Quantum mechanics is not intuitive, but it pass every test we make with it.
This is only true if you discard things we haven't figured out yet. Then again, the same can be said for literally any theory, correct or not. There was a point at which we had the phlogiston pretty well figured out too. We had Newtonian Dynamics nailed down well enough to predict the motions of everything from pinball to the celestial spheres. There was a point at which we could predict how much energy a fire would pull out of the Aether. Once upon a time, we knew the exact weight of the smallest possible particle, which we named the Electron. There was a time at which calculus contained all other mathematics (LISP programmers are nodding sadly right now.) There was a time at which the Principia Mathematica had not been torched by Godel and Erdos.
That quantum mechanics passes all our tests simply means the approximation is accurate enough that we don't know how to defeat it yet. All those other knowledges were well understood, well distributed, supported by the best science of the day, indicated by data, and passed every test we could throw at them. There was a time at which we knew how fast burning wood would disappear (though now we know it's just present in a different form as smoke and soot.) There was a time at which we knew how fast the heat in metal would die out (though now we know it's just being dissipated into the atmosphere or similar as thermal noise.) There was a time at which we knew the fourty three primary forces of the universe, though now we're down to gravity and the strong electroweak force.
One thing any trained scientist will tell you is that we don't actually know jack shit, and we never will. All we have are things we've eliminated, and a window of comprehension on the range of our current approximation.
Science was once certain that leeches helped with the bubonic plague. I'm not talking about the middle ages, I'm talking about 1860. They thought that one of the serious problems of the plague was that blood pressure increased catastrophically (the way the plague damages blood vessels looks like pressure bursting without microscopes; it's more like what happens to a tire if Scotty beams the radial belts out at 70 miles an hour. The system no longer handles normal usage.)
The thing is, leeches frequently have a parasitic bacteria that does happen to help a little bit with the plague. So, all our tests at the time - since we didn't know about things like germs until Robert Koch, despite van Leeuwenhoek's work - showed the leeches helping in cases we assumed were just not "too far gone already."
Fifty years later, we just used the bacteria. Now, we use a chemical those bacteria produce, in conjunction with another chemical that kills the plague disease, to thin the blood to reduce stress on the blood vessels.
Passing tests just means our tests aren't good enough.
I haven't noticed any difference between American Apple Pie and that I know from England.
Yeah. The phrase "American as Apple Pie" is a tongue in cheek reference to our tendency to ignore where things come from when we're having a xenophobic decade. It was common during and after the Revolutionary War to pretend we made that recipe up, and not long afterwards, when we got back to reality, newspapers would use that phrase to indicate the recent historic example.
More contemporary examples include freedom fries recently, or liberty cabbage (sauerkraut) and beefburgers (hamburgers) during World War 2.
That said, that you can't tell the difference means you're not getting good American apple pies. We use a lot more rhubarb than you do, and we involve lemon and orange zest, cinnamon, coriander and celery seed. The difference is significant, though the phrase predates the difference.
Come on, we might be a country full of people from everywhere else, but we have our own style and cuisine.
Not a lot of it, it seems - not in my opinion anyway.
Let's try someone who knows food, then. The entire Cajun cuisine, for example, is essentially new. Chowder (there's more to chowder than clam and corn) is an entirely American practice, as are Burgoo, Chioppino and Bouillabase. We invented recirculated roasting (no, it's not the same as a dutch oven.) The number two prepared food on earth is an American invention, despite its foreign name - whereas China beat us to rice with egg, we invented the Hamburger. We're responsible for nachos, hard tacos, chili con queso and chili con carne (look it up.) We're why Mexico loves cumin now. Basically anything you eat that you think is mexican food that has yellow cheese on it instead of white is America's fault.
The current state of Barbeque is entirely an American thing, though the Dutch independently reinvented it in South Africa later under the name "braai." (This is unfair to foreigners, as we use the word "barbeque" very differently than they do; a Briton hearing that word will think of the situation we think of as "grilled," and when they hear grill, they think of what we think of as stove-top burners. I do not know what foreigners call what we call Barbeque, though I know Australia uses the word the way we do.) We also invented Pit Barbeque (yes, we mean something different by that phrase too, sorry.) There's also Saint Louis Barbeque, Kentucky Barbeque and Louisiana Barbeque, all of which are substantially different (one's stewed in sauce, one's over a grill range open fire and one's surrounded by coal heat in a brick pit.)
We invented Chop Suey and General Tso's Chicken. Indeed, anything you see on a purportedly Chinese menu involving cheese, mango, brown/whole rice or tomato is our fault. Rangoon puffs (not crab rangoon) are our fault. What we call Egg Foo Yung is nothing like what the Cantonese call Fu Yung Egg. Spring rolls are Chinese; egg rolls are not. What we call beef with broccoli is supposed to use a relative of broccoli called gailan; however, the leafy parts are used, not the stalks and not the clubs, so it might as well be asparagus, it's so different. We invented Jibaritos and Jigaritos.
We invented the tri-tip steak. "You can't invent a steak, it grew in the cow that way!" Actually, no it didn't. We also invented cheesed steaks. (No, not Philly cheese-steaks; we didn't invent those, we just perfected them.) If you don't know what a cheesed steak is, look up what "new york strip" actually means; it's not a cut, like sirloin or delmonico. They're aged and molded. There's a reason they're that tender.
America includes several areas whose cuisines developed on their own before they were called America, such as Hawaii, Alaska, the Texarcana area and the pan-Florida area (Florribean food is awesome.) We're the country that merged Burmese and Oaxacan cuisine. We're about the only country to grill frog legs (the french batter them, the chinese boil them and the italians and thai fry them.) Chicken Vesuvio is ours.
We have a spectacular history of invention in the field of alcohol. I probably don't need to beleaguer this.
Americans use the phrase "fried chicken" differently than other countries, so when I say "fried chicken is ours," please understand that I mean something more specific than chicken which has been fried. We mean bone-in chicken ribcage halves and drumsticks which are larded, spiced, battered, breaded, deep fat fried and re-spiced, in that order. Furthermore, it involves a specific set of spices; it's a little like talking to the British about Shephard's Pie. You just have to know.
There are a lot of people who believe that the current popularity of the sandwich is largely due to their upsurge in use in America during the l
Though I am not a chocolate freak, I have to assume that there are American chocolatiers who make fine products. Just because most people in America are satistfied with non-gourmet products doesn't mean that those products aren't out there.
Realism, good judgement and the rejection of blind stereotypes? The hell are you doing on slashdot?
Exactly. The quality of American chocolate is every bit as fine as four other things you apparently don't know a thing about. There's a reason we win every major international beer festival year after year. There's a reason we take the French in their home turf in wines. There's a reason our cheese export is four times the size of our cheese import. Go look up the results of the German Beer Festival, which most people think is the center of the beer world. They have a competition for beers - mass and homebrew are seperate - which gets thousands of entrants every year. Dozens of professional taste testers.
Look down the list of winners. See all those German names? Don't jump to conclusions: most of them are in Pennsylvania or Massachusettes. Look them up one by one. In the German Beer Festival, for the last 20 years, America has been almost undefeated. Granted, it's a different American beer every year in the homebrew, but the mass produced beers have been nailed down by Sam Adams Boston Lager from Pittsburgh, PA for quite a few years now.
And ALL pizza is American, jerk. We invented it. You find me a good pizza in Canada and I'll give Tommy Lee a blowjob. I'll get a gel that actually supports Hep C's path down my throat. We can have a parade and fanfare.
"Rah rah well I heard in Italy" Bullshit. You go to Italy, you ask for a pizza, you get a pie. Not a "pizza pie," a pie pie. Like, with a pastry top. Italians don't make American pizza. Don't waste time talking about a country you've never been to. Italian pizza is almost a calzone. Italian pizza is a way to deal with left-overs, not something you make up front.
Next, you should bitch about American cars. That's another stereotype that people will nod to, despite a pile of scientific data to the contrary with decade after decade of repeat performances.
You only think American products are inferior because advertising told you so.
When you talk about American chocolate, you're talking about grocery store and gas station chocolate,
When I talk about European chocolate, I mean the cheap stuff. Even the various supermarket chains' house brands. They're even cheaper than the American chocolate you mention, and vastly, vastly better.
Horseshit. I've actually been there. I've had those store-brand chocoates. They most certainly are not vastly better than mass produced chocolates here; in fact they're significantly inferior, as scale of production issues suggest they should be.
Y'know, you posted this reply before I was even done searching my post for one quote I wanted to amend. That just shows that you didn't even bother to read past the first few paragraphs. You obviously don't have the faintest idea what I was getting at; that's why you're still trying to stand up for mass manufactured chocolate as good after I made it clear that my position was that no mass manufactured chocolate is good.
If you had read what I was saying, and still kept your beliefs, your response would have been very different.
Don't bother replying unless you read the original post in its entirety. I don't have time to talk to people like you, who read a paragraph and think they've got the whole story. Your reaction to my post is apparently the same as your reaction to chocolate quality: superficial, clueless and entirely unable to discern the important and occasionally subtle characteristics that make up character.
I'll wait for the person I was actually talking to, instead of some wanna-be passer-by.
I love it when people feign familiarity with international chocolate, then complain about American chocolate. All you're actually doing is displaying your complete ignorance of chocolates, and the depth of your gulliability for commercial advertising. Swiss and German chocolates are not in fact better than American chocolates, and this is relatively easy to work out for yourself, if you actually know such a person: run a double blind taste test.
The fundamental problem, of course, is that people like you will fill in Hershey for American chocolate. What you don't understand, since you've never been to any of the countries whose chocolates you indicate might be better than domestic, is that Swiss people have their Hershey too; it's called "Nestlé." Just like Hershey, Nestle makes a bunch of crappy chocolate, floods the domestic market under ten different brand names at different qualities.
You think America's the only country that makes crappy candy and sells it at a bargain? No: it's just not cost effective to import shitty candy. The local candy company can sell for half what a candy company on the other side of the planet can, on virtue of shipping cost alone. There is no way to compete with an advantage like that; hell, some companies leverage that advantage just locally in America, if they're far away from Pennsylvania (Ghirardelli's history has been largely rewritten, but effectively started that way in the 1960s; yes, they're older than that as a tiny company, but not as a large one.)
Therefore, no matter what country you're from, the local domestic stuff is going to be crap, and unless you're from Mexico, it's just market forces at work. (If you're from Mexico, you're probably eating tamarind flavored glass shards.)
Now, if you actually had the faintest idea about chocolate, you'd know that the best chocolate on Earth comes from three places: Ethiopia, Kenya and San Fransisco. Also, these chocolates come under brand names that quite likely you've never heard of. You probably think good chocolate comes under names like "Lindt," "Lindsor," "Godiva" or "Holl's."
Let me make one thing painfully clear to you: if any of those four companies came to mind when you thought about good chocolate, then you've never had good chocolate. Those are still mass produced chocolates made with no attention to the bean batches.
It's the difference between Starbucks and your local self-roaster. The Starbucks spent ten years finding the perfect average roast, and runs all their beans through that roast. Then, they compare themselves to places like doughnut store coffee, gas station coffee, fast food coffee and so forth, in order to give themselves the appearance of a gourmet product. The problem is, when you go around saying "Oh my god, East Coast Coffee is so terrible, west coast has Starbucks and Peet's and Boyd and Caribou Coffee," you're really just making yourself look like an ass. Those are all mass produced coffees.
The alternative is the local roaster. There are problems. Most local roasters aren't very good. They're really, really expensive, and that can't be fixed. Some local roasters don't know what they're doing, and leave clinkers and chiggers in the coffee. Some local roasters like their coffee green like tea, and some like their coffee roasted into coal. Even when you finally find a local roaster whose tastes are like your own, their batches vary, because they're not buying a hundred and sixty metric tons of coffee a day, and thus the plants' being different actually still matters. Even when you finally find a local roaster who does things the way you want them, they're only probably available within a hundred mile or so radius. Even when you finally find a local roaster whose coffee is your coffee, it's not your buddy's coffee; I like my coffee at a deeper roast than most people do, and I prefer a moderate acidity whereas most people like low acidity.
Nobody disagrees about the ranking of the major chains: gas station coffee is a step ab
What is it with people like you? The patent doesn't cover everything that can be interpreted in that one sentence. The claim list is fifty three points. If any ONE of those is different, the patent doesn't apply.
Quit with the "OMG I FOUND A SENTENCE THAT WHEN READ OUT OF CONTEXT SOUNDS OVERREACHING." Honestly. That just isn't how the patent system works. It never has been how the patent system works. Pick any dozen patents at random; if you'd bother to read the patent, you'd know it wasn't like that. Hell, the first textual sentence in the patent makes one stricture clear that isn't covered in what you said, namely that it applies to web applications.
TECHNICAL FIELD OF THE INVENTION
This invention relates generally to systems and methods for generating software applications in an arbitrary object framework, and more specifically to systems and methods for generating web sites in an arbitrary object framework.
Is this an application of model view controller? (MCV? Lord. At least get them in the right order.) Yes. Many patented things are applications of model view controller. Did you notice that Vlissides under IBM patented a variant on visitor pattern the other week? That's what you should be pissed off about.
If you had read the patent, you'd know that what's actually being patented is the methodology of using XML to describe a widget system which can be compiled to target HTML or widget systems equally. The methodology is critically contingent on the trilateral seperation between content as stored in XML, custom interpreter as compiled into application, and presentation as compiled into what Microsoft now calls a manifest. All they've actually patented is a compiled storage mechanism. All Microsoft had to do was implement.NET as traditional libraries, and they would not have fallen afoul of this patent.
The reason they fell afoul of this patent is that they chose to make applications that embedded an interpreter which could handle what amounted to an XML presentation of an application. That's foolish, as it was patented nine years ago, before Microsoft even deployed an XML interpreter with IE.
Does it seem obvious today? Hell yes. Did it in 1999? No. I saw this patent back then, and I laughed at it. I thought it was retarded, bloated and unnessecary. I was dead wrong.
A patent doesn't stop being valid just because a decade later it seems obvious. Indeed, with all the best patents, that's a matter of course. That kid who patented holding alkalai over deep fat fryers, to turn oil into soap to put out fires? His invention was bloody obvious just a month later. But, his patent held.
Look, the fact of the matter is that they came up with the encoding that makes.NET's web transition so powerful long before Microsoft ever did. Microsoft doesn't get to just show up and start using it, even if you think it's over-reaching.
And, in the future, please don't bother to say something's over-broad until you've read it. The karma whoring and FUD are fairly tiresome.
You're misunderstanding that explanation, largely because it is poorly written in a way that fails to make the emphasis clear.
Joe jobbing is when the purpose of the work is to discredit. The purpose of this work is simply to provide a semi-reliable intrusion vector for spam. Joe jobbing refers to an early attack of the proprietor of Joe's Cyberpost, Joe Doll. One of his users was a spammer, and had his email account revoked. As revenge, the spammer started spamming while imitating Joe, in order to make him look bad.
In the case according to this post, the spammer doesn't give a rat's ass how the owner of the real domain looks; he's just trying to get his advertisements through. If the owner of the domain manages to find a way to prevent the spoofing, the spammer will simply move on to a new domain and continue spamming; if it was a joe job, the spammer would find another way to attack the same domain. Joe jobbing is about harming the victim. This is just about making money unethically through bulk email.
Joe jobbing is similar to IRC nick squatting, if the squatter runs a flame bot on the squatted nick.
Spam is by definition commercial. That's why chain letters, despite being unsolicited bulk email, aren't spam. I applaud your attempt to label and stigmatize the jerk for having a hundred-bouncer, but let's at least be accurate in our slander. I would be inclined to call him a script kiddie.
Cowardice? What, are you supposed to be dangerous or something?
I don't have to be dangerous for you to hide from admitting the truth.
I can see why you're in a snit. Trying to stake out an untenable position
This might carry some weight if you weren't so desperate not to back up your claims. As stands, it's just more silly handwaving, trying to distract the situation from focussing on your now three message long chain of making claims you can't defend. That you call other people's positions untenable when the situation is your refusal to back up your claims is appalling and disappointing.
Make whatever unfounded claim you like in your next non-reply. I'm done with you.
Maybe Verizon's patent is a good one, but it's still pretty sleazy the way they did this. They basically let Vonage exist for years, let Vonage spend all the money marketing the VoIP concept to the masses, let Vonage spend all the time and money proving the concept that VoIP could make money and could move beyond the geek space. Vonage did all of that, and now that Joe Blow is comfortable with the concept, and now that Vonage has millions of established customers, Verizon can swoop in, kill Vonage, and get all of those customers without having to spend all the time and money building all of that up themselves.
Yeah, you don't actually know that.
I worked for a company I'll decline to identify when something vaguely parallel like this went on several years back; the companies were smaller, but still large companies. I worked for the Verizon analogue, which I'm going to start calling Bizarro-Verizon, because it's less awful than "the company I worked for" over and over, and because I've been watching SeaLab 2021.
Bizarro-Verizon spent six months notifying Bizarro-Vonage that they needed to open up a licensing agreement; Bizarro-Vonage never seemed to bother. So, Bizarro-Verizon set up an account as if they were a customer at the publically published rates, and just started invoicing Bizarro-Vonage. Some manager inside Bizarro-Vonage spent a month getting the account coordinated and set up, then several months trying to haggle the price down, all the while letting this enormous debt grow and grow, only to announce one day that he couldn't actually find any point at which his company had agreed to pay at all, and since it had been a year, he felt it was pretty obvious they weren't infringing, that negotiations were over, and that we might consider using the invoices as kindling.
So, Bizarro-Verizon spent a new six months indicating first that the account needed to be set up so that the standing debt for the use of their technology could be paid, and as that got ignored, progressively got angrier, until at the end they were threatening to sue. Bizarro-Vonage took the same gamble Real-Vonage took, and lost.
Did we submarine them for a year and a half? No: it's just at medium-sized companies, it takes time for stuff to percolate from one end to the other, and more time to be convinced they're not doing what they're supposed to. At companies the size of AT&T and Vonage, I'm surprised they got here this quickly, to be frank.
When I was just out of college, I did tech support for a local ISP for about two years. I managed to net a promotion or raise every other month by not succumbing to the tendencies you're describing. It's a lot harder to not to that than it sounds.
The problem comes earlier than that. 95% of the people who call in are on the war-path. It wasn't really so bad for me, because the ISP only had about ten thousand customers, meaning we had a few dozen regular callers and a few hundred occasional callers. It wasn't long until the problem users (and there are a suprising lot of them) were all being shipped straight to me, presumably because I have a deep voice, careful use of the language, I'm polite on the job and I'll put up with a lot of crap on the job.
I'm not going to say we had the cup-holder CD guy, but there's a lot of that kind of stuff to go around. The problem is, it's not funny, good natured or any of that. It's really sometimes quite bitter and acrimonious. I'll give you the example of Dave, who called in just after he moved; he wasn't able to dial in, and he was "certain it was [the ISP]'s low quality hardware tripping him up again." The problem was that he had forgotten to put a phone cable in place between the computer and the new wall.
Thing is, he had a teenage son, and that son would go screwing with his settings on a weekly basis. It wasn't long before he was asking for me by name to just go through the settings and roll them back one by one. He'd get furious if I didn't help with non-ISP stuff, and any suggestion that he just discipline the child or lock the machine down got met with a tantrum about how he paid his twenty dollars a month and that meant we had to come change the oil in his car if he wanted us to and rah rah rah.
They aren't treating you as a culprit. It's just that the chances you're going to be tolerable are miniscule, and it's almost certain that the person they just talked to completely screwed them off.
It's one of the paradoxes inherent in reliable systems: the more reliable your system, the fewer of your tech support calls will be from reasonable people who didn't cause their own problems. The more reliable the system, the lower the likelihood you're not a moron, and the higher the likelihood you're a jerk.
Given that Tivo's internal system is likely to be exceedingly simple, it seems to me quite likely that the rate of defects in their system is so low and the rate of assholes on the telephone so high that nearly everyone you talked to really has never seen a fault in the system, nor has met anyone else at work who has. They probably really believe what they're saying.
Going on the stuff I put up with at work ten years ago, I figure there's a good chance that the employee thought you had just misremembered the data you were trying to get them to look up by. About eleven times in ten, that's what's going on, and humoring the customer means they'll keep flogging the mistake, instead of trying to figure it out.
Not to mention these people are adults making nine bucks an hour without benefits, dealing with angry people on the phone all day. Wouldn't you assume the worst, if that was your life?
I just don't understand why large screens can't at least have the same resolution as a decent monitor.
Defect rates. At two million pixels per screen, they're already throwing away almost 15% of the screens they make. The pixel density you're suggesting would mean that either consumers would have to deal with dozens of dead pixels in their hundred thousand dollar product, or the price would have to go up to match the new discard rate (which would be into the 99.several nines percent.)
he US is the only country in the world that uses significant quantities of high fructose corn syrup, because the US Government bans sugar imports. The epidemic has moved to Europe. Therefore, it is not caused by feeding the bees high fructose corn syrup.
This logic only holds up if HFCS is the only thing you can feed a bee other than the unspoken European alternative to corn syrup. What you seem to have missed in your logic-without-education is that feeding bees sugar, molasses or any other fructose/galactose source will have the same harmful effect. It has nothing to do with the conversion from cane or beet sugar to corn sugar.
The issue is that bees are made for honey, which is partially digested sugar, not whole sugar. The beekeepers should be leaving some honey for the winter, but the cheap ones leave sugar water, HFCS or something similar instead. The problem is that it isn't honey.
If I set off a teargas canister in a field, every critter in the area will move away from it quickly. That does NOT mean that teargas canisters occur in nature or that they have existed for millions of years.
No, but it does mean that toxic gasses have existed for millions of years. Believe it or not, most creatures don't actually react when presented with fundamentally new stimuli; with the exceptions of neophobic animals like rats, and animals which think something about the deployment is threatening - like maybe the tear-gas canister hisses, or whatever - you're more likely to see animals go towards the grenade than away.
"But it's painful, of course they're going to run away." Yeah, why do you think pain exists? That's an evolved defense against generic caustic gasses, fires, et cetera. The gas in teargas was chosen specifically because it does a damned good job of setting off our natural reaction to the gasses in forest fire smoke. Just because humans can imitate the source of a biologically hardwired behavior doesn't mean that the behavior doesn't have an originating source. You'll note that tear gas is fine-tuned to piss off human biology; several other biologies on earth, such as insects, lizards, fish and hippies are completely unaffected, and still other biologies, such as deer, are killed by tear gas.
For comparison, set off a can of teargas in a container, then put the resulting liquid in the water of a tank containing crabs with an easy path out. The crabs will not react, if you're careful to not splash the water. They'll die quite ignorant of what's happening. We don't just magically run away from things. Biology has to know they're harmful before we'll bother. Most humans will silently asphyxiate in a room full of carbon monoxide, because the body doesn't know how to differentiate it from oxygen, and just sort of quietly fails.
There are tons of things humanity has made that are quietly toxic, and a few that were already in nature, like radon. The teargas reaction is not random. It's highly evolved and for a damned good reason. Animals set up shop in toxic sludge all the time.
every critter in the area will move away from it quickly.
Actually, many insects and smaller animals don't have the good sense to do so, and anything without exposed mucus membranes, like most lizards, won't have a good reason to leave. Only some classes of animal react to teargas, because many animals use different holy-shit triggers for fire. If you throw a quiet teargas grenade next to a seal, the seal will bat it around for a while, try to eat it several times, and end up getting bored and finding something to kill.
Funny how self-referential your comments are. Nonetheless, as the claims are yours, so is the burden of proof. Saying something like "wishing doesn't make it so" is funny when your supporting data seems to be pixie dust and malice. If you're going to pretend to understand engineering failure rates and the law, please show the failure rates you haven't bothered to investigate and the negligence statutes you pretend to know have been violated.
Wishing doesn't make it so, but citation does. Funny how you refuse to do such. I suspect inability, followed with another burst of ad hominem and tu quoque as reply, rather than actual support for the initial transparently clueless and wholly unsupportable assertions.
Shore up what you said if you're able, instead of going "omg you're so snotty."
It be like paying for phone service and getting only good connections to people who paid that also paid that specific phone company off.
Er. You do know that that has been common practice since the switched circuit days, right? What you bought is phone service. Nowhere in the contract does it say "we're not going to QoS rate the other side according to their payout." That's why cellular calls within a network generally sound so much better than cellular calls across networks. Make a Verizon to Verizon call, then a Cingular to Cingular call; if you're using similar phones, they'll both sound roughly equivalent. Now, make a call from Verizon to Cingular, or vice versa.
Welcome to the real world. They're not obligated to give you something just because you expected it.
but why they don't accept encrypted PDFs is beyond me. It's just as secure as a fax.
From the technological standpoint, yes. From the legal standpoint, no. Faxes have special exceptions to many duplication-of-signature laws long in place, which have not been applied to computer standards. When that changes, you will see companies racing to implement PDF transfer, which from a technical standpoint is far safer, and which from a customer service standpoint is far more convenient. Believe it or not, companies aren't all idiots; many companies are in fact quite unhappy about the current situation. It's costing them real money.
There is more to safety than mathematical hardness.
The fact that you closed with an ad hominem barb leaves me doubtful.
Calling someone a hippie isn't ad hominem, nor would it be even were calling someone a hippie an insult, as you seem to be implying. Ad hominem requires that the insult be the supporting justification of an argument against what the hippie said. No such thing is occurring here; grandparent's premise, while based on urban legend and undiluted frozen concentrate of pure capital-w Wrong, is based on clear logic. Were his facts actually correct - were it the case that the manufacture of a solar panel created more pollution than the device saved - then his ascerbic view would be both appropriate and reasonable.
His argument is based on clear, sound, reasonable and plain logic. And, er, incorrect data.
The point is, there is no fallacy here at all. It's a falsehood. Attempting to invoke ad hominem as the mighty logic daemon that will dispell what someone else said really just kind of makes you look like a jerk, here. Grandparent had something semi-valid to say. If you had cut yourself off after asking for reference, you would have been totally in the right. Perhaps you should read about the difference between fallacy and falsehood; it would help you the next time you wanted to dust off logical fallacies.
Amusingly, accusing someone else of ad hominem in order to devalue their position is an actual case of ad hominem; you are directly attacking them without warrant in a way that does not affect their actual argument whatsoever, and directly leveraging that in the attempt to make them seem less credible. That is precisely the definition of ad hominem: an attack against the individual to falsely deflate their statements. It turns out you're doing exactly what you're falsely accusing others of.
The fact that you closed with an ad hominem barb leaves me doubtful.
That's textbook ad hominem. Time for you to go back to school, fauxlosopher.
I just threw away five good moderations to set you straight. Don't rahr at me. This is an attempt to help you get past your belief in yourself as someone able to deconstruct others' logic. Tell me it couldn't be, Swingin' Joe, say it ain't so - 'cause it ain't. Don't try it again until you've read three books or levelled up. Blue Poster Needs Clue, Badly.
Slashdot Mirror
Quantum mechanics is not intuitive, but it pass every test we make with it.
This is only true if you discard things we haven't figured out yet. Then again, the same can be said for literally any theory, correct or not. There was a point at which we had the phlogiston pretty well figured out too. We had Newtonian Dynamics nailed down well enough to predict the motions of everything from pinball to the celestial spheres. There was a point at which we could predict how much energy a fire would pull out of the Aether. Once upon a time, we knew the exact weight of the smallest possible particle, which we named the Electron. There was a time at which calculus contained all other mathematics (LISP programmers are nodding sadly right now.) There was a time at which the Principia Mathematica had not been torched by Godel and Erdos.
That quantum mechanics passes all our tests simply means the approximation is accurate enough that we don't know how to defeat it yet. All those other knowledges were well understood, well distributed, supported by the best science of the day, indicated by data, and passed every test we could throw at them. There was a time at which we knew how fast burning wood would disappear (though now we know it's just present in a different form as smoke and soot.) There was a time at which we knew how fast the heat in metal would die out (though now we know it's just being dissipated into the atmosphere or similar as thermal noise.) There was a time at which we knew the fourty three primary forces of the universe, though now we're down to gravity and the strong electroweak force.
One thing any trained scientist will tell you is that we don't actually know jack shit, and we never will. All we have are things we've eliminated, and a window of comprehension on the range of our current approximation.
Science was once certain that leeches helped with the bubonic plague. I'm not talking about the middle ages, I'm talking about 1860. They thought that one of the serious problems of the plague was that blood pressure increased catastrophically (the way the plague damages blood vessels looks like pressure bursting without microscopes; it's more like what happens to a tire if Scotty beams the radial belts out at 70 miles an hour. The system no longer handles normal usage.)
The thing is, leeches frequently have a parasitic bacteria that does happen to help a little bit with the plague. So, all our tests at the time - since we didn't know about things like germs until Robert Koch, despite van Leeuwenhoek's work - showed the leeches helping in cases we assumed were just not "too far gone already."
Fifty years later, we just used the bacteria. Now, we use a chemical those bacteria produce, in conjunction with another chemical that kills the plague disease, to thin the blood to reduce stress on the blood vessels.
Passing tests just means our tests aren't good enough.
Perhaps you are joking, but I've often wondered if quantum effects are caused by the universe having limited floating-point accuracy.
Max Planck and Claude Shannon beat you to it.
Ack, I missed the second part.
I haven't noticed any difference between American Apple Pie and that I know from England.
Yeah. The phrase "American as Apple Pie" is a tongue in cheek reference to our tendency to ignore where things come from when we're having a xenophobic decade. It was common during and after the Revolutionary War to pretend we made that recipe up, and not long afterwards, when we got back to reality, newspapers would use that phrase to indicate the recent historic example.
More contemporary examples include freedom fries recently, or liberty cabbage (sauerkraut) and beefburgers (hamburgers) during World War 2.
That said, that you can't tell the difference means you're not getting good American apple pies. We use a lot more rhubarb than you do, and we involve lemon and orange zest, cinnamon, coriander and celery seed. The difference is significant, though the phrase predates the difference.
Does she know that it's originally a Mongolian practice, not Chinese?
Let's try someone who knows food, then. The entire Cajun cuisine, for example, is essentially new. Chowder (there's more to chowder than clam and corn) is an entirely American practice, as are Burgoo, Chioppino and Bouillabase. We invented recirculated roasting (no, it's not the same as a dutch oven.) The number two prepared food on earth is an American invention, despite its foreign name - whereas China beat us to rice with egg, we invented the Hamburger. We're responsible for nachos, hard tacos, chili con queso and chili con carne (look it up.) We're why Mexico loves cumin now. Basically anything you eat that you think is mexican food that has yellow cheese on it instead of white is America's fault.
The current state of Barbeque is entirely an American thing, though the Dutch independently reinvented it in South Africa later under the name "braai." (This is unfair to foreigners, as we use the word "barbeque" very differently than they do; a Briton hearing that word will think of the situation we think of as "grilled," and when they hear grill, they think of what we think of as stove-top burners. I do not know what foreigners call what we call Barbeque, though I know Australia uses the word the way we do.) We also invented Pit Barbeque (yes, we mean something different by that phrase too, sorry.) There's also Saint Louis Barbeque, Kentucky Barbeque and Louisiana Barbeque, all of which are substantially different (one's stewed in sauce, one's over a grill range open fire and one's surrounded by coal heat in a brick pit.)
We invented Chop Suey and General Tso's Chicken. Indeed, anything you see on a purportedly Chinese menu involving cheese, mango, brown/whole rice or tomato is our fault. Rangoon puffs (not crab rangoon) are our fault. What we call Egg Foo Yung is nothing like what the Cantonese call Fu Yung Egg. Spring rolls are Chinese; egg rolls are not. What we call beef with broccoli is supposed to use a relative of broccoli called gailan; however, the leafy parts are used, not the stalks and not the clubs, so it might as well be asparagus, it's so different. We invented Jibaritos and Jigaritos.
We invented the tri-tip steak. "You can't invent a steak, it grew in the cow that way!" Actually, no it didn't. We also invented cheesed steaks. (No, not Philly cheese-steaks; we didn't invent those, we just perfected them.) If you don't know what a cheesed steak is, look up what "new york strip" actually means; it's not a cut, like sirloin or delmonico. They're aged and molded. There's a reason they're that tender.
America includes several areas whose cuisines developed on their own before they were called America, such as Hawaii, Alaska, the Texarcana area and the pan-Florida area (Florribean food is awesome.) We're the country that merged Burmese and Oaxacan cuisine. We're about the only country to grill frog legs (the french batter them, the chinese boil them and the italians and thai fry them.) Chicken Vesuvio is ours.
We have a spectacular history of invention in the field of alcohol. I probably don't need to beleaguer this.
Americans use the phrase "fried chicken" differently than other countries, so when I say "fried chicken is ours," please understand that I mean something more specific than chicken which has been fried. We mean bone-in chicken ribcage halves and drumsticks which are larded, spiced, battered, breaded, deep fat fried and re-spiced, in that order. Furthermore, it involves a specific set of spices; it's a little like talking to the British about Shephard's Pie. You just have to know.
There are a lot of people who believe that the current popularity of the sandwich is largely due to their upsurge in use in America during the l
Exactly. The quality of American chocolate is every bit as fine as four other things you apparently don't know a thing about. There's a reason we win every major international beer festival year after year. There's a reason we take the French in their home turf in wines. There's a reason our cheese export is four times the size of our cheese import. Go look up the results of the German Beer Festival, which most people think is the center of the beer world. They have a competition for beers - mass and homebrew are seperate - which gets thousands of entrants every year. Dozens of professional taste testers.
Look down the list of winners. See all those German names? Don't jump to conclusions: most of them are in Pennsylvania or Massachusettes. Look them up one by one. In the German Beer Festival, for the last 20 years, America has been almost undefeated. Granted, it's a different American beer every year in the homebrew, but the mass produced beers have been nailed down by Sam Adams Boston Lager from Pittsburgh, PA for quite a few years now.
And ALL pizza is American, jerk. We invented it. You find me a good pizza in Canada and I'll give Tommy Lee a blowjob. I'll get a gel that actually supports Hep C's path down my throat. We can have a parade and fanfare.
"Rah rah well I heard in Italy" Bullshit. You go to Italy, you ask for a pizza, you get a pie. Not a "pizza pie," a pie pie. Like, with a pastry top. Italians don't make American pizza. Don't waste time talking about a country you've never been to. Italian pizza is almost a calzone. Italian pizza is a way to deal with left-overs, not something you make up front.
Next, you should bitch about American cars. That's another stereotype that people will nod to, despite a pile of scientific data to the contrary with decade after decade of repeat performances.
You only think American products are inferior because advertising told you so.
Y'know, you posted this reply before I was even done searching my post for one quote I wanted to amend. That just shows that you didn't even bother to read past the first few paragraphs. You obviously don't have the faintest idea what I was getting at; that's why you're still trying to stand up for mass manufactured chocolate as good after I made it clear that my position was that no mass manufactured chocolate is good.
If you had read what I was saying, and still kept your beliefs, your response would have been very different.
Don't bother replying unless you read the original post in its entirety. I don't have time to talk to people like you, who read a paragraph and think they've got the whole story. Your reaction to my post is apparently the same as your reaction to chocolate quality: superficial, clueless and entirely unable to discern the important and occasionally subtle characteristics that make up character.
I'll wait for the person I was actually talking to, instead of some wanna-be passer-by.
I love it when people feign familiarity with international chocolate, then complain about American chocolate. All you're actually doing is displaying your complete ignorance of chocolates, and the depth of your gulliability for commercial advertising. Swiss and German chocolates are not in fact better than American chocolates, and this is relatively easy to work out for yourself, if you actually know such a person: run a double blind taste test.
The fundamental problem, of course, is that people like you will fill in Hershey for American chocolate. What you don't understand, since you've never been to any of the countries whose chocolates you indicate might be better than domestic, is that Swiss people have their Hershey too; it's called "Nestlé." Just like Hershey, Nestle makes a bunch of crappy chocolate, floods the domestic market under ten different brand names at different qualities.
You think America's the only country that makes crappy candy and sells it at a bargain? No: it's just not cost effective to import shitty candy. The local candy company can sell for half what a candy company on the other side of the planet can, on virtue of shipping cost alone. There is no way to compete with an advantage like that; hell, some companies leverage that advantage just locally in America, if they're far away from Pennsylvania (Ghirardelli's history has been largely rewritten, but effectively started that way in the 1960s; yes, they're older than that as a tiny company, but not as a large one.)
Therefore, no matter what country you're from, the local domestic stuff is going to be crap, and unless you're from Mexico, it's just market forces at work. (If you're from Mexico, you're probably eating tamarind flavored glass shards.)
Now, if you actually had the faintest idea about chocolate, you'd know that the best chocolate on Earth comes from three places: Ethiopia, Kenya and San Fransisco. Also, these chocolates come under brand names that quite likely you've never heard of. You probably think good chocolate comes under names like "Lindt," "Lindsor," "Godiva" or "Holl's."
Let me make one thing painfully clear to you: if any of those four companies came to mind when you thought about good chocolate, then you've never had good chocolate. Those are still mass produced chocolates made with no attention to the bean batches.
It's the difference between Starbucks and your local self-roaster. The Starbucks spent ten years finding the perfect average roast, and runs all their beans through that roast. Then, they compare themselves to places like doughnut store coffee, gas station coffee, fast food coffee and so forth, in order to give themselves the appearance of a gourmet product. The problem is, when you go around saying "Oh my god, East Coast Coffee is so terrible, west coast has Starbucks and Peet's and Boyd and Caribou Coffee," you're really just making yourself look like an ass. Those are all mass produced coffees.
The alternative is the local roaster. There are problems. Most local roasters aren't very good. They're really, really expensive, and that can't be fixed. Some local roasters don't know what they're doing, and leave clinkers and chiggers in the coffee. Some local roasters like their coffee green like tea, and some like their coffee roasted into coal. Even when you finally find a local roaster whose tastes are like your own, their batches vary, because they're not buying a hundred and sixty metric tons of coffee a day, and thus the plants' being different actually still matters. Even when you finally find a local roaster who does things the way you want them, they're only probably available within a hundred mile or so radius. Even when you finally find a local roaster whose coffee is your coffee, it's not your buddy's coffee; I like my coffee at a deeper roast than most people do, and I prefer a moderate acidity whereas most people like low acidity.
Nobody disagrees about the ranking of the major chains: gas station coffee is a step ab
Quit with the "OMG I FOUND A SENTENCE THAT WHEN READ OUT OF CONTEXT SOUNDS OVERREACHING." Honestly. That just isn't how the patent system works. It never has been how the patent system works. Pick any dozen patents at random; if you'd bother to read the patent, you'd know it wasn't like that. Hell, the first textual sentence in the patent makes one stricture clear that isn't covered in what you said, namely that it applies to web applications.Is this an application of model view controller? (MCV? Lord. At least get them in the right order.) Yes. Many patented things are applications of model view controller. Did you notice that Vlissides under IBM patented a variant on visitor pattern the other week? That's what you should be pissed off about.
If you had read the patent, you'd know that what's actually being patented is the methodology of using XML to describe a widget system which can be compiled to target HTML or widget systems equally. The methodology is critically contingent on the trilateral seperation between content as stored in XML, custom interpreter as compiled into application, and presentation as compiled into what Microsoft now calls a manifest. All they've actually patented is a compiled storage mechanism. All Microsoft had to do was implement
The reason they fell afoul of this patent is that they chose to make applications that embedded an interpreter which could handle what amounted to an XML presentation of an application. That's foolish, as it was patented nine years ago, before Microsoft even deployed an XML interpreter with IE.
Does it seem obvious today? Hell yes. Did it in 1999? No . I saw this patent back then, and I laughed at it. I thought it was retarded, bloated and unnessecary. I was dead wrong.
A patent doesn't stop being valid just because a decade later it seems obvious. Indeed, with all the best patents, that's a matter of course. That kid who patented holding alkalai over deep fat fryers, to turn oil into soap to put out fires? His invention was bloody obvious just a month later. But, his patent held.
Look, the fact of the matter is that they came up with the encoding that makes
And, in the future, please don't bother to say something's over-broad until you've read it. The karma whoring and FUD are fairly tiresome.
You're misunderstanding that explanation, largely because it is poorly written in a way that fails to make the emphasis clear.
Joe jobbing is when the purpose of the work is to discredit. The purpose of this work is simply to provide a semi-reliable intrusion vector for spam. Joe jobbing refers to an early attack of the proprietor of Joe's Cyberpost, Joe Doll. One of his users was a spammer, and had his email account revoked. As revenge, the spammer started spamming while imitating Joe, in order to make him look bad.
In the case according to this post, the spammer doesn't give a rat's ass how the owner of the real domain looks; he's just trying to get his advertisements through. If the owner of the domain manages to find a way to prevent the spoofing, the spammer will simply move on to a new domain and continue spamming; if it was a joe job, the spammer would find another way to attack the same domain. Joe jobbing is about harming the victim. This is just about making money unethically through bulk email.
Joe jobbing is similar to IRC nick squatting, if the squatter runs a flame bot on the squatted nick.
Spam is by definition commercial. That's why chain letters, despite being unsolicited bulk email, aren't spam. I applaud your attempt to label and stigmatize the jerk for having a hundred-bouncer, but let's at least be accurate in our slander. I would be inclined to call him a script kiddie.
Cowardice? What, are you supposed to be dangerous or something?
I don't have to be dangerous for you to hide from admitting the truth.
I can see why you're in a snit. Trying to stake out an untenable position
This might carry some weight if you weren't so desperate not to back up your claims. As stands, it's just more silly handwaving, trying to distract the situation from focussing on your now three message long chain of making claims you can't defend. That you call other people's positions untenable when the situation is your refusal to back up your claims is appalling and disappointing.
Make whatever unfounded claim you like in your next non-reply. I'm done with you.
Maybe Verizon's patent is a good one, but it's still pretty sleazy the way they did this. They basically let Vonage exist for years, let Vonage spend all the money marketing the VoIP concept to the masses, let Vonage spend all the time and money proving the concept that VoIP could make money and could move beyond the geek space. Vonage did all of that, and now that Joe Blow is comfortable with the concept, and now that Vonage has millions of established customers, Verizon can swoop in, kill Vonage, and get all of those customers without having to spend all the time and money building all of that up themselves.
Yeah, you don't actually know that.
I worked for a company I'll decline to identify when something vaguely parallel like this went on several years back; the companies were smaller, but still large companies. I worked for the Verizon analogue, which I'm going to start calling Bizarro-Verizon, because it's less awful than "the company I worked for" over and over, and because I've been watching SeaLab 2021.
Bizarro-Verizon spent six months notifying Bizarro-Vonage that they needed to open up a licensing agreement; Bizarro-Vonage never seemed to bother. So, Bizarro-Verizon set up an account as if they were a customer at the publically published rates, and just started invoicing Bizarro-Vonage. Some manager inside Bizarro-Vonage spent a month getting the account coordinated and set up, then several months trying to haggle the price down, all the while letting this enormous debt grow and grow, only to announce one day that he couldn't actually find any point at which his company had agreed to pay at all, and since it had been a year, he felt it was pretty obvious they weren't infringing, that negotiations were over, and that we might consider using the invoices as kindling.
So, Bizarro-Verizon spent a new six months indicating first that the account needed to be set up so that the standing debt for the use of their technology could be paid, and as that got ignored, progressively got angrier, until at the end they were threatening to sue. Bizarro-Vonage took the same gamble Real-Vonage took, and lost.
Did we submarine them for a year and a half? No: it's just at medium-sized companies, it takes time for stuff to percolate from one end to the other, and more time to be convinced they're not doing what they're supposed to. At companies the size of AT&T and Vonage, I'm surprised they got here this quickly, to be frank.
When I was just out of college, I did tech support for a local ISP for about two years. I managed to net a promotion or raise every other month by not succumbing to the tendencies you're describing. It's a lot harder to not to that than it sounds.
The problem comes earlier than that. 95% of the people who call in are on the war-path. It wasn't really so bad for me, because the ISP only had about ten thousand customers, meaning we had a few dozen regular callers and a few hundred occasional callers. It wasn't long until the problem users (and there are a suprising lot of them) were all being shipped straight to me, presumably because I have a deep voice, careful use of the language, I'm polite on the job and I'll put up with a lot of crap on the job.
I'm not going to say we had the cup-holder CD guy, but there's a lot of that kind of stuff to go around. The problem is, it's not funny, good natured or any of that. It's really sometimes quite bitter and acrimonious. I'll give you the example of Dave, who called in just after he moved; he wasn't able to dial in, and he was "certain it was [the ISP]'s low quality hardware tripping him up again." The problem was that he had forgotten to put a phone cable in place between the computer and the new wall.
Thing is, he had a teenage son, and that son would go screwing with his settings on a weekly basis. It wasn't long before he was asking for me by name to just go through the settings and roll them back one by one. He'd get furious if I didn't help with non-ISP stuff, and any suggestion that he just discipline the child or lock the machine down got met with a tantrum about how he paid his twenty dollars a month and that meant we had to come change the oil in his car if he wanted us to and rah rah rah.
They aren't treating you as a culprit. It's just that the chances you're going to be tolerable are miniscule, and it's almost certain that the person they just talked to completely screwed them off.
It's one of the paradoxes inherent in reliable systems: the more reliable your system, the fewer of your tech support calls will be from reasonable people who didn't cause their own problems. The more reliable the system, the lower the likelihood you're not a moron, and the higher the likelihood you're a jerk.
Given that Tivo's internal system is likely to be exceedingly simple, it seems to me quite likely that the rate of defects in their system is so low and the rate of assholes on the telephone so high that nearly everyone you talked to really has never seen a fault in the system, nor has met anyone else at work who has. They probably really believe what they're saying.
Going on the stuff I put up with at work ten years ago, I figure there's a good chance that the employee thought you had just misremembered the data you were trying to get them to look up by. About eleven times in ten, that's what's going on, and humoring the customer means they'll keep flogging the mistake, instead of trying to figure it out.
Not to mention these people are adults making nine bucks an hour without benefits, dealing with angry people on the phone all day. Wouldn't you assume the worst, if that was your life?
I just don't understand why large screens can't at least have the same resolution as a decent monitor.
Defect rates. At two million pixels per screen, they're already throwing away almost 15% of the screens they make. The pixel density you're suggesting would mean that either consumers would have to deal with dozens of dead pixels in their hundred thousand dollar product, or the price would have to go up to match the new discard rate (which would be into the 99.several nines percent.)
but why should we trust wikipedia less than any other site?
For verifying the history of things that are worth money? Do you *really* need someone to answer this for you?
he US is the only country in the world that uses significant quantities of high fructose corn syrup, because the US Government bans sugar imports. The epidemic has moved to Europe. Therefore, it is not caused by feeding the bees high fructose corn syrup.
This logic only holds up if HFCS is the only thing you can feed a bee other than the unspoken European alternative to corn syrup. What you seem to have missed in your logic-without-education is that feeding bees sugar, molasses or any other fructose/galactose source will have the same harmful effect. It has nothing to do with the conversion from cane or beet sugar to corn sugar.
The issue is that bees are made for honey, which is partially digested sugar, not whole sugar. The beekeepers should be leaving some honey for the winter, but the cheap ones leave sugar water, HFCS or something similar instead. The problem is that it isn't honey.
If I set off a teargas canister in a field, every critter in the area will move away from it quickly. That does NOT mean that teargas canisters occur in nature or that they have existed for millions of years.
No, but it does mean that toxic gasses have existed for millions of years. Believe it or not, most creatures don't actually react when presented with fundamentally new stimuli; with the exceptions of neophobic animals like rats, and animals which think something about the deployment is threatening - like maybe the tear-gas canister hisses, or whatever - you're more likely to see animals go towards the grenade than away.
"But it's painful, of course they're going to run away." Yeah, why do you think pain exists? That's an evolved defense against generic caustic gasses, fires, et cetera. The gas in teargas was chosen specifically because it does a damned good job of setting off our natural reaction to the gasses in forest fire smoke. Just because humans can imitate the source of a biologically hardwired behavior doesn't mean that the behavior doesn't have an originating source. You'll note that tear gas is fine-tuned to piss off human biology; several other biologies on earth, such as insects, lizards, fish and hippies are completely unaffected, and still other biologies, such as deer, are killed by tear gas.
For comparison, set off a can of teargas in a container, then put the resulting liquid in the water of a tank containing crabs with an easy path out. The crabs will not react, if you're careful to not splash the water. They'll die quite ignorant of what's happening. We don't just magically run away from things. Biology has to know they're harmful before we'll bother. Most humans will silently asphyxiate in a room full of carbon monoxide, because the body doesn't know how to differentiate it from oxygen, and just sort of quietly fails.
There are tons of things humanity has made that are quietly toxic, and a few that were already in nature, like radon. The teargas reaction is not random. It's highly evolved and for a damned good reason. Animals set up shop in toxic sludge all the time.
every critter in the area will move away from it quickly.
Actually, many insects and smaller animals don't have the good sense to do so, and anything without exposed mucus membranes, like most lizards, won't have a good reason to leave. Only some classes of animal react to teargas, because many animals use different holy-shit triggers for fire. If you throw a quiet teargas grenade next to a seal, the seal will bat it around for a while, try to eat it several times, and end up getting bored and finding something to kill.
Insults and ignoring requests to defend what you say are the last resorts of cowardice.
Funny how self-referential your comments are. Nonetheless, as the claims are yours, so is the burden of proof. Saying something like "wishing doesn't make it so" is funny when your supporting data seems to be pixie dust and malice. If you're going to pretend to understand engineering failure rates and the law, please show the failure rates you haven't bothered to investigate and the negligence statutes you pretend to know have been violated.
Wishing doesn't make it so, but citation does. Funny how you refuse to do such. I suspect inability, followed with another burst of ad hominem and tu quoque as reply, rather than actual support for the initial transparently clueless and wholly unsupportable assertions.
Shore up what you said if you're able, instead of going "omg you're so snotty."
It be like paying for phone service and getting only good connections to people who paid that also paid that specific phone company off.
Er. You do know that that has been common practice since the switched circuit days, right? What you bought is phone service. Nowhere in the contract does it say "we're not going to QoS rate the other side according to their payout." That's why cellular calls within a network generally sound so much better than cellular calls across networks. Make a Verizon to Verizon call, then a Cingular to Cingular call; if you're using similar phones, they'll both sound roughly equivalent. Now, make a call from Verizon to Cingular, or vice versa.
Welcome to the real world. They're not obligated to give you something just because you expected it.
but why they don't accept encrypted PDFs is beyond me. It's just as secure as a fax.
From the technological standpoint, yes. From the legal standpoint, no. Faxes have special exceptions to many duplication-of-signature laws long in place, which have not been applied to computer standards. When that changes, you will see companies racing to implement PDF transfer, which from a technical standpoint is far safer, and which from a customer service standpoint is far more convenient. Believe it or not, companies aren't all idiots; many companies are in fact quite unhappy about the current situation. It's costing them real money.
There is more to safety than mathematical hardness.
Calling someone a hippie isn't ad hominem, nor would it be even were calling someone a hippie an insult, as you seem to be implying. Ad hominem requires that the insult be the supporting justification of an argument against what the hippie said. No such thing is occurring here; grandparent's premise, while based on urban legend and undiluted frozen concentrate of pure capital-w Wrong, is based on clear logic. Were his facts actually correct - were it the case that the manufacture of a solar panel created more pollution than the device saved - then his ascerbic view would be both appropriate and reasonable.
His argument is based on clear, sound, reasonable and plain logic. And, er, incorrect data.
The point is, there is no fallacy here at all. It's a falsehood. Attempting to invoke ad hominem as the mighty logic daemon that will dispell what someone else said really just kind of makes you look like a jerk, here. Grandparent had something semi-valid to say. If you had cut yourself off after asking for reference, you would have been totally in the right. Perhaps you should read about the difference between fallacy and falsehood; it would help you the next time you wanted to dust off logical fallacies.
Amusingly, accusing someone else of ad hominem in order to devalue their position is an actual case of ad hominem; you are directly attacking them without warrant in a way that does not affect their actual argument whatsoever, and directly leveraging that in the attempt to make them seem less credible. That is precisely the definition of ad hominem: an attack against the individual to falsely deflate their statements. It turns out you're doing exactly what you're falsely accusing others of.
That's textbook ad hominem. Time for you to go back to school, fauxlosopher.
I just threw away five good moderations to set you straight. Don't rahr at me. This is an attempt to help you get past your belief in yourself as someone able to deconstruct others' logic. Tell me it couldn't be, Swingin' Joe, say it ain't so - 'cause it ain't. Don't try it again until you've read three books or levelled up. Blue Poster Needs Clue, Badly.
Thank you, drive through.