My boss, in all his good business instincts and mostly great technical attributes, insists on installing java and downgrading all computers to ie9 instead of going with 11. Now I know 11 had issues with compatibility from time to time, but I am hard pressed to believe that running ie9 with Java is a great way to stay virus free.
Then again we are in the small business and home user repair market maybe he is just trying to go for reoccurring client repairs
I wonder if there is any kind of liability resulting from the gross incompetence of installing old, known to be insecure, software on customers' machines instead of the latest release with the latest security fixes...
(Also, doesn't Windows auto-update to IE 11 anyway? Or are you turning of auto-updates too?!)
The assholes who put them there and the assholes who made them.
It is rather doubtful that any of the people participating in this discussion did either. So if that's the answer to the question, then the original comment was directed towards the wrong people.
But some of the people participating in this discussion may have voted for the government who decided to lay the mines, or the government who decided that manufacturing and exporting mines was ok...
Ah, here it is straight from the horse's mouth: http://www.teslamotors.com/ser... Pay $2400 for four years and you get unlimited valet service, and all consumables (brake pads, tires, fluids, etc) are included in the price and checked/replaced at the yearly appointment. Considering the price bracket and bleeding-edge nature of the vehicle, it's not unreasonable, but does add to the cost.
Ah, ok. The original article I saw it in didn't make it clear that it included all consumables - it kind of sounded like your normal annual servicing charge (which would usually cover oil, except there's no oil, spark plugs, except there's no spark plugs...:)
All the Tesla owners I know say the only maintenance they have had to do in the last year is rotate the tires, which Tesla did either for free or for a reasonable fee. I'd like to see where you got that $600 number.
We've seen fossils of simple (prokaryotic, bacterial) life that are at least 3.8 billion years old. Basically the instant it became possible for single-cell life to exist, it did. That suggests that simple life is *easy*.
It took evolution roughly a billion years to produce eukaryotic life, suggesting that step is hard. It also took 2 billion more years to produce a eukaryotic lifeform capable of space flight, suggesting that step is also hard.
Since we only have one data point, all of this is basically a guess though. Maybe it doesn't take a billion years to produce eukaryotic life - maybe it's really quite fast, but the conditions just weren't right for a long time and that held it back. Get another planet with more suitable conditions and you might be talking millions instead of billions of years. My point is that we just don't know because we don't have enough data to tell the difference between low probability and high probability events.
There is that and the fact that Tesla's aren't going to need as much maintenance as a regular car. you don't need regular oil changes, etc.
Well, I'm not so sure about that - the Tesla S apparently has a $600/year service schedule... which largely seems to be an inspection - sounds expensive for an inspection to me...
I don't see any merit in your technical objections. Why would "everyone decide how best to change to protocol to use extended addresses"? What I'm suggesting is that the extension behavior should have been there from the get go,
Your "trivial mod" involves redesigning hardware, so not really trivial at all. High speed routers do routing in hardware - making them understand longer addresses involves building new hardware to handle it.
How is this about as hard as "extending in a minor way the current protocol without need for interruption?"
Because it isn't without need for interruption. Using IPv6 is only possible when all the network gear between the sender and recipient understands IPv6. In your scenario with an "extension", using the extended addresses would only be possible when all the network gear between the sender and recipient understands the extended address. So in short, you either have to specify the whole "extended address" system right at the start and ensure all the hardware supports it (which is basically the same as saying "we should've just used IPv6 from the start"), or you have to make everyone upgrade their hardware in exactly the same way as they do to support IPv6 anyway.
I can carry on, but all you are doing is pointing out minor technical issues which would have needed to be taken care of.
Sure, if you don't understand much about how networks work you can handwave all the problems away as "minor technical issues", but once you actually learn how networks work you realise that they aren't minor at all, especially when you consider that IPv4 was intended to run on the hardware that existed in the 70s, which would make most solutions way too expensive.
Most of the ISPs I've dealt with here in Canada do not offer routable IPv6 allocations to users. They certainly don't readily offer static ones for business use like they do with IPv4.
You can get IPv6 connections here in the UK so long as you pick your ISP carefully. Unfortunately, the last time one of my customers shopped for a new internet connection (i.e. expensive leased line), they directly asked the ISP if they did IPv6 and got a "yes" reply, and only after the connection was installed and paid for did it become apparent that the ISP lied. (unfortunately it wasn't important enough to the customer for them to kick up a proper fuss about the ISP mis-selling).
I call BS, it would only take that long if it was a low priority job. If they were told in no uncertain terms to sort it out or be kicked out of the internet I'm sure they could deal with it much quicker than that.
How exactly are you going to kick them off the internet? If IANA withdrew MIT's IPv4 allocation, nothing would happen - MIT would still be making BGP announcements for those addresses, all the other ISPs would still be listening to the BGP announcements, MIT's network would continue running. The only way you're going to "kick" them off the internet is by everyone independently filtering MIT's announcements - that kind of coordination just isn't going to happen. And you can't allocate those addresses to anyone else, because who on earth is going to want a bunch of addresses that aren't going to work reliably because someone else is already announcing them?
No, the only way you can reclaim an IPv4 allocation is with the cooperation of the organisation that is using them. And on the whole, this seems a bit pointless - even if you reclaimed *all* of these large pre-IANA allocations, it will buy a few weeks at best. That might be worthwhile if those few weeks were actually going to be used to help the transition onto IPv6, but that won't happen - we have had 16 years to migrate onto IPv6 and it hasn't happened; everyone's been putting off the whole thing for 16 years - buying a few extra weeks just means they will put it off for a few extra weeks. Its pretty clear now that significant migration isn't going to happen until it is forced through things simply not working any more with IPv4.
Frankly, *no one* should have any networking equipment that can't do IPv6 these days - the normal replacement cycle dictates that networking gear will have been replaced several times already since it was clear that IPv6 was necessary - anyone who didn't have "IPv6 support" as mandatory requirements for any new equipment bought over the past 5 or more years is a complete idiot.
I work for a company which installs and deploys home / business networks for home automation purposes, and EVERY Linksys device we have tested, has inevitably ended up in the bin, not because they were faulty, but because they turned out to be rubbish.
To be fair, this is true of pretty much *all* consumer grade routers running the vendor's stock firmware.
Lets see, a few anecdotes from my own list of hardware:
- Dlink router that decides legitimate traffic is some kind of an attack and blocks it, even when the firewall is disabled.
- Netgear router that hangs when receiving certain well formed UPNP packets, even when UPNP is disabled. Also provides no information about the PPP link status, beyond "online" or "offline" so good luck trying to figure out why it won't connect if anything breaks.
- TPLink router that won't automatically retrain the ADSL when running in bridge mode, even when the SNR has dropped to the point where all the packets are arriving as CRC errors (I reported this to TPLink - they tell me it is "expected behaviour" and therefore not a bug).
Wouldn't you have validated their password from the web portal side of things in the first place.
Ok, (1) what web portal? (2) when your email client is giving you a generic "something broke" message, how do you know to validate the password? Or are you going to validate *everything* one thing at a time until you (hopefully) find what's wrong rather than properly diagnosing the problem?
Microsoft would probably do it the way it does crash reporting, where the user is given the option to automatically send error reports to Microsoft. The developer can retrieve these crash reports by 1. forming a corporation or LLC, 2. buying a certificate from VeriSign or DigiCert in this company's name, and 3. registering with Windows Dev Center Hardware and Desktop Dashboard (formerly Winqual).
Yes, because its so useful for the developer of your mail reader to get "password wrong" notifications instead of the person who's actually supporting that user...
>> I shouldn't need to tcpdump their IMAP traffic to discover that the server is telling them their password is wrong damnit!
You should use encryption and not be able to analyze the traffic anyway.
Oh, don't get me wrong, everyone uses encryption. Unfortunately a few times over the past couple of years I've ended up getting people to temporarilly turn encryption off so I can dump the traffic and see WTF is going wrong because the damned applications won't display or log a useful error. I know *most* people don't understand technical error messages, but would it kill them to stick a "details" button on the dumbed-down error popup to make it trivial for a techie to ask the user to click it and read out a more useful message?
At least it fails gracefully with a clean error code. In Linux world it would show up as a dialog with corrupted text and a mysterious "Invalid argument" error message written in some log.;)
Mostly under Linux the error messages are useful to someone technical. Increasingly other OSes (Windows, OS X, iOS, Android) consider useful error mesages to be not user friendly and just give you a generic "something broke" error that is no use to man nor beast - frequently I'm left digging out tcpdump to diagnose customer's problems because the application itself won't give me any information (yes, even in the system log) - I shouldn't need to tcpdump their IMAP traffic to discover that the server is telling them their password is wrong damnit!
I think she is wrong to connect vaccines to autism. But attacking her personally is not necessary or relevant. Her general position that she is not against vaccines in general but only against un-safe vaccines is a valid position. Why bother nit-picking nuances or perceived contradictions in wording. It's all irrelevant. The only issue is: Are existing vaccines safe and could they be made safer? All else is nonsense.
The problem is: what constitutes "safe"? You're never going to have something that's completely safe, so it all comes down to probabilities. This is comparing the chance of your child being harmed through your actions (getting the vaccine) vs. the chance of them being harmed through your inactions (not getting the vaccine). Rationally, if getting the vaccine reduces the chances of the patient being harmed then obviously that is the right course of action, but does this make the vaccine "safe"? I suspect a lot of people take the irrational line that they don't want to take any action that might harm their child, but never properly think about the consequences of inaction, so go down the inaction line even if that is the worse choice.
Partly, there is a problem that diseases like measles aren't very common these days, to people perceive the risk to be very low. They ignore the fact that these deseases are uncommon *because* of vaccination.
Secondly, she seems to have a failure to understand basic statistics by her comment "If you ask a parent of an autistic child if they want the measles or the autism, we will stand in line for the f--king measles" - this argument is comparing a certainty (the child has autism) with an uncertainty (that the child will suffer lasting damage from the measels). Given the choice between a certainly autistic child and a child with a small chance of dieing (or other serious complication from measels), I might make the same decision and go with the measels, but that's not the choice the anti-vaccination crowd are making. If the argument had been comparing two certainties - "If you ask a parent of an autistic child if they want the child to die from measles or have autism" - then I imagine the response would be very different.
Whether or not you believe that vaccines cause autism (and there is absolutely no evidence that they do), the above rational arguments still apply - if the chances of serious injury or death from measels for unvaccinated people is higher than the chances of autism for vaccinated people then having the vaccine is a complete no-brainer.
One obvious example is the keyboard/trackpad layout of all modern laptops. It was Apple on their PowerBooks who pushed the keyboard toward the screen, making room for palmrests and pointing devices below. Prior to that, everyone was putting keyboards tight against the lower edge. They didn't patent it, and the rest of the industry quickly followed.
It doesn't sound like an especially revolutionary concept, hardly worth a parent. It's basically like me patenting putting my kettle to the right of my toaster instead of to the left.
Also, you're ignoring a 4th option: they might actually make more money by having reasonable roaming charges.
This bill is about not having *any* roaming charges. You pay the same abroad as you do at home.
Yes, so they will make some money from me when I'm abroad, just as they do when I'm at home. Compared to, at the moment, them making nothing from me while I'm abroad.
While I largely agree, Google maps and translate can be pretty useful. And to a lesser degree, posting photos on social networks is nice, if not all that important.
I've found that preloading your tablet / phone with openstreetmap maps works extremely well - I spent 2 weeks navigating around the Canadian rockies with Osmand running on a tablet and had no problems. Posting photos on social networks can probably wait until you're within range of a wifi hotspot.
Would you go to a tourist place where your internet that you intend to use to keep in touch with home sucks? Maybe you will, but how many like you?
Yes, I would. Because oddly, when I'm on holiday I'm actually more interested in doing holiday type stuff than spending my time using the internet. Its useful *occasionally* (getting weather forecasts, etc.) but it's not a huge loss to not have it. Which is why I turn roaming data off on my phone when I go abroad and just use wifi hotspots in cafes, etc. on the occasions I want to use the internet.
Option B : Mobile providers raise the standard charges the exact necessary amount to avoid having losses due to this law.
Option C : Mobile providers raise the standard charges more than necessary and justify the raise saying ordinary people need to pay for the yuppies who roam Europe in their sports cars while chatting on their phones.
The rates are largely set by the market - if they could get away with raising their standard rates, don't you think they would have already done so?
Also, you're ignoring a 4th option: they might actually make more money by having reasonable roaming charges. As an example, on my PAYG contract I pay £0.01/MB while at home, but while on a trip to Canada earlier in the year it would've been £6/MB - *600 times the domestic charge*. The upshot was that I simply turned off 3G on my phone and didn't use it at all - zero profit for the MNO. If the charges had been more reasonable then I probably would've left it turned on and they would've made some money. Same goes for voice calls too. (FWIW, roaming charges within the EU have been regulated for some time and are much much lower anyway)
This is basically the EU saying "you've shown you can't be trusted to not take the piss, so we're taking our ball and going home".
I had something similar happen recently, my bank website authentication going out for four days (it was part of an upgrade that went bad).
That's pretty much unthinkable these days. It really made me think, if that's even possible it may be a good idea to abandon this bank for some other.
Would other people give a service a one time pass for a multi-day outage if they otherwise liked the service? Or should that be a flag to drop them, any time it occurs? If the criteria you use to leave a service is too strict, you may be switching often...
Things break unexpectedly - whilst it shouldn't happen, it does and so long as it doesn't happen frequently and the vendor is reasonably proactive I'd generally give them a pass (for one thing, moving a bank account or similar is probably more hassle than a one-off outage). If it keeps happening then yes, I'd move to a vendor that has historically shown to be able to run a more reliable service.
However, one thing that I think is unforgivable is when the vendor doesn't bother to actually keep their customers informed. A single "the service is down, sorry" post which doesn't give any ETA, progress updates or anything just isn't good enough. Tell the customer what's going on! It seems to be all too common to keep the customer as uninformed as possible these days, especially with the larger companies. I imagine it's a combination of PR damage mitigation and liability concerns, but its just not helpful to the customers - I'm much happier to give my business to a company who says "oops, sorry, we screwed up, here's what went wrong, but we've now investigated and put measures in place to make sure it doesn't happen again" than a company who has an unexplained outage and doesn't provide any information about it.
I'll give an example - back in the 90s I had my internet connection from a small ISP called Demon Internet. They were pretty good - the techies knew what they were doing and they gave regular status updates. If something went wrong, they would publish it. If an outage was caused by someone screwing up then they'd let everyone know, even if it's a stupid "oops we unplugged the wrong cable". Then they got bought by Thus, a much bigger company, and the "big company" mentality very quickly showed - the techies stopped talking to the customers, status updates rarely happened and they especially never admitted that they'd made a mistake. I wasted hours on several occasions debugging my CPE because they swore blind they had no network problems so it must be my end before it became very apparent that they did know about problems in their network and they were just trying to keep it quiet. And that is why I dropped them - I'm not interested in dealing with businesses that waste my time by covering up their problems and refusing to keep their customers informed.
WRT services like MyCloud, I do wonder what kind of terms & conditions they give the end user, given that this is essentially a paid-for service. If they provide absolutely no service guarantees and can shut it all down on a whim then clearly it isn't worth paying for.
Just to put it in perspective, IIRC from my high school days as the president of the school's Space Settlement Design Team (don't laugh, we qualified for the international-level finals every year we competed back in the very early 2000s!), a torus a mile in diameter needs to rotate once a minute in order to achieve 1g. Tethers or not, it's hard to keep something like that together.
Wikipedia suggests that you probably want to keep the speed at or below 2 rpm and certainly no more than 7 rpm.
So how exactly does making everything free spur innovation??
Firstly, being able to "stand on the shoulders of giants" is good for innovation. Patents often stop that, especially in a fast moving field like computing - having to wait for the patent to expire before you can build upon it is a problem. You may argue that someone who wants to build upon a patented technology should just licence it, but the licence fee may be out of the reach of many inventors. And that's assuming the patent owner is even interested in licensing it - they may well just tell you to bugger off.
Secondly, the constant fear of being sued into oblivion if you happen to accidentally infringe someone's patent is a brake on innovation. It's pretty much impossible to write software that doesn't infringe someone's patent these days, so you're basically relying on not pissing off the wrong people. And giving the existing big players the ability to shut down a new competetor before they even get going is certainly not good for innovation.
The original intention of patents was twofold: 1. give the inventor a limited time to profit from their invention and recoup development costs. 2. provide documentation of the invention so that, after the patent has expired, the public can build their own rather than being at the mercy of the inventor. I certainly think both of these intents are great. Inventors *should* be able to recoup their development costs; but I don't think that's working these days - big companies ship such volumes that they are going to recoup their costs in short order anyway, and the small inventors simply can't afford to defend themselves, so the patents simply benefit the large companies (whether or not they are innovating) at the detriment to the small inventor. The second of these intents is a good thing too, but modern patents are trash - they are so thick with legalese that they're downright impossible to understand anyway, and the details are so scant that you wouldn't be able to reproduce the invention from the documentation provided in the patent.
So to my mind, the problems with patents currently outweigh the benefits.
Slashdot Mirror
AC because my boss reads /.
My boss, in all his good business instincts and mostly great technical attributes, insists on installing java and downgrading all computers to ie9 instead of going with 11. Now I know 11 had issues with compatibility from time to time, but I am hard pressed to believe that running ie9 with Java is a great way to stay virus free.
Then again we are in the small business and home user repair market maybe he is just trying to go for reoccurring client repairs
I wonder if there is any kind of liability resulting from the gross incompetence of installing old, known to be insecure, software on customers' machines instead of the latest release with the latest security fixes...
(Also, doesn't Windows auto-update to IE 11 anyway? Or are you turning of auto-updates too?!)
Maybe if international treaties are changed to put a limit on the implemented mine's life, the problem can be addressed partially.
There is already an international treaty - the Ottawa treaty bans the use, stockpiling and production of mines. The US refused to sign it.
The assholes who put them there and the assholes who made them.
It is rather doubtful that any of the people participating in this discussion did either. So if that's the answer to the question, then the original comment was directed towards the wrong people.
But some of the people participating in this discussion may have voted for the government who decided to lay the mines, or the government who decided that manufacturing and exporting mines was ok...
Ah, here it is straight from the horse's mouth: http://www.teslamotors.com/ser...
Pay $2400 for four years and you get unlimited valet service, and all consumables (brake pads, tires, fluids, etc) are included in the price and checked/replaced at the yearly appointment. Considering the price bracket and bleeding-edge nature of the vehicle, it's not unreasonable, but does add to the cost.
Ah, ok. The original article I saw it in didn't make it clear that it included all consumables - it kind of sounded like your normal annual servicing charge (which would usually cover oil, except there's no oil, spark plugs, except there's no spark plugs... :)
All the Tesla owners I know say the only maintenance they have had to do in the last year is rotate the tires, which Tesla did either for free or for a reasonable fee. I'd like to see where you got that $600 number.
Can't find the original article I saw, but this explains it:
http://www.greencarreports.com...
Includes stuff like tyres, but still seems slightly on the high side to me.
We've seen fossils of simple (prokaryotic, bacterial) life that are at least 3.8 billion years old. Basically the instant it became possible for single-cell life to exist, it did. That suggests that simple life is *easy*.
It took evolution roughly a billion years to produce eukaryotic life, suggesting that step is hard. It also took 2 billion more years to produce a eukaryotic lifeform capable of space flight, suggesting that step is also hard.
Since we only have one data point, all of this is basically a guess though. Maybe it doesn't take a billion years to produce eukaryotic life - maybe it's really quite fast, but the conditions just weren't right for a long time and that held it back. Get another planet with more suitable conditions and you might be talking millions instead of billions of years. My point is that we just don't know because we don't have enough data to tell the difference between low probability and high probability events.
There is that and the fact that Tesla's aren't going to need as much maintenance as a regular car. you don't need regular oil changes, etc.
Well, I'm not so sure about that - the Tesla S apparently has a $600/year service schedule... which largely seems to be an inspection - sounds expensive for an inspection to me...
I don't see any merit in your technical objections. Why would "everyone decide how best to change to protocol to use extended addresses"? What I'm suggesting is that the extension behavior should have been there from the get go,
Your "trivial mod" involves redesigning hardware, so not really trivial at all. High speed routers do routing in hardware - making them understand longer addresses involves building new hardware to handle it.
How is this about as hard as "extending in a minor way the current protocol without need for interruption?"
Because it isn't without need for interruption. Using IPv6 is only possible when all the network gear between the sender and recipient understands IPv6. In your scenario with an "extension", using the extended addresses would only be possible when all the network gear between the sender and recipient understands the extended address. So in short, you either have to specify the whole "extended address" system right at the start and ensure all the hardware supports it (which is basically the same as saying "we should've just used IPv6 from the start"), or you have to make everyone upgrade their hardware in exactly the same way as they do to support IPv6 anyway.
I can carry on, but all you are doing is pointing out minor technical issues which would have needed to be taken care of.
Sure, if you don't understand much about how networks work you can handwave all the problems away as "minor technical issues", but once you actually learn how networks work you realise that they aren't minor at all, especially when you consider that IPv4 was intended to run on the hardware that existed in the 70s, which would make most solutions way too expensive.
Most of the ISPs I've dealt with here in Canada do not offer routable IPv6 allocations to users. They certainly don't readily offer static ones for business use like they do with IPv4.
You can get IPv6 connections here in the UK so long as you pick your ISP carefully. Unfortunately, the last time one of my customers shopped for a new internet connection (i.e. expensive leased line), they directly asked the ISP if they did IPv6 and got a "yes" reply, and only after the connection was installed and paid for did it become apparent that the ISP lied. (unfortunately it wasn't important enough to the customer for them to kick up a proper fuss about the ISP mis-selling).
I call BS, it would only take that long if it was a low priority job. If they were told in no uncertain terms to sort it out or be kicked out of the internet I'm sure they could deal with it much quicker than that.
How exactly are you going to kick them off the internet? If IANA withdrew MIT's IPv4 allocation, nothing would happen - MIT would still be making BGP announcements for those addresses, all the other ISPs would still be listening to the BGP announcements, MIT's network would continue running. The only way you're going to "kick" them off the internet is by everyone independently filtering MIT's announcements - that kind of coordination just isn't going to happen. And you can't allocate those addresses to anyone else, because who on earth is going to want a bunch of addresses that aren't going to work reliably because someone else is already announcing them?
No, the only way you can reclaim an IPv4 allocation is with the cooperation of the organisation that is using them. And on the whole, this seems a bit pointless - even if you reclaimed *all* of these large pre-IANA allocations, it will buy a few weeks at best. That might be worthwhile if those few weeks were actually going to be used to help the transition onto IPv6, but that won't happen - we have had 16 years to migrate onto IPv6 and it hasn't happened; everyone's been putting off the whole thing for 16 years - buying a few extra weeks just means they will put it off for a few extra weeks. Its pretty clear now that significant migration isn't going to happen until it is forced through things simply not working any more with IPv4.
Frankly, *no one* should have any networking equipment that can't do IPv6 these days - the normal replacement cycle dictates that networking gear will have been replaced several times already since it was clear that IPv6 was necessary - anyone who didn't have "IPv6 support" as mandatory requirements for any new equipment bought over the past 5 or more years is a complete idiot.
I work for a company which installs and deploys home / business networks for home automation purposes, and EVERY Linksys device we have tested, has inevitably ended up in the bin, not because they were faulty, but because they turned out to be rubbish.
To be fair, this is true of pretty much *all* consumer grade routers running the vendor's stock firmware.
Lets see, a few anecdotes from my own list of hardware:
- Dlink router that decides legitimate traffic is some kind of an attack and blocks it, even when the firewall is disabled.
- Netgear router that hangs when receiving certain well formed UPNP packets, even when UPNP is disabled. Also provides no information about the PPP link status, beyond "online" or "offline" so good luck trying to figure out why it won't connect if anything breaks.
- TPLink router that won't automatically retrain the ADSL when running in bridge mode, even when the SNR has dropped to the point where all the packets are arriving as CRC errors (I reported this to TPLink - they tell me it is "expected behaviour" and therefore not a bug).
I don't understand how this is "wiretapping" - no *wires* were being tapped, this was a recording of a face to face conversation.
Wouldn't you have validated their password from the web portal side of things in the first place.
Ok, (1) what web portal? (2) when your email client is giving you a generic "something broke" message, how do you know to validate the password? Or are you going to validate *everything* one thing at a time until you (hopefully) find what's wrong rather than properly diagnosing the problem?
Microsoft would probably do it the way it does crash reporting, where the user is given the option to automatically send error reports to Microsoft. The developer can retrieve these crash reports by 1. forming a corporation or LLC, 2. buying a certificate from VeriSign or DigiCert in this company's name, and 3. registering with Windows Dev Center Hardware and Desktop Dashboard (formerly Winqual).
Yes, because its so useful for the developer of your mail reader to get "password wrong" notifications instead of the person who's actually supporting that user...
>> I shouldn't need to tcpdump their IMAP traffic to discover that the server is telling them their password is wrong damnit!
You should use encryption and not be able to analyze the traffic anyway.
Oh, don't get me wrong, everyone uses encryption. Unfortunately a few times over the past couple of years I've ended up getting people to temporarilly turn encryption off so I can dump the traffic and see WTF is going wrong because the damned applications won't display or log a useful error. I know *most* people don't understand technical error messages, but would it kill them to stick a "details" button on the dumbed-down error popup to make it trivial for a techie to ask the user to click it and read out a more useful message?
At least it fails gracefully with a clean error code. In Linux world it would show up as a dialog with corrupted text and a mysterious "Invalid argument" error message written in some log. ;)
Mostly under Linux the error messages are useful to someone technical. Increasingly other OSes (Windows, OS X, iOS, Android) consider useful error mesages to be not user friendly and just give you a generic "something broke" error that is no use to man nor beast - frequently I'm left digging out tcpdump to diagnose customer's problems because the application itself won't give me any information (yes, even in the system log) - I shouldn't need to tcpdump their IMAP traffic to discover that the server is telling them their password is wrong damnit!
I think she is wrong to connect vaccines to autism. But attacking her personally is not necessary or relevant. Her general position that she is not against vaccines in general but only against un-safe vaccines is a valid position. Why bother nit-picking nuances or perceived contradictions in wording. It's all irrelevant. The only issue is: Are existing vaccines safe and could they be made safer? All else is nonsense.
The problem is: what constitutes "safe"? You're never going to have something that's completely safe, so it all comes down to probabilities. This is comparing the chance of your child being harmed through your actions (getting the vaccine) vs. the chance of them being harmed through your inactions (not getting the vaccine). Rationally, if getting the vaccine reduces the chances of the patient being harmed then obviously that is the right course of action, but does this make the vaccine "safe"? I suspect a lot of people take the irrational line that they don't want to take any action that might harm their child, but never properly think about the consequences of inaction, so go down the inaction line even if that is the worse choice.
Partly, there is a problem that diseases like measles aren't very common these days, to people perceive the risk to be very low. They ignore the fact that these deseases are uncommon *because* of vaccination.
Secondly, she seems to have a failure to understand basic statistics by her comment "If you ask a parent of an autistic child if they want the measles or the autism, we will stand in line for the f--king measles" - this argument is comparing a certainty (the child has autism) with an uncertainty (that the child will suffer lasting damage from the measels). Given the choice between a certainly autistic child and a child with a small chance of dieing (or other serious complication from measels), I might make the same decision and go with the measels, but that's not the choice the anti-vaccination crowd are making. If the argument had been comparing two certainties - "If you ask a parent of an autistic child if they want the child to die from measles or have autism" - then I imagine the response would be very different.
Whether or not you believe that vaccines cause autism (and there is absolutely no evidence that they do), the above rational arguments still apply - if the chances of serious injury or death from measels for unvaccinated people is higher than the chances of autism for vaccinated people then having the vaccine is a complete no-brainer.
One obvious example is the keyboard/trackpad layout of all modern laptops. It was Apple on their PowerBooks who pushed the keyboard toward the screen, making room for palmrests and pointing devices below. Prior to that, everyone was putting keyboards tight against the lower edge. They didn't patent it, and the rest of the industry quickly followed.
It doesn't sound like an especially revolutionary concept, hardly worth a parent. It's basically like me patenting putting my kettle to the right of my toaster instead of to the left.
Also, you're ignoring a 4th option: they might actually make more money by having reasonable roaming charges.
This bill is about not having *any* roaming charges. You pay the same abroad as you do at home.
Yes, so they will make some money from me when I'm abroad, just as they do when I'm at home. Compared to, at the moment, them making nothing from me while I'm abroad.
While I largely agree, Google maps and translate can be pretty useful. And to a lesser degree, posting photos on social networks is nice, if not all that important.
I've found that preloading your tablet / phone with openstreetmap maps works extremely well - I spent 2 weeks navigating around the Canadian rockies with Osmand running on a tablet and had no problems. Posting photos on social networks can probably wait until you're within range of a wifi hotspot.
Would you go to a tourist place where your internet that you intend to use to keep in touch with home sucks? Maybe you will, but how many like you?
Yes, I would. Because oddly, when I'm on holiday I'm actually more interested in doing holiday type stuff than spending my time using the internet. Its useful *occasionally* (getting weather forecasts, etc.) but it's not a huge loss to not have it. Which is why I turn roaming data off on my phone when I go abroad and just use wifi hotspots in cafes, etc. on the occasions I want to use the internet.
Option B : Mobile providers raise the standard charges the exact necessary amount to avoid having losses due to this law.
Option C : Mobile providers raise the standard charges more than necessary and justify the raise saying ordinary people need to pay for the yuppies who roam Europe in their sports cars while chatting on their phones.
The rates are largely set by the market - if they could get away with raising their standard rates, don't you think they would have already done so?
Also, you're ignoring a 4th option: they might actually make more money by having reasonable roaming charges. As an example, on my PAYG contract I pay £0.01/MB while at home, but while on a trip to Canada earlier in the year it would've been £6/MB - *600 times the domestic charge*. The upshot was that I simply turned off 3G on my phone and didn't use it at all - zero profit for the MNO. If the charges had been more reasonable then I probably would've left it turned on and they would've made some money. Same goes for voice calls too. (FWIW, roaming charges within the EU have been regulated for some time and are much much lower anyway)
This is basically the EU saying "you've shown you can't be trusted to not take the piss, so we're taking our ball and going home".
I had something similar happen recently, my bank website authentication going out for four days (it was part of an upgrade that went bad).
That's pretty much unthinkable these days. It really made me think, if that's even possible it may be a good idea to abandon this bank for some other.
Would other people give a service a one time pass for a multi-day outage if they otherwise liked the service? Or should that be a flag to drop them, any time it occurs? If the criteria you use to leave a service is too strict, you may be switching often...
Things break unexpectedly - whilst it shouldn't happen, it does and so long as it doesn't happen frequently and the vendor is reasonably proactive I'd generally give them a pass (for one thing, moving a bank account or similar is probably more hassle than a one-off outage). If it keeps happening then yes, I'd move to a vendor that has historically shown to be able to run a more reliable service.
However, one thing that I think is unforgivable is when the vendor doesn't bother to actually keep their customers informed. A single "the service is down, sorry" post which doesn't give any ETA, progress updates or anything just isn't good enough. Tell the customer what's going on! It seems to be all too common to keep the customer as uninformed as possible these days, especially with the larger companies. I imagine it's a combination of PR damage mitigation and liability concerns, but its just not helpful to the customers - I'm much happier to give my business to a company who says "oops, sorry, we screwed up, here's what went wrong, but we've now investigated and put measures in place to make sure it doesn't happen again" than a company who has an unexplained outage and doesn't provide any information about it.
I'll give an example - back in the 90s I had my internet connection from a small ISP called Demon Internet. They were pretty good - the techies knew what they were doing and they gave regular status updates. If something went wrong, they would publish it. If an outage was caused by someone screwing up then they'd let everyone know, even if it's a stupid "oops we unplugged the wrong cable". Then they got bought by Thus, a much bigger company, and the "big company" mentality very quickly showed - the techies stopped talking to the customers, status updates rarely happened and they especially never admitted that they'd made a mistake. I wasted hours on several occasions debugging my CPE because they swore blind they had no network problems so it must be my end before it became very apparent that they did know about problems in their network and they were just trying to keep it quiet. And that is why I dropped them - I'm not interested in dealing with businesses that waste my time by covering up their problems and refusing to keep their customers informed.
WRT services like MyCloud, I do wonder what kind of terms & conditions they give the end user, given that this is essentially a paid-for service. If they provide absolutely no service guarantees and can shut it all down on a whim then clearly it isn't worth paying for.
Just to put it in perspective, IIRC from my high school days as the president of the school's Space Settlement Design Team (don't laugh, we qualified for the international-level finals every year we competed back in the very early 2000s!), a torus a mile in diameter needs to rotate once a minute in order to achieve 1g. Tethers or not, it's hard to keep something like that together.
Wikipedia suggests that you probably want to keep the speed at or below 2 rpm and certainly no more than 7 rpm.
So how exactly does making everything free spur innovation??
Firstly, being able to "stand on the shoulders of giants" is good for innovation. Patents often stop that, especially in a fast moving field like computing - having to wait for the patent to expire before you can build upon it is a problem. You may argue that someone who wants to build upon a patented technology should just licence it, but the licence fee may be out of the reach of many inventors. And that's assuming the patent owner is even interested in licensing it - they may well just tell you to bugger off.
Secondly, the constant fear of being sued into oblivion if you happen to accidentally infringe someone's patent is a brake on innovation. It's pretty much impossible to write software that doesn't infringe someone's patent these days, so you're basically relying on not pissing off the wrong people. And giving the existing big players the ability to shut down a new competetor before they even get going is certainly not good for innovation.
The original intention of patents was twofold:
1. give the inventor a limited time to profit from their invention and recoup development costs.
2. provide documentation of the invention so that, after the patent has expired, the public can build their own rather than being at the mercy of the inventor.
I certainly think both of these intents are great. Inventors *should* be able to recoup their development costs; but I don't think that's working these days - big companies ship such volumes that they are going to recoup their costs in short order anyway, and the small inventors simply can't afford to defend themselves, so the patents simply benefit the large companies (whether or not they are innovating) at the detriment to the small inventor. The second of these intents is a good thing too, but modern patents are trash - they are so thick with legalese that they're downright impossible to understand anyway, and the details are so scant that you wouldn't be able to reproduce the invention from the documentation provided in the patent.
So to my mind, the problems with patents currently outweigh the benefits.