actually what qualified as center-conservative until relatively recently in UShistory, and they're still center-right in other first-world democracies. From what I've heard, Ted Kennedy was the last real liberal to be a political success, and he served from freaking 1962 (when liberal still meant liberal to a large degree) until he died 5 years ago.
Second, only politicians willing to largely support the military/spying & corporatocracy have a chance at winning a federal position. "Somebody"digs up dirt on any politicians that try to defy it, and let their lapdogs in the media tear the person's career to shreds. Smart voters realize that our options boil down to voting for the politician whose other beliefs/actions align with their own, or for one that will betray everything they care about.
So given the Republican & Libertarian parties are also full of pro-spying &even more full of pro-military-industrial types, what precisely do you think that voting against Democratswould accomplish for a state like California? Are you claiming that a conservative/libertarian politician wouldn't take the opportunity to undermine or destroy as many of California's liberal-leaning policies as possible?
Wanting a "streamlined" option for accomplishing a task has nothing to do with how smart or knowledgeable a person is. For example, I've used Linux for 5 years and have installed plenty of firmware, but I find doing so stressful and tedious -- I'd rather click through a few screens so Ican start actively working on the device.
Besides, if you're a Linux user, you should know perfectly well that these days, it really doesn't take any more intelligence/knowledge to use it than to use OSXor Windows. To be honest, I find Mac OSX the hardest for some reason. :-)
Exactly -- NASA created the first complete liquid diet (called Vivonex 100) way back in the late 1950s for astronauts. It became a core treatment for infants &kids in a dangerous "failure to thrive" state due to malabsorption or malnutrition (often due to GI defects) and prodded companies to start producing commercial nutrition-replacement beverages. IMHO it's a good example of how NASA's research has helped everyday regular people and even (as in my case)saved lives.
Is /.'s server giving anyone else a hard time -- like logging them out with unusual frequency and/or not showing some of the paragraph breaks & spaces in preview/post mode that they visibly put there while typing? The last few days, I've been logged out 3-4 times, had to write "<br><br>" in my posts to keep random paragraphs from running together in preview/post, and force a non-breaking space in some places because similarly random spaces in my posts aren't showing up outside the text box. (No, I didn't change any settings...)
Oh shit, it's Eddie's ancestor -- Genuine People Personalities are right around the bend! Kill it! Kill it with fi...whoops, too late for that reaction...
I stayed away from G+until recently for the same reason... Online I've gone by a few different handles, one of which matches the nickname I've gone by IRL since I was 10 years old -- just my first or first & last initials. Google+ doesn't accept that. I don't want to use my last name, because it's unusual enough to act like a "come harass me" beacon to an abusive ex-BF stalker I don't want any contact with.
Idon't buy that it's for those users' comfort at all, though... Google has been partnering increasingly with stores (which, based on my grocery store, then pester customers to link their G+and clubcard accounts), and when it comes to selling user data after gathering &cross-referencing it to get as much info as possible, real names are much more valuable than fake ones. Ithink that's the real reason Google wants us to use our "real"names -- not for civility or users' comfort, but because they can sell the cross-referenced grocery-shopping, app store purchases, home address, etc. of a "real"person for a lot more than they can sell just a pseudonym and a few purchases
There were actually quite a few verified cases where Google suspended or even purged accounts over the names policy. A few links I found from a quick search:
Wikipedia's "Nymwars" article names a few
Google Plus deleting accounts en masse
Limor “Ladyada” Fried's brief post on being suspended
Violet Blue: Too Much Unnecessary Drama
William Shatner's Profile Temporarily Removed From Google+
Last Iheard, Google was allowing obvious pseudonyms in the "also known as"type field, but still required a "realistic"name for the account. (I use a "realistic"pseudonym myself.)
Icebike is probably talking about the small minority of sites that are coded to detect Adblock's mere presence and refuse to load. Here's one error page (can't figure out which site it originally came from) that I noticed in my older browser history earlier:
https://adscendmedia.com/gateway_adblock.php?p=13727
there is a lot of stuff on the net you simply can't get to with Adblock turned on).
Report the problem sites at the Adblock forum -- the people behind the extension & EasyList-type subscriptions really want to know about those incidents so they can tweak the filters to prevent that problem. (While Ican usually find a filter that's interfering with a site, I've now seen a few sites that detect Adblock's mere presence and refuse to load, so I'm guessing you mean that sort of trouble.)
The tiring part isn't the length (it's no worse than many academic &literary texts), it's the unfamiliar grammar,sentence structures and word definitions. For example, in Modern English, "secure" as a non-technical word refers to being protected from danger so "secure in your papers"makes very little sense; "the people...no Warrants shall issue"would sound like a clumsy way to say civilians can't create warrants.
Iwonder how many more Americans would have a better grasp of our Bill of Rights and Constitution if they were translated into modern English...
I'm surprised the lack of capital letters doesn't bother you, then. A lack of capitals or basic punctuation is what really bothers me, as not having those elements makes posts much more difficult for me to read.
It doesn't bother me when users sign posts *if* they aren't inexplicably changing languages just to display their adoration for another culture. There was one user on a forum Ihung out on several years ago that went 'all the way' in that department: she posted a couple dozen times per day, and diligently placed an overly-cutesy "aloha ^_^" at the beginning and end of every single one.
Would anyone really be likely to use a 9" screen hooked up to a RPi for any of those endeavors, though? Iworked recently with an old computer of mine with an 11" monitor, and it felt cramped enough that Iwouldn't use it if Ihad a larger screen of any sort available.
That said, don't forget that there's a growing number of people getting into older games, which were primarily written for 4:3 screens, as are a lot of games written for use in a windowed environment (some genres are also more comfortable for me that way, I've noticed). For productivity or reading on a small screen, Ifind 16:10 only slightly nicer than 16:9. (The 16:x can be useful on a 22" screen the once or twice a year I compare documents, but yeah, that's about it. My Nook Simple Touch taught me that 3:4 is excellent for e-books or writing/editing documents on a 6" screen, on the other hand.)
After seeing this Wikipedia diagram, what I think would work best on a small screen is a 3:2 that can switch orientations. As it's directly between 16:10 and 4:3, I think it would offer the benefits of both while minimizing their drawbacks. It's a shame the industry is so damned focused on video that we're unlikely to see it even on a productivity-oriented device.
The original spirit of hacking was finding ways to make hardware do things far beyond what its creators intended or even realized was possible -- pushing it to its limits -- either by altering the hardware itself (like by soldering new connections), or by reprogramming the firmware. It takes a great deal of raw creativity of the sort that the vast majority of adults lose before adulthood, from what Ican tell, and for experienced hacking, highly detailed knowledge of the hardware.
The software-focused activities you describe use a different, more guided form of creativity that builds on existing creations or concepts. (The potential exception: "playing with pretty pictures" if they'refrom scratch or a new way of combining existing elements.) Within those endeavors, you're not likely to do the technological equivalent to a kid (or artist) painting the sky lime green just to see how it will affect the way the classic-green grass looks -- but the tech-equivalent might be exact what you'd try if you were cobbling together pieces from a few failed hardware projects to see if you could make a robot that can detect salinity levels in tears.
Hopefully real hardware hackers can pitch in and come up with a better explanation than this. :-p