patja

I've bought into the idea that all major museums should have free admission or pay what you will. They are all well-endowed enough to do this, but are restricted from selling pieces of their collections to make ends meet. And what's the point of a museum anyways...is it just preservation or is it to allow the public to view and engage with our shared cultural heritage.

Part of the issue is the museum mafia puts onerous restrictions on the extent to which museums are allowed to sell off bits of their collections. That's why so many items are stowed away never to see the light of day. If they sell off items, they will be blacklisted from ever receiving a touring/visiting collection, which is the big money maker for additional admissions fees and bringing folks in who have already seen everything normally on display.

The code of ethics of the American Association of Museums explicitly forbids selling items from collections to meet operating expenses, and they will ban museums from receiving loans of artwork if they do so.

I think it helps if you think of it as a project with two sides to it: a production/creative side, and a consumption side.

The positive thing about the 3d printed objects is that kids can choose and print them themselves. This has the benefits that the kids (a) get some hands-on 3d printing production experience, which is a fast gateway to wanting to make your own 3d models, which is a useful and empowering skill and (b) I have found that 3d printing a cultural artifact creates an incentive to learn more about it -- consumer 3d printers are so slow, it gives you plenty of time to ponder the item being printed, as well as the post-processing/finishing step, it builds an intimacy with the object you wouldn't have just walking by it in a museum. It might be hard to buy into this idea, but I have personally experienced it when printing scans of sculptures like the Pieta from the Vatican or Rodin's Thinker -- it motivated me to dig in and learn more about the background and nature of these works of art.

But yes, there is the issue that at the end of the day you are just pushing more plastic waste into the world. My adult daughter kind of hates my 3d printer for that reason, and I can identify with the angst. I wish there was a better story for PLA recycling.

I've spent some time looking into this as I was quite excited about the possibility of building one of these for the school where I work. It seems like an engaging project which would have benefit for the younger students, and could have all the content generated by older students, and make for some fun 3d printing projects as well.

I was a little surprised to find it is a closed EdTech commercial product and not open source. The whole thing feels more like a Hackaday project than a product offering. It is the kind of idea that when you look at it, you instantly get how it is built and can see how you could assemble one yourself given a week or so of time to tinker with a 3d printer, a Raspberry Pi, and another $10 to $20 of electronics, and make your own decisions over how much to focus on audio vs. putting a touchscreen on it as well. There just is not that much to it. And to have no real way of engaging other than as a big name museum they want to partner with, it is off-putting and discouraging -- this thing could have some real legs if it was open source. As it is now, it feels like they are artificially constraining the growth and application opportunities by holding the thing close to their vest. Good luck to them I guess, but it seems like a mismatch.

Yes, yes, "execution is everything" and ideas are a dime a dozen, and if it is so easy to build why haven't I made one yet? All good points.

I also find this idea appealing. Reading the end of Gehttoside was an eye opener where the author describes how getting on SSDI (argued as being a limited form of basic income) for being unemployable (disabled) due to their history gang banging gave some former gangsters enough financial breathing room that they could break the cycle of relying on crime to get by. Sounds a little Polyanna-ish but it does have the ring of truth.

What are your thoughts on the counter-arguments that basic income will lead to a dystopian future where an underclass just sullenly gets by as dependents of the state. Plenty of scifi speculative descriptions of this future are a bit scary, but are they just scare-mongering?

I agree that the aggregate standards and quality of life are much improved over 20, 40, or 60 years ago, but I don't share your satisfaction with the status quo. I would prefer we made some changes that enabled the poor to be housed and receive more than emergency room reactive access to health care. No man is an island, and a devotion to meritocracy can blind you to the reality that the accomplishments attributed to merit and hard work are often simply correlated to the ZIP code where you spent your childhood.

In a nation with as much wealth as we enjoy, it is shameful how we relegate our neighbors to defecating on sidewalks, living in tents with no heat or plumbing, and raving in the streets due to lack of mental health care.

One of the best examples I can think of is when a really great technical individual contributor switches to a management career path because in many organizations that is the clearest path for career growth and higher compensation, even when the individual is not really interested in or motivated by managerial responsibilities such as developing others or listening to their problems. This pattern repeats: seeking individual gain by doing something that really is not authenticate to your values and interests, with negative consequences for everyone.

I was thinking it could be pre-loaded with tons of relevant media and reference materials. Plus being a general purpose tool. I could see distance sailboat cruisers packing one away, similar to how they would pack some redundant spares of key electronics, or an industrial sewing machine like a Sailrite, for enhanced self-reliance in challenging environments. Pack a 3d printer in there too!

I think this is a Canadian thing. Friends who emigrated to Nelson BC comment on how in the library, every book by a Canadian author has a maple leaf on the spine. Canada seems to have a bit of an underdog complex about maintaining its cultural identity in the shadow of its neighbor. The museum in Nanaimo has a whole shrine dedicated to famous Canadian entertainers...such as Loverboy and Bryan Adams. They also have a very comprehensive and delightful display covering the gem of Canadian desserts, the Nanaimo Bar.

This is the one I've been using to good effect: https://github.com/IgnoredAmbience/yahoo-group-archiver

no Mongo database required, just plain old .eml files

You do need to pull some cookie values out for the authentication to work, and the Readme is pretty sparse, but it does work.

You need to add some parameters for the Yahoo authentication cookie values. -tc and -ty should be set to the cookie values from your browser, after logging into Yahoo.

It also needs some try/except handling to be added for all the cases where Yahoo fails to provide the requested asset.

Once you sort those things out, it works pretty well.

Paypal will happily process credit card charges without needing the customer to have a Paypal account. They call it DirectPay

You can implement Stripe such that the merchant never sees the credit card number.

That would be consistent with everything I've seen from them as a developer. One of the most common recurring requests on the Facebook Developers Facebook Group is when someone has all of their privileges for app development on the FB API revoked because Facebook found they were using a second "company account" or "developer account" for managing their app. Facebook sees those as "fake accounts" which are prohibited under their policy/TOS. You get only one account for anything personal or business-related, and doing otherwise risks having everything thrown into the black hole of "everything has been revoked, and no human will tell me why or how to fix it"

Biggest tunnel boring machine ever and we end up with a tunnel that has the same number of traffic lanes as the old. Progress!

It does have improvements such as a small provision for emergency vehicles to squeeze by or pulling a disabled vehicle out of the way, and hopefully it is resilient to quakes. Still... Lot of expense for the same 4 lanes.

Sounds like you might be looking for C#, but I'm sure you've considered it already.

That does not include a request to approve the read_mailbox permission, which I think should be required to query a user's private messages. This permission was deprecated in 2015. https://www.theregister.co.uk/2018/04/11/facebook_admits_use...

On the other hand, Facebook is known to make a lot of one-off arrangements with specific preferred partners such as Spotify to grant permissions and access normal apps can't use. I suspect that money changes hands for some of these special arrangements, or if not outright cash then intangibles with significant value, hence the "selling data" accusations.

Permission to post on behalf of the user and read posts from the user's feed does not grant access to messages to any other app getting these permissions from a user. If they were getting access to messages, it was a special stealthy "partner only" deal not reflected in the permissions prompt as posted on imgur above.

That's not how it works. I've built a FB app in the past and had offline_access permission. It does not expand the scope of what data you can query. It just allows you to use the permissions granted whether the user is logged in or not.

That just shows which apps have which permissions. I think what is desired is a log of date and times the app accessed specific bits of data. For example, do they poll every day and hoover up all of your recent data for everything they have access to, or do they only take just what they need for the task at hand?

Tough problem, but it seems incomplete without covering long term visas for example 6 months

Have you tried? I had a tough time buying a used CPAP on eBay. I had a saved search on file for over a year before I was successful. Every listing that came up, eBay would quash because of the prescription requirement. I finally got one that was a buy-it-now where the seller and I managed to consummate the deal within a few minutes of the listing going online, before the eBay secret police could remove it.

I was on a bit of a Facebook diet and considering getting rid of it. Then I got a 3D printer and joined a few Facebook groups focused on owners of that printer, and it breathed new life into my Facebook experience. It can be a great information exchange and community, once you just get rid of all the friends and family stuff on it.

I teach coding and robotics to kids age 10 - 14. I'm constantly having to tell them to fill in the birthdate field accurately when signing up for things like Scratch or TinkerCAD because I know it triggers a different account creation path that complies with COPPA.

After half the class says "but my parents tell me to just lie about my age so I can use free stuff online" I end up having to have a whole conversation with the class about COPPA, and more to the point, the question "Is it OK to misrepresent yourself to someone else in order to get them to give you something they otherwise would not" and the slippery slope of little white lies, and when is it OK to lie. It's a good conversation but always eye opening to see what is taught at home. Of course many of these 10 - 12 year olds are also playing GTA V and other MA games with their parents' permission.

"I'm not sure many web developers can get away without visiting the command line."

IIS has significant market share. I'll bet most web developers who deploy on it get away without having to use the command line interface very often if at all.

https://news.netcraft.com/archives/2018/08/24/august-2018-we...

Since it is not using the Facebook platform or API, what is Facebook's recourse? If it was using the API and there was a developer with a Facebook account they could "hold accountable" then they could do something, but there is no specific Facebook account associated with creating this software. Ban/censor the Gizmodo page on Facebook.com? That would be an interesting gambit that would surely backfire in the court of public opinion.

This is just like Facebook banning anything which tries to track unfriending, another thing you can't do through the platform API and that they have actively worked to oppose and suppress.

Let's take Facebook's argument to its logical conclusion which would suggest that they should go on the warpath to ban all password manager applications that store a user's Facebook username and password.

It is a good one, but my experience is that the customer service on the card is not so hot. Namely they are overly aggressive with fraud detection, which combined with slow card replacement can be problematic. They canceled my card once because I swiped it instead of inserting the chip for reading, said they could not reverse the action, and then took over a week to get me a replacement card (granted there was a holiday weekend, but this was very different from Amex who always have overnighted replacement cards)

Vanguard is great as long as you don't ask much of them.

I used to have my accounts split between Fidelity and Vanguard. But after several botched transactions where Vanguard reps gave me inaccurate information about their own processes, and lost or claimed to have never received multiple mailed signed documents (with difficult-to-obtain Medallion signatures), I switched everything to Fidelity and am much happier. I have never failed to get a knowledgeable/expert person on the phone whenever I've called Fidelity, which is a stark contrast to my experience with Vanguard.

I used to think so too, but you get a lot of value for the price, especially when you consider the variety of projects you can build, the relatively beginner-friendly programming toolset, and the number of videos, books, and other supporting resources available.

Lots of data here: http://www.metrovancouver.org/services/regional-planning/Pla... to answer many questions about Vancouver housing. They average about 20,000 new housing units per year.

Isn't it just a question of tuning the dials for taxation levels? A billionaire values my home at $10 million when I value it at $1m, I need to sell it to them at $1m but then to protect it they need to pay taxes on a $10m valuation. So just set the taxes such that it makes it a net positive to society with the billionaires paying for state-funded housing (and other services...job training, language and culture courses for immigrants, etc.) as the cost of scooping up land. They get no free lunch.