Funny how Americans kick and scream and intervene in other countries until their authorities give up their own citizens to America to face "terror related charges" like copyright infringement...
No, our clusterfuck of a government harasses other nations until they turn their citizens over. You might notice that comments here (and on similar forums with reasonably intelligent/aware people) by actual everyday Americans show most of us not only strongly disagree with the practice, a hell of a lot of us cheer on countries that tell our government to shove its bullying up its flabby old ass.
Who is to blame for it ? Them in Washington, D.C., or us, the voters who voted them in, every fucking four years, without fail ?
We can't successfully vote out the corruption when the corporations/ultra-wealthy that own the mass media use it to ensure that any third-party political groups are thoroughly discredited, use their money/influence to "guide" the two functional political parties to only put forth candidates that will be sympathetic to their interests, and to ensure any recalcitrant/troublemaking politicians toe the line.
I suspect you don't know any actual creators. They automatically do the best they can under the circumstances (which often means rushing to meet contracts rather than taking their time to fine-tune their work length), out of a mixture of professional pride and knowing they have to compete with everyone else for sales.
But hasn't X.org been the standard for well over a decade now, with Wayland only being non-universal in the future thanks to Canonical's self-segregating behavior? Or am I misunderstanding what you're saying?
I don't think that this is the reason that it hasn't really thrived on the desktop; outside the hardcore devs, most of the people (particularly non-geeks) that might/do use Linux tend to not know or care about the details as long as it works with minimal/no intervention. IMHO, the reason is that it has only really been promoted by individual enthusiasts -- there haven't been deep pockets ensuring it gets plenty of positive press coverage, basically like Google did with Android (then practically a distro) early on by using plain language to ensure people understand what it is, how it differs from the better-known alternatives and why they might want to use it.
Whether they use AAVE depends on where they grew up -- I had a number of black classmates & friends as a kid growing up in a middle/upper-middle class Californian suburb, but they spoke, dressed, moved, etc. just like the white, Asian, etc. kids.
The first vowel sounds very different to me -- the "e" in "specific" is the same sound used in Pez, television, or pet, while the "a" in "pacific" is either the sound found in paw, caw, and law or the one found in dumb and plumb, depending on the person speaking. (I'm from Northern California, FWIW.)
At this point, using a VPN is kind of a must if we want to have even a bit of privacy. I've been doing my homework starting with things like TorrentFreak's Guide To VPN Services That Take Anonymity Seriously, 2013 Edition and the informational comments left on that article, and hopefully this month I'll finally have figured out which to go with.
Use a free virtual/online sms number, like the ones attached to GoogleVoice accounts. Often as not, Google will let you "verify" your account on their various services using the same account's GoogleVoice number, I've noticed.
Of course, there's a very good chance that it's one of the various Google account pages where they give you the (inaccurate) impression that you absolutely must verify -- often as not, there's a little link below the BS that will let you skip that step.
No, our government/authorities have that attitude. Most actual Americans (like me) want desperately to be able to turn back the clock when it comes to all of this crap, and have wanted to for years -- read Slashdot comments with less bias, and you'll see that. Our attitudes aren't much more related to the beliefs of the powers-that-be than a tenant's views are to their landlord's.
It was for the one network admin I dated, but worse... His Saturday routine was to go in to do computer/network maintenance when he'd have the office to himself. He said he didn't wash his hands while there because he was careful not to get anything on them, but that a couple of times, he'd had to rinse his underwear in the office bathroom sink and dry it out in the break-room microwave. When I got a bit grossed out about his "activities" at the office, he claimed that several friends in the industry evidently did the same thing once in a while (and didn't see what the big deal was).
Then the 'best & brightest' would be killed due to being distracted by thinking intensely about their projects, while the many Average Joes/Janes that bumble obediently through life would survive -- that's not exactly progress. Being "fit to survive" in a particular environment is usually tied to how physically capable the person is, not how brilliantly talented or otherwise good for society they are, just as people's mental and physical abilities are two separate beasts.
Besides that, the entire reason that humanity tends to think of itself as distinct from animals is because our species has figured out how to transcend nature in most ways -- curing diseases, creating electronics, following rules rather than just doing whatever our biological urges suggest, creating comfortable shelter where we're warm & dry regardless of weather, and so forth. Coming up with ways to make life around machines safer doesn't carry us farther from nature, as being with machines isn't natural in the first place...and removing people from the gene pool based on how well they do in society isn't going to do a damn thing beyond cause a lot of suffering, as many eugenics programs of the past have demonstrated.
I agree wholeheartedly -- and try using SpamGourmet for the address. It's ancient, but the vast majority of sites accept it, *no* messages over the limit you set per sub-address (sub1.user@, sub2.user@) can get through, and I've come to like it a lot more than the throwaway services. Otherwise, try using Mailinator with one of their alternate domains; they change those often enough that forums/sites rarely have the latest set of variants blocked yet.
It also means that since those networks generally don't let us log onto their networks using OpenID, we're stuck keeping track of which identity/account we used to log into each other website -- "let's see, did I use my user1 Gmail account, or was it the user2 Yahoo account, or maybe Facebook or...man, hope it wasn't site/service X, Y or Z because those don't even exist anymore...maybe I used Discus that time..."
Especially as the big commercial data-mining services don't let us set up multiple identities/personal info/userpics so we can use whichever seems the most appropriate. (Yeah, what a shock...not.) I liked being able to control whether I'm "seatofmypants" or "[insert real name]" or something else entirely, not having Google decide (as it does on all of its connected properties, pissing me off) that I *must* be known by my supposed real name, not the one I actually chose to suit my personality or life.
FWIW I use MyOpenID a couple of times each month, and haven't run into server problems.
The OpenOffice Alt Find & Replace extension can do that -- I've been using it for years to supplement the built-in find/replace dialog, and it's really rare that I encounter something that it can't actually tackle. That said, while it works fine in the latest OpenOffice despite the extension's age, I have no idea how LibreWriter will handle it.**
**On my computers, OOWriter can handle much larger documents without slowing down or having 'issues' than LibreWriter can -- I'm fairly sure that this is because OOW lets me choose which extensions I want (basically just Alt F&R), while LO has a bunch of science/math addons (which I don't use) coded into the program now.
If your state is like mine (CA), the county can't keep up with the roads & education has gone down the drain because the state has been taking/keeping a massive percentage of the funds usually allocated for that... The state in turn is doing so in hope of covering the budget shortfalls caused by a mixture of: -- rising costs, due in large part to the needs of the massive wave of low/no-income immigrants, including the explosion of kids needing expensive bilingual teachers full-time for several years -- a weak tax base related to both the high number of low-paid/unemployed residents and various loopholes for corporations & affluent residents/citizens
No, we still have free/open discussion, as it's still perfectly legal to write about current events online -- the fact that mainstream sources are no longer reliable is completely separate, as people like us tend to find more accurate/honest coverage elsewhere. If we didn't have free/open discussion, you and I wouldn't dare to have this conversation, as it would lead to some kind of horrible government-imposed punishment.
Well, according to a troll upthread, we supposedly won, so sure, why not -- we could even tweak the draft rules to say that only STEM majors will be exempt, thus fixing the shortage of STEM workers by 'encouraging' a whole generation to major in it!/tongue-in-cheek
Cold fjord was likely referencing the Vietnam War, which was basically a case of the US getting into a lengthly war in hope of keeping North Vietnam from taking over jungle-filled South Vietnam and imposing communist rule.
You should study the Vietnam War before you write a troll post that sounds *that* uninformed. The USA left because of things like this: -- Most young men drafted (often straight out of high school) were returning either dead, maimed or with severe PTSD & addictions to government-supplied hardcore drugs. Many of the survivors killed themselves over the atrocities they'd been forced to commit. -- Mass media stopped covering up the mess & showed the public what *really* was going on, like LIFE Magazine's coverage (keep in mind that movies/TV weren't at all violent, so this kind of thing was a horrible shock). -- Public sentiment turned so aggressively against the war (especially after the National Guard killed 4 students) that politicians they elected to end the war didn't dare fail to live up to their promises.
That's what I know about, at least -- I wasn't born until the late 70s and, frankly, I sucked ass at history as a student.:-p
To quote a famous protest song: Well, come on mothers across the land, Pack your boys off to Vietnam! Come on fathers, don't hesitate, Send your sons off before its too late! Be the first one on your block To have your boy come home in a box.
And it's one, two, three, What are we fighting for? Don't ask me -- I don't give a damn, The next stop is Vietnam. And it's five, six, seven, Open up the pearly gates! Well, there ain't no time to wonder why, Whoopee, we're all gonna die!
While I didn't care for Hitchens, I agree about Slate's decline -- I stopped reading late last year because I was fed up with BS pieces like the one mentioned here, their dumb-as-rocks discussion rules (no "naughty" language), the technology column becoming a stream of stupidity & advertorials, and the high percentage of users that are jerks.
They and competitor Salon.com (which I also gave up on) used to be great several years ago, but these days they're not much better than HuffPo. I keep hoping to find a site to take their place that's along the lines of Ars Technica, but so far each place I've tried leans either too far into a mix of shrill & dull, has far too many trashy clickbait articles, or both.
It's because "friend" refers also to relatives, classmates, or anyone else the person wants to keep in touch with, which would total far more than their close friends.
As for how it became so large, it's a combination of a few things:
-- The company started out by luring in university undergraduates as a way of coordinating schedules, knowing what was going on with one another, and so forth when each of them had a reason or the interest required to look at their "friends."
-- When open to the public, it became the first turnkey service that allowed people to similarly keep in touch and interact without dealing with technical jargon-laced configurations or a variety of different programs/services (even if they weren't interested in using more than one or two of its services). That made it perfect for both the older people that find things like "SMTP server" confusing & intimidating, and the adults that have the knowledge but simply didn't want to deal with the extra hassle of configuring several different programs.
When I had my mother's phone download the Facebook app and set it up for her yesterday, the first thing it did upon login was pop up a screen with three choices -- to not import any contact info from her phone (synced with a Google account), to import all contact data she has for Facebook friends, or import all contact data to Facebook, period. It was quite clearly not offering to merely see which contacts were on Facebook or send out invites to those that weren't.
I could be wrong, but I'm fairly sure it didn't offer to collect all data from her Google/Gmail contacts list when I last set it up for her several months ago... If I'm reading those choices correctly, it would mean that even if Facebook doesn't visibly plug the data into people's profiles, it would still be there for them to use behind the scenes. Obviously I told it to not import anything, but I really hope I misunderstood and leapt to the wrong conclusion.
Slashdot Mirror
I wish I had mod points, because you're the one person that nailed it.
Funny how Americans kick and scream and intervene in other countries until their authorities give up their own citizens to America to face "terror related charges" like copyright infringement ...
No, our clusterfuck of a government harasses other nations until they turn their citizens over. You might notice that comments here (and on similar forums with reasonably intelligent/aware people) by actual everyday Americans show most of us not only strongly disagree with the practice, a hell of a lot of us cheer on countries that tell our government to shove its bullying up its flabby old ass.
Who is to blame for it ? Them in Washington, D.C., or us, the voters who voted them in, every fucking four years, without fail ?
We can't successfully vote out the corruption when the corporations/ultra-wealthy that own the mass media use it to ensure that any third-party political groups are thoroughly discredited, use their money/influence to "guide" the two functional political parties to only put forth candidates that will be sympathetic to their interests, and to ensure any recalcitrant/troublemaking politicians toe the line.
I suspect you don't know any actual creators. They automatically do the best they can under the circumstances (which often means rushing to meet contracts rather than taking their time to fine-tune their work length), out of a mixture of professional pride and knowing they have to compete with everyone else for sales.
But hasn't X.org been the standard for well over a decade now, with Wayland only being non-universal in the future thanks to Canonical's self-segregating behavior? Or am I misunderstanding what you're saying?
I don't think that this is the reason that it hasn't really thrived on the desktop; outside the hardcore devs, most of the people (particularly non-geeks) that might/do use Linux tend to not know or care about the details as long as it works with minimal/no intervention. IMHO, the reason is that it has only really been promoted by individual enthusiasts -- there haven't been deep pockets ensuring it gets plenty of positive press coverage, basically like Google did with Android (then practically a distro) early on by using plain language to ensure people understand what it is, how it differs from the better-known alternatives and why they might want to use it.
Whether they use AAVE depends on where they grew up -- I had a number of black classmates & friends as a kid growing up in a middle/upper-middle class Californian suburb, but they spoke, dressed, moved, etc. just like the white, Asian, etc. kids.
The first vowel sounds very different to me -- the "e" in "specific" is the same sound used in Pez, television, or pet, while the "a" in "pacific" is either the sound found in paw, caw, and law or the one found in dumb and plumb, depending on the person speaking. (I'm from Northern California, FWIW.)
At this point, using a VPN is kind of a must if we want to have even a bit of privacy. I've been doing my homework starting with things like TorrentFreak's Guide To VPN Services That Take Anonymity Seriously, 2013 Edition and the informational comments left on that article, and hopefully this month I'll finally have figured out which to go with.
Use a free virtual/online sms number, like the ones attached to GoogleVoice accounts. Often as not, Google will let you "verify" your account on their various services using the same account's GoogleVoice number, I've noticed.
Of course, there's a very good chance that it's one of the various Google account pages where they give you the (inaccurate) impression that you absolutely must verify -- often as not, there's a little link below the BS that will let you skip that step.
privet key[ i]s you
I deny those allegations -- I've never seen that privet before in my life, and certainly wouldn't agree to be its key!
Plenty of people like me cared. Just because you (or even most people you noticed) didn't care doesn't mean " we " didn't.
No, our government/authorities have that attitude. Most actual Americans (like me) want desperately to be able to turn back the clock when it comes to all of this crap, and have wanted to for years -- read Slashdot comments with less bias, and you'll see that. Our attitudes aren't much more related to the beliefs of the powers-that-be than a tenant's views are to their landlord's.
It was for the one network admin I dated, but worse... His Saturday routine was to go in to do computer/network maintenance when he'd have the office to himself. He said he didn't wash his hands while there because he was careful not to get anything on them, but that a couple of times, he'd had to rinse his underwear in the office bathroom sink and dry it out in the break-room microwave. When I got a bit grossed out about his "activities" at the office, he claimed that several friends in the industry evidently did the same thing once in a while (and didn't see what the big deal was).
Then the 'best & brightest' would be killed due to being distracted by thinking intensely about their projects, while the many Average Joes/Janes that bumble obediently through life would survive -- that's not exactly progress. Being "fit to survive" in a particular environment is usually tied to how physically capable the person is, not how brilliantly talented or otherwise good for society they are, just as people's mental and physical abilities are two separate beasts.
Besides that, the entire reason that humanity tends to think of itself as distinct from animals is because our species has figured out how to transcend nature in most ways -- curing diseases, creating electronics, following rules rather than just doing whatever our biological urges suggest, creating comfortable shelter where we're warm & dry regardless of weather, and so forth. Coming up with ways to make life around machines safer doesn't carry us farther from nature, as being with machines isn't natural in the first place...and removing people from the gene pool based on how well they do in society isn't going to do a damn thing beyond cause a lot of suffering, as many eugenics programs of the past have demonstrated.
I agree wholeheartedly -- and try using SpamGourmet for the address. It's ancient, but the vast majority of sites accept it, *no* messages over the limit you set per sub-address (sub1.user@, sub2.user@) can get through, and I've come to like it a lot more than the throwaway services. Otherwise, try using Mailinator with one of their alternate domains; they change those often enough that forums/sites rarely have the latest set of variants blocked yet.
It also means that since those networks generally don't let us log onto their networks using OpenID, we're stuck keeping track of which identity/account we used to log into each other website -- "let's see, did I use my user1 Gmail account, or was it the user2 Yahoo account, or maybe Facebook or...man, hope it wasn't site/service X, Y or Z because those don't even exist anymore...maybe I used Discus that time..."
Especially as the big commercial data-mining services don't let us set up multiple identities/personal info/userpics so we can use whichever seems the most appropriate. (Yeah, what a shock...not.) I liked being able to control whether I'm "seatofmypants" or "[insert real name]" or something else entirely, not having Google decide (as it does on all of its connected properties, pissing me off) that I *must* be known by my supposed real name, not the one I actually chose to suit my personality or life.
FWIW I use MyOpenID a couple of times each month, and haven't run into server problems.
The OpenOffice Alt Find & Replace extension can do that -- I've been using it for years to supplement the built-in find/replace dialog, and it's really rare that I encounter something that it can't actually tackle. That said, while it works fine in the latest OpenOffice despite the extension's age, I have no idea how LibreWriter will handle it.**
**On my computers, OOWriter can handle much larger documents without slowing down or having 'issues' than LibreWriter can -- I'm fairly sure that this is because OOW lets me choose which extensions I want (basically just Alt F&R), while LO has a bunch of science/math addons (which I don't use) coded into the program now.
If your state is like mine (CA), the county can't keep up with the roads & education has gone down the drain because the state has been taking/keeping a massive percentage of the funds usually allocated for that... The state in turn is doing so in hope of covering the budget shortfalls caused by a mixture of:
-- rising costs, due in large part to the needs of the massive wave of low/no-income immigrants, including the explosion of kids needing expensive bilingual teachers full-time for several years
-- a weak tax base related to both the high number of low-paid/unemployed residents and various loopholes for corporations & affluent residents/citizens
No, we still have free/open discussion, as it's still perfectly legal to write about current events online -- the fact that mainstream sources are no longer reliable is completely separate, as people like us tend to find more accurate/honest coverage elsewhere. If we didn't have free/open discussion, you and I wouldn't dare to have this conversation, as it would lead to some kind of horrible government-imposed punishment.
Well, according to a troll upthread, we supposedly won, so sure, why not -- we could even tweak the draft rules to say that only STEM majors will be exempt, thus fixing the shortage of STEM workers by 'encouraging' a whole generation to major in it! /tongue-in-cheek
Preventing a communist takeover? Do you recall the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1955_State_of_Vietnam_referendum part?
Cold fjord was likely referencing the Vietnam War, which was basically a case of the US getting into a lengthly war in hope of keeping North Vietnam from taking over jungle-filled South Vietnam and imposing communist rule.
You should study the Vietnam War before you write a troll post that sounds *that* uninformed. The USA left because of things like this:
-- Most young men drafted (often straight out of high school) were returning either dead, maimed or with severe PTSD & addictions to government-supplied hardcore drugs. Many of the survivors killed themselves over the atrocities they'd been forced to commit.
-- Mass media stopped covering up the mess & showed the public what *really* was going on, like LIFE Magazine's coverage (keep in mind that movies/TV weren't at all violent, so this kind of thing was a horrible shock).
-- Public sentiment turned so aggressively against the war (especially after the National Guard killed 4 students) that politicians they elected to end the war didn't dare fail to live up to their promises.
That's what I know about, at least -- I wasn't born until the late 70s and, frankly, I sucked ass at history as a student. :-p
To quote a famous protest song:
Well, come on mothers across the land,
Pack your boys off to Vietnam!
Come on fathers, don't hesitate,
Send your sons off before its too late!
Be the first one on your block
To have your boy come home in a box.
And it's one, two, three,
What are we fighting for?
Don't ask me -- I don't give a damn,
The next stop is Vietnam.
And it's five, six, seven,
Open up the pearly gates!
Well, there ain't no time to wonder why,
Whoopee, we're all gonna die!
While I didn't care for Hitchens, I agree about Slate's decline -- I stopped reading late last year because I was fed up with BS pieces like the one mentioned here, their dumb-as-rocks discussion rules (no "naughty" language), the technology column becoming a stream of stupidity & advertorials, and the high percentage of users that are jerks.
They and competitor Salon.com (which I also gave up on) used to be great several years ago, but these days they're not much better than HuffPo. I keep hoping to find a site to take their place that's along the lines of Ars Technica, but so far each place I've tried leans either too far into a mix of shrill & dull, has far too many trashy clickbait articles, or both.
It's because "friend" refers also to relatives, classmates, or anyone else the person wants to keep in touch with, which would total far more than their close friends.
As for how it became so large, it's a combination of a few things:
-- The company started out by luring in university undergraduates as a way of coordinating schedules, knowing what was going on with one another, and so forth when each of them had a reason or the interest required to look at their "friends."
-- When open to the public, it became the first turnkey service that allowed people to similarly keep in touch and interact without dealing with technical jargon-laced configurations or a variety of different programs/services (even if they weren't interested in using more than one or two of its services). That made it perfect for both the older people that find things like "SMTP server" confusing & intimidating, and the adults that have the knowledge but simply didn't want to deal with the extra hassle of configuring several different programs.
When I had my mother's phone download the Facebook app and set it up for her yesterday, the first thing it did upon login was pop up a screen with three choices -- to not import any contact info from her phone (synced with a Google account), to import all contact data she has for Facebook friends, or import all contact data to Facebook, period. It was quite clearly not offering to merely see which contacts were on Facebook or send out invites to those that weren't.
I could be wrong, but I'm fairly sure it didn't offer to collect all data from her Google/Gmail contacts list when I last set it up for her several months ago... If I'm reading those choices correctly, it would mean that even if Facebook doesn't visibly plug the data into people's profiles, it would still be there for them to use behind the scenes. Obviously I told it to not import anything, but I really hope I misunderstood and leapt to the wrong conclusion.