People don't like having cameras streaming from their bedrooms and livingrooms. I'm shocked.

I'm not moving to a communist country.

The idea of living in a totalitarian shit-hole infested by a national surveillance network, people being taken in the middle of the night by masked and unidentified government agents, having protestors shot in the streets and generally living under the thumb of a dark and malevolent ruling class did make communism seem real bad.

Now it sounds like Trump's America.

There really isn't. I was skeptical and expected a 2-week long oddysey, but I put arch on my PC this past weekend and all my games work. It's definitely not suitable for mom, but my son could handle this.

Linux is still ... not great in terms of overall experience, but it's not worse than Windows, it's just different things that break. The difference is that it's often easy to identify exactly what is broken and work around it (ex. plasmashell crashesh when the screen is blanked, because my HTC vive was connected as a second device, so I can just unplug it while I look for a better solution)

You go to a sit-down restaurant:
1) You wait 30-60 minutes to be seated. If it's a really nice restaurant, you may try to make reservations. Nah, nobody does that anymore and the online things are booked a week in advance (Downtown Seattle, I'm looking at you). Nah.
2) If you manage to get seated, the clock has started. They want you in and out in under an hour. The waiter will show up typically just as you've sat and take your drink order, you will see him again in 5 minutes to take your entree order. In some places, you will not see him again until the bill, as food is run out to you by runners (door dash, but indoors). In most cases he'll appear as you're eating to see if they missed anything, hoping for another drink order (if they serve alcohol). Otherwise he's gone until he thinks you've had enough time to eat, and gives you the bill. Whether you're done or not "No hurry!" he hurriedly says. Frequently it's pay-by-QR code, even in nice, expensive places, so you'll never see him again. But he'll come see why you haven't left yet and take your card if you don't do that. Then you're expected to leave. If you're sitting with friends and talking, at some point they'll try to move you to the bar so they can turn the table over. If not, they'll stop by to "anything-else" you until you take the hint.
3) For reasons I don't understand, it's trendy not to leave the ceiling support exposed, offering no sound-proofing at all. The place is deafining, it's impossible to carry on a conversation in a busy place. This is probably the point, see #2.
4) If the sound-proofing isn't enough, it's also trendy to play music too loudly. It's nice to have some to wash out the din of clanking plates and masticating, but again, if you want to talk to people, it's almost impossible.
5) "Not turning a profit" is not the same as not being able to pay your staff and your bills. It means the owners yacht payments may get missed. I'd be very slightly empathetic if the owners of restaurants were at all involved, but in most cases they're not in the picture using managers to run the place, it's just a "property" in their "portfolio".

Restaurants, and honestly a shitload of other businesses, need to be reminded that they exist to serve customer needs. If they're not meeting those needs, someone or something will rise to answer them, possibly to their detriment. Figure it the fuck out and get on our level.

Just because the police are interested in someone, does not mean their reasons are just. We have lots of stupid laws, there's no reason to help the police enforce drug laws, or (here in texas) abortion laws. There's no reason an APB should be out on some girl trying to flee the state to get an abortion after she got a positive test and some stupid religious fuckwit nurse broke all kinds of laws to report her. Definitely no reason your ring camera should be used to help identify her going to the person who lives across the street from you who offered to drive her to New Mexico, and then that person is tracked by every flock camera between Austin and the border.

Or perhaps you were suspected of being a protestor in No More Kings day, and the ring reported on your whereabouts, We're calling such people domestic terrrorists these days. You personally could never be forced to testify against yourself, but your ring camera could.

And that's just official law enforcement. Flock is a Peter Thiel gamble, part of his ever expanding private global espionage platform. Maybe you told one too many pooh bear jokes on the internet and Xi decided to have you offed. For a price he can know where you are and what your routine is.

The only time you should be giving Ring data to anyone but yourself is if you need to report a crime to your property or the people within. You should be in a position to volunteer it, or at the very least require a court order.

This is the single dumbest thing I've read on slashdot in 20 years.

It would be great if they fixed bugs, rather than introducing new ones. They introduced one that blocked my garage door opener icon when I was in reverse, it took like 6 months for that to get fixed.

I've lost count of how many updates in the past 8 years have occsionally made my car firmware unstable and had me sitting there doing the vehicular equivalent of ctrl-alt-del.

But yeah, it's great, the updates are easy to schedule and use.

Nt

This isnâ(TM)t new, itâ(TM)s in the sales material and on the dash warnings. The average daily commute is 42 miles (66 for me). I have never needed to drive gas because the temp dropped for my daily commute, ever.

Sure, you might need to take occasional road trips of over 200 miles and want gas, but then you make the rent vs buy decision based on your situation.

We went 2 years working from home, did the same work, hit the same deadlines, delivered the same products. If they're measuring a decline in productivity WFH vs. WFW, they're clearly making a mistake.

No, it really doesn't. I cancelled a few weeks ago.

if they want to charge more and make better content, or expand their library, and offer their current release movies, I'll think about it. But right now it's shit at any price.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fupload.wikimedia.org%2Fw...

One gets the feeling that Seattle is taking away tax benefits to companies that aren't dragging enough employees into the city.

No mention of private wealth and private equity markets being able to pump significantly more money into private companies and reduce their need to go public, as well as being able to manipulate public markets to ensure that no strong competitors can emerge.

If it goes that far I only need to one gun and one bullet.