There are several before-during-after photos in this this blog article at the NYT. You decide.

I know a lot of guys who'd give her a go, regardless of how she smelled (or, ftfa, like "fresh-cut onions and pungent marijuana," maybe because of it).

Personally, I find other things far more of a deterrent than greasy hair and kronik BO: she looks too much like my sister... and the laptop's fisheye lens and that deathly pallor from the LED display aren't helping her prospects, either.

I'm absolutely positive you'd look sexier wearing them underneath your jeans.

No, he's gurps_npc.

GURPS plays him.

Haven't you been paying attention for the past 15 years? 'Utilities' are fair game for profitmongers now. First it was electric power exchanges, then municipal water (especially in developing countries in S. America and Africa) and now phone/internet. And don't even get me started on proposals to start charging tolls for interstate highway usage.

It won't be long before someone 'innovates' a way to charge you for the air you breathe.

Well, based on the additions they've made to their services in the past, their 'innovations' can only be 1) giving your data to the NSA 2) reporting your copyright infringement to the MPAA and RIAA, and/or 3) throttling your service based on your transfer protocol or content.

Oh, wait. Maybe they're using the finance industry's definition of 'innovation' which basically means finding or creating loopholes in the law that allow them to collude to steal your money while not technically committing any crimes.

Why is this moderated 'Troll?' While I don't like his conclusion, I won't call him wrong. And his summary of the regulatory situation is generally informative.

If you don't agree with someone's point, don't downmod them (and if you absolutely must, certainly don't use Troll or Flambait unless they actually are trolling or flaming). Post a reply, or mod up a counterargument.

Yes, but despite appearances and accusations otherwise, Obama doesn't get to decide who gets appointed as chief regulator for the FCC or any other agency that oversees major business sectors like telecom, energy, pharma, etc.

Regulatory capture is complete, from the administrative agencies to the legislative committees and now apparently even to the courts. GP is correct. This is no longer a democracy... it's a corporate plutocracy.

Anyone who still believes the president has the power to decide policy over anything that affects corporate profits is living in a fantasy world.

I kinda know how you feel.

I made the mistake of seeing Aliens in 1986 during its first run in theaters... after eating a gram of shrooms. (It was that or The Song Remains the Same for the fifth time instead.)

It's still my favorite movie of all time. Spawned my username, too. Been using it ever since.

I hope he's gone to his personal heaven...

Because I quail from imagining what his hell might look like.

sometimes, a cigar is just a cigar

And sometimes, it's a face full of alien wing-wong.

I have the opposite problem. I work in a building that has won awards for its energy efficiency - I guess all it takes to get an award is a roof painted white and some Solatubes, because some idiot put the thermostat on a wall that gets full sun from 1pm-sunset. This ironic arrangement makes the whole room an icebox... a 100x300 foot electronics manufacturing area with 30 foot ceilings.

Plus, I sit in a cubicle walled off from the rest of the production floor. The AC blows against the wall above me and the cold air sinks and pools in my office. I have to run a space heater in my office because I can't dress warmly. Half my day is spent in the inventory stacks, which has NO heat or air.

I've told the facilities people and even the GM, emphasizing the unnecessary electricity costs. They don't give a fuck, apparently.

So now I set my space heater on HIGH instead of MED.

'Minimalism' is driven by Marketing, so that you can hide the UI for a nice pretty glossy magazine ad or catchy TV advert.

'Minimalist' is not useful. It's photogenic. Period.

It's already in my fucking car. I went to go buy an aftermarket stereo "upgrade" and every goddamned one has all of the options and controls accessed by a menu navigated with one pushbutton knob. Not a single choice was available with the [enter] and [exit] command functions on separate controls from the [select/scroll] functions.

That's right. Want to change the time and date, press the knob, then spin the same knob until you get to SYSTEM (not SETUP or FUNCTIONS mind you), then press the button again to select TIME SET, then again to set the hour, spin it until the hour is set, then press it again, then spin it to set... and oh shit you hit a bump and pressed the knob accidentally so you're advancing the AM/PM now, exit all the way to the SYSTEM menu and start over...

It's the same way with things you need to access frequently: audio quality controls, station settings, etc. They're all buried two or three layers deep in a menu accessed by this press/twist control that is very easy to accidentally bump. And if you aren't watching what you're doing, a single bump will activate one of the options (RFDS?) that resets every fucking station preset to the factory defaults. (If you've seen someone on CA-101 suddenly scream at his car stereo and trying not to smash the faceplate in rage, that was me or another Pioneer customer.)

In addition to being susceptible to bumps (unheard of in a moving vehicle, right?) you can't dead reckon -- and you can't see what the next/previous selection is going to be. You have to constantly keep your eyes on the display not the road. And the fucking things are all so dim you need a second hand to shade the display from the sun, so now you're using both hands and both eyes to operate the goddamn radio.

It's the shittiest idea to come along in user interface design since the god forsaken Office 2007 toolbars. Worse.

I think the same pissant who worked on the Office UI team in the mid-2000's went to work for Pioneer shortly thereafter. He wasn't finished fucking with people's heads.

Now, apparently, he's at Mozilla.

Agreed. Does EVERY generation of commercial software designers* have to re-learn the hazards of conflating instructions with data?

A search term is data. A url is an address/instruction. FFS, don't try to combine the two!

__
*Cause you know for damn sure these constant unnecessary UI updates aren't pushed by code developers. It's all marketing and people who feel like they constantly have to leave a visible mark in order to justify their existence.

How does one shop for something like that?

Last time I looked into changing providers (was stuck at 3Mbps DSL with constant disconnects) all I could find was cable and AT&T resellers and DSL Reports database listings nearly a decade old. Search results for business internet solutions seemed to just bring scammy results.

The only good thing to come out of it is that I believe somehow my provider got word that I was shopping around and within a week of asking an agent to put together some proposals for business speed internet options, my provider doubled my d/l speed to 6 Mbps... it was enough to make me put it off again. (This was about two years ago.)

I'd be happy with 50 or even 25 Mbps down and a block of fixed IPs - I really just want to cut the cable TV cord and host a minecraft server or two on a spare machine. I know I'm getting a piss-poor deal on DSL, but a significant reason I haven't been in a hurry to change is because my provider isn't cooperating with the Six Strikes B.S. and I have family members who are heavy torrent users. I was holding out to hear the Aereo SCOTUS decision before trying again, but after reading the comments here, I figure I must have been overlooking something when I shopped around last time.