None of those schemes should make you happy, whether it's done via cash or done via debit card.

Yeah, they should.

See what I did there?

ust wait until Daesh (aka ISIS/ISIL/IS) decide to use this to target people in the west who criticize their particularly noxious brand of Islam, and as in target, I mean track you in real time and behead you on the street, at their leisure.

Not sure why your post was marked flamebait. It's a chilling possibility, that illustrates in very stark terms why we cannot afford to simply give up and allow our privacy to be stripped away, and why we need to roll back the invasions into our personal and digital space marketing firms and government agencies have already made. Our very lives may depend on it. Facial recognition is terrifying in this context.

Google and bing don't help. Google highlights creationist mythology as though it were scientific fact, and bing has the same nonsense cropping up as its first hit. Clearly these mysanthropes have managed to game the search engines, and the search engines can't be bothered to fact-check their own results (or highlighted articles! Come on Google, grow a brain!). A pity they can't use that same intelligence to think their way out of their own ass.

US Industry (Cisco et al) betrayed a basic position of trust. They did so when they helped facilitate the Great Firewall of China and assisted the Chinese government in imprisoning dissidents. Hell, they did when obese captains of industry were on TV signing accords with Chinese politicians days after the Tiananmen Square massacre.

However, facilitating the NSA's indiscriminate violation of everybody's privacy worldwide was a step too far for just about everyone, and now they are getting the smackdown they so richly deserve after decades of betraying our most basic, sacred constitutional principles.

In short, fuck every tech company who cooperated with the NSA. You haven't even begun to get what you deserve.

I've experienced literally none of those things on any of the Macs or iOS devices that I come in contact with daily. Are you certain that those aren't particular to your own system?

I've run across most of those issues at one time or another on Mavericks, on both my work macair and my wife's powerbook (the display port drop-outs are particularly annoying). It isn't helpful to simply dismiss issues people raise ... frankly, it makes you sound like a systemd developer. Better for all of us if these issues are raised and fixed (even if the corporate master in question will never officially admit such issues exist). Then we all win.

> Gentoo + OpenRC here, fuck systemd. If the rest of you enjoy having something shoved down your throats for political purposes

THANK YOU FOR TELLING US WHAT YOU USE!

His point is that you have more reasonable options for a server Linux system than a distribution that has adopted an opaque init system like systemd that is being pushed largely by the desktop crowd (not that you need it for a good desktop...lots of people have been running modern Linux desktops since the 1990s, and have kept up with the latest changes, without adding the complexity and opacity of systemd).

Some options for a systemd desktop OR server Linux system:

• Devuan - a fork of Debian with systemd removed (https://devuan.org/)
• Arch + Openrc (http://systemd-free.org/)
• Gentoo + Openrc (http://gentoo.org)
• Funtoo (http://funtoo.org)

and many more. All of which many find to be much more suited for servers than Fedora or Debian with systemd.

I met a couple of the Nebula folks at the Chicago Printer's Row Lit Fest yesterday. Very nice people, with a genuine interest in Sci Fi and deep knowledge of the Genre.

A really nice change from the Hugo acrimony of weeks past. I'm delighted to see Niven in there ... he's certainly waited long enough! I'm even more delighted to see a number of books I haven't read yet winning ... looks like my pile of summer reading just got higher.

Let's not pretend everyone has issues with systemd. Plenty of people are totally ok with it.

Until they have to debug a boottime issue (which crops up quite frequently in production environments with systemd). Some overworked desktop/power-management developers and lazy devops folks have been seduced by the promises of systemd, but all it takes is one morning wasted tracking down boottime issues within binary logs and quirky systemd corner cases to make it clear just how bad an idea systemd has turned out to be.

Unfortunately, by then their strategy of subsuming other projects (sianara ntp, it was nice knowin' you), enforcing dependencies, making it more difficult to maintain alternatives (dropping support for biosdevname=0 for example) will have made it difficult if not impossible for those who wake up to switch to something that adheres to more sensible unix norms. I have used Linux since 1993, on my desktop since I could get X running with twm, and later through the gauntlet of enlightenment, gnome, KDE, e17 etc., but I fear this really is the beginning of the end for Linux as a viable alternative to anything. Unless of course Google steps up to the plate with a solid alternative (after all, they don't seem to use systemd in chrome OS). OpenRC is great, but with power management developers refusing the support anything other than systemd, it faces an uphill battle despite being a well established and in most ways a superior init system.

Perhaps the Debian Fork, Gentoo, Funtoo, Arch without Systemd, etc. will succeed in joining forces to maintain a sensible alternative or two. Because otherwise you might as well run OS X ... you get the same byzantine init and config crap, without the other hassles that in the past were worth it to run a clean Linux system, but certainly aren't with systemd in the mix.

Depends on if the US air force can independently verify that what they whacked was actually a terrorist HQ.

... and whether or not the moron was on-premises when it was bombed. If not, you might have to wait for the beheading video before nominating him.

Anybody using a selfie-stick should be bombed into oblivion.

Well done US military, in cleaning up that particular corner of the gene pool.

As a result of this, I've been looking for a slashdot alternative, since I expect Dice to wreck this site as well in the not to terribly distant future. Sad, because I've been here for years.

Anyway, Soylent News looks promising:

https://soylentnews.org/ ... anyone have any other suggestions? Kiro5hin looked good at one time, but went full-bore political.

Over at the Atlantic Monthly Conor Friedersdorf addresses the same issue, the recent criminalization of circumventing government surveillance, in the context of the prosecution of former House Speaker Dennis Hastert. Notably, he states, "Prosecutors may suspect Dennis Hastert of serious misconduct, but charging him with trying to avoid surveillance risks criminalizing harmless behavior." Harmless behavior which apparently now also includes the clearing of browser data.

So according to the U.S. Department of Justice, withdrawing money from a bank account in small increments or clearing browser data, in and of themselves, are now criminal acts. But it's just fine to delete thousands of government emails which are under congressional subpoena and which were illegally maintained on a private server.

In the U.S., law is not justice. It is a tool used by powerful thugs to threaten and persecute their political enemies while coddling their allies. Also, it is actually possible to renounce U.S. citizenship and I hear the weather is nice in Chile.

Presumably he means a "new era" of debate in which gun-rights advocates are not resoundingly winning that debate. This week's news is that the Texas legislature approved campus carry and both houses of the Maine legislature approved constitutional carry. And those immediately followed the Federal Courts rollback of carry restrictions in DC. And last year Illinois legalized concealed carry.

I don't see how Andy Greenburg using a "Ghost Gunner" is going to reverse that trend.

What Cool New Tech Would You Put In?

Some of the best new home technology is actually old technology:

- Masonry Heaters, were invented in the Neolithic Era. Unlike wood stoves or fireplaces they burn clean with almost 100% efficiency and require infrequent fueling, only once or twice a day. They also look cool, have a neat ambiance and fuel costs are far lower than any alternative.

- Nickel-Iron Edison batteries were invented over 100 years ago by Waldemar Jungner in 1899 and developed by Thomas Edison in 1901. The nickel iron batteries in Jay Leno's 1909 Baker Electric Coupe are as good as new. Unlike any other home electric backup storage technology they last for basically an infinite number of charge/discharge cycles and have many other desirable characteristics such as immunity to 100% depletion (which destroys lithium and lead-acid batteries) and the are environmentally friendly, non-toxic and 100% recyclable. The only downside is their mass, but unless you will be driving your house around, it's by far the best option. And unlike aluminum batteries, and the Tesla Powerwall, the Nickel Iron batteries are available today.

- Used shipping containers: Build your house out of them. Invented, depending on your point of reference, some time between 1933 (first containerized shipping in Europe) and 1968 (ISO standard published). It's environmentally friendly and your house will be impervious to tornadoes and earthquakes. Container homes have gone from being kind of trailer-park to high-design.

Of course I would want modern options such as photovoltaics and a ground-source heat pump, in addition to the old stuff. So my advice: You will do best to select the best of both the old and new, instead of exclusively one or the other.

Is that a US style "world" cup? so that would include a few US states right?

Not true! We'll probably allow one or two Canadian cities to play along, to give the World Cup(tm American Soccar League) "that international" feel.