It’s been a long time since I worked on that case, and I only did a very small part working on the discovery documents, so I’ve forgotten a lot, and had a lot of details a little confused. :)
It sounds like it was probably one of the seminal patent troll cases.
SCO crashed and burned in part because they tried to sue multiple Linux providers claiming that they owned all the rights to certain pieces of code that they’d contractually leased from IBM, and that IBM giving code to Linux distributors violated the terms of their agreement with IBM. It was a lawsuit that dragged on for over a decade and a half–I think that it’s still going–and it’s bled SCO of tens of millions of dollars ,esp. since they’ve lost nearly every single claim they’ve made.
Linemen for the power company will always stay busy regardless of the economy, and it pays stupid well.
My boss is a former lineman; he quit because there was a lot of bullshit dealing with the power company. I gather that the pay in my area wasn’t that great either. When storms roll through, shifts are going to be long and brutal.
Vampires can enter your home whenever they choose. They’re just all autistic and really hate going into someone’s house without being asked to come in first.
Alan Dershowitz has turned into a right-wing hack, making ridiculous legal arguments to defend untenable positions.
Broadly speaking, failing to put in effort does tend to lead to worse outcomes.
…Unless your parents have the last name “Musk” or “Trump”.
Satanist.
Raised Mormon, was a Mormon missionary. Had a nervous breakdown, and religious leaders said that I must be sinning, and needed to pray more, read my scriptures more, and repent. But… What sin? And how was I supposed to pray/study more when I had already dedicated two years of my life to preaching? E.g., there’s 24 hours in the day, and I’m already spending multiple hours doing that stuff, so where am I supposed to fit that in?
That was the first crack in the foundation. Took a while, but once you realize that religious leaders are just men (and yes, it’s always men in the Mormon church), and that despite their claims they don’t have any prophetic powers, then you start questioning a lit of things, like how you can even know truth. (Spoiler: you can’t know truth without some kind of objective evidence, and all religions’ truth claims are based on subjective evidence and “see?, it says so, right here in my book!”)
Atheist is a label that says what you don’t believe. Satanist is a label that says what I do believe. So I eventually settled on Satanist.
10,000 acres of land in the northern mountains, with all associated rights (mineral, water, etc.).
I really, really, really don’t want to have neighbors. I already live in a rural area, and I still have neighbors 1/4 mile away that blast their music at 11pm loud enough to make out the lyrics. I want to be able to see the stars at night with no light pollution, and see wildlife that’s barely seen people.
Mine def. was not an impulse, mostly because I had to make an appointment several month in advance. Brian Decker travels, but it ended up being easier to go to NYC rather than wait for him to come near where I lived at the time.
I have a Meta Quest 3 that i use every single day. I bought it specifically so I could use AceXR, which is a “game” that’s a dry fire practice simulator. It’s significantly improved my shooting ability, since I now get feedback, and I’ve saved tens of thousands in ammunition prices versus going to a shooting range every single day. No, it’s not perfect–there’s no recoil control in dry fire simulation–but it’s very, very good for what it is.
People saying that VR is stupid sound a lot like people that didn’t see any reason to switch to LED from CRT.
Well. No, not really. Owning a house is just stressful, period. And sometimes really expensive things happen that you couldn’t foresee.
For ants, you want to get food-safe diatomaceous earth, and a bulb-style dispenser. If you can tell where they’re coming from, blow some diatomaceous earth in there. It’s completely safe for people and pets, but will kill insects. There’s also some non-toxic treatments for wood–Nissin Boracare, for instance–that will help prevent termite, ant, and powderpost beetle infestations.
If you have a damp moldy spot on a ceiling, that’s likely leaking from the roof. Roof leaks can be very difficult to find; if you have asphalt shingles that are starting to curl at the corners, then it’s probably just time to replace them, along with flashing. Thankfully, depending on the pitch of your roof, re-roofing isn’t that awful. It gets ugly it you have a really steep roof pitch, or if you have an flat EPDM roof in a brick home.
I have magnets for my car; American flags, 'Don’t Tread on Me", etc. (I wanted to get a Molon Labe/μολὼν λαβέ magnet, but my partner said no.)
It’s camouflage because I live in a deep red area.
I would put gun stickers on the car–god knows I have enough–but a ‘Glock perfection’ sticker = free gun in glove box, and is asking for a break-in while you’re in the Piggly Wiggly.
Windows 11 LTSC
I’m using Window 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC; the biggest issue I’ve had was that I couldn’t get my video card installed. I had to wait until there was an updated driver, a few weeks after I assembled my computer. Every time I tried to install the driver that was supposed to be the correct one, I got a BSOD.
Honestly, I like 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC better than I liked the 10 Pro version that I had. And–compared to the only Linux distro I’ve used, Tails–it’s fairly straightforward. And yes, I know the Tails is kind of a pain in the ass, and it’s not fair to judge all of Linux against that. But i’m old, and cranky, and just want Win 3.11 back.
Hello, fellow exmo.
I probably would have been ordained by now, but I left when the new CoC came out (2000, I think?) that–among other things–forbade members from speaking publicly as members about their own experiences within TST. The summary and capricious expulsion of numerous ministers that were agitating for change within the org confirmed to me that if congregations had autonomy, it was only because Doug and Cevin allowed it.
I was raised Mormon.
The first things that’s very important to know about the Mormon church is that they believe that they are led by direct revelation from god, and that god will never allow the ‘prophet’ of the church to lead the church astray. The ‘prophet’ is the head of the whole church, and Mormons believe he (and the prophet is always a man, because women are always subordinate to men in the Mormon church) receives revelation for the entire church and world. As you go down the chain of authority, each person is supposed to be receiving revelation for the people that are under them. So it is believed that if your bishop–who is a local congregation leader, not at all like a Catholic bishop–asks you to do something in his capacity as bishop, then that’s coming directly from god.
The second thing that’s critical to know about the Mormon church is that every member is very strongly encouraged to pray and ask god to confirm the truth of things. Members are told to read their scriptures (esp. the Book of Mormon) and study the words of Mormon ‘prophets’, and then pray about it. A warm, fuzzy feeling is believed to be the confirmation of the holy spirit that those things are correct; a lack of confirmation means that you need to pray harder, because those things are self evidently (</s>) the word of god.
Got it? Good, continuing on.
I didn’t particularly want to be a missionary, but it was expected that I would become one, so I did. I did not enjoy being a missionary; I absolutely hated it. The mission president–a man that presided over a specific geographical area and group of missionaries–largely did not believe in mental health, and told me to put on a happy face. I ended up having a nervous breakdown and became suicidal. I remember being told that “the light of the holy spirit has left your eyes”, and that the reason that I was suicidal was because I had sinned an allowed Satan into my heart. The solution that was prescribed by religious leaders was to pray more, study my scriptures more, bear my testimony more often, etc., and that I would be fine.
…But I knew that I had not sinned. How could it be that my religious leaders, people that were supposed to have the power from god to receive revelation for me, people that I had been promised would never lead me wrong when they were acting in their religious capacity, would be insisting that I must have sinned? What sin did they think that I had committed? (Spoiler: I’m actually high-functioning autistic, and the lifestyle demanded of missionaries was extremely stressful. That stress was what led to the nervous breakdown.) I was eventually sent to the LDS Social Services, which is a counseling org in the Mormon church; the church as a whole is very skeptical of therapists because they take a science-based approach rather than a religion-centric approach. The therapist decided that I was too preoccupied with sexual matters (which, fucking duh, I was 20, and was cut off from social interactions with people of my preferred gender while I was a missionary), and also counseled repentance, etc., along with some aversion therapy to make me feel even more shame about all things sexual.
Meanwhile, I had a psychiatrist for medication. The psychiatrist had a strictly science-based approach. He said that there wasn’t any clear reason why some people would become suicidal and others wouldn’t, but some medications might help.
It all eventually got me thinking: I knew that I wasn’t sinning, but my church leaders–the people that were supposed to be receiving revelation for me, on my behalf–were insisting that I must be. If I’ve been praying about the truth claims of the Mormon church, and had believed that the holy spirit has been told me that it’s all true, but the people that I believe have the gift of prophecy are completely wrong, what does this mean?
For me, the inescapable conclusion was that feelings were not a reliable indication of ‘truth’.
If feelings aren’t a way to know truth, then what is? Once you start studying the history of the Mormon church, the whole enterprise starts looking like a very sketchy con, and is certainly not something you would take at face value. Moreover, it turns out that all religions are relying on feelings that the religions say are from god in order to confirm that their religion is the One True Religion. Not only is there nothing that’s falsifiable about belief in Mormonism, there’s nothing falsifiable in religion in general.
Once you accept that, then the most reasonable answer is to say to say that either the existence of a god is unknowable with what we have right now, or that there is no god at all. I settled on the latter, although extraordinary evidence might be able to convince me.
Sure, I’m completely okay with that too. Although I was thinking of tackling fraud more of an ex post facto audit system, rather than adding in compliance paperwork.
I’m very much not opposed to taxation, including taxing me, if that means that people have stable jobs or get the help they need. And as long as billionaires also get guillotined.
Sure! It creates real jobs, while also discouraging people from fucking over the system. Even if there’s zero fraud happening, auditing the system to make sure isn’t going to hurt. (Well, it won’t hurt as long as they don’t remove people that are entitled to the benefits.)
In some ways, sure. I’m not religious, and I don’t have children. In terms of finances, no.
Prairie and Craftsman Bungalows. Unfortunately, I don’t think that either is a particularly energy efficient design.