Credit card charges will probably cost them as much as mailing that paper, which would be paid by check instead of credit card, usually.
Fortunately, the local Verizon store is right next to my favorite restaurant. I'll make sure I use paper billing (to cost them more) and pay in person (costing them employee time) using a credit card (to cost them transaction charges). If I have to spend $2 to do it the easy way, I'll make sure it costs them as much as possible for me to do it the hard way.
On what, exactly? I know I'm in a pretty progressive company in a lot of ways, but I can't imagine what would cause that much new paper to be generated each month.
Since we're tossing out anecdotes... I bought a used eMac from a friend who was upgrading to something else. When it was nearly three years old, the display started corrupting and freezing (but in grand Unix tradition, I could still SSH into it). I called Apple and they said it was a known problem with a batch of bad capacitors on the video card, and that they'd extended the 1-year warranty to 3 years for that specific part. With 4 days left on the extended warranty, I returned my used eMac to an Apple store where they fixed it without charging me a penny.
I don't doubt your story that you had a bad experience with Apple, but I've had nothing but good to say about them.
My coworker called Apple last Monday because his iPhone had problems. The replacement came the next morning by 10AM or so. I know that doesn't mean their customer service is always wonderful, but it shows that they're at least capable of it when they want to be. And from most accounts I've read, they usually want to be.
These self-righteous bastards view it as some kind of justice, when in fact they're just polluting the review ecosystem with lies, hearsay, and crappy manifestos. If the product or company is that bad it will become clear, from the legitimate reviews, quite quickly. No need to break out your weird brand of street justice and fuck up the system for everyone.
I disagree. The first "review bomb" I remember taking notice of was when EA released "Spore" with terrible DRM and roughly a zillion people lined up to warn would-be purchases that they were about to screw up their PC. Why shouldn't someone give software bad reviews when they have a legitimate beef with it?
They'll negatively review products they've never seen from companies or people they've never spoken to because of the author/companies political views
Yeah, in the real world I sometimes refuse to give my money to people who support positions I disagree with. In fact, that's pretty common for most people.
Take an example 1/4" = 0.635 cm, it's a hell of a lot easier (and cheaper) to make something 1/4th of the length of something else, versus 127/200th of some standard length.
I assure you that milling machines don't care if you do your math in base-pi as long as you program them in their native units.
Again, this is regarding domain registration, not web hosting. I don't care so much if a web host doesn't allow me to cuss or make fun of people because I can pick a different web host. There aren't nearly so many registrars to choose from.
But there are already laws that kick in there, hence the phrase "illegal purposes". If their terms of service said something like "we can delete your domain if ordered by a court of law", then I'd have no problem with it at all. Instead, they open the floodgates for deleting domains for any reason they feel like.
But it's not for web hosting - it's for domain registration. In what conceivable world could a domain's content cause legal trouble for a pre-SOPA American registrar?
Following up to myself, the blog post I mentioned points out the nearly identical terms and conditions in GoDaddy's and Namecheap's contracts. Gandi has the same objectionable terms. I've written to NearlyFreeSpeech to ask for clarification of their policy but haven't heard back yet, and it looks like Hover specifically avoids any "morality clauses".
I transferred an expiring domain to Namecheap last week for reasons unrelated to GoDaddy's asshattery, but I saw a blog post (that I can no longer find, alas) pointing out something in Namecheap's TOS that bothers the hell out of me. Specifically:
You agree that Namecheap, in its sole discretion and without liability to you, may refuse to accept the registration of any domain name. Namecheap also may in its sole discretion and without liability to you delete the registration of any domain name during the first thirty (30) days after registration has taken place. Namecheap may also cancel the registration of a domain name, after thirty (30) days, if that name is being used, as determined by Namecheap in its sole discretion, in association with spam or morally objectionable activities (as well as any activities set forth in Section 4 above). Morally objectionable activities will include, but not be limited to 1) activities designed to defame, embarrass, harm, abuse, threaten, slander or harass third parties; 2) activities prohibited by the laws of the United States and/or foreign territories in which you conduct business; 3) activities designed to encourage unlawful behavior by others, such as hate crimes, terrorism and child pornography; 4) activities that are tortious, vulgar, obscene, invasive of the privacy of a third party, racially, ethnically, or otherwise objectionable; activities designed to impersonate the identity of a third party; 5) and activities designed to harm or use unethically minors in any way.
Note the part about "Namecheap in its sole discretion" and imagine that the guy answering the "abuse@" email is having a bad day. Suppose I have a blog on a domain registered through them and I:
1) Embarrass a local politician.
2) Get AdSense revenue from a post saying that the Egyptian government sucks.
3) Say I think it's OK for someone to smoke pot, even if it's illegal where they live.
4) Say something that someone, somewhere, thinks is vulgar or obscene.
5) Make fun of Justin Bieber.
Namecheap could decide in its sole discretion that any of those is sufficient to delete my domain from the registry. Frankly, that's bullshit. I know that Namecheap is unlikely to do something so boneheaded, but I'm utterly against them having the right to yank me off the Internet just because they don't like what I've said. And although I'm talking here about Namecheap specifically, I recognize that a lot of other registrars have similar terms. Does anyone use a more freedom-respecting registrar that they would recommend?
Funny as hell. And I thought they'd lost any thinking customers once the elephant shoot hit the headlines.
I've heard several people mention both that and Go Daddy's less-than-stellar track record on admitting that women are human. Either of those alone should be sufficient to drop them on ethical grounds. But even a completely amoral sociopath who couldn't care less about elephants or other people can get angry at Go Daddy's desire to censor them.
Registrar with free DNS slaving and IPv6 glue?
on
GoDaddy Backs SOPA
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· Score: 1
I've used Domain Monger for years out of simple inertia. One of their features that I love is that I can set their DNS servers to slave off my self-hosted master server. I can make changes locally by editing my zone files, running rndc reload which sends NOTIFYs to their servers, and have the changes live on the Internet a few seconds later. I really, really don't want to give that up.
The problem is that Domain Monger is more expensive than other registrars, they're relatively tiny (will they be around 5 years from now? I don't know), and they don't support IPv6 glue records. I've asked Name.com's tech support and they don't support slave DNS. gkg.net offered to do it for "just" $25/year, which is way more than I pay for the domains themselves through Domain Monger. I haven't found a definitive answer yet for Namecheap.com. Does anyone know of a good registrar with decent prices, IPv6 glue support, and slave DNS?
While I agree that a working print system is basic and necessary, I "do actual work" in an actual office for an actual paycheck and I've printed maybe 20 work-related pages in the last decade.
sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop and log in to KDE
...after downloading a few hundred MB of new apps and libraries to replace the few hundred MB of old apps and libraries that the user probably didn't want in the first place if they were trying for a KDE desktop.
Do people really have personalized home pages now that Facebook came about (other than some hobbyists or professionals who run a side business)?
I have a blog (tech notes: static pages compiled with Blogofile and my own photo album plugin). If I get bored with Facebook, I can disconnect without losing any of my posts or photos - or the links to them. If I want faster web hosting than my home DSL provides, I can upload the files to a dirt cheap static host. I have virtually unlimited space with no content restrictions, upload limits, or annual fees over what I'm already paying for Internet access. I definitely fall into your hobbyist/professional category but it's more that I want more control over my web presence than any social network would give me.
A request for a screen element like an iframe 10,000 times the height of of the screen clearly fails any reasonable sanity check you might think of.
Never underestimated the size of a log file before opening it in an editor, huh? No, 0123456 is completely correct: it's the kernel's job to validate its function parameters. That doesn't mean Safari should be gratuitously throwing ridiculous values at it, but Safari should be able to without anything bad happening.
For example, you'll probably never need to printf("%1000000000000000s", &hugebuffer), but libc is required to tell you if you've asked it to do something dumb that it can't fulfill. It's right there in the spec. If it fails to ensure it can sanely execute your request, it's broken.
You're probably right and that's too bad. I didn't spend much time with the jocks at the reunion, but really enjoyed catching up with the other geeky kids I ran around with. I see those same people on Facebook, but that has nothing with a welcoming hug or slap on the back and genuine smiles all around.
And as someone else pointed out, a lot of the high school jerks mellowed out into perfectly decent people. I can think of a few people I couldn't stand back then who were friendly, pleasant, and chatty at the reunion.
When my wife brought up the idea of going to her 10 year reunion a few years back, I asked her what she was going to learn at said reunion that she doesn't already know from her Facebook news feed.
I went to my last reunion and had a great time hanging out in real life with friends I rarely get to see in person. Spending time with people you enjoy isn't about updating news items. It's about having fun conversations, laughing, and being connected to humanity. Facebook doesn't do that stuff.
My dad sufficiently terrified me of the 12 gauge that I'm still nervous about firing it, fully expecting it to dislocate my shoulder and launch me backward.
My kids have two simple firearm rules:
If you want to shoot a gun, let me know and we'll go to a friend's place in the countryside and shoot one. It's no big deal and not a special occasion; just ask and we can go fire off a few rounds.
If you ever, ever touch a gun outside of rule #1, I will kill you.
That's it. They're not some mystical forbidden fruit to play with when no one's looking, but just another recreational object that's OK to enjoy under supervision.
And sadly enough, it would be a completely different story for a kid today.
Yeah. Today you'd have to explain to the police why you allowed your kid to be near a hot iron, and even though they'd roll their eyes, abuse reporting laws would compel them to call Child Services who would then launch their own investigation.
In some ways, being a parent sucks these days. My youngest daughter fell on the driveway and bonked her head a while back. She started acting goofy so we took her to the ER to make sure she was OK. I lost track of how many different staffers we had to explain the injury to. How'd it happen, again? Who was present? Has she been injured before? How many injuries have your other kids had? How much food do you have in the home? Do you own firearms?
I think a good part of the reason people are so quick to blame is that the law doesn't allow accidents to happen anymore. Whenever something unfortunate happens, it has to be someone's fault. Parents have to find someone else to blame to deflect likely punishment. How many times have you heard "why wasn't someone watching"? The correct answer is "because kids don't require 24-7 supervision and how often did your parents watch you as a child?", but that reply will get your kids sent to a foster home.
The discrete cosine transform that mp3 uses typically requires about 512 samples to effectively capture the necessary coefficients that represent a statistically coherent unit of audio, or "frame" in mp3's terminology.
That seems reasonable and I'll take your word for it. In practice, then, an MP3 frame is about 1/80th of a second (41,000 samples/sec / 512 samples/frame ~= 80 frames/second)? If so, a completely empty extra frame between two tracks would inject 12ms of silence between songs. Is that noticeable enough to be an issue?
Because microbiology and astronomy totally helped my network admin degree.
I too "wasted" a lot of time in sociology, political science, writing, and history on my way to a comp sci degree. Who cares that it helps me understand my government and my country, and enables me to talk to smart people at parties without feeling like a total idiot?
Hey! I got my CSC degree there in 2000. I take the same experience: I lived with my parents and borrowed around $1,500 each semester for tuition and used books. It wasn't glamorous but I loved the school and it's been a good investment.
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Credit card charges will probably cost them as much as mailing that paper, which would be paid by check instead of credit card, usually.
Fortunately, the local Verizon store is right next to my favorite restaurant. I'll make sure I use paper billing (to cost them more) and pay in person (costing them employee time) using a credit card (to cost them transaction charges). If I have to spend $2 to do it the easy way, I'll make sure it costs them as much as possible for me to do it the hard way.
On what, exactly? I know I'm in a pretty progressive company in a lot of ways, but I can't imagine what would cause that much new paper to be generated each month.
Since we're tossing out anecdotes... I bought a used eMac from a friend who was upgrading to something else. When it was nearly three years old, the display started corrupting and freezing (but in grand Unix tradition, I could still SSH into it). I called Apple and they said it was a known problem with a batch of bad capacitors on the video card, and that they'd extended the 1-year warranty to 3 years for that specific part. With 4 days left on the extended warranty, I returned my used eMac to an Apple store where they fixed it without charging me a penny.
I don't doubt your story that you had a bad experience with Apple, but I've had nothing but good to say about them.
My coworker called Apple last Monday because his iPhone had problems. The replacement came the next morning by 10AM or so. I know that doesn't mean their customer service is always wonderful, but it shows that they're at least capable of it when they want to be. And from most accounts I've read, they usually want to be.
These self-righteous bastards view it as some kind of justice, when in fact they're just polluting the review ecosystem with lies, hearsay, and crappy manifestos. If the product or company is that bad it will become clear, from the legitimate reviews, quite quickly. No need to break out your weird brand of street justice and fuck up the system for everyone.
I disagree. The first "review bomb" I remember taking notice of was when EA released "Spore" with terrible DRM and roughly a zillion people lined up to warn would-be purchases that they were about to screw up their PC. Why shouldn't someone give software bad reviews when they have a legitimate beef with it?
They'll negatively review products they've never seen from companies or people they've never spoken to because of the author/companies political views
Yeah, in the real world I sometimes refuse to give my money to people who support positions I disagree with. In fact, that's pretty common for most people.
Take an example 1/4" = 0.635 cm, it's a hell of a lot easier (and cheaper) to make something 1/4th of the length of something else, versus 127/200th of some standard length.
I assure you that milling machines don't care if you do your math in base-pi as long as you program them in their native units.
Not in my company. That whole "paperless office" thing is coming to fruition in a lot of places.
Again, this is regarding domain registration, not web hosting. I don't care so much if a web host doesn't allow me to cuss or make fun of people because I can pick a different web host. There aren't nearly so many registrars to choose from.
But there are already laws that kick in there, hence the phrase "illegal purposes". If their terms of service said something like "we can delete your domain if ordered by a court of law", then I'd have no problem with it at all. Instead, they open the floodgates for deleting domains for any reason they feel like.
But it's not for web hosting - it's for domain registration. In what conceivable world could a domain's content cause legal trouble for a pre-SOPA American registrar?
Following up to myself, the blog post I mentioned points out the nearly identical terms and conditions in GoDaddy's and Namecheap's contracts. Gandi has the same objectionable terms. I've written to NearlyFreeSpeech to ask for clarification of their policy but haven't heard back yet, and it looks like Hover specifically avoids any "morality clauses".
I transferred an expiring domain to Namecheap last week for reasons unrelated to GoDaddy's asshattery, but I saw a blog post (that I can no longer find, alas) pointing out something in Namecheap's TOS that bothers the hell out of me. Specifically:
You agree that Namecheap, in its sole discretion and without liability to you, may refuse to accept the registration of any domain name. Namecheap also may in its sole discretion and without liability to you delete the registration of any domain name during the first thirty (30) days after registration has taken place. Namecheap may also cancel the registration of a domain name, after thirty (30) days, if that name is being used, as determined by Namecheap in its sole discretion, in association with spam or morally objectionable activities (as well as any activities set forth in Section 4 above). Morally objectionable activities will include, but not be limited to 1) activities designed to defame, embarrass, harm, abuse, threaten, slander or harass third parties; 2) activities prohibited by the laws of the United States and/or foreign territories in which you conduct business; 3) activities designed to encourage unlawful behavior by others, such as hate crimes, terrorism and child pornography; 4) activities that are tortious, vulgar, obscene, invasive of the privacy of a third party, racially, ethnically, or otherwise objectionable; activities designed to impersonate the identity of a third party; 5) and activities designed to harm or use unethically minors in any way.
Note the part about "Namecheap in its sole discretion" and imagine that the guy answering the "abuse@" email is having a bad day. Suppose I have a blog on a domain registered through them and I:
1) Embarrass a local politician.
2) Get AdSense revenue from a post saying that the Egyptian government sucks.
3) Say I think it's OK for someone to smoke pot, even if it's illegal where they live.
4) Say something that someone, somewhere, thinks is vulgar or obscene.
5) Make fun of Justin Bieber.
Namecheap could decide in its sole discretion that any of those is sufficient to delete my domain from the registry. Frankly, that's bullshit. I know that Namecheap is unlikely to do something so boneheaded, but I'm utterly against them having the right to yank me off the Internet just because they don't like what I've said. And although I'm talking here about Namecheap specifically, I recognize that a lot of other registrars have similar terms. Does anyone use a more freedom-respecting registrar that they would recommend?
Funny as hell. And I thought they'd lost any thinking customers once the elephant shoot hit the headlines.
I've heard several people mention both that and Go Daddy's less-than-stellar track record on admitting that women are human. Either of those alone should be sufficient to drop them on ethical grounds. But even a completely amoral sociopath who couldn't care less about elephants or other people can get angry at Go Daddy's desire to censor them.
I've used Domain Monger for years out of simple inertia. One of their features that I love is that I can set their DNS servers to slave off my self-hosted master server. I can make changes locally by editing my zone files, running rndc reload which sends NOTIFYs to their servers, and have the changes live on the Internet a few seconds later. I really, really don't want to give that up.
The problem is that Domain Monger is more expensive than other registrars, they're relatively tiny (will they be around 5 years from now? I don't know), and they don't support IPv6 glue records. I've asked Name.com's tech support and they don't support slave DNS. gkg.net offered to do it for "just" $25/year, which is way more than I pay for the domains themselves through Domain Monger. I haven't found a definitive answer yet for Namecheap.com. Does anyone know of a good registrar with decent prices, IPv6 glue support, and slave DNS?
While I agree that a working print system is basic and necessary, I "do actual work" in an actual office for an actual paycheck and I've printed maybe 20 work-related pages in the last decade.
sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop and log in to KDE
...after downloading a few hundred MB of new apps and libraries to replace the few hundred MB of old apps and libraries that the user probably didn't want in the first place if they were trying for a KDE desktop.
Do people really have personalized home pages now that Facebook came about (other than some hobbyists or professionals who run a side business)?
I have a blog (tech notes: static pages compiled with Blogofile and my own photo album plugin). If I get bored with Facebook, I can disconnect without losing any of my posts or photos - or the links to them. If I want faster web hosting than my home DSL provides, I can upload the files to a dirt cheap static host. I have virtually unlimited space with no content restrictions, upload limits, or annual fees over what I'm already paying for Internet access. I definitely fall into your hobbyist/professional category but it's more that I want more control over my web presence than any social network would give me.
A request for a screen element like an iframe 10,000 times the height of of the screen clearly fails any reasonable sanity check you might think of.
Never underestimated the size of a log file before opening it in an editor, huh? No, 0123456 is completely correct: it's the kernel's job to validate its function parameters. That doesn't mean Safari should be gratuitously throwing ridiculous values at it, but Safari should be able to without anything bad happening.
For example, you'll probably never need to printf("%1000000000000000s", &hugebuffer), but libc is required to tell you if you've asked it to do something dumb that it can't fulfill. It's right there in the spec. If it fails to ensure it can sanely execute your request, it's broken.
You're probably right and that's too bad. I didn't spend much time with the jocks at the reunion, but really enjoyed catching up with the other geeky kids I ran around with. I see those same people on Facebook, but that has nothing with a welcoming hug or slap on the back and genuine smiles all around.
And as someone else pointed out, a lot of the high school jerks mellowed out into perfectly decent people. I can think of a few people I couldn't stand back then who were friendly, pleasant, and chatty at the reunion.
When my wife brought up the idea of going to her 10 year reunion a few years back, I asked her what she was going to learn at said reunion that she doesn't already know from her Facebook news feed.
I went to my last reunion and had a great time hanging out in real life with friends I rarely get to see in person. Spending time with people you enjoy isn't about updating news items. It's about having fun conversations, laughing, and being connected to humanity. Facebook doesn't do that stuff.
My dad sufficiently terrified me of the 12 gauge that I'm still nervous about firing it, fully expecting it to dislocate my shoulder and launch me backward.
My kids have two simple firearm rules:
That's it. They're not some mystical forbidden fruit to play with when no one's looking, but just another recreational object that's OK to enjoy under supervision.
And sadly enough, it would be a completely different story for a kid today.
Yeah. Today you'd have to explain to the police why you allowed your kid to be near a hot iron, and even though they'd roll their eyes, abuse reporting laws would compel them to call Child Services who would then launch their own investigation.
In some ways, being a parent sucks these days. My youngest daughter fell on the driveway and bonked her head a while back. She started acting goofy so we took her to the ER to make sure she was OK. I lost track of how many different staffers we had to explain the injury to. How'd it happen, again? Who was present? Has she been injured before? How many injuries have your other kids had? How much food do you have in the home? Do you own firearms?
I think a good part of the reason people are so quick to blame is that the law doesn't allow accidents to happen anymore. Whenever something unfortunate happens, it has to be someone's fault. Parents have to find someone else to blame to deflect likely punishment. How many times have you heard "why wasn't someone watching"? The correct answer is "because kids don't require 24-7 supervision and how often did your parents watch you as a child?", but that reply will get your kids sent to a foster home.
The discrete cosine transform that mp3 uses typically requires about 512 samples to effectively capture the necessary coefficients that represent a statistically coherent unit of audio, or "frame" in mp3's terminology.
That seems reasonable and I'll take your word for it. In practice, then, an MP3 frame is about 1/80th of a second (41,000 samples/sec / 512 samples/frame ~= 80 frames/second)? If so, a completely empty extra frame between two tracks would inject 12ms of silence between songs. Is that noticeable enough to be an issue?
Because microbiology and astronomy totally helped my network admin degree.
I too "wasted" a lot of time in sociology, political science, writing, and history on my way to a comp sci degree. Who cares that it helps me understand my government and my country, and enables me to talk to smart people at parties without feeling like a total idiot?
Hey! I got my CSC degree there in 2000. I take the same experience: I lived with my parents and borrowed around $1,500 each semester for tuition and used books. It wasn't glamorous but I loved the school and it's been a good investment.