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Local councils can create some value by allowing people to pay council taxes, fees and fines with the issued currency. Enough to peg it 1:1 with the USD? I'll be honest, I don't know how countries like panama manage that, so hell if I know how a council would do it.

Fundamentally, this is what underwrites the US dollar as well. If you don't pay your taxes you (eventually, provided you aren't connected enough to avoid it) get arrested. You can generate your wealth in corn or software or boat building, but you have to pay your taxes in US dollars. You can't barter your boats for corn and pay your taxes in corn. Thus, (almost) everyone in the US needs some US dollars to avoid being jailed. This is the foundation upon which the value of the US dollar is built.

Of course, making sure it doesn't blow up in the councils face in a few months/years time due to lax issuing controls is a different matter.

It's just utter self serving hypocrisy.

I would say your post is reality-denial.

His experience was shit, total shit. Knowing his experience, I would avoid the site he chose like the plague. But now, let me ask you this, should I test each and every ebook retailer to try to find one that isn't shit, paying every time?

Should customers start maintaining their own index of which ebook providers are shit? Who pays to have someone go back and check them all once a week to see if they've changed their behavior since the last $7 purchase to check their DRM practices? Should customers pay a monthly subscription to some kind of digital mystery shopper service to find out who's webstores are just the fucking worst?

Your customers have _no_ reasonable path to control over shitty DRM practices. The only person in this entire conversation who has influence is Turukawa, because Turukawa is an author, and gets to choose who sells his books.

Bad news everyone: piracy exists, and provides a pretty great user flow. If authors want people to not pirate ebooks, they need to demand a not shit ebook option that /has a strong brand of being not shit/. Yeah, short term that might be really hard. Maybe authors need to form some kind of union and demand better from their publishers.

Because customers don't care. You can rant and rave about how they're immoral subhumans stealing from the mouths of authors children all you want, but piracy still exists and it's a much easier way of getting high quality ebooks that work on all platforms and devices. It's not the customers fault that zlib has a better reputation than your ebook retail partners, nor is it zlibs.

Why do you feel so entitled to such ultimate convenience?

Businesses are in the game of enticing customers. If your homeware store is so bad that double-digit percentages of the population choose to steal glasses and cutlery from local bars rather than shop at your store, you need to take a long hard look at your business and figure out what the fuck you're doing so wrong.

You can bitch and moan about how it's wrong for people to steal from the bars if you want, but that's reality denial. It will not get you more customers.

Well, actually, about that...

You never did give your graphics card model number, but according to this[1] page the Brazos platform had two codename variants for laptops and notebooks: Ontario and Zacate. Hondo and Desna were exclusively for tablets. There were no variants for desktops.

According to this page[2] that puts your card somewhere in the Radion HD 6xxx or HD7xxx driver set, and the only references to Ontario are the Radeon HD 6290 and the Radeon HD 7340.

If you go to the AMD drivers download page[3] you'll discover that both of these cards have dropped off the bottom of the list of supported cards in their respective driver categories.

Now hey, maybe your card is a slightly newer model and it's still in that download list. I don't know, since I don't know your exact card model. But my 10 seconds of research says that actually it's probably not supported any more. If I'm wrong about that then you're pretty god damn close to the cliff edge at this point.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Accelerated_Processing_Uni... [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radeon_HD_6000_Series [3] https://www.amd.com/en/support

I gather from your comment that it's been a while since you refreshed your knowledge of the current state of linux.

Graphics card driver issues largely stopped being a problem about 4 years ago, with both major graphics card manufacturers committing to open source drivers.

Packaging for multiple distributions is a problem that I would call "solved" for the past ~2 years, see my comment here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19844241

Discord has aggressive security measures. I can't use it, because it won't let me access it from my desktop unless I give it a phone number. I guess it's decided I look like a headless browser or something.

Certainly I'd say discord is a poor fit for an organization allegedly dedicated to web freedoms, such as mozilla.

I'd suggest rocketchat or mattermost, personally. Well, to be honest I'd suggest IRC, but if that must be abandoned, rocketchat is pretty good.

I've had my genitalia groped exactly zero times by the TSA.

or you're an ordinary person of color, not sure which.

Yeah, and that's fine, right? We shouldn't go out of our way to tell the TSA that's not acceptable or anything /s

The existence of this article kind of shows why I don't care for codes of conduct. It exemplifies the attitude of "you're not obeying my document entitled 'how to be a good person', so by definition you must be a bad person", and that's simply not true. It is, however, a repulsive attitude. Just because you named it that doesn't mean that's what you've written. Let me break it down:

1. There's no substitute for not being a horrible person. Good people don't need codes of conduct, and jerks aren't changed by codes of conduct.

2. Codes of conduct are a political tool, not a technical one. It is very hard to define human behavior, which means by their nature codes of conduct are relatively general and then get interpreted to fit specific cases.

3. Jerks like politics, because they're a great smokescreen.

Codes of conduct cannot possibly help organizations. No one changes their behavior to meet a code of conduct. Instead, it becomes a reason to exile users. That in itself is fine, but unnecessary. Most organizations have either a formal or defacto leader that can unilaterally excommunicate offensive members, either with a ban button or simply through social pressure.

When a leader does this, their decision can be questioned. The question revolves around "did the leader do the right thing for the community?". Once you introduce a code of conduct, the question becomes "did the leader make a decision in line with the code of conduct?", and that's a really shitty question to use as the guiding star for a community.

Once a community is in a position where it's making decisions based on an arbitrary piece of paper, it's easy for the very people the code is trying to protect against to use that code to solidify political power. The interpretations are pushed to be broader, and people start rules-lawyering their political adversaries with the CoC. This is not a healthy place for a community to be in. Jerks can no longer be excluded for being unhelpful and obstructionist, as long as they do it in a way that doesn't violate the CoC. Codifying your community behind a CoC reduces your flexibility because it gives people ammunition to argue against the statement "you're being horrible and we don't want you, goodbye".

I've seen this cause the ultimate heat-death of multiple formerly delightful internet communities. The pillars of the community get slowly weeded out because they refuse to bow down to the precise wording of the almighty CoC, the nazi moderators set in, the baseload members migrate to wherever the pillars went, and the community withers.

I've done it before and I'm bored of the cycle. I'll happily work with a team of enthusiastic people run by a benevolent dictator for life who isn't afraid to convo me and tell me I'm being a wanker. Tell me I've got to abide by the 37 point grand thesis to not triggering people and I'm out.

Try setting a calendar entry for a date on which you'll follow up if you haven't heard anything back

Thanks for the advice, but surprisingly I have actually tried just not having ADD. This simple advice doesn't work very well for me, which is why I'm attempting to pursue medication again. The calendar entry goes off, I try to contact the doctor, maybe they're not in today, it's half way through the work day, I go to set another, I spot an email while I'm doing it and start following up on that, and then 4 months later it never happened.

Not to mention that by the time you get to your doctor, un-medicated, you will forget to tell about half of your symptoms.

This is actually a major problem. I was diagnosed with ADD as a child but gave up the medication in my late teens because it had side-effects I didn't enjoy.

Late last year, I thought it might be worth trying it again, maybe with a milder dose. I booked an appointment with a doctor, who referred me to a psychiatrist. The psychiatrist told me there was a two week waiting period and that they'd call me back in a few weeks, and never did. It was two months before I remembered to follow it up.

I don't bore you with the rest of the details, but the short version is every medical professional I spoke to (and I spoke to about 5 during this saga) told me to wait and that they would organize something for me, and then didn't. Turns out if you lie to someone with ADD and leave the organization ball in their court like that, they'll never get treatment, because they struggle with the very thing you're asking them to do. It's pretty much the worst thing you can do for them.

Anyway, I've just realized I was planning to talk to the doctor about it again 4 months ago to try to get the ball rolling again. It's Christmas now, they won't be back at work until mid January. I'd better send myself an email, wish me luck.

Who is my vendor if I assembled my computer myself?

The downside is that if you don't keep buying the new systems even though the old ones work perfectly fine, eventually your device will get too old and you will be categorised as a legacy customer. When that happens, your shit will stop working.

https://www.theverge.com/2016/4/4/11362928/google-nest-revol...

That's the future. The dude with the 80's hifi setup knows what's up, in my opinion.

There are a bunch of other interesting ideas out there as well.

There's the polywell, my personal favorite, which uses a powerful electric field to confine the fuel: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polywell

(You can make a kind of shitty version of this in your garage with two microwaves, some thick wire and a healthy dose of personal risk: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusor )

There's the Dense Plasma Focus, one version of which is being developed by Lawrenceville Plasma Physics. They're cool dudes, I once donated $10 to help them get a new Beryllium cathode about three years ago, they still send me periodic and detailed updates on their progress. You can read about their approach here, complete with radical 90's theme and pretty good video: http://lppfusion.com/fusion-power/dpf-device/

Sandia National Laboratories is using a massive Marx generator [1] to power the Z-Machine, a Z-pinch that uses powerful magnetic fields generated by high current to squeeze matter in the middle of a conductor: http://www.sandia.gov/z-machine/research/fusion.html

This approach is known as ICF, and is also being pursued by the National Ignition Facility, who use lasers instead: https://lasers.llnl.gov/science/icf/how-icf-works

So there's a few different ideas out there. However, if you really want to know why no significant progress has been made[2] you need only look at this graph:

https://imgur.com/sjH5r

Note that it has a citation at the bottom, you should follow it and read the article to see that this isn't a bullshit internet chart. In the US at least, fusion has been consistently funded at a rate that the US government /knows/ is too low to see significant progress. You're welcome to make your own guesses on why this is the case.

[1] My second favorite thing in HV equipment after the explosively pumped flux compression generator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marx_generator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Explosively_pumped_flux_compre...

[2] I'm not sure this is really the case. I think that the fusion research community has made admirable progress under trying circumstances.

That line also struck me as odd. I feel like these guys maybe don't understand their customer base.

I have no need for this service, and would never register a business address to it for all the legal reasons being discussed in another thread on this topic, but I would have registered a private domain or two there anyway, just for the sake of supporting something I believe in.

But that sentence sunk it for me. If you're gonna offer an anonymous service to help promote freedom of speech, it can't be just the kind of speech you like. It's reasonable to say "nothing so illegal that we're gonna end up talking to three letter agencies about it", but beyond that you're either promoting freedom of expression or not, it's very much a binary thing.

seems like this is how dictatorships/autocracy/totalitarianism start.

Your police forces robs your citizenry in broad daylight with the support of your judiciary[1].

What kind of country did you think you were living in?

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civil_forfeiture_in_the_United...

Windows 10 isn't too bad OS wise either though.

On a fundamental technical level, windows 10 is a pretty finely tuned os.

On any other benchmark you might choose (privacy, invasiveness and advertising, user control, user experience, active user deception) windows has been going downhill for years.

To be honest, the difference between geeks and nerds is so regional that it's hardly ever worth trying to explain the distinction. I always found it interesting that the difference between the two words could change so radically depending on where you are, considering most of the west got the same movies and TV shows.

It's pretty rude to ask every visitor to a free report to hand over contact details. What are you planning to do with all those contact details?

I can only think of plans that range from annoying to malicious. None that are good.

Don't normalize rude behavior. Conditionally free is not free.

You set the price when you consume the content that you know is funded with ads.

You're objectively wrong. If that were the case, I would be blocked from accessing the content without "paying the price".

The situation is instead clearly analogous to a "pay what you feel it is worth" model.

The creators of the content allow anyone to view it, regardless of whether they run an ad blocker or not. Sometimes, they place alternative content where the ads would be, requesting that I disable my ad blocker, or like them on facebook as an alternative.

I think the "recommended price" of this "pay what you feel it is worth" model, which is usually watching advertising and allowing myself to be tracked, is too high.

I have once or twice directly sent the creator $5-10, when they offered a payment method that didn't require a paypal account. If it's good content, that's pretty reasonable. Dans Data[1] /is/ good content, even if it's getting a bit dated these days.

[1] http://www.dansdata.com

My attention is more valuable than that. It's /my/ attention, I get to set the price, and I don't accept their offer. They're welcome to block me from their websites, if they feel that's not acceptable.

3. I dislike activism without clear objectives. I see no list of guidelines here or good behavior that companies could adopt to immediately place them on the side of the good guys.

The goal highly specific. It is to make Internet advertising artificially expensive, and it is to make harvested data about users inaccurate.

There are no "good guys" on the other side. People shouldn't track me, that one's obvious, but they also shouldn't advertise at me, ever.

Human attention is extremely valuable, by far the most expensive commodity on the planet. If advertising companies want my attention so damn bad, they can pay me ~$65000 a year for it, same as my employer does. Otherwise, they can piss off.

There are a variety of third party applications and workarounds that can effectively re-patch explorer.exe to completely disable Modern UI and bring back the old start menu (think Start Is Back).

I'll stop you here: Why would I use an operating system so user-hostile that it's own advocates are saying "it's ok, lots of programs are available to unfuck it!", when the previous installment is on every level technically sound and doesn't require the unfucking?

Here's the thing about stack overflow:

How many people have worked at a location that has blocked stack overflow?

Because I have worked with an organization of about 2500 people, not all of which were IT. One day, management went on a mad whitelisting crusade and blocked about 98% of the internet, including the stack exchange network.

IT ground totally to a halt, across all our branches. No programming, no sys-admining, no help desk.

Stack overflow is not a programmer social network, and it is not a Q&A site.

It's the new textbook. Developers and sysadmins used to keep hundreds of kilos of dead tree libraries with them because only the textbooks contained the arcane knowledge like "component X was actually not implemented properly, and will crash under Y circumstances". Languages and libraries never advertise that on their website.

Post-stack-overflow developers and admins use stack-overflow as their source of kooky corner cases and badly explained concepts documentation. They don't have or need the dead tree books.

So considered harmful? In my experience any IT staff who say they don't rely on stack overflow are lying.