Smartphone do have negative affects on society, they allow constant surveillance and due to their efficiency it's harder and harder not to use one.

Self driving cars are not a problem, they are symptom of a shift our society goes throw from a mechanical one into a digital one.

The shift is speeding, as digital systems allow of efficiency, the issue is that this efficiency is not understood by the majority of people and is controlled by very few companies. As those new tools are more efficient, everyone not using them for what ever reason is left behind. As they are efficient, they are convenient to the majority, and so, used everywhere a social/economical pressure to use them is created.

It started with PCs, and gave us lock-in of data into proprietary file-types, now we have smartphones the ever spying tracking devices that make people walk into things.

While the programability of the smartphone is still being explored, we will get self driving -things-, cars, tracks, chairs, what-ever.

On the side you get automation of an ever growing list of jobs, and you can't stop it, efficiency wins, you will get 3d printers, and you you might get the ability to download and print viruses from the internet at some point, it can already be done in a lab with a few million dollars worth of equipment, but bio-science is moving forward so who knows.

Prepare for an ever growing list of "smart" crap, phones, cars, TVs, light bulbs, toasters, shoes, if there is profit to be done in putting a CPU inside, it will have a CPU inside.

I'm all for computing, hack, bioinformatics will give us DNA testing to fit you with the best medicine, smart cars will result in less death on the roads, and so on.

The issue is not with the technology, it's with how it is created and who owns it. Because very, very soon Google is going be controlling a shit load of cars traveling at 80-100[KPH], at their full control, with the ability to literally kill and cripple people everywhere, intentionally, a power which for better or worse used to belong only at the hand of governments, and they were mostly limited by boarders.

On the other hand we have FOSS movement that is trying to empower people (somewhat) with computers, but a lot of battles are lost.

Sorry for the ramble.

* The main source of government revenue should be a tax on the unimproved land value of all privately owned land

Could you elaborate ? it's a new one for me.

What is the minimal hourly salary ? I sounds expensive, I'm not sure about local chicken prices, but looking at stores web-sites it seems to be much higher.

Do you live far from agricultural areas ?

It sounds very depressing, I'm currently living in a poor city to save money on rent, and I can walk to a market twice a week in buy as much vegetables as I can carry.

I'm not trying to get perfect optimization, but meat is really bad for the environment and screws up poorer people as it leads to rising food prices.

You can make fun vegan food for social events, cookies, cakes, pizza, casseroles, salads, all can be made vegan.

When I had much more free time I had the hobby of bring vegan cookies and cakes to social events I attended, trying to make them better then the none-vegan food other people showed up with (then to share the recipe when people asked).

Oh, sorry, that makes sense, Israel has a better to grew food in, from the little I know about Russian weather.

Why limited ? there are many types of fruits and vegetables, seeds and beans. The number of combinations is huge, there are more meals I can make then meals I can't make.

At first, when I started to change my life-style it was hard, but as I relearned to cook I found out that I can make more variations of food then I need to never be bored from my food.

I'm doing yearly blood checks due to a medical conditions, and everything but B12 is good, so I'm taking B12 pills that you put under your tongue. The B12 issue my not be related, my close family is not vegan, not even one of them, and some of them are lacking B12 too. Not everyone can get enough B12 out of foods.

What I found funny, is that people used ask about my iron and how I'm not anemic, my iron was so high on my last blood test that it was on the highest healthy value according the graph my doctor handed to me.

After working out weekly for that past few years people stopped asking if I'm anemic or if I get enough protein.

The only big issue is that you need to drink more water (or you will fart, a lot), which means I'm going to the toilet more.

In what way, more efficient?

Basically ? energy, people are against drastic changes to their life style, to get them to buy man-made meat-like substance it will need to be cheaper.

Which will reduce damage to our poor plant.

From pizza stuff and chocolate, respectively. Not as mind-blowing as one would expect. However...

I've seen, I thought you talked about something much crazier, like turning lead to gold.

Then share your secret

I mostly eat types of beans (or is it fabaceae in English ?), with while rice and buckwheat, combined with seeds such as sesame. The rest is the seasons fruits and vegetables that I can cheaply buy in the market.

I have basil and some other nice stuff which I grew on the edge of the window, because they cost too much to buy and I really like them.

It costs between 100 to 200 NIS a month to live like that, which is 24.5 - 49 USD according to google. As I assume you are not from Israel, the minimum wadge for full time job is 1370.4 USD. So it's about 4% from a month of work on minimum wadge.

To cook the beans I set them in water for 24-36 hours before hand and cook them over gas, which I bought a yearly supply of for 41$ but that is not available everywhere, I can do that because there is no gas pipes around here.

On the other hand the rent is really high :(

- Left Hand of Darkness

I had a lot of fun reading her earthsea books, and I tend to enjoy scifi, with a topic that sounds very interesting and a recommendation from a friend I picked up the book. Never finished it, didn't even hit the 50 pages mark.

Reading it felt like a chore, it didn't catch me and as I tried to read it, I started to feel dread from the book till I just gave up.

- Nation

Terry Pratchett is a hit or miss for me, Nation was a miss I tried to read anyway after a lot of recommendations by my brother (he gave me the book) but I never managed to finish it. I found it jumpy and not interesting.

I have nothing against artificial meat, it will have to more efficient then normal meat in its energy consumption to compete with normal meat.

If it will be too real it too will increase the risk of heart problems and colon cancer, both are deadly.

What do you mean print a pizza and chocolate ? from what ?

We can make gold from lead, but it consumes too much energy to be practical (it was a big fuck you to past days alchemists).

Personally I love my food, I feel better on vegan diet, I also save money sticking to this diet.

They skipped NixOS, tried it after another breakage in Arch around a year and a half ago, the AUR was nice, with it infinite packages, but I'm very happy I moved.

Once you have a complex setup, or (inclusive) more then one device, NixOS gives a lot of benefits. The power to program your device and it's configuration, to sync those changes with git, keep backups, rollback (form NixOS updates and configuration changes).

It saved me a lot of time when my computer died (hardware failure), it took about 10 minutes to reconfigure a new one to my liking.

I'm eyeing for remote management of computers used by unsophisticated (computing wise) friends that want Linux but need my help from time to time. It will allow me to give them "apply remote changes" and "reverse changes" buttons, so they can just ask for the change and I can create it for them without fear of breakage.

Why a CRT ? the headaches and eye strain shudders

Thank you, I had a bad day, more then one, and it gave me a real smile, a sense of wonder and happiness.

They currently seems to be in the pocket of Putin, along with Trump, so along as they are useful and Trump is the president they won't be.

Unless I'm miss-informed about US politics and it's not the president that signs that ?

Ignoring the morality of eating animals, on the subject of the animals, raising animals as/for food is horrible for the environment.

Cows/pigs/ships contaminate water sources.

Mammals fart, which in big enough numbers is pushing global warming.

The resources used to prepare one meal from an animal can be used to make up-to 100 meals from plants.

This effects everyone, no one is above global warming, yea the poor will be screwed more then the rich, but everyone are screwed. So avoiding eating animals for this reason alone in your self interest (unless you are going to die soon).

Food prices mostly affect poor people, and less so in richer countries, those that can afford to eat enough meat make global changes in the economy will be effected by it, so it goes to morality (do you care that your enjoyment of eating dead animals might starve someone to death ?).

There is also the subject of heart problems and colon cancer, you are less likely to die from them if you go vegan.

I think those are the main topics of eating animals, from there it's a personal choice, do I care about my heart ? do I care about global warming ? people less fortunate then me ? can I handle the social aspects of going vegan ? can I handle the mental changes required to change my diet ?

Getting recognition by an important project such as GDB will help to introduce Rust into the wider (then Mozilla) crowed and it's good PR.

On one side, it's creepy how close it hits, on the other-side, good to know that it's yet perfect, that would have been disturbing.

I wonder what effect English being my second language had on the test.

Anyway, for the test:

You are shrewd and somewhat insensitive.

Adding formal texts in, added the insensitive.

You are unstructured: you do not make a lot of time for organization in your daily life. You are proud: you hold yourself in high regard, satisfied with who you are. And you are imaginative: you have a wild imagination.

Yes, no, no, no, yes, yes.

You are motivated to seek out experiences that provide a strong feeling of connectedness.

The fact that it was extracted from the text is creepy.

You are relatively unconcerned with tradition: you care more about making your own path than following what others have done. You consider helping others to guide a large part of what you do: you think it is important to take care of the people around you.

After wards I placed the result I got back into the text field, wanted to see what the test said about it-self:

You are tranquil, somewhat insensitive and shrewd.

You are laid-back: you appreciate a relaxed pace in life. You are unstructured: you do not make a lot of time for organization in your daily life. And you are demure: you prefer to listen than to talk, especially in group situations.

Your choices are driven by a desire for organization.

You are relatively unconcerned with taking pleasure in life: you prefer activities with a purpose greater than just personal enjoyment. You consider tradition to guide a large part of what you do: you highly respect the groups you belong to and follow their guidance.

As for the GPL v3:

You are shrewd, skeptical and tranquil.

You are imaginative: you have a wild imagination. You are philosophical: you are open to and intrigued by new ideas and love to explore them. And you are independent: you have a strong desire to have time to yourself.

Experiences that make you feel high efficiency are generally unappealing to you.

You consider achieving success to guide a large part of what you do: you seek out opportunities to improve yourself and demonstrate that you are a capable person. You are relatively unconcerned with tradition: you care more about making your own path than following what others have done.

Windows 10 EULA:

You are shrewd, skeptical and tranquil.

You are calm under pressure: you handle unexpected events calmly and effectively. You are intermittent: you have a hard time sticking with difficult tasks for a long period of time. And you are philosophical: you are open to and intrigued by new ideas and love to explore them.

Experiences that make you feel high prestige are generally unappealing to you.

You are relatively unconcerned with tradition: you care more about making your own path than following what others have done. You consider achieving success to guide a large part of what you do: you seek out opportunities to improve yourself and demonstrate that you are a capable person.

As some pushing hard to learn Rust, this is encouraging.

Skyrim was quite fun without mods as I enjoined a bit of travel in the world, then once it got repetitive I ran through the main story and finished it. After that, deleted the game.

Playing through Pillars of Eternity, without mods, having a lot of fun, if I had the time I think I would have just set for 2 weeks, 8 hours a day to finish it :)

On the other hand, Neverwinter Nights, which in my opinion was the best game ever created, had a boring Single Player mod, which I've never bothered to finish. However, this game was not created for it's single player, the single player was created to show-off the tool-set. The game inspired an amazing community of modders, story tellers and players. From hard-core role-play driven persistence worlds (mini-mmos which are actually story driven, controlled by players and effected by players) to role-play groups that played together on private servers. The game wasn't limited to RP, it had social servers, PvM servers, PvP servers. The game wasn't limited to servers, there was a very active community of moders that created extensive single player mods, some of them were better then paid game.

The modding community brought the game to it's limits and behind as coders created software to by-pass some of the game limits. Even after the main servers were taken down, some people are still playing the game, they created replacement for the main server.

Even though I'm not playing anymore, I think that NWN was and is better with mods, as it was design to be such a game. It saddens me that there is no modern replacement. But there is a problem with modding modern rpgs, games like Skyrim are so complex from the visual side that the bar for creating your own environments is much higher then in NWN. Which means that a single moder, or a small group can't just create a map to tell their story.

I hope my message makes sense in this context, I think that rpgs with complex stories like PoE when they are well made are in no need for mods. Skyrim, which has a simpler story but focuses on creating an open world can benefit from mods, but due to it's complexity limits the type of mods that a single and pairs of modders can create in their free time. I think NWN was in the middle, simpler graphics which meant easy map creation, but a strong tool-set with a strong scripting language.

I miss NWN and sadly no game was created since which, in my opinion, balanced so good around mod creation.

It's more then dumb, it's hurting discussion.

Some of my views are not well accepted, trying to explain my view in a mannered way would lead to a lot of negative comments. About me, about my kind, about my mother and so on. Other times the my message will just get down voted to oblivion.

But there was no discussion, my actual views got challenged very rarely.

That led my to delete my account and creating a new one, one which I avoided a lot of subreddits with, nothing political. Even in the none-political subreddits I've avoided a commenting most of the time.

When I did comment, the comments had to be self-censored, dumbed down.

Late edit: that's not to say I think reddit is bad or irrelevant, the web-site stills works as a good content aggarator, it just mostly fails miserably when it comes to encourage well-rounded open discussion and leads to echo chambers.

They are going to regret it, but it might be late and a lot of damage will done. After private information will be leaked it will be to late.

Your points on Arch are spot on, but I think that they are the topping of the cake.

I have a lot against Windows, the system is unstable, bloated and lacking at the same time*, the system is insecure, bad update mechanism (rebooting after every update ? taking hours to reboot after some updates), the system is very closed - you can't configure it to your liking, as it's not FOSS you can't see how it works.

I'm not installing Linux for people, if you can't read the instructions to install one newbies friendly distributions I don't want you asking for my support. But for friends that do use Linux, helping them is easy, I can just give them one-two command lines. Unlike Windows where you need to guide their mouse to the icon that looks like a ...

I did break my rule once, a person that needed help got Windows tech support from me (reinstalling the printer's driver, removing the new million of tool bars that installed them self into IE, removing viruses, etc...) on a weekly basis. Once he had Linux, it stopped, he could just use the computer and everything just kept working.

Not installing Linux now days and not giving Windows tech support.

* A clean installation of Windows 7 is taking over 20GB after updates, for this waste of space you are left with a horrible browser, no office software, no good shell, the WM is very lacking, etc...

Depends on what you are planning to do.

My PC is running Arch, after trying: Mandriva (or was i Mandrake ? it was years ago) which were very unstable for me, Ubuntu always go in my way, Debian was rock solid but too old, Gentoo was amazing, but compile times took to long. Arch gives me the freedom to setup my machine as I want it, doesn't get in my way, no need to upgrade every two years and frankly, it's more stable (as in, doesn't crash and burn, not APIs) then Ubuntu.

My personal server run with Debian, which is very stable. The exception is minimal KVM server, then Arch is acceptable, as long as it's not a commercial KVM server.

Finished my first degree, finished my masters, decided if I want a phd, and if so, finished it.

Done one of the advanced degrees in a different country.

Managed to leave every place I lived in a bit better.

Hiked across the country, from one border to the other.