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Off-topic, but legitimately purchased Kindle ebooks can still be quickly and easily liberated for the purposes of DRM-free personal backups of owned content. I won't comment on whether Amazon find this acceptable, or if it is legal in any given jurisdiction, but it is definitely possible.


Thankfully it will (probably) never get as bad as Stallman described it[1], but you never know.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html


I went around the office helping colleagues setup Zoom around mid-March before the UK went into "lockdown" and told people to work from home if at all possible, because it was obviously going to happen soon and the company wanted at least a stop-gap solution in place while everyone was still in the building with easy access to our IT team.

In my experience setting up accounts and installing the Windows software for 15+ people in one afternoon, I cannot believe what you're saying. Unless Zoom has gotten way easier to setup and use since March, it is a nightmare.

It's been a while, but I'm fairly sure was basically like this: 1) Enter email into website 2) Click link in email 3) Enter name and password 4) Invite others or skip 5) Click to start a meeting, which actually starts a download 6) Install software, meeting starts automatically 7) End meeting 8) Manually log in to Windows client despite it starting a meeting on your account immediately after installation

That is not easy or accessible to non-technical people at all, especially with how they hid certain buttons as really pale grey during the signup process. It was also a nightmare trying to oversee this process, and repeating it on each machine for those who got lost trying to do it themselves took ages due to waiting for emails, people deleting the email thinking it was spam, downloads not starting due to requests timing out, etc.

Then, a few weeks after we all started working from home, Zoom removed the automatic Company Contacts list and suddenly we could only contact colleagues through existing group chats. No warning, no explanation, not even a reference in the changelog or help pages on their website - rather, the help guides still said the feature was available and explained how to toggle it on or off. Everyone spent that morning adding all their colleagues as personal contacts by manually entering emails one-by-one and then accepting all the invites they received in return.

Zoom is useful once you get it working, but it is definitely not easy to get it working for non-technical people.


> And ~50% of the American voting public chose him over Hillary, because it was a shit sandwich vs giant douche race, you can't reasonably suggest banning all those people from Linux conferences.

That is a very different situation to choosing to wear a MAGA hat. Choosing to wear a MAGA hat at a large event is a conscious decision to broadcast your endorsement of Trump's policies, ideology, and everything else. It means you want people to know you agree with Trump's stance on immigrants, women, and all the other shit.

Maybe such people still shouldn't be banned from a Linux conference, but they absolutely should be considered as racists and misogynists.


If he wore the MAGA hat at the conference, I would actually be somewhat with you on this, in such a case I think staff should initially politely tell the person to take the hat off and escalate from there. My reasoning for this would be that someone walking around with such a hat at a conference is probably just begging for reactions, and US politics doesn't really fit into a conference environment.

However, you're being disingenuous. He didn't wear it at a large event, he thought it would be a fun idea to put it on in front of Trump Tower and share a picture of it with his friends on social media. That's something I might even do as a fun tourist picture, and I really don't like Trump.

This conference is not banning him for conduct at the event, they are banning him for an innocuous social media post on his personal twitter account, a week before the event has even begun. They are just policing the political views of attendees. That's what people have a problem with.


That’s absurd. Should someone walking around wearing a “Black lived matter” hat be banned as well because it’s potentially controversial?

When did it no longer be okay to express unpopular political views?

I find such reasoning absolutely ridiculous. Personally it brings me great sadness that the ideals of free speech - the ideals, not the legal meaning - have been so happily stomped on.


Yeah, I agree that it's a sad state of affairs. But the US political landscape is currently so torn and people are ravenously defending their own team in a fight away from the center, so much that I can just imagine the shitstorm you'd unleash by wearing a maga hat at a primarily left leaning conference like the Linux foundation conference.

It's not good, it's not healthy for anyone, and I'm wondering how long its going to go on for.

You have to keep in mind, that for the most staunch Trump opponents, any mention of him is likened to a personal attack, they honestly believe that supporting him is on the level of full blown white supremacy and fascism.

And in that climate, even thought it goes against my principles, I would advocate for everyone to just keep their political leanings to themselves at all times in these "professional" gatherings where it shouldn't matter where you stand politically. At least until things calm down.


Man I have to sympathize with you here. It seems no matter the opinion you express people are jumping down your throat. I just want to say that, to me, it appears you’re doing a good job of expressing your opinion in a kind way.

I would love to see hostile tensions like these die out online very soon.


There's two main things I don't understand about the redesign and other comments here: what's wrong with nested tabs, and why is it confusing that "releases" is under "code"?

The latter makes sense because a release is basically just a snapshot of the code at a point that the developer(s) thinks it's in an acceptable state for users. Sure, it might reference Wiki pages or issues or contain binaries that aren't in the repo itself, but ultimately it's still directly related to code and at best only partially related to anything else.

As for nested tabs... how is that bad at all? Grouping related things together just makes sense. Maybe Github's current design isn't the best way to group them, but the concept of grouping itself is fine. Grouping related links together, assuming the links are grouped in an intuitive way, is far better than overloading users with a long line of different options. Maybe the current main tabs could be drop-down menus or something?

Also, as mentioned by some other people, I absolutely hate the current trend of making websites and apps be as plain white as possible. Separators, gradients, and soft colour backgrounds make it really easy to distinguish different content areas at a glance. The end result of this redesign is just a mash of text that looks like the CSS didn't load properly.

I'm also very surprised neither this redesign nor Github themselves have added a dark mode. Why do people enjoy staring at white screens for any length of time? I don't trust people who code with light themed environments.


I honestly don't know why anyone at the auction, who was interested in that piece, thought there would be no trick or strings attached, or why Sotheby's didn't suspect anything after investigating Banksy. The wiki excerpt shown by Google says "Banksy is an anonymous England-based street artist, vandal, political activist, and film director." It then goes on to call his works satirical and focused on dark humour.

Anyone willing to spend £1,000,000 on a piece of art by Banksy should know enough about him to imagine that he'd hate auctioning his work to the rich at an elite establishment like Sotheby's.


The first rule of Excel is to expect immense frustration.

Named ranges and tables can't be used as conditional formatting targets, Excel just converts them to absolute cell references right before your eyes. Even if you use INDIRECT.

Most formula errors result in #N/A, a generic error which never has anything remotely useful in the Excel help articles. You have to waste time searching keyword by keyword until you accidentally get the right combination to display relevant SO or obscure forum links from over 3 years ago.


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