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User: yogidog98

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  1. Cell phone administrative fees on Charter Customer Sues Over Hidden Fees, Claims 'Massive Billing Fraud' (arstechnica.com) · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I hope the Charter customer sues the pants off them and wins. I have complained to TWC about the broadcast and sports fees and deceptive pricing for several months.

    Cell phone companies do the same thing but they call them "administrative fees". They are not required by the govt, and not an optional fee from the provider, so they should be included in the advertised base price or not charged at all.

  2. Re:anonymous is a bunch of childish kids.... on The Pirate Bay Suffering Global Outage From Massive DDoS Attack · · Score: 5, Interesting

    This is why there needs to be a Score:6 category.

  3. Already Sank on Australian Billionaire Plans To Build Titanic II · · Score: 4, Informative

    There is already a movie (using the term loosely) about the Titanic II from 2010. Spoiler Alert: Both the ship and the movie sank.

    http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1640571/

  4. It was their 2nd choice. on Prototype Space Fence Now Tracking Actual Orbital Debris · · Score: 5, Funny

    MPAA ruled out their first choice, so they use the closest synonyms they could find:
    Sky->Space, Net->Fence.

  5. Copyright trap on EFF Wins Protection For Time Zone Database · · Score: 3, Informative

    I think what most Database authors do is that they put bogus data entries into their database and if they can find their entries in someone elses database, they can show that it's a copy rather then a independent work.

    These are commonly called 'copyright traps' or 'fictitious entries'

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fictitious_entry

  6. FAA regulated model aircraft on Will Toys-R-Us Carry Spy Drones? · · Score: 1

    I'm not familiar with the laws surrounding the flying of model aircraft, but I suspect there will be some threshold when these 'toys' are prevalent and powerful (ie. potentially destructive) enough that the FAA will start heavily regulating them, possibly requiring licensing of both aircraft and operator.

  7. Better Comments this time around on A Few Million Monkeys Finish Recreating Shakespeare's Works · · Score: 1

    I do get one piece of insight from this near-repost of the previous article. Now that everyone has had a couple of weeks to stew on the subject, the comments are much better--both funnier and more insightful--this time around.

  8. Microwave on Erasing CDs By Using 150,000 Volts of Electricity · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Science geeks have been doing this for years with microwave ovens; though, it was more for the cool light show than for data security.

  9. Better than Android on Apple Faces Class-Action Suit For In-App Purchases · · Score: 1

    At least Apple allows you to set a password that has to be entered before any app store purchase. That's one of my biggest frustrations with my Android phone is that there's no way to set an market purchase password. My kids hit a couple of buttons in pop-up while playing angry birds, and whoop, I've just spent $10.

  10. Idealogical Dichotomy? on Scientists Create a "Worth Saving" Index For Endangered Animals · · Score: 2

    I never really thought of it that way. You may bring up an interesting dichotomy: My general impression is that most most animal preservation activists tend to be evolutionists, even though evolutionists should believe that extinction is a natural part of the evolutionary cycle. On the other hand, religionists tend to believe that we should do our best to preserve every creature the deity created, but my impression is they tend to have more lax environmental policy.

    I'm not suggesting causal relationships between evolutionists and preservationist or religionists and lax environmental policy, just that they seem to be somewhat correlated--by geography if nothing else.

  11. Made my Mom's career change possible on Columbia University Ending the Kermit Project · · Score: 2
    I know this is going to sound sappy, but when I was around 12, my Mom went back to school to change careers from teaching to computer science. I don't know how she could have done it without a tool like Kermit, which allowed her do much of her coursework from home, around her family, instead of having to spend late nights in the school labs.

    Looking over my Mom's shoulder, Kermit gave me my first glimpse of email, my first experience with vi (her preferred email editor), and indirectly I guess, put me on the engineering career path to where I am today... Curse you Kermit!

  12. Can big company block Joe-inventor's patent? on Senate Passes Landmark Patent Reform Bill · · Score: 1

    Misconception 2: This would mean big companies can steal ideas from open source projects and file applications on them. * This isn't true either. The open source project would function as prior art against the later application. Even though there is a first to file system, it doesn't mean that the first person to file can steal ideas that were out there and use it as their own.

    Even though the big company wouldn't be granted the patent due to prior art, wouldn't their filing-first preclude Joe-inventor from patenting an idea he pitched to them but hadn't filed yet? This is a serious question I'd like to know the answer to. If Joe-inventor could get big-company to sign an NDA, he may have a suit against big company, but from what I understand, big companies' lawyers usually aren't willing to sign NDAs from Joe-inventors. Under a first-to-invent system, Joe-inventor's right to the patent would be protected for the duration of the "patent-clock," even without the NDA. Though I concede that Joe-inventor may not have the resources to challenge big company if they tried to steal his idea.

  13. Re:OT: What's with the bad formatting in Firefox? on Activists Seek Repeal of Ban On Incandescent Bulbs · · Score: 1

    Same problem in Chrome 9.0.597.98

  14. Re:Advertised speeds, not useful on Feds Help You Find Your Fastest Internet Service · · Score: 1

    Agreed. advertised != actual. I hope government broadband policy isn't based on the assumption that provider advertised speeds are accurate... or honest.

  15. Small Bladders on Road Train Completes First Trials In Sweden · · Score: 0

    Cars lack two critical elements for long-haul travel: toilets and room to stretch your legs. It's easy enough to pull over when you're in control, but in a convoy controlled by a professional driver, depending on the length of the trip, you may need to bring Depends. I'm not sure what you'd do about cramps.

  16. They did in Star Trek on Will Touch Screens Kill the Keyboard? · · Score: 0

    Touchscreens are good enough for the Enterprise (at least some generations of it), so surely mankind will eventually be proficient enough on a touchscreen to do away with the physical keyboard. Or perhaps someday software, control systems, and alternative input methods will become good enough that we won't do enough manual input to require a physical keyboard.

  17. Effect on automatic DVR ad-skipping on Senate Votes To Turn Down Volume On TV Commercials · · Score: 0

    Many home-brew and commercial DVR packages support ad-skipping. Do their commercial-detection algorithms use the louder commercial volume to help distinguish ads from the show they're interrupting? If so, this bill could actually be a setback for people who have figured out how to eliminate commercials altogether.

  18. Meta on DARPA To Turn Humans Into Batteries · · Score: 0, Redundant

    Insert witty, esoteric Matrix quote here.

  19. Re:More accurate version.. on Apple To Issue a 'Fix' For iPhone 4 Reception Perception · · Score: 1

    News Flash - Further investigation has revealed the problem is unrelated to how you hold the phone. The reception is crappy all the time, we just lie about it sometimes.

  20. metric system on Do Scientists Understand the Public? · · Score: 4, Funny

    and what's with this metric system. Why can't scientists use standard measurements like football fields, ping-pong balls, "around the Earth," and "to the moon and back," like our brilliant news media?

  21. Re:It's all just a money grab... on HDBaseT Supporters Hope To Kiss HDMI Goodbye · · Score: 2, Funny

    Not a whiny 15 year old;I have a good understanding of intellectual property law and a couple of patents to my name. What I lack is a sense of humor good enough to write a comment funny enough to be modded up.

  22. It's all just a money grab... on HDBaseT Supporters Hope To Kiss HDMI Goodbye · · Score: 1

    to change standards again to sell a new generation of TVs to a soon-to-be-saturated HDMI market. HDMI is good enough for now. If they're going to progress from HDMI, just take the extra effort to move to wireless. Can I be the first to patent/trademark HD.b/g/n and HD.Wi-Max?

  23. Sell or donate on What To Do With Old 802.11b Equipment? · · Score: 1

    Sell it on craigslist or ebay, or donate it to charity and buy a stick of gum with the tax deduction.

  24. Re:seems reasonable on Univ. of California Faculty May Boycott Nature Publisher · · Score: 1

    99% of the time that is true, but if you need to have cancer treatment or a heart valve replaced, then the costs would be huge even with the low negotiated rate

    Then you get a much less expensive, high-deductible, catastrophic coverage policy to cover that 1% of the time.

  25. Re:seems reasonable on Univ. of California Faculty May Boycott Nature Publisher · · Score: 1

    I completely agree. This is why medical care in the US is broken. The only reason I need insurance is for the negotiated rates. I'd be way ahead if I didn't have to pay insurance premiums, paid everything out of pocket, and was charged 25% more than the lowest negotiated rate.