I'd play pinball. If the machine is broken, which is sadly the case the majority of the time in my experience, I'd go home.

Because MAME.

The only machine that would keep me in an arcade would be a Galaga upright... simply because I could show off mah skills.

Seriously. Bar, restauraunt, arcade managers? If you're not willing to put in the extra effort it takes to maintain a pinball machine, DO NOT BUY ONE. And for God's sake, unplug and put an 'out of order' sign on the ones that *are* broken, but you are willing to fix.

A certain alphabet agency that's been in trouble for tapping all kinds of folks lately? Or are they too clueless to put together a monster like this?

1. You'd have to write a boot loader that a) loads your bare-metal-level sound and microphone driver, networking driver, sonic network protocol, and payload.

2. You'd have to write the forementioned a) bare-metal-level sound and mic drivers. Network drivers that might as well be bare-metal, implement a sonic network protocol, and then get them to successfully transmit your payload.

3. You have to TEST this combo on many different machines.

We're either looking at someone who has a LOT of free time and hardware on his hands, or a 1st or 2nd world military-level dev team with LOTS of cash to spend, IMO.

Add on to that the inability of the average Japanese person to say 'No' to someone, even family. The Japanese (and many Asian cultures in general) place a very high importance upon maintaining face.

We're talking about people who move to a new town when family members are convicted of minor crimes so they can 'start over'. Major crimes... whew. That's only one of the reasons suicide is so damn common in Japan and SK.

The idea of kicking your adult child out of the house for his own damn good is HORRIFYING for most families that have to deal with this.

The idea of being KNOWN as the family who kicked your adult child out of the house for his own damn good is even worse.

Cinnamon is pretty nice. It nicely captures the features of the traditional app bar and combines the ability to use plugins and 'pin' apps. I LURVE me the ability to manage my networks and VPNs from the applet interface.

It does have a few problems. First off, it's somewhat confusing to edit the Cinnamon menu. My ideal solution would be to create a nested folder structure filled with softlinks so I could simply manage it with a file manager. (Sorry, haters. MS just got it right there.) However, a more-full-featured menu editor would be almost as good.

Secondly, it's pretty difficult to move the Cinnamon menu bar around. It can be done, but takes some config file editing rather than point-click-drag-drop like the proprietary OSs.

To my understanding, Cinnamon is ultimately a highly customized Gnome configuration, so I suspect that what's holding Cinnamon back are shortcomings in Gnome or GTK. However, I'm not an expert.

Pinging slashdot.org [216.34.181.45] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 216.34.181.45: bytes=32 time=746ms TTL=244
Reply from 216.34.181.45: bytes=32 time=692ms TTL=244
Reply from 216.34.181.45: bytes=32 time=711ms TTL=244
Reply from 216.34.181.45: bytes=32 time=701ms TTL=244

Hmm... Better add 'Texas' after 'in Space'.

This guy has said that allowing gay couples to adopt children is a form of discrimination against the children.

  So a lot's going to change in Vatican City

Seriously, I learned this a while back with the first 'Black and White' game. EA pushed the developer to release early. The game was simply unfinished. You literally could not finish it.

The 'patch' to fix that gawdawful mess broke gameplay so badly, I said 'Fuck it. This was wasted money. Fool me once, shame on you. No more money for you, EA!"

Mrs. Bonker came to the same decision some time later, after endless frustrations with the 'Sims 3'. She realized that a) she was essentially re-buying all the expansions for the 'Sims 2' one at a time and b) none of them worked. They were all so horrendously buggy that the game could quite seriously corrupt a filesystem.

It was painful for her since she really enjoys The Sims gameplay, but she's stuck playing 'The Sims 2' because she realized she was literally throwing her money away every time she purchased something for the 'The Sims 3'

As much as I'd like to see movie versions of Mr. Zahn's 'Thrawn' Triology, a line in 'Return of the Jedi' stands out to me, when Mon Mothma and Admiral Ackbar are discussing the assault on the Forest Moon of Endor.

I think it's Ackbar who addresses Han as 'General Solo' for the first time and Luke is rather surprised that his friend got promoted while he was busy back on Degobah.

Imagine, if you will, Ford as the aged, weathered space admiral who's seen it all, from Imperial recruit, to smuggler, to rebel pilot, to assault leader, to General and eventually a great leader of men...

We KNOW Ford is capable of the acting. What we don't know is 'Will Disney let it happen'?

I don't stay logged in and can't be assed to add an exception to my cookies whitelist for /.

One of the things I've noticed in the 'professional developer' community is that there is a bit of Jock Culture going on.

First of all, you have a business environment that tends to favor younger, fresher talent and puts a LOT of pressure on aging developers to keep up with their younger peers, many of whom are capable of (in the very, very short run) unhealthy work practices. 80 hour work weeks and back-to-back all-nighters are doable when you're 22 years old. They're fucking painful at 30, and ruinous by 35.

And it's hard to say 'No' to them because we've just come out of a nasty recession when upper management is all too eager to lay you off in favor of younger developers eager to prove themselves.

That shit WILL give you depression, anxiety, and insomnia, and all of those kill.

Second, again with the Jock Culture, developer culture tends to be dominated by hot-headed males, many of whom are eager to replicate locker-room style pecking orders in the cube farms... and that crap just doesn't work when you're developing software.

(Ex-military guys? I'm looking at you here. I've seen you do this shit. Stop it.)

Sadly, those pecking orders are often directly related to pay. The guy who manages to wedge his way into the 'Project Lead' or 'Senior Developer' slot tends to have a few more dollars attached to them. Again, the pressure results in depression, anxiety, and insomnia which are proven killers.

Shirkey's piece spends a lot of time talking about Aaron Swartz, but Aaron was a unique case of being uniquely and unfairly persecuted by multiple 800 pound gorillas. His depression and suicide *should* have been as fucking obvious to anyone who knew him as an 18 wheeler rolling the wrong way down the freeway.

The answer to these issues is, perhaps a shade ironically, the same answer we should be looking at in regards to our sudden flareup of chronic school shooting disease:

Mental Healthcare needs to be made a priority in this nation. We need to destigmatize ADMITTING mental health issues and seeking treatment for them. Also, we need to completely ditch the notion that drugs used for treatment of mental health problems cause more harm that good.

Seriously, guys, when you're having daily panic attacks, when sleep won't come for days at a time, when the world starts showing up in black and white and more black than white... it's time to talk to a doctor. And if your doctor won't help, ditch him and find a doctor who will.

Apropos captcha: Biopsy

Linux and the software available for it has finally reached the point for me that I can use it on my daily-use hardware. There is nothing I want to do that cannot be done under Linux now, GIMP be damned.

Mint with Cinnamon is a damn fine usable OS.

Windows 8 and it's tablet-wannabe interface will forever remain a distant nightmare of 'What might have been'.

I guess my warped way of thinking just can't embrace the notion of supporting a political party. I understand the need for governance of some kind to maintain social order, I understand being conservative in your views, or liberal, but I question the whole concept of being part of a political organization when so many members of that party are so manifestly corrupt, morally subversive or just plain vile. Why would you want to be part of anything that has even a little bit of rot in it?

from James Killough's excellent article 'Do Republicans Dream of Electric Elephants':

http://purefilmcreative.com/killough-chronicles/do-republicans-dream-of-electric-sheep.html

My cats have great skill at destroying keyboards. Whether it's lodging just the right amount of fur under the right Shift key, standing in just the right spot to crack the PCB under the membrane, or nudging the cup I'm drinking out of until it spills right onto the all-important WASD keys, they manage it about once every 6-7 months.

I'd love to get one of those mechanical switch jobbies for the nice tactile clickie feel, since I'm a fast touch-typist, but I can't help but think that they'd be even more cat-prone than membrane keyboards.

For the time being, Logitech makes a nice basic membrane-style keyboard, the k120 that retails for around $15. It's fairly spill resistant, can keep up with my typing, and is fairly easy to clean. Then, when it meets its end in the cruel feline paws of fate several months down the road, I don't feel so bad dropping another $15.

So back during the SOPA thing, I had a lot of real life matters going on that were somewhat more important than taking time to look for a new DNS and webhost. I contented myself with taking the ten minutes necessary for writing a nasty letter, got on with my pressing business, and SOPA died... for the time being.

Now, I happen to have a few spare moments to dedicate to looking for a new webhost, and Anonymous or AnonymousOwner or whoever has done me a favor by reminding me that Godaddy is not necessarily my friend.

Does anyone have any suggestions? I'd prefer somewhere that supports, or would let me install Ruby and Rails 3. Heroku seems to be the default Rails hangout, but frankly their pricing confuses the hell out of me.

My understanding is that, propagandist or no, Rasmussen leans heavily republican simply by their methodology.. ie, the way they do their polling means they skew their samples.

Electoral-Vote.com has a model that shows projection data with or without Rasmussen data included. According to their model, Obama will win in November either way, but a few more senate races will go Democrat rather than Republican if you exclude Rasmussen polling data.

http://www.electoral-vote.com/evp2012/Pres/Maps/Sep08-noras.html

Ironic captcha: Freeing. *sigh*. If only there was a candidate I could vote for who would really do that.