I keep hoping that this cycle will be the one that demonstrates that we need real transparency, real accountability, and real limits of power to screw around in the name of “national emergency.”

Of course, when half the people who vote vote for lunacy, lunacy is what you get.

Kinda how we never go to the dentist when nothing hurts even though we really shouldn’t wait until it does

Now I find that this all depends on the character of your dentist…

Regular visits to many dentists I have known in my life result in un-necessary procedures, additional pain and lower quality of life in general as compared to if you had just stayed the hell away and taken decent care of your own teeth at home. Yes, this is unethical, but in my life experience 9/10 dentists I have visited are unethical and do push any procedure they think they can sell you, particularly if the procedure is covered by your insurance.

If we could get a “real” dentist rating system going where you could judge them before experiencing the high-pressure sales pitch from authority while you are in the chair under the light, we might make some positive progress. Good dental practices are good for the patients. Un-necessary deep scale cleanings, recession reconstructions, drill and fill of not-really cavities and so many other things have given dentists in general a bad reputation IMO.

Basketball is a bad analogy. Life is not a game played for points where the “loser” is the one with just one less point than the “winner.”

I would lean in more on bankruptcy. Bankruptcy should not be used as a strategy in business: run 10 risky businesses and bankrupt 9 of them to stem your losses while getting lucky with the 10th. In one sense, your creditors are fools for continuing to deal with you after you have demonstrated a pattern of serial bankruptcy, but that doesn’t stop the harm you are doing to all the creditors of your bankrupt business (like: unpaid employees, suppliers, etc.) who didn’t get a whole lot of option to not do business with you, or opportunity to research your credibility before accepting your promises to pay.

Sociopaths would say: it’s a clearly precedented legal maneuver, it’s “smart business” to take advantage of bankruptcy laws, screw the creditors, they took a risk and it didn’t work out for them. I would say that bankruptcy laws need to become more aggressive about protecting creditors from harm, especially when dealing with “fake people” corporations.

Yeah, AOL was so obviously lame that I invested in Compuserve… oops.

Some technologies are better skipped, ignored until they collapse under their own annoyance.

I typically pay US$250 for unlocked smartphones, and they are fine for me, my wife, my kids, friends and family…

If the screen is 100€ and the labor to install it competently (I suppose this is a DIY serviceable phone, but the screen?) is another 75€, that’s 80% of what I would be paying for a brand new phone.

We had multiple fireproof boxes loaded with floppy backups…

I remember the name Walnut Creek, but I don’t remember why. Did they ship the Slackware CDs? I had a couple of full sets of those, but ultimately decided that Linux needed to mature before I’d mess with it. By 2003 it had gotten there.

Linux was getting pretty nice by 2004. In 1996 it was a LOT rougher.

I basically left Windows in 2006 and never looked back. I did some cross platform work in Qt where I’d develop in either iOS or Linux and then hand the product over to the test team to compile in Windows - worked beautifully. Sure, there were things that worked in one OS that wouldn’t work in one or both of the alternatives, but when I figured out the problem it was 90%+ me “getting away with” bad practice on my development machine that once cleaned up ran everywhere just fine.

These days the Browser is 99% of the OS that means anything to anybody.

I have turned to scripting all of my desktop mods and keeping them in a git repo. So, when I nuke a system from orbit all I have to do is install fresh, add git, check out my repo and run the scripts.

I started programming in DOS professionally in January 1991. It was pretty clear how bad Microsoft sucked by February of 1991, and blindingly obvious when they “updated” DOS more than annually with “95% backward compatibility” which translated to: "we just broke all your programs and you’re only going to have to figure out which 5% of your code you’re going to have to update to make it work in this version - aaaaand, by the time you do that we will be releasing a newer version! ;-P "

Something called DrDOS came along and we used it just because it wasn’t updating and breaking backward compatibility so often. Since 640k wasn’t enough for us even then, we ended up putting the kludge “Phar-Lap 32 bit extender” libraries on our product so we could access all the cheap RAM that systems were being shipped with (2MB was pretty much standard by 1992).

Then there was the day that McAffee decided that our product’s main .exe was a virus. It wasn’t. It wasn’t infected with anything. It didn’t do anything vaguely resembling malware. McAffee just had a false positive pattern match with our software.

The Microsoft treadmill was a very real thing all through the 1990s - much like Android and iOS are today. Sure, you’ve got a cool idea for an app, but we’re going to keep shifting the OS underneath you so that you’re spending 90%+ of your time just recoding your same old app for the latest OS release. That way you don’t have any time to innovate and maybe threaten our business model.

Monitors don’t work like that anymore. The ones that could catch on fire are pretty much all in the landfills by now.

Gentoo got pretty well defined / easy to compile by 2004 - I managed to get a 64 bit system built and working after a couple of tries, each try taking multiple days of course.

How many times did I read the condescending “HOW-TO sound drivers” with it’s condescending opening of “If you must hear biff bark” and it’s virtually always unhelpful content. Maybe one install in 10 would benefit from the pearls of Linux Audio wisdom contained therein, and it was the best available source for YEARS.

I tried to use Slackware in the mid 90s. After two solid days trying to get my ppp dialup connection to come up after a reboot - it would come up in the first boot after install, run for days like that, but after any reboot it was dead and gone and nobody on the internet seemed to know how to deal with it. “Real men” didn’t use dialup, and people on dialup (self included) had no clue.

I declared it “not ready for prime time” due to that, and issues with sound drivers, and ignored it until 2003. In 2003 I tried some Cygwin and was impressed with its performance, so very close to “bare metal” Ubuntu. In 2004-5 the 64 bit AMD chips were coming out and I used Gentoo to build a true 64 bit system addressing 8GB of RAM - there wasn’t really any other option.

I got tired of compiling every little part of the system from source for days on end and migrated to various flavors of Ubuntu / Debian, which by 2006-7 was becoming a viable desktop alternative. Before that you ALWAYS had to have a Windows machine for something, usually several somethings. At this point I only use my company issued Windows laptop when I need to connect to the company VPN, which can be months between needs depending on what I’m doing. My wife and I use Ubuntu full time now.

Yeah, that plus labor is 80% of what I typically pay for a whole brand new phone… I know why it is this way, but it really is this way and that makes it very hard for low volume players to enter the market.

What’s the cost to replace a cracked screen?

Any coincidence that 2012 e-mails are finally coming to trial today?

They “trust” me.

Dumb fucks.

If there ever is anything remotely competitive to Netflix, I’m gone like a shot.

Their “suggestive sell” interface is such garbage. We, the paying customers, should be able to default to a genre search without having to jump hoops every time. We, the paying customers, should be able to hit “not interested” and actually not see suggestions to watch the “not interested” title again. We, the paying customers, should be able to view the available catalog as we choose, not as their manipulative algorithms choose. The only reason we’re still with Netflix is because the ad-free version is still affordable, but their content selection system is heavy advertising in and of itself.

Honestly, folks, if you want to watch a couple of movies a week I bet your local public library has a better interface allowing you to choose from new releases and a deep catalog, all for free - you just have to drive by once a week to pick up / drop off your selections.