NoSorryCannot

I don't generally think it's a good idea to enforce that every road user have to follow rules that were designed for cars.

Someone on a bike (or skates or...) is slower and has better use of their hearing and is less deadly to others, but has to work harder to get going again from a dead stop.

Cyclists and cars have different "superpowers", like how bikes can share a footpath with pedestrians and cars get to go 80mph down a freeway. It's reasonable.

It sounds like you're assessing his ideas based on whether they harmonize with your current ideology, ergo thinking about it in terms of "favorability" like how you might vote for a politician. This is not the right way to read a persuasive essay.

Since it was just an example, I don't think refuting this particular item will nullify the opinion. The idea, I think, is that there are always more pieces in a state of deprecation and replacement at any given time in Linux land than in FreeBSD land.

I don't use them this way. I use them to emote or in a way that's almost like punctuation. If I replace words, I'm probably being obnoxious on purpose.

The character designs will be active trademarks, so a new Winnie the Pooh without Disney would have to look quite different.

I think you're onto something at the end there! The commenter was almost certainly talking about subjectively "nicer" photos that have been made more interesting by the use of flawed lenses.

And this isn't an uncommon idea either. It is the idea behind lensbaby, Lomography, and the slightest resurgence of Polaroid.

Back in the day, hobbyists looking for a cine look would hook up a kind of adapter to use SLR or cine lenses with a consumer camcorder.

Of course the camcorders had tiny sensors behind fixed lenses, so what was happening was the adapter had a bit of vibrating ground glass onto which the external lens was projecting its image, like a viewfinder, and the camcorder recorded that.

The effect looked very good. Manual focus of course but this was considered desireable. I'm not suggesting this as a commercial solution, I just thought it was very inventive.

I avoid eating before dinner time, say five o'clock in the afternoon. I try not to keep snackable foods in stock.

I kind of gave up on this when the pandemic began and my weight went out of control. Then, I would have said peanut butter pretzels. I'm back on the wagon now.

OP may be wrong or may not be. It is certainly not a rule that all executives are as you describe and there is no shortage of anecdotes to oppose yours.

No argument that they have the experience and knowledge within their organizations. I think OP was expressing doubt that "execs" will be informed enough to deliver actionable insights.

My point was, a lot of UI followed or was heavily inspired by whatever Apple was doing even then. These days, there's more Google in the mix.

Before pill buttons, they were gray beveled rounded rectangles, be it native or web, on every platform.

I don't view now as being especially dominated by sameness versus the past.

Pill-shaped buttons were part of the Aqua theme in the original release of OS X. For a long time after that, UIs aped Aqua with pinstripes and jelly-shaded pills and while the pinstripes and jelly have gone, I think the pills are here to stay for some styles.

I feel like the only other plausible color that could have been chosen is green, and even that seems too opinionated. Reasons being mostly associations (red, orange, yellow meaning danger or stop, and green meaning go) and legibility on white or gray backgrounds. Add to that that people seem to disproportionately pick blue as their favorite color and they especially seem to favor it as a conservative or relaxing color choice.

That is to say, I think the odds of two people independently picking blue are pretty good.

I hear your point but the quantity of files produced by initializing a new rails project is very large, larger than an equivalent node project with server and framework. These aren't transient build artifacts either, they will live in the repo and may occasionally need attention.

I think people tend to use "monopoly" as a catch-all for anticompetitive practices. Apple is not a monopoly except in contrived ways, but they can still be behaving in an anticompetitive way and some of those behaviors may violate regulations.

U.S. antitrust has a lot of discretion and is pretty political but the core metric they lean on, for good or ill, is consumer prices. Can it be argued that the green bubble is increasing consumer prices?

It will probably happen but if that were enough to make for a bad idea, there wouldn't be any good ones.

If not acacia then a groce of baobab, ideally with a giraffe in silhouette.

You really let that strawman know who's boss...

_Just_ as vital? If you had to choose between closing a hospital or a McDonald's, you would choose at random?

I hear what you are saying. Gas stations are vital transitively from the vital jobs that require gas, such as ambulance services. But I could still rank them as less vital than the services themselves, enabling me to at least close some gas stations. Fast food would be far down the list because it is predictable and trivial to plan around.

I didn't say that package managers are perfect. I think they are a lot better. They have downsides related to centralized control and contradictory interests, but I believe the good outweighs the bad and you can usually install software from somewhere else if you really need to, with one conspicuous exception.

Most Linux distributions fit for desktop use ship with an "app store" presentation so I think accessibility has been addressed.

The sheer number of original sources and secondhand sources that each need to be individually vetted clearly requires a lot more work and skill than using a well-curated package manager.

And a lot of vendors that should have been trustworthy ended up taking advantage of it by sneaking unwanted software in with the good stuff. Off the top of my head, Adobe did this. There was a glorious time in the 90s and early oughts where seemingly everything was trying so install another toolbar into IE...

There is plenty here to be critical of.

Lots of lesser schools are trialing test optional and sometimes the stronger "test blind" right now, for a variety of reasons including covid and competition from their peers. Off the top of my head, the University of Oregon, the University of Utah. All UC and California State schools are test blind right now.

Universities devote a tremendous amount of resources to the admissions process because it is, of course, extremely important to their business that they get the right number of enrollments from the right kinds of students.

It's not tortured, it's strictly the only supported and legal way of running it. Anything else is software piracy.

If that is the criteria for calling software free, then it's not a useful label.

Every legal macOS installation has been paid for with money.

Characterizing macOS as something Apple intends to distribute as free is mostly false. They intend to charge for it with the purchase of a Mac.

Microsoft also distributes Windows "for free" on their website and if you care not at all about license terms as we evidently don't when it comes to Mac OS, then it presents no moral quandary to disable its activation annoyances. Is Windows free?

Even after back pedaling, this is still really out of touch.

You don't seem to know what Syria looks like and "aesthetics" can't make something into the third world anyway. Not looking like a wealthy Swiss town or Japanese metropolis doesn't make anything third world.

I'm not being taken for a ride where we pretend that nothing was intended nor implied by calling it a narcotic.

See above indeed.

It would be a tautological argument for its addition to the list of controlled substances. Like so, "It's a narcotic because it's a controlled substance and it's a controlled substance because it's a narcotic." Calling it a narcotic is not helpful.

I do wish you would stop taking jabs at me personally.

I would argue that nicotine is not a controlled substance, so it doesn't fall under this definition anyway.

But, that said, it is totally valid to argue that a definition is wrong, misleading, or incomplete. Has nothing to do with whether I like it or not, but thanks for saying that.

But also to add, drug law enforcement's tendency to refer to something as a narcotic whenever it's politically expedient is obvious FUD.

I allege that FUD was the intended effect when the word was used by OP.