>>Apple are possibly the worst for warranties... and more specifically owning up to defects.
I suppose that explains Apple remaining in the top 3 for the last what 15 yrs in computer customer service.
Just this week I have seen Apple volunteer to repair TWO computers that were flat out abused by the customer because they want to keep happy customers. Your statement about Apple being "the worst" for warranties is about the biggest pile of flaming BS I have seen recently. They're expensive, they're arrogant, they're controlling, etc, but the grand majority of their customers rate the warranty and customer support five star.
That being said, yes the LSI are unreliable. They're also used worldwide by almost anyone that manufactures a handheld electronic gadget, including darn near 100% of cell phone manufacturers because they're cheap and WILL identify liquid contact. (erroring in their favor, what did you expect?) And every single one of them has started the game with a "if we see red, the warranty is void" policy, and will make exceptions/considerations in the customer's favor. (some more often than others) Take your dead cell phone into the store and say it won't turn on. The very first thing they will do is remove the battery. Not to reset it. (that's what they'll say though) But to look at the (most easily accessed, one of many) LSI in the phone. You make it sound like Apple is the only one in the world that does this. Remove your cell phone's battery. Look for the white dot.
>>I suppose owning up to a defect is difficult when your under the delusion of perfection
"defect" implies there was a "correct" way to do it. What was your suggestion? Don't you think by now someone would be wealthy having made a better solution to this industry-wide problem, if it were a trivial thing to improve on?
this ought to be good... I want to see the suits show up at a door, knock, and open it to see a tank barrel in their face. (sort of like in the Simpsons episode)
oh wait I forgot, the RIAA doesn't pick on anyone that can defend themselves.
oops forgot to address your "batteries" argument. ww2... tubes, not transistors. yes, you can run them off battery, but not easily, not efficiently, and certainly not at high power for any length of time. and when you are trying to operate a clandestine transmitter, portability and hidability are very important. Large flats of lead acid batteries are both hard to smuggle and hard to hide. But then again, back then, the transmitters themselves tended to be larger too. Though I'm sure there were a few, I've never read of any clandestine transmitters in ww2 that were battery powered. Got any links to share? I'd be interested in expanding my knowledge on the subject.
Nowadays however, that's not an issue. A 9v battery and a sardine can will get you by for basics.
Sorry, I got the name a bit wrong, it's been awhile. Adcock Array
Also, the best place for anyone to start RDF is with the book "Transmitter Hunting - Radio Direction Finding Simplified" - http://www.homingin.com./ Build the roanoke dopplar in that book with all the mods and get it properly tweaked and you can generally kick butt on foxhunts. But its weakness is multipath, and it's very hard to implement (mobile) on HF. Use a basic LPER or something of that nature for close in. (this applies to VHF and up) Everything has a weakness in RDF. A good null loop I've found is best for HF, but you have to get initial bearings and get out of the vehicle frequently till you get close, similar to the LPER.
Tactics and hardware are so dependent on band. Considering though that these people are going to be probably UHF, a dopplar would absolutely by the way to go for initial location. (there are companies you can buy dopplars from if you don't want to build your own, such as Dopplar Systems. (http://www.dopsys.com/) Kinda pricey tho and the roanoke's better;) The final 200ft at UHF can be a major PITA if there are other strong signals on band. I'm used to having to find transmitters that are elaborately hidden, and more than once I've spent many minutes within spitting distance (and I mean that most literally) before finding the bugger.
So many of the above posters are taking it for granted just what you can do to hide yourself. You're not looking for a guy holding a mic sitting on a lawn chair in the middle of his back yard beside a rig and a big dipole. And people that are in the situation on this thread have their freedom and lives on the line, they're not likely to be careless.
Expect your government to have multiple Adcock Arrays set up and will have a fairly tight initial location within seconds of detecting your transmission. And in 15 minutes suddenly the area is crawling with police and multiple white vans with lots of antennas on their roofs. You'd better stop transmitting now.
Looks like EVERYTHING is out. If you try to look at sites in Egypt, you get nothing. They don't even ping. I have to admit I enjoyed the irony of being cut off from Orascom's site, since they have built systems around the world for authoritatria
Post after post talking about sites. They took out the backbone routers. Of course all the SITES are down.
We should find out which companies bowed before the dictators. Looks like Vodaphoe is one of them.
When a truckload of soldiers show up at your NOC with automatic weapons and politely ask you to pull the plug, you do
You can't blame the ISPs for this. In cases like this the soldiers usually have orders to turn their weapons on the racks if the ISP refuses to cooperate. One way or another, you will cooperate.
It doesn't work like in the movies. Triangulating a transmitter takes time, coordination, and experience. (I consider myself one of the better foxhunters in my state) And if the person doesn't want to be found, they can make it extremely difficult to pin down.
Both german-controlled france and russia took the same novel approach trying to find spies transmitting in WW2... they'd cut power to parts of the city a chunk at a time until the signal went off the air, then tear apart that area. Shows just how difficult it can be. Nowadays though with dopplars and haddock arrays they don't have to shut down the grids, but finding the actual transmitter remains very difficult. (I've been foxhunting for just about 20 yrs)
It looks like you're taking this from tournament play. This kid wasn't in a tournament, he was just playing the online game. There's a huge difference in the number of players to scrutinize here, and it's completely unreasonable to expect direct admin intervention. They're relying solely on automated detection systems at this level.
However, their apparent complete lack of appeals process is unacceptable, especially when the main process is entirely automatic and subject to false positives.
Several previous posts have discussed checking game memory for hacks... I very much doubt this was a console hack, judging from the kid. So lets just throw that out right now.
So with direct admin spotting and memory scrubbing off the list, that leaves two basic routes to get banned. Either statistically improbable scoring, or statistically improbable performance. (similar to your watching for uncharacteristic pointer sensitivity) Autistic kids are well known to live outside the statistical norm, demonstrating (usually mental) seemingly impossible stunts. (the public classics like memorizing sections of telephone books, but that's uncommon) This kid could very easily have an average head-acquisition time of half a second, and still not be able to tie his own shoes. Autistic kids tend to focus on a few or a single thing and shut most other things out, so they grand-master that skill, and are utterly fail at most everything else we take for granted. It's usually something totally useless, but every now and then they hit on something that's actually useful, it's just completely random that way and there's no choosing what it is. MS's anticheat system can't account for this, and doesn't. The fact that they have no serious appeals process is the problem here.
But that being said, taking it from the other players' perspective, there may be no observable difference between this kid and someone that's using an aimbot. He may also have a very powerful spacial memory allowing him to maintain a picture of the game map in his head, along with all the players, accounting for movement, in real time, which closely resembles a wall hack. For the other players, this kid may have a huge advantage, and for people that come to xbox live for fun, this may really ruin their fun. It'd be like going to the playground for a round of basketball and having michael jordan show up. Maybe neat to watch, but not really that fun if you still want a chance of winning when you play, and most people do.
So as much as people might not like it, MS may have actually done the right thing for the majority. I don't particularly like that myself, but there it is. I know I personally don't care to sign into a game and see a person on the opposing team that I know is just going to spank everyone on my team including myself for the entire game.
Sorry AT&T, people have been fed up with slow internet. Everyone that has wanted an iPhone but waited is going to jump on this. Everyone with an expiring AT&T contract that was fed-up with AT&T service is going to jump. People have already made up their minds, this little 'incentive' isn't going to help.
Especially when you have to ask them to stop screwing you. If they wanted to make a serious attempt at saving face they'd just roll them all back, and not just those that are older customers. Letting older customers do it and NOT letting newer ones, wow. Way to keep a new customer!
I've been on a variety of trackers in the past and I can assure you that 100 users are not responsible for anywhere near 75% of the content available. But even on crappy public trackers like piratebay it can't be that bad.
it may be closer to reality to say that 5% of peers are responsible for 90% of the traffic however. There are always small clusters of high speed seedboxes running on any good tracker.
My initial impression is I like it. I'm a visual person, and I like the sharpness of the images on the main page, they're high res and properly masked. I didn't realize I wasn't the only one having pasting problems with safari, I assumed it was an issue on my end. I'd found a way around it but it was certainly annoying. Glad to see that's been addressed.
Changing most of the giant green buttons to underlined hyperlinks I like also. Somewhat more intuitive. Seems to have lost some of its contrast however as a result. There's black, grey, white, and just one shade of green now. Looks a little more sterile/bland as a result. OOOooo, I like the high visibility "won't be saved till you click submit". I've had an issue many times with having to go get lunch after clicking Preview before it refreshed, and not noticing when I got back that it was waiting for Submit, and going to another page, losing my post. That alone is a gem.
The infrastructure was not compromised. One user's password appears to have been compromised and changed. That account did not have "high value privileges".
>> The attack appears to have targeted one specific user account, which had some high-value privileges.
seventy-five percent of the people who subscribe to AOL's dial-up service don't need it.
Many dozens of times I've seen customers come in that are using AOL with their DSL. I don't see it so much with cable because the majority of people using AOL are using it because cable isn't available to them, they're too far from the city, but DSL is available and they've had it for years. Many of them signed up for their DSL (service by Qwest, formerly AT&T) through AOL and don't even realize it's not AOL providing it.
So I ask them why they are still using AOL, and it quickly becomes apparent that they believe that AOL is the internet. I'm able to reason with some of them, but even a percentage of those still want to keep AOL because they're comfortable with it. Me personally, having to change my email address would be the big problem. But last I checked, AOL reduces your charges down to something like $9.99/month if you just want to keep email and not have the rest of their service such as dial-up. But even when I explain this to them, many are just not interested in it. Many years ago when I quit my dialup, I switched to my isp's "email only" plan for that same amount and kept it for about 6 months, and it made the transition to cable a lot smoother for me.
I try to explain it to them, how using a local email app on your computer makes things like managing attachments so much easier, but a lot of these people just aren't interested in anything making their computer use unfamiliar again even if only for a brief time. They're in their secure zone and don't want to leave. Only just this year I finally got my next-door neighbor to drop AOL after showing her just how much easier it was to email photos from her new digital camera using a local email app.
And I'll just toss it right out there - they're all old people Every last one of them. So eventually AOL's user-base is going to literally die off.
There are lots of people posting about what the pilots are experiencing with almost none of them admitting to having any experience with even being on the receiving end of a laser. Well I have, many times. There's a reason the military is using them at checkpoints. If someone is lasing you, it's very hard to see them or anything right next to them. That's the only truth to this issue. And it only applies if the laser is originating where you are trying to look. So unless they are right inline from the runway, there's very little hazard at all.
It's like a headlight on a dark road. Do you really mind driving past someone that't stopped at an intersection with their headlights on bright? Side-on doesn't cause a problem. Now put them in the oncoming lane, and it's a whole different story. Same thing here.
While it's a nuisance to see someone shine a laser beam around your cockpit, the plane's speed, the shakiness of human hands, and the distance from the person pointing it makes it unlikely that the laser beam will find its way directly into one of the two pupils a pilot may have for more than a fraction of a second.
Moreso than that. The average consumer laser's columnating lens is much lower quality than scientific grade. My pointers have some serious expansion and scatter. At about a block the green dot that used to be 1/8" wide and sharply defined at a few feet away is about the size of a beachball. (the central dot, the scatter will be well over dumpster size)
So there is quite a bit of spread for most laser pointers. I don't think it poses anywhere near the usual safety issue of flat out getting permanent blind spots. The issue I think is the "dazzle" effect. Basically that when light like that hits you, even if spread out quite a bit, it temporarily messes with your vision, blinds you in that direction for a short period of time. And they are really good at catching your attention for some reason, you tend to look straight at them when they first come into your view off to the side even, before you can consciously stop yourself. And that puts a temporary blind spot right in your central vision.
Also, people keep talking about the distance issue trying to get a little green dot into a window. It doesn't work that way. These dots are very large at distance. I'd say about 1/2 mile or less is optimal distance, and you're going to be lighting up the entire front of the plane with your pointer. Given it will be hard to keep it right there, but it's not going to be impossible by any stretch.
At that distance, are you're going to sweep the nose of the plane several times, not being able to hold your aim exactly on target. If a pilot gets his attention caught by one sweep, and is looking in that direction by the time the second sweep glances the plane, it could create a minor hazard for them. The only way this is going to be serious is if the laser is coming from straight ahead of them, where they have to keep their eyes pointed to watch their approach. Lasers coming in from the sides can be largely ignored. And if they're coming in from the front, they're at the airport near the runway and the airport security should be able to deal with that.
But all of that being said, I think it's people over-reactng. It's about as dangerous as standing on the side of the highway and throwing a snowball at a car as it drives past. Some people will freak out and dial 911 and others will just flip you off. The danger is about the same. So are we going to ban snowballs too? It's just sensationalism.
Under the current proposed standard, we fear that we will have no realistic ability to object if a pirate chooses to hijack a music themed gTLD to enable wide scale copyright infringement of our works
They appear to be under the mistaken assumption (dilution) that it's the world's job to make sure they obtain maximum profits.
damn, nobody sells Torx Plus! oh wait, look, there, and there and there! Idiots submitting articles again. It took me 10 seconds to find that link, learn to use google please. This is just one of almost a dozen security screws, though it's one of the newest, it's only been around a few years. As with most security bits, you can't usually find it at your local small hardware store, but that's about it. Larger hardware stores and tons of places online carry them. It's to keep people that think they're a technician out of the equipment to stop them from breaking it.
Anyone that knows what they're doing has these bits and drivers already. And if you buy a kit online to replace something, it always comes with the tools you need. We've replaced so many ipod parts here we have a box full of ipod tools that the parts keep coming with.
So if you're one of the people that don't have the tool to open it, you probably ought not to BE opening it and it kinda proves the point.
Apple also puts these screws on a some (but not all) of the screws that hold down the internal batteries in some of their laptops, to stop people from trying to swap batteries out with spares because the internal connectors aren't meant for frequent use and will wear out and break. (those are the previous gen tamper screws, triwing - they don't use them for the smaller screws because they aren't good for small screws and don't torq well)
I'd expect that if it was a carrier-specific issue, that connection would easily have been figured out by this point.
Considering nobody (outside MS apparently) has found a common link yet leads one to believe the problem exists on every phone, and is being triggered either randomly or by some obscure circumstances. (does your ESN end in "000"?)
Now we're all fairly well aware that MS isn't too brilliant with their P.R., but to tell your customers "yes, we found out what's causing this known issue, we know who's responsible, but we're not going to tell you" doesn't sound like something that even they would pull without good reason to protect themselves from something.
So without being able to get specific about it, I think it's safe to assume it's something you'd prefer to know and that MS would really prefer you not. And that can't be good regardless of what it is. The whole "tinfoil hat" thing implies a good leap of faith is being made, but in this case we're fairly well assured that something unpleasant is really happening, even if we don't know all the details.
it can't have been easy holding onto a laptop while homeless when in the company of the crazies that cut. must have been quite the game to hide it and still use it from time to time.
OR they could read what they've typed before hitting SEND
but I'm chronically guilty of that myself, but it tends to be when I somehow futz up the last word or two in the sentence and my reading hasn't quite caught up with the end of the line when my fingers get anxious and hit the retrn key
I'd generally agree with that... the managers usually say "you're not supposed to discuss each others pay". Meaning "We don't want you to know you're being underpaid".
Coworker here recently got... check it... $0.25 raise. Oh he was pissed. And there was much yelling. I remember that being brought up later with regard to reviews and raises, in a critical way, and being told "he wasn't supposed to discuss that with anyone", as though it wasn't a valid point to raise during the discussion. I suppose not, that's both insulting and embarrassing at the same time.
Slashdot Mirror
>>Apple are possibly the worst for warranties... and more specifically owning up to defects.
I suppose that explains Apple remaining in the top 3 for the last what 15 yrs in computer customer service.
Just this week I have seen Apple volunteer to repair TWO computers that were flat out abused by the customer because they want to keep happy customers. Your statement about Apple being "the worst" for warranties is about the biggest pile of flaming BS I have seen recently. They're expensive, they're arrogant, they're controlling, etc, but the grand majority of their customers rate the warranty and customer support five star.
That being said, yes the LSI are unreliable. They're also used worldwide by almost anyone that manufactures a handheld electronic gadget, including darn near 100% of cell phone manufacturers because they're cheap and WILL identify liquid contact. (erroring in their favor, what did you expect?) And every single one of them has started the game with a "if we see red, the warranty is void" policy, and will make exceptions/considerations in the customer's favor. (some more often than others) Take your dead cell phone into the store and say it won't turn on. The very first thing they will do is remove the battery. Not to reset it. (that's what they'll say though) But to look at the (most easily accessed, one of many) LSI in the phone. You make it sound like Apple is the only one in the world that does this. Remove your cell phone's battery. Look for the white dot.
>>I suppose owning up to a defect is difficult when your under the delusion of perfection
"defect" implies there was a "correct" way to do it. What was your suggestion? Don't you think by now someone would be wealthy having made a better solution to this industry-wide problem, if it were a trivial thing to improve on?
this ought to be good... I want to see the suits show up at a door, knock, and open it to see a tank barrel in their face. (sort of like in the Simpsons episode)
oh wait I forgot, the RIAA doesn't pick on anyone that can defend themselves.
oops forgot to address your "batteries" argument. ww2... tubes, not transistors. yes, you can run them off battery, but not easily, not efficiently, and certainly not at high power for any length of time. and when you are trying to operate a clandestine transmitter, portability and hidability are very important. Large flats of lead acid batteries are both hard to smuggle and hard to hide. But then again, back then, the transmitters themselves tended to be larger too. Though I'm sure there were a few, I've never read of any clandestine transmitters in ww2 that were battery powered. Got any links to share? I'd be interested in expanding my knowledge on the subject.
Nowadays however, that's not an issue. A 9v battery and a sardine can will get you by for basics.
Sorry, I got the name a bit wrong, it's been awhile. Adcock Array
Also, the best place for anyone to start RDF is with the book "Transmitter Hunting - Radio Direction Finding Simplified" - http://www.homingin.com./ Build the roanoke dopplar in that book with all the mods and get it properly tweaked and you can generally kick butt on foxhunts. But its weakness is multipath, and it's very hard to implement (mobile) on HF. Use a basic LPER or something of that nature for close in. (this applies to VHF and up) Everything has a weakness in RDF. A good null loop I've found is best for HF, but you have to get initial bearings and get out of the vehicle frequently till you get close, similar to the LPER.
Tactics and hardware are so dependent on band. Considering though that these people are going to be probably UHF, a dopplar would absolutely by the way to go for initial location. (there are companies you can buy dopplars from if you don't want to build your own, such as Dopplar Systems. (http://www.dopsys.com/) Kinda pricey tho and the roanoke's better ;) The final 200ft at UHF can be a major PITA if there are other strong signals on band. I'm used to having to find transmitters that are elaborately hidden, and more than once I've spent many minutes within spitting distance (and I mean that most literally) before finding the bugger.
So many of the above posters are taking it for granted just what you can do to hide yourself. You're not looking for a guy holding a mic sitting on a lawn chair in the middle of his back yard beside a rig and a big dipole. And people that are in the situation on this thread have their freedom and lives on the line, they're not likely to be careless.
Expect your government to have multiple Adcock Arrays set up and will have a fairly tight initial location within seconds of detecting your transmission. And in 15 minutes suddenly the area is crawling with police and multiple white vans with lots of antennas on their roofs. You'd better stop transmitting now.
Looks like EVERYTHING is out. If you try to look at sites in Egypt, you get nothing. They don't even ping. I have to admit I enjoyed the irony of being cut off from Orascom's site, since they have built systems around the world for authoritatria
Post after post talking about sites. They took out the backbone routers. Of course all the SITES are down.
Do any of the satellite providers cover Egypt?
We should find out which companies bowed before the dictators. Looks like Vodaphoe is one of them.
When a truckload of soldiers show up at your NOC with automatic weapons and politely ask you to pull the plug, you do
You can't blame the ISPs for this. In cases like this the soldiers usually have orders to turn their weapons on the racks if the ISP refuses to cooperate. One way or another, you will cooperate.
It doesn't work like in the movies. Triangulating a transmitter takes time, coordination, and experience. (I consider myself one of the better foxhunters in my state) And if the person doesn't want to be found, they can make it extremely difficult to pin down.
Both german-controlled france and russia took the same novel approach trying to find spies transmitting in WW2... they'd cut power to parts of the city a chunk at a time until the signal went off the air, then tear apart that area. Shows just how difficult it can be. Nowadays though with dopplars and haddock arrays they don't have to shut down the grids, but finding the actual transmitter remains very difficult. (I've been foxhunting for just about 20 yrs)
the DM is anything but a "leader" in D&D. His job is more akin to that of the judges themselves, that passed this retarded ruling.
it really makes you wonder what "incentive" he was given, and by WHO.
It looks like you're taking this from tournament play. This kid wasn't in a tournament, he was just playing the online game. There's a huge difference in the number of players to scrutinize here, and it's completely unreasonable to expect direct admin intervention. They're relying solely on automated detection systems at this level.
However, their apparent complete lack of appeals process is unacceptable, especially when the main process is entirely automatic and subject to false positives.
Several previous posts have discussed checking game memory for hacks... I very much doubt this was a console hack, judging from the kid. So lets just throw that out right now.
So with direct admin spotting and memory scrubbing off the list, that leaves two basic routes to get banned. Either statistically improbable scoring, or statistically improbable performance. (similar to your watching for uncharacteristic pointer sensitivity) Autistic kids are well known to live outside the statistical norm, demonstrating (usually mental) seemingly impossible stunts. (the public classics like memorizing sections of telephone books, but that's uncommon) This kid could very easily have an average head-acquisition time of half a second, and still not be able to tie his own shoes. Autistic kids tend to focus on a few or a single thing and shut most other things out, so they grand-master that skill, and are utterly fail at most everything else we take for granted. It's usually something totally useless, but every now and then they hit on something that's actually useful, it's just completely random that way and there's no choosing what it is. MS's anticheat system can't account for this, and doesn't. The fact that they have no serious appeals process is the problem here.
But that being said, taking it from the other players' perspective, there may be no observable difference between this kid and someone that's using an aimbot. He may also have a very powerful spacial memory allowing him to maintain a picture of the game map in his head, along with all the players, accounting for movement, in real time, which closely resembles a wall hack. For the other players, this kid may have a huge advantage, and for people that come to xbox live for fun, this may really ruin their fun. It'd be like going to the playground for a round of basketball and having michael jordan show up. Maybe neat to watch, but not really that fun if you still want a chance of winning when you play, and most people do.
So as much as people might not like it, MS may have actually done the right thing for the majority. I don't particularly like that myself, but there it is. I know I personally don't care to sign into a game and see a person on the opposing team that I know is just going to spank everyone on my team including myself for the entire game.
OT, concerning your sig
No boom today. Boom tomorrow. There's always a boom tomorrow. - Cmdr. Susan Ivanova
The explanation lies in the last few letters of her name.
Sorry AT&T, people have been fed up with slow internet. Everyone that has wanted an iPhone but waited is going to jump on this.
Everyone with an expiring AT&T contract that was fed-up with AT&T service is going to jump. People have already made up their minds, this little 'incentive' isn't going to help.
Especially when you have to ask them to stop screwing you. If they wanted to make a serious attempt at saving face they'd just roll them all back, and not just those that are older customers. Letting older customers do it and NOT letting newer ones, wow. Way to keep a new customer!
(why is the italic tag not working?)
I've been on a variety of trackers in the past and I can assure you that 100 users are not responsible for anywhere near 75% of the content available. But even on crappy public trackers like piratebay it can't be that bad.
it may be closer to reality to say that 5% of peers are responsible for 90% of the traffic however. There are always small clusters of high speed seedboxes running on any good tracker.
My initial impression is I like it. I'm a visual person, and I like the sharpness of the images on the main page, they're high res and properly masked. I didn't realize I wasn't the only one having pasting problems with safari, I assumed it was an issue on my end. I'd found a way around it but it was certainly annoying. Glad to see that's been addressed.
Changing most of the giant green buttons to underlined hyperlinks I like also. Somewhat more intuitive. Seems to have lost some of its contrast however as a result. There's black, grey, white, and just one shade of green now. Looks a little more sterile/bland as a result. OOOooo, I like the high visibility "won't be saved till you click submit". I've had an issue many times with having to go get lunch after clicking Preview before it refreshed, and not noticing when I got back that it was waiting for Submit, and going to another page, losing my post. That alone is a gem.
The infrastructure was not compromised. One user's password appears to have been compromised and changed. That account did not have "high value privileges".
>> The attack appears to have targeted one specific user account, which had some high-value privileges.
seventy-five percent of the people who subscribe to AOL's dial-up service don't need it.
Many dozens of times I've seen customers come in that are using AOL with their DSL. I don't see it so much with cable because the majority of people using AOL are using it because cable isn't available to them, they're too far from the city, but DSL is available and they've had it for years. Many of them signed up for their DSL (service by Qwest, formerly AT&T) through AOL and don't even realize it's not AOL providing it.
So I ask them why they are still using AOL, and it quickly becomes apparent that they believe that AOL is the internet. I'm able to reason with some of them, but even a percentage of those still want to keep AOL because they're comfortable with it. Me personally, having to change my email address would be the big problem. But last I checked, AOL reduces your charges down to something like $9.99/month if you just want to keep email and not have the rest of their service such as dial-up. But even when I explain this to them, many are just not interested in it. Many years ago when I quit my dialup, I switched to my isp's "email only" plan for that same amount and kept it for about 6 months, and it made the transition to cable a lot smoother for me.
I try to explain it to them, how using a local email app on your computer makes things like managing attachments so much easier, but a lot of these people just aren't interested in anything making their computer use unfamiliar again even if only for a brief time. They're in their secure zone and don't want to leave. Only just this year I finally got my next-door neighbor to drop AOL after showing her just how much easier it was to email photos from her new digital camera using a local email app.
And I'll just toss it right out there - they're all old people Every last one of them. So eventually AOL's user-base is going to literally die off.
There are lots of people posting about what the pilots are experiencing with almost none of them admitting to having any experience with even being on the receiving end of a laser. Well I have, many times. There's a reason the military is using them at checkpoints. If someone is lasing you, it's very hard to see them or anything right next to them. That's the only truth to this issue. And it only applies if the laser is originating where you are trying to look. So unless they are right inline from the runway, there's very little hazard at all.
It's like a headlight on a dark road. Do you really mind driving past someone that't stopped at an intersection with their headlights on bright? Side-on doesn't cause a problem. Now put them in the oncoming lane, and it's a whole different story. Same thing here.
While it's a nuisance to see someone shine a laser beam around your cockpit, the plane's speed, the shakiness of human hands, and the distance from the person pointing it makes it unlikely that the laser beam will find its way directly into one of the two pupils a pilot may have for more than a fraction of a second.
Moreso than that. The average consumer laser's columnating lens is much lower quality than scientific grade. My pointers have some serious expansion and scatter. At about a block the green dot that used to be 1/8" wide and sharply defined at a few feet away is about the size of a beachball. (the central dot, the scatter will be well over dumpster size)
So there is quite a bit of spread for most laser pointers. I don't think it poses anywhere near the usual safety issue of flat out getting permanent blind spots. The issue I think is the "dazzle" effect. Basically that when light like that hits you, even if spread out quite a bit, it temporarily messes with your vision, blinds you in that direction for a short period of time. And they are really good at catching your attention for some reason, you tend to look straight at them when they first come into your view off to the side even, before you can consciously stop yourself. And that puts a temporary blind spot right in your central vision.
Also, people keep talking about the distance issue trying to get a little green dot into a window. It doesn't work that way. These dots are very large at distance. I'd say about 1/2 mile or less is optimal distance, and you're going to be lighting up the entire front of the plane with your pointer. Given it will be hard to keep it right there, but it's not going to be impossible by any stretch.
At that distance, are you're going to sweep the nose of the plane several times, not being able to hold your aim exactly on target. If a pilot gets his attention caught by one sweep, and is looking in that direction by the time the second sweep glances the plane, it could create a minor hazard for them. The only way this is going to be serious is if the laser is coming from straight ahead of them, where they have to keep their eyes pointed to watch their approach. Lasers coming in from the sides can be largely ignored. And if they're coming in from the front, they're at the airport near the runway and the airport security should be able to deal with that.
But all of that being said, I think it's people over-reactng. It's about as dangerous as standing on the side of the highway and throwing a snowball at a car as it drives past. Some people will freak out and dial 911 and others will just flip you off. The danger is about the same. So are we going to ban snowballs too? It's just sensationalism.
Under the current proposed standard, we fear that we will have no realistic ability to object if a pirate chooses to hijack a music themed gTLD to enable wide scale copyright infringement of our works
They appear to be under the mistaken assumption (dilution) that it's the world's job to make sure they obtain maximum profits.
http://www.wihatools.com/700seri/716_IPR_serie.htm
damn, nobody sells Torx Plus! oh wait, look, there, and there and there! Idiots submitting articles again. It took me 10 seconds to find that link, learn to use google please. This is just one of almost a dozen security screws, though it's one of the newest, it's only been around a few years. As with most security bits, you can't usually find it at your local small hardware store, but that's about it. Larger hardware stores and tons of places online carry them. It's to keep people that think they're a technician out of the equipment to stop them from breaking it.
Anyone that knows what they're doing has these bits and drivers already. And if you buy a kit online to replace something, it always comes with the tools you need. We've replaced so many ipod parts here we have a box full of ipod tools that the parts keep coming with.
So if you're one of the people that don't have the tool to open it, you probably ought not to BE opening it and it kinda proves the point.
Apple also puts these screws on a some (but not all) of the screws that hold down the internal batteries in some of their laptops, to stop people from trying to swap batteries out with spares because the internal connectors aren't meant for frequent use and will wear out and break. (those are the previous gen tamper screws, triwing - they don't use them for the smaller screws because they aren't good for small screws and don't torq well)
I'd expect that if it was a carrier-specific issue, that connection would easily have been figured out by this point.
Considering nobody (outside MS apparently) has found a common link yet leads one to believe the problem exists on every phone, and is being triggered either randomly or by some obscure circumstances. (does your ESN end in "000"?)
Now we're all fairly well aware that MS isn't too brilliant with their P.R., but to tell your customers "yes, we found out what's causing this known issue, we know who's responsible, but we're not going to tell you" doesn't sound like something that even they would pull without good reason to protect themselves from something.
So without being able to get specific about it, I think it's safe to assume it's something you'd prefer to know and that MS would really prefer you not. And that can't be good regardless of what it is. The whole "tinfoil hat" thing implies a good leap of faith is being made, but in this case we're fairly well assured that something unpleasant is really happening, even if we don't know all the details.
it can't have been easy holding onto a laptop while homeless when in the company of the crazies that cut. must have been quite the game to hide it and still use it from time to time.
OR they could read what they've typed before hitting SEND
but I'm chronically guilty of that myself, but it tends to be when I somehow futz up the last word or two in the sentence and my reading hasn't quite caught up with the end of the line when my fingers get anxious and hit the retrn key
I'd generally agree with that... the managers usually say "you're not supposed to discuss each others pay". Meaning "We don't want you to know you're being underpaid".
Coworker here recently got... check it... $0.25 raise. Oh he was pissed. And there was much yelling. I remember that being brought up later with regard to reviews and raises, in a critical way, and being told "he wasn't supposed to discuss that with anyone", as though it wasn't a valid point to raise during the discussion. I suppose not, that's both insulting and embarrassing at the same time.