Woah, the memories.

Bash shell or bash skulls!

I think by letting her get something positive out of bad behavior you're teaching her to keep doing it. Try giving her the response you think will teach her to interact with people in a productive way.

You can't help anyone that much. Just play your small part in teaching this person to be an adult and be on your way.

I just swapped ubuntu for fedora on my macbook air and the setup for that was super, super easy. With ubuntu I needed refind, but fedora shows up right in the OSX bootloader. On my desktop I use separate drives so I don't know how fedora plays with Win 10, but I think it is also pretty easy.

If you want easy install the big distros are probably your best bet. A live usb might help you with fix/recovery as well, including looking at the partitions and seeing what's going on (fedora's install has pretty straightforward tools for this.)

Behold! The future is now!

The future, man. I mean, like, the future.

It's a lot easier than quitting smoking outright. For me the important thing was letting my cigarettes run out and not buying any more instead of trying to "phase out" smoking, which didn't work. Also, the last time I tried I bought shitty "cigarette style" vaporizers which didn't last the whole day, were easy to lose, and didn't provide much of a hit. Because I was "phasing out" cigarettes every time something happened with the vaporizer I just smoked a lot more that day. Spend the extra money for a nicer rig (I went with the vaporfi pro-II; dropped about $130 with 3 10ml e-liquids, two batteries, and 5 extra atomizers; should be good for, at minimum, 2 weeks, and that's as a 2-pack a day smoker, so you'd probably be set for well over a month, then your "operation" costs would drop down to something like $20-30/month.) If you let yourself run out of cigarettes and vape full time you'll make it work, because it isn't that tough; it really isn't. Just don't try to do both because you'll keep smoking and eventually phase out the vaporizer (which is what I did the first time.)

The other thing is accepting that it is just different from smoking a cigarette, and forcing yourself to be alright with that. You're not burning plant matter. It won't be the same. That's fine. Why is burning plant matter so great, anyway? Wouldn't it be better to suck a cloud of unicorn farts and marshmallows? Well. That flavor is probably available.

You can download an app like QuitNow! to keep track of all the money that's staying in your pocket. The upfront cost of the vaporizer will pay for itself in a few weeks, so keep that in mind. It will also project how much extra time you'll live as a result, which is nice, if not a touch morbid.

Anyway, good luck to you, too! It isn't hard, but you have to take the steps. Once you do it's nothing like quitting cold turkey, so don't put it off; it's easy and all up-side. :)

I think I'm just going to embrace the fact that it's different, instead of trying to make it the same, if you follow me. I mean, if it can taste like anything, it might as well taste like fruit-loop-unicorn-glitter-party-daiquiri, or what have you; it's the future, man. Your nicotine cloud can be whatever you want it to be.

But yeah, I'm yet to find anyone that thinks the cigarette flavors are remotely close to a cigarette. Which is maybe a good thing, since it breaks the association somewhat.

As someone who has been playing video games since childhood and occasionally talks about them in public, I really don't know what you're on about.

It seems like every time white men get criticized in any domain they behave as if criticism was invented purely as a weapon against them.

No. It wasn't. Video games are criticized far less than film and tv. You just don't seem to notice it (which is fucking amazing, because it's everywhere.)

Yes, gamers get made fun of. Like everyone else. People make fun of the kardashians ruthlessly. They make fun of movie stars. They make fun of pop stars. (Do you really think gamers get made fun of more than Bieber? You're insane if you do.) They make fun of politicians. You haven't been singled out, and you aren't a victim.

I wish there were more to say, but there isn't.

XoXo,

Another person that plays video games.

Tough to say. Looking at the current hp2000 I would guess it would run most games 2010 or earlier without too much trouble, but I think there may be some exceptions to that. You could maybe give half-life a go, portal, perhaps a fall-out title. All of those are fun games that shouldn't be too taxing.

Try picking some older stuff out on steam that you can score for a few bucks and test your luck. Some of those titles are next to free. Also give Team Fortress 2 a try, since it will cost you nothing.

If you're more in to tactical stuff, perhaps a civilization title.

Check the specs and see what you can get away with.

With this sort of thing I think you have to look at the delta to give an honest reading of what google is doing. What can you think of in which the better-off aren't favored in this country? Nothing.

The question is: Is google creating more access than comcast, time warner, etc? I'm sure the answer is yes.

The answer to broadband really should be the government. We don't have private roads because if we did poor people wouldn't have roads. (Hey, this is America, maybe we will take roads away from poor people soon enough.) In terms of who lays the cables, that could be provided by private entities, but the infrastructure for this should be designed and managed by the government to ensure fair distribution, and anything else will always lead to inequality. Capitalism and inequality are different ways of saying the same thing. It doesn't matter how well-meaning a corporation is, they can't exist without making a profit. You make a profit off people that have money, not off people that don't. You can't sell anything to people that can't afford anything. None of this should be surprising.

Eventually internet service probably will be something every government provides as a basic service. The US will probably be far, far behind, like it is on everything else that doesn't involve dropping bombs.

This was interesting right up to murdered bunnies, then I decided I didn't need to know any more about the subject.

For a long time I've used my full name as my username on the internet, for accountability reasons. That is, if I say something on the internet, I say it knowing that anyone that cares to look for it will be able to find it and attribute it to me in the "real world."

I wish I could say that this has always insured that I behave on the internet the way I would in person, but that hasn't always been the case. I'm far more inclined to express anger or disdain than I would be if the actual person I was interacting with was standing right in front of me. Still, it's a lot closer to "real life" when I use my real name, and that's the accountability I was talking about. It's mostly a way to hold myself to account and I'm not worried of backlash from other people.

Am I afraid? No. I'm not a racist or a revolutionary. I'm not planning to take down the US government or burn any crosses. If someone wanted to "out" me for things I've said on the internet they would mostly be things I would say in person.

I think the internet is a frightening place if you're advocating for things that would disgust people. If you avoid that, what is there to be afraid of?

Yours,

Dean A. Solecki

I have a friend that does education research and we've talked about this a lot. For me, a university is almost completely useless. I have no problem making friends, I'm self-motivated in my intellectual pursuits, and I learn best by doing rather than listening. So from my perspective it's really easy to assume that universities are basically a profiteering racket, and in a lot of ways they in fact are.

But for a lot of people universities provide the only exposure that they will get to a lot of intellectual domains. Most people will never do any higher level math outside of a classroom, will never read philosophy outside of a classroom, will never read world literature outside of a classroom, will never do an empirical experiment outside of a classroom, will never read world history outside of a classroom... the list goes on and on.

So in terms of efficiency, the university system is a joke, but in terms of forcing people to approach things that they don't want to approach, there aren't any real alternatives.

As test-fetishism turns most universities into shallow stick-and-carrot degree factories the value of approaching those subjects is largely diminished, but that isn't inherent to the university model, and has more to do with distributing privilege to a handful of people at the expense of everyone else. This is a problem with capitalism more than a problem with the university model. When only a handful of people went to college, those colleges could get on with educating and the distribution of privilege didn't play a factor, because privilege was already adequately distributed by other means (race, economic standing, gender, what have you.) Since there has been a very strong push to send everyone to college, the distribution of privilege has become a function of the university system, and now they operate as gatekeepers of privilege, which really isn't a role that they should play (they should take in the students that they take in and teach them as much as they can; letting other forces operate on privilege.) The reason universities have turned into gatekeepers of privilege is the unseemly relationship between universities and corporations. Mass education and economic gain are not necessarily aligned with one another, but if they become aligned, universities will necessarily operate as gatekeepers of privilege.

Universities have become an instrument of corporations because people get degrees in an effort to appeal to potential employers and this has the adverse effect of pushing universities to gear themselves towards the interests of corporations, to appeal to potential students (the three-way relationship between employers, universities, and students/employees could be discussed at length, but this is the gist of it.)

And so the problem arises therein, but again, it's principally a failing of capitalism (there are only a handful of "good" positions in society that everyone is fighting for) and is not inherent to the university model itself (which should attempt to educated everyone as much as possible, rather than just the top few.)

They prefer being called "Mechanical Americans." -.-