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boldboldness

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hubskier for: 3182 days

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boldboldness  ·  2827 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Cleveland cavs

It's a shame that I missed game 7, since it sounds like it was the best of the series. You could tell the Cavs just wanted it more. One thing I noticed was in the first quarter of game 6, the Cavs weren't following the current NBA strategy of hanging back and going for 3's. Instead they went with power, rushing quickly to the paint for layups and dunks. Kinda suggests that it was more than just LeBron and Irving playing at an elite level, but there was an underlying strategy which intended to disrupt expectations.

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video  ·  #design  ·  #typography
boldboldness  ·  3154 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: POLL - 5 Best Linux Desktop Environments With Pros & Cons

I'm running Debian with Cinnamon right now after switching among a few of the other DE's. I really feel it has the best ratio of aesthetics to customizability to staying-out-of-my-face.

Though I'm still nostalgic to when I was running Arch with DWM.

boldboldness  ·  3156 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: So I'm stuck in a waiting room right now and CNN is on the television

I can't speak to your experience, but for myself, I haven't watched "real" television consistently for several years now, aside from a few NFL games and some annual shows, and almost always with friends. Man, television itself is completely unbearable now, and being away from it really gives perspective as to how terrible it all is.

As far as the Foxxinization of CNN, I haven't seen it for my self, but I would suspect it's the result of a demographic shift. I'm guessing older conservatives, now than in the past, are more likely to park themselves in front of the television and watch the news for hours.

It depends on what percentage of content submitters get pissed off enough to move on to another website. Since the vast majority of reddit users don't even have an account, if a significant number of active users leave, then the overall content decreases, which can impact all of these more numerous users. I can only assume that reddit has performed some sort of analysis to determine the overall impact, and that they feel that the negative impact of undoing their free speech policies is less than the positives of banning hateful subreddits. We'll see.

boldboldness  ·  3170 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: It's Official: No Kojima On Metal Gear Solid V's Box

I hate to say it, but I really hope that this is the very last Metal Gear game. I'd absolutely hate to see Konami try to continue making more of them without Kojima and milking the franchise dry.

boldboldness  ·  3170 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Is "none of them" singular or plural? Let Google Books decide!

My research at the University of Google seems to suggest that the plural-status of "none" is historically complicated. The OED suggests that both are historically valid and used. Further, the use of singular or plural seems to be based on whether the object being referred to is a group or not.

This makes sense, since the sentence "None of the cookies were eaten" actually addresses all of the cookies in a negation. However, "None of the cookie was eaten" concerns the quality of a specific cookie.

Of course, I could very well be wrong, but it feels so right.

Edit: Also, something like:

- None of them was the culprit.

- None of them were the culprits.

versus

- None of them were the culprit.

- None of them was the culprits.

The last two sound very incorrect... So maybe there really isn't a hard-and-fast rule.

boldboldness  ·  3170 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Hubski Update: A funding experiment

One of the main points of Dan Ariley's book Predictably Irrational was that the chasm between paid and non-paid is so far greater than people usually expect. Even when the transaction is merely pennies, the change in the attitude of a person can be immense. I mean, people have no qualms buying a $600 smartphone, but many of these people would prefer to use a broken ad-filled free app than shell out the whole 99 cents for the paid app. It turns regular joyful activities into work for many people, even if you don't need the income or even don't really care.

Basically, even fractions of a cent could cause users to behave significantly different and change the tone of the website. I wouldn't want to see any unintended consequences from such a change.

boldboldness  ·  3171 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Apple is now the iPhone company.

I'm not an apple user, but I was really hoping the Apple Watch would really shake things up and provide some direction in the smart watch market. I actually would like a smart watch and can think of quite a few uses. But every review I read of smart watches are full of regret or pessimism. Since I think I've vaguely heard from somewhere that the Apple Watch has been a bit of a dud so far, I guess we'll have to wait for the first worthwhile smart watch to arrive.

boldboldness  ·  3175 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: OPM: 21.5 Million Social Security Numbers Stolen From Government Computers

In all honesty, this really shouldn't be a problem. The real problem is that we've attached so much baggage to what is really just an ID in SSA's database. Giving away your Social Security Number in no manner should open you up to persistent hassles of identity theft and credit card fraud. Maybe instead of treating an SSN as a freakish username-password-hybrid, another sort of authorization system should be established. We really need to strip all of the paranoia from keeping the SSN private, especially since it needs to be freely given away for many transactions and accounts.

boldboldness  ·  3176 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: George W. Bush was a much better president than liberals like to admit

I've basically begun arguing that he is actually the worst president in American history. Yes, even worse than Harding!

Though the tax plan he created at the start of his presidency was, at the very least arguably, economically sound for the time, as soon as we entered wartime mode we should have done more to balance our fiscal budget and return taxes to their normal levels. When the economic collapse happened in 2008, the fiscal response was anemic because we had been running on empty already for several years. Not to mention the whole 'illegal war of aggression' thing.

Presidents like Harding and Grant had their corruption scandals, guys like Polk were marred with controversial war, and Hoover led the country through its worst economic collapse. Bush somehow managed to accomplish all three of these major catastrophes during his administration.