Android already WAS the mobile version of Windows, in that it was a case where someone elseâ(TM) work was taken by a company that grew really huge with the help of something they did not create, and who paid very little or nothing for it, and then proceeded to build an EMPIRE on it, while in reality, objectively, it is an ugly kludge of cobbled-together, mismatched parts that has become, despite its many, many MANY flaws, THE big thing that people eventually either come to love, or love to hate.
So Microsoft giving its irrelevant blessing just looks like an octogenarian announcing that he is joining a punk rock band, and learning to skateboard and wants to do body shots to convince his great great great grandkids he is cool.
(Settle in, folks. This one REALLY got away from me.)
People seem shocked when the laws of economics are proven over and over and over again. You can't make money out of nothing, or rather wealth out of nothing. You might think finding a seam of gold in a hillside you've claimed, or a giant, perfect pearl in an oyster, or a diamond, etc., is wealth out of nothing but it's not. The reason that those things are commonly held as being worth something, (often quite a bit,) is that they are relatively hard to come by, nearly impossible to fake, (at least until recently... I know, there's fool's gold, and gold-plated solid lead, or fake-looking diamonds, but throughout most of history, the technology to create fakes has rarely raced meaningfully ahead of the technology to detect them and make faking them only briefly ever really profitable. (Some of that technology includes things penalties for fraud, of course, but it's not like there was more than maybe a few years during which someone could fake any of these things and evade detection reliably and long-enough term to be able to extract or accrete about themselves a serious amount of wealth formerly and rightly belonging to others.)
Wealth is simply the accumulation of money; that which represents value, and is a negotiable and highly portable and durable form of storage and exchange that can be, generally, more or less freely converted back and forth between stored value, and a good, service, or other valuable mention. Money that is not exchangeable for anything is quite literally WORTHLESS. Think of Deutschmarks following World War I, when it's said that people would cart whole wheelbarrow-fulls of them to buy a loaf of bread. Consider places that have experienced hyperinflation, where the government is printing trillion-dollar (or trillion-whatever the currency is called) notes to be used as petty cash. Sure, you might be able to do other things with the bills, like write on them, shred them to start fires, wipe your ass with them, but as a medium of wealth storage and exchange they're worthless. If someone offered you a billion dollars to do some small favor, an unpleasant or annoying task, but not excessively so, obviously most people would do it, once convinced the offer was genuine, and there were no other strings attached... unless of course, while determining if the offer were legit, the person found out that the reason he or she was being offered a billion dollars is that overnight, the dollar's value has crashed so that now a billion dollars is worth less than a penny. Suddenly, most people might be disinclined to do that favor or minor task. Especially if the person asking for the favor first said, "have you heard the big news," and the other person said "no."
"But what, my dear Mister Sinister," you might ask, "is the point of that and how does it relate to Uber?" I am so glad you might ask, as I was just getting to that. Eventually, after this brief furtherance of my digression. Also, please... it's just Hallux. Mister Sinister was my FATHER. (LOL)
Money is only worth what it can be traded for. If someone who can issue currency does so in wild disproportion to the value of the economy that the money is essentially a share of, the money quickly loses value. The more ABOVE the amount at which the value is stable printed or issued impacts the value of each unit in the economy or circulation. See... if there were a trillion US dollars floating around, and overnight, the government quietly printed another trillion and started either giving it away or buying things with that money, the total value of the US economy will not have changed meaningfully; actually it will shrink a little due to the expense of printing all that money pointlessly, (let's further suppose it were unnecessary to print that,) and the market volatility and panic buying of supplies that would result would do further damage. BUT even once the dust has settled, the printing of a second trillion makes the original trillion (and each of
At best, a robot is basically something with at least a rudimentary decision-making system, taking input data, performing computations upon it and/or comparing it to previously stored data, that then arrives at a conclusion, and as a result makes and then implements a decision. In the case of a killer robot, (which we must recall is NOT a robot that does nothing whatsoever but kill from the instant it is created, to the instant it is destroyed, but rather a robot that is capable of killing, and which may, under the right circumstances, do so,) we're just talking about something that presumably will only kill under a certain specific set of circumstances, which upon being 'hijacked,' (by, one presumes, someone with malicious intent,) begins killing people whom it was not originally intended to kill, or to kill under circumstances other than those the people whose killer robot it was, intended.
What is a robot? It's something with at least a rudimentary decision-making system, within or controlling a chassis that can, in theory, in some cases, when designed and built or modified to be able to do so, move autonomously about. What is a killer robot? A robot that beyond the aforementioned requirements to be a robot, is physically capable of killing (people).
I remember this one time, I saw all over the news a couple of years ago, reports of this one day when a chassis, whose controlling decision-making system had gone haywire, (in this case, the killer robot was made of meat, but that's not really relevant,) went into a hotel room in Las Vegas, Nevada, high above and in sight of a nearby music venue. The rudimentary decision-making apparatus driving it, which had, up until that point only killed people when it was appropriate. (In this one instance of this model of killer robot, I believe that to the best of anyone's knowledge, the circumstances had never previously occurred in proximity to it since the day it went operational, decades earlier, when it would have been appropriate for it to kill, and so it had never killed anyone before that day. I could be wrong on that point, but what had happened before is not really relevant to the case, so... moving on... but if it had, it would probably not have been free to move about as it was, so for the sake of argument, let's say it had not.)
But on this fateful day, this killer robot's programming somehow got screwed up, and it decided that it needed to kill a large number of people, and picked the people at that music venue as its target. (I'm not going to speculate HOW or WHY its programming got screwed up, but suffice it to say that despite all that it had likely been through over decades of operation, it had never previously gone nuts and killed anyone,) and so it came to pass that it concluded that it was right and proper for it to use one or more weapons of war, either designed, modified, or rigged-up to maximize lethality, to kill and maim, or at least grievously wound, a large number of people in the music venue across from the hotel.
Now... you may dispute my equivocating a (human...ish, anyway,) mass-shooter to a robot, but at the end of the day, there's no meaningful difference. You have who or what was NOT supposed to kill random (or specific) strangers, and had for a long time managed somehow not to, and then one day, it does, and it kills a BUNCH, owing to being hijacked either by a hacker who figures out how to remotely control it, or a collection of bad ideas, improperly dealt-with anger or stress, or a desire to harm as many other people as possible. Again, the result is the same. Large numbers of dead and injured being made out of previously healthy, presumably happy individuals, by someone or some thing that is difficult to stop. (Recall the efforts that had to be made to stop the guy. Suppose he got away? Suppose he'd managed to take out the cops in the hallway, jump out the window and parachute to a waiting motorcycle, detonating the room and evidence behind him, and speeding into the night o
My biggest complaint about Haiku OS is that there are no haikus anywhere. Not in the comments, not in the name. Talk about a missed opportunity! I refuse to use any OS that so seriously misrepresents itself.
But your complaint was itself not in the form of a haiku either. Here, let me try:
Misappellation They should have to change its name Call it something else
Haiku are poems Not operating systems Do please try again
Heheheh... and a few more just for fun...
Years like drops of rain A river flows, splash of time New Haiku released
Blood, sweat, many tears BeOS' ghost in baby's cries What had died, reborn
I liked that one so much I'm going to reuse part of it...
Blood, sweat, many tears Would-be users waited years Can we install now?
YOU may stream whatever you like, and I respect your decision to do that. But that's apples, and we're talking about ORANGES here, friend. I'm talking about Sony making, (I'm suddenly struggling to remember the particulars of this story...) Playstation games downloadable, but in such a way, IIRC, that you can only play them if the console can verify that you're allowed to play them.
It sounds like you didn't pay attention to the story the first time either, because we're talking about PlayStation Now here. A subscription service where you pay monthly to access a library of streamable games for no extra cost. That you can also now download and play offline.
No, I read it, and I know that we’re talking about Sony and their Playstation. I was making analogies, and yeah, I may have made a hard left, gone offroading, and strayed WAY off into the weeds with that one, but I didn’t actually, IMHO, go completely off a cliff.
It’s just kind of my style. If I ever right an autobiography, it’ll start with, “I was born in a little town called,... wait, let me back up a bit and tell you one other thing first that you’ll need to know first, in order to know, I mean to really and truly understand, to grok, as Robert Heinlein would have perhaps put it, what I’m talking about here,” and the rest of the book will be a nested, recursive, 700+ page digression.
Please keep in mind that this is beta-quality software, which means it is feature complete but still contains known and unknown bugs. While we are mostly confident in its stability, we cannot provide assurances against data loss.
...just like the last several releases of M$ “Windows,” Apple’s ”iMacOSx,” (or whatever they’re calling it this week,) and “iOS,” (which I’ve been quietly amusing myself by reading that word as if it rhymes with bulldoze, phonetically: “aye-ohze,” because frankly, it’s a stupid name, and it deserves to get made fun of).
It’s okay. We’re used to it. All computer & software users are beta testers, nowadays, whether they want to be or not, whether they even realize it or not.
As an aside, I’ll add that I totally believe him, as what he’s saying makes sense given what we’ve seen from Apple in the Post Jobs era, and I wish him well, and the very best of luck. But he’s gonna lose. It’s a shame, but... he’s going to lose, and if they haven’t already, they may turn around and sue him, at which point you don’t use a ruler to measure how deep the shit he’s gonna be in is, you use a giant spool of line with knots tied in it every six FEET.
[...] Eastman, who is representing himself in court [...]
Dumbass.
It doesn’t sound like this guy’s a lawyer, and even those who are lawyers know better than to represent themselves in court, (that’s a bad look,) know they are less likely, statistically-speaking, to be successful in their case, and this guy is going up against a trillion+ dollar company with a fucking ARMY of lawyers, all by himself.
I don’t know if he’s got tapes and hidden video of these guys having corporate meetings that include satanic rituals, pledging allegiance to ISIS, filming child pornography and then EATING the flesh of the babies they just raped, using a cut-up American flag as bibs, napkins and tablecloth, and then wiping their assess with copies of the US Constritution and the Bible, or if he thinks he’s King Leonidas, Spartacus, and “Braveheart’s” William Wallace all rolled into one, with a little King David on top, but he fucking better be... because otherwise, he’s going to end up washing cars in Apple’s parking lot, AND paying Apple for the privilege by the time they're done with him.
What, you mean like instead of paying for individual audio CDs you could pay a flat monthly fee and listen to anything you like?
Or instead of paying for individual movie DVDs or TV show boxsets you could pay a flat monthly fee and watch anything you like?
That's not really what I was talking about. Streaming something for a flat monthly fee is the cable-TV model of buying entertainment, applied to what used to be (and still is, though once upon a time it was the only game in town, especially if you want portability,) broadcast over FM radio.
What we're talking about is when you BUY a COPY of something, and it's DRMed so you can only play it on THEIR equipment and/or it has to phone home, NOT to get information needed for playing the media, but to get PERMISSION.
Streaming media is NOT the same thing as... look, here's one more metaphor.
Suppose you bought a dead-tree paper book. It's a book. A book. A thousands-of-years-old-technology, technically, BOOK, in that it's some number of sheets of flat, foldable or rollable or bound-along-one-edge-pieces of durable flat material, (durable at least compared to say, writing on a flour tortilla, for example,) with marks made on it, probably with some kind of dye-carrying liquid, ink or paint, or perhaps traces of graphite, or something similar, or something made to resemble such marks. Now... you buy one and you own THAT copy of THAT book. Suppose somehow, though, that the one YOU bought has magic powers, such that all the pages appear BLANK inside until it telepathically communicated with the seller the identity of who's trying to read it, (you,) to make SURE that you are the person THAT copy were sold to?
I know this is getting silly, but to me, not having to worry about losing the ability to listen to, watch, read, etc., what I buy because someone ELSE decides they don't want me to be able to, or they go out of business or whatever, is important.
See, some people don't want to stream things. Some people aren't just going to ASSUME that whatever I might want to hear is always going to be available, accessible, and, oh, what if I don't have broadband internet access at some point if I travel somewhere? Or if net-neutrality gets undone and suddenly your ISP wants you to pay not a monthly fee with a cap, but per kilobyte?
I know it's old-fashioned, nowadays, but I still have a CD collection, and a DVD collection, and a Blueray disc collection that one of these days I'm going to replace with DVDs because I've decided it was pointless and stupid to "upgrade" to Blueray, since on MY TV, and likely any TV I'm going to have for a long time doesn't display pictures or play sound meaningfully better than what's on a DVD anyway, and I don't have to worry about some new DVD movie demanding I update my player with cryptographic variables so it can decode the damned movie, unlike some formats and technologies I could mention COUGHbluerayCOUGH COUGH... also, for the nearterm, at least, they're still making DVDs, and even if they stop, I'm pretty sure enough DVDs have been produced now that I could never watch them all if I had nothing to do for the rest of my natural life but watch fucking movies... so... yeah.
When I was a kid and had cassette tapes with all my music on them, and a small CD collection, and my father listened to his vinyl 45's and 78's, or his reel-to-reel tape copies of the same, (to keep from wearing out the grooves or cocking up the needles, since they were getting hard to find, or expensive or both,) I used to think it was funny, laughably old-fashioned, but you know what? It worked. And his old Teac A-6300 (IIRC) didn't ever phone home to ask PERMISSION to play a tape. Every so often he'd clean the heads with a q-tip, and then he'd put on a reel, wind the tape under the tensioner, across the head, up and around, the other reel, and press play. It would make this satisfying noise I can't
Change your topic to "someone i liked when they were on my side but hate now because Trump and fuck the truth I only want points" and at least I would respect you for being honest
I'm confused how anyone could think that I think Trump is (or ever was, or will be,) anything but a bag of flaming dog shit left on America's porch. Have you perhaps ASSumed what I think based upon a misinterpretation of what I wrote?
Oh, PS, BTW... Trump has, to the best of my knowledge, had no meaningful interaction with nor anything to say about Assange besides farting his stupid uneducated opinions out of his face-anus for years.
The guy with an at least quasi-legitimate beef with Assange was the last, (as of now,) President of the United States, Barrack Obama, a man whom I neither voted for nor supported nor liked, though I wouldn't dispute the legitimacy of his presidency, despite not being a fan, unlike the current illegitimate occupant of the White House.
Sounds like you decided what I meant without really thing about what I wrote, and decided to try to write a witty-sounding response attacking me as someone who says "fuck the truth," (which is very fucking funny,) and failed miserably.
I can see why you posted as an anonymous coward though. Makes sense. But why not log in, (I'm sure you've got a login,) and have a real discussion, instead of flinging feces, huh?
My question is this. Is it our turn to laugh at, well, NOT ALL Android fanboys, but the ones who take to places like this and mock Apple, Inc. product users whenever there's a problem in Appletania, is now our time to point and laugh?
I thought Apple was going to focus on internal improvements and making things better and more secure, not flashier and more exciting. Then they release the iPhone ECKS-ESS (and, I assume, ECKS-SMACKS, too,) and sure enough, it's new and flashy and emphatically NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME. Apple has all the credibility of a Google telling folks they're not evil at this point.
Apple is really trying to see exactly how much crap their fans will take before leaving their ecosystem.
Google will pretend to change things, and more quietly implement what we'll call, for convenience's sake, Plan B. If they get caught, there'll be an excuse for why it's not the same thing as they were doing before, they'll apologize, promise to change, possibly fire someone and/or rearrange bits of the company, and even more quietly implement whatever they will call it, but we may as well call it Plan C. If THAT gets leaked or discovered...
Why do you think they call it ALPHABET?!? They have at least 26 plans for how to screw users over and rip them off and get even richer, and if they exhaust those, they'll either move on to another, perhaps starting with the Greek, (Plan Alpha, Plan Beta, etc.,) or perhaps start incorporating numbers.
Maybe they'll even try to change their name to "Alphanumeric". Shit... I should see if there's already one of those and if not trademark THAT, and buy-up the domain name... nah. OTOH, I don't really care enough to bother looking. But that is kind of a cool name, right?
For people who regard Android as suspect, and while chafing at the restrictions of Apple's "walled garden," we still use it because it is simply more secure, despite occasional problems. HOWEVER, whenever there *IS* a security problem, error, oversight, or let's call it what it is, a fuckup, committed by Apple, Android boosters, (or at least, those among them who tend to be assholes,) go NUTS and take to sites like this one, slashdot, and laugh about how we're all idiots for buying Apple products, especially as they often cost more than competitors, because of the benefits they provide, such as overall better security and user experience, most of the time.
My question is this. Is it our turn to laugh at, well, NOT ALL Android fanboys, but the ones who take to places like this and mock Apple, Inc. product users whenever there's a problem in Appletania, is now our time to point and laugh?
SERIOUSLY THOUGH...
This is not the reason I don't use Android, or any product running on Android. Nothing really against the Linux kernel it runs on, but the rest of the OS around it is, in my experience, a sloppy, inconsistent, grotesque, pain in the ass KLUDGE of cobbled together crap that suffers from problems like this all the time, and all the perceived disadvantages you have to put up with using an Apple, or specifically an iOS device, iPhones, iPads, etc., you'll get just the same when you use Android, though the reputation for "openness" that you might mistakenly think makes Android "open" is false, or at least distorted or exaggerated. The fact that Android was bough-out/taken over by Google, (which people maybe were okay with because, you know, "don't be evil",) has made Android basically Google's iOS. Except instead of a company bilking you for overpriced hardware to cover all the background stuff like free software updates, maintaining available storage and data access through iCloud, etc., Google has to make that same money, (and they make LOTS) selling your information, selling YOU, in essence, to their advertisers.
I will pay Google the following backwards compliment: at least they were honest about becoming evil, when they ditched their motto. Android is the fruit of this poisoned tree that is Google, where you think you're getting the handset at cost, (or the software on it, anyway,) and paying what you pay for the device ONLY to cover the cost+profit of the actual company that made the device, such as LG or Samsung, etc., and not much if any money is getting kicked back to Google, (or "Alphabet," as they're pretending they're calling themselves now, almost certainly for nefarious, if not outright evil purposes). The reality though, is that Google is making money off you using Android devices, and it's a devil's bargain.
I knew that Myst was a hot game, but every time I tried to play it I got bored really quickly and really didn't have any idea what I was supposed to be doing.
That was what was revolutionary about it. The goal was to explore, and solve the various puzzles, rather than walking around and shooting things or hacking and slashing at monsters, etc. In the process, you pick up sheets of paper, (essentially rewards for solving the puzzles,) that turn out to be pages missing from one of a couple of books, and insert them into one of these books in the foyer of the central building on the main island of Myst, on the two shelves just inside the door there. As you do so, you get clearer and clearer indications of what (or who, rather,) is trapped in the two books, and piece together a kind of riddle about who they are, and decide whom to help by completing the books by reinserting the missing pages.
In case you should ever play again, I won't spoil it for you, if you still have your old copy and a machine capable of playing it. If not, and you're interested, Good Old Games (gog.com) sells copies made for modern computers with (ugh) M$ Windows XP through 9 (or 10, as M$ calls it,) for only a few dollars, and the Apple Mac App Store sells a copy for iMacOSx (or whatever they're calling it this week,) for under 20. The Apple Mac version has an extended ending beyond the original and is remastered. I imagine the GOG version for M$ Windows is the same way, though I can't swear to it.
I realized as I fell into the fissure that the book would not be destroyed as I had planned. It continued falling into that starry expanse of which I had but a fleeting glimpse. I have tried to speculate about where it might have landed, though I admit such conjecture is futile. Still, questions about whose hands might one day hold my Myst book... are unsettling to me. I know my apprehensions might never be allayed. And so I close, realizing that perhaps, the ending... has not yet... been written.
BOOOHhhhh....
I wrote that, (you'll just have to take my word for it, obviously I can't prove it,) from memory. As I typed, I played the music in my head, and heard Atrus' voice... yeah, I may have played it a few times.
God, I loved that game. It was such a break from what came before, the immersion... the music, the challenging and occasionally frustrating puzzles... I may have to play it through again now. It's one of the only computer games to which I actually shelled out for the soundtrack on CD. Ah, the memories....
Similarly, I can also basically run through almost every word of the opening dialog between Manny Calavera and Celso Flores from Grim Fandango, another game I played the shit out of for a while. Ah, the good ol' days. Happy birthday, Myst.
WTF are you talking about? Deep state? Did I say a single fucking word defending the NSA, the CIA, or any other of the alphabet of agencies and their tactics? The ends don't justify any means whatsoever, while still clinging to the pretense of being a journalist. He could bluff and posture and threaten, and try to save his skin... but he can't continue to pretend to be upholding the highest standards of journalism, AND claim that he's (that his 'news' organization's) never held back anything they've verified as true from publishing, AND threaten to release something he has, that has been vetted as true, which he could ONLY have in his possession if he HAD held something back, all at the same time, without at least ONE of those things being false.
Anyway, yeah, I consider all the people who have leaked evidence of governmental wrongdoing and lawbreaking as heroic. The way people like Manning and Snowden have been treated is downright criminal. I admire Edward Snowden and consider him a hero. But Assange is not Snowden, not even close, and just because I'm not fawning in admiration of Assange doesn't make me a toady or whatever nonsense you claimed. I'm just going to leave it at that.
Nice ad-hominem abusive attack though. Shame it wasn't any species of valid counterargument to a single thing I said.
Perhaps I was misinformed on this point, or I'm confusing Assange with some OTHER news guy being accused of rape or whatever... but I believe my recollection is intact in this case
People have false memories (for whatever reasons) all the time. I still believe I had a teacher of a certain name at school, even if I have spoken to the daughter of said teacher and it is NOT him. So I know that it was not hime, yet my memory STILL tells me otherwise.
So for your own sake and for the sake of others, please provide some proof of what you are saying. Hearsay is not a good way to go about it.
-Sigh- It was an offhand aside you're nitpicking at. The fact that you've had your memory fail in no way speaks to the question of whether I'm remembering correctly or not. Also, I'm not going to look it up because the aside is not central to the comment I was making.
Whether it's hearsay or not is irrelevant because this is a slashdot comment, not an argument in a court of law. If it were, yeah... I would have looked it up and sourced it. Thanks though.
Thanks to the corrupting influence of money on our politics, it's comforting to know that government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations, like Uber, and their sick, rich, greedy owners, (or their "elected" puppets,) shall not perish from the earth.
Actually, I am being sarcastic. It is a dreadful shame that the government of, by, and for the people,seemingly has perished from the earth, to be replaced by the aforementioned corrupt government, that works against, to the detriment of, and to spite the people.
They nip at our rights, won by the blood, sweat, and tears of our forebears, and all we can do is watch helplessly as the people who can be bothered to vote, mostly do so for either the Democratic monster, or the Republican monster, both puppets of the same people, and then those people, who are proximally responsible for the unending nightmare we're all living through, have the sheer unmitigated gall to wag their fingers at US for voting for someone who isn't the puddle of fetid vomit retched up onto the ballot by either the "Democratic" (as if they've any right to call themselves that,) or "Republican" halves of the one party that actually controls America, and tell us that the person we voted for "spoiled" something.
As yet another general political election creeps up on us in America, I'd like to remind anyone interested in my vote that if you derive any support of any kind whatsoever from anyone other than the common voters you propose to represent, i.e., if you take PAC money, big corporate money, if you are supported either directly or indirectly by a group that is making in-kind donations, etc... you are NOT eligible for my vote. EVER. If everyone held to a conviction like this, we wouldn't have the corruption and uselessness we now see in our so-called "government". But since many people are stupid and easily frightened into voting for those who will betray and exploit them, or ignore them, the rest of us, sadly, are screwed.
Anyway, sorry for that aside. I'm sure there's nothing in any way corrupt about a multibillion-dollar corporation that has been feeding parasitically off its employees, oh... please forgive me, I mean "independent contractors"... hahahahah yeah, okay, managing to litigate their way into having a court of "law" (hahahahahha) issue a "ruling" (bwaahahahaha) requiring their "contractors" to undertake to arbitrate INDIVIDUALLY any dispute they may have, virtually guaranteeing that Uber will never have to worry about uppity slaves... er, sorry, I mean "contractors," demanding anything again.
Nothing to see here. Move along. Just a multibillion dollar parasitic business fucking everyone they can get their paws on as usual.
No. "Scheiss esports" (without the "ist"...) means "fuck esports".
The idiomatic translation is the one that tells you what the person saying or writing a thing actually means.
The verbatim, or literal translation in this case is leading you so far astray that you're actually altering the original to fit into what you think is what they're saying, (or in this case, what's written on a sign,) either because you took a semester or two of German and so you think you know the language, or you assumed Google Translate is always right... it often isn't and in this case it's wrong. Nice try though...
No, a word by word translation is only useful if you want a translation of each word in turn, and ignore how they relate to each other in the native language in which they are written. If you want to understand what the original writer or author of a message meant, you need the idiomatic translation, which is WAY harder for a machine to do.
Source: I lived in Germany for a few years. Living among the people who speak a language is always a better instructor of HOW they actually speak a language, than you can get from Herr Berlitz, or whomever. While regional differences do change a few things, like whether to say "Grüss dich," or "Servüs" or whatever for hello, it doesn't, as far as I know, in this case. "Scheiss esports," (not "Scheisse," and definitely not "esports ist Scheisse,") means "fuck esports."
This reminds me of that time that Apple released a version of iMacOSx that allowed people to gain root by just pressing enter with no password.
I love Apple's new beta-testing program... where they release beta software as if it's release-ready, to find the bugs they used to find and crush BEFORE releasing their new OS to the general user populace.
Seems to me I recall Julian Assange publicly trying to use the threat of the disclosure of something Wikileaks had allegedly been given, as a tool to try to escape his current legal predicament(s) when it/they started, years ago. The fact that he'd use information as a tool like that, while pretending that Wikileaks never sits on anything, and publishes whatever they have and believe to be credible, made me think he was just a tool, to put it bluntly. Nothing I've seen or heard from him since has in any way changed my opinion of him, or the organization he 'leads'. The very fact that he had, allegedly, again, information he COULD publish, (presumably it means they vetted it and determined it was credible,) damaging to those trying to extradite and/or prosecute him, and he held it back as a shield, flies in the face of claims made of being journalists.
Journalists, REAL journalists, protect sources, and publish information for the good of the readers, etc., not timed or calibrated for their own maximum personal benefit. Even if the charges against him are totally fake and politically motivated, there's no moral difference between that and a doctor taking a patient hostage. Journalists should have to swear the Hippocratic Oath too, specifically, first to do no harm to their readers/listeners/viewers, and then never deliberately, knowingly, or intentionally to deceive them, nor to be used by anyone else negligently to do so. (Obviously, if a journo is reporting on a pol who IS ALSO a reader, the good of the many SHOULD win out, and as long as the truth is being told, the reader who is the malefactor is exempt from the reporter's proscription against doing harm to that specific person or group.) Obviously the highest call is to the truth, even when it's a hard truth, but just in terms of ethics... yeah.
Perhaps I was misinformed on this point, or I'm confusing Assange with some OTHER news guy being accused of rape or whatever... but I believe my recollection is intact in this case, and if it is, that's a real douchebag kinda move to pull, and NOT what any person describing himself (or herself) as a journalist should be doing.
I wonder if they'll capture enough to make a significant weight difference, and come marked with the exact weight of the battery, so you can throw it on a scale and check its remaining capacity that way. (Assuming also that increase in weight corresponds to diminished electrical voltage or ability to supply current at or near the rated voltage, of course.) It would be kinda neat. This would give rise to a new iteration of an old saying:
There's lies, damned lies, and battery CO2-capture-capacity-remaining specifications.
[...] the support page says your system will have to go online "every few days" in order to validate the PS Now subscription.
What if others picked up on this?
What if when you get in your car, and turn your key, it had to check to make sure that you were current on your car note payment, that you had insurance, and why not, fuck it... a valid driver's license, before the engine would even turn over?
What if your refrigerator and pantry every so often would refuse to open until you stepped, barefoot, onto your wired, internet-connected bathroom scale, which would verify with the near-field-communications chip you had surgically implanted in your feet that you're the one being weighed, to ensure you haven't put on too much weight?
What if whenever you turn on a light in your house, or a water tap, the house calls the utility which does a check to make sure your payment method is still valid?
What if every time you swiped your credit card, the Point-of-Sale terminal or cash register, in addition to requesting authorization for the specific charge, ALSO did a soft-credit-pull to make sure you weren't a deadbeat, and that you pay your bills? What if they ran your name against a list of people who use stuff and return it an unusually high amount of the time, and declines the charge if you do that too often? OR, what if they just insist you sign an acknowledgement that all sales (for you) are final, telling you that you can buy something, but you're not going to be able to return it?
Every bit of this shit we put up with will only encourage the proliferation of this bad idea. I reject this out of hand; it's why I buy games on GOG.com, and not Steam or PSN... I don't want or need a game that comes with DRM, (or most anything else, for that matter,) especially if it's going to PHONE HOME periodically to make sure it's okay to run. You all can do as you like, but I won't support this.
Even if you think, "I agree, I'm not supporting this either, I only play cracked games..." you still bought the console itself, right? Even if they're selling it at a loss, the fact that you bought one helps bump up their numbers that they can claim they've sold without obviously lying, which helps convince others to invest in that platform by buying their consoles, (and usually games as well,) and then on top of that is the fact that your ownership of an instance of the console is always going to present a temptation to buy a game, especially if you REALLY want to play it and you can't find a cracked copy... the console itself acts as a vector for temptation to get you to reward them for putting "phones home" DRM on games. You're obviously not helping them as much as if you just bought the console and the games legitimately, and also in so-doing you are exposing yourself to legal liability just about the same as if you tried to slip a boxed game at a store down your pants and slink out with it, hoping to be unnoticed, which is really silly.
(As an aside, I wonder if anyone's ever tried the Attractive Nuisance defense against charges of "pirating" music, movies, TV shows, books or games?)
I don’t think it’s possible to KNOW precisely at any given moment whether quantum mechanics is broken, and to what degree it IS broken if indeed it is. That’s kind of the point of quantum mechanics.
OR...
If a mechanic breaks your quantum, he should have to fix it, theoretically.
I cant decide which joke to go with, so I've decided on a quantum superposition of both:
If don’t mechanic it’s your to he preciesly have any fix...
Hehehehe... quantum humor... simultaneously both really funny, and not funny at all, but you won’t know WHICH it is unitl you read the joke and collapse the wave-function.
Slashdot Mirror
Android already WAS the mobile version of Windows, in that it was a case where someone elseâ(TM) work was taken by a company that grew really huge with the help of something they did not create, and who paid very little or nothing for it, and then proceeded to build an EMPIRE on it, while in reality, objectively, it is an ugly kludge of cobbled-together, mismatched parts that has become, despite its many, many MANY flaws, THE big thing that people eventually either come to love, or love to hate.
So Microsoft giving its irrelevant blessing just looks like an octogenarian announcing that he is joining a punk rock band, and learning to skateboard and wants to do body shots to convince his great great great grandkids he is cool.
(Settle in, folks. This one REALLY got away from me.)
People seem shocked when the laws of economics are proven over and over and over again. You can't make money out of nothing, or rather wealth out of nothing. You might think finding a seam of gold in a hillside you've claimed, or a giant, perfect pearl in an oyster, or a diamond, etc., is wealth out of nothing but it's not. The reason that those things are commonly held as being worth something, (often quite a bit,) is that they are relatively hard to come by, nearly impossible to fake, (at least until recently... I know, there's fool's gold, and gold-plated solid lead, or fake-looking diamonds, but throughout most of history, the technology to create fakes has rarely raced meaningfully ahead of the technology to detect them and make faking them only briefly ever really profitable. (Some of that technology includes things penalties for fraud, of course, but it's not like there was more than maybe a few years during which someone could fake any of these things and evade detection reliably and long-enough term to be able to extract or accrete about themselves a serious amount of wealth formerly and rightly belonging to others.)
Wealth is simply the accumulation of money; that which represents value, and is a negotiable and highly portable and durable form of storage and exchange that can be, generally, more or less freely converted back and forth between stored value, and a good, service, or other valuable mention. Money that is not exchangeable for anything is quite literally WORTHLESS. Think of Deutschmarks following World War I, when it's said that people would cart whole wheelbarrow-fulls of them to buy a loaf of bread. Consider places that have experienced hyperinflation, where the government is printing trillion-dollar (or trillion-whatever the currency is called)
notes to be used as petty cash. Sure, you might be able to do other things with the bills, like write on them, shred them to start fires, wipe your ass with them, but as a medium of wealth storage and exchange they're worthless. If someone offered you a billion dollars to do some small favor, an unpleasant or annoying task, but not excessively so, obviously most people would do it, once convinced the offer was genuine, and there were no other strings attached... unless of course, while determining if the offer were legit, the person found out that the reason he or she was being offered a billion dollars is that overnight, the dollar's value has crashed so that now a billion dollars is worth less than a penny. Suddenly, most people might be disinclined to do that favor or minor task. Especially if the person asking for the favor first said, "have you heard the big news," and the other person said "no."
"But what, my dear Mister Sinister," you might ask, "is the point of that and how does it relate to Uber?" I am so glad you might ask, as I was just getting to that. Eventually, after this brief furtherance of my digression. Also, please... it's just Hallux. Mister Sinister was my FATHER. (LOL)
Money is only worth what it can be traded for. If someone who can issue currency does so in wild disproportion to the value of the economy that the money is essentially a share of, the money quickly loses value. The more ABOVE the amount at which the value is stable printed or issued impacts the value of each unit in the economy or circulation. See... if there were a trillion US dollars floating around, and overnight, the government quietly printed another trillion and started either giving it away or buying things with that money, the total value of the US economy will not have changed meaningfully; actually it will shrink a little due to the expense of printing all that money pointlessly, (let's further suppose it were unnecessary to print that,) and the market volatility and panic buying of supplies that would result would do further damage. BUT even once the dust has settled, the printing of a second trillion makes the original trillion (and each of
At best, a robot is basically something with at least a rudimentary decision-making system, taking input data, performing computations upon it and/or comparing it to previously stored data, that then arrives at a conclusion, and as a result makes and then implements a decision. In the case of a killer robot, (which we must recall is NOT a robot that does nothing whatsoever but kill from the instant it is created, to the instant it is destroyed, but rather a robot that is capable of killing, and which may, under the right circumstances, do so,) we're just talking about something that presumably will only kill under a certain specific set of circumstances, which upon being 'hijacked,' (by, one presumes, someone with malicious intent,) begins killing people whom it was not originally intended to kill, or to kill under circumstances other than those the people whose killer robot it was, intended.
What is a robot? It's something with at least a rudimentary decision-making system, within or controlling a chassis that can, in theory, in some cases, when designed and built or modified to be able to do so, move autonomously about. What is a killer robot? A robot that beyond the aforementioned requirements to be a robot, is physically capable of killing (people).
I remember this one time, I saw all over the news a couple of years ago, reports of this one day when a chassis, whose controlling decision-making system had gone haywire, (in this case, the killer robot was made of meat, but that's not really relevant,) went into a hotel room in Las Vegas, Nevada, high above and in sight of a nearby music venue. The rudimentary decision-making apparatus driving it, which had, up until that point only killed people when it was appropriate. (In this one instance of this model of killer robot, I believe that to the best of anyone's knowledge, the circumstances had never previously occurred in proximity to it since the day it went operational, decades earlier, when it would have been appropriate for it to kill, and so it had never killed anyone before that day. I could be wrong on that point, but what had happened before is not really relevant to the case, so... moving on... but if it had, it would probably not have been free to move about as it was, so for the sake of argument, let's say it had not.)
But on this fateful day, this killer robot's programming somehow got screwed up, and it decided that it needed to kill a large number of people, and picked the people at that music venue as its target. (I'm not going to speculate HOW or WHY its programming got screwed up, but suffice it to say that despite all that it had likely been through over decades of operation, it had never previously gone nuts and killed anyone,) and so it came to pass that it concluded that it was right and proper for it to use one or more weapons of war, either designed, modified, or rigged-up to maximize lethality, to kill and maim, or at least grievously wound, a large number of people in the music venue across from the hotel.
Now... you may dispute my equivocating a (human...ish, anyway,) mass-shooter to a robot, but at the end of the day, there's no meaningful difference. You have who or what was NOT supposed to kill random (or specific) strangers, and had for a long time managed somehow not to, and then one day, it does, and it kills a BUNCH, owing to being hijacked either by a hacker who figures out how to remotely control it, or a collection of bad ideas, improperly dealt-with anger or stress, or a desire to harm as many other people as possible. Again, the result is the same. Large numbers of dead and injured being made out of previously healthy, presumably happy individuals, by someone or some thing that is difficult to stop. (Recall the efforts that had to be made to stop the guy. Suppose he got away? Suppose he'd managed to take out the cops in the hallway, jump out the window and parachute to a waiting motorcycle, detonating the room and evidence behind him, and speeding into the night o
My biggest complaint about Haiku OS is that there are no haikus anywhere. Not in the comments, not in the name. Talk about a missed opportunity! I refuse to use any OS that so seriously misrepresents itself.
But your complaint was itself not in the form of a haiku either. Here, let me try:
Misappellation
They should have to change its name
Call it something else
Haiku are poems
Not operating systems
Do please try again
Heheheh... and a few more just for fun...
Years like drops of rain
A river flows, splash of time
New Haiku released
Blood, sweat, many tears
BeOS' ghost in baby's cries
What had died, reborn
I liked that one so much I'm going to reuse part of it...
Blood, sweat, many tears
Would-be users waited years
Can we install now?
YOU may stream whatever you like, and I respect your decision to do that. But that's apples, and we're talking about ORANGES here, friend. I'm talking about Sony making, (I'm suddenly struggling to remember the particulars of this story...) Playstation games downloadable, but in such a way, IIRC, that you can only play them if the console can verify that you're allowed to play them.
It sounds like you didn't pay attention to the story the first time either, because we're talking about PlayStation Now here. A subscription service where you pay monthly to access a library of streamable games for no extra cost. That you can also now download and play offline.
No, I read it, and I know that we’re talking about Sony and their Playstation. I was making analogies, and yeah, I may have made a hard left, gone offroading, and strayed WAY off into the weeds with that one, but I didn’t actually, IMHO, go completely off a cliff.
It’s just kind of my style. If I ever right an autobiography, it’ll start with, “I was born in a little town called, ... wait, let me back up a bit and tell you one other thing first that you’ll need to know first, in order to know, I mean to really and truly understand, to grok, as Robert Heinlein would have perhaps put it, what I’m talking about here,” and the rest of the book will be a nested, recursive, 700+ page digression.
Please keep in mind that this is beta-quality software, which means it is feature complete but still contains known and unknown bugs. While we are mostly confident in its stability, we cannot provide assurances against data loss.
...just like the last several releases of M$ “Windows,” Apple’s ”iMacOSx,” (or whatever they’re calling it this week,) and “iOS,” (which I’ve been quietly amusing myself by reading that word as if it rhymes with bulldoze, phonetically: “aye-ohze,” because frankly, it’s a stupid name, and it deserves to get made fun of).
It’s okay. We’re used to it. All computer & software users are beta testers, nowadays, whether they want to be or not, whether they even realize it or not.
Just release it already.
As an aside, I’ll add that I totally believe him, as what he’s saying makes sense given what we’ve seen from Apple in the Post Jobs era, and I wish him well, and the very best of luck. But he’s gonna lose. It’s a shame, but... he’s going to lose, and if they haven’t already, they may turn around and sue him, at which point you don’t use a ruler to measure how deep the shit he’s gonna be in is, you use a giant spool of line with knots tied in it every six FEET.
[...] Eastman, who is representing himself in court [...]
Dumbass.
It doesn’t sound like this guy’s a lawyer, and even those who are lawyers know better than to represent themselves in court, (that’s a bad look,) know they are less likely, statistically-speaking, to be successful in their case, and this guy is going up against a trillion+ dollar company with a fucking ARMY of lawyers, all by himself.
I don’t know if he’s got tapes and hidden video of these guys having corporate meetings that include satanic rituals, pledging allegiance to ISIS, filming child pornography and then EATING the flesh of the babies they just raped, using a cut-up American flag as bibs, napkins and tablecloth, and then wiping their assess with copies of the US Constritution and the Bible, or if he thinks he’s King Leonidas, Spartacus, and “Braveheart’s” William Wallace all rolled into one, with a little King David on top, but he fucking better be... because otherwise, he’s going to end up washing cars in Apple’s parking lot, AND paying Apple for the privilege by the time they're done with him.
What if others picked up on this?
What, you mean like instead of paying for individual audio CDs you could pay a flat monthly fee and listen to anything you like?
Or instead of paying for individual movie DVDs or TV show boxsets you could pay a flat monthly fee and watch anything you like?
That's not really what I was talking about. Streaming something for a flat monthly fee is the cable-TV model of buying entertainment, applied to what used to be (and still is, though once upon a time it was the only game in town, especially if you want portability,) broadcast over FM radio.
What we're talking about is when you BUY a COPY of something, and it's DRMed so you can only play it on THEIR equipment and/or it has to phone home, NOT to get information needed for playing the media, but to get PERMISSION.
Streaming media is NOT the same thing as... look, here's one more metaphor.
Suppose you bought a dead-tree paper book. It's a book. A book. A thousands-of-years-old-technology, technically, BOOK, in that it's some number of sheets of flat, foldable or rollable or bound-along-one-edge-pieces of durable flat material, (durable at least compared to say, writing on a flour tortilla, for example,) with marks made on it, probably with some kind of dye-carrying liquid, ink or paint, or perhaps traces of graphite, or something similar, or something made to resemble such marks. Now... you buy one and you own THAT copy of THAT book. Suppose somehow, though, that the one YOU bought has magic powers, such that all the pages appear BLANK inside until it telepathically communicated with the seller the identity of who's trying to read it, (you,) to make SURE that you are the person THAT copy were sold to?
I know this is getting silly, but to me, not having to worry about losing the ability to listen to, watch, read, etc., what I buy because someone ELSE decides they don't want me to be able to, or they go out of business or whatever, is important.
See, some people don't want to stream things. Some people aren't just going to ASSUME that whatever I might want to hear is always going to be available, accessible, and, oh, what if I don't have broadband internet access at some point if I travel somewhere? Or if net-neutrality gets undone and suddenly your ISP wants you to pay not a monthly fee with a cap, but per kilobyte?
I know it's old-fashioned, nowadays, but I still have a CD collection, and a DVD collection, and a Blueray disc collection that one of these days I'm going to replace with DVDs because I've decided it was pointless and stupid to "upgrade" to Blueray, since on MY TV, and likely any TV I'm going to have for a long time doesn't display pictures or play sound meaningfully better than what's on a DVD anyway, and I don't have to worry about some new DVD movie demanding I update my player with cryptographic variables so it can decode the damned movie, unlike some formats and technologies I could mention COUGHbluerayCOUGH COUGH... also, for the nearterm, at least, they're still making DVDs, and even if they stop, I'm pretty sure enough DVDs have been produced now that I could never watch them all if I had nothing to do for the rest of my natural life but watch fucking movies... so... yeah.
When I was a kid and had cassette tapes with all my music on them, and a small CD collection, and my father listened to his vinyl 45's and 78's, or his reel-to-reel tape copies of the same, (to keep from wearing out the grooves or cocking up the needles, since they were getting hard to find, or expensive or both,) I used to think it was funny, laughably old-fashioned, but you know what? It worked. And his old Teac A-6300 (IIRC) didn't ever phone home to ask PERMISSION to play a tape. Every so often he'd clean the heads with a q-tip, and then he'd put on a reel, wind the tape under the tensioner, across the head, up and around, the other reel, and press play. It would make this satisfying noise I can't
Change your topic to "someone i liked when they were on my side but hate now because Trump and fuck the truth I only want points" and at least I would respect you for being honest
I'm confused how anyone could think that I think Trump is (or ever was, or will be,) anything but a bag of flaming dog shit left on America's porch. Have you perhaps ASSumed what I think based upon a misinterpretation of what I wrote?
Oh, PS, BTW... Trump has, to the best of my knowledge, had no meaningful interaction with nor anything to say about Assange besides farting his stupid uneducated opinions out of his face-anus for years.
The guy with an at least quasi-legitimate beef with Assange was the last, (as of now,) President of the United States, Barrack Obama, a man whom I neither voted for nor supported nor liked, though I wouldn't dispute the legitimacy of his presidency, despite not being a fan, unlike the current illegitimate occupant of the White House.
Sounds like you decided what I meant without really thing about what I wrote, and decided to try to write a witty-sounding response attacking me as someone who says "fuck the truth," (which is very fucking funny,) and failed miserably.
I can see why you posted as an anonymous coward though. Makes sense. But why not log in, (I'm sure you've got a login,) and have a real discussion, instead of flinging feces, huh?
My question is this. Is it our turn to laugh at, well, NOT ALL Android fanboys, but the ones who take to places like this and mock Apple, Inc. product users whenever there's a problem in Appletania, is now our time to point and laugh?
You can always do that.
Thanks. :)
I thought Apple was going to focus on internal improvements and making things better and more secure, not flashier and more exciting. Then they release the iPhone ECKS-ESS (and, I assume, ECKS-SMACKS, too,) and sure enough, it's new and flashy and emphatically NOT READY FOR PRIME TIME. Apple has all the credibility of a Google telling folks they're not evil at this point.
Apple is really trying to see exactly how much crap their fans will take before leaving their ecosystem.
Google will pretend to change things, and more quietly implement what we'll call, for convenience's sake, Plan B. If they get caught, there'll be an excuse for why it's not the same thing as they were doing before, they'll apologize, promise to change, possibly fire someone and/or rearrange bits of the company, and even more quietly implement whatever they will call it, but we may as well call it Plan C. If THAT gets leaked or discovered...
Why do you think they call it ALPHABET?!? They have at least 26 plans for how to screw users over and rip them off and get even richer, and if they exhaust those, they'll either move on to another, perhaps starting with the Greek, (Plan Alpha, Plan Beta, etc.,) or perhaps start incorporating numbers.
Maybe they'll even try to change their name to "Alphanumeric". Shit... I should see if there's already one of those and if not trademark THAT, and buy-up the domain name... nah. OTOH, I don't really care enough to bother looking. But that is kind of a cool name, right?
For people who regard Android as suspect, and while chafing at the restrictions of Apple's "walled garden," we still use it because it is simply more secure, despite occasional problems. HOWEVER, whenever there *IS* a security problem, error, oversight, or let's call it what it is, a fuckup, committed by Apple, Android boosters, (or at least, those among them who tend to be assholes,) go NUTS and take to sites like this one, slashdot, and laugh about how we're all idiots for buying Apple products, especially as they often cost more than competitors, because of the benefits they provide, such as overall better security and user experience, most of the time.
My question is this. Is it our turn to laugh at, well, NOT ALL Android fanboys, but the ones who take to places like this and mock Apple, Inc. product users whenever there's a problem in Appletania, is now our time to point and laugh?
SERIOUSLY THOUGH...
This is not the reason I don't use Android, or any product running on Android. Nothing really against the Linux kernel it runs on, but the rest of the OS around it is, in my experience, a sloppy, inconsistent, grotesque, pain in the ass KLUDGE of cobbled together crap that suffers from problems like this all the time, and all the perceived disadvantages you have to put up with using an Apple, or specifically an iOS device, iPhones, iPads, etc., you'll get just the same when you use Android, though the reputation for "openness" that you might mistakenly think makes Android "open" is false, or at least distorted or exaggerated. The fact that Android was bough-out/taken over by Google, (which people maybe were okay with because, you know, "don't be evil",) has made Android basically Google's iOS. Except instead of a company bilking you for overpriced hardware to cover all the background stuff like free software updates, maintaining available storage and data access through iCloud, etc., Google has to make that same money, (and they make LOTS) selling your information, selling YOU, in essence, to their advertisers.
I will pay Google the following backwards compliment: at least they were honest about becoming evil, when they ditched their motto. Android is the fruit of this poisoned tree that is Google, where you think you're getting the handset at cost, (or the software on it, anyway,) and paying what you pay for the device ONLY to cover the cost+profit of the actual company that made the device, such as LG or Samsung, etc., and not much if any money is getting kicked back to Google, (or "Alphabet," as they're pretending they're calling themselves now, almost certainly for nefarious, if not outright evil purposes). The reality though, is that Google is making money off you using Android devices, and it's a devil's bargain.
I knew that Myst was a hot game, but every time I tried to play it I got bored really quickly and really didn't have any idea what I was supposed to be doing.
That was what was revolutionary about it. The goal was to explore, and solve the various puzzles, rather than walking around and shooting things or hacking and slashing at monsters, etc. In the process, you pick up sheets of paper, (essentially rewards for solving the puzzles,) that turn out to be pages missing from one of a couple of books, and insert them into one of these books in the foyer of the central building on the main island of Myst, on the two shelves just inside the door there. As you do so, you get clearer and clearer indications of what (or who, rather,) is trapped in the two books, and piece together a kind of riddle about who they are, and decide whom to help by completing the books by reinserting the missing pages.
In case you should ever play again, I won't spoil it for you, if you still have your old copy and a machine capable of playing it. If not, and you're interested, Good Old Games (gog.com) sells copies made for modern computers with (ugh) M$ Windows XP through 9 (or 10, as M$ calls it,) for only a few dollars, and the Apple Mac App Store sells a copy for iMacOSx (or whatever they're calling it this week,) for under 20. The Apple Mac version has an extended ending beyond the original and is remastered. I imagine the GOG version for M$ Windows is the same way, though I can't swear to it.
I realized as I fell into the fissure that the book would not be destroyed as I had planned. It continued falling into that starry expanse of which I had but a fleeting glimpse. I have tried to speculate about where it might have landed, though I admit such conjecture is futile. Still, questions about whose hands might one day hold my Myst book... are unsettling to me. I know my apprehensions might never be allayed. And so I close, realizing that perhaps, the ending... has not yet... been written.
BOOOHhhhh....
I wrote that, (you'll just have to take my word for it, obviously I can't prove it,) from memory. As I typed, I played the music in my head, and heard Atrus' voice... yeah, I may have played it a few times.
God, I loved that game. It was such a break from what came before, the immersion... the music, the challenging and occasionally frustrating puzzles... I may have to play it through again now. It's one of the only computer games to which I actually shelled out for the soundtrack on CD. Ah, the memories....
Similarly, I can also basically run through almost every word of the opening dialog between Manny Calavera and Celso Flores from Grim Fandango, another game I played the shit out of for a while. Ah, the good ol' days. Happy birthday, Myst.
WTF are you talking about? Deep state? Did I say a single fucking word defending the NSA, the CIA, or any other of the alphabet of agencies and their tactics? The ends don't justify any means whatsoever, while still clinging to the pretense of being a journalist. He could bluff and posture and threaten, and try to save his skin... but he can't continue to pretend to be upholding the highest standards of journalism, AND claim that he's (that his 'news' organization's) never held back anything they've verified as true from publishing, AND threaten to release something he has, that has been vetted as true, which he could ONLY have in his possession if he HAD held something back, all at the same time, without at least ONE of those things being false.
Anyway, yeah, I consider all the people who have leaked evidence of governmental wrongdoing and lawbreaking as heroic. The way people like Manning and Snowden have been treated is downright criminal. I admire Edward Snowden and consider him a hero. But Assange is not Snowden, not even close, and just because I'm not fawning in admiration of Assange doesn't make me a toady or whatever nonsense you claimed. I'm just going to leave it at that.
Nice ad-hominem abusive attack though. Shame it wasn't any species of valid counterargument to a single thing I said.
People have false memories (for whatever reasons) all the time. I still believe I had a teacher of a certain name at school, even if I have spoken to the daughter of said teacher and it is NOT him. So I know that it was not hime, yet my memory STILL tells me otherwise.
So for your own sake and for the sake of others, please provide some proof of what you are saying. Hearsay is not a good way to go about it.
-Sigh- It was an offhand aside you're nitpicking at. The fact that you've had your memory fail in no way speaks to the question of whether I'm remembering correctly or not. Also, I'm not going to look it up because the aside is not central to the comment I was making.
Whether it's hearsay or not is irrelevant because this is a slashdot comment, not an argument in a court of law. If it were, yeah... I would have looked it up and sourced it. Thanks though.
Thanks to the corrupting influence of money on our politics, it's comforting to know that government of the corporations, by the corporations, and for the corporations, like Uber, and their sick, rich, greedy owners, (or their "elected" puppets,) shall not perish from the earth.
Actually, I am being sarcastic. It is a dreadful shame that the government of, by, and for the people, seemingly has perished from the earth, to be replaced by the aforementioned corrupt government, that works against, to the detriment of, and to spite the people.
They nip at our rights, won by the blood, sweat, and tears of our forebears, and all we can do is watch helplessly as the people who can be bothered to vote, mostly do so for either the Democratic monster, or the Republican monster, both puppets of the same people, and then those people, who are proximally responsible for the unending nightmare we're all living through, have the sheer unmitigated gall to wag their fingers at US for voting for someone who isn't the puddle of fetid vomit retched up onto the ballot by either the "Democratic" (as if they've any right to call themselves that,) or "Republican" halves of the one party that actually controls America, and tell us that the person we voted for "spoiled" something.
As yet another general political election creeps up on us in America, I'd like to remind anyone interested in my vote that if you derive any support of any kind whatsoever from anyone other than the common voters you propose to represent, i.e., if you take PAC money, big corporate money, if you are supported either directly or indirectly by a group that is making in-kind donations, etc... you are NOT eligible for my vote. EVER. If everyone held to a conviction like this, we wouldn't have the corruption and uselessness we now see in our so-called "government". But since many people are stupid and easily frightened into voting for those who will betray and exploit them, or ignore them, the rest of us, sadly, are screwed.
Anyway, sorry for that aside. I'm sure there's nothing in any way corrupt about a multibillion-dollar corporation that has been feeding parasitically off its employees, oh... please forgive me, I mean "independent contractors"... hahahahah yeah, okay, managing to litigate their way into having a court of "law" (hahahahahha) issue a "ruling" (bwaahahahaha) requiring their "contractors" to undertake to arbitrate INDIVIDUALLY any dispute they may have, virtually guaranteeing that Uber will never have to worry about uppity slaves... er, sorry, I mean "contractors," demanding anything again.
Nothing to see here. Move along. Just a multibillion dollar parasitic business fucking everyone they can get their paws on as usual.
No. "Scheiss esports" (without the "ist"...) means "fuck esports".
The idiomatic translation is the one that tells you what the person saying or writing a thing actually means.
The verbatim, or literal translation in this case is leading you so far astray that you're actually altering the original to fit into what you think is what they're saying, (or in this case, what's written on a sign,) either because you took a semester or two of German and so you think you know the language, or you assumed Google Translate is always right... it often isn't and in this case it's wrong. Nice try though...
No, a word by word translation is only useful if you want a translation of each word in turn, and ignore how they relate to each other in the native language in which they are written. If you want to understand what the original writer or author of a message meant, you need the idiomatic translation, which is WAY harder for a machine to do.
Source: I lived in Germany for a few years. Living among the people who speak a language is always a better instructor of HOW they actually speak a language, than you can get from Herr Berlitz, or whomever. While regional differences do change a few things, like whether to say "Grüss dich," or "Servüs" or whatever for hello, it doesn't, as far as I know, in this case. "Scheiss esports," (not "Scheisse," and definitely not "esports ist Scheisse,") means "fuck esports."
Hope that helped clear things up.
This reminds me of that time that Apple released a version of iMacOSx that allowed people to gain root by just pressing enter with no password.
I love Apple's new beta-testing program... where they release beta software as if it's release-ready, to find the bugs they used to find and crush BEFORE releasing their new OS to the general user populace.
Seems to me I recall Julian Assange publicly trying to use the threat of the disclosure of something Wikileaks had allegedly been given, as a tool to try to escape his current legal predicament(s) when it/they started, years ago. The fact that he'd use information as a tool like that, while pretending that Wikileaks never sits on anything, and publishes whatever they have and believe to be credible, made me think he was just a tool, to put it bluntly. Nothing I've seen or heard from him since has in any way changed my opinion of him, or the organization he 'leads'. The very fact that he had, allegedly, again, information he COULD publish, (presumably it means they vetted it and determined it was credible,) damaging to those trying to extradite and/or prosecute him, and he held it back as a shield, flies in the face of claims made of being journalists.
Journalists, REAL journalists, protect sources, and publish information for the good of the readers, etc., not timed or calibrated for their own maximum personal benefit. Even if the charges against him are totally fake and politically motivated, there's no moral difference between that and a doctor taking a patient hostage. Journalists should have to swear the Hippocratic Oath too, specifically, first to do no harm to their readers/listeners/viewers, and then never deliberately, knowingly, or intentionally to deceive them, nor to be used by anyone else negligently to do so. (Obviously, if a journo is reporting on a pol who IS ALSO a reader, the good of the many SHOULD win out, and as long as the truth is being told, the reader who is the malefactor is exempt from the reporter's proscription against doing harm to that specific person or group.) Obviously the highest call is to the truth, even when it's a hard truth, but just in terms of ethics... yeah.
Perhaps I was misinformed on this point, or I'm confusing Assange with some OTHER news guy being accused of rape or whatever... but I believe my recollection is intact in this case, and if it is, that's a real douchebag kinda move to pull, and NOT what any person describing himself (or herself) as a journalist should be doing.
I wonder if they'll capture enough to make a significant weight difference, and come marked with the exact weight of the battery, so you can throw it on a scale and check its remaining capacity that way. (Assuming also that increase in weight corresponds to diminished electrical voltage or ability to supply current at or near the rated voltage, of course.) It would be kinda neat. This would give rise to a new iteration of an old saying:
There's lies, damned lies, and battery CO2-capture-capacity-remaining specifications.
Hehehe....
[...] the support page says your system will have to go online "every few days" in order to validate the PS Now subscription.
What if others picked up on this?
What if when you get in your car, and turn your key, it had to check to make sure that you were current on your car note payment, that you had insurance, and why not, fuck it... a valid driver's license, before the engine would even turn over?
What if your refrigerator and pantry every so often would refuse to open until you stepped, barefoot, onto your wired, internet-connected bathroom scale, which would verify with the near-field-communications chip you had surgically implanted in your feet that you're the one being weighed, to ensure you haven't put on too much weight?
What if whenever you turn on a light in your house, or a water tap, the house calls the utility which does a check to make sure your payment method is still valid?
What if every time you swiped your credit card, the Point-of-Sale terminal or cash register, in addition to requesting authorization for the specific charge, ALSO did a soft-credit-pull to make sure you weren't a deadbeat, and that you pay your bills? What if they ran your name against a list of people who use stuff and return it an unusually high amount of the time, and declines the charge if you do that too often? OR, what if they just insist you sign an acknowledgement that all sales (for you) are final, telling you that you can buy something, but you're not going to be able to return it?
Every bit of this shit we put up with will only encourage the proliferation of this bad idea. I reject this out of hand; it's why I buy games on GOG.com, and not Steam or PSN... I don't want or need a game that comes with DRM, (or most anything else, for that matter,) especially if it's going to PHONE HOME periodically to make sure it's okay to run. You all can do as you like, but I won't support this.
Even if you think, "I agree, I'm not supporting this either, I only play cracked games..." you still bought the console itself, right? Even if they're selling it at a loss, the fact that you bought one helps bump up their numbers that they can claim they've sold without obviously lying, which helps convince others to invest in that platform by buying their consoles, (and usually games as well,) and then on top of that is the fact that your ownership of an instance of the console is always going to present a temptation to buy a game, especially if you REALLY want to play it and you can't find a cracked copy... the console itself acts as a vector for temptation to get you to reward them for putting "phones home" DRM on games. You're obviously not helping them as much as if you just bought the console and the games legitimately, and also in so-doing you are exposing yourself to legal liability just about the same as if you tried to slip a boxed game at a store down your pants and slink out with it, hoping to be unnoticed, which is really silly.
(As an aside, I wonder if anyone's ever tried the Attractive Nuisance defense against charges of "pirating" music, movies, TV shows, books or games?)
I don’t think it’s possible to KNOW precisely at any given moment whether quantum mechanics is broken, and to what degree it IS broken if indeed it is. That’s kind of the point of quantum mechanics.
OR...
If a mechanic breaks your quantum, he should have to fix it, theoretically.
I cant decide which joke to go with, so I've decided on a quantum superposition of both:
If don’t mechanic it’s your to he preciesly have any fix...
Hehehehe... quantum humor... simultaneously both really funny, and not funny at all, but you won’t know WHICH it is unitl you read the joke and collapse the wave-function.