Follow Slashdot stories on Twitter

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror

Comment Re:Question is (Score 1) 157

Well, back when I was a kid, 'autistic' meant, 'screaming and flapping your arms when somebody turned on the light wrong.'

"Rain Man" was a movie about what was, at the time, considered a high-functioning autistic.

Most of what we would nowadays call 'ASD' was just 'quirky' or 'weird' or 'shy.'

Go find a copy of the 1980s nuclear war film Testament. Watch the scenes with the sons. One son, the youngest, has several scenes with things like 'running the TV, a radio, and a record player at the same time,' 'being told that he can't only eat bananas,' 'wearing ear muffs at the dinner table' and so on.

Nowadays, that's clearly stimming, sensory restrictions and ARFID, and probably ADHD, and he's be labelled 'AuDHD'.

Back then? He was just being a kid.

But nowadays, 'doesn't look people in the eye "enough"' means you're ASD, and 'looks people in the eye *too much"' means you're ASD.

Given that we don't even know what 'Autism' is, we ascribe way too much to it.

Comment Re:Why does it matter? (Score 1) 33

Hope you're up on your Sumarian antivirals because I'm gonna Snow Crash your ass.

You're still alive, I see. Yes, it's true, the lethal payload mentioned in the above video isn't actually included within it. I knew there was little danger in linking to this video, but don't you realize it could have been much worse?

Comment Re: He might still be alive (Score 1) 103

And we wouldnÃ(TM)t have to deal with the enshitification of the iPhone and the Mac.

I won't say it about the Mac but it definitely applies to the iPhone: it came pre-enshittified and Jobs was definitely personally responsible it. The iPhone was a terrible regression in the history of PCs, where we somehow went from personal computer revolution of the 1970s back to the IBM-decides-what-you-run of the 1960s.

It would have been good for Jobs to have left the computer world a decade earlier than he did. He didn't need to die, but everyone would be much better off today if, in the early/mid '00s, Jobs had opened a tire shop or restaurant or gorilla costume rental business. Anything but handheld PCs. It's been nearly two decades (!!!) since Apple out-Nintendoed Nintendo and we still haven't recovered. If anything, things are getting worse.

OTOH the modernization of Mac OS to Mac OS X was done very well, and IMHO the word "Mac" would now be a semi-obscure 20th Century historical reference if Jobs hadn't brought in NeXT and made that happen.

Comment Re:Are people still using POP(3)? (Score 1) 47

I like being able to pull all my mail to my main machine, filter it into folders and have it, backups too.

I do all of that on my mail server. It's then accessible over IMAP, or I can fire up Roundcube in a browser. The filters are also managed through Roundcube. The VPS it runs on costs me maybe $12 per month, and that's not even the cheapest option out there.

Comment Cameron needs to rewrite Terminator 1 (Score 1) 120

The problem with the police station scene in The Terminator, was that the cops shot back. Now we realize, they wouldn't do that. "Well, no I can't stop you from seeing Ms Connor because you're not a human, so I guess go right in there and do what you need to, mister, uhrr, clanker skin job."

Comment Re:I *Hate* to Side With Google, But ... (Score 2) 78

if you're going to manage ANY ecosystem

The premise is that the customer (the person who owns the computer) has said "No thank you, I would rather that I (and my agent, F-Droid) manage it myself. Your interference is unwanted." That's what the owners are doing when they decide to install F-Droid.

I wonder if convicting some Google employees and everyone above them in the management tree of CFAA, might help remind everyone who is allowed to break whose computers.

Comment Re: Stupid comparison, apples and bowling balls (Score 1) 278

The difference between a 'personal' charger and a 'commercial' charger is 'is this being used by a person, or by the public.'

It's not different hardware. It might not even be a different firmware, depending on the manufacturer; I know that for my charger, all it takes to make it 'commercial' is to point it's configuration at a payment portal.

Comment Re:Stupid comparison, apples and bowling balls (Score 1) 278

Nope. You're conflating 'the car' with 'the driver.'

You, and your car, spend about ten minutes a week at a gas pump to pump 500 miles of range into your box on wheels.

Your neighbour spends about twenty seconds per week to put 500 miles of range into his box on wheels, which takes his car 12 hours.

Comment Re:Here come the edge cases! (Score 1) 278

Don't bother arguing with Fluffernutter; he's tried to argue in the past that 'clicking climate start in the car's app' is somehow too complicated for the average person to do, and too much hassle, where as climbing into an ice cold ICE car and waiting for the cabin to warm up while you sit there in the driveway is faster, easier, more efficient, and better.

Slashdot Top Deals

"Why can't we ever attempt to solve a problem in this country without having a 'War' on it?" -- Rich Thomson, talk.politics.misc

Working...