So we're stuck with email because people refuse to move on? Yeah, I'll agree with that.

Email will eventually die though. The young ones have already quit using it to communicate with friends. Newer businesses use newer protocols like RSS to distribute their news feeds. I'd have already ditched email entirely, except that too many people assume that an email address is something everyone has, and so without one you're a second-class citizen on the internet, barred from participating in online forums and from making online purchases.

Email is almost dead. I know too many people who, while they have an email account, it really isn't something they check every day. They just check it when they sign up for a web site account, or when they order something online, but otherwise ignore it as if it doesn't exist because it just isn't the best solution for anything it does, making it worthless for anything besides communicating with people who haven't yet figured that out.

Let me guess:

You often wake up to go to the bathroom, only to find once you're there that you really didn't need to go that badly. (Remember when you were a kid and you'd wake up in the morning almost ready to burst? That's normal. Waking up several times a night to empty a half-full bladder is not.)

Also, you sometimes have nightmares where you're running away from something, or doing anything that's physically exhausting, and then you wake up and breathe heavily for a while to catch your breath? (Guess what: Dreams are just imagination, they don't make you out of breath.)

I think you may have a sleep disorder. Specifically, either sleep apnea or upper airway resistance syndrome. In either event, lack of breathing will cause you to awaken, but by the time you're conscious, the problem is gone, so your mind doesn't know why you woke up. So it just blames the most annoying thing it can note at the moment: some really-not-that-loud noise, your not-that-uncomfortable matress, your half-full bladder, your kind-of-hungry stomach, or whatever. If it's bad enough, you'll end up so awake that you can't fall asleep again for hours.

The delayed sleep phase is due to your body having to make up some extra sleep, due to the poor quality. It wants to stay awake for 16 hours then sleep for 8, but ends up sleeping 9 or 10, and that just screws everything up.

You might also be able to get a guy with a broken foot to run if you chase him with a baseball bat, but no one would say that is because there's really nothing wrong with his foot. Cognitive behavioral therapy is bullshit. For those who aren't aware, it literally means "talk to the patient and figure out what they're doing wrong and tell them how to change it." So you keep suggesting shit until pure coincidence cures them (or merely makes them think they're cured) and take credit as obviously it was your advice that changed things, or you offer new advice every week until you're eventually forced to offer advice the patient just can't follow (like "get up in the morning anyway") at which point you can blame the therapy's failure on the patient's non-compliance. Like most of psychology, it's bullshit.

ADHD, though, is real. It just isn't what most doctor's think it is. There is one I saw on a television show who started testing kids with ADHD for sleep apnea, and cured quite a few of them of their ADHD with some oral surgery. Apparently he's the only person to think that poor sleep might result in kids who can't concentrate and who are hyperactive because being hyperactive is the only thing keeping them awake.

I actually think that most psychological problems are sleep disorders. Tired all the time, such that you can't improve your life or even enjoy it? That might make you depressed, right? ...and maybe, since your brain can't do sleep-things while you're asleep, it starts doing them while you're awake, and so you start having hallucinations. Then your sense of logic goes out the window, as it often does when people are asleep, and so everyone says you're delusional. I mean, just how many psychological conditions aren't known to be associated with sleep disturbances? Are there any?

...and then the drug of choice to treat ADHD is a stimulant. It's like we're just trying to keep the kids awake, to improve their concentration, and to make it so that they don't have to be so hyperactive in order to avoid falling asleep.

My guess is that the problem is that they sold out.

Simple fact is that the type of person Slashdot used to appeal to is like 1% of the population. The moment a web site catering to 1% of the population decides to become profitable, it's faced with a choice: Continue to serve that 1%, or change your content and appeal to a different but larger 2%, and after that, change it even more and appeal to 4% of the population. Never mind that you lost that original 1%, since you're only in it for the money.

Can't say I blame them. If I had a cool web site, and got to choose between having a cool web site or having a lot of money, I'd probably choose the money too. Of course, I'd probably also just go make another cool web site so that I could have both. It'd be nice if the Slashdot editors would do that so that the small portion of that original 1% which remains here can stop reading BS like this and just read their new site. It probably wouldn't even be any extra work for them, they could just take the Slashdot submissions they normally discard for being too intellectual and insufficiently emotional and just post them to their own site at the end of the day.

Just to add a "me too," I also have IPv6 support with Time Warner, which kind of surprises me as I live in the middle of nowhere and so I expected I'd be one of the last to see it.

Supposedly Time Warner is up to 10% deployment now, still behind Comcast's 30%, but no longer drastically far behind as they were in the past. http://www.worldipv6launch.org/measurements/ I think they were only at 7% the month before, but unfortunately that web site doesn't seem to keep the old data around.

It was quite hard to find that I even had IPv6. Time Warner's people don't even know what IPv6 is, so they can't tell you if you have it. My modem's status page has a line that says "Modem's IP Mode -- IPv4 Only" which for months made me think I didn't have it, but it turns out that that's irrelevant. Even after I discovered that IPv6 was there by using tcpdump and seeing IPv6 packets, it still took me all day to get Linux to recognize it and use it.

For some retarded reason, Linux doesn't accept IPv6 router advertisements when it is configured to route IPv6 packets. I still haven't figured out why anyone thought that it shouldn't. Doesn't a router need to know where to send its packets, and thus, it needs to accept router advertisements? Since I had been using a Hurricane Electric tunnel, and my computer had been routing IPv6 packets for the rest of the LAN, it was configured to be a router, and so it ignored my native IPv6. I eventually discovered there is a setting to make it accept router advertisements while also routing packets, but why it doesn't by default is a real mystery.

Pretty much everything I've done with IPv6 has been like that. The support is kind of there, but since it hasn't seen widespread use, the bugs haven't been worked out. Like router firmwares, even the open source ones, they may claim to support IPv6 but in reality it's just glued on and barely makes an appearance in the UI and where it does it often doesn't work correctly, like you can click on an IPv6 address that's a link to set up a static DHCP lease, but the page you're taken to to set it up has a text input field with a max length that doesn't permit the address to fit, and indeed even if it did it wouldn't work anyway.

The only thing I found that really works well is using pfSense, but even it has a few issues, like its inability to use DHCPv6 on your LAN if you obtained your IPv6 address via DHCPv6 (which you almost certainly did, as that's just how ISPs distribute addresses, even when they're static).

Anyway, while the ISPs have been dragging their feet on IPv6 for a long time, I don't think the router, application, and OS support is as great as everyone thinks. Seems more like it's just easy to pretend that it is since there's no IPv6 for anyone to use them with to know any differently. Indeed, it's likely part of the problem. If you're adding IPv6 support to something, the best you can do is test that it works with your specific IPv6 configuration, and so you'll know it works great with a Hurricane electric tunnel, but it isn't until someone tries to use it with native IPv6 that you'll figure out stuff like that routers need to accept router advertisements too.

A virtual machine is definitely the way to go. Paying $150 for a hideously under-powered computer, which you then struggle to find a new firmware for (because what came with it is garbage), trying to find one with the features you need that fits in the device's tiny memory, a chore which isn't made easier by the firmware authors because they just upload several dozen versions, all with little two-letter codes to specify which features they have, but with no key to the two-letter codes anywhere to be found so that you can only guess which versions have the features you want and which don't, and which will work in your router and which won't, all so that you can just try one and pray that it doesn't brick your $150 piece of shit, only to find that the firmware doesn't work as advertised and so you need to go find another... Well, it's just stupid. Fuck that bullshit.

I just tossed a second network card in my always-on-anyway PC, then installed pfSense in a VM, bridged both network adapters to the VM, and configured Linux to ignore the one that was connected to the cable modem, as the cable modem answers any DHCP request and so that's the only way to make sure the VM gets the global IP address. Worked wonderfully for the two months before my second network card died. Used only 2% of my CPU and RAM.

I've had people tell me "so how well does that work with 100 mbit internet service?" ...and I mean "tell me" as it wasn't a question. I really don't care. Simple fact is that I'm too poor for $150 routers, and in being so poor, I don't have 100 mbit internet service either. It works perfectly for what I need it to do, and so at least for me, the idea of wasting so much money on a router and so much time finding a firmware seems completely absurd, almost like everyone has forgotten that network switches exist and so you don't need a router to connect multiple computers together.

Indeed, the VM isn't strictly required either. You can technically make the Linux kernel do routing functions as well. The only problem there is that, aside from router firmware authors, no one else involved with Linux believes in ease of configuration. So you'll have to learn how to configure a dozen different tools, and despite what everyone says, plain text configuration files aren't magically easy to modify, you still have to know the syntax which is different with each and every one of them, and then you're still faced with problems like making the DHCPv6 server not hand out leases that are longer than the lease obtained by the DHCPv6 client, in case the routing prefix changes and so the IPv6 addresses on the LAN need to be renumbered. I tried for about two weeks to get all of the kernel's routing parameters, the DHCPv4 client, the DHCPv4 server, the DHCPv6 client, the DHCPv6 server, the router advertisement daemon, and a caching DNS server all working together before giving up. It's just a nightmare, and tossing pfSense in a VM is a far easier solution, even if it does add the unnecessary overhead of a VM.

The difference is whether or not you can give some to your friends and not have to worry about being arrested if the police find out. E.g., you can share your antibiotics, or your blood pressure medicine, even most antipsychotics. It isn't a good idea, but there's no law against it. On the other hand, those pain relievers, and most anti-anxiety and ADD medications are controlled substances, and sharing them will get you in trouble. It's a similar big deal for the doctors, as there's a lot more oversight of prescriptions for controlled substances and they can get in legal trouble for over-prescribing them, whereas if they over-prescribe other drugs, nothing will ever come of it.

It's all about how much energy someone has.

If you have energy and life is good, you'll make the most of it. You'll go on walks and play sports and otherwise get a lot of exercise, because those are all fun things to do. You'll cook healthy meals because all of the time it takes is no big deal and they taste so much better than frozen pizza. You'll keep looking for a better job rather than just sticking with the one you have. You'll totally be happy, healthy, and successful.

If you have no energy and life is good, then you can sit on your sofa all day watching T.V. and at least be some version of happy. You'll likely never exercise because you don't have the energy, and despite what everyone says, exercise doesn't give you energy, they're simply confusing correlation and causation. You'll eat nothing but frozen pizza because preparing food requires energy you don't have, as does cleaning dishes afterwards. Aluminum foil and paper plates will be your friends. ...but hey, at least you get to enjoy some good T.V. shows and eat some version of food so you're not starving.

If you have a lot of energy, and life is being a pain in the ass at the moment, you'll figure a way out. You'll spend a few hours every day looking for a job, or if you already have one, a better paying job. You'll also keep looking for a less expensive place to live. You'll make the most of your budget by preparing all of your meals from scratch. You'll walk / bicycle to work rather than drive to save gas. You'll spend an hour in front of the mirror every day making yourself as attractive as possible to potential employers. Whatever is wrong, you'll figure a way out of it.

However, if you don't have any energy, and life is constantly kicking you while you're already down, the only thing you can do is wonder if you shouldn't just end the pain because you certainly can't do anything else about it because doing anything requires energy. Even if you know that making home-made pizza costs only $1 per pizza, you just don't have the energy, especially after you get home from work, and so you're buying the $2 frozen pizza that tastes like shit. Even if you know that reducing your rent would help, looking for a new place to live is hard -- you looked for a few days, but didn't find anything, and it's really difficult to convince your brain which is constantly telling you "you need to conserve energy" that it needs to expend that energy to continue looking. So you're poor, and you stay poor, and you never get to take those fun walks and play fun sports because you just don't have that kind of energy. All you do is work hard in a low-paying job and come home and rest on the couch until it is time to go to sleep. Sometimes you try exercising anyway, but despite what everyone says, exercising regularly doesn't give you a lot of energy, and you wonder what crack they're smoking since you do have a job and so it isn't like you never get up and do anything. Indeed, no matter what you do, doing even the most simple things feels like an incredible chore. ...and to top it all off, no one wants to help, they all just want to criticize you, tell you that you're fat and lazy, that you're ugly (because you don't have the energy to spend an hour a day making yourself attractive to others), and that all of your problems are your own fault. You just can't be happy. So why not just get it all over with? You either live a miserable life, then die, or you can just die now.

Perhaps someday medicine will look into why these people don't have any energy, but for now it doesn't know and it's simply too easy to label them as lazy or crazy just to have a quick diagnosis and move on to the next patient.

Are you serious?

Well, just in case: I'm talking about spaces at the end of a line. The ones you can't even tell are there unless you're using one of those text editors which, if the spaces aren't there, will move your cursor down to the next line if you press the right arrow key.

With 'le' set to 'text' mode, you can move the cursor as far to the right of the line as you like, whether there are spaces there or not. When you type, if it needs to, it'll add enough spaces so that what your type can be where you've moved the cursor to. Then, when it saves the file, it'll strip off any unnecessary spaces at the end of lines.

My personal favorite is 'le' simply because its the only one I've found that doesn't obsess over whitespace. It isn't that way by default, you have to configure it from its 'exact' mode which is like most editors into 'text' mode, but at least it has the option unlike most editors. When in 'text' mode, when you push the right arrow while at the end of a line, the cursor just continues to go to the right, and doesn't do anything retarded like go down to the beginning of the next line.

Honestly, why nearly every editor does that, I have no idea. Just drives me fucking insane when I press the right arrow and the cursor goes to the left of the screen, or when I use the up/down arrows and the cursor completely disappears from anywhere I might look for it because the next line is longer/shorter than the previous one and so the editor has decided the cursor should now be at some other column. I don't care where spaces are or are not in the file. Indeed, I'd prefer the editor strip the file of all spaces not used for indentation when it saves, because spaces just don't fucking matter. Same with tabs, don't use them, just indent with spaces.

I wish I could find a GUI editor that works the same way, but aside from the author of 'le', everyone seems to think that where spaces are or are not in a text file is so critically important that anyone editing the file shouldn't be permitted the luxury of just putting the cursor where they want letters to be and typing them there, but instead they must be forced to add the spaces manually and only then be permitted to type what they want.

...and this is exactly what I'm talking about: Your explanation is no explanation either. If both twins see identical effects on space and time, then when they accelerate away from each other to come to a speed of 0.9 * c relative to their starting point, then each sees the other moving away at 1.8 c, but relativity tells us that can't happen.

For relativity's explanation of "the twin that goes away and comes back experiences time more slowly" to make sense, you essentially have to cherry-pick the simple case where everyone starts out in a stationary universe so that you can say "well, duh, obviously the twin that left and came back should experience time more slowly." Otherwise it's the case that someone passing us by may actually be experiencing time faster than us since they're "more at rest" than we are and we're the ones who are actually moving and therefore experiencing time more slowly. (...and yes, I know that relativity tells us that "more at rest" doesn't exist.) It's just a clusterfuck of contradiction and I don't get why everyone who tries to explain it tries to use something as painfully simplistic as "they would both age the same" to explain it. Anyone who can understand the twin paradox can obviously understand that that isn't a resolution of it, and that just makes me think that everyone who claims to understand relativity better than me (and believe me, I don't understand relativity at all) is just lying about it and they don't understand shit.

I once read an explanation of the dual slit experiment that made a hell of a lot of sense to me. Granted, I don't know much about this shit and so how much sense it makes to me isn't a terribly useful metric, but here it is:

Basically, IIRC, the experiment was set up so that they could allow single electrons through the slits at once and they observed that if they recorded their positions over time, they still obtained the diffraction pattern that was seen when many electrons were present, and so the electrons must be traveling as waves and interfering with themselves, but they assumed that because what they recorded on their film was individual points, that the electrons must also be points as well, and that the electrons were mysteriously turning into whatever they set their experiment up to observe.

Anyway, the page I was reading at the time proposed that the simple explanation of this is that electrons simply are waves, and that the result of a wave collapsing just happens to be a point despite the fact that everyone wants to imagine that it would be something far more mushy. Thus, it isn't that the particle is a wave or a point simultaneously, or that it chooses which to be depending on how it feels or what form we choose to set up our experiment to detect. It simply always is a wave, and when that wave collapses because it hits something, the end result of that collapse is that only a single point is affected.

No idea where the web site is unfortunately. I found it by searching for "physics bullshit" about ten years ago. It may have even been on Geocities.

In any event, I get the feeling that most advanced physics is bullshit, if not simply because it is, then because by the time it reaches an average person like me, it's been filtered through so many douches that are only interested in the magical properties of it that all factual knowledge has been mutilated. So I just end up with nonsense, like people telling me about something they call a "hypersphere" which they explain is like a hypercube, where each end of the cube is connected to another end, and so if you're inside the cube you can go on forever in any direction and not leave the cube. ...except it's a sphere so it doesn't have those pesky corners. Then I try to imagine this, and fail to come to any conclusion other than that the person talking to me has never tried to imagine how such a thing might fit together geometrically and simply made it up because they believe anything is possible and a sphere sounds much more elegant than a cube.

Too many people are willing to throw out logic when thinking about advanced physics. Yes, I get that it doesn't work the way we might assume, but there's a difference between "works like I think it works" and "is logical," the latter meaning something like "what I'm proposing isn't inconsistent with itself."

Like the twin paradox. People say it's solved because one twin accelerates and the other doesn't, but since when do the equations about space and time dilation give a fuck who accelerates and who doesn't? I only see variables for speed, none for acceleration. For that matter, what if we make them both accelerate in opposite directions? Which twin is older than which then? One must be older than the other because there is speed between them. I suppose there must be some truth to relativity if we can put a bunch of scientists on a plane with an atomic clock and have them calculate how far off it will be when it lands, but by the time that truth gets to me in the form of anything I might read about the twin paradox, it's a pile of nonsense.

This is kind of a new version of auto-run, one implemented by all operating systems.

The problem with auto-run is that a CD might tell the computer to do anything, not just what the user would like it to do.

The same problem exists with keyboards. They'll likely just send the keystrokes you type to the computer, much like the vast majority of CDs will only tell your computer to run the game that they contain that you want to play. However, a few will do something else, and the computer will happily do whatever that keyboard tells it to do. Even if it doesn't look like a keyboard, much like those flash drives that don't at all look like CD drives.

I think he meant "physical keyboard" when he said "virtual keyboard." In other words, if you don't already have an input device connected that you've approved, if the new device is a keyboard, the OS displays a code for you to type on that keyboard in order to verify that it is a real keyboard and not a phony device in a flash drive, and ignores other input from that device until the code is typed correctly. Similarly, for a mouse you could display some buttons on the screen and ask the user to click them, and ignore any other input from that device until it is able to complete that task successfully.

It would be annoying, but once the first device is verified, all of the rest can just be "If you wish to allow this second mouse to work, click this OK button with your first mouse." ...and the annoyance of that first device could be reduced by letting the user configure certain USB ports to be the mouse and keyboard ports, thus automatically trusting any mouse or keyboard attached to them and perhaps providing greater security by denying the use of those ports for any other type of device in case the user's keyboard or mouse become compromised.

Kind of the problem here is that USB is a "connect anything" port, but if you want to connect some storage you found in the parking lot, you really need a "connect storage" port. It'd be useful as hell if our operating systems made it possible to assign certain USB ports to certain functions. Even when not finding devices in a parking lot, it's quite convenient to be able to accept flash drives from people you should be able to trust without actually having to trust them. Of course, this working is dependent upon having an OS that isn't going to automatically use the device just because you attached it, whether "use" means "auto-run some executable files" or "accept typed commands from the device and execute them."

When you think about it, automatically accepting typed commands from anything that claims to be a keyboard is a lot like how auto-run would automatically run executables from anything claiming to be a CD. In both cases the OS is allowing a new device to tell it what to do, assuming that the user's decision to connect that device is sufficient indication that the user wants to do whatever that device is going to tell the computer to do.

Oh, that reminds me of another thing that pissed me off about AdWords: All their little success stories. They're quite obnoxious, and all have the sound of being made-up bullshit, much like your own post. Pretty much all of them amounted to different wordings of "it's totally possible to remain profitable while paying us $1 per click." I recall one story of a yoga studio in some particular city. It at least sounded plausible, but only because I can easily imagine just how over-priced such a thing might be as it likely only caters to the wealthy, and as such can afford $1 per click. ...but still, you have to imagine that a great many of the people who clicked such an ad didn't buy the services, be it because they ultimately decided to join a different gym, because they simply decided to do yoga at home, or because they were already a paying member and simply saw the ad as a quick way to return to the web site. So in all they probably paid Google $100 for each new customer, but if you're raping them on the order of $600/year, you can probably afford to do that. ...but still, there has to be a cheaper way to find your victims.

Clicks are an equally worthless metric.

A friend wasted some $75 on Google Adsense trying to expose a free game we've made to more potential players.

As it's similar (but not too much) to Minecraft Classic, we figured we'd just try to get Google to show an ad to the side of searches for stuff about Minecraft Classic, and some people might decide they're interested and check it out.

As Google presently showed no ads whatsoever for searches for "minecraft classic" and a few other search terms we wanted to display ads next to, we assumed this would cost us almost nothing, that they'd be willing to display them for a penny as we didn't have to out-bid anyone. That couldn't have been further from the truth. The minimum we could get any advertising for was $0.25/click, and none of that was on Google's search results.

Half of the clicks came from random web sites with the most horrible games (as in, there was sound and graphics (ripped off from other games), but no playability whatsoever) which displayed a dozen ads on each page with one of these games. Thus, those clicks were completely worthless to us as they were likely all coming from three year olds who simply didn't know what they were doing. Chances of a three year old downloading a game, installing it, and running it aren't that high, and we weren't interested in three year old players anyway.

The other half came from paid search result placement on altavista.com. These clicks were also completely worthless. Just think about it: You're searching for something related to a game you like, and you get sent to a web site about a completely different game, so what do you do? Do you say "yay, I'll download and play this instead" or do you just immediately click the back button and look for a search result that's related to what you searched for? We specifically wanted ads to the side of people's search results because then they'd know that what's over there isn't necessarily exactly what they're looking for and so they would only click on the ad if they were interested in finding a new game. Paid search placement may increase the number of clicks we get, but it ensures that those additional clicks are as close to worthless as can be imagined. Think about it again: How long would you stick with a search engine that does this? Only morons and five year olds use Altavista. Not our target audience, and if you're trying to sell a legitimate product or service, probably not your target audience either. On the other hand, if you're trying to scam people out of money, paid search result placement might be exactly what you're looking for.

After going through $20 on these worthless clicks, I looked up the statistics of how many of the IP addresses ultimately ended up playing the game. Normally about 50% of the IPs that visit the web site end up downloading our game and 30% (60% of those who download) connect to the game's servers, but not one of the people who clicked these links even downloaded the game.

This is the kind of bullshit you end up with when you consider that clicks are the only important thing: a system optimized to give you clicks at the expense of any sort of quality placement.

Anyway, it seems that if you want results displayed on google.com, you have to pay at least $1 per click. The adsense interface gives you all sorts of BS reasons about why your page won't display ads if you offer less money than that, but it's all designed to make you think there's some legitimate reason you can't figure out until you ultimately give up and just decide to give them more money and see if that fixes the problem. In particular, the supposed metric of the quality of your landing page is almost a random number generator -- just wait a while and it changes, as it's apparently chosen by monkeys. Eventually my friend paid the $1 per click, despite my objections that the whole deal was a huge scam, and as far as I know we got nothing for that either.

The one thing my friend did that did help was to list our game on www.indiedb.com as the people who showed up from there, while only about a dozen each time he's updated our information, were honestly interested in our game, downloaded it, tried it, said it was great, and never played again. (Our game's main issue is that it's just not that interesting.) That didn't cost us a penny and it was the best advertising of all. Needless to say, if our game ever does become interesting and we want a few more people to look at it, we won't bother with Google Adsense again, we'll just go to Indie DB.