jff

The Crown Victoria is quite pleasant to work on in general, although changing the rear spark plugs on my '86 was a huge pain--not as bad as a transverse V6, though!

Having an http option makes it better for those on restrictive work networks--I'm downloading the file because I want to experiment with it, but I certainly wouldn't want a call from Networking asking why I'm torrenting stuff.

> by the time that millennials walk the halls of power, their parents will have signed away all their rights.

It's not as though 'millennials' are so big on rights, take a look at Twitter to see how happy people are to suppress e.g. free speech as long as they're the ones who get to do the suppressing.

Strong crypto used to be considered 'arms'; export was forbidden under ITAR: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Traffic_in_Arms_...

If one accepts that part of the intent of the Second Amendment was to allow citizens to defend themselves against a tyrannical government (but please, let's not start the usual argument about asymmetric warfare), strong encryption capabilities would certainly be an important component of that in the modern era.

But that's just my stance, as someone who likes guns and crypto.

> the TV urging you to continue binging on your saved guilty-pleasures watchlist

The shelves in the grocery store calling out to me because they know I like potato chips! Can't wait!

I saw a reference to a "zettelkasten", a system for hierarchically organizing index cards containing knowledge, about 6 months ago. Interested by the idea, I put together some code to automate the process to some extent and started using it. It stores notes in a directory tree and provides commands to make it rather quick to move through the tree and print/edit things. Personally, I've gotten good use out of it: it provides some basic structure to my notes, and by aliasing the command name to something really short like 'zk' it's pretty quick to use, so I'm getting a lot better about taking notes.

Unfortunately, I wrote this in odd free moments at work and can't just release it without going through a rather convoluted process. It's only about 400 lines of Go, though, so anyone who thinks this sounds kinda neat should be able to replicate it pretty easily.

Oh, it also has commands that let you store a copy of a given file with the current note, so you could e.g. take screenshots as you're making notes and they'll live with the note.

Edit: I've played with org-mode but it's kind of a big beast and I like separating out all my notes into individual files, plus I'm only occasionally an emacs user (I get the bug, use it for a week, then get sick of it and bail out)

E-Mule isn't a web app at all, it's just an Internet application. The fact that we have so confused the Internet and the WWW, to the point that even people complaining about WWW conflate it with the Internet, is a fucking tragedy.

I've never worked at a McDonalds, but I've done my time out in the hot sun and honestly when I look at these poor bastards standing in front of a pot of boiling grease all day I wonder if I wouldn't go back to the farm.

Unless the work was picking onions or strawberries or some other crop which involves spending all day in a terrible bent-over posture. If the pay was the same, though, I'd rather spend the day harvesting apples than spend it making burgers for assholes.

Most of them still make plenty of sense to me.

When my wife and I visited Japan, her Tokyo-based friend came with us on the Shinkansen for the first part of our trip. If I remember right, it cost her something like $200 to ride the train to Nagoya and back. Now, that was something like 200 miles, but still, commuting via Shinkansen would not be cheap.

Edit: it was cheaper for us because we paid $250 for a 7-day Japan Rail Pass which let us ride almost every Shinkansen and almost every local train as much as we wanted. Highly recommended if you're planning a trip to Japan and want to get out of Tokyo.

All those places are sick to death of Californians moving in and fucking things up.

Governments typically already do this for classified information. If there's data that really shouldn't get out to the Internet, don't let anything on that network connect to the Internet. They'll also have procedures for moving things from one network to the another which are intended to avoid inadvertent disclosure and malware infection. Your average company or public radio station won't implement this sort of thing because it's too complicated and costly--or at least that's been the attitude until recently. Maybe we'll start to see the use of small isolated networks for things like the security system they mentioned in the article, or accounting/HR which deal with PII and money. Then you just have to convince the security guy not to plug his personal laptop into the security network, and get the HR employees to stop moving USB sticks back and forth between HR-net and the regular Internet-connected LAN :)

Or have the pandit come out to your house... every puja I've been to has been at someone's home, rather than at the temple.

I think he means he's not blaming Google for the behavior of other website owners.

> his then-belief that MIT was going to succeed doing its variant of the same thing (Multics -- insert notes of irony)

And yet Multics did in fact succeed, delivering an operating system that was used throughout the US, Canada, and Europe, with the final installation shut down in 2000. Unix history has, I believe, tended to exaggerate the early challenges to the extent where people now simply believe "Multics was a failure".

Yes. They also have a reputation for preferring quantity over quality (half-assed pullups) and a generally sloppy approach to safety (yeah sure do squats while balancing on an exercise ball). Check out the deadlift form in the "crossfit games": https://youtu.be/0lr1p7f2P4Y?t=50s

Or how they do "pullups": https://youtu.be/XQvSmqChm6M?t=1m40s

The pig had died at some unknown time before. It was summertime. The residual heat of the internal organs would have quickly spoiled the meat; this is why hunters, even in the winter deer season, try to get the guts out and the skin off as soon as possible, in order to let the heat out before it ruins the meat. Also, the pig died for a reason. Could have been a twisted intestine, or it could have been some sort of disease, but in any case the vet couldn't figure out what was making the pig sick which means they don't know if it's communicable.

I grew up on a farm. One winter day, years back, my sister's sheep just started dying. 3 or 4 of them died over the course of an afternoon, for no reason we could discover, and then the rest of the sheep were fine. We didn't eat the sheep, even the ones we had literally watched expire; it's just not safe.

Processors are cheaper than ever, and there are multi-core multi-gigahertz processors with multiple gigabytes of RAM scattered throughout most homes but yes, as you point out, nobody wants to use them, they want to ship them up to "the cloud" or as we used to call it, "some servers on the Internet".

A charitable soul might say that by keeping local software simple, the end-user's devices don't need to be updated as often, while the software running on the cloud systems can be continually enhanced. A cynic like myself would say they prefer to use the cloud:

1) because it's easier to gather serious data about the users for later use/sale

2) because by tying users to an online service, they have something valuable ("2 million active users!") to offer when the startup inevitably gets bought out

3) because you can get away with less efficient code if you're running on a big timeshared server vs. on a small battery-powered device

4) because "the cloud!" is still an effective marketing gimmick

vagina.to is available, so it seems that medical/technical/'proper' terms are not blocked, merely slang.

Edit: I love the web page design, unironically. Makes it feel like there's a cgi-bin directory full of Perl scripts in the background.

Automatically selecting what portion to crop is impressive, but just slamming the saturation level to maximum and applying an HDR filter is the sign of "professional" photography rather than good photography.

However, it's still Real Stupid.

I don't even bother using 'find' to actually find files. 'du -a <path> | grep <name>' works easily enough and I don't have to remember find's weird syntax.

If anyone else is using uBlock Origin, at least for me the page displayed completely blank until I disabled uBlock temporarily.

Nice one.

Don't forget the same meeting populated 2-3 times because somebody set up a recurring meeting invite and then made a new one and the old one never really deleted properly so you've now got the same meeting twice from 2:30-3:30 every Thursday.

The typical Soviet response to any accident: "What fire? What power station are you talking about? Why were you there instead of in your home? A photograph? Give it here" rip "What photograph?"

Establishing the destruction of that power station today would be extremely difficult, short of American spy photos, I'd wager.

> "I see a monitoring and surveillance system on farmers and traders," says Ramdas. "It's very Orwellian, our Animal Farm."

Mr. Ramdas may be confusing his Orwell stories a bit :) Although I gave it a shot, it's difficult to draw many parallels between the Soviet allegory of Animal Farm and post-independence India.

(I'm commenting on this inconsequential line because I don't have much to say about the larger article beyond "religious extremism sucks")

Just a combination of those joke plaques that say "On this site in 1897, nothing happened" with the date of the Tiananmen Square Massacre.

"On June 4 1989, absolutely nothing happened here" :)

We got Keen 4 bundled with this Gravis joystick: http://mocagh.org/forsale/gravis-back.jpg

I played Keen exclusively with a joystick for years and was pretty good at it. If you sat me down with the exact same joystick I could probably still play pretty well, but the much looser feel of a modern joystick would screw me up. When my brother and I would play Keen, we'd make the plastic on the joystick case creak from the frantic maneuvering!

> This seems like a lack of familiarity with the scientific method. First, there's a hypothesis about the world. Then, that hypothesis is tested against evidence. The origins of a seasoned researcher's hypotheses about the world and motivations they would like the world are not enough to impugn the integrity of their own hypothesis-testing or their ability to evaluate others' study design.

And yet the author of the article seems happy to impugn the motivations of the UW researchers, because his ideology does not agree with their results.