When attempting to change your password on the genealogy website Ancestry.com, you get this not-so-helpful message:

New Password -- Your new password should be between 5 to 24 characters long and can be any combination of letters, numbers, and some symbols.

Really. Some symbols. Not that they're going to tell you which ones. Oh no, that would be too easy. You have to guess!

The best I can figure out is some dev is just fucking with people for fun. Either that, or they had to spend way too much time writing escape code for special characters and this is payback.

For the record, so far I've determined that a period, hyphen, and underscore are all acceptable and a space is not. . - _

Ugh!

If I say Charter of Rights and Freedoms, nobody in America has a clue what I'm talking about.

If I say Bill of Rights, everyone on both sides of the border (and in other countries) knows what I'm talking about.

Capiche?

Now get off my freaking case, civvies.

The idea "Hey, what if I line up powers of 20, multiply them by sort of coefficients, and add them...?" - is a huge intellectual leap. So far as I can determine, it only happened twice. It never happened in Europe.

http://fredoneverything.org/the-maya-who-woulda-thunk-it/

Trump's attack lines on this are spot on:

and

Those are valid statements. I find it hard to to argue with these.

http://s4.reutersmedia.net/resources/r/?m=02&d=20160711&t=2&i=1145024204&w=976&fh=&fw=&ll=&pl=&sq=&r=2016-07-11T232013Z_2799_S1AETORGYTAA_RTRMADP_0_USA-POLICE-PROTESTS

Well, after doing all these non-squishy 1st and 2nd year pre-reqs for engineering, I'm starting to wonder if my PhD might do better in a more squishy role, since I'm better at taking tech concepts and translating them into human speak. The major question is, since both squishy and non-squishy are Doctor of Philosophy, should I resist the inevitable drift to the squishy side? Ecology, environment, energy policy are things I grok, and both the long term implications and short term changes that are most effective, a set of unique skills that few possess, and how to translate that into rural speak too.

So, what do you think? Fill up my 3rd and 4th year slots with squishy stuff and push on through? Will this lead me to (gasp) having to work in cities, or can I find a way to work in villages and towns and skype in for research meetings when there's 20 meters of snow in the pass and it ain't going to be cleared for 10 days, so relax, eh?

Where on EARTH is the /. UI for starting a journal entry? LOL!

I don't know how it's done, if you don't just know to navigate http://slashdot.org/journal.pl?op=edit

After a year, active as a wag and shameless flirt on Twitter, it looks exactly the same in hindsight.

Object lesson. When working in a professional job, don't take two hard courses at the same time. In getting ready for a PhD in Civil and Environmental Engineering (already have a post-grad DRM), have been taking engineering core courses, and this semester I took Environmental Science 160 and Physics 222. Got a 3.8 in ENVS and a 1.0 in PHYS. Sigh.

Have heard a lot of people have problems with this class, so am just going to retake it, NOT take the 2 3.5 hour classes a week that exhaust me and leave me no time to do homework before it's due, NOT do it without a new laptop, and take the version that is 4-5 classes a week during the day, so that I'm not exhausted.

Wish me luck.

inverted cathedral...and the ambulance died in his arms...snowflight daggermond itching bravely. Tonight augmented.

/. has no PM system, so post public messages to me here

No spoilers, just some quick comments.

It isn't bad, but it isn't great, either. Good enough is where I'd put it. Of the Daniel Craig Bond moves, I'd rank this one as #4 (of 4).

A couple of things that stick out at me were the early car chase scene. WTF people? Who wrote this? It wasn't so much a car chase as "lets watch expensive cars tool around Rome". No shooting, nothing exciting. Just what looked like an orange Lamborghini chasing whatever custom car Bond was driving. (Okay, it was a custom Jaguar C-X75 chasing a custom Aston-Martin DB10.)

See, Bond was driving a bullet-proof, armored car. WTF was he fleeing from? The bad guy couldn't get to him. He could've come to a complete stop, let the guy roll up, wave, and ask him to do his window and it wouldn't have mattered.

The second scene that bothered me was the train fight scene. Holy fuck! Are there no other people on the train? The bash their way through like 4 or 5 cars on a 7 car train and there aren't people scrambling to get out of the way. No staff, no passengers, nothing. It was like a ghost train. Then they get off at the next stop looking freshly showered and pressed, not like both protagonists just got their asses kicked and should be covered in bruises and welts and walking with severe limps.

The final scene that irked me was where Bond was chasing the cars in Austria with the plane. The plane loses its wings and a strut, then slides down the mountain only to bash through a barn and smash into one of the bad guys cars. And NO ONE IS OUTSIDE TO SEE IT! It is like they found the only Austrian ski resort village that IS TOTALLY DEVOID OF PEOPLE.

I guess they smashed up so many cars they had to save money somewhere, and skimped on the extras (except for the opening scene in Mexico City).

A little long, and a little disjoint. It really helped that I was at an Alamo Draft House and ordered a couple of beers while watching it.

All in all it really reminded me of a Roger Moore Bond as opposed to a Daniel Craig Bond. Not Moonraker bad, but still...

A couple of other notes on Ubuntu 15.10 on my hacked-up HP ProBoox 6475b.

1. The fingerprint sensor is a Validity VFS491, 138a:003d. Validity Sensors was bought by Synaptec back in 2013, but regardless those sensors have never been well supported under Linux. I did get this one working by digging out the old driver patch that HP supplied for SuSE Linux 11 back in 2012. I applied that to libfprint-0.0.6 and compiled everything from source. Ugly, but it works. I forwarded the patch over to the fingerprint-gui guys to see if they are interested in adding it in. Every little bit helps.

2. Playing with my Yubikey Neo I found that the pam-u2f package in the PPA (v1.0.2) segfaults on the pamu2fcfg command. I filed a bug report, provided debug and core data, and the developers patched the git HEAD source in a few hours. I rebuilt the utility and supporting libraries from scratch to test and all is working! Score one for open source software! Expect it to be released on the PPA next week.

That was really the last little nit. Everything went much smoother than I expected, and I'm quite happy with the setup. Every last feature on the machine works without a hiccup -- except the WiFI scanner, but that isn't part of the machine.

I'm actually fairly impressed with the open source AMD video drivers (Radeon 7660G, which comes with the A-10 processor), but don't play games on the machine other than WarZone 2100 so I don't really stress it.

I've tried everything, but can't connect to the scanner over WiFi. I can connect over USB, but the scanner is on the other side of the room and that defeats the purpose of the WiFi.

I have installed Epson's iscan, iscan-data and iscan-network-nt packages -- the latter being the one supposed to allow Epkowa devices connect over the network. Yes, I modified the epkowa.conf file in /etc/sane.d/ using both IP address and DNS name, but to no avail.

The printer works, the scanning port (1865) is active, but no joy on using simplescan, xsane, or iscan. Drat!

Ubuntu 15.10 automatically found my Epson XP-610 wireless printer / scanner and tried to install the proper printer driver, but failed miserably.

By "miserably" I mean it got stuck halfway through installing the package file and gummed up their software installation utility. I had to "kill -9" the appropriate, defunct dpkg instance. A reboot will do it as well.

The problem seems to be the proprietary Epson driver relies on LSB (Linux Standard Base), which is no longer installed by default in Ubuntu. The fix is to download the appropriate .deb package from the Epson site. Install the driver with sudo dpkg -i epson-inkjet-printer-201308w_1.0.0-1lsb3.2_amd64.deb, which will install but not configure because of missing LSB as a dependency. Finally, do a sudo apt-get install -f to handle the missing dependencies and you can go into the Printers app and add the printer, as the drivers will now be available.