No, you will be added to a list that gets sold around. Better to keep that data point private so you don't become a target.
I'm pretty sure the pollsters aren't cold calling or cold texting people any more. It is more likely than not, a scam.
The only poll that matters is election day.
Floorp and Zen are to Firefox what Vivaldi is to Chrome.
They provide a better UI and other features and strip out a lot of the bad stuff from the parent browser.
But fundamentally, Floorp and Zen and Vivaldi would not continue very long if the upstream decided to suddenly stop producing code, or altered their codebase in a significant manner. (This is what killed Palemoon and Seamonkey). This is always a threat.
So really, it's a shit situation for browsers right now. Just choose a browser engine and then pick whatever UI you like the most on top of it.
I'm optimistic that Servo turns out to be the new Mozilla without repeating its mistakes. It should be the reference implementation browser upon which everything will rebase and it should remain non-profit. This was the original goal of open source Mozilla 25 years ago but then the techbro crew rolled in and started grifting.
(I'm also aware that WebKit still exists but Gnome Web is seemingly the only browser built with it and there are no extensions).
Today the Mozilla Corporation is just a place for the already wealthy to funnel money into their golden parachutes. It's a grift. Personally I think it's time to move on. Last week I pulled the plug, deleted my ~/.mozilla directory, so for the first time in a quarter century I don't have anything Mozilla-related installed.
Yes, I have done this several times for work. Digital nomad life that turned into starting a family that travels for work.
It's difficult every time and sometimes you just have to admit that it isn't going to work out in that country. Some countries have really strange attitudes or laws or systemic issues that you will not solve as an outsider. Sometimes people will just see you as a target or an opportunity for money and that's never going to change.
Also looking back gives perspective; I had a difficult time in xxx country, but that was my first time overseas and I didn't have quite a grasp of the language, and I was also unfairly comparing it to the USA. A decade later, I've been back a couple of times and now xxx is my favorite country. Five stages of grief and all. There's more backstory but I can blend in a lot of countries.
Conversely, I went to some countries and saw how they are still very colonized from centuries of oppression. And then I go back to the USA sometimes and see the same mentality. Really shifts your perspective.
I was a child of a refugee so I always thought whatever complaints I had were nothing compared to what my parents went through. Also I had swastikas spray painted on my house when I was young so I never really fit in anywhere. Kind of keeps me going.
I feel more comfortable in some countries than my own home country. The USA has changed as much as I have over the past decade.
Finally, one semi-related point: I really, really learned to hate American missionaries. In every single country. They're just the worst. I think they choose their countries and villages for some sort of confirmation bias to themselves that American Jesus is the best and only civilized way to live. They aren't learning anything, just reinforcing their world view and not teaching anything useful. It's just a way for middle aged white guys to get young girls from poor villages. They aren't helping anything.
I agree, but the synopsis relies too heavily on extreme outliers to make it's case. Bill Gates was not a great programmer with a bit of luck. He was an ok programmer (IIRC, the only code we've ever seen from him is the QBasic game Nibbles) who was a nepo baby with family on the board at IBM where he got his first deal. This is the case for many other billionaires we are told to worship. Maybe they didn't all come the billionaire class, but they had plenty of resources available, access to extracurricular education as kids, and these kids weren't worried about their next meal growing up.
So just from the synopsis, there's not really a strong case against meritocracy. The bamboo ceiling that discriminates against Asian Americans in the workforce, and other institutional racism prevents true meritocracy. We also have this fixation, and it probably comes from Western culture in general, that when an invention or a new product comes out, we highlight and celebrate one person and that person is the "pioneer" or "inventor" of the project. From Neil Armstrong to Steve Jobs to Elon Musk, the media and our history books ignore the bureaucracy and teamwork of tens of thousands of people needed to bring a project to success. Safety experts, engineers, janitors, food services, logistics, HVAC teams, all important part of the process. The media also tend to reward grifters like that guy who was supposedly the inventor of Firefox a few years ago, and allow the "cult of genius" to run too far in our narratives. It's always the story of a single white guy with a good idea. Except in reality, it isn't that at all.
Finally, the reward for being "lucky" or whatever is far too high compared to the threat of just being "not lucky." A "lucky" person who worked hard and who is successful and never has to work again in their life and can afford to launch their kids in a way where they can live comfortable lives is one thing, I don't have a problem with that.
But to be "lucky" to the point where you alone have more money than a majority of mankind combined is another. There should be upper limits to wealth, and these feedback cycles do a poor job at ensuring the reward for success is distributed evenly to everybody who took part. Meanwhile the person who is equally talented/important but not as "lucky" still has to worry about their next paycheck, food on the table, and medical bankruptcy from a diagnosis or accident.
Less billionaires. Less starving kids. Free healthcare and education. Thanks for sharing.
He had nothing to gain from agreeing to this debate.
No feelings either way, I started using X since the last millennium and have been on Wayland without problems (Gnome or sway, never anything more than integrated graphics card) for about four years now.
But I really wish there was an fvwm for Wayland. And Window Maker.
Deadpool
It's funny that we buy these metal and glass phones and then protect them with rubber and plastic cases.
New phones are made to show wear so that they lose resale value.
People used their real names, and even posted where they were from on Usenet. There was a sense of community and there was a term -- netequitte -- that described how we would act towards one another. If you used a handle, watch out, you might be a troll, and you certainly weren't going to be immediately trusted and had to build your reputation.
Replies went below the body, not above it, and everybody hated Microsoft Outlook for unilaterally deciding that replies go at the top of a message. Similarly, people hated WebTV users for just bringing the level of discourse to the gutter.
Web forums were fast and also a good place for community, kind of a gateway from Usenet to modern discussion forums. When people passed away we would all attend the funerals or whatever if we were close. There were 56k warnings in the subject line if a post had embedded images.
In the metal scene, maybe other places too, you would trade CDs. So like you had a burner and someone else had a burner and you would swap copies of CDs that you had for something they had. So you could build an entire huge collection of CDs and demo tapes cheaply. There were trading lists and people had reputations and who was reliable, who was a rip-off, and who was an idiot for burning 256kbps MP3s and selling them as CD quality (yes, you could tell a difference back then; something we still haven't recovered from now that everyone is streaming). If you didn't have anything to trade, you would pay like $8 for a CD. Black Friday 2000 was huge because burners only cost a couple hundred dollars that week, so it was a wise investment.
Sometimes the traders of new music were the band members themselves, and that was always fun to find out. I got Sons of Northern Darkness from a guy who was in the studio. I got a copy of another highly respected album from the bassist of that band who just wanted people to hear it. They would just mail it your house and you would receive a CD in an envelope with chicken scratch handwriting on it.
When Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia was leaked in the trading community, it blew people's minds. People were like holy shit this meme band that everyone hates just got serious and took our entire genre to the next level. I cannot understate how big that album was.
People sent checks via the mail in exchange for goods. Online transactions were still done this way instead of all electronically. So you would purchase online, get an order number, put that order number on a certified check, and mail it off. And a week later you had your stuff.
Also everybody had a customized desktop. Not just the wallpaper, but the themes, the colors. There might be a talking cat that sat on the desktop and would get up and walk around and poop and tell you what time it was. Everybody had unique desktops. Everybody had different fonts. Maybe cursive, and in pink and yellow and that was what the entire interface looked like.
Slashdot was huge and the original Reddit. There was a Slashdot effect where if they linked a site, that site would suddenly get so much traffic that it might die. Also in those days you could tell if a webpage was using IIS or Apache because the Windows server was always slower to serve webpages. When Dell entered the server space people laughed because Dell was not an enterprise brand and who would ever seriously use x86 or Windows on a production server?
Online chat was a thing with a/s/l and everyone had an online significant other with whom they would chat about things daily, but who lived like 5 states away and no you would never, ever go meet them. Even suggesting such an idea would usually end the friendship. Everybody had an online diary with a guestbook and a stat counter -- showing how many page hits you had.
There was less corporate ownership and more independence back then. It was okay to be different and unique. The Internet wasn't just like 5 websites.
I think the Fediverse -- Mastodon especially, comes closest to recreating that turn of the century feel.
SeikoAlpinist
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No. Space Force chief wants more money, of course there's another disaster coming.
If they were serious about space tech, the first step would be to end all contracts with compromised Elon Musk.
Also, ArsTechnica is kind of a dumpster fire on reporting anything PRC and allowing ethnic slurs in the comment section so take it with a grain of salt.