Please post back here if you succeed with this boycott and still have a job at the end of that month.
You're not even a good troll, get back in your hole asshat. We use in-house/the cloud if you can even comprehend what business systems look like. Some tiny businesses use google, but I can go a lifetime without dealing with those, so I think I'm safe.
I take it from your response that you don't deal with clients/customers directly.
(yes, I meant that both ways)
He's right... if you need to communicate with the general public, you're going to be feeding info to Google. In order not to, you have to have no contact with: 1) Anyone using an Android phone that's not using a private server 2) Any website using Google tracking (this one's NoScriptable to a degree) 3) Anyone using a Gmail account (including businesses/orgs that have their own domain) 4) Anyone who Google has a data peering agreement with 5) Any Google-owned service (including apps like Sketchup) 6) Anyone using various Google-owned services (such as Google Voice) 7) Anyone using Google DNS to find assets you own (since they'll be looking up your info, which tells Google a bit about you) 8) Other stuff I've missed.
Since some of this stuff's pretty opaque, you're going to have a hard time proving to anyone that you're opting out of The Google.
Not using Google Search/GMail yourself, yeah -- that's easy, but makes almost no difference.
And based on what the Karmin line is measuring (if you've got this far, you're likely going into orbit), my guess is that the actual limit is a range slightly under 100km -- meaning that if you reach 100Km, you've got far enough to escape. Of course, if the line was defined in a cautionary way (don't go above this line, or you'll be sorry!) it's possible that the actual limit range starts slightly above 100Km. Anyone know for sure?
If Steve Jobs were still alive, he'd just find the next big thing, and stop using NAND flash. Memristors anyone?
Of course, if anyone else tried this, the new tech would be non-viable, but Steve would use his force of will to make the new tech work at the price he wanted to pay.
I hope you're not serious. Apple has NEVER found the next big thing, ever. Everything apple has ever made has always been done by someone else previously. Apple is just really good at attracting people in their 40s and people in their 20s to buy their products at a premium and that's it.
And as soon as apple releases a product at least 2 other companies release their own version which is a superior product at a much lower cost.
Apple has little to do with jobs at all really, he was just the spokesman. His engineers, marketing department, designers and lawyers are what built apple. He didn't do anything but soak up credit for it all and grand standed in front of everyone. Kind of like how movie directors take credit for everything when they are just a small cog in a big machine, or everyone thinks the president runs the country when in reality he is just a mouth piece. Jobs was just a showman that's it. Apple lovers praised him for being a genius, everyone else though he was a dick, and only half of those people were right.
I'm pretty sure he wasn't serious... but I hope you aren't too.
Back in the day, Woz created a floppy drive that didn't require physical sectoring -- it was picked up by the entire industry, and was part of what ushered in the PC era. Sure, you could argue that floppy disks were around before, but they were clunky, prone to failure, and the controllers were really expensive. Apple got it right.
That's pretty much the trend you see at Apple (except for the blip under Scully and Amelio) -- they took ideas in the industry, and then re-thought them to make them both affordable and useful (not just one or the other). Apple also, of course, has had more than its share of "me too" technologies, such as the mouse (ball and laser versions), USB, LCD screens, EFI, etc. But in all these cases, I think you'll find that Apple's implementation often drove market acceptance.
Apple grabbed people in their 40's and 20's for one very big reason: they targeted the education market when both of those groups were in elementary/highschool. To those groups, Apple is a brand synonymous with technology done right. Then Apple went after the hipster movement, and fed new lines of product into the same demographics.
However, Apple has also targeted other markets -- it's why you'll still find graphic designers using Apple products, as well as die hard groups in the US Military, among other places. Apple has always sold vision and a story, not just technology.
And this is where Jobs came in -- he was an excellent salesman for vision and story. He knew how to deliver the entire package in a way that would capture people's imagination (hence the reality distortion field).
And here's the big part: he didn't just use these skills on the general public: he did the same thing within Apple. As a result, he wasn't just a spokesman; he was the man who drove his engineers, marketing department, designers and lawyers. He pushed all of them -- hard. This is why he gets so much credit; he was a genius at getting things done, and was a dick when he needed to be to accomplish this. Not the sort of person I'd like to have as a friend, but as a totalitarian leader for a large company, he had just the right talents.
Oh, I missed out your comment about "superior products at a much lower cost" -- examples please. Apple used to be this way back in the 90's, when they were hefting most of the R&D costs and clueless about where they were actually heading. These days, prices are all similar, components are identical, and Apple is really only fronting the marketing research, with R&D being done by all the leaders on the technology front.
The thing about email, is there's not even any expectation of an expected routing path -- and anything leaving your jurisdiction is fair game as far as interception goes.
As a result, an email going from you to someone else in your local state-based company may go through some router that's not even physically in your country -- and your country's government has no restrictions against inspecting private correspondence upon (re)entry to your country. Not to mention wherever it went in the meantime.
Since you can't guarantee where an email actually goes, you can't logically (or legally) expect privacy.
That doesn't even get to the minefield of storing your sent/received email "in the cloud"....
The Russians and the Chinese have been at it for decades. Also, they couldn't care less about the computers used by the general public; they're after military nets, defense contractors, and other high tech companies. As for the Iranians, I dunno. Its not as if the U.S. broke into their facilities and wreaked havoc..
What the politician was saying amid the hubris was that these groups' methods for getting into the sensitive stuff is to go after the general public. Once they've graphed the data gathered from the public and co-opted their computers, they have an attack platform they can use to more intelligently go after the intended targets.
This really does happen on a regular basis. Of course, there's not all that much that an individual has to fear from this, other than the fact that they use the same techniques to break in that the Ransomware gangs etc. use.
They were voted "worst company" and everyone's getting hung up on their products. What about the other aspects? I've known a number of people who worked for them, and the stories have never been happy. I've also seen the impact they can have on the markets they "target". They're the Wal-mart or Pepsi/Coke of the gaming world... Let's not forget that and get distracted by what they actually produce. There's a lot of other negative impact they have on this world that would exist even if their games were wonderful every time.
It's astonishing, what with all the various gadgets enticing people's attention in the 1970s and 1980s, that it's only now become a problem.
I wonder what changed between now and then that has dramatically increased the incidence of accidents caused by driver distractions. But I suppose we needed something to make up for all mechanic and doctor billing lost after seat-belts and crackdowns on drunk drivers. Those people have mouths to feed, after all.
A few things here: other than things that impaired driving (and there were appropriate laws about that back in the 70's and 80's), what we have now are roadways designed for faster speeds, and vehicles with different safety standards (mostly significantly better). However, we also have significantly more vehicles on the road, and it is significantly easier to get your license and to afford a vehicle. Link this to a culture with isolationist tendencies, and you get a situation where something that would have been relatively safe in a 70's car can be incredibly dangerous today, even with improved standards. Plus, with the improved flow of information, people actually find out about all the bad stuff that goes on now, whereas back then, the problem wasn't assumed to be as big as it actually was.
Really BIG and thick mirrors that are tuned to the IR spectrum.... coating the boat in aluminum foil or holding up a shaving mirror's not going to do the trick here. Calling this thing a flame thrower is actually pretty apt; you'd need an equivalent heat shield to deflect it.
But university's not supposed to be about getting a job; it's supposed to be about higher learning
But 'real life' is about surviving, which means a good income stream, which means a reasonable job. University also seems to mean "take out $50k-100k in loans," which makes that getting a job part even more important.
I think you missed part of the thread; the part where I originally said "you can get a PhD and still get decent pay" -- this was responding to the "why get the PhD if it doesn't add to your pay grade?" question. You appear to have brought the discussion full-circle while missing the original point.
If the *AA's get out of hand, Google could easily just buy the entire industry. Every single one of those companies. With cash. Several times over.
Bullshit. Disney's market cap is ~$104 billion. Comcast has a market cap of ~$108 billion. Viacom has market cap of ~$31 billion. News Corp has a market cap of ~$71 billion. Time Warner has a market cap of ~$54 billion. Finally Sony has a market cap of ~$17 billion. So to purchase all the MPAA member companies they would need ~$385 billion. They don't have that in cash. Let alone "several times over".
They'd actually need ~$193 billion, plus the cooperation of shareholders. Still outside their ballpark. They'd need the full $385 billion to do a hostile takeover and make anti-profit-taking decisions though -- assuming this didn't get blocked by politicians or monopoly/merger lawsuits before that.
Pretty much; going past a Master's in Literature without already having a strong lead on where you'll end up when you're done, other for the joy of the subject, is pretty pointless.
But university's not supposed to be about getting a job; it's supposed to be about higher learning. I'm pointing out that you can follow that dream (including keeping in the field and on the discussion lists) while still being gainfully employed in a related field. The OP makes it sound like the process of getting a Literature PhD dooms you to a life of misery and slave labour.
I thought Hydrogen is difficult to contain since it is so tiny(molecularly speaking). Seems like it could be a hassle to facilitate storage and distribution?
Well, if they can make the xylose reaction happen quickly enough, it does mean that we can store xylose and biomass and convert it to hydrogen on the fly, avoiding the safe transport and storage issues. That's about the only possible gain I can see out of this (other than the scientific gains of being able to more intentionally shift atoms).
As someone who was told this 20 years ago but saw through it, let me say that there is plenty of room for literature majors in private industry -- the trick is to not believe everything you're told by the university literature culture, and keep those social connections outside of the field. There are also a significant number of positions available for decent pay within academia, as long as you don't mind not working in the field that stems directly out of your thesis.
Part of the problem is that many literature majors get their PhD and feel like they have arrived and deserve the tenure track positions -- when there's really only a limited market compared to the number of people seeking those positions. BUT, with a bit more education in linguistics, design, computing science, or a number of other areas, suddenly you're someone who can land anything from an administrative job designing courses for ESL schools, to a community college languages head (they love to get people with a PhD and diverse training) to work at a marketing or communications firm, to a research job at a tech firm.
These positions will make anywhere from $48-120K as a starting salary. The trick is to remember to balance literature research with real life. It can be done. I know a number of people from the field who have done it, and thrived.
This is not a forum. Also, using "code" as the format is the easiest way to avoid having to escape HTML to prevent it from being parsed as HTML. If you so loathe fixed width font, there's not much I can do for you.
Actually, the easiest way to avoid having to escape HTML to prevent it being parsed as HTML is to configure your commenting preferences to prevent it. If you must have HTML directly from the wysinwyg comment box, then put the code tags around the markup, not around the entire post....
Amazingly, most of what people would want to write and share could be done via a web server and an HTML5-based Scheme interpreter. Kay likes Scheme, right?
I don't know what he thinks about Scheme but Alan Kay probably does like Smalltalk.
Yeah; I figured SmallTalk was too close to Alan and too far from what others would use though;)
Good luck with that... the calls I get are either from American area codes, or call centers in India who are there just to scam people.
The hardware is on local soil.
Start fining people who install hardware that's subsequently used for robocalling. After a couple of large fines you can be damn sure they won't be installing equipment for any more foreigners (or will be asking for a million bucks in escrow as 'insurance' - same effect).
From the American bit, I think the GP is likely Canadian. The hardware is on American soil -- usually in Minnesota or Texas. Good luck getting Texas to do anything about fines levied by the CRTC.
Added to that, the actual perps are usually a few layers removed; they hire a firm who hires blocks of time at a call center; I've talked to the people who pick up, and they have no clue what company they're actually calling for; they just have their script.
Of course, the ones calling from Texas, you can at least use the Texas mindset to put the fear of God into the actual call center operators and their supervisors, which may result in the scammers having to create a new shell company to contract with the call centers -- but they have to do this regularly anyway.
This reminds me of a TV show where it turned out that a "haunted" house happened to have a fungus growing in the walls that caused hallucinations in susceptible people (not everyone). End result was that sometimes it was the people themselves throwing things across the room, but remembering it happening without them touching the objects. Once they cleaned up the fungus, the paranormal activity stopped.
Sure, that's just someone's script for a show, but there are quite often* explanations for paranormal things, as long as your thinking isn't trapped in a box of limited possibilities.
*OK, there's always more explanations (hypotheses) than events, and often even more than one is correct, for a given limited definition of correct.
Never forget that science is really just a collection of narratives that have been cross-referenced to hang together. Most of the time, we can create a narrative that's both simplistic enough for us to understand it and complex enough to cover most of the event horizon. But not always (see Lies to Children like "what is a solid object" and "what is gravity" -- even with Higgs (boson particle/field etc), we're dealing with narrative descriptions based on observations, not definitions of how things actually work).
Slashdot Mirror
Please post back here if you succeed with this boycott and still have a job at the end of that month.
You're not even a good troll, get back in your hole asshat. We use in-house/the cloud if you can even comprehend what business systems look like. Some tiny businesses use google, but I can go a lifetime without dealing with those, so I think I'm safe.
I take it from your response that you don't deal with clients/customers directly.
(yes, I meant that both ways)
He's right... if you need to communicate with the general public, you're going to be feeding info to Google. In order not to, you have to have no contact with:
1) Anyone using an Android phone that's not using a private server
2) Any website using Google tracking (this one's NoScriptable to a degree)
3) Anyone using a Gmail account (including businesses/orgs that have their own domain)
4) Anyone who Google has a data peering agreement with
5) Any Google-owned service (including apps like Sketchup)
6) Anyone using various Google-owned services (such as Google Voice)
7) Anyone using Google DNS to find assets you own (since they'll be looking up your info, which tells Google a bit about you)
8) Other stuff I've missed.
Since some of this stuff's pretty opaque, you're going to have a hard time proving to anyone that you're opting out of The Google.
Not using Google Search/GMail yourself, yeah -- that's easy, but makes almost no difference.
It also has a username similar to an existing one, drinkypoo (153816). Suspicious.
Next up: Sponge Doh (2661337)
And based on what the Karmin line is measuring (if you've got this far, you're likely going into orbit), my guess is that the actual limit is a range slightly under 100km -- meaning that if you reach 100Km, you've got far enough to escape. Of course, if the line was defined in a cautionary way (don't go above this line, or you'll be sorry!) it's possible that the actual limit range starts slightly above 100Km. Anyone know for sure?
If Steve Jobs were still alive, he'd just find the next big thing, and stop using NAND flash. Memristors anyone?
Of course, if anyone else tried this, the new tech would be non-viable, but Steve would use his force of will to make the new tech work at the price he wanted to pay.
I hope you're not serious. Apple has NEVER found the next big thing, ever. Everything apple has ever made has always been done by someone else previously. Apple is just really good at attracting people in their 40s and people in their 20s to buy their products at a premium and that's it.
And as soon as apple releases a product at least 2 other companies release their own version which is a superior product at a much lower cost.
Apple has little to do with jobs at all really, he was just the spokesman. His engineers, marketing department, designers and lawyers are what built apple. He didn't do anything but soak up credit for it all and grand standed in front of everyone. Kind of like how movie directors take credit for everything when they are just a small cog in a big machine, or everyone thinks the president runs the country when in reality he is just a mouth piece. Jobs was just a showman that's it. Apple lovers praised him for being a genius, everyone else though he was a dick, and only half of those people were right.
I'm pretty sure he wasn't serious... but I hope you aren't too.
Back in the day, Woz created a floppy drive that didn't require physical sectoring -- it was picked up by the entire industry, and was part of what ushered in the PC era. Sure, you could argue that floppy disks were around before, but they were clunky, prone to failure, and the controllers were really expensive. Apple got it right.
That's pretty much the trend you see at Apple (except for the blip under Scully and Amelio) -- they took ideas in the industry, and then re-thought them to make them both affordable and useful (not just one or the other). Apple also, of course, has had more than its share of "me too" technologies, such as the mouse (ball and laser versions), USB, LCD screens, EFI, etc. But in all these cases, I think you'll find that Apple's implementation often drove market acceptance.
Apple grabbed people in their 40's and 20's for one very big reason: they targeted the education market when both of those groups were in elementary/highschool. To those groups, Apple is a brand synonymous with technology done right. Then Apple went after the hipster movement, and fed new lines of product into the same demographics.
However, Apple has also targeted other markets -- it's why you'll still find graphic designers using Apple products, as well as die hard groups in the US Military, among other places. Apple has always sold vision and a story, not just technology.
And this is where Jobs came in -- he was an excellent salesman for vision and story. He knew how to deliver the entire package in a way that would capture people's imagination (hence the reality distortion field).
And here's the big part: he didn't just use these skills on the general public: he did the same thing within Apple. As a result, he wasn't just a spokesman; he was the man who drove his engineers, marketing department, designers and lawyers. He pushed all of them -- hard. This is why he gets so much credit; he was a genius at getting things done, and was a dick when he needed to be to accomplish this. Not the sort of person I'd like to have as a friend, but as a totalitarian leader for a large company, he had just the right talents.
Oh, I missed out your comment about "superior products at a much lower cost" -- examples please. Apple used to be this way back in the 90's, when they were hefting most of the R&D costs and clueless about where they were actually heading. These days, prices are all similar, components are identical, and Apple is really only fronting the marketing research, with R&D being done by all the leaders on the technology front.
The thing about email, is there's not even any expectation of an expected routing path -- and anything leaving your jurisdiction is fair game as far as interception goes.
As a result, an email going from you to someone else in your local state-based company may go through some router that's not even physically in your country -- and your country's government has no restrictions against inspecting private correspondence upon (re)entry to your country. Not to mention wherever it went in the meantime.
Since you can't guarantee where an email actually goes, you can't logically (or legally) expect privacy.
That doesn't even get to the minefield of storing your sent/received email "in the cloud"....
This is interesting actually
I should template all my email with
CLASSIFICATION DETERMINATION PENDING
PROTECT AS SECRET//SI/TK//NOFORN//X1
I wonder if it would be legal for me to read my own mail? Or would it just be illegal for most government agencies to read it?
Almost worth tagging everything with that just to see what automated systems it gums up ;)
The Russians and the Chinese have been at it for decades. Also, they couldn't care less about the computers used by the general public; they're after military nets, defense contractors, and other high tech companies. As for the Iranians, I dunno. Its not as if the U.S. broke into their facilities and wreaked havoc..
What the politician was saying amid the hubris was that these groups' methods for getting into the sensitive stuff is to go after the general public. Once they've graphed the data gathered from the public and co-opted their computers, they have an attack platform they can use to more intelligently go after the intended targets.
This really does happen on a regular basis. Of course, there's not all that much that an individual has to fear from this, other than the fact that they use the same techniques to break in that the Ransomware gangs etc. use.
Yeah, Mr "House Intelligence Committee chairman Mike Rogers (R.-MI)", where's the technical data supporting the claim that they are already there?
Well, the answer to that question is classified, meaning "We looked all over your computer and saw traces that they had been there."
I mean, how hard is it to ship new devices with something tougher than admin and 1234?
they should at least change the account name from "admin" to "luggage"....
They were voted "worst company" and everyone's getting hung up on their products. What about the other aspects? I've known a number of people who worked for them, and the stories have never been happy. I've also seen the impact they can have on the markets they "target". They're the Wal-mart or Pepsi/Coke of the gaming world... Let's not forget that and get distracted by what they actually produce. There's a lot of other negative impact they have on this world that would exist even if their games were wonderful every time.
Comments?
It's astonishing, what with all the various gadgets enticing people's attention in the 1970s and 1980s, that it's only now become a problem.
I wonder what changed between now and then that has dramatically increased the incidence of accidents caused by driver distractions. But I suppose we needed something to make up for all mechanic and doctor billing lost after seat-belts and crackdowns on drunk drivers. Those people have mouths to feed, after all.
A few things here: other than things that impaired driving (and there were appropriate laws about that back in the 70's and 80's), what we have now are roadways designed for faster speeds, and vehicles with different safety standards (mostly significantly better). However, we also have significantly more vehicles on the road, and it is significantly easier to get your license and to afford a vehicle. Link this to a culture with isolationist tendencies, and you get a situation where something that would have been relatively safe in a 70's car can be incredibly dangerous today, even with improved standards. Plus, with the improved flow of information, people actually find out about all the bad stuff that goes on now, whereas back then, the problem wasn't assumed to be as big as it actually was.
Or something like that.
Next up, sharks.
Erm, nope. Next up, Somali Pirates with mirrors
Really BIG and thick mirrors that are tuned to the IR spectrum.... coating the boat in aluminum foil or holding up a shaving mirror's not going to do the trick here. Calling this thing a flame thrower is actually pretty apt; you'd need an equivalent heat shield to deflect it.
But university's not supposed to be about getting a job; it's supposed to be about higher learning
But 'real life' is about surviving, which means a good income stream, which means a reasonable job.
University also seems to mean "take out $50k-100k in loans," which makes that getting a job part even more important.
I think you missed part of the thread; the part where I originally said "you can get a PhD and still get decent pay" -- this was responding to the "why get the PhD if it doesn't add to your pay grade?" question. You appear to have brought the discussion full-circle while missing the original point.
If the *AA's get out of hand, Google could easily just buy the entire industry. Every single one of those companies. With cash. Several times over.
Bullshit. Disney's market cap is ~$104 billion. Comcast has a market cap of ~$108 billion. Viacom has market cap of ~$31 billion. News Corp has a market cap of ~$71 billion. Time Warner has a market cap of ~$54 billion. Finally Sony has a market cap of ~$17 billion. So to purchase all the MPAA member companies they would need ~$385 billion. They don't have that in cash. Let alone "several times over".
They'd actually need ~$193 billion, plus the cooperation of shareholders. Still outside their ballpark. They'd need the full $385 billion to do a hostile takeover and make anti-profit-taking decisions though -- assuming this didn't get blocked by politicians or monopoly/merger lawsuits before that.
Pretty much; going past a Master's in Literature without already having a strong lead on where you'll end up when you're done, other for the joy of the subject, is pretty pointless.
But university's not supposed to be about getting a job; it's supposed to be about higher learning. I'm pointing out that you can follow that dream (including keeping in the field and on the discussion lists) while still being gainfully employed in a related field. The OP makes it sound like the process of getting a Literature PhD dooms you to a life of misery and slave labour.
I thought Hydrogen is difficult to contain since it is so tiny(molecularly speaking). Seems like it could be a hassle to facilitate storage and distribution?
Well, if they can make the xylose reaction happen quickly enough, it does mean that we can store xylose and biomass and convert it to hydrogen on the fly, avoiding the safe transport and storage issues. That's about the only possible gain I can see out of this (other than the scientific gains of being able to more intentionally shift atoms).
As someone who was told this 20 years ago but saw through it, let me say that there is plenty of room for literature majors in private industry -- the trick is to not believe everything you're told by the university literature culture, and keep those social connections outside of the field. There are also a significant number of positions available for decent pay within academia, as long as you don't mind not working in the field that stems directly out of your thesis.
Part of the problem is that many literature majors get their PhD and feel like they have arrived and deserve the tenure track positions -- when there's really only a limited market compared to the number of people seeking those positions. BUT, with a bit more education in linguistics, design, computing science, or a number of other areas, suddenly you're someone who can land anything from an administrative job designing courses for ESL schools, to a community college languages head (they love to get people with a PhD and diverse training) to work at a marketing or communications firm, to a research job at a tech firm.
These positions will make anywhere from $48-120K as a starting salary. The trick is to remember to balance literature research with real life. It can be done. I know a number of people from the field who have done it, and thrived.
yeah... after I posted that I realized the two ways that sentence could be interpreted.
In this case, "missed" = "was not alive/writing HTML markup at the time"
This is not a forum. Also, using "code" as the format is the easiest way to avoid having to escape HTML to prevent it from being parsed as HTML. If you so loathe fixed width font, there's not much I can do for you.
Actually, the easiest way to avoid having to escape HTML to prevent it being parsed as HTML is to configure your commenting preferences to prevent it. If you must have HTML directly from the wysinwyg comment box, then put the code tags around the markup, not around the entire post....
Hey, I'd like to buy some of those drugs. Hit me up on iMessage at 407-TOTALLY-NOT-A-COP.
When questioned, he'll just say his number is 407-TOTALLY-ONU-A-COP -- and that this should have been warning enough.
Of course, iMessage doesn't use numbers so it'd more likely be "addicted2drugs13@precinct32.sd.ca.us"
This is rather notable in that it's the first article I've seen in a while that talks about both GPU-compute and mining without being about Bitcoin.
You just invoked jhantin's law....
Maybe someone who missed blinks and marquees wanted to name it after the famous Dr. Who episode....
Amazingly, most of what people would want to write and share could be done via a web server and an HTML5-based Scheme interpreter. Kay likes Scheme, right?
I don't know what he thinks about Scheme but Alan Kay probably does like Smalltalk.
Yeah; I figured SmallTalk was too close to Alan and too far from what others would use though ;)
An HTML5 Squeak interpreter would also be nifty.
Good luck with that ... the calls I get are either from American area codes, or call centers in India who are there just to scam people.
The hardware is on local soil.
Start fining people who install hardware that's subsequently used for robocalling. After a couple of large fines you can be damn sure they won't be installing equipment for any more foreigners (or will be asking for a million bucks in escrow as 'insurance' - same effect).
From the American bit, I think the GP is likely Canadian. The hardware is on American soil -- usually in Minnesota or Texas. Good luck getting Texas to do anything about fines levied by the CRTC.
Added to that, the actual perps are usually a few layers removed; they hire a firm who hires blocks of time at a call center; I've talked to the people who pick up, and they have no clue what company they're actually calling for; they just have their script.
Of course, the ones calling from Texas, you can at least use the Texas mindset to put the fear of God into the actual call center operators and their supervisors, which may result in the scammers having to create a new shell company to contract with the call centers -- but they have to do this regularly anyway.
This reminds me of a TV show where it turned out that a "haunted" house happened to have a fungus growing in the walls that caused hallucinations in susceptible people (not everyone). End result was that sometimes it was the people themselves throwing things across the room, but remembering it happening without them touching the objects. Once they cleaned up the fungus, the paranormal activity stopped.
Sure, that's just someone's script for a show, but there are quite often* explanations for paranormal things, as long as your thinking isn't trapped in a box of limited possibilities.
*OK, there's always more explanations (hypotheses) than events, and often even more than one is correct, for a given limited definition of correct.
Never forget that science is really just a collection of narratives that have been cross-referenced to hang together. Most of the time, we can create a narrative that's both simplistic enough for us to understand it and complex enough to cover most of the event horizon. But not always (see Lies to Children like "what is a solid object" and "what is gravity" -- even with Higgs (boson particle/field etc), we're dealing with narrative descriptions based on observations, not definitions of how things actually work).