Because I'm funny, dammit! You want accurate parody? Some people use dead name to refer to a former after a legal name change. Others use it to refer to their prior name when beginning gender transition. By far the majority of use seems to belong to young people working out their individuality issues. If I had a nickel for every teen/20-something working thru some sort of delayed Erikson-stage-2 autonomy-vs-shame thing by declaring their old name dead, I'd be a rich xeno. Each cluster of people seems to think they own the language, which of course is silly in every case. Whatever. Words belong to everyone.

I don't have to be faster (or more right) than the bear, just faster than you^h^h^h the next coward... :)

Awright, bait taken:
1. "Asking people to be civil to each other" is absolutely my point. I object to the disorganized list vomit of all things a person can do wrong; in its place (as others have noted) we ought to say something positive or give a directive, such as "Don't be a jerk."
2. Precious snowflake or thick skinned; make up your mind. I can't do both for you.

True but irrelevant. The Necronomicon has nothing to do with the social notion of a "dead name" which roughly translates to "Don't call me by the hated name my inauthentic narcissistic parents gave me, even though I have been too lazy or inconsistent to legally change it, yet I will become enraged and publicly insulting if you do not refer to me by an obtuse nickname I've only told to a handful of people I felt safe disclosing it to."

With respect to the policy overall, it's like an angsty high-school kid exploded on the page, with a convoluted list of serious actual crimes intermixed with imagined slights and vague conditions defined by perception rather than action or intent. The list translates roughly to: "We're having technical difficulties adulting just now. Please leave us alone for a few years while we remove the sideways tampon from our sense of community, and ability to differentiate between criminal acts and mild transgressions that function as social lubricant. It's going to be a minute."

In both cases: "TL;DR: Ignore me."

The comparison to the iPod is backwards -- snap did precisely every wrong thing. By contrast, Apple works hard to create a broad-market appeal: even if the product is drenched in hipster niche mystique, everyone and I mean EVERYONE hears about it. Then they manufacture and stock the item, no matter what it is, for something like 60-80% of the expected actual sales on the first go. This ensures it's enough to get in the hands of someone you know even if you can't get it yourself... while also creating an artificial scarcity to ensure the perception of demand. The secondary manufacturing waves then kick in, according to actual orders, and they coast from one relatively successful debut to another.

Snap, on the other hand... did everything wrong. I'm the target market for damn near every stupid doodad, but I didn't hear ANYTHING about it because it was marketed within snapchat as if it were a limited upsell only to dedicated snapchat users.. because they designed it to be unusable to anyone not already sold on the service. Then they put all their eggs into the initial manufacturing run rather than a calculated step-by-step ramp up. What a fuck-up. Did no one inside Snap think to make it enticing the other way around -- to make it usable for non-chat users but so much cooler if you signed up for Snapchat? Did they soft-open to create sufficient buzz? Did they advertise ANYWHERE outside their own underpants?

SHM, if you were designing a product failure, they ticked every box except for the one where the glasses light on fire.
That's next week, undoubtedly -- after they firesale and start shipping swollen li-ion batteries that have been discharging in a hot warehouse for months.

I've been with T-Mobile for... well, since they started in the US in the VoiceStream days. I worked for ATTWS for many years, family members have had Sprint and Verizon, ...so with a couple decades of input it's clear: T-Mobile is pretty good.

The problem is how godawful the rest are. ATTWS is still a pile of bailing wire pretending to be a premium carrier at top dollar. Verizon's technology is decent, but the customer service is incompetent at best, and the pricing schemes are draconian. And Sprint... oh Sprint... their customer service motto is "we don't care," their technical philosophy is based on lock-in, and their billing policies are designed by people who run those fitness gyms that you can't ever get to stop billing your card even after the service ends. By contrast, T-Mo is amazing, because they just keep being pretty good.

PLEASE, T-Mo, don't do this. Sprint's infrastructure is barely worth it, and the human capital over on the yellow side of the fence needs to be sent back to barista school, from top to bottom. Why trash a good thing for another .000002% growth? DON'T MERGE WITH SPRINT, she's a-no-good-for-you!!

Curious re-use of something we saw several years ago -- showing yet again, there's (almost) nothing new under the sun. From a previous write-up I did:
For several days in in March 2010, erroneous or malicious router messages originating from state-owned China Telecom instructed Internet carriers that their connections were the fastest available worldwide. Automated acceptance of these instructions caused portions of traffic to be diverted through CT networks, effectively subjecting some U.S. Internet users to Chinese government proxy filters. On April 8, 2010, the same type of messages rerouted a large portion of the world's Internet traffic (all traffic on 15% of network routes) through CT networks for ~18 minutes, including all US .gov and .mil sites, Senate, Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, DoD, NASA, and US Commerce Dept; also websites for Dell, Yahoo, Microsoft, IBM, and specific Australian and Japanese sites. Analysts indicate target selection appears to be intentional & carefully-planned even if activation may have been mistaken or ill-timed. Access to SSL certificates from the China Internet Information Center (an arm of the China’s Ministry of Info & Industry) would mean all SSL traffic was exposed. While the Chinese government insists the latter incident resulted from IPV6 migration errors, the incidents demonstrate intercept and blocking capability that affect critical infrastructure.
Curious that CN state actors did this to pull traffic in for technical access, while the US state actors appears to use the same to push for legal access. Immoral yes, but simple and slick.

Yep, linux linux linux... all us geeks can rant about the virtues and advantages, but at the end of the day, the rank and file want to run office and a web browser. MS Office is the lock-in that sells Windows... and while Wine promised to solve that it's way too complex for most people. Enter PlayOnLinux, which makes common Windows software installation just as simple as on Windows. Point, click, install. Holy $#%@ it just works, and ALL that Windows telemetry is gone, because Windows is gone. And I don't miss it.

To keep it short: I set up Linux Mint and ran updates (about 10 min total install time, from bare metal), installed PlayOnLinux (about three clicks into the Software Manager app), then used that to install MS Office (including Visio), registered and all. The Cisco VPN works (of course), the browsers are faster (of course) and work well with corp apps, and MS Office just works. Tons of other stuff Just Works(tm). Corp IT never hears from me, all the tools just work, everything's much faster, and I didn't have to do ANYTHING at the CLI -- in fact, it was easier and much faster than typical interminable Windows setup processes. It's beyond me why people still put up with the stress of Windows, or insist that it's easier (it's not) or more secure (*snort*).

Still with the flaccid keyboard?

I regularly fly through SEA, native habitat of the traveling microsoftie, where one can observe both variations of the species -- salesdroids and geeks -- going through all sorts of contortions to compensate for the flaccid member protruding from the front of the surface. In the boarding area you can see the surface balanced on one thigh with front edge of keyboard pressed against bellybutton while the kickstand still sloooooowly slides back over the knee. On the plane, you can see the kickstand retracted or dangling in empty air as the tablet leans against the seat in front, while the softie hugs the keyboard ever closer. On Alaska Air's first class side-mounted tables, the whole thing collapses front and back, unless the silverback of the softie species places it atop a firm leather pad cover from a recent Ignite or TechEd, turned at an angle for a little extra space. Only in the comfort of its home conference room or spacious ergonomic standing desk can the Surface both recline its torso and flop out its full flaccid glory to be appreciated for... the normal functionality of other laptops.

In all seriousness, the surface line is a nice showpiece, but the OS makes it a mediocre tablet, and the floppy+kickstand mess makes it a profoundly handicapped laptop that takes up more room front-to-back than a typical 17in laptop. And they don't seem to be promoting the version that does have a good hinge system. FFS, it doesn't matter how much battery life the damn thing has if the ergonomics are so infuriating that I'd rather use a chromebook -- which iirc still connects to gogo internet for free.

Sigh... It's sad to watch the "peanut panic" crowd -- the people who claim all sorts of wild stats about allergy deaths unsupported by evidence -- and the companies that make money by giving them a soapbox. This US/UK-centered phenomenon is a cultural and economic situation, not a medical one. According to the Centers for Disease Control/CDC researchers and American Medical Association/AMA's actual reputable scientists (not med mfr salespeople), the verified death rate from the relevant allergens has been consistent for 50+ years, as long as they've been keeping statistics. No significant rise.

What *has* happened is the massive thousand-fold rise in the number of people *diagnosed* with *some* anaphalactic reaction to peanuts and a zillion other irritants. When more people get *informed* there is a risk, the risk gets wildly exaggerated because of medical liability to any medical provider that does not address the completely-consistent-not-rising remote possibility of fatal reaction. And that translates into sales of expensive epi-pens from the company that conveniently funded the first and oft-cited major study into peanut allergy. And keeps funding other shoddy whitepapers on the topic. And keeps raising prices.

These guys are thieves. Those people are fools. Nothing new under the sun.

Hypocrites, criminals, and nihilists, oh noes! This is precisely what the electorate wanted, what they voted for, and now someone (anyone?) is surprised by it?

Hillary should be thrown in jail for the email server and Benghazi... but Trump's illegal hidden email and messaging servers? It's ok because yuge hackers and fake news.
Trump wiping his ass with the constitution as Bannon hands it to him sheet by sheet? No problem because Muslims and walls and Messicans! And a million uppity fat women in pussy hats!
Take a sledgehammer to American healthcare because they hate the black guy? No problem, because God helps the sick, and you know, Jesus loves tax cuts.

I weep for the nation. This is the childish petulant sonofabitch we deserve.

I can't express how much I don't want these features. Intents? Unseen data sharing? Unwanted desktop links? More "apps" that are just PII-leaking bookmarks? Blurring every border? Solutions to 9000+ problems I don't have. Ffs Chrome is like Benjamin Button progressing backward in time to the bad old days of giant local applications engorged with ole and directory services and odbc and the kitchen sink, with so many attack surfaces that they become legion. I just want a damn browser not a Gitmo feeding tube.

Sigh. I feel old.

Didn't see direct links -- just off to Betanews blather. So here they are...

• Mint 18.1 cinnamon version
• Mint 18.1 mate version

Disclaimer: Been using Mint for years now. It's the schiznit.