Why is your 23-year-old daughter still living with you? She should be graduated from college by now and on her own (or at worst, in her senior year of college if she started late or took longer, or perhaps is in grad school).
This is exactly true. Match.com seemed to be legit 10+ years ago, but these days it's a total scam. I signed up for an account there recently (since I'm back in the market and all....), since I wasn't getting far on OKCupid, thinking I'd try a different site to see if there was a different crowd of women there. It completely reeked of being a scam; I never did give them any money, thankfully, but the signs were pretty obvious. First, while it was possible to fill out your profile for free and look at others', so many things required a paid account: receiving mail, seeing who "liked" you, etc. And second, just how many "likes" and emails I received, even though I hadn't mailed anyone else. For a month or two after signing up, I was barraged with emails saying I had received personal messages from women, that tons of women had "liked" me, etc. Yeah, bullshit. I've been on OKC more than long enough to know that men almost never receive unsolicited messages from women (and when they do, those women usually aren't too desirable, sorry to say). There's no way I'm getting tons of emails from beautiful women after sticking up a profile and a couple of photos and doing little else. Anyway, I kept getting emails from match.com for 2-3 months after this, constantly trying to get me to come back, pay money to read these supposed messages, etc., but it finally stopped.
As far as I can tell, most of these dating sites these days are scams. OKCupid seems to be completely legit; I haven't seen anything that reeks of fakery there, however the male:female ratio is of course poor as you'd expect and women who are at all desirable get bombarded with messages from men. From what I've read, eHarmony seems to be legit, but it's also completely geared towards conservative Christians so if you're not one of those, then don't bother. AFAICT, Tinder is completely legit too, but it's not a site at all, really more of a hookup app and because of its lack of detailed profiles, doesn't facilitate finding compatible partners.
I'd guess it's not legal, but very few people would seriously consider suing them, not just to avoid drawing attention to themselves, but simply because it's not really worthwhile initiating legal proceedings over a matter of a few dollars.
If it's a crime (fraud), then lawsuits are completely irrelevant. This is basic civics. Lawsuits are over torts, not crimes.
That's irrelevant. Criminal complaints (you only need one person to file a complaint) are investigated by the police, and prosecuted by the public prosecutor in criminal court. They're entirely different from lawsuits. The prosecutor can even pursue a case even when the victim refuses to cooperate (though they usually don't, because that makes it hard to win the case); that's why that stuff about "pressing charge" on TV shows is a bunch of bullshit. Crime victims have zero legal power over whether someone is tried for the crime or not, or whether charges are filed.
The problem with this idea is: how do you get all the ISVs to cooperate? It won't happen; they'd have to come up with some way for the OS to prevent 3rd-party software from installing itself the normal way, and force it to go through the package manager somehow. Or just create some kind of VM for every single application to keep them all separate and unable to change anything on the system, but that seems like it'll add a lot of overhead.
Unfortunately, Windows has trained users to expect to install software from all manner of different internet locations. I think that's the biggest flaw of Windows.
I wouldn't say they "trained" them to do that (after all, they're trying to push their new Windows App Store and that's going over like a lead balloon), that's simply the way things evolved. When Windows first became popular, people didn't even use the internet with it. What we're seeing now is simply the culture that has evolved, and that culture is what's causing them these problems. I have no idea what they could do to change it.
But surely if the product starts to function in a degraded manor [sic] because it was pwned due to bad security, this affects the manufacturer too when people don't buy that product any more because it is crap...
That's not a problem for two reasons:
1) People are stupid. They'll just buy another one, blame "the hackers", etc.
2) Even if the company's reputation gets dragged through the mud, it won't matter because the CEO will have already left with his golden parachute. The only thing that's important is the next quarter's financials.
Yes, but Arizona's not quite that way. Remember, the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio is in Maricopa County, which is the county that has almost all the Phoenix metro area (only Apache Junction, east of Mesa, is outside of it, in Pinal County). He keeps getting re-elected by the voters in the Phoenix metro area, not a bunch of rural people. Also, the majority of the state's population is in that same county, and they keep electing Republican senators.
Yeah, I don't understand motorcycles either. I mean, I sorta understand the appeal, as I'm a bicyclist and enjoy that, but I don't have to worry much about getting killed by bad drivers as long as I don't ride on main roads (I stick to bike trails mostly). My biggest worry for my safety when riding my bike is not going off the trail and hitting a tree or going in a ditch, but that isn't too hard to avoid... Motorcyclists OTOH get killed all the time in traffic accidents. I even saw one die when I was a small kid; his shoe came off his foot and landed in front of our car. So now I have a new compact car (Mazda3) that was a IIHS top pick for safety, and even did well in small-offset frontal crashes. It's also well-built and reliable, with lots of technology. Plus, it has a really nice interior for this class of car (I got the model with leather seats).
you need a huge number of informants (something like 2-3% of the whole population) placed everywhere who are paid and willing to rat you out to the state.
They don't need informants, they have automated surveillance now. They didn't have the internet, cellphones, NSAKEY backdoors, Stingray interceptors, etc. back in the 40s-70s. Having a typewriter in East Germany was a big deal.
Someone having some data on what might be you isn't the same thing as a guy in your workplace who knows you and who knows when it is time to call in the Stasi to detain you because you slipped and said something in their presence or worse, trusted them for some reason.
They don't need an informant; they can detain you based on what you wrote to your buddies on Facebook.
100F in Phoenix is *at night* (in the summer). In the daytime, you're looking at 110-120.
Why the hell would you build a new house in a place you think is a shithole? Why not move someplace you like better, and where you like the climate better, especially if you're going to make that kind of long-term investment? I'm not real wild about the place I'm living currently either, but there's a good reason I have no intention of buying a house here: I hope to get the hell out of here in a year or three. I made the house-buying mistake before, and I'm not ever doing it again (esp. with values not appreciating like they used to) until I'm living someplace that I actually like a lot, and plan to stay for a good long while.
The problem is Microsoft decided to trust the application to remove itself.
I don't think it's any different on Linux; if you run some crappy proprietary program's install script as root, it can do anything it wants. It's just a really different culture between the two OSes; Linux users generally don't use proprietary software at all, they get most of it from their blessed repos, and anything else is usually some other open-source program straight from the project page. Whereas on Windows proprietary software frequently all they use, or worse, they get some shit from places like download.com which could have anything in it.
Also, Android and iOS have package managers and people aren't crying about that.
Again, the culture is totally different. Android and iOS don't generally allow you to get software from outside the official app store. (iOS absolutely doesn't allow it, on Android it's possible but takes conscious effort, and usually isn't done much; aside from some mfgr-provided crapware that they distribute through their own app store, people just get everything from the Google Play store.) People aren't crying about it because they're used to it. This is the way Android and iOS have *always* been, whereas Windows has always had a culture of buying some boxed software from an ISV and installing it from disc (and later, downloading an.exe or.msi file and installing that). So Microsoft suddenly trying to push everyone into an app store for regular Windows software isn't going over well because it's a sea-change from what they're used to. They're not used to that freedom with phones, so they don't complain about it there (plus, they don't try to do all the stuff with phones that they do with PCs, so the expectations are lower).
Right now, companies have no liability for writing products with shit security. So on pretty much a daily basis we hear about products with shit security.
At this point I mostly assume any consumer technology which is designed to connect to a network is riddled with security holes. Because companies are lazy, incompetent, cheap, unaccountable, indifferent, and greedy.
It's a company's **job** to be greedy. Their sole purpose is to make money, so anything that detracts from that is by definition a bad thing.
The reason they have shit security is because their customers don't care about it, don't value it, and don't demand it. Customers want things that are cheap, and easy-to-use. Making something highly secure goes against both of these, both in developer effort needed, and in eliminating features that make things easier for consumers but are inherently insecure.
I just don't understand how people who design commodity networking gear can be so bad at network security. I am by no means a network expert, but it seems as though some of these things are just common sense....
To you maybe, but not to a manager.
- Don't have ports open to the Internet ("stealth" or otherwise) by default
But then their back doors won't work.
- Don't use unencrypted protocols... period
But then some idiot customers will complain.
- Don't enable wireless by default
But this makes it easy for idiot customers.
Seems like just doing those things our routers would be a lot safer than they are now.
Yes, but these things all have rational reasons behind them, which managers demand, and which increase profitability for the company. Consumers don't care about security, they just want it to work out-of-the-box and be easy. As long as it says it's "secure", that's good enough for them. It's just like the TSA and other security theater: people want to be told that they're safe, and the want to see stuff that makes it look like they're being kept safe, even if in reality they're not safe at all and all those security measures are completely worthless because the security protocols have wide-open back doors.
Now they are missing some important things like a package manager for installing software and centrally managing updates
Um, I thought Windows had that ages ago. It's not nearly as cool as the Linux ones (where you have command-line tools you can query the package database with to see what's installed, exactly which files are owned by each package, etc.), but in Control Panel there's an "Uninstall programs" selection where a lot of software is listed and can be uninstalled. Then, Windows Updates keeps that stuff up-to-date, or at least that's my understanding. The problem with MS's system, aside from general clunkiness and lack of advanced features, is that there's no culture in the Windows world of actually using the Windows facilities, so for some stupid reason most 3rd-party vendors implement their own, involving a separate installer, and a background process that continuously checks for updates, so if you have a lot of software on your computer, you end up with dozens of different update-checking programs all running in the background at once. It's a complete mess.
I have no idea what MS could do to change that, without severely limiting the functionality of Windows or outright blacklisting these 3rd-party installers and update-checkers, which would not only piss off the ISVs (and make them cry about anti-trust issues), but would royally piss off the customers who want to run that crapware. Linux doesn't have this problem because there just isn't very much commercial software on Linux; most users get the vast majority of their software straight from their distro's repositories, so it all works together seamlessly. For (usually business) users who do use commercial software on Linux, they end up only using one, maybe two commercial software packages, so they don't notice this as a glaring problem. They just get used to that one program being clunky and not fitting into the rest of the distro.
The people who are traditionally in favor of "law and order" and giving cops too much power are the conservatives; this is probably mainly because conservatives are usually racists, so they adopted this mindset when civil rights laws were passed, because they wanted black people to be kept separate and oppressed.
As for NBC & Univision and Trump, the problem there is that all the media outlets no longer do anything approaching real, unbiased journalism like they at least tried to in the Kronkite days. They all are pushing some kind of agenda. Univision obviously has a certain bias and agenda, but Fox News also has their own bias and agenda which is quite different.
I think I mentioned that (I called it "boarding"). The problem is they're expensive, and as you say, they require some planning. You can't just spend the night with someone unplanned and have a kennel keep your dog from crapping on the carpet before the morning.
And when I say socialism, I'm not talking about welfare, I'm talking about a form of economy where the government owns the means of production and at the end of the day doesn't give a shit about its customers because it has no competitors...which is no different at all from a monopoly.
Actually it is different. In theory, the government answers to the people, and the people have the ability to change the government through elections (of course in this country they don't work too well in most places, thanks to our crappy first-past-the-post voting system, though some localities actually have other voting systems which work better). With a corporate monopoly, there is no such ability, since the citizens have no power over the corporation, except perhaps through laws (which don't work well because the kind of laws affecting such corporations are mostly state- or federal-level, not local-level, so unless the monopoly affects the whole state or country the voters won't have much power to change things).
Anyway, you don't sound much like modern liberatarians, who basically just want a government that has a totally hands-off approach to corporations and doesn't do much except run the military.
This isn't "redistricting" per se, it's redrawing state boundaries to better serve the voters.
How you draw political boundaries is always going to affect the vote; there's no way around it. The alternative is to never draw any political boundaries at all, which means not having any kind of government, which is of course throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Or you can just leave everything the way it is, which means you can never fix anything or improve it. Why do you think that whoever drew those boundaries decades or centuries ago got them perfectly right the first time, and that they never need adjusting to account for change?
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Why is your 23-year-old daughter still living with you? She should be graduated from college by now and on her own (or at worst, in her senior year of college if she started late or took longer, or perhaps is in grad school).
This is exactly true. Match.com seemed to be legit 10+ years ago, but these days it's a total scam. I signed up for an account there recently (since I'm back in the market and all....), since I wasn't getting far on OKCupid, thinking I'd try a different site to see if there was a different crowd of women there. It completely reeked of being a scam; I never did give them any money, thankfully, but the signs were pretty obvious. First, while it was possible to fill out your profile for free and look at others', so many things required a paid account: receiving mail, seeing who "liked" you, etc. And second, just how many "likes" and emails I received, even though I hadn't mailed anyone else. For a month or two after signing up, I was barraged with emails saying I had received personal messages from women, that tons of women had "liked" me, etc. Yeah, bullshit. I've been on OKC more than long enough to know that men almost never receive unsolicited messages from women (and when they do, those women usually aren't too desirable, sorry to say). There's no way I'm getting tons of emails from beautiful women after sticking up a profile and a couple of photos and doing little else. Anyway, I kept getting emails from match.com for 2-3 months after this, constantly trying to get me to come back, pay money to read these supposed messages, etc., but it finally stopped.
As far as I can tell, most of these dating sites these days are scams. OKCupid seems to be completely legit; I haven't seen anything that reeks of fakery there, however the male:female ratio is of course poor as you'd expect and women who are at all desirable get bombarded with messages from men. From what I've read, eHarmony seems to be legit, but it's also completely geared towards conservative Christians so if you're not one of those, then don't bother. AFAICT, Tinder is completely legit too, but it's not a site at all, really more of a hookup app and because of its lack of detailed profiles, doesn't facilitate finding compatible partners.
I'd guess it's not legal, but very few people would seriously consider suing them, not just to avoid drawing attention to themselves, but simply because it's not really worthwhile initiating legal proceedings over a matter of a few dollars.
If it's a crime (fraud), then lawsuits are completely irrelevant. This is basic civics. Lawsuits are over torts, not crimes.
That's irrelevant. Criminal complaints (you only need one person to file a complaint) are investigated by the police, and prosecuted by the public prosecutor in criminal court. They're entirely different from lawsuits. The prosecutor can even pursue a case even when the victim refuses to cooperate (though they usually don't, because that makes it hard to win the case); that's why that stuff about "pressing charge" on TV shows is a bunch of bullshit. Crime victims have zero legal power over whether someone is tried for the crime or not, or whether charges are filed.
The problem with this idea is: how do you get all the ISVs to cooperate? It won't happen; they'd have to come up with some way for the OS to prevent 3rd-party software from installing itself the normal way, and force it to go through the package manager somehow. Or just create some kind of VM for every single application to keep them all separate and unable to change anything on the system, but that seems like it'll add a lot of overhead.
Unfortunately, Windows has trained users to expect to install software from all manner of different internet locations. I think that's the biggest flaw of Windows.
I wouldn't say they "trained" them to do that (after all, they're trying to push their new Windows App Store and that's going over like a lead balloon), that's simply the way things evolved. When Windows first became popular, people didn't even use the internet with it. What we're seeing now is simply the culture that has evolved, and that culture is what's causing them these problems. I have no idea what they could do to change it.
But surely if the product starts to function in a degraded manor [sic] because it was pwned due to bad security, this affects the manufacturer too when people don't buy that product any more because it is crap...
That's not a problem for two reasons:
1) People are stupid. They'll just buy another one, blame "the hackers", etc.
2) Even if the company's reputation gets dragged through the mud, it won't matter because the CEO will have already left with his golden parachute. The only thing that's important is the next quarter's financials.
You're forgetting about Buffalo. They have a whole line of routers running DD-WRT from the factory.
If you do start such a company, you'll be competing against Buffalo. They use DD-WRT firmware.
http://www.buffalotech.com/pro...
Yes, but Arizona's not quite that way. Remember, the infamous Sheriff Joe Arpaio is in Maricopa County, which is the county that has almost all the Phoenix metro area (only Apache Junction, east of Mesa, is outside of it, in Pinal County). He keeps getting re-elected by the voters in the Phoenix metro area, not a bunch of rural people. Also, the majority of the state's population is in that same county, and they keep electing Republican senators.
Yeah, I don't understand motorcycles either. I mean, I sorta understand the appeal, as I'm a bicyclist and enjoy that, but I don't have to worry much about getting killed by bad drivers as long as I don't ride on main roads (I stick to bike trails mostly). My biggest worry for my safety when riding my bike is not going off the trail and hitting a tree or going in a ditch, but that isn't too hard to avoid... Motorcyclists OTOH get killed all the time in traffic accidents. I even saw one die when I was a small kid; his shoe came off his foot and landed in front of our car. So now I have a new compact car (Mazda3) that was a IIHS top pick for safety, and even did well in small-offset frontal crashes. It's also well-built and reliable, with lots of technology. Plus, it has a really nice interior for this class of car (I got the model with leather seats).
you need a huge number of informants (something like 2-3% of the whole population) placed everywhere who are paid and willing to rat you out to the state.
They don't need informants, they have automated surveillance now. They didn't have the internet, cellphones, NSAKEY backdoors, Stingray interceptors, etc. back in the 40s-70s. Having a typewriter in East Germany was a big deal.
Someone having some data on what might be you isn't the same thing as a guy in your workplace who knows you and who knows when it is time to call in the Stasi to detain you because you slipped and said something in their presence or worse, trusted them for some reason.
They don't need an informant; they can detain you based on what you wrote to your buddies on Facebook.
100F in Phoenix is *at night* (in the summer). In the daytime, you're looking at 110-120.
Why the hell would you build a new house in a place you think is a shithole? Why not move someplace you like better, and where you like the climate better, especially if you're going to make that kind of long-term investment? I'm not real wild about the place I'm living currently either, but there's a good reason I have no intention of buying a house here: I hope to get the hell out of here in a year or three. I made the house-buying mistake before, and I'm not ever doing it again (esp. with values not appreciating like they used to) until I'm living someplace that I actually like a lot, and plan to stay for a good long while.
The problem is Microsoft decided to trust the application to remove itself.
I don't think it's any different on Linux; if you run some crappy proprietary program's install script as root, it can do anything it wants. It's just a really different culture between the two OSes; Linux users generally don't use proprietary software at all, they get most of it from their blessed repos, and anything else is usually some other open-source program straight from the project page. Whereas on Windows proprietary software frequently all they use, or worse, they get some shit from places like download.com which could have anything in it.
Also, Android and iOS have package managers and people aren't crying about that.
Again, the culture is totally different. Android and iOS don't generally allow you to get software from outside the official app store. (iOS absolutely doesn't allow it, on Android it's possible but takes conscious effort, and usually isn't done much; aside from some mfgr-provided crapware that they distribute through their own app store, people just get everything from the Google Play store.) People aren't crying about it because they're used to it. This is the way Android and iOS have *always* been, whereas Windows has always had a culture of buying some boxed software from an ISV and installing it from disc (and later, downloading an .exe or .msi file and installing that). So Microsoft suddenly trying to push everyone into an app store for regular Windows software isn't going over well because it's a sea-change from what they're used to. They're not used to that freedom with phones, so they don't complain about it there (plus, they don't try to do all the stuff with phones that they do with PCs, so the expectations are lower).
Right now, companies have no liability for writing products with shit security. So on pretty much a daily basis we hear about products with shit security.
At this point I mostly assume any consumer technology which is designed to connect to a network is riddled with security holes. Because companies are lazy, incompetent, cheap, unaccountable, indifferent, and greedy.
It's a company's **job** to be greedy. Their sole purpose is to make money, so anything that detracts from that is by definition a bad thing.
The reason they have shit security is because their customers don't care about it, don't value it, and don't demand it. Customers want things that are cheap, and easy-to-use. Making something highly secure goes against both of these, both in developer effort needed, and in eliminating features that make things easier for consumers but are inherently insecure.
I just don't understand how people who design commodity networking gear can be so bad at network security.
I am by no means a network expert, but it seems as though some of these things are just common sense....
To you maybe, but not to a manager.
- Don't have ports open to the Internet ("stealth" or otherwise) by default
But then their back doors won't work.
- Don't use unencrypted protocols... period
But then some idiot customers will complain.
- Don't enable wireless by default
But this makes it easy for idiot customers.
Seems like just doing those things our routers would be a lot safer than they are now.
Yes, but these things all have rational reasons behind them, which managers demand, and which increase profitability for the company. Consumers don't care about security, they just want it to work out-of-the-box and be easy. As long as it says it's "secure", that's good enough for them. It's just like the TSA and other security theater: people want to be told that they're safe, and the want to see stuff that makes it look like they're being kept safe, even if in reality they're not safe at all and all those security measures are completely worthless because the security protocols have wide-open back doors.
Just upgrade to DD-WRT or OpenWRT. Who still uses manufacturer-provided router firmware anyway?
Now they are missing some important things like a package manager for installing software and centrally managing updates
Um, I thought Windows had that ages ago. It's not nearly as cool as the Linux ones (where you have command-line tools you can query the package database with to see what's installed, exactly which files are owned by each package, etc.), but in Control Panel there's an "Uninstall programs" selection where a lot of software is listed and can be uninstalled. Then, Windows Updates keeps that stuff up-to-date, or at least that's my understanding. The problem with MS's system, aside from general clunkiness and lack of advanced features, is that there's no culture in the Windows world of actually using the Windows facilities, so for some stupid reason most 3rd-party vendors implement their own, involving a separate installer, and a background process that continuously checks for updates, so if you have a lot of software on your computer, you end up with dozens of different update-checking programs all running in the background at once. It's a complete mess.
I have no idea what MS could do to change that, without severely limiting the functionality of Windows or outright blacklisting these 3rd-party installers and update-checkers, which would not only piss off the ISVs (and make them cry about anti-trust issues), but would royally piss off the customers who want to run that crapware. Linux doesn't have this problem because there just isn't very much commercial software on Linux; most users get the vast majority of their software straight from their distro's repositories, so it all works together seamlessly. For (usually business) users who do use commercial software on Linux, they end up only using one, maybe two commercial software packages, so they don't notice this as a glaring problem. They just get used to that one program being clunky and not fitting into the rest of the distro.
America is quickly resembling East Germany.
The people who are traditionally in favor of "law and order" and giving cops too much power are the conservatives; this is probably mainly because conservatives are usually racists, so they adopted this mindset when civil rights laws were passed, because they wanted black people to be kept separate and oppressed.
As for NBC & Univision and Trump, the problem there is that all the media outlets no longer do anything approaching real, unbiased journalism like they at least tried to in the Kronkite days. They all are pushing some kind of agenda. Univision obviously has a certain bias and agenda, but Fox News also has their own bias and agenda which is quite different.
Don't forget the French Revolution shortly after. They got rid of the corruption too: everyone in power had their head lopped off.
I think I mentioned that (I called it "boarding"). The problem is they're expensive, and as you say, they require some planning. You can't just spend the night with someone unplanned and have a kennel keep your dog from crapping on the carpet before the morning.
So you want to stick with the shitshow that is the modern taxi industry, just because "stability is good"? WTF?
And how is there a "need" to protect taxi jobs anyway?
And when I say socialism, I'm not talking about welfare, I'm talking about a form of economy where the government owns the means of production and at the end of the day doesn't give a shit about its customers because it has no competitors...which is no different at all from a monopoly.
Actually it is different. In theory, the government answers to the people, and the people have the ability to change the government through elections (of course in this country they don't work too well in most places, thanks to our crappy first-past-the-post voting system, though some localities actually have other voting systems which work better). With a corporate monopoly, there is no such ability, since the citizens have no power over the corporation, except perhaps through laws (which don't work well because the kind of laws affecting such corporations are mostly state- or federal-level, not local-level, so unless the monopoly affects the whole state or country the voters won't have much power to change things).
Anyway, you don't sound much like modern liberatarians, who basically just want a government that has a totally hands-off approach to corporations and doesn't do much except run the military.
This isn't "redistricting" per se, it's redrawing state boundaries to better serve the voters.
How you draw political boundaries is always going to affect the vote; there's no way around it. The alternative is to never draw any political boundaries at all, which means not having any kind of government, which is of course throwing the baby out with the bathwater. Or you can just leave everything the way it is, which means you can never fix anything or improve it. Why do you think that whoever drew those boundaries decades or centuries ago got them perfectly right the first time, and that they never need adjusting to account for change?