Did you see the E-waste Recycling in India post here recently? I didn't just RTFS but went to the actual site. Great article; the discussion on that site reminded me of the old days here.

100% They have literally already deployed these kinds of systems. You can see their work in East Asia every day, but they don't talk about it in US media.

The CCP doesn't need to propagandize Americans through TikTok. All they need to do is NOT censor things that the US Government normally does, and then show them to Americans. People's views on how "bad" China is get tempered when they see first hand the destruction that US foreign aid delivers around the world in terms of two thousand pound bombs used against human beings.

The slavery abolition was probably the final straw for the "patriots." After the 7 years war was over, the British "gained" a bunch of territory west of the Appalachian mountains. Colonists were excited to expand their growth into the new territory. However, "in 1763, King George issued a Royal Proclamation forbidding any European settlement in British territories west of the Appalachians in North America, partly as a concession to allied Native American groups like the Iroquois Confederacy who fought with Britain against France." (battlefields.org) If the King wasn't going to let us enslave people and plunder everything, I guess we needed out. :-/

My alma mater Boston College just got rid of alumni email addresses ending in bc.edu. It's probably for the best; the last time I used it was years ago to sign up for a college student Amazon Prime account that I shouldn't have had access to.

I had a similar experience with a USB drive, but this one came from the most reputable of places. I got a free USB drive from the Free Software Foundation after getting a membership. It came with some cool GNU stickers. I think the thumb drive was supposed to have a bootable GNU*Linux distro or something on it.

I got the drive and decided to plug it into my brand new work laptop, a 17" Macbook Pro with all the bells and whistles. Well, as soon as I plugged it in the screen went black and something didn't smell right. I couldn't do anything to get it working again. Luckily, the logic board replacement was covered under AppleCare and only cost me a few days. I don't know if the problem was the thumb drive or a poor quality machine (I wouldn't be surprised either way). I did, however, throw that USB drive away just in case. Still used the stickers!

I think a lot of the people posting haven't tried GIMP recently. The 2.10 release (I think around 2018) has a much more standard interface that works really well out of the box, on Ubuntu 18.04 at least.

I was a long time Photoshop user on Mac (since Photoshop 5.5), mostly for my web site design needs. I finally ditched Apple hardware and went to Dell running Ubuntu a few years ago. Originally, getting the older version of Gimp up and running was an ugly beast. Since 2.10 though, it looks a lot like the Photoshop I was used to and I was able to install a set of shortcuts to mimic the Photoshop ones.

It's now my go to for graphics editing.

YMMV

I hadn't heard of this company until an NPR podcast last week about how they were targeting a critical short seller with a disinformation, intimidation, and surveillance campaign.

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.npr.org%2F2020%2F06%2F02...

Shady, shady, shady

Indeed. Up till recently this year, I'd always bought Samsung TVs. But this time I was looking for something I could plug into headphones or an external speaker and Samsung no longer offers that. I picked up a TCL with Roku built-in for a good price and I couldn't be happier. I was one of those "I like my dumb tv thank you very much" people before, but this software interface just works and does it well.

As with many others here, I don't want results from sites that I can't visit. I understand that Google wants the data, but there's no reason that I need to see that mixed in. Google currently has a feature for Chrome users that not many people seem to be aware of called the Personal Blocklist. You can get the extension from Google here:

https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fchrome.google.com%2Fwebs...

After you've installed it, when you're on a google search results page, you'll see a small link to "block example.com" under each result. No more articles from Forbes or pictures from pinterest that you can't browse through. Hope that helps someone!

I think that's generally true, but Star Trek? If there were a new series, I'd subscribe to a separate service in a heartbeat.

I would highly recommend Julian May's Intervention, Saga of Pliocene Exile, and Galactic Milieu from the 80s-90s. These interrelated series stretch from the far past to our space-faring future and combine science fiction, technology, and fantasy into one grand vision. Intervention is my favorite and works very well as a stand alone novel... Ah, Oncle Rogi...

My other recommendation would be Octavia Butler's Xenogenesis (aka Lilith's Brood) from the late 80s, a series of novels with an interesting take on the future of humanity and what it means to be human. A bit less Sci-Fi, but also highly recommended, is her powerful Parable series from the 90s (Parable of the Sower, Parable of the Talents). In it she explores issues of race, freedom, religion, violence, and more through extrapolating a dark but all too possible vision of the future based on current trends in American society.

My bill does no such thing, in fact I don't even have a bill... Oh, b-A-rney, not b-U-rney. Never mind.

-Paul Burney