>obsolescence of libraries

Last century, people were foretelling the future and saying that the Internet was going to be the death of brick-and-mortar retail stores.

I went to buy some suits a month ago. I didn't buy them online, because honestly, my sense of style is nonexistent. You might even call it a negative value. I was lamenting that I was too far away from my favorite store and I didn't know of who to go to, and I was tipped off to a place in Manchester NH (I'm in Concord). In short order, they got me what I needed, and I looked just spiffy according to my fiance.

Online, I would have spent weeks looking and eventually might have found something that looks nice on a hangar, but probably makes me look goofy.

Likewise libraries. Most people going into libraries are looking for specific information and they're fuzzy about where to look. Librarians offer the same level of personal service that the above retailer offered. Librarians are more than just nerdy stock-keepers and book hoarders.

Add on to this that libraries are also meatspace social gathering places if you check out the bulletin boards at the entrances.

Because of this, libraries aren't going away any time soon.

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BMO

The old mimeographed copies are collector's items, and most of the ones online have been "edited" like a game of telephone.

That said, if you take any of the content seriously and try the things in it, Uncle Darwin will greet you with open arms. The FBI's investigation into the document said as much.

In that light, I think possession of the Cookbook should make you /not/ a target of investigation as "the 'problem' will solve itself sooner or later."

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BMO
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BMO

Powershell's approach is more verbose, but it's also a little more readable

I beg to differ. I really, really beg to differ.

long.verbose.commands.that.grab.objects.are.impossible.to.read.

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BMO

...is that funding promising but currently expensive technology that can have big payoffs in the future for society is far different than corn or oil subsidies.

Or military subsidies.

Inflammatory article is inflammatory.

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BMO

P.S. I was going to use "nascent" as the word up there but didn't like it so I used a thesaurus. Pubescent is a synonym. That would have made the sentence far more interesting.

Surprised that there is only one post pointing this out. Non-crap manufacturers typically make them rechargeable, as opposed to filling landfills with used alkaline cells.

What, why are you looking at me like that?

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BMO

(it says "submit" on the button. yes, oh yes.)

I had to explain what "Lemonparty" was to my fiancee when we were watching the Chelsea Handler "Uganda Be Kidding Me" stand-up special on Netflix.

Chelsea Handler uses it to hilarious effect.

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BMO

You can thank Steve Jobs.

He was adamant that Flash should die in a fire, and IIRC, he disallowed Flash support for iOS. He did what everyone else wanted to do but were afraid of pissing off the customers who just "had to have their youtube." This triggered the exodus from proprietary video on the Web.

I'm not an Apple fanboy. The only Apple thingy I owned was an iPod 5 Video. The following iterations are impervious to Rockbox, so I've never bought them. But I give credit where credit is due.

Side note: Silverlight was so much better. It performed better in a Windows virtual machine on Linux than Flash did natively on any platform. Unfortunately, it too was closed and [soupnazi] "no silverlight for you" [/soupnazi] if you use Linux, like me.

HTML5 is good enough. At least it's a standard.

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BMO

Article is obviously written by an iOS fanboi.

The reason why people switching coming from Android is because the rest of the pack is simply too small.

Microsoft powered phones don't exist in the real world. I have yet to see one. They are apocryphal.

Before I get piled on by Softies, I have to point out that your fearless leaders ignored the smartphone market until it was too late. The "let the other guys do the pioneering and go in later to use dodgy tactics to muscle into the market" doesn't work all the time. And this time they ceded the market to everyone but them.

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BMO.

When Palin was selected to be McCain's running mate, she had the highest approval rating of any of the 50 governors.

The only surveying company to come up with that is some podunk company in Alaska. Just because it's on Wikipedia doesn't mean it's meaningful.

Then the left wing media went to work and convinced all the mindless cretins like yourself that she was the devil incarnate.

She is the epitome of someone who is both stupid and suffers from narcissistic personality disorder. Her speeches are pure fucking word-salad. They are unlistenable, because they contain not just no information, but rather /negative information/. I cannot stand to listen for more than 20 seconds at a time. To make me actually listen to a whole speech would entail something like what happened to Alex in "A Clockwork Orange." After which, you would have to commit me via an IEA to a mental hospital.

"Grow a brain."

You forgot the "Morans."

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BMO

The world does not owe you a living.

>internet will die if ads don't exist

I pretty much preferred the old Internet when the NSF was the backbone.

Go cry more.

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BMO

>What was the solution in the 80s that you are referring to?

Ethernet.

Either it has wifi or an "RJ45" jack on the back or it's crap.

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BMO

...it's not furry.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/w...

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BMO

I had to look up how to do comments on a Word document. The Microsoft page walks you through a bunch of stuff with the Ribbon, and not a single hotkey is mentioned.

In LibreOffice Writer, it's ctrl-alt-c, which is a whole lot quicker than dealing with the ribbon, especially if you are editing someone's manuscript and have to stick a ton of comments in.

Word allows audio and handwritten comments, at the expense of making the interface stupidly complicated. This is not useful.

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BMO

Do I you think a greedy bank would give a sub prime loan knowing that the borrower is going to default? A greedy bank will give a sub prime loian every tme if it knows it can repackage and sell the loan to the federal government

This explains exactly why you don't understand what was going on.

The banks *farmed out* their loan operations to mortgage brokers. Private ones. Ones that didn't give a /shit/ about whether or not the borrowers could pay them back.

BECAUSE THE BROKERS' INCOMES WERE TOTALLY DEPENDENT UPON HOW MANY LOANS THEY MADE. MORE LOANS, MORE INCOME. IN MANUFACTURING, THEY CALL THIS PIECEWORK.

Piecework without QC gets you CRAP. Guaranteed. Every. Time.

And these banks accepted all these crap loans, rubber stamped them, and with the AAA rating, fobbed them off to every investor house on the planet.

You have this fantasy that it was the banks' loan officers making the loans and not private contractors. That was no longer the case with the new deregulation. Yes, the brokers were supposed to follow the same rules. They didn't. Because their jobs were not dependent on making good loans. Their jobs were dependent on how many loans they could make.

>implying the banks were selling purely to the government

No, no they weren't. They were packaging them up and selling them to the likes of Magnetar and Bear Stearns. Whether Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac existed at all is irrelevant when they had so many private buyers.

I get it, you're one of those "all government is bad" people. The thing is that none of this would have happened if the Bush administration's regulators and the Federal Reserve hadn't had a totally hands-off approach to policing this shit.

"We had no idea this would happen" - everyone who was supposed to be watching the cookie jar.

Bullshit. Absolute utter bullshit. If they didn't know what was going to happen, how did Magnetar make out so well? They saw it coming, and so did anyone who wasn't turning a blind eye. Everyone who treated these vehicles as cash and rated them as such willfully closed their minds to the fact that the music was eventually going to stop in the financial game of musical chairs. FFS, I knew the game was up when I heard Alan Greenspan spout off that people should take out variable rate mortgages at the same time mortgage rates were the lowest they had been in 40 years. I saw it coming because it wasn't my first rodeo. I, my parents, and a ton of other people around me, were direct victims of the RISDIC scandal. People I knew killed themselves.

Greenspan claimed personally that he didn't know what was going to happen. I could grow roses for billions of years on that bullshit.

As long as people thought there were dumber greedy idiots to sell to, they'd be fine.

They eventually ran out of idiots.

Tens to hundreds of thousands of people should be in jail over this. But the Obama administration turned a blind eye to it too when it became his administration's problem and simply continued the policies of GWB (the new legislation has no teeth). Because of this, we are being set up for another round of this shit in another 10-15 years. It disgusts me.

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BMO

whole thing never would have happened.

Oh look, one of those people.

Bear Stearns (or anyone else for that matter in the private market) doesn't get any of the blame for what they inflicted upon themselves? That the ratings agencies are totally innocent of cooking the books when it comes to classifying mortgage backed securities? That the ratings agencies /defended to the death/ the right to "free speech" for putting out objectively fraudulent ratings?

Nobody else would have been in the market if Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac weren't there? Really?

You are delusional if you think FM and FM not buying these loans would have made even the tiniest dent in the scam.

Clueless isn't enough of a word.

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BMO