I'm also reminded of the old article, which described how the ancient samurai charged into battle, shouting You must install Flash plugin to view this content.
I assume they're trying to out-do the old Soviet joke.
Preface to a new sex education schoolbook:"Dear children. There are three kinds of love. First, there is the love between parents and children. We're sure all of you are already familiar with that, so there is no need to discuss it here. Second, there is the love between two adults. Some suggest it might be too early to tell you anything about that yet. And third, there's the love the People feel toward the Party, and that is what we shall discuss for the rest of this book..."
There's a movie plot hook buried there. About a kid on spectrum whose robot buddy gets killed by the uncaring business. They go "oh no, I'll have to fix my robot buddy" and go on to become a tech genius. One day, they become a tech millionaire, and the story's antagonist, the shady businesses partner, goes "look, we're bankrupt, we have no choice, we have to shut down all of the robot buddies". And the protagonist remembers the saddest moment of their childhood and are like "no, we can't do that".
I don't know if there's some way to override/customise the notification sounds on Android on per-app basis. At one point in history I wanted Twitter to go [random bird noises] and Reddit to go "Le." but since I don't use either of them anymore I really didn't investigate this further.
It's an insurance company. I assume they had a 6 hour meeting discussing the shade of the quotation marks. Then the social media intern said you can't change it.
LimeWire was based on Gnutella protocol, which was actually the first major P2P file sharing protocol. The file discovery was completely decentralised. But yes, way simpler and less robust than BitTorrent.
There was some 1990s documentary about fractals, narrated by Arthur C. Clarke (I think), where he said something along the lines of "I've not tried this myself, but I've been told there's certain illegal chemicals that can cause hallucinations that look like fractals".
(I have this on VHS tape somewhere. Should probably digitise it.)
For those who don't need cloud access, I just put all of my photos on a NAS and use a digital asset manager software. digiKam is great if you want an open source solution. I use ACDSee because it's faster and has better usability in my humble opinion. But since both of the software packages store the metadata in image files and XMP sidecars and basically only use local app-specific database for caching, if digiKam ever gets a couple of quantum leaps ahead, switching back to it isn't that big of a deal. (As usual, don't use Adobe Lightroom or you're screwed in that regard. Or so I've been told.)
Most of my local public transport is electrically-powered now
Which is kind of my point. Over the years our public transport has been proudly advertising their use of biodiesels and bio gas, CNG and LNG. And apparently battery-electric buses are coming too. (Sorry, Adam Something. Apparently our city cannot into trams, as fucking awesome as it would be! But apparently the Green Party is proposing TRAINS)
cash certainly lives here
Yeah, and that was kind of a pointed example on my part. I don't think cash is going away entirely. That said, vast majority of our public transport is already apparently either going on prepaid cards or debit so, eh.
Over here we already have plenty of memes based on "What if Breaking Bad happened in Europe? It'd been very underwhelming because we have public healthcare." But I'm glad Albuquerque can at least say "well we could maybe have mitigated some of the car shenanigans in the series now."
Kinect! I mean, a bunch of Wii games were really fun, but Kinect had some really interesting uses. And unlike Wii games the sports games actually gave me an exhausting workout. Without cheating.
Neither of the platforms really got to the fullest of the full potential though.
But even there, Kinect had one incredible example of where it was great. Xbox 360 Skyrim had the absolute best voice commands I've ever used anywhere.
It's apparently $50 a month, but based on one recent video from a guy who looked into this, there's apparently a hard sell to "commit" to the program for a year, and if you do commit, it won't let you cancel or refund, because you committed to the program, bro, that's a sacred vow, bro, you can't violate that, bro.
I'm a trans woman in Europe. Got traumatised by public restrooms in the 1990s way before my transition when one fucking coin-operated bathroom lock on a train station malfunctioned and I almost missed a train until some dude entered. Why the fuck do people use public bathrooms. Scourge on humanity. Especially coin-operated ones. Fuck them. I always hold until I get home, no matter what. Yet, glad our trains have gender neutral bathrooms. And they're free of charge. SEE, AMERICA? TRAINS GOOD.
Authors have to submit manuscripts to publishers individually (or, in some markets, agents who work with multiple publishers in the same niche).
Publishers get showered with manuscripts. Very small percentage of them are what publishers deem will meet market goals.
In standard publishing contracts, the author gets paid an advance. This is basically the royalty percentage for the entire first print run. It's not refundable. It represents the trust the publisher puts on the author, and if the publisher can't sell all copies, well, tough for them. (They'd probably just not work with that author again.)
Getting to that point is a pretty massive hurdle to clear for first time authors.
So no, authors don't really get to pick their publishers. The only scenario where people get to pick their publishers is some celebrity deal bullshit.
In my opinion, as an outside observer, I'd say it is the duty of every patriotic American to mass produce signs that say "THIS COUNTRY IS RUN BY IDIOTS" and post them everywhere.
And I'm like "No actually I'm in Finland. It's a whole different country. Don't get me wrong, I love the French, great country. I love our EU brothers and sisters and enbypals. Just don't buy a nuclear reactor from them."
I'm also reminded of the old article, which described how the ancient samurai charged into battle, shouting You must install Flash plugin to view this content.