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teetotaler(n.) also teetotaller, "one who formally pledges to entire abstinence from intoxicating drink," 1834, agent noun from teetotal (q.v.). Related: Teetotaleress (1834); teet…

On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that…

And if the jurisdictions don't have a treaty?

There ought to be an XKCD for this, but instead it's from the FAQ. In short: somebody thought it was interesting enough to submit, and enough other people voted for it that it got …

Counter-evidence: the Google Play Store, which is a wretched hive of scum and villainy. And also malware.

He's singing the praises of CostCo, which made him whole. Any dishwasher could have these problems; any warehouse could. How the seller handles the situation is key to whether you …

Because I don't own any that I want to use. I always have a phone, a laptop, a tablet or a desktop to hand. The tablet is a great device for reading comics as well as books. The ph…

I use KOReader on everything except e-ink devices. Linux desktop. MacOS laptop. Android tablets. Android phones. Where-ever I am, I can pick up a device and continue reading from w…

In system after system, people enthusiastically swarm to something which is easy to use. Then, after enshittification, they hang around too long because it's so hard to extract and…

The ACM sent around a nice query to members which made it clear that they were going to do it even if 100% of the members said "No, don't do that". I suppose they could be sued.

No, just leave a blank space in the middle that has nothing to do with the denomination and is there just to be interesting. Print something new in it for each member; issue half o…

My workplace has made health insurance a competitive point: zero employee premium, zero copays except for an ambulance call which does not result in an admission, zero Rx costs. Fu…

The primary source of uncorrelated bit-flips is, effectively, cosmic radiation. (Correlated bit-flips are likely from a manufacturing error... or, at least in one case, from excess…

Objection: most large cities haven't been designed. They grew, usually starting because they had a significant transportation advantage (seaport, seaport + river, river junction, r…

It's capitalism making things worse again. CDs improved over LPs in dynamic range, frequency response, error correction, replayability, stereo separation, and noise floor. They als…

On the contrary, this line of argument proves nothing. Rather, it is a caution that people telling you stories tells you a lot about what they want to portray, not so much about wh…

Remember that there is an alternate universe in which AirBnB is the way that 70% of all corporate short-term housing gets booked, and they are telling the story of how they nearly …

Moderation is a hard problem, period.

At $8500, I could justify having a 77 mile range electric car with a top speed of 30ish mph. That would take care of every in-town trip, but I couldn't do a full commute to work wi…

Shorter tickers are considered more valuable, because they are easier to say, type and remember. A is for Agilent. C is for Citigroup. T for AT&T, the Telephone Company.

That's how capitalism values things, yes. And that's why capitalism must be strongly regulated; it's a powerful tool and a terrible master.

The Concorde was cramped. JFK to Heathrow took five hours (3 in the air, an hour in each airport) plus the time for first and last miles. JFK to Heathrow today is 7 to 8 hours with…

App optimization happens in the background now, and pops a notification when it is done, asking to restart all open apps.

Programming is the reification of decision-making processes. If you don't understand the decision-making process that you want, you get a different one, which at best approximates …

If I use the web interface to my self-hosted library, each book's cover is shown along with a progress bar if it has ever been opened in the web interface. If I use the OPDS interf…