Haha, as a fellow supertaster I hear that one -- I've got to where I say "no sauce" as if by reflex, and dislike a lot of "good" stuff as being the wrong kind of bitter. OTOH, I have often refused to eat something that tasted wrong to me, and meanwhile my fellow diners are busy acquiring food poisoning.

As to sleep, dogs vary wildly in their sleep needs, but it's most obvious with pre-weaning puppies. Most sleep a lot; some slow-developers do almost nothing but sleep. But a few are up and at-em very early in life, and sleep very little then or ever. The most freakish I've seen was active 8 hours a day already by age 2 weeks, and her physical development was miles ahead of normal across the board. (Normal 2 week old puppies can at best stagger around for half an hour before they get tired and fall down asleep; she could already *gallop* back and forth, with good coordination and balance, for hours on end.)

Going from WinXP to Win7 pretty much made my mom give up using the computer too. She is 85 but not at all dim. She just doesn't live on the computer like some of us do, and if anything doesn't work as expected, she's like "whatever" and stops using it.

Geez yes. If it ain't broke, don't go fixing it. If it ain't broke, a whole LOT of people already depend on it, and whatever you change WILL break it for too many of 'em.

This kind of breakage is a major reason why I use so many old software versions, across the board.

Considering the radically poor quality I've observed in Chinese steel (speaking of construction materials here) -- I'm not at all surprised.

The first that I noticed was concrete bracing, which I formerly used for something it wasn't really meant to do, but worked well for anyway. And it held up great for many years of hard use under severe conditions -- no broken welds, no destructive rust. The current stuff coming from China starts popping apart in a matter of months, and is rusting away within a year.

You gotta wonder what that's doing to our infrastructure that's being built using Chinese materials.

Or maybe you need not wonder, just look at the example of that new bridge... where was it, San Francisco? that per what I've heard is already falling apart thanks to the foibles of Chinese steel.

Consider also your climate-related road conditions:

Recently I talked to someone here in Montana who drives a late-model hybird... and they plan to trade the damn thing in ASAP, because in ice/snow conditions, it has no torque. Get it the least bit stuck, either in snow or an ice rut (a common situation under icy winter conditions) and it won't climb out, and it can't be rocked out. It is STUCK until someone with a non-electric vehicle comes along and pushes or pulls them out.

How about we stop trying to make one plane do everything? Build something small, fast, and minimal for dogfights. Build something with more range and capacity for when that's needed. Don't cripple the pilot's ability to use the tool, either.

And I always use a link on my menu bar, never a toolbar -- interesting how user method changes perception like that.

[goes to check]

Looks like IXQuick/Startpage has reverted to the old layout (that was quick) which would explain why today it again works fine without javascript. The 'upgraded' page quite definitely did not. Plus it was hard on aging eyes. Fucking pastels everyone has suddenly gotten into...

DDG used to require JS to work, but doesn't now.

...the biggest reason middle-class rentals are disappearing is because there's no money in it. At best, you might cover your costs, but more likely costs will exceed income, by as much as 50%. Who in their right mind would own middle-class rentals when they're so likely to be a financial loss??

It is far, far cheaper to rent. Yeah, you don't build equity, but you also just pay rent. You don't pay tax, insurance, and maintenance that exceeds the value of a middle-class home, and which can bring your total outlay to half again more than the mortgage payment.

Home buying benefits realtors and mortgage lenders a whole lot more than it does home buyers.

That's actually why I decided not to use Dropbox, Backblaze, etc -- because more often than not, the file I want back is on some HD not presently connected, and would therefore look "deleted" to the backup software... so it would be deleted from the remote backup as well. This is probably fine for a business box that doesn't have removeables come and go. Not so fine for my use.

That's a problem, yeah. I think it would depend on whether "intent to defraud" could be demonstrated, and whether it gets prosecuted as "theft of services"... there's a fine can of worms, considering that Facebook users are the product being sold by Facebook. Are they thereby defrauding their advertisers??

(In the U.S., generally you can call yourself whatever you like so long as there's no intent to defraud.)

This was 2001. At the time there weren't all that many options in free FTP hosts, let alone with decent bandwidth. Walnut Creek's FTP.CDROM.COM had been THE main archive host for the whole world for a decade, and a lot of scenes depended on it. Mirrors that could handle its level of traffic were rare to nonexistent, and often limited to university use. Bandwidth/hosting was still expensive and even our puny 4GB archive was still a LOT of data (IIRC total data was about 300GB). So yeah, single point of failure wasn't a good thing, but you can't entirely blame facepalmworthy users here. We used what we had. And it failed us. Mirrors have since proliferated and hosting/bandwidth have become cheap, so today's self-appointed experts think the world was always that way and anyone who did different was too stupid to live.

And they fail to consider that anyone with a good printer and an editing program can whip up a convincing driver's license, certainly good enough to pass muster as a photocopy.

And yet there are over 500 Facebook users right now with the same rather unconvincing 'real name' as my own account.

The only blocker I use is NoScript, with javascript entirely disabled for the whole site, and as a result -- for me, Slashdot's look has changed very little since its earliest days.

Everything needs to be more broadly mirrored, so there's not a single point of failure for the source community. One or two big hubs may be convenient but if that one or two go bad, then what?