You realize, of course, that this means they are already making them. God damn it. See... This is why we can t have nice things. I would love if this were true, if I could believe these people. I would also love a big piece of double chocolate fudge cake, but that s not on the table either, nor is it likely to be. Figures this would be how it ends. Whatever evolves in the next few hundred million years to replace us, would be well advised not to do stupid shit like we did, but the same evolutionary forces that formed us will form them, and they will, given enough time, do the exact same thing.
It is, I firmly believe, not a unique thing endemic to humans, but rather it is a function of the forces that brought us about. The single, thin, feeble ray of light glimmering in all this gloom and impending doom is this: I think I just solved Fermi s Paradox. This is why we here are not inundated with visitors from other planets. Because shortly after a species develops intelligence, it develops science and technology, and shortly thereafter, its natural inclinations towards individual survival at the expense of others drives them to create increasingly intricate and sophisticated and powerful weapons, and you can only have those for so long, and in such abundance, and so widely proliferated, before someone does something earth-shatteringly fucking stupid with one, and all else follows unavoidably from that error.
Case in point: by rights, humanity should have ended at the Cuban Missile Crisis. We, as a species, lucked out there. Ever since we have all collectively been living on borrowed time. Inasmuch as it seems that with each passing year, there get to be more ways for all of us to die, as a species, more individuals who can have a bad day and, or can go nuts and, or who can just get really bored and... kill everyone on Earth, it becomes increasingly apparent that the odds of seeing another year get smaller with each passing year. This is simply how probability works. You can back out of a driveway into traffic without looking and get away with it if there doesnâ(TM)t happen to be someone trying to occupy the space you are trying to back into, at that moment or immediately thereafter, but I would not count on being able to pull such a stunt repeatedly. It eventually catches up with you and I am frankly surprised it has not caught up with humanity yet. But hey, climate change... if killer robots fail to wipe us out, there is always everyone starving to death as we further and further outstrip the natural carrying capacity of the planet, (see Malthus, Thomas,) and become more and more ludicrously dependent on technology to manage to keep us all fat and happy, when it all comes tumbling down... it is going to get horrifically ugly.
You have my permission, therefore, to get drunk now. I know I m going to.
That's not actually true, although it is widely believed apparently:
Research by Victorian historians showed that the original 1215 charter had concerned the medieval relationship between the monarch and the barons, rather than the rights of ordinary people, but the charter remained a powerful, iconic document, even after almost all of its content was repealed from the statute books in the 19th and 20th centuries. Magna Carta still forms an important symbol of liberty today, often cited by politicians and campaigners, and is held in great respect by the British and American legal communities, Lord Denning describing it as "the greatest constitutional document of all times – the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot"
That is from the Wikipedia article.
Your point is not without merit however. Al Sisi rules largely due to the military support of the US, as he is seen as an enemy of the Muslim Brotherhood.
I understood the US has a law that forbids the supply of military aid to any government that takes power in a coup, so the US just declared that there was no coup.
Problem solved.
Sounds like a neat idea. Shame about the name. Couldn't they have come up with some OTHER thing to liken them to, that isn't as loathesome and nearly-universally hated? Like... I dunno... Pixie Robots? Fairy Robots? Gnome Robots? Even just... some other insect besides THAT one? Lady bug robots? Anyway... I guess this is just a sign of the times.
So this would mean my very healthy lifestyle would reduce my insurance costs and pump up those who live on junk food, never exercise and other unhealthy choices? Great lets get this happening. That is apart from what squiggleslash said.
Unless they misread you, interpreting whatever you think you look like to them differently from the way you THINK you look to them, or unless they think that whatever you think is a very healthy lifestyle... simply isn't.
If you think there's such a thing as a single healthy lifestyle, let alone a single VERY healthy one, then I have some bad news for you. You know how every 6 months or so the whole "fitness" world changes its mind on whether eggs, or milk, or wine, or chocolate, or beer, or... you name it, is good for you or not? Also, you know how there are different camps all certain at any given moment, that THEIR beliefs, based of course, on SOLID... SCIENTIFIC... unimpeachable research, done by people wearing real, actual lab coats and everything, are the only ones that are valid? Yeah... if your insurer whom you're convinced KNOWS you're living a healthy "lifestyle," thinks Paleo is BAD and Atkins was right, and you're doing Paleo... or vice-versa, or you're a vegetarian and your insurer thinks Paleo is the way to go, or maybe they think ALL that is wrong and everyone should be eating what the people in that one remote Japanese village are eating, where people routinely live well past 100... and you're doing WHAT? Eating MEDITERRANEAN?!? OMG... SO unhealthy!
Or... do you take your dietary and lifestyle guidance from your health-insurance agent? Actually... they're the ones with the actuarial tables... screw the doctors, maybe we SHOULD be asking the INSURANCE guys how to be healthy! Or maybe not... since they have a vested interest in you dying young, while you're still healthy, before the unavoidable health care costs of advancing age make you a less and less profitable person to insure.
Unless they're also selling you your life insurance, in which case, maybe I'm wrong.
But even then, what happens when you ask your insurance agent, "how should I live my life," and then you do it, and then the company gets bought out by another company, who look in your file, see that you've been following the agent's advice to the letter, but they think your agent was a moron who didn't know what he was talking about? Or what if you've been living a healthy lifestyle, but you had three kids, and the insurer thinks you should only have had two, and that you've just placed a massive burden on the environment by producing.4783 more humans than it would take to replace you and hold the population stable... point is, NO, this is NOT a good thing, despite what you may have been lulled into thinking. It's rather like "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear," except instead of someone potentially throwing you in a cage as a result of someone thinking you did something wrong, it's someone deciding to allow you to die because a different someone thinks you did something else wrong. Allowing this kind of thing is like letting the cops be judges, juries, and executioners.
Letting the insurance pigs decide you're too expensive to insure, because you expressed an opinion he thinks is correlated with a reduced life-expectancy or increased costs of coverage, is a bad, stupid, wrong-headed idea. Still not convinced? Okay, so what happens if you think you're living a healthy lifestyle, but you're doing so somewhere your insurer knows is near a cluster of cases of a rare and aggressive form of cancer, and so cancels your insurance, because the premiums you pay aren't worth the risk given the cost of treatment and how much more likely it is for someone who lives where you do?
They could just turn commercials down, or shows up, but this does BOTH!
If it could automatically MUTE commercials, and moreover replace the screen image with something soothing and attractive, a nice graphic showing how many seconds, updated each second, with how long until the commercial ends, I'd consider buying one. But only if they could guarantee that they'll never water the feature down, or remove it, like you know they're going to once it makes economic sense to them, i.e., once their devices reach sufficient market penetration. Or they get sued by ad makers, or whoever is responsible for them. I really hate ads.
They are using Amazon to communicate clandestinely, obviously. The prices are code. Without the code book to decipher it, you have no hope of knowing what they are saying to each other, or to know who the sender or recipient are. Also, looking for used books on Amazon looks perfectly innocent.
An example message could be that there is a used copy of Wuthering Heights for 2901.08, meaning this: meet at the park and bring the diamonds, while a price of 2901.78 means: the director wants you to deposit the carcass with the bacterium from lab D into the reservoir on the 13th, after 8 pm. Or whatever. You get the idea.
Used to be they put cryptic ads in newspaper classifieds, now they can do this worldwide, not limited by newspaper circulation, and oh did I mention that doing it this way is free?
Now if they would just put all the ports they thoughtlessly ripped out back, put the magnetically coupled charging port back, and give it a reliable, fully-functional keyboard like they USED TO MAKE, they would have a laptop I might consider buying.
Is it that some people have more money than sense? You guys who drool over shit like this, surely you KNOW that your smartphone, (which if you have ANY interest in this, I KNOW you have one of,) CAN ALREADY DO THIS FOR YOU, right? There are a half dozen apps that come to mind. Google Maps For example has a feature that will automatically remember where you parked. I cannot understand what the point of this is.
This is like a $700 beer bottle opener that tells you how many beers you have drunk today, and tracks the calories for you. Except that you already KNOW how many beers you have drunk. There is a mathematical formula for that, that every beer-drinker instinctively knows. It is imbedded deep in your soul. But if you have forgotten...
Let us say x is the number of beers required to render you insensible, and n is some number between 0 and x, with a maximum value of x-1. If you are conscious, then you have consumed n beers, and the only way to ascertain whether n = x-1, is to drink a (or another if not the first) beer, and reevaluate consciousness. The beer-counting function of the $700 bottle opener is not only unneeded, it is a waste of money that could otherwise be used buying beer, to aid in recomputing the value of x for a given beer drinker on a given afternoon, evening, night, or in the case of a hardcore inebriatory researcher, morning. (For this value may change and therefore must be routinely reverified.). As for calories... if the drinker CARES about them, he or she should probably either NOT be drinking beer, or should alternatively drink a lot MORE of it.
The license plate thing is kind of similar to this, in that if you need one, you should not be driving in the first place, and if you WANT one, you need to be slapped upside the head with it.
Like did they account for the fact that one of the side-effects of people getting a fix of what they're addicted to is that it helps them to not die as a result of being executed for murdering all their coworkers like they MIGHT have done had they NOT reliably and regularly gotten their caffeine-fix? Just coo-ri-us.
For people who believe these guys when they offer something... this is a bit like going to a buffet where they offer "all you can eat," and "unlimited numbers of trips to the buffet line," but you can only use one plate at a time, the plates are handed out at the end of a long line and only one at a time, after the person handing the plates out verifies that you paid for the buffet by checking your receipt, (and does this each time, and marks down the time and checks your ID, so no receipt, no plate, and if someone ELSE besides you comes up with your receipt, they simply take your receipt away, meaning no more buffet,) and also the plates are actually saucers normally used with teacups. Kinda sucks the fun out of the whole experience. That said, of course, fuck Comcast.
The amendment would ban naming proposed legislation or laws in such a way as to make acronyms of the law spell out real words, because there's no reason why this proposed law has to have this as its name, other than because they thought it would be cute to call it the "PIRATE" act. We could call it the Final Universal Constitutional Knowledge Yet Amending Legal Legislation, or the "FUCK Y'ALL Amendment". Because, as this amendment points out, right there in its name, the name has little to do with the law in question, it's just there to make the acronym spell something funny.
It is important to note that this "PIRATE" Act cost us MONEY, in the form of paychecks to lawmakers to draft this shit, and they had to spend some time, (or pay someone else, out of our money) to spend some time figuring out which words to use to make the name of the law's acronym spell out whatever they want it to spell.
BETTER YET, make the law that if the acronym happens to spell out (or come really close to spelling out,) a real, actual word, that the words used to make it spell that MUST be changed to the first word in the dictionary, (whichever one they use in Congress,) starting with that letter, having at least the number of letters in the word corresponding to the position in the letter in the acronym (in alphabetical order, in case that wasn't obvious,) and skipping/excluding any word that is an abbreviation, a proper noun, (someone's or something's name,) containing punctuation, symbols, etc., or which is a contraction, or other combination, or which only meets the requirements because of the addition of an ending, (such as "-er" or "-edly",) or which is a one-word alternative form of a hyphenated word pair or group, or which is onomatopoetic, etc.
SO, since they want to call this the "PIRATE Act," The word from which we get P would be the first word starting with P that is at least one letter long. The second word in the actual name would start with I, and be the first that is at least two letters long. The third would be the first word in the dictionary starting with R that is at least three letters long, and so on.
In this case, using the New Oxford American Dictionary, the full name of the "PIRATE Act," would be the...
"The P Iamb Rabbet Abaca Tabard Earnest Act." Try saying THAT three times fast!
They should have to call this the "P Iamb Rabbet Abaca Tabard Earnest Act. Maybe then they wouldn't be able to giggle to themselves so much about it, which I just KNOW they're doing. "heheheheh we made it the PIRATE act... hahahahah" They did that using OUR tax dollars, too. That's, I know, a silly thing to be upset about that they did, given all the other abominations and atrocities they've committed only in the last... oh, couple of days or so, in our name, allegedly, with our consent, (hahaha!) and with our tax dollars, (extracted effectively at gunpoint,) but it's REALLY annoying that they keep pulling this shit, and it should STOP.
Under my proposed amendment, they would be exempt from this rule, if the name of the law, when abbreviated, doesn't SPELL anything special, or anything related to the thing being regulated. For example, the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (or whatever,) could still be called that, as the treaty has NOTHING TO DO WITH SALT. So calling it SALT is fine. They would be banned, however, from calling any law the "Nuclear Unification Kablooie Escape" Act, because that spells out "NUKE". Click "LIKE" if you agree with this idea. Oh, wait, there's no "LIKE" button. SHIT!
Two looks like an error, like a double period at the end of a sentence.. Like that. See? Two exclamation marks look like they could be the result of a mistake!! Like that. But three, three exclamation marks are sufficient to indicate enthusiasm, without risk of being perceived as a possible typographical error!!! See?!? More than that looks silly and four, five, or more, unavoidably look like this!!!!!1!!!!1!!11!1!!1!11!!! Just silly, and kind of childish or careless. So... three.
But sometimes you are trying to convey silly, childish enthusiasm!!!1!
Well, then you use as many as you like, and you have succeeded in your purpose of conveying silly, childish enthusiasm. For regular enthusiasm, I maintain three is the best choice.
Two looks like an error, like a double period at the end of a sentence.. Like that. See? Two exclamation marks look like they could be the result of a mistake!! Like that. But three, three exclamation marks are sufficient to indicate enthusiasm, without risk of being perceived as a possible typographical error!!! See?!? More than that looks silly and four, five, or more, unavoidably look like this!!!!!1!!!!1!!11!1!!1!11!!! Just silly, and kind of childish or careless. So... three.
Way to keep readers informed. Oh, by the way, you forgot to mention something kinda important, that this is malware impacting systems running MICROSOFT WINDOWS.
Had to waste time to go read the linked article to learn what you SHOULD have put somewhere in the title or summary. The term PC does NOT imply MS Windows; a device with the same electrical design and functionality running GNU/Linux, Apple macOS/OS X, or some other flavor or variant of UNIX is still very much, just as much, a PC. So saying malware infecting PCs and NOT specifying that itâ(TM)s MICROSOFT WINDOWS that, (if I read and understood the article,) is the targeted system, is a disservice to your readers. I didnâ(TM)t see which version or versions, etc., are impacted, but this was poor journalism from a website that styles itself as being news for nerds... I know you know that WE know that PC does not imply a system running something from Microsoft, and we know you know that. Or should.
Tomorrow, they're buying AT&T, (and all that they own,) SpaceX, (and getting a free Tesla thrown in... sorry, I mean getting Tesla, thrown in, for free,) Disney, and all they own, (wait, do they own Disney already? I forget...) then next week, they're buying Apple, IBM, Sony, Toyota, Volkswagen, and the company that makes all pens and most pencils. What do they not own yet?
Seriously... what idiot is still using Face...(--- checks to make sure old Facebook login doesn't work --- "okay, good, it doesn't,")... is still using Facebook anymore?
So I can maybe haz privacy, but I haz to move to California to get it? Shiitttt.... if I had that much money, (and could tolerate living in that crazy place,) I'd already be there.
Actually... I wonder, should California succeed in splitting itself into multiple states, which one I'd have to live in, WERE I to move back, to get the advantages of the protection of this new law. I assume whichever Baby Cali has Silicon Valley in it. Will that be the only one or will there be others?
Actually, the whole business is academic, since whatever law they enact will be either overridden by an act of the US Congress, (by which I mean an act of their owners, wielding them like the brainless, gutless, stupid little meat puppets that they are,) striking down any state law regulating a national telecom, or struck down by the "Supreme" (hahaha) Court, which is about to become, (and I add this at the risk of getting moderated to -2) Trumperific, with AT getting ready to retire, unless Congressional Democrats find their balls, (only speculated to exist as of this writing,) and BLOCK the SHIT out of whomever that fuckwad nominates, which they totally should, in response to the bullshit the Gas & Oil Party pulled with Merrick Garland, (not that I liked or supported either him or the person who nominated him, but the shenanigans pulled around that whole thing were just pure bullshit,) and would if they had balls, but... like I said, they're only theoretical.
So to summarize: this is a neat idea, too bad you have to live in Crazifornia to benefit, even theoretically, assuming it actually becomes law there; there's some doubt this law will still protect you even if you DO live in Califuckedia, as you might be in the wrong part of it, if/when it splits, and will it matter since the federal government is going to bitchslap CA over this, since the people running it are owned and operated by the same people who own the telecoms and internet companies this seeks to regulate? In short, good luck with this, Cali.
Heh, but the salt thing is old and wrong. Salt as much as you like.
The cult TV series Babylon 5 called it back in 1996 or something.
And kudos also to South Park for flipping the food pyramid, around three years ago.
That's just what Big Sodium WANTS you to think. Did you happen to notice that Morton's was a sponsor of Babylon 5?!? At least I think they were... I'd heard they were putting salt in the water, so I have been thumbing my nose at them by drinking seawater instead... ("I'll show YOU," I thought,) and... my head feels funny... is it like, really bright in here? I think I'm going to sit down for a while...
How about client-side salted hashes? Nobody can randomly guess something like 63DA4171F2D985441F1AE0C4F3C2AA27 as a password.
If you salt your hashes too much, you do run an increased risk of hypertension, stroke, and even death. Word to the wise.;-p I know they taste better that way, but it's important to exercise restraint. Instead of salt, (or in addition to a pinch, in proper moderation,) if you add some freshly ground black pepper and some butter... mmmmmm.... what were we talking about again?
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Slashdot Mirror
You realize, of course, that this means they are already making them. God damn it. See... This is why we can t have nice things. I would love if this were true, if I could believe these people. I would also love a big piece of double chocolate fudge cake, but that s not on the table either, nor is it likely to be. Figures this would be how it ends. Whatever evolves in the next few hundred million years to replace us, would be well advised not to do stupid shit like we did, but the same evolutionary forces that formed us will form them, and they will, given enough time, do the exact same thing.
It is, I firmly believe, not a unique thing endemic to humans, but rather it is a function of the forces that brought us about. The single, thin, feeble ray of light glimmering in all this gloom and impending doom is this: I think I just solved Fermi s Paradox. This is why we here are not inundated with visitors from other planets. Because shortly after a species develops intelligence, it develops science and technology, and shortly thereafter, its natural inclinations towards individual survival at the expense of others drives them to create increasingly intricate and sophisticated and powerful weapons, and you can only have those for so long, and in such abundance, and so widely proliferated, before someone does something earth-shatteringly fucking stupid with one, and all else follows unavoidably from that error.
Case in point: by rights, humanity should have ended at the Cuban Missile Crisis. We, as a species, lucked out there. Ever since we have all collectively been living on borrowed time. Inasmuch as it seems that with each passing year, there get to be more ways for all of us to die, as a species, more individuals who can have a bad day and, or can go nuts and, or who can just get really bored and... kill everyone on Earth, it becomes increasingly apparent that the odds of seeing another year get smaller with each passing year. This is simply how probability works. You can back out of a driveway into traffic without looking and get away with it if there doesnâ(TM)t happen to be someone trying to occupy the space you are trying to back into, at that moment or immediately thereafter, but I would not count on being able to pull such a stunt repeatedly. It eventually catches up with you and I am frankly surprised it has not caught up with humanity yet. But hey, climate change... if killer robots fail to wipe us out, there is always everyone starving to death as we further and further outstrip the natural carrying capacity of the planet, (see Malthus, Thomas,) and become more and more ludicrously dependent on technology to manage to keep us all fat and happy, when it all comes tumbling down... it is going to get horrifically ugly.
You have my permission, therefore, to get drunk now. I know I m going to.
That's not actually true, although it is widely believed apparently:
Research by Victorian historians showed that the original 1215 charter had concerned the medieval relationship between the monarch and the barons, rather than the rights of ordinary people, but the charter remained a powerful, iconic document, even after almost all of its content was repealed from the statute books in the 19th and 20th centuries. Magna Carta still forms an important symbol of liberty today, often cited by politicians and campaigners, and is held in great respect by the British and American legal communities, Lord Denning describing it as "the greatest constitutional document of all times – the foundation of the freedom of the individual against the arbitrary authority of the despot"
That is from the Wikipedia article. Your point is not without merit however. Al Sisi rules largely due to the military support of the US, as he is seen as an enemy of the Muslim Brotherhood. I understood the US has a law that forbids the supply of military aid to any government that takes power in a coup, so the US just declared that there was no coup. Problem solved.
So true. So minitrue...
Sounds like a neat idea. Shame about the name. Couldn't they have come up with some OTHER thing to liken them to, that isn't as loathesome and nearly-universally hated? Like... I dunno... Pixie Robots? Fairy Robots? Gnome Robots? Even just... some other insect besides THAT one? Lady bug robots? Anyway... I guess this is just a sign of the times.
So this would mean my very healthy lifestyle would reduce my insurance costs and pump up those who live on junk food, never exercise and other unhealthy choices? Great lets get this happening. That is apart from what squiggleslash said.
Unless they misread you, interpreting whatever you think you look like to them differently from the way you THINK you look to them, or unless they think that whatever you think is a very healthy lifestyle... simply isn't.
... you name it, is good for you or not? Also, you know how there are different camps all certain at any given moment, that THEIR beliefs, based of course, on SOLID... SCIENTIFIC... unimpeachable research, done by people wearing real, actual lab coats and everything, are the only ones that are valid? Yeah... if your insurer whom you're convinced KNOWS you're living a healthy "lifestyle," thinks Paleo is BAD and Atkins was right, and you're doing Paleo... or vice-versa, or you're a vegetarian and your insurer thinks Paleo is the way to go, or maybe they think ALL that is wrong and everyone should be eating what the people in that one remote Japanese village are eating, where people routinely live well past 100... and you're doing WHAT? Eating MEDITERRANEAN?!? OMG... SO unhealthy!
.4783 more humans than it would take to replace you and hold the population stable... point is, NO, this is NOT a good thing, despite what you may have been lulled into thinking. It's rather like "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear," except instead of someone potentially throwing you in a cage as a result of someone thinking you did something wrong, it's someone deciding to allow you to die because a different someone thinks you did something else wrong. Allowing this kind of thing is like letting the cops be judges, juries, and executioners.
If you think there's such a thing as a single healthy lifestyle, let alone a single VERY healthy one, then I have some bad news for you. You know how every 6 months or so the whole "fitness" world changes its mind on whether eggs, or milk, or wine, or chocolate, or beer, or
Or... do you take your dietary and lifestyle guidance from your health-insurance agent? Actually... they're the ones with the actuarial tables... screw the doctors, maybe we SHOULD be asking the INSURANCE guys how to be healthy! Or maybe not... since they have a vested interest in you dying young, while you're still healthy, before the unavoidable health care costs of advancing age make you a less and less profitable person to insure.
Unless they're also selling you your life insurance, in which case, maybe I'm wrong.
But even then, what happens when you ask your insurance agent, "how should I live my life," and then you do it, and then the company gets bought out by another company, who look in your file, see that you've been following the agent's advice to the letter, but they think your agent was a moron who didn't know what he was talking about? Or what if you've been living a healthy lifestyle, but you had three kids, and the insurer thinks you should only have had two, and that you've just placed a massive burden on the environment by producing
Letting the insurance pigs decide you're too expensive to insure, because you expressed an opinion he thinks is correlated with a reduced life-expectancy or increased costs of coverage, is a bad, stupid, wrong-headed idea. Still not convinced? Okay, so what happens if you think you're living a healthy lifestyle, but you're doing so somewhere your insurer knows is near a cluster of cases of a rare and aggressive form of cancer, and so cancels your insurance, because the premiums you pay aren't worth the risk given the cost of treatment and how much more likely it is for someone who lives where you do?
Still think this doesn't affect you?
They could just turn commercials down, or shows up, but this does BOTH!
If it could automatically MUTE commercials, and moreover replace the screen image with something soothing and attractive, a nice graphic showing how many seconds, updated each second, with how long until the commercial ends, I'd consider buying one. But only if they could guarantee that they'll never water the feature down, or remove it, like you know they're going to once it makes economic sense to them, i.e., once their devices reach sufficient market penetration. Or they get sued by ad makers, or whoever is responsible for them. I really hate ads.
They are using Amazon to communicate clandestinely, obviously. The prices are code. Without the code book to decipher it, you have no hope of knowing what they are saying to each other, or to know who the sender or recipient are. Also, looking for used books on Amazon looks perfectly innocent.
An example message could be that there is a used copy of Wuthering Heights for 2901.08, meaning this: meet at the park and bring the diamonds, while a price of 2901.78 means: the director wants you to deposit the carcass with the bacterium from lab D into the reservoir on the 13th, after 8 pm. Or whatever. You get the idea.
Used to be they put cryptic ads in newspaper classifieds, now they can do this worldwide, not limited by newspaper circulation, and oh did I mention that doing it this way is free?
Now if they would just put all the ports they thoughtlessly ripped out back, put the magnetically coupled charging port back, and give it a reliable, fully-functional keyboard like they USED TO MAKE, they would have a laptop I might consider buying.
Is it that some people have more money than sense? You guys who drool over shit like this, surely you KNOW that your smartphone, (which if you have ANY interest in this, I KNOW you have one of,) CAN ALREADY DO THIS FOR YOU, right? There are a half dozen apps that come to mind. Google Maps For example has a feature that will automatically remember where you parked. I cannot understand what the point of this is.
This is like a $700 beer bottle opener that tells you how many beers you have drunk today, and tracks the calories for you. Except that you already KNOW how many beers you have drunk. There is a mathematical formula for that, that every beer-drinker instinctively knows. It is imbedded deep in your soul. But if you have forgotten...
Let us say x is the number of beers required to render you insensible, and n is some number between 0 and x, with a maximum value of x-1. If you are conscious, then you have consumed n beers, and the only way to ascertain whether n = x-1, is to drink a (or another if not the first) beer, and reevaluate consciousness. The beer-counting function of the $700 bottle opener is not only unneeded, it is a waste of money that could otherwise be used buying beer, to aid in recomputing the value of x for a given beer drinker on a given afternoon, evening, night, or in the case of a hardcore inebriatory researcher, morning. (For this value may change and therefore must be routinely reverified.). As for calories... if the drinker CARES about them, he or she should probably either NOT be drinking beer, or should alternatively drink a lot MORE of it.
The license plate thing is kind of similar to this, in that if you need one, you should not be driving in the first place, and if you WANT one, you need to be slapped upside the head with it.
Google has made my ever-expanding list of "free" services I'm going to have to stop using.
Like did they account for the fact that one of the side-effects of people getting a fix of what they're addicted to is that it helps them to not die as a result of being executed for murdering all their coworkers like they MIGHT have done had they NOT reliably and regularly gotten their caffeine-fix? Just coo-ri-us.
For people who believe these guys when they offer something... this is a bit like going to a buffet where they offer "all you can eat," and "unlimited numbers of trips to the buffet line," but you can only use one plate at a time, the plates are handed out at the end of a long line and only one at a time, after the person handing the plates out verifies that you paid for the buffet by checking your receipt, (and does this each time, and marks down the time and checks your ID, so no receipt, no plate, and if someone ELSE besides you comes up with your receipt, they simply take your receipt away, meaning no more buffet,) and also the plates are actually saucers normally used with teacups. Kinda sucks the fun out of the whole experience. That said, of course, fuck Comcast.
...since I blocked all of Facebook by deleting my Facebook account.
AT&T Promised Lower Prices After Time Warner Merger -- It's Raising Them Instead
The amendment would ban naming proposed legislation or laws in such a way as to make acronyms of the law spell out real words, because there's no reason why this proposed law has to have this as its name, other than because they thought it would be cute to call it the "PIRATE" act. We could call it the Final Universal Constitutional Knowledge Yet Amending Legal Legislation, or the "FUCK Y'ALL Amendment". Because, as this amendment points out, right there in its name, the name has little to do with the law in question, it's just there to make the acronym spell something funny.
It is important to note that this "PIRATE" Act cost us MONEY, in the form of paychecks to lawmakers to draft this shit, and they had to spend some time, (or pay someone else, out of our money) to spend some time figuring out which words to use to make the name of the law's acronym spell out whatever they want it to spell.
BETTER YET, make the law that if the acronym happens to spell out (or come really close to spelling out,) a real, actual word, that the words used to make it spell that MUST be changed to the first word in the dictionary, (whichever one they use in Congress,) starting with that letter, having at least the number of letters in the word corresponding to the position in the letter in the acronym (in alphabetical order, in case that wasn't obvious,) and skipping/excluding any word that is an abbreviation, a proper noun, (someone's or something's name,) containing punctuation, symbols, etc., or which is a contraction, or other combination, or which only meets the requirements because of the addition of an ending, (such as "-er" or "-edly",) or which is a one-word alternative form of a hyphenated word pair or group, or which is onomatopoetic, etc.
SO, since they want to call this the "PIRATE Act," The word from which we get P would be the first word starting with P that is at least one letter long. The second word in the actual name would start with I, and be the first that is at least two letters long. The third would be the first word in the dictionary starting with R that is at least three letters long, and so on.
In this case, using the New Oxford American Dictionary, the full name of the "PIRATE Act," would be the...
"The P Iamb Rabbet Abaca Tabard Earnest Act." Try saying THAT three times fast! They should have to call this the "P Iamb Rabbet Abaca Tabard Earnest Act. Maybe then they wouldn't be able to giggle to themselves so much about it, which I just KNOW they're doing. "heheheheh we made it the PIRATE act... hahahahah" They did that using OUR tax dollars, too. That's, I know, a silly thing to be upset about that they did, given all the other abominations and atrocities they've committed only in the last... oh, couple of days or so, in our name, allegedly, with our consent, (hahaha!) and with our tax dollars, (extracted effectively at gunpoint,) but it's REALLY annoying that they keep pulling this shit, and it should STOP.
Under my proposed amendment, they would be exempt from this rule, if the name of the law, when abbreviated, doesn't SPELL anything special, or anything related to the thing being regulated. For example, the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty (or whatever,) could still be called that, as the treaty has NOTHING TO DO WITH SALT. So calling it SALT is fine. They would be banned, however, from calling any law the "Nuclear Unification Kablooie Escape" Act, because that spells out "NUKE". Click "LIKE" if you agree with this idea. Oh, wait, there's no "LIKE" button. SHIT!
Two looks like an error, like a double period at the end of a sentence.. Like that. See? Two exclamation marks look like they could be the result of a mistake!! Like that. But three, three exclamation marks are sufficient to indicate enthusiasm, without risk of being perceived as a possible typographical error!!! See?!? More than that looks silly and four, five, or more, unavoidably look like this!!!!!1!!!!1!!11!1!!1!11!!! Just silly, and kind of childish or careless. So... three.
But sometimes you are trying to convey silly, childish enthusiasm!!!1!
Well, then you use as many as you like, and you have succeeded in your purpose of conveying silly, childish enthusiasm. For regular enthusiasm, I maintain three is the best choice.
Two looks like an error, like a double period at the end of a sentence.. Like that. See? Two exclamation marks look like they could be the result of a mistake!! Like that. But three, three exclamation marks are sufficient to indicate enthusiasm, without risk of being perceived as a possible typographical error!!! See?!? More than that looks silly and four, five, or more, unavoidably look like this!!!!!1!!!!1!!11!1!!1!11!!! Just silly, and kind of childish or careless. So... three.
That should be true, but sadly, it is not. Every once in a great while, it is something else. They really should have specified.
Way to keep readers informed. Oh, by the way, you forgot to mention something kinda important, that this is malware impacting systems running MICROSOFT WINDOWS.
Had to waste time to go read the linked article to learn what you SHOULD have put somewhere in the title or summary. The term PC does NOT imply MS Windows; a device with the same electrical design and functionality running GNU/Linux, Apple macOS/OS X, or some other flavor or variant of UNIX is still very much, just as much, a PC. So saying malware infecting PCs and NOT specifying that itâ(TM)s MICROSOFT WINDOWS that, (if I read and understood the article,) is the targeted system, is a disservice to your readers. I didnâ(TM)t see which version or versions, etc., are impacted, but this was poor journalism from a website that styles itself as being news for nerds... I know you know that WE know that PC does not imply a system running something from Microsoft, and we know you know that. Or should.
Tomorrow, they're buying AT&T, (and all that they own,) SpaceX, (and getting a free Tesla thrown in... sorry, I mean getting Tesla, thrown in, for free,) Disney, and all they own, (wait, do they own Disney already? I forget...) then next week, they're buying Apple, IBM, Sony, Toyota, Volkswagen, and the company that makes all pens and most pencils. What do they not own yet?
Seriously... what idiot is still using Face... (--- checks to make sure old Facebook login doesn't work --- "okay, good, it doesn't,") ... is still using Facebook anymore?
So I can maybe haz privacy, but I haz to move to California to get it? Shiitttt.... if I had that much money, (and could tolerate living in that crazy place,) I'd already be there.
Actually... I wonder, should California succeed in splitting itself into multiple states, which one I'd have to live in, WERE I to move back, to get the advantages of the protection of this new law. I assume whichever Baby Cali has Silicon Valley in it. Will that be the only one or will there be others?
Actually, the whole business is academic, since whatever law they enact will be either overridden by an act of the US Congress, (by which I mean an act of their owners, wielding them like the brainless, gutless, stupid little meat puppets that they are,) striking down any state law regulating a national telecom, or struck down by the "Supreme" (hahaha) Court, which is about to become, (and I add this at the risk of getting moderated to -2) Trumperific, with AT getting ready to retire, unless Congressional Democrats find their balls, (only speculated to exist as of this writing,) and BLOCK the SHIT out of whomever that fuckwad nominates, which they totally should, in response to the bullshit the Gas & Oil Party pulled with Merrick Garland, (not that I liked or supported either him or the person who nominated him, but the shenanigans pulled around that whole thing were just pure bullshit,) and would if they had balls, but... like I said, they're only theoretical.
So to summarize: this is a neat idea, too bad you have to live in Crazifornia to benefit, even theoretically, assuming it actually becomes law there; there's some doubt this law will still protect you even if you DO live in Califuckedia, as you might be in the wrong part of it, if/when it splits, and will it matter since the federal government is going to bitchslap CA over this, since the people running it are owned and operated by the same people who own the telecoms and internet companies this seeks to regulate? In short, good luck with this, Cali.
Heh, but the salt thing is old and wrong. Salt as much as you like. The cult TV series Babylon 5 called it back in 1996 or something. And kudos also to South Park for flipping the food pyramid, around three years ago.
That's just what Big Sodium WANTS you to think. Did you happen to notice that Morton's was a sponsor of Babylon 5?!? At least I think they were... I'd heard they were putting salt in the water, so I have been thumbing my nose at them by drinking seawater instead... ("I'll show YOU," I thought,) and... my head feels funny... is it like, really bright in here? I think I'm going to sit down for a while...
How about client-side salted hashes? Nobody can randomly guess something like 63DA4171F2D985441F1AE0C4F3C2AA27 as a password.
If you salt your hashes too much, you do run an increased risk of hypertension, stroke, and even death. Word to the wise. ;-p I know they taste better that way, but it's important to exercise restraint. Instead of salt, (or in addition to a pinch, in proper moderation,) if you add some freshly ground black pepper and some butter... mmmmmm.... what were we talking about again?
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Tried to post original with different browser, and I got “invalid request”. Sorry about double post. :-/