Notice that it only mentions savings on electricity. While this is indeed a long-term saving, it's not taking account of anything to do with the purchase price and maintenance of the system.
I can save you 100% on your electricity for the next year. You just have to buy my huge-arse battery, and pay for a "recharge" once a year. Cost: More than you pay for electricity in a year.
Fuck. I'm security paranoid but leaving a port open on an IP is not the end of the world if you have anywhere near half a brain, even a well-known port.
Do you not have IP exclusion lists? Do you not have whitelisted users for RDP? Have you never run a terminal server? What about your firewall with in-built intrusion detection / prevention?
My workplace's port 3389, port 80 and port 25 are open. It doesn't mean you're talking to the *servers*. You're talking to the IDS/IPS which is analysing what you're doing. Hell, if you come from my home IP, they redirect to an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT PLACE to what everyone else sees on port 3389, for instance.
Case in point, if you don't know the words "Morto Inbound" then it means you're not monitoring your RDP port (it's a standard snort rule for that port) and/or you're just feeding it direct to an RDP server. Which, I agree, is moronic. But you have no way to tell, from just a port scan, what you're talking to and certainly no way to tell whether it's on the same network, VLAN, machine, etc. as the email server. And certainly not after-the-event.
Similarly, what fucking idiot just port-forwards port 80 to an internal webserver? You push it through reverse-proxy, and have the web servers as isolated as possible - even on an entirely separate VLAN. If nothing else it stops all those bollocks attacks with path traversal attempts etc. not to mention password brute-forcing, without having to change ANY of the underlying applications.
So, please, fire away and open yourself up to ridicule. These things are not dangerous if you have an ounce of common sense and treat them as what they are - untrusted connection ports. Sanitise, proxy, and isolate as necessary but you still have to have the fucking things open if you want to get anything done.
Fuck, even my workplace port 25 isn't the Exchange server. That's just moronic. Who would do that? It gets sanitised, analysed, proxied and multiple attempts from the same IP never even bother the actual, real email server whatsoever. After the third cock-up on the port, the firewall and proxy setup just block it out. On other setups, I've actually had it configured to send it to a tarpit email server that refuses all email (after long delays). But nowadays, I just block the IP for an hour or so.
Serious IT shops don't worry about open ports (sure, they keep the list minimal, and up-to-date, and document them). Because such things are part and parcel of running Internet-facing services. But they do make sure that they are monitored, proxied, sanitised, and not just handed off to random-PHP-application running on an internal server without at least some common sense applied en-route.
Fuck your setup. How the hell would you offer RDP to your users? You wouldn't. And fuck pissing about with strange ports (which two seconds of connecting to the port with telnet after finding it open with nmap will tell you exactly what protocol it's expecting!). Just make sure that you're applying proper procedures to random, incoming traffic.
And, sorry, but if any of your employee or internal administrator user accounts can be brute-forced over RDP, you're a fucking moron in more ways than one.
Why should your company be giving you this for free?
At what point does gaining "green credentials" falter under the expensive?
Do you really think that KW's of charging power available on demand throughout the day by allowing any significant percentage of your parking lot spaces to be able to charge is cheap or even possible? Honestly, you're into MW before you even get out of SMB territory.
Your electric cars are SO GOOD that you can't make it to work and then home before you need a charge?
There's just too much common sense missing from the article here. If your engine-based car conked out in the parking lot, would your company pay to put in fuel pumps or (worse) even pay the fuel for you? Not unless they were a HUGE company, and it would come with so many usage caveats.
If you're installed electric points and you are OVERSELLING them, how different is that to those ISPs oversubscribing their broadband connections, etc. and yet we moan about them?
The companies have a choice - install more capacity at great expense for a minority of users who can't be bothered to manage their recharging so it happens at home instead of work (at the saving of pence to them, and lots of money to the employer), leave things as they are and let people moan, or take all the chargers away.
Yes, communism - as an ideal - is something that almost all practical interpretations of have led to failure. There's nothing wrong with the idea of doing things for the good of everyone, but it breaks down catastrophically the second you have one person who doesn't want to play ball and wants more than their fair share.
Communism is an idealist dream. It works only when everyone co-operates.
I'm far from a Trekkie but from what I remember of watching it and the various spin-off series when I was a kid, money did indeed exist.
The Ferengi, for example. Profit was their main aim.
End of argument.
Sure, we can argue canons and spin-offs and all kinds of junk but imagining something to be "free" because of some (mis-remembered) imaginary perfect world just isn't going to work in the real world.
Because voice recognition - just for starters - hasn't come on much in the last twenty years.
Last time I used Siri (which was only a few months ago), I asked it a simple question and it just sat there baffled. I spent twenty minutes trying all kinds of simplification, better pronunciations, and rewording but still it wasn't able to fathom anything useful from it. No, I don't have a strong accent (but what the fuck should that matter anyway?) and no I wasn't in a room full of noise (but - again - are we going to have to go outside and find a quiet spot to get these things to work in the future).
Apart from where there are obvious detectable keywords that they can make up the rest of the query around, these things are SHIT, and always have been.
I work in schools, I've dealt with a number of teachers and "learning support specialists" who hear that there is a voice recognition software, who then insist we need to use it for those children unable to write properly, and then trial it and discover just how useless it is - especially if the child already has even the most minor of communications problems too - and then realise what a waste of time it is.
One teacher I know wanted to write all their school reports using voice recognition because they were sold how wonderful it was by some guy paid to train them. Yeah, in a silent hall, using his exact phrasing, it seemed to work. Ten times slower than typing, but the demo was nice. However, you've not saved time or effort, you still have to double-check everything before it goes out (and inevitably on a computer because the devices aren't even close to being able to be controlled by voice - "Oh, no, change that word elephant to giraffe, please") and the accuracy in any real-world environment or using anything other than very basic phrasing SUCKED. I laughed when they told me that's how they wanted to write their reports - hundreds of them each per member of staff within a one-week window. The technology is honestly that bad.
And the rest is just bollocks of the highest order.
I charged my Samsung (non-i) phone once this week.
And that was only because it dipped below 30%.
Admittedly it's not calling 24 hours a day, but it's on 4G all the time and has modern smartphone capabilities.
16 hours battery life? That's pathetic. Really?
The one thing I have to hand to iPads is that they last a long time on battery. But 16 hours? That's just the perfectly ANNOYING level of battery life. Not enough to survive a day.
I see nothing to suggest, in any literature that I can find, that they are any more than ordinary scientists who have detected an anomalous effect. That's not fusion. And neither is it fraud.
They were asked to verify existing research in 2004 and were unable to. They tried again in 2009, and could only detect something unusual. Nobody has yet come forward with any proof, method or explanation that actually attributes it to cold fusion past rumour, hearsay and guesswork.
This is the current state of the field.
I'm not saying they are frauds, I'm not saying that this effect isn't present, I'm not even saying cold fusion is impossible. I'm saying that the current state of science is that it cannot be produced, harnessed, reproduced reliably, explained satisfactorily, or attributed to fusion at all.
There are plenty of "respected" scientists out there, with qualifications and professorships who are spouting all kinds of nonsense in all kinds of fields (and cold fusion still attracts them - look into the credentials of certain people involved in eCat etc.).
Not definitive research, obviously, but since 2004, there's been nothing of note that I can see, and most of it rehash / recheck of previous results.
Yes, the field suffered a huge PR setback, but it recovered shortly after but is now more a discredited FIELD than a PR disaster. Nobody is able to reproduce even the early results, let alone come up with anything new.
And although such science is worthy of investigation, there is still investigation ongoing. And none of it appears to be particularly productive.
The crap about LENR being reproduced in 200 labs seems... well... bollocks to me. There's a big difference between an anomalous result and actual confirmed cold fusion and they almost all fall into the former virtually immediately.
As with all things scientific and Wiki-related: citation required.
Er... please do. You'll hurt yourself more than you'll ever hurt us.
In case you haven't noticed, the US is *not* top of quite a lot of things. Even when it is top, the EU is right behind it. Additionally, all those visas are for researchers and people already established to be in short supply in your native population. ANY country in the world would be idiotic to cancel visas like that. That's where the best international talent is choosing to come to your country and contribute to YOUR economy rather than their native one.
Cutting off your nose to spite your face is not an established or recognised economic tactic for a reason.
P.S. "I want your US-based ISP to give all your data to my EU-based company that owns a website that you occasionally log into. Why are you resisting? What's wrong with you? Just give it to me or I'll cancel all your visas!" Notice how STUPID it sounds when you turn it the other way around?
Severing ties with the US would be a net gain on our end. Unfortunately, you only get a net loss on the other or things wouldn't balance. It might also mean that we no longer feel obligated to follow you into wars that had nothing to do with us.
a) A fork is not the end of the original project. It can be. But usually it's not.
b) "In October 2014, Garrett stated on his blog that he would no longer contribute Linux kernel changes relating to Intel hardware" - That's pettiness, and I'm sure the kernel came to a grinding halt that day too.
c) If you can't get your changes past other people, to the point that you have to fork and maintain an entirely separate branch on your own, that's usually the sign of messy code or absolute loss. It means that you want only YOUR way to be the way. That kind of lack of co-operation isn't the way forward, but you are more than free to pursue that. The number of followers of that fork versus the stock kernel is likely to be tiny, and changes likely to come back in the "accepted" format into the stock kernel before you see any real usage of it outside developers and testers.
d) "He is a recipient of the Free Software Award from the Free Software Foundation for his work on Secure Boot, UEFI, and the Linux kernel". Ah! All the bits that I *don't* want in the kernel. Did he work on systemd too?
If you don't trust them, and know that, that it doesn't matter what you use.
Encrypt, and only use encrypted. You can do this in many different ways, but if you never reveal the encryption key to them, YOU CAN GIVE YOUR ADVERSARY ALL YOUR ENCRYPTED DATA. That's the whole point of encryption.
Encrypt, store in the cloud in any location you like. All they get is encrypted data that they can't do anything with. As only you need to access it (and not random general public, which is a much more difficult thing to secure), only you need the key.
In the EU (but not the UK), banks will send you a text for EVERY credit card transaction. If there's a problem, you can contact the bank. It's also free.
Are you really telling me, in this day and age, that we can't have suspect transactions result in a text to your phone that you can then authorise - even before the web page refreshes?
Banking is so in the 1950s of computing that it's laughable. It's done deliberately in some circumstances to profit from charges, fees and the timings of clearing payments. But you can't claim fraud if you haven't taken SIMPLE measures against it.
Like asking the user to confirm suspect transactions using a secondary method (that can be phone for old people without mobile phones, text for those with phones, maybe even the bank's secure app if you so choose). Declining a card transaction because it comes from an unusual place is no longer a metric to decide on the suspicion assigned to a transaction. I've purchased from all over the world, especially in the run-up to Christmas when Amazon, eBay et al only stock the normal boring stuff and I want something a bit different.
In one instance, my Italian relative came over, went to a DIY store with us, paid for the transaction and KNEW BEFORE WE'D HIT THE DOORS that he'd been double-charged on his bank account. A text came through, then another, in a foreign country, before he'd even left the shop. And we were then able to cancel the second transaction.
Where's the declaration of this war? Which nations signed up to it? Which elected official in charge of a country has been voted into power on the premise of declaring war on an entity on the other side of the world?
Terrorists have been around forever. You've melded "justice of terrorists acts" into "consensual war of nations".
No. They are terrorists. You are in control of professional soldiers. If you can't control your urge to hurt beyond such that you bomb doctors in hospitals, you shouldn't be in charge of anything remotely capable of doing that.
Bombing a hospital, even by mistake (which is hard if you've been told where it is), is very nearly an act of war in itself.
Even if you live in a country that's too fucking thick to sign up to the Geneva convention on humane treatment, you have to be a really stupid fucker to hit a hospital full of allied and even US-based doctors trying to heal the sick, injured and dying.
It's like shooting at the red cross. There's a reason that even special forces will not abuse the privileges provided by masquerading as red cross personnel.
Get your head out of your arse, and realise that your country just DELIBERATELY bombed a fucking hospital full of friendlies that they were told was there.
The sick and injured are not a threat to a military superpower.
Wait until the first 365 compromise, where you find out that all your documents, email and everything else that you use to communicate with customers and internally just became public.
Then see the sudden rush of realisation that just because Microsoft were hosting it for you, doesn't excuse you of your data protection obligations (at least for the entire EU), and you can't put the blame on them either.
I watch Amazon Instant Video, using Chrome, pushed across a ChromeCast to my TV.
When Chrome brought out the new ChromeCast, I bought one immediately just to get the 5GHz version, if nothing else (my 5GHz channels are dead, but the 2.4Ghz are jam-packed).
Fuck that up for me, Amazon, and I will just cancel the Prime subscription and not trust any software or online service from you again. I won't stop buying physical products, but you can forget all the add-on shit. No way I'm having my video library (which is 50% Amazon, 50% Google Play at the moment) tied into a format that I am denied playing how I like even though there is NO TECHNICAL BARRIER as far as I'm concerned. It works today, it should work tomorrow. If it doesn't, I'll reconsider how I use your service.
P.S. Why you'd buy a ChromeCast from Amazon anyway, I can't fathom. Bought from the Google website yesterday, have a delivery waiting for me at the post office today - not bad given that everyone was buying them. Same experience when I bought a Nexus for my daughter. Amazon is great, but you don't buy everything from Amazon just because it's convenient. It still has to be a good deal that you can't get elsewhere.
And this is why I like freedom in my licences as a consumer.
Sorry, pull this and lose my custom.
But I certainly will never give you a way to pull this on me retroactively or on a product I currently have and rely on.
The door swings both ways - you can't impose your political beliefs on me, and I can't stop you selling the software in your homeland either (unless you're doing something illegal there, etc.).
Maybe it's the country I grew up in, but anything "framed... in patriotic terms" is usually only ever a disguise for some of the worst atrocities and general scummy behaviour possible.
Be wary of people who are doing things "for their country" rather than, say, "for humanity", "for peace", etc.
My country is a geographic statistic of my birth. How that justifies criminal and/or amoral behaviour against those with a slightly different statistic, I've never quite fathomed.
Fuck, even "I did it because it looked like the right thing to do" holds a billion times more weight than any patriotic shit.
Patriotism is racism without mention of colour. "Not born here" syndrome.
Slashdot Mirror
Notice that it only mentions savings on electricity. While this is indeed a long-term saving, it's not taking account of anything to do with the purchase price and maintenance of the system.
I can save you 100% on your electricity for the next year. You just have to buy my huge-arse battery, and pay for a "recharge" once a year. Cost: More than you pay for electricity in a year.
Er... The EU are looking into it too and they will be recalling cars from there just the same.
It's not an EU only issue, they're in for a world of hurt world-wide.
Fuck. I'm security paranoid but leaving a port open on an IP is not the end of the world if you have anywhere near half a brain, even a well-known port.
Do you not have IP exclusion lists? Do you not have whitelisted users for RDP? Have you never run a terminal server? What about your firewall with in-built intrusion detection / prevention?
My workplace's port 3389, port 80 and port 25 are open. It doesn't mean you're talking to the *servers*. You're talking to the IDS/IPS which is analysing what you're doing. Hell, if you come from my home IP, they redirect to an ENTIRELY DIFFERENT PLACE to what everyone else sees on port 3389, for instance.
Case in point, if you don't know the words "Morto Inbound" then it means you're not monitoring your RDP port (it's a standard snort rule for that port) and/or you're just feeding it direct to an RDP server. Which, I agree, is moronic. But you have no way to tell, from just a port scan, what you're talking to and certainly no way to tell whether it's on the same network, VLAN, machine, etc. as the email server. And certainly not after-the-event.
Similarly, what fucking idiot just port-forwards port 80 to an internal webserver? You push it through reverse-proxy, and have the web servers as isolated as possible - even on an entirely separate VLAN. If nothing else it stops all those bollocks attacks with path traversal attempts etc. not to mention password brute-forcing, without having to change ANY of the underlying applications.
So, please, fire away and open yourself up to ridicule. These things are not dangerous if you have an ounce of common sense and treat them as what they are - untrusted connection ports. Sanitise, proxy, and isolate as necessary but you still have to have the fucking things open if you want to get anything done.
Fuck, even my workplace port 25 isn't the Exchange server. That's just moronic. Who would do that? It gets sanitised, analysed, proxied and multiple attempts from the same IP never even bother the actual, real email server whatsoever. After the third cock-up on the port, the firewall and proxy setup just block it out. On other setups, I've actually had it configured to send it to a tarpit email server that refuses all email (after long delays). But nowadays, I just block the IP for an hour or so.
Serious IT shops don't worry about open ports (sure, they keep the list minimal, and up-to-date, and document them). Because such things are part and parcel of running Internet-facing services. But they do make sure that they are monitored, proxied, sanitised, and not just handed off to random-PHP-application running on an internal server without at least some common sense applied en-route.
Fuck your setup. How the hell would you offer RDP to your users? You wouldn't. And fuck pissing about with strange ports (which two seconds of connecting to the port with telnet after finding it open with nmap will tell you exactly what protocol it's expecting!). Just make sure that you're applying proper procedures to random, incoming traffic.
And, sorry, but if any of your employee or internal administrator user accounts can be brute-forced over RDP, you're a fucking moron in more ways than one.
Are you using unlicensed Wifi spectrum for anything mission critical, such that jamming would be anything more than a slight inconvenience?
More fool you.
Why should your company be giving you this for free?
At what point does gaining "green credentials" falter under the expensive?
Do you really think that KW's of charging power available on demand throughout the day by allowing any significant percentage of your parking lot spaces to be able to charge is cheap or even possible? Honestly, you're into MW before you even get out of SMB territory.
Your electric cars are SO GOOD that you can't make it to work and then home before you need a charge?
There's just too much common sense missing from the article here. If your engine-based car conked out in the parking lot, would your company pay to put in fuel pumps or (worse) even pay the fuel for you? Not unless they were a HUGE company, and it would come with so many usage caveats.
If you're installed electric points and you are OVERSELLING them, how different is that to those ISPs oversubscribing their broadband connections, etc. and yet we moan about them?
The companies have a choice - install more capacity at great expense for a minority of users who can't be bothered to manage their recharging so it happens at home instead of work (at the saving of pence to them, and lots of money to the employer), leave things as they are and let people moan, or take all the chargers away.
I know which one I'd choose.
Yes, communism - as an ideal - is something that almost all practical interpretations of have led to failure. There's nothing wrong with the idea of doing things for the good of everyone, but it breaks down catastrophically the second you have one person who doesn't want to play ball and wants more than their fair share.
Communism is an idealist dream. It works only when everyone co-operates.
Really?
I'm far from a Trekkie but from what I remember of watching it and the various spin-off series when I was a kid, money did indeed exist.
The Ferengi, for example. Profit was their main aim.
End of argument.
Sure, we can argue canons and spin-offs and all kinds of junk but imagining something to be "free" because of some (mis-remembered) imaginary perfect world just isn't going to work in the real world.
Because voice recognition - just for starters - hasn't come on much in the last twenty years.
Last time I used Siri (which was only a few months ago), I asked it a simple question and it just sat there baffled. I spent twenty minutes trying all kinds of simplification, better pronunciations, and rewording but still it wasn't able to fathom anything useful from it. No, I don't have a strong accent (but what the fuck should that matter anyway?) and no I wasn't in a room full of noise (but - again - are we going to have to go outside and find a quiet spot to get these things to work in the future).
Apart from where there are obvious detectable keywords that they can make up the rest of the query around, these things are SHIT, and always have been.
I work in schools, I've dealt with a number of teachers and "learning support specialists" who hear that there is a voice recognition software, who then insist we need to use it for those children unable to write properly, and then trial it and discover just how useless it is - especially if the child already has even the most minor of communications problems too - and then realise what a waste of time it is.
One teacher I know wanted to write all their school reports using voice recognition because they were sold how wonderful it was by some guy paid to train them. Yeah, in a silent hall, using his exact phrasing, it seemed to work. Ten times slower than typing, but the demo was nice. However, you've not saved time or effort, you still have to double-check everything before it goes out (and inevitably on a computer because the devices aren't even close to being able to be controlled by voice - "Oh, no, change that word elephant to giraffe, please") and the accuracy in any real-world environment or using anything other than very basic phrasing SUCKED. I laughed when they told me that's how they wanted to write their reports - hundreds of them each per member of staff within a one-week window. The technology is honestly that bad.
And the rest is just bollocks of the highest order.
I charged my Samsung (non-i) phone once this week.
And that was only because it dipped below 30%.
Admittedly it's not calling 24 hours a day, but it's on 4G all the time and has modern smartphone capabilities.
16 hours battery life? That's pathetic. Really?
The one thing I have to hand to iPads is that they last a long time on battery. But 16 hours? That's just the perfectly ANNOYING level of battery life. Not enough to survive a day.
I see nothing to suggest, in any literature that I can find, that they are any more than ordinary scientists who have detected an anomalous effect. That's not fusion. And neither is it fraud.
They were asked to verify existing research in 2004 and were unable to. They tried again in 2009, and could only detect something unusual. Nobody has yet come forward with any proof, method or explanation that actually attributes it to cold fusion past rumour, hearsay and guesswork.
This is the current state of the field.
I'm not saying they are frauds, I'm not saying that this effect isn't present, I'm not even saying cold fusion is impossible. I'm saying that the current state of science is that it cannot be produced, harnessed, reproduced reliably, explained satisfactorily, or attributed to fusion at all.
There are plenty of "respected" scientists out there, with qualifications and professorships who are spouting all kinds of nonsense in all kinds of fields (and cold fusion still attracts them - look into the credentials of certain people involved in eCat etc.).
That's not what Wikipedia etc. tell me.
Not definitive research, obviously, but since 2004, there's been nothing of note that I can see, and most of it rehash / recheck of previous results.
Yes, the field suffered a huge PR setback, but it recovered shortly after but is now more a discredited FIELD than a PR disaster. Nobody is able to reproduce even the early results, let alone come up with anything new.
And although such science is worthy of investigation, there is still investigation ongoing. And none of it appears to be particularly productive.
The crap about LENR being reproduced in 200 labs seems... well... bollocks to me. There's a big difference between an anomalous result and actual confirmed cold fusion and they almost all fall into the former virtually immediately.
As with all things scientific and Wiki-related: citation required.
Er... please do. You'll hurt yourself more than you'll ever hurt us.
In case you haven't noticed, the US is *not* top of quite a lot of things. Even when it is top, the EU is right behind it. Additionally, all those visas are for researchers and people already established to be in short supply in your native population. ANY country in the world would be idiotic to cancel visas like that. That's where the best international talent is choosing to come to your country and contribute to YOUR economy rather than their native one.
Cutting off your nose to spite your face is not an established or recognised economic tactic for a reason.
P.S. "I want your US-based ISP to give all your data to my EU-based company that owns a website that you occasionally log into. Why are you resisting? What's wrong with you? Just give it to me or I'll cancel all your visas!" Notice how STUPID it sounds when you turn it the other way around?
Severing ties with the US would be a net gain on our end. Unfortunately, you only get a net loss on the other or things wouldn't balance. It might also mean that we no longer feel obligated to follow you into wars that had nothing to do with us.
a) A fork is not the end of the original project. It can be. But usually it's not.
b) "In October 2014, Garrett stated on his blog that he would no longer contribute Linux kernel changes relating to Intel hardware" - That's pettiness, and I'm sure the kernel came to a grinding halt that day too.
c) If you can't get your changes past other people, to the point that you have to fork and maintain an entirely separate branch on your own, that's usually the sign of messy code or absolute loss. It means that you want only YOUR way to be the way. That kind of lack of co-operation isn't the way forward, but you are more than free to pursue that. The number of followers of that fork versus the stock kernel is likely to be tiny, and changes likely to come back in the "accepted" format into the stock kernel before you see any real usage of it outside developers and testers.
d) "He is a recipient of the Free Software Award from the Free Software Foundation for his work on Secure Boot, UEFI, and the Linux kernel". Ah! All the bits that I *don't* want in the kernel. Did he work on systemd too?
If you don't trust them, and know that, that it doesn't matter what you use.
Encrypt, and only use encrypted. You can do this in many different ways, but if you never reveal the encryption key to them, YOU CAN GIVE YOUR ADVERSARY ALL YOUR ENCRYPTED DATA. That's the whole point of encryption.
Encrypt, store in the cloud in any location you like. All they get is encrypted data that they can't do anything with. As only you need to access it (and not random general public, which is a much more difficult thing to secure), only you need the key.
Problem solved.
In the EU (but not the UK), banks will send you a text for EVERY credit card transaction. If there's a problem, you can contact the bank. It's also free.
Are you really telling me, in this day and age, that we can't have suspect transactions result in a text to your phone that you can then authorise - even before the web page refreshes?
Banking is so in the 1950s of computing that it's laughable. It's done deliberately in some circumstances to profit from charges, fees and the timings of clearing payments. But you can't claim fraud if you haven't taken SIMPLE measures against it.
Like asking the user to confirm suspect transactions using a secondary method (that can be phone for old people without mobile phones, text for those with phones, maybe even the bank's secure app if you so choose). Declining a card transaction because it comes from an unusual place is no longer a metric to decide on the suspicion assigned to a transaction. I've purchased from all over the world, especially in the run-up to Christmas when Amazon, eBay et al only stock the normal boring stuff and I want something a bit different.
In one instance, my Italian relative came over, went to a DIY store with us, paid for the transaction and KNEW BEFORE WE'D HIT THE DOORS that he'd been double-charged on his bank account. A text came through, then another, in a foreign country, before he'd even left the shop. And we were then able to cancel the second transaction.
Why the fuck isn't just this standard practice?
Is it just me?
"Don't be evil" is like said "Don't commit crime".
It's stupid, obvious, and pointless to say. It should be obvious.
"Do the right thing" is much, much, much more difficult to do and something that happens much less often.
Not that it matters, it's a fucking company motto, which means nowhere near as much as they've spent on consultants to come up with that bollocks.
But in terms of semantics, this is an upgrade, if anything.
Great floods are recorded worldwide throughout history.
2 or 7 of every animal on Earth on a boat? That's the bit that's bollocks.
Where's the declaration of this war? Which nations signed up to it? Which elected official in charge of a country has been voted into power on the premise of declaring war on an entity on the other side of the world?
Terrorists have been around forever. You've melded "justice of terrorists acts" into "consensual war of nations".
No. They are terrorists. You are in control of professional soldiers. If you can't control your urge to hurt beyond such that you bomb doctors in hospitals, you shouldn't be in charge of anything remotely capable of doing that.
Ignorant fuck.
Bombing a hospital, even by mistake (which is hard if you've been told where it is), is very nearly an act of war in itself.
Even if you live in a country that's too fucking thick to sign up to the Geneva convention on humane treatment, you have to be a really stupid fucker to hit a hospital full of allied and even US-based doctors trying to heal the sick, injured and dying.
It's like shooting at the red cross. There's a reason that even special forces will not abuse the privileges provided by masquerading as red cross personnel.
Get your head out of your arse, and realise that your country just DELIBERATELY bombed a fucking hospital full of friendlies that they were told was there.
The sick and injured are not a threat to a military superpower.
Wait until the first 365 compromise, where you find out that all your documents, email and everything else that you use to communicate with customers and internally just became public.
Then see the sudden rush of realisation that just because Microsoft were hosting it for you, doesn't excuse you of your data protection obligations (at least for the entire EU), and you can't put the blame on them either.
I watch Amazon Instant Video, using Chrome, pushed across a ChromeCast to my TV.
When Chrome brought out the new ChromeCast, I bought one immediately just to get the 5GHz version, if nothing else (my 5GHz channels are dead, but the 2.4Ghz are jam-packed).
Fuck that up for me, Amazon, and I will just cancel the Prime subscription and not trust any software or online service from you again. I won't stop buying physical products, but you can forget all the add-on shit. No way I'm having my video library (which is 50% Amazon, 50% Google Play at the moment) tied into a format that I am denied playing how I like even though there is NO TECHNICAL BARRIER as far as I'm concerned. It works today, it should work tomorrow. If it doesn't, I'll reconsider how I use your service.
P.S. Why you'd buy a ChromeCast from Amazon anyway, I can't fathom. Bought from the Google website yesterday, have a delivery waiting for me at the post office today - not bad given that everyone was buying them. Same experience when I bought a Nexus for my daughter. Amazon is great, but you don't buy everything from Amazon just because it's convenient. It still has to be a good deal that you can't get elsewhere.
And nothing of value was lost.
And this is why I like freedom in my licences as a consumer.
Sorry, pull this and lose my custom.
But I certainly will never give you a way to pull this on me retroactively or on a product I currently have and rely on.
The door swings both ways - you can't impose your political beliefs on me, and I can't stop you selling the software in your homeland either (unless you're doing something illegal there, etc.).
Maybe it's the country I grew up in, but anything "framed... in patriotic terms" is usually only ever a disguise for some of the worst atrocities and general scummy behaviour possible.
Be wary of people who are doing things "for their country" rather than, say, "for humanity", "for peace", etc.
My country is a geographic statistic of my birth. How that justifies criminal and/or amoral behaviour against those with a slightly different statistic, I've never quite fathomed.
Fuck, even "I did it because it looked like the right thing to do" holds a billion times more weight than any patriotic shit.
Patriotism is racism without mention of colour. "Not born here" syndrome.