I still don't see how even that would be profitable, unless the expect people to subscribe to MoviePass in the same way as the gym...
You mean, pay for MoviePass totally intending to use it, then end up not using it, and be unable to cancel due to some small-print provision of the contract or another, or the company conveniently losing the cancellation request repeatedly... that kind of thing?
The trouble with that theory is, people actually LIKE watching movies, and generally don't sign up out of a sense of guilt for BINGE-READING over Thanksgiving weekend. "Oh, GAWD, I read SOO many pages! I think I read an entire chapter just in one sitting! I couldn't possibly read another word... oh, wait, that's right, I almost forgot, there's denouement stuffing, (mmmmrph...) and we still need to try and read that sweet, creamy, delicious pumpkin-spiced epilogue... but afterwords, (get it?) I swear I will sign up for a MoviePass membership and watch movies EVERY DAY and NO more binge-reading!";-p
Here's how you can tell if an offer on Twitter or anywhere else for that matter is a scam: Does it involve Ethereum or Bitcoin or Dogggeecoin or some other shit like that? Then yes. It is a scam. (It may also be a scam if it does NOT involve them, but if it does-- scam.) You're welcome.
Um, it's really ALL faceless, soulless, blood-sucking, parasitic, global-conglomerate, monolithic, for-profit, multinational corporations that are ignoring our humanity. 'S not just Facebook, though they're clearly leaders in the field of ignoring our humanity.
I don't know, have typewriters killed the art of penmanship?
Absolutely, yes.
I rarely write anything by hand any more and as a result, my handwriting is terrible compared to what it used to be.
I was going to argue that typewriters did NOT kill the art of penmanship, but mostly because relatively few people used them, and they weren't really portable. Sure, there were some you could stick in a suitcase, and lug onto the train or steamboat, but mostly people didn't, just before leaving the house in the morning, grab keys, wallet, watch, a cup of coffee, and stick a goddamned TYPEWRITER into a POCKET on the way out the door.
I doubt typewriters killed print, as it's alive and well today. They may have killed cursive though. Consider that over the last century, we went from cursive being the way of writing FASTER than print, to TYPING being a way of writing faster than printing text, individual letter by letter, but you couldn't really take it with you. The laptop computer and tablet are relatively recent inventions. I'm barely middle-aged and I remember when laptops and tablets were a new-fangled gadget, and the internet did not, for all intents and purposes, even exist.
It is my understanding that they don't even TEACH cursive in schools anymore, and that saddens me, being someone who not only was taught to write in print and cursive as a child in school, but who enjoys amateur calligraphy.
Now however, everyone carries around a smartphone, and I suspect most can text on one faster than they, or I even, could write in cursive. I do not, however, see text-entry on any device replacing handwriting of every kind and all kinds outright.
I simply don't see a day in which flesh-and-blood people will still exist, and can manage all to get by without occasionally having to apply some form of stylus to some form of media, papyrus, paper, an electronic tablet, whatever, and make symbols carrying meaning, rather than doing so at the touch of a button, real, physical, and actual, or a virtual one.
Although... what a neat sci-fi film that would make.
In a world... where the children of mankind are either pets kept by hyperintelligent robots, or beasts of burden..."
(smash cut to scenes of people being steered around various work environments by devices mounted onto them, all wearing something like a cross between Google Glass and a shock collar, moving about factories like automata, or fields like oxen,)
Speech is forbidden and writing a crime...
(cut to group of people furtively hiding in a densely forested area, clods of thick, wet mud caked around their tracking and control devices in the hope of blocking their signals,)
one ragtag group struggles to revive the secret art...
(Close up of man struggling with a stick to inscribe the letter "A" into some wet mud, a task made difficult by the lack of his wrist-guidance bands telling him how he's supposed to move his hands, while the other men whisper "a, a, a, a...")
'WRITING'... coming this Summer to a theater near you. Rated R."
Cry me a virtual river. One group of people stupidly buy that which doesn't even objectively exist, hoping to make money out of nothing, and then whine when they get ripped off.
These people were trying to create wealth out of nothing, evolving from action that really serves no one, helps no one, and accomplishes nothing. Bitcoin speculation is like you gambling on what number I'm thinking of, when you have to tell me what your guess was, before I tell you whether or not you were right, and unsurpisingly, you always lose. You can never prove what number I either was, or wasn't thinking of, and I have an interest (being the person you're betting against,) in picking a different number from the one you state.
If lotteries are taxes on people who are bad at math, then losses from speculating on Bitcoin (and any other so-called "cryptocurrency" or "virtual currency,") are taxes on idiocy. Despite being a relatively new thing, there are old quotes that apply perfectly to this situation, including such classics as "there's a fool born every minute," and "a fool and his money are soon parted..." and probably others but you get the idea.
Or maybe you don't get the idea, because you're the sort of person who is holding Bitcoins. I wish I could help but, besides pointing out the painfully obvious, I don't know how. Bitcoins are a poor investment because you're gambling on something that doesn't really exist.
The really sad part is the amount of environmental damage done by all the waste-heat from all the computers of all the morons trying to, for all intents and purposes, pray their way into wealth, and the amount of e-waste generated on computers that will never be put to any real, constructive purpose, and will likely ultimately end up in scrapheaps leaching toxic compounds into the world around them.
Oh can it? So can a can of tomato soup, and probably for less money. Here's how it works: open the can, drop it straight onto the floor. See how it just very rapidly goes EVERYWHERE? Pretty good model, I think, and it generally costs less than a dollar, no need to use the fancy stuff, and I'm not counting the cost of the can-opener, which is a common enough thing, and most households have one. To model future size and shape, you will need to have several more cans of tomato soup. Repeat as needed.
Of course, I admit it's not very SPECIFIC about modeling a given, actual wildfire. For that you may need software. I've read somewhere that it can be used to model how a wildfire will spread.
Fuck rental, fuck their percieved authority, and fuck their super high horse.
Maybe now is not the best time, but if it were me, (just as it WAS me almost 10 years ago, finally sick and tired of M$'s shit,) what I would do is check out linuxmint.com (Because that's just exactly what I *DID* do.)
If for some reason you're not familiar, it's a very popular and well-maintained distro of the GNU/Linux operating system, and the latest, 64-bit (assuming your computer does 64-bit, otherwise there's a 32-bit version too,) and the MATE edition, I think you'll find, will make you feel the most like you're at home. Things like keybindings are, I believe, pretty close between Linux and Windows, (like CTRL-C copies, CTRL-V pastes, and so on,) and the layout is Windows-ish, but far more flexible. If I didn't move to Apple (got tired of waiting for Linux on the smartphone,) it's what I'd still be using, and when Apple starts selling only devices with no headphone jack, it's what I will ultimately be going back to.
DON'T fall for the FUD that says it's not user-friendly, etc. There's a learning curve just like anything else. But it's not that hard to learn. It's easy to get directly from their site, download, follow simple instructions to make a bootable (DVD-ROM or USB thumb drive,) and even take it for a test-drive (they're all live-install images,) and test it out before you actually install it, which is pretty cool. It will boot and run much faster installed, of course, unless you have a ridiculously fast external device... but it'll give you a good idea what you're getting into. (IMPORTANT NOTE: I would be remiss if I didn't mention that it's CRUCIAL, just as a general best-practice of computing, but especially before changing OS's, to make sure you have a complete backup of all your data on your computer. Actually, have a couple. Sorry for the interruption.)
If for some reason you're allergic to Linux or the General Public License, there are other options. FreeBSD is even free-er than GNU/Linux.* BUT as I understand it, for day-to-day desktop stuff, it isn't as well or widely supported. I guess it depends on what you do, and are planning to do, with your computer. There are, I know, a metric fuck-ton of ports, (the famous "ports collection") but if you want and need modern, up-to-date stuff, the internet abounds in excellent solutions that can be used on some/most/all Linux systems, and/or UNIX-based systems, (like the afore-mentioned BSD) and there's plenty of information out there on the internet, as far as what to use or what to do under whatever situation you find yourself. *(Free-er in a way you won't notice as a user; Linux is free to use and, with certain common-sense limitations, free to redistribute. Other licenses, like the ones that cover the BSDs, as I understand it, don't place as much in the way of restrictions on redistribution if you modify the code, hence "free-er," but again, if you're not planning to redistribute, modify, adapt, or change anything, there'll be no difference, license-wise, between BSD and Linux to your experience as a user.)
If you're contemplating the move and considering GNU/Linux, (any, whether Mint or not,) and you're wondering, "what about X?" where "X" is a piece of software you currently use, here's a VERY short list of software, (some of which likely will come with your Linux distro, or which you can add pretty trivially,) to replace things you currently use on M$ Window$. For the web browser, Mozilla's Firefox is pretty standard, or any of a dozen forks of it, or Chromium, (which is I believe based on the same core Google's Chrome browser is, since like so many things today, it's based on Open Source Software). For watching videos, there's VideoLAN, which is very popular. For replacing most of the functionality of M$ Office, if that's what you're using, a couple of options off the top of my head are LibreOffice, (libreoffice.org,) and Open Office; (
Had they started using a windows is back in 2006, it's security would be no longer supported as well. If they can operate on Linux and are familiar, and I can't see why they would spend the money to change. I imagine they use them for basic tasks like email, typing word docs, excel sheets, and printing and not much else. In that case the free version will trump windows every time.
Holy shit, why are you suddenly talking about Windows and Linux in a conversation about immigration, you... (looks up) oh, shit, is THAT what conversation this is? Jesus Christ did THAT go off the rails. Thanks for trying to bring it back. LOL
Acknowledging that it has almost nothing whatsoever to do with some German region changing from GNU/Linux to MS Windows, I just have to say, I am so sick of the "legal" argument. Maybe you were trying to be funny, but the "law" you were alluding to is creating human misery on par with crop failure, floods, fires, and rocks hurtling in from space and making everything all dead and explodey, so I simply cannot help but respond.
"Respect our laws," they say. REALLY? Would YOU respect a "law" if the people passed one making it illegal for you to breathe? Let us suppose they passed such a law. You did NOTHING whatsoever to harm anyone else and occasion this, your mere PRESENCE brought it about. They decided they didn't like you. If they, as a result, decided that you personally, fizzer06 , were not allowed to breathe anymore, not because you did anything wrong, not because you harmed anyone else, or even that you're an actual threat to someone, but because you are adjudged inherently inferior because of which side of an imaginary line on the ground your mother pushed you, headfirst, out of her vagina on, YOU are not allowed to breathe anymore, would you do it? Would you comply? According to the "LAW," you should just hold your breath, turn blue, and fucking die. Tell me, truly, would you "respect" such a bullshit "law"? Would you just hold your breath because someone doesn't like what you look like, your accent perhaps, or thinks you pray the wrong way, to the wrong version of an imaginary character out of a fucking book, or to the right one but in the wrong language... or perhaps because they want to preserve their "culture," as if it's somehow better, more worthy than the one where you came from, for their FUCKING convenience and peace of mind, would you die?
The "LAW" that says someone isn't good enough to be a German just because he was born in Turkey, or isn't good enough to be a Frenchman because he was born in Chad, or isn't somehow worthy of being an American because his mother's vagina hovered over a piece of ground in Guatemala when he was pushed out of it, is worth about the same as the "LAW" that said that if a person was accused of being a runaway slave, even in a free-state that had outlawed slavery, that any local authority must assist a person claiming ownership over that slave, and help return him or her with that person to a shit-hole state that still allows people to own other people and frankly, fuck 100% of that shit.
Fuck nativism, fuck racism... we are all brothers and sisters, and the "LAW" you're referring to, with which immigrants are either IN, or OUT of compliance, is racist, nativist bullshit. America in particular is the one country on Earth where that shit, (given America's origins, founding, constitution, etc.,) really shouldn't fly, where such laws are particularly disgusting and morally reprehensible. OF ALL countries, if America were truly to subscribe to the idea that any person whose parents were here earlier was allowed to decide who else COULD and COULD NOT be in the country based on arriving later, then that would give to the descendants of the Native Americans who were here before the first European settlers arrived, (immigrants and refugees from "shit-hole countries" where people were being persecuted for their religion or starving due to famine, not to put too fine a goddamned point on it, like England, Ireland, Germany, etc.,) the right to kick literally EVERYONE who wasn't "legal," in compliance with THEIR laws, (if they were prescient enough to think to make such a law before 1492 C.E.,) and THEIR descendants OUT. Somehow, however, when the US Senate and House of so-called "Representatives" (that's a laugh,) decide on how many people to "let in," I very much doubt anyone is invited from one of the reservations to weigh in on how many refugees that America in particular helped create, America would let in.
Of course, many countries actually have such a situation, actually have natives to a region
Which state would switch FROM a version of GNU/Linux to MS WINDOWS of all things... Would that be the state of Dumkopf Obersheiß? Have they never heard of oh, I dunno, any other distro of Linux? Does SUSE not have an updated version they could update or upgrade to? Is it such a rich state that they have money coming out of their ears that they can afford to throw it away giving more money to Microsoft? Was der geliteral Fuckenstein?
Lovely... Russian zombie worms. Actually, that's probably the least of our worries. It does beg the question though... are Russians running out of worms? Is this some new, wild trend in keeping the populace fed? "Let them eat 40,000 year-old dead, zombified worms" just doesn't have the same ring to it as "let them eat cake". Does this make these the new oldest living things on Earth? Or does it not count to be alive, then alive 40,000 years later, if you were dead in the intervening time? Just curious.
Even when you actually get around to trying to make a point you insert needless digression. But anyway... it is not bullshit. Freedom of speech does not mean you have the inalienable right to spout deliberate lies intended to cause others harm. It's called either libel or slander, and just because PepsiCo is a multinational company doesn't mean you can try to damage them by lying about their products. You can express your opinion ("this tastes like plastic") but not post lies about it ("it's made of plastic"). This is case law, even in the country of the First Amendment.
This could be gotten around easily enough in two ways I can think of right off the top of my head. First, through the anonymizing power of the internet, and second, by prepending the words, "I think" to the allegation. Not much anyone can do about that, even in a place where there are laws concerning libel, since I'd be expressing an opinion (protected,) rather than fact, (which I'd have to back up with some sort of evidence). But I've not actually promulgated any such rumor, and I don't have a Facebook account with which to do so, either here or in India, so it's kind of a moot point. I was just grumbling at length about how messed up the censorship is, and no one forced you to read the post, though I appreciate that you took the time to do so.
When I apologize for digression, (since I digress quite a bit, if you've read my other posts, you'd probably have picked up on that,) you know it's going to be bad, with even me realizing I'm doing it. I know I have a tendency to ramble, so thanks for taking the time to read what I wrote. I know these days there are many demands for peoples' time and it seems like there are never enough hours in a day and...
Damn it, I'm doing it again. Sorry.:) Thanks for reading though. Seriously.
So I could share this far and wide. Not because I believe it, but the very idea of an American company, (I know, I know, it’s PepsiCo, a worldwide multinational conglomerate that can’t really be called American any more than you could argue that there’s a meaningful difference between the water in the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic, since they meet and join and flow freely between the two and around the globe, kind of like PepsiCo and their money, I imagine,) but for a company based and started here, (as I think it was and don’t really care if it wasn’t, so I’m not going to even bother to look it up, because it doesn’t matter; it’s not really relevant to the point I’m making here,) to exploit the fact that an Indian Court of Law will grant their request and engage in censorship like this makes me want to exploit the fact that I am outside that court’s jurisdiction to help spread this rumor, even if it’s totally false, so as to help render it pointless for PepsiCo (which I’m now boycotting over this,) to have sought the order in the first place. (TBH though, I was already boycotting their products because most of them suck. Not really a boycott, more of a personal choice.)
THAT SAID, HOWEVER... The truth is that if your product is such a bizarre thing, so far removed from any resemblance to real actual food or food precursor ingredients you claim it’s based on and/or made out of, that people find themselves legitimately wondering if maybe it’s actually made of plastic, (it’s probably not made of plastic, though; it’s probably made of wood pulp, much the way most shelf-stable “Parmesan” (hahaha) “cheese” is,) people probably shouldn’t be eating it, and such so-called “conspiracy theories” are a legitimate part of the discussion. Unless you have someone certified as insane, by some competent authority to do so, any allegation that that person is insane and shouldn’t be listened to, (as the words “conspiracy theory” are shorthand for,) is, from a rhetorical and argumentative standpoint, known as the fallacy of “poisoning the well”. For those of you not familiar, when you resort to poisoning the well, you are effectively admitting defeat and lose the argument. That people regard an argument that includes, “well, my opponent is a well-known crazy person,” as automatically forfeiting is HOW we maintain civil discourse, and have meaningful conversations.
ALLOWING people (or PepsiCo) to get away with poisoning the well in the argument about whether or not their little plastic-like nightmare snack “foods” are or are not made of plastic REWARDS them for their misbehavior, and encourages others to do the same. Here’s another example I know will be popular on slashdot: people claiming “it’s all rigged,” and asserting any reporting that is not favorable, true or not, is “fake news!”
Claims by certain individuals pretending to be elected leaders, are a perfect example of poisoning the well. “Don’t listen to people who tell you I’m a liar, because they’re all liars,” can’t be used in a real, legitimate argument. You have to prove the truth of what you’re saying through independently verifiable evidence, and asserting that you should believe simply because he says, “believe me” just doesn’t cut it.
They really need to emphasize this more in schools... sorry, I digressed. Anyway...
For any government, especially one like India’s, (let’s not forget they style themselves as “the world’s largest democracy,”) to reach its giant, government hand into the conversation and pluck voices out of it and silence them on PepsiCo’s behalf is straight-up bullshit. It’s a steep slope, and to spray a teflon-based or teflon-like lubricant all over it makes for legitimate slippery-slope concerns.
Keep a sharp eye out, people... this is one of the things that happens when you don’t have your freedom to speak and express your beliefs protected in law, or you allow your government to walk all over that freedom.
I think you've missed the point. The transmission of the code doesn't require anyone to buy the book. All the sender has to do is offer that book for sale from a (most likely fictitious seller, in no way connected to the real, actual person sending the message,) and all you (the intended recipient of the message, say,) have to do is look up books by, for example, that author, or containing a word of the title, and sort by price from high to low. The first thing that comes up is THAT book.
If you're expecting a particular account to be offering a specific book for sale, for several thousand dollars, or for some specific one of 50 or 100 different possible prices, where each one means something, even if the police, someone in counter-terrorism or counterespionage, or whatever, are spying on you, reading your e-mail, etc., and you're browsing for books, it would be probably a LOT harder to catch you, and hard to prove what you did since looking at used books on Amazon is a plausibly innocent activity. Even if a spy is looking over your shoulder, how will they know that you specifically are the intended target of the message? How will they know as you calmly scroll past the listing that you even received the message?
It is a simple, trivially easy solution to the problem of "how does person A clandestinely get a message to person B that is difficult or impossible to intercept?" Think about it. What are the police going to do, tell Amazon no one is allowed to sell something for a seemingly absurdly high price on their site? Tell Amazon that anyone attempting to do so must be doing so for criminal reasons and that they must turn over all the seller's information? (Fat lot of good that will do if the account was set up by someone using a fictitious name, in which case there's no "Mr. A. Nonymous," for them to arrest, let alone interrogate. No one needs to buy the book. The book doesn't even strictly speaking, (and I'm referring to the specific copy whose sale is allegedly contemplated by its being offered for sale, here,) have to even exist.
I'll illustrate this. Suppose I like this girl and want to talk to her, but her father's family and mine are enemies, so not only will they intercept any message I try to send her, she'll get in trouble if they even suspect she has received a message. Knowing they were going to be like this, we've previously arranged a code based on this premise. I tell her I've set up a fake account under the seller name "Anonymous Coward" at Amazon.com, and I'm going to offer for sale an old, used and worn, common and thoroughly unremarkable copy of William Shakespeare's "Romeo & Juliet," pocket-sized paperback on pulp-paper, (which normally sells for, let's say, $1.99 plus $3.99 for shipping). I tell her that I'll offer it for $32,000 + some number of dollars and cents, which will tell her where to meet me and when so I can whisk her away and we can elope and tell our respective families to go fuck themselves. In the hundreds and tens places of the price, it'll be the date, so $32,726.09 means, for example, "sneak out of your house on July 26th, meet me at the docks, pier number 9.
Here's a breakdown of the meaning:
William Shakespeare's "Romeo & Juliet" for sale for $32,xxx.xx, offered by, for sale by "A. Nonymous Coward." THIS is the listing that conveys the message from me to my sweetheart.
The 7 in the hundred's place means I want her to meet me in July...
The 26 after the 7 (in the ten's place,) means specifically, on the 26th of July.
The 0 in the dime's place means "meet at the docks,"
The 9 in the penny's place means "pier 9".
She'd have to know all that, but the idea is to achieve simplex, real-time or nearly-real-time communication so as to be able to coordinate something.
Alternatively, if I'd set a price of $32,803.14, for that same book, it could mean that I want her to sneak out on August 3rd, (8/03, right?) and meet me at the airport, in Terminal 4.
Eject anything that there's a provision in the OS to eject (meaning un-mount from the filesystem, in the UNIX sense,) before electrically disconnecting it by unplugging it from the system. Anyone who tells you to do otherwise should not be listened to, because he/she/they/it/etc. does not know what he/she (etc.) is talking about. Even if the device has an activity light on it, data could become corrupted, or the device could be damaged, or both, if you unplug it unexpectedly.
The problem most people fail to consider is that on a device with an indicator (an LED, generally) you have no idea when the device is actually working, and no idea when it's about to receive data. For example, you think your USB device is not in use, not being written to, not receiving data, and that it is therefore safe to unplug it. So you grasp it with a thumb and forefinger, and begin to pull. Your reflexes are typical of a human being, meaning you are capable of discerning events of as short as between a 10th and a 30th of a second in duration, and also that limitation restricts the speed with which you can respond to visual stimulus. So let's say you start to tug on the device. At that moment, your computer decides it's a good time to write data to the device. The computer sends a signal and the device realizes the computer is talking to it, (if I can anthropomorphize it a little,) and it then dutifully sends a pulse of electricity to light up the LED. HOWEVER, by the time the light from the LED reaches your eye, strikes your retina, travels to the occipital lobe of your brain, where it is processed and passed to your cerebral cortex, and you become conscious of the fact that the light has come back on, it's too late to stop the muscles of your fingers, hand, and arm, which are already yanking the device out, as data was being written to it.
Further, you have no way of knowing absolutely that you can depend on the little LED to come one ANY amount of time before writing to the device commences. None. Beyond that, some USB thumb drives, like some PNY and SanDisk I've seen, literally HAVE no indicator LED so there's no real way to know whether the thing is being written to, or if it's even mounted somewhere on the filesystem or not, without actually consulting the filesystem itself through, for example, looking in your file-manager/browser to see what's mounted, or dropping to an xterm and issuing the "mount" command, or doing something similar with a disc-management utility.
It may seem unlikely the thing would spontaneously start writing without the computer actievly working on something, but you don't actually KNOW if it is working or not, LED lamp or no, and it would only be safe to assume if you somehow knew exactly what your computer's kernel's filesystem driver was doing, knew at any given moment what was being prioritized and what put off until later, etc. Also, there could have been files that couldn't be FINISHED being written until some portion of the middle of the file was ready to be written. Perhaps a file began being written, and then some issue arose and the program or application concerned had to pause to ask you something, and couldn't proceed, but that application had been relegated to the background, was minimized, etc.
There's a saying that goes, "only floss between the teeth you want to keep." Similarly there's a saying that goes "only pull a flash drive out of a USB port when there's no important data on either the computer, or the flash drive, and you don't care about what happens to either." (Never heard that one until today? Well, it's a relatively new saying then, but it is a saying now, so...)
Incidentally, computers and peripherals used to come with instructions to shut everything OFF before plugging or unplugging ANYTHING, even a peripheral like a printer or a keyboard. Not powering everything completely off could result in damage to the equipment, or risk of electric shock, fire, or rattlesnakes armed with sub-machine guns suddenly falling from the ceiling and atta
I just can't wait for them to reboot "The Simpsons." I mean, why let the fact that it's still running stop them? They've rebooted every damned thing else, why not something still on the air? OH! Why not have The Simpsons, The Next Generation, which focuses on Bart Simpson's grandkids as plucky young soldiers in the Second Robot War? As a set of secondary characters, you could offer Futurama fans some fan service by showing an early predecessor of Bender Robots who ironically is working hard, trying to help patch-up humans injured by his fellow robots in the war because he's a robot DOCTOR, damn it, and he treats the PATIENT, not the UNIFORM! It would be a kind of cross between The Simpsons, Star Trek: The Next Generation, with just a hint of M*A*S*H added for good measure. Throw in some blue-collar stuff and I'm pretty sure FOX would pick it up.
It's not as upsetting of course as the fact that the Republican and "Democratic" (hahaha) Party of the United States has been hacking into and interfering in US elections since before I was born, but...
Don't get me wrong. I am very concerned and unhappy with external governments and intelligence services interfering in our elections, but I am much more concerned with the domestic ones doing it, since that's how they hold onto power despite the fact that they are almost universally loathed by the people whom they claim to derive their 'just power' to rule from the consent of. When Congress has a single-digit approval rating, and incumbents win reelection like, 70 or 80 percent of the time when they run... yeah, there's a problem. Russian interference is bad, but it's nothing compared to "Americans"* pouring billions upon billions of dollars into elections, bribing (oh, sorry, we're supposed to refer to it as campaign donations, or "speech" (hahahahhaha) yeah right,) our so-called "elected" officials.
* (Consider this: how American can one be when owning property all around the world, doing business in other countries with enemies of the United States, and acting as if he or she (haha, they're almost all "he") don't give a shit about AmericA, or AmericANS? The distinction is increasingly looking light on difference.)
When encryption is outlawed, only outlaws will
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Stop in the name of the law! I can't read every word you wrote, therefore I'm scared of it and deeply suspicious of both it and of you, even though your message was not written to me, and it's none of my business, I think I should be able to read any and everything written anywhere, anytime, by anyone, without having to show cause for why I should be allowed to do it.
The half-life of Cs-137 is about 30 years. If the amount found in California-produced wines was twice the previous level in 2011, (assuming all this is true, which I'm not really willing to assume,) then that means half of it will decay (statistically speaking,) in the 30 years following 2011. So if you hold-off drinking it until 2041, which is probably good for aging the wine anyway, that means the amount of radioactive, Fukushima-connected radionuclide (of Cs-137) should be at most, back to pre-tsunami levels by then.
Of course, if Cs-137 decays into something that's just like, WAY more poisonous, on the other hand... this might be cause for concern. Otherwise, the danger from the alcohol in the bottle is probably greater than the cesium inside. But who knows, I could be wrong. Just to be on the safe side, I'm going to drink something else instead... like the perfectly safe, totally clean drinking water in much of the rural, central United States. Bottoms UP!
Slashdot Mirror
I still don't see how even that would be profitable, unless the expect people to subscribe to MoviePass in the same way as the gym...
You mean, pay for MoviePass totally intending to use it, then end up not using it, and be unable to cancel due to some small-print provision of the contract or another, or the company conveniently losing the cancellation request repeatedly... that kind of thing?
The trouble with that theory is, people actually LIKE watching movies, and generally don't sign up out of a sense of guilt for BINGE-READING over Thanksgiving weekend. "Oh, GAWD, I read SOO many pages! I think I read an entire chapter just in one sitting! I couldn't possibly read another word... oh, wait, that's right, I almost forgot, there's denouement stuffing, (mmmmrph...) and we still need to try and read that sweet, creamy, delicious pumpkin-spiced epilogue... but afterwords, (get it?) I swear I will sign up for a MoviePass membership and watch movies EVERY DAY and NO more binge-reading!" ;-p
Here's how you can tell if an offer on Twitter or anywhere else for that matter is a scam: Does it involve Ethereum or Bitcoin or Dogggeecoin or some other shit like that? Then yes. It is a scam. (It may also be a scam if it does NOT involve them, but if it does-- scam.) You're welcome.
Um, it's really ALL faceless, soulless, blood-sucking, parasitic, global-conglomerate, monolithic, for-profit, multinational corporations that are ignoring our humanity. 'S not just Facebook, though they're clearly leaders in the field of ignoring our humanity.
I don't know, have typewriters killed the art of penmanship?
Absolutely, yes.
I rarely write anything by hand any more and as a result, my handwriting is terrible compared to what it used to be.
I was going to argue that typewriters did NOT kill the art of penmanship, but mostly because relatively few people used them, and they weren't really portable. Sure, there were some you could stick in a suitcase, and lug onto the train or steamboat, but mostly people didn't, just before leaving the house in the morning, grab keys, wallet, watch, a cup of coffee, and stick a goddamned TYPEWRITER into a POCKET on the way out the door.
I doubt typewriters killed print, as it's alive and well today. They may have killed cursive though. Consider that over the last century, we went from cursive being the way of writing FASTER than print, to TYPING being a way of writing faster than printing text, individual letter by letter, but you couldn't really take it with you. The laptop computer and tablet are relatively recent inventions. I'm barely middle-aged and I remember when laptops and tablets were a new-fangled gadget, and the internet did not, for all intents and purposes, even exist.
It is my understanding that they don't even TEACH cursive in schools anymore, and that saddens me, being someone who not only was taught to write in print and cursive as a child in school, but who enjoys amateur calligraphy.
Now however, everyone carries around a smartphone, and I suspect most can text on one faster than they, or I even, could write in cursive. I do not, however, see text-entry on any device replacing handwriting of every kind and all kinds outright.
I simply don't see a day in which flesh-and-blood people will still exist, and can manage all to get by without occasionally having to apply some form of stylus to some form of media, papyrus, paper, an electronic tablet, whatever, and make symbols carrying meaning, rather than doing so at the touch of a button, real, physical, and actual, or a virtual one.
Although... what a neat sci-fi film that would make.
In a world... where the children of mankind are either pets kept by hyperintelligent robots, or beasts of burden..."
(smash cut to scenes of people being steered around various work environments by devices mounted onto them, all wearing something like a cross between Google Glass and a shock collar, moving about factories like automata, or fields like oxen,)
Speech is forbidden and writing a crime...
(cut to group of people furtively hiding in a densely forested area, clods of thick, wet mud caked around their tracking and control devices in the hope of blocking their signals,)
one ragtag group struggles to revive the secret art...
(Close up of man struggling with a stick to inscribe the letter "A" into some wet mud, a task made difficult by the lack of his wrist-guidance bands telling him how he's supposed to move his hands, while the other men whisper "a, a, a, a...")
'WRITING'... coming this Summer to a theater near you. Rated R."
Or has someone already made this?
Cry me a virtual river. One group of people stupidly buy that which doesn't even objectively exist, hoping to make money out of nothing, and then whine when they get ripped off.
These people were trying to create wealth out of nothing, evolving from action that really serves no one, helps no one, and accomplishes nothing. Bitcoin speculation is like you gambling on what number I'm thinking of, when you have to tell me what your guess was, before I tell you whether or not you were right, and unsurpisingly, you always lose. You can never prove what number I either was, or wasn't thinking of, and I have an interest (being the person you're betting against,) in picking a different number from the one you state.
If lotteries are taxes on people who are bad at math, then losses from speculating on Bitcoin (and any other so-called "cryptocurrency" or "virtual currency,") are taxes on idiocy. Despite being a relatively new thing, there are old quotes that apply perfectly to this situation, including such classics as "there's a fool born every minute," and "a fool and his money are soon parted..." and probably others but you get the idea.
Or maybe you don't get the idea, because you're the sort of person who is holding Bitcoins. I wish I could help but, besides pointing out the painfully obvious, I don't know how. Bitcoins are a poor investment because you're gambling on something that doesn't really exist.
The really sad part is the amount of environmental damage done by all the waste-heat from all the computers of all the morons trying to, for all intents and purposes, pray their way into wealth, and the amount of e-waste generated on computers that will never be put to any real, constructive purpose, and will likely ultimately end up in scrapheaps leaching toxic compounds into the world around them.
In the spirit of Slashdot ... can we use this in a Tesla 3 battery?
Is that the new "imagine a Beowulf Cluster of..."?
Software Can Model How a Wildfire Will Spread
Oh can it? So can a can of tomato soup, and probably for less money. Here's how it works: open the can, drop it straight onto the floor. See how it just very rapidly goes EVERYWHERE? Pretty good model, I think, and it generally costs less than a dollar, no need to use the fancy stuff, and I'm not counting the cost of the can-opener, which is a common enough thing, and most households have one. To model future size and shape, you will need to have several more cans of tomato soup. Repeat as needed.
Of course, I admit it's not very SPECIFIC about modeling a given, actual wildfire. For that you may need software. I've read somewhere that it can be used to model how a wildfire will spread.
This *will* cause my move away from Windows.
Fuck rental, fuck their percieved authority, and fuck their super high horse.
Maybe now is not the best time, but if it were me, (just as it WAS me almost 10 years ago, finally sick and tired of M$'s shit,) what I would do is check out linuxmint.com (Because that's just exactly what I *DID* do.)
If for some reason you're not familiar, it's a very popular and well-maintained distro of the GNU/Linux operating system, and the latest, 64-bit (assuming your computer does 64-bit, otherwise there's a 32-bit version too,) and the MATE edition, I think you'll find, will make you feel the most like you're at home. Things like keybindings are, I believe, pretty close between Linux and Windows, (like CTRL-C copies, CTRL-V pastes, and so on,) and the layout is Windows-ish, but far more flexible. If I didn't move to Apple (got tired of waiting for Linux on the smartphone,) it's what I'd still be using, and when Apple starts selling only devices with no headphone jack, it's what I will ultimately be going back to.
DON'T fall for the FUD that says it's not user-friendly, etc. There's a learning curve just like anything else. But it's not that hard to learn. It's easy to get directly from their site, download, follow simple instructions to make a bootable (DVD-ROM or USB thumb drive,) and even take it for a test-drive (they're all live-install images,) and test it out before you actually install it, which is pretty cool. It will boot and run much faster installed, of course, unless you have a ridiculously fast external device... but it'll give you a good idea what you're getting into. (IMPORTANT NOTE: I would be remiss if I didn't mention that it's CRUCIAL, just as a general best-practice of computing, but especially before changing OS's, to make sure you have a complete backup of all your data on your computer. Actually, have a couple. Sorry for the interruption.)
If for some reason you're allergic to Linux or the General Public License, there are other options. FreeBSD is even free-er than GNU/Linux.* BUT as I understand it, for day-to-day desktop stuff, it isn't as well or widely supported. I guess it depends on what you do, and are planning to do, with your computer. There are, I know, a metric fuck-ton of ports, (the famous "ports collection") but if you want and need modern, up-to-date stuff, the internet abounds in excellent solutions that can be used on some/most/all Linux systems, and/or UNIX-based systems, (like the afore-mentioned BSD) and there's plenty of information out there on the internet, as far as what to use or what to do under whatever situation you find yourself. *(Free-er in a way you won't notice as a user; Linux is free to use and, with certain common-sense limitations, free to redistribute. Other licenses, like the ones that cover the BSDs, as I understand it, don't place as much in the way of restrictions on redistribution if you modify the code, hence "free-er," but again, if you're not planning to redistribute, modify, adapt, or change anything, there'll be no difference, license-wise, between BSD and Linux to your experience as a user.)
If you're contemplating the move and considering GNU/Linux, (any, whether Mint or not,) and you're wondering, "what about X?" where "X" is a piece of software you currently use, here's a VERY short list of software, (some of which likely will come with your Linux distro, or which you can add pretty trivially,) to replace things you currently use on M$ Window$. For the web browser, Mozilla's Firefox is pretty standard, or any of a dozen forks of it, or Chromium, (which is I believe based on the same core Google's Chrome browser is, since like so many things today, it's based on Open Source Software). For watching videos, there's VideoLAN, which is very popular. For replacing most of the functionality of M$ Office, if that's what you're using, a couple of options off the top of my head are LibreOffice, (libreoffice.org,) and Open Office; (
It's pronounced just like DOS. And I don't want anything to do with it, just like DOS.
Good luck resurrecting an auroch or a Bali tiger. These worms were merely hibernating.
They should try resurrecting the Jurassic Blue parrot . . . it's just resting . . .
Remarkable bird, the Jurassic Blue... beautiful plumage, innit?
German State switches Windows to YOU. Or... um... something...
I'll... see myself out.
LOL at your sig... every problem starts to look like a thumb... heheheheheh... thanks, I needed that today. aaahhhhh... :')
Had they started using a windows is back in 2006, it's security would be no longer supported as well. If they can operate on Linux and are familiar, and I can't see why they would spend the money to change. I imagine they use them for basic tasks like email, typing word docs, excel sheets, and printing and not much else. In that case the free version will trump windows every time.
Holy shit, why are you suddenly talking about Windows and Linux in a conversation about immigration, you... (looks up) oh, shit, is THAT what conversation this is? Jesus Christ did THAT go off the rails. Thanks for trying to bring it back. LOL
Acknowledging that it has almost nothing whatsoever to do with some German region changing from GNU/Linux to MS Windows, I just have to say, I am so sick of the "legal" argument. Maybe you were trying to be funny, but the "law" you were alluding to is creating human misery on par with crop failure, floods, fires, and rocks hurtling in from space and making everything all dead and explodey, so I simply cannot help but respond.
"Respect our laws," they say. REALLY? Would YOU respect a "law" if the people passed one making it illegal for you to breathe? Let us suppose they passed such a law. You did NOTHING whatsoever to harm anyone else and occasion this, your mere PRESENCE brought it about. They decided they didn't like you. If they, as a result, decided that you personally, fizzer06 , were not allowed to breathe anymore, not because you did anything wrong, not because you harmed anyone else, or even that you're an actual threat to someone, but because you are adjudged inherently inferior because of which side of an imaginary line on the ground your mother pushed you, headfirst, out of her vagina on, YOU are not allowed to breathe anymore, would you do it? Would you comply? According to the "LAW," you should just hold your breath, turn blue, and fucking die. Tell me, truly, would you "respect" such a bullshit "law"? Would you just hold your breath because someone doesn't like what you look like, your accent perhaps, or thinks you pray the wrong way, to the wrong version of an imaginary character out of a fucking book, or to the right one but in the wrong language... or perhaps because they want to preserve their "culture," as if it's somehow better, more worthy than the one where you came from, for their FUCKING convenience and peace of mind, would you die?
The "LAW" that says someone isn't good enough to be a German just because he was born in Turkey, or isn't good enough to be a Frenchman because he was born in Chad, or isn't somehow worthy of being an American because his mother's vagina hovered over a piece of ground in Guatemala when he was pushed out of it, is worth about the same as the "LAW" that said that if a person was accused of being a runaway slave, even in a free-state that had outlawed slavery, that any local authority must assist a person claiming ownership over that slave, and help return him or her with that person to a shit-hole state that still allows people to own other people and frankly, fuck 100% of that shit.
Fuck nativism, fuck racism... we are all brothers and sisters, and the "LAW" you're referring to, with which immigrants are either IN, or OUT of compliance, is racist, nativist bullshit. America in particular is the one country on Earth where that shit, (given America's origins, founding, constitution, etc.,) really shouldn't fly, where such laws are particularly disgusting and morally reprehensible. OF ALL countries, if America were truly to subscribe to the idea that any person whose parents were here earlier was allowed to decide who else COULD and COULD NOT be in the country based on arriving later, then that would give to the descendants of the Native Americans who were here before the first European settlers arrived, (immigrants and refugees from "shit-hole countries" where people were being persecuted for their religion or starving due to famine, not to put too fine a goddamned point on it, like England, Ireland, Germany, etc.,) the right to kick literally EVERYONE who wasn't "legal," in compliance with THEIR laws, (if they were prescient enough to think to make such a law before 1492 C.E.,) and THEIR descendants OUT. Somehow, however, when the US Senate and House of so-called "Representatives" (that's a laugh,) decide on how many people to "let in," I very much doubt anyone is invited from one of the reservations to weigh in on how many refugees that America in particular helped create, America would let in.
Of course, many countries actually have such a situation, actually have natives to a region
Which state would switch FROM a version of GNU/Linux to MS WINDOWS of all things... Would that be the state of Dumkopf Obersheiß? Have they never heard of oh, I dunno, any other distro of Linux? Does SUSE not have an updated version they could update or upgrade to? Is it such a rich state that they have money coming out of their ears that they can afford to throw it away giving more money to Microsoft? Was der geliteral Fuckenstein?
Lovely... Russian zombie worms. Actually, that's probably the least of our worries. It does beg the question though... are Russians running out of worms? Is this some new, wild trend in keeping the populace fed? "Let them eat 40,000 year-old dead, zombified worms" just doesn't have the same ring to it as "let them eat cake". Does this make these the new oldest living things on Earth? Or does it not count to be alive, then alive 40,000 years later, if you were dead in the intervening time? Just curious.
Even when you actually get around to trying to make a point you insert needless digression. But anyway ... it is not bullshit. Freedom of speech does not mean you have the inalienable right to spout deliberate lies intended to cause others harm. It's called either libel or slander, and just because PepsiCo is a multinational company doesn't mean you can try to damage them by lying about their products. You can express your opinion ("this tastes like plastic") but not post lies about it ("it's made of plastic"). This is case law, even in the country of the First Amendment.
This could be gotten around easily enough in two ways I can think of right off the top of my head. First, through the anonymizing power of the internet, and second, by prepending the words, "I think" to the allegation. Not much anyone can do about that, even in a place where there are laws concerning libel, since I'd be expressing an opinion (protected,) rather than fact, (which I'd have to back up with some sort of evidence). But I've not actually promulgated any such rumor, and I don't have a Facebook account with which to do so, either here or in India, so it's kind of a moot point. I was just grumbling at length about how messed up the censorship is, and no one forced you to read the post, though I appreciate that you took the time to do so.
When I apologize for digression, (since I digress quite a bit, if you've read my other posts, you'd probably have picked up on that,) you know it's going to be bad, with even me realizing I'm doing it. I know I have a tendency to ramble, so thanks for taking the time to read what I wrote. I know these days there are many demands for peoples' time and it seems like there are never enough hours in a day and...
Damn it, I'm doing it again. Sorry. :) Thanks for reading though. Seriously.
So I could share this far and wide. Not because I believe it, but the very idea of an American company, (I know, I know, it’s PepsiCo, a worldwide multinational conglomerate that can’t really be called American any more than you could argue that there’s a meaningful difference between the water in the Pacific Ocean and the Atlantic, since they meet and join and flow freely between the two and around the globe, kind of like PepsiCo and their money, I imagine,) but for a company based and started here, (as I think it was and don’t really care if it wasn’t, so I’m not going to even bother to look it up, because it doesn’t matter; it’s not really relevant to the point I’m making here,) to exploit the fact that an Indian Court of Law will grant their request and engage in censorship like this makes me want to exploit the fact that I am outside that court’s jurisdiction to help spread this rumor, even if it’s totally false, so as to help render it pointless for PepsiCo (which I’m now boycotting over this,) to have sought the order in the first place. (TBH though, I was already boycotting their products because most of them suck. Not really a boycott, more of a personal choice.)
THAT SAID, HOWEVER... The truth is that if your product is such a bizarre thing, so far removed from any resemblance to real actual food or food precursor ingredients you claim it’s based on and/or made out of, that people find themselves legitimately wondering if maybe it’s actually made of plastic, (it’s probably not made of plastic, though; it’s probably made of wood pulp, much the way most shelf-stable “Parmesan” (hahaha) “cheese” is,) people probably shouldn’t be eating it, and such so-called “conspiracy theories” are a legitimate part of the discussion. Unless you have someone certified as insane, by some competent authority to do so, any allegation that that person is insane and shouldn’t be listened to, (as the words “conspiracy theory” are shorthand for,) is, from a rhetorical and argumentative standpoint, known as the fallacy of “poisoning the well”. For those of you not familiar, when you resort to poisoning the well, you are effectively admitting defeat and lose the argument. That people regard an argument that includes, “well, my opponent is a well-known crazy person,” as automatically forfeiting is HOW we maintain civil discourse, and have meaningful conversations.
ALLOWING people (or PepsiCo) to get away with poisoning the well in the argument about whether or not their little plastic-like nightmare snack “foods” are or are not made of plastic REWARDS them for their misbehavior, and encourages others to do the same. Here’s another example I know will be popular on slashdot: people claiming “it’s all rigged,” and asserting any reporting that is not favorable, true or not, is “fake news!”
Claims by certain individuals pretending to be elected leaders, are a perfect example of poisoning the well. “Don’t listen to people who tell you I’m a liar, because they’re all liars,” can’t be used in a real, legitimate argument. You have to prove the truth of what you’re saying through independently verifiable evidence, and asserting that you should believe simply because he says, “believe me” just doesn’t cut it.
They really need to emphasize this more in schools... sorry, I digressed. Anyway...
For any government, especially one like India’s, (let’s not forget they style themselves as “the world’s largest democracy,”) to reach its giant, government hand into the conversation and pluck voices out of it and silence them on PepsiCo’s behalf is straight-up bullshit. It’s a steep slope, and to spray a teflon-based or teflon-like lubricant all over it makes for legitimate slippery-slope concerns.
Keep a sharp eye out, people... this is one of the things that happens when you don’t have your freedom to speak and express your beliefs protected in law, or you allow your government to walk all over that freedom.
How Do You Handle Hardware That Never Gets Software Updates?
Very carefully. (Buh-DUM-Tshhhh)
Borrowed from “How do porcupines make love?”
With apologies.
I think you've missed the point. The transmission of the code doesn't require anyone to buy the book. All the sender has to do is offer that book for sale from a (most likely fictitious seller, in no way connected to the real, actual person sending the message,) and all you (the intended recipient of the message, say,) have to do is look up books by, for example, that author, or containing a word of the title, and sort by price from high to low. The first thing that comes up is THAT book.
If you're expecting a particular account to be offering a specific book for sale, for several thousand dollars, or for some specific one of 50 or 100 different possible prices, where each one means something, even if the police, someone in counter-terrorism or counterespionage, or whatever, are spying on you, reading your e-mail, etc., and you're browsing for books, it would be probably a LOT harder to catch you, and hard to prove what you did since looking at used books on Amazon is a plausibly innocent activity. Even if a spy is looking over your shoulder, how will they know that you specifically are the intended target of the message? How will they know as you calmly scroll past the listing that you even received the message?
It is a simple, trivially easy solution to the problem of "how does person A clandestinely get a message to person B that is difficult or impossible to intercept?" Think about it. What are the police going to do, tell Amazon no one is allowed to sell something for a seemingly absurdly high price on their site? Tell Amazon that anyone attempting to do so must be doing so for criminal reasons and that they must turn over all the seller's information? (Fat lot of good that will do if the account was set up by someone using a fictitious name, in which case there's no "Mr. A. Nonymous," for them to arrest, let alone interrogate. No one needs to buy the book. The book doesn't even strictly speaking, (and I'm referring to the specific copy whose sale is allegedly contemplated by its being offered for sale, here,) have to even exist.
I'll illustrate this. Suppose I like this girl and want to talk to her, but her father's family and mine are enemies, so not only will they intercept any message I try to send her, she'll get in trouble if they even suspect she has received a message. Knowing they were going to be like this, we've previously arranged a code based on this premise. I tell her I've set up a fake account under the seller name "Anonymous Coward" at Amazon.com, and I'm going to offer for sale an old, used and worn, common and thoroughly unremarkable copy of William Shakespeare's "Romeo & Juliet," pocket-sized paperback on pulp-paper, (which normally sells for, let's say, $1.99 plus $3.99 for shipping). I tell her that I'll offer it for $32,000 + some number of dollars and cents, which will tell her where to meet me and when so I can whisk her away and we can elope and tell our respective families to go fuck themselves. In the hundreds and tens places of the price, it'll be the date, so $32,726.09 means, for example, "sneak out of your house on July 26th, meet me at the docks, pier number 9.
Here's a breakdown of the meaning:
William Shakespeare's "Romeo & Juliet" for sale for $32,xxx.xx, offered by, for sale by "A. Nonymous Coward." THIS is the listing that conveys the message from me to my sweetheart.
The 7 in the hundred's place means I want her to meet me in July...
The 26 after the 7 (in the ten's place,) means specifically, on the 26th of July.
The 0 in the dime's place means "meet at the docks,"
The 9 in the penny's place means "pier 9".
She'd have to know all that, but the idea is to achieve simplex, real-time or nearly-real-time communication so as to be able to coordinate something.
Alternatively, if I'd set a price of $32,803.14, for that same book, it could mean that I want her to sneak out on August 3rd, (8/03, right?) and meet me at the airport, in Terminal 4.
So then my Juliet casually, with he
Eject anything that there's a provision in the OS to eject (meaning un-mount from the filesystem, in the UNIX sense,) before electrically disconnecting it by unplugging it from the system. Anyone who tells you to do otherwise should not be listened to, because he/she/they/it/etc. does not know what he/she (etc.) is talking about. Even if the device has an activity light on it, data could become corrupted, or the device could be damaged, or both, if you unplug it unexpectedly.
The problem most people fail to consider is that on a device with an indicator (an LED, generally) you have no idea when the device is actually working, and no idea when it's about to receive data. For example, you think your USB device is not in use, not being written to, not receiving data, and that it is therefore safe to unplug it. So you grasp it with a thumb and forefinger, and begin to pull. Your reflexes are typical of a human being, meaning you are capable of discerning events of as short as between a 10th and a 30th of a second in duration, and also that limitation restricts the speed with which you can respond to visual stimulus. So let's say you start to tug on the device. At that moment, your computer decides it's a good time to write data to the device. The computer sends a signal and the device realizes the computer is talking to it, (if I can anthropomorphize it a little,) and it then dutifully sends a pulse of electricity to light up the LED. HOWEVER, by the time the light from the LED reaches your eye, strikes your retina, travels to the occipital lobe of your brain, where it is processed and passed to your cerebral cortex, and you become conscious of the fact that the light has come back on, it's too late to stop the muscles of your fingers, hand, and arm, which are already yanking the device out, as data was being written to it.
Further, you have no way of knowing absolutely that you can depend on the little LED to come one ANY amount of time before writing to the device commences. None. Beyond that, some USB thumb drives, like some PNY and SanDisk I've seen, literally HAVE no indicator LED so there's no real way to know whether the thing is being written to, or if it's even mounted somewhere on the filesystem or not, without actually consulting the filesystem itself through, for example, looking in your file-manager/browser to see what's mounted, or dropping to an xterm and issuing the "mount" command, or doing something similar with a disc-management utility.
It may seem unlikely the thing would spontaneously start writing without the computer actievly working on something, but you don't actually KNOW if it is working or not, LED lamp or no, and it would only be safe to assume if you somehow knew exactly what your computer's kernel's filesystem driver was doing, knew at any given moment what was being prioritized and what put off until later, etc. Also, there could have been files that couldn't be FINISHED being written until some portion of the middle of the file was ready to be written. Perhaps a file began being written, and then some issue arose and the program or application concerned had to pause to ask you something, and couldn't proceed, but that application had been relegated to the background, was minimized, etc.
There's a saying that goes, "only floss between the teeth you want to keep." Similarly there's a saying that goes "only pull a flash drive out of a USB port when there's no important data on either the computer, or the flash drive, and you don't care about what happens to either." (Never heard that one until today? Well, it's a relatively new saying then, but it is a saying now, so...)
Incidentally, computers and peripherals used to come with instructions to shut everything OFF before plugging or unplugging ANYTHING, even a peripheral like a printer or a keyboard. Not powering everything completely off could result in damage to the equipment, or risk of electric shock, fire, or rattlesnakes armed with sub-machine guns suddenly falling from the ceiling and atta
I just can't wait for them to reboot "The Simpsons." I mean, why let the fact that it's still running stop them? They've rebooted every damned thing else, why not something still on the air? OH! Why not have The Simpsons, The Next Generation, which focuses on Bart Simpson's grandkids as plucky young soldiers in the Second Robot War? As a set of secondary characters, you could offer Futurama fans some fan service by showing an early predecessor of Bender Robots who ironically is working hard, trying to help patch-up humans injured by his fellow robots in the war because he's a robot DOCTOR, damn it, and he treats the PATIENT, not the UNIFORM! It would be a kind of cross between The Simpsons, Star Trek: The Next Generation, with just a hint of M*A*S*H added for good measure. Throw in some blue-collar stuff and I'm pretty sure FOX would pick it up.
It's not as upsetting of course as the fact that the Republican and "Democratic" (hahaha) Party of the United States has been hacking into and interfering in US elections since before I was born, but...
Don't get me wrong. I am very concerned and unhappy with external governments and intelligence services interfering in our elections, but I am much more concerned with the domestic ones doing it, since that's how they hold onto power despite the fact that they are almost universally loathed by the people whom they claim to derive their 'just power' to rule from the consent of. When Congress has a single-digit approval rating, and incumbents win reelection like, 70 or 80 percent of the time when they run... yeah, there's a problem. Russian interference is bad, but it's nothing compared to "Americans"* pouring billions upon billions of dollars into elections, bribing (oh, sorry, we're supposed to refer to it as campaign donations, or "speech" (hahahahhaha) yeah right,) our so-called "elected" officials.
* (Consider this: how American can one be when owning property all around the world, doing business in other countries with enemies of the United States, and acting as if he or she (haha, they're almost all "he") don't give a shit about AmericA, or AmericANS? The distinction is increasingly looking light on difference.)
When encryption is outlawed, only outlaws will -----BEGIN GPG MESSAGE----- Charset: utf-8 qANQR1DDDQQJAwKQIuGxR9ku8L/SQgH6kXzdtVHv9IwDWcZVsGX5G2UZje9L8VoC Y6faoCNMAg+Zq8S92arz+DV/yEsZo3jBoCFZBsOPqXOO8ATiMmoSQA== =7Ce4 -----END GPG MESSAGE-----
Stop in the name of the law! I can't read every word you wrote, therefore I'm scared of it and deeply suspicious of both it and of you, even though your message was not written to me, and it's none of my business, I think I should be able to read any and everything written anywhere, anytime, by anyone, without having to show cause for why I should be allowed to do it.
~ The US government.
The half-life of Cs-137 is about 30 years. If the amount found in California-produced wines was twice the previous level in 2011, (assuming all this is true, which I'm not really willing to assume,) then that means half of it will decay (statistically speaking,) in the 30 years following 2011. So if you hold-off drinking it until 2041, which is probably good for aging the wine anyway, that means the amount of radioactive, Fukushima-connected radionuclide (of Cs-137) should be at most, back to pre-tsunami levels by then.
Of course, if Cs-137 decays into something that's just like, WAY more poisonous, on the other hand... this might be cause for concern. Otherwise, the danger from the alcohol in the bottle is probably greater than the cesium inside. But who knows, I could be wrong. Just to be on the safe side, I'm going to drink something else instead... like the perfectly safe, totally clean drinking water in much of the rural, central United States. Bottoms UP!