Posts by Trilkhai 230 publicly visible posts • joined 20 Aug 2016
If the alarms only go off in reverse when there's a wall in front of the car, that's a step up on my stepmother's car — it always spends the entire time it's in reverse playing an alert beep in the cabin that's very similar to the beeping a large delivery vehicle makes. If it was audible outside the car, then I'd just figure it was warning other people, but nope, it's silent from their perspective...
I wonder how much of an impact all of this has on global warming?
Thinking about that as I noticed this headline right after hearing more talk about spending tax money to give hefty earned-income tax credits to people who can justify buying a brand-new electric car, thinking about the extra taxes/fees added in some countries/states to purchases of gas/petrol, electronics, cans, etc., non-carpool drivers being stuck in heavier traffic so the electric-car drivers can get their own special lane, and so forth. It's a bit annoying to consider that we might be making all of this effort only to have some (all?) of the impact wiped out by things like this...
(Don't even go down the "we need to colonize other planets so we have somewhere to go after trashing the Earth" road, considering that's on par with "I need to buy a janky roach-infested apartment so I have somewhere to live when my habit of setting the furniture on fire causes my $900,000 house to burn down.")
It's really a shame... I was a member on the original service when it was called ONEList (1997–1999), through the eGroups merger (early 1999), early years of the YahooGroups buyout in mid-1999, then intermittently after that — and all three were far more user-friendly than the alternatives available now. I tried participating on one of the two main alternatives, since a group I'd been on before moved its archive there, but it was just too much of a PITA to bother with.
Also, moderation controls over the list and individual users were available on ONEList/eGroups before YahooGroups bought them out. (I spent far too much time in college in 1998–1999 manually approving messages for a very active 2,000-member discussion group that kept having massive flamewars over stupid things.)
Yep — but even before that, the discussion-groups were run by ONEList. eGroups was originally an email archiving service launched around the same time, and the two companies merged a year or two before Yahoo bought them to create YahooGroups.
Also, El Reg is incorrect about another thing: both ONEList and the eventual eGroups allowed owners to set their list to either allow all messages, only allow messages approved by a moderator, have new accounts (or ones whose owners had misbehaved) moderated either for a set amount of time or until the owner/mods cleared the status.
I'd like to stop buying from Amazon But that would mean I'd have to stop buying anything, as local stores stock almost nothing I need.
You're not stuck choosing between "Amazon" or "local" — there's no lack of other stores online that sell the same things, often for better prices.
For example:
Nowhere stocks ... decent brands of pliers, like Knipex.
Taking the lazy route for the moment, it took me about two seconds for Google Shop to show me a whole bunch of places selling those — all of which have to also appear in regular Web searches in order to show up there, I believe.
It's not just happening with WF — people shopping for services like Instacart are also encountering the same issue, partly because bots are snapping up most of the spots and selling them.
If the first (and only) place a person's mind goes to when encountering the word "master" is to an institution that hasn't existed for well over a century, then the problem isn't with the term, it's with the person's inability to place terms into context and obsess over long-past events. It's like a woman finding the existence or mention of dresses or skirts traumatic because females as a whole used to be banned from wearing pants in Western society; there's a point where the emotional hypersensitivity and "trigger"-phobic behavior just becomes ridiculous.
I don't know about other areas, but I've been volunteering at the polls in California for the last 18 years, and we've accepted completed absentee ballots for at least that long. In recent years, we've gotten more dropped-off 'mail in' ballots than in-person voters, and we're bound to get a *lot* more of them in November since the state decided everyone will get a mail-in ballot.
As a side note, everyone healthy who can spare the time and can safely do so should volunteer at the polls if they can. Normally most of our volunteers are senior citizens, but many of them are staying home due to the virus, so as many people as possible are needed to fill in for them. Besides that, it's an amazing education in how the voting system works behind-the-scenes.
When I finally decided to upgrade from my Moto E4 last summer, I went with a Moto G6 (Amazon exclusive without the Amazon cruft) because it didn't have the hideous notch the much-more-expensive G7 models did. The hole in the G8 looks like it could feasibly be small enough to not annoy me too much, IF it wasn't off in the corner, which does make it look a bit like a defect now that you mention it. I wouldn't pay anywhere near that much for one, though; my budget is closer to the $130 I spent for my E4 and G6.
That's not his masterpiece, the original film's version was. ;-)
About 20 years ago, I had a nice SVGA CRT that could be cranked to a refresh rate of over 130Hz if I didn't mind the extra heat it'd give off. One warm summer evening, I momentarily placed a mostly-full large (maybe 12oz) glass of Sprite on the hutch above it, forgetting that we had hyperactive kittens in the house until one of them knocked the glass face-down onto the top grate of the monitor. It made a very interesting sizzling zap sound with a fwoosh of what seemed like steam, I unplugged the whole thing in panic and flipped the monitor upside down as well as I could to drain onto paper towels.
I checked it the next day, and there was not only no sign the paper towels had even gotten damp, the inside of the monitor seemed perfectly clean and dry as well. I cautiously plugged it back in, and while it couldn't go over 121Hz anymore, it still worked just fine. I can only guess that running with such a high refresh rate heated the components to the point that it vaporized the soda on contact.
As a result of this, multiple trans mods have either stepped down or have been forced to leave the TL in tears because of how they've been made to feel in the room.
Can't SE manage to find enough adults to volunteer that they're not required to rely on people who are so unstable/hypersensitive that they run out of chatrooms bawling like babies over somebody using the wrong freaking pronoun?
Cripes, as a regular on some forums for interests that are traditionally seen as masculine, I frequently encounter newcomers who automatically refer to me as "man" "bro" "dude" or similar, but I don't consider it a big deal. If it bothered me, I'd just switch to a new username that explicitly referenced my sex/gender in some way, like "Lady Trilkhai" or something like that.
we really like to rub those recipient's noses in it, to make sure that everyone knows that they're receiving welfare (and make sure they know their place as well)
You mean like by calling a pregnant woman (or mother with a child under age 5, per the rules) a "low life scrounger" rather than just someone who's trying to get enough food to feed her kids?
That also describes most video games that take place in anything resembling civilization. The player is told that there's a big evil monster/person (who often isn't shown doing anything evil) they need to get rid of, and in order to do this, the player runs around honing their fighting skills by killing anything they can get away with killing, and earning money or gaining supplies by stealing from caves, buildings, dead bodies, or anywhere else they can find stuff — IOW, actively being closer to "evil" than the monster/person who spends the game waiting around for the 'hero' to show up.
To be honest, I'd never even seen any of the GTAs until last December, so I had the same basic impression you do. It came as a bit of a shock to learn that many of the later GTAs have a strong stance against drug use, drunk driving, homophobia, xenophobia, gambling, or hypocrisy, that they're packed with police officers & SWAT teams eager to enforce the law, and that some make it painfully clear that joining a gang or the mafia has devastating consequences for the person's innocent friends & family. (I was also very surprised when it turned out that players often spend at least as much time in the game on legal recreation like bowling, golf, dance/comedy clubs, etc. as they do on illegal activity.)
The numbering refers to the underlying engines, e.g GTA IV is the fourth generation, and its multi-platform expansions were The Lost and Damned and The Ballad of Gay Tony. If we count all of the Rockstar-produced GTAs that either were numbered or direct expansions/spinoffs using a numbered engine — which then includes Vice City Stories & Liberty City Stories (as platform is kind of irrelevant) — we end up with GTA V technically being the thirteenth game in the series.
This exactly. I started adulthood being actively friendly with everyone, but gradually learned that a) a certain percentage of guys persistently won't grasp/accept that I'm only interested in platonic friendship, and b) some of them will then proceed to aggressively 'pursue' or even stalk me, sometimes even if I am in (or claim I am in) a relationship. Now I'm friendly if there's a good reason to talk to somebody, but otherwise largely keep to myself just for my own peace of mind.
1985 was obviously better in Britain, musically at least and better monsters. ... Windows 3.11 was the best it ever got.
Windows 3.1x didn't come out until 1992; Windows 1.x came out in 1985, and it definitely wasn't the best of the GUIs at the time.
Musically speaking, I believe all of the English-speaking countries in '85 were getting a similar mix of each other's pop songs, so it's hard to say the experience was better on that count. (I have no idea what monsters you're talking about, so I can't comment about that.)
For a long time, I had my family's PC startup sound set to a cheerful game-host voice announcing, "you have won a fabulous day…chained to this machine!"
My one nastily juvenile tech moment was when, as a joke, I created a large .wav file consisting of a very loud Macarena sample ("hey, Macarena! Ai, ai") that repeated the "ai, ai" for 20-30 seconds, then put it in a self-extracting .exe that'd replace the AOL 'got mail' sound and sent it to my boyfriend as a prank. I thought it'd just trigger once before he figured out how to fix it, but instead it consistently caused Windows to crash before he could reach his inbox, so he disappeared & reappeared from AIM over-and-over (much to our mutual friends' great amusement) for a good 45 minutes before he figured out how to fix it.
Everyone from districts 24, 44, 49, or 62 (see district map here) ought to be calling, sending physical letters, etc. to their rep, making it clear that regardless of their party, you will vote against them in the next election & encourage others to do the same. Links:
Nope, sorry, wrong. As an autistic 3-year-old, I was definitely able to read at least on an average pre-teen's level, and my favorite activity at home as a toddler was pretending I was "in school" by completing math, spelling, grammar & reading worksheets that either my mother made up or that came from elementary-school-level workbooks. My nieces are maybe a bit above-average in IQ, and thanks to having one grandparent who is a retired teacher, by age 3 both were at the "gleefully point at words and read them aloud for adults' benefit" stage reading-wise... My mother also tells me that she remembers teaching herself to read as a toddler by getting her mother to read words aloud for her out of the newspaper.
A pretty large percentage of my library's staff at this point are volunteers (including those who sell donated books/media in a side room to drum up a little extra money for the library), plus it's closed on Sunday and often only open until early afternoon on Saturday. Definitely not the well-funded library system we had when I was growing up here...
A hell of a lot of people either don't have homes, can't afford Internet service, and/or don't have jobs that involve available Internet access. In the US, at least, libraries are both heavily used by them, as well as quite well-used by a lot of people since we can check out movies, audiobooks, etc. and many older adults in particular prefer to read novels on paper.
As for why someone would used a monitored device: as the article pointed out, people often go online via library computers because it's their only way to access the websites they have to use in order to obtain or keep government benefits.
I didn't get drunk, take drugs, attend raves (or even exciting parties), yet I developed an appreciation for their music back in the late 90s as a college student... They were on heavy rotation on the local alternative radio station along with other high-energy music/bands, and I was high enough on life to think it all sounded awesome.
I think that in cases like showing database contents, CSS is fine... The problem is when it's used to produce static documents instead. I periodically become frustrated enough with the number of errors in e-books I'm reading that I'll take the time to fix the problems myself (removing DRM if needed), and the auto-generated CSS in there is almost always an absolute nightmare to deal with. The most jaw-dropping I recall encountering a couple of years ago was one really sluggish book that turned out to have every single character placed in a separate [span class="text"] element, sometimes with multiple font-formatting spans overlapping them so that using search-and-replace resulted in the formatting change applying to far more text than it should've been. (I eventually gave up with that one and downloaded a pirated copy that had more reasonable code.)
I remember getting a 14.4k modem and thinking 'I cant read that fast'. But that was OK as I was on AOL and they took care of that.
I remember wanting to upgrade from 14.4 to 28.8 so badly as a teenager that I made a number of charts and graphs to prove to my parents that the up-front cost wouldn't take too terribly long to be surpassed by how much they'd save in AOL hourly fees.
I was thrown by the use of "gimp" as well, as in American English it's normally used as a very derogatory synonym for "physically disabled person." Normally I can figure out any unfamiliar terms on El Reg through context, but this one stumped me enough that I had to look it up on Urban Dictionary.
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