snogglethorpe

9 ms·

31.
by snogglethorpe 11y ago
> Ads are much less an intrinsic cultural phenomenon than you think. We think they matter to culture simply because they exist, but their absence has no important effect on it. The thing is, though, every culture, every city, is differ
32.
by snogglethorpe 11y ago
Yes... I find the "global movement" label sort of annoying, because it's very much a local issue. Some places suffer from excessive advertising, other places are energized by it, and the actual contents, presentation, placeme
33.
by snogglethorpe 11y ago
This is ... very suspect. I suspect the vast majority of users haven't the faintest idea what init system their OS is using, or even know what an init system is. Even amongst knowledgeable users who do know (e.g., me), I'd guess
34.
by snogglethorpe 11y ago
Some Romaniams I follow refer to Transnistria as "basically a Russian military base," and are of the opinion that the Russians are so entrenched that's likely never to change.... [Shades of the Crimean peninsula...]
35.
by snogglethorpe 11y ago
As far as I'm aware (from personal experience), "online" has been the common form when talking about computers since at least the 1980s, if not before. But maybe whoever added that particular property to IE4 wasn't famil
36.
by snogglethorpe 11y ago
That's the thing that first came to mind when I saw the pics of those doors opening... sure they look cool, and probably work ok if you're outside away from anything, but seems like there are plenty of situations in which they jus
37.
by snogglethorpe 11y ago
That seems a bit overwrought.... In my experience (and anecdotally from friends), the withdrawal symptoms are real, but not particularly severe. For me it's just very mild (as in I barely notice) headaches and a vague under-the-weathe
38.
by snogglethorpe 11y ago
Google's action is infinitely better than Facebook's "Facebook for everybody!" push (another current India-related news item)...
39.
by snogglethorpe 11y ago
Mandarin is effectively a Chinese lingua-franca these days... I know people from all areas of China and Chinese-origin countries like Taiwan, and they happily chat away when they meet, although their native dialects are supposedly not mutua
40.
by snogglethorpe 11y ago
Japanese tends to be a lot more "conglomerative" than English, presumably because it has kanji—which are little self-contained nuggets of meaning—as one of its fundamental units. Many words are formed by cramming together smaller
41.
by snogglethorpe 11y ago
Nathaniel Boronstein has interesting take on this. You might describe him as an old-school left-winger, as anti-war as they get (ok, that's my description, not sure if he'd agree!), but somehow he ended up consulting for NATO, ri
42.
by snogglethorpe 11y ago
... what I'd like is maybe some sort of system of adding links between different encyclopedias, so a user can easily move between articles for a given subject in multiple places...
43.
by snogglethorpe 11y ago
Sometimes I find Wikipedia's "haphazard" articles are actually a benefit , because in practice they often seem to end up covering a subject from multiple angles, with lots of examples etc. My impression is that in many cases
44.
by snogglethorpe 11y ago
Actually the biggest fear I have of this sort of thing is that they'll end up with standalone unshared forks of stuff, which won't benefit from newer developments and bug fixes in other forks, and vice-versa.
45.
by snogglethorpe 11y ago
For many words, I actually remember the location on the page, and the page's location in the book, and the book, where I first learned it! [I usually don't remember the exact page number, but some sort of general sense of the pos
46.
by snogglethorpe 11y ago
I'm all for ebooks in theory (so convenient!), but find that in practice reading on a computer/ipad/kindle/phone is almost always an unsatisfying, and in some cases almost stressful, experience. I think the hardware ju
47.
by snogglethorpe 11y ago
I suppose like most class-action suits, each participant will get about $0.43 and only the lawyer will really benefit. But in this case, it's still a great thing, as the main goal is punitive, to make copyright vultures feel some pain.
48.
by snogglethorpe 11y ago
Yeah, obviously which interface is "best" depends on a huge number of factors, context, task, user, etc, and there is no universally best choice. Even in the context of a graphics editor, though, where a GUI makes a lot of sense g
49.
by snogglethorpe 11y ago
... and frankly, at least in a country with a stable legal system, it's a slight bit of comfort to know that if all else fails (hopefully it never reaches that point of course), the police can go and arrest somebody that caused us harm
50.
by snogglethorpe 11y ago
One thing I found neat about this was that (at least by default) it seems language-neutral: scrolling around the world, labels over the U.S. are in English, labels in Japan are in Japanese, Korea, in Korean, China, in simplified Chinese, e
51.
by snogglethorpe 11y ago
> Sure, we want it to replace money We do...? -.-;
52.
by snogglethorpe 11y ago
... but also remember that Buddhism mutated quite a bit as it spread around asia, and the term "Buddhism" encompasses quite a few different schools of thought...
53.
by snogglethorpe 11y ago
Yes; given the technological and legal hurdles, they'll initially only be allowed in certain constrained areas and uses. They're not going to be anything like a widespread option for a long, long, time, and certainly not somethin
54.
by snogglethorpe 11y ago
Another issue is that it looks like would start a new history file only when a new shell is started. Some people log in fresh every day, but I've got terminal windows on my home machine that have been sitting around for many months...
55.
by snogglethorpe 11y ago
Yeah, while I was "typing" my response to that question, my screen suddenly went completely black... and then luckily just returned to normal a few seconds later. ... or at least I thought it returned to normal... Having read yo
56.
by snogglethorpe 11y ago
... and even worse, cars do not limit themselves to killing their occupants, but are responsible for huge numbers of pedestrian deaths, of which many are not even in the road (deaths involving cars mounting the sidewalk and killing people,
57.
by snogglethorpe 11y ago
What's really annoying is that there are quite a few sites that have flash-based video players and so run afoul of flash-blockers (on by default!) on the desktop, but then play just fine when viewed from something like an ipad that doe
58.
by snogglethorpe 11y ago
Don't even have to go as far as fiction.... SDF is a common abbreviation for the Japanese Self-Defense Force.
59.
by snogglethorpe 11y ago
[BTW, I edited my comment to add some more detail, which might touch on the reason for this...]
60.
by snogglethorpe 11y ago
I had a mechanical typewriter I bought in the '80s, and it was pretty basic, no real features at all, and the same classic type-bar mechanism that would jam if you pushed it too hard... but I rather liked it. Lots of typewriters of th

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