It has only gotten worse. I'm planning to close my account soon. The final straw for me was a group that a friend runs is now invisible to several of us in the group - there's nothing on his end that would seem to be causing it, and I (and several others) didn't block it, but...at least three of us can't see the group (there are probably more, but you don't notice it's missing until you go look for it, and of course any post from the group doesn't show up on our walls). Even when he sends us a direct URL to the group page, it just takes us back to our own feed. Facebook is turning into Skynet. I just need to get a few family members to revert back to email for contacting me, clean up a few things, then I'm out.
Oh, yeah, I've been turned over to collections a couple times, because of old bills that weren't paid that I was unaware of. One was a medical bill for $100 that I thought had been paid but hadn't (an error on my part); another was a vehicle tax bill (in which my former state even HAD my new address but still somehow neglected to bother to contact me before heading to collections - and it turned out in fact I didn't owe them a cent; I was able to give three separate reasons for why I didn't owe that money) for $35. It wasn't a matter of not being able to pay it. Knowing what has happened to me makes me laugh at that 35% number - it's certainly artificially inflated with stupid debts in situations like mine - someone goofs (me or someone else) and the debt just sits there unbeknownst to you, until you check your credit report, apply for a mortgage, or get something in the mail about it. This reminds me, we haven't checked ours lately... last time I did, I found a credit card for Wal-Mart on my record, a card I've never had.
I've tried replying to let them know they sent the email to the wrong address (as requested in the disclaimer), along with a bill for $200 for the service. They never respond.
To me, it's yet more evidence that our health insurance should not be tied up with our employment. I don't know what the right solution to untangling that mess is, but we have to do something different.
I've not heard anyone describe functionality added to MS Office since Office 2000. Excel has it's uses, but what have they done to it since, except forced people to learn new places for buttons?
Exactly! And they didn't really even do that - they just converted the drop down menus into the "ribbon". They didn't rethink the logic. For example, it still throws me - after using Word for at least 15 years - that page numbering is on the "Insert" menu/tab. I can see "inserting" page numbers the first time I add them to a document, but most of the time I need that control, it's because I'm editing page numbers that are already there, so "insert" is not the menu I think of when I want to do that. It should be a "page layout" option - it's something that's usually fixed on every page, in a defined layout, regardless of what else is on the page, like headers, footers, margins, etc.
In short, Microsoft didn't take the time to rethink how people use Office and see if they could perhaps improve efficiency, with a cost of a learning curve while people learned the new way. Instead, they just converted the menus to buttons and sold it as a huge upgrade, at the cost of the learning curve for the ribbon with no net gain in the end.
The shells aren't, but often the frames are, or are close to it - they're just steel. (Airstream owner here, although ours is a relatively young one, built in '95. I do have quite a few friends with vintage units from the 60s and before, though. Some of them had to do shell-off restorations, starting with the frame, to get them usable again.)
I'm going to Vienna, Austria (from the US) in a few weeks for work. My work-supplied credit card doesn't have the chip, so I asked about getting one with it. The area that handles the cards in my office said, "You're the first to ask about them," and called the credit card issuer. The CC company came back and said, "No, we don't issue them." Oddly enough, I have a personal CC in my wallet with the chip, issued by that same company. That card will be going with me to Europe.
They used to have an entire section for politics, then it would be easy to remove those stories from the feed. This, for inexplicable reasons, is filed under "Hardware".
i'm all for mass transit and use it almost every day, but i'm in NYC
a lot of cities in the US aren't dense enough to support the costs of the system
I'm not sure mass transit is self-supporting anywhere in the world. But people see the build cost + maintenance costs and flip out, ignoring that roads also have a build cost + maintenance cost + police cost + etc.
Uh, Apple does make an adapter for it... I know it's $30, but it's at least a solution. (Our car has a USB port, so it's just a matter of changing the cable for us.)
They failed to mention it only supports apple products.
Are you sure? Android phones now use something called "MTP", which most devices don't seem to support (neither of our car stereos do, one is a factory Honda, the other is a Pioneer; similarly, my Macbook Pro *still* can't connect to my S3, a year and a half after I bought the phone). Did you try a standard USB drive? I bet it'll work.
They have those already - at least the sonar one. It pings for up to 30 days once it hits the water. The issue is that you have to be relatively close to the plane to hear the pinging. Even with Air France 447 when the ACARS data told us where the plane was as it was crashing, it still took almost two years and several searches to find the hull of the plane. In this case, it appears everyone spent the last several days looking in the wrong place, because the military either didn't report or no one listened to their report of spotting the plane in a very different, unexpected location over an hour after it disappeared off the civilian radar. I hope someone in charge wrote down that lesson.
As for the cost of the devices: How much is this search costing the countries involved? It's probably enough to pay for installation on quite a few airliners at this point...
What I find amazing is there is a large segment of the population who will get up in arms over this kind of collection, dig out their pitchforks and storm the castle, but will willingly post GEO tagged photos online to document their "privacy" protest activities. These same people will run Google maps, Wayze or other applications on their smartphone to navigate their way to the protest, then do the same to find someplace to eat, while cranking up the coupon application to find a deal on the sandwich they are hungry for. These folks don't think twice about their privacy in any other context.
You don't see the difference? Google Maps, Waze, etc. provide a useful service to the user in return for that information. Repo camera databases don't.
Yep. Also, I recently got life insurance, and one of the questions they asked me was, "Have you been aboard an aircraft other than as a passenger on a commercial airliner?" I wonder how much a "yes" answer would've cost me each month. I'd love to do it, but we're talking about $6000-$8000 just for the license, daytime, single engine only. How much more for any of the other certifications? I drive past an airfield every day on my way home from work and look longingly...then remember how much it costs.
Sport pilot would be cheaper, of course. But as you pointed out there are quite a few expenses aside from just the license.
And, it's not like you can, say, fly yourself to vacation to save money. A friend of mine has his license and his own plane (owned one before he even could drive, in fact), and still flies commercial whenever he needs to actually go somewhere.
That's the point of a protest though; to get the attention of people who might otherwise not notice that there is a problem.
They are effectively picketing slashdot; inconveniencing the normal readers like you and I, to put pressure on the management to take their protest more seriously, and offer something more than just platitudes and empty promises.
It's not working...this is the first I've noticed ANYTHING, and I usually check/. a couple times a day. I have tags turned off, because they're useless, and I'm logged in. I may have looked at beta once or twice a while back.
I just looked at it and didn't care for it, though. What's with the useless, unrelated pictures - a compass for the article about GPS dead reckoning in cars? A picture of LEGO on an article about coding? Useless. I don't get the top "block" of three stories or whatever... what happened to the summaries of those? The menu bar is of little use to me - I don't browse by topic, and I doubt many others do, either. And the narrow comments isn't good, either - as deep as this thread is, my comment would be about one character wide in beta...all kinds of fun for reading! There is a trend amongst web designers to make everything very narrow, ignoring that the interruption while your eyes move to the next line makes the text harder to read and comprehend.
We get the Sunday Washington Post, which includes a free subscription to their website that can be shared with a second person. The coupons we get more than pay for the cost of the subscription, and I get the Sunday comics to read...on Saturday. My wife also checks the ads for sales on stuff we'll need soon. The newspaper itself goes right in the recycling bin, unfortunately. (Side note: this tells me there's a market for a service of just delivering coupons like the papers do, but it would make more money than the newspaper by ignoring the news!)
The only reason I continue to use Network Solutions is because over the years (and yes, some of my domains have been up since the 90's as well) I've watched other name registering outfits come and go, seen various name server problems, etc., and for all their horrifying business practices and high prices, my sites seem to always work, which is what I place the most emphasis on.
Seriously? You can find reviews of plenty of other domain registration sites. I use pairnic.com (which is part of pair.com hosting...they've been around 18 years, according to the email they sent me the other day), and pay $14/year for domain names, without any of this crap, and I've been using them for at least 10 years. I'm sure there are plenty of other good ones, too. Don't reward an abuser.
I completely agree with you, but how long until an airline gets sued because a passenger was unable to take an emergency-related call? Reasonable policy exceptions must be allowed.
Well, how many times has the government been sued for that very same issue until now?
My Yahoo email address (yeah, I know, and I'm moving away from it - I've had the account since 1995 or 1996, but this latest mail interface redesign is finally getting me motivated to stop using it for anything other than junk mail) often receives legitimate mail intended for other people. My favorite incident so far was when a wife tried to email their password spreadsheet to her husband, but sent it to me instead. I let her know of the error, and she thanked me and said her husband was pretty pissed at her for the mistake. I deleted the message, though: if their accounts were broken into, I wanted to be able to say, "I deleted the message and the attachment."
I usually just ignore the messages and delete them. If it keeps happening I'll often respond and let them know they have the wrong person. I really want to slap the lawyers that have "if you are not the intended recipient of this email, delete it immediately!" at the bottom - I mistakenly received a message with that at the bottom once, so I responded per their directions and included a bill for my fee of $200 for the service. I never heard from them again, and if their little disclaimer was legal than my bill probably was too. I wonder if my point got through...probably not.
I would be careful about saving anything that could open you up to liability - the password spreadsheet above is a perfect example. The odds are excellent you'd never have a problem saving something compromising, but it only takes one idiot, and even if you're innocent, the hassle wouldn't be worth it.
Our Honda requires us to press a button to agree to the license terms for the nav system every time we start the car. I hadn't previously considered that Honda would be collecting that data - GPS itself is one-way data transfer only; apparently at least Ford overcame that, apparently by simply storing the data until the next dealer visit.
I'm not - I spent most of the snowboarders video trying to scroll around to get back to a normal forward view, and failing. Part of any kind of art is trimming the raw material down to the gold nugget inside. We're not impressed by a hunk of stone, but we are impressed when someone takes that stone and carves an elephant from it. This camera just gives you all the raw video in every direction, like that hunk of stone. Other than inside a 360 degree theater like in Canada's pavilion at Epcot (the only one I've ever seen), it's hard to understand the appeal of this camera... I'm just not seeing it.
Yeah, it was what I recommended as well. I have a version 1.1 floating around; I stopped using it just last year, after buying an n-capable router with gigabit ethernet (I often move large files around my network, so the n network speeds were a useful upgrade). Unfortunately, that router sometimes won't let devices connect and has to be rebooted, a problem I never had with my WRT54G... sigh.
You're right - the first and third ones are fixtures, but the second is definitely a bulb replacement. It's quite possible we're seeing different results.
Slashdot Mirror
It has only gotten worse. I'm planning to close my account soon. The final straw for me was a group that a friend runs is now invisible to several of us in the group - there's nothing on his end that would seem to be causing it, and I (and several others) didn't block it, but...at least three of us can't see the group (there are probably more, but you don't notice it's missing until you go look for it, and of course any post from the group doesn't show up on our walls). Even when he sends us a direct URL to the group page, it just takes us back to our own feed. Facebook is turning into Skynet. I just need to get a few family members to revert back to email for contacting me, clean up a few things, then I'm out.
Oh, yeah, I've been turned over to collections a couple times, because of old bills that weren't paid that I was unaware of. One was a medical bill for $100 that I thought had been paid but hadn't (an error on my part); another was a vehicle tax bill (in which my former state even HAD my new address but still somehow neglected to bother to contact me before heading to collections - and it turned out in fact I didn't owe them a cent; I was able to give three separate reasons for why I didn't owe that money) for $35. It wasn't a matter of not being able to pay it. Knowing what has happened to me makes me laugh at that 35% number - it's certainly artificially inflated with stupid debts in situations like mine - someone goofs (me or someone else) and the debt just sits there unbeknownst to you, until you check your credit report, apply for a mortgage, or get something in the mail about it. This reminds me, we haven't checked ours lately... last time I did, I found a credit card for Wal-Mart on my record, a card I've never had.
That was Airplane!
I've tried replying to let them know they sent the email to the wrong address (as requested in the disclaimer), along with a bill for $200 for the service. They never respond.
To me, it's yet more evidence that our health insurance should not be tied up with our employment. I don't know what the right solution to untangling that mess is, but we have to do something different.
I've not heard anyone describe functionality added to MS Office since Office 2000. Excel has it's uses, but what have they done to it since, except forced people to learn new places for buttons?
Exactly! And they didn't really even do that - they just converted the drop down menus into the "ribbon". They didn't rethink the logic. For example, it still throws me - after using Word for at least 15 years - that page numbering is on the "Insert" menu/tab. I can see "inserting" page numbers the first time I add them to a document, but most of the time I need that control, it's because I'm editing page numbers that are already there, so "insert" is not the menu I think of when I want to do that. It should be a "page layout" option - it's something that's usually fixed on every page, in a defined layout, regardless of what else is on the page, like headers, footers, margins, etc.
In short, Microsoft didn't take the time to rethink how people use Office and see if they could perhaps improve efficiency, with a cost of a learning curve while people learned the new way. Instead, they just converted the menus to buttons and sold it as a huge upgrade, at the cost of the learning curve for the ribbon with no net gain in the end.
Ever seen an older Airstream? Think that's dust?
The shells aren't, but often the frames are, or are close to it - they're just steel. (Airstream owner here, although ours is a relatively young one, built in '95. I do have quite a few friends with vintage units from the 60s and before, though. Some of them had to do shell-off restorations, starting with the frame, to get them usable again.)
I'm going to Vienna, Austria (from the US) in a few weeks for work. My work-supplied credit card doesn't have the chip, so I asked about getting one with it. The area that handles the cards in my office said, "You're the first to ask about them," and called the credit card issuer. The CC company came back and said, "No, we don't issue them." Oddly enough, I have a personal CC in my wallet with the chip, issued by that same company. That card will be going with me to Europe.
They used to have an entire section for politics, then it would be easy to remove those stories from the feed. This, for inexplicable reasons, is filed under "Hardware".
i'm all for mass transit and use it almost every day, but i'm in NYC a lot of cities in the US aren't dense enough to support the costs of the system
I'm not sure mass transit is self-supporting anywhere in the world. But people see the build cost + maintenance costs and flip out, ignoring that roads also have a build cost + maintenance cost + police cost + etc.
Uh, Apple does make an adapter for it... I know it's $30, but it's at least a solution. (Our car has a USB port, so it's just a matter of changing the cable for us.)
They failed to mention it only supports apple products.
Are you sure? Android phones now use something called "MTP", which most devices don't seem to support (neither of our car stereos do, one is a factory Honda, the other is a Pioneer; similarly, my Macbook Pro *still* can't connect to my S3, a year and a half after I bought the phone). Did you try a standard USB drive? I bet it'll work.
They have those already - at least the sonar one. It pings for up to 30 days once it hits the water. The issue is that you have to be relatively close to the plane to hear the pinging. Even with Air France 447 when the ACARS data told us where the plane was as it was crashing, it still took almost two years and several searches to find the hull of the plane. In this case, it appears everyone spent the last several days looking in the wrong place, because the military either didn't report or no one listened to their report of spotting the plane in a very different, unexpected location over an hour after it disappeared off the civilian radar. I hope someone in charge wrote down that lesson.
As for the cost of the devices: How much is this search costing the countries involved? It's probably enough to pay for installation on quite a few airliners at this point...
What I find amazing is there is a large segment of the population who will get up in arms over this kind of collection, dig out their pitchforks and storm the castle, but will willingly post GEO tagged photos online to document their "privacy" protest activities. These same people will run Google maps, Wayze or other applications on their smartphone to navigate their way to the protest, then do the same to find someplace to eat, while cranking up the coupon application to find a deal on the sandwich they are hungry for. These folks don't think twice about their privacy in any other context.
You don't see the difference? Google Maps, Waze, etc. provide a useful service to the user in return for that information. Repo camera databases don't.
Yep. Also, I recently got life insurance, and one of the questions they asked me was, "Have you been aboard an aircraft other than as a passenger on a commercial airliner?" I wonder how much a "yes" answer would've cost me each month. I'd love to do it, but we're talking about $6000-$8000 just for the license, daytime, single engine only. How much more for any of the other certifications? I drive past an airfield every day on my way home from work and look longingly...then remember how much it costs.
Sport pilot would be cheaper, of course. But as you pointed out there are quite a few expenses aside from just the license.
And, it's not like you can, say, fly yourself to vacation to save money. A friend of mine has his license and his own plane (owned one before he even could drive, in fact), and still flies commercial whenever he needs to actually go somewhere.
That's the point of a protest though; to get the attention of people who might otherwise not notice that there is a problem. They are effectively picketing slashdot; inconveniencing the normal readers like you and I, to put pressure on the management to take their protest more seriously, and offer something more than just platitudes and empty promises.
It's not working...this is the first I've noticed ANYTHING, and I usually check /. a couple times a day. I have tags turned off, because they're useless, and I'm logged in. I may have looked at beta once or twice a while back.
I just looked at it and didn't care for it, though. What's with the useless, unrelated pictures - a compass for the article about GPS dead reckoning in cars? A picture of LEGO on an article about coding? Useless. I don't get the top "block" of three stories or whatever... what happened to the summaries of those? The menu bar is of little use to me - I don't browse by topic, and I doubt many others do, either. And the narrow comments isn't good, either - as deep as this thread is, my comment would be about one character wide in beta...all kinds of fun for reading! There is a trend amongst web designers to make everything very narrow, ignoring that the interruption while your eyes move to the next line makes the text harder to read and comprehend.
We get the Sunday Washington Post, which includes a free subscription to their website that can be shared with a second person. The coupons we get more than pay for the cost of the subscription, and I get the Sunday comics to read...on Saturday. My wife also checks the ads for sales on stuff we'll need soon. The newspaper itself goes right in the recycling bin, unfortunately. (Side note: this tells me there's a market for a service of just delivering coupons like the papers do, but it would make more money than the newspaper by ignoring the news!)
The only reason I continue to use Network Solutions is because over the years (and yes, some of my domains have been up since the 90's as well) I've watched other name registering outfits come and go, seen various name server problems, etc., and for all their horrifying business practices and high prices, my sites seem to always work, which is what I place the most emphasis on.
Seriously? You can find reviews of plenty of other domain registration sites. I use pairnic.com (which is part of pair.com hosting...they've been around 18 years, according to the email they sent me the other day), and pay $14/year for domain names, without any of this crap, and I've been using them for at least 10 years. I'm sure there are plenty of other good ones, too. Don't reward an abuser.
A poor implementation doesn't mean it's a bad idea. If it was, Yugo would have killed the market for automobiles.
I completely agree with you, but how long until an airline gets sued because a passenger was unable to take an emergency-related call? Reasonable policy exceptions must be allowed.
Well, how many times has the government been sued for that very same issue until now?
My Yahoo email address (yeah, I know, and I'm moving away from it - I've had the account since 1995 or 1996, but this latest mail interface redesign is finally getting me motivated to stop using it for anything other than junk mail) often receives legitimate mail intended for other people. My favorite incident so far was when a wife tried to email their password spreadsheet to her husband, but sent it to me instead. I let her know of the error, and she thanked me and said her husband was pretty pissed at her for the mistake. I deleted the message, though: if their accounts were broken into, I wanted to be able to say, "I deleted the message and the attachment."
I usually just ignore the messages and delete them. If it keeps happening I'll often respond and let them know they have the wrong person. I really want to slap the lawyers that have "if you are not the intended recipient of this email, delete it immediately!" at the bottom - I mistakenly received a message with that at the bottom once, so I responded per their directions and included a bill for my fee of $200 for the service. I never heard from them again, and if their little disclaimer was legal than my bill probably was too. I wonder if my point got through...probably not.
I would be careful about saving anything that could open you up to liability - the password spreadsheet above is a perfect example. The odds are excellent you'd never have a problem saving something compromising, but it only takes one idiot, and even if you're innocent, the hassle wouldn't be worth it.
Our Honda requires us to press a button to agree to the license terms for the nav system every time we start the car. I hadn't previously considered that Honda would be collecting that data - GPS itself is one-way data transfer only; apparently at least Ford overcame that, apparently by simply storing the data until the next dealer visit.
I'm not - I spent most of the snowboarders video trying to scroll around to get back to a normal forward view, and failing. Part of any kind of art is trimming the raw material down to the gold nugget inside. We're not impressed by a hunk of stone, but we are impressed when someone takes that stone and carves an elephant from it. This camera just gives you all the raw video in every direction, like that hunk of stone. Other than inside a 360 degree theater like in Canada's pavilion at Epcot (the only one I've ever seen), it's hard to understand the appeal of this camera... I'm just not seeing it.
Yeah, it was what I recommended as well. I have a version 1.1 floating around; I stopped using it just last year, after buying an n-capable router with gigabit ethernet (I often move large files around my network, so the n network speeds were a useful upgrade). Unfortunately, that router sometimes won't let devices connect and has to be rebooted, a problem I never had with my WRT54G... sigh.
You're right - the first and third ones are fixtures, but the second is definitely a bulb replacement. It's quite possible we're seeing different results.