eponeponepon

Are you in the UK and within some short distance of civilisation? If so, you very likely have a newsagent near by you and there's a surprisingly good chance they still do a paper delivery round.

Obviously if you're in a hut up a mountain or live in Norfolk then this may be less useful advice for you.

It's fine, it's worked for millennia - you simply gather your many belligerent sons, hand them large clubs and send them to batter the power company's director till he gives in.

On a long enough timescale, all of these things are dust, though.

...basically, label your axes.

The key to building an idea is inducing blind faith in others.

...imho.

Edit to expound: if you have blind faith in your idea, then when it is about to fail, you will go down with it. If you don't, and it's about to fail, you will recognise this and extract yourself in time to survive.

At that point it's up to your personal moral compass whether you help the others whose blind faith you've built to reach the escape pods.

I'm not disagreeing :-)

The Orwell comparisons may seem trite to you, but the fact is that if there's no available word for a thing, it becomes difficult for people at large to discuss it.

Some organisations conclude that if the masses can't name a thing, then it's impossible for anyone to think of it, and that this makes it go away. Personally I think this underestimates individual people's capacity to think up new names for things, and is therefore doomed to failure.

My word, but this would break _so much_. I would like to think that I've managed to keep my wits about me enough over the years that I haven't got any code needing to find both 'A.txt' and 'a.txt' in the same place... but I really wouldn't put it past past-me to've screwed that up... that guy's just the worst.

edit to add: I don't think I ever noticed Android being case-insensitive. Always something new to learn!

Email has been slowly balkanising itself for years now. By way of example, I know personally several people who run mail relays and not only refuse to relay messages from and to Google email servers but even refuse to _receive_ emails addressed to their users from GMail addresses. All of this on what is essentially a political objection.

In the fullness of time, email will fail as a communication medium because of these situations. I don't think that Google will mind terribly when it does.

I think this is the story you were after: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/stories-42951788

(apologies if that's one of the BBC's randomly unavailable-outside-the-UK pages...)

It's not just Western society, it's humans in general. The rest of the world might not get so wound up about narcotics as the West does, but there are plenty of other things that the mob makes unhelpful binary judgments about.

There is never anything wrong with writing "n/a" in any kind of form. There was a long overlap during which any form that took contact details already had fields for email address and mobile phone number, but before either of those were as ubiquitous as they are today; nobody processing those forms ever ignored one with "n/a" for email address.

Granted, it might be less prudent to skip some fields than others, of course.

Unsettling is exactly the word. https://stackroboflow.com/#!/question/16662 leaves me trying to work out what on earth the poster's really trying to do - even though I know full well that there is no poster...

On the other hand, cherrypicked excerpts can be terrifyingly convincing: "What is the best way to login to my Ruby application in a browser via Perl?"

We've all been asked a question like that and had a cold dread creep over us as we try to formulate a response...

Neat. I could definitely use this for some home infrastructure I'm playing around with at the moment - will definitely give it a shot!

I don't really get the way terminal usage gets framed as outdated, or GUIs as unnecessary depending on one's preference.

They're each for very separate use cases - tasks that are easier done in a terminal belong in a terminal and those that are easier in a windowed idiom belong there.

E2E doesn't actually matter that much in the end; it's far more interesting to advertisers (and therefore valuable to Facebook) to know who you're talking to than to know what you said. Three-letter agencies know this too - scanning encrypted traffic for keywords is going to get them a lot more chaff than wheat, but spotting that five suspected criminals/subversives/journalists (delete as appropriate to your political tastes...) are having an ongoing conversation is almost pure wheat in that it tells them to expend effort on finding out whether they're making nefarious plans or just sharing cat macros.

I think the exact changes that he (or his agents) made are kind of immaterial - ultimately, it seems, he tried to implement too large a change too suddenly, and it failed.

There's a lesson in Akhenaten's history for many areas of many sectors - not least the tech sector.

The Amarna period is endlessly fascinating to me - it seems such a clear example of how little has changed in the way politics and society interact for thousands of years.

In theory, the same way as a policeman - assessing the situation and the context, and then making a decision not to issue the fine.

But in practice, I don't think it can, without having total surveillance capabilities - not to mention essentially sci-fi quantities of AI advancement.

This cuts both ways, of course - in some ways, I think we want automated systems to be able to discriminate. A good example is speed cameras - in days past, a man speeding to get his wife to the maternity ward could be pulled over and then hurriedly wished good luck, maybe even getting an escort. These days, he gets a fine in the post three weeks later.

There's a world of difference between "this person has a track record of not paying their bills, so exercise caution before lending" and "this person was observed reading subversive literature, so don't let him leave the country".

I agree that pre-employment credit checks seem unhelpful for most lines of work (but consider: do you think a bank should be happy to employ a sysadmin with massive gambling debts?), but I have my doubts that every employer does them as you imply.

Some matter is conscious. My fingernail is not, but it's a subset of the matter that equals me, and I am conscious (you'll just have to take my word); I am a subset of the matter that equals all matter, so it has to follow that the set of all matter is conscious, though subsets of it are not.

It's all a matter of where you draw the boundaries.

It's a throwback to our feral ancestry. I'd contend that the urge to overcome our animal nature is the bedrock of what makes us human.

    > In a way, that's part 
    > of its appeal. 

You're not wrong - and this is no small part of why it's a tough problem.

But I think those three are a bit of a "pick any two" situation.

    > sad kids LARPing as Nazis.

Spot on. A description I am undoubtedly going to steal when the opportunity arises, so thanks! :)

No, I mean half of them flat-out don't know how to handle their instruments properly, and even the ones who do are still using them to make art that is lazy, adolescent and derivative.

The production-value stuff I totally understand and wholly dig, and that's not why I lack respect for their music.

I have never looked at the term that way, but what you say is completely fair.

I seem to recall a time when a lot of that scene rejected the label and tried to claim it was "just black metal", but now that I think about it, I suspect they've collectively owned it these days.

I don't know what else to call it that doesn't either minimise it or need a dozen paragraphs' worth of explanation, though...

Can we be clear on this, please? It's inhuman to hate another for their origin or religion - not just un-American. This problem isn't about whether or not you're a good American, it's about whether or not you're a good human.

NSBM's a difficult problem. For one thing, where do you draw the line? For every band that are out-and-proud unequivocal neo-nazis preaching race-war, there's another who insist they're apolitical as musicians, another who just want to "explore themes of our national history" (yeah, pull the other one...) and probably half a dozen who just flirt with the imagery because it sells records.

For another thing, this stuff is interesting - there's no two ways around that. Musically, it's almost entirely straight-up bad (when Varg Vikernes is the best a movement has to offer, you know there's a quality problem), but the cultural mechanisms that made it and the social history that feeds it is, speaking with cold clinicism, really very interesting.

Buckle up - it's only worsening. I'd bet on there being plural internets by 2030 at this rate.