That commercial was annoying as hell but I never would have seen it if it weren't for Slashdot.
I live in Fort Collins and traffic is very light.
It's sort of relative though. After living here for a while I sometimes curse at it, but then I remember when I lived in larger cities where traffic was really bad.
If I have to wait more than one light cycle to get through an intersection it means I shouldn't have ventured out during "rush hour" which doesn't actually exist here.
I am not going to vote the way Comcast wants me to.
Here's how a typical call to Comcast customer service went when I was still their customer.
Me: Your internet service is down. Comcast: No it isn't. Me; Yes, it is I've rebooted my router and everything. Comcast: There are no reported outages in your area: Me: Well, I'm fucking reporting one right now! Comcast: Would you like to add our triple play service to your account?
I'm not a Comcast customer anymore, but CenturyLink's customer service is identical. Their service is more reliable though s at least I don't have to call as often.
What's really annoying is when they tell me I can chat online about my internet connection being down. Brilliant!
I can't confirm it, but I remember hearing that he did not actually want libraries to be named after him despite the fact that he donated a lot of money to help establish a lot of libraries and many of them do bear his name.
Before the law stepped in and required it there was a growing market for non-smoking bars. Some were banning smoking even without the government telling them they had to.
I remember going to see a band at some venue in Houston at least 15 years ago and it was a non-smoking night. It was weird because some nights you could smoke, other nights you had to go outside.
I felt a bit foolish standing outside smoking all by myself watching the band play through the door while all my friends and everyone else was seated at their tables and enjoying the show without the need to get their fix (well, other than all the alcohol they were drinking). There were a few other smokers in the audience, but it was a cold night (for Houston) and nobody really wanted to stay outside too long.
And that wasn't the only bar to do it. Some bars completely banned smoking and even loudly proclaimed that they had done so. It may have only been a niche market, but it was there and growing.
Many non-smokers often complained that the worst thing about going to a bar is coming home smelling like smoke. A certain segment of the market was demanding non-smoking bars.
Has there ever been a smoking ban that's been repealed? I'd bet if you did that in many cities a lot of bars would say they still wouldn't let people smoke. The non-smokers who make up the vast majority of people wouldn't put up with it. There are young people today who go to bars, but have never been in a bar which allowed people to smoke.
Of course other bars would eagerly welcome the smokers but they are definitely a dwindling market.
I still believe that bar owners should be allowed to decide for themselves if smoking should be allowed in their establishments.
I actually feel the same about restaurants but society has long since decided they disagree with me and there is no Constitutional right to smoke anywhere you want.
At least with a restaurant you can make the argument that everyone should be able to eat without poisoning themselves, but in a bar? Nobody needs to drink and drinking certainly isn't helping your health and I still believe there are enough jobs out there that some poor bartender or server isn't going to be forced into working in a smoking bar if it's really a health concern for them.
Before the statewide ban on smoking in bars here (in Colorado) some would advertise they were "smoker-friendly". You couldn't smoke in a bar in the town where I lived, but you could go to some bar outside the city and smoke to your heart's (dis?)content.
Now Colorado treats e-cigs the same as they do cigarettes which I agree is kind of ridiculous and you can't even use an e-cig outdoors in some parts of town here. I'm actually okay with that. I don't need to vape everywhere I go.
I didn't even need to be told that I shouldn't vape indoors where smoking wasn't allowed. I just knew it was wrong just as surely as I believe outdoor bans on smoking or vaping are wrong too.
And while vaping is a lot less obnoxious than smoking, let's not lie to ourselves or others. It does produce a smell and it does put chemicals besides water vapor into the air.
This really hit home a couple of months ago as I was dragged into the non-smoking area of the downtown touristy area of my city. I was really jonesing and to make things worse my e-cig was almost dead anyway. When I did try to take a discreet hit outdoors it just wasn't working well at all. And then I saw a woman just chasing clouds all by herself. She had dutifully gone outside but was ignoring the outdoor smoking/vaping ban and I could smell it from 20-30 feet away.
She wasn't bothering me other than making me a bit jealous because her e-cig was working just fine and mine wasn't but it kind of struck me that it's not quite as innocuous as many of us would like to think.
And don't even think about smoking marijuana anywhere in public even if you're allowed to smoke cigarettes there. Or just go ahead and do it anyway. You probably won't get caught, but you could still be arrested for it.
While I don't mind I can understand other people's objections and we have laws about vaping and smoking anything in public.
And even before smoking was banned by law some bars were taking it upon themselves to ban smoking all on their own and not just in Colorado but in other states as well.
If you're a smoker, I highly recommend quitting. I substituted with e-cigs and I still wish I would quit those but it's a lesser evil IMO.
What really helped me quit was the reaction of the tobacco companies and their distributors and retailers to the big 2009 tax increase on cigs. Even BEFORE the higher taxes went into effect they raised prices and blamed Obama. I saw price increases 2 months before the tax went into effect that were 60% higher than what I had been paying and the tax increase wasn't even close to.
A 2009 law approved by Congress, the Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act, increased the federal tax rate on cigarettes by 61.66 cents per pack (from 39 cents to $1.0066 per pack)
So I should have had to pay about $6 more per carton WHEN the tax actually took effect. Instead I was paying $25 more per carton 2 months BEFORE the tax took effect.
Fuck those greedy bastards!
I didn't even quit right away. I kept buying them for months and so they probably figured we were so addicted we had no choice - which may have been true to some extent, but I did quit being an RJR customer eventually.
It's amusing that the author goes to the trouble of doodling a piece of tofu. I realized my signature was worthless the first time I encountered an electronic signature pad. I tried to sign my name and it didn't look anything like my actual signature.
Since then I have scribbled my signature. The cashiers in the stores know I'm just faking it - they don't care. I only even make a half-hearted attempt because it takes so long to read the chip in my credit card.
The only time I even bother to try to write my signature correctly is when I'm at the bank but I don't think they care either. I don't even do it very well. It looks different - and it looks wrong to me - every time I do it. I'm so out of practice I can't even sign my name anymore.
Many years ago I disputed every charge on my credit card that someone else had made (a long and terrible and stupid story). They reversed every charge that didn't actually have a signature (like pay-at-the-pump gas purchases). The ones that actually had a signature, even though they didn't match mine, were more problematic and I ended up having to pay for most of those.
Even though I was stupid and it was largely my fault I still ended up dropping that credit card after paying off the bill and they're still trying to get me back as a customer over 20 years later.
What's in my wallet? Not that credit card. I have cash and an ATM card and a different credit card.
It's creepy how banks try to own you. That different credit card company still thanks me for being a loyal customer for 30 or so years. Yeah, I pay the bill and it usually works so I'm still a loyal customer. I actually don't have any loyalty to them at all - and the rewards points may as well be a slap in the face and only remind me of how much money I've put on my card over the years.
The reward points can only be redeemed for cheap trinkets that I would never actually buy if I had to pay cash for them.
I hate mosquitoes but I found I solved that problem by moving far away from the Gulf Coast.
I was chased out of a park once by a swarm of them. And some people are trying to get me to move back there. Bad timing. I told them you just had a hurricane and your homes are flooded and I don't even want to imagine what the mosquitoes are like. I think I'll stay up here in the mountains far away from any bayou.
In between living in the swamp and living in the mountains I lived in the desert for a couple of years and I don't believe I saw a single mosquito in the desert. And I've only seen one palmetto bug (roach) since I moved out of the swamp and I'm pretty sure that one just hitchhiked its way across the USA- just like in that Lou Reed song.
I hate most bugs especially roaches and mosquitoes but I made a mistake a few years back. When I moved into my current home I killed all the wasps with chemical weapons and they never came back. Some might call this a successful victory over stinging insects but I realized after the fact that I had done wrong. Unlike mosquitoes, wasps don't want to sting or bite humans. They just wanted to pollinate the plants. I regret killing the wasps.
One type of bug I've never killed though is spiders and they've been good to me. One spider rid my house of some kind of tiny fly infestation - they weren't gnats or fruitflies - not exactly sure what they were but the spider built a web and caught them all and when they were gone the spider went away.
Supposedly there are mosquitoes around here but I can't remember the last time one bit me.
I started to reply to your post earlier today and decided my comment wasn't worth posting but since then I changed my mind as I have disabled javascript on my browser and re-enabled it and disabled it once again. And the list of websites I have made exceptions for is way too long (and includes slashdot).
What's the point of disabling Javascript if I'm just going to make exceptions one by one for every website that doesn't work if it's disabled?
You could make a case that any website that doesn't work without enabling Javascript isn't worth visiting and should be avoided but today I had compelling reasons to visit websites that weren't already in my browser's whitelist that required it.
It's a risk/reward situation and a question of usability and convenience. I do try to maintain a certain level of security on my computer and I do take steps to secure my personal data but I'm just an average type of a person. I'm not going to spend a huge amount of time being paranoid.
I also have a lock on my front door, but anyone could easily break into my home. There are even small rocks in my front yard which could be used to break a window.
Most people just want websites to work and they're not going to want to go to the hassle of evaluating on a case by case basis if it's safe to run javascript on a particular site because they really want to access their content.
Even my ad-blocker "breaks" a lot of websites. The internet is not entirely unusable but I often come across content that just doesn't play well with my browser settings and extensions even with js enabled. Usually I look for another source or just forget about it but sometimes I really want to see it and I start disabling extensions and that kind of defeats the purpose of any security, doesn't it?
My old cat (may she rest in peace) downloaded Chrome for me one night and then opened about 80 empty tabs.
Okay, I may have just been drunk and didn't remember downloading Chrome but at the time I was still using Firefox.
The part about her opening 80 empty tabs is definitely true though - she was sleeping on the keyboard when I woke up.
The cat I have now actually has a twitter account.and to my amazement still has nearly 500 followers despite her complete failure to convince me to promote it online. She hasn't posted anything in months and nearly 500 might be bragging, but it is over 460 and only 2 or 3 of those are relatives who know she's my cat.
She actually has at least one corporate follower because in one picture you can see the brand of food she eats and they liked it and followed her.
It really is a mystery to me how she got any followers at all. Where do these people come from? And why are they following my cat on twitter?
And the cat is careful to remove any metadata from the images and even blur out anything that could possibly be used to personally identify her - well, except for her name which is kind of unique.
My current cat looks a lot like that cat who downloaded Chrome for me. I've even been tempted to upload old photos of that cat on my current cat's twitter feed to see if anyone would notice it wasn't the same cat. I wonder if Google could tell the difference. If I wasn't familiar with the photos in question even I might not be able to tell.
If you want to freak me out and prove how there is no such thing as privacy tweet to my cat and reference this slashdot post. Can you connect the dots? Somebody probably can. I actually just logged in to her twitter account using the same browser as I'm using here. But at least I'm content in thinking that only a few big corporations can connect me to my cat's twitter feed and not just anyone on the internet.
Now that I think about it, I've given up quite a few clues already.
* Cat has a unique name * All images are scrubbed of metadata (unless she made a mistake of course) * between 450-500 followers * hasn't tweeted anything in months * at least one picture shows a brand of cat food * at least one picture has something blurred out
The first point just eliminates any cats with any common name you can think of. The next 3 points are actually quantifiable things which could be used to narrow down the search. The last two points would require some sort of image recognition or painstakingly going through each picture in however many Twitter accounts that has narrowed it down to.
Oh, and she's a female feline. That should help you all some more.
Consider this a challenge to find my cat on Twitter!
Seriously, I do wonder how much those details narrow it down to. Is it a few hundred? A few thousand? A dozen? I have no idea.
Netflix isn't perfect and the price increase is mildly annoying I guess. One more dollar a month? I can deal with it. Hulu with no commercials is still more expensive and I still haven't finished watching everything I want to watch on Netflix.
And compared to what I was paying for cable before I cut the cord it's completely insignificant.
But why is Netflix raising their prices by a whole dollar considered news anyway?
Is it news when Comcast raises the price of their service by more than that or when they drop a bunch of channels from the basic plan?
One thing that's great about Netflix is I know how much it will cost from month to month and if there's ever a price increase Slashdot or some other internet news will warn me about it - lord knows Netflix never talks to me. I don't even know if they have a current email address.
But with cable TV you never know what your monthly bill will be and if they tell you one price you know they're neglecting a bunch of add-on fees and it will go up or channels will be removed.
With Netflix, I guess I'll lose Disney movies but I haven't even mustered up the patience to watch that Star Wars movie that's on Netflix because there's other stuff I'd rather watch.
I say that because the other day I watched a news story about Blade Runner on the lesser of my TVs - the one that's only 720p. I had been drinking but the picture looked great and I seriously wondered if they had done something to it. I have all the different versions of Blade Runner so it couldn't have been something I hadn't seen before - or was it?
I don't know, but for some reason it looked more vibrant with the colors contrasting better than I had remembered in the movie.
Maybe I was affected by the alcohol although it wouldn't be the first time I've seen Blade Runner (or scenes from it) while drinking.
Sadly my eyesight is deteriorating with age seemingly almost as fast as TVs are improving. I used to have eyes like a hawk but now I can't even see what time it is on my alarm clock across the room when I'm in bed. What do I need with a better TV?
Not surprisingly I sympathize with those with poor vision more than I used to. I had no idea what it was like when someone told me they were practically blind without their glasses. I just couldn't relate to it until my own eyesight started to falter.
Given the choice between an 8K TV and a pair of glasses that would let me see like I did 10 years ago, I'd take the glasses over the TV.
Where are my replicant eyeballs?
If anyone can get me in touch with Hannibal Chew I'd be most appreciative. He just does eyes.
if only you could see what I've seen with your eyes!
A few months ago I bought Samsung U-Pro wireless headphones and granted they were cheaper than my 10 year old wired headphones which cost 10 times as much but the BT headphones weren't even as good as the headphones that came with my Walkman in 1985.
Through my laptop they sounded extremely tinny. Maybe it's just Samsung who I should know better than to buy anything from but I couldn't believe how bad they sounded. They sounded a little better through my phone which is NOT a Samsung - I read something after purchase which suggested Samsung phones have something built in which takes advantage of some bullshit buzzwords Samsung was garbling about. I'm kind of skeptical of that, but what good are headphones if they rely on software or hardware from a specific vendor?
And even at full volume I can't drown out even the muzak they play in a grocery store.
Both laptop and phone use the same version of bluetooth. I love the idea of wireless and I've used BT earpieces for voice calls which weren't horrible but for music? Is there anything good? I don't mean super hi-fi or anything but just adequate.
I'm inclined to want a headphone jack for now and I almost bought a Pixel a year ago just so I could have the latest version of Android but now that my phone is a year older and the new Pixel has no headphone jack it's a non-starter for me.
I've only owned two vacuum cleaners in my life and both were Electrolux. The first I inherited and was about 50 years before the motor died out. The newer one still sucks.
Unfortunately the new one is not backwards-compatible with the bags the old one used.
The idea is every time you post a comment you are required to rate several other comments as either "Civil" or "Not Civil", but if you are "wrong" too many times you might get banned. That is, if you rate a comment as "Civil" when enough other people say it's "Uncivil" you get warnings at first and are told to click a button saying you agree to rate comments fairly.
It's also persistent - once I was asked to rate the same comment 4 or 5 times in a row and I kept saying it was "Uncivil" (it was a response to someone with "Richard" in their name and the comment called him "Dick" as an obvious insult).
I took the same approach as I do here - I'm not going to downvote (or rate as "Uncivil") a comment just because I disagree with it but I soon discovered that rating a comment as "Uncivil" was much less risky than rating a questionable comment as "Civil".
And abuse still exists although it has curtailed some of it. I still see uncivil comments and I see what I consider civil comments removed presumably just because someone disagreed.
If a post is removed it reads:
this comment did not meet civility standards
None of my comments were ever removed AFAIK, but I kept getting warnings for misrating other people's comments. The last straw was when I rated a questionable comment as "Civil" even though I disagreed with its point. It was mostly opinion, but the facts stated were true. It was the kind of comment I'd have rather recused myself from rating but in the interest of fairness and not rating anything I disagreed with as "Uncivil" I rated it as "Civil". I guess I was wrong.
Since then I haven't even bothered to comment or even log in to rate other people's posts. I don't think I'm actually banned as long as I'm willing to click that button.
And I'm better off for not participating. There are a handful of regulars who post there and you can probably predict what they're going to say about any particular article. Very few comments are anything but the usual partisan BS that isn't funny and certainly doesn't add any insight to the article.
That's a nice gesture, but most of the time I find it awkward dealing with a person at the grocery checkout these days.
If I see a cashier standing there with nothing to do I'll let them ring up my purchase, but that is hardly ever the case. I prefer to shop in the dead of night anyway when there is no crowd and at 4 AM you can get a cashier to open a register if you want but I can ring up my own groceries faster than they do and I'd prefer not making small talk with them. All I want to hear is the beep registering the scan I just made and a glance at the screen to make sure it's correct.
When they first adopted self-checkout at my local grocery store the clerk monitoring the 4(?) self-checkout registers asked me if I used to work in a grocery store because of my efficiency. I hadn't. I can just remember that bananas are 4011 and I just want to get home and put my groceries away.
There aren't even dedicated cashiers after midnight at the 2 stores where I prefer to buy groceries. You can get one if you want, but they're busy doing other things.
The stores are still constantly hiring though. There are employees stocking shelves and cleaning the floors and maybe it's because they pay them in dirt that they can't seem to retain but a few of them. I wonder where they go - hopefully they're moving on to better jobs.
It seems to me that the polls made people overconfident that Clinton would win. I'm not sure what's important about voting for "the winner" but maybe that appeals to some people.
I think it's more likely people who wanted Clinton (or just didn't want Trump to) to win didn't bother to vote because they believed she was a shoe-in.
NLP = Natural Language Processing or maybe Neural-Linguistic Programming (is there a difference? I don't know) UIMA = Unstructured Information Management Architecture SPSS is statistical analysis software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
originally stood for Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS)
Surely they're not going to put Jeremy Clarkson in the driver's seat. I think he's artificially intelligent and artificially amusing as well.
I saw a report on this with a British truck...uh....lorry driver (from Sky News I think). He was very skeptical and while I couldn't help thinking he was just trying to preserve his job he raised some good points.
When 3 trucks try to "platoon" on or off an exit ramp what happens to other drivers? What happens if they change lanes? It's hard enough for a single 18-wheeler to get enough room in heavy traffic.
Could the platoon be broken up by having to yield to traffic - and if so what becomes of the trucks who are following?
Someone claimed Britain had more exit/entry ramps (per mile I guess) than any other European country.
OTOH, I'd love to see Clarkson, May and Hammond just sit in trucks that platooned as they navigated through a desert. And they wouldn't be able to drive they'd just have to sit in them and make snarky comments about how badly the trucks were driving by themselves.
Still, given that horrible accident in England the other day, maybe turning the keys over to an autonomous truck leading a couple of others would be safer.
But I'm having a hard time imagining 8000 pound loads. I mean I only worked with supply chain management for about 20 years and it was amazing to me that automated systems could store boxes in carousels (and retrieve them as well) and even drop boxes of pills into totes for drug stores but I don't think that even the pallets being loaded on trucks weighed anything close to 8000 pounds.
Maybe they were - meat is heavy but even when I worked for a protein provider (otherwise known as an abattoir) a cow only weighs about 1000 pounds (actually less I think especially after being disassembled and put into boxes).
I don't think I ever saw a forklift carrying 8000 pounds. We were usually more concerned about how much space it took up.
Of course the trucks that they were loaded on to carried much more than 8000 pounds. Wake me up when those are automated.
Labor standards were a big issue both for our customers and the unions though. We had engineers who mapped warehouses and determined how much time it should take someone to pick all the product that was being received or shipped out. We calculated the shortest path, determined how much time someone should take to traverse it and how much time it should take for them to pick an item.
Complete automation was always the dream and I'm sure it still is. The fewer human hands that have to touch something in a warehouse, the more efficient it is and the fewer mistakes that will be made - unless us developers totally screw up. (And we sometimes did)
But at least robots don't steal products off the shelves (or do they?)
And for reference I looked up how much a pallet can hold.
4700 pounds,but I'm sure most pallets don't actually need to carry anything near that weight.
But forget weight, the automation is the exciting aspect of this, but even in the '90s there were automated picking machines that could go down an aisle in a warehouse and grab pallets off shelves 50 feet in the air.
I'm sure there is some need for pallets that can hold 8000 pound loads - that link I just used shows a pallet of brick for example.but your typical retailer like a grocery store or a drug store or Best Buy isn't shipping things that weigh that much.
I personally have no memory of Winamp. I have drunk a whole lot of alcohol since I last had that installed on any machine.
And if you do have memories of Winamp I would suggest they're just implants.
Implants. Those aren't your memories, they're somebody else's. They're Tyrell's niece's,,,,,. Ok. Bad joke. I made a bad joke. You're not a Replicant. Go home. Ok? No really, I'm sorry. Go home."
It seems to me there are quite a few Americans who don't know what the 4th Amendment is either but I guess it's pointless trying to explain it to them.
Slashdot Mirror
That commercial was annoying as hell but I never would have seen it if it weren't for Slashdot.
I live in Fort Collins and traffic is very light.
It's sort of relative though. After living here for a while I sometimes curse at it, but then I remember when I lived in larger cities where traffic was really bad.
If I have to wait more than one light cycle to get through an intersection it means I shouldn't have ventured out during "rush hour" which doesn't actually exist here.
I am not going to vote the way Comcast wants me to.
Here's how a typical call to Comcast customer service went when I was still their customer.
Me: Your internet service is down.
Comcast: No it isn't.
Me; Yes, it is I've rebooted my router and everything.
Comcast: There are no reported outages in your area:
Me: Well, I'm fucking reporting one right now!
Comcast: Would you like to add our triple play service to your account?
I'm not a Comcast customer anymore, but CenturyLink's customer service is identical. Their service is more reliable though s at least I don't have to call as often.
What's really annoying is when they tell me I can chat online about my internet connection being down. Brilliant!
Andrew Carnegie reportedly said
The man who dies thus rich dies disgraced.
I can't confirm it, but I remember hearing that he did not actually want libraries to be named after him despite the fact that he donated a lot of money to help establish a lot of libraries and many of them do bear his name.
Apparently you and I were the only ones who got the reference- either that or no one else cares about fascists anymore.
We need Woody Guthrie's guitar more than ever now.
Before the law stepped in and required it there was a growing market for non-smoking bars. Some were banning smoking even without the government telling them they had to.
I remember going to see a band at some venue in Houston at least 15 years ago and it was a non-smoking night. It was weird because some nights you could smoke, other nights you had to go outside.
I felt a bit foolish standing outside smoking all by myself watching the band play through the door while all my friends and everyone else was seated at their tables and enjoying the show without the need to get their fix (well, other than all the alcohol they were drinking). There were a few other smokers in the audience, but it was a cold night (for Houston) and nobody really wanted to stay outside too long.
And that wasn't the only bar to do it. Some bars completely banned smoking and even loudly proclaimed that they had done so. It may have only been a niche market, but it was there and growing.
Many non-smokers often complained that the worst thing about going to a bar is coming home smelling like smoke. A certain segment of the market was demanding non-smoking bars.
Has there ever been a smoking ban that's been repealed? I'd bet if you did that in many cities a lot of bars would say they still wouldn't let people smoke. The non-smokers who make up the vast majority of people wouldn't put up with it. There are young people today who go to bars, but have never been in a bar which allowed people to smoke.
Of course other bars would eagerly welcome the smokers but they are definitely a dwindling market.
Curiously I've found that when those around me drink they tend to lose their inhibitions more and more and appear to become less intelligent. :^/
Well, I had been drinking when I wrote that comment so take it for what it's worth.
I still believe that bar owners should be allowed to decide for themselves if smoking should be allowed in their establishments.
I actually feel the same about restaurants but society has long since decided they disagree with me and there is no Constitutional right to smoke anywhere you want.
At least with a restaurant you can make the argument that everyone should be able to eat without poisoning themselves, but in a bar? Nobody needs to drink and drinking certainly isn't helping your health and I still believe there are enough jobs out there that some poor bartender or server isn't going to be forced into working in a smoking bar if it's really a health concern for them.
Before the statewide ban on smoking in bars here (in Colorado) some would advertise they were "smoker-friendly". You couldn't smoke in a bar in the town where I lived, but you could go to some bar outside the city and smoke to your heart's (dis?)content.
Now Colorado treats e-cigs the same as they do cigarettes which I agree is kind of ridiculous and you can't even use an e-cig outdoors in some parts of town here. I'm actually okay with that. I don't need to vape everywhere I go.
I didn't even need to be told that I shouldn't vape indoors where smoking wasn't allowed. I just knew it was wrong just as surely as I believe outdoor bans on smoking or vaping are wrong too.
And while vaping is a lot less obnoxious than smoking, let's not lie to ourselves or others. It does produce a smell and it does put chemicals besides water vapor into the air.
This really hit home a couple of months ago as I was dragged into the non-smoking area of the downtown touristy area of my city. I was really jonesing and to make things worse my e-cig was almost dead anyway. When I did try to take a discreet hit outdoors it just wasn't working well at all. And then I saw a woman just chasing clouds all by herself. She had dutifully gone outside but was ignoring the outdoor smoking/vaping ban and I could smell it from 20-30 feet away.
She wasn't bothering me other than making me a bit jealous because her e-cig was working just fine and mine wasn't but it kind of struck me that it's not quite as innocuous as many of us would like to think.
And don't even think about smoking marijuana anywhere in public even if you're allowed to smoke cigarettes there. Or just go ahead and do it anyway. You probably won't get caught, but you could still be arrested for it.
While I don't mind I can understand other people's objections and we have laws about vaping and smoking anything in public.
And even before smoking was banned by law some bars were taking it upon themselves to ban smoking all on their own and not just in Colorado but in other states as well.
If you're a smoker, I highly recommend quitting. I substituted with e-cigs and I still wish I would quit those but it's a lesser evil IMO.
What really helped me quit was the reaction of the tobacco companies and their distributors and retailers to the big 2009 tax increase on cigs. Even BEFORE the higher taxes went into effect they raised prices and blamed Obama. I saw price increases 2 months before the tax went into effect that were 60% higher than what I had been paying and the tax increase wasn't even close to .
A 2009 law approved by Congress, the Children's Health Insurance Program Reauthorization Act, increased the federal tax rate on cigarettes by 61.66 cents per pack (from 39 cents to $1.0066 per pack)
https://www.tobaccofreekids.or...
So I should have had to pay about $6 more per carton WHEN the tax actually took effect. Instead I was paying $25 more per carton 2 months BEFORE the tax took effect.
Fuck those greedy bastards!
I didn't even quit right away. I kept buying them for months and so they probably figured we were so addicted we had no choice - which may have been true to some extent, but I did quit being an RJR customer eventually.
Or a Programmable Logic Array
It's amusing that the author goes to the trouble of doodling a piece of tofu. I realized my signature was worthless the first time I encountered an electronic signature pad. I tried to sign my name and it didn't look anything like my actual signature.
Since then I have scribbled my signature. The cashiers in the stores know I'm just faking it - they don't care. I only even make a half-hearted attempt because it takes so long to read the chip in my credit card.
The only time I even bother to try to write my signature correctly is when I'm at the bank but I don't think they care either. I don't even do it very well. It looks different - and it looks wrong to me - every time I do it. I'm so out of practice I can't even sign my name anymore.
Many years ago I disputed every charge on my credit card that someone else had made (a long and terrible and stupid story). They reversed every charge that didn't actually have a signature (like pay-at-the-pump gas purchases). The ones that actually had a signature, even though they didn't match mine, were more problematic and I ended up having to pay for most of those.
Even though I was stupid and it was largely my fault I still ended up dropping that credit card after paying off the bill and they're still trying to get me back as a customer over 20 years later.
What's in my wallet? Not that credit card. I have cash and an ATM card and a different credit card.
It's creepy how banks try to own you. That different credit card company still thanks me for being a loyal customer for 30 or so years. Yeah, I pay the bill and it usually works so I'm still a loyal customer. I actually don't have any loyalty to them at all - and the rewards points may as well be a slap in the face and only remind me of how much money I've put on my card over the years.
The reward points can only be redeemed for cheap trinkets that I would never actually buy if I had to pay cash for them.
I hate mosquitoes but I found I solved that problem by moving far away from the Gulf Coast.
I was chased out of a park once by a swarm of them. And some people are trying to get me to move back there. Bad timing. I told them you just had a hurricane and your homes are flooded and I don't even want to imagine what the mosquitoes are like. I think I'll stay up here in the mountains far away from any bayou.
In between living in the swamp and living in the mountains I lived in the desert for a couple of years and I don't believe I saw a single mosquito in the desert. And I've only seen one palmetto bug (roach) since I moved out of the swamp and I'm pretty sure that one just hitchhiked its way across the USA- just like in that Lou Reed song.
I hate most bugs especially roaches and mosquitoes but I made a mistake a few years back. When I moved into my current home I killed all the wasps with chemical weapons and they never came back. Some might call this a successful victory over stinging insects but I realized after the fact that I had done wrong. Unlike mosquitoes, wasps don't want to sting or bite humans. They just wanted to pollinate the plants. I regret killing the wasps.
One type of bug I've never killed though is spiders and they've been good to me. One spider rid my house of some kind of tiny fly infestation - they weren't gnats or fruitflies - not exactly sure what they were but the spider built a web and caught them all and when they were gone the spider went away.
Supposedly there are mosquitoes around here but I can't remember the last time one bit me.
Yes, but it's frustrating as hell.
I started to reply to your post earlier today and decided my comment wasn't worth posting but since then I changed my mind as I have disabled javascript on my browser and re-enabled it and disabled it once again. And the list of websites I have made exceptions for is way too long (and includes slashdot).
What's the point of disabling Javascript if I'm just going to make exceptions one by one for every website that doesn't work if it's disabled?
You could make a case that any website that doesn't work without enabling Javascript isn't worth visiting and should be avoided but today I had compelling reasons to visit websites that weren't already in my browser's whitelist that required it.
It's a risk/reward situation and a question of usability and convenience. I do try to maintain a certain level of security on my computer and I do take steps to secure my personal data but I'm just an average type of a person. I'm not going to spend a huge amount of time being paranoid.
I also have a lock on my front door, but anyone could easily break into my home. There are even small rocks in my front yard which could be used to break a window.
Most people just want websites to work and they're not going to want to go to the hassle of evaluating on a case by case basis if it's safe to run javascript on a particular site because they really want to access their content.
Even my ad-blocker "breaks" a lot of websites. The internet is not entirely unusable but I often come across content that just doesn't play well with my browser settings and extensions even with js enabled. Usually I look for another source or just forget about it but sometimes I really want to see it and I start disabling extensions and that kind of defeats the purpose of any security, doesn't it?
My old cat (may she rest in peace) downloaded Chrome for me one night and then opened about 80 empty tabs.
Okay, I may have just been drunk and didn't remember downloading Chrome but at the time I was still using Firefox.
The part about her opening 80 empty tabs is definitely true though - she was sleeping on the keyboard when I woke up.
The cat I have now actually has a twitter account.and to my amazement still has nearly 500 followers despite her complete failure to convince me to promote it online. She hasn't posted anything in months and nearly 500 might be bragging, but it is over 460 and only 2 or 3 of those are relatives who know she's my cat.
She actually has at least one corporate follower because in one picture you can see the brand of food she eats and they liked it and followed her.
It really is a mystery to me how she got any followers at all. Where do these people come from? And why are they following my cat on twitter?
And the cat is careful to remove any metadata from the images and even blur out anything that could possibly be used to personally identify her - well, except for her name which is kind of unique.
My current cat looks a lot like that cat who downloaded Chrome for me. I've even been tempted to upload old photos of that cat on my current cat's twitter feed to see if anyone would notice it wasn't the same cat. I wonder if Google could tell the difference. If I wasn't familiar with the photos in question even I might not be able to tell.
If you want to freak me out and prove how there is no such thing as privacy tweet to my cat and reference this slashdot post. Can you connect the dots? Somebody probably can. I actually just logged in to her twitter account using the same browser as I'm using here. But at least I'm content in thinking that only a few big corporations can connect me to my cat's twitter feed and not just anyone on the internet.
Now that I think about it, I've given up quite a few clues already.
* Cat has a unique name
* All images are scrubbed of metadata (unless she made a mistake of course)
* between 450-500 followers
* hasn't tweeted anything in months
* at least one picture shows a brand of cat food
* at least one picture has something blurred out
The first point just eliminates any cats with any common name you can think of. The next 3 points are actually quantifiable things which could be used to narrow down the search. The last two points would require some sort of image recognition or painstakingly going through each picture in however many Twitter accounts that has narrowed it down to.
Oh, and she's a female feline. That should help you all some more.
Consider this a challenge to find my cat on Twitter!
Seriously, I do wonder how much those details narrow it down to. Is it a few hundred? A few thousand? A dozen? I have no idea.
But I will never pay for Hulu.
Netflix isn't perfect and the price increase is mildly annoying I guess. One more dollar a month? I can deal with it. Hulu with no commercials is still more expensive and I still haven't finished watching everything I want to watch on Netflix.
And compared to what I was paying for cable before I cut the cord it's completely insignificant.
But why is Netflix raising their prices by a whole dollar considered news anyway?
Is it news when Comcast raises the price of their service by more than that or when they drop a bunch of channels from the basic plan?
One thing that's great about Netflix is I know how much it will cost from month to month and if there's ever a price increase Slashdot or some other internet news will warn me about it - lord knows Netflix never talks to me. I don't even know if they have a current email address.
But with cable TV you never know what your monthly bill will be and if they tell you one price you know they're neglecting a bunch of add-on fees and it will go up or channels will be removed.
With Netflix, I guess I'll lose Disney movies but I haven't even mustered up the patience to watch that Star Wars movie that's on Netflix because there's other stuff I'd rather watch.
I say that because the other day I watched a news story about Blade Runner on the lesser of my TVs - the one that's only 720p. I had been drinking but the picture looked great and I seriously wondered if they had done something to it. I have all the different versions of Blade Runner so it couldn't have been something I hadn't seen before - or was it?
I don't know, but for some reason it looked more vibrant with the colors contrasting better than I had remembered in the movie.
Maybe I was affected by the alcohol although it wouldn't be the first time I've seen Blade Runner (or scenes from it) while drinking.
Sadly my eyesight is deteriorating with age seemingly almost as fast as TVs are improving. I used to have eyes like a hawk but now I can't even see what time it is on my alarm clock across the room when I'm in bed. What do I need with a better TV?
Not surprisingly I sympathize with those with poor vision more than I used to. I had no idea what it was like when someone told me they were practically blind without their glasses. I just couldn't relate to it until my own eyesight started to falter.
Given the choice between an 8K TV and a pair of glasses that would let me see like I did 10 years ago, I'd take the glasses over the TV.
Where are my replicant eyeballs?
If anyone can get me in touch with Hannibal Chew I'd be most appreciative. He just does eyes.
if only you could see what I've seen with your eyes!
A few months ago I bought Samsung U-Pro wireless headphones and granted they were cheaper than my 10 year old wired headphones which cost 10 times as much but the BT headphones weren't even as good as the headphones that came with my Walkman in 1985.
Through my laptop they sounded extremely tinny. Maybe it's just Samsung who I should know better than to buy anything from but I couldn't believe how bad they sounded. They sounded a little better through my phone which is NOT a Samsung - I read something after purchase which suggested Samsung phones have something built in which takes advantage of some bullshit buzzwords Samsung was garbling about. I'm kind of skeptical of that, but what good are headphones if they rely on software or hardware from a specific vendor?
And even at full volume I can't drown out even the muzak they play in a grocery store.
Both laptop and phone use the same version of bluetooth. I love the idea of wireless and I've used BT earpieces for voice calls which weren't horrible but for music? Is there anything good? I don't mean super hi-fi or anything but just adequate.
I'm inclined to want a headphone jack for now and I almost bought a Pixel a year ago just so I could have the latest version of Android but now that my phone is a year older and the new Pixel has no headphone jack it's a non-starter for me.
Doesn't Russia have its own social media and search sites?
I can't vouch for this source, but Facebook only barely makes the top 10 websites in Russia:
Russia’s top 10 websites include Facebook, Google, Instagram, and YouTube
The other sites are Russian and rank higher.
How good a source can that be? They talk about the top 10 but only list 9!
I'll wait for Electrolux's entry into the market.
Nothing sucks like Electrolux.
I've only owned two vacuum cleaners in my life and both were Electrolux. The first I inherited and was about 50 years before the motor died out. The newer one still sucks.
Unfortunately the new one is not backwards-compatible with the bags the old one used.
A few months ago, the Denver Post switched their comment section to something called "Civil Comments"
Our article comments have been a cesspool of trolls and spam for years. Enter Civil Comments. Civil Comments is intended to bring back the civil in online discourse
The idea is every time you post a comment you are required to rate several other comments as either "Civil" or "Not Civil", but if you are "wrong" too many times you might get banned. That is, if you rate a comment as "Civil" when enough other people say it's "Uncivil" you get warnings at first and are told to click a button saying you agree to rate comments fairly.
It's also persistent - once I was asked to rate the same comment 4 or 5 times in a row and I kept saying it was "Uncivil" (it was a response to someone with "Richard" in their name and the comment called him "Dick" as an obvious insult).
I took the same approach as I do here - I'm not going to downvote (or rate as "Uncivil") a comment just because I disagree with it but I soon discovered that rating a comment as "Uncivil" was much less risky than rating a questionable comment as "Civil".
And abuse still exists although it has curtailed some of it. I still see uncivil comments and I see what I consider civil comments removed presumably just because someone disagreed.
If a post is removed it reads:
this comment did not meet civility standards
None of my comments were ever removed AFAIK, but I kept getting warnings for misrating other people's comments. The last straw was when I rated a questionable comment as "Civil" even though I disagreed with its point. It was mostly opinion, but the facts stated were true. It was the kind of comment I'd have rather recused myself from rating but in the interest of fairness and not rating anything I disagreed with as "Uncivil" I rated it as "Civil". I guess I was wrong.
Since then I haven't even bothered to comment or even log in to rate other people's posts. I don't think I'm actually banned as long as I'm willing to click that button.
And I'm better off for not participating. There are a handful of regulars who post there and you can probably predict what they're going to say about any particular article. Very few comments are anything but the usual partisan BS that isn't funny and certainly doesn't add any insight to the article.
That's a nice gesture, but most of the time I find it awkward dealing with a person at the grocery checkout these days.
If I see a cashier standing there with nothing to do I'll let them ring up my purchase, but that is hardly ever the case. I prefer to shop in the dead of night anyway when there is no crowd and at 4 AM you can get a cashier to open a register if you want but I can ring up my own groceries faster than they do and I'd prefer not making small talk with them. All I want to hear is the beep registering the scan I just made and a glance at the screen to make sure it's correct.
When they first adopted self-checkout at my local grocery store the clerk monitoring the 4(?) self-checkout registers asked me if I used to work in a grocery store because of my efficiency. I hadn't. I can just remember that bananas are 4011 and I just want to get home and put my groceries away.
There aren't even dedicated cashiers after midnight at the 2 stores where I prefer to buy groceries. You can get one if you want, but they're busy doing other things.
The stores are still constantly hiring though. There are employees stocking shelves and cleaning the floors and maybe it's because they pay them in dirt that they can't seem to retain but a few of them. I wonder where they go - hopefully they're moving on to better jobs.
It seems to me that the polls made people overconfident that Clinton would win. I'm not sure what's important about voting for "the winner" but maybe that appeals to some people.
I think it's more likely people who wanted Clinton (or just didn't want Trump to) to win didn't bother to vote because they believed she was a shoe-in.
NLP = Natural Language Processing or maybe Neural-Linguistic Programming (is there a difference? I don't know)
UIMA = Unstructured Information Management Architecture
SPSS is statistical analysis software https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
originally stood for Statistical Package for the Social Sciences (SPSS)
Surely they're not going to put Jeremy Clarkson in the driver's seat. I think he's artificially intelligent and artificially amusing as well.
I saw a report on this with a British truck...uh....lorry driver (from Sky News I think). He was very skeptical and while I couldn't help thinking he was just trying to preserve his job he raised some good points.
When 3 trucks try to "platoon" on or off an exit ramp what happens to other drivers? What happens if they change lanes? It's hard enough for a single 18-wheeler to get enough room in heavy traffic.
Could the platoon be broken up by having to yield to traffic - and if so what becomes of the trucks who are following?
Someone claimed Britain had more exit/entry ramps (per mile I guess) than any other European country.
OTOH, I'd love to see Clarkson, May and Hammond just sit in trucks that platooned as they navigated through a desert. And they wouldn't be able to drive they'd just have to sit in them and make snarky comments about how badly the trucks were driving by themselves.
Still, given that horrible accident in England the other day, maybe turning the keys over to an autonomous truck leading a couple of others would be safer.
But I'm having a hard time imagining 8000 pound loads. I mean I only worked with supply chain management for about 20 years and it was amazing to me that automated systems could store boxes in carousels (and retrieve them as well) and even drop boxes of pills into totes for drug stores but I don't think that even the pallets being loaded on trucks weighed anything close to 8000 pounds.
Maybe they were - meat is heavy but even when I worked for a protein provider (otherwise known as an abattoir) a cow only weighs about 1000 pounds (actually less I think especially after being disassembled and put into boxes).
I don't think I ever saw a forklift carrying 8000 pounds. We were usually more concerned about how much space it took up.
Of course the trucks that they were loaded on to carried much more than 8000 pounds. Wake me up when those are automated.
Labor standards were a big issue both for our customers and the unions though. We had engineers who mapped warehouses and determined how much time it should take someone to pick all the product that was being received or shipped out. We calculated the shortest path, determined how much time someone should take to traverse it and how much time it should take for them to pick an item.
Complete automation was always the dream and I'm sure it still is. The fewer human hands that have to touch something in a warehouse, the more efficient it is and the fewer mistakes that will be made - unless us developers totally screw up. (And we sometimes did)
But at least robots don't steal products off the shelves (or do they?)
And for reference I looked up how much a pallet can hold.
https://greenwaypsllc.com/how-...
4700 pounds,but I'm sure most pallets don't actually need to carry anything near that weight.
But forget weight, the automation is the exciting aspect of this, but even in the '90s there were automated picking machines that could go down an aisle in a warehouse and grab pallets off shelves 50 feet in the air.
I'm sure there is some need for pallets that can hold 8000 pound loads - that link I just used shows a pallet of brick for example.but your typical retailer like a grocery store or a drug store or Best Buy isn't shipping things that weigh that much.
A warehouse without people - that is the dream.
I personally have no memory of Winamp. I have drunk a whole lot of alcohol since I last had that installed on any machine.
And if you do have memories of Winamp I would suggest they're just implants.
Implants. Those aren't your memories, they're somebody else's. They're Tyrell's niece's,,,,,. Ok. Bad joke. I made a bad joke. You're not a Replicant. Go home. Ok? No really, I'm sorry. Go home."
I would consider it a blessing if my email stopped working.
For non-americans
It seems to me there are quite a few Americans who don't know what the 4th Amendment is either but I guess it's pointless trying to explain it to them.
http://www.billofrights.org/
That's "Bill Of Rights", but to some it's a "Bill o' Frights".