Hunh.

And here I always thought it was about entertaining me with an engrossing "what if..." story.

Another fool who thought people would be impressed by their PhD.

Get over yourself. Nobody outside of the research world gives a shit. In fact, most companies will avoid interviewing or hiring you because you're going to expect higher pay for your education while having spent less time learning the craft of programming than someone who got into the job market after their BSc. (or equivalent.)

Regardless of the distro, I install KDE and I'm good to go. The only thing I use the "default" GUI for is any tools that aren't portable.

Gnome 3 sucks farts off dead chickens in August... :P

It's only a matter of time until lazy-assed system admins create installation packages (aka "distros") that include exactly what should be running on a particular VM.

I mean, FFS, what the hell does the OP expect? For the world to do his job for him?

Lazy bastard...

You can find "proof" of anything you want to on the internet. That doesn't make it true or real. Religion and ghost stories are the fantasies of idle minds, and nothing more. There isn't a single tale of religion that is substantiated by facts, especially Judeo-Christian-Muslim. Oh, sure, Mohammad existed, but he was a freakin' delusional schizophrenic who convinced his followers his fantasies were the "word of God."

Wait, what? Since when are retailers supposed to ask for your identity when using a credit card? My understanding was that they were actively discouraged from doing so by credit card companies. In fact, I remember they used to have a toll free number you could call to report a retailer if they refused to accept your VISA without giving them ID.

That's what I thought had happened. I remember TPB selling themselves to a software company for like ten million bucks with plans to turn into a "legitimate tracker of licensed/contracted content". Everyone went nuts over it. Then they all switched to private trackers.

I've actually always been highly suspect of TPB. Not because of those behind it, but because it is such a high value target, compared to other trackers that you could use (especially private, obviously -- though then there are situations like Demonoid and others that become really iffy due to certain events).

The campfire gave rise to two things that permeate human society: religion and ghost stories.

Unfortunately, both are about equally grounded in reality and truth.

You're thinking of music as something that mostly young people spend money on. That's not so true any more. Old folks have a lot more disposable income and are willing to spend money on the physical formats they're most familiar with. The largest group of CD purchasers are the 50+ crowd, and while they lag in digital downloads, even there, they're beating out the previously dominant 13-17 demographic.

See this article. Yeah, Buzzfeed, I know.

Their traffic is up that much?! I assumed they were all but dead.

Also, I thought they sold themselves to GGF and went legit half a decade ago?

This requires a great number of assumptions or an tremendous amount of work to prove them out and there are too many variables to make this viable in more than a few very specific edge cases.

Even if we somehow know that the account belongs to the person it appears to, that the account is active, that it doesn't just appear active due to automatic sign-ins, browser extensions, mobile apps, malware, that someone else doesn't have access to the account (any form of significant other, roommate, family member, etc), that the person actually ever reads their messages (I have an account just so nobody else can use the identity; I sign in maybe twice a year; I can count the number of times I have read my inbox there on one hand), that they read *that* message, etc.

If it were simply enough to say "we know this account really belongs to this person and that they actively login and use the account", then we wouldn't need certified mail or people to serve a summons in person. It would be enough to say "we have a mail address for this person and we'll just send a regular first class mail notification to them". But that *isn't* enough. And neither is saying "well, shit, we sent a facebook message".

And facebook can be more reliable than physical mail? We're going to bank all of this on the reliability of a single third party entity? Didn't we just go through like six months of "gosh, we lost every single email for all these important IRS people of the last five years, because email's supes unreliable, guys!"?

You need to sign for certified mail to verify that you at least received it, after which the onus is on you to consider it important and actually read it. If someone else signs for it or it is never signed for, then there is no verification that *you* received it and that can be proven with a simple signature comparison.

There is no way to verify that this has been done with any sort of online delivery. Saying that "well, it went to his inbox" (or worse, "it went to his fucking facebook messages") or even "his inbox or facebook messages show that they have been read" do not in any way confirm that the message has reached the point upon which the onus is now upon you. There is no way to verify that a human processed the message. Or that a human actually saw and read it. Or that the correct human did. Especially in a world of cracked accounts, handing over your credentials to your bosses, idiots "sharing facebook logins to confirm their love", userscripts, browser extensions, malware, fake accounts, and any number of things.

I mean, relying on facebook or twitter or any other service as some sort of delivery verification is even less reliable than banking on an SMTP DSN, which is itself practically meaningless.

Proof that it has been viewed is more important than delivered. Who cares if it has been delivered to a Facebook account that I don't actually use? And, unfortunately, there is no more proof that someone viewed a document online than there is that someone actually viewed a EULA (skipping it, looking the other way, getting a toddler to click-through for you, etc).

I block ads because I don't need to have every second of my life consumed with being fed advertisements (my adblocker on just one machine has blocked nearly one million ads in just 2014, so far). That it also prevents certain tracking and infection from nefarious advertisements and payloads is just a bonus.

Find a new model or find a new job, nutsacks.

They're not burned out. They have lives now. Wives. Families. Something to do other than be a slave to the corporation.