devilbunny

The problem with Libby is finding a local library that has a good selection. Mine does not, and my state does not have the feature of being able to get a library card from any library in the state. I would have to buy a membership to a non-local library, which can be surprisingly difficult to do if what you care about is a large selection of ebooks.

As is MoCA, which in my experience is a lot higher-speed and more reliably so.

People tend to want speed, speed, speed, but tons of use cases are totally fine with a reliable 100 Mbps. For a lot of remote monitoring stuff, even 1 kbps is enough if it works reliably. Not everything needs to serve up a webpage.

If Siam realized that there was value in being a buffer, rather than a warzone, and made the changes necessary to become that buffer so that accepting it as such was better for the colonial powers than trying to take it, that’s not taking away agency; that’s standard politics for small states nestled between major powers.

Cool technique but… a beagle? Odd choice to me.

I can’t get too bothered by the “whataboutthe shelter and rescue?” song and dance. This is experimental, even when it’s not it won’t be cheap, and it’s not like this is a huge market. Shelter dogs are always iffy; they don’t deserve misery but realistically most won’t ever make good pets and there are only so many barn dogs needed.

I have had good luck with rescues but neither was ever abused, just neglected by people who realized they couldn’t take care of them and wanted them to have a good home.

Yeah, but social media won’t be the only companies that notice. If Australia’s government will do it to them to prop up their local dying industry, they will do it to you, too. If the EU or US tries that, well, those are huge markets and maybe you bend (maybe you don’t!). But Australia is 27 million people, less than 10% the size of those. If they want to get heavy-handed, well, it’s their country, but as recent US actions have shown, other countries’ companies may pick up their ball and go home rather than play with you.

I was really responding to the article’s odd claim of 18 C being the perfect sleeping temp, and your comment was so extreme in the make-it-cold direction that it seemed to be a good spot to reply. If we’re talking about “optimum” sleep temp as though such a thing has meaning beyond personal preference, then clearly it must not be cluttered with cultural detritus like depth of blankets, etc.

My wife wants it to be 20 C or lower and sleep under two blankets. I pointed out that 23 with a fan and a sheet is less energy-intensive and gives equivalent results, and she said stuff it. Not a battle worth fighting at home, but on the internet…

(Of note, the one of our dogs that loves me but worships her still sleeps next me every night, under covers, because she’s a Chihuahua and gets cold easily, and unlike my wife I sleep like a dead log.)

> 10% of its global revenue

Yeah, there’s no chance that the response to such a law would be for them to immediately shut down all Australian operations, block all connections from Australia, immediately lay off every Australian citizen working for them, and essentially evacuate the country.

If you are wearing clothing or any covering, clearly it isn’t your optimal temperature. I’m not trying to be glib here; I understand the appeal of being warm in a cool or even chilly room with air that keeps you from overheating. But that’s not sleeping at the optimal temperature; it’s choosing the sleeping setting you like.

And there are huge swaths of the world where the temperature basically never gets that low (18 C is the lowest temperature ever recorded in Kingston, Jamaica; 16 along the coast of west Africa, 18.9 in Jakarta). Even here in the southeastern US it is normal for temperatures to stay above 20 C at all times for three full months of the year (late June through early September).

Nothing wrong with liking to sleep in cold air, but it’s a preference.

That was (is?) how it was in dry counties in TX. Join the club for $1, you can get drinks. Membership valid for a year.

… in Massachusetts. New England Republicans are not the bulk of the party, and that’s not all bad - remember, the phrase was “banned in Boston”, not “banned in Bakersfield”.

Bill Clinton was a once-a-century skilled politician, but if you translated his policies without his extreme personal charisma to today it’s unlikely he would make it through the Dem primaries.

It did fine iff you had a good Kermit implementation at the BBS. Most used the most basic possible version of the protocol, which was godawfully slow, but I did some dialup at the end of the BBS era (93-95) where someone showed me how to use Kermit properly with large packets and sliding windows. It was every bit as fast as Zmodem, though I don’t recall if it supported transfer resuming.

I never used the translation features, though I can think of one particular summer where that would have been very useful (had a 7E1 connection - I got files to my PC by uuencoding to screen, saving the buffer contents to my PC, and then uudecoding them locally).

One major shift has been the death of newspapers. When that was the primary way to get information about the world around you, it wasn’t just readers who benefited - it created a steady stream of capable, workmanlike writers. They weren’t literary geniuses, but they were capable of stringing together a few paragraphs of readable prose on a deadline. And they got paid for it; how many people can make a living off their Substack?

Since you worked in radio, at WZZQ no less, you probably would enjoy the story of the earlier WZZQ.

https://www.pbs.org/show/wzzq-the-movie/

It is vanishingly unlikely, or would have been, but given that the US has started examining people’s social media, it is not unreasonable to think tit-for-tat might happen.

Again, I agree it is very, very unlikely. But it’s possible, and in an age of mass outrage it isn’t incomprehensible that some activist, somewhere, might latch onto something they don’t like and just doggedly pursue someone. It does happen.

Because they have identifiable owners who might wish to travel to Europe and not risk someone deciding to make an example of them.

In high school, I was invited every time even tangential friends wanted to go bowling because I was the only person who knew how to keep score on paper (the nearby lanes didn’t have electronic scoring). And that was over 30 years ago.

That one relay is the only connection between the pinsetting machine and the scoring system.

I first heard about this internet thing from Cliff Stoll in The Cuckoo’s Egg. I got on a few years later.

For all that we complain, it’s still the most amazing thing ever.

I, for one, don’t care if thieves are excluded from stores. They can buy and get curbside delivery in the parking lot, and if that is a little more expensive than shopping for yourself, well, you’ve made everyone else’s groceries just that little bit more expensive for years while getting them for yourself for free.

This is how legal reasoning should work.

Yeah, before capitalism you just worked until you died, or your children took care of you. That’s still an option, but you must have kids and they must like you.

> If a criminal misuses his own resources to commit crimes and then you take that away from them, it only affects him.

There is certainly a case to be made here for “if it seems too good to be true…”, but realistically we are not going to impoverish the retired teachers of X state because X state chose poorly.

The owners of corporations are mostly pension funds and the like.

One thing that Slashdot moderation got right is that you can’t be more than +5 or less than -1. Groupthink is much less forceful with those limitations.

Cape York is also 10 degrees west of Brisbane. That alone gets sunset 40 minutes later even if you stay at the same latitude.

> The average is like past midnight

Jesus, for what age group?

I'm an outlier because I have to be at work at 6:30 AM daily (so I get up around 5:15), so staying up past 10 PM is a rarity and I see midnight maybe two or three times a year. I don't think I've slept past 8 AM in the past decade, even on vacation. But I haven't even frequently stayed up past midnight since my mid-twenties, and even then didn't do so every night. I'd have been too sleep-deprived.

Kroger can and does run nice stores. Kroger Signature, Harris Teeter are two I've been in relatively recently.

You're also only going to find those in the same kinds of places you'd find a Trader Joe's or Costco - only in the nicest parts of town unless it's very densely populated or a small but rich enclave.

Yeah, it's one of the products where you are clearly paying an Apple tax for the hardware, but OTOH it's also one of the products where it's clearest that the Apple tax is paying for software that's both good and consumer-friendly. It's not a hackable box, but if you want to just hand something to a non-technical person to use in their house, it's considerably better than the alternatives.

Somehow wires got crossed here. I'm saying that once-a-week cleaning won't be 4 hours each time.

It is expensive, just not four times as expensive as a once-a-month job.

> capitalism is inherently corrupt

People are inherently corrupt. That's just life. The Soviet Union was corrupt as hell.

If you want to put down capitalism, feel free, but don't blame it for something that isn't unique to it.