Call me the neckbeard prime but traffic shaping doesnt bother me much as its based on the notion that internet = future of infotainment. movies: check them out, free, from my local library these days. And much better quality too (you get more independent films with better plot and writing than the crap hollyoaks delivers.) music: If i like a song and can support the artist, Ill buy it from their site. I dont scrape along with a jolly roger screwing over every artist I see. Again, the library is your friend for some stuff. e-books: never bought into this racket. Ill check it out from the library, read it at my own leisure, and not worry about the risk that my rented copy will be reposessed wirelessly without notice. Books i enjoy will be bought used from the local bookstore.
I use IRC, and my firefox is so incapable of showing advertisements its like a time machine to 1989. Hell, my hosts file wont even route most of it.
Also from most of the slashdot community: fuck your social networks.
People forget that bitcoin became popular during the advent of wikileaks, lulsec and the activism of Aaron Schwartz. Tying bitcoin to an exchange means the minute you start a website that publishes sensitive government secrets like warrantless wiretapping, Anone who feels compelled to help your efforts is just as vulnerable to government detention and surveillance as you. The point of bitcoin, dogecoin, and other cryptocurrency is to prevent the government from quietly telling banks to refuse your transactions on the basis of your dissent, and ferrying you off to some resort in cuba for waterboarding and lemon pepper fish.
And unrelated: Bitcoin is dead, for all intents and purposes. a combination of shit-tier security and unaccountable exchanges made it what it is today. switch to doge or something else, keep your wallet encrypted, and make frequent withdrawals.
Government: founded by and for the people, beholden to certain truths inalienable to all mankind, servant of the public trust and keeper of the freedom. checks and balances exist in theory to crush any attempt to tread on constitutional rights. Corporations:: Facebook gmail gchat pinterest funtime! its snapchat loads of fun social social! just sign up! its free and all ur friend r here its fun! play farmville!:D Fusion Center:Warrants are hard, congress is slow, we steal your data, but you'll never know..
As a consumer in america ive always had the choice of locking into a 2 year contract and receiving my phone at a subsidized price, or paying full price. the first month is still prorated but i always choose to pay a little extra for the privilege of actually owning my device instead of the plan, which feels more like renting. your ultimate penalty for shunning a wireless carriers extreme savings deal on a bundle of contractual nonsense is add-on fees from hell and quite a bit more marketing than normal. I've been charged $25 just for the SIM card, $45 for activation, and another $18 for some amorphous 'network initialization.' Theyll even try to sneak insurance and free replacement in. since cellular jocks in strip malls are payed a commission for contracts they rope people into, you're also going to get some pretty lousy service once they realize you chose financial independence instead of indentured servitude.
yeah, Haselton is right. cellular isnt about the phones or the cases or extras, its about contractual service agreements that ensure repeat business. companies use nice electronics and catchy tv commercials; whatever it takes for the dog to bite. you can stick it to them by being a lousy customer. refuse to upgrade every 4 years as youre instructed to by the moving pictures. use an adblocking hosts file. root your phone, and use its data monitor to ensure your data plan, which should be 500mb or less, is never exceeded. use wireless access points and VoIP across them. disable opt-in advertising by sms and opt out of mail flyers.
with a couple of recent, very public commit feuds between RedHat engineers (Kay Sievers and David Howells for their systemd trainwreckage and x509 microsoft driver signing demand respectively) and Linus, they're looking to pick up a project with some respectable engineers attached.
Anyone who has a legitimate concern for their privacy and personal security has absolutely rid themselves of google plus and facebook. It didnt take a clever app to convince us, foiled fedoras or not, that we were as much a product as a herd of free-range cattle. our cud would be our status, the apple our friend request. We were to spend lazy afternoons basking on the hillside in the glow of farmville and grow strong and fat on content from friends and our mobile devices. This app is the same as working a stun bolt in front of a heiffer. Sure its loud and gets a response every time, but one must wonder if the audience ever truly understands its ultimate implication.
There are a number of reasons why analytics is kinda a hard nut to crack. For poeple who genuinely enjoy physics and math as a discipline its frustrating to find yourself pidgeonholed in a single process as most analytics firms are outsource sweatshops for larger players like Boeing. Many firms just do one thing, like structure or fluid thermodynamics, and sometimes only on a single part or mind-numbingly enough a single subcomponent. Finding yourself staring at a combustor model or a bottle thread for 5 years is depressing and these firms will generally understand that. Expect to get short changed on licenses for software you use and your workstation wont come with super helpful things like a spaceball (navigation tool for 3d simulations)
the other problem with these outsource firms is theyre practically the only way to get a job at a larger firm, so youre going to have to do time in the trenches and hope some customer thinks highly enough of your understanding of their processes to steal you from the firm youre in. Until then expect a rather meager paycheck to be spent on your college debt. Your "laureate" or upper level engineers in some of these firms literally only work there for 30 years because theyre borderline incompetent and can simply go through the motions of bullying the IT department to help them launch simulation software. They know the customers products and terminology inside and out, but are too incapable as engineers to make it beyond approving your timesheets.
that make up critical elements of their information infrastructure.
Frankly the only reason I think these multibillion dollar monopolistic companies have banded together to throw money is because their reputation and userbase have clammored for some kind of response to the problem.
lets be perfectly clear: Theo De Raadt is completely capable of handling the code refactor (he even went so far as to say he didnt need help with the code projects website.) going to the Linux foundation just shows how fucking shortsighted these guys are. If you want to help, donate to the OpenBSD foundation because this is a BSD package that was kindly ported to Linux. It will be released as LibreSSL, not the OpenSSL you want to "fix" in your products, as the code is completed and tested in accordance with what I presume is an OpenBSD development model, not Linux. And in regard to the 'other open source projects will follow' statement, its arrogant and absurd to think that once the LibreSSL code is finalized and ported that these dicks are going to stick around and continue to contribute to any open source technology that doesnt clandestinely butter their bread in user facing products that happen to be facing a sev. 1 exploit they cant avoid through marketing or a new product.
'good enough' and 'still useful' are poisonous concepts in consumer capitalism and should be viewed with immediate concern for Apple. A lack of tangible innovation combined with a loss of the cult of personality that defined the brand has concluded inevitably with stagnation. That people, apple users, stop to question their purchase now is something profound I think. Certainly some credit to google is due in that its managed to create a competent, fast alternative that in some instances is actually more attractive than the iphone and ipad (not to mention presented at a fraction of the cost.)
I mean sure man you get a six figure salary but i mean...TEXAS...you'd be living in a state that prays for rain and endorses creation science! its secession threats are so regular you could set your watch to them. And that doesnt even count the governor who compares gays to alcoholics. I mean its fine so long as you're cool with theocracy.
If you expect me to believe this articles summary, that the worlds largest telecommunications monopoly and government spy against American citizens is lying about their services or speeds, then you clearly dont underst42t2$T%Y%[NO CARRIER]
Here in america we certainly dont have anything this ridiculous. Our social networks take careful steps to ensure profits are privatized and personal information is harvested and transmitted to the government quietly and quickly without so much as raising the issue for reasonable discussion. Our media outlets would never consistently report on the legality or morality of such normal operations as theyre both patriotic and in the interest of the people of the united states. Our elected leaders would never pressure private companies to shut down websites and deny financial remuneration for wholesome and informative whistleblower agencies such as wikileaks. For the Russian government to even consider a takeover of a private corporation is bombastic. We've never once taken over an auto industry or a bank, for example. And as for conventional media in america, we have never delivered talking points and restricted journalists in an attempt to control the dissemenation of information.
Poor people may only work 20 hours per week, but i assure you its not fucking apathetic leisure they revel in. These hours have been intentionally redacted by large multinational corporations so as to create a permanent underclass of part time workers that is forced to take on two or three jobs in order to create a normal work week capable of sustaining basic rent and food. their total time spent at different jobs can easily total more than 50 hours per week. They spend long, odd hours standing at bus terminals waiting on neutered public transit systems to get them to starbucks after they work their walmart shift and then later, hopefully, back to mcdonalds to their fry cook job. their 'downtime' is sometimes spent figuring out how to balance getting their kids clothed and their bills paid without taking food off the table.
The economist is so detatched from the concept of poverty and the culture of indentured servitude in the service sector of the United States as to be bad comedy.
its easier to simply do something and say you're sorry later than to ask for permission or follow the rules. We've locked up japanese americans during the second world war for nothing more than being japanese. We've tortured and detained without trial in secret military prisons the nationals of other countries in which we've declared a war upon something so ephemeral as 'terror.' We shackled and enslaved thousands of africans throughout our history in direct defiance of the charter that all men are created equal. We exterminated more native americans than hitler killed jews, an entire race of natives, just because we could. We branded countless celebrities communist, forever obliterating both their good name and their gainful employment.
in short, this administration as every one before it will invoke the same rhetoric to assert the privilege of spying on, and murdering, american citizens. that to think otherwise is unpatriotic, that to question it at all is tantamount to unamericanism. "Because fuck you, thats why."
Oocyte cryopreservation has been available since 1986 with success rates of nearly 90%. Its commonly used for women with cancer or history of early menopause.
my biggest issue is that the article is predicated on the condescending notion that without this technology, women are forced to forego their careers and simply bare children instead. There are plenty of women who do not want children. Its also worth noting that the spike has very little to do with the success rate of cryopreservative technologies but instead:
with increased media attention and an unlikely celebrity spokeswoman. In a 2012 episode of Keeping up With the Kardashians, Kim, post-divorce, consulted with a fertility doctor about freezing her eggs.
given this recent advocation and the fact that fertility is a 4 billion dollar industry in the united states, its difficult to say women are intentionally choosing this rather expensive procedure not covered by insurance by their own volition and without the assistance of businessweek articles. like gout, antidepressants, and erectile dysfunction medications, expect cryopreservation to start making its commercial debut on television in the near future.
This is a case insisted upon by a conservative group and a delegate from the state of virginia. The idea is the same as the polar researcher Charles Monett who faced formal misconduct charges for his research into climate change.
these are personal attacks of a political nature designed to destroy the career of a scientist attempting to validate or research climate change. If neoconservative corporate shills cant deny funding then they'll shit-coat your career and personal life as a reminder to shut the fuck up about climate change and focus more on Benghazi and anchor babies. If you're a scientist like me, crap like virginia just makes you want to dedicate your life to researching the subject more fervently.
If youre trying to find tech products crafted with longevity in mind, you're going to have a bad time. The entire technology industry is built around intentional, and unintentional, Planned obsolescence. Connectors are intentionally standardized then customized slightly to stymy interoperability and in turn drive sales of every other accessory they use. cellphones are made from thermoplastic and glass, and come with a multi billion dollar advertising industry to ensure you buy new ones every year or two. And if that doesnt work, Software is simply bloated up until you're forced to buy a new one. everything from laptops to food processors have replacement parts, but those parts are often at the economic disadvantage of the buyer in that they cost upwards of 50% or more of the original purchase cost. this is to induce you to consume more. Proprietary operating systems like windows, and applications like crysis or autocad will intentionally fail to function if you dont have a machine of a particular newness. The data transfer standards themselves are also wildly flexible in that for example what once was an open USB standard for most handheld electronics has become a confounding vortex of shit called MTP or media transfer protocol with limited support in open operating systems and wildly different/broken implementations across devices that do claim to support it.. Video game consoles are rarely backwards compatible. and arguably the digitization of over the air television was a pointless subsidy from congress to force consumers to buy a new TV so they could turn around and gift companies like AT&T with practically free spectrum. tablets are routinely locked down with UEFI to ensure once its not supported by the vendor anymore, you cant do something insane like install your own OS and continue to use it. No, you'll rent your technology and open your purse when you're told to.
devices will never be built to last because our society is predicated upon an open market and endless consumption in which we never question the longevity or practicality of the devices we're told to purchase. The best you can do is mitigate your participation in this endless moebius strip by championing open standards and solutions. build your own pc and replace components as necessary. stop buying a phone every two years. Pick up a book at the library instead of renting text on a device you never actually own.
Everything Yahoo was, namely search, was purchased greedily by microsoft after a relentless and quite aggressive 3 year campaign to make a Bing. that search was then rolled into a search engine that by its very definition could never find itself in the ecosystem of internet websites outside of the mandatory, default configuration in internet explorer. Yahoo is for all intents and purposes a holding company that re-invests what little capital it still maintains into genuinely innovative companies. it sloughs off its patents to the highest bidder and treats its employees with ever growing contempt. Yahoo is not an internet company, its the monopoly man with dog-eared pockets shuffling the streets of internet town. Its designed to return dividends to a select group of core investors through a combination of profiteering and axing the headcount.
I switched to a standing desk last tuesday, and found my company supported the idea as part of our wellness initiative (I got free fruit for deciding to do it.) The first two days were kinda rough, but afterwards it just becomes a normal part of your day. What i was surprised to find was im way more refreshed at the end of the day, and find it a lot easier to communicate with people who are at my cube than if im sitting.
A few other coworkers do a 'part time' standing desk by elevating their normal work surface using cardboard boxes from the datacenter. im also told a stress relief mat helps make the transition a lot better. Either way, I dont see myself going back to a sitting desk anytime soon.
I cant see a use for this technology. The human brain has an inherent ability to detect and respond to a glasshole even in crowded environments and insufficient light. the revulsion, the rage, its practically an autonomic function. What we need is some sort of future technology to kick someone in the dick from many meters across a room.
Americans constitute 5% of the worlds population, yet we consume 24% of its energy. Even if the pollution is coming from china, and thats a seriously tentative argument, I find it difficult if not impossible to discount the fact that we as americans drive that pollution. A more reasonable article (and one that drives far less click cash) would be 'man made climate change causing weather problems'
because this is how you get school shootings. Or in Pennsylvanias recent case, school stabbings. When you strip a person of their safety, and offer them no recourse, they become hard. They become determined with nothing to lose. They adopt these horriffic scorched earth tactics because nothing you say or do is consistent or fair, so the outcome and result of their actions is no longer relevant. And the saddest part is in the aftermath.
people will wonder how they could have helped, what caused it, and why this happened. Gun nuts will bark about bullet proof blackboards and guns for teachers. Parents will entirely miss the point and call for tougher gun laws. No one will stop to consider students or kids for that matter as real people.
Slashdot Mirror
Call me the neckbeard prime but traffic shaping doesnt bother me much as its based on the notion that internet = future of infotainment.
movies: check them out, free, from my local library these days. And much better quality too (you get more independent films with better plot and writing than the crap hollyoaks delivers.)
music: If i like a song and can support the artist, Ill buy it from their site. I dont scrape along with a jolly roger screwing over every artist I see. Again, the library is your friend for some stuff.
e-books: never bought into this racket. Ill check it out from the library, read it at my own leisure, and not worry about the risk that my rented copy will be reposessed wirelessly without notice. Books i enjoy will be bought used from the local bookstore.
I use IRC, and my firefox is so incapable of showing advertisements its like a time machine to 1989. Hell, my hosts file wont even route most of it.
Also from most of the slashdot community: fuck your social networks.
People forget that bitcoin became popular during the advent of wikileaks, lulsec and the activism of Aaron Schwartz. Tying bitcoin to an exchange means the minute you start a website that publishes sensitive government secrets like warrantless wiretapping, Anone who feels compelled to help your efforts is just as vulnerable to government detention and surveillance as you. The point of bitcoin, dogecoin, and other cryptocurrency is to prevent the government from quietly telling banks to refuse your transactions on the basis of your dissent, and ferrying you off to some resort in cuba for waterboarding and lemon pepper fish.
And unrelated: Bitcoin is dead, for all intents and purposes. a combination of shit-tier security and unaccountable exchanges made it what it is today. switch to doge or something else, keep your wallet encrypted, and make frequent withdrawals.
Government: founded by and for the people, beholden to certain truths inalienable to all mankind, servant of the public trust and keeper of the freedom. checks and balances exist in theory to crush any attempt to tread on constitutional rights. :D
Corporations:: Facebook gmail gchat pinterest funtime! its snapchat loads of fun social social! just sign up! its free and all ur friend r here its fun! play farmville!
Fusion Center: Warrants are hard, congress is slow, we steal your data, but you'll never know..
As a consumer in america ive always had the choice of locking into a 2 year contract and receiving my phone at a subsidized price, or paying full price. the first month is still prorated but i always choose to pay a little extra for the privilege of actually owning my device instead of the plan, which feels more like renting. your ultimate penalty for shunning a wireless carriers extreme savings deal on a bundle of contractual nonsense is add-on fees from hell and quite a bit more marketing than normal. I've been charged $25 just for the SIM card, $45 for activation, and another $18 for some amorphous 'network initialization.' Theyll even try to sneak insurance and free replacement in. since cellular jocks in strip malls are payed a commission for contracts they rope people into, you're also going to get some pretty lousy service once they realize you chose financial independence instead of indentured servitude.
yeah, Haselton is right. cellular isnt about the phones or the cases or extras, its about contractual service agreements that ensure repeat business. companies use nice electronics and catchy tv commercials; whatever it takes for the dog to bite. you can stick it to them by being a lousy customer. refuse to upgrade every 4 years as youre instructed to by the moving pictures. use an adblocking hosts file. root your phone, and use its data monitor to ensure your data plan, which should be 500mb or less, is never exceeded. use wireless access points and VoIP across them. disable opt-in advertising by sms and opt out of mail flyers.
with a couple of recent, very public commit feuds between RedHat engineers (Kay Sievers and David Howells for their systemd trainwreckage and x509 microsoft driver signing demand respectively) and Linus, they're looking to pick up a project with some respectable engineers attached.
We pushed a firmware update this morning to the firewall and its been smooth sai#*($$#[NO CARRIER]
Anyone who has a legitimate concern for their privacy and personal security has absolutely rid themselves of google plus and facebook. It didnt take a clever app to convince us, foiled fedoras or not, that we were as much a product as a herd of free-range cattle. our cud would be our status, the apple our friend request. We were to spend lazy afternoons basking on the hillside in the glow of farmville and grow strong and fat on content from friends and our mobile devices. This app is the same as working a stun bolt in front of a heiffer. Sure its loud and gets a response every time, but one must wonder if the audience ever truly understands its ultimate implication.
There are a number of reasons why analytics is kinda a hard nut to crack. For poeple who genuinely enjoy physics and math as a discipline its frustrating to find yourself pidgeonholed in a single process as most analytics firms are outsource sweatshops for larger players like Boeing. Many firms just do one thing, like structure or fluid thermodynamics, and sometimes only on a single part or mind-numbingly enough a single subcomponent. Finding yourself staring at a combustor model or a bottle thread for 5 years is depressing and these firms will generally understand that. Expect to get short changed on licenses for software you use and your workstation wont come with super helpful things like a spaceball (navigation tool for 3d simulations)
the other problem with these outsource firms is theyre practically the only way to get a job at a larger firm, so youre going to have to do time in the trenches and hope some customer thinks highly enough of your understanding of their processes to steal you from the firm youre in. Until then expect a rather meager paycheck to be spent on your college debt. Your "laureate" or upper level engineers in some of these firms literally only work there for 30 years because theyre borderline incompetent and can simply go through the motions of bullying the IT department to help them launch simulation software. They know the customers products and terminology inside and out, but are too incapable as engineers to make it beyond approving your timesheets.
that make up critical elements of their information infrastructure.
Frankly the only reason I think these multibillion dollar monopolistic companies have banded together to throw money is because their reputation and userbase have clammored for some kind of response to the problem. lets be perfectly clear: Theo De Raadt is completely capable of handling the code refactor (he even went so far as to say he didnt need help with the code projects website.) going to the Linux foundation just shows how fucking shortsighted these guys are. If you want to help, donate to the OpenBSD foundation because this is a BSD package that was kindly ported to Linux. It will be released as LibreSSL, not the OpenSSL you want to "fix" in your products, as the code is completed and tested in accordance with what I presume is an OpenBSD development model, not Linux. And in regard to the 'other open source projects will follow' statement, its arrogant and absurd to think that once the LibreSSL code is finalized and ported that these dicks are going to stick around and continue to contribute to any open source technology that doesnt clandestinely butter their bread in user facing products that happen to be facing a sev. 1 exploit they cant avoid through marketing or a new product.
'good enough' and 'still useful' are poisonous concepts in consumer capitalism and should be viewed with immediate concern for Apple. A lack of tangible innovation combined with a loss of the cult of personality that defined the brand has concluded inevitably with stagnation. That people, apple users, stop to question their purchase now is something profound I think. Certainly some credit to google is due in that its managed to create a competent, fast alternative that in some instances is actually more attractive than the iphone and ipad (not to mention presented at a fraction of the cost.)
I mean sure man you get a six figure salary but i mean...TEXAS...you'd be living in a state that prays for rain and endorses creation science! its secession threats are so regular you could set your watch to them. And that doesnt even count the governor who compares gays to alcoholics. I mean its fine so long as you're cool with theocracy.
If you expect me to believe this articles summary, that the worlds largest telecommunications monopoly and government spy against American citizens is lying about their services or speeds, then you clearly dont underst42t2$T%Y%[NO CARRIER]
Here in america we certainly dont have anything this ridiculous. Our social networks take careful steps to ensure profits are privatized and personal information is harvested and transmitted to the government quietly and quickly without so much as raising the issue for reasonable discussion. Our media outlets would never consistently report on the legality or morality of such normal operations as theyre both patriotic and in the interest of the people of the united states. Our elected leaders would never pressure private companies to shut down websites and deny financial remuneration for wholesome and informative whistleblower agencies such as wikileaks. For the Russian government to even consider a takeover of a private corporation is bombastic. We've never once taken over an auto industry or a bank, for example. And as for conventional media in america, we have never delivered talking points and restricted journalists in an attempt to control the dissemenation of information.
Poor people may only work 20 hours per week, but i assure you its not fucking apathetic leisure they revel in. These hours have been intentionally redacted by large multinational corporations so as to create a permanent underclass of part time workers that is forced to take on two or three jobs in order to create a normal work week capable of sustaining basic rent and food. their total time spent at different jobs can easily total more than 50 hours per week. They spend long, odd hours standing at bus terminals waiting on neutered public transit systems to get them to starbucks after they work their walmart shift and then later, hopefully, back to mcdonalds to their fry cook job. their 'downtime' is sometimes spent figuring out how to balance getting their kids clothed and their bills paid without taking food off the table.
The economist is so detatched from the concept of poverty and the culture of indentured servitude in the service sector of the United States as to be bad comedy.
finds out openssl is bollocks,
radically refactors and overhauls millions of lines of code.
as for the LibreSSL team, might i suggest some music?
http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics....
http://www.openbsd.org/lyrics....
its easier to simply do something and say you're sorry later than to ask for permission or follow the rules. We've locked up japanese americans during the second world war for nothing more than being japanese. We've tortured and detained without trial in secret military prisons the nationals of other countries in which we've declared a war upon something so ephemeral as 'terror.' We shackled and enslaved thousands of africans throughout our history in direct defiance of the charter that all men are created equal. We exterminated more native americans than hitler killed jews, an entire race of natives, just because we could. We branded countless celebrities communist, forever obliterating both their good name and their gainful employment.
in short, this administration as every one before it will invoke the same rhetoric to assert the privilege of spying on, and murdering, american citizens. that to think otherwise is unpatriotic, that to question it at all is tantamount to unamericanism. "Because fuck you, thats why."
my biggest issue is that the article is predicated on the condescending notion that without this technology, women are forced to forego their careers and simply bare children instead. There are plenty of women who do not want children. Its also worth noting that the spike has very little to do with the success rate of cryopreservative technologies but instead:
with increased media attention and an unlikely celebrity spokeswoman. In a 2012 episode of Keeping up With the Kardashians, Kim, post-divorce, consulted with a fertility doctor about freezing her eggs.
given this recent advocation and the fact that fertility is a 4 billion dollar industry in the united states, its difficult to say women are intentionally choosing this rather expensive procedure not covered by insurance by their own volition and without the assistance of businessweek articles. like gout, antidepressants, and erectile dysfunction medications, expect cryopreservation to start making its commercial debut on television in the near future.
This is a case insisted upon by a conservative group and a delegate from the state of virginia. The idea is the same as the polar researcher Charles Monett who faced formal misconduct charges for his research into climate change.
these are personal attacks of a political nature designed to destroy the career of a scientist attempting to validate or research climate change. If neoconservative corporate shills cant deny funding then they'll shit-coat your career and personal life as a reminder to shut the fuck up about climate change and focus more on Benghazi and anchor babies. If you're a scientist like me, crap like virginia just makes you want to dedicate your life to researching the subject more fervently.
If youre trying to find tech products crafted with longevity in mind, you're going to have a bad time. The entire technology industry is built around intentional, and unintentional, Planned obsolescence. Connectors are intentionally standardized then customized slightly to stymy interoperability and in turn drive sales of every other accessory they use. cellphones are made from thermoplastic and glass, and come with a multi billion dollar advertising industry to ensure you buy new ones every year or two. And if that doesnt work, Software is simply bloated up until you're forced to buy a new one. everything from laptops to food processors have replacement parts, but those parts are often at the economic disadvantage of the buyer in that they cost upwards of 50% or more of the original purchase cost. this is to induce you to consume more. Proprietary operating systems like windows, and applications like crysis or autocad will intentionally fail to function if you dont have a machine of a particular newness. The data transfer standards themselves are also wildly flexible in that for example what once was an open USB standard for most handheld electronics has become a confounding vortex of shit called MTP or media transfer protocol with limited support in open operating systems and wildly different/broken implementations across devices that do claim to support it.. Video game consoles are rarely backwards compatible. and arguably the digitization of over the air television was a pointless subsidy from congress to force consumers to buy a new TV so they could turn around and gift companies like AT&T with practically free spectrum. tablets are routinely locked down with UEFI to ensure once its not supported by the vendor anymore, you cant do something insane like install your own OS and continue to use it. No, you'll rent your technology and open your purse when you're told to.
devices will never be built to last because our society is predicated upon an open market and endless consumption in which we never question the longevity or practicality of the devices we're told to purchase. The best you can do is mitigate your participation in this endless moebius strip by championing open standards and solutions. build your own pc and replace components as necessary. stop buying a phone every two years. Pick up a book at the library instead of renting text on a device you never actually own.
Everything Yahoo was, namely search, was purchased greedily by microsoft after a relentless and quite aggressive 3 year campaign to make a Bing. that search was then rolled into a search engine that by its very definition could never find itself in the ecosystem of internet websites outside of the mandatory, default configuration in internet explorer. Yahoo is for all intents and purposes a holding company that re-invests what little capital it still maintains into genuinely innovative companies. it sloughs off its patents to the highest bidder and treats its employees with ever growing contempt. Yahoo is not an internet company, its the monopoly man with dog-eared pockets shuffling the streets of internet town. Its designed to return dividends to a select group of core investors through a combination of profiteering and axing the headcount.
I switched to a standing desk last tuesday, and found my company supported the idea as part of our wellness initiative (I got free fruit for deciding to do it.) The first two days were kinda rough, but afterwards it just becomes a normal part of your day. What i was surprised to find was im way more refreshed at the end of the day, and find it a lot easier to communicate with people who are at my cube than if im sitting.
A few other coworkers do a 'part time' standing desk by elevating their normal work surface using cardboard boxes from the datacenter. im also told a stress relief mat helps make the transition a lot better. Either way, I dont see myself going back to a sitting desk anytime soon.
not news for nerds
not stuff that matters
however it does drive click revenue to feature a hot button culture war issue.
I cant see a use for this technology. The human brain has an inherent ability to detect and respond to a glasshole even in crowded environments and insufficient light. the revulsion, the rage, its practically an autonomic function. What we need is some sort of future technology to kick someone in the dick from many meters across a room.
Americans constitute 5% of the worlds population, yet we consume 24% of its energy. Even if the pollution is coming from china, and thats a seriously tentative argument, I find it difficult if not impossible to discount the fact that we as americans drive that pollution. A more reasonable article (and one that drives far less click cash) would be 'man made climate change causing weather problems'
because this is how you get school shootings. Or in Pennsylvanias recent case, school stabbings. When you strip a person of their safety, and offer them no recourse, they become hard. They become determined with nothing to lose. They adopt these horriffic scorched earth tactics because nothing you say or do is consistent or fair, so the outcome and result of their actions is no longer relevant. And the saddest part is in the aftermath.
people will wonder how they could have helped, what caused it, and why this happened. Gun nuts will bark about bullet proof blackboards and guns for teachers. Parents will entirely miss the point and call for tougher gun laws. No one will stop to consider students or kids for that matter as real people.