themadturk

Oh, that's too bad! I read my first Winchester, The Perfectionists, just this year, and a couple of other beside. Enjoyable and educational, the epitome of this type of non-fiction.

That's not dumbing down; it's a difference in usage between one side of the Atlantic and the other. "Philosopher" doesn't have the same connotation in the US as it does in the UK, especially to children, the book's target audience.

There were only a couple of things that stood out to me during voir dire: after they told us it was a murder case (murder is no longer a capital crime in my state), they asked every juror if they would have problems judging a case based only on circumstantial evidence (there was no video evidence and there were no witnesses), and if anyone would be prejudiced if the defendant never took the stand. I'm sure all the usual questions about neutrality, etc. were presented, I just don't remember them.

It's hard to believe there are still people who think having a witness take the stand in their own defense is a good thing. The only trial I've been in where that happened, the witness did what every defense attorney fears: he made things worse for himself than they were before (and things were pretty bad: it took us less than half an hour to convict).

Not quite. In every jury selection I've been through, there were people obviously chosen or not chosen for specific attributes, none of which had anything to do with intelligence, level of education, age, etc. Jurors were not chosen at random...only the initial pool of jurors was selected in any "random" fashion. American attorneys try to look for specific characteristics in jurors, depending on the circumstances of the case.

I agree. I was on a jury in a murder trial this past summer. There were several complainers on the jury (one got relegated to alternate juror status), but when it came down to deliberations, everyone took part and did the job seriously.

Neal Stephenson has written many novels in longhand, including all of the Baroque Cycle. The picture below shows the pile of paper of the MS, and the three published hardbound books below it.

https://www.flickr.com/photos/djwudi/3617012248/

Yeah, double deckers don't work everywhere. Overhead infrastructure isn't always conducive. And I rode one of these for years (it could have been the very bus in the first picture) and they were often full on the suburban runs.

When COVID-19 hit, the only prep my employer had was that everyone had laptops and we had basic VPN infrastructure. The first week or two were chaotic. Everyone had to provide their own high-speed Internet. Eventually they let us come in small groups to the office to bring home monitors, keyboards, and mice.

Our company was never BYOD, but they were pretty loose about personal hardware. They didn't provide or require phones, but to get office mail, documents, etc. you had to have management software on your phone or tablet. You couldn't connect your own computer to the VPN.

We came back to work in mid-2021. In early 2022 we had a ransomware breach on a Sunday evening. If you happened to have your laptop with you (I did), you could eventually do some WFH stuff, after certain servers were certified clean (they never told us, but indications were someone succumbed to a phishing attack). Otherwise you were SOL until they either certified your machine had been turned off or was otherwise certified clean, or you got a brand new laptop.

Once we were back in the office (again), things were stricter...no USB drives allowed, for instance, and software installs were more tightly controlled. But the phone/tablet policy was the same -- even if you were on call, you had to provide your own phone. MFA could be on your phone or software on your laptop, and again you weren't required to have company software on your phone.

OMG, finally someone who articulates what I feel.

I'm old. I was in college when the first personal computers made their debut. I was a married adult when I got my first computer (a Timex 1000). I was a father by the time the Internet appeared in public. The first cell phone I used (not owned) was the size and weight of a brick.

I keep thinking that, though it's been abused and in many ways turned against us, this is the world many of us dreamed of. Baby Boomers grew up wanting Star Trek communicators. When we got Commodore 64s and Apple IIs, we wanted them to be portable. When they became portable, we wanted them to be connected everywhere.

Just because greed and scrabbling for power corrupted the people who made all these dreams come true, it doesn't mean the dreams didn't come true. We asked for the tech, and we got it. Now I guess we have to take responsibility for how we use it.

I'm an Apple OS owner and I'm trying to imagine what these nags for free trials and services are. I have most notifications off, so perhaps I'm missing them? Some apps do this, I guess, but I just can't think of the last time my Mac or iPhone or iPad or Apple Watch nagged me to join a free trial or service.

I live in a densely populated suburban apartment complex with absolutely no gating or restrictions on access. People much worse off than I am are close neighbors, and homeless people wander nearby. Yet I have never, ever had a package stolen.

I lapped this up eagerly when it was first syndicated in the US, I was in high school at the time. It wasn't until a few years later that I saw Doppelgänger, probably the first time it was on TV.

I was actually introduced to Gerry and Sylvia Anderson as a much younger kid, when I saw Fireball XL-5 on Saturday morning TV. But I missed Thunderbirds until I was an adult!

I did this as well a few years ago, fortunately for a relatively small sum of money. I don't need MS products all that much, usually just Word. So I'm very happy with LibreOffice.

This took me back nearly fifty years to my Econ classes, and I have been re-traumatized.

What many people do is buy them from places like Kobo.com, download them, and remove the DRM (usually via plugins to the Calibre library management software).

Kindle books have become impossible to download, but other online bookstores aren't as restrictive.

It's easier on the eyes. LEDs and related technologies give me eyestrain after a while; eInk devices don't (and many, like the X4 model, have front-lighting, also easier on the eyes than backlit screens.

Some people like supporting the authors of the books they read.

There's an active dev community over at Mobileread.com. Look for the Kobo Developer's Corner under the Kobo Reader forum.

Check out the Onyx_Boox subreddit. People often put their used Boox devices up for sale (presumably when they buy new ones).

It's good that it works for you. Before unloading my Kindle, I was getting over 50% failures when side loading books via Send To Kindle. These were all ePubs that have subsequently worked fine on Kobo. That was completely unacceptable, and I was uncomfortable with the amount of control Amazon was exerting over the platform.

I don't hate Amazon, but I was not willing any longer to give them knowledge and control over my reading.

Thanks! I'll be looking at this very soon. I'd heard of it, but hadn't ever looked its features.

Actually (and I'm being pedantic here, I admit), only IBM made an XT, the others were all XT-clones or compatibles. And you could get a compatible ROM that contained BASIC. I also owned a non-IBM XT clone, which did not have BASIC in ROM.

I was disappointed that he couldn't find anything life-changing in a book of fiction.

Unless you plug it into your deck, of course.

Cassette BASIC was exclusive to early IBM PCs, XTs and PC Jrs. PCs like Compaq's, with their very, very compatible BIOS, didn't have BASIC in ROM.

How about someone who was raised on 12h time and has used it for 70 years? Sure, the math to convert is pretty easy, but why?

I'm an American Costco shopper. I'm in there at least every other week and haven't had a hot dog there in a couple of years.

It's good to read Ada Palmer's Inventing The Renaissance, because understanding whatever the Renaissance is (and Palmer says it is many different things), you need to understand the Middle Ages, since the Renaissance started with the fallout of Middle-Ages Christianity's love of Aristotle and ended with the beginning of real science.

Plus it's a fun book.

Yeah, we need a name change here. Mole for Mac is a very nice system maintenance app, for both terminal and GUI.

I'd suggest looking at Admiral Cloudberg's recent analysis of the Jan. 2025 airliner/military helicopter collision in Washington DC. It's a study in the difficulties of air traffic control in the 21st century and the reality of transponder usage, complicated by an overwhelmed airport and legislative indifference. Transponders aren't universally used, technology and people aren't perfect.

This one is long; I suggest reading the first chapter, then skipping to chapter 7 for the important parts of the story.

https://medium.com/@admiralcloudberg/reaping-the-whirlwind-i...