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Comment Re:What a horrible idea. (Score 3, Insightful) 115

"To cease all production and consign us all to a pre-industrial way of living? "

This is weapons level stupid and or disingenuous. Do you actually think a) that's the point of the suit b) the person who filed it wants that?

It's mostly a bad idea because it will not succeed, and in the current judicial climate (no pun intended) of the USA may very well set some kind of precent at complete odds with the goal of the lawsuit.

And I say this as somebody who thinks the people behind such a lawsuit are not in it for money or notoriety or whatever. People can be driven by emotion for certain things that are right - you know, like if your mom died on a night that was substantially warmer than you remember experiencing when you were a kid. Suing oil companies could *very well* help with "the transition" as you call it, if only to decimate their ability to lobby for policy - people really don't understand how subsidized their industry is.

None the less, what appears to really sell right now in the US is antagonization so here we are. It's somehow "our fault" witch to me smacks of somebody who really isn't particularly interested in the larger scale details.

Comment Re:Heh (Score 1) 284

Back in the day, I remember the local Bell main switching center being a very non-descript, completely unmarked mysterious building.

I imagine that also was for security reasons.

Yeah, the enemy would never guess that a large office building completely devoid of windows might possibly be a telephone switch.

Comment Re:Despite (Score 1) 276

It has been a while since I've used Word, but I remember it was really good at propagating tiny changes through a document that made it important that you keep an extra copy around because some seemed to have no easy way back to what you wanted.

This "feature" actually saved me quite a bit of work at a job I had a few years back. The documentation people were so afraid that anyone who was not a full-time Word expert would irrecoverably screw up the corporate branding (IOW, formatting) of their docs, they didn't want developers to directly edit them. So I was often able to get away with emailing a quick text summary to them, and they had to do all the fidgety proof reading, formatting, etc.

I don't know how they managed to get their jobs done, given that they had no real source control and mainly juggled each update amongst themselves over email and random impoossible-to-find folders on Sharepoint.

Since all the docs had the same basic layout and they were mainly trying to make them look consistent with whatever corporate branding was being promulgated that week, it could easily have been done by writing them in "markdown" and having a script that converted them directly to PDF. Or maybe even learn LaTeX. Then the docs could all be maintained and diffed in github like all the other project artifacts. I didn't even bring that up because I knew that their heads would explode.

Comment Re:That is not a good sign (Score 1) 141

Uh, debit cards do all those things. Only you don't have to engage in all the "make work" that middlemen loyalty programs incur. You spend money, it comes out of the money you have, it's a card. The merchant doesn't have to pay anybody to run a loyalty program, and then pass the costs on to you. The end.

Comment Re:That is not a good sign (Score 1) 141

So what do you get from using a credit card if you always pay it off? Are you magically always one month behind being able to afford anything?

I'm guessing it's not that. Do you get points? Services? Goodies? I wonder how credit card companies pay for those? Oh yeah, you pay for them - and that's even if you use the stuff that comes "with" credit cards. Truly the ultimate middleman/redistribution scheme.

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