acabal

112 ms·

511.
by acabal 14y ago
Perhaps, but there is a kernel of truth in what the parent comment says. As long as an IP address can be associated to an undeniable identifier, like an address, credit card, SSN, etc., your identity and activity can ultimately be tracked.
512.
by acabal 14y ago
I've actually been thinking a lot about this in the past month. I too am transitioning away from Google-everything for various reasons. I only use Gmail via IMAP in Thunderbird, so I've already migrated my address book and calendar to sel
513.
by acabal 14y ago
Too much of anything is going to mess with your body. I would have been surprised if drinking the equivalent of 100 tea bags daily for 17 years didn't mess this woman up.
514.
by acabal 14y ago
Pale Fire is my favorite book of all time. I have a braingasm every time I read it. I first read it as part of a class back in my university days, and it's definitely hard to grasp the incredible intricacy, detail, and even humor in every
515.
by acabal 14y ago
This drives me mad. At least Lenovo kept the buttons. Other laptops like Apple and now Dell have dropped them entirely. And for what? "Minimalism" or "elegance" I guess. I'm going to have to hang on to my aging Dell for as long as I ca
516.
by acabal 14y ago
I don't dispute any of that, but in an ideal Bitcoin economy people wouldn't need to convert to USD. Obviously the Bitcoin economy isn't at that point yet and people need the USD to peg "value" to what a Bitcoin is. But eventually, if B
517.
by acabal 14y ago
As I mentioned, for those with the skill, time, patience, and determination, any traditional publishing deal, including O'Reilly, isn't worth it. But I think you're overestimating the amount of O'Reilly authors who can do (and are interest
518.
by acabal 14y ago
Printing, warehousing, distribution, handling remainders, the privilege of having your book on O'Reilly's market website, coordinating distribution of updates to ebooks, etc. are not one-time efforts. All of this invisible stuff eats out o
519.
by acabal 14y ago
You can still get a lot of value from what O'Reilly provides if you're in their niche. Imagine the CS professor writing a book on the latest hot language. He'll need an editor; how does a CS professor go about finding a trustworthy one?
520.
by acabal 14y ago
I run a website for writers. Very often we get the question, "Why should I bother chasing a big publisher if I can self-publish?" Then, people often turn around and call self-publishing companies "scams" because everything can be done by h
521.
by acabal 14y ago
I haven't used CentOS for very long and when I did it was long ago, so this comment isn't the best-informed. But from my brief experience, you have access to more or less the same software (plus or minus some version numbers), but with thei
522.
by acabal 14y ago
Because for the first time in history, every action you take in fundamental aspects of your life--your communications with others (email), what you read (everything online), what you watch (Hulu, etc.), what you listen to (Pandora, etc.), a
523.
by acabal 14y ago
Anonymity online, one of the most important problems of the coming decades. Even if you don't think it's important to be anonymous to the eyes of the government, being anonymous to the eyes of drive-by troll litigants is almost undoubtedly
524.
by acabal 14y ago
A good start, but shopping around is hard, if not impossible. I always try to do it when getting care in the states, and more often than not the person you're talking to has no idea what they charge, or else won't discuss it without having
525.
by acabal 14y ago
Maybe this is a good idea, I don't know about X/Wayland enough to say. But it worries me that Ubuntu is increasingly striking out on its own. What I like about the GNU/Linux ecosystem is that a lot of distros share a lot of common underpi
526.
by acabal 14y ago
I'm starting to feel like anonymity on the internet is going to be one of the most important challenges in the next decade. Especially with stuff like 6 strikes starting the ball rolling (today it's warning messags, in ten years it might b
527.
by acabal 14y ago
In a practical sense these concepts only exist to the extent that the "owner" is willing to enforce them. If this guy says he has uncopyrighted everything and doesn't bother chasing after people for copyright violations, then there you go.
528.
by acabal 14y ago
Nice resource, but I disagree about indenting paragraphs in web copy. I've found that for me, I'm more comfortable with narrow paragraphs spacing and traditional indentation in print media; but web media just reads more smoothly with wider
529.
by acabal 14y ago
Very interesting to see. I had no idea there were so many community-owned providers. That begs the question: Would community providers do deep-packet inspection and send out copyright notices like the big telcos do? Or would they, as com
530.
by acabal 14y ago
That's part of the problem, but the other part is that regular people just don't care. I don't think they will care until it's too late, and even when it's too late they might not care to realize it. (I.e. in the future where the intern
531.
by acabal 14y ago
This strikes me as a scary first step. The whole "re-education" spin is extra-scary; if I had a kid who downloaded something and was exposed to this kind of treatment, I'd be pretty loudly wondering who Comcast thinks it is to be "educatin
532.
by acabal 14y ago
Seriously. Just like that "Bitter Pill" story in Time a day or two ago highlighted that insurance is a red herring for the deeper problem of profit-driven costs in US health care, the issue of gun control is a red herring for a deeper cultu
533.
by acabal 14y ago
I'm hedging my bets in that way; should I be diagnosed with something serious like cancer, I'll probably just fly to be treated with first-world health care at a reasonable price and in a tropical setting, in the country where my family liv
534.
by acabal 14y ago
No, looking at treating sick humans--people who have no choice but to get treated or die--as a business instead of a social responsibility is exactly the problem. Business opportunities created the disgusting situation we're in.
535.
by acabal 14y ago
This is such an amazing blog. It's fascinating to read about the sloppy guts of games you spent hours on in your youth. It's also a testament to Blizzard's dedication to polish, because although I was only ever a casual Starcraft player, I
536.
by acabal 14y ago
Looks like the web has gone full circle. Back in 2000 frames were all the rage; in 2005 frames were the bane of good designers everywhere; now in 2013 we're back to frames again. Here's hoping the frames trend dies a swift, permanent deat
537.
by acabal 14y ago
From a US perspective, foreign hackers are a threat--but I think mostly to companies and to individual cases of identity theft. I'd argue that a government spying on its own citizens is a much greater threat. If a Chinese hacker steals you
538.
by acabal 14y ago
My reasoning was that it's the in the IdeaPad line, and that the whole tablet-conversion gimmick is more oriented towards iPad-style media consumption than productivity. Actually I was really close to buying one myself as a dev machine--it
539.
by acabal 14y ago
I get what you're saying, but I use those keys to navigate so often that constantly contorting my pinky to reach fn is going to wreck my wrist. With the keys on their own row I can drift my right hand over and comfortably scroll through lo
540.
by acabal 14y ago
I do a lot of navigation and reading via keyboard, and being able to drift my right hand over and press pgup, pgdown, home, end to navigate documents is much more convenient than trying to contort my already-achy left pinky to find the fn k

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