Are you kidding me? Without electronics and industry, all performance arts are live and local. There's no high-quality music on demand from iTunes or YouTube, no recorded music playing at restaurants, parties, or festivals, no constant background music in television and movies. Maybe you can get crappy records made out of wax if you're lucky.

During the day, when most people are doing grunt work, the gymel expert might not be anything special. (Or they might -- people are not solely defined by their profession.) But at night, when everyone's sitting around a fire relaxing? I bet someone who can make strange and beautiful music would be very popular indeed.

Unfortunately, this is true of many art forms. TV has become so much "reality" TV because it is formulaic and easy and cheap to produce because it has no production value. Movies have become very uniform and bland, also, because the "spice" they use is special effects rather than writing a decent story, because it is cheaper and easier to do. Music is not "performed" an more, but "produced" by stringing together bits of this and pieces of that, then "normalizing" it by compressing the living shit out of the dynamics to the point where you can easily hear the whole sound go "squish" on every beat of the thing that used to be a kick drum. And so it goes.

The good news is that every now and then, some market niche will buck the trend . . . going to see a local band play live . . . buying bread that came from a bakery rather than a factory . . . seeing an independent film that was produced by an artist and not subject to the whims of a studio exec . . . but these niches are just that, and not enough to reverse the trend, at least, not yet.

Anyone working as a coal miner is so far past the "I'm willing to do jobs that suck" threshold that it has vanished over the horizon.

Yep, but so, sometimes is the "Jobs that are available, that I can get to" threshold. I know a lot of people who are stuck in this type of mess because:

• They were born in East Bumfuck, and
• They were born poor because they live in East Bumfuck, and
• They have no transportation because they are poor and
• They can't commute far because they have no transportation and
• The only job they can find that is within walking/biking/bumming a ride distance is the one they got.

Pay close attention to that bumming a ride distance. If you are dependent on another family member for a lift to work, and you are poor, you know that one car that works (not counting the ones parked on the lawn) will break because they're poor and can't maintain it well. You're not going to go anywhere that that family member doesn't deem, and so, there you sit, another generation festering in the rot that is East Bumfuck

I know it first hand because these folks are my in-laws. Some of them have escaped (very few, my wife being one), and some of them are going to, but mostly the opportunities just aren't there.

Mod this guy up because he actuall read all the words and demonstrated the ability to grok basic sentence structure.

That map is so much better and more informative than the tube map that I don't know why the latter exists at all. I know it's supposed to be a simplification, but if you condense that many cables into one route you end up with a map of countries that border the sea, not network routes. For example, there's nothing on the tube map to indicate that the UK is only one or two hops from Japan, or that the Seychelles are at the end of a line, even though it's clearly visible in both your map and the tube map's questionably accurate source material.

Five years after it was passed, yes. And the Supreme Court case was resolved on a technicality about Article III standing.

No, they most certainly were not. The full text of Prop 8 was:

There is no grandfather clause in there. The California Supreme Court did the grandfathering the year after Prop 8 passed. And the same sort of people Brendan Eich donated money to showed up to defend Prop 8 there, too.

This was not a small thing for the people affected by it, nor were the resulting court trials insignificant. If you'd like to understand this better, I recommend reading the transcripts of Perry v. Schwarzenegger.

Seconded. 2-4 GB is enough to turn off your page file in Windows, and that's where performance improvements for normal desktop apps ends for me. I have 16 GB for gaming, but I'm not sure I've ever used more than 8.

You know Prop 8 passed, right? Plunging thousands of gay and lesbian couples who had already married into years of legal limbo? Which was part of an ongoing movement to continue denying gay and lesbian couples legal recognition forever? And you're aware that that movement springs directly from millennia of unjustified prejudice and violent persecution that still lingers today, right? And that all of this deeply affects the lives of many Mozilla employees and Firefox developers? There's a larger context here, and none of that disappears just because a federal court throws out a law.

Nobody has a right to a specific job. Especially a job that makes them the public face of an organization that relies on a large and diverse group of outside developers. Eich chose to be an oppressive bigot, and chooses not to apologize for it. That's his choice, but he doesn't get to dodge the consequences just because he's a good coder or manager.

The Mozilla Foundation board should have known better. This isn't a new criticism.

Your understanding is reversed.

TDMA for WiFi is what we have now.

MU-MIMO is simultaneous comms with each device.

You know, I was going to make a Roland Picquipaille joke, and then I looked, and lo it was Hugh Pickens, the second copypasta/clicktroll master.

I'd rather replace/upgrade a $49 widget than a $500 TV.

I need something that will play iTunes. AppleTV and homebrew fiddly options are out. I need it to just work.

Also, I'd love to watch what happens when the voice recognition is active and you tell some "go fuck yourself". Will it immediately search for and start playing porn?

He doesn't want to manage stuff in house because it's hard. But wait, that's his job, and why he draws C-level pay. If you are not just occasionally using it, the whole advantage of "cloud" goes away, unless you replace it with the concept of "outsource". Which might be his goal all along, either way, I would look for a new job. Cloud would be great if you needed to load test from 1000 machines or something, but even for that there are simulators.

That's not a thing, that's just a narcissist.

Woz spoke last year about this - how you should have your data, on your device, in your hand.