waspleg

Got laid off yesterday. Hooray.

This.

I donated to the defence fund when she was Bradley and I'm not sorry I did it. Secret courts and whatnot have no place in America. At all. Ever.

I confess to disabling SELinux being one of the first things I always do on a new Linux box. It gets in the fucking way. A lot.

I bought that humble bundle as well, but I didn't know that there was a website too. Thanks for the information.

Seems like you made some enemies with the truth. Nothing has come out for several years and the prices on the high end cards haven't moved an inch because AMD had nothing to compete with. Nvidia absolutely sits on tech and milks everything and always has - markets where there is 0 competition always do this; see local cable co monopolies for great examples.

Completely agree. I was an original Prime member when it first came out which was before price increases, add on items, restrictions and bullshit. After learning about how they treat their workers as well as them adding sales tax on to things that were previously untaxed (state law). I look elsewhere for a lot of things and if I can't find something other than on Amazon I buy from the 3rd party retailer. Paying for the shipping is still cheaper adding shit I don't need/want to meet the $35 threshold and faster.

I never owned an xbox, but for games that require a controller and suck with a mouse and keyboard, the 360 controller is the best one I've used.

I'm a card carrying EFF member. The EFF supports Internet Freedom and Privacy (those things go hand in hand).

Without even looking, if they're against you the chances are they're in the right. I've yet to see them do anything I disagree with as someone who considers those points very important.

To be honest, this is a first world problem. Most people on Earth (and honestly, at least the in US, the majority of people http://money.cnn.com/2010/01/05/news/economy/job_satisfactio...) work at a job they hate because they feel they have to for whatever reason be it survival or their kids or their bills, etc.

My job is easy (for me), requires little from me and very occasionally is worth getting out of bed for. I'm probably one of the lowest paid people here. But, I take lunch when I want, I wear what I want, I have a situation that is somewhat flexible (not because the employer wants it to be and actively dissuades it, but because my co-worker and I will mutually look out for and cover for each other). The benefits are bad. Treatment by management ranges from indifference to overtly hostile for the most part.

I'm not a programmer and would put myself somewhere in the middle satisfaction wise. The money sucks but I've had worse jobs and the time off (2 months a year), while unpaid, is great.

$.02, my ultimate point was not worrying where your next meal is coming from is a luxury most people don't have - so worrying that you're not doing something fulfilling becomes a secondary concern at best.

I completely agree with the author of the article. Apple is the real-world incarnation of the economic premise of Huxley's "A Brave New World". This was just the mask dropping for a second to pander to the faithful.

I'd like to add, as someone who works at K12 public high school, that I've seen the reality of the article played out. My building is 100% free lunch, most are extremely poor, and yet there is a sizable number with new iphones. Why? Because they don't want to look poor or be thought of as such.

In American society poverty is associated with failure on many levels. We have our caste system as much as India, only ours is economic, and enforced ruthlessly with endless class warfare - largely in one direction.

Only because they don't know what it is, nor largely that it exists, nor what it means for them to not have it.

Most of the big tech companies prey on ignorant users these days in the most insidious and pernicious ways for their profits - to a far greater extent than the seemingly innocent things like making a quick buck because someone doesn't know how to snap in a DIMM.

EDIT: Nor any viable alternative in the same form factor.

Neither. I prefer a completely open non-marketplace aka PC minus Windows 10. Phones in their current iteration are the death of device freedom. Sure there are work arounds for some things but they're band-aids on bullet wounds.

"Operating through a company doesn't make me immune from the law, and neither should working through an algorithm."

That might be technically true but in reality it quite often does. See nearly all bankers from 2K8 melt down for good examples of how money and power buy immunity in what is really an economically based caste system.

Do you really think if this was some garage start-up and not Google that they would have been granted anything but a swift kick in the ass out the office door of whatever bureaucrat handled this?

My best friend is a devout atheist and he likes to quote dawkins and hitchens and other high priests of his religion. I use these terms purposefully. He's every bit as fervent as any hell fire and brimstone Baptist.

We are/were both raised in, and still live in, the "Bible Belt" as well. I've studied most world religions, have read quite a bit in that arena from the esoteric like "A Course in Miracles", "The Book of Urantia", Meister Eckhart, much of Jiddu Krishnamurti, the Tao Te Ching, etc etc to formalized things like William James's the variety of religious experience.

I've had my own, I would say spiritual rather than religious, experiences that are deeply personal and beyond the rationale of atheists. I have seen firsthand how introspection and quiet-minded observation can provide insight and intuition.

However, I also I went to science magnet schools starting in pre-school, work in IT, and am quite a rational pragmatic individual.

I consider myself to be an agnostic at the moment mostly due to a lack of options. I don't consider it to be a "weasel term". Uncertainty is ubiquitous in life. How is this topic any different? There's always Pascal's Wager ;)

I was thinking the same thing.

That's already an issue. I also don't see how it's reasonable to ask someone to essentially sign a contract with a third party entity to do one's job while sacrificing that individual's personal privacy in the process.

That last point is far worse than you think. In my school the principal is entirely enamored with all things apple and google and wants to mandate certain staff have twitter accounts. This is unwittingly signing up lots of people for life long tracking. Although, many already do it to themselves with no thought whatsoever to what the repercussions are, or that there may even be any. Many other schools are even worse.

An anonymous source... must be gospel.

I put early access games I'm interested in on my "wish list" aka watch list and then wait for them to be released and received. I no longer buy games in early access.

I really wish that Steam had much better filters for what it shows, i.e. I have 0 interest in F2P games, like 99.99% of anime/manga games, etc. I greatly prefer the old interface which didn't try to force-feed you other people's "curated" opinions.

The recent sales have been lackluster discount wise as well and 3rd party shady key sites and whatnot often have better pricing.

Having said that, though, I did get Witcher 3 from Steam during the Winter sale which is the best RPG I've ever played and I've put 100+ hours in to it in less than 2 weeks. I was disappointed to see the same price as was in the sale. I waited expecting a better discount. It's so good I went back to buy the season pass at full price though - <3 for CDProjekt. They're outstanding and I hope they don't go the way of the other (mostly) scumbag publishers.

Find a local credit union. They'll pay you interest with no fees for holding your money (aka using your money to invest and making money with your money).

Why do you require a sign in/sign up in the first place? My ad blocking is configured to disable all that crap and I don't make accounts unless I really want whatever is behind it (which is exceedingly rare). On the other hand, I'm the only one I know personally who does not have a Facecrook account and when I tell people they're the product they just stare at me with doll eyes. shrug

My guess is, it's more likely he's a micromanager, but, he also spent $250 million of his own money on it as well.

Maybe it's because a lot of Germans have already experienced a total surveillance state and what that means for their freedom/well being when the information is turned against them, or, at least, remember the stories from their relatives who did.

Maybe you should handle the "unusual" transactions?

I bet you don't pay them much - maybe not even enough to live on (that would definitely be the case here in the US I don't know about Australia). I've worked shitty retail jobs (hotels) before, for years, if you're trying to assess their "status" they'll just lie to you to get you to leave them alone. A checklist is just an extra hurdle when it's busy (and even when it's not).

I've never been a manager so I'm not sure what to tell you as far as motivation. I think money might help. I'm sure you have your pets and the other employees will resent those people and you for having them. Maybe letting them vote on shift leaders or something so it's not you correcting them but someone they may already like/trust.

When you have people living on nothing they will perpetually be in a survival mindset - which is to say, cut-throat and self focused. I doubt whatever you want them to do is of any real concern to them and I doubt you can make it that way without spending money and showing that you actually care about the person and not just the job.

I can say for certain though, you'd be hard pressed to get people to hate you more and faster than to try to micromanage them. Your employee turn over will increase which will just mean more people for you to try to train "the right way".

I don't know about you but my primary system disk is an SSD, which is far less than 2 TB... Guess what kind of partition it is (and guess which one it came with)?

I've found AOEMEI (?) to be good for converting other partitions from MBR to GPT but their shareware version won't do boot partitions without paying ;)

I agree. I don't know anything about either of these but this has been interesting to read.

I agree with all of this. For your sales people getting paid on commission they will, of course, flat out lie and try to up sell you things or combine those together to say they're out of something they have and try to sell you something more expensive because you look like you need it (I'm looking at you Fry's).

tl;dr - My best isn't necessarily your best. We're different people with (likely) different needs.

That seems pretty foreign to me. While I would definitely look at something like that (although I've never heard of either of those sites until now, thanks), it seems weird to me that people would assume what some website thinks is "best" is so accurate as to accept their recommendation without doing any research whatsoever and immediately going out to buy that.

Even when I was a kid and had a Consumer Reports subscription I never just bought whatever they said to buy I have always done my own research. It doesn't seem that difficult to me if you have at least a rough idea of what you're looking for in an item and can prioritize those things.

I know of people who would lose their jobs if some of their stuff went public. I don't think that's what it's for though.

This seems to be more fodder for the insatiable targeted-ad/law enforcement data crunching monster.

Yes. I also abhor their walled garden business practices. Here's Richard Stallman from 2011 on Job's death, I completely agree with him:

"Steve Jobs, the pioneer of the computer as a jail made cool, designed to sever fools from their freedom, has died.

As Chicago Mayor Harold Washington said of the corrupt former Mayor Daley, "I'm not glad he's dead, but I'm glad he's gone." Nobody deserves to have to die - not Jobs, not Mr. Bill, not even people guilty of bigger evils than theirs. But we all deserve the end of Jobs' malign influence on people's computing.

Unfortunately, that influence continues despite his absence. We can only hope his successors, as they attempt to carry on his legacy, will be less effective."