IMHO, the author's conclusion is a bit overly dramatic. I think a more realistic conclusion is a gradual fade out of cloud computing and cloud storage. Business and people will be more inclined to keep their private data on local, closed systems now because they no longer trust the government not to stick their nose in where it doesn't belong. How long will it be before the same effect happens to socialized medicine? Would you trust the government not to use your medical status against you?
Bad example on the "socialized medicine" angle.
It's the private insurers that one needs to worry about: they'll use your health status to refuse you because they have a profit motive. At least with socialized medicine that doesn't happen.
Starting in 2014, health insurance plans can't refuse to cover you or charge you more just because you have a pre-existing health condition. Being sick doesn't keep you from getting coverage
Further interesting examples seen via something like this:
In fairness, the one about "Authenticity" of the sheepskin covers had a reply with a link showing a cockpit with seemingly-similar seat covers, so I learned something there.
And the one about which software it ran was ok for Slashdot, although the reply to it, "He probably doesn't even know" was snotty.
Certainly at +6C vast swaths of terrain in Russia and Canada are opened for agriculture, but is that good? I don't know.
Plants need light as least as much as they need warmth.
And vast swaths of terrain in Russia and Canada have very poor light levels during large amounts of the year.
Maybe lettuce and other greens can be grown a 2nd season. Perhaps moss salad will become haute cuisine.
But don't overlook the fact that a lot of the water to irrigate current agriculture comes from snow pack that melts all summer long... So - warmer weather = less snow pack / faster melt might just mean less agricultural productivity. Subterranean aquifers will not capture it all - it'll run off or require a whole lot of dams and new reservoirs.
But the Deniers are too dangerous and short-sighted to laugh at; the very real possibility that things won't magically resolve themselves and serious impacts on humanity can, just maybe, occur.
The fanatical Left will insist that anyone who upholds the fundamental meaning that marriage has always had, everywhere, until this generation, is a "homophobe" and therefore mentally ill.
Nailed it except for the part about marriage having some fundamental meaning, everywhere, until this generation. That is fiction unless it's about procreation, in which case it wasn't necessarily then and isn't now.
And the part about wanting equal rights is an aspect of "the fanatical Left", unless one is so far right that they can't see the centre anymore.
The statements “lol” and “jk” — meaning “laughing out loud” and “just kidding” — indicate that Justin’s statement was entirely sarcastic, said his father.
But a Canadian woman who saw the post looked up Carter’s Austin address, determined that it was near an elementary school, and called the police.
Fucking Canadians...
This Canadian supports jail sentences for users of "LOL". If we bring back the death penalty in this country, that crime will be 2nd on the list after treason, and followed by emoticon abusers.
It is my personal opinion that Snowden (and even Assange) will only be safe as long as Correa is in power in Quinto. But as a history of Equador (and frankly entire Latin America) predicts from the past -- it will not be too long before the power will change due to hunta (as 1972-1979), or removal from the office (like Abdalá Bucaram) or a continues power struggle (Rosalía Arteaga / Fabián Alarcón). Either way, Equadorian history predicts that the next government will be pro-American.
You've expressed my fears and even expanded on them.
South American sanctuary can't be more than fleeting. And refuge in Cuba pretty much guarantees Castro will expire immediately and upheaval will happen.
Not liking his chances.
Not to mention, any flight that has to have a routing to the States in case of emergency means a) he's refused onto the flight, or b) flight is "mysteriously" diverted to US.
And most modern airline protocols mean they can't plot routes with > 4 hours from an airport, I believe. Could be wrong, would like clarification on that, but AskThePilot.com had something on it a fair while back.
Why is this down voted? These are all valid points. Per usual "Ask Slashdot", there's not enough information given to give informed advice or suggestions.
No down-votes (so far; at this time: it's +5 Informative with +6 divided between Informative & Insightful), but the user has bad karma, so it started at -1.
Correct. Obama is merely continuing and expanding on Bush's policies
Bull shit!! Bull shit!!! Bull shiiiiit! Bush hired enough lawyers to make sure he walked just on the line between legal an illegal. He chose to stay within the law and to demand that laws change just so that the head of state of this nation would still be bound by the laws of this nation. Obama does not even pretend to be restricted by such frivolities as the law. The obsequious news media is what does it. No benevolent dictatorship stays benevolent for long.
Wait, that doesn't sound right.
Lawyers ok'd the WMD lies and resulting war? Can they be held accountable for that?
What about the outting of a CIA operative, Valerie Plame?
And weren't John Yoo's (sp?) so-called Torture Memos highly questionable from the first day they were publicized?
Wasn't the spying on Americans begun under Bush? If lawyers approved it then, then why isn't it okay now?
And that record number of... what are they called when signing a bill into law? Waivers? Bush was famous for enacting laws with little notes at the bottom, "Except for me" essentially.
I think the GP was correct. If you stand by and allow, or even cheer, the abuse of power of your president, then it's hard to complain when the next guy, whom one may not like at all, continues on with those policies.
You're absolutely right there is a difference. Still, the issue is having one company control the ecosystem. While they have every right to design their systems that way, we have to be more active consumers and refuse to use such locked-down, 1-company systems, because they always come back to bite us.
I'm more than willing to give up a little slickness in the name of openness. Everything doesn't have to "just work" if it means I lose choice and control.
I agree with monocultures being a Bad Thing(TM) but bringing us back to the topic at hand, Microsoft's option should be to start their own video uploading service, or buy Vimeo perhaps. And to comply with Google's ToS with their Youtube app.
Your implication is that Google is being evil because they're preventing Microsoft from taking market share from Google by using Google's services. It's hard to imagine a more one-sided and asinine analysis.
Well, wait a minute now. If it was some bunch of open source geeks making an app that download's YouTube videos and strips the advertisements, and Google came down as hard, I think we'd hear squeals of outrage and demands for Google not to be "evil".
If Google blocked the add-ons that allow for downloading, I'd be unhappy. Not squealing about evil-ness, but unhappy, for sure.
However, those add-ons aren't developed for commercial purposes. Or if they are, it's for donations as opposed to by a commercial entity that gives away nothing and is doing this to increase the profitability of something they market heavily.
The ability to block advertisements and download movies is provided by web browser addons, so people championing Google in its fight against this windows phone program would also have to come out against those addons. I hope that isn't as prevalent a view here as it seems from most of the comments so far.
Only if those browser add-ons were developed by a commercial enterprise, for profit. Otherwise, I'm comfortable having an add-on installed and thinking Microsoft is clearly in the wrong here.
I stopped with Windows around Ubuntu 8.04, was fully weaned on 8.10.
Cannot imagine going back, ever, unless they took FreeBSD and wrapped their stuff around that. Then, maybe.
But MS does deserve a smaller market share than before; I'm happy about that.
They aren't going away completely for a long time.
And going forward, Ubuntu is over. Still on 10.04 and kubuntu 12.04 and CentOS 6.3. Won't use Unity, will avoid Gnome 3 for as long as it takes to become compelling.
In one web application a form has to be completed within 10 minutes. I have a bit of javascript that puts a message the top of the screen when there are 90 seconds to go, and then makes it blink when there are only 30 seconds left. I don't pretend that it is pretty, but it can bring the user back to a task that they got part way through before being distracted.
Just because something can be used to create monstrosities does not mean that it should be banned. If that were the case, then ban.jpg on the grounds of what used to be found at goatse.cx
I'll have to agree 100%. Yours seems like an entirely reasonable usage case for the blink tag. I would hope they'd keep it in the rendering engine and we can just leave pages that abuse the feature, as we do for so many other abused features.
The cursor blinks slowly, just as it would in a real terminal.
It was a PITA to get characters "typed" slowly with some randomness since JS doesn't have a blocking sleep/wait function. I don't care to have to go in there and update the code.
Google gets a lot of hate and are often put into the same category as other big corporations, but they do a lot of work on keeping the web free and "open", and this:
EFF attorney Matt Zimmerman was quoted as saying, 'the people who are in the best position to challenge the practice are people like Google. So far no one has really stood up for their users.'
puts them in a league apart from the others, even though they aren't perfect.
I do dread the day they become "evil" like everyone else though; I expect it's just a matter of time.
But so far, despite their mis-steps and their massive collection of users' data, they remain sui generis.
The problem is that people can spoof source addresses (because ISPs arent stopping it). Fix this issue, and youll still have to worry about any of a million other scenarios where a small request gets a lot of data back.
All you have to do is make sure source addresses are filtered when they hit the ISP, and the huge majority of these issues (as well as being able to cloak where an attack came from) go away.
Actually, they are. The feature being leveraged here is that the servers are performing recursive lookups for domains that they do not control for the open Internet; BIND turns this off, by default, starting with version 9.4. The problem is that a lot of 9.3.X and older DNS servers are still out there, as well as a lot of bad network architecture jobs. The servers should only handle recursion for IP addresses that are on the inside. And as for the spoofing? Well, ingress filtering is trivial to do at the border. And these two things in concert shut this problem down entirely.
If my DNS is doing recursive lookups on spoofed packets, and I turned off recursion, wouldn't the attackers then send spoofed packets to, say, Google's DNS, causing the same havok?
Sure it would be easier for Google to implement rate limiting through IP tables or whatever, but they wouldn't be able to recognise spoofed packets either.
So I don't see how recursion is the issue versus ISPs blocking spoofed packets leaving their own networks.
Anyone know of any good double-blind studies comparing people's ability to tell FLAC from 320kbps MP3? Googling just turns up people debating in forums whether you would be able to tell the difference rather than any serious academic research.
This may not be exactly what you're looking for: Xiph on 24/192 music, but it likely has links to something that will answer your question.
Thankfully Brian had already contacted his local PD and advised them that this was a distinct possibility so they were prepared for the possibility that it was a hoax when they arrived.
That and Brian is white, so that helps...
Furthermore, the police called him before he came out his front door and was confronted by armed police.
However, as he was vacuuming and preparing for a dinner party, he didn't answer the phone but made a mental note to check his voice mail.
The police had to respond and it did seem to end rather quickly. Had he answered the phone things would have gone down at least slightly differently. The police would've had to still check the situation out but perhaps it would've been easier on him.
So, a big "Thank You" to Brian Krebs for his on-going work on computer security issues and a big "fuck you" to whomever called 911 with his phone number faked as the calling number.
I don't doubt that the far north is getting greener, but don't think for a moment that it'll lead to food crops way up north.
Food crops require copious light, not just absence of freezing / cold to produce crops. Oranges & bananas more so than lettuce, more so than moss.
When the sun is low on the horizon at noon, there just isn't enough sunlight to make the land productive for agriculture.
Not to mention the relative lack of rich organic material and somewhat acidic soil for the most part.
If this were not the case, then a simple greenhouse with a heater situated way up north would allow for hobbyists to grow all year round; this hasn't been the case and isn't likely to change.
The above is as I understand it as a gardener and a Canadian who laments the lousy winter (non-)growing season in the mildest part of the country and with good soil.
Like, ones that make a backup before messing with critical data? As an elementary precaution known to anybody halfway competent in IT?
This just demonstrates a massive, massive management screwup, as they allowed unqualified personnel to work on their systems. Save a buck, loose a million.
Speculation: backed up the email server settings, made minor change such that spam matched against "*" wildcard.
Just prior to xmas, I was without internet for > a week due to some routing issues within Shaw, so it may well be that they have an over abundance of incompetence these days.
Also, lost->lose. Tight->loose. See how easy it is to make a simple mistake of only one character that changes drastically the intended outcome?
I went through hell and back trying out a smaller ISP (Acanac); the disjoint between them and Ma Bell caused a 3-week delay between when I paid for service and when a telephone technician came to my house and properly wired the phone lines for DSL service. (There were 2 other visits, both of which resulted in no-service.) And forget about calling someone on the phone; sitting on hold for two hours only to be disconnected at the end isn't my idea of good service.
Going with a smaller ISP always bears the risk of dealing with the ineptitude of technicians who don't give a rat's ass about getting your service up and running (i.e. "that's not my department"). When I gave up on Acanac and made the call to Rogers, I had service up and running in two days.
I don't like Rogers' caps and expensive prices, but when there's a negligible delay between when I make a phone call and my service is up and running, the attraction of "trying out" smaller ISPs in the hopes of finding one which doesn't cause hair loss and premature graying wanes quickly in favor of being able to actually use a service.
You raise valid issues and I experienced something similar when Shaw caused a routing issue just before xmas which lasted for a week. TekSavvy was unable to do very much about it due to the problem being with Shaw.
Fortunately I could tether with my phone and have 5 Gb / month that way so it wasn't a complete loss.
However, I declined to reward Shaw for their ineptitude by switching to them.
Canada is as bad or worse than the us when it comes to ISP competition.
I can pick between 20MBPS down 2 up or 20/20 capped at 250GB. two providers. When i threatedn to switxh, the offical stance is "why bother? Theyre just as bad"
Theres faster, but any faster (up to200 GBPS) is capped at 250GBPS. This is in a major city.
Check with Teksavvy, they use Rogers/Bell/Shaw/Telus for the last mile and are very competitive.
Does that not simply lend credence to his claim of "the end of democracy in America"?
No, what would lend credence to his claim would be a US state enacting a same-sex marriage law without the necessary majority support from elected representatives.
What about when the opposite happens; when the majority of state voters decide to not allow same sex marriage but the unelected judiciary orders it allowed anyway? Is that a failure of democracy?
Responding to the emboldened part, if we replaced "same sex marriage" with "mixed-race marriage" or any of innumerable other terms, the answer would clearly be, "No, that's not a failure of democracy; it's democracy preventing the tyranny of the majority."
Depending on what rights it's decided are basic human rights that a government cannot revoke.
Slashdot Mirror
IMHO, the author's conclusion is a bit overly dramatic. I think a more realistic conclusion is a gradual fade out of cloud computing and cloud storage. Business and people will be more inclined to keep their private data on local, closed systems now because they no longer trust the government not to stick their nose in where it doesn't belong. How long will it be before the same effect happens to socialized medicine? Would you trust the government not to use your medical status against you?
Bad example on the "socialized medicine" angle.
It's the private insurers that one needs to worry about: they'll use your health status to refuse you because they have a profit motive. At least with socialized medicine that doesn't happen.
http://www.healthcare.gov/what-if-i-have-a-pre-existing-health-condition/
Further interesting examples seen via something like this:
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=hmo+pre-existing+condition+refuse+coverage
In fairness, the one about "Authenticity" of the sheepskin covers had a reply with a link showing a cockpit with seemingly-similar seat covers, so I learned something there.
And the one about which software it ran was ok for Slashdot, although the reply to it, "He probably doesn't even know" was snotty.
slashdot is so biased against apple and pro-windows its pathetic!
Great - just because of this post, Slashdot is gonna have to revise their system to allow +10 funny.
Certainly at +6C vast swaths of terrain in Russia and Canada are opened for agriculture, but is that good? I don't know.
Plants need light as least as much as they need warmth.
And vast swaths of terrain in Russia and Canada have very poor light levels during large amounts of the year.
Maybe lettuce and other greens can be grown a 2nd season. Perhaps moss salad will become haute cuisine.
But don't overlook the fact that a lot of the water to irrigate current agriculture comes from snow pack that melts all summer long... So - warmer weather = less snow pack / faster melt might just mean less agricultural productivity. Subterranean aquifers will not capture it all - it'll run off or require a whole lot of dams and new reservoirs.
But the Deniers are too dangerous and short-sighted to laugh at; the very real possibility that things won't magically resolve themselves and serious impacts on humanity can, just maybe, occur.
From 2004:
Nailed it except for the part about marriage having some fundamental meaning, everywhere, until this generation. That is fiction unless it's about procreation, in which case it wasn't necessarily then and isn't now.
And the part about wanting equal rights is an aspect of "the fanatical Left", unless one is so far right that they can't see the centre anymore.
Sir, you have a really old house.
A cave dweller, it seems.
The statements “lol” and “jk” — meaning “laughing out loud” and “just kidding” — indicate that Justin’s statement was entirely sarcastic, said his father.
But a Canadian woman who saw the post looked up Carter’s Austin address, determined that it was near an elementary school, and called the police.
Fucking Canadians...
This Canadian supports jail sentences for users of "LOL". If we bring back the death penalty in this country, that crime will be 2nd on the list after treason, and followed by emoticon abusers.
It is my personal opinion that Snowden (and even Assange) will only be safe as long as Correa is in power in Quinto.
But as a history of Equador (and frankly entire Latin America) predicts from the past -- it will not be too long before the power will change due to hunta (as 1972-1979), or removal from the office (like Abdalá Bucaram) or a continues power struggle (Rosalía Arteaga / Fabián Alarcón).
Either way, Equadorian history predicts that the next government will be pro-American.
You've expressed my fears and even expanded on them.
South American sanctuary can't be more than fleeting. And refuge in Cuba pretty much guarantees Castro will expire immediately and upheaval will happen.
Not liking his chances.
Not to mention, any flight that has to have a routing to the States in case of emergency means a) he's refused onto the flight, or b) flight is "mysteriously" diverted to US.
And most modern airline protocols mean they can't plot routes with > 4 hours from an airport, I believe. Could be wrong, would like clarification on that, but AskThePilot.com had something on it a fair while back.
Thanks for that, my head was starting to spin, and no matter how many times I checked the score was never marked "funny".
Odd, here's what I see for the score:
Starting Score: 0 points
Moderation +4
30% Funny
30% Underrated
20% Insightful
Extra 'Interesting' Modifier 0 (Edit)
Total Score: 4
NO Interesting votes cast, at all. Yet it sits at +4 Interesting.
That, in itself, is interesting.
Why is this down voted? These are all valid points. Per usual "Ask Slashdot", there's not enough information given to give informed advice or suggestions.
No down-votes (so far; at this time: it's +5 Informative with +6 divided between Informative & Insightful), but the user has bad karma, so it started at -1.
Correct. Obama is merely continuing and expanding on Bush's policies
Bull shit!! Bull shit!!! Bull shiiiiit! Bush hired enough lawyers to make sure he walked just on the line between legal an illegal. He chose to stay within the law and to demand that laws change just so that the head of state of this nation would still be bound by the laws of this nation. Obama does not even pretend to be restricted by such frivolities as the law. The obsequious news media is what does it. No benevolent dictatorship stays benevolent for long.
Wait, that doesn't sound right.
Lawyers ok'd the WMD lies and resulting war? Can they be held accountable for that?
What about the outting of a CIA operative, Valerie Plame?
And weren't John Yoo's (sp?) so-called Torture Memos highly questionable from the first day they were publicized?
Wasn't the spying on Americans begun under Bush? If lawyers approved it then, then why isn't it okay now?
And that record number of ... what are they called when signing a bill into law? Waivers? Bush was famous for enacting laws with little notes at the bottom, "Except for me" essentially.
I think the GP was correct. If you stand by and allow, or even cheer, the abuse of power of your president, then it's hard to complain when the next guy, whom one may not like at all, continues on with those policies.
You're absolutely right there is a difference. Still, the issue is having one company control the ecosystem. While they have every right to design their systems that way, we have to be more active consumers and refuse to use such locked-down, 1-company systems, because they always come back to bite us.
I'm more than willing to give up a little slickness in the name of openness. Everything doesn't have to "just work" if it means I lose choice and control.
I agree with monocultures being a Bad Thing(TM) but bringing us back to the topic at hand, Microsoft's option should be to start their own video uploading service, or buy Vimeo perhaps. And to comply with Google's ToS with their Youtube app.
Cheers,
Well, wait a minute now. If it was some bunch of open source geeks making an app that download's YouTube videos and strips the advertisements, and Google came down as hard, I think we'd hear squeals of outrage and demands for Google not to be "evil".
If Google blocked the add-ons that allow for downloading, I'd be unhappy. Not squealing about evil-ness, but unhappy, for sure.
However, those add-ons aren't developed for commercial purposes. Or if they are, it's for donations as opposed to by a commercial entity that gives away nothing and is doing this to increase the profitability of something they market heavily.
I do think there's a difference.
The ability to block advertisements and download movies is provided by web browser addons, so people championing Google in its fight against this windows phone program would also have to come out against those addons. I hope that isn't as prevalent a view here as it seems from most of the comments so far.
Only if those browser add-ons were developed by a commercial enterprise, for profit. Otherwise, I'm comfortable having an add-on installed and thinking Microsoft is clearly in the wrong here.
I stopped with Windows around Ubuntu 8.04, was fully weaned on 8.10.
Cannot imagine going back, ever, unless they took FreeBSD and wrapped their stuff around that. Then, maybe.
But MS does deserve a smaller market share than before; I'm happy about that.
They aren't going away completely for a long time.
And going forward, Ubuntu is over. Still on 10.04 and kubuntu 12.04 and CentOS 6.3. Won't use Unity, will avoid Gnome 3 for as long as it takes to become compelling.
Love the choices available.
In one web application a form has to be completed within 10 minutes. I have a bit of javascript that puts a message the top of the screen when there are 90 seconds to go, and then makes it blink when there are only 30 seconds left. I don't pretend that it is pretty, but it can bring the user back to a task that they got part way through before being distracted.
Just because something can be used to create monstrosities does not mean that it should be banned. If that were the case, then ban .jpg on the grounds of what used to be found at goatse.cx
I'll have to agree 100%. Yours seems like an entirely reasonable usage case for the blink tag. I would hope they'd keep it in the rendering engine and we can just leave pages that abuse the feature, as we do for so many other abused features.
I have a page that simulates a Bash terminal in which the client watches as commands are typed into a Bash terminal and the results are fetched via AJAX.
The cursor blinks slowly, just as it would in a real terminal.
It was a PITA to get characters "typed" slowly with some randomness since JS doesn't have a blocking sleep/wait function. I don't care to have to go in there and update the code.
Google gets a lot of hate and are often put into the same category as other big corporations, but they do a lot of work on keeping the web free and "open", and this:
puts them in a league apart from the others, even though they aren't perfect.
I do dread the day they become "evil" like everyone else though; I expect it's just a matter of time.
But so far, despite their mis-steps and their massive collection of users' data, they remain sui generis.
Because the DNS servers are doing nothing wrong.
The problem is that people can spoof source addresses (because ISPs arent stopping it). Fix this issue, and youll still have to worry about any of a million other scenarios where a small request gets a lot of data back.
All you have to do is make sure source addresses are filtered when they hit the ISP, and the huge majority of these issues (as well as being able to cloak where an attack came from) go away.
Actually, they are. The feature being leveraged here is that the servers are performing recursive lookups for domains that they do not control for the open Internet; BIND turns this off, by default, starting with version 9.4. The problem is that a lot of 9.3.X and older DNS servers are still out there, as well as a lot of bad network architecture jobs. The servers should only handle recursion for IP addresses that are on the inside. And as for the spoofing? Well, ingress filtering is trivial to do at the border. And these two things in concert shut this problem down entirely.
If my DNS is doing recursive lookups on spoofed packets, and I turned off recursion, wouldn't the attackers then send spoofed packets to, say, Google's DNS, causing the same havok?
Sure it would be easier for Google to implement rate limiting through IP tables or whatever, but they wouldn't be able to recognise spoofed packets either.
So I don't see how recursion is the issue versus ISPs blocking spoofed packets leaving their own networks.
Am I wrong here, and if so, how?
Anyone know of any good double-blind studies comparing people's ability to tell FLAC from 320kbps MP3? Googling just turns up people debating in forums whether you would be able to tell the difference rather than any serious academic research.
This may not be exactly what you're looking for: Xiph on 24/192 music, but it likely has links to something that will answer your question.
And it's extremely interesting in its own right.
Thankfully Brian had already contacted his local PD and advised them that this was a distinct possibility so they were prepared for the possibility that it was a hoax when they arrived.
That and Brian is white, so that helps...
Furthermore, the police called him before he came out his front door and was confronted by armed police.
However, as he was vacuuming and preparing for a dinner party, he didn't answer the phone but made a mental note to check his voice mail.
The police had to respond and it did seem to end rather quickly. Had he answered the phone things would have gone down at least slightly differently. The police would've had to still check the situation out but perhaps it would've been easier on him.
So, a big "Thank You" to Brian Krebs for his on-going work on computer security issues and a big "fuck you" to whomever called 911 with his phone number faked as the calling number.
I don't doubt that the far north is getting greener, but don't think for a moment that it'll lead to food crops way up north.
Food crops require copious light, not just absence of freezing / cold to produce crops. Oranges & bananas more so than lettuce, more so than moss.
When the sun is low on the horizon at noon, there just isn't enough sunlight to make the land productive for agriculture.
Not to mention the relative lack of rich organic material and somewhat acidic soil for the most part.
If this were not the case, then a simple greenhouse with a heater situated way up north would allow for hobbyists to grow all year round; this hasn't been the case and isn't likely to change.
The above is as I understand it as a gardener and a Canadian who laments the lousy winter (non-)growing season in the mildest part of the country and with good soil.
Like, ones that make a backup before messing with critical data? As an elementary precaution known to anybody halfway competent in IT?
This just demonstrates a massive, massive management screwup, as they allowed unqualified personnel to work on their systems. Save a buck, loose a million.
Speculation: backed up the email server settings, made minor change such that spam matched against "*" wildcard.
Spam of course gets deleted and not backed up.
Hours later(!), someone notices overly aggressive spam filter and restores backed-up rules.
Just prior to xmas, I was without internet for > a week due to some routing issues within Shaw, so it may well be that they have an over abundance of incompetence these days.
Also, lost->lose. Tight->loose. See how easy it is to make a simple mistake of only one character that changes drastically the intended outcome?
I went through hell and back trying out a smaller ISP (Acanac); the disjoint between them and Ma Bell caused a 3-week delay between when I paid for service and when a telephone technician came to my house and properly wired the phone lines for DSL service. (There were 2 other visits, both of which resulted in no-service.) And forget about calling someone on the phone; sitting on hold for two hours only to be disconnected at the end isn't my idea of good service.
Going with a smaller ISP always bears the risk of dealing with the ineptitude of technicians who don't give a rat's ass about getting your service up and running (i.e. "that's not my department"). When I gave up on Acanac and made the call to Rogers, I had service up and running in two days.
I don't like Rogers' caps and expensive prices, but when there's a negligible delay between when I make a phone call and my service is up and running, the attraction of "trying out" smaller ISPs in the hopes of finding one which doesn't cause hair loss and premature graying wanes quickly in favor of being able to actually use a service.
You raise valid issues and I experienced something similar when Shaw caused a routing issue just before xmas which lasted for a week. TekSavvy was unable to do very much about it due to the problem being with Shaw.
Fortunately I could tether with my phone and have 5 Gb / month that way so it wasn't a complete loss.
However, I declined to reward Shaw for their ineptitude by switching to them.
Of course, YMMV...
Cheers
Canada is as bad or worse than the us when it comes to ISP competition.
I can pick between 20MBPS down 2 up or 20/20 capped at 250GB. two providers. When i threatedn to switxh, the offical stance is "why bother? Theyre just as bad"
Theres faster, but any faster (up to200 GBPS) is capped at 250GBPS. This is in a major city.
Check with Teksavvy, they use Rogers/Bell/Shaw/Telus for the last mile and are very competitive.
Does that not simply lend credence to his claim of "the end of democracy in America"?
No, what would lend credence to his claim would be a US state enacting a same-sex marriage law without the necessary majority support from elected representatives.
What about when the opposite happens; when the majority of state voters decide to not allow same sex marriage but the unelected judiciary orders it allowed anyway? Is that a failure of democracy?
Responding to the emboldened part, if we replaced "same sex marriage" with "mixed-race marriage" or any of innumerable other terms, the answer would clearly be, "No, that's not a failure of democracy; it's democracy preventing the tyranny of the majority."
Depending on what rights it's decided are basic human rights that a government cannot revoke.