I told one of these guys that I believed he enjoyed an unusual relationship with his mother, then hung up on him. He called me back to call me names, so I suggested that he needed to pay a visit to his mother, and hung up on him again. It would be funny, except for the fact that some people fall for this kind of scam, and end up being bilked out of a lot of money. I hope the folks who perpetrated these ripoffs spend a very long time in a very not nice prison.
I even asked the owner of the gas station if he intended to keep the video advertising with the blaring sound going for more than just a test period... and he said he was. So I stopped getting gas there. I'm not sure if it made any difference to his sales, but at least I stopped being assaulted by advertising while gassing up my car.
The most dystopian aspect of Blade Runner to my eyes and ears was the blaring advertisements. I thought to myself - no one would ever stand for that! Now there are blaring video kiosks as the mall, and on gas pumps, and web sites that hi-jack my own computer and software to blare their video advertisements in my home. Sheesh.
And I guess that means that your rice cooker won't *function* unless its Internet connection is working... I mean, of course - the manufacturer might need to update it while it's in the middle of cooking your rice!
Zoning regulations are absolutely necessary. Crafting the right zoning regulations may be tricky, but with no zoning regulations many more people will end up becoming victims of other people's self-interest/profit motive than without zoning regulations.
How about the "Internet Police" take the device into "protective custody" because its creating a "public nuisance" and "being a threat to public safety". Then charge the original manufacturer a fine each time one of their devices has to be taken into "protective custody" due to a manufacturer's flaw in the device.
By extension, if the problem device is a problem because of Joe/Jill Homeowner, do the same but charge them the fine, not the manufacturer. A bit murkier to handle since there will be so many Joe/Jill Homeowners and they will be so hard to track down, but perhaps someone can find a good way to handle this.
Exercise for the reader: Define/organize the "Internet Police" - perhaps its a division of the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) in the United States, define their scope: devices on IP addresses allocated to entities operating within the United States of America for the US Internet Police, for example. Constrain their duties: the Internet Police are charged with addressing threats to the health and well-being of the Internet caused by poorly configured devices (for example).
I used to read "Car and Driver" magazine a lot (I had a subscription) back "in the day". I also like off-road vehicles. It was always funny reading the "Car and Driver" reviews of any kind of vehicle with off-road capabilities, because the wits at "Car and Driver" would totally disparage it. From their point of view, if the vehicle couldn't compete head to head with a BMW or Porsche or other refined on-road vehicle, then there was no point to buying it. The good news with Car and Driver as well as Consumer Reports is that, in general, they are "transparent" in their reviews, providing the data and how they interpreted the data to arrive at their conclusion. I don't read reviews like that so that they can tell me what to think; I read them so that I can understand how they think, adopt as much of their thinking as I find useful, and apply my thinking to their data to arrive at my own conclusion.
You can include me in the group as well. I usually want to make sure that I have fairly represented a situation and all points of view about the situation so that that the listener can come to their own conclusions and not be led into a possibly false conclusion by the way I'm relating something. I'm pretty good at doing root cause analysis, but suck at telling stories or relating anecdotes that people actually want to listen to.
I think that its more complicated (and insidious) than that. People who are really good at lying are capable of imagining a possible circumstance under which what they are saying would be/is true, then making their statement in such a way that it does not contradict the imagined circumstance. They "haven't lied" yet the conclusion drawn by the people to whom they are talking is probably not true, because the people to whom they are talking are unaware of the imagined circumstance that the liar is using as the unstated context for their statement. Lawyers are good at this. Politicians are good at this. And the more they practice it, they better they get at it. And although they believe what they are saying to be true (in their imagined context), they fact that it works and they get away with it reinforces their willingness to do it again.
As an American, this election merely gives me the opportunity to vote against the candidate I most don't want to win, rather than to vote for the one I do want to win. And I can't throw away my vote symbolically, voting for a 3rd party candidate who has no chance of winning. If I really feel like one of the two major candidates is worse than the other, I have to vote for the one that is less worse in order to make a meaningful statement. It would have been nice if a significant 3rd party candidate had been able to rise up this election - he/she would have stood a good chance of winning, I think.
All politicians lie, frequently, and in my opinion more so than the general population and about more substantive things. If I lied in my job they way that politicians lie in theirs, I would be fired. I've taught my kids the old saying "How can you tell when a politician is lying? - His/her lips are moving." The higher the office, the more likely they are lying, either directly or by omission. The whole "private opinion" versus "public opinion" comment from a current presidential candidate underscores my point. It is difficult, if not impossible, for a candidate to appeal to a broad enough electorate to be elected unless they "obscure the truth" (i.e., for purists like me, lie). Color me cynical, I guess.
So we need a meme that re-labels meme images to something that doesn't clash with the term meme, so that the meme meme isn't lost. Perhaps meme images could become memage, a term distinct from meme. So now we just need a way to spread the memage meme - perhaps someone could create a memage about the memage meme and get it into circulation?
One problem I can foresee is that although there is a process in place *now* for keeping the copper in place (it it can be justified), once the FIOS or wireless solution is in place, that premise will probably never be "qualified" to have a copper line hooked back up, so a future need for the copper line cannot be met. The other is that the Verizon "battery backup" is ridiculous - my FIOS backup battery lasts for 8 hours from the time that the power goes out (not 8 hours of call time) and it needs to be replaced every 1 to 2 years. When I had copper service, and we had a house power outage of a week or so in duration (happens roughly 1/year), I could still make phone calls. Now... tough luck. And this means that the E-911 system/service that I've been paying for years to build and maintain won't be there for me if my emergency happens when the power is out.
Dismantling the copper telephony infrastructure should be a public utility decision, not something the phone company does by subterfuge and one-on-one interactions with home owners who don't understand the ultimate ramifications.
Yes, an already-paired Bluetooth connection is easy to set up. Too easy. My wife pulls up in her car next to mine, and all of a sudden I can't hear my phone call anymore, because my phone has paired automatically with the Navigation system in her car and stolen the audio input/output away from my phone. Ok, it doesn't happen that often. But its annoying when it does. My 3.5mm jack never does that.
Yea, the lack of NAT in IPv6 isn't exactly a beneficial feature... I would like to see IPv6 adoption get completed in my lifetime, but I haven't adopted it myself because a) I don't *need* it yet, and b) for personal privacy and security the current commonly available infrastructure tools seem to be a step backwards.
Well, I had good intentions. I'm a network engineer, and I planned out my multi-segmented network so that my home IT (servers/computers) stuff was separated from my home infrastructure (security devices, smoke detectors, etc) and that the latter were walled off from the Internet. And I *plan* to make it all work correctly someday. But in the meantime... All I have implemented so far is separate SSIDs for kids and adults so that the kids are blocked from 24-hour/day Internet time wasting, and some firewall block rules to keep my home security infrastructure from being able to communicate to the Internet, mostly triggered by the Nest Protect's incessant need to upload its motion detection data to the mothership.
In the meantime, I generally avoid buying things for the home network that aren't "self-contained" (i.e., I don't buy the things that need to communicate with the "cloud" in order to work. This is for practical reasons (I don't want my stuff to stop working just because a vendor goes out of business, or simply stops supporting an old product line, or my Internet connection is on the fritz) as well as privacy reasons (I don't need to have any more data on my habits and choices being uploaded to the cloud than is already there from my using Amazon, credit cards, Hulu Plus, Redox, and the library).
I *hope* more vendors get off of the "connect it to the cloud" bandwagon and that IoT devices are mostly self-contained, but don't see much chance of it happening unless either there is a huge blowup with legal liability that causes companies to go that way, or legislation requires/encourages it. Too many folks want to be able to view the inside of their home from their smartphone while on vacation, without realizing that what works for them can very well be subverted to working for others...
Based on my observations of people traveling public transportation such as the subway or riding in car pools, I suspect that any time saved due to autonomous vehicle use will be spent surfing the web or incessantly checking social media to see if someone, anyone, as offered up a new crumb of intercourse to consume.
Perhaps the answer to this conundrum will be found to lie with the source of the funding for the study. The study certainly seems to be measuring things strangely. I don't see any other way to judge the portion of the report you found fault with as anything but "math challenged" - "Out of the 58 percent of iOS devices that failed, iPhone 6 had the highest failure rate (29 percent), followed by iPhone 6S (23 percent) and iPhone 6S Plus (14 percent)."
"Failure" must be being measured as the discovery of a fault of some kind, not overall device failure, but even with that interpretation I can't make sense of the math.
I suspect its not so cut and dried in many cases (give me the money, you get your law). Its more like the money buys access to the ear of the politician, and the politician's ear is filled predominantly with one point of view, that probably sounds well thought out and reasonable. Unless the politician has the time to go out and seek an alternative view (and that may take a lot of time, because the alternative view may be poorly understood/poorly bankrolled), the politician could just be happy to be passing a reasonable law that makes sense to a lot of people. So $70K to get the chance to explain your side of things to a lawmaker might even seem like a lot of $$, and you might even feel put upon that you had to put up that kind of money to get the person to listen to you. After all, you are a citizen, aren't you?
Hmmm. How about this - if I have hidden evidence that ties me to a crime, can I be ordered by the court to tell the police where I hid that evidence? By analogy, if I have hidden evidence on my phone by using encryption, can I be ordered by the court to tell the policy how to "find" the information on my phone by revealing my password/encryption key?
I would love to see the data backing up your claim that most gun owners in the United States support keeping people on the "no fly" list from owning guns. My experiences with people who own firearms tells me that they generally believe in the private ownership of firearms, and that they are against the restriction of that right by non-judicial means, especially through a mechanism as opaque as the "no fly" list. As soon as someone such as yourself uses the words "common sense" while talking about firearms, it is a strong indicator that you likely picked up your talking points from the folks who do not believe in the private ownership of firearms. They adopted the "common sense" phrase a while ago for use in discussions on this topic, and they use it fairly indiscriminately to refer to any proposed restriction on private ownership of firearms that they are pushing. (They are also fond of claiming that they know what "most gun owners" think). From my own personal viewpoint, it's a matter of living under the rule of law. At first blush, this might be taken to mean that any rule enshrined as a law is valid. I think it means more than that. I think that it means eliminating hidden subjective determinations as well - the whole bit about "due process" and the right to face your accuser, right to a trial by jury, etc. The restriction of rights requires that kind of "rule of law", not a secret decision to place someone on a secret list without even recourse to the US code requirement that all citizens have the right to review all government records pertaining to them, and to petition for corrections to those records where they are in error.
The whole point of the FCC is to provide the regulation that makes the system work. I like market-based economies, but unbridled "free market" fails. We don't have to sit around and take whatever works best for businesses even when it causes us misery.
How about some variation on holding the telephone company responsible for the falsified CallerID information? The false information gets there in the first place because the phone companies let anyone with a digital interface supply their own CallerID information. Perhaps the phone companies should develop a screening process whereby they don't accept CallerID information from a subscriber if it doesn't match a previously agreed-upon pattern (for the text, and for the number). Legitimate uses of injected CallerID information are for things like Direct Inward Dial trunks handing out the internal PBX routing number; this would fit the pattern for the number, and the names could be prefaced by some kind of approved organizational identifier.
If the CallerID information could be guaranteed to lead back to the real call initiator, then the Federal reporting forums for illegal and harassing phone calls could have real data to work on. As it stands now, I can report the illegal robocall, or the call even though I'm on the "Do Not Call" list, but even as I report it I'm pretty sure nothing will happen because the CallerID information I'm using to identify the actual caller is falsified. And... good luck getting an actual organization name out of an individual should you choose to speak to one on a robocall. They know better than to give you an actionable name.
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I told one of these guys that I believed he enjoyed an unusual relationship with his mother, then hung up on him. He called me back to call me names, so I suggested that he needed to pay a visit to his mother, and hung up on him again. It would be funny, except for the fact that some people fall for this kind of scam, and end up being bilked out of a lot of money. I hope the folks who perpetrated these ripoffs spend a very long time in a very not nice prison.
I even asked the owner of the gas station if he intended to keep the video advertising with the blaring sound going for more than just a test period... and he said he was. So I stopped getting gas there. I'm not sure if it made any difference to his sales, but at least I stopped being assaulted by advertising while gassing up my car.
The most dystopian aspect of Blade Runner to my eyes and ears was the blaring advertisements. I thought to myself - no one would ever stand for that! Now there are blaring video kiosks as the mall, and on gas pumps, and web sites that hi-jack my own computer and software to blare their video advertisements in my home. Sheesh.
And I guess that means that your rice cooker won't *function* unless its Internet connection is working... I mean, of course - the manufacturer might need to update it while it's in the middle of cooking your rice!
If the Republicans keep espousing a business before citizen privacy position, I might have to stop voting Republican.
Zoning regulations are absolutely necessary. Crafting the right zoning regulations may be tricky, but with no zoning regulations many more people will end up becoming victims of other people's self-interest/profit motive than without zoning regulations.
How about the "Internet Police" take the device into "protective custody" because its creating a "public nuisance" and "being a threat to public safety". Then charge the original manufacturer a fine each time one of their devices has to be taken into "protective custody" due to a manufacturer's flaw in the device.
By extension, if the problem device is a problem because of Joe/Jill Homeowner, do the same but charge them the fine, not the manufacturer. A bit murkier to handle since there will be so many Joe/Jill Homeowners and they will be so hard to track down, but perhaps someone can find a good way to handle this.
Exercise for the reader: Define/organize the "Internet Police" - perhaps its a division of the FTC (Federal Trade Commission) in the United States, define their scope: devices on IP addresses allocated to entities operating within the United States of America for the US Internet Police, for example. Constrain their duties: the Internet Police are charged with addressing threats to the health and well-being of the Internet caused by poorly configured devices (for example).
I used to read "Car and Driver" magazine a lot (I had a subscription) back "in the day". I also like off-road vehicles. It was always funny reading the "Car and Driver" reviews of any kind of vehicle with off-road capabilities, because the wits at "Car and Driver" would totally disparage it. From their point of view, if the vehicle couldn't compete head to head with a BMW or Porsche or other refined on-road vehicle, then there was no point to buying it. The good news with Car and Driver as well as Consumer Reports is that, in general, they are "transparent" in their reviews, providing the data and how they interpreted the data to arrive at their conclusion. I don't read reviews like that so that they can tell me what to think; I read them so that I can understand how they think, adopt as much of their thinking as I find useful, and apply my thinking to their data to arrive at my own conclusion.
"Not the complete truth" IS a lie, when you know that people will draw an incorrect conclusion from what they say. Its called "lying by omission."
Well said (I don't have moderator points).
You can include me in the group as well. I usually want to make sure that I have fairly represented a situation and all points of view about the situation so that that the listener can come to their own conclusions and not be led into a possibly false conclusion by the way I'm relating something. I'm pretty good at doing root cause analysis, but suck at telling stories or relating anecdotes that people actually want to listen to.
I think that its more complicated (and insidious) than that. People who are really good at lying are capable of imagining a possible circumstance under which what they are saying would be/is true, then making their statement in such a way that it does not contradict the imagined circumstance. They "haven't lied" yet the conclusion drawn by the people to whom they are talking is probably not true, because the people to whom they are talking are unaware of the imagined circumstance that the liar is using as the unstated context for their statement. Lawyers are good at this. Politicians are good at this. And the more they practice it, they better they get at it. And although they believe what they are saying to be true (in their imagined context), they fact that it works and they get away with it reinforces their willingness to do it again.
As an American, this election merely gives me the opportunity to vote against the candidate I most don't want to win, rather than to vote for the one I do want to win. And I can't throw away my vote symbolically, voting for a 3rd party candidate who has no chance of winning. If I really feel like one of the two major candidates is worse than the other, I have to vote for the one that is less worse in order to make a meaningful statement. It would have been nice if a significant 3rd party candidate had been able to rise up this election - he/she would have stood a good chance of winning, I think.
All politicians lie, frequently, and in my opinion more so than the general population and about more substantive things. If I lied in my job they way that politicians lie in theirs, I would be fired. I've taught my kids the old saying "How can you tell when a politician is lying? - His/her lips are moving." The higher the office, the more likely they are lying, either directly or by omission. The whole "private opinion" versus "public opinion" comment from a current presidential candidate underscores my point. It is difficult, if not impossible, for a candidate to appeal to a broad enough electorate to be elected unless they "obscure the truth" (i.e., for purists like me, lie). Color me cynical, I guess.
So we need a meme that re-labels meme images to something that doesn't clash with the term meme, so that the meme meme isn't lost. Perhaps meme images could become memage, a term distinct from meme. So now we just need a way to spread the memage meme - perhaps someone could create a memage about the memage meme and get it into circulation?
One problem I can foresee is that although there is a process in place *now* for keeping the copper in place (it it can be justified), once the FIOS or wireless solution is in place, that premise will probably never be "qualified" to have a copper line hooked back up, so a future need for the copper line cannot be met. The other is that the Verizon "battery backup" is ridiculous - my FIOS backup battery lasts for 8 hours from the time that the power goes out (not 8 hours of call time) and it needs to be replaced every 1 to 2 years. When I had copper service, and we had a house power outage of a week or so in duration (happens roughly 1/year), I could still make phone calls. Now... tough luck. And this means that the E-911 system/service that I've been paying for years to build and maintain won't be there for me if my emergency happens when the power is out.
Dismantling the copper telephony infrastructure should be a public utility decision, not something the phone company does by subterfuge and one-on-one interactions with home owners who don't understand the ultimate ramifications.
Yes, an already-paired Bluetooth connection is easy to set up. Too easy. My wife pulls up in her car next to mine, and all of a sudden I can't hear my phone call anymore, because my phone has paired automatically with the Navigation system in her car and stolen the audio input/output away from my phone. Ok, it doesn't happen that often. But its annoying when it does. My 3.5mm jack never does that.
Yea, the lack of NAT in IPv6 isn't exactly a beneficial feature... I would like to see IPv6 adoption get completed in my lifetime, but I haven't adopted it myself because a) I don't *need* it yet, and b) for personal privacy and security the current commonly available infrastructure tools seem to be a step backwards.
Well, I had good intentions. I'm a network engineer, and I planned out my multi-segmented network so that my home IT (servers/computers) stuff was separated from my home infrastructure (security devices, smoke detectors, etc) and that the latter were walled off from the Internet. And I *plan* to make it all work correctly someday. But in the meantime... All I have implemented so far is separate SSIDs for kids and adults so that the kids are blocked from 24-hour/day Internet time wasting, and some firewall block rules to keep my home security infrastructure from being able to communicate to the Internet, mostly triggered by the Nest Protect's incessant need to upload its motion detection data to the mothership.
In the meantime, I generally avoid buying things for the home network that aren't "self-contained" (i.e., I don't buy the things that need to communicate with the "cloud" in order to work. This is for practical reasons (I don't want my stuff to stop working just because a vendor goes out of business, or simply stops supporting an old product line, or my Internet connection is on the fritz) as well as privacy reasons (I don't need to have any more data on my habits and choices being uploaded to the cloud than is already there from my using Amazon, credit cards, Hulu Plus, Redox, and the library).
I *hope* more vendors get off of the "connect it to the cloud" bandwagon and that IoT devices are mostly self-contained, but don't see much chance of it happening unless either there is a huge blowup with legal liability that causes companies to go that way, or legislation requires/encourages it. Too many folks want to be able to view the inside of their home from their smartphone while on vacation, without realizing that what works for them can very well be subverted to working for others...
Based on my observations of people traveling public transportation such as the subway or riding in car pools, I suspect that any time saved due to autonomous vehicle use will be spent surfing the web or incessantly checking social media to see if someone, anyone, as offered up a new crumb of intercourse to consume.
Perhaps the answer to this conundrum will be found to lie with the source of the funding for the study. The study certainly seems to be measuring things strangely. I don't see any other way to judge the portion of the report you found fault with as anything but "math challenged" - "Out of the 58 percent of iOS devices that failed, iPhone 6 had the highest failure rate (29 percent), followed by iPhone 6S (23 percent) and iPhone 6S Plus (14 percent)."
"Failure" must be being measured as the discovery of a fault of some kind, not overall device failure, but even with that interpretation I can't make sense of the math.
I suspect its not so cut and dried in many cases (give me the money, you get your law). Its more like the money buys access to the ear of the politician, and the politician's ear is filled predominantly with one point of view, that probably sounds well thought out and reasonable. Unless the politician has the time to go out and seek an alternative view (and that may take a lot of time, because the alternative view may be poorly understood/poorly bankrolled), the politician could just be happy to be passing a reasonable law that makes sense to a lot of people. So $70K to get the chance to explain your side of things to a lawmaker might even seem like a lot of $$, and you might even feel put upon that you had to put up that kind of money to get the person to listen to you. After all, you are a citizen, aren't you?
Hmmm. How about this - if I have hidden evidence that ties me to a crime, can I be ordered by the court to tell the police where I hid that evidence? By analogy, if I have hidden evidence on my phone by using encryption, can I be ordered by the court to tell the policy how to "find" the information on my phone by revealing my password/encryption key?
I would love to see the data backing up your claim that most gun owners in the United States support keeping people on the "no fly" list from owning guns. My experiences with people who own firearms tells me that they generally believe in the private ownership of firearms, and that they are against the restriction of that right by non-judicial means, especially through a mechanism as opaque as the "no fly" list. As soon as someone such as yourself uses the words "common sense" while talking about firearms, it is a strong indicator that you likely picked up your talking points from the folks who do not believe in the private ownership of firearms. They adopted the "common sense" phrase a while ago for use in discussions on this topic, and they use it fairly indiscriminately to refer to any proposed restriction on private ownership of firearms that they are pushing. (They are also fond of claiming that they know what "most gun owners" think). From my own personal viewpoint, it's a matter of living under the rule of law. At first blush, this might be taken to mean that any rule enshrined as a law is valid. I think it means more than that. I think that it means eliminating hidden subjective determinations as well - the whole bit about "due process" and the right to face your accuser, right to a trial by jury, etc. The restriction of rights requires that kind of "rule of law", not a secret decision to place someone on a secret list without even recourse to the US code requirement that all citizens have the right to review all government records pertaining to them, and to petition for corrections to those records where they are in error.
The whole point of the FCC is to provide the regulation that makes the system work. I like market-based economies, but unbridled "free market" fails. We don't have to sit around and take whatever works best for businesses even when it causes us misery.
How about some variation on holding the telephone company responsible for the falsified CallerID information? The false information gets there in the first place because the phone companies let anyone with a digital interface supply their own CallerID information. Perhaps the phone companies should develop a screening process whereby they don't accept CallerID information from a subscriber if it doesn't match a previously agreed-upon pattern (for the text, and for the number). Legitimate uses of injected CallerID information are for things like Direct Inward Dial trunks handing out the internal PBX routing number; this would fit the pattern for the number, and the names could be prefaced by some kind of approved organizational identifier.
If the CallerID information could be guaranteed to lead back to the real call initiator, then the Federal reporting forums for illegal and harassing phone calls could have real data to work on. As it stands now, I can report the illegal robocall, or the call even though I'm on the "Do Not Call" list, but even as I report it I'm pretty sure nothing will happen because the CallerID information I'm using to identify the actual caller is falsified. And... good luck getting an actual organization name out of an individual should you choose to speak to one on a robocall. They know better than to give you an actionable name.