If Verizon was really going to give her a new iPhone for nothing (but a contract extension), she should have still paid Apple the $100 to fix the screen on the old one, and then sold it immediately.

Meh... depends on what phone she had and has now. She probably has a 4S. $100 to repair it and then maybe sell it for $200... $100 net profit whooo... still worth it assuming you value your time less than whatever grief is involved dealing with putzes on craigslist. :)

The guy had already shown his willingness to publicize his dissatisfaction by tweeting about a minor inconvenience,

You know who reads the average persons tweets? Their moms.

https://twitter.com/DuffWatson

300+ tweets, to 400 followers (and I wonder how many of those followers are post-him-being-on-the-news). Seriously this guy is a nobody.

The tweet itself? That was just the catalyst, if the employee hadn't escalated it by pulling him off the plane, nobody would have given two shits about random nobody from minnensota posting his brain diarrhea on twitter where next to nobody cares. He may as well have threatened to tell his sewing circle.

See, the thing is, you're reading that I actually need .docx, which I haven't actually said anywhere

No I caught that, but decided to making the point that docx (actually the harder HR requirement to meet) is still a very low practical barrier.

But mate, cheers for the MS Office sales pitch.

By providing 3 ways to avoid buying it altogether? and one final way that costs less than a premium coffee?? Yeah... Microsoft is paying me well to shill for them, LAMO. :p

and being financially challenged I'm doing the work from LIbre Office.

Ok, so your "financially challenged". I can accept that.

And lets suppose you need your resume in DOCX format as part of the application process. What do you do?

We're trying to do it on the cheap so...

a) Do you really not have a single friend, family member, or neighbor who has office who would be willing to allow you to load your ODF resume, clean it up, and save it as docx? Really? Not a single one?

b) Employment offices - around here there are all manner of taxpayer funded, and volunteer organizations to help people get jobs -- they provide resume assistance, job boards, etc... surely someone there can take your file and help you get a clean DOCX version.

c) Grace period. ok, you have no friends and there are no support mechanisms out there for you to lean on. There are plenty of versions that will run for 30 days grace period before they insist on activating. Several don't even require a key to be input during install. Download a VLA ISO via a torrent site and install it, get your DOCX and remove it. Don't even need cracks.

d) ok, you have no friends, no employment support groups, and you feel even taking advantage of the free grace period is too close to piracy for your strong sense of ethics. $7 bucks a month gets you office 365 personal edition. That's pretty cheap for a legal and DIY option. Skip a meal and haul a bag of aluminum cans to the recycler and you've got MS Office for few weeks, more than enough time to get a resume in order.

Not to be disrespectful to your or your current position, but I'm skeptical you really can't get a reasonable docx version of your resume that easily.

So you don't have $120 to drop on Office Home and Student right now, despite it being an "investment" in getting a job... but really ... you don't know anybody who has a copy who will help you out? Nevermind the other options I listed.

As for PDF... sheesh that's even easier. Assuming your word processor doesn't have the capability built in, or your operating system via the pritner subsystem. (OSX can save to PDF natively, as can Linux if you set it up. And there are several free PDF printer drivers for windows as well.)

But even if all that is too complicated or esoteric there are plenty of online document convertor websites that will take your document and give you a download link to a pdf version. Just google "word to pdf"... even a newbie can manage that or will at the very least know someone who can help them with that.

No. In fact it's absurdly difficult to reliably create reproducible builds.

Yes and no. Yes, absolutely, its absurdly difficult to create identical binaries, for the reasons you mentioned.

But you can pretty reasonably get close enough to make manual inspection of the differences easy enough. And as you said the differences are usually filepaths, hostnames, timestamps etc so one can identify the difference as benign pretty easily.

That's not good enough for general build reproducibility, but for one off code to binary verifications of key pieces its reasonable.

AC isn't about transmission easy, it is all about transformers and mechanical systems.

I guess it would be more correct to say that AC is easier to transmit *because* of the relative simplicity of transformers at the end points.

I know nothing about electricity

So you figured you'd post your suggestion on /. instead of attempting even the most cursory self-directed research. Gotcha. Laziness for the win.

Is it just that we're so used to designing electronics etc. to use AC, or are there other benefits?

Its easier to transmit long distances, at high voltages.
Its trivial to step up and down to different voltage levels via transformers. The equivalent in DC is not simple.

Mechanical AC generators are simpler and cheaper to build and maintain. And nearly all electicity is generated from mechanical sources (turbines).

Hydro and tidal are water driven turbines. Coal, wood, biomass (methane), natural gas, nuclear, even geothermal electricity are all "steam driving turbine" eleciticity generators, wind is an air driven turbine.

That leaves solar, which IS DC. Worldwide, like 0.2% of electricy is from solar.

Batteries too, are DC, but are charged nearly exclusively from AC sources.

then why not put effort into designing AC sources of electricity?

I guess so. I mean, only 99.8% of electricity comes from AC sources. Just imagine what they could do if they put some effort into designing some AC sources, right? :p

Erm...

"Effective 2014-06-18 Freecode is no longer being updated (content may be stale)"

Or were you making a joke that just whooshed by me?

I would like to know what people watch who love the streaming from Netflix because there sure are plenty of them.

TV shows mostly. There's several. And all it takes is a couple series your interested in to burn off weeks. We've been watching Dr. Who episodes, about 4 or 5 a week, for, it feels like over a year now.

The movie selection is ... meh. There's generally always something I'm interested in watching, if I browse the selection.

But if I independently decide I want to watch movie X, odds are very high its not there, regardless of how new or old it is, and I'll need to source it from somewhere else.

Other than 2 TV shows from a few years ago that I missed when they were on, I've found Netflix's streaming offers to be very poor.

Yeah, I don't know, maybe you watch a LOT more TV than I do, or have really narrow interests but I miss more series than I've ever watched, so there's literally tons of stuff I haven't seen, or haven't seen in long enough that I'd watch or re-watch. More than enough to fill several hours a week for as far ahead as I care to imagine.

Seems like every Galaxy owner I've talked to has their own list of twenty things their phones does really shittily.

20 things? Wow... I've been entirely happy with my S3. My only complaint was the battery barely made it through the day, no matter how little I used it.

My new S5, solves that problem amply.

And really my only complaint about it, is a complaint about android in general... the UI is a bit schizophrenic (google vs touchwiz vs ??? ) and it shipped with two browsers ("internet" and chrome, two voice control systems, (google and s voice), multiple IM apps... messenger, hangouts, chaton, etc... so its a bit overwhelming.

As a linux enthusiast, schizophrenic ui, and overwhemling app redundancy is par for the course. After all, only on linux is "yet-another-X" a common naming pattern. :)

But i still see it as a flaw in the new user experience of the device.

I guess if i had to have another complaint about it, its that i don't much like or trust google*, and want to do more with the phone without being herded into giving google access to everything, and loading everything onto the cloud, but that's not a flaw of the phone.

* so what am I doing with android if i don't like google you might ask? Well... its simple...I see the walled gardens from Microsoft or Apple and they are even worse.

Fb and twit were instrumental for on location reports during rebellions ... Saying otherwise suggests that you are ... ignorant.

Instrumental yes. In the same sense that Bic pens were instrumental in me graduating university. However, if there were no bic pens I'd have found something else to use.

Likewise, twitter was instrumental, in the sense that it got used, but if there had been no twitter, they could have just as easily organized from something else.

And get uncensored news from buzzfeed

Don't get me wrong, Tor is a great enabler for countering censorship, etc... but advocating that these people need access to facebook and twitter? Honestly. Nobody needs that.

The Virtuix Omni is basically an omnidirectional treadmill.

You use it in a VR environment and to move forward, you walk forward on the treadmilll.

This should solve the simulator sickeness issue.

Sure until you reach some stairs, or a ladder, or need to jump down from a ledge. Or crouch. Or do anything interesting with a portal gun.

And where do I put the keyboard and mouse? Or do I have to line up my shots with a toy rifle instead?

Thus being wasted by people playing in a chair with a keyboard and mouse, because I'm tired from running, and have gorilla arm from pointing. Hell, even the xbox controller crowd will finally have advantage over someone.

Not saying i don't think it would be cool I was actually on a VR setup with a treadmill like this years ago at a tech exhibition (Duke Nukem 3D was the game they used) and it was neat. But it was really neat as a 5 minute tech demo... and that's about it.

I know that. That's WHY it its brilliant.

"I got assigned an IP ending in .666. I refuse to support any company with such obvious anti-christian leanings."

Brilliant.