forca

I agree. As a veteran myself, I often wondered about the decisions to move from the proven 7.62 to the not-so-effective 5.56. Back in WWII, if a German soldier took at .30-06 in the chest from an M1, he wasn't getting up from it. Even the British Enfield and Vickers guns using the venerable old .303 (7mm) would put a man down reliably with a solid hit.

I personally know troops who have shot insurgents several times with M4s at lethal ranges (less than 200') and they took the hits and kept fighting long enough to return fire. Those same insurgents hit with a 7.62 slug would be DRT. Full stop. There is a reason quite a few Marines and soldiers carried .357 revolvers in Vietnam. The reason was the stopping power. The 125 grain .357 traveling at 1400 FPS boasts 96% one shot stops on human torsos that are not armoured. The .357 is still the gold standard for handgun stopping power. Like you with your 1911, I'm a .357 guy. If I cannot do it with six, I need something belt fed. Plus, like a lot of guys I know, I favour a New York reload anyway.

Stay safe.

Cannot say I don't welcome Uber getting curtailed in all these places. Like many people have said, I doubt the drivers have the insurance to cover their passengers should something really bad happen whilst a passenger is in the car. Something to consider. Taxis are required by law to be insured in certain ways, as are bus companies and limo services.

Also, I like the traditional taxis and bus systems.

I really miss the "old days" of programming. Things were simpler then. I fondly remember the early 80s programming on a Commodore 64, then moving to the early IBM machines and DOS.

Even though I favour a nix environment, there is more sanity in Windows programming circles methinks. I have been thinking about getting into some .NET development these days and moving away from doing nix stuff, altho I really love the BSDs.

Depends.

If you install Ubuntu, for example, and do nothing but be an end user, no. If you install Debian or Slackware or Fedora, or CentOS and actually learn how the internals work by installing software, setting up networks, firewalls, proxy server, Web servers, then yes.

I started with Linux back in 1998 and it's still my primary desktop flavour (Debian). I prefer BSDs for servers being they are arguably more stable and nothing beats ZFS, the BSD notion of jails, and the TCP/IP stack.

Gentoo is a good learning experience, but only if you have a full weekend to start it. Last time I ran a stage 1 Gentoo tarball, it took 12 hours to bootstrap. Never again.

Slackware or CRUX Linux are great learning flavours. As is Debian if you do the expert install and make mistakes.

Go to a Linux Users Group when they have installfests. Have an experienced Linux sysadmin "break" your installation and try to fix it. This is how I learned. Going to my LUG and getting jobs where Linux and UNIX were prevalent. I'm making inroads with bosses where I work now to displace Windows. Slowly but surely. They see the savings and they see the stability. Win.

No. Go away. Nerd culture needs to be cultivated and rewarded. Full stop.

We, at least in the US and in Western Europe are no longer making anything. We are no longer makers. Sure, a few places make stuff, but the risk/reward idealism from being a nerd is now discouraged in favour of simply accepting what is by people who "know better than us". Sorry, most of what I know in life is because I cared enough to learn and grok stuff. I'm curious by nature and so are most nerds/geeks. If the sheeple want it easy, let them subscribe to those ideas, but never ever discourage those of us who want to be nerds/geeks to give that up.

I use *nix precisely because I don't want it to just "work". That's boring. This is why my kids are getting Raspberry Pi sets and Lego Mindstorm sets. They need to think it out and do something. Make mistakes. Learn along the way. Who knows. Maybe one of my kids will invent the warp drive or cure cancer. The nerd culture is what encourages the risk takers and the outliers with the ability to think for themselves. This is a gift and should be cultivated to the highest extent possible. Education today, sadly is delivered to the lowest common denominator in the class. This is why the West is losing... kids that cannot hang need to go to remedial learning like they used to, not drag the smart kids down. Damned liberals running the education the West.

Yes. I hate receiving documents in .docx or any other proprietary format, especially if I have not agreed to that format prior to receiving them. I like plain text if at all possible. I'll happily receive PDFs because I can view them under Linux/BSD, but others piss me off. People THINK MS Word is the de facto business standard. It isn't. Text and PDF are the standards. Never had issues with either.

I had a friend tell me my CV should be in PDF and locked down to prevent recruiters and others from changing it to something other than the original. I know recruiters are fond of changing things up without informing you.

Yes, I know about this, and thank you for reminding me, but in the end, I just don't trust software.

I really do like old school and I stick with it. I write most of my docs as text in either vi or nano. I neither want nor need formatting beyond the basics. My CV is the only document I own that has formatting, and I used LibreOffice for it. It's a single page.

This is a very good reason to never use software in the so-called "cloud". I also remember years ago when someone showed me "Track Changes" in MS Word and other programs and how you could go back and look at, say, a bid offer and see if everything was on the up and up. You could see, esp. if the document was a form letter or canned response, to which other companies were offered different terms, you name it.

I dislike revision-able software for a number of reasons. Privacy is the foremost reason. Yes, yes, "if you've nothing to hide, you've nothing to fear..." That old chestnut gets trotted out every time someone worries about security or privacy.

Since about 2000, I keep my documents in plain text only on an encrypted drive backed up several times over -- none of the backups are online, but I'm still good if my house burns down, my machines get stolen, you name it.

No, just no.

I don't use the software in question. I only use AdBlock Plus and some creative OS-side tweaks under Linux to accomplish what I need. I don't need to use the software to go after ad companies.

It's a big deal because it's disingenuous.

I wonder what the viability of setting up a subscription service proxy that mobile users (and others) could point their mobile phones to that strips out all the dreck? I know there are VPS offerings that do this. Webhosting companies do offer unlimited bandwidth, so theoretically, bandwidth is not a problem.

Sites love to view user history. It helps them build up a profile to sell to marketers. You want to deny sites access to this info if you can, In FF, you can do this by toggling to "false" layout.css.visited_links_enabled under about:config