I see. I don't mean to be rude, I'm genuinely curious (and don't want to annoy people, so avoid saying anything). I think from an observer point of view it can be frustrating to watch someone in a rut of having a defeatist attitude (even knowing they can't necessarily help it) where they won't get help for themselves because of this belief that it's pointless because life sucks, but the reason it sucks so much is because of the lack of help.. you sort of want to try and guide them out of the self defeating infinite loop and towards recovery.

Also whilst it may be rude to say it'll get better, it's hard to think what else to say when someone is kind of "brb killing myself" and you need some way to convince them not to and to illustrate that you can't get better from being dead.

I'm curious what would be more helpful. I'm primarily thinking of online here, where "just being there" is something rather difficult to convey.

Is it possible to get better, then?

When I've pointed out this uncomfortable truth of "people are attracted to positive, happy people" and that finding some way - be it therapy, meds, determination, some combination whatever - to stop being negative, then people would react to them better and they'd have a happier life and less to feel miserable about, I have tended to get shouted at and told that clinical depression is a lifetime battle and that suggesting a depressed person at least *try* and adjust their attitude a little is massively insulting and like telling a disabled person they should just try to get up and walk etc etc.

Yeah... we have a habit of assuming that "exercise" means running (outside or pounding on a treadmill) or other time-consuming 'deliberate exercise' things that a lot of people don't have the time for (or rather, don't notice enough of a benefit to justify making the time for, or find really boring).

It's good, for your cardio / general fitness, but weight loss? You just have to get off your backside a bit. I'm normal weight now but in the process of getting there, I could've been eating and drinking the same stuff for 2 weeks, week 1 I'd just sit there as usual, week 2 I'd make the effort of standing up once an hour for a few paces, park on the opposite side of the car lot, and get up to see people in my workplace instead of phoning them. Once or twice I'd maybe walk into town for lunch. No more effort than that, no actual exercise sessions. Week 1 I'd shift 0.5-1lb, week 2 I'd shift 2lb+. It seems to be the overall attitude / mindset being in favour of moving that matters the most, not necessarily sweating away in a gym.

The other thing is, if you eat or drink too much of something "bad" (weekend of beer drinking say), yes, it's probably wise to offset that with some form of heightened activity to maintain a decent weight loss and/or not have weight creeping on over the months/years. And if you know it's going to happen, maybe getting some of that extra activity in advance. But we should also avoid a mindset of "if I go for a run today I can have some extra beers / chocolate". There's a very subtle yet very important difference between the two, imo.

The other thing is weighing regularly. If you do go wrong and put weight (back) on, it's amazing how much you can pile on before you actually notice.

I'd +1,Insightful this if I was able to. I'd not really thought of it like that, but the comparison seems sound.

My initial reaction was like many, that this would be a bad thing, and everyone would be playing the "I stuffed myself, now I'm disabled and so don't have to work / am able to get handouts, discounts and special treatment" card. I'm sure there are some people who would do just that. But maybe the majority would think "oh shit, I'm disabled" and be more motivated to do something about it.

That said, it would seem that "disability" usually implies that it's a long term / lifetime problem. "Illness" may be closer to the mark.
I've been obese. The cure is a balanced diet, exercise, and expending more calories than you ingest. The first step towards that though, is caring about your long term health MORE than you care about short term enjoyment. For me that didn't apply for a while, and you will find a lot of people saying the same as what I did: "I don't care about living to be 90 if I have to be miserable along the journey".
I think in those cases it could be considered a mental illness sometimes. A combination of low self esteem (in the form of not caring about your own life enough) and just the inability to get one's head around the fact that you can still enjoy yourself and will not be miserable at all. And heck, almost nothing is bad enough in moderation to matter. I still drink beer. I still sometimes indulge in some chocolate (though rarely, as I'm more aware of how densely packed the fat and sugars are and don't like to do that to myself). It's just that I don't throw them down my neck as fast as possible, and I've acquired the taste of fruit and veg and other healthy foods (just like we all did with beer, did anyone like it the first time they tried it?).

We just tend to need a push start, a reason to care about yourself, beyond "other tax payers hate me because people like me cost the NHS billions" (more self loathing, yay). Being considered disabled? That might the the push that a good few need.

This.

I'll use my favourite fruit as an example: oranges (I like them, and they keep colds at bay). Medium-to-large oranges are about 40p each in supermarkets (though you can get down to 25p or so on the market stalls, but people tend to stick to the supermarkets). A massive (250g+) bar of chocolate can often be found for about £1. Or people can go to the pound shop and buy packets of crisps ("chips" to the American folk) for 5-10p each. The same shop also tends to have massive bags of broken biscuits (cookies) for £1.
To someone on a tight budget, it's a no-brainer to go and pick up 10-20 packets of crisps rather than a couple of oranges. They'd love to get their 5-a-day, but fruit and veg do not come cheap! And rather than 1 day's worth of fruit, they get a week's worth of crisps.

I think a fruit and veg subsidy would be one of the best investments any government with a health service (like ours) could possibly make. Obesity costs the NHS... I think I heard £7bn mentioned recently. I'm sure they could spend a bit to save a few of those billions if they put their minds to it.

I think the problem comes in that not every web server in the world supports ipv6. Heck, when I was setting up a personal web server, I was sort of tempted to disable ipv6 because fail2ban doesn't support it and so it represents a bit of a security hole in that a cracker can bypass the security by simply using ipv6. (But I decided to do The Right Thing for the Internet and left it on, even though no-one relies on it right now)

I'd be curious to see the results from someone who has ipv6 but NOT ipv4 in day to day browsing, as that's the scenario we're ultimately looking at when v4 addresses dry up - not people who are running both, like now, but people who are exclusively running v6. Would they then only half half an internet with loads of blackspots due to sites that haven't adopted v6 yet.

Finally someone gets it.
I know Apple are arrogant, but even they wouldn't be THAT bad, it's pretty funny that people are taking this little joke so seriously :P

I know exactly why I originally switched: I was not yet educated on the sheer depth of Google/Chrome's hostility towards your privacy, it had a huge selling point: silent, background updates where I don't even know they're happening (I like it that way).

This was at that time shortly after Firefox went to that crazy new release schedule and whizzed along from version 4 to version 26 in what felt like about 20 minutes. It was during this time that Firefox was driving me ABSOLUTELY NUTS popping up every few weeks with yet another new release, and getting in the way with its addon checks etc next time it's launched.

There is little that infuriates me more than when I launch an application and can't use it for the next 30 seconds because it's picked that time to chug around doing updates. I don't know if it's because they're too busy coding to use their own applications, but very few developers in the world seem to understand that "when an application is launched, that's when the user wants to USE that application" (sometimes urgently), and therefore very few have the sense to do their updates in the background or on exit (still annoying if you're waiting to shut down, but at least slightly less annoying).

Pre-empting the inevitable "30 seconds isn't that long you're not going to die waiting 30 seconds to see your cat videos" reply: Oh hold on, I'll just bin my SSD, and I believe Grace Hopper would like a word about nanoseconds. Chrome didn't need to waste those seconds, and so neither did Firefox. Unnecessary wastes of time are quite irritating.

{/rant}

The other issue was Chrome's excellent sync vs. Firefox's messy faff of one.

HOWEVER!

Two things have happened since:

1) An acute awareness of how much Google treat your personal info / metadata / browsing habits as an all-you-can-eat buffet, made all the more obvious in our recent privacy conscious times triggered by NSA et al

2) They finally fixed the Firefox browser.

There is still a foreground element to updates and their notifications, but nowhere near as obtrusive as they were when I abandoned it, add-ons don't usually break, and now it has a proper sync system.

Nowadays it's a no-brainer to use Firefox again. It gives you the same conveniences regarding sync and less annoying updates, but doesn't spy on you or restrict you like Chrome does and has much more respect for your privacy and freedom. Wouldn't touch Chrome with a bargepole now, and them locking it down even further only seals the deal.

Yes indeed. I took control of a site in 2007 and haven't knowingly broken a link since. Various restructures just led to more redirect entries in .htaccess, and if you somehow have an old 2007 link it should take you to the relevant page on today's site. It just needs disciplined webmasters.

(I'm not the most creative of people and our marketing girls are not exactly the most constructive in dealing with other departments (such as making suggestions for improvement or even opening their mouths and telling me they don't like it in the first place), so they've decided to simply outsource it from under me. The new developers will no doubt break my lovely 7 year chain. But hey ho, that's life.)

I thought about this kind of thing recently - take something like Google Drive. You pay for the premium version and they give you more space, but you're still tied to their (lack-of-)privacy policy and they still spy on you.

If part of a premium service was "no ads *and no tracking or scanning your stuff or your habits in any way*" (preferably with some way to prove it) I think I'd be more inclined to pay for it.

If clicking on a site had options:
- View free (ad and data mining supported)
- View for 2p (100% private and ad-free)
I'd pay the 2p. Assuming there's some way to prove that they're not lying, which yeah, wouldn't be easy. It'd need some interesting open-source "thing" to make it happen.

:|
I bet it would be
8|
a bit of a cash cow.

This means they can hire multiple providers (generally in different regions), evaluate them against each other, encourage competition between them to lower prices, etc.

This of course, worked great for the rail industry.

The reason I switched from iOS was because personally, I *want* control over my smartphone. I want the options and customisations, and the ability to decide what keyboard to use and where my music sits. My advice to those who can't handle a few options is "get an iPhone".

Though really, I can't see why both user groups can't be catered for - have sensible defaults and basic options, and put everything else inside an "Advanced settings" button somewhere - no one is forced to tap it.

It does work on some routers and mobile hotspots! Support IS a bit hit and miss though. It comes up as non-unicode symbols on Windows (though most when out and about are in iOS or Android devices, which display it correctly)

Slashdot can't seem to print unicode stuff, but basically it's a list of symbols that might scare Whovians. :)