darkpuma

I don't care about freedom of the tobacco industry, nor the freedom of teenagers to smoke, nor the freedom of adults to smoke flavored cigarettes. I take it you can't identify any other 'harm.'

> If nicotine addiction is relatively harmless without conventional cigarettes, who cares?

Because we aren't doing anybody any favors when we permit the industry to give teenagers a chemical addiction to their commercial product, even if their product were harmful in no ways other than financial.

(Yes, I also object in strong terms to other addictive substances in consumer products, don't even bother replying with whataboutism.)

> "Changing the flavor sounds needlessly draconian, as adults like apple and bubblegum, too."

I heard this same sort of thing back when Obama banned flavored cigarettes. I wasn't very sympathetic to it back then and I'm still not. But with the passage of several years I think we should be able to evaluate the impact of banning flavored cigarettes. Have any adults been unduly impacted by this restriction? I can't imagine how anybody would be, but there is no reason to speculate since it's been several years. Is there any demonstrable harm caused by the banning of fruity flavor cigarettes?

NFS will give you better performance if you've got a trusted LAN.

I don't think "war with the US" was meant to imply "A war in which America was on it's own and did everything"; that's a cynical read of it. A less cynical read would be that "war with the US" means "war in which the US was a participant."

Germany did declare war with the US, hence there was in fact a war with the US. Of course, Germany was also at war with lots of other people. All Americans are taught that in schools. It's called a World War for a reason and people do understand that, even when they're going out of their way to mention it. If Americans don't mention Canadian participation much it's simply because they don't talk about Canada much in the first place. It's not because they're unaware that Canada participated in the war. Canada is a commonwealth country, of course they participated in the war. Everybody here knows that.

Americans do call it a World War, don't they? I think you're being a bit too cynical.

I think you're discounting the roll of America's massive industrial output, which shipped more than 17 million tons of goods to the Soviet Union throughout the war, including more than 400,000 trucks/jeeps, 7,000 tanks, 11,000 airplanes, and 1.75 million tons of food, just to name a bit.

Relative to national size, the Soviet Union received more tanks and planes from the British than the Americans, but the American trucks in particular were incredibly important for the Soviets. During that same period the Soviet Union only produced a fraction of that many trucks and Soviet trucks were frankly inferior trucks. Beyond the obvious logistic advantages of trucks in a war largely characterized by mobility, receiving American trucks allowed the Soviet Union to dedicate more of it's (relatively limited) industrial capacity to the production of tanks and airplanes.

Incidentally, here is something else American students aren't taught (I wonder if Japanese students are?): The leadership of the Japanese military considered the emperor to be a figurehead and after the 2nd atomic bombing when the Emperor was preparing to surrender, the staff office of the Ministry of War as well as several members of the Imperial Guard seized control of the Imperial Palace, with the goal of preventing surrender. They failed of course, but only due to the bravery and good luck of a few people in the Palace. The point here being, there were high ranking elements of the Japanese military that wanted to continue fighting even after the second bomb, and even with the Soviets preparing an invasion. Nationalism is a hell of a drug...

> "aren't those ads targeted to the viewer (you) rather than the content of the video?"

That shouldn't matter; youtube should not be showing adult ads to an adult when the adult is watching a children's show. Did nobody at youtube consider the probability that the adult's account is watching a children's TV show because there is a child in the room and the adult put the tv show on?

Oh, I completely agree. Youtube should stop pretending they have a service suitable for children. Youtube should be making it clear to consumers that their service is for mature viewers only because they are incapable of vetting content for children with the accuracy consumers rightfully expect from a children's entertainment company.

It may be the case that they do it with sufficient accuracy to stay in business, but insufficient accuracy to provide quality content streams for children.

My above comment seems a bit unpopular, but I really don't think youtube is deliberately trying to show inappropriate content to kids. I think it's happening despite their efforts to do something about it. In other words, they are trying and failing. Maybe I'm giving them too much credit, but you've got to remember a lot of youtube employees have kids too.

> " The fact that this isn't a difficult problem to solve is the strongest indication that A) YouTube knows exactly what's going on"

It may also be the case they're totally incapable of doing it right, despite trying their best. I'm not sure that possibility really changes the situation though; either way the outcome is not quality entertainment for kids.

If kids 'need' TV shows to watch and parents need a source of children's entertainment they can trust, isn't that were we normally expect an organization like PBS to fill the need?

With an organization like PBS, they have a reputation of manually curating what they show, while something like Youtube Kids just has automated systems and manual reports to supplement it. It's hard to believe Google/Youtube could ever provide automated curation as well as PBS. How many media articles that boil down to "youtube showed this to kids but PBS never would have" are we going to have before people get the idea?

Yep, people saying Breezewood isn't special probably haven't been there. The experience isn't something you can really derive from looking at any picture. I've driven across America numerous times, been to more rest stops and exit towns than I could ever remember. Breezewood is a uniquely frustrating experience.

This is certainly not what Dobbs had in mind.

> "[fans don't] help when it gets above the 98.6 degree body temperature."

I'm not sure about that. It would be true with a spherical cow, but I don't think it's true when real people are involved because people sweat to cool down. I believe that phase change of water evaporating off your skin should continue to cool you down no matter how hot it gets, like a swamp cooler in Arizona. A fan should help this by rapidly replacing the humid air around you with more dry air.

(However my understanding is that evaporation cooling stops working once humidity hits 100%)

Could it be the case that Boeing is behaving obstinately as a negotiation tactic, perhaps to negotiate more favorable terms concerning who pays for the re-training? Maybe they recognize that retraining will be necessary, but fear if they admit it they'll have no leg to stand on when airlines demand Boeing pays for it. Or maybe they realize retraining to some degree is an inevitability but they're trying to minimize the breadth of that retraining?

If I headbutt a brick wall because it's in my way, was it the wall that gave me a concussion? Or was it me that gave me a concussion?

From what I've personally seen, the vast majority of "hostile design" is employed on private property. Particularly on property owned by corporations or universities, moreso than private residences. It's pretty easy, and common, to sleep in a city park around here.

If a private property owner has trouble with people loitering or sleeping on their property, what options do they have? Call the police or hire a security guard, who will use [threats of] violence to solve your problem. Or using "hostile design" that non-violently but clearly communicates the desires of the property owner, thus avoiding any potentially lethal confrontation.

It seems obvious to me that "hostile" design is in fact the humanitarian approach.

So called hostile design in fact reduces the incidence of confrontations between police officers and trespassers. Since it reduces the incidence of confrontations, and therefore violence, I think comparing it to "cracking skulls" is unwarranted.

> "Yet an underlying concern is that pilot programs like these could alienate riders from taking public transportation entirely."

Junkies defecating in the train station discourages me a hell of a lot more than "hostile design", which for the most part is purely decorative from my perspective because my perspective is not that of somebody wishing to do precisely that which the "hostile design" is meant to encourage.

"Hostile design" is in fact defensive design, designed to protect the common people from the anti-social and frequently hostile behaviors you frequently see on public display in Californian cities. We need more of it.

(Note also that "hostile design" does not focus just on the homeless, but in fact encompasses a wide range of techniques aimed at addressing a wide range of anti-social behaviors. For instance, skate boarders can be discouraged from playing in crowded areas where they present a risk to bystanders with use of furniture and structures specifically designed to discourage skateboarders. This addresses the problem of skateboarders causing property damage or frightening bystanders without threats of force (e.g. property owners calling the police or hiring a security guard) or any other form of confrontation. Isn't that better, or at least safer, for everybody involved? Similarly, "hostile" design allows property owners to discourage the homeless without instigating a confrontation between the homeless and police officers.)

I was participating in rec.games.roguelike.development until 2011 or so. Some of those communities lasted a lot longer than most would expect.

Sometimes, but it's becoming less and less common.

I've seen professionally-oriented PHP forums and they are no better than any casual-interest oriented PHP forum.

Tons of visual clutter with all kinds of rectangles nested inside each other all over the screen with little apparent purpose for any of them. Join dates of users are given higher visual precedence to the date a comment was made (why is the join date of a user even visible on a discussion page at all?? That's pointless clutter!) 90% of users attaching signatures to every comment they leave with the signature body being longer than whatever remark they left, and often being filled with shitty animated gifs that look like they were stolen from somebody's geocities page.

It's a trash medium. Fundamentally flawed. Trying to fix typical PHP forums is like trying to polish a turd.

I think we're beginning to see the emergence of the videophile, like the audiophile, in which a small minority of consumers become obsessed with video quality and pursue it to the ends of the earth, all the while illogically neglecting obvious issues like "Gold plated TOSlink cables are completely moronic"[1][2] or "maybe I should be buying bluray DVDs instead of streaming video onto my smartphone."

I don't think the GP is really exemplary of this, but I've seen it cropping up more and more. For instance people who insist on running their low-quality anime rips through numerous interpolators and scalars to knock 720p/12fps source material up to 4K/60fps, or similarly insane endeavors.

[1] Technology Connections brought my attention to this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ICcEOXVZ3F0

[2] https://www.amazon.com/s/?field-keywords=TOSlink+gold

I bet they A/B tested that feature and decided users loved it because their metrics did not reveal how many users were muting their televisions. Maybe on Smart TVs they know, but perhaps not if that smart TV is hooked up to an external sound system.

Let me preface this by admitting that I'm a very poor judge of video quality since I generally think those 720p/700MB torrent encodes are swell. So I'm going to ignore the matter of video quality; by my awful standards they're both perfectly adequate.

I think Amazon has Netflix beat on UX. To search Netflix without using third party tools is a real nightmare. The user interface seems user-hostile, like it's designed to conceal from the user the true breadth of Netflix's library (I earnestly believe it was.) It wasn't always this bad, in the early days of netflix's streaming business the search wasn't bad, and back when they were a DVD service (which is when I first subscribed) the search functionality was pretty decent even.

But with Amazon video, you've got the search features built into the amazon prime apps, which admittedly usually sucks, but you've also got the option of searching on amazon.com itself, or on IMDB (which has been owned by Amazon since the late 90s.) Searching on IMDB is what I do. When doing advanced searches you can specify that you're only interested in movies that are free on amazon prime in your region.

E.g.: Feature Action movies that are free on Amazon Prime in the US, and are in the IMDB Top 1000: https://www.imdb.com/search/title/?title_type=feature&genres...

(Perhaps IMDB advanced search for prime videos is bad UX for casual users (although it was my non-technical mother who brought my attention to it, so I'd push back against that notion) but at the very least it's an option. While I've seen third party websites offering a good proper advanced search of Netflix's catalogue, as far as I know if you stick to Netflix operated search interfaces you're basically stuck up shit creek.)

You seem to be right. This article talks about mass graves of diggers being found: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/08/03/underworld-mon...

The men who made it were in fact professional miners and engineers from what I understand.

The last time I was in an Apple store I was in Seattle getting a MBA battery replaced. The Apple employee told me there were indications of water exposure but no apparent board damage, so the humid Seattle air was probably to blame. Thankfully for me, they didn't refuse to replace the battery because of this.

But that experience leads me to believe those water indicators are considerably more sensitive than the electronics themselves. If I had gone in there complaining about some weird issue instead of simply wanting a new battery, would the lack of apparent corrosion on the board still lead that Apple employee to conclude that the board wasn't water damaged?

For monkeys, we're pretty damn clever aren't we? The lesser apes don't make war nearly so complicated.