I want my damned phone to ring when a call is coming in. I dont want the VM notification after the phone did not ring for some stupid reason. I have a huge problem with this (I've got Sprint POS). Every time I call customer disservice to complain, the droid on the other end says that Sprint's delivery of calls is best-effort, not a guarantee. 'Sir, depending upon many factors, such as the brand and model of phone you have, network utilisation at any given time, weather, et cetera, there may be times when a call doesn't go through to your particular handset. It is something we simply don't have control over.' I also have a problem with 'batching' of VM's. Family and friends constantly complain that I didn't pick up, or didn't respond to a message. I say I never received a message. Lo and behold! A day later, I have something like 20 batches VM's all coming in at once. Sprint's response? 'Depending on utilisation of our voicemail system, there may be times of overloading.'
Amen to the parent post. Lots of people are wondering what will be done with vacant skyscrapers once many people are telecommuting for work. One answer -- towering hydroponic farms. Just think -- skyscrapers could house automated, indoor 'farms' and outdoor farmland can revert to wilderness.
And from where are these rights to complain granted?
Quoting from the First Amendment (omitting parts not germane to the current discussion):
Congress shall make no law... abridging the freedom... to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
However, if people are too lazy to get in their cars and go to the nearest polling precinct, what makes you think they'll take any other active initiative in civic affairs?
I also know quite a few people with 10 Mb hubs still operating on their network. Dude, you need to tell them that an unmanaged 16-port switch can be had on NewEgg for like $25-30. They need to stop being such scrooges....shit, 10Mb hubs are 1980's technology.
[The] problem is that, people (the majority) in the USA (similarly, in Mexico) do not care about electing, and going to election once every four or six years to choice a president is cumbersome enough. My answer is this: millions of people have died over the centuries to ensure one's right to vote. Not only is it a right, it's a duty. Anybody who is too lazy to go to the polls or write the occasional letter to an elected official has no right to complain about government. And I only have one thing to say to such people: 'Put your money where your mouth is, or sit down and shut the fuck up.'
What will it take for the public to realize that some things simply can not be handled well by the private sector? The only way to stop people from ripping us off for a necessity they have a natural monopoly in is for we the people to take control of it ourselves. Yeah, because we all know that, for example, the USPS is a paragon of a well-run service.
"Stealing" bandwidth from an inadvertently unsecured or under-secured wireless connection without permission will now be literally stealing, as the poor subscriber will be stuck with the bill. Expect a few prosecutions under theft or fraud statutes if this becomes commonplace.
...which is why router manufacturers should have things like MAC address ACL's and WPA2 enabled by default, ditching WEP (which is far more inherently insecure than WPA, which itself is by no means perfect, but better). Also, there should be a way to force a router's owner to change the default password and SSID.
Note: Yeah, even with MAC address ACL's spoofing is still possible, but it raises the bar. And yes, defaulting to these more secure options makes router administration more difficult for Joe Sixpack, but is a $500 bill for broadband a preferable alternative?
Because claiming that the church that beat down and imprisoned Galileo has a bias against intellectualism is obviously an unfounded slander, right? This is not a slander. This is a historical fact. And you are absolutely correct. Many in the Church have made apologies for the blind arrogance and dogmatism of those in centuries past. It doesn't help that the current Pope is provincial and bigoted. But please don't paint us all with the same brush, m'kay?
Belief in evolution is a dividing point between rational people and the 'faithful'. A false dichotomy. One can be at once rational, and have faith in something. I am a Christian (Catholic, specifically) and believe in the validity of evolution. To paraphrase Stan Marsh when rebutting the cartoon version of Richard Dawkins, 'Doesn't evolution explain the How, but not the Why?'
If you want smart christians you'll have to look no further than your local Jesuits. You pretty much have to have an an advanced degree (or two) to get in. Thank you for at least replying to me in a reasonable tone. As far as Calvin, I was alluding to him because of his intelligence -- that does not make all or even most of what he espoused correct, however. Even utterly brilliant people can be wrong. My point was simply to refute the fallacious assertion by many atheists that by being Christian, one is necessarily intellectually deficient, or else ignorant. For the record, I am most certainly not a Calvinist.
My point was that it is impossible for someone to be both a scientist and religious. Erm...no. Science is wonderful. It is, however, a severely limited tool. Any true scientist worth of the name both realises and admits this. Science limits itself to those phenomena which are directly observable, with the hypotheses attempting to explain said phenomena subject to falsifiability. For example, even when physics gets to the point where the origins of the universe can be explained in excruciating detail (the 'How'), science will *never* be able to explain precisely Why the universe was created. The question of Why (as opposed to How) is one left to philosophers and theologians, not scientists. Plus, your assertion that the scientific method is omnipotent and absolute -- that would imply a bit of something known as Faith, would it not? Science is ultimately based upon axioms, which by definition are unprovable. Example: something equals itself, e.g., 2 = 2. Is this statement provable in the scientific sense? No, it is not.
You caused the Dark Ages for crying out loud! Oh, and one last thing -- the Christians did *not* cause the Dark Ages. It was Germanic tribes (non-Christian, I might add) who brought on the Dark Ages. Get your facts straight, you fucking imbecile!
Care to step out from behind the cloak of anonymity and show your name? Casting these aspersions from the safe perch of anonymity leads me to believe that you are indeed a coward....
A lot of it probably has its roots with Christianity. The Devil is smart, remember? When Dante was populating the Inferno, he dumped Odysseus in the 8th circle, 1 up from the bottom. Why? Because he's a smart, tricky bastard, just like the Devil is supposed to be. This country has a lot of radical Christian roots (Puritans, anyone?) so it's not all that surprising that our views on intellectualism are shaped around that. I'm getting sick of the constant anti-Christian rants here on/. I happen to be Catholic, and nobody who knows me would accuse me of being an intellectual lightweight -- i.e., Christian != stupid. There is a rich intellectual tradition amongst the mainline Christian denominations -- Calvin and Aquinas, anyone? Just because the faith has its share of backwoods Bible-beaters does not mean that we are all ignorant rubes....
I would say that most sites' implementation of Flash is horrendous. Witness a site like Myspace, where if a person has a busy webpage, it's enough to cause my quad-core Mac Pro to seize up and require a restart (both Firefox and Safari put the machine into a state of deadlock). And lest one chalk it down to hardware or OS problems, I know other people with Core2 Duo-based machines (both OSX and Windows) who suffer the same problems. Probably what's happening is that people who have no business developing websites go into Dreamweaver and churn out monstrosities without any concept of what they're actually doing.
The reason people in the US are ignorant about physics isn't because they see movies with incorrect physics in them, it's because K-12 science education in the US is a disaster.
You're being too generous -- K-12 education in its entirety is a disaster in this country...
For something that is literally the heart of democracy, i.e., voting, proprietary systems are anathema. May Diebold act in accordance with its name, dying a bold and noble death, in searing flames....
T-Mob seems to have standing on the platform in front of the ClueTrain(tm). Why do people get a hard-on about using WiFi to surf websites on a 2" display? I want a cellphone with WiFi so I can MAKE PHONE CALLS THAT DON'T EAT INTO MY PRECIOUS MINUTES!!!! Yeah, imagine the novelty of that -- using a cellPHONE for placing voice calls. Hopefully more carriers will catch on and realise that their attempts to shackle customers into exorbitantly-priced, limited-use plans is ultimately doomed to failure. Technology will out.
Oh, and for those in the developed world who want to bring up the dubious use of mobiles as a web-surfing device: get a fucking laptop rather than using a crippled jack-of-all-trades piece of shit.
Hop on over to GreenDimes and sign up. For $36/yr (at least that's what it cost when I signed up a few months ago), they purge your name from all these mailing-lists AND plant one tree a month in your name. So you can reduce the flow of junk (which saves trees) and have trees planted. It gets you that much closer to carbon neutrality.
FWIW, before I signed up, I used to have my box stuffed with junk on a daily basis. Now only the occasional piece trickles in, and that's only from companies who haven't scrubbed their lists yet.
Microsoft is grasping at straws after having spent tens of billions of dollars in development and marketing costs for what has turned out to be, quite frankly, a steaming pile of shit. I bought a brand new 'Vista ready' PC with Vista Home Premium installed and used it for all of a week before wiping it and buying a copy of XP. All the people I know who have recently bought machines preloaded with Vista are doing the same because guess what? It's good enough for what they need. Most IT people I know say their companies aren't planning on upgrading to Vista for a long time if ever -- they have tuned their XP environments to run quite well, and don't need another forced upgrade. Let's face it, Microsoft: ya done fucked up....
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Amen to the parent post. Lots of people are wondering what will be done with vacant skyscrapers once many people are telecommuting for work. One answer -- towering hydroponic farms. Just think -- skyscrapers could house automated, indoor 'farms' and outdoor farmland can revert to wilderness.
Quoting from the First Amendment (omitting parts not germane to the current discussion):
Congress shall make no law ... abridging the freedom ... to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
However, if people are too lazy to get in their cars and go to the nearest polling precinct, what makes you think they'll take any other active initiative in civic affairs?
I also urge everyone to look at Downsize DC and sign some petitions.
...which is why router manufacturers should have things like MAC address ACL's and WPA2 enabled by default, ditching WEP (which is far more inherently insecure than WPA, which itself is by no means perfect, but better). Also, there should be a way to force a router's owner to change the default password and SSID.
Note: Yeah, even with MAC address ACL's spoofing is still possible, but it raises the bar. And yes, defaulting to these more secure options makes router administration more difficult for Joe Sixpack, but is a $500 bill for broadband a preferable alternative?
Care to step out from behind the cloak of anonymity and show your name? Casting these aspersions from the safe perch of anonymity leads me to believe that you are indeed a coward....
I would say that most sites' implementation of Flash is horrendous. Witness a site like Myspace, where if a person has a busy webpage, it's enough to cause my quad-core Mac Pro to seize up and require a restart (both Firefox and Safari put the machine into a state of deadlock). And lest one chalk it down to hardware or OS problems, I know other people with Core2 Duo-based machines (both OSX and Windows) who suffer the same problems. Probably what's happening is that people who have no business developing websites go into Dreamweaver and churn out monstrosities without any concept of what they're actually doing.
You're being too generous -- K-12 education in its entirety is a disaster in this country...
Yeah, but they couldn't out-swim the sea bass who had frickin' lasers attached to their heads.
Features Include:
For something that is literally the heart of democracy, i.e., voting, proprietary systems are anathema. May Diebold act in accordance with its name, dying a bold and noble death, in searing flames....
T-Mob seems to have standing on the platform in front of the ClueTrain(tm). Why do people get a hard-on about using WiFi to surf websites on a 2" display? I want a cellphone with WiFi so I can MAKE PHONE CALLS THAT DON'T EAT INTO MY PRECIOUS MINUTES!!!! Yeah, imagine the novelty of that -- using a cellPHONE for placing voice calls. Hopefully more carriers will catch on and realise that their attempts to shackle customers into exorbitantly-priced, limited-use plans is ultimately doomed to failure. Technology will out.
Oh, and for those in the developed world who want to bring up the dubious use of mobiles as a web-surfing device: get a fucking laptop rather than using a crippled jack-of-all-trades piece of shit.
Who the fuck modded this as a Troll? It's entirely accurate, and insightful. Must've been some MS fanboi...
Hop on over to GreenDimes and sign up. For $36/yr (at least that's what it cost when I signed up a few months ago), they purge your name from all these mailing-lists AND plant one tree a month in your name. So you can reduce the flow of junk (which saves trees) and have trees planted. It gets you that much closer to carbon neutrality.
FWIW, before I signed up, I used to have my box stuffed with junk on a daily basis. Now only the occasional piece trickles in, and that's only from companies who haven't scrubbed their lists yet.
Microsoft is grasping at straws after having spent tens of billions of dollars in development and marketing costs for what has turned out to be, quite frankly, a steaming pile of shit. I bought a brand new 'Vista ready' PC with Vista Home Premium installed and used it for all of a week before wiping it and buying a copy of XP. All the people I know who have recently bought machines preloaded with Vista are doing the same because guess what? It's good enough for what they need. Most IT people I know say their companies aren't planning on upgrading to Vista for a long time if ever -- they have tuned their XP environments to run quite well, and don't need another forced upgrade. Let's face it, Microsoft: ya done fucked up....