I let my Linux Mint desktop slide way out of the support envelop while I waited for PC-BSD to become a viable replacement. I had a single FreeBSD machine running ZFS as my server, which had been rock solid, but I'd never run a BSD desktop before. Then in a single week it was "BSD everywhere" on my home network.

I embrace change on my own terms (which is not change caused by the Gnome developers becoming bored of their own architecture, or Canonical deciding that tablets are the new shit). PC-BSD features boot environments. This amounts to an "undo" key for your operating system. Batch patch? Nuke the fucker.

I can temporize for years, then jump in with both boots if the time seems right.

It's one of the worst things about computing culture that we still collectively tolerate: the notion that capability upgrades are welded at the hip to work flow "innovation". Install a new OS, you're guaranteed to get a mixture of both.

I'd vastly prefer the tick-tock model as practised by Intel (or the alternating new airframe / new engine model as practised by Boeing) where releases that muck with the established user interface change no underlying features / capabilities at all (so the only reason anyone installs the GUI refactor release is because you actually want to partake in the bling rebinding).

Hopefully BSD won't someday lose its mind like Linux did, in which your trusty tighty-whities suddenly becomes a full-body support corset (with no-one asked). Personally, I can handle the change from tighty-whities to rc.d boxer shorts just fine, thank you very much.

Do we really want the advertising revenue stream to disappear for content developers and for all internet content to be behind paywalls?

If we view advertising as a net negative burden on cognition and productivity (there's scientific literature to support this view), and explicit, informed choice as a net human asset (there's virulent ideology to support this view), I'd have to say "yes".

The wheel-house of our lizard brain appears to be managing our past and future sexual entanglements. I personally suspect it doesn't do much else well at all. It used to have other valuable functions, but these have all been subverted. Dracula, modern society's founding mythology of lizard brain vs alluring predator, has now brought us the Twilight franchise.

Paywall or tweewall, name your poison.

from people being employed in the areas had nothing to do with more people going to hospitals

The proper experimental control is to take three regions that went from no fracking to fracking, and three other regions that went from no fracking-like revenue to a fracking-similar amount of fracking-like revenue so as to match the upticks in net employment.

Obviously for natural experiments, this is not always easy to pull off (and your detractors will necessarily claim you didn't succeed no matter how far you go).

So why don't you just cut to the chase and declare that all natural experiments are moist excrement? Is there any standard for a controlled natural experiment you'd actually accept? From the structure of your comment I suspect not, as you never once mention the caliber of controls actually used (which is, for maximal troll-seed efficiency, entirely beneath the notice of those who reject the entire category).

Done right, I view this as a form of agile econometrics. First you see what clears the fence under modest controls, before gold-plating round two.

On the other side, blanket cynicism is a crutch of the anti-progressive mindset.

... Give me back my caps!

But I suspect that your browser set the character encoding as ISO-8859-1 in its headers.

Drawing an inference from the not-fact that the top of the batting order in every Wikipedia FAQ does not include how to set your user agent to send the right encoding header, I'd suggest that Slashdot's long-disabled Unicode support fell far short of the mark in the first place. (2005 just called. It wants to dissolve its de facto clue-stick monopoly.)

I authored a CJK word processor that ran under MS-DOS in the 1980s and early 1990s. Two of our linguists did our own in-house unification that ended up not so different than Unicode which came later.

At the time that Unicode came out, our largest customer groups were embassies, diplomats (Snowden-style), and other academic linguists (with a strong representation from the Brigham Young young-adult diaspora). Maybe 40% of our new customers in the early 1990s were still running turbo XTs, 286s, and 386 castrati (16 MHz SX of the 16-bit bus resurrected). It takes a long time for the wallet of a dusty academic sinologist to recover from dolling out $5000 in 1985 (true story, many times over). 20-year-old Mormon missionaries where not especially flush, either.

Imagine this as your early-adopter power-user-base for the newly ratified Unicode 1.0 Asian language support.

Many people at the time running Windows 3.11 were running in 4 MB. Multilingual software remained stuck in this grotesquely underpowered rut until the P54 was introduced in the mid-nineties.

It's not just the print and display fonts that were a burden to the software of the day, but the mere Unicode code point tables themselves. 256 KB of code-point mapping tables was the rough equivalent of Google grabbing another 256 MB to process-isolate another browser tab (4 MB then, 4 GB now).

Of course, one can code up a bespoke compression method and clever language subset overlays. I'm sure we invested more man-hours in bespoke compression methods and clever data overlays than Zuckerberg invested in coding up The Facebook, original edition.

It's probably a good thing that Unicode was rushed to fruition, however broken it now appears to be twenty-five years later, before the first release of NCSA Mosaic. Otherwise, Unicode might have been cobbled together Brendan Eich in a succession of 4 a.m. coding binges the week after he pounded out JavaScript.

It's funny that this bug involves typesetting mathematics. If any software was broken with respect to Asian character support, it was surely the original TeX—paragon of infinite breakage that we all now know it to be.

Back in the mid-to-late eighties, the very idea of sprinkling Asian fonts into math display mode would have been delegated to the savant sibling sequestered in Lamport's sound-proof attic.

This guy is entitled to use the word "plant" as he will, but it doesn't agree with modern systematics. For example he calls "kelp" a plant, but it is taxonomically closer to the parasite that causes malaria than it is to land plants.

"Macroalgae" is a multi-phyletic category, including eukaryotes of the Archaeplastida group that includes red algae and green algae and the land plants that evolved from green algae, and of the super-group Chromalveolata that includes red tides, brown algae (such as kelp or Plasmodium). Green algae and land plants are grouped together under the kingdom "Plantae" in modern taxonomies.

So "seaweed" as a category includes organisms which are (cladistically speaking) closely related to land plants (green algae like sea grapes or sea lettuce), middling-related (red algae like nori or carageenan) and not very closely related at all (brown algae like kombu/kelp). Of course all organisms are presumably related to some degree.

The seaweed in question is a kind of dulse, a red algae. It's more closely related to land plants than a brown algae like kelp would be, but less related than sea lettuce. Red algae are specifically not included in the Kingdom Plantae. However, layman are free to call whatever they want a plant, even if it's in fact something else entirely, the way they call any small arthropod a "bug", even through true bugs are one of the 75,000 species in the order Hemiptera (out of over a million insect species).

Technically it's not a plant. Its a macroalgae and thus belongs to an entirely distinct taxonomic kingdom from plants and animals. Of course halakhically it probably counts as a plant because Jewish law isn't based on modern scientific concepts.

Many years ago some of my wife's friends inhabited a kosher apartment near her engineering school that had been passed down through generations of orthodox students. A dispute arose over whether a particular bowl was glass or pottery. Finally they called in their buddy the material science major for a scientific ruling. "It's neither," he said. "It's ceramic." Which was technically accurate, but irrelevant to the question of whether it could be kashered.

Here's an idea. You can do one more Google search before you leave home.

True, but ones that do come at the barrel of a gun almost always trump the ones that don't.

Not even close. Only seems true with availability bias dialed up to 10,000%

What ultimately trumps a bloody confrontation is not getting into a bloody confrontation in the first place.

Always has, and always will.

Except perhaps in the western genre where every episode features an overemployed undertaker, or in space opera where the red tunics are interwoven with a wearable dereplicator.

It's a lot like earthquakes where the barrel of the gun is the subduction zone. If you happen to wind up right on top of an active subduction zone, guns are a welcome tool. That said, we were equipped with the big brain so as to plan ahead, which involves a little bit more than merely obtaining the best possible result from the worst possible situation.

...no need to say more.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

In my opinion, all professionals are obliged to have an opinion of the system within which they operate, and a sense of whether dysfunctions exist which could be better resolved than endured.

The excessive influence of money on the American Congress was well understood. What did the politicians do? They went ahead and made the whole problem worse.

All too often politicians fail to publicly criticize the dysfunctional nature of the political system, preferring instead to revel within the obvious dysfunction, because the game-theoretic Frank solution (as the system is presently constituted) is paved in rivers of green.

I'm impressed by a heroine addict doing a good job at keeping the worst of their heroine addition at bay. I'm fundamentally more impressed by a heroine addict making any kind of progress at not remaining a heroine addict in the first place.

Politicians style themselves as leaders (leaders of the free world if an aircraft carrier is visible in the backdrop), and as such they deserve to be judged in the largest available frame.

From what I've read, a great number of politicians in Lincoln's era regarded avoiding a civil war as the business-as-usual Frank solution. Does that make him the worst American president?

You left out not getting to meet John Candy.

Bombus sonorus -- the Sonoran Bumblebee -- is a common North American desert species.

To answer your question every critter has it's range. Even you do. Visited Antarctica recently? Or Mars?

If you were a bumblebee you'd have a range of about a quarter of a kilometer from your nest. In rare instances you might go as far as 800m distant. And therein you can see why climate change poses an adaptation challenge to bumblebees.

Bumblebee colonies die every winter. The old queen perishes and the new queens hibernate until the spring then disperse to a new nest site. So you can see that the species can only relocate northward at a fraction of a kilometer per year -- although it may have better luck moving vertically -- to higher altitudes where a convenient mountain is handy.

Species that adapt well to climate change either have individuals with large ranges, or they hitch a ride on critters that travel long distance. For example mosquito species have lifetime ranges on the order of 2-3 km, but the Asian Tiger Mosquito (Aedes albopictus), which breeds in small containers of water, usually spends its life within 100m or so of where it hatches. The Tiger Mosquito species was introduced to the US at Houston in 1985 and fifteen years later it was found all over the United States. How is this possible if an individual lives its entire life within a 100m radius of its hatching place? I went to a presentation at CDC Fort Collins where their arthropod borne disease doyen plotted out the spread of Ae albopictus and showed it followed the route of the US Interstate Highway system. Eggs and pregnant individuals hitched a ride. That's because cars and trucks provide things that mosquitoes are attracted to: people to bite and tiny pools of water trapped in spare tires or crevices of the machine for egg-laying. Note that Ae albopictus larvae are known to arrive in the US in a shipments of that "lucky bamboo" you can buy in Chinatown; those stalks hold maybe 20-30 ml of water. It takes a "container" with only a tablespoon or two of water to transport viable larvae.

Now back to bumblebees. Because bumblebee colonies are small (typically 50 individuals to 50,000 for honeybees) and temporary, bumblebees don't stockpile honey. So unlike honeybees humans have no reason to transport them deliberately. Likewise cars and trucks aren't attractive to bumblebees so it's rare that a new queen will get an accidental ride north with a human. So bumblebees are poorly adapted to a rapidly changing climate.

It's a scam that's been shut down, but it's impossible to put a nail in its coffin because it's not one company doing it. The FTC tracked down a bunch of companies at the start of this year and forced them to fork over $700,000 in compensation, and it didn't even make a dent in the volume of calls.

"Cardholder service" scams are low success rate, high volume affairs which require only a small number of people to run and thus are easy to shut down and start up again under a different corporate entity. The only way to stop them is to make all low success rate, high volume telemarketing businesses intrinsically unprofitable, and the only way to do that is to charge for all calls.

This can be a nominal amount that wouldn't interfere with normal calls, it just has to be enough to deter calls that have very little chance of accomplishing anything useful. Ten minutes of a US minimum wage employee's time will cost a company $1.20, so let's set the level of pain at less than 1/10 that: every time a call is connected, $0.10 should be deducted from the caller's account and credited to the recipient's account. That way parties that call each other equally will tend to come out even.

Well that may be so. But as you get older you get less patient with people wasting your time.

Let's say you're 90 years old. You're using a webmail system which does everything you need it to do. Then some manager has a brainwave and suddenly all the functions are somewhere else. How much of the 3.99 years the actuarial tables say you've got left do you want to spend dealing with that?

It's not just 90 year-olds. Take a poll of working-age users and find out how many like the MS Office Ribbon; how many people are cool with the regular UI reshuffling that takes place in Windows just to prove you're paying your upgrade fee for software that's "new"?