cforrester

I think you're thinking of "slavery" as a term applying exclusively to chattel slavery, but it's far from exclusive to that form. Bonded labour and forced labour are commonly recognized forms of slavery, as people are obligated to serve another under threat of violence.

Poverty was also a major factor for a lot of us. Entertainment is a basic human necessity, and video games were so compelling to me as a child. When you have days where your mom has sleep for dinner so you don't, it's tough to find any money to spend on entertainment. I can see how it might seem like a better investment to chip in $10 to a cracker who will then release multiple games.

We were fortunate to benefit from a program meant to help get lower income families access to computers and the internet, in the early 2000's, so piracy opened up entertainment options far more diverse than the TV channels we could get over the air. On top of games, I remember burning music CD's for my friends and family. Hell, I remember long hours fiddling with the concept of transcoding and burning VCD's (basically a DVD, but on a CD) for my family to watch.

Does this tracking data really need to be transmitted outside of the local environment, though? The driver simply needs to download a list of the available application profiles and compare it to the process list locally. Then, if a specific profile is available, it can request it and Wacom doesn't learn about the other processes running on the system.

This makes me wonder how emoji might be used in the future. They're becoming pretty ubiquitous, and even adopting meanings of their own. Might they replace punctuation entirely in the future, as a marker of tone the way punctuation marks pauses?

On reddit, he elaborated that it's just the size of his hands that make it as annoying as all trackpads: https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/eq2pwa/my_review_of_...

That doesn't mean it's wrong to criticize his choices, so long as it's done without being insulting.

> Does the contemporary New York Economy connect people around the world and put all the worlds knowledge at your fingertips?

Would it be any more acceptable to lure people into the "dependent contractor" trap if it did?

I can remember a time when there were serious complaints about Walmart's influence in the home video market. It used to be very expensive to produce a DVD, and smaller studios couldn't afford to produce both an original widescreen and a cropped ("pan-and-scan") version for 4:3 televisions. For the longest time, Walmart would refuse to carry a title that didn't have a cropped version. It ended up forcing some to choose between losing a significant source of sales and compromising the visual quality of a film's only home video release.

Do you suppose they mostly use WeChat there?

I'm wondering if they don't have a different idea of training internally than you do...

When I was younger, my mother worked as a freight forwarder. After she'd been there for awhile, the company paid to send her for training and certification to work with hazardous materials. If I recall correctly, she signed a contract agreeing to repay the costs of the courses if she left the company before a certain period of time had passed.

Essentially, rather than hiring externally a freight forwarder who is already certified to handle dangerous goods, they identified their strongest existing employee without that certification and paid for them to learn what they needed for a more advanced position, with conditions to assure they recoup their investment. The way I read it, I thought the person you replied to was suggesting identifying existing employees with potential and paying to expand their skillsets for a different role, e.g. with bootcamps or MOOCs, not hiring fresh graduates for low pay.

I wouldn't say that helium is becoming scarce in the sense that we can't get any more, though. I may be wrong, but my understanding is that it's just expensive to store, so nobody wants to do it if it's not worth the money. If air ships started to "take off", there would surely be more money in producing helium.