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> Daylight saving time ends Nov. 3, setting off an annual ritual where Americans (who don’t live in Arizona or Hawaii) and residents of 78 other countries including Canada (but not Saskatchewan), most of Europe, Australia and New Zealand turn their clocks back one hour.

I find it hard to take this solution seriously when they can't even get the basic facts right. I'm sure this is some kind of argumentative fallicy but Australia's DST started in October and we put our clocks forward one hour, because we're in the Southern Hemisphere and heading in to summer. This semi-makes the article's point about confusion... but really computers have fixed all that confusion for me anyway.


Europe also changed in October. Not sure why the article claims November 3 "set[s] off an annual ritual" in 78 countries, when most have already changed, unless it's journalistic license in an article only targeted at Americans.


Humans program the computers, though, so the computers can't remove the confusion in places where the human government changes the rules a handful of days before a transition time. For example, this happens every year in Morocco. The entire country must update all their computers manually -- I don't see any way all devices could have correct tzdata in time for the transitions.


Hah, my first thought is "humans also make the government" and I know which one I'd optimize first... sorry about the snark though.


No, because working schedules are based on the clock face.


Can you ask your employer to shift the schedule?


Also ask your friends' employers, the restaurants, the fast food joints, the public parks ...


If only there were some mechanism we could use to get everyone to change their schedules at the same time.


Perhaps that mechanism could work by waking up at a different time, instead of changing the time, which causes trouble for those who do not change with you.


Looks like a standard catalogue photograph to me. Opportunity wasted.


Is there a way, given consensus among the bitcoin community, to mark these coins as "bad" and effectively destroy their value?


Technically, yes. However it's very unlikely because the consensus does not want to go down the slippery slope of politics.


There's been chatter from the lead developers about tagging coins as tainted. Not so much over these coins as for coins that for certainly stolen.

It's something that really would have to be done in the client, and for it to work everyone would have to agree to use the "official" client (or code derived from the official client).

My suspicion is that it would actually make client fragmentation more likely as there would be a clear financial incentive to deviate from the standard.


Coca-cola as done a lot to destroy its value, yet it continues to be one of the world's most valuable brands. Humanity has established a pattern of irrationally flocking to proven flawed systems and insisting on their perfection.


Right now I'm listening to "Chronojigga" a Jay-Z/Chronotrigger mix. IT's great.


This occidental fascination with Japanese sex is embarrassing. Or perhaps I just feel that these "reports" don't lend enough academic gravitas to the subject and end up being weird, discomforting vouyeristic pieces that conflate several different phenomena without the rigour the topic deserves.


Most of these articles seem to largely overestimate the size of phenomena because the journalist doesn't understand what's actually happening.

It's not like everyone in Japan is an otaku or something, they happen to be more visible but you're just as ostracized there as if you were a super nerd in the West. And most of them (at least the ones I talk to) aren't disinterested in sex or having girlfriends or whatever. Just going to large events like Comic Market and the number of otaku couples you see prove otherwise.

The people like those in the article are basically the same as that one nerd who, through a combination of social inpetitude and bad circumstance, ends up being completely unwanted by any girl. In the west you'll get the same sort of people , and they end up turning into women-hating MRAs or something. In Japan they get a different outlet through dating sims or whatnot. Different outlets for the same problem.

A more benign reason for people not getting married or having sex or whatever is simply that people don't seem to have the time. In Tokyo especially, people are beyond busy. The Japanese elite must be proud of themselves, because they've seemed to trick an entire society into thinking that working 80 hour work weeks, and only taking 2 weeks vacation a year, is normal. It's bizarre and depressing. At least in my experience, Japanese want to have fun just like other people (the fun is usually more benign but still), it's just they have no time.


They make for great headlines though.


If there is one argument it's impossible to win, it's an argument with people trying to impose their own "original" or "traditional" word usage over the more colloquial understanding of it's meaning.


While I appreciate what you're trying to say, it seems obvious that "viewing" and "editing the content of" a website are quite different concepts. If you've been told to no longer edit the content of my website and you continue to do so, it would be hard to argue against a charge of unauthorized access.


I had registered with Microsoft my copy of Windows 98, and they mailed me a CD with an upgrade to SE for free when it was released.


Ah, never mind then. This is notable because neither Windows 98 SE or Windows 8.1 really are updates or service packs (it's not like the usual "KBxyz restores the start button in Windows 8" and it won't appear in Windows Update), that's why they have distinct names and packaging to set them apart from the other Windows versions. The MS press release / blog post (and related press coverage), however, made it look like the free upgrade was a first. I stand corrected, but I don't loathe Windows any less because of it.


> And setting up transcoding to mp4 just made me realize that there are better uses of my time than dealing with such piddly issues. I'd rather be learning rust for example than dealing with streaming/transcoding issues to my phone.

AFAIK that's not an issue? I have VLC on two iOS devices and you open the app, turn on the internal server, go to your web browser and drag/drop files in to it. VLC on iOS plays every format the desktop application plays.


My goal was to setup streaming so I could stream to my ipad or iphone when on my network. Having to drag/drop each file hits the same barrier as "I can just write a shell/ruby/perl/python script to run this through ffmpeg and add it to itunes and kick of a sync instead".

But that means applescript which also means I probably won't bother dealing with it. :)

What I was trying to setup was convert a video to mp4 transcoding and the live streaming server stuff that chunks the file for "streaming" aka, 10 sec section here/there.

My ipad only has 16g so streaming was my primary goal.


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