So, your okay with puttinng up with the hassle of disputing the charge every month, but not with the temporary hassle of getting a new card? So you pay with cash for a few days and have to update cc details on a handful of sites. You're wasting more effort disputing the charges every month!
Just rip the damn band-aid off quickly already!
But...but...i have this number memorized...:'(
Yeah, I know, I should just do it. But it's also kind of a "why should I have to move, I was here first!" thing now. If I dispute it often enough, perhaps someone will actually investigate these assholes and shut them down...I know, wishful thinking...
Okay, let me get this straight. The owner of Bild is suing the maker of Blockr for blocking ads, thereby reducing his website's revenues. In practically the same breath he's bragging about how their strategy of counter-blocking users who are using ad-blocker technology is such a success:
Techcrunch reports: "In October, Axel Springer forced visitors to Bild to turn off their ad blockers or pay a monthly fee to continue using the site. Earlier this month, the publisher reported the success of this measure, saying that the proportion of readers using ad blockers dropped from 23% to the single digits when faced with the choice to turn off the software or pay. 'The results are beyond our expectations,' said Springer chief exec Mathias Döpfner at the time. 'Over two-thirds of the users concerned switched off their adblocker.' He also noted that the Bild.de website received an additional 3 million visits from users who could now see the ads in the first two weeks of the experiment going live."
So...what's the problem here? If your users are 'seeing the light' and un-blocking your site after being told to 'or else', and you're apparently getting more users than ever, what's the financial harm being done here?
What's that? Is it possible that users aren't reacting as positively to your bullying tactics as you'd like us to believe? You'd lie to us? *shocked-face*
Can't they do something like what the credit card companies do and put a "watch" on the account? When I did customer service, we didn't have specific watches, but we had the call log and pulled up customer history with every call. They could, at the very least, put NOTICE CUSTOMER WATCH in the subject line for a log entry. They could request to not have any service changed except by personal appearance with ID at the office. That should easily stop a teen from Europe.
Hell, I can't even get my cc company to block charges from some lowlife scammer, I have to dispute the charge every.damn.month.
I am told the only way to stop them is to cancel and get a new card issued...trouble is, it's only $20 per month. That is an enormous hassle to me because the credit card company can't just block one bad actor...I'm continuing to dispute the charges month-by-month so far, but once it reaches a year of this nonsense I'll probably cave in and get a new card. Damn their eyes.
Doesn't help if you can get to a fire, and not have anything to put it out.....
Indeed, and the only "practical" delivery method would be to fly over and basically and drop it on the fire.
Can't you just imagine the hilarity if someone were to try to use any sort of propellant while operating one of these? What are you supposed to do, lean into it? "Whoops...just launched another one into the burning building with a backpack of fuel, guess these fire extinguishers aren't as fully charged as we thought...next!"
Why can't we just have moderation? Most of the poor (low quality, as opposed to negative) reviews are easy to spot; knuckleheads that break things two seconds after they get it out of the package; half the things they buy are mysteriously "DOA." Moderation enables your smart customers to punish your idiot customers.
Just spotted one of these today on eham.net. A beautiful hand made band pass filter rated 4.2/5 instead of the 5/5 it deserves because — years ago — some moron used it on the wrong band for the wrong purpose and rated it 0/5.
I thought that was what the "Was this review helpful to you? YES/NO/Report Abuse" options were for?
Effective community policing needs an involved community like slashdot. Even here, where nobody's trying to sell you anything other than an opinion, the sock-puppet modding can get out of hand sometimes...
I think most of the tech showed in CSI counts as sci-fi.
It's what kept me watching far past my usual "drama-blech" tipping point...eventually had to give up on it, though, as the inter-personal tripe started vastly outweighing the occasional cool tech bits.
On the other hand, students and people in-general have gotten > and < confused for a long time. I can understand why too, they look like arrows, and normally we associate the arrow as pointing to the thing that we are attempting to focus on. They also look a bit funnel-like, almost like they're representing how the thing on the open-side is a component of the thing on the pointed-side.
Huh, interesting. I learned that they were Pac-Man skeletons, and of course an undead Pac-Man would eat the biggest meal he could find...
My primary school math teacher may have been a bit eccentric, but hey, he was memorable:)
However my book expenses was nothing compared to what they had to put up with in other areas, such as psychology or pedagogy. They had to buy $200 books just for a chapter or two.
That's what university libraries are for...go fair-use and photocopiers!
Agreed, but from TFA, seems like they were chosen because they're cheap (in every sense of the word), therefore people would feel more comfortable using them as 'burner' laptops (or pseudo-laptops).
But diesels can meet emission standards honestly if auto makers include a urea tank. They just fear consumer reaction to having another consumable fluid (that needs to be refilled every 9 thousand miles, or so) and don't want to do the heavy lifting of consumer education.
Or the consumer could provide 'incremental' top-ups. Just market it as a new feature: "No more 'Mom, I gotta go!' during long road trips!";-)
The person with the wrong number may feel obligated to pay off the bill collector just to stop the phone calls. The debt collector keeps the money and sells the debt to another debt collector, while never marking the debt as paid. Otherwise known as legalized exhortation.
Um, no. Legalized exhortation would be the hour long info-mercials with a "Buy Now!! Limited Time Offer!!! Buy one, get ten FREE!!!!!!(pay separate S&H)" spiel. They're just as scummy, really, but not actually costing you anything besides increased blood pressure and thumb blisters on the remote-holding hand.
The type of twat that says feminists spoiled his chances for sex is the type that wouldn't get laid anyway.
Indeed. It's so much easier to blame the women for not wanting to deal with their emotional and physical baggage than it is to actually lose the baggage.
Something else that I find interesting is the (seemingly) vast fields of ordinary men who feel entitled to date supermodels. Fantasize about, yeah, that I can understand, but lots of these guys seem to feel that if they're not with (or at least chasing) a Heidi Klum clone, they're a failure of some sort. And, I mean, a lot of these guys are...at or below average, at least in the looks department. Sure, they may be sweet and funny and charming...but so might the woman that they get their morning coffee from, the one that has a slightly higher BMI, or crooked teeth, or whatever. Artificially limiting yourself to a small subset of a product, then bitching because you can't get any of said product just doesn't make much sense to me...
While looking through the AlternativeTo site, saw something that sounds like it might fit your needs, depending on the specifics: Laverna
AlternativeTo describes it as:
Laverna is a web application written on JavaScript. It's built to be an open source alternative to Evernote.
Laverna stores notes in indexedDB and personal settings in local storage.
## Features ----------- * Markdown editor based on Pagedown * Manage your notes even if you're offline * Secure - client side encryption with SJCL and AES algotithm. * Synchronizing with cloud storages. At the time only with Dropbox. * Three editing modes: distraction free, preview and normal mode * WYSIWYG control buttons * Syntax highlighting * No registration required * Web based * Keybindings
Note: never used it, never heard of it before, just throwing it out there.
Just wondering if anyone else uses the alternativeto.net site for questions like these? You can filter by platform and license type, 'vote' for applications you find particularly useful, suggest new alternatives...I don't know, I've found it useful in the past *shrugs*
FYI, here's the open source alternatives listed for Amaya on the alternativeto site for all platforms (sorry about the trail-offs in some of the descriptions, but I'm not digging down that far):
KompoZer This application has been discontinued. "The project seems to be discontinued. Latest stable version, 0.7.10, was released on 2007 and last development version, 0.8b3, on 2010, but the program is still downloadable from the official website."
Bluefish Editor Open Source by Olivier Sessink, Daniel Leidert | Mac, Windows, Linux Bluefish is a powerful editor targeted towards programmers and webdesigners, with many options to write websites, scripts and programming code. Bluefish supports many programming and markup languages, and it...
BlueGriffon Open Source | Mac, Windows, Linux An HTML editor based on Mozilla rendering engine. Supports some CSS3 features and since recently has a built-in SVG editor.
NVU This application has been discontinued. "Development stopped in 2005"
Quanta Plus This application has been discontinued. "The project stopped at version 3.5.10, released on June 2, 2009. It can be still downloaded from Slax.org"
ACE (Ajax Code Editor) Open Source | Web / Cloud Focused and built towards coders, web designers, and web builders, ACE (Ajax Code Editor) can help users get familiar with how the coding is and it's basic structure. This web app is useful for those with...
Openbexi Open Source by openbexi.com | Windows OpenBEXI is a WYSIWYG HTML builder using the magic of HTML5 and CSS3 . By resizing, dragging and dropping various HTML widgets it is easy to build a web page. All texts using the DOJO editor, pictures...
Another good thing about that way of doing it is that by the time you've built the fuel-making plant, you've had to learn how to live there without constant resupply of air and food. Once you've done that, you have the beginnings of a colony there, and you can use what you've learned once you reach Mars. And, building a self-sustaining base on Mars will be easier than on the Moon because Mars has an atmosphere, making pressure issues simpler and giving you some protection against the smaller micrometeorites.
This!
The first thing that jumped out at me from this summary is "OMG, to do this we'd have to have a manned structure on the moon!"
How awesome would that be? And where do I sign up to be a gas jockey on the moon?!?
However, there is no cost if you don't hit "Send". You have the option to cancel the text just as we have done for years with mailto: links.
Now, if they figure out how to actually send the text without consent, that's another game altogether.
If you accidentally hit 'Send' on a mailto link, there are no monetary consequences either, unless there's a whack of data attached to the email. If you do on the text, you're unwittingly establishing a monetary contract to pay some asshat real dollars on a regular basis. I have also heard that once 'subscribed' to these jerks, it can be hellish to get them to 'unsubscribe' you.
They're banking on the fact that the user a) is a fumble-fingered idiot like me, or b) isn't technically savvy enough to know how to cancel the text, like my parents, grandparents or the 5yo playing with moms phone in the grocery store. Actually, strike that, the 5yo would probably know how to cancel a text better than me, but they wouldn't necessarily understand why they should cancel instead of hitting send.
In a similar vein, those scam 'your windows computer has a virus' phone calls are often hilarious diversions to people who know better, but there must be a percentage of people who don't otherwise they'd die off for lack of funds/results. IMO this is in roughly the same category of sleaze.
Why is there an API for sending a text message from a web page? Why does this need to exist at all?
You'd think someone at Apple, when they came up for this idea for this, would be shot down by someone else saying "Sorry dude, this is a feature that can be abused."
It wasn't shot down when mailto: was included in the HTML spec. As long as the API doesn't allow you to actually send it without further consent, how is it any different than every other app's "Send to Facebook|Twitter|Email|Whatever" functionality?
The difference is money.
For many people, there is a cost per message (over some monthly limit) to send/receive texts, and 'subscription' texts (as the ad in the article was apparently trying to set up through this sketchy exploit) charge the user above and beyond the carrier costs. Posting to FB or Twitter doesn't carry any significant cost rider (just loss of dignity, but that's going cheap nowadays), unless the payload is big enough to impact data costs. Even emails are not individually metered like text messages, although I suppose there the data costs could potentially be higher depending on attachments.
This is even worse than those scammy mailers for credit cards, the ones that 'helpfully' pre-fill the application form out with as much of your personal info as they have access to. At least for those you have to make an effort to fill in the remaining fields and physically mail the application form: here you just have to accidentally hit the 'send' button instead of the 'cancel' button (easy to do, esp. if you're used to Android) in order to give them 'permission' to charge you, not only once but multiple times. Also, you can bet that your phone number is now on as many robot scam-dialer databases as possible...there's just no way the user wins in this scenario.
Slashdot Mirror
Previous slashdot story: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/...
Cox's response: http://ia801407.us.archive.org...
Their response is actually kinda fun to read.
It's even more fun if you mentally replace the redacted sections with uninterrupted cussing! Some of the sections are quite long, so get creative! ;-)
So, your okay with puttinng up with the hassle of disputing the charge every month, but not with the temporary hassle of getting a new card? So you pay with cash for a few days and have to update cc details on a handful of sites. You're wasting more effort disputing the charges every month!
Just rip the damn band-aid off quickly already!
But...but...i have this number memorized... :'(
Yeah, I know, I should just do it. But it's also kind of a "why should I have to move, I was here first!" thing now. If I dispute it often enough, perhaps someone will actually investigate these assholes and shut them down...I know, wishful thinking...
Okay, let me get this straight. The owner of Bild is suing the maker of Blockr for blocking ads, thereby reducing his website's revenues. In practically the same breath he's bragging about how their strategy of counter-blocking users who are using ad-blocker technology is such a success:
Techcrunch reports: "In October, Axel Springer forced visitors to Bild to turn off their ad blockers or pay a monthly fee to continue using the site. Earlier this month, the publisher reported the success of this measure, saying that the proportion of readers using ad blockers dropped from 23% to the single digits when faced with the choice to turn off the software or pay. 'The results are beyond our expectations,' said Springer chief exec Mathias Döpfner at the time. 'Over two-thirds of the users concerned switched off their adblocker.' He also noted that the Bild.de website received an additional 3 million visits from users who could now see the ads in the first two weeks of the experiment going live."
So...what's the problem here? If your users are 'seeing the light' and un-blocking your site after being told to 'or else', and you're apparently getting more users than ever, what's the financial harm being done here?
What's that? Is it possible that users aren't reacting as positively to your bullying tactics as you'd like us to believe? You'd lie to us? *shocked-face*
Can't they do something like what the credit card companies do and put a "watch" on the account? When I did customer service, we didn't have specific watches, but we had the call log and pulled up customer history with every call. They could, at the very least, put NOTICE CUSTOMER WATCH in the subject line for a log entry. They could request to not have any service changed except by personal appearance with ID at the office. That should easily stop a teen from Europe.
Hell, I can't even get my cc company to block charges from some lowlife scammer, I have to dispute the charge every.damn.month.
I am told the only way to stop them is to cancel and get a new card issued...trouble is, it's only $20 per month. That is an enormous hassle to me because the credit card company can't just block one bad actor...I'm continuing to dispute the charges month-by-month so far, but once it reaches a year of this nonsense I'll probably cave in and get a new card. Damn their eyes.
the Finnish police have several investigations ongoing,
BS. If the investigation is ongoing, the police aren't finished.
+1 facepalm
How much water or other suppressant can it carry?
Doesn't help if you can get to a fire, and not have anything to put it out.....
Indeed, and the only "practical" delivery method would be to fly over and basically and drop it on the fire.
Can't you just imagine the hilarity if someone were to try to use any sort of propellant while operating one of these? What are you supposed to do, lean into it? "Whoops...just launched another one into the burning building with a backpack of fuel, guess these fire extinguishers aren't as fully charged as we thought...next!"
I guess the voices weren't just in my head...
Why can't we just have moderation? Most of the poor (low quality, as opposed to negative) reviews are easy to spot; knuckleheads that break things two seconds after they get it out of the package; half the things they buy are mysteriously "DOA." Moderation enables your smart customers to punish your idiot customers.
Just spotted one of these today on eham.net. A beautiful hand made band pass filter rated 4.2/5 instead of the 5/5 it deserves because — years ago — some moron used it on the wrong band for the wrong purpose and rated it 0/5.
I thought that was what the "Was this review helpful to you? YES/NO/Report Abuse" options were for?
Effective community policing needs an involved community like slashdot. Even here, where nobody's trying to sell you anything other than an opinion, the sock-puppet modding can get out of hand sometimes...
I think most of the tech showed in CSI counts as sci-fi.
It's what kept me watching far past my usual "drama-blech" tipping point...eventually had to give up on it, though, as the inter-personal tripe started vastly outweighing the occasional cool tech bits.
On the other hand, students and people in-general have gotten > and < confused for a long time. I can understand why too, they look like arrows, and normally we associate the arrow as pointing to the thing that we are attempting to focus on. They also look a bit funnel-like, almost like they're representing how the thing on the open-side is a component of the thing on the pointed-side.
Huh, interesting. I learned that they were Pac-Man skeletons, and of course an undead Pac-Man would eat the biggest meal he could find...
My primary school math teacher may have been a bit eccentric, but hey, he was memorable :)
However my book expenses was nothing compared to what they had to put up with in other areas, such as psychology or pedagogy. They had to buy $200 books just for a chapter or two.
That's what university libraries are for...go fair-use and photocopiers!
A Chromebook is not a laptop!
Agreed, but from TFA, seems like they were chosen because they're cheap (in every sense of the word), therefore people would feel more comfortable using them as 'burner' laptops (or pseudo-laptops).
But diesels can meet emission standards honestly if auto makers include a urea tank. They just fear consumer reaction to having another consumable fluid (that needs to be refilled every 9 thousand miles, or so) and don't want to do the heavy lifting of consumer education.
Or the consumer could provide 'incremental' top-ups. Just market it as a new feature: "No more 'Mom, I gotta go!' during long road trips!" ;-)
There might be a mutual auth like RFID tags, or even Hall sensors.
Then I can see 'drafting' becoming more popular...along with the inevitable spike in rear-end collisions at highway speeds...
The person with the wrong number may feel obligated to pay off the bill collector just to stop the phone calls. The debt collector keeps the money and sells the debt to another debt collector, while never marking the debt as paid. Otherwise known as legalized exhortation.
Um, no. Legalized exhortation would be the hour long info-mercials with a "Buy Now!! Limited Time Offer!!! Buy one, get ten FREE!!!!!! (pay separate S&H)" spiel.
They're just as scummy, really, but not actually costing you anything besides increased blood pressure and thumb blisters on the remote-holding hand.
tl;dr ;-)
I think you meant "extortion"
The type of twat that says feminists spoiled his chances for sex is the type that wouldn't get laid anyway.
Indeed. It's so much easier to blame the women for not wanting to deal with their emotional and physical baggage than it is to actually lose the baggage.
Something else that I find interesting is the (seemingly) vast fields of ordinary men who feel entitled to date supermodels. Fantasize about, yeah, that I can understand, but lots of these guys seem to feel that if they're not with (or at least chasing) a Heidi Klum clone, they're a failure of some sort. And, I mean, a lot of these guys are...at or below average, at least in the looks department. Sure, they may be sweet and funny and charming...but so might the woman that they get their morning coffee from, the one that has a slightly higher BMI, or crooked teeth, or whatever. Artificially limiting yourself to a small subset of a product, then bitching because you can't get any of said product just doesn't make much sense to me...
While looking through the AlternativeTo site, saw something that sounds like it might fit your needs, depending on the specifics: Laverna
AlternativeTo describes it as:
Laverna is a web application written on JavaScript. It's built to be an open source alternative to Evernote.
Laverna stores notes in indexedDB and personal settings in local storage.
## Features
-----------
* Markdown editor based on Pagedown
* Manage your notes even if you're offline
* Secure - client side encryption with SJCL and AES algotithm.
* Synchronizing with cloud storages. At the time only with Dropbox.
* Three editing modes: distraction free, preview and normal mode
* WYSIWYG control buttons
* Syntax highlighting
* No registration required
* Web based
* Keybindings
Note: never used it, never heard of it before, just throwing it out there.
Just wondering if anyone else uses the alternativeto.net site for questions like these? You can filter by platform and license type, 'vote' for applications you find particularly useful, suggest new alternatives...I don't know, I've found it useful in the past *shrugs*
FYI, here's the open source alternatives listed for Amaya on the alternativeto site for all platforms (sorry about the trail-offs in some of the descriptions, but I'm not digging down that far):
KompoZer
This application has been discontinued. "The project seems to be discontinued. Latest stable version, 0.7.10, was released on 2007 and last development version, 0.8b3, on 2010, but the program is still downloadable from the official website."
Bluefish Editor
Open Source by Olivier Sessink, Daniel Leidert | Mac, Windows, Linux
Bluefish is a powerful editor targeted towards programmers and webdesigners, with many options to write websites, scripts and programming code. Bluefish supports many programming and markup languages, and it...
BlueGriffon
Open Source | Mac, Windows, Linux
An HTML editor based on Mozilla rendering engine. Supports some CSS3 features and since recently has a built-in SVG editor.
NVU
This application has been discontinued. "Development stopped in 2005"
Quanta Plus
This application has been discontinued. "The project stopped at version 3.5.10, released on June 2, 2009. It can be still downloaded from Slax.org"
ACE (Ajax Code Editor)
Open Source | Web / Cloud
Focused and built towards coders, web designers, and web builders, ACE (Ajax Code Editor) can help users get familiar with how the coding is and it's basic structure. This web app is useful for those with...
Openbexi
Open Source by openbexi.com | Windows
OpenBEXI is a WYSIWYG HTML builder using the magic of HTML5 and CSS3 . By resizing, dragging and dropping various HTML widgets it is easy to build a web page. All texts using the DOJO editor, pictures...
...pointing at the sun for two weeks out of every month.
...thereby delighting the solar physicists...
Another good thing about that way of doing it is that by the time you've built the fuel-making plant, you've had to learn how to live there without constant resupply of air and food. Once you've done that, you have the beginnings of a colony there, and you can use what you've learned once you reach Mars. And, building a self-sustaining base on Mars will be easier than on the Moon because Mars has an atmosphere, making pressure issues simpler and giving you some protection against the smaller micrometeorites.
This!
The first thing that jumped out at me from this summary is "OMG, to do this we'd have to have a manned structure on the moon!"
How awesome would that be? And where do I sign up to be a gas jockey on the moon?!?
Ha, beat you by a minute!
Quit referring to yourself in the second person, AC! Jeez, you'd think you'd have that multiple personality thing under control by now... :-P
Biohackers...hmm. Sounds like a low-budget horror film.
I hope this makes railguns more feasible for tank-sized vehicles.
Or more compact wireless tasers...so many fun applications!
However, there is no cost if you don't hit "Send". You have the option to cancel the text just as we have done for years with mailto: links.
Now, if they figure out how to actually send the text without consent, that's another game altogether.
If you accidentally hit 'Send' on a mailto link, there are no monetary consequences either, unless there's a whack of data attached to the email. If you do on the text, you're unwittingly establishing a monetary contract to pay some asshat real dollars on a regular basis. I have also heard that once 'subscribed' to these jerks, it can be hellish to get them to 'unsubscribe' you.
They're banking on the fact that the user a) is a fumble-fingered idiot like me, or b) isn't technically savvy enough to know how to cancel the text, like my parents, grandparents or the 5yo playing with moms phone in the grocery store. Actually, strike that, the 5yo would probably know how to cancel a text better than me, but they wouldn't necessarily understand why they should cancel instead of hitting send.
In a similar vein, those scam 'your windows computer has a virus' phone calls are often hilarious diversions to people who know better, but there must be a percentage of people who don't otherwise they'd die off for lack of funds/results. IMO this is in roughly the same category of sleaze.
It wasn't shot down when mailto: was included in the HTML spec. As long as the API doesn't allow you to actually send it without further consent, how is it any different than every other app's "Send to Facebook|Twitter|Email|Whatever" functionality?
The difference is money.
For many people, there is a cost per message (over some monthly limit) to send/receive texts, and 'subscription' texts (as the ad in the article was apparently trying to set up through this sketchy exploit) charge the user above and beyond the carrier costs. Posting to FB or Twitter doesn't carry any significant cost rider (just loss of dignity, but that's going cheap nowadays), unless the payload is big enough to impact data costs. Even emails are not individually metered like text messages, although I suppose there the data costs could potentially be higher depending on attachments.
This is even worse than those scammy mailers for credit cards, the ones that 'helpfully' pre-fill the application form out with as much of your personal info as they have access to. At least for those you have to make an effort to fill in the remaining fields and physically mail the application form: here you just have to accidentally hit the 'send' button instead of the 'cancel' button (easy to do, esp. if you're used to Android) in order to give them 'permission' to charge you, not only once but multiple times. Also, you can bet that your phone number is now on as many robot scam-dialer databases as possible...there's just no way the user wins in this scenario.