Slashdot is having serious problems with forms. https://slashdot.org/journal only loads sometimes. After submitting a comment, the subsequent page load almost always fails (but the form submission works.) What did you guys break this time?

Why does it need to be so damned hard to tell the difference between a visited and non-visited link on Slashdot? I have color-calibrated my display, so it's not me.

Went to Fortuna for the beer fest, which was pretty good except that I didn't have any beer there which I liked much which I hadn't had before. Found out that, shock amazement, Hoparillo became Hop-Trio due to threat of lawsuit by a Texan brewery which might have been in or had a beer named Amarillo. (Hello Texas, I hope you don't get your asses kicked too bad, some of you are with me always.) Anyway, most of my comments got up-modded. I'm certainly going to combine beer with Slashdot a lot more.

A big part of the formula had to be that I was using my phone, though, and less is more. So with that thought in mind,

Looking for sysadm or auto electrical work, willing to tone down online rhetoric if it's a dealbreaker

There are many times in history that are a turning point. A time when there is enough people with enough resources to call forth action that will impact millions more. The time to focus on these things is always, but with limited time it becomes something that's brushed aside until a point that people see that action must be taken. They seek a solution and the seek salvation in leaders who act as if they know what to do.

But often enough, leaders have their own agenda. They see a world that does not work in they way they think it should. There is a belief that even so, the world works in certain ways and they somehow can fulfill that form through their actions. Yet this is a contradiction. Instead of seeing things for what they are, they wish to mold the world into a way they want it to be no matter how impossible those actions are.

So we see calls to replace Obamacare. Obamacare is a failure. It is a failure of vision to see the systemic problems we have in the US. We have too few doctors and too much willingness to coddle the AMA's desire to limit licensing the doctors we need. We embrace a system that would prefer 100 well-trained US trained doctors--native born and foreign immigrant doctors--over 150 US mostly well-trained doctors and another 50 or 100 questionable trained foreign immigrant doctors. We give license to drive to most anyone to one of the leading causes of death--cars--but we put much higher standards on licensed doctors from eastern and western countries of comparable (or even superior) medical systems. We push the burden to train new doctors on government spending instead of mandating it to hospitals in the same way we mandate emergency care. We allow monopolistic pricing on drugs and advertising meant to manipulate the public, rather than educate, instead of coming down hard on abuse of patents--a government monopoly only Constitutional so long as it promotes Science and useful Arts (hint: fraud, con artistry, and ever higher profit margins are not useful arts). We allow middle men insurers to negotiate prices and limit access to medicine all the while with their focus to skim as much money out of the public as possible.

We've created a system where every step of the way, the focus is on more waste in profit than treatment of people. We've become most focused on just enough emergency care to not cause the poor and elderly to not physically riot while treating the idea of actual, regular health care as a job perk that only last so long as you're healthy enough to keep going to the same job--as health insurance is tied to work as COBRA insurance is no substitute and making continued payments is unrealistic in a society built on debt.

The answers are there. Remove the middle men. Make legislation that focuses on health care, not health insurance. Mandate the residency of more doctors by hospitals. Reduce or eliminate, as warranted, the restriction of foreign doctors to practice. Punish drug companies that inflate prices beyond the reasonable to cover R&D of more drugs. Ban advertising of drugs to patients entirely and limit it to doctors to the medically important information, not to the possible side-uses or to a system of explicit or implicit kickbacks. Cut the red tape on FDA approval of drugs or devices where it is more about laborious paperwork rather than proper documentation.

Above all, do not put forth legislation that imagines a continuation of the current system is some sort of solution. Do not believe that shifting money out of Medicare and Medicaid into tax cuts is going to magically make people health when even conservative estimates spell out that thousand more will die because of those actions.

If winning means to through willful inaction let people die, I want to lose. What makes America great is the American dream: the idea that you can take huge risks, go bankrupt many times, and repeatedly get back on your feet because never will it be the lack of money to pay for an operation that will take you down. It will be a lack of determination that will make you fail. Only in a system where everyone will be treated when sick and every injured person knows that the moral hazard of risk will not inherently be met with death can we strive forward to the greatness that is America. We support those who strive to the Moon and beyond. Or we turn inward and eviscerate ourselves like a pack of dogs that see a bone and would kill all others to live. What do you want to win?

So I'm playing with this antique iMac because whee shit and I'm trying to download the 1GB developer tools DMG and Apple sure makes it a gigantic pain in the arsehole, don't they? You can't just download the URL with wget without rigamarole which I haven't gone through yet. I can't actually load the site in Safari at all because of some kind of https error. And my download just failed somehow in the last seconds, which means I get to download it all over again. And then it may fail again. Other downloads are working fine, it's just Apple that's incompetent here somehow.

This is the kind of thing that convinces me that anyone who gives Apple money is either a moron or a masochist. Luckily, I got this machine for free, so all I'm wasting is time.

That may not be a good way to describe it but... I have a C64 I never use and I think I shall desolder its SID before consigning it to recycling since they are now officially hard to come by. What can I put it on that will let me use it efficiently?

The above quote rendered one of my comments unpostable...

Surely someone around here knows where's the best slightly-reputable site to buy some knockoffs of the Oakley M2 XLs. I want to try them out for a while and see how they feel on my head. The sites I've found so far are registered straight outta China. Oakley has successfully driven the fakes off eBay and Amazon... the problem is, I'm not going to drop two hundred bucks on some glasses that might give me a headache, like most glasses do.

Apple is now actively, willingly, and deliberately aiding in online harassment and identity theft against me. They refuse to destroy an Apple ID which has been created with my email address, to which I do not have the answers to the "secret questions". They will not permit me to proceed any further without having an attorney.

What do I do now? Who do I call for relief? I can't afford a legal battle with Apple. I don't have an attorney on retainer.ï

Finally, I got my A8 Quattro up to the point where I could get it smogged. Registration and rubber to follow imminently. Crap, this thing is quick.

I have Excellent karma, as usual, but I have a five minute delay between my posts. It seems to have appeared on my account again after the last time I said something mean about a Slashdot "editor". Is this something that Slashdot has done to everyone recently, or is it a punitive action against me specifically by one of the "editors"?

I can afford it. I'll be back at the karma kap before you can say "drinkypoo huh huh huh you drink poop"

They get all butt-hurt

I really want to like libressl. But it pretends to be openssl badly. They refused a patch that would have mitigated this whole RAND_egd problem by simply returning that it doesn't work when someone tries to use it, which means that you commonly need a patch to use it at all. If it's not going to work like openssl, then it shouldn't occupy the same space in the filesystem.