stoolpigeon

You might enjoy Beckey Chamber's Galactic Commons series. She does a great job of creating all kinds of interesting characters and exploring them and what makes them unique.

The Sparrow by Mary Doria Russell is very compelling.

And I seconded it below but I'll mention it again - the Bobiverse series is excellent with amazing exploration.

The Bob series by Dennis E. Taylor is amazing, and I highly recommend it. Very positive, very creative.

SpaceX is reusing spaceships, landing them, catching rockets in chopstick contraptions. But a spaceship that lands near its launchpad can also land anywhere in the world. In an hour. Loaded with military might.

No - no they can't. Referencing Starship Troopers is appropriate because this is fiction.

In my friend group - those with a Commodore 64 were at the top. The Vic-20 was the middle and the Sinclair the bottom. My one friend with a Tandy Color Computer had no idea what he was doing, his family just had money.

I'm the same - I call it "pseudoambidextrous".

I lived in Europe for 10 years and that was nice as far as eating goes. Here in the USA I always try to grab a left corner so I'm not bumping elbows with anyone.

I had an uncle just like us, my son is a true full on lefty.

I enjoy the camera for backing up.

I was surprised at how many athletes for other nations live and train the ihe US

I think it would be interesting to see all medals grouped this way, regardless of the country the athlete represented.

I think point 3 of the grand parent indicates admins were not given an opportunity to test this.

My company had a lot of Azure vms impacted by this and I'm not sure who the admin was who should have tested it. Microsoft? I don't think we have anything to do with crowdstrike software on our vms. ( I think - I'm sure I'll find out this week.)

Edit: I just learned the Azure central region failure wasn't related to the larger event - and we weren't impacted by the crowd strike issue - I didn't know it was two different things. So my second part of the comment is irrelevant.

I wouldn't say almost nothing. But the more domain specific things get the less I can track.

My big takeaway has been when that happens, I remind myself I'm not fit to judge if a comment is good/right or not. I try to get a feel for the context of conversations and just kind of mentally file it away.

I've learned a lot here over the years and the discussions sometimes remind of the good old days on slashdot.

I had a discussion with an engineer from John Deer, I'm not a farmer and don't have direct experience with it so I am taking his word but he told me in most cases the person in the tractor is just there to monitor what's going on for safety. I imagine this frees up people for other work if someone maybe less qualified can be in the tractor, or just takes the load off so they can work longer, allow them to do more in less time, etc.

The Bourbaki dangerous bend symbol is also a part of the lore and symbology for the band. I think that the use of the name is a 'clue' to the meaning of the symbol. The recent new release is the first time I think they've stated this explicitly.

I never thought about this - I'm aware of Bacon and the mathematicians - but not other famous people.

This is cool - my Winston Churchill number is 3.

Number 3 makes it worth it alone. If I buy something I want to be able to back it up and own it.

Number 2 is awesome because when people publish without DRM, effectively I don't need to worry about the format.

The first has never been that big a deal to me but I'll always have it on a machine I use for the other two.

I don't usually photograph places and stuff but I do take pictures of people I care about in places and in front of stuff. That I enjoy. But the really cool buildings and things I usually grab a picture online that's way better than what I would make.

You keep equating killing an industry with killing people - this is a false comparison.

Ending the use of coal saves human lives and does not take any human lives. The batman comparison is irrelevant.

No longer using asbestos saved lives and didn't take lives. Removing lead from consumer products saves lives and didn't take lives.

I'm sure you there were people in the asbestos industry who weren't happy about the change and they would have gladly gone on giving people cancer. Just like people in the coal industry still bemoan the fact they can't keep killing as many people.

Getting rid of an industry that literally is killing people world wide is not the same as killing a person. It's the opposite, it is saving lives.

thank you - I appreciate it.

I've seen a couple of these keyboards that I assume are mechanical in the last couple days or weeks here.

Serious question - do they not have function keys because that's just the models shown? Or is it normal for keyboards like this to not have them and if so why?

Almost anything one can do, of value to their fellow humans, is a crime somewhere.

I've tried 3 times. Haven't made it through yet.

Tolstoy on the other hand, Anna Karenina I binged and had done in like a week (on vacation, reading a good portion of my time)

"I don’t know if there were any sites displaying cumulative karma for people."

Slashdot did for a long time - though there were caps on it. I used to see if I could get it to the top limit, down to the bottom limit and back to the top in a single day. It wasn't really all that difficult.

The first time I saw a personal computer was at the home of a friend. His father was an engineer for Ping and they had a computer at their house. We weren't allowed to touch it but we watched his dad play a Star Trek game on it for a little while.

A couple years later I'd get my hands on a TRS-80 at school. I loved it.

When I went to high school in 1983 we had the Apple IIe in our lab. I spent hours on them doing basic and later Pascal. By then I had a vic-20 at home. I was a part of a nerdy group that hung out in the computer lab any time we could and we had a pretty good relationship with the head of the match department. When they go their first Mac, that was the first time I saw gui in person.

We were given a few minutes to play with it and I really liked it. I don't think it was so shocking though. While the command line was my normal initial interface, I was used to playing games that provided a GUI of their own to interact with the game. The gui on the mac was another program like a game running on top of the OS.

After high school I didn't have a pc of my own for years. When I did get one is was a Packard Bell sx386 running DOS. I had that for a decent amount of time before I got my first copy of windows. For me it all just fit together and I would say to this day I think of a computer and it's operating system as the CLI it provides. The GUI is an abstraction that runs on top. I like a nice desktop ( KDE is my favorite ) but I get very frustrated any time I can't get underneath it and do what I want. My first instinct any time I hit a problem that feels difficult, is to drop to the shell.

I had a five year period where I wrote book reviews for fun - and to get more book reviews posted to Slashdot, so I could post Amazon affiliate links there.

It was an interesting combination of events. It got kicked off because I read a book review on Slashdot and the reviewer mentioned getting a book in the mail. I asked ( not expecting any response ) how people just got books in the mail for free.

Later that day I got an email from a publicist at O'Reilly. That kicked things off.

When I was in the thick of it a few years in I got to exchange brief emails with Jon Scalzi, Tim O'Reilly and Lev Grossman. I think Grossman was my favorite because I've read his reviews, respect his ability and he complimented my review of The Magicians.

The other part of it was that I had a Slashdot subscription and that meant I saw things that were greenlit by the editors early. All book reviews would have a link to Barnes & Noble. I would see the reviews early and often get a first post and I'd put a link to the book on Amazon at a lower price. That would be an affiliate link and anyone who clicked on it - I'd get a cut of anything they bought on Amazon for the next 24 hours.

So the publicists liked me getting reviews in front of a large tech audience ( Slashdot still was at the time ) and I took my affiliate payments as Amazon gift cards - so I got free stuff.

Something else I found funny was my reviews were all tech books, Sci-fi or fantasy. Whenever possible I'd get an ebook. Somehow I got on a list with Penguin where they were just mailing all kinds of physical books that were fiction but not anything I'd read. I couldn't get them to stop. They kept sending them for years after I moved away from where I lived at the time. (Friends would occasionally let me know books were still showing up.)

I thought it was super interesting that they had a wog day with all the civilians and press on board and it looks like they allowed the non-sailors to become shell backs. I didn't know that was something that had ever happened. Super interesting.

I grew up reading a lot of Heinlein. I always really got a kick out of reading about people flying around the solar system (and beyond) in nuclear powered ships, using slide rules to do the math for plotting their course.

Hungary has a VAT of 27% and a flat income tax of 15%. VAT doesn't replace income tax, it complements it. Then there are vehicle taxes, property taxes, and so on.

That seemed really low to me - I've itemized pretty much whenever I've had a mortgage. So I've always assumed for most people with a mortgage it would make sense.

Looking here it seems you're pretty much right - https://taxfoundation.org/standard-deduction-itemized-deduct...

I really don't understand what happened here.

I really wish I could have received an answer. I don't follow why asking the question was considered wrong.

Really - if someone who downvoted this - or understands why it was downvoted could explain I'd really appreciate it.

I just looked at the Wikipedia article about her and it appears her and her husband were often overlooked while making huge contributions.

Is it assembly he is talking about or Hamming Distance and correcting binary?

If it's the former are you saying he claimed to have invented assembly?

It's an interesting speech and I'm glad you posted it but I'm struggling to understand the connection to Booth