The lead is leaded solder is entirely manageable. You should keep track of it all and dispose of it properly. (I.e. not in a landfill.) Wash your hands afterwards. It doesn't vaporize, or at least not in any quantities that you should care about.
As long as you are not directly inhaling in the flux smoke while hovering over the project, it's not that unhealthy. If you are a hobbyist doing an hour of soldering a week, you probably get more smoke particle inhalation making toast. Or pizza. Or frying literally anything.
(If I was soldering for a living, yes I'd want a really good fume extractor on the bench, though.)
It's more of a case of the boy who cried wolf than it is of denial.
Too many people see something they don't like, imply a nefarious motivation without evidence, then expect everyone to agree that it is corruption.
If there is corruption, show the evidence. Otherwise, be honest and state that you don't agree with something. If you want to persuade people, back up your claims with verifiable evidence without falling back to nebulous claims of corruption.
One can also look at distinguishing what is important to what is unimportant to a particular person. Personally, I look towards functionality over aesthetics. That isn't to say that I will completely disregard aesthetics, but I have certainly gone with those black bricks called ThinkPads over MacBooks in the past.
You are right about it cutting both ways though. I remember laptop shopping with a colleague in the past. They were trying to replace a barely functional laptop that they purchased because of its "design" with something they could get work done on. Unfortunately, they refused to acknowledge that functionality is an element of design. The whole experience was one of frustration.
This calculator appears to fit into a similar category. I'm sure it is a perfectly fine calculator, functionally speaking, if you are performing basic financial calculations. It isn't going to cut it if your working outside of that domain. When you consider that a calculator that is a tenth (or even a hundredth) of the price is going to offer a similar experience, I'm not even sure I would regard the nuances in its design a good thing. Yes, it says something about it's owner. I'm just not sure it says the right thing.
I can't speak to that specific example, because I'm unfamiliar with the US highway system, but plenty of people got lost in the bad old days. At the very least, if you missed a turnoff, you would have to re-anchor yourself on a map. Some people can do that quite easily. Other people cannot do it at all.
Keep in mind, the lost husband buried in maps was a common joke in those days. Also, in the early days of GPS, someone getting lost by following the directions on their phone, was also a common news story. (Presumably these people would still have had situational awareness/direction from using maps in the past.)
As for the shirtless Kentuckian, you're probably right. That said, I've found motorists skittish when I ask them for directions or when checking to see if they need help. I've always chalked that up to being part of car culture.
It is reasonably safe to say that people find it funny because of the absurdity of the situation, while realizing that it is not funny for the person who has been declared as dead.
> It’s irritating enough that new linux installs want me to add accounts.
I don't quite understand what you are saying here. If you're talking about setting up an account to use the system, it's the same idea as setting up a local account on Windows.
If you're talking about online accounts, I believe you are referring to a convenience feature offered during setup. Ironically, it was put there to guide people who are coming to Linux from Windows.
Most modern software uses .config, and I suspect the holdouts are due to cross-platform support issues. Windows may have it's own equivalents, but they are radically different from Unix. Developers may not want to deal with those differences, or don't want to deal with the support issues related to those differences.
The remaining holdouts tend to be very old applications. (The XDG standards are less than 25 years old, then you have to give time for them to be adopted.) For some of those applications, it would create support issues even if it would be trivial to implement. For others, it would create issues since other software would have to be modified to reflect the changes. For others, the software did not have a distinct configuration directory so untangling it would be a major effort.
In the case of the latter, just look at Firefox. Yes, it recently moved the .mozilla directory to .config. It is in no way reflective of the XDG standards. Among other things, there are log files, cache files, and add-ons in there. In my mind, that is worse than having ~/.mozilla. Instead of having a directory that can be cleanly backed up, with the exceptions being elsewhere, I am left having to sort through everything. I don't blame Firefox for taking that approach though: users were demanding a clean home directory and the developers had legacy code to deal with. They simply took the path of least resistance. (That said, Firefox isn't the only culprit here.)
> Someone here on HN used the term "cloud terminal" for modern electronic devices, and I think that is a very fitting name for phones and tablets.
Not really, at least not in the case of Android.
We have been able to install (and develop) software for these devices since day one. To me, that is pretty much a general purpose computer. The only real difference are peripherals, which is better suited for content consumption than creation. Even then, it is trivial to add a keyboard, mouse, or printer. Other forms of I/O are "walled off" behind permissions, but most of those have to do with privacy (very few computers have things like GPS, accelerometers, etc.). The big difference after that is the cellular modem, where security is a big concern. Yet that mostly affects phones.
I'm not sure I would even agree with it in the case of iOS. The distinguishing difference between iOS and Android is that the development and distribution of third-party software is restricted by the vendor. I don't think that makes it any less of a computer.
Contrast that to the typical ereader. Technically it is a general purpose computer, but most ereaders are developed to support a singular purpose. You aren't going to be installing third-party apps in the course of normal usage.
> We're entirely curating what she's watching and I'm just not that concerned.
That is likely the key element, along with being the reason why the guidance suggests no screen time before the age of 2.
Some parents know what their child needs, some parents don't know how to navigate the mess of children's content, some parents would use it to justify using the screen as a babysitter. It is nearly impossible to offer generic advice, so it tends to be on the safe-side.
It is also worth noting that you are using one metric here, assessments based upon academic achievement. There are other things to consider, such as social and physical development. Perhaps your family is also taking that into account, but again they have to consider how everyone would interpret generic guidance.
It has been a while since I've played interactive fiction, so I can't make a specific suggestion, but modern games seem to be better at keeping the directions consistent (or at least providing clues when they are not). As others have noted, older games broke directionality to serve as puzzles -- failing to acknowledge that some people have a sense of direction while following twisty paths!
Newer games also tend to follow some quality of life rules in their design, things like avoiding arbitrary deaths and avoiding situations where the player cannot progress because they missed something earlier in the game.
Anything Non-Zork. Even Adventure from Don Woods was half-consistent in some places. But having an "odd" geometry matched perfectly the environment of a cave.
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