mavrc

I find it quite frustrating. I can easily say what I want on other platforms because I can write what I need to without worrying about every single word.

Twitter makes me stop and rewrite and rewrite and rewrite and finally get something that fits in 140 and makes sense for the most part after the third read if you understand me and all the context surrounding the thing I said.

I suppose it's at least partially generational for me but it seems so inelegant. Like we're in a global bit shortage.

If I didn't know better I'd think you were CGPGrey. You're right, though, checklists do make things so much better, as long as you're not tied to the list. I would imagine (please correct me if I'm wrong) that pilots' checklists are developed over time by veterans and changed infrequently. If you're developing your own checklists, be prepared to modify them. Often. This is still better than the alternative, because you are now aware of problems or steps you should have included.

Checklists are also good for helping you start things, if you have trouble getting started with stuff. It might be a little weird, but I keep a list of fun things I want to do. And I don't mean just big things ("visit London"), I mean smaller stuff. I find that after busy weeks my (old) brain is tired and doesn't want to start a new task, even if it's a fun task, so it tends to fall into patterns like "eat popcorn and watch Netflix." But if I have a list that reminds me that I could read up a bit about that microcontroller project I want to work on, or that topic I wanted to write something about, it helps me get started.

> Steam, Netflix, Spotify

I use and enjoy all of these things but the DRM they include isn't why they are successful - it's the fact that they make it so much easier to deliver content to anyone, immediately, bypassing the normal 'store shelves' systems of distribution. (well, as long as you're in North America or some parts of Europe.)

While I agree that the EFF's message is often more reactionary than necessary, the DRM in these services serves no purpose except to make to provide a placebo to traditional commercial content owners, to get the content on those services. Ultimately, this is only a placebo. Netflix exclusives appear on the Pirate Bay minutes or hours after they go up on the service. Yet Netflix not only survives, but thrives - to such a degree that people use VPNs to circumvent the region locks, not the payment system.

How many years has it been since iTunes music went DRM-free? Yet it's the most popular means of acquiring paid-for music. Build a successful distribution system, make it available to everyone, and people will pay for content.

A rudimentary search or two would seem to indicate that driver happiness and driver safety are connected. I don't know how to effectively measure it, but it would seem to me that at least some consideration should be paid to driver happiness as a safety factor.

I wonder if this is in regard to the fact that for a while, some time ago, Spotify required the use of a Facebook-integrated login. They no longer do, but people who signed up during that time would need to go through a conversion process to have a non-Facebook login.

You're making the significant assumption that the original part is either still available, or was ever available for individual sale (often, batteries that aren't considered user-replaceable are never sold directly.)

Apple systems are generally better off in this regard as vendors like iFixit can make official batteries available for older systems, but for other vendors, no such luck. For example: I can't find any source for an official Lenovo battery for my first-gen X1 Carbon. It's also long since out of warranty.

There is still the time consideration, but assuming you have time available to do the work, why not?

> You can walk into any emergency room in the country and receive whatever care you need even without insurance or payment on-hand.

While this is a benefit of sorts (you won't actually be allowed to die due to lack of funds), it's not like the work you receive is free. You'll end up paying it back to someone.

Where I live, for example, the county tends to pay off debt like this to the hospital for a significantly smaller portion of the cost. They will allow you to finance it for a very long time, but you will still pay for it. Until it's paid for, even if it takes a very long time. If the county decides not to help you (maybe, for example, you're not a taxpaying resident of the place you ended up going to the emergency room in) then the hospital will bill you for it. They might, after hounding you for a while, charge you only pennies on the dollar to pay it. Or they might be convinced to write it off - which they do occasionally, but only occasionally.

The only sure way to avoid paying debt accrued through emergency medical services is to have no assets.

CableOne does this for lots of different stuff. If you're over your bandwidth cap, if you haven't paid your bill yet...

Come to think of it, we have had a rocky relationship, they and I.

> ad-free version[1]

> [1]It's not completely ad-free

So it's like an unlimited data plan, then.

I keep trying to remind myself that there really has never been a time when organizations were not abusing language in order to make bad ideas more palatable, but from a consumer's point of view, it's infuriating.

Silverlight is still hanging around in a number of edge cases as well, or at least, I keep running into it in education.

It's going to be really hard on a lot of things when NPAPI vanishes entirely.

Usually in the $250 range, unless you decide to go completely nuts on the keycaps. Then, well, the sky's the limit these days.

It refers to the idea that most asymmetric cryptosystems (which, generally speaking means that each user has a public key and a private key) allow for a user to create a 'signature' using their private key, which can be verified using their public key. See here:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/454048/what-is-the-differ...

In the country, this happens pretty frequently. If you think that's bad, try driving by a large dairy on a hot, still day.

Even in the tiny rural community I live in, cashiers are being replaced by automated systems in large stores. Smaller stores will probably continue to have cashiers until forever, but we're not talking about 100% of cashiers going away, we're talking about some percentage of that. If half of the available jobs in a market vanish, that will have significant and devastating effects, regardless of how they're lost. Especially for jobs like cashiering, because there are limited places for cashiers to go, and this problem will eventually effect lots of jobs that have no up front professional training requirement (and perhaps many that do, but that's its own discussion.)

It's only a matter of time, for example, until Domino's pizza production is automated. The only reason we haven't seen this yet is because hiring humans is cheaper than solving the complex automation problem this presents. But technology continues to get cheaper. When that swings the other way, your pizza will get made by robots. Pizza delivery by robots is already a solved problem, just waiting for the costs to skew the right way. In short: at the speed at which technological problems get solved, it's unlikely we will have even adequately discussed the ramifications of the problem before it arrives on our doorstep.

There is no explanation for us.

Also, not only is "Butch" not the biker in question, but the biker in question was not even the weirdest candidate for office. The televised gubernatorial debate was so bizarre it made Colbert. Enjoy.

http://thecolbertreport.cc.com/videos/sk5fyk/idaho-s-bizarre...

> I'm not sure what you're encountering, but I have yet to meet anyone that teaches that Jesus rode a dinosaur and owned Exxon stock, or anything remotely resembling it.

I had the same reaction as the previous poster; I'm from rural Idaho, where in my experience with it, "homeschooling" is a transparent veil for "too fundamentalist for government-run schools" (which in Idaho, is terror at a very special level). I'm sure it's not that way everywhere, and I'm sure that not all rural homeschooling parents are doing so for religious reasons. But there are places like my hometown, where that is primarily the case.

> Do I need an iphone to use apple watch?

Yes.

I'm under the impression that Android Wear devices will do most, if not all, of the things you want, though I don't actually own one. There are many of them at this point; I've personally only used the Moto 360, and quite liked it, but just could't justify the expense.

So much, yes.

I have an Ergodox at home and a Kinesis at work, and I almost universally prefer the Kinesis. I type faster and make less mistakes, and my hands seem to be less fatigued over long periods when working on the Kinesis.

Like others, I also wish the Kinesis seperated into two halves, because I think it'd be even better if you could tilt each hand out a bit. This is complicated due to the controller placement in the Kinesis, but that could be fixed through some creative restructuring. Well, that and the fact that if you screw it up, you just broke a $300 keyboard...

I was thinking this as well. I wonder, there must be statistics that show that annoying your users gets results, or they wouldn't be used so frequently.

I agree. In particular, I wonder what, say, Metafilter would look like if every link were preceded by a diamond.

Things look a lot rosier for audiobook listeners, though, because audiobooks are significantly more expensive than textbooks. Even the cheapest Audible subscription is $15. I'm really looking forward to seeing what they mean by "thousands of audiobooks;" if they're incorporating the Audible library, then this is an easy decision.

With Stephen Colbert changing shows next year, Comedy Central should consider hiring the writer of this to run a new show. Though something leads me to believe the writer doesn't know it's satire.

> Once I didn't get their email, and they purged my whole account. I had to recreate it as a new account, and by now they had severely restricted the list of domains that were available for the free service, so I couldn't get the old domain back.

This exact same thing happened to me a few years back - didn't even notice the email, so I lost a name I'd had for years. I get that it wasn't really 'mine' per se; I might have paid for it anyway, since their service at the time was hardly expensive, but cancelling my stuff abruptly seemed... well, not exactly dishonest, I suppose. Let's go with 'distasteful.' I moved over to afraid.org's free dns service, and never looked back. It's sad it took Dyn so long to come out and admit they weren't interested in free users. I hope their new service works out for them, and that their free users are happier in their new homes.

This is what I was thinking, too. Facebook buying Oculus is the exact sort of disaster that Parzival spent the entire book trying to prevent against.

In fairness to Mark Zuckerberg, RP1 was wildly idealistic in a way I can only describe as Stallmanesque. Beautiful, but wildly idealistic.

No, you're not crazy. Netscape Navigator was not free as such, but if I recall correctly, was free for individual users, schools, non-commercial entities, etc. (Am I mis-remembering this? The Wikipedia page doesn't have much detail.)

Is the problem just that there is no setting to enable this behavior out of the box? Perhaps I just swear too fucking much, but my SwiftKey has learned all of my common uses of profanity, and is surprisingly good at auto-correcting them.

> Steam's DRM is why I've bought more games than I've pirated.

Steam's DRM has nothing to do with why individuals buy games on Steam. Steam offsets the net negative of DRM by bundling in a number of very attractive value-adds, like the ability to reinstall your games on any system without media, keeping all your games up to date for you, syncs settings and such (for Steamworks games) and provides an attractive platform for communicating between friends/arranging games and such. Not to mention that they have great sales. (For me, the first one is the killer feature. I hate playing the install + patch game.)

Now, they could easily provide all of those things without adding any DRM at all, but they don't, presumably because neither they nor their customers (which, make no mistake, are primarily the companies who distribute games through their platform) want it enough to cause it to come to pass.

I mean, I love Steam, it's incredibly handy and has singlehandedly transformed the way I consume games. But let's not pretend it's something it's not.

While I agree with you - I really do - it's also an incredibly difficult choice. You'd have to give up owning nearly all movies and TV shows legally, the lion's share of ebooks, and nearly all commercial audiobooks. You basically have to live a life where the only media you can consume is in formats created before the 90s, or those rare one-offs where new content is issued in DRM-free formats.

I don't really have an answer for this. I feel guilty every time I buy a Blu-Ray, but I haven't stopped buying them either.

edit: and, oh, yeah, video games. Not all of them, but most of them.

No.

http://help.rdio.com/customer/portal/questions/32743-does-rd...

>Then the problem is fraudulent manufacturers.

Or a certification standard that mandated that vendors do something, but was highly nonspecific as to exactly how they were to do it.