Duke87

(5324) Changes of pace can be refreshing. If you don't live in a city, that can mean going into one. If you do live in a city, that can mean getting away from it.

(5319) 'Salright, this threas has no topic. :P

Note about the above image: the picture of the Empire State Building is not current. The Empire State Building was lit up only white last night (I can confirm this personally). The Freedom Tower's spire was, however, lit up in bleu, blanc, rouge. http://nj1015.com/one-world-trade-centers-spire-in-frances-colors-to-honor-paris-victims/

(5316) Those artful trains and highways are basically THE reason why I'd love to visit Japan someday. Visit, mind you, not move to, even temporarily. As much as I love traveling about, I have lived in the same metro area my entire life. And while I occasionally look into the possibility of relocating to some other part of the US, for practical reasons that is unlikely to happen anytime soon.

I wouldn't worry about a Democrat downsizing the US military. Some of them may expel hot air from their mouths in a way that makes it sound like they want to, but none of them actually will. At the end of the day no matter who is elected, they will serve the same master: the almighty dollar. Wars are too profitable to stop funding.

It's probably more likely that the attackers were citizens and born there--France has actually taken in very few refugees, and it seems that many of these people are radicalized within Europe. Which makes these things even harder to prevent. In some cases they're French-born, with French parents, educated in French schools and who don't speak a word in Arabic except what they're taught by their trainers. Indeed, the assumption that anyone committing acts of terrorism must be of foreign origin is hasty. Often this is the case, but examples abound where it isn't. Meanwhile, the attackers here are the people the refugees are running away from. So blaming the refugees for it is exactly backwards.

Freaky. When these things happen in the age of social media, the whole world has direct access to firsthand accounts. Certainly goes a ways towards making the tragedy more human. Indeed, the imagery here is particularly powerful given what that building is.

The problem is twofold. One, hardware designers don't future proof their work, so updates put strain on their resources that they weren't built to handle. Two, software designers have ceased recognizing that there is any scarcity of computing resources, and write bloated programs because they can get away with it. Of course, this creates a cycle where people are encouraged to buy new devices when an update bogs down the old one, so the people in charge love it and have no motivation to stop it.

(5313) I can't imagine living in a place like Hawaii. I have too much wanderlust to be confined to a small island.

(5307) If you're worried about getting attacked while playing the game, you should consider building yourself a Fallout shelter. *ducks*

The mobile version of Firefox does have a mobile version of Adblock Plus, but it only blocks banner ads. It seemingly is not capable of blocking these Javascript-based popups which are not technically "popups" in the classic sense since they open within the page, not in a separate window. And, unfortunately, there is no mobile version of NoScript.

I haven't seen a mobile website actively install something. They do however often pop annoying ads in your face saying "hey, install our app!", which are seemingly designed with the goal of beating the user into submission by making downloading the app easier than putting up with the nagging every time they go to the web page. Presumably if you click yes it's a link to the download page in your provider's app store rather than a direct command to install.

This is unto itself an excellent point. A great many apps, it seems, don't really do much that a webpage in a mobile browser cannot. But, when you view a website in a mobile browser, it can't snoop on you outside of said browser. Install their app, as they will often nag you to do, and they gain the ability to pull information about what you are texting to whom and when, what apps you are using, etc. (seriously, read the terms of service). These apps exist in order to provide more robust data mining to the people making them. If they provide the user with any added convenience that is merely how they are marketed. There's no such thing as a free app. If you don't pay with money, you pay with information. The files are on the device itself. Even if they are not stored permanently there, they must be downloaded into the device's cache in order to be viewed on it (streamed audio and video notwithstanding). Moving files between a smartphone and a PC is pretty easy, all you need is a USB cord which conveniently is half of most chargers these days. At that point the phone becomes just like any other external drive, you can browse folders, copy stuff off of it, and put stuff on it. Files are compatible since they are in the same sorts of formats (jpg and such for images, etc.) that your computer uses. There are also programs available that will auto-sync things between your devices, but from a security perspective this is not recommended because it means you have no air gap and if one device is compromised, your other devices can easily be compromised as well.

Oh look, Ron Paul said something quite intelligent. Must be that point in the day when the broken clock happens to coincide with the current time.

(5304) You'd be surprised. About a year and a half ago I was complaining similarly, that all the women in New York City were in one way or another just not my type, and "my type" seemed to be some sort of mythical creature. I was seriously considering trying to move to somewhere else where I figured I might have better luck (funny enough, Pittsburgh was one of my top choices). Then I met someone in New York City who met the mythical criteria, and we've been together for 14 months now.

I've been an Android user as long as I've had a smartphone primarily because I refuse to use an Apple product on principle. It does stick in my craw a bit, though, that iOS generally has better security than Android does, so my ears perked up a bit at the idea of an Android phone with a heavier security focus. Alas, Android's greatest security shortcoming can't be fixed simply by changing the phone, because it is neither a software nor a hardware flaw, but rather a policy flaw: Android relies on wireless carriers to push updates to device holders and allows them to pick and choose what they make available. Major wireless carriers generally decline to offer updates of any kind unless you buy a new phone, because of course they want to keep selling more phones so people keep signing new contracts. So, you either deal with your OS being near-perpetually out of date or illegally (at least in the US) root your device so you can update it manually. Meanwhile the fact that Priv supposedly contains DRM hardware to prevent the phone from working if rooted is naturally going to be a major turn-off for anyone who wants to do that.

The idea of the national capital being its own political enclave is not unique to the US. Mexico, Brazil, Russia, and Australia all have the same sort of setup. The sticking point with the US' version of it is that residents of the capital district lack representation in their own national government. This could be solved without combining the district with an adjacent state, but no one has been able to get enough support for any one particular solution. Though we did manage to amend the constitution allowing DC residents to vote for president, at least. For Guam, yes. Puerto Rico, hardly. Puerto Rico is home to 3.6 million people, it would rank 29th out of 51 on population if it were a state. Puerto Rico is not a state largely because of politics. - There is no majority support among the people of Puerto Rico in favor of statehood, it has been put to referendum several times and failed. - Puerto Rico would likely elect a lot of liberal politicians, so Republicans in congress are naturally going to oppose granting it statehood. - The primary language spoken in Puerto Rico is Spanish, and it is culturally part of Latin America. Making it a state would be mighty awkward for everyone who believes that in America everyone should speak English. Bilingualism and cultural tension would be unavoidable, it would create a Quebec-like situation. - Economically, Puerto Rico is weaker than the mainland US. If it were a state it would be the poorest, and it has a very high level of public debt. This could create issues if it were admitted to the union, although it is often argued that many of its economic problems are largely caused by the legal restrictions of its current territorial status and things would improve without special assistance if it were to become a state.

My take on the confederate flag is that like any other flag, it's just cloth dyed with a particular pattern of color. It can be taken to symbolize various things but at the end of the day complaining about it is solid #firstworldproblems. Appreciate that our freedom of speech allows us to fly whatever flag we see fit to. There are places in the world where displaying the wrong symbols can get one far worse consequences than criticism from one's peers. Meanwhile, all this fuss over symbols is a distraction from the real problem. We all see headlines about "Someone flying the confederate flag did a bad thing!" and then try to eradicate said flag from public display as though that's somehow going to stop people from doing bad things. Which of course is absurd. All it does is make people feel better, it's blatant placebo policy. But policy which is far easier to enact than having a serious conversation about why the psychopath had is psychopathy unchecked and untreated, where he learned that members of a particular race were to be the subject of his hatred, and how he was able to so easily get his hands on weapons with which to kill a bunch of them.

Meh. Despite decades of separatist rabble, Quebec is still part of Canada and Scotland is still part of the UK. I doubt any similar referendum in Hawaii would stand a better chance of success and even if it did, the US federal government would be unlikely to recognize the legitimacy of it. If you think about it though it is pretty weird, geographically speaking, that Hawaii is a US state. Even Alaska makes more sense since at least it's on the same continent and as the crow flies it's only separated from the rest of the US by a little over 500 miles at its closest point. Meanwhile, the west coast of the continental US is as close to Hawaii as it is to the east coast (~2500 miles)

The exact reasons why we ended up with red=Republican and blue=Democrat are unclear. What is known is that for the 2000 election, these happened to be the colors the major news networks chose to use for their maps, and the prolonged coverage due to the recount issue resulted in the colors getting burned into the brains of the American public. Prior to that, different sources used different colors in different years, there was no consistent scheme. It's worth noting that the donkey and elephant logos of both parties have both been red, white, and blue for quite some time. Neither major party created an image for itself around a particular color, they merely took on the colors that became popularized after 2000.

Welp, YouTube is moving into the next phase in its lifecycle, the same lifecycle that all online content hosting services go through. First, a free service is launched, funded by ads. Second, the ads get more pervasive to raise more money. Third, the site finds it impossible to be profitable on ads alone so they start offering premium membership. Fourth, they try to force the premium version on more people by making the free version increasingly difficult to use. Finally, the site fades to a shadow of its former self as everyone abandons it for something new. YouTube has now entered phase 3. Which means brace yourselves, it's midlife crisis time and it's downhill from here.

The comparison the OP article makes to the Democrats in the 1970s is interesting, although it remains to be seen whether it is apt. It is, however, difficult to question that the current schism/purification drive within the Republican party is a source of trouble for them (house divided against itself and all that), and that changes in demographics will not be in their favor if they maintain their current platform. Nonetheless, as has been pointed out (this article gives a nice rundown), the legislative structure of the US gives more power relatively speaking to rural areas than to urban areas, and politically rural areas tend to elect Republicans while urban areas tend to elect Democrats. In both 2012 and 2014, Republicans have won a greater percentage of seats in congress than they have received as a percentage of congressional votes nationwide, simply because the voters are not evenly distributed geographically. Even without gerrymandering, have geographically compact districts would favor rural areas and therefore favor Republicans. Consider for example the following map, which shows by county who won a majority of votes for president in 2012: Note how by area, most of the country voted red, while the blue candidate actually got the most votes and won. But if you look at who won what state it becomes quickly apparent that there are more large red areas in overall blue states than there are large blue areas in overall red states. Given this it would require deliberate effort to draw districts in a way that didn't overall favor the Republican party.

(5299) Given that KC is up two games to none the odds are certainly well in their favor at this point (82.9% chance of winning if these stats are to be believed), although such deficits have been come back from before. See Yankees vs Braves in 1996.

(5296) What I find interesting is that we have a World Series between two teams who last won in adjacent years three decades ago - 1985 for the Royals, 1986 for the Mets.

(5292) The legend about the Cubs is that someone brought his pet goat to a game of the 1945 world series but was kicked out of the stadium when people complained about the smell. The man then placed a curse on the team as revenge, they lost that world series and have not won a pennant since. The legend about the Red Sox was that they cursed themselves by trading Babe Ruth to the Yankees... there wasn't much more to it than that. There is no commonly accepted story as to why the apparent curse suddenly ended in 2004, either.