ldjb

"This essay, which I am about to record as an audiobook […], and will thereafter upload to ACX as a self-published, free audiobook."

Doctorow seems to have intended to release this audiobook on Audible for free. However, when I look it up on Audible's website, it is on sale for a regular price of £3.69 (or £3.23 / one credit for Audible members). I wonder why this is.

This is not a criticism of Doctorow; I think he probably doesn't expect people to actually pay for it, and he's released a DRM-free copy, free of charge.

I wonder if this is something that Audible enforces (i.e. they do not normally allow audiobooks to be available free of charge). I have seen some audiobooks available free of charge on Audible, but perhaps those are the exception rather than the rule.

Interesting. I know a lot of websites are designed with a font size of 16pt in mind, and you'll tend to encounter issues if you set the size to anything else. I find that rather a shame.

The links appear underlined for me (using Firefox), not strikethroughed, and look perfectly fine.

Google are well known for the amount of services they deprecate [0], but what gets less attention is functionality they remove from their core search product. It seems like quite a few "advanced features" have been removed, including `link:` which I found extremely useful for finding web pages that link to a given URL, and for which I haven't found a decent alternative.

[0] https://killedbygoogle.com/

A throwback from the days when domain hacks like del.icio.us were all the rage.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain_hack

Interesting question. A few thoughts:

Obviously everyone's tastes are different but, broadly speaking, the most popular porn videos do not tend to be the most romantic or sensual. That said, there are many niches in porn, and videos made for women can be very successful within that niche.

Producers are incentivised to create videos that will sell. It's not much good if a video is popular on free tube sites but nobody pays for it. There is evidence to suggest that women are a lot less likely to pay for porn than men are, and there is therefore a lot less of an incentive to create porn for that demographic.

Creating romantic/passionate porn is not easy! The script and casting (amongst many other things) need to be just right for it to work. Therefore it's going to take more time and effort. So many studios will focus on mass producing videos. There's an obvious trade-off between quality and quantity, and many studios will have found that it's just more profitable to churn out videos as quickly as possible.

If you open the kebab (three vertical dots) menu, select Add-ons then Add-ons Manager, you should see a list of add-ons you can install.

Edit: I've updated my previous comment with a better link.

It works on Firefox Android if you install the Google Search Fixer add-on.

https://addons.mozilla.org/android/addon/google-search-fixer

I'm not familiar with this concept. What exactly do you get during these "office hours"?

Is it an online call with someone knowledgeable about the contents of the selected book, who can answer questions about it?

See also: S.S. Van Dine's Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories

https://www.openculture.com/2016/02/20-rules-for-writing-det...

"Toots" were renamed to "posts" in April 2021.

https://github.com/mastodon/mastodon/pull/16080

If browser vendors want to create their own DRM extensions, then that's on them. But it seems to me that the W3C went too far in including DRM capability within the standards for the web.

The end result may be comparable, but I think the principle of it is important.

Parts of the station are owned by Network Rail, parts are owned by TfL who manages the overall station (but there are also staff from the individual train operating companies).

The TfL station layout covers the entire station, and shows which parts are owned by TfL and which aren't.

The axonometric diagrams are only intended to be used as a location guide. They are part of larger Station Layout documents which have very detailed 2D plans for every part of the station. The axonometric diagrams therefore provide the overall view, including (in the original document) reference numbers for the individual drawings, like a sort of contents page.

King's Cross St. Pancras, for example, has 20+ pages of detailed 2D plans, covering the entrances, ticket halls, platforms, escalator areas, vent shafts and so on.

An axonometric diagram exists for Stratford (actually, there are two -- one for the platform levels and one for the subway levels). I'm not sure why they weren't included in the Freedom of Information response; it could have been for security reasons.

We also use Azure DevOps. Where I work, developers, testers, designers, product owners, product managers and so on all use it without too many issues. It helps that you can create a hierarchy, with epics and features being more high-level, and user stories and tasks being more low-level. This allows people in different roles to work at a level of abstraction that works for them.

That said, we also maintain high-level roadmaps in ProductPlan, which we've found to be more suitable for non-tech stakeholders, since it lets you quite easily see where projects sit on a timeline and the dependencies involved.

This reminds me of something that happened to me a couple of years ago, near the start of the pandemic and when we had recently switched from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams.

I needed to set up a one-to-one Teams meeting with a colleague, so I hit the 'Schedule meeting' button, added my colleague as an attendee, filled in the meeting name, date and time.

I saw that Teams was asking me to select a channel. I didn't realise this was an optional field, so I just selected the General channel in my department's Teams channel. It seemed the most appropriate. And so I sent out the meeting invite, thinking it would only go to one colleague (the only one I had selected as a participant).

I realised something was wrong a few moments later when I started receiving out-of-office responses from people I didn't recognise. I checked the meeting invite in my sent folder and realised it had gone out to the entire department. Hundreds of people, including all the senior managers and even the CTO!

Turns out that when you specify a channel when creating a meeting in Teams, it also sends the meeting invite to everybody who has access to that channel which, in this case, was the entire department. There was no indication that this would happen, however.

Still, I learnt my lesson. Now I know not to select a channel when creating a Teams meeting.

As a product manager at the local transport authority, my parents both know that my job has something to do with public transport, but they don't seem to know what exactly my job entails.

My mum seems to think I'm some sort of programmer. My background is in software engineering, so I can certainly code, but it's not something I regularly do in my day job.

My dad hears the word "manager" in my job title and thinks my job is to give orders to other people. Leaving aside the fact that management in general isn't really about giving orders, it's difficult for me to explain in a way that he'll understand that just because my job title includes the word "manager" doesn't mean I'm the boss. Yes, I collaborate with colleagues, but I'm not involved in hiring and firing.

Although (to my knowledge) a new version hasn't been produced since 2014, the London Connections map [0] does something along these lines.

It's primarily geographical, but isn't completely precise, and it retains some topological features.

I think most passengers would find it too confusing, but maybe there are ways it could be simplified.

See also the unofficial Carto Metro map [1], which is an actual geographic map of London's rail network. And also the map of key bus routes in Central London [2], which is largely topological but represents major parks and attractions.

[0] http://web.archive.org/web/20181222165456/http://content.tfl...

[1] https://cartometro.com/metro-london/

[2] https://tfl.gov.uk/cdn/static/cms/documents/bus-route-maps/k...

Related but nowhere near as severe, Samsung prevents you from creating an account with the email address samsung@domain. It showed a generic error message so I couldn't figure out why I couldn't create an account until I tried using a different email address.

Thanks for your comments. However, for certain languages it is important to specify the language in the HTML with the `lang` attribute. Otherwise incorrect glyphs may be displayed. More info:

https://heistak.github.io/your-code-displays-japanese-wrong/

You can sign up for an account without an email address, so I don't think there is a need for Mailinator here.

The short answer is that there is no difference.

The longer answer is that CC0 is not a licence – it's a public domain declaration. With CC0, you relinquish all rights to the work, including copyright. With MIT-0, you still hold the copyright; you're just allowing people to do whatever they want with the work.

Another difference is the one you alluded to. CC0 is designed for written content, images, videos, etc. It's not really designed for code/software. That's not to say you can't use it for software, however. MIT-0, on the other hand, is designed for code.

So, in essence, these two legal instruments are in a sense equivalent, but there is enough nuance there that it could make a difference in a court of law, depending on how they are interpreted.

There's also the fact that CC0 is quite a mature piece of text at this point, whereas MIT-0 is the new kid on the block. That might be something to consider, too.

Also, obligatory disclaimer that I'm not a lawyer and that this does not constitute legal advice.

From the Rationale section:

This license has proven useful for code that is intended for developers to use as reference, teaching samples, examples, or templates that other developers may modify for their own purposes.

I don't think teaching proper care and attention of licensing is incompatible with wanting to release teaching materials under a licence that does not require attribution.

Let's suppose you work in government and want to build a business case for using and contributing to FLOSS.

Idealogical arguments will only go so far; the priority is to cut costs, make do with limited resources (staff) and ensure systems are reliable and flexible.

What do you do? Are there any tried-and-tested approaches? Asking for a friend. ;-)

Coinbase CEO's excuse is that he sees Martin Agency as a "creative firm" not a "traditional ad agency" and he felt they "were all one team". Although it should be noted that last Tweet was posted hours after the original set of Tweets.

https://twitter.com/brian_armstrong/status/14958203518796595...

I don't believe the source code is still available officially (although it used to be through Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative and Government Security Program), but the Windows 2000 source code was leaked back in 2004.

https://news.microsoft.com/2004/02/12/statement-from-microso...

On my Samsung Galaxy phone, I can double-tap the Home button and it downscales the screen into the corner so I can reach the entire screen with my thumb. So there is a solution to that problem.

The main problem I have with large phones is that they won't fit into my pocket. Sure, I could get out the needle-and-thread and sew myself some larger pockets, but I shouldn't have to do that. I'd much rather just have a smaller phone.

Although I don't have a problem with this kind of promo, I think it's a shame the sweepstake page [0] does not clearly explain that only US residents who haven't previously subscribed to Disney+ are eligible. To find this out, you have to click a tiny link to the official rules [1] which are full of legalese.

It personally feels a bit deceitful that they're, in a sense, tricking people into signing up for Firefox news under the guise of a sweepstake that many people won't be eligible for.

[0] https://truecolors.firefox.com/contest

[1] https://truecolors.firefox.com/contest/rules

In the past, I've used pdf2ps to convert the PDF to a PostScript file, then used ps2pdf to convert it back to a PDF. This often reduces the file size substantially.

I probably wouldn't recommend doing this for anything serious (since it might negatively affect the a11y of the file), but in the right situations it can be a quick and simple way to massively reduce a PDF's filesize without noticeable side-effects.