ragingrobot

> I'll be at least spending part of the day in the PacNW forests to keep the depression at bay.

Enjoy some of it for me. I will get out there, someday...

I keep saying it, before I visit any foreign country, I'm spending some time in the PacNW.

I have been feeling the same, and I'm in the same situation on all accounts. I think it may be all that has been going on the past months is just starting to now manifest itself in these feelings.

I also noticed that in instances where the one or two families still home on my block who had friends or family pull up I felt kind of envious, which has never happened before.

I'm in the same boat, no family or friends to share with. It's been a wet and dreary day here in NJ, spent all of it outside.

The sun came out for a few minutes, and grabbed a steak from the freezer. It's gone away again now, but too late. Screw it, I'm barbequing myself a steak for Christmas.

All of you out there alone today, enjoy. Get out that (perhaps metaphorical) steak of yours and enjoy.

> essential rubber belts crack

Any soft material degrades, and probably faster than most people think, only a few months. Oil pan gaskets, brake seals, injector o-rings, you name it. Modern cars probably suffer less, but it still happens.

I have a 30 year old pony car that I only get to take out once every few months due to lack of time. Every time I do get the chance to take it out, something fails due to that lack of use.

Perhaps the subtitle is off by a factor of ten (or multiple)? It would seem more reasonable to have issues at 15,000km (although still disappointing), or even moreso at 150,000km.

Fully agreed. I work in such a job (laborer), and the only thing I can figure is that giving office workers extra time off has less of an impact, whereas giving laborers off would affect production/output/service/whatever. We can't have that now, can we? Those companies did not enact this policy without their bottom line as priority, as usual.

> I'm an introvert. I don't need humans 24/7. I need them more than zero, though.

Like the other poster, I'm in my 40's. I'm an introvert as well.

What has the pandemic taught me?

I always had the attitude "I don't need anybody." Single, no kids, no friends because I told myself that. And how wrong I was. Even that occasional interaction - even passing - with a stranger on the street was something I didn't realize. So I too, despite all the b.s. I wanted to tell myself, learned I need them "more than zero" as you put it.

Having no human contact outside of work has severely hurt my attitude toward life.

> My only gripe so far with their series was when Linus complained that right-clicking and doing “Save as” on a GitHub link saves an HTML file instead of the file itself.

However, that's a function of the browser, and not of the OS itself. If I were to do that using Firefox on Windows or Linux, it would save as a file regardless. So, my gripe would be that he apparently can't distinguish problems with the OS itself, and those of software running on the platform.

I think you mean KDE 5 ;) Three was quite some time ago.

Plasma Desktop 4 was the version that lost them a lot of users, yes. It has slowly been recovering. The past few releases have been good. I still have some issues when running with Wayland, but that's not just a Plasma problem.

One thing I have to give GNOME is their focus on cohesiveness, which KDE still struggles with. It can be annoying to have one application with a full menu, another with a hamburger, and yet others with just toolbars, and on top of that some with their own version of headerbars - all under the KDE umbrella.

I remember when I was in High School and used the school's Internet access (between 1993-1997), and search engines still were not big yet. AltaVista came around toward the end. Yahoo was "meh." I purchased a print directory of the Internet in Price Club. The directory listed Gopher, Veronica, Archie and Web sites that one could visit - mostly educational at the time.

Both in size and content it was a "yellow pages of the Internet." I wish I had the foresight to save that book.

I can't say I disagree with his take, however he was communicating en masse. He probably should have thought harder about his words before he sent them.

In the field these students are interested in, they're going to need thick skin. What happens when they have an off night, or are just not that good, and put on a poor performance? A local newspaper prints a rather direct review, and now what? Does the review writer lose his job for not being sensitive? Does every reviewer now just avoid the issue?

> This is just what I read, I don't know it actually makes the vaccine better than a normal immune response, which I imagine is also robust.

I'm sure the powers that be have their reasons for not going into detail, but I am interested as well. I'm sure I only understand a simplified version, but I thought that a vaccine worked pretty much by invoking an immune response. As a curious layman, I'd like it explained to me. Just to satisfy that curiosity. Web searches give me the "CDC says it's better" without going into the "why."

Imagine you use that last screwdriver, and a job needs to get done, and your car won't start so you can't get a new one at a hardware store outside of walking or cycling distance. And now you're unable to repair a vital system.

As I was writing that, I was just thinking of the recent Surfside collapse, what would would have happened if the regions data networks had gone down simultaneously (by chance). A major event two decades ago, cellular networks were overwhelmed and calls could not be made. I dare say we're more reliant on those networks today, as well as the Internet.

Not that I would expect it to happen, but it was just a thought.

O'Brien: I'm afraid to touch anything. It's all cross-circuited and patched together - I can't make head nor tails of it. Bashir: Sounds like one of your repair jobs.

Seriously though, it seems like every form of infrastructure we rely on is held together in such a fragile manner. I hate hate to think of the chaos should there be a major Internet and physical infra failure in close proximity, time-wise.

In a few centuries, it will hijack a star ship to escape.

Thanks for this. Finally another question I've pondered from time and again is answered.

Living in NYC all my life, I knew about the system, and who used it. I was always curious about why the system would be vented (other than a leak). Of course, by the time I'd get home, I'd forget to look it up.

Thanks for the laugh :) Seriously, I see a lot of people thinking like this as the headline give the impression: this is something that's going to happen overnight.

I blame the media. When the press release came out about the Gulf Stream, several media personalities, including the weather reporter at CBS News in NY made a statement like "Remember 'The Day After Tomorrow'? That's what we're looking at," regardless of how many scientists have stated that is not the case.

We're surpassing the fatalities by number, but the U.S. population is greater than it was in 1918. Percentages would be a better comparison, but I guess that doesn't create the desired (sensationalist) effect.

I'll have to try it out over a cool weekend. Thanks!

Needless to say it'd be me making them, and not a bagel making GF, so... the jealousy still stands ;)

Pretty cool work, and just as cool of a background story. Being from the bagel capital (NYC), a bit jealous you have a bagel making girlfriend. ;)

Hope to see great progress in the future!

Never mind the driver who can't wait the two to five seconds for the pedrestrian to cross, which is probably far more common than the above, and rather intentional.

TBH I don't think it's ever crossed my mind whether a Tesla was in FSD or not, even when driving alongside one. As long as it doesn't enter my space, I'm fine.

Walking through Manhattan, I'm more worried about the human driver nowadays than the non-human.

> the trains wouldn’t run, because their motors couldn’t turn

Last I knew, the 600VDC which supplies the power to the motors was supplied separately from the lower voltage system and should not be affected by such problems.

> If signals (think “traffic lights”) have no power, running trains would be extremely dangerous, because two trains might try to occupy the same track at the same time.

This is false. The system is designed so that in the event of failure stopping a train is the default action. The signals automatically go to red, "stop arm" raises, basically opening a valve on the bottom of the train, and releasing the air in the braking system - bringing the train to a stop. Electricity is required to retain the stop arm. It was designed that way.

> Labor shortage. From Bloomberg: “A wave of pandemic retirements and a hiring freeze have left the system short on operators and conductors,

The pandemic accelerated the inevitable. As far as labor shortages, the subway has been running with more or less a skeleton crew for quite some time. With a workforce with a significant portion at or above retirement age, it's only going to get worse.

> What if I have a couple of peer-reviewed articles saying otherwise? How do I present that without being banned in this world?

At this point, you'd probably need the backing of a government of a large or influential body.

Yes, the quality of the agents has changed for sure. However it seems the population now are easier to polarize, perhaps because media is so prevalent in our lives. There have always been groups that went to the extreme with the "for or against" attitude, it seems now that those groups are far larger.

And again, if you're not interested or undecided, then you're the enemy, whereas in the past you would have just been ignored.

I think we have a problem now that certain large media organizations and government are directing the narrative. They put out what they want in the media, they control what's there. These large parties are dictating what's misinformation, and the big problem is that large amounts of people are just accepting it. That then feeds the "hive mind" where anyone who does not share that "popular" opinion/viewpoint are ostracized. To make matters worse, in most cases now it's black and white - either you're for or against. You can't be undecided - that automatically puts you on the "against" side of things. As well, for the most part the likelihood of civil discussion with those on the side of the sponsored viewpoint is just not going to happen.

> They think we'll freak out set everything on fire or something at the first hint of bad news.

Could it be that they've used this tactic so often just to get this effect when they so desire it, that now they fear that it will be our only reaction?

I think quite a few people monitor their accounts, but what comes as a surprise is that they can get charged after expiration.

I have checked my cardholder agreement with Visa, and can find nothing about this "convenience" of continuing to allow a recurring charge after a card has expired. Although, I will say I'm not ungrateful it's there as changing a whole bunch of such charges is not something I would look forward to.

After noticing banks/card issuers have done this, I have treated the expiration date as affecting new purchases only.

I guess it depends on your bank, and who the toll tag issuer is.

I wrote earlier about a long standing account I had never updated, and just realized it may just be cellular phone with Sprint. I don't believe have never updated that info since I started service with them in 2008 - for a long while I think their site was a PITA to use so I just never bothered.

I've always suspected so. Many times I have had a card expire and be replaced, and recurring payments under the old expiration dates continue to charged to the account. I have at least one such payment that I probably have not updated payment information in over 10 years, so that expiration date is long expired.

At one time I suspected in such cases that the bank automatically provided the payee with the new information.

Last year I had a payment issue with E-ZPass. The payments were suddenly being rejected. I came to find it this was due to out of date expiration information. The card number had remained the same, but the expiration on record was June 2012.

Yes, it took over 8 years for the bank (Chase/Visa) to start rejecting payments.

TBH I'm thinking "Strange New Worlds" is going to be more "let's dragg up old TOS ideas".

I think Discovery in a time far far into the future had a better chance at exploring "strange new worlds" and they screwed it up with "same old stuff just written even more poorly".