Linux games on Steam?
http://store.steampowered.com/...

Ranting is the first step to changing anything. As you point out, we are all pretty powerless as individuals, but collectively we can change a lot, if history is any judge. After all, Democracy itself didn't just happen. It wasn't a gift from the powers that be, but taken from them, very much against their will.

Right now, the largest threat to democracy in the US (where I live) is the atomisation (thank you Hannah Arendt) of society. We have all been broken down - not into the disconnected individuals of early 20th century totalitarian systems (of both the left and the right BTW) but into slightly larger groups of ideologically uniform members that can be manipulated in large chunks. This little subthread has already seen several different chunks bumping into each other and having to deal with each other, so in that sense I think my "rant" was very constructive. Not to mention my sig quote.

It seems to me that the constant "overhaul" of a GUI to change icons, menu structures, etc is bad design. Not because the final product is necessarily bad, but because whatever improvements the new design brings are dwarfed by the cost of throwing away of user knowledge about the old interface and the cost of re-learning a new interface and its symbols and structure.

There's probably even unconsidered effects. A lot of clients I've worked with have resisted upgrades (they own and have paid for) to Office because of the radical changes in look and feel. By running older versions with weaker security, they're now exposed to greater risk of compromise by malware. There may even be meaningful losses in productivity from missing new features or improved implementations of existing functionality. This can even be made even worse by resisting operating system updates.

I've always been puzzled that some of the best minds in user interface design get together and say "obviously, the best solution is to throw out everything the users have learned and give them something totally different."

Automation can't replace all jobs, but from what I've read there are a couple of concerns.

A lot of the jobs that seem to be most easily automatable are "good" white collar jobs that previously had required some skill. There's a lot less manufacturing left (partly due to automation, but partly due to offshoring of manufacturing), so there's a lot less fallback jobs outside of very low wage service jobs.

Even if the job loss ends up being only 20%, 20% unemployment is a big deal. It can have higher-order economic impacts on significant markets, like real estate, it can have potentially destabilizing political effects which can feed back into the economic system through bad policy,

There is also an amplification of inequality from automation, as technology allows greater amounts of capital to be controlled by fewer people, usually with a feedback loop that allows them access to superior technology, enabling advantages in capital control.

And how many of us proles have to die before our lords and masters decide to piss some new antibiotics into our water supplies for us to use?

Get rid of the incentives. All they do is complicate the situation and distort the market economics.

Solar should stand or fall on its own merits. Incentives and net metering just creates a a hocus-pocus accounting situation where the people who have the panels installed don't pay the true cost of owning them, they shift it to the taxpayer in the form of tax credits and rebates and to other utility customers in the form of overpriced electricity.

I'm sure there are many who will argue that solar is a social good and should be subsidized by the government and utilities, but you can't take altruism to the bank. I'd like to know how many residential solar installs would exist if people weren't shown spreadsheets showing their solar install paid for itself with net metering and rebates. I'll bet a significant number of people wouldn't have bothered if it only meant offsetting the power they actually used during the day AND they didn't get rebates.

I actually think eliminating the net metering requirement would actually be a better incentive for power storage technologies, as the excess generation capacity would be something valuable that panel owners would want to keep. Realistically, the panels themselves aren't where we need incentives for new technologies, its the storage.

"Here I am, brain the size of a planet..."

"Heavy Fog In Channel. Continent Cut Off"
    -- Headline in The Times, October 22, 1957

It also is, as Mr. T. said, an ancient practice that was well respected before modern science. Mind you, there have always been astrological crackpots, those who don't apply it scientifically, but just make stuff up. And, yes, the inference is "the sun's position in the sky has a direct and obvious effect on existence below the sphere of the moon; the moon's position in the sky also has an influence, although less strong (think: tides); therefore, the position of the other celestial spheres - mercury, venus, mars, jupiter, saturn and uranus - against the sphere of fixed stars, notably the constellations of the ecliptic, should have an influence.

Of course, it doesn't quite work that way. The inference is false, and the whole thing collapses.

I agree with you in principal, but they don't want to just get the job done. They want to get the job done faster so they can get more jobs done overall in as little time as possible. Reducing labor costs is the name of the game.

The problem with positional tracking is it doesn't tell you why X was in some location. Because he needed to be there to do some job or because he was trying to chat up some woman?

In true Slashdot fashion, I didn't RTFA but is he suggesting:

1) Hard encryption should be illegal -- ie, you can't actually sell software that does encryption that either the NSA can't break or that doesn't provide key escrow?

2) Third party vendors (eg, Apple) can't sell devices which self-encrypt in a way that Apple doesn't have access to? Ie, if you buy an iPhone it will self-encrypt but with a key that Apple has access to?

My guess is he's aiming at the latter, he wants most products that do encryption that are sold commercially to be done in a way that preserves the ability for vendors to decrypt on demand.

I guess part of what I was commenting on is that the trend seems to be away from all the trappings of "pro" porn -- perfect bodies, fake tits, and the fairly robotic sex routine of 3-4 positions ending with a facial.

It seems to me that there is a much greater interest (or at least availability) of porn with women that don't look like porn stars (varied bodies with imperfections), sex that seems a little less artificial and more real than the traditional all-pro porn. Sure, some of it is fake amateur but many of the women seem semi-pro at best if not actual non-porn-actresses doing it for a quick buck, not as a career, which seems to add to the verisimilitude of the amateur nature of it.

And actual amateur home-made porn is often bad from a technical perspective, you wouldn't know it from online reviews and view counts. I think the fact that it is real has an appeal that traditional pro porn can't match.

Which definitions are you referring to? Mine is Paul Tillich's "Ultimate Concern". By that definition, Buddhism is certainly a religion in the sense that it provides a path to meaning (i.e. enlightenment.)

Who's watching pro porn anymore?

The trend in adult content seems to be amateur, whether that means actual amateurs in purloined home-made photos and videos or "prosumer" amateurs where some money changed hands but nobody other than the male/cameraman/site owner (the same guy) is actually trying to make a living at it -- certainly the female talent doesn't seem to be a prototypical porn star.

And even when the content is for sale, the same companies selling it often have all you need to see for free on their own YouPorn channels, whether its pro all the way or the sort of semi-pro stuff.

One of my questions would be why are they even bother producing pro porn. There seems to be so many people willing to get naked and have their picture taken out there that actually paying people to do it seems to be a waste of time.

Why not both? AFAIK there is no double-jeopardy protection between civil and criminal cases.

Sure, the lawyers could get rich on a class action settlement but you never know, the class could get something useful out of this. I don't know what's involved in removing this spyware, but you could potentially argue for something like 4 hours of skilled time per system just to clean it as a rough median (maybe much less for brand new systems, maybe much more for systems that would need to be wiped, re-setup and have apps and data put back on). And that doesn't include any claims for damages resulting from the infection itself, just remediation. Even if Lenovo bargained that down to half, in theory they could be on the hook for $200 per machine.