This is my news printer. Each morning I turn it on, and it prints a paper tape with the Reuters news summaries.

This is 1926 technology. The machine talks to a standard serial port at 45 baud, 5 bits, no parity, 1.5 stop bits.

This is fascinating. It's not the classic "people don't have social lives in the real world because they are on line too much" argument. The authors argue that following people who are "different" from you is bad for you. They write:

"Compared to face-to-face interactions, online networks allow users to silently observe the opinions and behaviors of an immensely wider share of their fellow citizens. The psychological literature has shown that most people tend to overestimate the extent to which their beliefs or opinions are typical of those of others. There is a tendency for people to assume that their own opinions, beliefs, preferences, values, and habits are âoenormalâ and that others also think the same way that they do. This cognitive bias leads to the perception of a consensus that does not exist, or a 'false consensus' (Gamba, 2013)."

"The more people used Facebook at one time point, the worse they felt afterwards; the more they used Facebook over two weeks, the more their life satisfaction levels declined over time. The effects found by the authors were not moderated by the size of people's Facebook networks, their perceived supportiveness, motivation for using Facebook, gender, loneliness, self-esteem, or depression, thus suggesting the existence of a direct link between SNSs' use and subjective well-being."

This is a new result, and needs confirmation. Are homogeneous societies happier ones? Should that be replicated on line? Should efforts be made in Facebook to keep people from having "different" friends?

So, what you're saying is that you need spinning magnets?

I don't think it's more of a lost cause than the general population. Once I'd have thought it would be less, but these days I no longer believe that, either. The real difference is that modern communications methods make it easier for you to see who's an asshole. Before, it was entirely possible for someone to be a vicious asshole their whole lives and yet go unnoticed.

Yes, I live in California. You know, the state with more residents than anywhere else in the country. But we're also talking about online, which makes geography irrelevant.

You can surely find limited localities where there is less repression, but frankly I do not believe that there is no sexism in Colorado, and further that your assertion that it does not exist there (that's what sexism does, after all, hold women down) only illustrates your blindness to the problem.

If that's true, it's new. Last time I launched Steam on Linux, which was at least well after the launch of big picture mode, the default was still to just show all titles.

FFVII for Steam refuses to launch if you're not online, at least the first time. This ties into my prior complaints about Steam "backups", which cannot be played until Steam is installed and blessed by Valve, and then the game titles themselves are blessed by Valve.

I don't like it. I decided not to buy Portal 2 for just $5. The only Steam games I buy any more are indie titles. I did buy FFVII on Steam, because it was on sale, but then I torrented the non-steam version because fuck having to be always online to play a console game of yore.

Steam is shit.

The only reason Steam even shows you titles which won't run on your platform by default is to trick you into buying them. It's intentionally deceptive.

I predict that these will sell poorly because the people who can afford them want comfort, and room to fuck their secretary/mistress.

No, no we do not. That is called the instruction set. The programmer does not use the instruction set architecture, they simply issue instructions which the processor then executes as it sees fit, especially in [OoO] architectures with branch prediction. The architecture is the silicon, and the programmer isn't sitting on the die flipping switches.

And herein lies the proof that you know you are wrong, but are continuing to argue. Those things didn't make x86 translation possible, they made it easy and fast. Which is what I said previously. Thanks for the confirmation.

"Off the cuff" doesn't mean what you think it does, because it doesn't preclude racism or sexism. Indeed, it indicates it more strongly, where it appears to be present.