icewater0

Oooh, I can't wait to ignore Microsoft products on Linux as well!

PostgreSQL for me thanks.

Hmm. I cannot reach the site.

Naturally, anyone within earshot of an idiot with a smartphone has opted in as well?

I was going to post a comment how I would like to have a local instance of OSM for my state/region.

Is it possible to calculate directions/routing locally too?

Bret Easton Ellis also has an excellent podcast: http://podcastone.com/Bret-Easton-Ellis-Podcast

I see a couple of things missing in the comments thus far on George Bell's isolation.

First, his age. When he was younger, he was (presumably) in love with, and almost married, a woman whom he stayed in touch with for the rest of his life. He also had close relationships with friends. For some people, the "desaturation" of life that comes with age makes it feel less worthwhile to pursue the things that once made them happy.

Second, some people who do not socialize are not necessarily devoid of the inner need for friendship and companionship - they may have learned that the pain and risk that can come with social connections outweigh the advantages.

When a man becomes old, disabled, and considerably overweight, interacting with others might not be a particularly pleasant experience.

There are no "solutions" to the "problems" George Bell had. They are a part of the human condition, and they were his experience of life.

Echoing some of the sentiment elsewhere in comments, I liked programming a lot more when I was more of a one-man show, instead of a team member with other people doing business analysis, project management, client contact, and basically everything except pulling predefined stories off a scrum board and delivering them.

I'm sure it's more efficient and effective, but it feels like factory work now.

I think part of "the system" involves learning and lending institutions informally forecasting what the lifetime return on a student's education will be, and then attempting to maximize the return on the student loan(s) as an investment on those future earnings.

The learning and lending institutions clearly fucked up big-time in their forecasting, along with everyone else who was irrationally exuberant in their optimism about the future economy.

Now they are stuck between students on one hand (who have been sold a bill of goods and are seriously pissed about the pittance left over after their loan payments, if they're able to pay back at all), and the investors on the other hand (which includes not only evil bankers' money but also people who have been sacrificing in good faith for decades to contribute to their retirement accounts).

So the stage is set for a nice messy society-destroying generational war that should distract everyone from the forecasting mistakes.

> How much of it is due to needlessly churning out new editions to cut off the used book market?

And there is all the more incentive when the instructor requires a book he has written himself.

> I assume it's because you can't stand Las Vegas?

Haha, I have no idea because I haven't been there, but you're right that I can't stand even the idea of Las Vegas :-)

When the crying person gets this all resolved, perhaps the crying person will want to consider alternatives to Facebook, such as diaspora*.

As I get older, among my regrets are not having gone to see either the Grand Canyon, or the Hoover Dam. I have half-made plans to take the trip, some day.

I would go with:

1) Suppress the empathy response; 2) Implement a kill-switch for rogue units.

:-)

I just subscribed to the feed

Good interview

If nothing else, the title is "The Road Not Taken", not "The Road Less Traveled". It implies the subject is the road not taken.

Every single day. It's how I get 99% of my news and other periodical written content.

Actually something will have to be extremely compelling for me to bother keeping up with it if it doesn't offer an RSS feed.

> regularly encounter people that use the "they are criminals" justification

The inclination to enslave others is ingrained into certain strains of the human species and they will take them where it can find them.

A typical Facebook is mildly nauseating at first, and this increases the longer you look at it. The privacy sacrifice is unacceptable. I don't use it.

I do use diaspora*. No one I know IRL uses it, but that's fine for now.

Slack is really useful but it really bothers me that it's hosted off-site. I would rather my communications with my team stay within the team, and not with slack.com.

Do you know if there is any information sent to Microsoft by default for which they did not offer you a screen widget to click that says "off"?

Do you know what actual data is, and is not, sent to Microsoft as you use your device?

Even if you do, will you still know once Microsoft pushes a mandatory update and/or changes its 12,000 word terms of service?

While it is true that most end users of Free software do not audit or compile their own binaries, the situations aren't even remotely comparable.

Do you think Esperanto is a bad idea?

Honestly I'm not even comfortable with my work interactions being stored on Slack. I would never use a service like this for personal info.

You can put Rockbox on iPods (and many other devices). http://www.rockbox.org/