When my Mom's old Dell running XP got too slow five or so years ago, I wiped it and installed Ubuntu, and she adapted quickly. She's still on Ubuntu now, but still has an old enough version that she has Gnome 2. I'm thinking for her 80th birthday in a few months I'll get her a new machine running Mint.

Yeah, but he's not dead yet. In fact, he thinks he'll go for a walk....

Wasn't a really low numbered one auctioned off for charity once upon a time?

It's too bad you think she's annoying, because in the meantime she grew up, and is really beautiful and seemingly really smart and interesting.

The line is awfully blurry when you remember that it was the FBI and not the NSA that developed Magic Lantern.

Worse than that, during Christmas they claimed they delivered my package, but they really didn't. I had to get the seller to initiate an investigation, the conclusion of which was that it had actually been returned to the sender for no good reason and without apology. I get it that Christmas is busy, and if it had merely been late I'd have gotten over it. But they treated me really shabbily.

Incidentally, so did the seller, which took three days to respond to each of my inquiries, had no phone number, ignored my requests, etc. Pretty sad that from a company called 6dollarshirts you don't even get what you pay for!

Interestingly, around the turn of the century the Germans considered a series of plans to attack the U.S. directly. And as an alternative history buff you may be interested in a novelization of those plans by Robert Conroy called 1901, and also the H.G. Wells classic The War in the Air, which if written today would be considered steampunk alternative history but is cooler than that for having been written in 1907.

First name: OMG

In particular, I like ones like Harry Turtledove's oeuvre, S.M. Stirling's Nantucket series and various other works, the 1632niverse, and to go way back, L. Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall. (I realize some of these are more military than others, but you know what I mean here.)

Sounds sort of like a benefit corporation, although good luck getting that to be the default.

I no longer feel sorry for people who have to learn English.

What they said was that they wouldn't rescind Slashdot Classic until Beta was "ready", which is missing the point that we don't want Beta at all. It was a very disappointing response.

Very well.

Fuck beta. Try Usenet: comp.misc is the new Slashdot.

Being libertarian doesn't mean you defend everything that companies do. It just means you think that if Dice wants to treat us like we're irrelevant there shouldn't be a law against it. It certainly doesn't mean those in the community can't express their negative opinion of Dice's behavior, boycott the site, etc.

Yeah, I think I got here during the late '90s. In 2000 I had a web site that was hosted on a friend's PC that was connected by a 33.6 Kbps modem, and mentioning it here Slashdotted it into the ground. Fun days, those.

And like seemingly everyone else who doesn't get a paycheck from Dice, I too prefer Classic to Beta. If they want to offer Beta as the default UI for new accounts I guess I don't feel strongly against that, but the Classic UI should remain as an option for the established community, and if it doesn't and the community dries up, then that will be a real shame but I suppose it won't be surprising.

My mom still subscribes to the print edition, so I use her access to the web site and everyone's happy. But with them bringing Radley Balko and Eugene Volokh on board, they're actually on track to enter the "I'd pay if I had to" category.

Other than that I'm willing to donate to the local Pacifica radio station in part because of Democracy Now. As a libertarian I obviously don't always agree with Amy Goodman, but she reports on important stuff that no one else covers often enough that I respect her.