This is such a ludicrous point, and really only gets made by those who don't understand the full scope of 2020. These "protestors" were active from the end of May until election day. That's five solid months of events. In my specific neighborhood (I live in a downtown tourism/entertainment district a few blocks from our Federal building, fire station, and central police HQ) we had "protests" happen an average of about every other day.

That's every other day police helicopters are there, the streets are tense and unsafe, and if tiny little towns in the middle of nowhere can erupt into flames because some event happened somewhere in the country earlier that day then it could certainly happen on my block.

The fact that 93% of protests were non-violent means nothing when the events are happening in dozens of cities, every other day, for five months. How would you like it if there was "only a 1-in-12 chance" that you'd get punched in the face if you walked out your front door that day over the course of five months. THAT is what that stat is saying.

Funny. People here in San Diego refuse shelters that don't allow them to continue using drugs and alcohol.

I guarantee you that 40% of the people sitting in camps on 5th Ave do not have full time jobs. You're committing a category error. Someone couch-surfing or crashing at a friend's place for a month is technically "homeless", but they are obviously not the people at issue here. Besides, the friend probably has wifi.

This, exactly. I understand why the Bush Admin was distracted when it approved the purchase of DoubleClick, and we were all still sort of techno-optimists and thought Google were the Good Guys... but that doesn't mean it was the right call.

No one smuggles out TS documents and randomly includes jack shit.

This is some sort of hidden message, identifier, or back-channel information being sent out to... someone. Quite easily a verification or authentication message.

That's absolutely not correct. Any ethical and responsible ISP will want to kick spammers and network abusers of their network (or they'll hear it from their peers), and most ISPs also want to keep people doing very, very illegal things getting the attention of the Feds off their network, for reasons which you can put in any order you like.

VPN providers for whom everything is anonymous and likely outside of their jurisdiction are one thing. ISPs themselves very much are OK with cooperating and getting rid of headaches for everyone.

Are you kidding? That's exactly how you prevent your entire company falling victim to a ransomware infection all at once. And if you're referring to server hardware, the cost of paying a DC Ops guy to manually verify and coordinate firmware updates via physical button press with your Sustained Operations team initiating it is trivial compared to the cost of a mass attack -- especially one that results in hardware you're really not sure you can trust again.

America is responsible for rather little of it. If you really wanted to stop trash from entering the ocean first you'd bomb the top 5 countries and 10 rivers that contribute almost half of the refuse, because there are cities that literally just use rivers going straight to the ocean as their landfill.

AFTER that, yes systems like this can help gross municipal run-off for coastal areas. States making up river basins should each be handling and screening their own outflow so that downstream doesn't have a giant mess though (eg, Louisiana filtering the MIssissippi).

Everything else is cultural. As a coastal Californian resident, it baffles me how some people actually litter. Throw that in a trash can, or get a $3000 fine if it goes anywhere near a storm drain. Can't pay because you're homeless? One-way ticket to the desert where your littering will not affect a river.

Orr... How 'bout this.

STOP LITTERING.

California used to have a nice $2000 fine for littering on public highways. Let's have cities enforce that everywhere.

Can't hold it till you get to the can?
Too bad. Pay a fine.

There's probably a category error going on here. For some folks, Linux From Scratch is their entry to the world of "tech", but with so many layers of operator abstraction going on, even running a Linux Distro is a bit lit coding in assembly was when I was growing up, and this is for young adults entering the workforce! (When everything's a container, the OS is passe.)

This speaks to a more specific issue though: Lack of "computer literacy" skills that Xennials and Millennials took for granted that they'd pick up, I was training college students how to use MS Word in a computer lab in 1998, and not to pay for printing by shoving quarters into the floppy disk drive. It seemed like those days were behind us, as once people picked up computer interaction concepts, they didn't really forget them. This is why people in 2006 were able to tell you the basics of a computer's layout, and could pick up some HTML and CSS and bedazzle their Myspace page with ease.

TFA does a poor job at clarifying the skills deficit, but *plenty of Gen-Z have no idea how to use Word, and even fewer can use Excel*. In fact, I'd say they're probably *worse* that Gen-X was at this time in their lives, because Gen-X folks trying to figure out Office at least knew that there were grokable concept that they'd need to figure out; Gen-Z can't open a file browser and barely understands that they don't understand the desktop metaphor. Many of them literally grew up on tablets and the cloud and can't function in an office environment at all. Sure, they can use a consumer smartphone app, but they don't have general purpose computing skills.

In short: We (the 40 year olds making up this site) can't assume that The Kids are just gonna pick up this stuff naturally when they no longer get challenged to do it, and suffer from myriad mental health issues relating to being faced with a challenge to begin with. Learning Excel and Word (or rather, spreadsheet and wp interfaces), and Computer Hardware 101, and how tablets and smartphones differ from other computing technology is a foundation that they really do *need* in school right now.

Us survivors of the dot-com implosion and the CO-based DSL market leasing lines from ILECs would like to have a word.

All three of those would be awesome, but I'm definitely curious to see how much of A/UX (besides AppleSingle/Double) was present in Rhapsody PR. Maybe people being reminded what was possible by the time of OS 8.6 will be inspired to try simplifying our current bloated *nix ecosystem.

It's been a while, but what was the process for changing window titles? I thought the Window Manager stuff came in pretty early -- was that a System 7 thing too?

I have glorious memories of pouring through the final numbered one, Inside Macintosh VI (covering System 7), back in the day.
You could knock out a Clydesdale with that thing it was so huge.

This is probably the best solution. Minors can't legally enter enforced contracts in the first place, so they really shouldn't even be doing a click-through without parental approval. Beyond that, IMHO there's certainly good cause for extending something like COPPA to all minors when it comes to social media sites.

That depends on whether you mean asking or "asking." Subborning a private company to do what the government cannot do itself when it comes to a constitutional right constitutes a violation, as it brings in the state-action clause. The increasingly common claim is that Big Tech (and the major social media platforms in particular) control enough of the economy and "national conversation" (think how the Fair Use Doctrine used to be applied as a result of there only being a handful of national TV networks) to constitute public squares, so if the Federal Government is leaning on companies to tweak the conversation (Not Twitter, but cf. https://www.wsj.com/articles/w... ) then that's definitely a matter of public interest.

Frankly, I think there's a strong case that regulation *should* be applied, and a reasonable case that regulation *may already* apply under existing "public accommodation" precedent. Being blacklisted off social media when most of those same tech giants also control the two primary App Store platforms, the major public compute clouds, large chunks of payment processing, and (most importantly) the ad networks controlling the current incarnation of the economic framework that have made most forms of media actually functional over the past 60 years, then that's a serious power imbalance against the average Joe Schmoe, not to mention a public figure, bona fide press, or politician who does in fact get certain precedent-guaranteed communication rights.

The censoring of the New York Post off Twitter and Facebook for several weeks leading up to a Presidential election is simply intolerable and can't go unrectified.