Unlike most loans which have assets (home, car, etc) that can be confiscated a student loan doesn't result in a physical resource but in knowledge held in the students mind which cannot be taken.
Bullshit. You keep posting this tired incorrect argument all over this thread. Most debt discharged in bankruptcy is unsecured. (In fact, if people didn't have unsecured debt, they wouldn't even qualify for bankruptcy.)
How exactly do credit card companies confiscate "assets" from vacations taken and meals eaten out? How exactly do drs and hospitals confiscate medical care previously provided? (Which is one the biggest causes of bankruptcy in this country.) Well of course they can't.
You're right about the credit cards, but the inability to discharge a federally-guaranteed student loan is a large part of why the loans are issued at 4-8% instead of the 17-30% that you see on credit cards.
It's easy to say "grow up" when the biggest loan you had to take out was for a motorcycle. An education in the US can cost 10s-100s of thousands of dollars not including living expenses. Couple this with low earnings coming out of college and interest rates that capitalize (interest is added to principle) which occurs during forbearance, deferment, or even while you're still in school. For the vast majority of people, repayment is not so simple when the average wage for a US employee is $45,327 as of 2012 according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. This doesn't take into account the costs of living, healthcare, health insurance, transportation, or god-forbid entertainment.
Yes, tuition in the U.S. can cost 100s of thousands of dollars, but it need not. If you're borrowing "100s of thousands of dollars" to earn a degree to qualify you for a job earning $45,327, you're doing it wrong.
There are two things people keep teaching their children about college (by their words or actions) that are flat-out wrong:
1. Always go to whichever college you want, no matter the cost. Any degree is guaranteed to be worth any price paid.
2. In college, always pursue your dreams. It doesn't matter what you can get paid for it, because then you'll be a well-rounded individual and society will value you.
We are seriously short-changing our children by not teaching basic financial skills like loan repayment, ROI, and critical thinking about this while they are in high school. Signing up an 18 year old for $100k worth of student loans without requiring some sort of competency exam seems borderline criminal, to me.
So is a Master of Philosophy now only available to the wealthy? SO what if people go to school and study art history or whatever 'useless' degree they want? Is education so frowned upon that it is considered a waste of time unless you are already wealthy and have nothing better to do than study art?
Yes, I'll say it: if you are not wealthy and have to worry about making a living in this world, it is a waste of your time and money to study art as your profession.
We really need to reset our public priorities in regards to education. I don't have a problem with the fact that you might have to work at Starbucks after getting an art history degree. But there is absolutely nothing wrong with having an educated populace, even amongst the working class. Would it be so bad to be able to have that person handing you your coffee to actually be well-educated? Or would that threaten your worldview that they are greedy and useless?
I have no problem with people studying whatever they want, and society does benefit from having an educated populace. That's why we have K-12 programs in this country. But the idea that "a degree" is of such value to society that taxpayers should be on the hook to allow anyone to study anything they want, for as long as it takes, is where I have to disagree.
Salaries were lower too. If he had gotten a more lucrative degree or went to a less expensive school, and/or (I imagine) had a job while going to school, he'd probably be fine, or at least better off, too.
I'm roughly the same age as Lee and went to school at roughly the same time. I had 2 Pell grants, 2 student loans, 2 at-school jobs (1 in the CS dept office and 1 as a research assistant doing LISP/Prolog programming) and a summer job at Pizza Hut. I managed work my way through school, get a job and pay off my debts. What's his problem?
Well, see, there's your problem: you wasted your life working in Pizza Hut instead of spending your summers pondering the greatness that someday you would bestow on humanity through your writing.
Also, it would have been great to know what 'stock options' were.
...snip...
* In extremely rare cases both the lottery aspect and the fine art aspect will conspire. The company succeeds in the lottery of business, and you will have kept them long enough for them to achieve some value and not sold them for a nice dinner or entertaining night. These extremely rare and extremely lucky individuals discover unexpectedly they can buy a mansion and retire early.
Also, you can fall victim to having lots and lots of pre-IPO or pre-investment-round options which can be diluted to the point of worthlessness. If you are not a founder of the company and driving the ship when the options are massaged through the funding rounds, do not consider any options as future earnings. Consider them as worthless trinkets, then you can only be pleasantly surprised when they will, hopefully, be worth enough for a night on the town 5 years down the road.
To be honest, I'd be really pissed off if I learned I had wasted my time interviewing someone who had no intention of taking the job.
If you're changing jobs every few years it stands out like a sore thumb on the resume too. It says "hey, I won't be here very long". I'm not joking, we've brought up that topic a few times when evaluating candidates.
It's a two-way street. If you can't convince me during the interview that I want to work for you, who's time has been wasted? Hiring the right person is hard work, that's just part of being a manager.
At some point your old car is worth less than the minimum trade in price they will give you. The trick is to time it just right so that you roll on to the forecourt just as the engine chokes on the last drop of gas, and conclude the sale a few minutes before the wheels fall off.
Never fool yourself into thinking a car dealership is paying more than a trade-in is worth. Dealerships are not in the charity business; they will make money off of it; either by reselling the car or rolling it into the deal on the new car.
I think what he's asking is whether or not he can network them together even though they all have the same IP address. And the answer is yes.
As a network engineer, I can think of a way with a Cisco catalyst switch, OR, a linux box with multiple ethernet ports:
Yes, there are a few possible solutions, but I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned the biggest barrier to implementing any of them:
Trying to connect to 8+ pumps at the same time is going to require running 8+ ethernet cables from a central location to each pump. You're going to have cables all over the place, and unless it is done while the gas station is closed it means people driving over the cables, stepping on them, tripping on them and yanking them out of the socket, etc........
And having 8 pumps off-line at a time will probably lead to less-than-cheery looks from the station owner and his customers.
(Aside: I have been witness to what happens when a Walmart store runs out of pallet wrap. It is... awkward.)
You'd hope someone would think to just go and unpallet a pallet of plastic wrap, but this is Wal-Mart we're talking about.
Are you thinking of the food-grade plastic wrap that a Walmart might have sitting in the warehouse? That stuff is wimpy compared to the stretch wrap that is used on pallets. It would be like saying if they're all out of cardboard cartons, why not open up some Christmas wrapping paper or tissues and build a box, it's all paper, after all...
Standard resistive Touchscreen tech is dirt freaking cheap. I can get 7" resistive types for $9.00 each all day long at single quantities. If I was a car maker I could get them at less than $1.00 each in 1000+ quantities.
Honestly this IR system is a rehash of really old tech that is just not needed.
What is needed is the important buttons existing as REAL HARD BUTTONS. the systems that are 100% touch are complete crap. Yes I do want my hard buttons back on android, the on screen home button is really 100% crap.
Resistive touchscreens also don't care if the user is wearing gloves, which would be a plus for automotive use. But, they are not as durable as capacitive, which I would argue is a reason to not use them in a car.
But IR systems are also not a good choice because the sensors can be swamped by sunlight.
IR systems still find uses in industrial settings because they can be completely sealed, respond to gloved fingers, and have no flexible/moving parts like a resistive screen, but IR is hardly the new, groundbreaking technology that the sponsor of this article claim.
I recently test drove a Chevy Volt. I was very excited about this car and its technology. But then I tried to turn on the climate control. Way too much touch screen interaction is required to do anything. If not for the touch screen, I might have bought the car, but now I won't even consider it.
I had the exact same reaction to the 2009 Prius that I test drove a couple of years ago. If I have to look down to find a button to change the fan speed on the A/C, Toyota has failed on it's UX.
As I've said in other threads, Sony won't benefit from the publicity if it doesn't release the movie. Now I suppose you'll claim that Sony owns Anonymous too, and is having them release a torrent version of the film that secretly includes a better version of the famed Sony rootkit.
No, but The Cause* would benefit from the publicity around yet another valuable, copyrighted movie stolen by evil hackers.
----- *The Cause being the movie studios' upward battle to convince the populous that torrented movie rips are starving children in Hollywood.
Keep in mind that Sony is only pulling the release after the five largest theater chains refused to show it. And the reason they refused to show it is because they could potentially be liable should anything happen anywhere in any of their theaters. Given the poor reviews the movie is getting they presumably decided that it just wasn't worth any risk as they're probably not going to make much anything off showing it anyway.
I propose a much simpler reason aside from potential liability that they are pulling it. Looking strictly at the bottom-line (and setting aside the idea that Sony might actually have a corporate conscience, somewhere..). The rule-of-thumb is that the opening weekend box office numbers are the best indicator of which movies are hot and which are stinkers. Ticket sales usually taper off week by week, and never surpass the numbers at the opening. If a movie has a weak opening weekend, everyone assumes that the movie is crap and even fewer people go to see it the next week. By not having an opening weekend in the top 5 chains, Sony would pretty much guarantee they have a flop on their hands, never mind the fact that all signs point to a crappy movie to start with.
Heh, when I did embedded development we were always forbidden from using bitfields. Load, operate, store is the correct way to access a hardware register. "Let the C compiler do something probably based on the assumption the target address is in RAM" is the wrong way to access a hardware register:p
Load, operate, store is the correct way to access a hardware register, except when it's not. Some hardware has side effects when reading from or writing to a hardware port. On some devices, using bit-manipulation instructions is the correct way to do things.
The thing is, if you use structures with bit fields, C will not optimize the manipulations with them correctly. So you end up doing a lot of hand-holding in driver development in C. You have to be very much aware of the code being produced. It is not uncommon that you check specific inner loop sections to see exactly how they are being compiled and then based on the result and number of instructions might need to rewrite the C part or even just insert the assembly code directly.
No, the C standard does not guarantee that bit fields are implemented in a portable way, but if a compiler is not optimizing correctly, that's the fault of a broken compiler, not C.
If you are accessing hardware registers using bit-mapped structures, then yes, you need to understand the machine code being spit out by the compiler.
Because bug-free automatic memory management is silly, who would want that?
Actually, it's still possible to have some bugs if you improperly use auto_ptr and shared_ptr, etc, but it's still much better than the classic method of allocation.
To be bug free, it has to be on-par with something like Java, where you can't break memory management no matter how hard you tried. This won't happen as long as there's the need to deal with raw pointers or if you have to dodge misaccessing elements (e.g. bounds checks...)
"It's harder to shoot yourself in the foot with C++, but if you do, you blow your whole leg off."
Really? Are you saying it's not possible to have a Null Pointer Exception in Java? Hmm...
Because maybe the evolution team realized that top-posting is an abomination? Sometimes people refuse to actively support people at doing something wrong.
+1 to the evolution devs for not implementing this.
Well then kudos to the evolution devs for sticking up to their principles, and a reminder to myself to have no sympathy for the lack of adoption of their product.
Very apropos; this is a perfect example of the type of self-righteousness that drives people away from a FLOSS project.
This is my exact experience as well. I couldn't convince the customer service rep that their "system" also showed that I was an Internet customer for 2 years before they started trying to charge me a modem rental fee. How was I receiving service before that time? Did their system show me ordering a modem? Did their system show them shipping me a modem? All of these questions fell on deaf ears.
After cancelling service with them, their automated phone service would no longer recognize my account number as an active account, but then 4 months later the attempted billings for not returning this mystery modem began again.
The very helpful person I chatted with on their website last month assures me the problem is fixed. We'll see about that.
If your experience pans out like mine has, in about 4 months you will start getting e-mails and letters from Comcast attempting to bill you for the equipment you haven't returned yet.
Attempting to explain that you don't have any more equipment to return, will get you empty promises that they will fix the error in their computers, along with another e-mail and bill next month.
In my case, they continue to attempt to bill me $70 for a cable modem that I have never rented from them. Their system still shows a credit of $42 they owe me, but no one seems to know when that money will be returned to me, 6 months after cancelling.
If I never hear from them again, I'll consider it $42 well spent.
If you are not making $45 or more an hour you are being robbed. Programmers are massively underpaid compared to the skillset we need to do our jobs. Why the hell do we tolerate deflating the job down to the level of a factory worker?
First off, $45 per hour is not too high. After factoring in benefits that probably equates to a salary of about $65k per year. So while I agree that making less than $65k per year is low for all but junior developers (or those working in very low cost areas), I'm not sure I agree with your assertion that most developers are underpaid. The average salary of a developer is about $90k per year, which is an incredibly high salary.
$45/hour * 40 hours * 52 weeks = $93,600/year. I'm sure where your message goes from there... is $45/hour "not too high", or is $90k an "incredibly high" salary?
"Name 1 way to back up her emails and pictures on a remote server that requires fewer mouse clicks than forwarding them herself with email."
Dropbox - drag, drop, done. Single click.
You forgot the following steps: 0a: Learn what Dropbox is. 0b: Find Dropbox on the web without being suckered into look-alike advertisements and link farms. 0c: Download the installer from Dropbox's website. 0d: Execute installer and navigate Windows' UAC restrictions. 0e: Create Dropbox account, along with reading/skipping EULA. (Optional: Visit DropBox's website every 90 days to stay on top of any changes to their EULA, verify they haven't had any new breaches that might require a password change, or that the free account quota hasn't been exceeded. 0f: Learn how to create a folder to sync with Dropbox. 0g: Learn how to find said folder again. 0h: Learn to using Windows' file search functions to glean the cat videos from the grandkids e-mails which now all live in one folder.
Other than that, yeah, pretty much single click. I'm really not trying to be snarky here; my dad's on about this level. About three times a year I have to walk him through the differences between single-click, double click, shift click, and right click. Also why files that he's dragged from a folder to the desktop are no longer in the folder.
Slashdot Mirror
Unlike most loans which have assets (home, car, etc) that can be confiscated a student loan doesn't result in a physical resource but in knowledge held in the students mind which cannot be taken.
Bullshit. You keep posting this tired incorrect argument all over this thread. Most debt discharged in bankruptcy is unsecured. (In fact, if people didn't have unsecured debt, they wouldn't even qualify for bankruptcy.)
How exactly do credit card companies confiscate "assets" from vacations taken and meals eaten out? How exactly do drs and hospitals confiscate medical care previously provided? (Which is one the biggest causes of bankruptcy in this country.) Well of course they can't.
You're right about the credit cards, but the inability to discharge a federally-guaranteed student loan is a large part of why the loans are issued at 4-8% instead of the 17-30% that you see on credit cards.
It's easy to say "grow up" when the biggest loan you had to take out was for a motorcycle. An education in the US can cost 10s-100s of thousands of dollars not including living expenses. Couple this with low earnings coming out of college and interest rates that capitalize (interest is added to principle) which occurs during forbearance, deferment, or even while you're still in school. For the vast majority of people, repayment is not so simple when the average wage for a US employee is $45,327 as of 2012 according to the National Association of Colleges and Employers. This doesn't take into account the costs of living, healthcare, health insurance, transportation, or god-forbid entertainment.
Yes, tuition in the U.S. can cost 100s of thousands of dollars, but it need not.
If you're borrowing "100s of thousands of dollars" to earn a degree to qualify you for a job earning $45,327, you're doing it wrong.
There are two things people keep teaching their children about college (by their words or actions) that are flat-out wrong:
1. Always go to whichever college you want, no matter the cost. Any degree is guaranteed to be worth any price paid.
2. In college, always pursue your dreams. It doesn't matter what you can get paid for it, because then you'll be a well-rounded individual and society will value you.
We are seriously short-changing our children by not teaching basic financial skills like loan repayment, ROI, and critical thinking about this while they are in high school. Signing up an 18 year old for $100k worth of student loans without requiring some sort of competency exam seems borderline criminal, to me.
So is a Master of Philosophy now only available to the wealthy? SO what if people go to school and study art history or whatever 'useless' degree they want? Is education so frowned upon that it is considered a waste of time unless you are already wealthy and have nothing better to do than study art?
Yes, I'll say it: if you are not wealthy and have to worry about making a living in this world, it is a waste of your time and money to study art as your profession.
We really need to reset our public priorities in regards to education. I don't have a problem with the fact that you might have to work at Starbucks after getting an art history degree. But there is absolutely nothing wrong with having an educated populace, even amongst the working class. Would it be so bad to be able to have that person handing you your coffee to actually be well-educated? Or would that threaten your worldview that they are greedy and useless?
I have no problem with people studying whatever they want, and society does benefit from having an educated populace. That's why we have K-12 programs in this country. But the idea that "a degree" is of such value to society that taxpayers should be on the hook to allow anyone to study anything they want, for as long as it takes, is where I have to disagree.
You know it was a lot cheaper in the '80s, right?
Salaries were lower too. If he had gotten a more lucrative degree or went to a less expensive school, and/or (I imagine) had a job while going to school, he'd probably be fine, or at least better off, too.
I'm roughly the same age as Lee and went to school at roughly the same time. I had 2 Pell grants, 2 student loans, 2 at-school jobs (1 in the CS dept office and 1 as a research assistant doing LISP/Prolog programming) and a summer job at Pizza Hut. I managed work my way through school, get a job and pay off my debts. What's his problem?
Well, see, there's your problem: you wasted your life working in Pizza Hut instead of spending your summers pondering the greatness that someday you would bestow on humanity through your writing.
Also, it would have been great to know what 'stock options' were.
* In extremely rare cases both the lottery aspect and the fine art aspect will conspire. The company succeeds in the lottery of business, and you will have kept them long enough for them to achieve some value and not sold them for a nice dinner or entertaining night. These extremely rare and extremely lucky individuals discover unexpectedly they can buy a mansion and retire early.
Also, you can fall victim to having lots and lots of pre-IPO or pre-investment-round options which can be diluted to the point of worthlessness. If you are not a founder of the company and driving the ship when the options are massaged through the funding rounds, do not consider any options as future earnings. Consider them as worthless trinkets, then you can only be pleasantly surprised when they will, hopefully, be worth enough for a night on the town 5 years down the road.
To be honest, I'd be really pissed off if I learned I had wasted my time interviewing someone who had no intention of taking the job.
If you're changing jobs every few years it stands out like a sore thumb on the resume too. It says "hey, I won't be here very long". I'm not joking, we've brought up that topic a few times when evaluating candidates.
It's a two-way street. If you can't convince me during the interview that I want to work for you, who's time has been wasted? Hiring the right person is hard work, that's just part of being a manager.
At some point your old car is worth less than the minimum trade in price they will give you. The trick is to time it just right so that you roll on to the forecourt just as the engine chokes on the last drop of gas, and conclude the sale a few minutes before the wheels fall off.
Never fool yourself into thinking a car dealership is paying more than a trade-in is worth. Dealerships are not in the charity business; they will make money off of it; either by reselling the car or rolling it into the deal on the new car.
I think what he's asking is whether or not he can network them together even though they all have the same IP address. And the answer is yes.
As a network engineer, I can think of a way with a Cisco catalyst switch, OR, a linux box with multiple ethernet ports:
Yes, there are a few possible solutions, but I'm surprised that nobody has mentioned the biggest barrier to implementing any of them:
Trying to connect to 8+ pumps at the same time is going to require running 8+ ethernet cables from a central location to each pump. You're going to have cables all over the place, and unless it is done while the gas station is closed it means people driving over the cables, stepping on them, tripping on them and yanking them out of the socket, etc........
And having 8 pumps off-line at a time will probably lead to less-than-cheery looks from the station owner and his customers.
(Aside: I have been witness to what happens when a Walmart store runs out of pallet wrap. It is... awkward.)
You'd hope someone would think to just go and unpallet a pallet of plastic wrap, but this is Wal-Mart we're talking about.
Are you thinking of the food-grade plastic wrap that a Walmart might have sitting in the warehouse? That stuff is wimpy compared to the stretch wrap that is used on pallets. It would be like saying if they're all out of cardboard cartons, why not open up some Christmas wrapping paper or tissues and build a box, it's all paper, after all...
NPR's Planet Money had an interesting episode about pallets and CHEP pallets this summer: http://www.npr.org/blogs/money...
Standard resistive Touchscreen tech is dirt freaking cheap. I can get 7" resistive types for $9.00 each all day long at single quantities. If I was a car maker I could get them at less than $1.00 each in 1000+ quantities.
Honestly this IR system is a rehash of really old tech that is just not needed.
What is needed is the important buttons existing as REAL HARD BUTTONS. the systems that are 100% touch are complete crap. Yes I do want my hard buttons back on android, the on screen home button is really 100% crap.
Resistive touchscreens also don't care if the user is wearing gloves, which would be a plus for automotive use. But, they are not as durable as capacitive, which I would argue is a reason to not use them in a car.
But IR systems are also not a good choice because the sensors can be swamped by sunlight.
IR systems still find uses in industrial settings because they can be completely sealed, respond to gloved fingers, and have no flexible/moving parts like a resistive screen, but IR is hardly the new, groundbreaking technology that the sponsor of this article claim.
I recently test drove a Chevy Volt. I was very excited about this car and its technology. But then I tried to turn on the climate control. Way too much touch screen interaction is required to do anything. If not for the touch screen, I might have bought the car, but now I won't even consider it.
I had the exact same reaction to the 2009 Prius that I test drove a couple of years ago. If I have to look down to find a button to change the fan speed on the A/C, Toyota has failed on it's UX.
As I've said in other threads, Sony won't benefit from the publicity if it doesn't release the movie. Now I suppose you'll claim that Sony owns Anonymous too, and is having them release a torrent version of the film that secretly includes a better version of the famed Sony rootkit.
No, but The Cause* would benefit from the publicity around yet another valuable, copyrighted movie stolen by evil hackers.
-----
*The Cause being the movie studios' upward battle to convince the populous that torrented movie rips are starving children in Hollywood.
Keep in mind that Sony is only pulling the release after the five largest theater chains refused to show it. And the reason they refused to show it is because they could potentially be liable should anything happen anywhere in any of their theaters. Given the poor reviews the movie is getting they presumably decided that it just wasn't worth any risk as they're probably not going to make much anything off showing it anyway.
I propose a much simpler reason aside from potential liability that they are pulling it. Looking strictly at the bottom-line (and setting aside the idea that Sony might actually have a corporate conscience, somewhere..). The rule-of-thumb is that the opening weekend box office numbers are the best indicator of which movies are hot and which are stinkers. Ticket sales usually taper off week by week, and never surpass the numbers at the opening. If a movie has a weak opening weekend, everyone assumes that the movie is crap and even fewer people go to see it the next week. By not having an opening weekend in the top 5 chains, Sony would pretty much guarantee they have a flop on their hands, never mind the fact that all signs point to a crappy movie to start with.
Heh, when I did embedded development we were always forbidden from using bitfields. Load, operate, store is the correct way to access a hardware register. "Let the C compiler do something probably based on the assumption the target address is in RAM" is the wrong way to access a hardware register :p
Load, operate, store is the correct way to access a hardware register, except when it's not. Some hardware has side effects when reading from or writing to a hardware port. On some devices, using bit-manipulation instructions is the correct way to do things.
The thing is, if you use structures with bit fields, C will not optimize the manipulations with them correctly. So you end up doing a lot of hand-holding in driver development in C. You have to be very much aware of the code being produced. It is not uncommon that you check specific inner loop sections to see exactly how they are being compiled and then based on the result and number of instructions might need to rewrite the C part or even just insert the assembly code directly.
No, the C standard does not guarantee that bit fields are implemented in a portable way, but if a compiler is not optimizing correctly, that's the fault of a broken compiler, not C.
If you are accessing hardware registers using bit-mapped structures, then yes, you need to understand the machine code being spit out by the compiler.
Actually, it's still possible to have some bugs if you improperly use auto_ptr and shared_ptr, etc, but it's still much better than the classic method of allocation.
To be bug free, it has to be on-par with something like Java, where you can't break memory management no matter how hard you tried. This won't happen as long as there's the need to deal with raw pointers or if you have to dodge misaccessing elements (e.g. bounds checks...)
"It's harder to shoot yourself in the foot with C++, but if you do, you blow your whole leg off."
Really? Are you saying it's not possible to have a Null Pointer Exception in Java? Hmm...
Yes but you would not be able to actually empress this in C. Not possible! The best you could do would be something like:
void set_class_to_blue(Element* ele)
{
set_class(ele, "blue");
}
foreach(dom, "a", set_class_to_blue);
Any if you inline the code, you can see what it does line for line and translate it to ASM.
That's not C. What is this "foreach()" you speak of?
Because maybe the evolution team realized that top-posting is an abomination? Sometimes people refuse to actively support people at doing something wrong.
+1 to the evolution devs for not implementing this.
Well then kudos to the evolution devs for sticking up to their principles, and a reminder to myself to have no sympathy for the lack of adoption of their product.
Very apropos; this is a perfect example of the type of self-righteousness that drives people away from a FLOSS project.
Amen to this. If your goal is to get your ideas implemented, you need to be able to accept them being known as your boss's ideas.
This is my exact experience as well. I couldn't convince the customer service rep that their "system" also showed that I was an Internet customer for 2 years before they started trying to charge me a modem rental fee. How was I receiving service before that time? Did their system show me ordering a modem? Did their system show them shipping me a modem? All of these questions fell on deaf ears.
After cancelling service with them, their automated phone service would no longer recognize my account number as an active account, but then 4 months later the attempted billings for not returning this mystery modem began again.
The very helpful person I chatted with on their website last month assures me the problem is fixed. We'll see about that.
I wouldn't consider your journey done just yet.
If your experience pans out like mine has, in about 4 months you will start getting e-mails and letters from Comcast attempting to bill you for the equipment you haven't returned yet.
Attempting to explain that you don't have any more equipment to return, will get you empty promises that they will fix the error in their computers, along with another e-mail and bill next month.
In my case, they continue to attempt to bill me $70 for a cable modem that I have never rented from them. Their system still shows a credit of $42 they owe me, but no one seems to know when that money will be returned to me, 6 months after cancelling.
If I never hear from them again, I'll consider it $42 well spent.
They continually invent new and creative kinds of suck.
No they don't. They just change the suck icons, names, and desktop locations with each new edition. Still the same old suck.
Well, yeah, but now it's got the Ribbon of Suck.
If you are not making $45 or more an hour you are being robbed. Programmers are massively underpaid compared to the skillset we need to do our jobs. Why the hell do we tolerate deflating the job down to the level of a factory worker?
First off, $45 per hour is not too high. After factoring in benefits that probably equates to a salary of about $65k per year. So while I agree that making less than $65k per year is low for all but junior developers (or those working in very low cost areas), I'm not sure I agree with your assertion that most developers are underpaid. The average salary of a developer is about $90k per year, which is an incredibly high salary.
$45/hour * 40 hours * 52 weeks = $93,600/year. I'm sure where your message goes from there... is $45/hour "not too high", or is $90k an "incredibly high" salary?
"Name 1 way to back up her emails and pictures on a remote server that requires fewer mouse clicks than forwarding them herself with email."
Dropbox - drag, drop, done. Single click.
You forgot the following steps:
0a: Learn what Dropbox is.
0b: Find Dropbox on the web without being suckered into look-alike advertisements and link farms.
0c: Download the installer from Dropbox's website.
0d: Execute installer and navigate Windows' UAC restrictions.
0e: Create Dropbox account, along with reading/skipping EULA. (Optional: Visit DropBox's website every 90 days to stay on top of any changes to their EULA, verify they haven't had any new breaches that might require a password change, or that the free account quota hasn't been exceeded.
0f: Learn how to create a folder to sync with Dropbox.
0g: Learn how to find said folder again.
0h: Learn to using Windows' file search functions to glean the cat videos from the grandkids e-mails which now all live in one folder.
Other than that, yeah, pretty much single click. I'm really not trying to be snarky here; my dad's on about this level. About three times a year I have to walk him through the differences between single-click, double click, shift click, and right click. Also why files that he's dragged from a folder to the desktop are no longer in the folder.