Yep. I have a whole bunch of things that I can do. Playing video games is only one among them.

It has gotten a lot worse, hasn't it?

I want a search engine to identify when someone is attempting to manipulate it and to counter that. I don't want Google Bombs like "miserable failure" regardless of how I feel about the actual politics, to make the results useless. I'm not so childish as to expect an echo-chamber everywhere I look.

This means no more companies whose entire existence is to try to improve someone's search rankings.

As to data being collected, I'm actually okay with the top 80% of searches in a given day being used for advertising revenue, assuming no geographic data beyond nation, and no personally-identifiable data is collected. That's how a search engine would make money, by selling ads based on what people want to know about. If Ford has a press-release about the new Focus, and people search for that, I'm okay with ads related to the Focus or to Fords coming up. I just don't want more than "this term is being asked for this many times on this day" to be reported.

Call this a guess, but I expect that if the other gender isn't present, the reduction in social problems resulting from a sexual difference compared to the majority would probably be greater than the social problems of homosexual students being around only their heterosexual peers of the same gender.

Or in short, homosexual adolescents are attracted to their same-sex peers and cannot express that attraction will occur in either situation, but a lack of the opposite gender being present might make it less obvious since there's no opportunity to perceive that they're ignoring the opposite sex.

Yup. I've had to deal with contractors in the physical realm (cabling and other physical infrastructure) and in the logical realm (switch and router programming) and with the cabling if we weren't constantly inspecting them we got absolute crap. Punched the wrong color pattern (sorry we're T568A, but deal with it), leaving out drops, leaving out service loops, leaving out cabling supports, attempting to pass-off PVC in a plenum airspace, attempting to use lesser jacks (we called for Leviton for a reason dammit!), and lazy, lazy bastards that couldn't comprehend no zip ties.

On the switch side, they're getting $1200 per switch to program and rack them. We started calling it $300 a screw but that suddenly became not-funny after we found them using 10-32 screws in 12-24 racks, or leaving half of the screws out altogether, and that's before dealing with the crappy programming that I've had to go back and fix. It's so much fun when they never test the user VLAN, but the management VLAN trunks through, so the switch MUST work, right?

Anyway, Contractors are lazy bastards that will do as little as possible to satisfy the contract, and when called on their mistakes will try to weasel out of them. A NOAA satellite fell over at the manufacturer's assembly building because the morons forgot to check all of the bolts in the assembly hoist, and they got away with simply 'making no profit', when they should have paid the entire cost of the SNAFU. Perkin Elmer, who ground the Hubble mirror wrong, should have had to pay for the cost to repair it IN SPACE or should have suffered the corporate death penalty, had their charter revoked.

Screw contractors. They'll screw you.

Looks like we've hit peak 3d printer, at least as far as the near-term is concerned.

I'm wondering if this will be analagous to the daisy-wheel printer. For certain applications it's the best choice, but those are very few and far between, and are entirely based on fixed fonts and software made to do a standard set of rows and columns with fixed-width characters. They work great for printing multi-part forms and for where one wants text that's more readable than dot-matrix, but that's about it.

These first generation consumer-grade 3d printers are like that, but worse, because there's not much in the way of a business market compared to those paper printers. They were bought by businesses that specifically needed rapid prototyping, or they were bought by hobbyists that got into it as the latest craze. There's only so much of either, so once that small market is saturated there's less need for companies supplying whole printers.

I've actually made a similar argument before. When boys are socially ostracized they've tended to turn to technology. Turning to technology gives them peers, and as a group they tend to delve deeper into the nuts and bolts at a young age. When those kids become adults they tend to gravitate toward technical subjects, especially computers, because they've developed a ken with the machines from such a young age.

It makes me wonder, if all of the people that came into tech in this fashion were discounted from the numbers, would those numbers be closer to parity?

The causes of the gender divide begin in childhood, and become integral with society to where genders are expected to be certain ways. I suspect that this girls' school will probably drain girls from other schools that were already interested before it establishes new interest.

What do you mean by, "don't see a future for themselves."?

As in, they've looked to the future, and what they see bodes ill, so they don't see a reason to participate, or they haven't really even considered the future too much, and are screwing around in the same way as the parable about the grasshopper with winter approaching?

Because I can tell you, it's probably more of the latter than the former.

Based on my experiences at work, there are lots of 'boys' that really don't give a damn and would have been happier in other careers anyway.

I'm actually in favor of gender-segregated junior high schools, mainly because of the showboating that goes on due to the hormones. It's been demonstrated that it's significantly curtailed when the other gender isn't present to display toward.

Well, I dislike it because it makes it much harder to administer a box as a UNIX-type machine with a simple text editor. Now it seems like I'm stuck with meta-scripts invoking meta-scripts invoked by other scripts to do something as simple as changing my DNS servers. A whole lot of stuff just got a lot harder because of an abstraction layer.

People are not smart.

There are panhandlers at the freeway offramp lights around here, usually because they can stand on the left side of traffic near the driver's side. If you consider that your average light takes about 90 seconds to cycle, there are about forty times an hour when cars are sitting there. If one driver, every other light gives $2, then the panhandler can make $40/hr while sitting at the light. The advantage the panhandler has is that since the potential givers completely flush and replace every 90 seconds, there are new marks constantly, and it's unlikely that any would see anyone else giving money, so they may feel obligated to be the one to do so.

I figured out it was a borderline scam when I saw the bicycle that the panhandler had sitting off in the bushes. It cost more than the car I was driving.

What do you want to name the fork? I vote for flock.

I don't think that there ever was supposed to be a Duke Nukem Forever. It was supposed to be a joke, as in, no game development would ever happen, so we would be waiting forever. Unfortunately someone else ended up with the rights to the franchise and didn't realize this.

S'okay. I've been in local Fandom for almost 25 years. Shouldn't be worse than eighty clones of the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons...

Writing drivers is hard mmmkay...

If systemd comes to dominate Linux, we could see something more like 2020: the year of the GNU Hurd Linux replacement...

I had not really considered using Hurd until the systemd explosion. Maybe I'll load it on a spare box to see what I get.

I think I'll wait for the computer with the nontouch 'mouse' that determines what I want to do without using another device.