I don’t agree with everything in this piece, but it reminds me of something that I’ve discussed before.

I’m guessing that in my lifetime, the age of legal adulthood will be raised to somewhere in the 22-25 range. Utterly irrational — I’d support it being lowered to 16 — but that’s the way society is moving.

We’ve already seen examples of this with the drinking age being raised to 21, so it’s not without precedent.

Of course Republicans will be very much in support of this because it will remove a lot of Democrat-leaning voters from the rolls.

And lefties will support it as well because they are in general nearly as paternalistic and prone to helicopter-parenting as their counterparts on the right (actually probably more prone to helicopter-parenting).

This article is full of inaccurate or misleading information.

It can be tempting to see this as a big conspiracy. These big corporations—Intel and hardware manufacturers—are preventing us from running the software we want to run on our own computers, as if we were using some underpowered, locked-down Surface RT instead of a powerful PC we’re supposed to have control of.

And sure, that’s true, but Boot Guard does help secure the UEFI firmware and protect against malware that infects the boot process. Intel and PC OEMs aren’t out to crush free software and prevent open hardware. The truth is more mundane—Intel and hardware manufacturers prioritize tighter security for the masses over the proprietary firmware concerns of a few.

Intel isn’t out to crush free software — rather, they don’t care about it all as long as they are getting paid. PC OEMs are however out to crush free software as it makes them less money, and the same for Microsft et. al.

BIOS and firmware-infecting worms and viruses are very, very rare in the wild and always have been, even before this sort of “security.” They are very difficult to write and not nearly as effective as attacks that compromise already relatively-insecure applications and operating systems.

Nope, the only reason to have Boot Guard and similar technologies is to prevent people from running what they want to run on their own machines. That’s all. Has absolutely nothing to do with security in any way — that’s just the pretext, the excuse.

Technical people are really bad at hiring because they expect that what they know is “general knowledge” and what anyone else knows is some special case.

When in reality, the technical world is so broad that nearly everything is a special case.

I’ve been to a good number of interviews lately and most interviewers are like this. It’s usually some irrelevant trivia questions covering what the interviewer has worked on most recently, thus what they consider “general knowledge,” with nothing of substance on which any decision should be made.

When I conduct an interview, I generally shock candidates by asking no technical questions at all. They are irrelevant. If I can’t tell that you’re technical in a regular conversation about the field and the work, then asking trivia questions won’t help.

Interviews are a terrible way for deciding who to hire anyway, but most people make them less useful than they could be.

I don’t really have a good solution that most businesses would accept since random hiring after some minimal qualification evaluation seems too risky, but I’d like to try that in the real world sometime.

By the way I now have the 5K Retina iMac and it’s a-fucking-mazing.

Really it is glorious. While I don’t care for many parts of MacOS especially on a desktop, having such a gorgeous  screen is worth nearly any tradeoff*.

I’m kind of glad they didn’t have this sort of screen when I was younger as I might never have gone outside even once in my life.

By the way, for those who say having 218ppi on the desktop is pointless, consider this: the human eye can discern misalignment of two parallel lines up to two arc-seconds in resolution, equivalent to 1800ppi at ten inches.

Most people don’t sit 10 inches from their monitor, so it’d be about 500-600ppi at average sitting distance.

The main difference I’ve noticed other than being overwhelmingly happy with it is that I don’t get any eye strain at all no matter how long I read.

I got the base model because as 5K on Windows matures in 2-3 years I’ll probably just sell this and go back to Windows. I’m going to add some memory myself and that’s all I’ll need until then.

But for now it’s the best tech device I’ve ever used, right ahead of our MacBook Pro Retina.

*Windows will run on it, but not in 5K. AMD has not made a driver. Without 5K, what’s the point?

My mom was obsessed with Sylvia Plath and Janis Joplin, both women who felt out of place in the world and who killed themselves deliberately or through neglect. Both tragic figures.

I’ve no doubt that my mother saw herself as a similar tragic figure.

Everything in her existence was tinged with regret, even when she was controlling the actions. I think she felt like a passenger in her life though she never even attempted to be the captain. The role of long-suffering victim suited her well, and in her heart of hearts she probably enjoyed it. And if not enjoyed it, it at least felt natural to her.

I’d read most of Sylvia Plath’s output by the time I was 10 or 11. Not because my mom was interested in it — I cared little about her interests even then — but because Plath was a great writer.

My mom however never tried to write, or to sing, or to produce anything in the world. In that she was like most people. Unlike most people, she blamed the world for suppressing her, for holding her back, even though she never made the minimal effort to break through to something else. She never risked anything in the world, never even had the basic courage of Plath to write a single line of poetry, or a book.

And in my mom’s mind it was all someone else’s fault.

My sister had the same victim mentality — in this case I believe not inherited but rather passed on by the family acculturation and thus she was also doomed.

My tendency towards mild sociopathy helped me and made me able to survive all the depredations of my family with little ill result. I learned how not to be from watching my family, and in that way it was a good education.

My mom’s best friend Cookie (a nickname, and a very North Florida one at that — I never knew her real name) killed herself when my mom was 30 or so. I remember her as a cheerful yet morbidly obese woman who like my mom also saw herself as a victim of the world.

I don’t know Cookie’s story, so I won’t tell it nor even speculate any more about her life or motivations, but I do think my mom sought out people who viewed life the same way as she did — a cycle of eternal victimhood over which they had absolutely no control.

I once asked my mom why she had no hobbies, never did anything, never went anywhere. Just never lived.

She saw it — correctly — as a criticism but I also really wanted to know the answer. Wanted to know how someone got to be that way, and implicitly how to avoid it.

But it was worthless. She blamed her parents, blamed my father, blamed my sister, blamed me. And perhaps some of that was even true.

But as she was casting blame on everyone, anyone to which her nicotine-stained fingers could point, never once did she even consider doing what I would’ve done and actually did do later, which was get up and leave and never look back.

That I cannot understand.

Mozilla continues to destroy Firefox.

While on the surface this sounds like a good idea, it’s all about control. It’s not about protecting the users and it certainly won’t help me.

About 25% of the extensions I use are not on the AMO site and never will be.

One of the benefits of Firefox was its openness, how anyone can and did do anything with it. Yes, this sometimes includes bad actors but that’s the way open systems work.

I think when this finally becomes a reality it will be time to tell Firefox and all its variations goodbye. It’s been a good 10 years or so, but they have lost the plot and aren’t worthy of support any longer.

I’m not sure which browser I will switch to. Perhaps Chromium or some variant thereof.

While I think Chrome and its variants are pretty evil, it’s evil I can control and deal with. It’s predicable evil, in other words.

Firefox is just stupid, and wilfully stupid to me is worse and less comprehensible than evil because you can never be sure what misguided dumbass thing they will do next “for your own good.”

If Mozilla were a person, it’d be a 9/11 truther anti-vaxxer.

Because it’s uncommon now for any media elites or even middle-class people to have served in the military, I see stranger and stranger things written about the topic.

To forestall any complaints, I don’t believe the military as a whole or individuals even should be hailed as heroic. It’s just a job, albeit a fairly dangerous one. The military is too large and mismanaged, etc.

With that excursus proffered, referring to parts of your military compensation as “entitlements” is ridiculous. Republicans have never been friends of veterans as is the common belief. They like the military when it blows up brown people, but don’t care of the actual service members.

Most of the lower ranking military members are very aware of this. It is not some unified block of rah-rah conservatism and patriotism as it is portrayed in the media or by Republicans.

In other words, there is no one in the world more cynical about patriotism and how the system works than someone who has just gotten out of basic training and is on his or her first deployment, duty posting or mission. Trust me, I know. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.

When you sign up for the military, you sign a contract. In the contract is detailed what your compensation is to be. Some of it is paid immediately. Some of it is delayed. This is normal in all careers. For instance, receiving VA benefits or the GI Bill is considered delayed compensation. It is not some tacked-on entitlement relied on by parasites of the system. It is a compensatory benefit of the job contractually agreed to by both parties well in advance. (If any delusional types don’t believe this, I still have my my military contract and it’s all in there. I can post it if needed.)

I’ve seen veteran retirement benefits referred to as entitlements as well. This from congressmembers who receive far better retirement packages than even the most lavishly-compensated veteran could ever dream of.

“Nothing makes me more nervous than people who say, ‘It can’t happen here.’ Anything can happen anywhere, given the right circumstances.”

-Margaret Atwood

Facebook will soon be able to ID you in any photo.

If any of ya’ll (in the general sense) put any photos of me on Facebook, don’t be too surprised when you wake up in the middle of the night with me standing over your bed with some duct tape and a long knife.

Just sayin’.

(In case anyone hasn’t copped to it, this is a joke. I wouldn’t use a knife. Sooo messy.)

It’s kind of cool what can happen if we don’t just reflexively shoot black kids on sight.

Yeah, Target is using it for marketing now, but it appears to be just a decent person trying to help someone out, not corporate-initiated.