Thanks, for some reason I saw MD on the car. Probably my crappy laptop screen.

*ban
Self link
Laptopic

I actually used an old Intellimouse Explorer 2.0 from 2003 today -- it's in my laptop bag for those times when the trackpad just doesn't cut it.

Still works pretty well. The button hardware switches are a bit old and some of them produce signals that are too noisy for the signal bounce processing chips to filter out. So, the wheel button registers a single click as a double basically 100% of the time (PITA when using it to open new tabs in a browser), and the "forward" button does the same 50% of the time (much less frequently an issue). Not half bad for 15 year old hardware, really.

After these phased out of popularity, I switched loyalties to Logitech and then more recently Razer. But the hand feel of the chassis (which will be the exact same for this reboot version) of the Explorer was really quite excellent. Might have to look for one!

The pertinent video he mentions that was posted in the yt description

How unauthorized idiots repair Apple laptops https://youtu.be/ocF_hrr83Oc

Trump represents himself as the opposite of everything wrong with Washington DC and Hillary Clinton and the last 8 years.

His agenda to to MAGA. and to drain the swamp.

He is bring jobs back and lowering unemployment. The tag line "Its the economy stupid. " rings true. After 8 years of poor growth and leadership indicating 2% growth is the new norm, Damn right people want someone who promises better. And Trump is delivering on the economy. Hillary really didn't have a message.

World affairs-- Tentative , promising ? still evolving, but hopeful. Got 3 prinisors out of NK, alive. It's a start.

Draining the swamp, dozens not seeking reelection or just leaving.
DOJ, FBI, Fired,resigned , compromised
Anthony Weiner laptop search warrant was unsealed today. Now more bad news for HRC and many more.
But the wheels of justice moves slowly.

Also The Inspector General final Draft is nearly completed--

Also noted that the FBI had a snitch placed in the Trump camp and was feed bogus information -- A total FBI scam.


If Obama delivered solid growth Hillary would have been a shoe in, as repulsive as she is.

Like how you blame Republicans for destruction in 2008. BS but ok lets go with it and take ownership. Obama took ownership in 2008 and was responsible for fixing the mess and he failed.

Clinton stood for what ? LBGTQ and universal healthcare.

Can you cite your sources, please? I have not heard this information. What I had heard matches some of what you said.

The information I read on several news sites (CNN, WaPo, and I forget the thrid) all said similar things to what you said, except that the 2 were waiting for a friend to arrive, who happened to arrive just as they were being led out.

They were not customers, yet. Why buy anything before your friend arrives, if he is buying the drinks?

I am white and I have never once been hassled at a Starbucks for showing up and hanging out with my laptop, going to the bathroom, or doing anything for any amount of time.

I don't think we can ignore that they were black, and it sounds like they were getting grief pretty early on in their stay.

Your video, Cheerleader Chases Laptop Thief and Catches Her!!, has made it into the Top 15 New Videos listing. Congratulations on your achievement. For your contribution you have been awarded 1 Power Point.

Was I the only one counting the number of times the laptop owner said "like"?

*nature *kids *music *comedy

What's the URL to that laptop/notebook's video?

Slashdot had a post about an upcoming (about 1 year out) phone that can run pretty standard Linux distros. I took interest because I'm very annoyed about how UNconfigurable android is.

I have a Samsung Galaxy S2, very old by now, but hardware wise it still works fine. Software wise, it is shit. Android apps are massively bloated compared to when the phone was new, so the "system" partition of the phone is too small to install anything other than like 1-2 apps. From what I can tell, rooting might not help because there are still standard partitioning requirements? I dunno. Anyway, it is a big mess compared to a desktop, where I can partition things any way I want (which works great if you know what you are doing).

Anyway, I don't want to shill for Purism, the company that will be making the phone in the Slashdot article (for one thing, the phone is still a year or so away from final production), but they seem to be doing things right. They DO have some laptops on the market now, which apparently include a relevant feature mentioned in the write-up about their upcoming phone: hardware kill switches for the microphone, camera, and WiFi/Bluetooth.

If you read the ToS (hah! as if) for things like Facebook's app or the phones / OS themselves, you might see that you are "agreeing" to this kind of data collectionspying. If that sets the bar for "good" behavior, imagine what the bad guys (NSA, other agencies, state actors, unscrupulous advertisers, malware producers, etc.) can and will do. That's why any software solution is dubious. That's why electrical tape over your webcam is better than assuming that the record light is trustworthy. That's why a hardware kill switch is a good feature if you're concerned about this (like me).

Here's links to:
an article about the hardware kill switches in Purism's laptops, and
an article about their upcoming phone the Librem 5

I don't own any of their hardware. I don't like paid shills. That being said, I'm interested in what they are doing.

Sorry, that's pretty culturally-ignorant thinking right there.

Japanese people are not "meek" or "inhibited" any more so than Americans are. There are different cultural rules about self-expression but there are most certainly loud, aggressive, and flamboyant people here. They just express themselves in different ways than your typically loud, aggressive, and flamboyant American would.

You might think socioeconomic factors were a reason for the lack of crime, but you'd be wrong there too. Japan has a higher poverty rate and lower median income than the U.S.

The low crime rates here can much better be attributed to cultural factors. Every Japanese person is raised with the belief that it is shameful cause problems to the people around them, whether that be family, schoolmates, or co-workers. Getting arrested is about the most shameful thing you could do here. Just being suspected of a crime will likely get you fired from your job, before you are even tried.

And let's not forget the role the justice system here plays. If you get arrested you are almost 100% going to get convicted because the odds are massively stacked against you in the court system. You are basically guilty until proven innocent. Read this for more info about it.

And people here know this. They also know that Japanese prison is hellish. You won't be raped or assaulted there like in the U.S. but you will know exactly what is like to have all of your freedom stripped completely away.

You add to all of this the low unemployment rate of Japan, the high regulation of all weapons (including knives), a robust social system for helping the unemployed (although unfortunately lately a lot of people seem to be falling through the cracks), a nationalized health insurance plan (I pay a $1 co-pay to take my daughter to the doctor and all prescribed medicines are free), a strong social stigma against drug use, and the ability as an island nation to strictly police the borders to prevent the influx of illegal goods (i.e. drugs/guns) and you get the low crime rates in Japan.

tl;dr

There is little incentive to commit crime in Japan because the both social and legal repercussions are extremely severe, and there is little need to resort to crime to survive (plentiful jobs and robust social security). Likewise the opportunity to commit crime is lessened because of the strict regulation of weapons, drugs, and borders.

EDIT: I will say that on more than one occasion I've thought that a career criminal in the U.S. who suddenly found himself in Japan would feel like a kid in a candy store. Because of the lack of crime, people here don't take precautions against it--some people leave doors and windows unlocked when leaving the house, you'll see laptops or iPads left in cars in plain view, and people carry ridiculous amounts of cash on them (I'm talking like on the order of $1000 or more in some cases). On the one hand it can be reassuring but on the other hand I seriously worry about these people when they travel overseas.

Yes, I agree my iPhone 7 is a good product. I never saw a cellphone as a necessity but I have to say I wouldn't be able to do my current job without it. My company sent me to a remote site to replace the network router and switch and my iPhone served as the hotspot to connect to VPN so the network engineers could remote in to my laptop and run Putty to configure the new equipment. At the same time I'm talking to them on that phone, emailing them pictures of the equipment with it, checking my personal email, etc without a performance hit on the phone. I would have been listening to Pandora too if I didn't have to talk to them. So I was impressed that this device not much bigger than a playing card could do all that.

The road and electricity don't matter nearly as much as the metric system because they are geographically bound.

Generally, you drive in one country at a time, and most countries with land borders drive on the same side of the road.

With electrical appliances, they usually stay in one country and the ones that do travel (i.e. laptops, phones, etc) generally will accept any voltage.

Damn, sorry to hear that. I could go off on a frothing at the mouth rant at how bad it was, what we went through. To save money our original company, a nationwide US health insurance company, outsourced us right at merit raise time (nice touch, a-holes) to an off-shore company that would probably only ever meet expectations running an assembly line operation for building PCs.

They were out of their league taking over level 1 and 2 operations for a large company, which was already working through the pains of merging with other companies they had acquired. Instead of inspiring the legacy workers to stick around to make the transition work, their attitude was we were lucky the host company insisted we get first crack to reapply for "our" jobs. Like it was all one big assembly line and we could be easily replaced with someone with an A+ cert for $11\hr. The equivalent of pulling up to a storefront and having IT landscapers jump in the back of a pickup truck to work that day. Might work for an assembly line but not for a complex embedded IT infrastructure with 1001 local support quirks. They were completely clueless.

Add insult to injury, their internal processes were so bad, over the course of a year they asked us continually to remind them of the phone# of the iPhone they gave us and the serial# of the laptop they gave us. At least half a dozen times, it was fucking absurd. And when we were offered an incentive to help reduce the ticket log backup, they mailed unsigned money orders to fictional home addresses they had on record for us. With the stamp on the wrong part of the envelope for those lucky enough to receive their unsigned money orders. You had the option of mailing the money order back to get it signed (good luck getting it back) or committing a felony to get the money you legally earned, by not using the first option. Took me 7 months to finally get my money order, who knows where they originally mailed it. Their indifference during this whole mess was staggering, you had to badger management and HR like they were a deadbeat drunk brother-in-law who owes you money.

And they kept putting off the review\raise process until they finally offered us 50 cents an hour for the highest performers. I gave my notice the next day.

Sorry for the rant, it was such a colossal failure on all fronts, except no doubt for the amount the host company saved on IT during that time. But of course nobody is interested in capturing the countless hours of downtime and lost productivity introduced by these IT cost "savings". Last I heard they were putting the contract back out to bid before the scheduled end of the current contract, which doesn't surprise me. What a freaking waste.

I hope you find work soon, Ant.

Specifics on terrorist plots like laptop bombs, and where (not from who) he got the Intel.
Washington Post, citing unnamed intelligence agents.

Man, I've never seen right wingers so willing to look the other way over treasonous behavior concerning Russia. Regan must be spinning in his grave.
There is none so blind as he who will not see.