I had a number of family members in jail that were sent to facilities around the US. I had looked into Pigeonly because of their telephone service rates. Calling inmates is ridiculous - either on their books or calling collect - it's a ransom to call long-distance. What I ended up doing instead was signing up for 3 different google voice numbers in the area codes of the prisons my family were all in and had them call me at the local numbers. While still a lot more than a traditional call, it was astronomically cheaper than long-distance, and cheaper than the plans offered by Pigeonly.

The federal prisons system has email access, and was the cheapest way for all of us to stay in touch. Snail-mail was bad. Sorting and scanning at the prisons is kind of a crap shoot. Sometimes letters wouldn't arrive until 4-6 weeks after we'd sent them. Sometimes they'd show up in 3 days. I think a few showed up 3-4 months latter. The intake office rejects all kinds of letters for arbitrary reasons. They sent back a picture we included with a letter, that my 3 year old had drawn for her uncle. Their note said it was returned because it was an "unsigned card".

My mom's prison had access to video chat. $20 for 15 minutes I think. We tried it 2 times. The latency and lag was really bad. Kind of felt like I was video chatting on an old 320x240 from the early 00s. The apps didn't have any kind of noise canceling / mute function with the mic so unless we chatted on headphones you start an infinite feedback loop. I tried once on computer and once on an iPhone. Because we were only doing it some my mom could see her grandkid, and this 3 year old wasn't into headphones we gave up the video chatting too.

Good on him for helping out people not savvy enough to setup VOIP lines in local area codes and making letter writing easier. Keeping up with people in prison is hard and expensive.

For a long time I ran an AppleTV and lived in the iTunes world. It was fine, a long time ago, but new/cheaper/better options exist. I personally rip all of my media to a Synology NAS and have started working with 4K media files. If I didn't have the 4k HDR h.265 media and the large digital collection I've amassed, I'd probably have gotten a FireTV - incredibly capable, plenty of streaming options, and cheap. But the 4k files that I have require a whole lot of horsepower, and I wanted to try to future-proof myself for a few years so I got an Nvidia Shield. Love the Android app options (it's fully rootable if you wanna get real custom with it), I run Plex on my Synology NAS with my own media, Kodi/Netflix/Prime all stream well, RetroArch works flawlessly with the Shield game controller so game emulation is super easy. All in all the Shield is pretty much a MPC replacement for fraction of the cost.

I've seen it happen at bars and clubs, though it's more common that the person is being 86'd by the bouncer because they couldn't keep their head off the table/bar or were obnoxiously drunk. I've also seen liquor store clerks turn sales away because they could smell alcohol on the customer's breath. I've also seen flight attendants refuse to serve drunk passengers on airplanes. Lots of US state and cities have what are called SIP (Sales to Intoxicated Person) laws.

Selling alcohol to an intoxicated person

An interesting viewpoint and experience I'd never considered. Are you open to the idea then of the offenders' having the same capacity of deleting their names and information of their offenses off the internet?

I've personally lost 2 fake name accounts on Facebook. I live in an ultra-conservative state governed by a majority conservative religious electorate (Utah), and I personally hold some liberal views. I changed my Facebook account from my real name, to a fake name years ago specifically to stop any potential employers from seeing any of my social media activity (even with stringent privacy settings) and then causing me employment issues. On two separate occasions Facebook shutdown my fake name accounts, so I just don't use Facebook anymore.

Anyone else notice that tons of apps on SourceForge (owned by the same great overlord as /.) are bundling MacKeeper with the installer? Seriously, I've tried to grab a few apps from SourceForge recently only to find the app I'm trying to grab wrapped with some kind of crap-ware installer. Apparently it's wrapped at random and doesn't always happen to everyone. After seeing a few installers that I got from SF fail or never install my app or attempt to connect to the internet (and thankfully able to be stopped by Little Snitch), I did a few google searches to figure out WTF... Apparently SF has been doing this for a while now - and so really, I partially blame them for the fact that so many people have this kind of crap installed on their machines... See the reviews on FileZilla for some reviewers complaining about this very thing.

I did something similar a few years back. I worked for a certain "fruit"-based tech company that has (had?) a policy in place that said if we repaired the same piece of hardware, through no detectable fault of the owner, 3 times in a 12 month period, that the customer was to get a brand new current model computer for free. So in an effort to get upgraded stuff for my family and friends, I spliced an AC power plug to a Cat5 ethernet cable. When I'd plug them all together, it would usually trip the breaker on the electrical panel and sometimes blow sparks out of the ethernet port, but within one or two attempts the logic board (or motherboard for you non-"fruit" techs) would be fried and no one was ever the wiser. o.0

I graduated from the Y too - and while most of my professors were not irrational about science, much of the student body was. I had a professor in a 100 level geology class who would start off most of his lectures by saying, "Now I know for some of you, your testimonies may tell you the earth is only such and such many years old. I'm not here to rock your testimonies or shake your faith, but simply to present scientific evidence as we understand it today."

I laughed every time he had to make a disclaimer to the believers about the validity of his lectures (and then face-palmed myself for going to a school where so much of the student body sticks their heads in the sand).

Simplest solution - use the ISBNs - plenty of bar code scanning apps exist to scan these in... For books without the ISBNs - create your own QR codes to catalog/scan them all...

Didn't this happen last leap year to the Zunes... oh yeah...

Why not just set the file permissions to not allow write access - then said director will be forced to work on and save files locally..

Speaking of rootkits, from TFA:

Linux servers have become a favorite home for memory- resident rootkits because they're so reliable. Rebooting a computer resets its memory. When you don't have to reboot, you don't clear the memory out, so whatever is there stays there, undetected.

I don't mean to sound like a moron or naive but are Linux rootkits really that prevalent? After doing a quick google search for "rootkits for linux", I found a few for the old 2.0 and 2.2 Linux kernels... Have updates that have since come out made life that much harder for the hacking community? Anyone have an idea of what's going on here, because I'm really surprised to see them make the claim that Linux servers are a new favorite home for rootkits...