Maine no longer needs one to hold a CCP to conceal carry so long as you're legally entitled to be in possession of a firearm. You can still get your CCP (and should) to ensure that you're legal when you leave the state. Without one, you'd likely be violating the law in other states even though there's an agreement between them. Those states will still require you to have the permit, for the time being. It's untested but that's the current assumption. You've pretty much always been allowed to open carry without needing a permit.
To which I ask, what's your point? I accept that risk in the name of freedom. You can have freedom or the illusion of safety, which would you prefer? If someone wants to kill you, they'll do so with or without a firearm. Bad things happen. Oh well. You get freedom or the illusion of safety. Numerically, it's a trivial amount of difference. Thoughts like your thoughts are what gave us Homeland Security and the TSA. I would rather die free than live a coward, as pithy as that sounds - it is entirely true.
You are not going to get a completely safe world. The problem is not firearms, the problem is culture, crime, risks and rewards, and poverty. Taking the guns away attempts to cure the symptom and not the disease. I am not a coward and I don't think we should amend the constitution because you're afraid. I don't think that people who live in constant fear make good decisions. Just because you're afraid of some gun violence does not mean that the problem is the guns themselves. You should know the causation and correlation adage well enough by now.
There are countries with a higher per capita gun ownership rate than the US that have far fewer violent crimes or shootings. (See Sweden for one example.) The problem is not now, nor has it ever been, the tool. The problem is cultural, economic, educational, and the risks of being caught being so great that they're willing to die to avoid the punishment - which means they're willing to kill.
For a bunch of supposedly logical people who love to trot out statistics and numbers and assume they've made a case, you've continually failed to actually make that case. No, we're not changing the Constitution because you're afraid and unwilling to accept accountability. It's the lack of accountability that has us in this position. It's not the guns, it's the people behind them. This has been explained to you, time and time again. You're peers and yourself are reaching the point where you're starting to act like children. Stop being a coward and trying to base policy on fear rather than actually addressing the problems that you helped to create.
In a state of anarchy, would having laws be unlawful? I think that's what it boils down to and it is akin to asking if $deity can create a pepper too hot for he, himself, to eat. Or, more accurately, "If perpetual motion machines were invented, would elephants wear pajamas?"
No, no... Now that I reread that, I've nothing to contribute that makes sense. I'm gonna post it anyhow.;-) I guess, in seriousness, no because we can't realistically outlaw laws because even saying that there is no laws is a law, after a fashion.
In short order, with distributed compute power, we might be able to set this up in chunks (each getting a reasonable set) and every one of us send out a few hundred thousand of them to ensure we've covered every single alphanumerical combination up to 12 letters for the entirety of the.gov.au addresses or whatnot. With enough time, and enough effort, we could even cover all the major email providers including the various ISPs. We can even us VPNs and spread our message of love and freedom across the globe as far as originating IP addresses are concerned.
Hmm... I imagine it'd be fairly trivial to get a small script going that sends mail. It probably wouldn't even have to be a full blown server? I've done some playing with SendMail but I don't think that's quite what I'm looking for. Hell, we could all do it and just have it use random combinations. Some would be repeats, of course, but that'd be enough to get the message across. Some random and some regex, a small script (I'm sure I can find one), and a list of email providers as well as government ccTLDs and we should be good to go. We can probably be even fancier if we know the format they use for email addresses and wanted to create a dictionary to work with.
We should probably wait for them to enact the law before acting on this. I think this is a lesson best learned in hindsight and not foresight. If they want to behave in a ludicrous manner then they should expect a ludicrous response. If our Australian brothers aren't going to stand up for themselves then we should do it on their behalf. This is, of course, assuming that they don't stand up for themselves and that the law is enacted. We might as well wait for that and see if they're going to punish themselves for possession of these plans.
I figure that's true for the first few which is why I included that.
I'm sure there will be a few 'success' stories at first.
Perhaps you missed it or I wasn't clear enough? Or do you think they're going to *keep* doing that after the first few and they've gained the PR boost from it? If so then, well, I don't think that's going to happen. They'll end up getting labor at next to nothing if not just outright stealing the ideas and changing them enough to ensure they don't violate any agreements. Their terms of service indicate that they've already concluded that many ideas are so similar that they need to include an indemnification clause to ensure that they can't be sued for similar works.
I'd hope you're right but it does't look likely. I don't suppose you want to place a friendly wager on it?:D
There were a couple of dozen fruit trees in what used to be a clearing on my property. A neighbor advised me to consult an arbor-something-or-other tree specialist instead of just leaving them there. I hired him and he came in, cleared the overgrowth, and then trimmed the trees. I get *some* fruit now (pears and apples) but not a whole lot but they're a full order of magnitude larger than what they were when I first build the house and discovered the old orchard.
The historical society, down in the village, doesn't have a whole lot of information but coring one of the trees indicates that the tree is a couple of hundred years old. I've not yet reached the point where we've done *any* pollination or fertilization. Simply cutting the growth back and then trimming the trees properly has been enough. In a few years, I'll be getting normal sized fruit from the trees.
I'll have time, and motivation (hopefully) to harvest the majority while the fruit is still on the tree. I'll make jams, jellies, and can much the rest (there appears to be four different types of apples - we're not sure what one of them is just yet). I'll probably get some pressed and make cider. From that cider, I'll allow some to harden for friends and family.
Point being... If you harvest in a timely manner AND get them pruned professionally (or learn to do it yourself - I guess there's quite a bit that goes into it) then you may not need to rely on any pesticide at all. I've eaten some of the fruit, some of it is still bitter and the sizes are still quite small. I'll probably save the "drops" for the deer. I can't, legally, bait a deer but I sure as hell don't have to pick up the apples and I am certainly eligible to hunt there. (Nature is allowed to bait on my behalf.)
It wasn't too expensive to have him come in and look at it. Depending on how many trees you have, you may not spend much at all and they don't need to be pruned often. I've gone out and watched him do it a few times (it takes more work if the orchard goes sour like mine had) and could probably pull it off in a fashion, if needed, on my own. If you're willing to harvest on time and able to keep them properly pruned, you might be good to go without the need for any additional pesticides and fertilizer. The animals attracted by the fruit will probably take care of the pests for you.
This may, of course, vary greatly depending on your location. If they don't drop then I don't have any reasons to expect pest trouble. Even then, so long as I get them in a timely fashion after they've dropped, I'll still have little problems (or so I'm told).
Who the hell would be denying that spraying bees with poison is going to have a negative impact? I don't think that I've heard anyone say that, not even stupid people online. Well, not seriously at any rate. I've probably seen someone say it sarcastically but I don't think anyone has ever made an actual attempted argument for such that I have seen. (Not to say it didn't happen but that I've never seen it.)
Bah, you can probably get an LXDE distro to run on it. Specifically, I'd try Lubuntu 14.04 or wait for the next LTS but the 15.10 should run. I've installed 15.04 on some old, I mean old, hardware (slower than your hardware but maybe more RAM). It runs, it runs like a champ, honestly. It runs far better than I'd have expected. I don't have said hardware with me to test on but I suspect 15.10 would run just fine on it too.
Sure, you won't be loading a few dozen heavy sites in different tabs and full-screen YouTube isn't going to work well but you can probably set the quality down to around 360p and be fine in regular screen. It most likely won't like full screen but I imagine it will run just fine. Perhaps you've greater expectations of it than you're able to get? I know that I've installed on slower hardware and had it work well enough that I've sat there and browsed with hit, used a light VM loaded on it (with nothing running on the host), and have even compiled stuff on it. I've done this with more than one distro and more than one old computer - tweaking, poking, and breaking is what I do.
If I can do it then, well, you're almost certainly able to do it. Check distrowatch for more distros, use the search and find something optimized for older hardware. You may need to do some compiling but probably not much. I'm no guru or anything which is why I say that if I can do it, you can do it. I think the slowest thing I've installed a *recent* Ubuntu on (I'm thinking it was 14.04 the last time) was a 1.8 GHz, single core, 32 bit, Athlon. I think it was even Ubuntu and not Lubuntu. As I recall, it booted fairly well and ran a browser well enough so long as I kept the scripting to a dull roar. I don't remember if I played any streaming videos but I'm sure I tested with music and local video content and I'd likely remember if it didn't work properly. This was not long before I left so this was in the past six months or so.
So, yeah... If a meatstick like me can manage then I'm quite sure you can get it to run. Hell, I've had Windows 7 running on hardware that slow. (Getting stuff to run on old hardware is a bit of a hobby of mine and I used to have an MSDN subscription.) Hmm... I've even had Lubuntu running on an early Acer Aspire One netbook. I forget the model number but it was one of the oldest ones made. I never got the wifi to work but it worked plugged in well enough. It was faster than XP was on it and was a more recent version of Ubuntu or, maybe, Mint. It needed one to be patient but it wasn't that bad.:/ I've got much, much, faster hardware but it's nice to poke, play, and learn so I've been known to get a number of things running on older hardware. No choking at all, so long as I've reasonable expectations. It's not going to run like it's on a new i7 with 32 GB of RAM or the likes, it can't.
Yes, it was conspicuously absent! Heretic! Burn the heretic!
I'm not really a vi or emacs fan. Nor do I like vim. I don't even like nano. I suppose that's largely because I've never really enjoyed using them and never learned to use any of them at anything greater than a rudimentary level. I should like to take some sort of online course in vi, however. I wonder if edX.org has anything on the subject?
I think the point is that, yes, there's a lot of choices still to be had but, for the most part, it's just a limited set of applications that gets the development time, dollars, and attention. The apps that end up being default end up getting the donations. It is just like there's a distro out there for everyone (and, if not, you can use openSuse's online tool to make one) and still, unless they're in the top ten list at DistroWatch, they're not getting much in the way of donations or the likes.
It's unfortunate but that's the way it is. Sure, there are choices but they often suck. We don't all have the time or skills to get something changed. Some of us are willing to pay, to donate at least, for a project to be maintained or even for customization work but we're few and far between. Personally, I'm more likely to donate than I am to freshen up on my coding skills (though that's starting to change). I've even paid for custom work to be done.
I do participate, in small ways, with a few projects and I'm not really privy to, or interested in, their financial information but I'm understanding that it's not too common to get donations for smaller projects. The big distros get the money. The big projects get the money. The one that some guy still does out of love, in his basement, is just languishing more often than not.
I think it was about a year ago that a study was released that showed some 90% of all open source projects (that they could enumerate) were abandoned. I didn't agree with their criteria and I think the number was actually higher than 90% (like 98% or something alarming) but it was still eye-opening. I didn't agree with their process but I think the differences probably wouldn't have been significant.
They took a look at all the public projects on sites like SourceForge, GitHub, and the likes and any project that hadn't had any changes made in a year was considered abandoned. (I didn't agree with the year long period of time. Some software doesn't need updating.) So, while I didn't agree entirely with their conclusions the numbers were still interesting and still valuable as they included a bunch of other results and raw numbers with the study.
Anyway, I think that was their point. It's not that you don't have options, it's just that there aren't many options and the options often aren't very good. Certain things have, for better or worse, become the defacto standard. Things that are installed by default have greater momentum and greater mass. The greater mass attracts more attention and the momentum makes it difficult (not impossible) to get things changed.
I think a good example of something becoming the standard would be systemd. For better or worse, that's what we've got in a lot of distros. Sure, you can work around it and you can find a distro without it but can you find one that's well funded, is reasonably feature complete, has a good ecosystem of pre-compiled software in the repos, and has a good sized community around it? (Choosing BSD is not an option for this rhetorical question.) They're few and far between and likely to get more rare as systemd becomes further entrenched.
I frequently find myself in agreement with you and seldom agree with the person you're responding to. This leaves me in a confused state. That means, as usual, I'm probably missing something. Would you be so kind as to explain to me what it is that you're choosing to use for your definition of "modern language" and what you think was lacking in C++98 (not specifically, but conceptually) that makes your argument hold water?
I should also be *very* clear. At one point in time, I was moderately familiar with C++ but this would have been C++98. The last time that I'd have touched any code would have been not much after that and most of my fluency was in C and not C++. I'd never say that I was fluent with C++, even when it was used frequently. I'll also be quite specific and say that I should not be confused for a programmer.
I have programmed, in fact I've written countless lines - usually when they could have been condensed to a few lines. It was a necessity. My code base was, in time, rewritten in its entirety and I did learn a lot from the professionals by being smart enough to know that I paid them because they were good. They did things that I could not do. They did things in time-frames that were not achievable by me. They did things like go to college and get degrees specifically in computer science. Some of them were actual real-life engineers, not just "software engineers."
I say that to say, explain it like I'm five - if you don't mind.:-/ For I am not that skilled in the art of programming and can generally grok things conceptually more so than specifically but I have a search engine handy if need be.
No, they are not agreeing. It's an automated process. You, on the other hand, are agreeing to the terms. They can not be expected to read each and every submission to its conclusion nor can they be reasonably expected to respond to such. No judge, even if they steal your work, will give you any consideration for this. No lawyer will take it on contingency. No jury will award you damages or find in your favor.
I am not a lawyer but this is legal advice: Do not listen to the parent poster without getting professional legal council.
I've done quite a bit of work with lawyers, specifically with contract law, and have even done a great deal of my own research in some cases. I've also had some dealings with criminal courts, up to and including petitioning for standing - you can always ask, well - until you piss a judge off by bugging them too much, then they may tell you to stop and hold you in contempt if you don't. But, you can petition the court for most anything - even for them to let you take a deity to court. (They won't agree but you can ask.)
Anyhow, judges don't take kindly to legal weasel words regardless of what you see on television, read in books, or see in the movies. It doesn't work like that and you'll piss the judge off. On top of that, your submission, via an automated process, would not even remotely indicate that they approved of the contract and such would not be legally binding in any way, shape, or form. You mentioned it several times in the thread (the same verbiage was used each time) so I feel compelled to tell you to not do this and I feel obligated to make sure nobody is daft enough to believe you.
What I can recommend is that you uphold your end of the social contract. What's that? Such a severe topic for such a trivial post? Yes, yes indeed.
See, we as citizens are obligated to make sure that we have the government we're due. One of the easiest routes to access and change the government is the court. The court is an important place. You, as a citizen, need to watch the courts and observe their actions - which means knowing a little bit about the law and ensuring that the court has upheld the law - even for people who are likely guilty of crimes you find reprehensible. (You can always petition for standing or to speak as a friend of the court - it doesn't always work.) So, it's fairly obvious that you've not done this. What you should do, as well as everyone else, is take a few days a year our of your busy schedule and use that time to observe the courts. They're usually open to the public. They have access to a law library, it's free, and you can generally even ask a nice lawyer for a little help and they'll give it to you if you have a quick question and a wise question.
Such is your end of the social bargain. You want a government that does what it is meant to do? You need to take the time to observe the government and make sure that it is doing the job you let it do. This lapse in social duty is probably the greatest cause of the governmental degradations we have. You rely on media or someone else to do the job. It does take some sacrifice to accomplish this, one needs to make the time for it, but it is your job to do so. An inattentive populous is a politician's dream. Do your job.
They, the real professionals, might review this site for ideas. They'll just change a few names around, make the setting sightly different, and call the idea their own. This is a stupid idea and they are stupid for enabling it. Nothing good will come of this except for a few key events that are short-lived. It will look like a success on paper (at best) and be in the news no more than three times as a success. If it's in the news beyond that then it will be for negatives such as the above mentioned copying of said ideas.
Even if they don't copy the ideas, there will be something written that is so similar that someone will think it belongs to them, was their idea first, and will attempt to sue over it because they've a frail ego and will not be able to accept that someone else had the same idea already.
Years and years ago, I needed to take a filler class in a language so I took a creative writing class. This was at the collegiate level and it was more difficult than I'd expected (for I am not a writer). One of the things that the professor taught us is that there are something like 21 basic plots and that's it - nobody's come up with more. You can twist 'em, you can manipulate them, and you can mix and match them but there are, all told, just something silly like 21 total basic plots. (I'm not even sure it was that many but it was a lot of years ago.)
So, no... Nothing good will come of this. I'm sure there will be a few 'success' stories at first. I imagine that will be the end of it and it will fade into the dustbin of history. I'm inclined to believe so, at any rate. Good on them for trying and all but I just don't see this being as big a hit as they might be expecting. I anticipate a lot of unhappy people who think they're more clever and qualified than they really are. I also expect greed, manipulation, and outright abuse. To be frank, I don't think I'm expecting anything out of the ordinary.
You know, the world is a bit more gray than that black and white statement you've made. For example, I know plenty of people who are "job creators." Personally, I own a portion of (non-controlling shares or "silent partner" ownerships) a number of businesses and, quite literally, create jobs. I guess, in most cases, I help people maintain the jobs they have but I've helped create more than my fair share of jobs in my day and still do. At one point, I even had a business that employed over 200 people.
Now, to the point, no! I'll speak for me and me alone. I can't and won't speak for others but I know a number who feel similarly. I don't mind taxes. In fact, I could stand to pay more in taxes - sometimes I don't even write off donations which means I'm paying more in taxes than I am obligated to pay. What I do mind is that my taxes are spent poorly! I still employ three staff members directly as well as an accountant, a lawyer, and a personal finance manager. I pay a higher sum total but a lower percentage overall than they do. And it's not because I pay them poorly - it's because that's where the tax rates are.
See, almost all of my income is derived from "capital gains." Now, they tax me at the rate they do (about 15% overall, I guess) not because they like me - but because they want to encourage me to keep my money invested. I quite agree - it's nice to keep it invested. I honestly had no idea that it was this lucrative. There's something to be said about municipal bonds! At any rate, I don't actually even get taxed until I *spend* the money (pretty much). So long as the money remains in the market then, as near as I can tell, err...
Hmm... I'm not actually sure what rules apply? I don't think I get taxed until it's spent. I'm pretty sure that if I move some funds earned into the market then that too isn't taxed - so long as it's in a fairly reasonable period of time. If I move it into the credit union account then I'm taxed on it but I don't really pay any taxes other than that (on income).
It's a little embarrassing, now that I think about it, but I have to admit that I don't know all the specifics but, in my defense, that's kind of my point. I don't worry about taxes - at all. Well, I worry that they're paid on time and to the exact amount (or greater) owed. I'm not even very good at keeping receipts or anything. Sure, I pay a pretty big number but it's not that big, comparatively speaking.
My taxes could go up, a reasonable amount, and it would not even begin to be noticed by me. It would not stop me from investing until it reached the point where it was less costly to simply live elsewhere or to not invest at all, that's quite a ways away from where it's at. I've said before, and I repeat, go ahead and raise my taxes and lower the tax burden of the low and middle class brackets. The upper-middle class kind of gets screwed, from what I've read. They can deal with it.
However, if you want me to pay more in taxes then I ask that you spend it wisely. I have a social contract to uphold but so don't you. I'm willing, able, and doing so. I am willing and able to do more but, again, I ask simply that you spend it wisely. Do you really need a giant military? Do you really need as much waste as you do have? Do we really need to be giving tax breaks to the wealthy? Do we really need to incarcerate so many people? If you want more of my money then how about you use it to feed the hungry and treat the ill? Is that too much to ask?
To be fair, if we stayed on topic and limited ourselves to only pertinent subjects not only would your comment be superfluous and against your own rules but we'd have maybe a half-dozen comments on a given subject. This here's howler monkey-esque screeching and poop flinging territory. And, to cut some folks off at the pass, before you recollect an idyllic past -- keep in mind that such is revisionist's history. We've never been good or on topic.
Hmm... In truth, it would be "death panels." We'd have to - we simply can't afford some treatments with improbable odds. That means there will be groups of people allowing some to die. (Of course, they'd still be allowed to die in the current or prior systems as well.)
My preference? Single-payer-health-care, something akin to the style used in the NHS from the UK would be a good start. With it, one should have the chance to buy additional insurance and pay for private care out of pocket. What would have been the maximum benefit from the NHS style can be applied to those other treatments.
We're the wealthiest nation on the planet. We can afford this. In fact, it's cheaper for us if we do. Well, it's quite probably cheaper for us if we do. This isn't even really all that complicated and shouldn't be a matter of debate. Prevention is less expensive than curing. Yes, this means taking care of the poor and the willfully unhealthy. You're going to pay for it regardless, you might as well pay less for it by distributing the amount owed and preventing as much as you can rather than pay for catastrophic care.
Get rid of the insurance companies, at the scale their at, and let people opt into them if they want to - and no, opting in to private insurance does not absolve them from their tax obligations. And no, you don't get to say that people can't smoke, eat fatty foods, and drink. Sorry. Suck it up and spend the extra nickel it costs you in your tax bill. Hell, there's a good chance that the people complaining the loudest don't even pay a great deal in taxes. Why they're worried about my tax bill is something I've yet to understand. I appreciate the concern but, really folks, I'll be fine.
The real world has occupied more of my attention. I've a new(ish) female in my life who takes an inordinate amount of time! It's nice and something that I was kind of hoping to achieve (albeit not expecting it to occur quite like it has) but it does eat into my Slashdot-time. There is a huge, I mean huge, gingerbread house and candy display in the hotel lobby. (I'm still in Buffalo and will be until tomorrow afternoon or Tuesday morning, probably Tuesday morning.)
There are other links, that was the first one I came across. It's kind of neat but press and people are crawling about. It'll be nice to get the hell back on the road but it will be odd as I've a second person with me. Yay? I'm probably just going to go to DC next. I've been in this damned city, and hotel, since early/mid September. It's a nice suite and all but, honestly? I'm kind of sick of it.
Either way, to the point of the connectivity... *grins* I have three current DSL lines that are all separate. I don't know why I can't just buy the bandwidth and have access to it entirely but I need three. I have one connection in the garage/workshop. There's one in the house that was here when I bought the place, I also keep some hardware there. I have the last connection in the the new house. I'd love to be able to have the total bandwidth and just provision it myself but it seems that Fairpoint doesn't allow it.
I did have satellite for the longest time. It's not really a good solution. I don't game but latency was still problematic. My usage pattern is not conducive to satellite bandwidth. I go through a lot of bandwidth, even though I am not home - the home connection (the others are fairly idle) is still eating up a TB or more per month. I am usually connected to a machine at home, via VNC or SSH, and that's where I do a lot of "work." (It's not really work - it's just easier to spin up a bunch of VMs on more robust hardware, compile there, or even use it as another layer in security.)
The telephone lines only come from one direction. I live off of a routed highway but about five miles beyond my house the lines stop and don't start again for about sixty more miles. There are no electrical lines in there, no anything. There are some hunting camps and one or two homes that are entirely off the grid but that's it. Otherwise, I'd try to get a DSL provisioning from the other direction. As it stands, I can use cellular data if there's something that takes me offline for an extended period of time. Thus, it's my only redundancy and it's not configured to kick in if I'm not home so the network isn't so very robust. It's fine, I guess, for a residency.
When I last counted, I had some 143 ISO/compressed distros shared via torrent, some going back quite a ways, so it's probably for the best that it's not set to auto-restore service via cellular data. I've got a few dollars but that's because I don't tend to waste money on frivolous things. If it's a friend who needs to backup their data then, worst case, they know where the key to the house is and know the alarm code. If they're too remote then they can *probably* call another friend, one that is more local, and they may have the technical chops to get connectivity restored. If not, well, they can go without or call me and I can talk someone through it.
What that had to do with bookmarks is, well, only tangentially related - a lack of organization, the use pattern, etc... Hell, it's not even tangentially related.;-) I mean, this is me! I'll just meander around from topic to topic but that was so far removed that I had typed it out a goodly portion of it before I realized how far removed it is and decided to delete it.
Seeing as I'm on the subject, it would be nice to be able to build a more robust network. I'm usually home but I like being able to access my own networks from afar. I'd also like to be able to maintain connectivity in an emergenc
LOL I'd wondered about that, while posting, but this is Slashdot so you never know.:/ I was pretty sure that they were serious but it probably doesn't help that I am unfamiliar with the series. I've never been a huge fan of television. I miss a few references but I do learn about a few programs by the various conversations.:D
Presumably, they were properly interpreting the statistics which is, of course, the problem. Regardless, if you don't speak out then you will not be heard. For better or worse, that means enabling telemetry. If you don't enable this then, it would seem, you don't get a vote. While there are certainly valid complaints to be made, I'm not sure of the validity of opting to stay silent while expecting to be heard.
Personally? I typically disable telemetry and accept that there may be features lost or gained that I did not voice an opinion on. For better or worse, if you want a say you have to voice your opinion and the only viable way, at this time, is to do so via enabling telemetry data. If they do not know your use patterns or what you use for features then you'll find that your concerns are not a priority.
Security has always been about a process. It's about making choices - what will you risk to accomplish the goals you have? Privacy is a part of security. What are you willing to give up in order to have the desired results?
I don't have a solution that's going to work for everyone. I will say that it is there software and they can do with it as they please. I simply do not donate to Mozilla any longer. I'm not sure that donating would actually mean that I'd be eligible to a greater voice than someone who hasn't donated. I do know that offering my telemetry data, in aggregate, is being allowed to share my opinion. Typically, and specifically with Firefox, I do not voice my opinion and I end up simply accepting that my voice is not heard which means lost features, features I do not want, and a potentially inferior user-experience.
That said, I simply use an alternative browser. As I use three different builds of that browser, I enable telemetry data collection in two of them.
You know that Opera supports bookmarks, right? You can safely return now. They've done pretty well with it since the dark days. I've been using Opera since the days when we had to pay for it. I did take a break and I did also use Firefox for a while. Hell, I even helped support Firefox a few times. Now? I can't even *donate* to Opera.
I don't donate to Firefox any longer - I haven't for quite a while now. I'd donate even if I didn't use them but, for a few reasons, I see no reason to help support them any longer. It's a shame. I used to donate a couple hundred bucks a couple of times per year, sometimes more and sometimes less. I've probably not donated anything in the past three or four years for reasons of my own.
Anyhow, take a gander at Opera again - if you're interested. It has made some great improvements.
Coupled with this one can have access to the whole Chrome extension ecosystem as well, though I find little reason to do so. Is there a specific bookmarking functionality that Opera is lacking? (I don't actually recall a time when they didn't have it but I may have missed something or simply forgotten something.)
They've come a long ways and have started the innovation thing again. It has taken them some time but they're making great improvements to the browser. I find that it's speedy and light, comparatively speaking, and haven't had any issues with any of the builds -- in quite some time. I regularly make use of all three versions and find myself most frequently making use of the beta build. Yup, even beta is stable enough to be my main browser. The dev builds are often rather interesting and sometimes have half-baked functions built into them but they're optional.
I think, literally, every single modern browser does tab recovery if you have it set to re-open tabs on startup. Well, I don't know if IE does it. I think the rest do it, however. Unless you're talking about some feature that I'm unaware of? If the browser crashes, I reopen it, my tabs are still there - sometimes this kind of sucks because I'll have to find the offending tab and close it before it reopens.
I suspect that you'll find that it is not their sole consideration. On the other hand, you've got people in here saying that they're smart so that they disable the telemetry data collection. One might conclude, or at least argue, that they're not that smart after all. We often think we're more or less clever than we really are, so there's no surprise there. I believe my phone collects telemetry data but I do disable it, as a general rule. I accept that this means I have less say in the future of an application. I am okay with that. Features come and go, I'll make due and I'm not so obsessed that I'm inclined to be upset about a missing or added feature unless such is basic functionality - in which case, I'll simply use alternative software.
I actually, intentionally, deleted my bookmarks a year or so ago. I'd not been using them but had simply been adding things to them. They were an unorganized mess that had things in there from *years and years and years* prior. I'd exported and imported them and kept them going since the 1990s. I had tens of thousands of them, many of them duplicates from one error or another during importing or whatnot. I had folders and subfolders and just a mess of them. It was almost painful but it felt so much nicer afterwards.
Now? It's much more curated and much better laid out. There's a definite folder-tree taking place that is logical (to me) and the functionality is vastly improved. Add to that the nature of the beast and searching becomes viable again. I know there's a size consideration but it would be nice if adding to bookmarks actually also added the text of the page, or perhaps some highlighted text. Then, when searching, it'd also search the text. I still struggle to remember what is and isn't bookmarked.
Anyhow, that was part of my night of the long knives - I purged a great deal of things over a period of time. The last one was getting rid of scads of backups, archived data, and things like movies and music. In the end, I deleted something like approaching 15 TB of data though much of it could be retrieved from storage. I doubt that I ever will but it is there if I ever really wanted to. My home servers and networks now have so much storage that I'm not sure of what to do with it all. I've got friends who actually have "unlimited" backup abilities as they can login and store data on certain networks in my home. But that's not got a whole lot to do with bookmarks.
(You should see what I'd deleted. I'd somehow meandered so far off-topic that I was talking about redundancy with connectivity. I figured that I'd spare you the novella.)
I seem to recall, but I am not a Firefox user, that if you don't select the upgrade it won't be upgraded? Using, say, Ubuntu as the platform - when it pops up asking you to do your daily updates you can just untick the box and it won't be downloaded and installed. At least, I'm pretty sure that's how it works. I've never actually tried not ticking the box - I let it stay up to date even though it is seldom opened. (I typically use Opera, almost exclusively.)
I've started, hopefully, making use of bookmarking groups of tabs that become folders in the new page tab. I also have been trying to keep searching my bookmarks. Much like you stated, that's where pages go to die. It's not like I remember what I have bookmarked and what I don't. So, I try to find stuff in there prior to going out to a search engine - if I think it was something off the beaten track. However, no, not so much. Instead, I've just started trying to bookmark the groups and will open them again.
What I have also been doing is using Opera Beta, Developer, and Stable. This enables me to have a profile *and* be able to have things a little bit more organized. I can dig down in the profile's synced open tabs pretty well. It's hard to change old habits. I was pretty messy for a while and had lots of tabs open. Then, I grew weary of that and had just a few tabs open - that was probably the most productive period. Then they grew to around 10. Now, I'm at around 10 per browser and I keep each browser in a different desktop - if I'm home they're on different screens.:/ It's still a bit of a hodgepodge. I seem to recall getting my first "modern" web browser in the early 1990s. I am not exactly sure when. It has actually gone downhill in how I use it, in an organizational way, and I'm doubtful that I'll ever get completely back to where I once was. I still don't understand the people who have 100+ tabs open and are somehow proud of this. I'd hate to see how they keep their house clean.
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Maine no longer needs one to hold a CCP to conceal carry so long as you're legally entitled to be in possession of a firearm. You can still get your CCP (and should) to ensure that you're legal when you leave the state. Without one, you'd likely be violating the law in other states even though there's an agreement between them. Those states will still require you to have the permit, for the time being. It's untested but that's the current assumption. You've pretty much always been allowed to open carry without needing a permit.
To which I ask, what's your point? I accept that risk in the name of freedom. You can have freedom or the illusion of safety, which would you prefer? If someone wants to kill you, they'll do so with or without a firearm. Bad things happen. Oh well. You get freedom or the illusion of safety. Numerically, it's a trivial amount of difference. Thoughts like your thoughts are what gave us Homeland Security and the TSA. I would rather die free than live a coward, as pithy as that sounds - it is entirely true.
You are not going to get a completely safe world. The problem is not firearms, the problem is culture, crime, risks and rewards, and poverty. Taking the guns away attempts to cure the symptom and not the disease. I am not a coward and I don't think we should amend the constitution because you're afraid. I don't think that people who live in constant fear make good decisions. Just because you're afraid of some gun violence does not mean that the problem is the guns themselves. You should know the causation and correlation adage well enough by now.
There are countries with a higher per capita gun ownership rate than the US that have far fewer violent crimes or shootings. (See Sweden for one example.) The problem is not now, nor has it ever been, the tool. The problem is cultural, economic, educational, and the risks of being caught being so great that they're willing to die to avoid the punishment - which means they're willing to kill.
For a bunch of supposedly logical people who love to trot out statistics and numbers and assume they've made a case, you've continually failed to actually make that case. No, we're not changing the Constitution because you're afraid and unwilling to accept accountability. It's the lack of accountability that has us in this position. It's not the guns, it's the people behind them. This has been explained to you, time and time again. You're peers and yourself are reaching the point where you're starting to act like children. Stop being a coward and trying to base policy on fear rather than actually addressing the problems that you helped to create.
In a state of anarchy, would having laws be unlawful? I think that's what it boils down to and it is akin to asking if $deity can create a pepper too hot for he, himself, to eat. Or, more accurately, "If perpetual motion machines were invented, would elephants wear pajamas?"
No, no... Now that I reread that, I've nothing to contribute that makes sense. I'm gonna post it anyhow. ;-) I guess, in seriousness, no because we can't realistically outlaw laws because even saying that there is no laws is a law, after a fashion.
In short order, with distributed compute power, we might be able to set this up in chunks (each getting a reasonable set) and every one of us send out a few hundred thousand of them to ensure we've covered every single alphanumerical combination up to 12 letters for the entirety of the .gov.au addresses or whatnot. With enough time, and enough effort, we could even cover all the major email providers including the various ISPs. We can even us VPNs and spread our message of love and freedom across the globe as far as originating IP addresses are concerned.
Hmm... I imagine it'd be fairly trivial to get a small script going that sends mail. It probably wouldn't even have to be a full blown server? I've done some playing with SendMail but I don't think that's quite what I'm looking for. Hell, we could all do it and just have it use random combinations. Some would be repeats, of course, but that'd be enough to get the message across. Some random and some regex, a small script (I'm sure I can find one), and a list of email providers as well as government ccTLDs and we should be good to go. We can probably be even fancier if we know the format they use for email addresses and wanted to create a dictionary to work with.
We should probably wait for them to enact the law before acting on this. I think this is a lesson best learned in hindsight and not foresight. If they want to behave in a ludicrous manner then they should expect a ludicrous response. If our Australian brothers aren't going to stand up for themselves then we should do it on their behalf. This is, of course, assuming that they don't stand up for themselves and that the law is enacted. We might as well wait for that and see if they're going to punish themselves for possession of these plans.
I figure that's true for the first few which is why I included that.
I'm sure there will be a few 'success' stories at first.
Perhaps you missed it or I wasn't clear enough? Or do you think they're going to *keep* doing that after the first few and they've gained the PR boost from it? If so then, well, I don't think that's going to happen. They'll end up getting labor at next to nothing if not just outright stealing the ideas and changing them enough to ensure they don't violate any agreements. Their terms of service indicate that they've already concluded that many ideas are so similar that they need to include an indemnification clause to ensure that they can't be sued for similar works.
I'd hope you're right but it does't look likely. I don't suppose you want to place a friendly wager on it? :D
There were a couple of dozen fruit trees in what used to be a clearing on my property. A neighbor advised me to consult an arbor-something-or-other tree specialist instead of just leaving them there. I hired him and he came in, cleared the overgrowth, and then trimmed the trees. I get *some* fruit now (pears and apples) but not a whole lot but they're a full order of magnitude larger than what they were when I first build the house and discovered the old orchard.
The historical society, down in the village, doesn't have a whole lot of information but coring one of the trees indicates that the tree is a couple of hundred years old. I've not yet reached the point where we've done *any* pollination or fertilization. Simply cutting the growth back and then trimming the trees properly has been enough. In a few years, I'll be getting normal sized fruit from the trees.
I'll have time, and motivation (hopefully) to harvest the majority while the fruit is still on the tree. I'll make jams, jellies, and can much the rest (there appears to be four different types of apples - we're not sure what one of them is just yet). I'll probably get some pressed and make cider. From that cider, I'll allow some to harden for friends and family.
Point being... If you harvest in a timely manner AND get them pruned professionally (or learn to do it yourself - I guess there's quite a bit that goes into it) then you may not need to rely on any pesticide at all. I've eaten some of the fruit, some of it is still bitter and the sizes are still quite small. I'll probably save the "drops" for the deer. I can't, legally, bait a deer but I sure as hell don't have to pick up the apples and I am certainly eligible to hunt there. (Nature is allowed to bait on my behalf.)
It wasn't too expensive to have him come in and look at it. Depending on how many trees you have, you may not spend much at all and they don't need to be pruned often. I've gone out and watched him do it a few times (it takes more work if the orchard goes sour like mine had) and could probably pull it off in a fashion, if needed, on my own. If you're willing to harvest on time and able to keep them properly pruned, you might be good to go without the need for any additional pesticides and fertilizer. The animals attracted by the fruit will probably take care of the pests for you.
This may, of course, vary greatly depending on your location. If they don't drop then I don't have any reasons to expect pest trouble. Even then, so long as I get them in a timely fashion after they've dropped, I'll still have little problems (or so I'm told).
Who the hell would be denying that spraying bees with poison is going to have a negative impact? I don't think that I've heard anyone say that, not even stupid people online. Well, not seriously at any rate. I've probably seen someone say it sarcastically but I don't think anyone has ever made an actual attempted argument for such that I have seen. (Not to say it didn't happen but that I've never seen it.)
Bah, you can probably get an LXDE distro to run on it. Specifically, I'd try Lubuntu 14.04 or wait for the next LTS but the 15.10 should run. I've installed 15.04 on some old, I mean old, hardware (slower than your hardware but maybe more RAM). It runs, it runs like a champ, honestly. It runs far better than I'd have expected. I don't have said hardware with me to test on but I suspect 15.10 would run just fine on it too.
Sure, you won't be loading a few dozen heavy sites in different tabs and full-screen YouTube isn't going to work well but you can probably set the quality down to around 360p and be fine in regular screen. It most likely won't like full screen but I imagine it will run just fine. Perhaps you've greater expectations of it than you're able to get? I know that I've installed on slower hardware and had it work well enough that I've sat there and browsed with hit, used a light VM loaded on it (with nothing running on the host), and have even compiled stuff on it. I've done this with more than one distro and more than one old computer - tweaking, poking, and breaking is what I do.
If I can do it then, well, you're almost certainly able to do it. Check distrowatch for more distros, use the search and find something optimized for older hardware. You may need to do some compiling but probably not much. I'm no guru or anything which is why I say that if I can do it, you can do it. I think the slowest thing I've installed a *recent* Ubuntu on (I'm thinking it was 14.04 the last time) was a 1.8 GHz, single core, 32 bit, Athlon. I think it was even Ubuntu and not Lubuntu. As I recall, it booted fairly well and ran a browser well enough so long as I kept the scripting to a dull roar. I don't remember if I played any streaming videos but I'm sure I tested with music and local video content and I'd likely remember if it didn't work properly. This was not long before I left so this was in the past six months or so.
So, yeah... If a meatstick like me can manage then I'm quite sure you can get it to run. Hell, I've had Windows 7 running on hardware that slow. (Getting stuff to run on old hardware is a bit of a hobby of mine and I used to have an MSDN subscription.) Hmm... I've even had Lubuntu running on an early Acer Aspire One netbook. I forget the model number but it was one of the oldest ones made. I never got the wifi to work but it worked plugged in well enough. It was faster than XP was on it and was a more recent version of Ubuntu or, maybe, Mint. It needed one to be patient but it wasn't that bad. :/ I've got much, much, faster hardware but it's nice to poke, play, and learn so I've been known to get a number of things running on older hardware. No choking at all, so long as I've reasonable expectations. It's not going to run like it's on a new i7 with 32 GB of RAM or the likes, it can't.
Yes, it was conspicuously absent! Heretic! Burn the heretic!
I'm not really a vi or emacs fan. Nor do I like vim. I don't even like nano. I suppose that's largely because I've never really enjoyed using them and never learned to use any of them at anything greater than a rudimentary level. I should like to take some sort of online course in vi, however. I wonder if edX.org has anything on the subject?
I think the point is that, yes, there's a lot of choices still to be had but, for the most part, it's just a limited set of applications that gets the development time, dollars, and attention. The apps that end up being default end up getting the donations. It is just like there's a distro out there for everyone (and, if not, you can use openSuse's online tool to make one) and still, unless they're in the top ten list at DistroWatch, they're not getting much in the way of donations or the likes.
It's unfortunate but that's the way it is. Sure, there are choices but they often suck. We don't all have the time or skills to get something changed. Some of us are willing to pay, to donate at least, for a project to be maintained or even for customization work but we're few and far between. Personally, I'm more likely to donate than I am to freshen up on my coding skills (though that's starting to change). I've even paid for custom work to be done.
I do participate, in small ways, with a few projects and I'm not really privy to, or interested in, their financial information but I'm understanding that it's not too common to get donations for smaller projects. The big distros get the money. The big projects get the money. The one that some guy still does out of love, in his basement, is just languishing more often than not.
I think it was about a year ago that a study was released that showed some 90% of all open source projects (that they could enumerate) were abandoned. I didn't agree with their criteria and I think the number was actually higher than 90% (like 98% or something alarming) but it was still eye-opening. I didn't agree with their process but I think the differences probably wouldn't have been significant.
They took a look at all the public projects on sites like SourceForge, GitHub, and the likes and any project that hadn't had any changes made in a year was considered abandoned. (I didn't agree with the year long period of time. Some software doesn't need updating.) So, while I didn't agree entirely with their conclusions the numbers were still interesting and still valuable as they included a bunch of other results and raw numbers with the study.
Anyway, I think that was their point. It's not that you don't have options, it's just that there aren't many options and the options often aren't very good. Certain things have, for better or worse, become the defacto standard. Things that are installed by default have greater momentum and greater mass. The greater mass attracts more attention and the momentum makes it difficult (not impossible) to get things changed.
I think a good example of something becoming the standard would be systemd. For better or worse, that's what we've got in a lot of distros. Sure, you can work around it and you can find a distro without it but can you find one that's well funded, is reasonably feature complete, has a good ecosystem of pre-compiled software in the repos, and has a good sized community around it? (Choosing BSD is not an option for this rhetorical question.) They're few and far between and likely to get more rare as systemd becomes further entrenched.
I frequently find myself in agreement with you and seldom agree with the person you're responding to. This leaves me in a confused state. That means, as usual, I'm probably missing something. Would you be so kind as to explain to me what it is that you're choosing to use for your definition of "modern language" and what you think was lacking in C++98 (not specifically, but conceptually) that makes your argument hold water?
I should also be *very* clear. At one point in time, I was moderately familiar with C++ but this would have been C++98. The last time that I'd have touched any code would have been not much after that and most of my fluency was in C and not C++. I'd never say that I was fluent with C++, even when it was used frequently. I'll also be quite specific and say that I should not be confused for a programmer.
I have programmed, in fact I've written countless lines - usually when they could have been condensed to a few lines. It was a necessity. My code base was, in time, rewritten in its entirety and I did learn a lot from the professionals by being smart enough to know that I paid them because they were good. They did things that I could not do. They did things in time-frames that were not achievable by me. They did things like go to college and get degrees specifically in computer science. Some of them were actual real-life engineers, not just "software engineers."
I say that to say, explain it like I'm five - if you don't mind. :-/ For I am not that skilled in the art of programming and can generally grok things conceptually more so than specifically but I have a search engine handy if need be.
No, they are not agreeing. It's an automated process. You, on the other hand, are agreeing to the terms. They can not be expected to read each and every submission to its conclusion nor can they be reasonably expected to respond to such. No judge, even if they steal your work, will give you any consideration for this. No lawyer will take it on contingency. No jury will award you damages or find in your favor.
I am not a lawyer but this is legal advice: Do not listen to the parent poster without getting professional legal council.
I've done quite a bit of work with lawyers, specifically with contract law, and have even done a great deal of my own research in some cases. I've also had some dealings with criminal courts, up to and including petitioning for standing - you can always ask, well - until you piss a judge off by bugging them too much, then they may tell you to stop and hold you in contempt if you don't. But, you can petition the court for most anything - even for them to let you take a deity to court. (They won't agree but you can ask.)
Anyhow, judges don't take kindly to legal weasel words regardless of what you see on television, read in books, or see in the movies. It doesn't work like that and you'll piss the judge off. On top of that, your submission, via an automated process, would not even remotely indicate that they approved of the contract and such would not be legally binding in any way, shape, or form. You mentioned it several times in the thread (the same verbiage was used each time) so I feel compelled to tell you to not do this and I feel obligated to make sure nobody is daft enough to believe you.
What I can recommend is that you uphold your end of the social contract. What's that? Such a severe topic for such a trivial post? Yes, yes indeed.
See, we as citizens are obligated to make sure that we have the government we're due. One of the easiest routes to access and change the government is the court. The court is an important place. You, as a citizen, need to watch the courts and observe their actions - which means knowing a little bit about the law and ensuring that the court has upheld the law - even for people who are likely guilty of crimes you find reprehensible. (You can always petition for standing or to speak as a friend of the court - it doesn't always work.) So, it's fairly obvious that you've not done this. What you should do, as well as everyone else, is take a few days a year our of your busy schedule and use that time to observe the courts. They're usually open to the public. They have access to a law library, it's free, and you can generally even ask a nice lawyer for a little help and they'll give it to you if you have a quick question and a wise question.
Such is your end of the social bargain. You want a government that does what it is meant to do? You need to take the time to observe the government and make sure that it is doing the job you let it do. This lapse in social duty is probably the greatest cause of the governmental degradations we have. You rely on media or someone else to do the job. It does take some sacrifice to accomplish this, one needs to make the time for it, but it is your job to do so. An inattentive populous is a politician's dream. Do your job.
They, the real professionals, might review this site for ideas. They'll just change a few names around, make the setting sightly different, and call the idea their own. This is a stupid idea and they are stupid for enabling it. Nothing good will come of this except for a few key events that are short-lived. It will look like a success on paper (at best) and be in the news no more than three times as a success. If it's in the news beyond that then it will be for negatives such as the above mentioned copying of said ideas.
Even if they don't copy the ideas, there will be something written that is so similar that someone will think it belongs to them, was their idea first, and will attempt to sue over it because they've a frail ego and will not be able to accept that someone else had the same idea already.
Years and years ago, I needed to take a filler class in a language so I took a creative writing class. This was at the collegiate level and it was more difficult than I'd expected (for I am not a writer). One of the things that the professor taught us is that there are something like 21 basic plots and that's it - nobody's come up with more. You can twist 'em, you can manipulate them, and you can mix and match them but there are, all told, just something silly like 21 total basic plots. (I'm not even sure it was that many but it was a lot of years ago.)
So, no... Nothing good will come of this. I'm sure there will be a few 'success' stories at first. I imagine that will be the end of it and it will fade into the dustbin of history. I'm inclined to believe so, at any rate. Good on them for trying and all but I just don't see this being as big a hit as they might be expecting. I anticipate a lot of unhappy people who think they're more clever and qualified than they really are. I also expect greed, manipulation, and outright abuse. To be frank, I don't think I'm expecting anything out of the ordinary.
I was wondering where that was going and followed it through to the end. I came!
You know, the world is a bit more gray than that black and white statement you've made. For example, I know plenty of people who are "job creators." Personally, I own a portion of (non-controlling shares or "silent partner" ownerships) a number of businesses and, quite literally, create jobs. I guess, in most cases, I help people maintain the jobs they have but I've helped create more than my fair share of jobs in my day and still do. At one point, I even had a business that employed over 200 people.
Now, to the point, no! I'll speak for me and me alone. I can't and won't speak for others but I know a number who feel similarly. I don't mind taxes. In fact, I could stand to pay more in taxes - sometimes I don't even write off donations which means I'm paying more in taxes than I am obligated to pay. What I do mind is that my taxes are spent poorly! I still employ three staff members directly as well as an accountant, a lawyer, and a personal finance manager. I pay a higher sum total but a lower percentage overall than they do. And it's not because I pay them poorly - it's because that's where the tax rates are.
See, almost all of my income is derived from "capital gains." Now, they tax me at the rate they do (about 15% overall, I guess) not because they like me - but because they want to encourage me to keep my money invested. I quite agree - it's nice to keep it invested. I honestly had no idea that it was this lucrative. There's something to be said about municipal bonds! At any rate, I don't actually even get taxed until I *spend* the money (pretty much). So long as the money remains in the market then, as near as I can tell, err...
Hmm... I'm not actually sure what rules apply? I don't think I get taxed until it's spent. I'm pretty sure that if I move some funds earned into the market then that too isn't taxed - so long as it's in a fairly reasonable period of time. If I move it into the credit union account then I'm taxed on it but I don't really pay any taxes other than that (on income).
It's a little embarrassing, now that I think about it, but I have to admit that I don't know all the specifics but, in my defense, that's kind of my point. I don't worry about taxes - at all. Well, I worry that they're paid on time and to the exact amount (or greater) owed. I'm not even very good at keeping receipts or anything. Sure, I pay a pretty big number but it's not that big, comparatively speaking.
My taxes could go up, a reasonable amount, and it would not even begin to be noticed by me. It would not stop me from investing until it reached the point where it was less costly to simply live elsewhere or to not invest at all, that's quite a ways away from where it's at. I've said before, and I repeat, go ahead and raise my taxes and lower the tax burden of the low and middle class brackets. The upper-middle class kind of gets screwed, from what I've read. They can deal with it.
However, if you want me to pay more in taxes then I ask that you spend it wisely. I have a social contract to uphold but so don't you. I'm willing, able, and doing so. I am willing and able to do more but, again, I ask simply that you spend it wisely. Do you really need a giant military? Do you really need as much waste as you do have? Do we really need to be giving tax breaks to the wealthy? Do we really need to incarcerate so many people? If you want more of my money then how about you use it to feed the hungry and treat the ill? Is that too much to ask?
To be fair, if we stayed on topic and limited ourselves to only pertinent subjects not only would your comment be superfluous and against your own rules but we'd have maybe a half-dozen comments on a given subject. This here's howler monkey-esque screeching and poop flinging territory. And, to cut some folks off at the pass, before you recollect an idyllic past -- keep in mind that such is revisionist's history. We've never been good or on topic.
Hmm... In truth, it would be "death panels." We'd have to - we simply can't afford some treatments with improbable odds. That means there will be groups of people allowing some to die. (Of course, they'd still be allowed to die in the current or prior systems as well.)
My preference? Single-payer-health-care, something akin to the style used in the NHS from the UK would be a good start. With it, one should have the chance to buy additional insurance and pay for private care out of pocket. What would have been the maximum benefit from the NHS style can be applied to those other treatments.
We're the wealthiest nation on the planet. We can afford this. In fact, it's cheaper for us if we do. Well, it's quite probably cheaper for us if we do. This isn't even really all that complicated and shouldn't be a matter of debate. Prevention is less expensive than curing. Yes, this means taking care of the poor and the willfully unhealthy. You're going to pay for it regardless, you might as well pay less for it by distributing the amount owed and preventing as much as you can rather than pay for catastrophic care.
Get rid of the insurance companies, at the scale their at, and let people opt into them if they want to - and no, opting in to private insurance does not absolve them from their tax obligations. And no, you don't get to say that people can't smoke, eat fatty foods, and drink. Sorry. Suck it up and spend the extra nickel it costs you in your tax bill. Hell, there's a good chance that the people complaining the loudest don't even pay a great deal in taxes. Why they're worried about my tax bill is something I've yet to understand. I appreciate the concern but, really folks, I'll be fine.
The real world has occupied more of my attention. I've a new(ish) female in my life who takes an inordinate amount of time! It's nice and something that I was kind of hoping to achieve (albeit not expecting it to occur quite like it has) but it does eat into my Slashdot-time. There is a huge, I mean huge, gingerbread house and candy display in the hotel lobby. (I'm still in Buffalo and will be until tomorrow afternoon or Tuesday morning, probably Tuesday morning.)
http://www.usatoday.com/videos...
There are other links, that was the first one I came across. It's kind of neat but press and people are crawling about. It'll be nice to get the hell back on the road but it will be odd as I've a second person with me. Yay? I'm probably just going to go to DC next. I've been in this damned city, and hotel, since early/mid September. It's a nice suite and all but, honestly? I'm kind of sick of it.
Either way, to the point of the connectivity... *grins* I have three current DSL lines that are all separate. I don't know why I can't just buy the bandwidth and have access to it entirely but I need three. I have one connection in the garage/workshop. There's one in the house that was here when I bought the place, I also keep some hardware there. I have the last connection in the the new house. I'd love to be able to have the total bandwidth and just provision it myself but it seems that Fairpoint doesn't allow it.
I did have satellite for the longest time. It's not really a good solution. I don't game but latency was still problematic. My usage pattern is not conducive to satellite bandwidth. I go through a lot of bandwidth, even though I am not home - the home connection (the others are fairly idle) is still eating up a TB or more per month. I am usually connected to a machine at home, via VNC or SSH, and that's where I do a lot of "work." (It's not really work - it's just easier to spin up a bunch of VMs on more robust hardware, compile there, or even use it as another layer in security.)
The telephone lines only come from one direction. I live off of a routed highway but about five miles beyond my house the lines stop and don't start again for about sixty more miles. There are no electrical lines in there, no anything. There are some hunting camps and one or two homes that are entirely off the grid but that's it. Otherwise, I'd try to get a DSL provisioning from the other direction. As it stands, I can use cellular data if there's something that takes me offline for an extended period of time. Thus, it's my only redundancy and it's not configured to kick in if I'm not home so the network isn't so very robust. It's fine, I guess, for a residency.
When I last counted, I had some 143 ISO/compressed distros shared via torrent, some going back quite a ways, so it's probably for the best that it's not set to auto-restore service via cellular data. I've got a few dollars but that's because I don't tend to waste money on frivolous things. If it's a friend who needs to backup their data then, worst case, they know where the key to the house is and know the alarm code. If they're too remote then they can *probably* call another friend, one that is more local, and they may have the technical chops to get connectivity restored. If not, well, they can go without or call me and I can talk someone through it.
What that had to do with bookmarks is, well, only tangentially related - a lack of organization, the use pattern, etc... Hell, it's not even tangentially related. ;-) I mean, this is me! I'll just meander around from topic to topic but that was so far removed that I had typed it out a goodly portion of it before I realized how far removed it is and decided to delete it.
Seeing as I'm on the subject, it would be nice to be able to build a more robust network. I'm usually home but I like being able to access my own networks from afar. I'd also like to be able to maintain connectivity in an emergenc
LOL I'd wondered about that, while posting, but this is Slashdot so you never know. :/ I was pretty sure that they were serious but it probably doesn't help that I am unfamiliar with the series. I've never been a huge fan of television. I miss a few references but I do learn about a few programs by the various conversations. :D
Presumably, they were properly interpreting the statistics which is, of course, the problem. Regardless, if you don't speak out then you will not be heard. For better or worse, that means enabling telemetry. If you don't enable this then, it would seem, you don't get a vote. While there are certainly valid complaints to be made, I'm not sure of the validity of opting to stay silent while expecting to be heard.
Personally? I typically disable telemetry and accept that there may be features lost or gained that I did not voice an opinion on. For better or worse, if you want a say you have to voice your opinion and the only viable way, at this time, is to do so via enabling telemetry data. If they do not know your use patterns or what you use for features then you'll find that your concerns are not a priority.
Security has always been about a process. It's about making choices - what will you risk to accomplish the goals you have? Privacy is a part of security. What are you willing to give up in order to have the desired results?
I don't have a solution that's going to work for everyone. I will say that it is there software and they can do with it as they please. I simply do not donate to Mozilla any longer. I'm not sure that donating would actually mean that I'd be eligible to a greater voice than someone who hasn't donated. I do know that offering my telemetry data, in aggregate, is being allowed to share my opinion. Typically, and specifically with Firefox, I do not voice my opinion and I end up simply accepting that my voice is not heard which means lost features, features I do not want, and a potentially inferior user-experience.
That said, I simply use an alternative browser. As I use three different builds of that browser, I enable telemetry data collection in two of them.
You know that Opera supports bookmarks, right? You can safely return now. They've done pretty well with it since the dark days. I've been using Opera since the days when we had to pay for it. I did take a break and I did also use Firefox for a while. Hell, I even helped support Firefox a few times. Now? I can't even *donate* to Opera.
I don't donate to Firefox any longer - I haven't for quite a while now. I'd donate even if I didn't use them but, for a few reasons, I see no reason to help support them any longer. It's a shame. I used to donate a couple hundred bucks a couple of times per year, sometimes more and sometimes less. I've probably not donated anything in the past three or four years for reasons of my own.
Anyhow, take a gander at Opera again - if you're interested. It has made some great improvements.
wget -O - http://deb.opera.com/archive.k... | sudo apt-key add -
sudo sh -c 'echo "deb http://deb.opera.com/opera-sta... stable non-free" >>
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install opera-beta && sudo apt-get install opera-developer && sudo apt-get install opera-stable
Coupled with this one can have access to the whole Chrome extension ecosystem as well, though I find little reason to do so. Is there a specific bookmarking functionality that Opera is lacking? (I don't actually recall a time when they didn't have it but I may have missed something or simply forgotten something.)
They've come a long ways and have started the innovation thing again. It has taken them some time but they're making great improvements to the browser. I find that it's speedy and light, comparatively speaking, and haven't had any issues with any of the builds -- in quite some time. I regularly make use of all three versions and find myself most frequently making use of the beta build. Yup, even beta is stable enough to be my main browser. The dev builds are often rather interesting and sometimes have half-baked functions built into them but they're optional.
I think, literally, every single modern browser does tab recovery if you have it set to re-open tabs on startup. Well, I don't know if IE does it. I think the rest do it, however. Unless you're talking about some feature that I'm unaware of? If the browser crashes, I reopen it, my tabs are still there - sometimes this kind of sucks because I'll have to find the offending tab and close it before it reopens.
I suspect that you'll find that it is not their sole consideration. On the other hand, you've got people in here saying that they're smart so that they disable the telemetry data collection. One might conclude, or at least argue, that they're not that smart after all. We often think we're more or less clever than we really are, so there's no surprise there. I believe my phone collects telemetry data but I do disable it, as a general rule. I accept that this means I have less say in the future of an application. I am okay with that. Features come and go, I'll make due and I'm not so obsessed that I'm inclined to be upset about a missing or added feature unless such is basic functionality - in which case, I'll simply use alternative software.
I actually, intentionally, deleted my bookmarks a year or so ago. I'd not been using them but had simply been adding things to them. They were an unorganized mess that had things in there from *years and years and years* prior. I'd exported and imported them and kept them going since the 1990s. I had tens of thousands of them, many of them duplicates from one error or another during importing or whatnot. I had folders and subfolders and just a mess of them. It was almost painful but it felt so much nicer afterwards.
Now? It's much more curated and much better laid out. There's a definite folder-tree taking place that is logical (to me) and the functionality is vastly improved. Add to that the nature of the beast and searching becomes viable again. I know there's a size consideration but it would be nice if adding to bookmarks actually also added the text of the page, or perhaps some highlighted text. Then, when searching, it'd also search the text. I still struggle to remember what is and isn't bookmarked.
Anyhow, that was part of my night of the long knives - I purged a great deal of things over a period of time. The last one was getting rid of scads of backups, archived data, and things like movies and music. In the end, I deleted something like approaching 15 TB of data though much of it could be retrieved from storage. I doubt that I ever will but it is there if I ever really wanted to. My home servers and networks now have so much storage that I'm not sure of what to do with it all. I've got friends who actually have "unlimited" backup abilities as they can login and store data on certain networks in my home. But that's not got a whole lot to do with bookmarks.
(You should see what I'd deleted. I'd somehow meandered so far off-topic that I was talking about redundancy with connectivity. I figured that I'd spare you the novella.)
I seem to recall, but I am not a Firefox user, that if you don't select the upgrade it won't be upgraded? Using, say, Ubuntu as the platform - when it pops up asking you to do your daily updates you can just untick the box and it won't be downloaded and installed. At least, I'm pretty sure that's how it works. I've never actually tried not ticking the box - I let it stay up to date even though it is seldom opened. (I typically use Opera, almost exclusively.)
I've started, hopefully, making use of bookmarking groups of tabs that become folders in the new page tab. I also have been trying to keep searching my bookmarks. Much like you stated, that's where pages go to die. It's not like I remember what I have bookmarked and what I don't. So, I try to find stuff in there prior to going out to a search engine - if I think it was something off the beaten track. However, no, not so much. Instead, I've just started trying to bookmark the groups and will open them again.
What I have also been doing is using Opera Beta, Developer, and Stable. This enables me to have a profile *and* be able to have things a little bit more organized. I can dig down in the profile's synced open tabs pretty well. It's hard to change old habits. I was pretty messy for a while and had lots of tabs open. Then, I grew weary of that and had just a few tabs open - that was probably the most productive period. Then they grew to around 10. Now, I'm at around 10 per browser and I keep each browser in a different desktop - if I'm home they're on different screens. :/ It's still a bit of a hodgepodge. I seem to recall getting my first "modern" web browser in the early 1990s. I am not exactly sure when. It has actually gone downhill in how I use it, in an organizational way, and I'm doubtful that I'll ever get completely back to where I once was. I still don't understand the people who have 100+ tabs open and are somehow proud of this. I'd hate to see how they keep their house clean.