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Comment nc (Score 1) 261

> When a digital device has to sit and spin after every single click or action, it's hard to resist the temptation to jump ship.
Fixed.

A book has better real estate than a phone. A book has absolutely, non-figuratively, zero UI lag. A book is lightweight, portable, you can drop it on concrete from 10ft and you don't need to stress over keeping track of a valuable. It's paper, it's worthless.

It's hard to resist the temptation to jump shit when GUI devs dick around with faders and sliders and icon bullshit, and endless bloat. And then it's menus within menus of navigation - we pound the life out of hotkeys and shortcuts to get around it.

Comment nc (Score 1) 285

> benefits to the public from not taking action
Any content left in place continues to benefit its original purpose.
Content isn't meant to benefit the public. It's meant to benefit consumers.
Any content removed will, of course, serve no purpose whatsoever.
So far, these observations extend to any silenced content, not just adult. Mark Twain said "Censorship is telling a man he can't have steak because a baby can't chew it."

That said, Google has the right to censor what they own. Yes, it's "censorship", and it's quite allowed and legal. It might not be "right", but at least in this case we're not losing anything that's very exclusive - to most of us, pr0n is pr0n.

Comment Re: iPad too fucking expensive (Score 1) 139

They might edu discount you a tiny bit. If you buy them by the thousands. Otherwise expect to pay shelf price, or you build a time machine to the 90's Apple.

Source: Local district IT, already seeing them give iPrices the finger, but not looking forward to endless hours of scut work that will result from deploying everyone's new chromebooks.

Comment Re:VPN's are about to be.. (Score 2) 78

It's funny. My first thought was "Yep, gonna see more VPN sales." and then I realized, we already are. Consider the frequency of mentions, then of mentions of specific offers, then even the frequency of straight-up ads promising to solve spying.

It's no wonder there's so much effort in owning TOR nodes and branding it a pedorist tool. The number of people who use TOR has increased, yes, but more dramatic is the ballooning number of people aware (and interested). Say what you will about his patriotism (or lack) but Snowden got a lot of people covering up the red blinky weakspots they didn't know they had.

Comment Some unmentioned FF's (Score 1) 353

Here's a couple of little QoL perks I haven't seen (I skimmed) mentioned:

* Text-to-link (or something like that) or any other equivalent that will grab URLs and hyperlink them. You should (as always) double-check the actual destination of a weird link/post/message.

* Text-to-image (or something like that) is a toss-up. Any direct IMG link will be displayed in-page (handy on forums), but sometimes it makes layouts look a little awkward. You can blacklist sites (use wildcard) or pages from triggering it.

* Used to have one that would try to capture text fields (like the post I'm writing) and would allow for some historical fetching, like if your browser crashes or a Next Page load fails. L*S did one gag dedicated to just this. Might want to check the fine boilerplate (I didn't) or just skip it if you're super-tinfoil, seeing captures of yourself can feel uncanny. Some of you may already be in the habit of clipboard/notepad dumping for safety, but consider that automation is consistent.

Echoing on NoScript and RequestPolicy, they're privacy tweaks but also improve safety. After whitelists are done, page layout and even load times can improve. Take control of what your machines accesses.

Comment Nothing to do (Score 5, Insightful) 389

Look. Look there, at that guy. The young, healthy frycook.

Maybe he's heard that without exclusive skills, he'll end up in terrafoam someday, so he's decided to try and buy a ticket from the diploma printers, and trying to scrape together at least SOME of the gouging education costs (which have long since skyrocketed past "easily afforded with a 20h/wk part-time") rather than become another sucker hooked by the predatory student loan system.

Is there anything for this guy to do? We're already post-labor. We don't pay shit for "labor". There are no ditch diggers. Even those burgers he's flipping, he's only paid because he has the "skills" required for a warm body to deliver a result. The warm body itself is worthless.

Is there anything for this guy to do? He has a few options today, but the moment a robo-cook's cost ticks under his $8/hr or whatever? The existence of that job will evaporate. Globally. "Overnight", if you will.

Is there anything for this guy to do? There's a lot of naive posts saying "There will be jobs" with examples like fucking scientist. We have an ideal, motivated homo sapien right here, eager to work and rearing to go, and no robo-owner will look twice because nothing he does is worth money.

We're in tech, we've got some of the best tickets for The Ark, but we're not going to need ten billion robot repairmen.

Submission + - Site Launches to Track Warrant Canaries

Trailrunner7 writes: In the years since Edward Snowden began putting much of the NSA‘s business in the street, including its reliance on the secret FISA court and National security Letters, warrant canaries have emerged as a key method for ISPs, telecoms and other technology providers to let the public know whether they have received any secret orders. But keeping track of the various canaries scattered around the Web is difficult, so a group of legal and civil liberties organizations have come together to launch a new site to monitor the known warrant canaries.

The Canary Watch site is the work of the EFF, the Berkman Center for Internet and Society and NYU’s Technology Law and Policy Center and it works on a simple concept. The site maintains a list of all of the known warrant canaries and periodically checks each organization’s site to see whether the canary is still there and then lists any changes to the status.

Right now, Canary Watch lists 11 organizations, including Lookout, Pinterest, Reddit and Tumblr.

“Canarywatch lists the warrant canaries we know about, tracks changes or disappearances of those canaries, and allows users to submit canaries not listed on the site. For people with interest in a particular canary, the site will show any changes we know about,” Nadia Kayyali of the EFF said in a blog post.

Comment Regarding the book (Score 1) 591

Yes, it was dumb. Tell the kid off and get back to your day. Imaginary powers (much like angry trolls on a screen) are of no direct consequence - if they are, there's a few Unnatural Phenomena awards you can cash on.

I wanted to suggest that behind the he-said-she-said, the kid was probably showing off the book (the page*, even to some kids, like other generations did with dad's nudiemags or a Sear's catalog lying around. Which, again, tell the kid off and send parents a note to also tell the kid off.

*https://leonsmom.files.wordpress.com/2011/03/tbbk1.jpg, supposedly. And looking at it, you can tell their fascination was with something weird and exotic, kind of like telling Billy that one secret word that my dad muttered and it made uncle Joe gasp and I think it's a bad word and I don't actually know what "vagina" means but I'm gonna whisper it to Billy and we're gonna giggle cluelessly at something that we can at least tell is foreign and taboo and that makes it AWESOME nervous giggle goes here now keep your voice down Billy.

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