Mmmmm.... No. Bzzzzt.

Presbyopia eventually affects virtually everyone by age 40-50, but that just means that you become slightly more farsighted as the natural lens becomes less flexible. Corrective surgery still removes all astigmatic defects, corrects the focal distance to a normal range, reduces eyestrain by normalizing the two eyes, along with other minor benefits. Old people getting laser correction just means "only" having perfect vision past 0.5-1 meter or so.

Now that I'm old (near death by hipster standards, or so I'm told) and need reading glasses for close work, do I regret getting laser correction? Am I not getting "bang for the buck" as I read highway signs a quarter mile ahead? Do I feel sad as I look at the moon and pick out crater edges wiith my naked eyes?

No. Not one single teensy bit. I am happy to age this way; much happier than all other options.

Mod parent up. Wish I had points.

I had my eyes zapped about 5 years ago, and even with some complications I'd do it again in a heartbeat.

Why? I did it beause glasses were making me hesitant to play with my kids.

As they grew older, I was always getting them knocked off in game play or horsing around, and then I found myself declining to play or playing soft or begging off.... Sport lenses were always a half-measure, and contacts are a maintenance timesink vs continual risks of infection. For a while I was interested in intracorneal rings (the only corrective eye surgery that is 99+% reversable) but there wasn't enough data and they were never really popular in the US. I had PRK instead of LASIK because my astigamtism's anomalies were near the surface (the "flap" would contain irregularities). The final thing that swayed me was that laser surgery (in my case) could be performed in about 10-15% of the corneal depth that is safe to treat. This meant plenty of safety margin for the initial treatment, plus I can have it re-corrected to better than 20/20 as necessary over multiple years without hitting safety limits -- basically I'll die many years before hitting any kind of limit on corneal correction. The PRK process is a much slower recovery than LASIK, and I had some complications that added a couple weeks to that, but I remember the first afternoon after getting the "bandage contacts" off and seeing with my fresh new 20/15 eyes... looking across Lake Washington at ripples in the water from canoe oars, and seeing the color and texture of the window trim on the Safeco building well over a mile away from my car on the 520 bridge. The world is absolutely fucking gorgeous again.

But would I have done it specifically for gameplay? What?

Jesus, dude, go outside and look at a tree.

Yes it is: just ask Picasso's models.

You're not incorrect in your logic--one can be a terrorist without having yet been linked to a terrorist group. But it begs the question of how they were identified as terrorists and put on watch lists in the first place. Is it because they look funny? Smell funny? Have a funny hair-do? Wear traditional "muslim" clothing when they travel? Have the wrong political beliefs? Have the right political beliefs but don't express them ardently enough for big brother's taste?

The basic problem with a "Terrorism watch list" in which 40% of the people on it have seemingly no link to known terrorists or terrorist organizations, where the criteria for getting on the list in this category are murky (or possible just don't exist) the potential for abuse is absolutely staggering. How many of those people up in Dearborn Heights that can't travel are actually just being declared terrorists for having a funny name and living down the street from someone interesting? With zero oversight, we really have no way of knowing WTF is going on behind the scenes.

It does. The list arbitrarily denies the right to free travel and movement among the various states for no reason whatsoever, almost 300,000 people in total. It draws into question the accuracy of the "60%"--that is, if nearly 300,000 people are arbitrarily on the list for no discernible link to terrorism, how many of the "60%" that they claim have ties to terrorism, actually do?

The incompetence of the 40% casts doubt on the claim of "60%" accuracy. I.e. "Of the 60% who do allegedly have terrorist ties, against how many of them is the evidence either completely non-existent or just because some arbitrary bureaucrat somewhere says so?"

That's what people are concerned about. An admitted 40% error rate is appalling, and it leads to wonder "If that's what they're admitting to their superiors, how much worse is the problem, actually?"

Indeed. The cloud fad is already starting to pop as executives find out "Holy fuck, you mean when something goes wrong there's no amount of screaming I can do to make them prioritize our service?" and other things that weren't in the brochure. "You mean we're on a shared infrastructure so when one of the other tenants gets DDOSed we're down too? "

Or (my favorite) "You mean to actually have high availability we have to spend almost double the quoted price to run identical machines in another geographic-zone"?

or the feature plain sucks (track changes in Office > Libre)

Huh? Have you used a recent version of LOffice? The track-changes feature in LO is considerably more elegant than MSOffice, both visually (in page view you still see the tagged and ordered comments/changes while displaying an accurate representation of the print view), and logically (I can reply by comment on a comment in LO, and record the justification for edits as the comments are ordered in a threaded conversation. And you don't lose the comments if you select and type instead of explicitly deleting text. By contrast in MSOffice, if you overwrite a section with track changes turned on, it always deletes the comments that went with the old text -- so MSOffice only has "track SOME changes."

I know it's a minor issue, but that in that respect, LO wins hands-down.

Visio... ugh. I have a love-hate relationship with Visio, and got off the train at Visio 2010 -- which is ok, because it runs acceptably under Wine.

Some detail: At work I have a major publication based on about 50 complex diagrams in Visio, now in its 5th edition over the past 5 years. Originally drafted using 2003, the move to 2010 was annoying but acceptable, as it brought no discernible benefit but took away no features I needed. I was also ok with 2010 because it runs acceptably under Wine, which means I can load it at home where I much prefer Linux.
Since I work somewhere near Redmond, I got pushed to 2013, and I find it completely dysfunctional. The interface is hideous, object manipulation is difficult and requires many extra clicks for common tasks... and FFS the PDF rendering is totally broken. Even our IT and product support can't get pub-quality resolution out of the v2013 PDF engine. For a while I used Visio 2013 + GhostScript to generate acceptable PDFs because the file format incompatibilities between 2010 and 2013 made it a PITA to roll back, but there were other problems with that and eventually I just rolled back to 2010.

Upshot: If you're content with Visio 2010, then I'd say to use it on Windows or Linux as you prefer.
But Visio 2013 has regressed in UI and functionality to the point where I prefer to use DIA on Linux.

...and I'm not alone. According to Moz's own dev feedback tools, the Australis phelgm-globber of an interface has been trending at 80%-dislike from day one after introduction..

http://www.lifehacker.com.au/2013/11/less-than-20-per-cent-of-users-like-firefoxs-new-australis-ui/
https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/questions/999831
http://soylentnews.org/article.pl?sid=14/05/12/133214

I'll install it when that godawful Australis interface is rolled back or replaced with something less eye-bleedingly bad. (And no, the craptastic classic plug-in is not a long-term solution.) For now, I'm holding at v28 (on Linux Mint or Ubuntu: "sudo apt-mark hold firefox"), and pondering what to do re security updates in the long run.

Firefox has gone down the ugly-UI-shuffle-for-the-hell-of-it route, Chrome sends an astounding amount of telemetry back to the hive-mind, and IE's performance is still a total joke even if I can see past the OS implications and numbingly-bad design. Are niche browsers all we have left?

And, of course, if Obama suggests congress do something reasonable, they're CERTAINLY not going to wave their arms and scream about what a terrible idea it is, and how it would turn our country into a Socialist state...

It would actually be easy enough for Walmart to switch to paper debit cards that had the amount of the card printed on the front. When you used that card, the cashier simply gave you lower-denomination of cards (say, a $5 debit card when you paid for a 5 dollar item with a $10 debit card).

Once this practice became pervasive enough, unfortunately the government would have to step in to create rules and regulations as to how all the printing would appear, and to prevent fraud. I suggest they mandate the use of engraved printing plates; green magnetic ink; and heavy cotton rag for the card. Oh, and to certain security features like holograms, watermarks, embedded plastic strips, etc.

My god, the level of convenience we'd enjoy would blow away any other form of paying for goods and services literally overnight.

I don't know where you went to college, but if this was the norm you picked a party school. Real university is real work.

Peasant Han: "Honest officer! Our child was sold into slavery over a year ago!"

Officer Zau kicks over the wood stove, lifts open a patch of the tile floor and shines his light into the darkness below. A dozen eyes shine back.

Officer Zau (screaming): Zui cha. Chaqu. Yongyuan!

Officer Zau unholsters her Type 15 pistol, takes aim at Han and puts her finger on the trigger.

(fade to black)

Is there any other kind?</snark>