Diners Tend To Eat More If Their Companions Are Overweight this morning, and First Birth From Human Womb Transplant.

So Ben Bernanke tried to refinance his home for a 3rd time in 5 years, and got turned down. Guess what, Ben? You shouldn't be treating your home as an ATM.

I guess the 1%ers still think that absolutely none of the rules don't apply to them, and that banks should continue to make risky loans to them, just because of who they are.

The new acquirer, ncrowd, currently has an empty FAQ page, so former dealfind and teambuy customers need to rely on blogs and the press for information.

Sure, the conventional start menu is back, but the live tiles off to the side are going to present two problems for business, who will probably want to lock that feature down tight or remove it entirely. I can't picture employers wanting their employees to customize the menu so that they can see their facebook, twitter, or other social media feeds. And I don't think employers want every supplier of data to a live tile to know every time the user clicks the start menu.

Sure, you could set a time between refreshes (but that sort of defeats the whole concept of a "live" tile), but the suppliers of the data feeds are still going to have some idea of when the person starts work, etc.

Back when businesses first integrated Windows into their workspaces, there was a tremendous waste of time by employees playing solitaire and arranging the desktop the way they liked it, always fiddling around with the wallpaper and icons. And then the web came along, in many ways making things worse. And smartphones. Live tiles are going to be yet another distraction. Every time a user goes to start another application, they're going to be presented with several opportunities to look at something else instead. Distractions lead to mistakes and lower productivity, and businesses will be paying for this. So too will employees who find themselves out of a job because they get caught up in the "new shiny" to the point where their work suffers.

At least with Windows 8.1, you can disable showing the start menu by default and never see a live tile. Unless Microsoft provides a way to completely lock down or disable tiles in the start menu, I don't think Windows 10 is going to be classifiable as "business friendly".

and

Pretty good argument that not all users of Tor are doing it to hide acts of wrongdoing.

As Yuval Harari points out, "What is so special about us that allows for such cooperation? Unflatteringly, it is our talent for deluding ourselves. If you examine any large-scale human cooperation (or co-option), you will always find some imaginary story at its base. As long as many people believe in the same stories about gods, nations, money or human rights (memes and antitropes) - they follow the same laws and rules (of conduct)."

https://www.coursera.org/course/humankind

While looking around for a minecraft clone so I could see what the hype was about, I came across something called Dwarf Fortress. The New Yorker describes it as SimCity's evil twin.

This canard still persists today. I know it can be beaten - I did it, and it's simpler than I thought.

First - the background. Back when my retinas were getting lasered on a regular basis, I would fire up SK2k in an emulator under KNOPPIX. This gave me a chance to focus on large graphics on a large screen, instead of stuff like fonts. It worked too - my eyes would recover after a few days of intermittent gameplay.

So, since SC2K had always held a certain fascination for me, I determined to beat it. Without bothering with complications like variable tax rates for different industries, etc.

It turns out that the real limiting factor is good old H20. Starting with a flat world and enough water available in rows in the center, you never have to add any more water. Why in rows? Because your pumps benefit from having water on 6 of the 8 adjacent tiles, giving them the best space/capacity trade-off. Why in the center? Because you'll put your industries along the edge, so half (or more near a corner) of your pollution goes to your neighbors, instead of spoiling your water supply.

You do NOT need a seaport. Ever. Or a marina. And you can ignore most of those "Commerce needs new connections" messages.

The optimal grid is 9x9, surrounded by roads on all sides. Continue this pattern, even through the water area (a grid of 9x9 blocks of 9x9), surrounded by a ring of 9x9 blocks for commercial / sports development later in the game. Leave enough of a gap for a set of highways to go from one edge of the screen to the other (forming a huge # sign), by working from the edge to create more 9x9 blocks.

DON'T draw all the roads right away - just lay them out as you need them, otherwise you'll go broke.

If you build police departments, fire departments, schools, etc. as required, you will eventually "break the simulator" Turns out (it's in the docs) that there are only 150 "mini simulators" in the game. You'll know when you're broken this because the next launch arcology will fill up immediately. Do this a few times, and you can start eliminating public utitilies, schools, etc., to increase revenue even more.

Once you have built and populated enough launch arcologies, you'll get the "The exodus has begun" dialog. Game over.

It took me 24 hours, going from 1900 to 26-something. I took a load of screen-shots, to document progress, and saved the game almost every "year", just in case that last run hadn't worked, but it DID!

'The Cause Of Empire Leads To The Graveyard'

"This is a vision of the world in which might makes right - a world in which one nation's borders can be redrawn by another, and civilized people are not allowed to recover the remains of their loved ones because of the truth that might be revealed. America stands for something different. We believe that right makes might - that bigger nations should not be able to bully smaller ones; that people should be able to choose their own future...

America is and will continue to be a Pacific power, promoting peace, stability, and the free flow of commerce among nations. But we will insist that all nations abide by the rules of the road, and resolve their territorial disputes peacefully, consistent with international law. That's how the Asia-Pacific has grown. And that's the only way to protect this progress going forward."

Time was when most of us were complaining about needing more ram, more cpu, more storage. Today? Computers are cheap, fast, multi-core, more energy-efficient than ever, with more storage than many of us will ever use ... and by the time we fill up those huge hard disks, we'll just buy a newer, faster computer with several times the storage and even more ram for less.

And if that's not enough, there's online storage. It's not just Linus Torvalds who can say "Only wimps use tape backup: real men just upload their important stuff on ftp, and let the rest of the world mirror it." Everyone does it - even when they really shouldn't.

"Fast, good, cheap - pick two?" Not any more. For most users and use cases, we really can have it all, literally right in the palm of our hand if that's what we want. Sure, a lot of the old skills that were needed when hardware sucked are now obsolete, but I for one don't miss those days. Not when I can concentrate on doing what I want instead.

I took another poster's advice and went through my two dormant accounts and friended a bunch of my old friends. But looking at the date many of them made their last post or last journal entry, it looks like many of them are gone, probably for good.

On another note, I simply don't have time to read, never mind respond to, AC posts any more. I know how disappointed that will make a certain individual (and everyone else will be going YAY!!!! FINALLY!!!! :-)

So what's next? All I can say is that I guarantee it will probably be more interesting than anything I've journaled about so far. I just haven't quite decided where to start, because it's a bit more complicated than anything else I've written about to date.

Curiosity works for a lot of us. We're willing to turn aside from the tools that work for us for a bit, even build up some technical debt in our area of expertise, to explore some new technology that might in the long run prove beneficial, or at least interesting (and if you're a curious person, poking around stuff that's interesting is FUN).

And yet, we probably all have areas where we're a bit of an iconoclast. And technology is littered with people who just refused to accept change, and became irrelevant. We don't code everything in assembler, or c, or c++. Even I use java (gasp) on occasion. But what happens when the computing environment becomes so user-centric (a GOOD THING) that people are free to choose what works for them without having to seek the advice of self-anointed gurus whose advice is no longer relevant?

We should ask ourselves why "haters gotta hate"

Sometimes those "gurus" fail to move on, becoming more shrill with every passing year. It's a personal thing for them - they cling to what used to work because that's all they have. They become trollish, haters, because if they're forced to realize that their life's work is now worthless, what will they have left? What WILL they do? They know in the back of their mind that they're too far behind to catch up, so this fear drives them to become even more rigid in their views.

Which brings us to Alexander P Kowolski, the HOSTS file troll.

Here's a guy who posts up to 100 anonymous responses a day, going through my posting history to crap-flood every discussion. I think this response sums up the problem pretty well, at least from my perspective:

He has time and again failed to realize that people who use alternatives that work for them, such as adblock, don't give a damn about his stupid hosts file and the supposed benefits. It's THEIR computer, and they're free to use what works for them - and it's NOT going to be his HOSTS file. And crap-flooding discussions with challenges to enter some useless "pissing contest" of the benefits of one over the other is irrelevant to pretty much everyone except him. So why do it? Perhaps because he is so psychologically invested in his world view that any alternative is just too scary.

So why "feed the troll" by posting a journal entry about him?

That's a valid question, for sure. But if you see him as a victim of technological change instead of just a troll, it might help put some of the other "wars" on slashdot into perspective. We get comfortable with our niche, change happens, and we have to, once again, learn a whole new slew of technologies. The prospect can be daunting, sometimes it's just a feeling of "oh heck, here we go again, change for the sake of change yadda yadda yadda ...", and it's easier to say "I'm just going to stick with what works" ... until one day we wake up and realize we're in danger of becoming totally irrelevant.

It can happen to any of us. Did it happen to APK? Or was he always like this? I don't know, and I don't really care. Either way, the lessons to be learned are the same. Haters gotta hate, because if you take that away from them, they have nothing to fall back on. They are more to be pitied, same as many of the opponents of same-sex marriage, now that they can't bolster their own sense of self-worth by hating gays and lesbians, are feeling a bit lost.

http://developers.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=5725497&cid=47939979

I can see well enough to use a computer again, which came as a welcome surprise. Huge thanks to the retinal surgeons who patched my left eye back into some semblance of working order, and to the work over the last several years by the team of ophthalmologists and tech assistants who helped preserve much of the sight in my right eye.

It's been an interesting experience so far, and one that I have learned a lot from. I've been told that the betting money would be on my retinas being relatively stable for the next two-three years, though the vitrectomy was such an insult to the lens that I can expect to need it to be replaced in the next year or so.

The more things change, the more they stay the same ... especially here on /., where APK wasted no time claiming that various anonymous posters were me. Comments like this one must be driving him even nuttier - will he be accusing that poster of being me?

Only on slashdot :-)

Unfortunately, I never expected to use a computer again, so I don't have the passwords to my old accounts (neither my original one, nor the one I created with a gender-appropriate nic after I was outed as a transsexual). I'm sorry for the inconvenience. Just like I'm sorry that I wasn't able to keep people up to date before falling off the face of the net.

There are still plenty of challenges ahead, both near-term and long-term. And plenty of unanswered questions that I will do my best to clear up. I was going to do it elsewhere and just post links, but really, this is home (despite the beta crap).

by David Swanson / September 13th, 2014

To the extent that the U.S. public is newly, and probably momentarily, accepting of war -- an extent that is wildly exaggerated, but still real -- it is because of videos of beheadings of James Foley and Steven Sotloff.

When 9-11 victims were used as a justification to kill hundreds of times the number of people killed on 9-11, some of the victims' relatives pushed back.

Now James Foley is pushing back from the grave.

Here is video of Foley talking about the lies that are needed to launch wars, including the manipulation of people into thinking of foreigners as less than human. Foley's killers may have thought of him as less than human. He may not have viewed them the same way.

The video shows Foley in Chicago helping Haskell Wexler with his film Four Days in Chicago -- a film about the last NATO protest before the recent one in Wales. I was there in Chicago for the march and rally against NATO and war. And I've met Wexler who has tried unsuccessfully to find funding for a film version of my book War Is A Lie .

Watch Foley in the video discussing the limitations of embedded reporting, the power of veteran resistance, veterans he met at Occupy, the absence of a good justification for the wars, the dehumanization needed before people can be killed, the shallowness of media coverage -- watch all of that and then try to imagine James Foley cheering like a weapons-maker or a Congress member for President Obama's announcement of more war. Try to imagine Foley accepting the use of his killing as propaganda for more fighting.

You can't do it. He's not an ad for war any more than the WMDs were a justification for war. His absence as a war justification has been exposed even faster than the absence of the WMDs was.

While ISIS may have purchased Sotloff, if not Foley, from another group, when Foley's mother sought to ransom him, the U.S. government repeatedly threatened her with prosecution. So, instead of Foley's mother paying a relatively small amount and possibly saving her son, ISIS goes on getting its funding from oil sales and supporters in the Gulf and free weapons from, among elsewhere, the United States and its allies. And we're going to collectively spend millions, probably billions, and likely trillions of dollars furthering the cycle of violence that Foley risked his life to expose.

The Coalition of the Willing is already crumbling. What if people in the United States were to watch the video of Foley when he was alive and speaking and laughing, not the one when he was a prop in a piece of propaganda almost certainly aimed at provoking the violence that Obama has just obligingly announced?

Foley said he believed his responsibility was to the truth. It didn't set him free. Is it perhaps not too late for the rest of us?