If it's any consolation it's even worse the other way around. USPS wanted to charge me $76 just to ship a jewel case CD once and I'd have had to pay another $30 import duty including their "admin fee" if the customs guys this side decided it needed import costs on top.
"So SRI wrote the AI piece which does the heavy lifting, and the kid's company made pretty UI to display the summarized articles. $30 million well spent..."
It doesn't stop there, apparently they had a 3rd party making the Android version for them who are now ticked off that the app they've built wont see the light of day. In other words his company couldn't even do the Android side of things in house.
What exactly has Yahoo paid for here? a 17 year old who can write an iOS interface for a bit of software he bought in? For over $36million?
"Why should it be illegal for you to take my higher bid? You might not take my bid because you find it morally distasteful. But it certainly shouldn't be illegal for me to offer that or for you to accept it."
It's not the offering or accepting that's the problem, it's the shutting down and laying off the staff that's the problem - the point being that if the only way to make the $150k bid tenable is to destroy the business then something is broken, effectively there should be legislation in place to fix what is broken and ensure that the $150k bid simply isn't tenable.
More specifically, the issue is in what is broken, and as the GP pointed out it's the fact that things like pension pots can be raided to pay off shareholders rather than to give the money back to the people whose employment paid for and into those pension schemes. Effectively the only reason your theoretical $150k bid can be made is because current legislation allows the likes of shareholders greater priority in having their debt paid off than the people to whom much of the money really actually belongs to because they're the ones who put it into the pot to start with.
Politically, the laws surrounding this sort of thing need to be restructured to take into account the public good, rather than the current status quo where they're biased to making the select few rich at the public's expense. To put it into an example, what serves more people better - to allow a small amount of shareholders to make a little bit of extra money at the expense of making hundreds, potentially thousands of people a burden on society either through forcing them onto benefits, or forcing them into crime, whilst also eliminating a company that was a net benefit to society through also paying corporation tax, or for those people to retain their jobs, the company to keep trading and paying corporation tax to society, and those same shareholders still make a decent fortune, just slightly less than they'd have otherwise made?
It should be illegal to make your example offer if the end result is a shifting of wealth from the tax payer and state to a private individual. If an investor or group of investors makes a takeover like Icahn's proposed take over and then kills off the company as a result they should be the last people that get paid, after all the workers have got their pension money back, and all the suppliers have been paid, because ultimately they're the ones who caused the failure. Currently shareholders can fail a company and make a profit from it - this is no different to CEOs who drive a company down the pan but still end up leaving with a golden parachute, failure should not be profitable for those responsible for the failure, and that's the fundamental problem - those who are the cause of the failure aren't the ones suffering from it, quite the opposite.
"The first amendment is your defense against a tyrannical government. The second is not. You can't afford any guns that would be much of a threat to a tyrannical government in control of the military, or even police force today."
I think this is an important point, if we've learnt anything from revolutions, especially recent ones it's that they tend to fall into two camps:
1) The military leads them and hence they're successful, often with little bloodshed. This applies in both coups and popular revolutions like in Egypt/Tunisia - the military was key, and I suspect any possible US revolution would occur like this.
2) The military is strongly government controlled, but the people are oppressed and suffering enough that they'll rebel regardless. Libya is an example, where sheer number of annoyed people was enough to overrun a military base and access arms stored within. This revolution could've still failed were it not for foreign intervention but as you say, the foreign intervention was with weaponry the 2nd amendment wont let you access, like nuclear subs firing cruise missiles, heavily armed jets with AGMs.
In either scenario the 2nd amendment would have little relevance, either people are willing to give their life for revolution and they'd obtain arms either through smuggling or raiding military police supplies, or it's going to be military led anyway. When it comes to revolution what the constitution says goes completely out the window, it doesn't matter if it's legal or illegal to bear arms, if you're that desperate you'll acquire them one way or another anyway.
I have, one of the first things I saw the NRA do after the last school shooting was to blame video games, and mental health.
Between blaming video games, and lobbying to block laws that impose greater background checks on gun sales (what? didn't they just blame people with mental health problems for these massacres?) it seems obvious the NRA has one interest - ensuring the gun lobby can sell more guns, even to crazy people.
Whatever the reason for people getting to the point where they carry out these massacres whether it's guns, games, mental health, alien mind implants or whatever other theory you have, one things is clear and that's that the NRA is an evil and hypocritical organisation who on one hand blames mental health, and on the other tries to block laws that would go some way to blocking sales of guns to people with a history of mental health problems whilst also trying to deflect attention onto the video games industry.
The first thing tells me they don't really care what the real cause is, they just want to sell more guns.
The second thing tells me that they've got something to hide.
Neither of these things paints a picture of an organisation that has anything of value to say on the subject, yet if US politicians continue to listen to them, video game players will be the next victim of their extensive lobbying - in this respect, the NRA is a pro-censorship group, whatever they might scream about the constitution when it suits them.
I completely agree with you and work exactly as you do, but therein lies the problem - sometimes clients demand bleeding edge so whilst in an ideal world you could stick to the simple long tried and tested XHTML1.1 + CSS2 with minimal Javascript using it where only very necessary, but for some clients that's not an option and when that's the case, it rapidly becomes clear that there's as much disparity between Firefox and Chrome, as there is between IE and Chrome/Firefox.
My point being, that most people complaining about IE and standards/differences of rendering nowadays (IE9+) and holding the likes of Firefox/Chrome up on a pedestal are just parroting old fashioned anti-MS rhetoric without actually having any justification for doing so - as you said, bugs are the price you pay for bleeding edge, but the fact is, the bugs are there, whatever browser you use.
"My point is, it was called "spam" because it was repetitive and clogging up forums (e.g. cross-posting the same ad to 1000 different newsgroups), not because it was unsolicited."
Sure, but was it solicited? Did people want, ask for or intend to find it there?
"And every new thread someone starts is technically "unsolicited.""
No it's not, if you go to a newsgroup on say, Number Theory, and someone makes a post on Number Theory, then it's solicited, because that's what you would expect to find by visiting such a newsgroup. What wouldn't be solicited by visiting such a group is a posting about cheap viagra.
I think you're making the assumption that the unsolicited portion of the definition of spam came from the UCE definition for it, but this is the wrong way around. The UCE definition used the term unsolicited because that's an important key trait of spam and always has been so is largely essential to any definition.
"I'm not about to even try and claim the blue screen isn't useful, it just don't help me personally track down issues. I would rather have raw kernel output with a nice stack trace then see random memory address and a name.sys file."
I think the BSOD is really just intended as a summary. You can get much of the sort of information you probably want from the minidump files, though it's been quite some time so I can't remember exactly what's in there, but IIRC I believe it does include a stack trace.
I guess as much as anything though a lot of it depends on what you're used to.
Yes, a ton of first hand experience dealing with clients who were brutally anal about it having to look as close to identical as possible between browsers, something that's just as hard to achieve between Chrome and Firefox as it is Firefox/Chrome and IE9.
It depends what level of development you do as much as anything. If you're a web developer it wont contain much of any relevance to you, if you're an OS or kernel developer it should be clear as day.
Sure, but none of that changes the fact that spam has always been unsolicited messaging.
In Usenet it was still messages that people didn't solicit (i.e. advertising about some product being posted in a group where it had no relevance to the subscribers).
"Microsoft may be doing this to stop web developers stop feeding broken IE 6-8 code and refusing to serve HTML 5/CSS 3 whenever it detects MSIE in its user agent string. Unfortunately this will break many business apps that are tied to ancient and specific version of IE."
Why? Just because IE11 is coming out, doesn't magically make existing business apps suddenly change themselves to stop working with the "ancient and specific version of IE" they've always worked with. If it only ever worked with a specific version of IE, it'll still only work with a specific version of IE, no matter what Microsoft does with new versions. If IE11 now renders HTML5/CSS properly and completely then why on earth would they want to receive some hacked together version that's no longer relevant to the new version? Or is the implication that Microsoft should keep their browser broken so people can continue to use broken sites whilst always enjoying features of each new browser for ever? If so then that's stupid. Really stupid.
"Or does IE10+ really act like Chrome or Firefox and this will finally end the hell of custom CSS tricks?"
No it wont, because even if IE11 now works exactly like Firefox (which it probably doesn't) you'll still have a million custom CSS tricks to make Firefox and Chrome display a site the same.
Or what, you thought Firefox and Chrome consistently implemented the HTML/CSS standards? Oh, sorry to burst your bubble - no, Firefox/Chrome/Safari et. al. all require just as many hacks as modern IE versions to ensure consistency across all browsers to the greatest extent possible.
I don't really like IE, god only knows I haven't used it as my browser in about a decade now. It has a lot to complain about like the stupid compatibility mode settings that broke far more than it ever fixed, but this story is full of troll, makes little sense, and is very much wrong.
"Perfect example: Signing up for an account for an online game.. generating 30 spams within 10 mins all of which say "you requested this email" are still spam.."
If that's a perfect example then this simply proves you don't know what spam is. Spam is unsolicited e-mail, the fact you've signed up for an account means it is, by definition, solicited.
"the assertion that high volume email dispatch is required or good is absolutely nuts.. "
Perhaps if you live under a rock and have never heard of things like say newsletters that people actively seek out and ask to receive.
"and if every one of those emails cost what it cost to do a direct mail campaign.. they would stop instantly.."
Which is why direct mail campaigns don't exist.
Oh wait, nevermind, yes they do.
"SendGrid is a cause of spam by enabling otherwise sane firms to shit out emails because they want a profit.. IE they are encouraging more unwanted spam in the inbox by "selling" their service to others."
Except none of it is actually spam because it is solicited.
"and if they where not relying on spam to generate profits and TRULY believed that every piece of email they sent was wanted by consumers.."
You confusing "want" with "asked for", the consumer may not have wanted it, but they certainly asked for it. It's not for SendGrid to engage some mystical psychic power and figure out if the end user really wanted it and didn't just carelessly ask for it.
For example, a previous project I worked on provided a training system to be sent to retail staff at outlets across the world. The retail sector in question was fast moving and saw a lot of changes and so required that staff keep their knowledge up to date. As such information updates could be sent to tens of thousands of staff at a time, with each e-mail personalised for each member of staff, and a few days later a personalised link to a follow up quiz to ensure they learnt what they read. This ensured staff knew what they were on about when customers asked them questions. This sort of operation absolutely needed something like SendGrid.
Also, I don't really understand why you keep going on about cost. You do know that SendGrid charge for use of their service, right?
Look, I get it, you've signed up to a lot of companies who send you mail you didn't really want and can't be bothered to get in touch with them to tell them to stop, that's fine, but don't take it out on SendGrid because they provide an essential service. Many spam blockers nowadays use centralised providers that give reliability ratings on different e-mail dispatch services, this means that servers with a poor reputation will more likely have their e-mails flagged as spam. SendGrid has to maintain a good reputation to maximise delivery of it's client's e-mails and all it takes is for lots of unhappy people to report it as a source of spam if that were genuinely the case. But SendGrid does have a good reputation, go check policies at places you can report spam, they all make it clear you can't report it if it's solicited because then it's not spam. SendGrid has a good reputation because it's not a spammer, because it actively works against spammers who attempt to use it's network, it's really quite that simple.
So therein lies the problem, you're blaming your lack of understanding about what spam is and about why providers like SendGrid are useful on SendGrid. Attacking something because you don't understand it is one of the lowest forms of idiocy.
I really have no problem understanding the content of a blue screen, but I'm a developer. Your average IT support tech wouldn't have a clue because the information is too low level for them but then, BSODs only happen when low level faults have occurred so it kind of makes sense.
This isn't about BSODs though, it's about Windows Blue, Microsoft's new name for Windows or whatever.
Yes, it's all fun, games, and high pay until you get beheaded in the Algerian desert, blown up in the gulf of Mexico, or jail time when you're used as a scapegoat for a superior's dodging of H&S standards to get things done on the cheap.
FWIW, you can easily earn the same amount from a CS degree after a few years, and without the risk of injury/loss of life/prison to boot.
FWIW I and both my previous employers all stopped using Dell when they started to move to India.
It coincided with a massive decrease in build quality and support quality - laptops turning up without keyboard cables plugged into motherboards, tech support folks in India insisting they need us to give them the error message on screen before they can get an engineer out when we phone up to tell them the laptop is completely dead and wont turn on.
Prior to the outsourcing moves we actually used to really like Dell, quality hardware and quality support. We were happy to pay for that. Now it's just bottom of the pile trash and I can get that cheaper elsewhere I'm afraid.
â" vb , spams , spamming , spammed 1. to send unsolicited electronic mail or text messages simultaneously to a number of e-mail addresses or mobile phones
â" n 2. unsolicited electronic mail or text messages sent in this way
SendGrid only allows solicited e-mails to be sent, hence by definition it's not a spammer. Get over it dickhead.
"0. SendGrid is an email spammer. Yes, they only send legal spam, stuff the direct marketers want you to call bacn, but really most of the emails they send you do not want. Anything bad that happens to SendGrid is a good thing."
If by spam your view is that all mass mail, including that which is specifically opt-in is spam then sure, but that's a definition of spam pretty much no one else recognises.
There are many legitimate uses of SendGrid and they explicitly try and ensure their servers are viewed as trustworthy by spam filters by explicitly actively dealing with people who send unsolicited mail.
Companies use them for everything from opt-in newsletters, to sales/invoice confirmation dispatch for e-commerce companies, to couriers dispatching delivery updates, to internal corporate newsletters, and many other things.
Your understanding of what SendGrid is is completely wrong. There is a legitimate need for high volume e-mail dispatch services, and someone has to provide that. As providers go SendGrid does a good job of keeping spammers off the network and as someone who has worked on a completely non-spam high volume mail system for a client I can assure you they put a lot of effort into vetting you before you can even use them - i.e. they want evidence of domain ownership, description and samples of e-mails you intend to send (and diverging from the types of e-mails is grounds for termination). They seem to have effective policies for individuals wanting to complain about unsolicited mail sent from their servers too.
It's like saying Slashdot is a child porn site because some troll once probably linked kiddie porn here or whatever.
"In the US we have a pretty good history of not hanging outgoing politicians for controversial political decisions they made while in office. This is one of the reasons that our politicians are so very willing to leave office."
If leaders can learn at a dog-like level that if they can leave office they wont be punished, they're also capable of learning that if they do nothing illegal in office, they can leave office without being punished, and hence shouldn't do anything illegal like starting illegal wars for example.
Either leaders can come to logical conclusions or they can't, you can't argue that they have the intelligence to recognise that it's okay to leave office because they're allowed to without fear of prosecution, but not intelligent enough to recognise that the only reason they'd be prosecuted in the first place is because they'd done something illegal
This needs the usual "Depends what country you're in, and who you bank with" disclaimer.
I've had my debit card used fradulently before because it was leaked by a major online retailer. Frankly it was no big deal, the bank gave me an interest free overdraft for the amount that was missing whilst I filled in the forms, sent them off etc., they investigated and gave the money back (took them about a month).
No big deal, no drama, one phone call and 2 pages of forms to fill in and there was no impact on me beyond that.
As I mentioned in my other thread though, the key difference is that those antisocial 16 year olds that normally pull this off are still quite uncommon relative to the general internet population their age, and for them to exist they have to be found from a wide pool of internet users who have had (near?) life long access to the internet. That sort of environment with a wide pool of people with widespread internet access to produce these sorts of folk naturally just doesn't exist in North Korea.
Who are these foreigners? am I a foreigner? Which country are we making some arbitrary assumption about that I come from here? Who has taken my job? It's the first I've heard of it, certainly never heard about any North Koreans getting employment around here.
Personally I'm quite happy for "foreigners" to come and "take" jobs in my country, I've always felt if someone can come from another country, often with a poorer education system, and sometimes with less experience with the English language then beat a local candidate then they deserve the job because they've obviously got something to offer if they can beat those odds against them. I've never found it a threat personally though, because I've always kept my skills sharp.
Still, well done on jumping to conclusions, lucky you posted AC, else you'd have made yourself more publicly look like an idiot. But then, that's why you posted AC isn't it? to avoid that possibility.
I know where you're coming from, and whilst it's true that the privileged few in North Korea get sent to Western universities and so forth I have to ask if that's really enough?
Consider that most talented hackers in the world today whether from the West or from places like Russia are talented because they've grown up with the internet, they've been sat on it day in day out. That doesn't seem a realistic possibility in North Korea given that the pool of people with decent access is so utterly tiny it seems unlikely you'd also find a bunch of top-tier hackers within such a small pool of people.
So even if these guys get a few years outside the nationwide prison that is North Korea I'm not entirely convinced it's enough. This is a pretty wide scale effective hack and even many western kids and groups that have had a far better environment to learn about and practice this sort of thing couldn't do it. That's why I suspect it requires some kind of external training from a nation like China that does have the expertise and experience.
Slashdot Mirror
If it's any consolation it's even worse the other way around. USPS wanted to charge me $76 just to ship a jewel case CD once and I'd have had to pay another $30 import duty including their "admin fee" if the customs guys this side decided it needed import costs on top.
Needless to say I didn't buy.
"So SRI wrote the AI piece which does the heavy lifting, and the kid's company made pretty UI to display the summarized articles. $30 million well spent..."
It doesn't stop there, apparently they had a 3rd party making the Android version for them who are now ticked off that the app they've built wont see the light of day. In other words his company couldn't even do the Android side of things in house.
What exactly has Yahoo paid for here? a 17 year old who can write an iOS interface for a bit of software he bought in? For over $36million?
Apparently it ones in the multiple tens of millions.
Seriously, Yahoo just paid at least $20million for something they could've engineered for a fraction of the price themselves?
Mayer really does have absolutely no idea what she's doing does she?
"Why should it be illegal for you to take my higher bid? You might not take my bid because you find it morally distasteful. But it certainly shouldn't be illegal for me to offer that or for you to accept it."
It's not the offering or accepting that's the problem, it's the shutting down and laying off the staff that's the problem - the point being that if the only way to make the $150k bid tenable is to destroy the business then something is broken, effectively there should be legislation in place to fix what is broken and ensure that the $150k bid simply isn't tenable.
More specifically, the issue is in what is broken, and as the GP pointed out it's the fact that things like pension pots can be raided to pay off shareholders rather than to give the money back to the people whose employment paid for and into those pension schemes. Effectively the only reason your theoretical $150k bid can be made is because current legislation allows the likes of shareholders greater priority in having their debt paid off than the people to whom much of the money really actually belongs to because they're the ones who put it into the pot to start with.
Politically, the laws surrounding this sort of thing need to be restructured to take into account the public good, rather than the current status quo where they're biased to making the select few rich at the public's expense. To put it into an example, what serves more people better - to allow a small amount of shareholders to make a little bit of extra money at the expense of making hundreds, potentially thousands of people a burden on society either through forcing them onto benefits, or forcing them into crime, whilst also eliminating a company that was a net benefit to society through also paying corporation tax, or for those people to retain their jobs, the company to keep trading and paying corporation tax to society, and those same shareholders still make a decent fortune, just slightly less than they'd have otherwise made?
It should be illegal to make your example offer if the end result is a shifting of wealth from the tax payer and state to a private individual. If an investor or group of investors makes a takeover like Icahn's proposed take over and then kills off the company as a result they should be the last people that get paid, after all the workers have got their pension money back, and all the suppliers have been paid, because ultimately they're the ones who caused the failure. Currently shareholders can fail a company and make a profit from it - this is no different to CEOs who drive a company down the pan but still end up leaving with a golden parachute, failure should not be profitable for those responsible for the failure, and that's the fundamental problem - those who are the cause of the failure aren't the ones suffering from it, quite the opposite.
"The first amendment is your defense against a tyrannical government. The second is not. You can't afford any guns that would be much of a threat to a tyrannical government in control of the military, or even police force today."
I think this is an important point, if we've learnt anything from revolutions, especially recent ones it's that they tend to fall into two camps:
1) The military leads them and hence they're successful, often with little bloodshed. This applies in both coups and popular revolutions like in Egypt/Tunisia - the military was key, and I suspect any possible US revolution would occur like this.
2) The military is strongly government controlled, but the people are oppressed and suffering enough that they'll rebel regardless. Libya is an example, where sheer number of annoyed people was enough to overrun a military base and access arms stored within. This revolution could've still failed were it not for foreign intervention but as you say, the foreign intervention was with weaponry the 2nd amendment wont let you access, like nuclear subs firing cruise missiles, heavily armed jets with AGMs.
In either scenario the 2nd amendment would have little relevance, either people are willing to give their life for revolution and they'd obtain arms either through smuggling or raiding military police supplies, or it's going to be military led anyway. When it comes to revolution what the constitution says goes completely out the window, it doesn't matter if it's legal or illegal to bear arms, if you're that desperate you'll acquire them one way or another anyway.
I have, one of the first things I saw the NRA do after the last school shooting was to blame video games, and mental health.
Between blaming video games, and lobbying to block laws that impose greater background checks on gun sales (what? didn't they just blame people with mental health problems for these massacres?) it seems obvious the NRA has one interest - ensuring the gun lobby can sell more guns, even to crazy people.
Whatever the reason for people getting to the point where they carry out these massacres whether it's guns, games, mental health, alien mind implants or whatever other theory you have, one things is clear and that's that the NRA is an evil and hypocritical organisation who on one hand blames mental health, and on the other tries to block laws that would go some way to blocking sales of guns to people with a history of mental health problems whilst also trying to deflect attention onto the video games industry.
The first thing tells me they don't really care what the real cause is, they just want to sell more guns.
The second thing tells me that they've got something to hide.
Neither of these things paints a picture of an organisation that has anything of value to say on the subject, yet if US politicians continue to listen to them, video game players will be the next victim of their extensive lobbying - in this respect, the NRA is a pro-censorship group, whatever they might scream about the constitution when it suits them.
I completely agree with you and work exactly as you do, but therein lies the problem - sometimes clients demand bleeding edge so whilst in an ideal world you could stick to the simple long tried and tested XHTML1.1 + CSS2 with minimal Javascript using it where only very necessary, but for some clients that's not an option and when that's the case, it rapidly becomes clear that there's as much disparity between Firefox and Chrome, as there is between IE and Chrome/Firefox.
My point being, that most people complaining about IE and standards/differences of rendering nowadays (IE9+) and holding the likes of Firefox/Chrome up on a pedestal are just parroting old fashioned anti-MS rhetoric without actually having any justification for doing so - as you said, bugs are the price you pay for bleeding edge, but the fact is, the bugs are there, whatever browser you use.
"My point is, it was called "spam" because it was repetitive and clogging up forums (e.g. cross-posting the same ad to 1000 different newsgroups), not because it was unsolicited."
Sure, but was it solicited? Did people want, ask for or intend to find it there?
"And every new thread someone starts is technically "unsolicited.""
No it's not, if you go to a newsgroup on say, Number Theory, and someone makes a post on Number Theory, then it's solicited, because that's what you would expect to find by visiting such a newsgroup. What wouldn't be solicited by visiting such a group is a posting about cheap viagra.
I think you're making the assumption that the unsolicited portion of the definition of spam came from the UCE definition for it, but this is the wrong way around. The UCE definition used the term unsolicited because that's an important key trait of spam and always has been so is largely essential to any definition.
"I'm not about to even try and claim the blue screen isn't useful, it just don't help me personally track down issues. I would rather have raw kernel output with a nice stack trace then see random memory address and a name.sys file."
I think the BSOD is really just intended as a summary. You can get much of the sort of information you probably want from the minidump files, though it's been quite some time so I can't remember exactly what's in there, but IIRC I believe it does include a stack trace.
I guess as much as anything though a lot of it depends on what you're used to.
Yes, a ton of first hand experience dealing with clients who were brutally anal about it having to look as close to identical as possible between browsers, something that's just as hard to achieve between Chrome and Firefox as it is Firefox/Chrome and IE9.
I'm not sure if you misread my post but you seem to be telling me I'm missing the point and then pretty much agreeing with what I said.
It depends what level of development you do as much as anything. If you're a web developer it wont contain much of any relevance to you, if you're an OS or kernel developer it should be clear as day.
Sure, but none of that changes the fact that spam has always been unsolicited messaging.
In Usenet it was still messages that people didn't solicit (i.e. advertising about some product being posted in a group where it had no relevance to the subscribers).
It doesn't even make any sense whatsoever:
"Microsoft may be doing this to stop web developers stop feeding broken IE 6-8 code and refusing to serve HTML 5/CSS 3 whenever it detects MSIE in its user agent string. Unfortunately this will break many business apps that are tied to ancient and specific version of IE."
Why? Just because IE11 is coming out, doesn't magically make existing business apps suddenly change themselves to stop working with the "ancient and specific version of IE" they've always worked with. If it only ever worked with a specific version of IE, it'll still only work with a specific version of IE, no matter what Microsoft does with new versions. If IE11 now renders HTML5/CSS properly and completely then why on earth would they want to receive some hacked together version that's no longer relevant to the new version? Or is the implication that Microsoft should keep their browser broken so people can continue to use broken sites whilst always enjoying features of each new browser for ever? If so then that's stupid. Really stupid.
"Or does IE10+ really act like Chrome or Firefox and this will finally end the hell of custom CSS tricks?"
No it wont, because even if IE11 now works exactly like Firefox (which it probably doesn't) you'll still have a million custom CSS tricks to make Firefox and Chrome display a site the same.
Or what, you thought Firefox and Chrome consistently implemented the HTML/CSS standards? Oh, sorry to burst your bubble - no, Firefox/Chrome/Safari et. al. all require just as many hacks as modern IE versions to ensure consistency across all browsers to the greatest extent possible.
I don't really like IE, god only knows I haven't used it as my browser in about a decade now. It has a lot to complain about like the stupid compatibility mode settings that broke far more than it ever fixed, but this story is full of troll, makes little sense, and is very much wrong.
"Perfect example: Signing up for an account for an online game .. generating 30 spams within 10 mins all of which say "you requested this email" are still spam.."
If that's a perfect example then this simply proves you don't know what spam is. Spam is unsolicited e-mail, the fact you've signed up for an account means it is, by definition, solicited.
"the assertion that high volume email dispatch is required or good is absolutely nuts.. "
Perhaps if you live under a rock and have never heard of things like say newsletters that people actively seek out and ask to receive.
"and if every one of those emails cost what it cost to do a direct mail campaign.. they would stop instantly.."
Which is why direct mail campaigns don't exist.
Oh wait, nevermind, yes they do.
"SendGrid is a cause of spam by enabling otherwise sane firms to shit out emails because they want a profit.. IE they are encouraging more unwanted spam in the inbox by "selling" their service to others."
Except none of it is actually spam because it is solicited.
"and if they where not relying on spam to generate profits and TRULY believed that every piece of email they sent was wanted by consumers.."
You confusing "want" with "asked for", the consumer may not have wanted it, but they certainly asked for it. It's not for SendGrid to engage some mystical psychic power and figure out if the end user really wanted it and didn't just carelessly ask for it.
For example, a previous project I worked on provided a training system to be sent to retail staff at outlets across the world. The retail sector in question was fast moving and saw a lot of changes and so required that staff keep their knowledge up to date. As such information updates could be sent to tens of thousands of staff at a time, with each e-mail personalised for each member of staff, and a few days later a personalised link to a follow up quiz to ensure they learnt what they read. This ensured staff knew what they were on about when customers asked them questions. This sort of operation absolutely needed something like SendGrid.
Also, I don't really understand why you keep going on about cost. You do know that SendGrid charge for use of their service, right?
Look, I get it, you've signed up to a lot of companies who send you mail you didn't really want and can't be bothered to get in touch with them to tell them to stop, that's fine, but don't take it out on SendGrid because they provide an essential service. Many spam blockers nowadays use centralised providers that give reliability ratings on different e-mail dispatch services, this means that servers with a poor reputation will more likely have their e-mails flagged as spam. SendGrid has to maintain a good reputation to maximise delivery of it's client's e-mails and all it takes is for lots of unhappy people to report it as a source of spam if that were genuinely the case. But SendGrid does have a good reputation, go check policies at places you can report spam, they all make it clear you can't report it if it's solicited because then it's not spam. SendGrid has a good reputation because it's not a spammer, because it actively works against spammers who attempt to use it's network, it's really quite that simple.
So therein lies the problem, you're blaming your lack of understanding about what spam is and about why providers like SendGrid are useful on SendGrid. Attacking something because you don't understand it is one of the lowest forms of idiocy.
It depends on your level of knowledge.
I really have no problem understanding the content of a blue screen, but I'm a developer. Your average IT support tech wouldn't have a clue because the information is too low level for them but then, BSODs only happen when low level faults have occurred so it kind of makes sense.
This isn't about BSODs though, it's about Windows Blue, Microsoft's new name for Windows or whatever.
Yes, it's all fun, games, and high pay until you get beheaded in the Algerian desert, blown up in the gulf of Mexico, or jail time when you're used as a scapegoat for a superior's dodging of H&S standards to get things done on the cheap.
FWIW, you can easily earn the same amount from a CS degree after a few years, and without the risk of injury/loss of life/prison to boot.
FWIW I and both my previous employers all stopped using Dell when they started to move to India.
It coincided with a massive decrease in build quality and support quality - laptops turning up without keyboard cables plugged into motherboards, tech support folks in India insisting they need us to give them the error message on screen before they can get an engineer out when we phone up to tell them the laptop is completely dead and wont turn on.
Prior to the outsourcing moves we actually used to really like Dell, quality hardware and quality support. We were happy to pay for that. Now it's just bottom of the pile trash and I can get that cheaper elsewhere I'm afraid.
spam
â" vb , spams , spamming , spammed
1. to send unsolicited electronic mail or text messages simultaneously to a number of e-mail addresses or mobile phones
â" n
2. unsolicited electronic mail or text messages sent in this way
SendGrid only allows solicited e-mails to be sent, hence by definition it's not a spammer. Get over it dickhead.
"0. SendGrid is an email spammer. Yes, they only send legal spam, stuff the direct marketers want you to call bacn, but really most of the emails they send you do not want. Anything bad that happens to SendGrid is a good thing."
If by spam your view is that all mass mail, including that which is specifically opt-in is spam then sure, but that's a definition of spam pretty much no one else recognises.
There are many legitimate uses of SendGrid and they explicitly try and ensure their servers are viewed as trustworthy by spam filters by explicitly actively dealing with people who send unsolicited mail.
Companies use them for everything from opt-in newsletters, to sales/invoice confirmation dispatch for e-commerce companies, to couriers dispatching delivery updates, to internal corporate newsletters, and many other things.
Your understanding of what SendGrid is is completely wrong. There is a legitimate need for high volume e-mail dispatch services, and someone has to provide that. As providers go SendGrid does a good job of keeping spammers off the network and as someone who has worked on a completely non-spam high volume mail system for a client I can assure you they put a lot of effort into vetting you before you can even use them - i.e. they want evidence of domain ownership, description and samples of e-mails you intend to send (and diverging from the types of e-mails is grounds for termination). They seem to have effective policies for individuals wanting to complain about unsolicited mail sent from their servers too.
It's like saying Slashdot is a child porn site because some troll once probably linked kiddie porn here or whatever.
"In the US we have a pretty good history of not hanging outgoing politicians for controversial political decisions they made while in office. This is one of the reasons that our politicians are so very willing to leave office."
If leaders can learn at a dog-like level that if they can leave office they wont be punished, they're also capable of learning that if they do nothing illegal in office, they can leave office without being punished, and hence shouldn't do anything illegal like starting illegal wars for example.
Either leaders can come to logical conclusions or they can't, you can't argue that they have the intelligence to recognise that it's okay to leave office because they're allowed to without fear of prosecution, but not intelligent enough to recognise that the only reason they'd be prosecuted in the first place is because they'd done something illegal
This needs the usual "Depends what country you're in, and who you bank with" disclaimer.
I've had my debit card used fradulently before because it was leaked by a major online retailer. Frankly it was no big deal, the bank gave me an interest free overdraft for the amount that was missing whilst I filled in the forms, sent them off etc., they investigated and gave the money back (took them about a month).
No big deal, no drama, one phone call and 2 pages of forms to fill in and there was no impact on me beyond that.
This was in the UK.
As I mentioned in my other thread though, the key difference is that those antisocial 16 year olds that normally pull this off are still quite uncommon relative to the general internet population their age, and for them to exist they have to be found from a wide pool of internet users who have had (near?) life long access to the internet. That sort of environment with a wide pool of people with widespread internet access to produce these sorts of folk naturally just doesn't exist in North Korea.
Who are these foreigners? am I a foreigner? Which country are we making some arbitrary assumption about that I come from here? Who has taken my job? It's the first I've heard of it, certainly never heard about any North Koreans getting employment around here.
Personally I'm quite happy for "foreigners" to come and "take" jobs in my country, I've always felt if someone can come from another country, often with a poorer education system, and sometimes with less experience with the English language then beat a local candidate then they deserve the job because they've obviously got something to offer if they can beat those odds against them. I've never found it a threat personally though, because I've always kept my skills sharp.
Still, well done on jumping to conclusions, lucky you posted AC, else you'd have made yourself more publicly look like an idiot. But then, that's why you posted AC isn't it? to avoid that possibility.
I know where you're coming from, and whilst it's true that the privileged few in North Korea get sent to Western universities and so forth I have to ask if that's really enough?
Consider that most talented hackers in the world today whether from the West or from places like Russia are talented because they've grown up with the internet, they've been sat on it day in day out. That doesn't seem a realistic possibility in North Korea given that the pool of people with decent access is so utterly tiny it seems unlikely you'd also find a bunch of top-tier hackers within such a small pool of people.
So even if these guys get a few years outside the nationwide prison that is North Korea I'm not entirely convinced it's enough. This is a pretty wide scale effective hack and even many western kids and groups that have had a far better environment to learn about and practice this sort of thing couldn't do it. That's why I suspect it requires some kind of external training from a nation like China that does have the expertise and experience.