The quest to further "monetize" customers that have already paid for a product is one that more and more companies are doing. I understand the business reasons behind it, but what about the consumer's rights? Do we have any let? Superfish is an especially egregious example if this problem. It is, in essence, a back door installed into millions of consumer devices. The penalties on a company should be so severe that they couldn't just make it disappear in one quarter, but not so severe that it forces the company in bankruptcy. In other words it needs to be painful enough that other companies will think long and hard about possibly doing something similar, but stopping short of putting the head of the villain on a stick outside the castle walls.
Sadly, I think the extent of the punishment will be a little bad press for a few days, then they'll continue on as if nothing had happened.
Be careful with that advise. I friend asked my what specific recommendations I had for a product. I told him to buy anything but Brand X. A few days later he's showing off his beautiful new Brand X. I asked why he bought it and he said it was because he remembered me saying "Brand X". Most people these days are so tuned into brand names, it's the name they remember, not the good or bad behind it.
Sadly, I agree. I moved to the Mac world 10 years ago because I was tired of the constant struggle to keep Windows boxes working, both hardware and software. At that time, Mac was a breath of fresh air. It did just work. Now I'm with macalli, I dread each new update wondering if things will net out as better or worse.
Also, talk to Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail about being blocked.
For the first time every I'm going to use this expression....
ROTFLMAO
Unless you have some kind of super squirrel secret agent phone number, or your company is worth billions, please explain how to call any of these companies and actually talk to somebody that can _accurately_ answer your questions and just as importantly has the power to make a change.
And how is this different than most other endeavors throughout time which need significant funding? How many men were lost at sea exploring the world in search of trade goods for the ships owners? The list is virtually endless. I'm sure that Oog sent Uma to a probable death in trying to kill a sabertooth tiger in order to have the teeth to trade with the neighboring clan. Nothing has changed, and nothing will.
Oh no, can't sit on the living room couch. An engine might fall off a passing jetliner, crash through your roof, and kill you. Better get in your bomb shelter in the basement. Or, since you will need to remove all joy and sensation from life in order to be "safe", just skip to the end game instead.
I get so frustrated reading these kind of articles. We get 3mb for $70/month. That's 3mb with horrible latency and dropped packets. That's 3mb that frequently requires pages to be reloaded in order to complete properly.
Of course 3mb is a lot better than my first connection which was, and I kid you not, 110kb via an acoustic coupler on a good old fashion TTY. So I guess that makes my complaint a first world problem.
Oh well, never mind. Century Link just carry on with your fine upstanding service.
I use a spam filter which quarantines suspected spam. I then review the quarantine and white list or black list as appropriate. Not an ideal solution for large scale users, but for us it works.
Last week I black listed an email. The subject was "You've got to see this!" and the body was only a link. It turned out that it was a legitimate email so I turned around and white listed the sender. But that email would set off the spam flags on just about any filter, including human based filters. Sadly, there is no certain means of determining spam vs non spam.
Right now I have 3mb at best, and that's with high latency and a heck of a lot of dropped packets. And I have the highest speed that can be delivered, or at least so they tell me.
The tax issue is with diesel fuel. All gas sold has the road taxes included, even if so.d at marinas. You can, if you are fueling your boat, collect the receipts and submit for a refund of the road taxes.
Marina fuel is usually more expensive because of the significantly higher costs of moving the fuel from the tank up on shore to the tank in the boat.
Later in life I started a consulting company. One of our clients was a governmental agency. At peak I had 4 full time employees there. As near as any of us could tell, the agency provided good paying jobs to a bunch of people, but hired consultants to actually get the work done because none of the employees had the knowledge or desire to be productive. This went on for years and my employees and I profitted handsomely from it; but as a tax payer it ticked me off.
In the early nineties I was Director oif Development for a company that wrote and sold software to small telephone companies. We created a lot of automation into the process which allowed small companies to do much more than their staffing would otherwise allow. One prospective customer was a county owned telephone company. Their first response when we showed them all the features of our softwar ewas to ask if those capabilities could be turned off. Huh? Turns out that they viewed their primary role to be a provider of jobs within the county. Providing telephone service was considered secondary.
So there's nothing really new about these finds. Just that he's getting noticed for writing about them.
What's the difference between a hunter with a drone and a factory fishing vessel with spotter planes? Is it scale? money? Both models are using airborne technology to assist in the gathering of food. If we are going to ban aerial observation, than it should be for all applications and uses of it regardless of how monied the operator is.
If I could reply, I would add a reply to my prior comment about incomplete summaries. Now that I'm on my desktop I can see that there is a goofy multi-bar icon, and when I click on it I can select classic view. Or at least pseudo classic view.
What's with the fixed width content and all the white space? Yuck. Please let me pick the width of the content area by changing the width of the window.
What's with all the white space. Did WalMart have a sale on blank pixels?
What happened to the "From the... Dept." tag under the title. Are we now too grown up for levity?
Why is the fortune cookie now virtually invisible in small font with a low contrast?
The whole new look and feel, the removal or minimization of light-hearted portions of the site, and other features give me a strong sense that your corporate overlords have decided that you should look just like all the other sites that various corporate overlords control.
Increasingly/. seems to becoming irrelevant. I read Google News before getting to/. and increasingly I've already read stories about an issue before I get to/., sometimes days earlier. Slashdot used to be a site where one could find interesting stories about the tech world that generally weren't covered in the mainstream press, or at least we'd learn about them before they became mainstream. Not so much anymore. The new layout seems to be completing/.'s trip to being a JANS. (Just Another News Site)
The title says it all. I don't want to have to load a new page, along with all the comments to read the whole summary. Additionally, with more and more people using mobile devices, loading a new page with a whole whack of comments that won't necessarily be read, just to get the whole summary, is a waste of metered bandwidth.
I'm not sure what bank you deal with, but at my bank funds are available the next business day after I deposit, and the first $100 is available immediately. Maybe that's "float", but not enough that I'm going to squawk.
One important thing for people to realize is that even if the bank clear the check immediately, as in the instant you present it, it can still bounce. All the electronic clearing does is validate that the account number is real and that the account has sufficient funds to cover the check. The account holder can still claim that the check is a forgery and you are then liable for the amount of the check unless some other resolution is arrived at, e.g. it can be shown that the presenter of the check is lying that it is a forgery.
Just remember, curious is not synonymous with approve or accept.
If I met somebody with a Google Glass I too would be curious. That doesn't mean I would approve or welcome the person taking a video of me. As irrational as it is, to a lot of people there is a big difference between somebody standing there blatantly videoing you Vs the ever present surveillance cameras, at least from an emotional perspective.
The wealthy(especially so in countries with high levels of economic inequality) are where the assets are, often a commanding percentage of them; but they also have by far the most sophisticated measures for avoiding taxation.
Like the USA? We have greater economic inequality since the robber baron era. And we seem hell bent on becoming the newest third world country.
I do not have to agree with everything someone believes in order to agree with them on some things.
Well stated. If only we could somehow move there as a nation we'd be a lot better off. Unfortunately we're stuck with the Bushism "If you're not with us, you're against us."
I don't know the legal issues at hand, nor do I know the laws of China, but if what you are planing to do is a violation of those laws you should be prepared for an extended stay as a guest of the Chinese government.
While you might not believe that what they do is correct, moral, or defensible, it is non the less their country. Just as you would expect foreign visitors to your own country to respect the local laws, you should respect the laws of a country that you visit. If you find the laws so personally distasteful that can not abide by them, don't go.
While I'm concerned about being tracked, the major reason I adblock is to avoid having annoying animated ads appear. My eyes are inexorably drawn to anything animated within my near field of view. If a site has any animation on it I have an extremely hard time concentrating on the content. So adblock is most helpful in helping avoid all maner of methods that advertisers use to try and capture your eyeball.
If there were some means of blocking any animated content while still allowing ads I would think seriously of using that. I want the sites that I rely on to earn money. I don't have a problem with advertisers using sites as a venue to get the word out about their product. But I do want to be able to read the sites I visit.
I just visited a link on the dailyrecord.co.uk and received some kind of cookie notice. The notice appeared as a pop up in the bottom right corner (the last place an english speaker will scan to) with text in pale grey. The notice was clearly designed to be difficult to notice. Even though I saw it pop up right away, I didn't have a chance to read the text or see which link to use to opt out before the notice disappeared. It was clear from the first sentence that if I did nothing I was consenting to be tracked.
I guess the law, which clearly had good intentions, has been eviscerated so that now the websites can just briefly display a hard to notice blob of text, remove it before you have a chance to read it, and continue tracking you with impunity.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh for mod points. That would be a +1 funny.
But what about next time?
What about other vendors?
The quest to further "monetize" customers that have already paid for a product is one that more and more companies are doing. I understand the business reasons behind it, but what about the consumer's rights? Do we have any let? Superfish is an especially egregious example if this problem. It is, in essence, a back door installed into millions of consumer devices. The penalties on a company should be so severe that they couldn't just make it disappear in one quarter, but not so severe that it forces the company in bankruptcy. In other words it needs to be painful enough that other companies will think long and hard about possibly doing something similar, but stopping short of putting the head of the villain on a stick outside the castle walls.
Sadly, I think the extent of the punishment will be a little bad press for a few days, then they'll continue on as if nothing had happened.
Be careful with that advise. I friend asked my what specific recommendations I had for a product. I told him to buy anything but Brand X. A few days later he's showing off his beautiful new Brand X. I asked why he bought it and he said it was because he remembered me saying "Brand X". Most people these days are so tuned into brand names, it's the name they remember, not the good or bad behind it.
Sadly, I agree. I moved to the Mac world 10 years ago because I was tired of the constant struggle to keep Windows boxes working, both hardware and software. At that time, Mac was a breath of fresh air. It did just work. Now I'm with macalli, I dread each new update wondering if things will net out as better or worse.
Also, talk to Yahoo, Hotmail, and Gmail about being blocked.
For the first time every I'm going to use this expression....
ROTFLMAO
Unless you have some kind of super squirrel secret agent phone number, or your company is worth billions, please explain how to call any of these companies and actually talk to somebody that can _accurately_ answer your questions and just as importantly has the power to make a change.
And how is this different than most other endeavors throughout time which need significant funding? How many men were lost at sea exploring the world in search of trade goods for the ships owners? The list is virtually endless. I'm sure that Oog sent Uma to a probable death in trying to kill a sabertooth tiger in order to have the teeth to trade with the neighboring clan. Nothing has changed, and nothing will.
Oh no, can't sit on the living room couch. An engine might fall off a passing jetliner, crash through your roof, and kill you. Better get in your bomb shelter in the basement. Or, since you will need to remove all joy and sensation from life in order to be "safe", just skip to the end game instead.
Ford has it available. Go to http://owner.ford.com/
Perhaps others do as well.
I get so frustrated reading these kind of articles. We get 3mb for $70/month. That's 3mb with horrible latency and dropped packets. That's 3mb that frequently requires pages to be reloaded in order to complete properly.
Of course 3mb is a lot better than my first connection which was, and I kid you not, 110kb via an acoustic coupler on a good old fashion TTY. So I guess that makes my complaint a first world problem.
Oh well, never mind. Century Link just carry on with your fine upstanding service.
I use a spam filter which quarantines suspected spam. I then review the quarantine and white list or black list as appropriate. Not an ideal solution for large scale users, but for us it works.
Last week I black listed an email. The subject was "You've got to see this!" and the body was only a link. It turned out that it was a legitimate email so I turned around and white listed the sender. But that email would set off the spam flags on just about any filter, including human based filters. Sadly, there is no certain means of determining spam vs non spam.
I'd be happy with 4mb if it were reliable.
Right now I have 3mb at best, and that's with high latency and a heck of a lot of dropped packets. And I have the highest speed that can be delivered, or at least so they tell me.
The tax issue is with diesel fuel. All gas sold has the road taxes included, even if so.d at marinas. You can, if you are fueling your boat, collect the receipts and submit for a refund of the road taxes.
Marina fuel is usually more expensive because of the significantly higher costs of moving the fuel from the tank up on shore to the tank in the boat.
Later in life I started a consulting company. One of our clients was a governmental agency. At peak I had 4 full time employees there. As near as any of us could tell, the agency provided good paying jobs to a bunch of people, but hired consultants to actually get the work done because none of the employees had the knowledge or desire to be productive. This went on for years and my employees and I profitted handsomely from it; but as a tax payer it ticked me off.
In the early nineties I was Director oif Development for a company that wrote and sold software to small telephone companies. We created a lot of automation into the process which allowed small companies to do much more than their staffing would otherwise allow. One prospective customer was a county owned telephone company. Their first response when we showed them all the features of our softwar ewas to ask if those capabilities could be turned off. Huh? Turns out that they viewed their primary role to be a provider of jobs within the county. Providing telephone service was considered secondary.
So there's nothing really new about these finds. Just that he's getting noticed for writing about them.
The conversion to this system would make all the Y2K mitigation costs seem like peanuts. Oh yeah, and a beer to go with the peanuts.
What's the difference between a hunter with a drone and a factory fishing vessel with spotter planes? Is it scale? money? Both models are using airborne technology to assist in the gathering of food. If we are going to ban aerial observation, than it should be for all applications and uses of it regardless of how monied the operator is.
If I could reply, I would add a reply to my prior comment about incomplete summaries. Now that I'm on my desktop I can see that there is a goofy multi-bar icon, and when I click on it I can select classic view. Or at least pseudo classic view.
What's with the fixed width content and all the white space? Yuck. Please let me pick the width of the content area by changing the width of the window.
What's with all the white space. Did WalMart have a sale on blank pixels?
What happened to the "From the ... Dept." tag under the title. Are we now too grown up for levity?
Why is the fortune cookie now virtually invisible in small font with a low contrast?
The whole new look and feel, the removal or minimization of light-hearted portions of the site, and other features give me a strong sense that your corporate overlords have decided that you should look just like all the other sites that various corporate overlords control.
Increasingly /. seems to becoming irrelevant. I read Google News before getting to /. and increasingly I've already read stories about an issue before I get to /., sometimes days earlier. Slashdot used to be a site where one could find interesting stories about the tech world that generally weren't covered in the mainstream press, or at least we'd learn about them before they became mainstream. Not so much anymore. The new layout seems to be completing /.'s trip to being a JANS. (Just Another News Site)
The title says it all. I don't want to have to load a new page, along with all the comments to read the whole summary. Additionally, with more and more people using mobile devices, loading a new page with a whole whack of comments that won't necessarily be read, just to get the whole summary, is a waste of metered bandwidth.
I'm not sure what bank you deal with, but at my bank funds are available the next business day after I deposit, and the first $100 is available immediately. Maybe that's "float", but not enough that I'm going to squawk.
One important thing for people to realize is that even if the bank clear the check immediately, as in the instant you present it, it can still bounce. All the electronic clearing does is validate that the account number is real and that the account has sufficient funds to cover the check. The account holder can still claim that the check is a forgery and you are then liable for the amount of the check unless some other resolution is arrived at, e.g. it can be shown that the presenter of the check is lying that it is a forgery.
Just remember, curious is not synonymous with approve or accept.
If I met somebody with a Google Glass I too would be curious. That doesn't mean I would approve or welcome the person taking a video of me. As irrational as it is, to a lot of people there is a big difference between somebody standing there blatantly videoing you Vs the ever present surveillance cameras, at least from an emotional perspective.
The wealthy(especially so in countries with high levels of economic inequality) are where the assets are, often a commanding percentage of them; but they also have by far the most sophisticated measures for avoiding taxation.
Like the USA? We have greater economic inequality since the robber baron era. And we seem hell bent on becoming the newest third world country.
I do not have to agree with everything someone believes in order to agree with them on some things.
Well stated. If only we could somehow move there as a nation we'd be a lot better off. Unfortunately we're stuck with the Bushism "If you're not with us, you're against us."
I don't know the legal issues at hand, nor do I know the laws of China, but if what you are planing to do is a violation of those laws you should be prepared for an extended stay as a guest of the Chinese government.
While you might not believe that what they do is correct, moral, or defensible, it is non the less their country. Just as you would expect foreign visitors to your own country to respect the local laws, you should respect the laws of a country that you visit. If you find the laws so personally distasteful that can not abide by them, don't go.
While I'm concerned about being tracked, the major reason I adblock is to avoid having annoying animated ads appear. My eyes are inexorably drawn to anything animated within my near field of view. If a site has any animation on it I have an extremely hard time concentrating on the content. So adblock is most helpful in helping avoid all maner of methods that advertisers use to try and capture your eyeball.
If there were some means of blocking any animated content while still allowing ads I would think seriously of using that. I want the sites that I rely on to earn money. I don't have a problem with advertisers using sites as a venue to get the word out about their product. But I do want to be able to read the sites I visit.
I just visited a link on the dailyrecord.co.uk and received some kind of cookie notice. The notice appeared as a pop up in the bottom right corner (the last place an english speaker will scan to) with text in pale grey. The notice was clearly designed to be difficult to notice. Even though I saw it pop up right away, I didn't have a chance to read the text or see which link to use to opt out before the notice disappeared. It was clear from the first sentence that if I did nothing I was consenting to be tracked.
I guess the law, which clearly had good intentions, has been eviscerated so that now the websites can just briefly display a hard to notice blob of text, remove it before you have a chance to read it, and continue tracking you with impunity.