Iced coffee is an abomination. Do you also douse your Fillet Mignon with ketchup?
Iced coffee is not filet mignon with ketchup.
It's more like a desiccated hamburger that fell out of your kid's Happy Meal after he nodded off and rolled right under the driver's seat, then SAT there while you went on a road trip through the middle of Arizona in July, only to be discovered a month later.
In response, the vice president of YouPorn responded by sending a memo to staff banning Starbucks products from company offices starting Jan. 1, 2019.
People bringing coffee to work is considered pretty normal. People watching porn at a coffee shop isn't. That VP is making YouPorn look pretty stupid.
If watching porn at a coffee shop isn't normal, why does Starbucks have to make a company-wide rule against it? People watch porn everywhere, even if only behind their eyes in the sticky-floored movie theater of the mind.
I think I'm going to start a coffee shop called StarFucks. Not only MAY you watch porn on our wifi, you HAVE TO. (It's like Fight Club. "If this is your first night, you have to fight.") Also, our coffee won't taste like burnt, undrinkable swill, and it won't cost an obscene amount per cup.
Okay, I'm dreaming big... what did YOU dream about today? Another day sitting in class naked, without your homework?
[...] I don't care what website it is, I will ruthlessly block third party stuff. Your revenue model doesn't trump either my privacy or security.
Fuck advertisers, they're the reason why security on the internet is so fucking broken.
It’s also the reason the internet exists. If all advertising went away, (and I hate it myself and wish 99% of it would disappear, then maybe I’d stop using ad blockers,) and all the money went with it, either every site you’d visit would have a paywall and you’d have to log in to use it, or it simply woulnd’t exist. Every name you typed in would give you a DNS error or 404 Not Found error.... you’d try to go to Google (or your favorite search engine if not Google,) and try to search around to see what happened, and it would be down too.
You’d think it was the apocalypse and would wander outside and see a bunch of other people wandering the street in housecoats or else underwear, staring blinkingly at the sky. What’s going on, you’d shout to a neighbor, who’d stare at an object far, far behind you, and say, in a hollow, broken voice, ‘there’s no Google. It’s just... gone...”
You’d look all around, the horror dawning on you... no web ads... no internet. No web ADS! No internet. No ads, no search providers. No ad revenue, no INTERNET! Then you’d but it all together and shout, NO INTERNET!
Then the pitchforks and torches get broken out, and you don’t want to know what happens after THAT
Unfortunately, the ad blocker, in order to work, (if it works at all, I’ve tried a couple, and promptly deleted them,) on iOS needs permissions that would allow it to see everything you do. So if you use your iOS device for anything you don’t want whoever made the ad blocker to know, including keystrokes, don’t use an ad blocker.
Whenever I start seeing these things, here’s how I stop them:
Open Settings, go to Safari, then to Advanced, and set JavaScript to OFF.
That should solve it.
Unfortunately, it also renders roughly half the web completely useless.
BUT, half a web is more useful than no web because of this goddamned malvertisement bullshit.
ALSO, whenever it happens, complain to Apple. They get enough complaints, they’ll find a way to fix it, including building a blocker right into iOS, which is what they should have done a long damned time ago. Their site is “getsupport.apple.com” — bug them loudly and often. It’s the only way they’ll know that it’s happening.
Sounds like a great idea... except that with our luck, that only makes him stronger, too.
You ever see the movie, "The Blob?" I think he's kind of like that. What we need, if memory serves, is a vast refrigeration system in a place to lure him into... that's how they stopped The Blob, wasn't it?
How much will China have to funnel to the Trump Crime Family “organization” or Trump regime’s interests to make this go away, I can’t help but wonder.
Won’t hurt Apple, it’ll just mean that your next iPhone will be made in Indonesia, or Malaysia, or some other place with little or no environmental regulation or protections for workers, laws against modern slavery / human trafficking, etc. SURE as hell it’s not going to cost APPLE money... it’s Apple. They don’t pay taxes, or follow laws, or whatever. They just find ways around it, like parking money in a fake subsidiary in Ireland. Since we all found out about that one, they had to pay some small part of what they owed, or may one day have to, and meanwhile, things will get rearranged to some OTHER tax haven or dodge.
They’re all a bunch of goddamned fucking crooks, all the way around.
For a guy so very, VERY into privacy, Richard M. Stallman, son of Terry and Maud Stallman, of 325 North Maple Street in Sheffield, *... sure does like to talk publicly a lot, using his own name.
Does really no one at all besides myself find that odd?
It’s a bit like a scantily-clad, gorgeous, and voluptuous woman going out into the public square and shouting at people to stop paying attention to her and that they’re DEFINITELY not to look at her heaving, ample breasts.
(Pauses a moment to picture this mental image.)
MMMmmmm yeah. Sorry, what was I talking about?
* J/K on all that made-up detail, LOL... though how funny would it be if ANY part of it were correct? Hehehehe...
I know they say ‘brevity is the sole of wit,’ but unfortunately, brevity does not come easily for me. I wax laconic for several hours a day, typically... when I’m asleep. The rest of the time, I tend to the verbose. Speaking of which, though, it’s about time I went and waxed laconic for several hours.
Cow flatulence, according to the article, is responsible for as much greenhouse gas emmissions as the transportation industry. Without changing the diets of cattle, or forcing everyone to drive electric cars, carbon dioxide emissions could be cut in half by combining these two things so that the same objectives are achieved by a single action instead of two:
RIDE COWS!
Look at the situation. We have like, billions of cows, most of them standing around doing NOTHING. We, as a society, produce X gigatons of CO2 moving stuff around, while the cows farting also produces roughly X gigatons of the same gas in the same amount of time, resulting in a total of 2 * X gigatons of CO2 per time period.
If, however, we all abandoned our cars and trucks, and just rode cows, we could ELIMINATE X gigatons of CO2, just by doing that. PLUS, as a free bonus, EVERYONE gets heated leather seats to ride around on, no more cheap, shitty vinyl or cloth seats! AND If your ride ever breaks down, instead of calling AAA or a tow service and paying hundreds of dollars, you just call your nearest friend, who rides his cow out, bringing his wife and kids, plus a BIG ‘OL BUCKET of BBQ sauce and some fire wood, and instead of your day being ruined, you get barbeque BURGERS and STEAKS! IT’S A WIN-WIN, FOLKS!
IF your cow was lactating at the time she broke down, guess what? You get milkshakes to wash those burgers down with! You know it’s the right thing to do! Write your member of congress or senator, or preferably both, and DEMAND we eliminate all gasoline and diesel-powered cars and trucks from America’s highways and bighways, and replace them with good ‘ol BESSY!
If they use the same class divisions as they do for conventional air travel, it will allow everyone access to space. They'll have first-class seats that will be padded, with all the amenities, and go for 20 million dollars a pop.
They'll have business class, which will cost between 350,000 and 5 million dollars per ticket, but you'll have to bring your own pillow, blanket, space suit, and acceleration chair. Hope you can find ultra-light-weight ones, because each additional pound costs 32,000 dollars. Oh, also, there's no bathrooms provided for you, nor water, nor heat, nor radiation shielding, so you'll have to bring your own one of each of those, too. BUT at least, they'll get to ride INSIDE the spacecraft.
The class below that, Economy-Plus Class, which will sell tickets for between 800 and 13,000 dollars each, is a far cheaper option, blending affordability with the barest of essentials: thrust.
Using Economy-Plus Class tickets consist of being allowed to hold onto a 100-foot-long, carbon-fiber and stainless steel braided, heat-resistant tether, and cling to it below the rocket as it heads to orbit. Like with business class, you will need to bring everything you might need or want to have for yourself, and again, it's 32,000 per pound, but Economy Plus Class does not provide a standard courtesy weight included in the cost of the ticket, so if you weigh 100 pounds on Earth, that's 3.2 million dollars that will have to be paid for, as a weight surcharge, before counting your space suit, etc.
If you buy a century in advance, it only costs 800 dollars, which is how you can get one for that low a price. One ticket per customer, only, however, and of course, they're neither transferable nor upgradeable. A 150% cancellation fee applies, so if you've decided after buying the ticket that you'd rather not go, just don't show up. Bear in mind, of course, that as the rocket climbs, all the people hanging from the tethers are going to be bathed in rocket exhaust, which basically means they're going to end up feeling a bit like marshmallows being toasted over a campfire, upside down, but instead of a campfire, it's an acetylene torch. Still beats flying coach though...
Speaking of which, there's one class even cheaper than Econ+, which is of course, the aforementioned venerable old "Coach" Class. In coach, the tickets only cost $0.99 each. You may wonder how it's so cheap for them. Well... Flying to the stars in Coach Class consists of showing up to the launchpad on the day of the flight, and lining up facing the rocket. Then they show you a picture of the rocket in flight, and slowly raise the picture higher and higher in front of the passengers while making roaring and whooshing noises. Then, as the picture of the flying rocket gets about as high up as the guy holding the picture can hold it, someone steps up behind each of the passengers and simultaneously shoots them all in the back of the head.
Then they dump the corpses into a mass grave. The $0.99 ticket price covers the cost of the bullet, and amortizes a portion of the costs of the gun, the steam-shovel, and digging the giant pit for the grave, of course. Religious services, if desired or required, will have to be arranged and paid for beforehand. (NASA's not running a charity, after all.)
In other words, it would be pretty close to exactly like flying coach class on an airplane, but without the long wait at the end to retrieve your baggage from the carousel.
Upon reflection, it occurs to me that if you're flying Economy Plus, you're really going to fare just about as well as the folks in Coach, and you're paying a LOT more for it, so you're really just squandering your money.
Know what else causes depression? Depressing shit. Social media is a mirror held up to real life, (perhaps an incredibly twisted, deceptive, fun-house mirror, but still a mirror,) and if you find shit in real life depressing, (and who the fuck wouldn’t?) you’re likely to find what you see in the mirror that IS social media depressing too. In other words, “well, DUH...”
You only get one life - live it in the real world.
Stop using social media.
Turn off the algorithms.
Stop watching 24/7 opinion channels pretending to be news.
There is nothing positive in any of it.
...posted someone to slashdot, which is just as much social media as Facebook. Just because you can’t post photos and videos (or if you can, I’ve no idea how,) doesn’t mean it isn’t social media.
Let’s go down the checklist:
Use your name or adopt a pseudonym by which you’re known on the site: check Have capital ascribed to you (“Likes” there, Karma and Mod Points here,): check Continuously running news feed of information submitted by community: check Has facilities to check and see how many people agree with you: check Provides the ability to have “Friends” (and on slashdot, “Foes,): check You get out of it what you can, and what you get depends on you: check
Yeah. Slashdot is social media too. Being at least historically vaguely tech-centric doesn’t make it anything other than social media.
We are sucking... really? Normally I’m mister gloom and doom, but I’ve just had a really good roast beef sandwich, so I’m feeling up. Every time someone bitches about how humanity has mined eleventy zillion tons of this, that, or the other precious kind of material out of the earth, try to remember that there are eleventy leventy leventy go-gadzillion zillion tons of earth, and eleventy zillion is a minescule drop in the bucket. Also, the earth doesn’t miss it. 99.9999999% of what we’ve mined hasn’t actually LEFT Earth. It’s simply gone from being buried in the top 0.0000001% of the crust to being a few dozen meters higher, and oh, by the way... it’s going right back where it came from in a blink of an eye in geological time.
Human beings are as natural as any other thing. We are a product of nature. We’re just making minor changes to the top 0.0000001% of the earth’s surface for a heartbeat out of time. Earth will blink, and we’ll all be gone. Oh, and as for all the species we’re killing... 99+% of species that had ever lived died before we were born. All the ones we wiped out and all the ones we’re going to will. Be. Replaced. I promise you.
They’ll be replaced by the very thing that made them in the first place: the repetitious and space-filling nature of life itself, and the existence of a niche that stands unfilled. When something dies, it leaves a vacuum, and nature fills it. This happens whether the reason the void comes to be is mankind decides some creature’s skin would look great on his women, or because the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide changes, or the planet suddenly gets too cold or too warm for too long, or a giant chunk of rock strikes the Yucatán peninsula and blasts out a plume of dust and gas into space that, upon reentry, briefly turns the entire biosphere into an oven for a few hours, and kills everything.
Dinosaurs once roamed the Earth. Along comes an asteroid and by the next day, they’re all dead. Something rose to took their place, and in relatively short order too. When we’re gone, the same will happen again.
For all our bluster and bravado, we’re just building castles out of sand, in the vast span of time that our species has existed, we are metaphorically between crashes of waves upon the shore. The next big wave will wipe most of what we’ve built away, and in another million years, you will never know we were here. Two million, tops.
So please everyone just relax, have a coke and a smile. We’re all just here for a little while. All the birdies and bunnies we off will be replaced. Maybe with rather different ones, but there’s nothing magical, certainly nothing preordained or special about the ones that are here now, except that they happen to be the ones that are here now, and that’s just coincidence. They certainly weren’t meant to be here, or designed to be here except in the sense that they evolved to fill their respective niches.
As did we. Every actor has his turn upon the stage, stumbles through his lines, and then bows out. As shall we.*
Damn... suddenly channeling William Shakespeare and shit... sorry about that. That was one seriously good sandwich.
* Unless we’re wiped out by a gamma-ray burst that sterelizes everything in our part of the galaxy, in which case, yeah, Earth’s dead, but that has probably little to do with us.
There’s a gazillion tons of sand. If the sand is too smooth and round, all you have to do is come up with a cost and energy efficient way to process the sand into something with lots of jagged edges, and two birds are killed with one stone: the problem of there not being enough good, usable sand, and two, the problem with you’re not being rich yet.
The obvious approach, I think, is put the sand in a machine that fires it at high speed into a hard, flat surface, causing the round, smooth grains to shatter into lots of jagged pieces. Then after they strike the surface, you have them fall into a selecting sieve that sends jagged pieces in one direction, (towards the bags where they will be packaged for sale,) and on the other hand towards a recycling loop that sends it to smash into the target again.
That’s just one idea. Here’s another: take the cheap and unusable sand, melt it, then pulverize it. Yes, these both require energy but I’m sure each one can be done, with a little scientific and engineering wizardry, in a way that ends up being so efficient that the devices that are used pay for themselves.
Hell, you can probably pulverize them AND purify them, extracting impurities all in a single process, if it’s designed right.
Engineers and scientists... get on it! There’s fortunes to be made! Oxides of silicon are the twenty first century’s OIL! Just need to work out how to refine it!
Any computer system that CAN run Windows and Apple iMacOS-X (or whatever they’re calling it this week,) but NOT GNU/Linux is, as far as I’m concerned, defective by design.
Yet another reason added to the growing stack of reasons not to buy anything from Apple ever again.
When my current crop of Apple devices is gone, so am I, even if that means having to buy things to replace ones that I currently have, even if they still at least sort of work. At that time, they’ll get replaced anyway, and sold off if they’re still worth anything, which I doubt, since Apple’s insane pace of cranking out new, and marginally improved or differentiated products with different names just means their old stuff goes obsolete faster and faster. At this point, you’d be an idiot to buy anything from Apple, as it’ll be obsolete before you even get home.
Yeah, Apple might not miss me as a customer, but if there are enough of me, they will eventually feel it and it will be too late then, because Apple is going to have to wait until I get Alzheimer’s for me to even consider buying another thing from them at this point or in the future. Not sure I’d forget even then how much they’ve been pissing me off.
Come to think of it, pissing customers off is a great way to ensure you never see them again. Case-in-point: it will be a cold day in hell before I spend another dollar on a Microsoft product, give AT&T another dime, or Sprint another nickel, or any one of a dozen or so other companies, another goddamned penny. Apple has joined that list of companies ineligible for my further patronage.
You build shit that’s broken on purpose, and you don’t get me as a customer. Maybe I’m alone in this, but somehow, I kind of doubt it.
Apple is rotten to the core, probably because it’s riddled with worms.
I’m holding out for LVPQDR5Z99 chips. The more letters and numbers it has, the more awesome it is, right? Why in 2018 are people settling for only DOUBLE data rate (DDR,) we should hold out at least for triple data rate (TDR) as a minimum!
Honestly... are they seriously going to keep jamming more letters and numbers onto things?
Will there be rotary-dialed telephones too, that I can call up, wait on hold for 10 minutes, then read off a 20 digit number, one digit at a time, for each item I want to purchase?
How do I opt out of this bullshit? It's just an annoying waste of paper.
The "records" are wrong, so they may think they know, but they don't. If anyone asks, I'll tell them that whether or how I voted is none of their, (or anyone else's but mine and the secretary of state in my state who runs the voting system,) goddamned motherfucking business, and that they can fuck off if they don't like it.
I consider the right to vote to imply the right to abstain in protest, which is itself a form of voting. I will not be shamed or intimidated into either not voting, OR voting.
Fuck you if you don't like it. My vote is MINE, to bestow or NOT as I fucking goddamned well please.
My cable bill has decreased 100 percent in the same interval of time. I like it that way. Pink Floyd said it best: I’ve got thirteen channels of shit on the TV to choose from.
That’s about how many I get over the air. But whenever I go somewhere where they have cable, I find that there’s a larger selection but it’s just as much shit as the dozen or so air channels I can pick up with rabbit ears. So why pay extra for... more shit?
Thanks to ATSC, the channels I CAN pull down are pretty clear; although I never watch them. I just leave it hooked up there because I already own it and in case the shit hits the fan and I have no internet... in inclement weather, for example, I have the ability to watch news broadcasts. I don’t thinks I’m missing out on anything actually worth watching. Also, I have an extensive po...er... um... DVD collection.
Otherwise, I just pay the 15 a month for HBO GO when they’re airing Game of Thrones, and leave it off the rest of the time.
The Mac is only barely more immune from hacking and malware than Windoze.
That is demonstrably untrue.
But in which direction? [...]
Actually, I'd be willing to stipulate that Macs are far more impervious to malware than a Windows box, REGARDLESS of the above stipulations (all that would make it too easy, right?), with the notable exception that the User cannot have been tricked by Social Engineering into ignoring all warnings and instead, installed a Trojan.
I think we can all agree that NO reasonable OS can guard against a User with sufficient permissions and insufficient smarts. And I will stipulate that macOS is, of course, no exception.
I was talking about the rando "Open this email, get pwned" type of stuff. That STILL happens all too often in the Windows world. I work in that environment every day, and can also read.
Not to be argumentative, and I almost hate to ask it, but do you remember when Apple shipped a production version of macOS where you could gain root by trying to login as root and just provided no password?
I think the argument could be made that macOS is USUALLY more secure, when someone at Apple has not royally cocked up (as they occasionally do,) and left the keys metaphorically hanging from the lock in the highly secure door.
Did anyone hear if Apple fired anyone over that debacle? Im curious.
The Mac is only barely more immune from hacking and malware than Windoze.
That is demonstrably untrue.
But in which direction? Are you asserting that the Mac* is no more immune to hackers and malware than a M$ Windows computer, or that it is FAR more? Can you substantiate your claim?
* By "Mac," I think we must agree because of the role the user plays as a sysadmin, that it's pointless because without qualification the word is functionally meaningless, to talk about a Mac generically. For the purposes of this discussion, I think we should limit the meaning of the word "Mac" to mean an Apple, Inc., built, offered for retail sale computer as part of the Mac line, (i.e., iMacs, Trash-Can Mac Pros, Mac Minis, and all variants of MacBook,) running a cleanly (or factory) installed copy of the latest version of macOS, which at any given time is the current version, that the "rootless" feature, or System Integrity Protection is and has always been enabled, that the "Allow apps downloaded from:" security settings has never been set to anything but "App Store" only, that firewall is enabled, that automatic updates is selected, and that all this was so BEFORE it was ever connected to the internet, and has remained so ever since. Therefore, excluded would be any Mac running any previous version of OS X or macOS, any Mac which has any updates that have ever not been immediately applied, any Mac on which any software NOT from Apple has ever been run, any "vintage" Mac that cannot run (or is not running) the latest stable/production release of the OS, and obviously any "Hackintosh" computers. Any Mac connected to the internet BEFORE all the security settings were selected must be excluded, which kind of means that MOST Macs would be excluded, since you'd have to connect yours TO the internet TO download security updates, meaning if you DID need an update right after you bought it... you'd have HAD to connect it to the internet BEFORE it was fully patched and up-to-date... (oops! that can't be counted,) and also any Mac for which you are not the first owner, as you can't prove what happened to it BEFORE you got it, and also any Mac which you've let any other people use under your login, or whom you have provided with their own login account on your machine, who was then allowed to use it (not completely supervised and observed,) by you. So honestly, there really aren't NEARLY as many Mac computers out there to make this comparison with as you might think or expect.
Obviously, any Mac running Bootcamp must also be excluded, at least when NOT booted into macOS.
What if instead of malware, we had MalWear? MalWear is something you can buy at a store (also called MalWear, or something similar,) which stocks war-surplus Independent Browncoats, guns that look like they should go "bang-bang" but instead go "pew-pew" or "zzaouuuu," and of course vaguely futuristic-looking yet simultaneously old-timey western-wear like what Captain Malcolm "Mal" Reynolds wears in the sci-fi/old-west series, "Firefly" (and of course, the film "Serenity"). I wouldn't mind having some of THAT kind of MalWear. I actually toyed with the idea of buying one of the jackets, but... guess I'm not enough of a Browncoat myself, after all. (I was raised on an Alliance world, (Earth that Was,) after all. It kind of spoils you.)
The T2 is found directly between the T1 and T3, and counting down from the base of the skull, it is the 9th vertebra. It serves as the anchor point for your second rib on your posterior side, which in turn connects anteriorly with your sternum at the sternal angle, (where the manubrium, or upper part of the sternum, meets the sternal body, (a.k.a. your breast bone,) around the front side of your thorax).
(Okay, I might have had to reach for the old anatomy textbook for SOME of that information...)
Slashdot Mirror
Iced coffee is an abomination. Do you also douse your Fillet Mignon with ketchup?
Iced coffee is not filet mignon with ketchup.
It's more like a desiccated hamburger that fell out of your kid's Happy Meal after he nodded off and rolled right under the driver's seat, then SAT there while you went on a road trip through the middle of Arizona in July, only to be discovered a month later.
People bringing coffee to work is considered pretty normal. People watching porn at a coffee shop isn't. That VP is making YouPorn look pretty stupid.
If watching porn at a coffee shop isn't normal, why does Starbucks have to make a company-wide rule against it? People watch porn everywhere, even if only behind their eyes in the sticky-floored movie theater of the mind.
I think I'm going to start a coffee shop called StarFucks. Not only MAY you watch porn on our wifi, you HAVE TO. (It's like Fight Club. "If this is your first night, you have to fight.") Also, our coffee won't taste like burnt, undrinkable swill, and it won't cost an obscene amount per cup.
Okay, I'm dreaming big... what did YOU dream about today? Another day sitting in class naked, without your homework?
[...] I don't care what website it is, I will ruthlessly block third party stuff. Your revenue model doesn't trump either my privacy or security.
Fuck advertisers, they're the reason why security on the internet is so fucking broken.
It’s also the reason the internet exists. If all advertising went away, (and I hate it myself and wish 99% of it would disappear, then maybe I’d stop using ad blockers,) and all the money went with it, either every site you’d visit would have a paywall and you’d have to log in to use it, or it simply woulnd’t exist. Every name you typed in would give you a DNS error or 404 Not Found error.... you’d try to go to Google (or your favorite search engine if not Google,) and try to search around to see what happened, and it would be down too.
You’d think it was the apocalypse and would wander outside and see a bunch of other people wandering the street in housecoats or else underwear, staring blinkingly at the sky. What’s going on, you’d shout to a neighbor, who’d stare at an object far, far behind you, and say, in a hollow, broken voice, ‘there’s no Google. It’s just... gone...”
You’d look all around, the horror dawning on you... no web ads... no internet. No web ADS! No internet. No ads, no search providers. No ad revenue, no INTERNET! Then you’d but it all together and shout, NO INTERNET!
Then the pitchforks and torches get broken out, and you don’t want to know what happens after THAT
Unfortunately, the ad blocker, in order to work, (if it works at all, I’ve tried a couple, and promptly deleted them,) on iOS needs permissions that would allow it to see everything you do. So if you use your iOS device for anything you don’t want whoever made the ad blocker to know, including keystrokes, don’t use an ad blocker.
Whenever I start seeing these things, here’s how I stop them:
Open Settings, go to Safari, then to Advanced, and set JavaScript to OFF.
That should solve it.
Unfortunately, it also renders roughly half the web completely useless.
BUT, half a web is more useful than no web because of this goddamned malvertisement bullshit.
ALSO, whenever it happens, complain to Apple. They get enough complaints, they’ll find a way to fix it, including building a blocker right into iOS, which is what they should have done a long damned time ago. Their site is “getsupport.apple.com” — bug them loudly and often. It’s the only way they’ll know that it’s happening.
Sounds like a great idea... except that with our luck, that only makes him stronger, too.
You ever see the movie, "The Blob?" I think he's kind of like that. What we need, if memory serves, is a vast refrigeration system in a place to lure him into... that's how they stopped The Blob, wasn't it?
How much will China have to funnel to the Trump Crime Family “organization” or Trump regime’s interests to make this go away, I can’t help but wonder.
Won’t hurt Apple, it’ll just mean that your next iPhone will be made in Indonesia, or Malaysia, or some other place with little or no environmental regulation or protections for workers, laws against modern slavery / human trafficking, etc. SURE as hell it’s not going to cost APPLE money... it’s Apple. They don’t pay taxes, or follow laws, or whatever. They just find ways around it, like parking money in a fake subsidiary in Ireland. Since we all found out about that one, they had to pay some small part of what they owed, or may one day have to, and meanwhile, things will get rearranged to some OTHER tax haven or dodge.
They’re all a bunch of goddamned fucking crooks, all the way around.
Sent from my iPad.
Oops... shit.
For a guy so very, VERY into privacy, Richard M. Stallman, son of Terry and Maud Stallman, of 325 North Maple Street in Sheffield, * ... sure does like to talk publicly a lot, using his own name.
Does really no one at all besides myself find that odd?
It’s a bit like a scantily-clad, gorgeous, and voluptuous woman going out into the public square and shouting at people to stop paying attention to her and that they’re DEFINITELY not to look at her heaving, ample breasts.
(Pauses a moment to picture this mental image.)
MMMmmmm yeah. Sorry, what was I talking about?
* J/K on all that made-up detail, LOL ... though how funny would it be if ANY part of it were correct? Hehehehe...
I know they say ‘brevity is the sole of wit,’ but unfortunately, brevity does not come easily for me. I wax laconic for several hours a day, typically... when I’m asleep. The rest of the time, I tend to the verbose. Speaking of which, though, it’s about time I went and waxed laconic for several hours.
Cow flatulence, according to the article, is responsible for as much greenhouse gas emmissions as the transportation industry. Without changing the diets of cattle, or forcing everyone to drive electric cars, carbon dioxide emissions could be cut in half by combining these two things so that the same objectives are achieved by a single action instead of two:
RIDE COWS!
Look at the situation. We have like, billions of cows, most of them standing around doing NOTHING. We, as a society, produce X gigatons of CO2 moving stuff around, while the cows farting also produces roughly X gigatons of the same gas in the same amount of time, resulting in a total of 2 * X gigatons of CO2 per time period.
If, however, we all abandoned our cars and trucks, and just rode cows, we could ELIMINATE X gigatons of CO2, just by doing that. PLUS, as a free bonus, EVERYONE gets heated leather seats to ride around on, no more cheap, shitty vinyl or cloth seats! AND If your ride ever breaks down, instead of calling AAA or a tow service and paying hundreds of dollars, you just call your nearest friend, who rides his cow out, bringing his wife and kids, plus a BIG ‘OL BUCKET of BBQ sauce and some fire wood, and instead of your day being ruined, you get barbeque BURGERS and STEAKS! IT’S A WIN-WIN, FOLKS!
IF your cow was lactating at the time she broke down, guess what? You get milkshakes to wash those burgers down with! You know it’s the right thing to do! Write your member of congress or senator, or preferably both, and DEMAND we eliminate all gasoline and diesel-powered cars and trucks from America’s highways and bighways, and replace them with good ‘ol BESSY!
Shouldn't that be more like Office 364? I mean, to be fair. Unless it's out more than a day...
If they use the same class divisions as they do for conventional air travel, it will allow everyone access to space. They'll have first-class seats that will be padded, with all the amenities, and go for 20 million dollars a pop.
They'll have business class, which will cost between 350,000 and 5 million dollars per ticket, but you'll have to bring your own pillow, blanket, space suit, and acceleration chair. Hope you can find ultra-light-weight ones, because each additional pound costs 32,000 dollars. Oh, also, there's no bathrooms provided for you, nor water, nor heat, nor radiation shielding, so you'll have to bring your own one of each of those, too. BUT at least, they'll get to ride INSIDE the spacecraft.
The class below that, Economy-Plus Class, which will sell tickets for between 800 and 13,000 dollars each, is a far cheaper option, blending affordability with the barest of essentials: thrust.
Using Economy-Plus Class tickets consist of being allowed to hold onto a 100-foot-long, carbon-fiber and stainless steel braided, heat-resistant tether, and cling to it below the rocket as it heads to orbit. Like with business class, you will need to bring everything you might need or want to have for yourself, and again, it's 32,000 per pound, but Economy Plus Class does not provide a standard courtesy weight included in the cost of the ticket, so if you weigh 100 pounds on Earth, that's 3.2 million dollars that will have to be paid for, as a weight surcharge, before counting your space suit, etc.
If you buy a century in advance, it only costs 800 dollars, which is how you can get one for that low a price. One ticket per customer, only, however, and of course, they're neither transferable nor upgradeable. A 150% cancellation fee applies, so if you've decided after buying the ticket that you'd rather not go, just don't show up. Bear in mind, of course, that as the rocket climbs, all the people hanging from the tethers are going to be bathed in rocket exhaust, which basically means they're going to end up feeling a bit like marshmallows being toasted over a campfire, upside down, but instead of a campfire, it's an acetylene torch. Still beats flying coach though...
Speaking of which, there's one class even cheaper than Econ+, which is of course, the aforementioned venerable old "Coach" Class. In coach, the tickets only cost $0.99 each. You may wonder how it's so cheap for them. Well... Flying to the stars in Coach Class consists of showing up to the launchpad on the day of the flight, and lining up facing the rocket. Then they show you a picture of the rocket in flight, and slowly raise the picture higher and higher in front of the passengers while making roaring and whooshing noises. Then, as the picture of the flying rocket gets about as high up as the guy holding the picture can hold it, someone steps up behind each of the passengers and simultaneously shoots them all in the back of the head.
Then they dump the corpses into a mass grave. The $0.99 ticket price covers the cost of the bullet, and amortizes a portion of the costs of the gun, the steam-shovel, and digging the giant pit for the grave, of course. Religious services, if desired or required, will have to be arranged and paid for beforehand. (NASA's not running a charity, after all.)
In other words, it would be pretty close to exactly like flying coach class on an airplane, but without the long wait at the end to retrieve your baggage from the carousel.
Upon reflection, it occurs to me that if you're flying Economy Plus, you're really going to fare just about as well as the folks in Coach, and you're paying a LOT more for it, so you're really just squandering your money.
Know what else causes depression? Depressing shit. Social media is a mirror held up to real life, (perhaps an incredibly twisted, deceptive, fun-house mirror, but still a mirror,) and if you find shit in real life depressing, (and who the fuck wouldn’t?) you’re likely to find what you see in the mirror that IS social media depressing too. In other words, “well, DUH...”
You only get one life - live it in the real world.
Stop using social media.
Turn off the algorithms.
Stop watching 24/7 opinion channels pretending to be news.
There is nothing positive in any of it.
...posted someone to slashdot, which is just as much social media as Facebook. Just because you can’t post photos and videos (or if you can, I’ve no idea how,) doesn’t mean it isn’t social media.
Let’s go down the checklist:
Use your name or adopt a pseudonym by which you’re known on the site: check
Have capital ascribed to you (“Likes” there, Karma and Mod Points here,): check
Continuously running news feed of information submitted by community: check
Has facilities to check and see how many people agree with you: check
Provides the ability to have “Friends” (and on slashdot, “Foes,): check
You get out of it what you can, and what you get depends on you: check
Yeah. Slashdot is social media too. Being at least historically vaguely tech-centric doesn’t make it anything other than social media.
We are sucking ... really? Normally I’m mister gloom and doom, but I’ve just had a really good roast beef sandwich, so I’m feeling up. Every time someone bitches about how humanity has mined eleventy zillion tons of this, that, or the other precious kind of material out of the earth, try to remember that there are eleventy leventy leventy go-gadzillion zillion tons of earth, and eleventy zillion is a minescule drop in the bucket. Also, the earth doesn’t miss it. 99.9999999% of what we’ve mined hasn’t actually LEFT Earth. It’s simply gone from being buried in the top 0.0000001% of the crust to being a few dozen meters higher, and oh, by the way... it’s going right back where it came from in a blink of an eye in geological time.
Human beings are as natural as any other thing. We are a product of nature. We’re just making minor changes to the top 0.0000001% of the earth’s surface for a heartbeat out of time. Earth will blink, and we’ll all be gone. Oh, and as for all the species we’re killing... 99+% of species that had ever lived died before we were born. All the ones we wiped out and all the ones we’re going to will. Be. Replaced. I promise you.
They’ll be replaced by the very thing that made them in the first place: the repetitious and space-filling nature of life itself, and the existence of a niche that stands unfilled. When something dies, it leaves a vacuum, and nature fills it. This happens whether the reason the void comes to be is mankind decides some creature’s skin would look great on his women, or because the balance of oxygen and carbon dioxide changes, or the planet suddenly gets too cold or too warm for too long, or a giant chunk of rock strikes the Yucatán peninsula and blasts out a plume of dust and gas into space that, upon reentry, briefly turns the entire biosphere into an oven for a few hours, and kills everything.
Dinosaurs once roamed the Earth. Along comes an asteroid and by the next day, they’re all dead. Something rose to took their place, and in relatively short order too. When we’re gone, the same will happen again.
For all our bluster and bravado, we’re just building castles out of sand, in the vast span of time that our species has existed, we are metaphorically between crashes of waves upon the shore. The next big wave will wipe most of what we’ve built away, and in another million years, you will never know we were here. Two million, tops.
So please everyone just relax, have a coke and a smile. We’re all just here for a little while. All the birdies and bunnies we off will be replaced. Maybe with rather different ones, but there’s nothing magical, certainly nothing preordained or special about the ones that are here now, except that they happen to be the ones that are here now, and that’s just coincidence. They certainly weren’t meant to be here, or designed to be here except in the sense that they evolved to fill their respective niches.
As did we. Every actor has his turn upon the stage, stumbles through his lines, and then bows out. As shall we.*
Damn... suddenly channeling William Shakespeare and shit... sorry about that. That was one seriously good sandwich.
* Unless we’re wiped out by a gamma-ray burst that sterelizes everything in our part of the galaxy, in which case, yeah, Earth’s dead, but that has probably little to do with us.
There’s a gazillion tons of sand. If the sand is too smooth and round, all you have to do is come up with a cost and energy efficient way to process the sand into something with lots of jagged edges, and two birds are killed with one stone: the problem of there not being enough good, usable sand, and two, the problem with you’re not being rich yet.
The obvious approach, I think, is put the sand in a machine that fires it at high speed into a hard, flat surface, causing the round, smooth grains to shatter into lots of jagged pieces. Then after they strike the surface, you have them fall into a selecting sieve that sends jagged pieces in one direction, (towards the bags where they will be packaged for sale,) and on the other hand towards a recycling loop that sends it to smash into the target again.
That’s just one idea. Here’s another: take the cheap and unusable sand, melt it, then pulverize it. Yes, these both require energy but I’m sure each one can be done, with a little scientific and engineering wizardry, in a way that ends up being so efficient that the devices that are used pay for themselves.
Hell, you can probably pulverize them AND purify them, extracting impurities all in a single process, if it’s designed right.
Engineers and scientists... get on it! There’s fortunes to be made! Oxides of silicon are the twenty first century’s OIL! Just need to work out how to refine it!
Any computer system that CAN run Windows and Apple iMacOS-X (or whatever they’re calling it this week,) but NOT GNU/Linux is, as far as I’m concerned, defective by design.
Yet another reason added to the growing stack of reasons not to buy anything from Apple ever again.
When my current crop of Apple devices is gone, so am I, even if that means having to buy things to replace ones that I currently have, even if they still at least sort of work. At that time, they’ll get replaced anyway, and sold off if they’re still worth anything, which I doubt, since Apple’s insane pace of cranking out new, and marginally improved or differentiated products with different names just means their old stuff goes obsolete faster and faster. At this point, you’d be an idiot to buy anything from Apple, as it’ll be obsolete before you even get home.
Yeah, Apple might not miss me as a customer, but if there are enough of me, they will eventually feel it and it will be too late then, because Apple is going to have to wait until I get Alzheimer’s for me to even consider buying another thing from them at this point or in the future. Not sure I’d forget even then how much they’ve been pissing me off.
Come to think of it, pissing customers off is a great way to ensure you never see them again. Case-in-point: it will be a cold day in hell before I spend another dollar on a Microsoft product, give AT&T another dime, or Sprint another nickel, or any one of a dozen or so other companies, another goddamned penny. Apple has joined that list of companies ineligible for my further patronage.
You build shit that’s broken on purpose, and you don’t get me as a customer. Maybe I’m alone in this, but somehow, I kind of doubt it.
Apple is rotten to the core, probably because it’s riddled with worms.
RIP, Apple.
Read, bitches!
I’m holding out for LVPQDR5Z99 chips. The more letters and numbers it has, the more awesome it is, right? Why in 2018 are people settling for only DOUBLE data rate (DDR,) we should hold out at least for triple data rate (TDR) as a minimum!
Honestly... are they seriously going to keep jamming more letters and numbers onto things?
Will there be rotary-dialed telephones too, that I can call up, wait on hold for 10 minutes, then read off a 20 digit number, one digit at a time, for each item I want to purchase?
How do I opt out of this bullshit? It's just an annoying waste of paper.
The "records" are wrong, so they may think they know, but they don't. If anyone asks, I'll tell them that whether or how I voted is none of their, (or anyone else's but mine and the secretary of state in my state who runs the voting system,) goddamned motherfucking business, and that they can fuck off if they don't like it.
I consider the right to vote to imply the right to abstain in protest, which is itself a form of voting. I will not be shamed or intimidated into either not voting, OR voting.
Fuck you if you don't like it. My vote is MINE, to bestow or NOT as I fucking goddamned well please.
Sick of this fucking bullshit.
It’s. A. Trick.
Get an axe.
My cable bill has decreased 100 percent in the same interval of time. I like it that way. Pink Floyd said it best: I’ve got thirteen channels of shit on the TV to choose from.
That’s about how many I get over the air. But whenever I go somewhere where they have cable, I find that there’s a larger selection but it’s just as much shit as the dozen or so air channels I can pick up with rabbit ears. So why pay extra for... more shit?
Thanks to ATSC, the channels I CAN pull down are pretty clear; although I never watch them. I just leave it hooked up there because I already own it and in case the shit hits the fan and I have no internet... in inclement weather, for example, I have the ability to watch news broadcasts. I don’t thinks I’m missing out on anything actually worth watching. Also, I have an extensive po...er... um... DVD collection.
Otherwise, I just pay the 15 a month for HBO GO when they’re airing Game of Thrones, and leave it off the rest of the time.
The Mac is only barely more immune from hacking and malware than Windoze.
That is demonstrably untrue.
But in which direction? [...]
Actually, I'd be willing to stipulate that Macs are far more impervious to malware than a Windows box, REGARDLESS of the above stipulations (all that would make it too easy, right?), with the notable exception that the User cannot have been tricked by Social Engineering into ignoring all warnings and instead, installed a Trojan.
I think we can all agree that NO reasonable OS can guard against a User with sufficient permissions and insufficient smarts. And I will stipulate that macOS is, of course, no exception.
I was talking about the rando "Open this email, get pwned" type of stuff. That STILL happens all too often in the Windows world. I work in that environment every day, and can also read.
Not to be argumentative, and I almost hate to ask it, but do you remember when Apple shipped a production version of macOS where you could gain root by trying to login as root and just provided no password?
I think the argument could be made that macOS is USUALLY more secure, when someone at Apple has not royally cocked up (as they occasionally do,) and left the keys metaphorically hanging from the lock in the highly secure door.
Did anyone hear if Apple fired anyone over that debacle? Im curious.
The Mac is only barely more immune from hacking and malware than Windoze.
That is demonstrably untrue.
But in which direction? Are you asserting that the Mac* is no more immune to hackers and malware than a M$ Windows computer, or that it is FAR more? Can you substantiate your claim?
* By "Mac," I think we must agree because of the role the user plays as a sysadmin, that it's pointless because without qualification the word is functionally meaningless, to talk about a Mac generically. For the purposes of this discussion, I think we should limit the meaning of the word "Mac" to mean an Apple, Inc., built, offered for retail sale computer as part of the Mac line, (i.e., iMacs, Trash-Can Mac Pros, Mac Minis, and all variants of MacBook,) running a cleanly (or factory) installed copy of the latest version of macOS, which at any given time is the current version, that the "rootless" feature, or System Integrity Protection is and has always been enabled, that the "Allow apps downloaded from:" security settings has never been set to anything but "App Store" only, that firewall is enabled, that automatic updates is selected, and that all this was so BEFORE it was ever connected to the internet, and has remained so ever since. Therefore, excluded would be any Mac running any previous version of OS X or macOS, any Mac which has any updates that have ever not been immediately applied, any Mac on which any software NOT from Apple has ever been run, any "vintage" Mac that cannot run (or is not running) the latest stable/production release of the OS, and obviously any "Hackintosh" computers. Any Mac connected to the internet BEFORE all the security settings were selected must be excluded, which kind of means that MOST Macs would be excluded, since you'd have to connect yours TO the internet TO download security updates, meaning if you DID need an update right after you bought it... you'd have HAD to connect it to the internet BEFORE it was fully patched and up-to-date... (oops! that can't be counted,) and also any Mac for which you are not the first owner, as you can't prove what happened to it BEFORE you got it, and also any Mac which you've let any other people use under your login, or whom you have provided with their own login account on your machine, who was then allowed to use it (not completely supervised and observed,) by you. So honestly, there really aren't NEARLY as many Mac computers out there to make this comparison with as you might think or expect.
Obviously, any Mac running Bootcamp must also be excluded, at least when NOT booted into macOS.
What if instead of malware, we had MalWear? MalWear is something you can buy at a store (also called MalWear, or something similar,) which stocks war-surplus Independent Browncoats, guns that look like they should go "bang-bang" but instead go "pew-pew" or "zzaouuuu," and of course vaguely futuristic-looking yet simultaneously old-timey western-wear like what Captain Malcolm "Mal" Reynolds wears in the sci-fi/old-west series, "Firefly" (and of course, the film "Serenity"). I wouldn't mind having some of THAT kind of MalWear. I actually toyed with the idea of buying one of the jackets, but... guess I'm not enough of a Browncoat myself, after all. (I was raised on an Alliance world, (Earth that Was,) after all. It kind of spoils you.)
The T2 is found directly between the T1 and T3, and counting down from the base of the skull, it is the 9th vertebra. It serves as the anchor point for your second rib on your posterior side, which in turn connects anteriorly with your sternum at the sternal angle, (where the manubrium, or upper part of the sternum, meets the sternal body, (a.k.a. your breast bone,) around the front side of your thorax).
(Okay, I might have had to reach for the old anatomy textbook for SOME of that information...)