okcando

Do you think it was necessary to be this hostile?

The poster didn't claim to be an American and even if they are American, there are lots of different opinions on what things are important to spend time on and not everyone agrees that it's following the news or reading up on various ways places structure their government.

This may be the dream but is not and has not been the reality of rooting phones and flashing them with custom software.

It's ugly, it's error-prone, and the software that attempts to simplify it doesn't and is of unknown trustworthiness. A very unhappy path.

Absolutely not a reasonable option for the typical user, and an even less reasonable expectation that they should do it or should have known to.

Another way to approach interacting with other humans is to understand that the law only describes minimum expectations and isn't a replacement for ethics or common decency.

You can use all the tools of the law to disadvantage others but word will get around that you're a dirty dealer and it'll be their privilege to not do business with you anymore.

I went through a similar change from my sparkier first years of driving as a teen and early twenty something to now.

The motivation incidentally wasn't to improve economy or avoid citations. It was mostly to reduce the frustration of feeling like I was constantly being impeded by others who weren't interested in driving as aggressively as I had been, and partially an increased interest in safety.

It worked. Driving is much less stressful with cruise control.

What I find especially bothersome is that their resolution has, in practice, only cost their victims more.

Because the time needed to fill out that form and provide the documents will have been worth more than the payout, if one ever comes, for just about anyone who bothered to do it.

Not at all satisfactory.

This particular example is an added expense but doesn't strike me as an extraordinary one, and brings with it many administrative savings to do with applications, enrollments, grading, payments, educational resources, and so on.

These are things that would have required more physical space and more personnel in the past. Schools have transitioned a lot to a more self-service model but it has not translated into savings for students or their families as far as I can tell.

There certainly would be more murders if concrete deterrents were relaxed or eliminated. We definitely do not rely on the honor system to keep murder rates in check.

In any case, someone raising questions about emergent behavior in the general population shouldn't invite questions about that specific person's imminent ethical lapse.

Trying to address a problem like this one by placing the responsibility squarely on end consumers seems like a mistake. There are too many of them in too many places and their behavior is harder to regulate.

Placing the cost of disposal or pollution (best that regulators can assess that) upon the producers seems at first glance to create many of the right incentives, such as improving packaging, reducing waste, increasing recycling, more effective disposal, and modifying consumer behavior in the only way that seems to be universally understood: the price of goods.

This is nearly the opposite of what I would want from HTML or the web.

A fixed layout is not going to work for all devices.

Such a choice is tantamount to deciding that some classes of devices are not going to be supported, which may be a reasonable choice but better to make good choices in the HTML and CSS and let the devices try to make something usable of it rather than giving them a fixed window into a layout intended for another.

How does this use case differ from (legal) distributed file sharing, like Bittorrent, which people do at home all the time?

Sure, but it's not conventionally what is called "uptime", an uninterrupted period in a normal and responsive state. Voyager has had faults and been rebooted. In any other situation that I'm aware of, you'd have to say that uptime started over or that uptime is <100%.

I still get Corelle branded dishes, like you see at Walmart these days. I haven't broken one yet; they're remarkably durable compared to your usual ceramic pieces. That they're thin and light and a little translucent like china is just icing on the cake.

I like them a lot. Can't say how they compare to the Corelle of old but they're definitely solid.

Claims like this have been made from older generations to the younger and about every language since recording began. They were once made in Latin about a degenerate bastardization that eventually became French. Naturally, the French have in turn become rather protective.

Speakers are entitled to "abuse" their language if they want to. It is theirs.

[Excentro](http://www.excourse.com/excentro/) is fun specialized software for creating guilloche or "Spirograph" vector designs like you might see on bank notes and contracts and such. You can bring the results over to your vector program of choice to integrate into a composition.

I'd say that's a pretty uncharitable reading of my comment! That wasn't intended, to be clear.

Eeeehhh... He's arguing for principles and I'm not comfortable with the claim that not having principles is every bit as valid as having them.

In US law, you aren't supposed to be able to trademark or copyright things that are functional to the product, which I'd strongly contend applies to their word list and their algorithm, though who knows how it would play out if some interested party were to try pushing back.

That's what patents are for, but then they'd have to disclose it.

Things not being free isn't a very compelling argument for inventing a problem and charging for its solution while adding no value.

That's called rent-seeking.

There are licenses to address that, though they're even more expansive or "viral", making the proposition less attractive. What I've seen instead is software project owners, tired of being profited upon by cloud services without contribution, switching to more restrictive licenses or attaching the Commons Clause. Then, commercial use is pay to play.

It's a small tragedy.

The way I see it, we're drawing from a pool where most ideas are bad. Most problems (or, more broadly, "systems") have unsettlingly narrow parameters under which we can secure a beneficial outcome. Like the human body: a very narrow happy path flanked on both sides by a boundless abyss of deranged and dysfunctional pathologies limited only by your imagination.

I don't have an answer for how to identify good ideas that's convincing to everyone, especially in the flimsy-whimsy domain of politics, but I believe there are always more than two sides even if it's presented that way. There are uncountable many "sides" and most of them are bad, wrong, and insane. And to entertain all of them in earnest under the pretenses that we're being fair is a paralyzing waste of time.

Even for a comedy show. It's not really about the show anyway but the bigger picture of politics that it fits into.

Yours is a good example, if a bit meta, of one side arguing in bad faith and being less legitimate than the other. Arguably so is this one.

These tradeoffs aren't laws of nature and they can be changed. Discussing them, the economic and social forces behind them, and what remedies might exist is reasonable and worthwhile.

By analogy, you might as well be asking if I've ever seen Rolexes get cheaper. Why are you talking about Rolexes and not watches?

It's a seldom-acknowledged fact but ad hominems run both ways.

If saying that he can't have been that good for his bad actions is an ad hominem, then saying he can't have been that bad for his good actions is surely also an ad hominem.

For however we define good and bad.

Would it be impractical to engineer a limited portion of the fuselage to withstand this scenario?

They gave the market what the market demanded at a cost they tolerated.

This suggests a level of informed consent that I don't think existed. It implies that "the market" (who?) knew of, understood, and agreed to the risks.

And anyway, "the market" does a poor job of representing some of its stakeholders, notably the disorganized group known as users, and immediate competitive advantage may be the only metric driving decision-making.

OK, wise guy.

There's a single bare lightbulb suspended out of reach in the void. The walls feel like ScotchBrite though you can't see them. You aren't wearing any clothes. The room begins to rotate slowly as if it were a large tumble drier, rolling you off your feet. The walls gradually turn red.

Peaceful or nightmarish?

An almost perfectly black and almost perfectly anechoic chamber with almost zero external sound.

Peaceful or nightmarish?

Surprisingly, you can microwave a stapled tea bag that's submerged in water.

You can also get away with microwaving metal spoons but _not forks_.

I've been trying to avoid groceries that come with single-use plastic and it's tough. Grapes and cherry tomatoes come in plastic bags or cartons, even at salt-of-the-earth type places. Meat or cheese from the deli gets a zip lock. There's no way to use the olive bar without grabbing a plastic carton, in various sizes.

I wouldn't have even suspected the tea bags themselves. I assume some of them are still made with natural fibers but how would you know?