I'd actually search Google Images for National Geographic images, but that was the only one that even resembled the ones I'd seen there. I was hoping for something more tasteless, but that was all I could find.
You can email me and we can talk more about it in private, and see if we can hunt the source down a little better, or at least a better complaint route.
I have absolutely nothing against screwing with spammers. The place I was at that I was referencing, we had a huge spam problem. It was fairly high profile, so was inundated with email spam constantly. We went as far as building our own dynamic blacklist, and even setting firewall rules against spammers. It helped that it seemed every spammer in the world hit dormant accounts, so those went straight through the system to be blocked immediately. It was all done very fairly, so no legitimate mail was delayed. That took a little doing, but I worked through our rules quick enough that the legitimate problems went away in just a few days. The providers appreciated us, because if they did get a problem report, we were quick to answer and if it was on our side we resolved it quickly.
Being that I'm not working in a place with good Tier 1 connections any more, I can't pull any strings, but I can help.
I agree with the IM spam. I don't use IM services unless specifically requested, and then I only stay on long enough to talk to the person who requested it. If I leave it up regardless of the network, I'll find dozens of spams within a day.
My mom has been using Skype to talk to my sister. She's out of country, so it's been a good way to see each other. Every time I go over to fix a computer problem for her, I click through a dozen Skype spams.
Won't happen, if they're paying the bills, and the bills are large. You really have to piss off the other Tier 1 providers to get cut off. Cogent got pretty good at that at least a couple times.:) I'd be willing to bet Amazon is actually paying their bills on time. Amazon appears to be well peered, so it's not just one or two that'd have to drop them. The ones who didn't wouldn't mind the jump in revenue at all.
I can understand (to a degree) when a problem isn't directly addressed back. Sure, you detected it, and it's perfectly possible 10,000 other people reported the same thing.
Knowing a little about the business, and not having enough information from you, it may be possible that the destinations that you referenced had absolutely nothing to do with it. If the destination is an affiliate sales company (i.e., affiliates make a percentage of the sale that they sent), you may have simply bounced through a page that passed on their affiliate code and never noticed it.
http://hotchick.spammer/ redirects to http://some.cam.site?id=9999 which then redirects to http://some.cam.site/ . Some affiliate companies take that seriously, and will forbid any sales revenue from going to that affiliate. Then again, plenty see it as "not their problem" and enjoy the extra profits where they weren't directly involved in the illegal activities.
I've seen it where site X gets spammed for, which has links to Site Y, which then has the affiliate code for site Z. Go ahead and complain to Z, it won't do you a lot of good. It will do even less if site Z is responsible for over a million per year in revenue for their provider. If it's some schmuck with a $20/yr account, it'd probably be gone in minutes.
If I was at some large hosting company, it'd be perfectly possible to get tens (or hundreds) of thousands of complaints like yours daily. Is it worth tracking those to resolution and getting back directly to every complainer, or simply adding your complaint to the list? Ok, I would, but most won't.
I've been on the receiving end of complaints in the past. Most of the time, the complaints were misdirected anyways. "I got a spam". Sure you did. When it's reviewed, it's simply an email stating that their membership was expiring and if they wanted to continue service they should renew. Of hundreds of thousands of those sent, they'd generate maybe a few dozen complaints like that. Sometimes they were a hosted site where a newbie webmaster had put some mailto.cgi up, and folks were spamming through it. The upstream provider would send an email saying "We've received a bunch of these", and following them through we'd find the problem, and imply reply "It's been corrected". Corrected for us meant the cgi was disabled (like chmod 000) with an email to the webmaster about how not to be a dumbass.
Looking at the "upstream provider" web site, it looks like they're just reselling someone elses services. I could be mistaken, but I've never heard of them, and couldn't find much interesting online.
What exactly would those places have to do with Sonora Pass in California? What I do know of California landscape is that there are vast areas of flat lands, and mountainous areas. I lived in a house on the outskirts of Los Angeles that if you stepped off the back porch, you were on a > 45 degree incline down a couple hundred feet. That was just a foothills area. Not far from there, you could drive up to 7,000 feet, and if you were to go very far off the road (5 to 50 feet), you'd find yourself falling at least 1,000 feet to the next thing resembling flat land. It's fun to climb on, but it's also a regular event where search and rescue has to go in by helicopter to extract a hiker who miscalculated their walk.
Being that it's called "Sonora Pass", that would usually indicate that it's a pass through the mountains, but I didn't want to say that positively that it was on a mountainous area, since it could have been in a flat lands part.... and I've been to 36 states in the United States, 4 Canadian providences, 2 other countries, and visited one of the 7 natural wonders of the world. Does your statement imply I haven't seen enough places to know terrain varies by location?
We all have to start somewhere. First it's discovering that it can be done. Then it's migrating to script kiddie level. Before you know it, he'll be writing the next killer app. I'm glad that the police were invited to step away so the school could just warn him where the fine line is between knowledge and abuse.
I learned the terms as petit mal and grand mal. I know they changed them. It seems most people are familiar with the older terms, and even when I've looked around online, they show both terms.
My step sons neurologist was a nice guy, and explained things very easily for us. I guess when your a pediatric doctor, everyone gets treated with kid gloves. As we talked, he understood that I already had a good base understanding, but I'm sure habit kept things simple with him.
I know they've been making lots of progress to defining the seizure disorders better. It still seems like a lot of guess work for the first while on most patients.... and yes, I read your whole comment.:)
For the first 20 years of my life, I never knew anyone with a seizure disorder. It was just something that occasionally made its way into a TV show. Over the next 15 years, I've only personally known two. Well, two that I knew about. Even the school factuality told us that they hadn't had a student with any sort of seizure disorder, so they were a little confused about how to treat him. They offered the "short bus" to come pick him up. He wasn't a special needs student. Except for the very occasional episode which we were just learning about ourselves, he was very smart, but otherwise a perfectly normal kid.
If you use the Walmart card, it's $3 at the register to reload. You just hand them the cash (+$3) and tell them you want it on the card.
It's all in how much you're willing to lose. If you have $2k in the bank, and your debit card is compromised, you could be out $1950. If you put $500 at a time on a prepaid card, you're out $12 for the fees and possibly the $500 if you just refilled it.
$512 < $1950.
To each his own. I know using cash to get gas is a pain in a lot of places. I did a road trip recently, paying exclusively in cash. Being that I didn't know the neighborhoods I had stopped in for gas, the risk was higher that walking away from my car it may not be there when I got back. Sometimes I didn't have the luxury of saying "This doesn't look like a safe place, I'll stop at the next exit", when the car is on E, and the next exit is 40 miles away.
There was a little noise about doing better security for a while. A few companies were embedding chips in the cards, either smart cards with a contact chip, or a contactless smart card with a RFID chip.
The problem is, these cards require the physical presence of the card holder at the point of sale. At least one bank was selling (for like $99) a contact smart card reader for online purchases. That died off.
Magnet strips and the ability to use your number online are too embedded in the retail market.
I've opted to use Green Dot cards. They are available through Walmart as the Walmart Money Card at a lower rate. Get one, or a stack of them. Put as much money as you're willing to lose, and then you can use them liberally. If you put $300 on a card, and spend $250, there's only $50 to lose. Reload it at any Green Dot or Walmart location if your card is safe. If the card is compromised, pull out whatever is left, and stop using the card. You can contact them, which isn't the easiest to attempt a refund on the stolen money. If (big if) you get your money back, pull it all out at the nearest ATM, and cut up the card.
There are other options, but this works for me.
Paypal had a nice feature for virtual credit cards through their (Windows only) plugin, but that's no longer available. I don't know of any other services that let you get a one-time use credit card number for any cards that you may have. If someone knows of one, I'd love to know about it.
I just saw the video on TV a couple hours ago. I was joking that it wasn't a meteorite. There are distinct flashes that were its deceleration thrusters firing.:) I love starting conspiracy theories.:)
For what I saw of it, CNN probably screwed up when they said 15 minutes. Otherwise, it would have spun half way around the world on its entry.
There was a good show on this, I believe on the Discovery Channel. There's an art (and science) to searching debris fields. They had assembled a large loop to be a metal detector attached to a PVC pipe frame that they dragged behind their truck. If you know the direction it came in, and a likely impact site, you can start hunting. You have an advantage that you know at least one part of the debris field. I'd guess that area is mountainous, so a tow behind metal detector is probably out, but you and a few friends doing a grid search with metal detectors may be able to find something useful. If it's been a few years (like more than 3), since you know the location of one piece, you may be able to spot impact craters with Google Maps.
You got $1k for a chunk the size of your hand. What if you collected a truck full of them? I'd offer to play, but I'm a couple thousand miles beyond coming out to search.
Thank you. As I tell everyone, there's no reason to send apologies or sympathies, there's nothing anyone could have done.
As for the 3D TV's, the disorder has to already be there, for it to be triggered. I haven't read the labels, but if it says "may cause seizures", then that's only indicating that it may trigger them, not that it would turn a person without a seizure disorder into one that does.
It's possible for you to have a seizure disorder, and it's simply never been triggered.
In the case of my step son, after we knew he was having grand mal seizures (it was pretty obvious from the moment I saw him in the first one), it was apparent that he was having petit mal seizures for quite a while, but no one noticed. What's the difference between a kid "not hearing" you when you tell them to do something, and them not hearing you because they're having a seizure? It all looked the same to us, his teachers, and his doctors. After he had a real visible seizure it jumped out at us all like "how could we have missed this?"
I felt bad about the times that I said "I just told you to... didn't you hear me?!" He didn't hear a word I said, which is why he didn't do what I told him to. Or sometimes maybe he just didn't want to clean his room.:) As he got older, he'd talk back to me, so at least I knew he heard me. Then I'd threaten him, we'd chase each other around the house, and mom would say "Stop that!":)
I'm not saying every kid that ignores you when you say "clean your room" or "take out the trash" should be delivered straight to a neurologist, but it is a possibility. Here is a writeup on CNN Health about petit mal seizures.
This page has some numbers on seizure disorders 3% of children have a seizure when they're young. Half of those (1.5%) are caused by fevers. 1% of children have epilepsy. So, if 100,000 3D TV's were sold, assuming an average household size of 4 people, statistically 4,000 people with epilepsy will be viewing them. If (the big if) the trigger is flashing lights, then there could be a good number of cases reported. The only thing I got from the doctors on the flashing light part was it is a trigger "sometimes".
I prefer the office space story line, but if I remember correctly even they referenced the Superman movie.:)
I knew someone who was doing work for a major insurance company (which I won't name here). They weren't worried about fractional pennies. They actually had dormant bank accounts that they had forgotten about until the person I knew went looking through old paperwork. There were hundreds of thousands of dollars there, which likely showed as an insignificant fractional percentage of the company income.
And no, they didn't steal it.:) They advised their manager who then had it absorbed back into the normal company accounts.
So, which number would you rather your payroll company use? I prefer the accuracy of 1.000000000000002 hrs. By your logic, truncate anything beyond two decimal points, and you're getting *REALLY* shorted on your pay.
I think you should clarify, flashing lights may trigger seizures in some people. They are people who already have a seizure disorder, not the random Joe who had no pre-existing condition.
My step son had epilepsy. We didn't know until 6 months before he passed away because of it. After his first observed seizure we went to a pediatric neurologist, where they did a whole battery of tests, which did include flashing lights. He didn't have a seizure, but he was bored senseless watching the lights. What they were able to detect was that he did have a seizure the night before. They can read lingering signs of a seizure on an EEG.
Unfortunately, and not commonly explained, is that seizures can cause spasms in any muscle, including the diaphragm or heart. He died during a seizure, which did stop either his breathing or heart. They couldn't conclusively say which, but when we found him, he was still frozen in the same position which was consistent with him having a seizure. I was a trained first responder, so I did everything I could until the paramedics got there. I disregarded the signs of rigor mortis. Lividity had just started (light signs of what appeared to be bruising on what was the lower part of his body). I performed CPR until they arrived about 3 minutes later. CPR on a training dummy is a lot easier than trying to save the life of someone you care about. They pointed out what I had already seen and ignored. At least I was a good witness, and was able to describe clearly what I had seen and done. I won't say I was unaffected, I just did my best to keep my composure while describing it to them for their reports. And oh are there a lot of people who want to talk to you after something like that. Official folks (law enforcement, child protective services, etc) were in and out for 3 days. They were very polite with us, it was just a formality in case there was something unusual about it.
Sorry, this still effects me. It's only been a few years.
Back to the topic, if it were to trigger a seizure, that would be a seizure, ranging from petit mal (aka absence seizure) where the person doesn't respond, to grand mal (tonic-clonic) where they fall down in convulsions. It would only happen in a person who had a pre-existing condition, and wouldn't cause a completely unrelated disorder. It is possible that she has both disorders, but that wasn't indicated in the article.
Disclaimer: I am not a doctor. My first ex-wife suffered from petit mal seizures. Years later my step son (from my second wife) had grand mal seizures. I've listened to everything the doctors had to say when they were explaining the conditions and asked questions at the appropriate times to further educate myself.
People get judgement against them all the time, and avoid paying for as long as possible. If you win a judgement, they can want you to pay, and then either send it to a collections company or sue again which will just reinforcement judgement. In the end, you never *have* to cut a check. It doesn't look good on your credit, but hey, who's credit is golden these days? It's extremely doubtful you'd ever get the courts for you to pay or go to jail on contempt. If it comes down to that, ya bankruptcy is another route. I believe this case is against a company. Companies "fold" all the time, and continue operations as a new company. When you see an "under new management" sign, either the company really sold, or they sold to a new company with slightly different listed officers and they continue to operate as they did.
Well, you can get frost bite if exposed to water ice long enough, or from something like dry ice (carbon dioxide ice) for more than a few seconds. Personal experience there on the latter.
With the power that LED barcode scanners put off, I can't imagine how long she'd have to be exposed to it before it caused any harm. I actually have one here at home for something I'm working on, and I routinely either look at the front or light up my hand to see if it's working. Sometimes it doesn't turn on (cheap Chinese made crap). Shit, I might have fucking Tourette's. Motherfuckers, I should sue!
It's the job of the courts to hear arguments and settle them. They're suing. There could be merit. Ok, there isn't, but we actually understand the power put off by these scanners. Experts will testify, and the girl will lose.
It's the lawyers we need to do something about. Lawyers are taking on frivolous cases, regardless how little merit there is, hoping that there is an out of court settlement. It's cheaper for most companies to just settle, rather than be dragged through court. Unfortunately, this is the nation of litigation, and anyone can sue anyone for anything at any time. It's a huge industry. Every day on the radio, I hear ads for traffic attorneys. If you're in an accident, they want you to sue regardless of which side you were on. You can crash your car into someone else, and I'd bet a lawyer would be more than happy to sue the victim because they were in the way.
I was in an accident once where something like this happened. A guy was on his bicycle waiting for me to pull out into traffic. He sat there for about 10 minutes. When there was finally a break in traffic for me to pull into, he rode in front of me. He wasn't hurt, and his bike was fine. The cops even ticketed him for being dumb. Ok, the ticket didn't read that, but that's basically what it was. He wanted me to pay for his bent kickstand. Ok, $20, big deal, right? Nope, $200. I asked for a receipt, and he wouldn't produce it. I told him to talk to my insurance company. I had a nice talk with them later. The price had increased to $300. They told me he's pretty well known in the area for doing stunts like that. It was cheaper for them to pay the $300, rather than have their lawyers go to court and argue it through a trial. He did dent the hood of my car, and I didn't even ask for that to be paid. It was a shitty car, I didn't care. It was something to complain about though. Since that happened, I pay extra attention for people like that. I've had several walk in front of me to get hit. It's not accidental either. They'll step out, I'll come to a quick stop, and they'll look at me like "Why didn't you hit me?", and then try the next lane of traffic. I don't know, I'd never see money as a good enough reason to get hit by a few thousand pounds of vehicle.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd actually search Google Images for National Geographic images, but that was the only one that even resembled the ones I'd seen there. I was hoping for something more tasteless, but that was all I could find.
Sorry, I didn't intend to call the function while you were drinking. We'll fix that up in version 4.01.
Damn humans, so picky about their coding. The Cylons aren't as picky.
while(1){
acquire_target();
shoot();
};
function acquire_target{
identify_live_human();
};
But, the ones they show aren't usually anything to admire.
(no offense lady, if your tribe has a computer and you read this.)
You can email me and we can talk more about it in private, and see if we can hunt the source down a little better, or at least a better complaint route.
I have absolutely nothing against screwing with spammers. The place I was at that I was referencing, we had a huge spam problem. It was fairly high profile, so was inundated with email spam constantly. We went as far as building our own dynamic blacklist, and even setting firewall rules against spammers. It helped that it seemed every spammer in the world hit dormant accounts, so those went straight through the system to be blocked immediately. It was all done very fairly, so no legitimate mail was delayed. That took a little doing, but I worked through our rules quick enough that the legitimate problems went away in just a few days. The providers appreciated us, because if they did get a problem report, we were quick to answer and if it was on our side we resolved it quickly.
Being that I'm not working in a place with good Tier 1 connections any more, I can't pull any strings, but I can help.
I agree with the IM spam. I don't use IM services unless specifically requested, and then I only stay on long enough to talk to the person who requested it. If I leave it up regardless of the network, I'll find dozens of spams within a day.
My mom has been using Skype to talk to my sister. She's out of country, so it's been a good way to see each other. Every time I go over to fix a computer problem for her, I click through a dozen Skype spams.
Won't happen, if they're paying the bills, and the bills are large. You really have to piss off the other Tier 1 providers to get cut off. Cogent got pretty good at that at least a couple times. :) I'd be willing to bet Amazon is actually paying their bills on time. Amazon appears to be well peered, so it's not just one or two that'd have to drop them. The ones who didn't wouldn't mind the jump in revenue at all.
I can understand (to a degree) when a problem isn't directly addressed back. Sure, you detected it, and it's perfectly possible 10,000 other people reported the same thing.
Knowing a little about the business, and not having enough information from you, it may be possible that the destinations that you referenced had absolutely nothing to do with it. If the destination is an affiliate sales company (i.e., affiliates make a percentage of the sale that they sent), you may have simply bounced through a page that passed on their affiliate code and never noticed it.
http://hotchick.spammer/ redirects to http://some.cam.site?id=9999 which then redirects to http://some.cam.site/ . Some affiliate companies take that seriously, and will forbid any sales revenue from going to that affiliate. Then again, plenty see it as "not their problem" and enjoy the extra profits where they weren't directly involved in the illegal activities.
I've seen it where site X gets spammed for, which has links to Site Y, which then has the affiliate code for site Z. Go ahead and complain to Z, it won't do you a lot of good. It will do even less if site Z is responsible for over a million per year in revenue for their provider. If it's some schmuck with a $20/yr account, it'd probably be gone in minutes.
If I was at some large hosting company, it'd be perfectly possible to get tens (or hundreds) of thousands of complaints like yours daily. Is it worth tracking those to resolution and getting back directly to every complainer, or simply adding your complaint to the list? Ok, I would, but most won't.
I've been on the receiving end of complaints in the past. Most of the time, the complaints were misdirected anyways. "I got a spam". Sure you did. When it's reviewed, it's simply an email stating that their membership was expiring and if they wanted to continue service they should renew. Of hundreds of thousands of those sent, they'd generate maybe a few dozen complaints like that. Sometimes they were a hosted site where a newbie webmaster had put some mailto.cgi up, and folks were spamming through it. The upstream provider would send an email saying "We've received a bunch of these", and following them through we'd find the problem, and imply reply "It's been corrected". Corrected for us meant the cgi was disabled (like chmod 000) with an email to the webmaster about how not to be a dumbass.
Looking at the "upstream provider" web site, it looks like they're just reselling someone elses services. I could be mistaken, but I've never heard of them, and couldn't find much interesting online.
# It would seem that you aren't actually multitasking.
/dev/ears);
# We retrieved this from your data storage unit.
while ($system_state == "awake"){
$starttime = time();
chew_gum();
listen_music();
post_slashdot();
$endtime = time();
if (($endtime - $starttime) > 2){
distracted();
};
};
function chew_gum{
hardware_actuate_mandible_updown();
};
function listen_music{
open(MUSIC_RECV,
$soundchunk = <MUSIC_RECV>;
if ($soundchunk){
hardware_actuate_skull_updown(1);
hardware_actuate_femur_updown(1);
};
};
function post_slashdot{
$msg = $slashcomments[rand @slashcomments];
};
function distracted{
hardware_actuate_speech("Sorry, I was distracted.");
};
What exactly would those places have to do with Sonora Pass in California? What I do know of California landscape is that there are vast areas of flat lands, and mountainous areas. I lived in a house on the outskirts of Los Angeles that if you stepped off the back porch, you were on a > 45 degree incline down a couple hundred feet. That was just a foothills area. Not far from there, you could drive up to 7,000 feet, and if you were to go very far off the road (5 to 50 feet), you'd find yourself falling at least 1,000 feet to the next thing resembling flat land. It's fun to climb on, but it's also a regular event where search and rescue has to go in by helicopter to extract a hiker who miscalculated their walk.
Being that it's called "Sonora Pass", that would usually indicate that it's a pass through the mountains, but I didn't want to say that positively that it was on a mountainous area, since it could have been in a flat lands part. ... and I've been to 36 states in the United States, 4 Canadian providences, 2 other countries, and visited one of the 7 natural wonders of the world. Does your statement imply I haven't seen enough places to know terrain varies by location?
We all have to start somewhere. First it's discovering that it can be done. Then it's migrating to script kiddie level. Before you know it, he'll be writing the next killer app. I'm glad that the police were invited to step away so the school could just warn him where the fine line is between knowledge and abuse.
I learned the terms as petit mal and grand mal. I know they changed them. It seems most people are familiar with the older terms, and even when I've looked around online, they show both terms.
My step sons neurologist was a nice guy, and explained things very easily for us. I guess when your a pediatric doctor, everyone gets treated with kid gloves. As we talked, he understood that I already had a good base understanding, but I'm sure habit kept things simple with him.
I know they've been making lots of progress to defining the seizure disorders better. It still seems like a lot of guess work for the first while on most patients. ... and yes, I read your whole comment. :)
For the first 20 years of my life, I never knew anyone with a seizure disorder. It was just something that occasionally made its way into a TV show. Over the next 15 years, I've only personally known two. Well, two that I knew about. Even the school factuality told us that they hadn't had a student with any sort of seizure disorder, so they were a little confused about how to treat him. They offered the "short bus" to come pick him up. He wasn't a special needs student. Except for the very occasional episode which we were just learning about ourselves, he was very smart, but otherwise a perfectly normal kid.
That's a GreenDot card too. :) That's good to know about though, I'll read through their pricing and add one to my collection.
Some chicks are into body mods. Tattoos, piercings, permanent vibrator implants. It takes all kinds.
Hmmm, the possibilities I can think of.
Gimme a remote control on that thing. Kinda like a wireless butterfly (look it up if you don't know), but better. :)
If you use the Walmart card, it's $3 at the register to reload. You just hand them the cash (+$3) and tell them you want it on the card.
It's all in how much you're willing to lose. If you have $2k in the bank, and your debit card is compromised, you could be out $1950. If you put $500 at a time on a prepaid card, you're out $12 for the fees and possibly the $500 if you just refilled it.
$512 < $1950.
To each his own. I know using cash to get gas is a pain in a lot of places. I did a road trip recently, paying exclusively in cash. Being that I didn't know the neighborhoods I had stopped in for gas, the risk was higher that walking away from my car it may not be there when I got back. Sometimes I didn't have the luxury of saying "This doesn't look like a safe place, I'll stop at the next exit", when the car is on E, and the next exit is 40 miles away.
That was removed effective the 1970 edition. You should pick up a newer copy, preferably from someone who isn't in a retirement home.
That was all explained in the handbook "Guide to human nature" that you were supplied at birth. You did read it, right?
Once the honeymoon is over, the honeymoon is really over. It's time to start spending money on "the other woman" or an escort.
{sigh} I wish more people would read the handbook so they wouldn't be surprised when the inevitable happens.
There was a little noise about doing better security for a while. A few companies were embedding chips in the cards, either smart cards with a contact chip, or a contactless smart card with a RFID chip.
The problem is, these cards require the physical presence of the card holder at the point of sale. At least one bank was selling (for like $99) a contact smart card reader for online purchases. That died off.
Magnet strips and the ability to use your number online are too embedded in the retail market.
I've opted to use Green Dot cards. They are available through Walmart as the Walmart Money Card at a lower rate. Get one, or a stack of them. Put as much money as you're willing to lose, and then you can use them liberally. If you put $300 on a card, and spend $250, there's only $50 to lose. Reload it at any Green Dot or Walmart location if your card is safe. If the card is compromised, pull out whatever is left, and stop using the card. You can contact them, which isn't the easiest to attempt a refund on the stolen money. If (big if) you get your money back, pull it all out at the nearest ATM, and cut up the card.
There are other options, but this works for me.
Paypal had a nice feature for virtual credit cards through their (Windows only) plugin, but that's no longer available. I don't know of any other services that let you get a one-time use credit card number for any cards that you may have. If someone knows of one, I'd love to know about it.
I just saw the video on TV a couple hours ago. I was joking that it wasn't a meteorite. There are distinct flashes that were its deceleration thrusters firing. :) I love starting conspiracy theories. :)
For what I saw of it, CNN probably screwed up when they said 15 minutes. Otherwise, it would have spun half way around the world on its entry.
There was a good show on this, I believe on the Discovery Channel. There's an art (and science) to searching debris fields. They had assembled a large loop to be a metal detector attached to a PVC pipe frame that they dragged behind their truck. If you know the direction it came in, and a likely impact site, you can start hunting. You have an advantage that you know at least one part of the debris field. I'd guess that area is mountainous, so a tow behind metal detector is probably out, but you and a few friends doing a grid search with metal detectors may be able to find something useful. If it's been a few years (like more than 3), since you know the location of one piece, you may be able to spot impact craters with Google Maps.
You got $1k for a chunk the size of your hand. What if you collected a truck full of them? I'd offer to play, but I'm a couple thousand miles beyond coming out to search.
Thank you. As I tell everyone, there's no reason to send apologies or sympathies, there's nothing anyone could have done.
As for the 3D TV's, the disorder has to already be there, for it to be triggered. I haven't read the labels, but if it says "may cause seizures", then that's only indicating that it may trigger them, not that it would turn a person without a seizure disorder into one that does.
It's possible for you to have a seizure disorder, and it's simply never been triggered.
In the case of my step son, after we knew he was having grand mal seizures (it was pretty obvious from the moment I saw him in the first one), it was apparent that he was having petit mal seizures for quite a while, but no one noticed. What's the difference between a kid "not hearing" you when you tell them to do something, and them not hearing you because they're having a seizure? It all looked the same to us, his teachers, and his doctors. After he had a real visible seizure it jumped out at us all like "how could we have missed this?"
I felt bad about the times that I said "I just told you to ... didn't you hear me?!" He didn't hear a word I said, which is why he didn't do what I told him to. Or sometimes maybe he just didn't want to clean his room. :) As he got older, he'd talk back to me, so at least I knew he heard me. Then I'd threaten him, we'd chase each other around the house, and mom would say "Stop that!" :)
I'm not saying every kid that ignores you when you say "clean your room" or "take out the trash" should be delivered straight to a neurologist, but it is a possibility. Here is a writeup on CNN Health about petit mal seizures.
This page has some numbers on seizure disorders 3% of children have a seizure when they're young. Half of those (1.5%) are caused by fevers. 1% of children have epilepsy. So, if 100,000 3D TV's were sold, assuming an average household size of 4 people, statistically 4,000 people with epilepsy will be viewing them. If (the big if) the trigger is flashing lights, then there could be a good number of cases reported. The only thing I got from the doctors on the flashing light part was it is a trigger "sometimes".
I prefer the office space story line, but if I remember correctly even they referenced the Superman movie. :)
I knew someone who was doing work for a major insurance company (which I won't name here). They weren't worried about fractional pennies. They actually had dormant bank accounts that they had forgotten about until the person I knew went looking through old paperwork. There were hundreds of thousands of dollars there, which likely showed as an insignificant fractional percentage of the company income.
And no, they didn't steal it. :) They advised their manager who then had it absorbed back into the normal company accounts.
Not when working time can be calculated in minutes, and they calculate them in hours or rounded hours. We'll use $20/hr as an example.
1 hr = 60 minutes = $20.00 .9996 hrs = $19.99
1 minute = 0.0166666666666667 hrs
0.0166666666666667 * 60 = 1.000000000000002 hrs = $20.00000000000004
0.01666 * 60 =
0.016 * 60 = 0.96 hrs = $19.20
0.01 * 60 = 0.6 hrs = $12.00
0.02 * 60 = 1.2 hrs = $24.00
So, which number would you rather your payroll company use? I prefer the accuracy of 1.000000000000002 hrs. By your logic, truncate anything beyond two decimal points, and you're getting *REALLY* shorted on your pay.
I think you should clarify, flashing lights may trigger seizures in some people. They are people who already have a seizure disorder, not the random Joe who had no pre-existing condition.
My step son had epilepsy. We didn't know until 6 months before he passed away because of it. After his first observed seizure we went to a pediatric neurologist, where they did a whole battery of tests, which did include flashing lights. He didn't have a seizure, but he was bored senseless watching the lights. What they were able to detect was that he did have a seizure the night before. They can read lingering signs of a seizure on an EEG.
Unfortunately, and not commonly explained, is that seizures can cause spasms in any muscle, including the diaphragm or heart. He died during a seizure, which did stop either his breathing or heart. They couldn't conclusively say which, but when we found him, he was still frozen in the same position which was consistent with him having a seizure. I was a trained first responder, so I did everything I could until the paramedics got there. I disregarded the signs of rigor mortis. Lividity had just started (light signs of what appeared to be bruising on what was the lower part of his body). I performed CPR until they arrived about 3 minutes later. CPR on a training dummy is a lot easier than trying to save the life of someone you care about. They pointed out what I had already seen and ignored. At least I was a good witness, and was able to describe clearly what I had seen and done. I won't say I was unaffected, I just did my best to keep my composure while describing it to them for their reports. And oh are there a lot of people who want to talk to you after something like that. Official folks (law enforcement, child protective services, etc) were in and out for 3 days. They were very polite with us, it was just a formality in case there was something unusual about it.
Sorry, this still effects me. It's only been a few years.
Back to the topic, if it were to trigger a seizure, that would be a seizure, ranging from petit mal (aka absence seizure) where the person doesn't respond, to grand mal (tonic-clonic) where they fall down in convulsions. It would only happen in a person who had a pre-existing condition, and wouldn't cause a completely unrelated disorder. It is possible that she has both disorders, but that wasn't indicated in the article.
Disclaimer: I am not a doctor. My first ex-wife suffered from petit mal seizures. Years later my step son (from my second wife) had grand mal seizures. I've listened to everything the doctors had to say when they were explaining the conditions and asked questions at the appropriate times to further educate myself.
People get judgement against them all the time, and avoid paying for as long as possible. If you win a judgement, they can want you to pay, and then either send it to a collections company or sue again which will just reinforcement judgement. In the end, you never *have* to cut a check. It doesn't look good on your credit, but hey, who's credit is golden these days? It's extremely doubtful you'd ever get the courts for you to pay or go to jail on contempt. If it comes down to that, ya bankruptcy is another route. I believe this case is against a company. Companies "fold" all the time, and continue operations as a new company. When you see an "under new management" sign, either the company really sold, or they sold to a new company with slightly different listed officers and they continue to operate as they did.
Well, you can get frost bite if exposed to water ice long enough, or from something like dry ice (carbon dioxide ice) for more than a few seconds. Personal experience there on the latter.
With the power that LED barcode scanners put off, I can't imagine how long she'd have to be exposed to it before it caused any harm. I actually have one here at home for something I'm working on, and I routinely either look at the front or light up my hand to see if it's working. Sometimes it doesn't turn on (cheap Chinese made crap). Shit, I might have fucking Tourette's. Motherfuckers, I should sue!
It's the job of the courts to hear arguments and settle them. They're suing. There could be merit. Ok, there isn't, but we actually understand the power put off by these scanners. Experts will testify, and the girl will lose.
It's the lawyers we need to do something about. Lawyers are taking on frivolous cases, regardless how little merit there is, hoping that there is an out of court settlement. It's cheaper for most companies to just settle, rather than be dragged through court. Unfortunately, this is the nation of litigation, and anyone can sue anyone for anything at any time. It's a huge industry. Every day on the radio, I hear ads for traffic attorneys. If you're in an accident, they want you to sue regardless of which side you were on. You can crash your car into someone else, and I'd bet a lawyer would be more than happy to sue the victim because they were in the way.
I was in an accident once where something like this happened. A guy was on his bicycle waiting for me to pull out into traffic. He sat there for about 10 minutes. When there was finally a break in traffic for me to pull into, he rode in front of me. He wasn't hurt, and his bike was fine. The cops even ticketed him for being dumb. Ok, the ticket didn't read that, but that's basically what it was. He wanted me to pay for his bent kickstand. Ok, $20, big deal, right? Nope, $200. I asked for a receipt, and he wouldn't produce it. I told him to talk to my insurance company. I had a nice talk with them later. The price had increased to $300. They told me he's pretty well known in the area for doing stunts like that. It was cheaper for them to pay the $300, rather than have their lawyers go to court and argue it through a trial. He did dent the hood of my car, and I didn't even ask for that to be paid. It was a shitty car, I didn't care. It was something to complain about though. Since that happened, I pay extra attention for people like that. I've had several walk in front of me to get hit. It's not accidental either. They'll step out, I'll come to a quick stop, and they'll look at me like "Why didn't you hit me?", and then try the next lane of traffic. I don't know, I'd never see money as a good enough reason to get hit by a few thousand pounds of vehicle.