In aerospace, independent verification and validation is a critical part of the regulatory process. Every change has a reason, every reason is documented, and every change is reviewed by someone else.

Hey, 1990 called and wants their headline back.

There was a LOT of discussion about the "Nintendo Warriors" and the precision ordnance guided by soldiers with years of training in their parents' basements. Operation Desert Strike, and then later Desert Storm.

In Japan, you can buy a special locker which the delivery companies can open. Inside it, you have a small tethered "signature stamp" so they can drop off a package and stamp their paperwork with your stamp. The lockers vary from flimsy vinyl rainproofing tents to steel boxes, and you can buy any of them from Amazon.JP.

I always wondered why they didn't just say "rounded corners were functional; they don't rip pockets or carrying sleeves." A design patent has no functional component. Boom, dead patent.

Fucking DRM is a whole 'nother problem!

Fuck off, fascist. There's a HUGE FUCKING ESSENTIAL DIFFERENCE between a spy agency spying on other countries and it spying on its own citizens.

Not only would I prefer not to see people with negative reputations, but I'd actually prefer to filter on a relative basis in terms of people who are clearly much better than me.

You've got a game theory problem there: why would those better people want to see you?

Why should any random asshat running a website expect to be compensated? It used to be the case -- before the sociopathic marketing droids invaded -- that people put up websites because they wanted to, not because they expected to profit. And the Internet was better that way.

Take off your rose colored glasses for minute. First of all, no-reply emails are a means to notify a customer of something. They are one-way.

I am writing to "notify" you that any business using with this attitude is run by shitty people and deserves to fail. You don't get to dictate what I'm "meant" to do!

Please direct all responses to no-reply@gofuckyourself.com

Sometimes when I have a choice of companies to buy a product from, Ill send an email or fill out the web form asking the same question to multiple companies.

And that's the other asinine thing about bullshit web forms: they force you to send the message to one recipient at a time. As a slightly different example, say I want to write my Congressmen about something. Instead of just writing an email and putting three names in the To: field, now I have to answer a slightly disjoint set of (potentially) invasive questions three times over. It's not that it's hard or even that time-consuming; it's that it's galling because I shouldn't have to jump through hoops like that.

Think about it - if you were running a very large company, would you rather: a) have a catch-all email that runs the gamut of issues, feedback, etc. b) have a way to submit categorized feedback via web forms?

If I were running a very large company, I would want everyone to be forced to just give me their money instead of having to go through the trouble of actually selling something to them in return.

But I wouldn't be entitled to that -- just like how companies are not entitled to be able to dictate communications terms to their customers, either!

Nope. Fuck that class of company too, because it's ultimately the same damn thing. Fundamentally, companies are either willing to engage on the customer's terms... or they aren't. And the latter don't deserve anyone's business.

I like $1.99 apps that have no strings attached.

LOL, as if $1.99 and closed-source weren't strings!

On a real "no-strings-attached" system you can just do:

$ sudo apt-get install youtube-dl
$ youtube-dl [video URL]

I'd call that even easier, since you don't have to screw around with a payment processor.

Firefox in F-Droid is depracated

Why?

On devices with a large enough screen for the UI to work well, I like using uMatrix instead of uBlock + NoScript.